Читать книгу The Eyes of Love - Warwick Deeping - Страница 9

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To Jesse Falconer the world became a world of “voices,” and of sounds that reached him through the darkness of a hopeless night. He sat in his chair in the oak parlour, and heard the crackle of the wood upon the hearth, the slow ticking of the grandfather clock, the noise of the wind in the trees and its piping in the chimneys. The penetrating smell of some drug pervaded the room, the smell of the dressings under the bandages, a smell that Jesse was never likely to forget.

At first he was dazed, and sat like a child gazing through a window at night and wondering at the strangeness of the stars. The self in him seemed dead, or, if not dead, drugged and shut away in some cool, dark place. He felt no pain, no bitterness, no despair. A kind of quiet amazement spread the mood into a smooth, tranquil surface.

Some days passed before the self in him awoke. It was like the return of sensation to a limb that had been crushed under a great weight. And it was terrible. His consciousness was so quick in him that his brain felt like a ball of glowing metal shining in the midst of impenetrable blackness. He had some of the feeling of horror of a man buried alive. The world had fallen on him, a black, smothering world that stifled his senses. He felt that he must struggle, cry out, or die. And his loneliness was the loneliness of a solitary hell.

True, there were the voices about him, but they had no intimacy, no nearness. They seemed to speak of him, not to him, and to come from a long way off. They spoke, and yet said nothing that was real, and resembled a murmur of sound in a hollow, empty space. Jesse, as he sat in solitude, heard the monotonous ticking of the clock. It was like the drip of water on his brain, and for a while he believed that he was going mad. His brain-case resembled a shell of steel strained to bursting-point. The ticking of the clock resounded in it like blows struck with a heavy hammer.

Then a simple thing happened. They had kept dog Brick away from Jesse, though why, God and the wit of a practical woman alone could tell! But Brick had waited for his opportunity and seized on freedom. A dog’s paws trembled on Jesse’s knees. He felt something warm and moist licking his hands.

The touch of the dog’s tongue may have saved Falconer from madness. A great surge of emotion rose into his throat. He took the dog into his arms, and Brick lay there, licking Jesse’s hands, and even the bandages over the blind face. The dog’s sympathy, the warm caress of the beast’s tongue, broke the dry anguish of his despair.

From that moment a quiet patience came to him. The storm had passed, leaving a mood of falling rain and June scents amid tall grass. It was a season of still, haze-wrapped meditation. Fortitude drew near out of the inevitable darkness. He was content to sit still awhile, and let the mongrel lick his hands.

The world was a world of voices, and as the days went by, Jesse found that these voices suggested various colours. The vivid distinctness of the impressions puzzled him. Each voice had its own colour, as though certain sound vibrations could impress upon the brain the same stimulus as it would have received from certain waves of light.

Kate’s strident, Day of Judgment voice suggested a hard, raw red. It was a vigorous colour, aggressive, and able to dominate others.

Jenny, the maid, gave out nasal whinings, and her colour was a weak ochre. She inspired visions of an egregious and sallow democracy squeaking resentfully against the rule of the few, never realising that it is the doom of fools to serve.

Rushholm was all grey—tired grey.

Jack Rickaby resounded, and his note was a note of brass.

Jim Purkiss suggested a rich russet, streaked with the green of weeds.

As for the voice that Jesse desired to hear, it came but once, and from a distance, and for the moment left no colour note behind it. Jesse sat in his chair, and waited for the colour of Ann’s voice. And presently it came to him as a mysterious blue, the colour of the far hills in the clearness before rain.

People turned into the farm gate, and sat in the oak parlour, talking to Jesse.

John Strutt, curate of Ashhurst, was one of the first to come, bringing a sense of yellow light with him, like sunlight on the golden leaf-buds of an oak. A brown boy, better in the cricket field than the pulpit, he filled Jesse’s pipe for him, and talked great nonsense. His vitality was the vitality of perfect health and generous good humour. He did not sadden Jesse, perhaps because he was so little of an egoist, and not in the least self-conscious. His laugh was a hit to the boundary. It refreshed Falconer, without making him thoughtful and morose.

The vicar was very different. He smelt of the chancel, and talked of “Know-ledge,” and “Gud’s pruvidence.” To Jesse he was the colour of dry bones. They did not humour one another, and the vicar came no more.

Bentall, the bird lover, wandered in and talked of tits and wild duck, though care was clawing at his heart. He was a quiet man, and his colour was the colour of the brown back of a wren. He and Jesse would sit long together, and in the spirit, they clasped hands.

“What a strange world! Nature is at the bottom of everything. We do not see her hands move, or how she does it. It’s juggling.”

And that was all that they could say.

