Claire Ambler (1928, Doubleday)/Part 2/Chapter 15
THE station at Raona is by the water, and the road down from the great cliff to the sea level is one that in a photograph seems to be an interminable gray ribbon strewn back and forth upon the landscape. Rennie drove down in a donkey cart he owned, and he was late. When he arrived upon the platform the passengers were all aboard and the train was slowly beginning to be in motion. He looked up and down the length of it, disappointed.
"Mr. Rennie! Mr. Rennie!"
Claire had seen him, and she called loudly from the open window of a wagon-lit compartment.
"Mr. Rennie! Here, Mr. Rennie!"
He looked again, then catching a glimpse of a waving hand, saw framed in the open window the face he sought. Upon it were the glistening streaks of heavy tears; but her eyes were wide and staring with an anxiety more poignant than her grief. The train was moving faster.
"Mr. Rennie!" she screamed. "Mr. Rennie!"
He ran toward her, and for a few seconds maintained a pace as rapid as the train's. She leaned from the window and seized his uplifted hand.
"Did I get by with it?" she gasped.
"Yes! God bless you!" he cried, and their hands were parted swiftly.
He stood at the end of the platform and waved his white handkerchief to her; but in a moment, as she looked back, his receding figure dwindled and grew tiny, as if he were a mechanical toy at the end of two long, converging horizontal rods—a little doll man, diminishing and waving a doll's white handkerchief. Above him the vast and broken blue landscape climbed into the sky, and a hazy curve of the cliff disclosed the gray monastery set upon its precipice. Thin as a spider's guy lines, the garden railing ran at the edge, and tiny dark figures stood there, the size of exclamation points. "Ah, good-bye!" Claire cried. "Good-bye . . ."
Her mother pulled her back into her seat. "Do you want to get your head taken off?"
"It seems so strange," Claire said, and uselessly applied a soaked handkerchief to her eyes and nose. "It's so strange, Mother. I don't understand it!"
"For heaven's sake, stop crying! It only makes you talk as if you had a cold in the head. What don't you understand?"
"It's so strange there'll be people there—in that garden—year after year—just as we were. They'll come there and never know anything happened there. . . . There'll be people there, looking down over that cliff at the sea a hundred years from now. It's so strange"
"Yes, of course there'll be people there," Mrs. Ambler said. "Probably a thousand years from now; they were there a thousand years ago, and three thousand for that matter. It's an everlasting sort of place. Do you think it does any good to cry about it?"
But she knew what her daughter was crying about, and her sharpness was tactful. She said no more, but took up a book and read, apparently paying no attention to anything else. Claire was silent, sitting motionless, and, as the afternoon waned, her mother, glancing at her almost imperceptibly, saw that her eyes were dry. She was pale, but her breathing was quiet and not troubled by the little starts and catches that had beset her during the first hour of their journey.
The train stopped at the seaport town of Castrovecchio; and when it went on again they heard American voices in the next compartment—voices of a mother and her son, it became evident. A little later, a youth of twenty-four or thereabouts appeared in the corridor, lounging, enjoying a cigarette and looking out of the window opposite the Amblers' open door. He was tall, of an athlete's figure, comely of face, well-advised in dress, and his air was that of a carefree and generally amused person. After a time his observation wandered, and he was aware of the girl sitting in the compartment outside of which he took his pleasure. His awareness of her, indeed, was vivid, almost fervent. He looked full ready to be cordial.
"I beg your pardon," he said. "Does my smoking annoy you?"
"Not at all," Mrs. Ambler assured him.
"Are you sure?" he asked earnestly. "Does it annoy you in the least?"
"No. It doesn't come into the compartment; it blows the other way."
"Well, I'll be glad to throw my cigarette away," he said. "I will if it annoys either of you." He looked anxiously at Claire and added: "Are you sure it doesn't annoy either of you?"
Claire did not even look toward him.
