Kitabı oku: «Katharine Frensham: A Novel», sayfa 18

"No wonder they are a melancholy people, if they have had to struggle so hard to get so little," she said.

"It is not that which has made them melancholy," Clifford replied. "It is the loneliness."

He was silent for a moment, and then went on:

"Certain nations seem set apart for loneliness, even as certain people. Nature has willed it so. Have you not seen how in active bustling communities there are always several detached persons who prefer to go away into the wilderness? They belong there. It is their native soil, even if they have been born in crowded cities. I believe my father was one of those persons."

"I have seen them out in Colorado," Katharine said. And she added impulsively:

"But you are not one of them."

"No," he said without looking up at her; "I am not one of them. I was forced into my wilderness."

And again she could not help him. For the very life of her, she could not have said to him:

"Tell me about your wilderness, and I will tell you about mine."

In a few minutes they came to a Gaard hanging over the hillside, which Clifford thought, from Bedstemor's description, must be Peer Gynt's homestead. He hurried on to inquire, and soon came back to the great rock where Katharine was resting.

"Yes," he said, "we have reached our destination. And that is supposed to be Peer Gynt's house – that old stue there. The other buildings making up the Gaard are newer, as you can see. The Gaardmand's wife says many people come to visit it."

So there they were, at last, at Peer Gynt's home, perched up on high, looking straight down on the valley and the river – a wild, isolated spot, fit abode for a wild, restless spirit. The Gaardmand's wife showed them over the old stue, which was very much like others they had seen, built of great tree-trunks, and black with age outside, and mouldy with age within; and when they had looked and looked, each of them remembering Knutty's injunction to enjoy, believe, and to be seized by the "spirit of place," she took them into the courtyard, and pointed out another old building used as stables.

"Peer Gynt was buried here," she said. "He was too wicked to be buried in the churchyard."

They lingered there for a long time, held in very truth by the spirit of place. Clifford knew his 'Peer Gynt' well, and Katharine, who had read it in English, understood a little of its real significance. He, knowing its whole scope from beginning to end, was able to make the poem real to her. He told her that Peer Gynt, brought up by his mother Ãse on legends and fairy tales, was typical to Ibsen's mind of the Norwegian nation, brought up on Sagas, and at the moment when the poem was written, not able to put away phantasms, and awake to the realities of life. He admired the poem intensely, and seemed delighted that she was interested in all he had to tell her about it. And he was moved at being in its very atmosphere. He had forgotten his doubts about the genuineness of the place.

"Cannot you see him coming down from the mountains after one of his escapades," he said, "his mother standing scolding him, and then listening entranced to his fantastic stories? Can't you see him seizing his mother when she was a nuisance to him, carrying her over the river and putting her on the grass-roof of the corn-house, where she could not interfere with him? Was there ever such a fellow? And there is the river – the very river!"

He pointed to it with almost a child's eagerness.

"He must have crossed there, you see, on his way to the wedding at which he stole the bride and took her away into the mountains," he said. "And where was it, I wonder, that he used to lie in the woods, dreaming his dreams of action and achievement which never came to anything? Perhaps yonder, sometimes, in that little copse over there."

Then he turned once more to the stue.

"And to think that there, actually there, poor Ãse died," he said. "Don't you remember how, even at her deathbed, he could not face the reality of the moment, but buoyed her and himself up with pitiful romancing? I can see the whole scene as I never saw it before."

It was a long time before they tore themselves away, and then they did not go far. They sat down by some stones outside the Gaard enclosure, still talking about Peer Gynt.

"The poem always stirs me," said Clifford. "I know nothing in literature which ever took a greater hold on me. It may be partly because Knutty taught me to know and understand the Northern mind. But the more I read it, the more I see that it is not typical of the Northern temperament only. Peer Gynt stands for us all, whether we hail from the North, the South, the East, the West; for all of us who cover up realities with fantasies."

"But do we not all have to help ourselves with make-believe, more or less?" Katharine said. "If we went through life doing nothing but facing facts, we should be intolerable to ourselves and other people. Surely now and then we need to rest on fantasy?"

She was silent a moment, and then went on:

"We make a fantastic picture to ourselves that we are wanted in the world, that we have work to do, a call to answer, things and people needing us, and us only. If we did not do that where should we be?"

He turned to her suddenly:

"Have you felt that too?" he said.

"Yes," she answered.

"So have I," he said.

"But you had, and have always had, your work," Katharine said, "your own definite career, which no one, nothing, could take from you."

