Читать книгу Blind Man's Year - Warwick Deeping - Страница 6

Table of Contents

The blurtings of the vulgar, like the sayings of little children, may bruise the skin of some secretly cherished sin, and Miss Gerard could apply all the Prodgers’ adjectives to her own separative soul. Mean, selfish, suspicious. Was the accusation true? Yes, in a sense it was, even as she could have been accused of possessing a heart, liver, kidneys. She had chosen to live this separative life, to inhabit a secret world in which she shared the lives of the creatures she created. She had walked up to the pinewood after her sister’s departure, and let herself slip into one of those analytical and self-accusing moods that afflict those who are too sensitive. Sackcloth rubbing against silk! There would be no submergence of self in creative dreaming. Phœbe had left her feeling raw and elemental and restless.

All this loveliness of sea and landscape and of sky! Was she selfish in desiring to possess it and her soul in peace? Did she desire it and nothing else? Oh, intimate, inevitable flinchings of the flesh! She, too, had to contend with and suppress those elemental qualms and yearnings. It was so easy for a separative person to become—what was the word?—Funny? That, no doubt, was the word her relations used, and even in its vulgar implications it was adequate. Funny, faddy, abnormal. She was so wise as to her own hypersensitive reactions. She was quite absurdly intolerant of noise, the many mechanical noises of the modern world. She detested aeroplanes. A plane overhead made her feel almost like a bird crouching in a hedge with a kestrel poised up above. She had bought Knoll Farm because it did not lie near any of the new arteries of noise, in the air or on the earth. Her very work insisted upon silence, and even old Will had been educated into refraining from activities under her window when she worked.

“Am I growing funny?”

The firs were talking softly to each other, but such nature sounds never disturbed her. She loved them. No wind could be too strong, no seas too thunderous. But had she not seen something in the eyes of Margaret, a kind of physician’s look, deep, penetrating, troubled? Hyperæsthesia of the soul! Margaret had teased her gently.

“I believe you have only half a skin. Oh, yes, I know. If you lived next door to a school playground—”

She could laugh at herself with Margaret.

“Would you call it neurasthenia?”

“No, my dear.”

“Or the selfishness of the hypersensitive?”

“I might. I’m going to be puckish, and prescribe one small child hammering a tea-tray under your window.”

“But it wouldn’t be my child.”

“Why not consider it as a universal?”

She had smiled at Margaret.

“None of your symbolism. As if one did not know when one was being naughty! One does, and goes on being naughty. One even discovers a sort of pleasure in it.”

“Spiting the Nanny in yourself! Aren’t we strange creatures? Just because someone else in you says ‘Don’t’.”

“You’re so impartial, my dear. Tell me, do you see signs of incipient reclusomania?”

“I wish you would bother a little more about your clothes.”

“My dear, to what purpose?”

“We moderns rather regard it as a sign of health.”

“Physical and mental?”

“Both.”

She let her head rest against the trunk of the tree, and looking up at its green branches she supposed that Margaret was right. She had no personal vanity, nor had Margaret for that matter, for Margaret’s loveliness was so complete that she had no more need to be self-conscious about it than this stately tree. Though Margaret would have said that no beauty can transcend clothes, and that the skin and texture of life should be part of the ritual of a fastidious self-regard. But clothes? How could clothes concern a woman who lived the life of a recluse? She had done with mirrors, for mirrors had tortured her as a child. Did her dog care how she dressed? Was old Will Spray Molyneux minded?

She shopped by post, though once or twice a year she did permit Messrs. Timmer and Morse’s of Westbourn to send a representative to call on her with a selection of frocks. Flowery fabrics and silks appealed to her because of their beauty, and she would buy a dress and perhaps wear it once or twice before hanging it in a kind of Bluebeard cupboard among other discarded frocks. Often she passed them on to Margaret for her adaptation and use, or for distribution elsewhere. Apparently it had not occurred to her that you might dress to your garden if you loved it, and keep the flowers in countenance.

Yes, undoubtedly she was growing more and more separative and eccentric, and shy of all contacts with the outer world. Mr. Biederman of Messrs. Hacking and Squires, her publishers, came down to see her twice a year. She liked Mr. Biederman. He was large and restful and matronly, a man with a lap. His big blond face would have fitted admirably into a lilac sunbonnet.

Did this monastic life matter? She might qualify the no by saying that it concerned no one but Miss Gerard. She assured herself that she did not ask to be happy. She could sublimate all elemental urges into creative dreaming and give them expression in her work.

There was one question she had not asked herself. It had fluttered in at her window like a moth in the dusk of some lonely mood, and wilfully she had ignored it, perhaps because it had made her afraid. But both Margaret Hayle and Mr. Biederman had had that same question unuttered on their lips. Was it possible for a creative mind to continue to be creative while withdrawing itself from all human contacts? And even if it survived, might not its flowering be odd and unsymmetrical and bizarre, a little macabre? But who could say? Genius inhabits strange places, and its twilights and its dawns may belong to a world of other dimensions.