White Narcissus (15 page)

It was, he remembered, only an image upon which all his thoughts were converged. Allowing for the beginning and the course, attended by absence and memory, of his love, he could not hope to see the woman as others saw her. It had been one of the twin deities of his life. His urge to expression – and this. Perhaps she was at the bottom of his urge to write. Otherwise she might not have remained beside all his efforts as they proceeded. And if she had been more than an ideal – or less – he should have forgotten her in turning to any one of the numbers of girls and women he had known, charming or admirable. But he had remembered her, and perhaps the function of his repeated returns was to renew the impression which her physical presence made upon him, or to free him from it. And once back in this place, so near to her, if farther than ever in spirit, he was obsessed, he could not escape her appeal to the senses. It was the more confusing after his long freedom from such feelings. He saw her face in its sad meditation, and in its proud contours. He saw the soft, even curve
of her lips, which were a continual marvel to him whenever she came before his sight. How a girl could go through all the spirit-chapping experiences she had known without some weakness, some bitterness, showing in that most sensitive feature, her mouth, was beyond his comprehension. It was not a strong mouth, the mouth, “denoting character,” which exhibits an impervious attitude built up to withstand the world, or an aggressive one to battle with it. Her lips showed nothing of submission or revolt, nothing of joy or despair, in repose, nothing but a sweet calm and an understanding sympathy not to be betrayed into sentimental sorrow, a calm sweetness never to be betrayed into hasty greed of sensation. Her mouth, he thought, was Ada Lethen.

Her hands, too, pale, large, narrow, graceful, and yet easily forgotten. Her arms were slightly too slender for them, despite her vigorous life. Her figure was slight, yet not without modelling. Her hair was heavy and dark as night, her commonest gesture a turning of it aside from her forehead. She had recently had it bobbed, though he had not noticed this until the second meeting, in daylight, when she had sent him away from her.

But her distinguishing mark, to a stranger, was a mole below her left cheek, at the corner of an equilateral triangle formed between it, her eye, and the corner of her mouth. It was thus in the least conspicuous and yet most effective spot. For it gave piquancy to her face, added to her otherwise sombre beauty; made it distinguished and unforgettable, while one would not remember explicitly, “She had a mole.” It was ornament and relief. It was the most endearing feature in her face; its loss would have detracted greatly, and yet he forgot constantly that she possessed it.

She came before him, night after night, and scarcely left
his daytime thoughts, more seductive than she ever was in reality. She did not in fact present such a quality to the world. He seriously doubted whether she would charm many men, even men of more than average insight. She was like some rare work of art, inordinately admired, even idolized, by a few devotees, tolerantly assessed by snobs and cognoscenti, and neglected by the world. He at least knew her value; and to him she was far more seductive even of face and limb than any woman he had encountered. Her spell was such that it met him at every point, in his memory.

Such considerations could not always be pleasant, and he was glad of any opportunity of distraction. When the following morning was again bright, Richard put on old clothes. After breakfast he and Bill got the binder out of the shed, tightened the canvases which had been unbuckled to allow for stretching from moisture, and drove back the muddy lane.

“We’ll get a start anyway. The horses should hold out to get around once, wet or no wet, and it may get drier as we go.”

“If it doesn’t rain we’ll have a dry time,” Richard assented with a shout, striding behind the jingling and jolting binder, with risen spirits.

It was a day enchanted, aside from the unpleasantness under foot, with the harmonious concord usually imparted only to art or dreams. The woods held aloof in misty solitude, like a vision, though the warm air gave most objects an appearance of being near. Later, vast cool clouds began a sultry procession above the land. They hung like vast bags, bunches of dirty blue silk protruding from the meshes of a net formed by their fissures. And toward noon the sun gave them a silver radiance, hardening to metal likewise the verdigris of forests. The air was still heavy, close. Horses and men sweated copiously.

