White Narcissus (9 page)

The very appearance of the girl, her quick step, look of concern, was reassuring to his now obviously absurd fear, which had been tantalizing, like that of a man who has lost a precious stone in the grass. In the relief and gratitude of having her before him again, as though she had escaped who knew what occult fate, he was made sure of all that he had doubted, and her bearing seemed to tell him that, instead of anything coming between them unaware, they were more subtly linked than before.

“What is it?”

He looked at her reproachfully, with a smile that made light of all he had been feeling, a smile which was to take away the embarrassment she must share. “What should it be? Do you want me to go away without seeing you?”

“Yes.”

“But, Ada! What’s the matter? What has come over you since I came?” He saw his worst fears realized, and himself put against one of those unforeseeable psychic debacles as intangible as they are overpowering, and as irremediable as insidious.

“I don’t like the attitude you take toward my parents.” Ada spoke calmly.

“And I don’t like the attitude they take toward you,” he answered in a flare of anger. “Nor to me either. I thought you could make allowance for at least that.”

“Your course then seems obvious.” Her tone was unfathomable, without feeling. She might have been torturing him, though he fancied that if torturing herself she was delighting in the agony.

“My course is not obvious, but it will be definite, when I’ve decided. I’ve had about enough of this.”

She made no reply, and so uncertain had everything become that he wondered whether in this he should see hope
or forbearance which was more strongly entrenched than active repugnance; she did not ask him to go.

“What did your mother say in the kitchen?” he demanded. “What did she say about me?”

She shook her head slowly, looking far away over the fields, to the bright forest splotched with dark shade. There was no indecision apparent in her air, yet to Richard’s vexation it was as though she did not know what she was doing, what she wanted. With an effort he eschewed forcible expression of this feeling of his; in a situation which seemed to him to demand the utmost care of reasonableness and good sense, these qualities appeared to have deserted Ada Lethen, and he was further angered by the abruptness with which he discovered them measurably lost to himself; when he should have risen to an occasion he was ready for any wild and final word or action.

“Let us go for a walk. You can’t see things straight here, Ada; I can explain. Come.”

He had never seen her more beautiful, in poise of foot and head. Her eyes were no longer sad, but bright with some enigma beyond his conception, wide, unfathomable, maddening:

“No, thank you.”

Fearing himself, he turned and was gone. He would not say never to return to that house.

S
he had spoken, and he had pretended to accept what she said. He could scarcely convince even himself that there was any use of hoping, or of staying here. He could love her, with a love which should have moved mountains, and blown trivial obstacles from them as sand is swept across a beach, which should have caused happiness as the air of a valley is changed, charged with sunlight. But as for being effectively moved by these considerations, she might have been a worn-out stump in such a valley, on such a beach. What balked him, what finally enraged him, was not the feeling that she did not return his love, or the difficulty of convincing her that she loved him, but the fact that love could make so little difference. He had found exaltation and in his darkest despair had taken consolation from thinking that he was to learn what love alone could do, and he thought he saw now that it could do nothing when circumstances and temperaments conspired to cause a deadlock.

Nothing, nothing to be done, his mind repeated, and he did not know how he put in the rest of the day, the afternoon and evening. The Hymersons seemed to take it for granted
that he should be preoccupied, revisiting his old haunts. It was an effort to recall the day of the week and month. No mail pursued him, he was cut off from his old world, and no work could be undertaken; no reading reminded him of either work or world.

As time passed he discovered that he was curiously thrust back into a self, an existence which he had thought to forget with boyhood. Sitting on a corn-cultivator in rough farm clothes, musing at the end of a row, he admitted to himself that it was not the circumstances of the present, his vacation, or any plan which held him. Days were following each other, and though they were futile, when he recalled their manifest summer beauty he lingered, postponed deciding to go. Before long, tired of the feeling of a spectator while every hour he became more a part of that former life, he had volunteered to join the Hymersons in their farm work.

