Читать книгу The White Gate - Warwick Deeping - Страница 6

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Constance Brent found the life at Furze Cottage intolerably lonely. She and her mother had been living there for two years, and Mrs. Power and the rector’s wife were the only people who had called. For Constance each day was much like every other day, save that sometimes it rained, and rain meant an added dullness and more reading aloud of trashy books. Or she could sit at her bedroom window, watching the fir trees on the heath being blown by the wind, till she knew the outline and the characteristic gestures of each restless tree. The landscape had become so tristfully familiar that much of the beauty had been washed out of it, and even the purples, the amethysts and golds seemed infinitely sad.

For many years Dora Brent and her daughter had lived at a succession of South Coast watering-places, and, though they had known very few people, there had been shops, libraries, concerts, a sense of movement and of hope. For every healthy girl is born to look into shop windows, to laugh a little, to flirt a little, and to gloat over new clothes. Up at Furze Cottage in winter, when the lamps were lit, Constance had a feeling of being lost for ever in a black, moaning wilderness. The finest trickles of life seemed to die away into the far distance, and there was not a twitter of hope anywhere. Sometimes a kind of despair came upon her—the despair of one buried alive, a thrusting off of stifling, terrifying silence. She would even go out and stand at the gate, on the chance of hearing a motor go whirling down the road, a hundred yards away. Things were like that. They came out of the unknown, swept by, and rushed into the unknown again. She was always left alone, and listening. And she wanted to live.

Moreover, the girl had an exquisite sensitiveness, a love of beauty so keen that it meant pain and tears in the throat. The ecstatic “Ah!” of the wind-swept pine woods at sunset would make her shiver and thrill like an echo. The coarsening of her mother’s nature had even driven her towards a more delicate fastidiousness. Her inner world became more and more a secret world, wherein she shut away odd corners of romance, old gardens under moonlight, strange castles upon sunset peaks, visions of human, summer lands.

Existence at Furze Cottage had compensations; she could number them on three fingers—her music, Mary, and Jim Crow.

Music was part of her way of feeling things. She fled to it also for utterance, and, knowing nothing of the ultra-modern school, she found her expression in Schubert, Chopin, Liszt, and Grieg. She had one of those soft, moaning voices, of not great power, but boasting some of the arrestive strangeness of the voice of an oracle. She read Maeterlinck with passion, and his spirit was in her and her singing.

Mary, the servant, was an immense cushion. She had the gift of sympathy, and of letting people lean against her and get rested. Moreover, she was very fond of Constance, and love counts in a wilderness.

As for Jim Crow, that fledgeling who had been sold to Constance by a farmer’s boy, he lived in a box fastened to a laburnum tree at the end of the garden, and was the one comic character in the girl’s life. With one wing clipped, he came flopping and cawing towards her whenever she appeared in the garden, stood at her feet, cocking a blue eye, or pulled her shoe-laces undone with facetious solemnity. Jim was the one person who had no respect for the dog Gussie, and perhaps part of Constance’s love for the bird went to the mischievous and sly ferocity with which he tormented the Pekinese. Jim seemed to have sufficient sense to make these attacks when the yellow head was within doors. If Gussie tried to sleep anywhere in the garden Jim came stalking up and pulled his tail or tweaked his ears. The Pekinese would start up, yap, and snarl, but he was a coward, and whole-heartedly afraid of the big black bird. It was one of Connie’s joys to see an indignant mop of fluff being chased up the garden by the crow. Jim would come and sit on her wrist after the performance and be stroked. His blue eyes appeared to say: “All right, you leave it to me. I’ll take it out of the little beast sometimes.”

The experiences of the last few years had taught Constance Brent to think, and she had come to realise the significance of her isolation. She could remember the time when she had said to herself: “Oh, things will be better next year. We may get to know people. It can’t go on like this.” But that was just what the present life persisted in doing, in going on and on indefinitely in the same dull, muffled way. Constance had faced the panic thought that it might go on and on like this for ever and ever, and that she would get up and go to her window each morning, and see the same view till the day of her death.

