Читать книгу Blind Man's Year - Warwick Deeping - Страница 7

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A still, serene and golden day.

She liked to wake early in such weather, dress and steal downstairs into the farmhouse kitchen to put a match to Jane’s meticulously clean and odourless oil stove, and while the kettle was boiling for her early tea she would go into the garden. It was so much more beautiful in the slanting, early light, with dew on the grass, a little world possessed in secret by herself and the birds. At such a time she would be conscious of a thinning of the sensuous veil. The green and flowery bosom of the earth was but a garment, the trees strange shapes in the mirror of mysticism.

She was out early on this morning in April. There was a haze over the sea, and wisps of vapour trailing from the Scotch firs. The sun and the mist were weaving fantastic patterns, covering hillsides and woods in grey tissue and then snatching it aside. One valley was in the sunlight, the other blind, and even as she watched, the sea-wrack changed its drift. A billow of mist came pouring over the garden, not a complete wave, but a great white scroll broken into vapoury patches and fringes of fog. She could see clumps of daffodil brilliantly yellow in the young grass, and suddenly they were turned to silver. The cold mist played upon her face. It was as though some world was taking shape within this primordial cloud of vapour, flashing and disappearing, becoming and glowing, veiled in the gradualness of its lovely reality, a beginning of things beneath the beneficent and unseen face of a God.

Was not her own creative craft somewhat like this, mist, vagueness, and then the penetrating light of inspiration, something to be marvelled at and exulted over? The white page was like that sheet of fog. She would sit and gaze at it, and then her pen would begin to move and her world of words would take shape in a subtle pattern of shades and sounds and colours, for to her words had colour. This would be a morning upon which things poured from you, and returning to the kitchen she made her tea and carried it up to her working-room.

She sat down at her desk by the window. Yesterday she had been groping amid the implications of a complex situation. She had lost sight of her people, but to-day she felt that she would see them clearly. She had to see them and listen to them to know them and express them. She drank her tea, and lighting a cigarette picked up her pen.

Immediately she became conscious of a sound, a melancholy complaining like that of some vast animal in pain. Had it been there before without her being aware of it, and had the added tension of her creative mood made her conscious of it? The siren of the Long Shoal Lightship! Fog at sea, and that great grey bleating sea-cow calling for its calf. Always this particular sound had a peculiar and unpleasant effect upon her. It was like the voice of some primordial creature in pain, calling to the deep sea and the sky. Something in her answered it, that unsatisfied, secret, human self which she suppressed and kept like some blind creature in a cave. And sometimes she was conscious of its struggles and complainings.

The fog was thickening. Wisps of it floated in at her window.

The siren’s voice died away. How absurd of her to be affected by a mechanical cow! She willed herself to write. She was very conscious of the fountain pen as a black, hard object between thumb and forefinger. She scribbled a few words, and paused, confronted by yet another distraction. The pen was running dry; it needed refilling.

She was conscious of saying “Damn you.” She opened a drawer on her left where the bottle of ink lived with brass clips, rubber bands, envelopes, sealing-wax. She refilled the pen, but dipping it too deeply into the inkpot she found ink upon her thumb and finger. Blotting paper. She closed the drawer, and with a sense of inward stress sat squarely to recover her concentration. The sheet of paper was like an unfriendly face.

An inward voice said “Relax.” She tried to let the tension melt from her mood. Again that melancholy wailing. The sound might have been just outside her window. She set herself to ignore it, only to be distracted by yet another sound, the distant howling of a dog.

Prince! She remembered that Prince was affected almost as she was by this mournful noise. But he gave tongue; he protested. Prince passed the night in a kind of super-kennel in what had been the farmyard, a chained sentinel whose duty it was to rouse old Will should any strange sound suggest trespass. The dog was chained, because Miss Gerard had found that Prince’s peregrinations could be disastrous in the garden. He could leap gates, and would come and whimper under her window. Originally she had allowed the dog to share her bedroom, but he had shown such a determined desire to share the bed with her that she had been compelled to banish him. Prince’s size and weight and affection were not conducive to tranquil sleep.

She surrendered. She could not be held responsible for the lightship’s bellowings, and had she been able to silence them men and ships might have suffered disaster, but for the dog she was responsible. She went down and into the farmyard which had been converted into a paved court with a sunk lily pool in the centre. The old red brick buildings had been faced with treillage over which glycine and vines and clematis scrambled, and in this courtyard she had collected statues, an Italian well-head, vases, a Charles II lead cistern, the busts of Roman emperors upon freestone pillars. Marcus Aurelius, that stoic soul, wore on his head a gilded wreath and the blessings of perching robins.

The dog saw her, and standing rampant with the chain taut between kennel and collar made welcoming noises.

“You scoundrel, Prince. You and the lightship ruined my inspiration.”

She went to let him off the chain, but he put his forepaws on her shoulder and licked her face, her poor undesired, blemished face.

“My dear, it doesn’t matter to you.”

She felt grateful to this creature, responsible for him. Prince, too, was a celibate, living a separative life, yet craving his share of affection. She slipped the catch of the chain, and he went bounding round the courtyard as though challenging her to share the joy of life. Barbarous things, chains.

“All right, my dear, we’ll go and look at the sea.”

But looking at the sea was a mere figure of speech. She could distinguish nothing but a great white sheet hanging above the dewy turf and the dim gorse bushes. It was not easy to tell where the hillside ended and the cliff began, and out of that mysterious, genetic haze came the sighings of the lightship.

“O woman, and those who sail the sea, beware! I suffer that you may be saved.”

The dog was standing close beside her, staring into the fog as though he too divined in it the sinister inception of things unseen.