And as soon as the words had left her lips, she remembered that Knutty was always saying that if ever a man had had his career marred and checked by others, that man was Clifford Thornton. She could have bitten her tongue out. She did not know that she had helped him by what she had said.

He drew a little nearer to her.

"There is a passage from 'Peer Gynt' which has always haunted me," he said:

 
"'We are thoughts,
Thou shouldst have thought us…'
'We are a riddle,
Thou shouldst have solved us…'
'We are songs,
Thou shouldst have sung us…
A thousand times hast thou
Crushed and choked us.
In thy heart-depths
We have lain and waited
Vainly for thy summons…'
 

That is the true picture of my career."

"Every humble-hearted person with gifts would think that," Katharine said impulsively.

It was as though she were defending him from some accuser; as though she imperiously wished to sweep all regrets and grievings out of his horizon. He felt her tender sympathy enfolding him, and it gave him courage. With one tremendous effort he broke down the wall of reserve. The long-imprisoned thoughts came tumbling out. At first they freed themselves with effort, and then with natural ease. Katharine listened wonder-struck. He spoke of the years which had gone, of Marianne, of her strange attitude to his work, of the battle which he had always been fighting between bitterness and self-reproach, of the inroad which it had made on his powers of thought and concentration, of his contempt for himself that he had not been able to deal more successfully with difficulties which spoilt her life and his.

Katharine, knowing from Knutty something of the daily difficulties which had beset him, was touched by his gentle chivalry of heart and spirit; for he did not say one single ungentle word of Marianne, nor give expression to one single ungenerous criticism. His criticism was of himself, not her. He said repeatedly that if he had cared enough to find the key to a good understanding, it could have been found.

"I can tell you all this so easily now that I have once begun," he said. "I have been longing to lay it all before you; time after time I have tried to speak to you of my poor Marianne, of her death, of the boy's disbelief in me, of my own disbelief in myself, of the secret trouble which has gnawed at my heart, and which, in spite of reason, will gnaw at my heart until I have told it to you. You are the only one in all eternity to whom I could tell it."

"Tell it," Katharine said gently.

Then he told her.

And as he told her Peer Gynt's stue faded from her eyes – the river: the birch-wood: the distant mountains: the valley: Norway. She was back in England once more. She saw a lonely man sitting dreaming by his fireside. She saw him go slowly up the staircase and hasten his step as he heard Marianne's voice calling to him in alarm. She saw the expression of shock and pain on Marianne's face. She heard him saying:

"It was only a dream – your dream and my dream – let it go the way of all dreams."

She saw him go down to the stable and saddle his horse. She saw him ride out into the darkness of the night. She saw him throw himself on the bed, worn out in body and spirit. She heard Alan calling to his father. She saw Marianne leaning back, dead, and with that terrible look of shock and pain on her poor dead face.

The very simplicity and directness of the man's story added to its significance. That he could tell it at all, showed his terrible need of telling it. That he could tell it thus unreservedly, showed his entire trust in her, and his entire freedom from any desire to give the impression that he had suffered without having inflicted suffering.

The directness was almost more than Katharine could bear. More than once she could have cried out to him to stop. But she had not the heart to check him; and on he went, his intensity, his frankness increasing the whole time.

"Yes," he said, "she left me; she died in that terrible way, and I was alive to fight with and face the possibility that I had caused her death. Hundreds of times I said that if I could have tuned myself to be more in harmony with the best that was in her and in me, my dreaming thoughts of her would never have broken through the bounds of kindness, would never have attained to that fierce acuteness which penetrated to her so ruthlessly in her own defenceless state of dreaming. By what force, by what process they reached her, I, in my ignorance, cannot pretend to know. I only know that our minds met each other then as they had never met in normal life."

He paused a moment. Katharine thought that he had come to the end of his power of telling. But before she had finished thinking that brief thought, he had begun again.

He said he had been tortured and puzzled by that dream until his reason nearly left him. There was no one to whom he could have confided it. He could not have told it to Knutty, for he never had been able to speak with her about Marianne. He could not talk it out with any one who might have given time and serious thought to such phenomena. Perhaps that might have helped him more than anything at the time: to have talked it out, analysed it, found the relative meaning of it, and satisfied his intelligence about it by means of some one else's intelligence. But that was an impossibility to him; and so it remained locked in his heart, gnawing at his heart whilst he battled with it alone.