As before in the wheat-cutting, the three sizeable Percherons could pull the binder only a few rods without weakening; and when the ponderous machine slowed, the broad drive wheel slid in the soft black soil, digging furrows a foot wide, almost that deep, and as many feet long as the horses could drag the binder thus, while the heads were torn from the stalks. Soon the field was spotted with these dark trenches, as though some preternaturally active rodent had been digging his home there in great numbers. And the horses were losing their freshness, even their willingness, as though they did not expect that their best efforts would cause the binder to run more than a few yards.

Richard with a fork pitched briskly out to the fence the sheaves thrown in from the first round, so that the binder could turn and begin cutting in the normal fashion, with a leftward circuit. After that he had little to do, since several rounds had to be reaped before he could shock the bundles conveniently without carrying them too far. The sheaf-carrier, controlled by Bill Burnstile’s foot, dropped the sheaves in bunches of two and three and four, at intervals the same for every round. Richard lay on a couple of sheaves and looked up to the sky. Tom, now that he was not needed to “throw out,” appeared and knelt on another sheaf beside him.

“Kind of thistley, ain’t it, for shocking,” mentioned the boy, selecting a stalk from his sheaf, and slowly spitting through it.

Richard smiled. “Good boy! You knew that without taking hold of a single bundle, didn’t you.” He looked away with absent enjoyment over the country. One elm, even in the noonday light, standing against the sky on the river bank alone seemed to gather about itself a slight haze, a softness over its green.

Tom’s lips twisted naïvely. “I got hold of a bundle all right, didn’t I? This one I’m sitting on! … That’s why I didn’t want to shock none. Thistles are too much of a good thing, I can tell you.”

Milne began to lecture lazily in a rôle of practicality. “You should have spudded the thistles out when you saw they were going to grow faster than the oats. Before they get ripe, that’s the time to catch thistles. … Now look at that white thistledown….” He puffed at his pipe dreamily. “Very pretty no doubt … floating over the field….”

“Don’t catch thistles at all, that’s me, boy! Too sharp. Not in my bare feet, anyhow. When Dad got me in here to spud out the docks, I found out! There weren’t many docks, though.” The boy looked at his brown and mud-caked feet stuck out before him.

“Probably not many more than there are now,” reflected Milne silently, looking over the field where an occasional maroon-coloured spire showed itself. The farm had been neglected in the matter of weeds before Bill Burnstile settled upon it.

Suddenly there was a scream from Tom, and, turning, Richard saw the boy’s neck encircled by smaller hands. Bill and Johnnie were upon him, gasping.

“Well, are you going to slap my face?” Bill asked his older brother vindictively.

“I never said I’d slap your face. Go ’way, can’t you!” Tom thrust at them, cunningly taking an injured tone as though interrupted in a grown-up colloquy. The smaller two backed away, looking at the man with laughing respect. But Tom was leaving nothing to afterclaps, and knelt on the sheaves.

“Can you do this?” he asked, attempting to stand on his hands, and falling over backward in the stubble.

Richard, for whom the display was given as much as for the marauders, glanced back as he walked away to recommence shocking, and smiled at the failure. Bill and Johnnie, witnessing this reception of the attempted feat, began to pummel Tom again, and his yells resounded in the field, uplifted in the uncertain, husky, or shrill tones of his age.

But little Johnnie came presently trotting after Richard, and watched the man work, in silence or saying words softly to himself, and occasionally running to take up an odd bundle left over, to drag it to a site where Richard could use it to build the next shock, two and two.

By noon the sunlight was clear and hot, the air still rather heavy. They had not made much impression on the field of oats. The area cut around the edge did not appear very wide. But all hands were hungry, including the boys, who rode up the lane on the three sweating horses. The perfect purity of the air was tinged by the heavy, moist smell of the grass and trees, by the animal odours of the barnyard, and finally by bacon and boiled potatoes, rhubarb pie.

After dinner the day became overcast, and Burnstile, as the two men fastened the weighty ends of the binder neck-yoke to the horses’ necks, opined with a curious and unusual depression that he might as well not go on cutting; it was going to rain, sure as anything. Besides, packing the land would do it no good. He had brought Tom to the field to help, but presently the boy lingered behind Richard shocking, and slipped away into the woods beside the field, or into the lane which led to the house and barn.

