He had had to fight jealousy, secret opposition, inertia, the various stupidities. He knew that he had a little clique against him away yonder where men sat in office chairs. He appeared to some men as a haughty and irascible beast, a fellow with insulting silences. Yes, some of them would like to see him down.
At dinner that night he said little. He had his usual self-absorbed stare. The elderly and almost hairless Chinaman moving about the room was not more silent. It was this silence that bore most heavily upon his wife, for she was one of those women with a brown warmth of eyes and hair, a sanguine creature, most happy when she was giving.
And on this night she felt that she must talk or stifle. All day she had been suffering from a spasm of home-sickness, a yearning for that moist greenness that was England, the smell of it. Another month, the twelfth in this yellow brazier of a valley—and then——!
She felt that she could not bear much more, even for his sake.
“Only another month, Jack.”
He gave her a vague glance.
“A month——?”
“Leave. They must give you leave. Six months. You need it.”
“Oh—I’m all right.”
She said gently:
“We both need it. Grey skies. One’s brain gets scorched. Think of green fields——”
But it was obvious to her that he could not think of them. He had the eyes of a man who had been staring into the open door of a furnace, and he could see nothing but the glare of it, the glare of his immediate purpose. All else was blotted out.
Afterwards he did not stay with her, but lit a cigar and took the smell of it with him out into the night, as though out there he would find some assuagement for his restlessness. A full moon was up, beautiful or beastly according to your mood, but there was a soreness in Ramsden that resented the moon. He wanted darkness like a cool compress laid upon his soul, utter darkness; he wanted to think, for if your mind must go round and round like an animal in a cage it is better that the cage should be a dark one.
Ramsden’s mind was working in a circle, an eternal circle of strains and stresses, thrusts and breaking weights, and all the complicated histology of that bridge of his. There are moments when a man is attacked by leering doubts, and Ramsden, irritable and tired, was like a lamp to the moths of worry.
Had he got everything right? Had he allowed sufficiently for every malignancy of Nature, for wind and water, scour and flood? Was the stuff what it should be? He had had his doubts. He had had to fight the miserable economies of men in chairs, economies that might bring a man’s good name crashing, and lose other men their lives.
And Moody?
That big, well-oiled, slimy brute! He did not trust Moody, and yet he had had to trust him.
Craft pride! Could a man be false to it?
He sat down on a rock and smoked, while up yonder his wife, sitting alone in a lighted room, and turning the pages of an old illustrated paper that showed her England, heard footsteps. She paused to listen, with one page half turned, and her eyes on the open doorway. Loneliness sat in her eyes, the loneliness that only a woman knows.
A voice said:
“Excuse me, is your husband at home?”
She was startled. She knew to whom that fat and well-oiled voice belonged, and she saw the dim shape of the man on the stoep.
“Oh, it is you, Mr. Moody. Come in. My husband has gone for a stroll.”
He came in, a big fat man, too fat for his age, brown, loose-lipped, self-assured. His round thighs showed through his trousers. He was going bald, and he grew his hair in a rolled and shiny fringe over the nape of his neck. His blue eyes were adventurous and shifty.
“Mr. Ramsden back soon?”
“Yes. Please sit down.”
“I wanted to ask him about something.”
The light from the hanging lamp fell full upon him as he let his largeness down into a rocking-chair. There were little blue gleams in his eyes; he looked at her as a man of his type looks at most women.
And instantly a queer cunning stirred in her. Her mind grasped it as her hand might have grasped a knife. The man was false; she knew it, but she did not know how false. But if she knew——
She smiled at him.
“Have a drink——”
She saw those eyes of his react to hers.
“I don’t mind——”
“I’ll get it——”
“Oh, let me——”
“No—sit still. I know you are tired.”
She mixed him his drink and he allowed her to bring it to him, while he looked up at her with an adventurous inquiry in his eyes. Their fingers touched as he took the glass, and rocking himself slightly in the chair he thought:
“Ha, ha, you’re a warm creature, and you are beginning to find that man of leather a bit dull.”
He smiled and raised the glass to her.
“Good luck! In this confounded climate—one must—you know. Doesn’t seem to trouble you, though.”
The compliment was slimy, and edged with insolence, but she took it as her first score!
“You don’t think so?”
“Hardly. How do you manage it?”
She laughed.
“Cold storage, Mr. Moody.”
“Come,” said he after a second drink, “I have been Mr. Moody rather a long time. Why not Frank?”
She sat at the table with her chin on her hands.
“Oh, perhaps! Frankness is welcome at times. And I’m—a little bit bored.”
“Now?”
His audacity began to swagger.
“No—with life—the bridge—and everything about the bridge.”
“Sick of it?”
“Yes.”
She played with him awhile, meeting his half-amorous persiflage with masked eyes and a set smile. She let him drift more and more into a splurge of confidences, and when she had him roped she drew the noose to a sudden purpose.
“Tell me about the bridge.”
“Does the bridge matter?”
“It does. To me. Can’t you understand? It is a sort of nightmare, a curse. I get it everywhere and every way. I want to be done with it.”
He looked at her narrowly over his glass.
“What way?”
“I want it finished and done with. Then—we can all of us—get away down to civilization and shops.”
He laughed, rocking himself in the chair.
“Live the life, eh? Well—what about this confounded bridge?”
“He—is worrying himself—sick about it. I get all the worries—transferred—I can’t stand much more of it. It is all imagination—isn’t it? You know.”
“What?”
“The bridge is all right? Safe? Some of the nightmare would lift if I felt sure.”
She felt his little hot blue eyes fixed on her, and she made herself meet them as she knew he wished her to meet them.
