The Woman Who Had Imagination Page 12

  And following him, we went into the garden. There we heard the nightingales again, one against another, tuning up, half sharp, half sweet, their notes enriched by the sultry summer air under the shelter of the pines. The scent of lilac in the full heaviness of its blossoming was like a drug, marvellously fragrant. The green peas were bursting into white flower and the first roses were crimsoning the house wall, their glossy leaves splashed with the white droppings of the swallows flying to and fro to nest under the thatch-eaves.

  All the time we were in the garden my uncle Silas talked more garrulously and more excitedly than usual, and he was still very garrulous and excited when the cabs and wedding-flies drove up the lane to take us to church. And I remember saying to my mother again as he walked down the lane with us: ‘Why can’t he walk straight?’

  ‘Sshh!’ she whispered. ‘It’s this rough lane.’

  We all drove to the church in flies and cabs drawn by white horses with polished hoofs and silk-ribboned bridles. There were more than a hundred guests, a great dazzle of white dresses and white buttonholes, and my uncle Silas looked magnificent. There was a sort of purposely devilish splendour about his light grey coat and trousers, his yellow carnation, his canary waistcoat, and his grey square bowler rakishly cocked askew as though to match that everlastingly devilish look in his blood-shot eye.

  ‘Well,’ said my grandmother, ‘it might be a skittle-match to look at Silas.’

  The church was full, and I remember my grandfather saying to me: ‘Don’t want to hear a lot o’ popery and hymn-singing, do you?’ and we stayed outside together, looking for nests in the churchyard yews and reading the names on the tombstones until the wedding was over.

  It was not until then, when the church door opened and the guests and the congregation began to flock into the churchyard that I saw Georgina.

  ‘Ain’t she flash?’ whispered my grandfather. ‘Didn’t I say so?’

  She was unforgettably lovely. As she came from the church-porch with Abel, who looked more than ever solemn and simple in his suit of blue serge, his bowler hat, and his light brown button-boots which squeaked a little, she seemed to me more beautiful, more spirited, and more enchanting than perhaps she really was. She was very dark, her black hair and eyes shining vividly against her white wedding dress. Her face seemed full of a half-angelic, half-wicked vivacity and the conflicting lights and expressions of pure naivety and passion. She was across the churchyard and in the wedding-fly in a moment, and I did not see her again until we were all sitting about the long tables in the marquee eating and drinking and talking and laughing, with the sweating waiters rushing hither and thither, juggling with food and drink, madly trying to serve everyone at once.

  And at the table-head, next to Georgina and Abel, sat my uncle Silas, and opposite him Lord Henry and Lady Hester, for whom Georgina and Abel worked. Lord Henry put on an eyeglass and read a speech, ‘Ee heev greet pleesyah,’ and so on, which we all applauded by banging the tables, making the glass and crockery dance and ring. After him, I remember, my uncle Silas rose with a sort of noble unsteadiness to his feet, waved his hands, almost pitched forward, clutched the table in time, took a drink to steady himself, and began a long, tipsy speech, which we half drowned with our table-banging and laughter, and of which all I can remember is a kind of refrain that he kept repeating as he gazed with a sort of sleepily wicked admiration at Georgina:

  ‘Afore the night’s gone we’ll sing you a song. Me and the bride, eh?’

  Georgina would smile without opening her lips, a marvellous, lovely, insinuating smile, and my uncle Silas would wink and proceed with his speech, breaking now and then into long words which he could not pronounce with his drink-fuddled lips.

  ‘Silas has swallowed the dictionary,’ someone remarked.

  ‘Don’t know what it is,’ declared Silas, lifting his glass, ‘but it wants a hem of a lot o’ washing down.’

  I could see my grandmother fuming, her lips set thin with exasperation. ‘You won’t catch me at another wedding with Silas,’ she said, ‘as long as I live. Not if I know it.’

  ‘Silas,’ she said to him, severely, when the feast was over, ‘you ain’t responsible.’

  ‘I know,’ he said.

  ‘If you go singing one of your pub-songs with that girl,’ she warned him, ‘I see you know about it.’

  He cocked his eye at her with purposeful devilishness.

