White Narcissus (8 page)

“Obviously here there are. But don’t you think that it is possible to know people too well for their comfort and yours?”

“Perhaps, if you know them without sympathy. But then if you didn’t sympathize you couldn’t know anyone perfectly. Could you? And if you did know a person perfectly you would be compelled to sympathize with him.”

“Perhaps.” Richard Milne was not tempted to explore this syllogism. “Still, people don’t like to be understood. Not really. Not too well; and perhaps it is fortunate I don’t understand Carson Hymerson. But he does cause me to speculate.”

“I think my father does him, too,” she said with an intonation of sadness. “If only such people would resign themselves not to understand. They seem to think that since my
father is what they call ‘queer,’ they are licensed for any means to attain their ends, the petty ends of trickery. They do manage to bother him; it can’t be denied. I can’t see why they should attempt to do so, or what they hold against him. I suppose to see anyone unhappy arouses a sadistic tendency in coarser minds.” Her voice trembled.

“Ada,” broke in Richard Milne, his tones sharp and yet heavy, “you just tell me when anything overt – but, of course, nothing can happen, save by the rarest mischance. I’d just like to see them bother you.” Ada looked up at the savageness of his tone. A thwarted anger struggled within him at the thought that this girl should be forced to consider such a trifle as he denominated the rest of the community, the rest of the world.

Her eyes met his intense gaze, then looked away and filled, while she caught her breath. “Dear boy …” she murmured. “Nothing’s going to happen.”

“Promise me you will,” he insisted.

“Yes. I shall be glad of any help you can give.” She spoke in the steady tones of one unwilling to reveal an invisible burden.

“Ada!” He stopped, unsatisfied, as though uncertain of what he wished to say to her, or of how he was to say it. “You don’t seem to realize my right – haven’t I earned it? – to want to protect you, in all the years you’ve ruled my life.” He laughed shakily. “Why, my dear, I wouldn’t be here. … Love is like –”

“Hush!”

“Like an intermittent fever.” He had stopped in his preoccupation.

“Hush!” She stepped back toward him, taking his hand. “We are nearly there. Let’s talk about – anything – dinner,
until you can eat it! You’re too late for the locust blossoms.” She waved her hand above them.

They walked along together beneath the high, grey-barked trees with their fine, small leaves. The upper branches showed dead, broken off straight and blunt on the tops of the trees, and would have been even more conspicuous by contrast when the great white blooms of locust were interspersed among them.

When the pair reached the road the dust was deeper, but they saw that their shoes already had been covered by the deposit on the grasses of the lanes. In noonday silence and glare the river road was like a snake twining into the shade of the weeds, as it wended below uneven elms and clumps of wild apple, sumach, and elderberry in the fence corners. The road made Richard silent, perhaps with a memory of his walk along it the afternoon before and the night before, perhaps with the memories of earlier times.

U
nder this white glare of sunlight the Lethen place was appreciably less ominous and more dilapidated than it had appeared the previous night. The very trees edging the lawn at the road and along the drive seemed veterans recalling many storms. Rust-coloured needles and rotting cones were strewn beneath the evergreens in arcs which encroached upon the uneven and tufted grass. The brick gables of the house above the Virginia creeper were bleached and eroded of mortar like the face of a harridan washed of paint in the morning light. The roof, dirt-coloured shingles edged with green, looked water-soaked, and as they walked toward it Richard Milne could see a thread of sky through the top of an ornate, tall, ochre chimney.

“Your house doesn’t seem to change,” he remarked, grasping at symbolism as he spoke, “but still it does. It’s becoming more dilapidated and worn, more forsaken-looking every year.”

“Ah, forsaken.” She laughed. “At any rate you don’t say, as almost anyone else would, that it looks smaller than your memories of it.”

“No, not smaller. Nothing connected with it could dwindle.” He brought the implication to light.

Ada Lethen sighed, and they walked up the damp and shady lane in silence, turned across the unfenced lawn, and stood on the patch of grass, which was turning yellow from exposure to the sun, before the veranda.

“Come right in,” said Ada, as he hesitated on the sagging veranda. “It’s time I got dinner. Or would you rather wait here?”

