White Narcissus (16 page)

She stopped and regarded his approach without surprise. Her musical voice greeted him, seeming to change the course of his soul like a rifle bullet in the heart of the hunted. It was a glorious day. But too much of the day’s spirit of storm was within him to know the words that he said; and with foreboding he knew only that he was to be drawn into saying all that he ever had said, and as ever vainly. He looked into her quiet face; when her eyes answered his they filled with tears. The two stopped.

“Ada, do you love me?”

“I love you.”

T
he words, repeated as though by an echo, left him light-headed; but her lips had moved, she had spoken, at last spoken all. As a crackling fire in a great downpour of rain he was quieted in spirit momentarily even as he held her with fierce arms.

“Then we shall go, Ada. To-day – to-night. Just as we are. We can buy clothes and everything when we get to the city. There is another world besides this one, which you must know. Where you can be all yourself.”

As he spoke a doubt like pain spread in his mind, and it was as though she voiced it in her whisper. Everything had been the same before.

“No. No, we cannot go.”

Slowly he was numbed, as though he had disenchanted the moment by repetition of an old maleficent charm. Her eyes held his anxiously. In the forest of this world, the same invisible dell of passion and anguish, of a commingled loneliness which made more poignant than all else the solitude of their aching souls. The same; the same!

“We can’t.”

“Ah, you say that!” he murmured after a moment, in a choking tone. “It’s a monstrosity, that feeling. It is as though one in the free air should say, ‘I can’t breathe,’ or an angel, ‘I can’t fly.’ When heaven depends upon it, it suddenly looms as impossible. Oh, Ada, is it your feeling of the oppressive rooms - it must be a long oppression of those rooms of narcissi. It can’t be your mind assents to such a lie. … Tell me your mind knows that it is only a fallacy.”

Ada Lethen glanced aside as though about to walk on; or as though for refuge from inexorable compulsion, from inquiry addressed to her being more poignantly than from the plaintive lips of this man. She raised her slender, large left hand to her breast, in a gesture which tinged for him the bitterness of that moment with the old sense that nothing she could do, no action or tone of hers, but could give inimitable joy, the more profound for seeming to tease with surprise. The trees in a livid frenzy of the wind paused, while a dying breath seemed to brush past the grasses and weeds at their feet. Their silence lasted for a long while, deepened, lapsed, and became stringent again.

“Oh, Richard, I have told you! I have confessed what my whole soul has fought against. And when I tell you I do love you – you are not satisfied.”

He stared as though addressing the horizon. “I should be glad you’ve admitted that you love me, in that case. You are a mystery.” But the words of youthful, defiant pique were deepened with a note of restraint from almost maddening uncertainty. She turned away.

As they walked on through the forest its depths grew more profound, more sheltering, though it seemed that they held somewhere a vortex of storm to cover the pair. The tall, stately trunks and thick, fallen trunks, mossy stumps, pools
of brown water at the foot of this tree or that, hollows and brush piles, and general unevenness of the ground, made it appear before they had penetrated a hundred yards of the bush that they had traversed miles, over appalling inequalities of footing and divergencies of course. To this effect the obstacles added by raising a resistance in their minds which made them hurry on, hand in hand over the difficult places, until it was as though they were in retreat, a flight whose openness made them a little ashamed to conceal the goal.

“Why must you talk – in this way?” But she gasped as though already they had begun their flight to freedom. She stopped abruptly. They looked at each other.

“Talk!” exclaimed Richard Milne in deepened tones, as it were of wrath. “It is the curse of our whole position.” Her eyes fled, remote, but otherwise she did not move by a hair’s quivering.

She laughed a little, with a halt, as though from breath-lessness or from potential hysteria. “I should have said the lack of talk. My parents do not even discuss each other with me any more.”

“… Give them enough of their accursed silence,” muttered the man, as though his thoughts were far away. “Your pity amounts to heartlessness, finally, if it does not lose them their soul.” In his mind was a bitter desire to deride their lack of any such possession, to resort to any cruelty, to deny her devotion to them, the devotion which she held so dearly. Shouldn’t she suffer for his pain too? What love had those two ever given her? His own detachment – which forced him to restraint and to a realization of the selfishness of which he was a vehicle – won his curses as part of the spell.