There had been periods of bitter rebellion, a beating of wings that had broken helplessly against her mother’s cynical apathy.

“Of course, if you like to go out and scramble with the fools who live on tea and buns, well and good. But I shan’t offer to help in the scramble. Don’t be an idiot, Connie. You are not made for that sort of life. You don’t know what it means.”

“But I’m no good to you here. Gussie is a much better companion than I am. And——”

“You want a new frock. Or perhaps you would like to go out as a governess, though I don’t know what on earth you could teach. You haven’t anything that the world wants, anything that it will give money for, except——”

She broke off suddenly with a queer laugh, and looked at the girl with a moment’s critical interest.

“You are just a bit French, you know—all eyes and white skin. I suppose you haven’t learnt the pussy-cat wisdom of finding someone who can give you a pleasant, sheltered corner?”

“Don’t, mother. I shall never marry. How could I?”

“There is no need to throw the blame on me. If your father had not had the head of a sheep——”

The realisation of her own helplessness made Constance’s moods more bitter. The sensitive and idealistic youth in her rebelled against the world’s callous and unjust ordering of everything. She was very feminine, and discontent made the lives that she imagined other women to lead seem ten times more mysterious and desirable. She knew that she would like to be exquisitely dressed, even to the very last delicate detail, to be able to wear French lingerie, the smartest of shoes, beautiful lace, tailor-made costumes, well-fitting gloves. Oh, she was sick of cotton and flannel, cheap blouses, and the old black stockings that Mary darned so beautifully. Dora Brent did not appear to care what her daughter wore. Constance had no fixed allowance, and her mother always protested poverty when she looked at the shop windows in Reading, and thought of what she herself desired and what would do for the daughter.

This longing for material things was but a small part of Constance’s discontent. She wanted to live, to do what other people did, to go to Henley and Ascot, and spend a month in London, to see Paris, France, Italy. She was hungry and starved, full of a yearning for the human touches of life, for the interplay, the laughter, the exultation of youth. She was ready to be passionately interested in everything, but Fate had ordered her into a corner and told her to turn her eyes to the wall.

Constance Brent made no more appeals to her mother, and her impulse towards rebellion took a more secret and inward course. She felt driven to break out, to assert herself, to seize life by the sleeve and insist upon its noticing her. Had she been ten years older she would have known how near she was to despair, and to the terrible desire that overtakes the best of us—the desire to cease from existing.

Trivial incidents were needed to join up the wires and to cause a flash of revolt.

Jim Crow was largely responsible for something that happened about that time. The Pekinese lay asleep in the veranda one morning, when Jim came across the lawn with an observant blue eye turned upon the house. The opportunity tempted him. There was a yelp, a scuffle, and a sudden uprising of wrath within an open French window. A book—thrown viciously—caught the crow sideways, elicited a loud squawk, and sent him retreating in flopping confusion down the path.

Partisans were up in arms.

“You’ve hurt Jim! Oh, you’ve hurt him!”

“Go and call Harry. I’ll have the bird’s neck wrung. He’s always tormenting the dog.”

“If you tell Harry to touch Jim, I’ll take the dog and drown him. I mean it.”

Her white face blazed as she followed the bird, who was settling his dignity and uttering self-encouraging squawks. He brisked up when Constance approached, blinking an eye, and hopped on to the wrist she held towards him.

“Poor old Jim!”

She had never before felt such bitter wrath against her mother. Certainly the bird had been the aggressor, but he typified in his way the spirit of rebellion against the rule of lap-dogs and apathy.

