Читать книгу The White Gate - Warwick Deeping - Страница 10

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A full moon had risen over Roymer Heath, changing from copper to silver as it rose higher in the sky. The August night was warm and oppressively still, so warm and oppressive that Constance Brent had both the door and the French windows of the drawing-room wide open. Her mother had gone to bed half an hour ago.

She stood at one of the windows, leaning against the frame, and the simple white blouse and skirt that she was wearing were like the white petals of a flower that waits for the coming of some big moth. The lad who looked after the garden had, by some blessed lapse from stupid uniformity, sown night stock in the bed below the veranda, and the scent of it filled the air. The night had a strange sensuousness, and this subtle scent was like the perfume of some scented body wrapped in rich fabrics and stretched in sleep behind hangings of eastern silk. Stars flickered in the soft sky. The very shadows had a feminine suggestiveness, and stretched out desirous and alluring arms. Southwards the heathland rolled, a sea of tarnished silver stippled with the black masts of solitary pines. Queer wisps of white mist lay in the hollows, spirits rising from earth with a floating whirl of diaphanous tissues.

Utter stillness prevailed, the stillness that surrounds an isolated house in the country on a windless summer night, yet Constance Brent felt restless, yearning for something she knew not what. She had a vision of life hurrying on and leaving her alone in the wilderness. Had she but heard the moaning of violins and the soft, sibilant swish of swinging skirts, she would have held out her hands for a partner, though believing that no one would ask her to dance. It was a night for ghosts, the ghosts of many hopes that laugh, whisper, and vanish into the darkness. Never had she felt more alone, more smothered behind the curtains of a house in which nothing happened.

The hunger for life cried out in her, and the silence of the moonlit landscape flung the cry back. Oh, for some sound, even the barking of a dog! She turned, opened the piano, sat down, and let her hands wander. Then her white throat lengthened. Song rose in it like wine into the throat of a Grecian vase. It passed her lips and flowed out into the moonlight:

“Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns.”

She sang on in the darkness, her eyes half closed, her white throat a throbbing curve.

Upstairs a bell began to jangle, making an ill-tempered, outraged clangour. And to amplify the discords a dog began to yap.

Constance swept an impatient hand over the notes, crashed out a dissonance, and stood up. Her mother’s handbell still jangled. In the hall she met Mary pinning on a cap hurriedly, and looking sleepy and solicitous.

“I had dropped off in my chair. Shall I go, Miss Connie?”

“No, I will, Mary.”

A light was burning in Dora Brent’s room, and Gussie, offensively awake, capered about the bed, yapping. The haggard face under a grotesque and frowsy arrangement of pins and wisps of hair was the face of fury, the half-moon mouth drawn down at the angles and open as though to screech.

“Didn’t you know I had a headache? Waking Gussie up just as I was getting to sleep!”

The girl stood stone still.

“I thought——”

“You didn’t think! That’s just it; and you’ve spoilt my night. Pour me out a dose of my sleeping stuff.”

Constance went to the little medicine-chest and took out a bottle and a measuring glass. A horrible frost seemed to have stiffened her into utter callousness towards this woman. She was astonished, and yet not astonished, at the thoughts that went sleeting through her mind. She found herself thinking as she measured out the draught that she would not care if her mother never woke again.

Her hand trembled, and something caught in her throat.

“I’m sorry. Here it is.”

“Don’t touch the piano again till I tell you.”

“Yes.”

“And tell Mary to take off those beastly squeaky shoes of hers when she comes up to bed.”

Constance left her, shutting the door gently, and as she descended the stairs she had a feeling of going down, like one condemned to some cell, under the surface of life. A voice cried out in her: “It is going on like this for ever, it is going on like this for ever! I can’t bear it, I can’t!”

She eluded Mary who had waited tentatively for the chance of a few comforting words, and going out on to the veranda she sat down in a basket-chair. The night was so perfect that it was a mockery of her limitations, and the scent of the night stock touched the edge of pain. This vastness, this mystery, what did they offer her but contrasts? Where were the happy, adventurous days she yearned for? Somewhere afar off people would be dancing, making love, listening to music, watching life from the chairs outside Continental cafés, laughing, talking, being human. Those Paris boulevards she had read of! To-night in her hatred of the immediate present she felt she could rush into that boulevard life, do wild things, dance and sing in some cabaret, drink absinthe till she forgot. She had a hunger for sensation, even for some stab of exquisite pain that should break the numbness of this solitary existence.

She lay back in the chair, her breath coming and going in great heaves. Was she going to weep, or be whirled away into some hysterical outburst? Every organ in her body seemed to be throbbing in revolt, calling for life, and threatening violence if life were not given.

She sat up suddenly, stark, listening.

There were footsteps going along the laurel hedge. Someone whistled softly, casually, as though the whistler had no particular purpose in passing the white house.

“I have a song to sing o’.”

The footsteps went up along the hedge, stopped, and came back again.

“I have a song to sing o’.”

Constance Brent’s hands were gripping the arms of the chair. She started up, stood a moment irresolute, and then walked out of the veranda and across the lawn towards the wicket gate opening upon the heath. She raised the latch noiselessly, and went out from the shadow of the hedge into the moonlight.

The whistle came again:

“I have a song to sing o’.”

She answered, puckering up her mouth:

“Sing me your song o’.”

A figure appeared round the angle of the hedge, and came along slowly, keeping under cover.

“Hallo!”

It was a large and very confidential whisper.