“Well, I kind of thought from the start you was sensible that way, not scairt of getting your hands soiled,” Carson told him. “We got an extra team all right, unless you’d rather use the hoe.”

Any kind of work which would be of use, Richard assured him, would do, but he preferred a job of driving horses at first. Since no change in the terms of lodging was mentioned, the farmer was well satisfied, and disposed even to make a confidant of his guest, to become intimate with him. As opportunity arose Carson told him of all the wrongs he was suffering from his neighbours, particularly from Mr. Lethen; the misunderstanding of his motives when he told people how things should and could be run; and prophecies of what would happen where his advice was disregarded. And Richard would lean against the dusty wall while evenings passed, interjecting the necessary rejoinders, keeping his
thoughts from wandering far. Or he helped Carson with the milking, tying the cow’s tail by its longest hair about the animal’s hind leg.

Arvin Hymerson had soon given up interest in the new dispensation, baffled by the city man’s apparent listlessness. He spent most evenings in the village store, which was a source of audible deprecation to his father. “He didn’t use to be that way,” the latter declared with a puzzled smile. “He didn’t use to be the kind to waste time like that. I can’t figure out what’s got into him lately. He don’t seem to have no interest in home ties, somehow.” Milne was only surprised that Arvin had not been “this way” long ago. He was aware of a sympathetic reaching-out from the young man, but his own calloused and languid response did not add enough to serve as the basis of companionship. It seemed to be as unnecessary that they should be friends as that they should not be friends.

Usually silent and equable, the two were well-matched to set off the garrulity of Carson, who at noon would glance at yesterday’s paper, and start ridiculing the evolutionary theory, at the time coming in for much publicity. Mrs. Hymerson, by way of maintaining a balance, sought to defend it with equal unreason: “Why, Pa, you know there’s negroes in Africa a lot like monkeys.”

“Not me. When them ginks start talking about evolution to me, I just got to say, ‘Look at Paul. Do they build better men than Paul nowadays?’” Arvin smiled without seeking the attention of Richard.

As day passed after day Milne knew himself deadened in them, carefully following such routine as was discoverable, trying to work out a programme which would account for all of his waking hours. He rose early, though once at first Carson Hymerson deferentially waived the right of calling him;
harnessed the team, which had been curried the night before; ate breakfast to the equally inane jocularity or resentment of his host’s talk, and the almost surprised taciturnity of Mrs. Hymerson and Arvin; hitched the team to the cultivator or the mower, if he were not hoeing potatoes or pitching hay. Through the long hours of morning and afternoon he attempted participation in the ever-wonderfully oblivious pageantry of nature: sunlight, birds, greying green of oats, stylized symmetry of waxing corn-hills; ripening amber ponds of wheat; in breezes for a damp brow, rain to give a half-day’s respite. He felt that he had been part of this for ever.

Still a general enveloping indifference almost imposed upon him the illusion that something did hold him there. It was to go farther, coupled with the monotonous routine, until he found that to himself he was at times that earlier uncouth boy, for whom nothing was sure, not even his own hope or his smothered longing to get away into the world. He scarcely remembered his late life in the city, his books, his dealings with editors and publishers, film companies, and a return there seemed inconceivable. Only with a start, perhaps lying on a load of hay, through which the rumble and boom of the wagon and the trotting horses smote his ears, would he return to Richard Milne, and the courage once more to admit that what held him there would be resolved this time or lost for ever. That alone was enough to make him hesitate, and again he would be driven back by reluctance of the test, never giving up the certainty that years might elapse, and his former interests drop from him one after another, but he would go, when he did go, with Ada Lethen, conclusively and for ever.

Her part in his life, he looked back and saw, had been of a strong growth with his ambition and his bent for expression. And when those had taken him to the city against his
will, where he had slaved and managed until his first books came out, and at the same time he had obtained a foothold in the advertising field, he still thought of no other woman. He was not long in discovering that his need was not physical simply, and convinced of this he was prepared to allow himself a latitude which he saw in the lives of people around him, sure that he would never become engrossed. He had no leisure for that, he told himself and once or twice a friend or two; and he felt the need of no emancipation.

