White Narcissus (18 page)

He spoke at length and with enthusiasm of his haunts, and possible haunts in the city, and of his friends; spoke with humour, emotion, automatically rising spirits, and enjoyment in courtship which he had never known before. And as the evening passed she turned now and then to look with a smile into his always present eyes, or looked away into those fields and bush she always had known, and which she saw, he was convinced, with the insight lent by the seers and poets of the ages, part and portion in her unique and rich spirit. He had a sense of her opulence such as he had never known before. They talked, were silent, and she was charmed to be charmed. It seemed that they had never before known peace; but it was a fleeting vision. … She was sobbing against him. He could not remember any cause in his own words.

“I can’t, I can’t! Don’t you see – what I’m afraid of? The same thing would happen as – Oh, no – nobody knows what would happen.”

He was silent. The blow was overwhelming, seemed final, though he seemed always to have expected it. He had found an incontrovertible obstacle. “They’re, they’re tough!” he brought out with savage absurdity. “I guess if all these years they have managed to stand it, they won’t come to any harm. You know what I think – that even yet they would discover each other. Unless you are positive that it is the wrong time, I think it would be well to see them, say to-night, and explain the whole matter to them, get it all straightened out reasonably.”

She shuddered.

“You think it wouldn’t help? Perhaps it would make things worse. But it seems to be practicable. In fact it seems the only thing to do. If one had a Shakespearean imagination now, to devise some
Measure for Measure
plot, to reconcile
them. … Alas, such things are too problematical in real life.”

Her look was strained, agonized. “I can’t think of Mother here alone when I’m gone.”

For the first time the thought came to him that if all intervention proved vain, perhaps he would take Mrs. Lethen with them. To his mood even that was not insuperable. Ada and he were going away, whatever the barriers or impedimenta. But he rushed on in urgent words. “Listen. You love me. … I love you. We’ve – we must have each other. Isn’t that right?” Her hands and her lips assented. “And we can’t be happy here. You see that. I doubt whether I could even attempt to go on with my work. And you must, you
must
get away.” He knew that his work, which had been inspired first by her, would never loosen its hold upon him, so that he could not be happy even with her, without it. The realization was confusing, almost sickening.

Was Ada thinking this? She had been looking at him with starry eyes in the pearl dusk. Did she think his decision mere complacent briskness? Now wearily she rose from the bench, and he with her, and before she could turn into the house, he led her half by force down the veranda and they walked in silence about the lawn in the shadow of the tall pines, the upper boughs of which tossed a little in spite of the apparent calm of the evening.

“Let us walk along the river,” he proposed at length, when they came to the gate at the road. She shook her head as it were sadly. “Yes,” he insisted, pulling her hand. It became limp, as though all animation had gone out of her. He was struck by the difference, perhaps not incongruous, between her attitude and his own inclination to pick her up in his arms and run. Slowly, silently they walked to the veranda.

But they agreed tacitly not to ascend to it, and turned
away to the shadowed lawn once more. There was the feeling that all this had happened before, drearily, many times. They could never do more than return into that house, into the past; and a recognition, a far-off salutation of it would be their only approximation to mortal felicity.

“You don’t really believe in happiness, that’s it,” he pronounced with a slow bitterness as they turned at the gate once more. “You don’t believe that we could be happy. Do you?”

Ada Lethen did not answer. Then, as they turned and came beneath a low-sweeping pine-bough, she stopped and her raised arms encircled his neck, and her great eyes looked up …

Blood, spirit, pounded through him. They held each other so. The resolve rose in him, lifted him as though on a wave: man or devil, nothing human or enchanted would part them. They’d go. … Yet he saw that after all the moment was not yet.

Back on the veranda again they sat clasped, whispering. Darkness had fallen, and with it the breeze had freshened. “You do believe we’ll be happy,” he muttered softly in her ear. Once more they were beyond time and space. He thought that he detected a movement of assent.