“Hallo! I say, you do look well in white.”

She let him come close to her and stare down into her face with those round, shallow eyes of his. His largeness cast a shadow that nearly enveloped her slim whiteness. A sheepish excitement possessed him—the excitement of a young man who feels himself a devil of a fellow and who means to put the feeling into prose.

“Jolly out here to-night. I say—” He glanced towards the house.

She knew that by recognising that glance she would be conspiring with him.

“Isn’t it beautiful out there on the heath?”

His male mind, vulgarly agog for anything suggestive, sprang at the supposed invitation.

“Let’s go and look at the view? What about a coat or something?”

“It’s so warm.”

His smile would have been a leer on the face of an older man.

They started off along the path between the furze bushes, and so came into Briar Lane. The whole southern landscape, glimmering white under the moon, seemed more vivid and miraculous when seen from between the high black banks of the lane.

Constance Brent paused, with a drawing in of the breath.

“Isn’t that wonderful?”

Bertie Gascoyne looked at her as a butcher might look at a gazelle. He was an obtuse youngster, with all the selfish complacency of youthful obtuseness, the ordinary coarse-grained young cad found everywhere, at the Universities, and in the workshop, whose thoughts run perpetually to peer under the hem of a woman’s skirt. He had a sort of vague notions of honour, but these notions applied only to the young women, the sisters of his compeers, whom he knew that it was dangerous to meddle with. The average young man’s honour is only a class affair. It does not extend to the people whom he considers to be his inferiors.

“Look at the moonlight on the hills!”

“Fine, isn’t it?”

She did not understand the thing at her elbow, and certainly young Gascoyne did not understand her. “Tosh”—that was the word he applied to states of feeling that he could not comprehend. And the soul of a sensitive girl was as unexistent for him as the artists’ world is unexistent for the stevedore or the butcher. He did not see the spirit of beauty, and mystery, and pathos beside him, and was ready to walk blindly through it like a gamekeeper through a ghost.

The night was marvellous, and something had come to Constance Brent and offered her human comradeship. It must please him to be with her. She guessed that much, and a kind of innocent exultation stirred in her, a delight in the thought that she could create a necessity in the life of another. Some of her discontent floated away into the moonlight. She felt gay, happily reckless, eager to accept the spirit of comradeship, and to give it. Oh—he was alive; he must have felt some of the things that she had felt; he was at Oxford; he was young, and he would understand.

“I say, don’t you find it a bit lonely up here?”

He was plotting to come closer.

“Lonely? It is lonely.”

The crude male instinct took the inference to itself. They were talking at cross-purposes, the girl’s eyes turned towards spiritual things, the man’s fixed on mere matter. She began to talk to him, offering tentative, shy confidences, while the rough youth grabbed them complacently, always suspecting a double meaning, and accusing her to himself of “coming on.”

“Like bein’ out here?”

“It is new to have someone to talk to.”

“Me? Oh, thanks. Did you find it much of a bother to get out?”

“Get out?”

“Yes, out of the coop.”

Her white face, a little puzzled and appealing, with its dark eyes and hair, might have touched an older man. It looked so innocently for life, desiring to understand and to be understood.

“What do you mean by the coop?”

He thought, “You do play up to me, don’t you?”

“Why, the house,” he said aloud.

“Oh!”

“Took me a deuce of a lot of thinkin’ about. I’m supposed to be out after moths with Emma Cottle.”

“Emma Cottle! Is she——”

Bertie Gascoyne blurted a laugh.

“Emma Cottle! My hat! Old Emmery—don’t you see? He’s fly, too; knows the game.”

“Oh!”

“The old ’uns are always so deuced inquisitive.”

She had a sudden bright idea that Bertie Gascoyne might be tyrannised over by his mother and that he had come to her for sympathy. “They never seem to realise that we are young, do they?”

“Who?”

“The older people.”

“Suppose not. Is your old lady pretty stiff on you?”

His vulgar directness disconcerted her.

“I don’t know. Do you mean——”

“Keeps you on a chain. And I’ve come to let you off, eh?”

He swayed nearer, brushed up against her, and his hand touched hers. A queer, fastidious thrill went through her. She did not like him to come so close, but perhaps he meant it kindly.

She paused and turned about.

“I think we have come far enough.”

Constance did not guess how near she was to being caught, and bespoiled by the barbarian’s rough hands. But Bertie Gascoyne had a moment’s cowardice, a raw dread of the crisis that he would provoke.

“All right.”

He became awkwardly and half sulkily reticent. They reached the laurel hedge again; young Gascoyne half ready to clutch at the white figure, yet half afraid to play the devil.

“I think I must go in now.”

“Must you?”

“Yes.”

He loomed above her, sulkily and sensually inept.

“All right. Suppose I may come up again?”

She looked up at him quite frankly.

“Do you want to?”

“ ’Course I do. I’ll just whistle.”

She moved towards the gate where a blurred and unseen figure was standing under the shade of the laurels. The figure hurried away across the grass, and disappeared under the veranda.

Five minutes later Constance Brent and Mary met in the hall.

“You can shut the windows, Mary, and we’ll go to bed. I’ve been out on the heath. It’s beautiful by moonlight.”

“Yes, Miss Connie.”

The woman kept her own counsel, but she was troubled within herself.

“It’s only natural,” she thought; “but then—I don’t know. She’s so lonely, poor dear! And men—some of them young men are mean beasts. Anyhow, I didn’t mean to be spying.”