White Narcissus (4 page)

They exchanged little words, about his travels, how the village seemed to him, changes … almost as though shy. And a wave of tender memory came over Richard Milne at her
questions, her concern. He saw those days mysterious and full of homely poetry, when he had been a boy in these fields – an evocation of weather, irrelevant transitory conditions, neighbours, above all the surveillance of these over the Lethen family, which had drawn to it his child’s curiosity. The odd and vivid little girl of whom he was conscious sitting at one side and behind him in the schoolhouse; their awakening to each other which seemed without beginning; the silence between them, always the silence, and the forbidding looks which he read in the constraint of either of her parents he inadvertently met. The secret coming out at last from the mouth of gossip that wondered at his not always having known. All these made a medium through which translucently to see Ada Lethen – an image of sleet frozen upon maple buds.

“You do not love them,” he continued slowly, half-unwilling to voice his thought. “But that does not cause you to change your attitude toward me. You’re no kinder or more – reasonable. I dare say if you hated them you’d think that gave you the right, or the obligation to care for their needs.” The cruelty of his suffering was speaking now.

“Hate? I can never hate them – it would be impossible.” Yet she had answered so swiftly, with an involuntary look at him, that he felt he had probed her most secret dread. “Only pity. It is pity which – Pity will kill me!” she exclaimed with sudden wildness, as though the words themselves lent to her sense a foretaste of ultimate bitterness.

“I can’t! I can’t!”

She was sobbing words against his shoulder, while all his thoughts, the froth on the billow of his emotion flew scattered by this sudden contact. And he had come determined not to touch her hand, for the havoc it would be to him afterward. Now he held her, tightly, speaking incoherently.

“Precious Ada! This is going to kill you. Ada! Let us go away. You must! We can live a different life from this. We’ll go –”

All the time her tears were changing something in his mind. The hot tears fell on his hands, and he began to try to comfort her. It was as though they were children again, and she had cried, as she did once, about something some of the other children said, and he had offered her his handkerchief. The years were broken up and their emotions returned upon him in a confused avalanche, while he held her, and at the same time he was in the present, his arms were holding her as they had longed to do.

“Let us go away!” he heard himself repeating in a tone of anguished pleading which was almost maudlin.

The night was flowing past them, through the trees, past them in cold vines of the veranda of the decayed house. And it seemed as though they were being left, stranded in an unimaginable waste beyond life, alone and not together, deserted even of hot and frenzied words, while the mystery of the earth and the skies became in imminence torturingly sweet.

A
t this moment something made Richard Milne aware of a stirring in the room behind them. There was still light enough to show the figure of a woman, that woman who was sinister in his mind by very reason of her appalling and helpless misery. Her tall form bent over a vase of white narcissus. Other vases of the glowing white flower lent a distilled radiance to the dusk of the room. It seemed, though the window was down, that a sickly, heavy odour came spreading impalpable through the air. Richard seemed to be stupefied by it, and kept his watch in fascination; but the woman inside appeared unconscious of everything but the flowering bulbs. Her fingers caressed a blossom, and she passed to the other side of the room to look at a bulb just breaking into bud, with a slow, trembling shake of the head. She gazed a long time at this one, and long at one wilting with the accomplishment of its short life. She turned at last and passed into another room, opening and closing the door in silence peculiarly a summation of her white face.

He felt and heard a sigh at his cheek. “She can’t have
heard us….” The window was darkened by the Virginia Creeper.

“You speak as though nothing could be more terrible than her hearing us,” he replied aloud. “As a matter of fact, it would probably be one of the best things which could happen if they overheard us – both of them – discussing them in the harshest and least sympathetic manner.” His own surprised misgiving at the urgency of these words was only equalled by hers. She was struck silent in a way which made patent the effort with which she began speaking again.