The afternoon found her starting off on one of her lonely walks, feeling that she could not bear to sit opposite her mother in the pony-cart, and look into the sulky, hard, white face under the yellow hair. Yet there are times when the most perfect country is detestable, a certain temperament being needed by those who are to succeed in being eternally interested in Nature. The heartache of youth cannot be lost in studying the ways of the dodder plant or the sundew, in watching ants at work, or in collecting specimens for systematic botany. Nor can the exotic modern spirit bear too much Arcadian loneliness, or the tantrums of a perverse climate. It seeks to build itself cities of refuge into which it can retreat when that mob-woman, Nature, beats her drum and brandishes her red flag, or seeks to make long and boring orations.

The shadeless road over the heath revelled in glare that afternoon, and the heather had lost its richness and had taken on duller, rustier tones. Now and again a motor passed. Constance Brent felt that she detested motors, and the people who owned them. They exaggerated the sense of life’s limitations, so far as she was concerned. The people appeared to stare so hard as they whirled by, and for one moment she had an absurd and primitive desire to put out her tongue. At all events it was humiliating—as the mood held her—to be left behind feeling a creature of the meaner sort.

A long grey car overtook her and swept past, driven by a fresh-coloured young man in a brown coat. He was alone, and he glanced round at Constance as he passed her with an interested glare of his blue eyes.

When the car had travelled about two hundred yards beyond her, Constance saw it draw to the side of the road and stop. A brown figure climbed out, and disappeared behind the grey body of the car. She knew the man quite well by sight, young Bertie Gascoyne, of Winwood Place. He always stared rather hard when he passed her on the road.

As she drew level with the car Constance saw him bending forward over a front mudguard. Something about the waiting expectancy of a half-turned profile, the furtive side glint of an eye, flashed home the thought that he was about to speak to her. Intuition triumphed. Bertie Gascoyne lifted his tweed cap and smiled rather foolishly.

It was a challenge, and she knew it. The next instant she had smiled back at him.

“Jolly warm, isn’t it?”

“Very.”

She felt a sudden heat go over her. The impulse towards revolt blazed up and seized its fuel. She faltered, and then stopped, conscious of the red blood in her cheeks.

“Is it a breakdown?”

“Nothin’ much. Had a new carburettor fitted, and just givin’ it a trial.”

He stood half turned towards her, one hand fiddling with something under the bonnet. He was a big young man, with a youthful largeness of manner, long-sighted eyes the colour of speedwell but without depth, throat and face burnt a rich red brown. A kind of sheepish self-assurance went with his flat, round face and large body. The mouth was rather too soft and loose, the teeth within very white when he smiled.

“You been walkin’?”

“Yes.”

“Too jolly hot. I say, let me take you for a spin; it’s the coolest thing goin’.”

So was he—in a sense. His large manner seemed to grow larger, as though an additional impression of size were needed to carry off the informality of the whole affair. Constance felt his blue eyes tentatively searching her face. She was conscious of an exquisite suggestion of mischief, of a moment’s flitting behind the footlights. Young Gascoyne was trying not to look afraid of a possible snub. She felt the power of her silence, and it delighted her, for life had hardly ever given her the chance of refusing anything.

“Go for a drive?”

“Why not?”

“I have been abusing motors for the last half-hour.”

“Beastly things when you are walkin’. My ‘Hawk’s’ a ripper. Just you let me show you what she can do.”

She nodded and smiled. The conspiracy was complete.

Bertie Gascoyne gave a queer laugh, and his blue eyes took on a glaring hardness. He turned to the car, and then glanced round at her with an air of heavy slyness. Constance noticed what a thick red neck and big hands he had. A momentary fastidiousness attacked her, a sensitive shrinking from this big creature, a feeling almost akin to fear. Then young Gascoyne’s face came up and smiled at her. Surely it was a mere piece of rebellious fun, unconventional no doubt, yet the most natural thing in the world.

She found herself leaning back in the well-cushioned seat beside this stranger, a rug over her knees, the glass screen keeping off the draught and the flies. The car was gathering speed, and for a minute or more she fixed her eyes on the white ribbon of the road that seemed to slide towards them and disappear down the throat of the great car. Beside her sat the young man with the brown face and the staring blue eyes that puzzled her.