He shook his head, and they went into a front room of indeterminate size and character, until his eyes became used to the dimness. Vague huge patterns adorned the wallpaper; the carpet was green, with great yellow scrollings. A sewing-machine stood in one corner, and in another stood a wood-burning stove without a pipe. Above was the hole in the ceiling through which it would have to reach the chimney, and glancing up, Richard Milne fancied that he heard a hasty stirring, silenced at once. Ada had retreated to the back of the house, after having murmured something about her mother. The young man crossed his knees and prepared to look as much more at ease than he felt, as the impending presence of Mrs. Lethen would allow.

Until now he had not noticed the table, perhaps because, directly before him, it was too obvious. A large square dining-table, covered with a dark chenille cloth extending in shadowy pattern almost to the floor. On the cloth rested two large bowls, bearing each three bulbs of white narcissus, all in flower, and nicely arranged with the tallest in the middle of each bowl. The brilliance of these flowers, hard as flame for all their whiteness, seemed to diffuse a certain radiance throughout the dim room, with its two windows latticed by the creeping vine. The window-sills themselves, he noticed,
each bore more bulbs, and the sewing-machine in the corner must have had one, but for the necessity of use, for it was opened, and on a chair beside it stood still another vase.

A gaunt, pale woman entered at this moment, and it was with something like terror in his surprise that Richard rose, facing her haggard and piercing eyes, even as Ada appeared behind her.

She grasped his hand, holding it high and limply for an instant, and then dropped it. Something made Ada speak, as though the two were strangers newly met.

“Mr. Milne has consented to stay to dinner with us, but I’m afraid he’ll have a little wait, for I’ve just put the potatoes on to boil. I spent too long on my walk, it seems. But we’ll be alone.”

The woman peered into his face quickly, but without seeming to have heard her daughter’s last words. Then with a sharp glance aside she took a chair, laughing.

“Yes, you’ll have to see to dinner, now you’ve said you would.”

“I’ve every sympathy with her intentions,” remarked Milne, “and I’m sure she can feel for us, since she has been out developing an appetite of her own.” He tried to put understanding and support into his smiling attitude toward the girl. She turned away to the kitchen, leaving the door open.

Silence seemed to deaden the air of the room like a gas. There was nothing to be said to this lady, and the impression of the first seconds that she was an enemy returned to him, became conscious, so that he watched her critically.

Her dress was not old-fashioned: timeless rather, so that it would have seemed to become her in any age or scene: a long black skirt, a white shirt-waist. Her hair was white, and though brushed straight back, so abundant that it seemed a
tangled mass. Her face was almost equally colourless, except for black eyebrows, dark burnt-out eyes. Her mouth kept up a constant movement of mood or, he considered, of calculated foiling of decipherment.

Half purposely he waited, feeling that she might be driven to utterance. What things in her soul! A feeling of pity arose upon his reverence of the mystery of life. His eyes roved hither and thither about the room, as though unaccustomed to it, then, as if in resolved defiance, rested upon the narcissi. She opened her lips.

“Look at them!” She extended her hand, smooth and well-kept. “Look at them. Aren’t they beautiful?” She laughed abruptly, as at an understatement so grotesque. “Beautiful!”

“Your narcissi are very nice,” observed Richard Milne with sedate inflections, “and you have a good number of them too!” He did not veil the acid of his smile, behind firm eyes.

Her silence became remote as she looked at the flowers, then she seemed to return to him, and finally she said, as though satirically:

“They’re worth coming a long way to see, aren’t they, Mr. Milne?”

He had to own himself beaten at the futile and childish game of discomfiture – what he called the feeling which gave rise to alarmed pity, carrying anxiety into his mind. Candour was better than such obvious perversity. There would have to be a reckoning, and he struck, with a directness which surprised them both.