  It was late in the evening, just after the May dusk had begun to fall, when my uncle Silas and Georgina sang their song. My grandmother protested and threatened, not knowing whether she was more disgusted with Silas for enticing the girl or with the girl for making a promise to sing a duet with a man who had been drunk since noon. She retired to the house, excusing herself when she found that the dew was falling. But I stayed outside, in the warm lilac-heavy air, and listened. The guests had been dancing on the grass to the music of two fiddles and a piano brought out of the house. There was such an atmosphere of laughter and happiness, and besides the fragrance of lilac and may-blossom a strange odour of bruised grass and moon-daisies that the dancers had trampled down. My uncle Silas and Georgina stood at the entrance to the marquee, and Silas took the girl’s arm in his and they sang ‘I’m Seventeen Come Sunday’ without the fiddles or the piano. Uncle Silas had the ugliest voice in the world, and the girl’s contralto seemed exquisite beside it. She put an unexpected spirit and passion into her voice:

  ‘Will you come to my mammy’s house

  When the moon shines bright and clearly?

  And I’ll come down and let you in

  And my mammy shall not hear me.’

  ‘Yes,’ said my grandmother, who listened after all, from the house, ‘and that’s what she will do if I know anything.’

  All the time my uncle Silas and Georgina were singing, Abel was watching her. His eyes never flickered or changed their expression of wide, mute adoration. He looked not only as if he would do anything for her, but as if he would forget or forgive anything she did. He seemed almost stupefied with love and worship of her.

  When the song was over my uncle Silas kissed Georgina with a loud smack. Abel smiled with the serenity of pure adoration, while the guests laughed and applauded. In the silence before the music began for dancing again I could hear the nightingales singing unfrightened in the spinney, and the cuckoos, as in the morning, croaking across the darkening fields in mockery.

  It was past midnight when we harnessed the trap and lighted the lamps and my grandfather led the horse down the lane. We could hear my uncle Silas bawling ‘We won’t go home till morning’ long after we were on the road.

  ‘I’ll never come within fifty mile of a wedding with Silas if I live to be a thousand,’ my grandmother kept declaring. ‘And what in the wide world are you doing, man? Can’t you drive straight?’

  My grandfather could not drive straight, and my grandmother, reaching suddenly across my sleepy face, took the reins from him and slapped them across the back of the horse.

  ‘Lord, I’d Georgina that girl if she were mine. Kissing Silas! — and he wasn’t the only one she kissed, either. Saucy! — saucy ain’t the word! Somebody’s going to be led a fine old dance if I know anything about it. There’s going to be trouble afore the year’s out.’

  But there was no dance and no trouble. Georgina died suddenly, in childbirth, the following spring. My uncle Silas is dead too. But I shall never forget their song, the girl’s spirited loveliness, the feast in the marquee, the smell of lilac and wine and bruised grass, and the sound of the cuckoos contradicting the nightingales.

  The Waterfall

  I

  The only sound in the air as Rose Vaughan hurried across the park was the thin glassy sound of the waterfall emptying itself into the half-frozen lake. The snow that had fallen a few days after Christmas had thawed and half vanished already, leaving little snow islands dotted about the sere flattened grass among the wintry elms. It was freezing hard, the air silently brittle and bitter,
the goose-grey sky threatening and even dropping at intervals new falls of snow, little handfuls of pure white dust that never settled. Now and then the black trees and the tall yellow reed-feathers and the dead plumes of pampas grass fringing the lake would stir and quiver, but with hardly a sound. The winter afternoon darkness gave the new skin of ice across the lake a leaden polish in which the shadows of a few wild duck were reflected dimly. The duck, silent and dark, stood motionless on the ice as though frozen there, but as the woman came down the path and crossed the wooden bridge over the lake-stream they rose up frightened, soaring swiftly and with wild quackings flying round and round, their outstretched necks dark against the wintry sky.

