The Refuge (21 page)
She too had changed from her city clothes into a tweed skirt and a brilliant woollen jumper with a high neck, and she looked both younger and more agreeable, for her sallow skin and jetty eyes had not gone perfectly with the black coat and frock she had worn earlier. There was another improvement—no diamond flashed back the streaming firelight from anywhere about her person. She was rubbing her plump fingers together slowly, as though to restore normal feeling to them; when I raised my eyes to hers I caught her smiling down widely at me, showing her large white teeth.
‘You miss my jewels,’ she said, nodding. ‘They are locked up where I usually keep them. In Europe, Mr. Fitzherbert, the refugees carry their savings with them, so, for safety. Today I too am a refugee, a little. Who knows what can happen?’
She was laughing as she spoke. I stood up and moved in a chair for her. Irma’s voice called from the bedroom with startling gaiety, ‘I am not going to bed, if that is what you are saying.’
Donna sprang up from under my hands, and barked sharply once. Miss Werther called back, ‘It’s all right, darling.’ I quietened the bitch again, thinking that those two women, far from being ill at ease in unfamiliar surroundings, were now in a vast good humour.
‘We are both excited,’ Miss Werther explained in her lilting voice, sinking comfortably into the chair and stretching out to the fire her feet on which she now wore strong golfing shoes with rubber soles, so that her fat insteps no longer bulged. ‘We are excited,’ she repeated, drawling the word nonchalantly, ‘because this is such a very nice place, and you are a very nice person, and you have a very nice little dog.’ She glanced sideways at me with a sly and friendly humour, folding her hands in her lap peacefully.
‘That is what I hoped,’ I said, ‘though it may be a bit early to judge. Except about Donna. She really is very nice. Would you both like a drink? I have whisky and sherry in that sideboard.’
‘Thank you, I drink very seldom,’ she said, ‘but it would be good for—’ and she jerked her head sideways and back to indicate the bedroom door. Automatically I looked that way, and as I looked Irma came out, turning to close the door behind her very carefully, as though it were fragile. Once again, as when I had first seen her, she was wearing pyjamas and over them what I believed to be the same thick green house-coat, cut Chinese fashion and fastened high at the neck with that golden medallion or button as big as a florin. Her hair hung fine and loose to her shoulders, and she stood for a moment very still and erect against the dark wood of the door, looking round the room with a kind of severity before she came towards us and with a smile sank down on the floor beside Miss Werther’s chair.
At the same time Jack looked in from the kitchen and said to me with a leisurely wink, ‘If you folk want a cup o’ tea, kettle’s boilin’.’
Nothing could have been more matter-of-fact; and nothing could more surely have made me aware of how peace, the great maternal, mysterious and timeless peace of the mountain night, had settled over us, over the cottage and the land, like a blessing spoken from the altar of a supreme divinity.
At Hill Farm one sleeps well. The enormous silence of the mountains at night is oppressive at first to some ears, half-sealed against the imperfect night of the city, where always there is an unbroken undertone of sound from darkness to dawn. In the mountains, night sounds are only of bird or animal, sudden, subtle and brief, emphasizing without even ruffling the silence itself, which flows down from the peaks and up from the valleys like the light of the summer noons, embracing and engulfing consciousness.
All round and over the cottage the silence held fast, but some unfamiliar stirring movement within the walls woke me after midnight. At that hour a man wakes as a rule with difficulty from the depths of first sleep, but tonight I came full awake at once, and from habit looked at my watch in the same movement.
Somewhere, the sound of stealthy, mysterious movement continued; stopped; resumed. Lying in the dark open-eyed, I decided after a minute’s bewilderment what it was. Someone was at the fireplace in the big room, pushing the burned logs together over their bed of coals. I lifted back the bedclothes and swung my feet to the floor, feeling for slippers. The cold had become hard and sharp, giving the sensation when I moved of ice passed lightly over the skin of my ankles.
No light showed under the door, but when I opened it I saw that the tall old standard lamp whose wick I had left turned low was still alight by the hearth, and that a dark scarf had been placed round the yellow shade. In the faint downcast radiance below this screen I beheld Irma’s bent back and bared heels as she knelt on the hearth rug. Her face, intent and quite lonely, was lit rosily by the glow of the embers she was softly coaxing into flame under the half-burned wood.