"When the boy began to turn from me, it gnawed more and more," he said. "When I learned that Marianne's friend was openly condemning my conduct to her, it gnawed more and more. For I said to myself, 'If the boy knew the awful thought which is haunting me, if Mrs Stanhope knew it, if they all knew it, what then?' So I kept my secret to myself. I had the sense to know that I was justified in doing that. And I turned to my work and tried to forget. I turned to my work, which had always been a haven when I was able to keep it uninvaded by – by outside influences. It was invaded now. I could not forget. I went as usual to my study and laboratory, and I tried to continue my neglected investigations; but I failed from the first. Time after time I tried. You would scarcely believe how often – and always in vain. For my mind was filled with the one imperious thought from which there was no escape – not even for a moment: Was I guilty of Marianne's death? Time after time I found myself saying aloud, 'Have I killed Marianne, or have I not killed Marianne?'"

Katharine had been leaning forward gazing fixedly into the distance, but she stood up now, and turned to him.

"Don't go on," she said in a stifled voice. "I cannot bear any more."

Then he saw the keen distress on her face.

"Oh," he cried in an agony of remorse, "I have been thinking only of myself – forgive me – "

"No, no, it isn't that," she said. "But you have suffered so much, and you are suffering now in telling me, and I cannot bear it."

"Forgive me, forgive me," he pleaded almost inaudibly. "It was my soul's necessity to tell you – to lay it all before you – so that you might know me and judge me."

"Judge you!" she cried.

And there was a world of love and understanding in her eyes, in her voice, and on her face.

She turned to him with outstretched hands; but as she turned, she saw a vision of Marianne leaning back in the arm-chair, dead, and with that expression of alarm on her poor dead face.

Katharine's hands fell.

"Let us go home," she said in a voice which was full of pain.

So in silence they descended the steep hillside.

In silence they went along by the river, and over the bridge, through the fir-woods, and up towards the Solli Gaard.

CHAPTER XX

Katharine went straight to her room and threw herself on her bed. All her thoughts were of Clifford. Her heart was flooded with love and pity for him, a hundredfold intensified now that she knew his secret history. The manner of Marianne's death and the long-continued silent suffering of the man appalled her. She had known from the beginning that he had suffered acutely; but when she had called him the man with the broken spirit, she had little realised the torture which his gentle and chivalrous spirit was undergoing day by day, hour by hour. He had fought and conquered. She knew that. She knew that she, coming into his wilderness, had helped him to do that; even as he, coming into her wilderness of loneliness, had brought her a new life and a new outlook.

Judge him – judge him! The words rang in the air and echoed back to her.

"My belovèd!" she cried, "I shall yet be able to tell you all that is in my heart. You suffered – and she suffered too – that poor Marianne – and I saw her face before me when I turned to you – and, oh, my belovèd, we could only go home in silence."

Her genius of sympathy did not leave that poor Marianne out in the cold. Marianne's turbulent temperament, Marianne's jealous rages, all the impossibilities resulting from a wrong aura, were reverently garnered into Katharine's tender understanding. For she knew Marianne had suffered too; and that in that strange dream, that heart-breaking final communication between husband and wife, Marianne had learnt the truth, and the truth had killed her. She had gone to her death with a knowledge which was too much for her life. The truth and not Clifford had killed her: the truth, spoken in a defenceless moment.

In the midst of her serious musings there came a knock at the door. Katharine answered, "Come in," and Alan appeared. His manner was, as usual, shy, and he blushed a little. He was always greatly pleased to see Katharine. He brought two English letters for her. His young face and young presence broke in upon her as a song of spring.

"Don't go," she said, holding out her hand to him. "What have you got there?"

"Oh, it's only a drawing I've been doing of the cowhouse," he said in his shy way. "Knutty wanted it. She says it isn't bad."

"It is very good, I think," Katharine said. "I wish it were for me."

"Oh, I am going to do something ripping good for you before I go back to school," he said. "I've begun it."

She smiled her thanks to him.

"Shall you be glad to go back to school?" she asked, as she broke open her letters.

"I shall not like to leave father," he said, without looking up. "But he has promised to come and see me."

"Ah, that's right," Katharine said, and she glanced at one of the letters.

"Will you come and see me?" Alan said with a jerk.

"Of course I will," she said.

Then she turned to her letters. Alan did not go away. He sat in the window recess cutting at a model of a Laplander's pulk (sledge) which the Sorenskriver had given him. Katharine forgot about him, forgot for the moment about everything, except the contents of her letters.