  The woman, hurrying over the bridge and up the path under the trees, hardly noticed them. She walked with strange, long half-running strides, as though walking were not quick enough for her and running too undignified. As the path ascended sharply from the lake she began to pant a little, breathing the icy air in gasps through her mouth. There was the desperation of fear in her haste. Her father, the Reverend Ezekiel Vaughan, lay very ill at the rectory, which stood at the far end of the park, where she herself had been born and had lived for forty years and where she expected to go on living until she died; and she was hurrying to get across the park to the big house in order to telephone from there for the doctor. Her father was a man who had grown old before his time, and she had lived alone with him for so long that as she panted up the path, with her mouth a little open and her feet slipping backwards on the half-frozen path, she also looked prematurely middle-aged, her face joyless and negative, her pale grey eyes devoid of alertness and light.

  She met no one coming down the path, and in her desperate hurry might not have seen them if she had. Until lately the path had been public, a right of way going far back in time, but at Christmas some deer in the park had been molested and the path closed. She and her father alone had been granted the special privilege of it. There had been a putting up and a breaking down of fences which had distressed her. She was distressed also because her father had said nothing, not a word, on the side of the people. ‘My silence,’ he said, ‘will be ample evidence of my impartiality.’ But it was clear enough, and to her painfully clear, that his sympathies were with Abrahams, the owner, whom he could not afford to offend. She had found herself despising for the first time the old liaison of church and property. It had struck her so forcibly that she had been angry, her anger breeding a kind of timid horror at the mere realisation of that emotion. Alone, as she hurried up the path, it was difficult to realise that she had ever cherished emotions, sinful emotions, like hatred and anger. And she felt ashamed, the pain of her conscience mingling with the pain of her fears.

  Where the path divided into two she took the left-hand turn to the house. The right-hand path, formerly a way to the vicarage, had been cut off by a new snake-fence. She saw that the fence had been smashed down again. It had happened since the snow. She could see the scars and fractures made by the axes on the new skinned chestnut stakes and the black footprints in the islands of snow.

  She felt at once distressed again and as she hurried on she half resolved to speak to Abrahams. She would reason with him; she would make him see the pettiness of it all. He must see it. And she would make him see it, not for her own sake nor for her own satisfaction, but for his own sake and the sake of his fellow men. Words of entreaty and reason came easily to her mind: ‘What you give comes back to you. It comes back a thousand fold. Surely you don’t need me to tell you?’ softened and quickened by her fears and agitations about her father.

  But suddenly the house appeared from behind its dark barricade of yew and pine. The sight of it, huge and red, with its weather-green cupola high on the grey roof, made her suddenly and inexplicably nervous, and her footsteps on the gravel drive and their echo among the trees seemed painfully loud to her in the frost-silent air.

  She hurried up the steps leading to the terrace and the house. Along the terrace formal rows of flower-beds lay bleak and empty, the earth snow-flattened and lifeless. She rang the big brass door-bell and waited, apprehensive. A servant came, she murmured a request about the telephone, and a moment later she was in the entrance-hall, the door shut behind her.

  The telephone stood on a large mahogany table in the hall. She sat down in a chair by the table, picked up the receiver and gave her number. She spoke very low, so that Abrahams, if he were about, should not hear her; but the operator could not catch what she said and asked her once, twice and then even a third time, to repeat the number. She repeated it, her face growing hot and scarlet, her voice in her own ears so loud that she felt she was shouting and that Abrahams would hear and come into the hall. Her fears were multiplied into panic, all her resolutions to speak to Abrahams driven away. She gave her message for the doctor quickly, too quickly, so that again she had to repeat the words, and again louder.

  In the middle of this confusion she became conscious of another voice. It was Abrahams, saying:

  ‘Let me see what I can do, Miss Vaughan.’

  In another moment he was standing by her, had the telephone from her hands and was half-shouting: ‘A message for the doctor. Yes, yes. Put a jerk in it, do. Ask him to come at once, for the Reverend. Yes, he’s very bad. It’s urgent. For the Reverend at once, please.’

  She stood apart half-nervous, half-affronted, until he had finished speaking. His way of speaking about her father, off-handedly as it were, as the Reverend, offended her. Yet when he put down the receiver she was bound to murmur her thanks.

  ‘And now I must go,’ she added quickly.

  ‘Oh, stop an’ have a cup o’ tea,’ he began.

  ‘Oh no, I must get back,’ she said. ‘I’m urgently needed. I must get back.’

  ‘Ah, you can swallow a cup o’ tea in a jiff,’ he insisted. ‘It’ll help to keep the cold out.’

