White Narcissus (7 page)

S
omehow the day had become overcast for him. It was as though a shadowy thought of happiness had been driven from his mind by some intervening emergency, and now he could not even recall in what this mood consisted. Probably it was no more than morning hope and healthy spirits. And those were as likely to be illusion as the anonymous doubt which was now filling his mind. At least he could not blame Bill Burnstile. He should have been – he was, he told himself – gratified by the encounter with his old friend of his boyhood, now a man, honest, simple, rough, real, true to himself, and open-eyed to what reality came his way.

It was what the man had told of the Lethens which bothered him. Somehow he must have thought that he possessed the secret in his own right, and that, possessing it, he might be able alone to unfathom the riddle. Behold now, though, others had watched, baffled, even dispirited as himself by the sight. Bill Burnstile had talked as though absorbed by the subject, though without ulterior intent; and Carson Hymerson spoke with bitterness. Richard could not help wondering whether all the neighbours were so deeply
concerned, whether an atmosphere had not been caused to rise about these people which would forever forbid his imposing reality or recognition upon them. In what reality did they believe? What could he have believed in Ada Lethen’s place?

He was sitting on an old wooden gate at the head of a green lane which sloped down into a farm, with no buildings in sight, and he jumped off to continue his walk when he saw the girl before him. He paused. It was Ada Lethen who came up to him. The stateliness which he had known in the dusk of last night was modified by a languor which must have been weariness, for he saw that she was really thin. Her smile quite transfigured her dark, pale face; her eyes remembered themselves in a glint of happiness, looking at him steadfastly.

“You’re going the wrong way,” he told her with an assumption of country jocosity. It seemed that for surprise of joy he could have leaped the high gate before her.

“I am? I hadn’t any particular place in view –”

“Just out for a walk?” he interrupted urgently. “Then you may as well come with me.”

She looked back over her shoulder at the forest into which the lane ran. “But I just did come out of that bush. I rather expected,” she drawled softly, “that there might be some wild flowers there. Perhaps I’m too late. But then I didn’t happen to think of them before….”

“Never too late! Orange lilies, jack-in-the-pulpits, we’ll find some! Come. I must explore the whole country while I’m here!”

They walked along the grass of the wide, rail-fenced lane, down and up the slopes of which twined branching cow-paths, worn in other years by droves of belling, tranquil animals. The morning was passing in a mellow green quiet, which seemed to Richard Milne loud with another clamour
than that of the city: his awakened hopes, a tumult of memories and desire. Looking at her beside him, he heaved a great breath and said:

“I can hardly believe it, but here I am. Here are you, what’s more. Here are we!” he sang suddenly in the echoes of the trees. “Whatever foundling gods take the place of Pan, we are here!”

She smiled slightly at his enthusiasm of a boy; her generous lips seemed trembling to a smile as they walked. “I’m inclined not to come out very often. I think to-day is the first since winter that I have left the farm like this. In winter, spring, autumn, it’s good to come and see that there is growth, change, and death, nothing of which is bitter or gay, simply because it does return again. It does return again. … Yet in that way, too, it is very precious. But you don’t wish me to be serious,” she laughed.

He was silent, not knowing how to convey his risen spirits, and not daring to try for fear of jarring on her mood. She had kept inviolate for a few far-parted days of the year this desire to commune with nature, and had avoided the chafing with which day-by-day intercourse would have blunted her love. And this to her was everything, everything tangible of beauty beyond the poignant and trivial dullness of her days. After all, she scarcely had realized, save as a rumour, that there was another world beyond these fields. Had she not known the world of poetry, ideas, she perhaps would not have been conscious of loving them, nor ever have known the fear of love, that fear that she could grow to hate them, though her bitterness would be the mere working of monotony. Then she would wish that, like the clod-like people about her, she had never learned to love them. She looked about her with quiet eyes, not asking of the forest that it be to them rest from vain
study, but that it be its strange self as it had been to her childhood memories, when in earlier spring she never forgot to come out for wild flowers, and sometimes little Dick Milne went beside her, and they raced each other to clustered violets or more common wet-rooted mayflowers, shy lady-slippers.

