White Narcissus (10 page)

He would not admit that he was baffled; but every day saw him sunk more deeply into an inertia distinct from his revived interest in farm ways, moderately healthy spirits and appetite. He did not know that he went about with the air of one sentenced irretrievably, yet bearing up with thoroughbred reserve. His syndicate had allowed him the holiday, and he assumed that there was no use in his going elsewhere to spend it – in going anywhere now. Still, his condition forbade inaction, and a part taken in the farmer’s routine put him back into that state of wilfully resigned hopeless longing of his early years. So that after the first few days he felt that Ada Lethen was miles away, out of reach, and each day added its weight to his sense that he must not go to see her, to his inability to visualize himself in such an attitude again.

Where was his appreciated success, his poise between introspection and enterprise, which had made him the poetical novelist and one of the most adept writers of mail-order advertising matter of his generation? The years which had laid the foundation of that surety, in health and resolute patience with hard circumstance, had returned upon him, and he seemed a callow youth daunted by a now unapproachable ideal, eating his heart out unwittingly before the suddenly comprehended difficulty of life. He felt that he had never worn anything but the overalls and shirt in which he was cultivating corn.

The afternoon was sultry, but the breeze played with rasping corn-leaves throughout the dark field, and he rested his team beside the road before another plunge among the dense growth. In a sudden revelation of his impotence he sat with hands uplifted on the handles of the cultivator as in a gesture of awe or beseeching, his head lowered, eyes regarding the dusty grass of the headland as they had overseen the passing hills of corn as he drove along them.

An automobile shot past with a flying streamer of dust, and the people in the tonneau turned to look back at him. He smiled grimly as they vanished down the worming river road, and in a second his thoughts had returned upon him in a wave.

There was a soft clop-clop in the dust, and a buggy, faintly rattling, approached. Beneath the open top sat a bronzed, heavy-featured man and a slight, thin-clad boy. As Richard Milne nodded he recognized Wallace Bender, a former neighbour.

“Hello, Dick, old boy!” the man shouted cordially. “Back on the land, eh? Poetry played out, I suppose! Well, that’s all right for a side line,” Bender continued in a confidential tone, wagging his head, “but for a living you got to get down to farming; that’s the sure thing to stick to.” The boy looked on, curious.

Richard laughed, and inquired regarding his old neighbour’s family, and when they had passed the time of day and he went on cultivating he was surprised at the resentment which filled his breast. It was as though he really concurred in Bender’s appraisal. The latter, after all, must have detected something in his bearing which told of defeat. That it was not in the material battle was Milne’s disadvantage. But he was unappeased, overtaken by a rage for not having told him – the crabbed skinflint with his criterion of a village mortgage-holder – how much in money he had made in the past year. But the other would not have believed. And though Milne told himself how little it mattered, his discomfort was unabated; until he laughed at these new qualms of self-esteem, the general absurd upheaval in himself. … Perhaps after all Ada Lethen had spoken from an inner discord properly encouraging.

“Nothing will resolve doubt but action,” Goethe had said it. He would go and see Ada Lethen again. He would watch every ripple between their minds; he would not lose control of his emotions this time. But a sad private smile of incredulity met the thought, while a symbolic rhythmic monotony of corn brushed his knees. His mouth hardened. He would tell her once for all – but what was the use of telling her anything? She was in possession of all the determining factors which should move her. They did not suffice. Surely she comprehended his point of view, perfectly sympathized with it, supported it with her reason. In vain. Hers was an obsession with duty. Let her have time to ponder the value of her loyalty, he thought with quick savagery. Let her wait and think things out. But his anger melted; he recalled that she had surely done so, surely had had time. He was in a maze, helpless.

Yet a miracle was possible, and perhaps one was happening now. He could hope that the passing of years would be compressed in sensation into days, and she should see herself alone, prey to memories and the squalid, tacit recriminations of her parents. And after that, nothingness, more memories changed from a torture to her only solace. Unless he lived still … and found his way back.

