Читать книгу The Road - Warwick Deeping - Страница 11

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For centuries the stillness of this green valley had remained virginal and inviolate, and the cupola clock over the Georgian stables of Stella Lacey seemed to claim this silence when it struck the deliberate hours.

“Mine, mine, mine.”

Did a fish jump in the moat the valley might have heard it, though in the spring of the year the birds made at dawn so great a clamour that the very trees seemed to tremble. So far as Gloriana’s ears served her it was a thrush who began it, and always from the top of one of the cedars. With the strange steadfastness of nature, on the same spire for an infinite number of years a thrush had led those multitudinous sweet pipings.

She opened the door in the wall and saw the six white pillars of the portico standing like ghosts. The oak door made a little creaking as she swung it back. She passed along the brick path of the rose garden to the arched opening in the yew hedge, and here the turf began, and the cedars, and the twelve clipped yews, the historic yews of Stella Lacey. She moved noiselessly, skirting the branches of a cedar where darkly they almost touched the grass. Another yew hedge rose like a deep-green wall with flecks of gold upon it, and beyond it lay the terrace with its statues and its two garden-houses, and beyond the terrace lay the moat.

Venus, Eros, Pan.

The robins would perch on the leaden heads of these statues, and ever and again a gardener with bucket and cloth would wash Venus, Eros and Pan, and remove the white anointings.

She stood on the terrace and listened, a woman with very white hair, and eyes of whimsical tenderness. She still had beauty, the beauty of one who had grown old with dignity, and who—when life tore illusion after illusion from her, held fast to a jocund sense of life’s humorous inevitableness. Here—on the terrace—the troubling of the valley’s stillness became sound, as though the Jacobean walls of Stella Lacey caught these vibrations and transmuted them into vague rumblings. So, during the war, she had sometimes heard the guns in Flanders, and the sound of the slaughter on the Somme.

In those days she had stood by one of the pedestals, and made an inward murmuring.

“What does Pan say? Can Pan hear the guns? O, unhappy summer, unhappy generation! Old things and thoughts blown to pieces.”

Her two sons had died over yonder, Oliver in front of Ypres, Victor near Contalmaison. Stella Lacey itself had had its death-wound there. It lived while she lived.

She walked towards one of the garden-houses and entered it, and opening one of the lattices between the mullions, looked out. This gazebo gave upon the valley, and between the beeches and the clumps of old Scotch pine she could follow the windings of the river to the grey bridge at Monks Lacey. A portion of the Mill House was visible, a slip of tarmac, and perhaps two or three yellow umbrellas.

A tea-house, a petrol pump, the Buck family, modernity multitudinous and mechanical, and to her—both strangely futile and wholly inevitable.

Those dreadful young women!

No, not dreadful—but different. Twelve years ago she might have referred to them as dreadful, but not now. Though, if her sons had been alive? Well—yes, possibly. Oliver—most certainly—would have been seeking adventure down yonder, lured by flesh-coloured legs even as his Georgian forefathers had glimpsed a red stocking. Mrs. Buck and her daughters, and young men with untidy heads and electric pull-overs and floppy grey trousers, and an air of promiscuous intimacy. But just how promiscuous was it?

She would say to herself: “Don’t be old. Don’t grouse against youth. Youth is the same and different. It looks at life as it looks at a car. How does it go, how fast will it go? I see, I want, I take. We took in the old days, and somehow made our takings seem gracious and pleasant. These—the new ones—are taking from us now. Get—quickly; there is no mumbo-jumbo God to balk you.”

She heard footsteps on the flags of the terrace. Bonthorn had arrived, and was in search of her. She saw him standing by Eros, all brown in the evening sunlight, and somehow suggesting the happy celibate. She saw both the priest and the soldier in him, a figure in bronze from one of the Gallipoli beaches, rather like one of those hawk-headed Australians. He glowed in khaki drill. Were those strange clothes of his relics of the war, or did he have them made for him? The Flower Man looking at Eros with a kind of gentle fierceness.