They paused as they had done in those times, and looked up the long trunks of rough trees, to the feathery, cloudy upper branches, and there, as in an old afternoon, circled a crane, its long, thin legs and neck stuck straight out against the sky: soared and soared in the opening above the feathery boughs, huge, until they thought they were staring up phantom trees, pillars of a dream, immeasurably high.

“Oh, it makes me dizzy!” The girl lowered her head.

“We must have looked up quite a while,” the man muttered. “Ada, do you remember the time we saw a crane when we were children? We stared and stared just the same, and you were dizzy that time too. Seems impossible to believe that bird’s not going to do something interesting. Does he see our faces in the rift of treetops, and wonder what those strange, wavering bulbs are going to do, whether they are a menace or … The bush is drier now than it was in those days. I remember it was all pools under the trees, brown with dead leaves. I thought you were going to fall into one when you became dizzy looking up.”

“It’s later now … later in the year.”

They walked forward. “And the land all about is drained now. How vast the bush seemed, and echoey then. Now we know how few acres it is, and how small a mystery.”

They spoke of a girlhood and boyhood it seemed impossible to know would never return. It seemed that they had been nearer together then than now or at any time during the long siege of her. He remembered the first day Ada had gone
to school at the little frame schoolhouse at the cross-roads, and how he and she had walked home on opposite sides of the road, along the ditch banks without a word. Soon they became friends and compared the lunches which they carried to school in tin pails, and shared them at noon. The teasing of the older children stopped this, and they did not pay much attention to each other during the day at school. But they always walked home together, until a new family moved to a neighbouring farm and provided Ada with the company of other girls. Later they walked together when the privilege of carrying her books had come to mean much to Richard.

Through these years he had been scarcely aware of her parents save as a rumour in the mouths of other children. Grown people seemed to keep silence about them. They must have been utterly indifferent to anything the little girl did away from their sight. She never spoke of them, and you could not think of her with them. She seemed perfect alone, needing no one. She was neatly dressed at school, on occasion came to Sunday school with neighbour girls, and looked a distinct and exotic creature among them. Scarcely ever in his memory had he seen Mrs. Lethen. Once she had been driving past in a buggy with Ada, and picked him up. He had never forgotten the consciousness of her presence under the narrow buggy-top as they drove down the muddy road.

Mr. Lethen was seen more, at threshing tables, in neighbours’ houses, at meetings of the municipal council, of the school ratepayers, and so forth. He was not disposed to take a keen interest in his duties as a citizen, but his neighbours, knowing him a man of intelligence and some education, from time to time pressed him into certain offices. He was known to have queer ideas, and by some this was laid to his being educated, and by others to his year-long misunderstanding
with his wife; while others took it as one of the reasons the two had not been able to get on together. More of the women, however, sympathized with him than the men. Farming indifferently, he pursued a casual course among his neighbours, as though there was nothing to be remarked about him, and it was quite ordinary to live a life with neither an impelling motive nor the warmth of family ties.

He never appeared in public with Mrs. Lethen, and when it was necessary to have people in the house she was not present. On her side, she avoided association with other women, often did not answer knocks at the door, and one who came of an afternoon to call was likely to go away puzzled. It was something to be marvelled at that their life could continue in the community and the family take its part therein as an efficient unit, while Mrs. Lethen remained apart, indifferent, or malign, present-in-absence.

Her hold on her daughter became more apparent as the girl grew up, and a second estrangement, Richard Milne recalled, had come between him and Ada Lethen. She seemed to grow away from him. Music had been her passion, and she had lent herself to it wholly. Her parents, indulgent or indifferent, had allowed her unchecked progress with elementary teachers, local girls returned from the Toronto conservatory, who insisted that Ada must “go on” with her “wonderful touch.” Who knew what triumph of musical splendour might yet be released? Music – it was the impelling passion of her life, by which she existed.