They would have smiled with irony had they known; freedom was impossible for him. The first vantage-place attained, he found himself back, besieging her inaccessible ears. Nothing could exhaust his patience, ever in imminence, as it seemed, of breaking. She had become the core of his life, of all his intimate work, the concern of his hours, so that he could not write an eloquent sentence, see a fair morning, or step aside from danger, without her face. He could never forget holding her in his arms, and it was with enormous surprise that he would rouse himself in the seething flotsam of the city.

His second return – with unregarded laurels – had been as vain as the first, as all former time; and when writing and his sense of the city had engulfed him again he declared that he could never go back. Yet, with a finality of faith he would willingly have relegated to poetry, he seemed thrust into a fate of unrelieved constancy. And, since he could not bear the thought of flight, here he was back – rebuffed as he had been before, wounded by a futility alien to the remainder of his world.

Always her outward passivity had matched his patience. Yet, in a tone of her voice, a look, he surprised all yearning and compunction at his averted despair; in her unexpected
pronouncement of his name he had detached tiny glints, something more – like sight of a goal – that seemed an index of her heart, that dreamed a little, while it seemed to rest in sleep. Though Ada Lethen and the part she played with him were the most familiar things to his mind, they formed its greatest mystery – more profound because part of the mystery was himself.

Because he was part of the mystery he wondered at it the more. He had two months before him in which it seemed he meant to do nothing except indulge his sense of desperation and his sudden attack of listlessness – though within him the purpose still held to achieve a different finality. So he told himself, with a conscious effort to rouse himself to that purpose once more. Time, after all, was effecting changes in the one thing which had appeared changeless in his life. He would not have settled here to this dumb inaction a few years ago; he would have betaken himself to the city, anywhere away from the scene of his repulse. The thought held frightening possibilities. What was this business making of him? Unaccustomed, his mind was fascinated by the question. There must have been changes in him before this, which others had noticed, which he would begin to see as time passed. He would become after all a man essentially estranged from life, at least from the world, a romantic figure of absurd incompleteness, an unadjusted person, if successful in art, which does not demand normality, “a queer stick.” All for what? “He lost a woman,” one-time friends would say.

These doubts of himself were not allayed when he thought of the change in Ada Lethen beyond the sameness of circumstance and the timelessness of her beauty. That would be stamped more finely with the years; she would always be Ada, but these would make her in the end just a woman, an
“old maid” with a temper! Perhaps she would be as nearly commonplace as that … but a denying flood, impressions of her ways and charms, swept through his memory. She never would be like other women. Yet there was some new recognition of the hardness of life which she had been forced in the interval of his absence to meet – or was forced now to consider. Perhaps in himself … he had not gone quite unscathed; he was beginning to know himself for a different man in these quiet, memory-haunted fields. He roused and started the horses down another row of corn.

But after consideration he rejected as self-flattery the thought that her petulance had been a reflex of the emotion he desired in her. Nor was it pique. It was love of her mother, of her whole past life, which spoke when the mother came into clash with the man who loved her. She felt smothered by circumstance, yes; she loved him, perhaps; but that molten penetralia in her soul had never crystallized to jewelled hardness shining through the ponderous, iron-fretted doors, “portion and parcel of the dreadful past.” She might even know that she loved him; but if it had been a slow growth, that love had never become the flame of her being, he thought, as his rare love had been – to burn from her the coils of duty and pity and half-forgotten hatred which bound her – to make her follow wherever he should lead.

Yet he recalled moments. … Perhaps, perhaps there was a centre of storm in her which, caught up with his own, in time would make, if necessary, an upheaval in the lives of everyone about them, once it had arisen. What held them back; what held him back? Until now he had trusted to reasoning and delicacies of aspiration, longing and intellectualized passion. Now futility whispered to him crudely. … What means did other men take?