He looked up when the horses stopped, and saw that he had come to the end of the row, which from youthful habitude he had followed accurately, without injury to a stalk of corn. He was still the prey of conflicting emotions. He did not know what to do with himself. Action – to fight. He should have liked to catch Bender again to lecture him on his small-spiritedness … though he saw the absurdity of accepting that man as a representative of the outer world – of which a considerable portion would be wondering what had become of
him, and which had a regard for him sufficiently favourable. He was allowing this matter to disturb him, was acting as though nothing else existed but these few people, and as though there were nothing to be done but to accept their point of view, their limitations, and ineffectiveness. But something must happen. Things could not go on in this way. For weeks he had felt an oppression amounting at times to physical sensation.

There was his writing. But he expected the galley proofs of his latest book in a couple of weeks; and he had permitted the lack of typewriter and reference works to keep him from the beginning of even the first draft of his next one. He had determined upon spending his summer here, and he would do so, though every day put him further at the mercy of the woman who had waited at the completion of every page he had ever written, whose imagined wonder only the most intense compacted inspiration could dim. Even the utterly sapped weariness of mind and body after long creative effort hardly could make his longing tolerable – inspiriting so that he could bend to more effort again.

In a bright, fevered dream, with tangential flying wraiths of hope, so had the years, the best years, gone. While each book became more monumental than the last, he promised himself that the end of each would mark his return, his finally triumphant return, his bearing-off of that girl, never to see this confined place again. She feared, she feared. But for him there was more security even in flight, and any place in the world represented less of a danger to their love than this sheltered countryside in a remote part of Canada.

Well, if ever she consented, there would be no delay, no hesitation. How poignantly had every step been printed in his mind long ago, so that whenever the suggestion came he
busied himself automatically with travellers’ letters of credit, calculations of railway and steamship lines, hotels. … It was still impossible to believe that they could rest there happily, even in the definitive achievement of their love. Even if the old people – died.

No, they’d go away. They would be like children, happily lost babes in the woods of this wondrous world. At last the grip upon him would loosen: he would do none but his best creative work, a flowering of unbelievable peace, of immense happiness. They would look back upon these people, these fields in the way they should be regarded; perhaps at last, by the operation of the irony in life, they would seek out others like them. They would look back with removed pity, even with the quality of affection one has for an old dog dead long years ago. What was memory for but that? Yes, it was possible, he smiled to himself bitterly, that they could yet see something of benignance in even these tortured times….

Perhaps the fault lay all in himself, not – as he had always felt – a strong man. Was it a lack of inclination over some deeper lack? Didn’t he want her badly enough? He had seen enough of men that it profited him nothing to ask himself how others would have acted in his circumstances. He might – but his mind recoiled. He could not connect such impulses with the defined image of Ada Lethen. And since in the world he had had his opportunities and found no freedom, he did not give much credence to the physical side of his love. It seemed to be something deeper than his desires, than his will, like a spell cast upon his mind while it had been forming. He could never find freedom but in complete enslavement.

No, bitterly as he sought something to be blamed for all this, even something in himself, he could not admit a fundamental lack of passion, not even in Ada Lethen. He would
rather indict this oppressive atmosphere, this time and place, which smothered spontaneity and natural virtue. Perhaps it really had ruined Ada? … And reason told him at the same time that that was a recession to adolescent standards, that there was as much freedom anywhere as one could take. He invoked all the operose sophistries of his generation.

“Get up there!” He slapped the horses savagely with the lines as he turned them awkwardly round. He was doing little. Musing thus at the ends of the field, he was scarcely vindicating the intention of service to Hymerson which he had professed tacitly, whether or not any were owing.

