Of Time and the River (87 page)

“But it IS an extraordinary thing, George—a simply astonishing thing—to find a young man of your age who has read and studied— and—and—PREPARED himself for life the way you have. It’s SIMPLY astonishing!” she concluded, and then did what was perhaps an astonishing thing for her—quickly and vigorously she blew her nose. “But SIMPLY astonishing!” she said again, as she thrust the handkerchief away and put a cigarette into her eight-inch holder.

“No, I think not,” he said quietly, and without a trace of vanity or false modesty. “It would have been astonishing if I had not done it. After all, my debt to society for all that it has done for me is great enough as it is: I could not with any decency look the world in the face if I knew that I had not made some effort to repay it.”

“How few rich young men feel that way about it,” said Mrs. Pierce quietly. “I wish more did!”

The conversation was now turned to other, lighter channels of discussion: gossip, spirited but light debate. Mrs. Pierce renewed her conversation with Howard and Polly; farther away upon the steps Rosalind, Seaholm, a dark girl named Ruth, and George Thornton talked, gossiped and laughed together with the charming intimacy of youth, and Joel and Miss Telfair were engaged in eager and excited debate—Joel, for the most part, listening with the eager, respectful, bent-forward attentiveness, the devoted courtesy of reverence, that marked all of his relations with women, and Miss Telfair doing most of the talking. She talked the way she looked and dressed and acted, the way she was: a speech fragile, empty, nervous, brittle, artificial and incisive as one of the precious bits of china, the costly, rare, enamelled little trinkets that filled up her house, her life, her interest.

“No, Joel!” she was saying with a voice that had a curious, shell- like penetration—a positive, brittle, but incisively certain voice—“you are absolutely wrong! You are COMPLETELY mistaken about that! The thing cannot by any stretch of the imagination be called Sienese! It is PURE Ravenna—PERFECT Ravenna—ABSOLUTELY!” she cried, shaking her enamelled face with obdurate conviction. “It’s nothing else on earth but the PUREST and MOST PERFECT Ravenna—and Fourteenth Century Ravenna at that! . . . No! No!” she cried incisively, cutting him off shortly, and shaking her head stubbornly as he tried to put in a smiling, whispered word of courteous doubt. “My dear child, you are dead wrong! You don’t know what you’re talking about! . . . I was an authority on these things before you were born. . . . I’ve forgotten more about Ravenna than you’ll ever know! . . . No! . . . No! . . . Absolutely NOT! . . . You’re ALL wrong!”

He received this stubborn, arrogant and almost insulting rebuttal as he always did—with the whispered, gracious humility of his beautiful good nature: laughing softly and enthusiastically over her arrogant and contemptuous denial, as if he were merely the victim of the most tender and high-spirited raillery.

At this moment, however, when, with a sense of resentment and displeasure he was listening to the naked and arrogant penetrations of Miss Telfair’s voice, Rosalind Pierce rose from her seat on the terrace step, left the other young people there, came swiftly to where Eugene was seated, and sat down beside him.

“Why are you sitting here all by yourself—so quiet and so alone?” she said in her warm, sweet, lovely, and affectionate young voice. “Can I sit here and talk to you?” she said, and even as she spoke these words, she slipped her arm through his and clasped him by the hand. The whole life and character of this beautiful, fine and lovely girl were in that simple, natural and spontaneous gesture. That gesture did what words could never do, explained what years of living with many people could not explain: in an instant she communicated to him the whole quality of her life, told him the kind of person she was. And the kind of person she was was unbelievably good and beautiful.

“What have you been thinking of all the time you have been sitting here?” she whispered in her low, sweet voice. “I could see you sitting here, listening, looking at us, and all the time it was just as if you were a million miles away. What were you thinking?— that we are all an idle, shallow lot, with nothing to do except to chatter and gossip about other useless people like ourselves?”

“Why—no—no,” he stammered. “Why—not at all—” He looked at her with a red embarrassed face, but there was no guile or mockery in her. She was not clever enough for sarcasm or malice, not witty enough for irony: she was a creature full of innocence and ardour, without profound intelligence, but with a nature full of warmth, generous enthusiasm, and affection.

“I—I--think you’re all fine,” he blurted out. “I think you’re great.”

“Do you, darling?” she said softly. “Well, we’re not.” She pulled him towards her with a gesture of friendly intimacy, and said: “Come on: let’s leave them all for a few minutes. I want to talk to you.”

They got up, and still with her warm hand clasped in his, they walked along the terrace and around the great, moon-whitened wings of the house on to the road that swept in an oval before it.