Ronald wrote in great trouble begging for her return. As she had guessed, money matters had been going wrong with him; he had been gambling on the Stock Exchange, had lost heavily, had taken money from the business, crippled it, compromised it, compromised himself, compromised her, but he could and would retrieve everything if she would stand by him.

"Stand by you; of course I'll stand by you," she said staunchly.

In his hour of happiness he had shut her out; and now in his hour of need he opened the door to her, and she went in gladly, without a thought of bitterness in her heart.

"Stand by you; of course I'll stand by you," she repeated. "Poor old fellow! In trouble, and through your own fault entirely – the worst kind of trouble to bear, too, because there is no one to blame except your own self."

The other letter was from Margaret Tonedale, Willy's sister. She wrote that Willy had been very ill from pneumonia, and they had nearly lost him. He was still ill and dreadfully low, and asked repeatedly for Katharine. His intense and unsatisfied yearning to see her was retarding his recovery, and Margaret felt that she must let Katharine know, so that if she were thinking of returning soon, she might perhaps be inclined to hasten her steps homewards.

And the letter ended with these words:

"Although you do not want to marry him, Kath, you love and prize him, as we all do, and I know you would wish to help him and us."

"Dear old Willy," she said. "Faithful old fellow. Of course, I must go and see after you."

She had been living her own personal life, focusing on the present and the sad and sweet circumstances of the present, slipping away for the time from home affairs, home ties, deliberately pushing aside any passing uneasy thoughts about Ronald's extravagant mode of life, letting herself go forward untrammelled into a new world of hopes and fears.

But now voices from the old world of a few short weeks ago, the old world grown strangely older in a few swift days, loved voices, with all the irresistible, exacting persuasion of the past, called to her.

She rose, determined to go home at once, and then she saw Alan.

"Alan," she said, "I must go and find out about the trains and the boat. I must return at once."

"Go away from us?" the boy asked. And he looked as though he heard of some great calamity.

It was he who broke the news to his father.

"Father," he said, "she is going away. Can't we go too?"

Clifford made no answer. He seemed stunned. His face was ashen when he sought Katharine out, and said in a voice that trembled:

"Is it I who am driving you away?"

"No, no," she answered. "I shall write to you. I shall write to you. I cannot trust myself to speak. If I began, I – "

It was she who broke off this time.

"I have so much I want to say to you," she went on. "Up at Peer Gynt's stue, when I turned towards you, I – "

She broke off again.

The news spread about that the Englishwoman was returning to England the very next morning. It caused general dissatisfaction.

"Going away!" said Bedstemor. "Why doesn't she stay in Norway? That is the only place to live in."

"Going to leave the Gaard!" said Solli reproachfully; "before the harvest is gathered in too."

"Going to England!" said the Sorenskriver sulkily; "to that barbarous country, which scarcely exists on the map."

"Going away!" exclaimed old Kari, "and before the cows come down from the mountains."

"Going away!" said Gerda, "before my Ejnar brings us 'the Ranunculus glacialis.'"

"Going to England!" said Knutty, "leaving us all in the lurch here, alone, without you. Leaving me, my icebergs, and my botanists – and for the sake of a brother and a sick friend: people whom you've known all your life! I never heard of anything so inhuman. Brothers indeed; sick friends indeed! Let them take care of themselves. Bah, these relations! They always choose the wrong time for crises; and as for friends, they are always sick when you want them to be well, and well when you want them to be sick. Ignore them all, kjaere, and stay with us."

But in spite of their loving protests, Katharine tore herself away: from the beautiful Gudbrandsdal, from the quaint and simple peasant life, from the surroundings which were hallowed for ever in her memory.

Her departure took place so quietly that no one realised that she had gone. Knutty sat on the verandah trying to work at the Danish translation; but, discovering that her nerves were out of order, she found it a relief to pick a quarrel with the Sorenskriver, who had sulkily refused to go to the station, and then was angry with himself and consequently with the whole world.

At last Clifford came back from the station. He sat down by Knutty's side.

"Knutty, she has gone," he said forlornly.

"Kjaere," she said, comforting him as she put her hand on his head. "My poor iceberg."

Alan came. He, too, sat down by Knutty's side.

"Knutty, she has gone," the boy said sadly.

"Kjaere," Knutty said, and she put her hand on his head too. "My poor other iceberg."

Then she turned to them with a smile on her face.

"I see daylight!" she cried. "Go after her!"