Testimony Of Two Men (53 page)

There was a desperate resolution about Jenny now, as she pushed aside Marjorie’s pleas, “I really am not afraid. I really like to be alone. I have locks on the doors,” she said. “Please don’t insist, Aunt Marjorie.”

“I’m really too tired to oppose your willfulness,” Marjorie said with severity. “And I’m very angry with you, Jenny. Jon will drop me at home and then will take you to the river. And then,” she said in a clear hard voice, “he will row you over to the island and inspect every room for you, and the grounds, and then wait until you are locked up. No, Jenny, I won’t hear anything more. I’m very tired. I’d like to sleep tonight and not worry about you. Jon?”

He was delighted to make the girl more distracted than she already was. “It will be a pleasure, dear Jenny,” he said, and gave her a low bow. She looked at him with mute wretchedness and her mouth shook and he was elated.

It was deep twilight when Jonathan let his mother out of the surrey and led her to the house. “Hurry back,” she whispered, “I’ll go in alone. It would be just like Jenny to get out and run away. Jon, be kind to her, will you? Don’t tease, her so.”

“Kind? Jenny doesn’t want anyone to be kind to her. She’s sufficient unto herself, a very haughty and sullen young lady with a mind of her own. At least let me unlock the door for you.”

Marjorie stood in the lighted doorway and watched the surrey drive off. Jenny, apparently, had refused to leave the back seat and still sat crowded among the baskets, which Marjorie had forgotten. It was just like the poor child. Intel-lectual, intelligent, proud, but shrinking and afraid. Marjorie thought, Intellect isn’t enough for
a
woman, or even intelligence. A woman isn’t really
a
man, though so many militant women seem to think so these days, and say “there is very little difference.” They don’t understand that that little difference is the most important thing in the world. There’s little difference, I heard, between lead and gold—until it reaches the marketplace. A woman stripped of her “difference,” in mere mind, was still not a man. Even those deprived of their generative organs were not men. The mysterious and inexorable “difference” remained, and, thought Marjorie, closing the door behind her, let the world beware when it forgets that. A woman who was not distinct from a man in
a
spiritual way could betray the whole race.

The surrey clopped through the quiet dark streets. The lamps were already lit, and burned in yellow straightness, for there was no wind. A few voices sounded sleepily from dark porches, and there were the creakings of rockers and an occasional scolding as a woman addressed herself to dilatory children inside the houses. Now the refreshed grass exhaled its sweetness and the trees murmured a little, and at a far distance there was a clatter of one of Hambledon’s few streetcars going toward the river park. It was
a
somnolent early night.

Jonathan drove in silence but acutely aware of the girl behind him. He knew that she hated him, but he had never cared, until now, to know the reason why. He had seen her in childhood and young girlhood, and then in early womanhood, and it was not until she had been sixteen—and still untouched, he had presumed—that he had sharply noticed her. That had been six months after his marriage to Mavis. She had reminded him of a young white swan sailing alone in
a
pond, quiet, shy, nervously smiling when spoken to, rarely speaking. Her mother had been alive then, foolish Myrtle, and had recently married Harald. No, it had not been that marriage which had changed the girl from a touching young softness to a steely witch, for though it had been evident that she had at first thought her mother had violated the sacred memories of Daddy, she had regarded Myrtle as a child who must be given what she desired to make her happy and to keep her protected. Jenny had not changed until her mother had died. Myrtle had been on digitalis for a considerable time, then six months before her death her condition had worsened. Jonathan had told her then that her days were counted, and to his surprise the silly woman had not become hysterical or maudlin but had accepted what was to come. But Jonathan, she had said, must not tell dear Harald or darling Jenny. It would destroy them. Jonathan had been freshly surprised. Myrtle had not seemed to be a woman capable of strength to carry her affliction alone.

Myrtle’s death changed Jenny violently. The girl who could speak so gently in her sweet strong voice—when pressed by kind insistance—and could even laugh a little, though she was always so grave, became cold and hard and remote and silent. It was her foolish mother’s will, of course, which had changed her. She had probably felt herself betrayed. It was odd, but not so very odd—considering human nature—that money could transform people. Yet, at her early age, she had become Harald’s mistress, and not long, if one was to credit reports, after her mother’s death. Was it to hold Harald to the island? If he left for more than seven months at a time, the money would be hers, but it was possible that it was not only the money she wanted but Childe Harald, too.

