Testimony Of Two Men (55 page)

“I’m going to search the damned place, as my mother asked me,” he said. “Anyone could have rowed over here during the day or even during the last hour. Haven’t you any sense at all?”

She blocked the way stubbornly, leaning against the wide bronze doors which caught golden glints from the lantern. Then with a sigh of resignation she went into the hall, her footsteps hard on the black and white marble squares. She lighted a lamp, which was waiting on a Spanish commode, and it brightened on the laughable suits of armor against the walnut walls and threw long shadows up and down the medieval stairway. The stained-glass window on the first landing glimmered into sections of rose and purple, red and yellow.

Jenny turned and faced Jonathan. “Thank you,” she said. The hall, as usual, smelt musty as if ages had passed here, and the banners hanging along the walls lifted in the light wind which came through the open door. Jenny’s face was bleak and still and she stared at Jonathan with formidable bitterness.

“Not yet,” he said. “I must still search this monstrosity.” He knew his remark would hurt her, but he was not prepared for the deep and quivering pain that ran over her face, and he was surprised at the trembling of her mouth. Then she turned and ran up the stairway, her steps clattering and loud, and he called after her, “When I’m finished, come down and shoot the bolts.” A door banged upstairs and he heard a lock slide. He laughed shortly. He looked about him and found a candelabra and lit the candles on it and held it high, feeling ridiculous. No gaslight here, and, of course, no electricity.

This preciousness annoyed him and made him shake his head. He went down a rear passage to the dining room and glanced in carefully, and the candlelight struck the peaked and timbered ceiling, brought out a glow of rose on the damask walls, struck against the thin mullioned windows, and raced across the vast old table and the beautiful Aubusson rug and sparkled on the lavish silver displayed on the big black buffet, and showed the cavern of the white granite fireplace. Everything was deathly silent, and musty and still.

He next went into the vast drawing room in the tower wing, and again all was quiet, and the candlelight showed nothing but the Oriental rugs, the green damask of the walls, the tapestry at the windows and the frivolous French furniture all gilt and velvet and silk. The light brought the faces in the portraits on the walls into sudden life, and they gazed at Jonathan coldly and watchfully, the eyes seemingly following him as he came farther into the room. He stumbled over
a
velvet footstool and loudly swore, and one of his elbows knocked against the glass of a buhl cabinet and the candelabra was almost thrown from his hand. His elbow went numb for a moment or two. Unfortunately, the glass had not broken. For an instant Jonathan wanted to rectify this injustice, then laughed at himself. He climbed the stairway, careful to keep his footing on the polished wood. Now he was on the second floor and facing a long narrow hall carpeted in Oriental rugs. He knew Harald’s studio and went to it and opened the carved wooden door. He could smell paint and turpentine and airlessness, and the candlelight glanced at easels and on canvases stacked against the wooden walls. He could hear the river gurgling secretly below, and it had a sinister sound. He climbed a much smaller staircase to the third floor, where the servants lived and slept, and he examined each quiet room and even the closets and wardrobes. The voice of the river was louder here for some reason, and the explosions that still continued in the park. Jonathan retreated down the stairway and passed the shut doors along the hall, reasonably certain that no intruder lurked there. However, he went back and did open other doors. One of the rooms, very large and exquisitely furnished, was Harald’s bedroom, where he had slept with his dead wife. He had not bothered to remove certain furbelows and ruffles and pink draperies, and it still possessed
a
wan feminine air, mutely pathetic and lonely. A quick search showed it to be empty. Another search of other rooms verified Jonathan’s opinion that no unauthorized person was present. He tried a last door, far down the hall. It was locked. So, this was Jenny’s room. The old-fashioned handle was brass and polished; it turned in his hand but the strong door remained shut to him.

