Читать книгу Blind Man's Year - Warwick Deeping - Страница 4

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With the dog at her heels she walked back to the Sussex farmhouse which she had converted into a secret sanctuary for her soul. Grey stone below, red brick and tile above, its patina softened by the wind and the sun and the rain, its windows looked down two green valleys to the sea. The place was set upon the saddle of a hill, the ridge rising in front of it to a belt of old Scotch firs, and falling again in a green glacis to the cliff edge. The two valleys were full of rolling gorse and sheltered above by oak woods, and from the window of the room in which she wrote her secret self could dwell upon all this loveliness of sea and wood and sky. In her dreaming moods she would call it “Tristan Country,” though her Iseult might be but a dim and tragic shape.

A certain sound came to her ears as she reached the corner of the house, a sound that associated itself with the smell of hyacinths, and the yellow flutter of the wings of the Sulphur butterfly. Almost it was a nature sound, a stridulation of the spring. Her old gardener was cutting the grass. She saw him appear, bending over the handles of the machine, his very blue eyes set in an absorbed stare. His face and neck were like creased leather, his Saxon mustachios grizzled. On his head he wore an old grey cloth cap that was eternally incongruous. To her historic sense it should have been a helmet.

The blades ceased from whirring. The grass-box was full, and as he unhitched it to empty the contents into a barrow he became aware of her presence.

“Heavy going, Will.”

Always she was conscious of the extraordinary straightness of his glance. He looked at her as a dog might look, not seeming to see that which she shrank from showing to the world.

“Plenty o’ bottom to it, miss.”

He was sixty-seven and she had offered him a motor-mower, and he had scorned it. “Foreign, new fangled things!”

“I suppose it is not quite safe yet to put out the Blue Lilies?”

No, it wasn’t safe. Frosts in May. Besides, why be in a hurry? Your country man learns to wait upon the whims of Nature.

“I hope Mary’s toothache is better?”

“I made she poultice it. Bust in the night, it did.”

“We must send her to see a dentist.”

Will did not altogether hold with dentists. When he had been afflicted with an aching tooth he had suffered the darned thing grimly, or dealt with it, if the tooth was at all loose, with ruthless finger and thumb.

She too worked with her hands, for such labour had become part of her philosophy. To be all head was not wholesome, and though she had the world of her imagination to wander in, the world outside her windows insisted on being lived in. She had set herself to create beauty, without believing that it was possible to lose yourself in impersonal things. You just made your choice without craving the crowd’s illusion of happiness. What was happiness? She had days of beautiful serenity, and days of sadness when some unsatisfied urge troubled her like the swell of the sea. Why this restlessness? And if you set out to interpret life, to be the medium of humanity’s moods, it behoved you not to be too happy. No one would describe the violin as an instrument of crude, trumpeting complacency.

When Mr. Trevor Jones’s intrusion had interrupted her she had been scuffling the caked soil of the herbaceous borders with a Dutch hoe. The oblong space in front of the farmhouse had, with its low stone wall, persuaded her to plan a beautiful formality, grass and stone, lead figures, a pool, flanking hedges of yew, and broad borders under the wall for a coloured setting. Two formal beds were a blaze of tulips, wallflower, polyanthus, red daisies and myosotis. She liked her colours rich and varied. The big borders were full of Darwin and May flowering tulips, and she had had to work carefully and deliberately so as not to injure them with her hoe.

But those few moments of contact with the outer world had altered the morning’s rhythm for her. An anxious young man, a wife, children, the scramble to survive, the strange game of collecting what was known as news! Picking sensation like rank herbs to spice the stew of other people’s dull lives! She felt that she wanted to go and look at the sea, and leaving the hoe standing in the soil, and followed by the dog, she took the paved path to the iron gate in the stone wall. It was a beautiful gate, if a reproduction, of Italian work, and through its scrolls she saw the green hillside rising to the sailing firs.

Will had pushed his cap back and was watching her before giving the mower’s bearings a dose of oil. Will’s brain was not all turnip and winter-wash. A man who has watched the ways of Nature for fifty years is no fool, though the mass-product mind might think him an old oaf in corduroys. Will was saying to himself as he had said before: “Well, be’nt that queer, that one side of her face should be like a white rose, and t’other blotched the colour o’ beetroot! Nature made a mess o’ that, I reckon. And she not much more than five and thirty!” That there could be bitterness in such a blemish was well within Will’s understanding. Didn’t he know that if a woman lost a front tooth, or had a spot on her forehead, she was shy of being stared at? Thin-skinned creatures, women. Miss Gerard had been born with that port-wine mark on the left side of her face, like a splodge of purple paint laid on flat, and the doctors had not been able to do anything about it.

Will squirted oil into the machine’s bearings.

“Look at her one side and she’s a pretty woman; look at her t’other—! Nature do play tricks on we mortals.”

The patched seat of his trousers was turned to the windows when a voice hailed him.

“Will?”

“Hallo.”

“Where is she?”

“Gone up to t’fir wood with t’dog.”

The face of Jane saluted the sunlight. A plain, kind, crumpled face, it had made her just Jane to all humanity. She had hairs on her chin and brown eyes that are somehow doomed to devotion, be the object of it a cat or her kitchen range.

“I wanted to ask her if she’d remembered about something.”

Will was again in action with the mower. If women liked to be vague, that was their business, not his.

“Well, if you’ve both forgot, I can’t help ’ee.”

Which was obvious, as obvious as the patch on William’s rump, and Jane, knowing her Will, left it at that.

Meanwhile, Rosamund Gerard had climbed the green hill to the grove of firs, and from this high place she could look out over Sussex and the sea, and on this April day the spring woods were spun silk and the sea almost the sea of Greece. Leaning against one of the trees and looking up along its tall straight trunk, she could detect no movement of the green top. This stillness should have soothed her. Was not this little world all hers, with its burning gorse and burgeoning oaks, and that orchard in bloom beside Will Spray’s cottage? Sea and sky and woods were hers, peace, security, the right to be utterly herself, and yet this ultimate restlessness pursued her.

Had she not made her choice? Had not this lonely life given her powers of self-expression, just because of the foolishly simple things that were denied her? The unshed tears of her loneliness! And then, feeling the dog’s cold nose touching her hand, she looked down, met his asking eyes and understood him.

“Run, Prince.”

Something broke loose in her. She ran like a long-legged girl down the grass slope to the cliff’s edge, with the dog bounding beside her. She stood poised on a shelf of grey rock, her hands clasped behind her head, her eyes catching the sparkle of the sea. It lay far below, making wet murmurings against the rocks, and between her and the sea a great cliff smothered itself in scrub oak, wind-blown thorns, bracken and ivy. She swayed a little in a kind of ecstasy. How easy it would be to throw oneself down!

The dog’s nose touched her hand again, and she remembered, and suddenly bending she kissed his head.

“One must suffer in order to be able to say things, my dear.”

And turning back she reclimbed the grass slope to the grove of firs, and sitting down among the trees sat brooding with the dog’s head in her lap.