In the last few hours she had become so accustomed to my presence that I had been able to watch her unguardedly, and thus in my turn I had come to be more at ease where she was. My position as host and as it were custodian in my own place was a strong one. By my very passivity, which was only at first an effort, I let her know this, and let her know I knew it too. While they with cheerful talk and frequent questions to Jack or me, where we sat silent by the inside fire, had made a meal ready, it had occurred to me—for I admit that by now I was thinking of her constantly—that she had likely never been able to depend completely upon the presence and behaviour of a man. With men she could not relax herself inwardly; there was always a game, often dangerous and never wholly pleasant, to be played; from moment to moment she must, so to speak, count her cards.
Here, in the safe solitude of Hill Farm, her safe friend by her side and two safe men thinking not hers but (as she supposed) their own age-old fireside thoughts, she found herself without an opponent, and—to persist in the metaphor—without use for whatever cards she might pick up. All that had been to do was done: there was no conceivable outcome to this situation, yet she was more secure from fear or the need to act for herself than she had ever been since early childhood.
What her own thoughts might have been I could not know. Abruptly, the years of flight and pursuit, real or half-imagined according to the circumstances, had ended, in a way she could not have foreseen, in a place that until tonight did not exist for her; and at the beginning, when she came out from the bedroom and looked about her with that air of severe investigation, rather like an animal in strange surroundings, she must have been bewildered by it all. As one sometimes does, she may have had the feeling that her mind and her consciousness were not functioning properly for her.
Then, little by little, mind and consciousness revived. When we three sat down to supper at the kitchen table of scrubbed pinewood—where Jack would by no means join us, preferring his own fire and his own food—she was like another person altogether. Even her face had changed, and for the first time I saw it naturally animated, with a moist shine in her eyes and lips and a glow of warm blood in her cheeks and sometimes her throat, as though the warmth and a little wine and the stronger draught of this strange freedom of the spirit had renewed the very tissue of her blood itself. With her dark hair drawn back now to the nape of her neck and enclosed chignon-wise in a net, as she always wore it for kitchen tasks, she had a brave, naked look of candour, in spite of the queer, sly, Slavic slant of her eyes and brows and cheekbones. She looked at once slightly cunning and more than slightly vulnerable; and for the first time I saw how small and flat her ears were, with that clean, unweathered, delicate look of women’s ears, naked as shells newly warmed and dried on a beach in the sun, and with round lobes as red in that light as if they had been rubbed with geranium petals. The lamp on the table between us showed her clearly to me, while I hid comfortably in my own peace of mind and watched the change arise and finally claim her.
How completely it had claimed her, this released and little-known self, I was quickly to learn. She now was quietly and steadily blowing upon the responsive embers, and small rags of flame were flapping noiselessly up and down from the heated logs. She could not have heard my door opening, for she did not turn her head or falter in her task, and the look of loneliness remained in her face. But of this I am not sure, for she neither moved nor faltered either when I crossed the room silently and seated myself on the rug at her side, drawing up my knees under the thick dressing-gown I had hurriedly put on in the dark; for the cold was gnawing at my ankles like icy water. She remained kneeling and bowed forward, supported on her elbows and hands like someone doing homage to Prometheus; her loosed hair hid part of her face that was at once pale and ruddy in the increasing firelight, and her pursed lips were dry with the heat, so that now and then she licked them and pressed them together before inhaling and blowing out another earnest breath. Not for years had I seen anything so moving and lovely, in my world of gas-fires and electric radiators, and vain, self-conscious women. My heart went out to her as it sometimes did to Alan when I watched him absorbed in one of the tremendous occupations of childhood.
At last she sat back on her heels, flushed and pale, and turned upon me the curious deep gaze of her eyes now again—as I had seen them the previous afternoon—not cool opaque blue but hot violet; and with a sort of scared, childish triumph she smiled.
‘You could not sleep?’ I murmured casually, though my pulse had quickened as I watched her with something more than compassion.