As for his neighbours, they were no more cruel in their judgment of Jesse than a boy is who shoots sparrows with a catapult. Human nature loves a disaster, mangled bodies, and huge death-rolls. And there were many egg-headed pietists in Ashhurst who rejoiced at the chance of flapping the rag of their religion in the face of a blind pagan.

Many men said, “Falconer always was a fool, and an unlucky one.”

Some old women remarked, “The man did not fear God. This is a judgment on him.”

And they exulted.

Yet there was one heart that put up a prayer for Falconer, a prayer that should have compelled the First Cause to create itself in the likeness of a god in order that it might be supplicated by the lips of young girls.

“O God, give Mr. Jesse back his sight.”

It was to the unseen that Ann Wetherell prayed, to a possible god beyond the stars, for the girl had no theology. She was a rank heathen so far as doctrine and religious education went, and like most of the moderns she had no time to think of her latter end. Hours of insufferable boredom in a stuffy room, that was all the Church had given her. The pious folk instil much hatred and weariness into the hearts of the children, and the smell of the Sabbath clings, like a musty and unpleasant odour. With the burying of much old rubbish, people have grown healthier, and ceased to sweat self-consciously about their souls. Ann Wetherell did not know or care whether she had such a thing as a soul. She believed that there was “Someone who managed everything.” Though sometimes it seemed to her that things were mismanaged rather than managed.

Dusk had fallen when Jesse heard the sound of Ann Wetherell’s voice. The girl had come to the back porch, and knocked—rather timidly. Kate Falconer herself had opened the door.

Ann found herself looking into a hurried and impatient face. The elder woman’s eyes said, “Well, what have you come bothering for? Hurry up, I can’t stand loitering here!”

“How is Mr. Jesse, ma’am?”

The “Jesse” slipped instinctively off Ann’s tongue. Kate stared, as though the girl were a presumptuous slut.

“Mr. Falconer is very well, considering.”

Ann faltered before a raw insolence that did not attempt to cover its meaning.

“Thank you, ma’am.”

And Kate closed the door.

In truth her whole attitude towards her husband had become a closing of doors. Strenuous egoist that she was, she had taken the disaster as the final proof of Jesse’s supreme incompetence. From the very beginning her mood was a resentful mood, though she decorated it with a dictatorial pity. Her husband had become a great, useless, inert mass; a thing that had to be moved from place to place. It was not that she was unkind to him, though her kindness showed a busy, and half-contemptuous thoroughness. Since he could do nothing for himself, she seemed to assume that he could not be considered a free man. She managed Jesse, and treated him as a piece of furniture that had to be dusted, polished, and pushed hither and thither.

“Jesse, time to go to bed.”

“Jesse, come and sit in the kitchen. The girl wants to clean out the parlour.”

“Jesse, you’re too near the fire. Push your chair back.”

She helped him to dress, cut up his food, and even fed him till he began to manage these things for himself. Yet there was a subtle suggestion of impatience and haste in all that she did that made the man feel that he was useless and a burden.

Mr. Jack Rickaby called pretty frequently. Kate would see him in the best parlour, and Jesse would sit and listen to the distant murmur of their voices. Jack Rickaby came into the house with the air of a man in authority. He made Jesse feel like a blind ghost driven to mope in the dark corners of his own house. Some men are very sensitive, and all Mr. Rickaby’s wealth of blunt compassion could not conceal a certain brisk condescension that made some decent delay before it shouldered the helpless man aside.

Jack Rickaby advised about the farm. Jesse had attempted to help his wife by telling her what the men should be doing, and she had brushed his suggestions aside without much ceremony.

“Now, Jesse, don’t you worry your head about the farm. Just you leave things alone.”

He soon understood that they did not consider him as a man wielding authority. Jim Purkiss and the other labourers never came to him for orders. The truth rankled in him, even when it was plausibly asserted that he was better without all worries. He felt as though they were shutting him up in a cupboard.

Perhaps the saddest moment of the day was when he woke in the wooden bed in the spare room over the porch. It was a room of chintzes and solid mahogany with a scent of lavender about the bed-quilt. Each morning for many days Jesse woke in that room with an expected sense of light. Then the truth would leap at him out of the darkness. There was no dawn for him—nothing but perpetual night.

It was a moment of exquisite anguish. Nature rebelled, and stretched out despairing hands. The live manhood in him cried out:

“Light, oh for light!”

Then the inevitableness of it all would descend upon his consciousness, like a great hand smoothing out a crumpled cloth. He would hear Kate and her servant moving about the house. Nothing mattered. He doubted whether there was a single person in the world to whom his blindness was not a matter of comparative indifference. Some of them spoke kind words, and then went their way. No heart was hurt by his misfortune, or suffered from any appreciable sense of loss.

The one creature who comforted him was the mongrel, Brick. The dog rarely left him. He would have slept on Jesse’s bed, had not Kate refused to humour so questionable a habit.