White Narcissus (3 page)

“Oh, I see! There’s attraction over there, come to think of it. Not that I blame you. Now that I remember, you did use to kind of shine around Ada when you was a young gaffer. That’s all right!”

They had risen from the table by this time, and a slow-mounting annoyance approaching anger had modified Richard Milne’s haste to get away. “That’s pleasant,” he asserted. He secured his hat and went outside, to the accompaniment of the housewife’s expressed wish that he remember her to Mrs. Lethen; but Carson was still beside him, hands comfortably stuck in deep overall pockets.

“Kind of looks as though I wasn’t going to have you help me see to them calves after all, eh? Unless you go that way through the fields with me. Maybe I’ll see you over there, anyway. Ha! Ha! But, of course, you wouldn’t be coming away with me yet so early. Well, I’ll see the door’s left unlocked for you.”

Milne thanked him with a grave smile, as one willing to accept all this as well-intentioned jocosity, and hurried down the lane to the road. His chief feeling was one of haste.

“Well, don’t go ’way mad, looks like it was going to freeze, don’t it,” was the parting sally, which his mind repeated to his hurried steps down the dry road.

T
he wind was dying before the sunset, but had chilled, turning up the under sides of leaves. Trees shivered under a dulled sky. The evening, muted by wind and cold, given a sullen swiftness of animation, mated the feeling of Richard Milne. After a week of torrid weather in which the very sky seemed to melt, rain should have come to sweeten the smell of ripening grain and whitened clods. But first this dry cold, in which trees writhed blanching, while now and again a cricket chirping up fitfully made still greater the removal from the sultry quietude proper to the time and season.

Once more the man was overcome by a sense of strangeness. He had been in his office that morning, had walked and taxied in the streets of the city and left it at noon, riding through unforgettable miles of railway yards and factories and grimy suburbs. And already he could make himself believe in the existence of such things only with an effort. For all the years in which he had struggled for success there, it seemed that the only real and personal part of his life had been lived here, surrounded by trees, fields, river, which claimed him as though he had never left them. He did not need to look at this
house or hedge or vista for a landmark, because he could have believed that he had walked down this road every night for the past year. And accompanying the return upon him bodily of the old life was the same sense of futility and uncertainty which he had known in those times – the cause of his eventual determination to leave, and also of his periodic returns. And with every step he was approaching nearer the source of that uncertainty.

The Lethen place hid the sunset, looming beyond a dredged cut to the river, like a moat, dry and overgrown with weeds. The tangle of vegetation, which in this light seemed to overlay the buildings, was in itself a quickening token to Richard Milne’s remembrance, and he slowed, paused. Great evergreens shadowed the front of the place and guided his footsteps toward the lane. Dust flurried about him impotently as he reached the little leaning gate and went across the front yard, itself no haven to him: a wild expanse of grass and pine needles shadowy and whispering to his rising excitement of insuperable awaiting barriers.

The house was old, its narrow windows peered dark from drapery of Virginia Creeper, only the gables showing the weathered brick expanse which towered remote as though to scan the oblivious invader below. There was something secret but secure about the air of the house, like an awareness of its life indecipherable in dark hiding of the vines. So much of its appearance Richard Milne knew more from an act of memory than by bodily sight. He had reached the low weathered wooden gate giving on the lawn, and he became unconscious of everything for that moment, of the mysteriously-quickened night, the house, the trees, the dark, the pressing sky. For he knew that Ada Lethen was on the veranda before him, a few steps before his feet.

Her white dress stirred against the dusk, and he was filled and enveloped, overwhelmed with sense of her. He surprised a look of gladness and incredulity on her pale face as she slowly rose to greet him. And as of old her nervous pale fingers fluttered to her hair.

“Richard Milne! Why are you here? When did you come?”