It was a mystery which Jonathan had not been able to settle satisfactorily in his own mind. There was a dimension here which eluded him, which was stark and brutal, yet hidden. Certainly, in the presence of others she was deadly silent and did not speak to Harald, and, if he spoke to her so directly that she was forced to notice him, she looked at him with what appeared to be actual and deep aversion. It was all very elusive. Of course, they could have conspired together to give this effect to others in order to deceive, for there were times when Jenny could not take her eyes off Harald and watched his every movement like a woman possessed, and it was very evident, then, that nothing he said was not heard by her intently and probably weighed and measured. Jenny was the weighing-and-measuring kind; that had been evident from her very childhood, for she had always been thoughtful and contemplative and had answered the most casual question as if she had given it her deepest consideration and had not replied until she was certain her answer was correct in all respects. When others spoke in her presence and Harald’s, she was totally indifferent and gave the appearance of deafness, but when Harald spoke, she came alive.

Only an infatuated woman could behave so and have such an immoderate reaction to a man’s every gesture and every word.

Jonathan remembered the first time that Jenny, as an awkward girl approaching womanhood, had become more than a child to him and had invaded the wretched cloister of his life with Mavis. It had been a spring day and he had visited Myrtle and Harald on the island—they had not long been married—and Jenny, the devoted daughter, was pruning her father’s roses. She had never dressed well but always frumpily, as if deliberately trying to offset her mother’s very fashionable and elaborate clothing. Jonathan, strolling over the grounds and silently laughing at them as usual, had come upon Jenny in the pale spring sunlight, bending solicitously over the steaming dark earth and tenderly cutting here and there as careful as a surgeon cleaning up after an operation. She wore a brown wool dress and an ugly brown coat and her hair was bare to the cool crispness of the wind and it rolled in long black waves over her shoulders and her back.

She had looked up at him, startled, for she had not heard him come, and the sunlight had suddenly struck the exquisite pale contours of her face and the carved rose jade of her hps and had made her blue eyes blaze like illuminated sapphires. Knife in hand, still bending, she had turned her head, and the wind lifted her long black hair and blew it about her in a tumbling cloud of deep shadow and sparkling light. She was like a nymph, he had thought without originality, faintly smiling, still startled, shy, ready to run but afraid to offend, her hands stained with mud, her immature body as delicate and pliant as a white birch sapling.

“Hello, Jenny,” he said. “I thought you were over in Hambledon today.”

“No. No, Uncle Jon,” she answered, and for the first time he was conscious of the promise of rich sweetness in her voice. She straightened, and tried to control the tossing masses of her hair. “I didn’t know you were here, either. I— I’m pruning my father’s roses. It should have been done long ago, I’m afraid. So much dead wood from the hard winter. I think his best old-fashioned one died.” She looked down at the bush sadly. Jonathan inspected it, too. “No,” he said, “there’s a leaf or two, very small, near that dead crotch. Just cut off the top.”

She was joyful and bent with him for a closer inspection. “Four leaves!” she cried. “I don’t know how I missed them! It’s such a wonderful bush; the roses are like little cabbages, and their scent is much deeper than the others. My father loved it best.”

He saw her profile now, childlike and radiant and softly smiling. She cut expertly. Her lips were parted and he saw her teeth, small and pearly, unlike Mavis’, which were so large and so lavishly displayed in her wide laughter, and which just narrowly escaped being called “buck” or “horse teeth.” Jenny’s were like white ivory, barely showing between her lips, yet perfect and feminine. Too many girls these days were producing teeth as big as a young mare’s, and they seemed to be proud of them, which was mystifying, and flared them out on all occasions. Jonathan thought that it was very inexplicable that two such arrant vulgarians as Myrtle and Peter Heger had brought forth such a daughter.

