Читать книгу Imagined Corners - Willa Muir - Страница 11

TWO

William Murray stood looking out of the window, his hands clasped behind his back, while Sarah piled the dirty dinner-dishes on a tray. Now that Ned was actually out of the house she felt exhausted; the exertion of lifting the tray was almost too much for her. She would be thankful when she got into bed. So precisely regulated was her scheme of life, however, that she thought it rather a disgraceful weakness to lie down during the day, and for the same reason it did not occur to her that William, being stronger and less tired, might carry the tray into the kitchen.

Nor did it occur to William. He had not quite escaped the influence of his father, who had ruled his house, as he had ruled his school, on the assumption that the female sex was devised by God for the lower grades of work and knowledge, and that it was beneath the dignity of a man to stoop to female tasks. But although this assumption lay at the back of William’s mind it appeared so natural that he had never recognized it; if Sarah had asked him to carry the tray he would have taken it willingly; the assumption merely hindered him from thinking of such an action. So he gazed out of the window, meditating on his sermon and on Ned.

‘Judge not, and ye shall not be judged: condemn not, and ye shall not be condemned: forgive, and ye shall be forgiven.’ That was his text. The thought which had arisen in his mind that morning had given it a new aspect; he was looking at it from a longer perspective. Instead of being an absolute virtue forgiveness was merely a second-best, a concession to ordinary flesh and blood which was too imperfect to enter at once into the full peace of God. That blessed state, he thought, could not be conveyed in words alone to those who had never experienced it; but perhaps it could be transmitted by contagion…. It was a state of fearless trust in the love of God, a fearless acceptance of the universe, acceptance without criticism, without fear of criticism, without self-consciousness. But most of us, he thought, live on the defensive; we live as if under a jealous and critical eye. ‘Thou God seest me.’ For such timid creatures the leap into the infinite space of God’s love is too great; small fears must first be cast out, small encouragements given. That was the purport of his text: to cast out people’s fear of each other, as a step on the way to boundless trust in God.

Ned was clearly an extreme instance of human mistrust. He filled the world with the shapes of his fear. Every act, every word, every inflection of other people’s voices he construed as hostile; kind words appeared as hypocrisy, kindly services as specious intrigue. His fears were so monstrous that mere persuasion could not dispel them; he must be cured by the greater force, the more absolute revelation. The text was not enough for Ned.

‘Did you notice,’ said Sarah, ‘how Ned flared up at me when I told him Mabel wanted him to golf with her? And the things he said about her! But when she came he went off as meekly as a lamb…. I don’t understand it. It seems as if we brought out the very worst in him.’

Ned’s tirade was still rankling in Sarah’s heart.

‘You think I don’t see through you!’ he had shouted when she mentioned the proposed golf match. ‘Low, sneaking cunning,’ he had reiterated. Women were snakes in the grass. All alike. Not one better than another…. On the whole, it was a comfort to Sarah that he had abused Mabel too. But when Mabel appeared, gay and pretty, asking him if he cared to golf, he had become even excessively complaisant. It tortured Sarah to think that Mabel could succeed where she had failed.

‘No, no,’ said William, turning round. ‘We don’t bring out the worst in him. He fears us less than other people, that’s all. Other people impose a constraint on him. Don’t let such ideas discourage you. Go to bed now and sleep a little.’

‘What are you going to do?’ Sarah still lingered as if there were something left unsaid. She did not herself know what it was.

‘I shall visit Ann Watson,’ said the minister. ‘Go to bed now.’

Reluctantly Sarah withdrew, reminding herself again that she ought to feel grateful to Mabel.

William walked slowly by unfrequented by-roads towards the house where Ann Watson lay in bed. The sand-scoured, windswept little streets were filled with clear light; everything was sharply focussed as if seen through a reducing lens; above the plain grey-stone houses the sky was pale and remote. Clear and thin and sharp as the air were the voices of the passers-by, for the Calderwick dialect is born in the teeth of an east wind that keeps mouths from opening wide enough to give resonance to speech. The shrill almost falsetto tones pierced the minister’s meditations; he ceased to think about the peace of God, and remembered the querulous voice of Ann Watson. In spite of himself, his heart sank a little at the thought of the close-lipped, tight-fisted old woman. He turned a corner into a cobbled lane, at the end of which the Watsons’ house stood at right angles to the others, enclosed by a fence and presenting a blank wall to the street. Here Ann and Mary Watson had been born, and here they would die. Here as children they had played among the cobbles, like the children playing there that day. The minister paused to watch half-a-dozen little girls who were rushing, with screams of simulated terror, towards another girl standing by herself in the middle of the lane.

‘Mither! Mither!’ they shrieked. ‘I’m feared!’

‘Tits!’ said the ‘mother’, ‘it’s just yer faither’s breeks. Away ye go!’

Back they all rushed pell-mell to the Watsons’ gateway.

‘What are you playing at?’ inquired William, laughing.

The girls crowded together shyly and looked at him.

‘Bogey in the press,’ one of them suddenly spoke up.

‘And is this the press?’ he pointed to the gate.

They nodded, giggling.