“How fast we are going!”

She looked up at him with a sudden shyness that would have made a more sensitive man than Herbert Gascoyne wholly her servant, but this god in the car was a young barbarian out for his own pleasure. He belonged to a type that is excessively healthy, and whose appetites are very much alive. Constance did not guess the insult his inward attitude towards her was levelling at her pride.

“She can go! You wait till we get to Hanger Hill, then I’ll let her rip! You don’t mind going the pace?”

“No, it’s splendid.”

He laughed, enjoying the little innuendo by himself, but imagining that the girl had understood it perfectly. She was sitting relaxed, her eyes half closed, her mood for the moment one of exquisite exhilaration. She was wondering whether they would meet anyone who knew them by sight. If the man did not care, certainly she did not. Nothing mattered at Roymer.

Brown heathlands, dull green woods, blue sky, silvery distances swam and melted, raced and changed. A delightful physical languor stole over her. It was like being carried on the wings of the wind.

“Here’s Hanger Hill. Hold tight!”

They seemed to drop down the hill like a spent shell returning to earth. Trees and telegraph poles went by in rhythmic flashes. The girl felt life rising to her throat as she sat with her two feet pressing hard against the slope of the footboard. She had a wild desire to laugh, even to cry out.

They were down in the trough of a valley. The farther slope rose against them, white and steep and menacing. Up and up swept the car. There was the quickened, racing roar of the powerful engine.

Young Gascoyne turned and glanced at her. His eyes were alight, his lips parted over white teeth.

“Not quite all the way on top.”

The rush through the air and along the steep windings of the road made her feel a vague respect for the man who sat there and drove. There seemed something solid yet alert about him, a male effectiveness that counted.

“How many miles an hour was that?”

“Oh, about sixty. Hanger Hill’s a bit tricky.”

“Is it very difficult to drive?”

“Like to learn?”

“I should never have the nerve.”

“Timid thing!”

“I should lose my head.”

She was puzzled by the way he looked at her, and by the casual bravado in his voice. It did not occur to Constance Brent that this young man measured his respect for her by the yellowness of her mother’s head, and that he allowed himself the right of easy familiarity. He was out for pleasure, and he considered that this girl who had that woman for a mother might be quite ready to please him.

“Often wanted to speak to you, you know.”

“Have you?”

“Rather.”

She knew practically nothing of men, and it was this very innocence that made her think Herbert Gascoyne a blunt and ingenuous boy. They were on the homeward road now, and she dallied with a strange new sense of power, the power of the feminine creature to provoke and please the male. Bertie Gascoyne laughed and flirted, and became rather fatuously personal. It was only when the Hesketh Powers’ car flashed round a corner, with Philippa Power’s grey eyes looking straight at both of them, that the young man uttered a suppressed “Damn,” and grew less talkative.

Constance noticed the changed atmosphere. Perhaps he was thinking that he ought not to have tempted her into this exuberant piece of mischief, though Constance need not have worried her head about young Gascoyne’s hypothetical chivalry. He was not thinking of the girl at all, but of himself.

“Shall I put you down past the ‘Three Firs’?”

“Please.”

They grew silent, self-conscious, and ill at ease. Herbert Gascoyne had opened the throttle, and let the car travel at full speed. The little white-faced inn came into view, and the three fir trees on the grass knoll in the dip beyond. Young Gascoyne let the car thunder on till it had passed the trees, and then pulled up with a suddenness that made the brakes scream. He leant across and opened the door.

“Awfully good of you to have come.”

“I have enjoyed it.”

His brown face was very close, his blue eyes staring into hers.

“I say, you go for walks sometimes?”

“Yes.”

“Wonder if you’d let me come?”

“I don’t know.”

She escaped and climbed out, feeling her face burning.

“Well, may I?”

The spirit of revolt was still strong in her.

“Perhaps.”

He waved his cap and drove on, his blue eyes watching the road.

“Sly little bit of goods! Now, I wonder——”