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Imagined Selves. Willa Muir
Читать онлайн.Название Imagined Selves
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781847675910
Автор произведения Willa Muir
Жанр Контркультура
Серия Canongate Classics
Издательство Ingram
Ann groaned as she shuffled to the door, but the key grated in the lock, and the minister stalked in.
‘Let us have a light,’ he said.
Ann’s fingers were shaking, but the minister avoided looking at her.
‘Go and put on a wrap,’ he said, ‘while I bring in your sister.’
Mary was sitting on the ground where he had left her. She was crying. She had not cried since the day of her father’s funeral.
‘Go inside,’ said the minister coldly. ‘I’ll pick up your things.’
He groped in the flower-bed, which was now faintly illuminated by the paraffin lamp in the kitchen. A fur coat, a hat with hard jet ornaments, two black kid gloves, a flannel nightgown and, gleaming in the dark soil, a large gold watch with the glass smashed he collected one by one, shook the damp earth from them and took them into the cottage.
Mary was sitting at the table, her head supported on her hands. She had unpinned her hat. He noted that Ann was in her bedroom and that Mary had stopped crying. For the first time in his life he felt scornful of tears: his old susceptibility was gone. He noted simply that she had at least stopped crying.
‘Get me a Bible,’ he said, in the same cold, authoritative tone, laying his armful on the table.
Mary looked up and saw the watch.
‘It’s broken! Father’s watch, and she’s broken it! Fifteen years I’ve had that watch —’
He silenced her. What were fifteen years compared to eternity?
The minister picked up the watch, and when Ann reluctantly appeared, in an ancient dressing-gown, he made it the text of his sermon.
On earth, he told them, what is broken can be repaired, but although mended it can never be unflawed again. A moment, a second, suffices to smash for ever what has for years been intact. How much more irrevocable is a break in one’s relations with God! What is done can never be undone, never; even repentance cannot undo it…. The least of our actions is of eternal significance….
The more he berated them the more they felt involuntarily drawn together. His insistence that they were both equally wicked exacerbated but united them. It was the threat of expulsion from the Church that had cowed them, and they now submitted to his exhortations from fear rather than from conviction.
Mary was the first to fidget.
‘I have to get back to my shop, Mr Murray.’
‘Your shop! You should be thinking of your immortal soul.’
‘My shop canna wait.’ The ban was lifting from Mary. Her immortal soul could wait till the morn, she was thinking, but Saturday was Saturday and not Sunday.
Ann exchanged a look with her sister, a look which said plainly: Get him out of here.
‘I’ll mak’ you a cup o’ tea before you go to the shop,’ she offered.
‘Aweel,’ said Mary, rising, ‘we’ve had it out, now, and I dinna think we’ll flee at each other again for a while, Mr Murray. If Ann has ony mair o’ her tantrums I’ll let you ken.’
‘Me! It’s no’ me has the tantrums—’
The minister rose quickly, clapped on his hat and marched out into the night without another word.
Half frightened the two sisters looked at each other.
‘Na, he’ll no’,’ said Ann abruptly. ‘He’s no’ like us. It winna last.’
She hobbled to the fire and drew the simmering kettle on to the middle of the range. In response to this generous action Mary cleared her things off the table, merely compressing her lips as she looked at the condition they were in, and shaking them out ostentatiously before taking them into her room. A tacit truce was thus concluded.
Common sense had triumphed over rage and tears.
We’re queer folk, reflected Mary, as she went slowly back to her shop. Queer, dour folk, the Watsons.
That evening had brought her closer to her sister Ann. She actually felt the better for it.
The minister also was feeling the better for it. Although he had departed in impatience the heavy oppression which had weighed so long on his bosom had discharged itself like a gun with the flash and explosion of his attack on the two sisters. As if he had finally vaulted an obstacle he had balked at for years, William Murray was exhilarated and wondered at his previous foolishness. It now seemed to him that he had been faint-hearted all his life. He had made himself spiritually sick by evading the fact that God’s anger was as real as God’s love. The old ecstatic serenity was gone, but in its place he felt a tense determination to fight the battle of the Church. Instead of spreading himself anonymously into the universe, as if he were a quiet wave lapping into infinity, he recognized himself now as an individual with a definite place in the world; he was a minister, backed by that authority and prestige of the Church which, for the first time in his life, he had invoked, and invoked successfully. His appeal to the Church had been involuntary, almost unconscious; its very spontaneity convinced him that it had been prompted by God Himself.
Anger was at times good and necessary, he said to himself, as he walked home buoyantly. It was weakness to be too sympathetic. In his sick state he had sympathized too much with everybody: for instance, he had sympathized with both Mary and Ann Watson, first with one and then with the other, and yet they were both in the wrong – not to be sympathized with at all. Christ had driven the money-changers out of the Temple, and had spoken to devils as one having authority. That was the right way with those possessed of a devil.
He remembered suddenly how Sarah had said about Ned: ‘I’ve daured him.’ She was right. One could not create light without dispelling darkness. For years he had shut his eyes to the fact of evil; but now he had heard the word of God, and he would deal faithfully with evil wherever he found it. He had awakened out of his sleep. ‘Wherever I find it,’ he said, opening his own front door.
The wall in front of William Murray was no longer smooth, without handhold or foothold, no longer blank. It now had both lights and shadows on its surface. He could climb it.
EIGHT
When Elizabeth Shand awoke in the morning Hector was still asleep. He was facing her as he lay, but his head was half-buried in the pillow and little of him was visible save his tumbled hair and closed eyes. The terrible sensation Elizabeth had of having dropped down a bottomless chasm began gradually to fade before the reassuring familiarity of Hector asleep in the next bed. She could not see his face, but she knew that his body was the same body it had always been; behind those closed lids the same Hector must exist. If once she had been daunted by the aloofness of her sleeping husband she was now comforted by it. Asleep, he was still her sweetheart, unchanged by the conflicting storms of yesterday, sunk into the most profound part of himself, which, of course, was the essential Hector, the Hector who loved her and whom she loved. Their quarrel of the night before seemed irrelevant as she lay looking at him. She remembered how she had told the minister that she could not believe in the separation of the spirit from the body; and now she thought that it was when most completely sunk in the body, as in sleep, that the spirit was most itself.
Quietly she crept out of her own bed and crawled in beside Hector. Let him awaken to find her close to him, she thought. Surely there was some current of invisible force which flowed in an unbroken circuit around them as they lay motionless together, a healing current, she thought, which would bear away all their differences. She felt his eyelashes stir on her cheek, and pressed him to her in a passion of tenderness.
If Hector was surprised to be awakened in this fashion he did not show it. He rubbed his cheek on hers and kissed her tenderly enough. Even the reek of stale whisky did not annoy Elizabeth; she was both exalted and contrite, and she dismissed all scruples