As they walked on, the trees thinned on the other side of the bush, and they came to the smooth grass of the border
of the woods, the springy, hollow-sounding turf, and walked among the stoic inverted pendulums of the mulleins – frigid northern cactus – under a lowering sky and gusts of wind. From the height of land they could see the river stretched away to the east and below them, like a heavy-linked silver chain extending to the sky, with curves here and there, links formed by a tiny islet, or an overhanging intervened bough. The girl was walking briskly now as though to a definite goal, almost as though she were forgetting him.

“Ada, I don’t want you to think I don’t appreciate that you love me. Say it again!” Her eyes seemed fixed on some symbolic vision that had nothing to do with the trees, the river, the darkening sky, the drops of heavy rain, the urgent man. “But if you do, there can be no question of things continuing in the manner of the present situation. It’s one thing or the other.”

The confident words abashed himself, for Ada Lethen was not animated to the length of assent or denial. Her silence made meaningless the most eloquent plea that he could find in his inexhaustible courage to repeat. Before them stood the great beech tree, its upper boughs writhing above the bank of the river; complaining softly, every leaf moved in ecstasy, though the body of the tree itself seemed to be in torment, until they stood above it and looked down into the hollow, to the promontory its roots held against the wear of the river. The curtain of morning-glory vines was spread over the two cedars before it, and on the other side was the curve in the thicketed river bank.

As though remembering that they had stopped, she took one step, and his hand caught her hand, pulling her around. “Let’s go down,” he said in a tender tone. “Of course we shall.” He stepped half sidelong down before her, holding up his
palm, which at the last drop, a jump of three feet, she took. Her fingers were not released even when they sat beneath the tree, over the running water, and he held her in his arms. When there was a pause in their kissing he looked down into her eyes, whispering once more, “Say it again.”

She bent back her head, looked long with glinting eyes, which seemed to mirror and contain all deviously beautiful and simple things of the world, into his face, and raised her arms to draw his head down.

“I love you.”

It was as though the whisper spoken entered, became part of his being, returning between them, until there was no intervention in its passage between her soul and his, his and hers.

With a single movement that seemed familiar, easy as old endearing thought, his arms lifted her. On his knees, her arms never left his neck. They were silent for a long time, until he was again invaded by painful foretaste of the transitory and literal nature, the illusion of possession.

“Why do you feel the way you do?” he muttered hoarsely as if in a fever of haste. “Can’t you let those two people take care of themselves? I tell you it would be the best thing that ever happened to them. It would have been the best thing long ago. You see that now? Of course you do!” His arms tightened.

There was a smile on her face he could not see, but her silence was neither indeterminate nor happy. Her cheek touching his drew away as if with resolve. Her voice was almost tearful, “Oh, dear Richard, why must we never forget them? Why must you always try to make me change my mind? You can see my duty as well as I….”

“You see,” he returned simply. “Even you want to forget,
you’re admitting. … You know that you can’t be happy that way, and that there must be a change.”

All pain seemed focussed in her great steady eyes looking into the forest, and she spoke at length slowly. “You are right that ten years ago – oh, twenty years ago when that happened and I didn’t understand, it would have been the right thing to do. Now, how can I? What can be done? I doubt whether either would recognize the tones of the other’s voice. When Mother talks to me it is always when he is away, and she worships the narcissi. When I go outside, Father stops his work and tells me what is on his mind. And I know that if they did not have anyone to tell their troubles to –”

Richard Milne was silent again as she had been, withdrawn, his arms as it were galvanized, staring vindictively into the opposite darkening bank of the river. The consciousness of his complete abstraction reached them both at the same instant and he kissed her once more, automatically, and looked away, his mind engaged intensely in a struggle for relevance. She looked at him and a realization crept over her. At last, drawing an immense breath, he spoke, and his words were alien though not unfamiliar.