“Do you really like us?” she said, as they walked on down the road away from the house under a deep, nocturnal mystery of great trees through which the moonlight shone and swarmed upon the earth in mottles of light. “Don’t you like Joel? Don’t you think he’s grand?”

“I—I think he’s the best fellow in the world,” he said. “He’s— he’s just TOO good!”

“Oh, he’s a saint,” she said in her quiet, sweet voice. “There was never anyone like him: he’s the loveliest person I’ve ever known. . . . Aren’t people wonderful?” she said, and turned and paused in the moonlit road and looked at him. “I mean, there are a lot of mean ones . . . and useless ones . . . and sort of shabby ones like . . . like—well, like some of those people there tonight . . . but there’s something good in all of them—even poor little Howard Martin has something sweet and good in him: he has a kind heart—he really has—he wants to be amusing and to entertain people, he wants everyone to be happy and have a good time. . . . And when you meet someone like Joel, it makes up for everything else, doesn’t it? . . . Or George Thornton—don’t you like him? Don’t you think he’s a grand person, too?”

“He—seems fine,” he answered with some difficulty. “I—I never met him till tonight.”

“Oh, you’ll LOVE him when you get to know him,” the girl said earnestly. “—Everybody does. . . . He’s another saint, just like Joel . . . and he’s so brave, and kind, and good—and his life has been so terrible.”

“Terrible? I—I thought he said—”

“Oh, he IS, darling—he DOES have everything THAT way—money, I mean. He’s terribly rich: one of the richest young men in the world. . . . Only he doesn’t spend it on himself, he gives it all away and then . . . you see, darling, George has had an unhappy life of it from the beginning. . . . His father died a raving madman, there’s been insanity in his family for generations back, his mother was a horrible woman who deserted him when he was a child and ran off with a man, and he was brought up by an aunt—his father’s sister—who was half cracked herself. . . . Now he lives all alone on this big place that he’s inherited—he has one brother, Dick, who is two years older than he is—and he has spent practically his whole life in looking after Dick.”

“Looking after him?”

“Yes,” the girl said quietly, “—Dick is insane too—a raving maniac; they have guards for him, they have to watch him every minute of the time—when George comes to see him, Dick tries to kill him. . . . And George loves him, he’d give his life for him, he does everything he can to make Dick happy—and Dick hates him so that he’d kill him if he could. . . . And George has this thing hanging over him all the time, he can’t forget about it for a moment, it’s made his whole life wretched, and yet you’d never know it when you talk to him: he never mentions it, he’s always the same to people,—always kind and good and gentle, never thinking of himself.”

“I see. And is that the reason why he studies all these different philosophies—Christ and Socrates and Confucius?—”

“Yes,” she said quietly. “—And Buddha. I think so. . . . He would never admit it . . . he has never said so . . . and of course no one COULD ask him. . . . But I think that’s the reason. . . . There’s something . . . something desperate . . . lost . . . in his eyes sometimes,” she said slowly, after a pause. “. . . It’s . . . it’s not good to look at . . . it’s . . . I imagine it’s like the look you would see in the eyes of a drowning man.”

“And you think that he may be afraid of . . . of insanity?”

She was silent for a moment, and did not answer him directly.

“He’s been studying Buddhism for the last two years,” she said. “He’s had all kinds of people at the house to teach him. . . . Hindus, mystics, scholars—learned people . . . he’s . . . he’s become more and more . . . I don’t know,” she said in a puzzled tone. “—I don’t know what you’d call it—sort of mystical.” Again she was silent, and presently added matter-of-factly: “He’s going to India next year.”

“To study?”

“Yes, I think so,” the girl said, and again was silent. “Somehow— it’s a dreadful thought, isn’t it?” she said in a low tone after a moment—“But sometimes I have wondered if George would ever come back. . . . Perhaps,” she concluded quietly, “. . . perhaps that is why we all love him so much . . . it’s like loving someone who is brave and good and gentle that you know has got to die.”

For some time they walked on slowly down the moon-white road without further speech.

“I want you to know Carl, too,” she said. “He seems very cold and strange at first—but that is just his foreign way. He is really one of the loveliest, sweetest people that ever lived. . . . You know,” she said presently, “we are going to be married in October.”

“Yes, I know. Joel told me. . . . Will you live here—in this country?”

“No. I’m afraid not. . . . You see, Carl is in the diplomatic service, and they get moved around a great deal. They have to go where they get sent.”

“And where will you go first? Do you know?”