"Well," he said, still hopefully earnest, "if you're sure you both don't mind it"
At that, Mrs. Ambler was a little amused with him and a little embarrassed; then, looking at her silent and motionless daughter, she was stirred by a faint anxiety. Claire's eyes, staring straight before her at the wall of the compartment, seemed to express a dangerous hostility.
"No, no! Neither of us minds it at all," Mrs. Ambler said hastily; whereupon, after coughing and murmuring, "Well" he moved away. They heard him speaking a few minutes later when he had rejoined his mother. The train had stopped at a village, and in the silence his voice, though not loud, was more audible than he knew. "Americans, yes. Frostiest looking girl I ever saw!"
He was not wholly discouraged, however; for after they were in motion again, he reappeared in the corridor, and the two ladies were conscious that upon the slightest sign to indicate they knew of his existence he would offer them the entertainment of conversation. Mrs. Ambler timidly considered offering the sign; but a glance at her daughter dismayed her.
"See here," the mother said, when the young man had again been frosted into a departure. "I hope you aren't going to keep this up too long, Claire."
"Keep what up?"
"Now, now!" Mrs. Ambler protested. "There wouldn't be anything out of the way in letting that good-looking boy talk to you. He seems very nice indeed, and as he and his mother are probably going all the way through, I don't see" She paused. "It might help you to get out of yourself a little."
"I don't want to be got out of myself."
"Now, now!" Mrs. Ambler said again, and she smiled, though not unsympathetically. "You don't think this is going to last, do you, dear—at your age? How long do you suppose it will be before you'll be interested in seeing something of pleasant young gentlemen again?"
"I never will," Claire said. "Never."
"But if only on your own account you ought"
"No," Claire interrupted. "On their account is what I mean."
"Good gracious! You haven't become precisely poison to gentlemen, my child!"
"Yes," Claire said, in a dead voice. "That's all I am."
Her mother urged no more, and the unhappy girl sat staring frozenly at the polished wall before her. Her thoughts were long and sorrowful, and after a while they became bitter, as well. The persistent youth returned once more to the corridor, and although he affected a manner of interest in his cigarette and the landscape, she was unable not to be conscious of his ever-hopeful consciousness of herself. "Idiot!" she thought, addressing him. "Miserable sleek-haired little idiot! Thinking your awful prattle could be endured for an instant! Haven't you got eyes?"
She blamed him fiercely for not seeing her as she pictured herself to herself. In the autumn she had seen Clothilde Berin, the Parisian actress, play an abysmal tragedy. Mlle. Berin was a tall black-and-white woman with gloomy black eyes under black brows, and, in the final scene of the drama, she sat, in black mourning, staring hollowly straight before her, over the heads of the audience, into an eternity of pain. And thus, to Claire, it seemed now that she herself appeared. She forgot her charming little dress, her pinkish gray stockings, her jaunty blue hat, and even her roses from Raona. What she imagined the young man in the corridor would see—if he had eyes!—was a long, black-haired, black-eyed, black-clad woman with a dead white skin, staring forever before her. Couldn't the idiot recognize a tragedy when he saw it?
Then, with horror, she realized that her two natures were in conflict again; the tricky and malicious artist was at work within her even now, when she was in the midst of the deepest suffering she had ever known. In spite of her true anguish, she was thinking of herself as picturesque; and she was indignant with a cub of a boy, whom she had never seen before, because he did not perceive how picturesque she really was! And thus she reached the bottom of her despair. "No wonder I do such harm!" she thought. "My very soul is artificial—and hideous!"
But at night she lay in her berth in the train that still sped roaring northward—endlessly northward—and the desperation of her will to return was so great that, conscious of her own absurdity, she entreated the iron tracks beneath her to change their course, curve backward and bring her again, in the morning, to Raona.
"I've got to go back," she whispered to the soggy little pillow. "Ah, I want to see him again! I'll only just look at him. They'd let me do that, wouldn't they?"
Then she knew what she had given up. The morning could not bring her to Raona but it need bring her no despair of her soul. The artist within it had behaved not so badly, after all.