“Perhaps you think me harsh. You know them better than I. I have never had any doubt that they are, or were, or should have been fine people. You don’t object to my being open? Separately, that is.” His voice revealed no humorous intention.

“Why should I object to anything you may say,” she murmured with a sort of contrition, almost equivalent to repeating her declaration, as though, now, she were determined somehow to accept his love and his convictions coupled with her devotion to her parents, however troubling these commingled elements (in the calm lake of her being).

Richard Milne saw this, and saw the futility of trying to bring her to a choice – a conscious choice – in which her mind would bear the burden. There would come a time when it would be seen accomplished, without her having known. It was as though independently of volition that his words continued.

“What they have done to you. … They have shaped your spirit to what it is, and perhaps – certainly I should be the last to complain. But only the rareness of its tempering has saved it. You have come past pain to sweetness. But you would be happier and we could love each other no less, had you not pitied them – too well. When they were hurt, they put you by, callously; then they discovered your power to assuage, and bent your tender soul to theirs like a splint between their festered wounds.”

Very still, she made no answer, the eyes dark in her pale face, as though the words had struck her vitally through a recess in the wilderness which guarded her heart. His voice rose in the old unrewarded eloquence.

“Though it gave you all understanding, it was a weight of pity too cruel for a young soul. Though a tree grow beautiful and strong, wind-shaped on a hill, though your spirit has taken on the colour of poetry, you have known too much sacrifice, and I am trembling for the tragedy you may yet know, my lady.”

He was conscious of a futile exaltation of spirit, conscious of his own attempt to move her, and in a maze of words he thought that he descried the loss of their love, now it was recognized, and pictured his own barren assuagement in memory. Even the fact that they had confessed their love would not take away the reservations, would not make any difference in the end. He felt like rising and walking away
from the spot, but that would make their memories bitter, when they should be tempered with the melancholy of longing, not of regret.

“Dear, dear, my dearest Richard!” Her voice broke on a sob. “I know it must seem hard. … You know the tragedy is not – not all in the future. It hasn’t been easy. And I can’t imagine what would have happened….”

Silenced, humbled by her strong undeniable feeling which at last answered his and cast aside intellectual reservations, Richard Milne kissed her hands, her neck, as though in adoration of her sacrifice.

“Never in future at all,” he murmured as one wilfully disregarding the import of life: struggle, from which Ada Lethen had freed herself momentarily by declaring her love, and back to which he must win, if he were to hold his own love and hers in the inexorable condition of development.

Ada Lethen put her tears by, with a little unhappy laugh. “You know,” she began, speaking in another curiously more intimate tone. “Father was so grateful to you for advising him in the trouble about the farm. He said he didn’t know what he should have done if you had not stepped into the breach.”

“Of course, under the circumstances, there was nothing else to do. One couldn’t allow such a thing to take place.” Richard was anxious to know precisely the facts of the entanglement, which scarcely had seemed vital before. But he could not ask Ada. With all his resentment against her father, he could not expect her to tell him the truth of the matter, even if she understood. For he was assured that there could not be right only on one side and obliquity on the other. That he had come to dislike Carson Hymerson was perhaps more or less extraneous to the case. And his feeling on the other side was even more mixed.

“I remember,” he told Ada Lethen, “how I looked up to your father when I was a boy. There was no other man in the community like him. … I suppose really I owe him more on that account than I’ll ever know. He did not notice my worship, of course. But at meetings of any kind, or church, I would always pick him out, admiring his fine bearing and his features – I would recognize his erect brown head among any crowd. Your father was handsome then. No wonder you are beautiful.”

She had slipped from his arms. “We must be going.” He clung to her hand and would have drawn her down beside him, but a glance at her face made him rise. What was it? Mere distrust of his eloquence? Was there a jealousy in her attachment for her parents which made perilous all reference to them, even the most favourable? But he did not need to search his memory to know the outcome to that, and to see danger. She had already turned away and begun climbing up the bank.