“She has always loved the narcissi.” Ada’s cadence on that word “loved” was enough to show that her fear was well grounded, and that pity could drain her soul. Instead of seeing an unreal, almost delusive quality in the situation, as one fresh from the sane world, she appeared to conceive of no other reality beyond this abnormal state of affairs. She accepted wholeheartedly the fact of her mother and her mother’s state, where one unobsessed would have implied, for all its gravity, a lightness of reservation.

“I remember,” he assented heavily, with an accumulation of unspoken criticism in his tone. “But how does she endure them? A bulb or two is nice to have, if you like them, but such a number, with their enervating odour, must be intolerable to anyone else.”

“But she likes them, worships them. She seems to think of nothing else from day to night. She looks at them, cares for them, she has some of them beside her when she sleeps, and first thing in the morning she comes downstairs to look at the others. I have known her to get up in the middle of the night to come downstairs to the sitting-room and look at them. Sometimes she will fall in a reverie over them, and I can scarcely call her away to a meal.”

“Yes, she must be fairly fond of them,” he assented grimly. “But how do you stand it? It must get on your nerves, doesn’t it, day after day?” He was consciously trying to arouse her. “To say nothing of the smell. And she keeps the windows closed all the time?”

“Yes, nearly all the time. … Sometimes I plead with her, but I think it does no good, it does harm. She becomes secretive, and starts when I come into the room and she is with them.”

Richard was almost ready to feign such brutality as casual curiosity would dictate. “It’s pathological,” he muttered. “Should be looked into.”

“They’ve always been so much to her, a refuge for her yearning, since I seem inanimate and averse. And – more now – And then –” He could see that she was struggling with the obviousness of some feeling which was obscurely trying to make her refer to her father.

Richard Milne smiled bitterly at the conception of her as inanimate and averse, but he said:

“And your father still means more to her than she admits or knows, though she would cut her heart out to be rid of him –” There was a weary flippancy almost of cynicism in his utterance, as of one arming himself with brusqueness against too many torturing perplexities. Again there was an upward inflection here suddenly warily deceitful, though he would not openly question her; for while he knew the outward circumstances of this quandary, never yet had he known Ada Lethen to talk about it in the way he wished, as though she expected or even hoped that he could understand.

“That is to be expected,” she answered, with a tinge of coldness, “seeing the source of it all. Had it been any ordinary quarrel which tempted them into declaring in the frenzied
tones I remember, that they would never speak to each other again – the bitterness might have, it must have, lapsed, passed away in the lukewarm tolerance with which most people must regard each other.”

It came to him that she was a stranger to the warmth and coolness of ordinary domestic relations and family intercourse. An uncanny thrill was imparted with her words, as if they had embodied an exercise of intuition on the part of an immigrant from another planet, but hardly inured to the life of this; and he could have wept to think of that little girl.

“You – you were present at the quarrel, the original one?” He dared not ask, and yet he must.

Yes, she told him. The child had sat at the head of the stairs, shivering in her nightgown, and she heard it all. The raised voices went on for hours, and, as in the height of a storm, it always seemed that violence could reach no further pitch and these emotions would come to outrageous ends. “I’ll never forget how I shivered, and my heart went when I thought they meant to kill one another. But at last I fell asleep there.” She went on with added constraint in her tone, “And there I was in the morning.” They had passed her, the woman to her room, the father to get his coat in the hall. Neither had touched the child, though they had passed so near as almost to step over its insensible form.

His arm went out to her again. “Poor little thing! I’m afraid I can never understand all that your childhood was; only pity. But what you say does not tend to make me pity – these people. Quite the contrary.”

In an instant, while he sat there unmoving, unchanged in aspect, a flame of rage had wrapped him as a tree may be robed in fire, leaving him for the moment gripped helpless and listening only half-consciously to her words.

“You shouldn’t pity me,” she murmured, and continued, “it must have been that, perhaps, rather than my rational intelligence, which taught me to be cold to both of them. Perhaps if any love for either of them had been left afterward my heart should have been broken. As it is –” She laughed bitterly.