She spoke to him from the shadows of the garden-house.

“Mr. Bonthorn, I’m here.”

His blue eye searched for her. He suggested the heat and the glare and the dust of Cape Helles, where he had left the other eye. She moved into the doorway, smiling at him and his unusualness.

“Almost like hide and seek.”

He had no hat, and he saluted her.

“They sent me out to find you. I hope you don’t mind?”

“Why should I—when I am wasting your time?”

“Hardly that. A man finds excuses——”

Her glance was whimsical.

“For doing what he wants to do?”

“Exactly.”

He stood still, as though his world waited upon hers.

“Some places and people reassure one.”

She joined him.

“Do you need reassuring?”

“Sometimes. Even names are reassuring. Oriana of the Moated Grange. Your valley is looking very beautiful to-night.”

She moved to the terrace wall and looked down at the white lilies in the moat.

She said: “It is so difficult to realize that a beauty like this dies. To you—I suppose—it might seem so permanent.”

And then she laughed.

“I am an old woman, Mr. Bonthorn, in an age when no one is supposed to grow old. One arrives at the impersonal. Both my sons were killed in the war. Had they lived, it would not have been here—after me. Even this terrace, which seems so solid, slips from under one’s feet.”

She turned to him half questioningly.

“Does it strike you as sad?”

“You mean——?”

“This other England that is dying? No—I am not being gloomy. No tradition is final, thank God. We people who lived spaciously and thought of ourselves as England, and who put our servants to live in cellars and sent missionaries and millions to the so-called heathen! To appear sententious and selfish and superfluous to the new age? Why not? This place is just a beautiful dead shell.”

He thought for a moment.

“Not dead! Surely not dead?”

“Not yet, perhaps. Five years ago I planted that bank of flowering trees and shrubs over there. You saw it—a month or so ago.”

He nodded.

“Double cherries—pink and white, Siberian crab, Pyrus Floribunda, Pyrus Purpurea, lilacs, red mays, a touch of laburnum. Is that death?”

Again her eyes were whimsical.

“Death duties do not consider flowering shrubs and water lilies. The Stella Laceys—are—museum pieces. Yet, if one is a mystic——”

“All gardeners are mystics.”

“O, don’t generalize. One has to sit still with beauty, and this age cannot sit still.”

He passed a hand over the weathered stone of the parapet.

“Are you sure? Was any age so flower-loving? Was any age so full of a divine discontent? Even the rush and the restlessness. Confusion, but the confusion of——”

“Change.”

“Why not—creation?”

She stood reflecting.

“Prejudices—without prejudice! That road down there, all the new roads, a vast sameness, that Mill House a tea-shop, two long-legged girls, trippers in char-a-bancs. I ask myself—— But how bête to ask if it is good, or better, or different? It just—is.”

“Yes, it just is.”

She made a movement as of smoothing her hair.

“And the solution? I could give you one from America.”

He bridled.

“America!”

“My Californian friend, Mr. Jonathan G. Cripps. You’ve met him.”

“And what does Mr. Cripps say?”

“Just this. You English are finished. You are blind to your own beauty. Over there we are—or some of us—are just getting our eyes wide to it. We—or some of us—are emerging from the mere material scuffle; you—with your something-for-nothing crowd—are heading for the thick of it. We shall buy up your beauty. I can see England becoming like the Italy of the seventeenth century, an antique shop, bric-à-brac, a little subsidized show-country, parasitic and picturesque.”

She laughed gently.

“Just that.”

Bonthorn said: “I wonder.”

She observed him for a moment; he was staring at the moat with that one very blue eye. His face had a fierceness. She spoke.

“Come and see Isabeau. She has most exquisite lavender standards, and claret-coloured falls. And the phloxes.”

He came out of his strained reverie.

“Yes—I expect your phloxes have eel-worm. That’s serious.”