“Above pity, we’re above despair,” she whispered. Then he knew that her face was wet with tears, and held her close, comforting, though he knew too that they were tears of pure joy. They were no longer hungry and alone, and yet there was nothing left of the world, of life.

Suddenly, he knew not after how long a time, Ada thrust his arms from her, sat back on the bench, looking into the window which gave off the veranda with widening eyes. Without a word or question, quickly he turned, hearing a noise within the room, though doors and windows were
closed. But it was too late to see what had happened. The man was there, her father, stooping to the floor. He had somehow dragged the chenille cloth from the table on which the narcissi had been sitting. It must have been by accident, for he was stooped over them, his grey head shaking as with palsy. He straightened one flower and then another, which was ruined. He held them in his hand a moment, looking at them.

Then all at once, as with an access of rage, or in some perverse fear of leaving the thing incomplete, he stamped on the bulbs and slender blossoms, ground them into the carpet. He went to others on the sewing-machine, destroyed those, dashed them to the floor. The two outside could hear his pantings. Ada Lethen’s hand became cold, and glancing at her, Richard feared that she would faint.

The crack of light beneath the door facing them widened, the door opened, and at that moment Mrs. Lethen, tall, pale, in white, entered. For an instant, a long moment, her face was like a mask. Then it was seemingly contorted in rage. The man stood with his back to them, at bay.

“I did it!” they heard him hoarsely shout. “I did it purposely. Now what?” He folded his arms with bravado, plainly meaning to insist on his intention.

The livid face of Mrs. Lethen changed. They did not know what to think. It was fright, they knew, white fright in the realization that after all it did not matter, her devotion of years, not in the sudden discovery of feeling, words directed to her from this man. They could see the strength leaving her as she sank into a chair. They thought that she might have come to the time of her death.

The man was still looking at her, changed now insensibly to a culprit air, pathetically ridiculous.

Staring at him, the woman began to laugh, weakly, uncontrollably, laughing hysterically and exhaustingly.

“What a – what a fright! You gave me!” She gasped. “Oh, Frank!”

Mr. Lethen straightened and walked to his wife’s chair.

How the other two got away from the veranda, and whether they did so without Ada’s parents hearing, they never knew. But they were far down the windy road before Richard Milne could say:

“And now, will you believe me?”

“Foolish boy! When you’re right.”

Her generous eyes were the stars of that night.

Northwood, Ontario, Oct.—Dec. 1925
.

Hanlan’s Point, June—Aug. 1927
.

O
ne day in 1925, when I was in my second year at law school and my stories had begun to appear in the avant-garde literary magazines in Paris, I saw the name of another Canadian story-teller, Raymond Knister, in one of those magazines. Astonished, I sat down and read the story. And in that same issue this Knister also had a sheaf of farm poems. I liked the farm poems. I could also smell the farm in them. They were simple and direct. They were effortlessly authentic. The story had some of the same quality. I could see that this Knister had the honest eye and neat skill to get down precisely what his eye caught. This remarkable gift didn’t quite work for me in the story because without the rhythmic flow of the poems the meticulous observations seemed a trifle laboured. I sat up and took notice because here was a writer from this neck of the woods who aspired to be first-rate.

I suppose Knister was as curious about me as I was about him, for, about a month after I read him, he came to see me. He walked in on me, saying simply, “I’m Raymond Knister,” and smiling as if he fully expected I would know all about
him. He was of medium height with a very high forehead, a nice looking man a few years older than I, a man with a stutter he tried to control by talking in a sing-song tone. Welcoming him like a long lost brother, I wanted to know where he was from and how it came about that he was appearing in such an international magazine. He was from a farming family, he said. He could not explain how it was that a boy from a farming family, who had spent a little time at Victoria College in Toronto, should have an innate taste for the best in literature. In 1923 he had gone off for a year to Iowa City to serve on the editorial board of
The Midland
, which was certainly one of the best little literary magazines in America. In the summer of 1924, he told me, he lived in Chicago, writing during the day and driving a taxi at night. Musing, I said he must have come from a very cultured farming family. No, he didn’t think so, he said, smiling. He was the only one who had a literary talent. Then, as young writers do, getting the feel of each other, we talked about the writers we loved, found some splendid agreements and new excitements. He had read all of Sherwood Anderson, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Dorothy Richardson, Joyce’s
Dubliners
, and Turgenev. He loved Turgenev. Well, I parted with him reluctantly and was sure I had found a treasure.