‘Oh, well,’ said William, ‘I don’t mind the bogey. I’m going right into the press; look at this.’

He opened the gate and went into the garden, followed by an outburst of disconcerting childish laughter.

My bogey is just as much of a fabrication as theirs, thought William, walking along the narrow paved path to the front door. Why did children like to frighten themselves?

He lifted the big knocker and rapped it firmly before he noticed that the door was ajar. A shrill scream sounded within the house, and he took it as a command to come in. He pushed the door open and saw across the kitchen another open door leading into Ann’s bedroom. She was half sitting up in bed, so that she had a clear view of the kitchen.

‘Oh, it’s you, minister! Come away in. Have you seen that lassie o’ mine?’

The minister looked round the kitchen as if the lassie might be hiding somewhere.

‘She’s awa’ oot half-an-hour syne to go to the baker’s; set her up with her gallivanting,’ said Ann, still stretching her neck towards the kitchen. ‘I’ll give her a flea in her lug – Oh, there you are, you good-for-nothing jaud!’

A sulky-looking girl bounced in past the minister, and set two loaves of bread on the dresser.

‘Dinna leave the bread there!’ screamed Ann. ‘Put it in the bread crock. And see that you put the lid on right.’

The minister advanced and sat down on a horse-hair chair beside the bed.

‘You wouldna believe it,’ went on Ann in the same high scream, ‘what I have to suffer. Folk just take a pleasure in spiting me. I canna trust that lassie to do a thing right.’

A loud rattling from the kitchen fireplace answered her.

‘What are you doing there?’ cried Ann.

The minister got up and shut the bedroom door.

‘I don’t like to see you worried, Miss Watson,’ he said. ‘Never mind the lassie. It’s you I’ve come to see.’

‘It’s all very well to say never mind the lassie,’ grumbled Ann; ‘if I didna keep an eye on her she would have everything going to rack and ruin. And she puts things where I canna bear them to be, just to spite me. And my sister Mary’s every bit as bad. You wouldna believe it, but yestreen she changed every stick o’ furniture in the kitchen, till I was nearly blue in the face. I kept that kitchen for years, and I kept father’s auld chair in its right place beside the dresser, but last night nothing wad please her but to have it out at the cheek o’ the fire for her to sit in. I tell you, I’ve made Teenie put it back beside the dresser, and there it’ll bide. We’ll see what my lady has to say till’t when she comes hame.’

‘But if Miss Mary wants to sit in it—’

‘She’ll no’ sit in it! Na, she’ll no’ sit in it! The shop’s hers, but the house is mine, and I’ll no’ put up with interference. Day in, day out, I’ve had to mind the house while she was fleein’ all over the town enjoying herself; she needna think she’s to have everything her own way here as well as outside. I may be bedridden, but I’m no’ done for yet.’

Ann nodded her head vehemently, and drew down her upper lip. She had forgotten the minister and was carrying on an inaudible quarrel with an invisible opponent. William Murray found himself looking at her as if for the first time. Her long, hard face must have been handsome once. And once she must have been a little girl playing outside on the cobbles. He felt a sudden sympathy for her; it was touching to see a human soul journeying from one infinity to another in such a narrow cage.

She was still nodding her head, but her lips had ceased to move. So he addressed her again:

‘How did you come to stay at home while Miss Mary took over the shop?’

Ann, without knowing it, might have been affected by the sympathy in his voice; at any rate she now answered him simply and directly:

‘Because I aye had to keep the house, you see. Mother was like me, helpless wi’ rheumatism for years an’ years, and I was the handiest in the house. She couldna bear to see Mary flinging the things aboot, so I bude to bide, and Mary gaed to help father in the shop. And she just stayed on there. I never got a chance to do anything else. I’ve just been buried alive here – buried alive.’

Her high voice quavered.

‘I dare say,’ said the minister, ‘you didn’t feel like that while your father was at home? He must have liked you to keep house for him?’

‘I aye got on fine wi’ father,’ said Ann. ‘I aye got on fine wi’ father…. But Mary wadna let me in the shop. An’ I’ll no’ let her in father’s chair. Na, I’ll no’.’

‘And yet,’ said the minister, ‘she and you are all that’s left on this earth of your father.’ He put his hand on hers. ‘You were bairns together,’ he said.

Ann’s mouth opened in amazement. But what she was going to say remained unspoken as her eye met the minister’s.

‘We’re all bairns together,’ he went on: ‘bairns frightened to believe in the love that’s behind everything, the love of our Heavenly Father. There’s a lot of love in you, Miss Ann, that has never had a chance.’

The Reverend William Murray walked down the lane much more briskly than he had come. Ann had suffered him to read ‘a chapter’, and had even asked him to put up ‘a bit prayer’. Instinctively his eye sought the pale sky, now veiled with insubstantial clouds through which the light of the declining sun was softly diffused. The firmament, he said to himself, with a new realization of the word. A firm basis. An enduring reality. It did not even enter his mind that there were people in the world who might regard his firmament as a mere illusion of beauty woven of light and air. The Reverend William Murray did not doubt the universal validity of his personal experiences.