“You know that as it is I am heartless.” Yet this speech and the eyes with which she looked at him as she said it made Richard Milne wonder and hope. Clearly there had been a change, and she must have learned in his absence to admit to herself whether or not she loved him. The thought was enough: with mounting surety he felt she did love him, that this was the time appointed – that surely he and Ada Lethen would not let go the chance of happiness without a struggle. If only it were just a matter of duty. But it was not. For so much of her life she had been bound to this place and to these slowly petrifying people that she could not imagine herself apart from them.

Perhaps the knot of the whole difficulty lay there. Desperately as she might yearn, he felt that she could not conceive happiness. Perhaps nothing but the death of one of those parents would bring her awake – alone – drive her to living.

“Your heart was too tender for such storms. It makes me wild to think of it – to think of your sitting there, hearing –” The vividness of the picture he saw caused him to wince away from its unbelievable pathos, its meagre sharpness, like the outline of a remote folk-story, suddenly quickened to life by the lips of one of its participants.

“I think I could repeat every word,” she said quietly. “They – each thought the other unfaithful. They proved that each was certain, no matter how much the other denied it, and that they would be obliged by every human consideration to hate each other to the end of life. And they have never spoken to each other since.”

“Never?” He mused with what seemed an idle particularity. His mind had accepted the fact long since, so that it did not occur to him to brand this inveterate silence as insane and foreign to humanity. Everyone in his boyhood world had accepted it.

Night had set in, wild as autumn; out in the open wind tore the darkness, the trees sighed loud, and colour was given to strain. Among the sheltered recesses of the lawn, about the thick evergreen trees, the hedge, and the veranda, the occasionally flawed quietude allowed the mind, lulled and affrighted anew, to return again and again to the turbulence without. A cricket or crickets took up their cry, silenced, and returned. What portion could there be, what human portion, but a strife of futility, meaningless turmoil? To watch it was to be lulled, only to hear were peace; and he looked at her face, hoping to hear her voice go on, sweetening the acrid past. But she said nothing, the moment was gone; and on the flood of many remembered longings and resolves surged back his single intent.

“Ada!” he burst out. “This is absurd. For anyone who could do that, much as I might ultimately pity them, it’s impossible to find excuse or condolence. To pamper them emotionally all this time is ridiculous. As your parents they will receive my respect; not otherwise, I assure you. You know as well as I that unless some definite course is undertaken nothing can be hoped.”

“A course! What course?” she half moaned.

“But,” he adjured her, “if you let things take their own way there is bound to be a great deal of trouble and bitterness. You will find that you have acquired nothing for the furnishing of your life but sorrow and the memories of sorrow. You are even farther removed than my own ideals are from the
dogma of to-day. That arrivism, opportunism, at best only cloaks the thirst for getting which is rendering barren the lives we see everywhere. Materialism. Yet in a degree we’ve got to recognize that it is based on the reality which is foundation to material things. People get it reversed and think that material things are the only basis of reality. But it is our destiny: we are bound to conquer. We must subdue things; we’ve got to take from life even the emotions, the experience, and fulfilment we need. If we shirk that we are doing a wrong as great as that of starving in the midst of nature’s abundance.” Words had betrayed him again. He did not know whether she were listening.

“There’s no use talking, sacrifice is all right. It is part of the acceptance of life. Calmness and freedom from inordinate grasping is good. But the fact which you and I have to face right now is that happiness is not offered for ever in this world, it does not go begging; and we have a right to all of it we can make, a duty to ourselves which is imperative and primary, and only the fruition of which enables us to do a duty to others.”

She said nothing. He knew that she agreed with him, and that her agreement would make no difference. She was not to be aroused by the acrimony of the first part of his harangue, nor by the reasons of his special plea. Though he spoke with a cool voice, emphatic intonations, and at times almost judicial deliberation, he had become warmed so that her inert silence met him like a chill barrier. He felt that he had talked the “sales-talk” of a “go-getter” of his city, city like an enthusiastic nightmare of another planet now.