  But she was at the door, rigid, drawing on her thin kid gloves. Against her prim nervous voice Abrahams’ seemed aggressively loud, almost coarsely self-confident. He himself was big-framed, getting to stoutness, his hair very grey above the red temples. He cultivated the prosperous country air, with loose check tweeds, a gold watch chain, and brown boots as polished as a chestnut. But his butterfly-collar, stiff and white, and his black necktie upset the effect. He had made his money quickly, out of boots and shoes, during the war period, rising from nothing. The tightness, the struggle of the early years had left its mark ineffaceably on his features, his lips compressing narrowly and his eyes hardening, at unexpected moments, with unconscious avarice. Coming out into the country, to enjoy his money, he had lost his wife within a year, and had presented the church with a window of stained glass in her memory. He still had about him the hardness, the bluster and the coarseness of the factory. And it was this about him which intimidated her and made her draw on her gloves, more rigidly and hastily, by the door.

  Seeing that she would not stay he stood with his hand on the big iron door-latch.

  ‘And how is the Reverend?’ he asked.

  ‘He’s very ill,’ she said, ‘very ill.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear it, I am that, very sorry.’

  It seemed an unconscionable time before he began to lift the door latch. In the interval, remembering her resolution to speak about the fence, she half-reproached herself: it was her duty, now that her father could no longer speak, to say something. It was clearly her duty. But still she said nothing. The words she had formed so clearly and easily in her mind had been driven away by her foolish panic and fear.

  ‘Ah, well, if you must go,’ said Abrahams, lifting the door latch.

  ‘I must go,’ she said. Her voice was strangely distant with its prim, polite emphasis.

  ‘Anything I can do? Can I have anything sent down?’ he said.

  ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘Thank you. Nothing at all.’

  She fled, buttoning her coat collar against the freezing air, not glancing back, knowing by the long interval before the sound of the do
or clanging, that he was watching her.

  Down by the lake the waterfall fell with an even sharper, thinner sound in the ice-covered lake. The duck had not returned and the ice was empty of all life, growing darker every moment. Little patches of new black ice and frozen snow cracked under her feet as she panted up the path, beyond the lake, towards the rectory. The house, its grey stone drabbened but unsoftened by time and rain, stood half-hidden by a line of elms, a gaunt solitary place, walled in, with half its windows plastered over long ago, a squat stone belfry in the roof of the disused stables, a light burning in a single upstairs window. She hurried on, apprehensive, fearing the worst intuitively, falling into the old half-running, half-walking pace, hardly pausing to shut the gate in the stone wall of the garden.

  Before she could reach the house the front door opened and the white figure of the servant-girl appeared and stood there ready to meet her. With tears in her voice she began to tell Rose Vaughan what she already half-knew, that her father was dead.

  II

  She spent the first days of the New Year putting things in order, on wet days indoors, arranging her father’s papers, packing his sermons into neat piles, which she tied together with tape, rejecting old letters, reading through them and sometimes weeping a little and then reproaching herself both for reading and weeping. On fine days she and the servant-girl carried the rejected papers out to the garden, in clothes-baskets, and set fire to them under the elms, but the earth and the dead elm leaves were never dry and the papers burnt sluggishly, with thick harsh smoke that hung under the wet trees and stung the women’s eyes. At last rain set in, dismally and as though it would last the year, and a south-west wind that cried in the house and howled in the black dripping elms. The burnt and half-burnt scraps of paper were blown about the garden like black and white leaves until the rain soddened them at last and the wind hurled them into corners and under the clumps of dead chrysanthemum stalks that had never been cut down. Driven indoors again with no papers to arrange, the women scrubbed and polished the floors and furniture and washed the pictures and the windows. In that large house, built more than a hundred years before for a more spacious family than had ever lived in it, there were rooms which had never been used and some which had never been opened for twenty years. The women flung open their windows and the rain blew in on the mice-chimbled floor-boards, the old travelling-trunks, the piles of faded and forgotten church magazines, the rotting sunshades, the disused croquet sets, the piles of half-rotten apples laid out on sheets of The Times to dry for that winter and even the winter before. The women worked with a great show of noise and hustle, tiring themselves out in an unconscious effort to efface the effect and the memory of death.