The next time he came to see me, he brought a copy of the issue of
The Midland
that contained his story, “Mist-Green Oats.” I really liked this story. It had, of course, that splendid authenticity of all his farm work, but it was brought close to me by a lyric prose flow.

I had introduced Raymond to Loretto, whom I was to marry, and I remember one charming evening in the summer when the three of us walked all the way out to Sunnyside, walking slowly and exchanging profound insights into the
other contemporary writers we thought important. Raymond talked about e. e. cummings. Now he declaimed loudly, “When on a pale green gesture of twilight …” This was a beautiful poem, he said fervently. He would have liked to have written those lines. He began to talk about his own work. He began to stammer. Then suddenly in a rather loud voice, free from all stammering because he was really singing, he declaimed:

Then, laughing, he said, “I wrote that last week and showed it to Charles G.D. Roberts. He told me it was all right except for the last line. What do you think?”

Though I thought of Raymond as a stranger in town, the astonishing thing about him was that he knew all the local literati. At that time I knew none of them. He knew E.J. Pratt, Wilson Macdonald, Roberts, and Mazo de la Roche, who at that time lived with her cousin on Yorkville Avenue and was as poor as a church mouse. Obviously, he wasn’t at all shy. I found he simply presented himself to anyone he really wanted to meet.

My own private world, which at that time was in Paris, was widening quickly. All those experimental magazines now wanted stories from me. I wondered if Raymond was getting left out. At the time I owed Hemingway a letter, and when I wrote him, I asked, “By the way, did you notice in that second issue of
This Quarter
the work of another Canadian, Raymond Knister? I know him. What about him?” In a month or so
Hemingway answered my letter but did not mention Raymond Knister.

Before he met me, Raymond had written some pieces for the
Toronto Star Weekly
. The bit of money he got from those pieces had been important to him, he told me. Now he found that this market was drying up for him. I introduced him to the
Weekly
writer, Greg Clarke, who could tell him what the
Weekly
wanted from him. Their meeting wasn’t fruitful. Raymond’s luck seemed to have run out. “The
Weekly
!” I remember him saying with exasperation, “If they will only tell me exactly how they want it written, I can write it exactly that way.” And he actually believed this. Not only was he wrong about this, he was wrong-headed about himself and foolishly stubborn in believing he could make any style his own. He could only be Raymond. He wasn’t a hack. Yet he had this strange stubborn faith in himself – a writer with a hundred arrows in his bow. It was this stubbornness at the time which made him so remarkable in this country. He really believed that he could support himself writing uncommercial stories, and not only himself, for he was planning to get married.

I learned myself how annoyingly stubborn Raymond could be. A new issue of
This Quarter
had come out, featuring a story of mine and using nothing of Raymond’s. He came to see me and told me that
This Quarter
hadn’t paid him for the prose and poetry they had used in their previous issue. I remember how he kept looking at me strangely as he told me this. What happened to that payment?, he wanted to know, waiting grimly for my comment. Well, I knew he needed money, but I didn’t know what was on his mind till a week later when he asked me point-blank if they hadn’t sent this money to me, believing I would give it to him. I was astonished. A few days later he confronted me again. “Had the money come to
me?” he asked. I shouted at him, “Why the hell should they send your money to me? How can you be so stubborn?” Yet I wasn’t angry. He was the isolated writer, the hard-up lonely writer grimly determined that his talent should be rewarded by someone somewhere, even if the someone had to be me.