He made considerable noise clattering downstairs. He examined the breakfast room with its plain but beautiful Amish furniture, then he went into the morning room and wrinkled his nose at the dark oak and chintz. He last came to the library and set the candelabrum on a table while he lit two or three oil lamps. This was certainly the gloomiest room of the house, he thought, narrow, cold, and tall, lined with books and furnished with leather sofas and chairs in dull dark blues and blacks and crimsons, and here the air was definitely dank. The lamps flickered on the bearded portraits of Victorian men and prim ladies in their huge golden frames, and they eyed Jonathan with expressions of pure resentment at his intrusion. He opened one of the windows and the long crimson velvet draperies bellied inward into the room.

Where was that stupid girl? Why hadn’t she come down, hearing him descend, to lock the doors behind him? He debated on calling her, then saw that there were several books on one of the black oak tables, and pencils and paper. He picked up a very slim book bound in soft leather. Villon. The book fell open in his hand and he saw that it was well-read and that verses, here and there, had been marked as if particularly poignant. Jonathan’s eye fell on one:

“I have a tree, a graft of love, That in my heart has taken root. Sad are the buds and blooms thereof And bitter sorrow is its fruit.”

I bet, he thought, and slapped the book shut and wet his lips wryly. So, that was a favorite of Jenny’s, was it? Harald had never cared for poetry. These were all Jenny’s. He threw the book down and picked up another. Emily Dickinson. Again there were heavy markings.

“There’s a certain slant of light, On winter afternoons, That oppresses, like the weight Of Cathedral tunes.”

Well, thought Jonathan. So we can be melancholy, can we?

“As all the heavens were a bell, And Being but an ear, And I and silence some strange race, Wrecked, solitary, here.”

All at once the quiet around Jonathan became enormously oppressive and mournful and he heard the sad lapping of the river and he thought, quite involuntarily, of the lonely girl who lived in a dead man’s dream and loved such poetry. He put down the book more slowly than he had replaced the other. His hand touched another, worn and bending. Elizabeth Browning.

“How do I love thee? Let me count the ways—”

“Sentimental claptrap,” he said aloud, and now he was sick again with his old anger. He could see Jenny here in this clammy library, mooning over these ardent and sorrowful love poems—and thinking of Harald. Did she read them to him, on winter nights, perhaps, before they climbed the stairs together, hand in hand, laughing secretly? Then he could not imagine Jenny like that, laughing secretly or at all, with Harald.

He picked up still another book, a selection of poems, and at once it opened to Matthew Arnold and he read:

“Ah, love, let us be true to one another, For the world which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams, So beautiful, so various, so new, Hath neither joy nor hope, nor help from pain—”

Jenny had enclosed this in blacker markings. Jonathan stood still, the book in his hand, and remembered his wedding night, when he had quoted this to Mavis. He saw Mavis’ translucent face and wide laughing mouth and all her large white teeth, and he heard her pettish rejection of the poem and her sullen remark that she did not like it. Well, it was considered rather puerile these days, like all truths. It struck on his thoughts, however, with a kind of dull misery, and again he thought of Jenny, who liked this poem as much as he did.

He put the book down. Near it was a notebook. He opened it curiously. He had never seen Jenny’s handwriting before, and he felt a sharp internal sting. The writing was small but not schoolgirlish nor affected. Every word was clear and strongly written, even angular and very firm. The pages held poems, and some of them were infernally bad and amateurish, and so Jonathan knew that these were Jenny’s own essays into poetry. His eye stopped on one, and as he read he stopped smiling.

“I had shaken the world to its heart’s centre, And when it was sobbing and crying like a harp, I knew my Love and looked upon His Face— Calm and stately as the morning, and as still. I touched His Hand and said to Him in wonder: ‘But You I always sought and never knew ‘til now!’”

For God’s sake, thought Jonathan, and shook his head, and frowned uneasily. It was a young and passionate poem of deep and simple love and devotion, addressed, as all such poems should be, to God. It disturbed Jonathan. His inner conception of Jenny seemed reflected in water, and as it was so reflected a wave shattered and dispersed it and dissolved it away. He forced himself to read other lines, unfinished poems, or just sentences:

“Sweet rush of April skies—of cloud and wing—”

“Ripe days of wine and apples, blue shine of noonday sun!”