“Yes, I think they are sending him to Paris next.”

“Will you like that? Do you think you’ll like living in Paris?”

“Of COURSE,” she said with her rich, warm, easy laugh. “I’m awfully easy to please—I like everything—I’m happy anywhere— wherever I am. Is that very bad of me?” she said with a kind and gently teasing smile.

“No, that’s very good of you. . . . Have you ever been to Paris?”

“Yes,” she cried in a rich, enthusiastic tone, “and I love it. I adore it. I studied music there. Mother and I lived there for two years before I came out.”

“But now you’ll have to learn Swedish and German and Italian and Spanish and Russian—all those languages—now that you’re getting married to a diplomat. Won’t you?”

“Yes,” she said with her sweet and careless laugh—“Everything! One must become a regular little walking Berlitz school of languages—only I shan’t mind very much: I’m very stupid, but my husband is so kind and clever I’m sure I’ll learn in spite of everything.”

“And you’ll live in Paris and Rome and London and Berlin—all those places? Won’t you?”

“Yes, darling,” she said in her warm, sweet tone that always had something maternal and tolerantly amused in its humour, “—and in Copenhagen and Stockholm and Bucharest and Madrid—even in Pogo Pogo or in China or Peru—wherever they choose to send us. We’ll be two international hoboes, darling—that’s the kind of life we’ll have to lead.”

“God!” he said bluntly. “It sounds wonderful! What a thing to happen to anyone!—and to happen to you at your age! . . . But won’t if make all this—this place here—seem awfully far away, and very strange—when you think back on it?”

“Yes,” the girl said quietly, and added so softly that she seemed to breathe the words—so softly that he could scarcely hear her, “—and quite impossibly lovely!”

He stared at her in blank astonishment for a minute: she had clasped her hands against her breast in a natural and simple gesture, the moon had made an aureole of magic around the silken strands of her brown hair, and suddenly he noticed that her eyes were bright with tears.

“Very, very far away,” she said in a low tone, “and enormously beautiful. . . . You see,” she said simply, “this is my home. . . . I was born here, and I love it.” She was silent for a moment longer, and then she said quietly but in a more matter-of-fact way:

“Don’t you think our place—this country here—is beautiful?”

He did not answer her for a moment: at first he was not even conscious that he had heard her. He kept staring at her with a comical expression of gape-jawed and hypnotic fascination. He was conscious of a queer, bewildered and inappropriate feeling of surprise—a kind of numb, absurd wonder that if he had read all the books and poems in the world, and then tried to imagine for himself something as impossibly lovely as this girl and the whole scene around her, he could never, by any soaring stretch of the imagination, have come within a million miles of it.

Behind her head the moon was making its spun aura of enchanted light, the dress she was wearing was of some sweet gossamer stuff of light moon-blue that seemed spun out of the very substance of the moon itself—to float, to move like some aerial fume of magic smoke, but the girl herself was lovely, sweet and strong as the whole earth around her. She was herself no creature of elves’ fantasy, she was not lithe and slender, fleeting as a nymph: she was a warm, strong-bodied girl, wide in the hips for children, a nature warm and soft and gentle as a cow, but radiant and lovely with fair girlhood, too, and full of sweetness, strength, and tender, jolly humour.

She stood there in the middle of the white, empty road with the enchanted radiance of the moon upon her, and he stared at her unbelievingly, like a man who meets some vision in a dream and does not know if he is dreaming or awake, and yet knows all the time that it is real. Then he would take his fascinated gaze away from her, and look down at the moon-white road, and stamp it with his foot, and kick and scurf the ground of the moon-white road to see if it was real, and then lift his head and look at her again, and turn and see the great, sweet fields and meadows dreaming in the moonlight, and cows down upon their knees, facing toward him with their strange and silent stare, or faced one way and grazing towards him through the moon pastures with sweet, wrenching pull of teeth; and then he would see the dark and sleeping woods of night, with all their mystery and loveliness and wild and solemn joy, and secret terror, and all the grand and casual folds and convolutions of the sleeping, moon-enchanted earth, and far away the moon-blaze and wink, the herring glamour, and the dancing scallop fires and all the darkness, coolness, and the velvet-breasted mystery of the strange and silent river, the haunted river, the great Hudson River, drawing on for ever from the dark and secret earth the sources of its depthless tides, and in the night-time, in the dark, with soundless movings of its tide, drawing on for ever like time and silence past the strange and secret land, the mysterious earth, the sleeping cities and the lost and lonely little towns of dark America.