He held her hand, looking into her darkened eyes, almost level with his own. “You are asking!” he exclaimed slowly. “Do you know, I couldn’t quite believe – well, in you.” Suddenly he realized it. “Ever since I got off the train I’ve been hurried, urged by something. Something was wrong – at least; and I had to see you to believe that this sorry, this decorative and rapscallion world did hold you – all that you mean.” In a boyish access he laughed.

She laughed a little, with an intonation of sadness, withdrawing her hand. “Sit down. You’ve not changed. When did you come?” She moved two books on the seat, and reposed beyond them.

He sighed, still lost in the sight of her. “Then you don’t refuse to see me, you don’t send me away this time … or not yet.” His tone was reproachfully accusing, more than ironical. She smiled faintly. Her pale, almost sallow face had become radiant.

“Why shouldn’t I be … simply enchanted, to see an old friend?” She spoke softly. “Not every evening. … It’s a long time….”

His mind refused to hope, to consider implications, overpowering, impossible and rapt. He was not annoyed by the word “friend.” It was enough to be here. Without touching them he indicated the books.

“You still read a great deal.” His tone strove to flit to a
lightness belying his pity, the feeling in his familiar recognition which had brought the tears to his eyes when he met her. “Still,” he had said. And “not every evening” did he come.

He had long since for all his freedom in thought, his assent to her ideals, looked with uneasiness upon her unremitting, her almost possessed reading. That feeling was beyond his rationalizing. He had been able to object only interferingly, as he felt powerless. What were books to her? Anodyne, perhaps, and they had to be of increasing potency. She paid little heed to him. What was she to do? She had been too wise to put it so, knowing what his answer would be. He felt absurd to cavil, though he did not like some of the things she read. … In his remark was contained a whole cycle of reminiscence, of familiarity which now seemed impossible.

“Yes, the books.” She spoke in tones which to his cherished vision of her were what finality is to despair. “I read a great deal still – still.”

Her present listlessness did not relieve him, but incongruously made him more anxious for her. He tried to speak as casually as a stranger.

“I remember them, your wide and esoteric explorations! Am I to take it that you are wearying of wandering? Or are you only temporarily abashed by the illimitable wastes, you’re waiting to start forth again, afresh – you see the minarets of your city, lost in vapour, and you pause; and its riddle, while you rest, calls again. Its riddle….” As he went on, the words seemed to flow automatically, as though he were drunk with a surprise of enchantment, while he watched her happy and tired face.

“The riddle,” she murmured. They were silent a little. “That alone used to serve as reward, but it is long since the penance.”

“I am not a riddle, but a man,” he reminded her. “Come, are you so quiet because you think I am a ghost? You want proof!” But he did not touch her. “I should inquire about your parents, the circumstances of your life which nobody else knows.”

He had spoken as though determinedly gay, cheering one sick; and now there was purpose in the indirect reference to her family, as of a relic of embitterment.

Ada Lethen laughed. “Do I seem so quiet? I assure you it’s not because I don’t appreciate, in all the word means, that you are here. Only the other day Mother was speaking to me of you.”

“Did she?”

His eagerness was based, again, upon imagined changes during his absence. But it was no time yet to stake anything on the possible discovery of what had taken place in that house. “I hope Mrs. Lethen has been in good health lately?”

“Not exactly. She never is, of course, that would be too much to expect. Lately at times she seems better, and then a day or a week will come when she alarms me.” Though the voice was soft, her articulation was definite and precise, her manner quietly explanatory, so that Richard Milne at moments fancied he was in a dream, not there, that far away she, like himself, sat alone.

He saw the real image of her as she sat alone, while seasons passed. How else should she sit, though her reason for being in that house always had been to keep from loneliness the father and mother whose estrangement had been one of the legends of his childhood? In itself that was enough to make for loneliness, and he marvelled at her endurance, her poised good sense. With the coming of womanhood, should she not feel free? But she could not believe in freedom.

She was talking softly, with the same certainty in which she had always shaken her head at his reasonings, his pleadings, implying that he understood her situation better than he pretended.