Jenny’s hair fell over her cheeks as she bent for a last clipping, and she seemed clothed in that brightly black cloak, living and soft and shimmering in the sun. Then she stood up and flung her hair back unaffectedly and laughed at Jonathan with delight, as if he had given her a priceless gift. The sound of her laughter rang through the gold and frail green quiet of the spring gardens, and it was laughter unlike Mavis’ boisterous and bursting mirth, for it was very musical and shy.

Jenny, Jonathan had thought, as he stood there easily and smiled at her with his chilled hands in his pockets and his polished boots already muddy. Sweet Jenny. He had forgotten, since his marriage, that there were such girls as Jenny in the world, tender, simple, honest, gentle and diffident, who could be so happy when a dead bush proved it was not dead at all but was importantly and exuberantly alive. Here was no avaricious flirt, no schemer, no liar, no grasping woman with tiny eyes and a huge grinning mouth, which could express the utmost in callous cruelty. Jenny’s mother was rich, yet Jenny was unaffected and her joy in a rose could never have been known to a Mavis.

She stepped back from the rose bed and her shoe stuck in the mud and she hopped on one foot. Jonathan retrieved the shoe and he never noticed it was several sizes larger than Mavis’ dainty slippers. He scraped the mud off on the new green grass, then gallantly insisted on putting it on Jenny’s foot again. To support herself she leaned her hand on his bent back, and all at once a fiery thrill ran through his shoulder and then through his body. For an instant he could not move. Then, his hands shaking, he put the muddy shoe over the coarse brown stocking and he saw that though the girl’s foot was large, it was also miraculously slender and beautifully molded. She was murmuring something, but he did not catch her words. He was still stricken by his response to her touch, and now felt the heat in his flesh, and a sudden incredulousness, and a sudden rush of happiness and buoyance. He had never known these before, and he was dazed at his own beatitude.

“Thank you, Uncle Jon,” said Jenny. He stood up, his face darkly flushed. He said, “I wish you wouldn’t call me ‘Uncle Jon,’ Jenny. I’m not really your uncle. Call me Jon.”

She studied him seriously. Then in her shyly blunt way she said, “But, Uncle Jon, you are so much older than I ami I’m only sixteen. It wouldn’t be respectful.”

“What’s fifteen years between friends?” he asked, trying for lightness because his breath was coming too fast. “You call Harald ‘Harald,’ and he’s only two years younger than I. Come on, Jenny.”

She considered him with that young solemnity of hers. The blueness of her eyes seemed to fill her face, that immaculate face of absolute purity and without any guile at all. Then her expression changed after long moments. It became startled, very frightened and confused, and she turned her face aside and her cheeks were suddenly awash in brilliant scarlet. Without a word she flung herself away from him and ran back to that ridiculous castle. Her long black hair floated behind her like a mantle, catching the light.

Jonathan watched her go. He was too involved with his own emotions to wonder why the girl had run like that and why she had colored so and had been so silent.

He did not see her again that day. But as he lay awake that night with Mavis sleeping blissfully beside him—she had not as yet moved to another room—he could not forget Jenny. Academically, he knew much that was to be known about humanity and human emotions, for he was a doctor, but as young Father McNulty was to later say, he was essentially and amazingly a simple man who could not, as yet, translate his knowledge into personal objectivity. If another man had told him of this experience, he would have said with a broad smile, “There’s nothing mysterious about it. You’ve fallen in love with that girl, and probably you’ve fallen in love for the first time, and never mind that you’re married.”

His marriage took a change for the worse in the next few days and then he and Mavis had gone to Europe for the summer, on her insistence, and he had agreed in a last desperate hope that he could change Mavis and save the marriage and persuade her to begin a family.

He had not seen Jenny again for nearly a year, and incomprehensibly he only saw her at a distance. In the following years he saw her exactly three times before her mother’s death. He would have jeered to learn that he was a rigidly upright man in his soul, yet for a long time he not only tried to devote himself to Mavis and to change her but he suppressed that day with Jenny in his mind. He had removed himself from his Church, but the moral teachings and doctrines had sunk irrevocably into him. Whenever he remembered Jenny, he choked the thought at once and did not know that the heavy sadness he always felt was connected with that spring day in the castle’s gardens.