T
he horses raised heads and ears suddenly, and the young man, looking too, saw a strange sight. The cornfield abutted on the line fence between the Hymerson and Lethen places, and over the fence was a gloom of trees, dark even now beyond a clearing minaretted by mulleins. The shadowed oaks and maples seemed darkened thickly, and even with their flourish of green, somehow old and cool, wintry. And before them, in the clearing among the slender spires of mullein, stood a human figure.

Never since beginning work in this field had Milne’s subconscious alertness given way, as though some time, among the green, he would descry the face of Ada Lethen, calling him. … Though nothing of the sort could happen; she would see him from among the bush and avoid him, unless … he were to consider himself dreaming more wildly than ever.

It was not she. The figure was strangely forlorn, as though strayed there by chance from some indefinitely remote quarter, an alien. It was hatless, with straggling grey hair, and advanced to him almost as though subjectively cringing; suggesting the same motives as a stray dog.

It was a man, who appeared to sidle around stumps and mulleins, fallen logs, a huge ant-city, without noticing such obstacles, or even Richard Milne, upon whom he was nevertheless intent as though looking through him. The face was long and grey, with cleaving perpendicular lines below, and level ones on the forehead criss-crossed by the straggling hair. The figure was not so much stooped as attenuated, slighter, so that it seemed at first as tall as in former times. Arrived at the fence, he leaned against the topmost rail as though there was no danger that his weight would displace it, and gazed earnestly with slate-grey eyes into the young man’s face.

“Good day, Mr. Lethen.” Richard Milne spoke with a recollected sort of serene severity. His hands twitched upon the levers of the cultivator. The other did not reply, but gazed at the young man with an almost entreating intentness. There was indeed something dog-like in his haggard eyes, and his shoulders seemed twistedly sagging, knobbled by heavy braces over the khaki shirt – store clothes, machine-made, as those of other farmers seldom were. His dejection, however, spoke an indifference to all details of the sort which gave him an air of natural things and weathered objects, as though he had never been beneath a roof within memory.

These matters, and the silence, gave Richard Milne an exasperation which, as he was half-conscious, transposed the natural pity following on a shock of recognition. His mood stiffened as he told himself that everything was the old fellow’s own fault, in part at least. All the pent-up bitterness of years found vent in a monosyllable, while he tugged at the lines as it were to turn the team about:

“Well?”

“You are Alma Milne’s son, aren’t you?”

The gentle plangency of the tone, the words, surprised Richard into his natural courteous consideration. He had almost forgotten that he had been an orphan from early years, and had not thought ever to be saluted in that manner again. Memories of childhood and a dark country back of that, with weeping at a black winter funeral, stirred him.

“Ada, my daughter, has told me about you,” went on the tired voice. “You’ve changed a little, or it seems so to me, since your last visit.” He meant the visit before last. They had not met, Richard recalled, at the time of his last repulse, “I understand you are to be congratulated on very creditable work. I’m glad,” he added simply, gazing about at the woods as though the scene of that work had put him forward to thank the artist in its behalf. Richard almost laughed with a mixture of incredulity, thwarted hostility, impatience, smothered pity.

“Thank you, Mr. Lethen. What can I do for you?”

The brusqueness did not cause the old man to change attitude or expression, yet he seemed to consult an inward necessity whether it would force him on in the face of this hard unconcern.

“I hardly know how to put it,” he ventured. “You are helping Carson just now, and I don’t want to be bearing tales against him like this. But it seems like there’s nothing else to be done. You must have noticed his attitude. And I was wondering whether you couldn’t do anything to straighten things out.”

“I might,” agreed Milne readily, “if I could see in what way it affected me.” His feeling of the earlier afternoon had died down, but he felt that he must play with the old man a little before descending to that store of vehemence he had at times consciously been keeping for such an opportunity as this occasion offered. Wrath distilled in verbal form, since
any other was out of the question. He had long desired to tell Mr. and Mrs. Lethen his opinion of such a course as they followed.

“It means everything,” the old man was saying earnestly, “everything to me, to get this straightened out. Surely there’s a way.”