Part 8 (2/2)
”I clip her wings!” he yelled with an obscure laugh, and bent to take up the shears. Instead he s.n.a.t.c.hed the sickle lying nearby and spun it in the light until its cresent flamed; he stood and brandished it like an idiot Crusader. ”She cannot fly to her lover. Neither by night nor day,” he said, grimacing at my governess. ”A duck without a mate”-it was a village jingle-”will not propagate.”
The Dutchwoman glowed with fury. ”Sterile guts yourself!” she burst out in her ready French. ”Brain of a fowl! Pantaloon!”
”What is it?” asked my mother, dazed.
”The old man is crazy,” Anneke said.
”I didn't get a word.”
”Oh, he has made a portrait of his wife.”
”What?”
”In the hedge,” said my governess irritably, ”the duck in the hedge. He did it to punish the concierge. Vraiment,” she shrieked into his ear, ”the resemblance is very close. It is the picture of your wife exactly!”
”I thought it was just an ordinary duck,” I said.
”What would he want to do that for?” my mother wondered.
”To cure her of lying. His wife has a crooked tongue. It is a punishment for telling stories, you see,” said the Dutchwoman dangerously.
My mother shrugged but did not comprehend.
”She will come to you with a bad story.”
”The concierge?”
”You will hear how she lies with her dirty mouth. It is a shame, madam, it is a shame for the child.”
”Oh, the child,” said my mother abstractedly; she looked toward the house. The windowpanes blazed with sunset. ”Listen-I think they've stopped!” It was true: a barren voicelessness roared in the garden. ”Do you suppose that's the end?” my mother cried. ”If it is we're off to Zurich tomorrow-you had better pack,” she advised my governess. ”Take her to supper and then get the suitcases ready. I'm going in to Enoch,” she called, and fled across the darkened gra.s.s.
It was very quiet now. Nevertheless the rhythm of the voices still faintly beat, as though lodged over our heads in a specific piece of sky, eternally. Until the moon brightened dusk delayed, then hurtled greyly down. The concierge's husband leaned like a pillar of ash.
”Well, come,” said my governess, and the look she wore that moment, and the cadenced psalmings of the deathcamps which did not leave our ears, were for me then a hieroglyph of Europe, and have since so remained.
3.
It happened that after that I never saw Anneke again.
The next morning my mother called me to her and announced the plan of my banishment. ”There's no use your staying. Not any more-there's no sense in it,” she gave out hoa.r.s.ely. ”Enoch was perfectly right. He told me when I brought you this wasn't the place for you.” Sleeplessness had skeined her eyes with complexities. ”It was a terrible mistake!” she charged me, as though I were somehow guilty. ”You're going to go away, that's all that's left to do.”
Her voice was heavy with accusation-I could not tell whether of herself or me. Yet there was nothing I had done. ”Away?” I said weakly.
”It's the only possibility. We talked it out all last night, and it's decided.”
Cautiously I considered her words. ”I thought I was going with you and Enoch. To Zurich, you said.”
”Zurich? Certainly not! It would be the worst thing imaginable.”
”Then where?”
She sighed and resumed her excavations in her bureau. ”Everything's changed,” she said, as though this were an explanation: she went raging through her drawers to hide from me the fever of her breathing. ”I can't expect Enoch to have you in his tracks after this. It isn't logical. The responsibility is too much.” She raised her head to answer me; it was weary and beleaguered, and badly-groomed for that hour. ”Where? Oh, out of Europe, that's the thing. Out of Europe altogether.”
She dipped her hands back into the bureau drawers as into waterbasins, and churned up a rumpled mound of s.h.i.+rts and socks. ”Your suitcases are already downstairs. I locked them up myself this morning. Well?” she waited, turning her spoiled swollen face to me.
”Is it because I made Enoch cross?” I asked meekly.
”No, no, Enoch's not cross,” she said, hardly paying attention.
”Well, I did make him cross the other day,” I confessed timidly. ”Anneke said I had to play in the garden, but I ran in to see what he was doing. He didn't want me there.”
”No, he wouldn't want you there,” she agreed.
”Then is that why I have to go away?”
”It has nothing to do with it. Now go and get some air,” she admonished, ”and don't ask questions beyond your years.”