But even in those days the girl had begun to attempt composition of her own. She began to be haunted by the strange tantalizings which are known to the genius of expression. She would be in despair or dullness. Or a muted ecstasy came over her, in which, so high was her vision of the beauty
she wanted to embody, she did not dare attempt composition. Everything was hard for her. It was unbearable to remain silent, chilling the music from her heart with duties of the household day; and unbearable to yearn for composition, filled with ineffable impulses which she knew from old would not flower into the singing perfection of art.

Something had happened between their infrequent meetings. Richard had known that, youth as he was; but he had not questioned her closely then or later. She told him that she was not leaving home. The most her willingness could explain was that the music affected her too strongly. She couldn’t bear it, and the house was silent for ever, the piano closed, looking like a giant black bier, until it was moved into a storeroom of the rambling house, never opened. And after that again he had not seen her for months. Her mother had had a long illness; Ada had nursed the woman through it, at the same time helping her father and carrying on the household….

Looking at her now, it came to him that Ada Lethen had become that inaccessible music which had tortured her until she could bear it no more. There had been, finally, in her nineteenth year, what the local doctor had called a “nervous breakdown.” This had been temporary, and seemed to leave no trace beyond the resignation which baffled her lover now, a sort of nihilism of the emotions, not of the will, which kept her from any new courses, or even acquiescence in the validity of the projects he urged. Yet she seemed strong; her activity dominated the family, which probably, as she said, would fall to pieces without her. It was strength which seemed to be in her soul now, beneath a wild vibrancy to ineffable spiritual intimations he could only guess, and in wonderment reverence.

But again, was it with her as she said, as she believed she felt? She feared that the lives of her parents, her mother, would tumble into ruin if she left them. But did she fear, too, that, lacking their supporting needs, she would collapse, become useless, a recluse, prey once more to music or to love more poignant and devastating still? He would bring all this to light; he would conquer it. He had been gathering his forces during all the months of being apart from her. Now he would test his will, his love for her, his belief in their happiness, test his whole ultimate life and hers. Perhaps his failures, his diversion to the course of ambition, had been a preparation, his own development for the goal which his imagination had held before him in a vision of her.

They had come out of the forest before they knew, and were walking in a by-path near the bank of the river. Their wanderings had transgressed line-fences so vaguely that they did not know whose farm they were crossing. But they knew that the river glided smooth, occasionally revealed below them, the trees were gracious, the vines and hedges veiling. Far ahead of them loomed the top of a broad beech tree, among the slim second growth spared from the axe along the banks. Nearer, its quick leaves glittered before them as though it grew from the middle of the river. And indeed when they came up and stood on the bank opposite the towering old tree, they saw that, far below, it held an isthmus of its own from the river, which was forced to twine about its roots in springtime, but ran several yards away in a sunken bed now. The knoll beneath the trees was high, grassy, sheltered on one hand by a bend in the creek bank, and on the other by two cedars overgrown and joined to form a screen by creeping morning glory vine, which wrapped them to the tips. It was a place for shelter from too rough winds, from sun, and all
noise and unquiet they looked into; but there seemed no path leading down to it.

They had scarcely walked fifty feet on along the lane before they met Carson Hymerson, both forks on his shoulder, evidently going home to dinner. The small, thick, stooped man looked at them quickly, suspiciously once, mumbled something, and had passed.

They looked at each other, and Richard Milne smiled.

“He won’t be expecting you home for dinner now,” Ada said with a soft drawl, “so you’d better come home with me. Never mind,” she said with sudden decision as he began to excuse himself. “I want you to meet Mother, and it’s no inconvenience.”

His acceptance was curiously tentative, tacit. “You seem to know Carson.”

She laughed a little. “Yes, but I wonder whether I do. One thinks one knows this one and that one, when, if one did, things would be different; there would be no flaws in intercourse.”