Читать книгу Doomsday - Warwick Deeping - Страница 13

There were times when Mary Viner reasoned with herself, composing little homilies that laid a gentle and restraining hand upon her restlessness. She confronted the age-old problem of the begetter and the begotten, trying to feel dutiful and not succeeding, and coming to rest upon a feeling of pity. Yet, she knew in her marrow and heart that age and youth should not live together, though youth may not know what it wants and age wants so little, but that little a tyranny of trifles.

She felt her exasperations to be atrocious, but there they were, like muscle pain or toothache or a chafed heel—realities, disharmonies, and though she strove for their repression she was but weaving them into the texture of herself, threads that would break or get ravelled when some human crisis should come upon her. Such repressions are not good for the soul. For her parents were nice old people, sweetly selfish in feeling themselves unselfish. It is probable that they thought Mary fortunate in having a home, and in not having to cheapen herself in the world's market. And healthy, homely work, cooking and washing and cleaning. Besides, you had to live somewhere, and pensions did not carry you far at post-war prices, and the Sandihurst Estate had gentlefolk upon it, and you could get "bridge" most nights a week, and Colonel Sykes and Commander Troton and the Twists were putting down a hard tennis court. Age forgets so easily its own youth and its youth's blind gropings and hungers. It sits resigned by the fireside, and yet can be full of a senile restlessness of its own, of little chatterings and exactions, and odd irritating tricks and mannerisms.

O, those evenings, those long winter evenings when "Green Shutters" seemed buried under a mountain of finality! Nothing happened, nothing could happen, save perhaps the occasional and tentative intrusion of poor Coode who sat nobly on the edge of a chair, and called Captain Hesketh "sir," and listened politely to an old soldier's meanderings. A nice fellow! And his one eye was so dull and adoring! Those evenings, with her mother reading and stopping her reading to chatter directly Mary opened a book! And her father and his acrostics! How she loathed those acrostics and the ingenious people who strung the jingles together. And the poor old man's perpetual clearing of his throat, an explosive sound rather like a sheep's cough; and the trick her mother had of tapping with one foot on the iron fender! Silence, an immense, eventless silence, and those fidgetings and rustlings and poor little fussinesses!

There had been nights when she had put on a hat and rushed out wildly into the darkness.

"Where are you going, Mary?"

Yes, where—and why? They always wanted to know the reason for everything. As if one could give reasons, at the age of six-and-twenty, when life felt like a dead volcano, and your heart was ready to break for something and nothing.

"Where are you going, Mary?"

She would blurt out some excuse. She had forgotten to shut up their six hens, or Winnifred had a dress to show her, or the Brownlows had asked her in. She would rush out and walk wildly up the wet and empty road to Carslake or down the wet and empty road to Melhurst. Sometimes her heart cried—"It would be better if we were dead."

Also, on those nights she thought much upon the foresight of her sister Clare. She glimpsed Clare as a palely glowing and fortunate creature away yonder within reach of that London shimmer. Lights, happenings! In the damp, dark deeps of a Sussex night she would turn her face in the direction of the distant city, yearning for it and for all the things that to her young loneliness it seemed to offer. Theatres, dances, shops, a sense of appetites felt and satisfied, trains, buses, tea-shops, the crowds, the stir, the full-throated life of it all. She envied Clare. Clare had escaped, as most women long to escape and dare not confess it.

Sometimes she would wander a little way up the "Doomsday" lane, not because she was conscious of the man who lived there, but because she had no business in the lane and it gave her a faint thrill of childish adventure. Once or twice she had scrambled up the mound and stood among the Six Firs, looking out into the rolling darkness, with Cinder Town pricked out in yellow points below her. She would lean against one of the trees, and hear its sighing. Her heart seemed to sigh like the tree.

On other rare days she would escape for an hour or two on her old bicycle, going out to meet life that never came, so full of her own unsatisfied youth that she was blind to the life about her. She loved beauty, but in her passion to escape she passed beauty by, youthfully hurrying, hastening somewhere and nowhere. She seemed to know Melhurst and Rotherbridge by heart, and all the lilies in the moat of Cadnam Castle, and the ruins of Carslake Abbey and the Roman walls of Hoyle. To ride up to Carslake was no adventure, for she did the household shopping there, buying meat and groceries, and her father's cough mixture, and her mother's wool, and an occasional Weldon's Journal with a brown paper pattern of a jumper or a nightdress pinned up inside it. True, you could buy hats at Sturtevant's, but what hats!

It was on one of these excursions to Melhurst early in March that her old hack of a bicycle broke its chain halfway up the long hill that ended in the white gates of Melhurst Park. She accepted the rupture as fate, and went on, wheeling her machine, and into Melhurst Park, for the public road ran through it. The park rolled like a great green sea, with woods of beech and fir sailing upon it, a north wind blowing white clouds across an intense blue sky, and dead leaves scudding like foam. She saw the downs in the distance. In the valley below deer were feeding, and the cedars and sequoias and spruces of Melhurst House looked black as thunder.

A four-mile walk! Well, quite an event. And she would be alone for the best part of two hours, and there are days when loneliness can be precious. She walked at her leisure, and coming to a group of old beech trees standing beside the park road, she leaned her bicycle against one of the white posts and sat down on the high grass verge. The March wind had dried the grass; it was still wintry and brown, and thousands of last year's beech leaves were scurrying about and making little fluttering rushes hither and thither. The air was full of the sound of their rustlings and of the blowing of the wind through the beech boughs.

A blue wagon drawn by two grey horses, and coming from Melhurst way, appeared upon the road. It topped a rise, and was lost to view in a hollow, though Mary heard the rumble of the wheels. A man's figure rose into view, and then the heads of the two horses, and both the man and the horses were familiar. It was the "Doomsday" wagon.