Already proceeding toward the west, the sun might have been forgotten save for a cliff of cloud the shape of the map of Denmark, the illuminated top of which covered the sun, while the lower part as boundaried by a quicksilver edge. The
binder was driven on doggedly, and Burnstile’s shouts could be heard resounding dully from one end of the field to the other. The hair of the horses was roughened and spiked with sweat, and when they stopped at one corner of the uncut rectangle, where Richard was working, Bill could be heard, apparently talking half to himself:

“I don’t know what’s got into me, seem so stupid to-day. Horses, if you have your off days when you don’t feel any funnier than I do just now, and you’ve got to work, I feel sorry for you.”

Richard smiled absently as one who listens to a child, and gathered two more bundles in his abraded hands. The strip which had been cut around the field was dark with the stubble of rank weeds and the black soil. There was a rhythmic swish as he strode on, stooping to catch up one bundle and then another to put under the other arm. The sharp, crisp rectangle of uncut oats in the centre of the field was cream-tipped, stretching away out of sight, and the pale blue bottoms of the stalks gleamed in a strange light.

Wind arose, and blew the thistledown about the oats field, to the imperturbable bush, like swarms of some swift insect bent on a common goal; and a few like bubbles settled in the black trenches dug by the starting binder. Day was overcast, and it seemed that the elements were bent on a dreadful play before some outburst of passion. Swallows high in the air seemed higher against the dark smoke-blue of a storm cloud, ecstatically battling with the wind, hanging stationary and struggling against it, while one lone bird executed a long, straight dart of half a mile at aeroplane speed with the gale.

The oats field and the gloomy light were curiously lethargic in their tranquillity, even the forests seemed to toss with a
heavy, slow resignation which was strange to the tumult above the earth. At the south-west, above the horizon, glowed light, cool, green-blue sky, but above that a torn selvage of cloud writhed, and vast continents of them were flocking from the north-west. Drops fell heavily on the backs of Richard Milne’s hands as he worked.

All at once he was aware of little Johnnie beside him. The child’s dark eyes were full and glowing, his dirty face ecstatic, as he gambolled over the sheaves, apparently without seeing Milne, who nevertheless had an attraction which he could not resist. He paused, looking on, the toes of one foot rubbing his calf.

“Where do you come from?”

“Me? Anywhere! Can’t I go some!” The boy’s bare legs twinkled as he ran, and looked back. “It’s going to storm! It’s going to storm! But not to-day.”

“How do you know not to-day, old man? Don’t those stubbles and thistles hurt your feet?”

Stopping at the edge of the uncut oats, the little boy pulled stalks from the wet earth and flung them, roots up, into the air, his bright face turned up until they fell, twisted by the wind.

“I can’t help you, so I think I’ll go,” sang the urchin.

“That’s right,” agreed Milne, “better go to the house and keep in the dry.” But Johnnie stayed, now following behind, now running ahead into the standing oats and out again, stopping, swaying, his face uplifted to the wonder of the sky.

“It don’t look like rain, but the drops are falling, falling like spiders.”

Richard Milne started, as though he had forgotten something, but he had only remembered, as one to whom every word of magic unlocked a certain door; and he went on
with the abandon of one who had longed in idleness for the day of labour. The sweat was in his eyes.

At the end of the field a wide strip of rows of bundles awaited his completion of the round; and as he set up each row evenly a strip was left behind him again, to be widened as the binder made its circuits, until once more he would be faced with a wide expanse of prostrate sheaves in waves….

Johnnie had gone, and there were no more shouts at the horses, nor the shuttling rattle of the binder. Bill Burnstile waved at him from the lane, where he walked behind the three horses to the barn. The long bamboo whip in the derelict binder slenderly speared the uncertain sky. It might be quitting time, though all the afternoon had been dusk. Perhaps Bill was leaving the field in fear of rain, but it was more likely that his horses had had enough for the day.

Instead of looking at his watch, Richard went on working. He was on the side of the forest now, which stirred gustily; and looking toward it, his eye caught the figure of a woman, walking, turning back, going farther within its shade.

After a few steps he was sure, and then he ran.

“Ada! Ada Lethen!”