‘No,’ she said in a soft, unpenetrating whisper, ‘it is too quiet . . . Never have I known such quiet as you have here.’
‘The mountain silence,’ I said; but she shook her head quickly, watching my lips with listening eyes.
‘It is not silence. I can hear it—something—I do not know what. I can hear the mountains themselves.’
I thought of D. H. Lawrence in the Darling Ranges in Western Australia, listening to the overpowering self-assertion of lost Lemuria in the seething stillness of the moonlit valleys. Here, on the fringe of the eastern coast, the mountains have a different psyche, a different voice, more vigorous perhaps, less ancient and toneless and indestructible; but it is there, the same mysterious, compelling sense of
being
, quiescent and all-powerful like a tiger watching, which travellers say is to be discerned nowhere else on the earth’s surface. It has the quality of a threat withheld and a hunger so profound that the mind at first turns from it in alarm, and sleep, as Irma had found, seems impossible; as though only by remaining awake can one avoid suffering some gigantic and obscure conquest of the soul.
‘It will pass,’ I said. ‘Do you want anything—a drink, or food?’
‘Thank you.’ She shook her head, turning back to the vigorous spectacle of the revived fire burning upwards for ever yet never able to depart in flight. By leaning sideways I could reach a pipe and tobacco on the top of the low flanking bookshelves on my left. I felt a need to move, to make the small, protective movements with my hands that the business of filling a pipe and lighting it calls for. While I did this I watched her, and she watched the flames in steadfast, dreamy immobility. So some minutes passed, and the night bent over the cottage. I too felt as though I were about to fall into some timeless and beneficent trance as I smoked and looked my fill at my companion in this solitude.
At length she moved, careful to make no carrying sound, and sat down with her slippered feet stretched out towards the warmth. My hand lay on my knees, and she hesitantly put her own hand under my arm and covered my fingers with hers; and this time there was no force or urgency in her touch, which seemed to be without thought.
‘I have been thinking,’ she murmured. ‘You are so kind that I do not know what to do.’
Once again, outside all reason, my heart which had been stilled began to beat more hastily. I felt a great urge to silence her, to put my hand over her murmuring lips and ensure silence; for it suddenly seemed to me that only silence would save us both. But I could not move and I could not speak. Some word of warning stuck in my throat like a solid thing which would not be properly swallowed. I could only remain carefully unmoving, hoping to appear unmoved, and stare into the flames, while that small part of my mind which was not wholly absorbed by its violent awareness of her wondered what time it could be, what time had passed.
‘Why are you so—rigid? We are alone. There is no one.’
Her whispering voice seemed to come from another part of the room, because she had turned her head away like a person hiding laughter or grief or some feeling not in keeping with her lightly-breathed words. I still found nothing to say, still felt my own inward cry of warning stifled in my throat. It was a moment of extreme peril, and I knew I must at all costs survive it; yet I was paralysed, powerless to draw away from her in body or mind, for she had become mistress not only of my fleshly desire but of my compassion, and, though I could master the one from long habit, I could not quell and drive down the other which, freed, must—I thought—take all with it.
What was at stake here—and for all my agitation I saw it clearly, clearly—was not my simple faith-keeping with the memory of my dead wife. I found no virtue in that now save a way towards peace of mind sometimes. What was at stake was that life of the mind to which I still aspired, and in which I believed my eventual spiritual salvation lay. The girl at my side with her averted face and her arm linked with mine held out to me not only the trivial temptations of the flesh, from the yielding to which any priest can absolve an indulgent man, but also, and far more terribly, the temptation to abandon a strengthening way of thought which alone made possible the worldly life I lived.
I was afraid now, in my turn. It is clear to me now, long afterwards, that my faith in my own carefully-nurtured inner strength had not until this moment been tried with any force. At the time all that was clear was that abruptly, unforeseen as an abyss at the feet of a night wanderer, a choice of my own devising was being put to me. It was a choice between possessing her, as instinct and bodily wisdom so tenderly urged me, and possessing myself, now and for ever; for even then, in the turmoil of my mind, I knew that such a moment could never again in my life come upon me with this fierce, unpardonable surprise.