I went out into an absence of sunlight, only half-amazed at my predicament. The concierge was spreading newly-washed laundry on the gra.s.s to dry, flapping the loose heels of her ugly worn slippers; she laid a pattern of sleeves and trouser-legs, and set a sheet to sail, and looked up contemplatively at the unpromising sky, and then recomposed her white geometries. The bare rosebush sagged gloomily and had no shadow; someone had raked away the petals. I roamed about and poked after worms in a seeded patch with a stick, until the concierge saw me and called wrathful threats-but at that distance I could not disentangle her cries: they might have been the quibbling of a sea-gull. Red-faced she started toward me, swiveling her fleshy neck, slapping air, screaming. It was as though she were a puppeteer, with strings leading from her rapid fingers to marionettes of raindrops, large and warm, obedient to her flying arms as she pulled them down out of the sky. Midway in pursuit of me she fled again, her brow all splattered, her nose bathed and streaming; she s.n.a.t.c.hed up the wash of triangles and rectangles, shouting at me as if it were I and not she who had willed them drenched.
It rained for only a moment. A pang of sweetness quickened the air. In another part of the sky the sun made a slit and shot through like a spear. Then it rained again, but more lightly and generally, less violently. The strained droplets were blown about like powder, falling through the thinly purple beam of sun as through a slung net. Nevertheless the hedge quivered and swayed in a palsy of rain, and pendants of water hung from the duck's broad side, until it was no longer a duck, but only a cl.u.s.ter of twinkling wreaths. I roamed again and roared in the fresh fragrance, prevented by n.o.body-the concierge had vanished, her imprecations and doomed laundry with her. The color of the gra.s.s altered, grew more blue than green. There were influences: ”Everything's changed” was my mother's view of it, but clearly there were influences. I felt purified and simplified, and trans.m.u.ted, like the gra.s.s, less by a force than by an illusion. It was not chemistry but atmosphere. I stood in the awesome light, exciting a puddle with my s.h.i.+ning stick: meanwhile aware of a sort of peril; meanwhile abandoned by all plausible caretakers. My governess was nowhere-not asleep in bed, and not for a walk in the road, not anywhere. I thought I saw the flap of her smock-tail behind the gate, but it was only the concierge's towel thieved by the wind. I thought I heard her call my name from the house, but it was the rubbed moan of a twig caught in the door-hinge. I began to be afraid, because I despised her and was pledged to her and would perish without her. She had trussed up my destiny, and I sought her all around, in every wet path. It did not matter that they were sending me off, if it were in the ordinary way, leashed to the Dutchwoman's melancholy and s.h.i.+pped abruptly to some new spot of ground with a difficult name-I hardly cared, I was indifferent, for when we arrived it was always a disappointment: there was nothing to do there. Never mind that my mother spoke to me, at the journey's start, of high and tremendous deeds which had once shaken that very piece of soil, this very scoop of hallowed granite-by the time we set foot there, it had all been long over. And never mind, that sometimes a bemused and persuaded Enoch, sunk in scorn, told of lootings and pillage, ma.s.sacre and l.u.s.t, which the place, by its nature, gave rise to-for when we came, it was always too late: the looters, robbers, a.s.sa.s.sins and sinners were gone; I never saw anything of them or their works; and usually they had departed years ago. Tumult never touched these crannies where we lighted. So what difference to me if it were Zurich or some other part? Zurich too was old, everything had happened long ago, nothing would happen now. And for me what would there be but the ragings of my bitter governess?
But she, like the looters and the sinners, was strangely gone.
I threw away my stick and went in again to learn more of this decree.
My mother fingered my dress at once. ”Oh, for pity's sake, you're all damp I”
”I can't find Anneke,” I said. ”I looked and looked.”
”And when all your clothes were sent to the station not two minutes ago,” she exclaimed. ”Now what shall we do, I ask you!”
”Won't I dry? I suppose I'll dry.”
”You'll dry into pneumonia. Here, take off everything, and get into bed. Not in mine. Go into your own room. Enoch is having a conference in a little while”;-she pushed a swatch of hair from her forehead, distraught-”with a visitor. He'll need to be private, really private, do you hear?”
”But I haven't had anything to eat.”
”At eleven o'clock?”
”Anneke always takes me out to breakfast.”
”Very well, I'll have the concierge bring you something.”
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