He closed the notebook, slapping it loudly together. Then, as he did so, he heard a quick gasp and after that a rustle. He turned quickly and saw Jenny in the doorway, staring at him in the lamplight, unbelieving and alarmed.

She wore nothing but a long nightgown of some light white cotton with a childish collar of lace, and her hair tumbled down her back and her blue eyes were wide and glittering and her feet were bare.

“I thought,” she said, “that you had gone!”

Then she looked down at herself and turned a vivid red.

The voice of the river appeared to roar into the room
like a torrent of tumultuous water, and Jonathan and Jenny stood and looked at each other. “Jenny,” he said. “I didn’t mean—I was just waiting for you to come down and lock the door after me. as I asked you to.” He heard his own voice, thick and ponderous, and the heat was in his neck and throat again, and the pain was knifing into his temples, and then, with primal instinct, he felt the stab of excruciating desire. It was so intense that he bent a little, and he knew that he had never forgotten this girl at all and had always loved her and wanted her.

“Jenny!” he said. He took a step toward her.

She retreated, and the fright was big in her eyes, and she covered her breasts, in that thin cotton, in the ancient gesture of a startled woman, her arms crossed. Her long thighs drew together stiffly. She had never seemed so beautiful to him, not even in the garden, nor so desirable and beloved, in her present disheveled state and with the color leaving her face and her lips parting in embarrassment and shame.

“Jenny,” he said, and took another step toward her. She fell back, and she made a little sound like a faint cry. She began to turn. Then he was upon her, catching her wrists, swinging her around to face him. She tried to resist; he had known she was strong, but she was like a young man in her sudden resilience. She bent backward to loosen his hands, and he bent over her and tried to kiss her mouth, holding her with violence, but she swung her face from him so that his lips touched only her cheek. She screamed sharply and it was the sound of frantic rage. Again she swung her head and her soft cloud of black hair swept over his face. It fell back. Her exposed white throat gleamed in the lamplight, and he bent over her again and pressed his mouth into its soft warm hollow.

Their bodies cleaved together, Jenny’s arching back, Jonathan’s following hers. Then Jenny was very still, no longer struggling. He felt the long sweet length of her against his clothing, the pressure of her breasts, the slender rigidity Of the -wrists he held behind her back. He exclaimed, “Jenny, sweet Jenny!” and kissed her again, and he was determined, in the shout of his desire, to have this girl and to have her at once. She was not resisting now. Her flesh clung to his, languid and weak, and now he found her mouth eagerly and with ruthless demand. He began to groan, to pull her farther into the room, and her stumbling feet followed him. “Sweet Jenny,” he said, and he let her wrists go and his hand fumbled for her breast and found one and closed tightly about it. It was like a sun-warmed apple in his hand, and the scent of her flesh was in his nostrils, fresh and maddening and young.

Then she came to wild life. Her hand knocked away the hand that held her breast with a force that amazed him. Then both her hands were on his shoulders and were pushing him away from her. He was so surprised that he fell back from her.

Her eyes were one furious blue blaze of hatred through great tears, and her teeth could be seen, clenched, between her white lips. He came to her again, lust pounding in him, and when he had almost reached her, she lifted her hand, swung it in a large circle and struck him viciously across the face. She jumped back and faced him, and her breast rose up and fell in frenzied outrage.

“Murderer!” she shouted. “Murderer!”

Her voice rang in the library. It was the ugliest sound he had ever heard, and the most terrible. She was no longer afraid, and her hands were clenched at her sides. She trembled with fury.

The strong lash of her hand had made his face burn with throbbing pain, and had rocked him on his heels. It had the effect of increasing his ferocious desire for her, and he also wanted to inflict the same pain on her and subdue her, and conquer her, and he upon her and take her brutally and at once.

If she had struck him only and had not thrown that hateful word at him, he might have controlled himself. But he was aroused. His dark face was a dull and heavy red, and his features thickened.