And in reality that was the case. He understood, but he felt surely that if the pair had been left to themselves long ago, they probably long ago should have become reconciled. Yet what seemed reasonable and practicable in the daylit world of the material and of work, ebbed away from him here before the power of a reality long-accepted, which denied the existence of all else. And peering into the past to that child, strange-eyed, fearfully-watchful, wounded, which Ada Lethen must have been, he felt that her presence might have been a sword between the two, so that they could never forget the bitterness of the first few days after the quarrel. That bitterness, dying away to inanition, died to a complete disregard so deep that they did not care to separate, even would not have done so, perhaps, had the girl not been there.

Ada Lethen was silent now, looking across the fields, and Richard Milne could not believe that she had spoken. Those fields, he remembered, while they became dreary and inanimate to him at memory of the many times he had returned to them in vain, these fields barrenly flourishing to the darkening oblivious forests, were her constant sight. He seized her still hand – he who had vowed never to touch her again until the availing outcome of his quest had appeared. He had seen it all many an evening before, and she – she had looked on few other vistas throughout her years. “What is it holds you, Ada?” he asked in a choking tone, as though she were dying before his eyes.

She did not stir, there was no motion of her body on the bench while her hand warmed in his, and she looked into the
approaching night. With a long sigh, a smile, she turned, looked at her hands on the books, at him. At last, quietly:

“I don’t know.” She roused herself and smiled almost brightly at him. “Why are you here?” she asked, as though the question were as reasonable as his had been.

He made no answer, since they both knew that it was not necessary to mention why he had returned this time. Something made him understand that she had not changed, that surely in all this place of eroded dreams she was least changeable. And yet he knew as well that his spirits were rising as if in obedience to an old call, and he was about to press her with reasonings, expostulations she had heard often enough before, and which would pour from his lips in a flood. But she turned her eyes away and went on.

“I don’t know, and I have admitted to you that there is no reason which would operate logically. But perhaps what holds me here is knowing that if I went my mother would die. She would starve, as completely – God knows it is precious little that I do or can do for her, and yet it is only my being here that keeps her soul alive. They have been estranged so long that they are really dead to each other, and yet if they were left alone together they would both, she, at least, would die the bodily death as well.”

He smiled bitterly. “It is always of her you speak,” he added, with a surprising acrimony, for his thwarted feeling was being transferred to annoyance in behalf of the representative of his own sex in this generation-long quarrel. “Doesn’t your father feel? Do you think he doesn’t know the bitter of loneliness and misprision as well as your mother?”

“Father, of course. I know that, and it is why things are as they are. Possibly if I could take sides, there could be some outcome, even to strife. But I see, I understand too well, so that
there is no hope. I see the sadness of both, and how oblivion awaits it all … across a mist of pathos like dreaming.”

“You’re too sympathetic,” said the man gruffly. He wanted to add that she had been thinking about it too much. “Surely something could be done. I tell you, it would be a tonic, a rough cold-blooded treatment. Why, they could have been laughed out of everything, or I’m mistaken. To go on in this way – it’s absurd….” But he spoke less from reason than desperation, with a maddeningly increasing sense of impotence in the smothering shroud of time and place, the overpowering creep of memories that die only to haunt implacably. “It’s plain to me that your father has a good deal to complain of. Perhaps you don’t know that there are many kinds of men with whom no – no such situation could exist.”

“I hope so,” she murmured, so that he could scarcely hear. The silence grew, big with all that they could not say, which neither could understand well enough to form into words, and yet which they felt between them like an impalpable tie.

“There are women who wouldn’t let it exist,” he continued, with a doggedness which ignored his paradox. But Ada did not smile.

“Well,” sighed Richard Milne at last. “We don’t seem to know that we have been apart for a long time.”

They smiled, lost in a sense of this, of being together, and that each dearly-lost moment gave its measure of almost painful bliss. Looking at the clear profile of Ada Lethen, he felt his heart rise, as though it would break his body apart. The mazed night could have lasted forever, it might have been the beginning or end of eternity.