“Mrs. Lethen,” he contended in deliberate tones, “don’t you find something more beautiful in the souls of people about you than in these flowers? Something warmer at least, that concerns you, your own fate and your happiness, rather than a momentary pleasure of the eyes. Are you sure that you
have not raised up an idol? Are you not likely to waken some time and find that everything vital in your life is gone, and there is left only these wilted flowers to mock you? What of the happiness of your daughter? Have you ever thought that Ada deserved your support, all your effort now, to gain the happiness which the world, which life is saving for her, and which for reasons which you know it may be hard for her to discover? It is possible to look across the fields of everyday life to some mirage of mountains, longing to be there, and to find after years that one’s limbs are too worn even to gather the valley flowers of reality. And then the mirage dissolves; you are left with nothing who might have had all the sweets of reality without the empty yearning of thwarted longing for unseizable beauty. But how empty and cold is such beauty without the part fulfilled by others. Think how wonderfully different Ada’s life would be, and your own. Sacrifice is the badge of motherhood, and the honour of it finer than any flower.”

Labelling himself a prig, he was consciously letting himself be carried away, so that, while at first his feeling had driven him to words, now the words were cumulating, carrying forward his emotion.

“The world! Beauty! The soul! Idols!” Mrs. Lethen’s white face laughed without interest or surprise at this long outburst. “Yes. I have erected an idol, and since it gives more satisfaction to my days, leavens them better than the clods of this dull life can, who is to say me nay? If they give me the love everything and everyone else denies me, what then?” She paused, as though surprised at this revelation coming uncalled from her lips. “Sacrifice. How like a man,” she murmured, while her face took on a marble quietude, staring now at the hole in the ceiling. Then abruptly she rose and passed into the kitchen.

“Excuse me,” she dropped in a perfect, conventionally polite tone at the door, which she was closing. “I should help her.”

“Indeed, yes !”

The young man remained plunged in thought, apart from his consciousness of the house of his dreams and forebodings. He did not raise his eyes; he was feeling that he had always been there, as Ada had – living for himself her life – until the girl reappeared and called him to the meal.

She was changed. He saw it while she enumerated casually the excuses necessary for her extempore cooking, the tardiness and lack of conveniences. He paid little heed to the neat, painted, and oilclothed kitchen in which the table was set, with Mrs. Lethen opposite him and Ada pouring tea at the head. A kettle sang diminuendo over a wood fire in a dull, huge stove, but a window was open above the fourth side of the table. Upon the sill a pad of fly poison floated in water among a few dead flies. He spoke pleasantly and generally at first. Ada was preoccupied with serving the dinner, and Mrs. Lethen maintained, of purpose, he saw, a watchful silence.

As he talked and the meal progressed he became aware of an obscene, unreasonable foreboding, and began to struggle with a sense that he was talking against time, like a man waiting to be taken to the gallows, who must conceal the fact. Ada replied to his remarks with consideration, as though weighing the literal meaning of each of them. The older woman’s face, he now saw, was more fleshy than he had supposed, and more paste-like in colour. Her mouth was rayed with wrinkles gathering and slackening. With her chief attention on her food, she regarded him from time to time with a detachment almost amounting to hauteur. The oppression increased upon him, while with desperate inquiry he cajoled
his strange impulse to rise and be gone. Surely it was all nothing. He had been recalling aloud old-time friends and neighbours, then:

“Mr. Lethen is not at home to-day?” he asked the face opposite him, almost unaware of speaking at all, as one might unwittingly strike a mortal blow in a mêlée of combat.

The attitude of Ada Lethen gave him a feeling of having impudently blurted like a schoolboy. It was so conspicuously tense that he did not heed her mother for the moment.

“If you are really anxious to see my father, he will be at home to-night, or almost any time after that.” It was as though he had been to Ada some stranger meddlesome in personal matters, some tradesman, a dealer come to buy a load of cattle or to sell her father a hay-loader.

“Unfortunate,” he murmured.

His own ire rose.

“I had naturally hoped to see him, but, of course, I am not giving up hope.”

The two women said nothing. Richard, not to be drawn into conventional insincerities of manner, much less of fact, resigned himself almost to monosyllables until the end of the meal, and found himself once more in the sitting-room with Mrs. Lethen, whom he asked if he might smoke. He had still to put in time until Ada should have dispatched her duties. Talk as he might, the woman stared alternately at the narcissi and at himself. Finally he was driven out to the veranda, and after waiting there another half-hour in a mounting uneasiness he walked over the lawn, already shaded pointedly along the western side by the row of evergreens. Returning, he found a stillness which seemed to bespeak a house deserted. At last he heard a step within and, going to the door, addressed Mrs. Lethen: would she speak to Ada?