She could have walked on, but there was no conscious impulse bidding her go or stay, and yet she had a feeling that the man on the wagon had been watching her, and that she was sitting there like a deer covered by a sighted gun. The wagon rolled towards her, and she looked straight ahead towards the downs. It was right upon her now, and still she had that feeling of being observed.

Furze stopped his horses. Her quick upward glance caught him in the act of rising from his seat on the rail. He had a hand to his old grey-green soft hat.

"Any trouble, Miss Viner?"

He looked at the bicycle leaning against the white post, and she was aware of a quick flushing of her face.

"The chain is broken—"

He came down at once, deliberately seizing the opportunity with his strong hands and yet doing it so naturally that that flush of hers need not have happened. He asked no permission, but picked up the machine and lifted it on to the wagon and standing on a fore-wheel hub, settled it on the load of cake he had picked up at Melhurst station. Then he stood down and looked at her. The turned-down brim of his hat seemed to make the deep stare of his quiet eyes more serious. She had a new and sudden impression of him as a man who had some meaning for her, a man with a tanned and silent face, and a mouth that was both hard and kind.

"Will you ride?"

She stood up.

"I was going to walk."

"Just as you please. I can fix you up a seat."

His curiously dark blue eyes remained fixed upon her face all this time, not boldly or gallantly, but with a deliberate and grave interest. She had the instant knowledge of the fact that as a woman she pleased him. She may have gone on to the intuitive glimpsing of him as a man who was not easily pleased. Her thoughts flew back to the morning when he had brought the milk, and she had shown him a smudged face. Again, her colour changed quickly.

"It is very good of you."

"Not a bit."

"I think I will ride."

She had not visualized his helping her up, and she felt more lifted than helped. His hands were very strong, but they touched her gently, giving her a sudden and very vivid impression of contact. She felt it as an act of homage, and her eyes sought to veil themselves. She was just a little confused.

"Where shall I sit?"

"Wait a moment."

He was up in the wagon, gathering two or three empty sacks and a horse cover. There was a space between the stacked cake and the front of the wagon, and he made a seat for her on the cake, folding the sacks very deliberately and placing the cloth upon them as though the careful doing of it mattered.

"That ought to do."

"Thank you so much."

She smiled, with something of a quick, scared self-consciousness in her smile, and sat down. She was aware of a pleasant perfume, the smell of the cake. And he, smiling down at her momentarily with a something in his eyes that went straight down into the depths of her, climbed over the edge and gained the road.

He was going to walk.

"O,—please," she felt like saying, and was silent, her hands clasped in her lap. But if he meant to walk, well—it meant—She drew a deep breath. For his walking was like his touching of her, an act that was both sensitive and big and manly, not the act of a little, vain, agile creature, and yet so natural. She had a glimpse of him standing there brown and still beside the blue wagon and the grey horses, part of the landscape, and right with it.

"Thank you," she said.

So, her blue ship sailed through Melhurst Park, with the white clouds going over, and the landscape half sunlight and half shadow, and she sat and wondered, because he walked beside the head of the near horse as though the wagon held nothing but its load of cake. In a way she was glad of his silence and his back. She could consider him at her leisure, or as much as she could see of him, the broad back, the tanned neck, the old felt hat with the brim turned down, the long, striding legs, and the arms swinging easily. His very clothes seemed to have the soft, weather-worn half tints of the landscape.

He owned Doomsday Farm. He was supposed to be a little unusual. She had seen the house in the distance from the field path by Beech Ho, and had thought it romantic, and a little mysterious, but lonely. Him, too, in a sense she had only seen at a distance and almost as though he shared Doomsday's mystery and loneliness.

Half-way up the long hill out of Cherry Bottom he stopped his horses, placed the little wooden roller under a back wheel, and let them rest. He pushed his hat back, looked across the hills and smiled. Next moment he was speaking to her, standing square to the wagon, and looking up steadily into her face.

"Do you mind the smell of the cake?"

No, she did not mind it; she thought it rather fragrant.

"Country smells are," he said; "at least to me. They hang about like memories. The meal tub and the hay loft, and the reek of a weed fire. All good. You don't get out much—I suppose?"

"No, not much."

His quiet blue eyes confused her.

"Women don't. Not with house work. Same with me. I'm stuck there on the soil."

She had a feeling that he approved of woman as a domestic creature, and his man's view of it was as of something natural and inevitable. Vaguely she was aware of resenting this.

"But yours is more interesting. A man's always is."

His blue eyes seemed to receive this statement with peculiar seriousness, and to consider it.

"Do you think so?"

"I would rather be a farm labourer than a servant."

He appeared puzzled.

"Much the same—surely, though one is out in the air more. A man's job is."

"But why should it be a man's job?"

"It happens so. Always has been, hasn't it? Except in the case of the idle young persons who play golf and tennis all day and every day, and they don't count."

She felt herself flushing. It seemed to her rather ridiculous to be sitting there in his wagon and getting into an argument with him. What had they to argue about?

"You think women ought to work?"

His blue eyes suggested that he had never thought of it in any other way than that.

"Well, don't they? Ninety-nine out of a hundred. It's life. Of course, if you get the notion—"

He had silenced her, and he seemed suddenly aware of the fact, and grew silent himself, and then he restarted his horse, and resumed his place by the head of the horse. They sailed slowly athwart the landscape till they came to the place where the Melhurst and the Rotherbridge roads joined, and here he pulled up.

She stood up, and refused his hand.

"I can manage, thank you."

But she had to leave him the handling of her bicycle. She noticed that he glanced at her with something between perplexity and half-amused concern.

"Thank you so much," she said.

"Not at all. Glad to have been of use."

He raised his old felt hat, and with a grave and smile-less nod she turned away towards Cinder Town.