“You are asking me?”
“Some men have plenty of nerve. Inspire confidence. One knows—that when——”
He smiled at her.
“Yes—I don’t get rattled.”
“That’s what I mean. Do tell me, Frank, as an engineer, what you really think. I know that as an engineer——”
She was aware of a sudden queer change in him, of a something serious and stable behind the shimmerings of sex. She had appealed to the craftsman, the creator.
“The bridge is all right—absolutely. Don’t you worry.”
“I’m glad,” she said, and hearing her husband’s footsteps, rose with a sudden smile at the man in the chair, a smile that left him perched on an illusion.
“Oh, Jack. Mr. Moody’s here. I thought you would not be long.”
And she left the two men together.
Indifference walks through life so easily, unwounded and unbleeding, for those who care most suffer most. And Grace Ramsden cared. There are certain things about which men will not lie, for lying about them would be as unnatural as talking away the honou
r of your wife, and Grace Ramsden felt very sure that Moody had not lied to her.
The bridge was sound, but the scheming and the building of it had strained the soundness of her husband. And more than that; it had turned him into a hard-eyed fanatic, a man who has lost the power of sympathy and almost the power of speech. The bridge was in his brain, like a monstrous spider, devouring all other impressions, so that his consciousness had become a thing of steel, of overstrained and complaining metal.
There were times during the month that followed when Ramsden’s wife asked that the Saaba Bridge might vanish in the night. It was taking her husband and comrade from her, raising a barrier between them.
It was his, and she had been proud of all that was his, but in those last days she began to be jealous, and bitterly afraid. She had to bear with her man’s frettings. Almost she felt like a mother trying to be patient with a son in the blind ecstasy of a first unpropitious love affair.
She repeated the same phrases.
“Don’t worry, Jack; it will be all right.”
His moodiness was exhausting her. She felt herself becoming like him, irritable, suspicious, querulous. There were times when her jealousy threatened to burst into flame, this absurd jealousy inspired by a thing of steel. She could have cried out:
“Damn your bridge. Oh, run away and live with it. I’m nothing, a mere woman.”
Nor was this the limit of her fear. There was that night when she could not sleep because of the heat, and getting up from beside him, went out and stood upon the stoep to feel the darkness and the stars, those alien stars, and in looking down towards the Saaba Bridge she had realized that this structure of steel and stone was but symbolical. It symbolized her husband’s craft, the passion of the creator.
He was like a man destined to have many love affairs, and this was the first of them. And she——?
She would have to stand aside and watch and wait, and perhaps now and then in the empty pauses he would come back to her, and expect to find in her the same woman. And she, a woman, starved, denied for months at a time her full free right of self-expression, would be expected to open her arms, to give herself, to make a soft cushion of her starveling love.
“I can’t bear it!” was her cry. “I can’t bear it.”
Yet, with that very cry in her heart she knew that she would have to bear it; for, through all time—woman has been a bearer of burdens. She may rebel. She may shake the burden from her shoulders, but bare shoulders do not carry happiness, or that which is more important than happiness, the realization of the inevitableness of our human fate.
She went back to her room and found Ramsden awake.
“What’s wrong, Gracie?”
“Oh, the heat. I wanted air.”
“You’ll find it easier in the cooler season.”
As she stood by the bed, a dim figure hardly visible in the darkness, he seemed to divine in her an equally shadowy distress, and a distress that was not physical. He came out of his steel cage for a moment.
“You have stuck it very pluckily, old girl. Only another week or two.”
She sat down on the edge of the bed, her whole self softened and reaching out to him.
“Oh, it’s my part of the job, Jack! And when it is over——”
Her hand met one of his.
“We’ll have a fortnight’s haymaking.”
“No more than that?”
He was silent for a moment, and she waited eagerly in the warm silence.
“I’ve been thinking, Gracie—you ought to have a change. There is no reason why you should not take six months in England.”
“Alone?”
“It is good for people to be alone sometimes.”
“I know. But you——?”
“There’s that big irrigation scheme in the Kaarhi Valley. After this—I ought to get it. We shall have to build a monster dam.”
She held her breath.
“How long will that take?”
“A three years’ job—perhaps.”
His voice sounded resonant and eager, and she was conscious of a sudden spasm of despair. A three years’ job in this ghastly country, three years of striving and self-absorption, of moods and silences. The Kaarhi Valley Dam would be his second love—while she——
Her courage failed her. She had to fight back her tears, while her hand gripped him as though she felt him slipping away from her.
“Jack—I’m not so strong as I was. Won’t you take me home for six months, and let the Kaarhi Valley go?”
She was aware of tenseness in the silence. His fingers seemed to stiffen.
“My dear girl—I can’t.”
“Can’t?”
“It has taken me ten years to push my way; I’m just on the peak. The Kaarhi Valley will be the biggest thing yet. I can’t let it go if it comes my way. A man has to go on.”
She bowed her head.
“And a woman, too,” she thought, “following behind, breathless and hungry. I haven’t the strength.”
She saw him climbing away from her into the clouds of his strivings and creatings, while she followed like an unnoticed shadow.
Aloud she said:
“It is your life, Jack. I suppose a man has to choose. I’m very proud, of course; I shall always be proud. But don’t forget me—quite——”
He was astonished.
“Why—aren’t you here? We are doing things together, aren’t we?”
How little he understood her! And she left it at that.
During those last days of the bridge’s growth when the last rivets were being hammered, and the masons were pointing the stonework of the piers and facing the embankments with stone, Grace Ramsden sat on the stoep of the bungalow and looked down upon her husband’s world. It might have been her world, too, had he been one of those men who have the knack of taking a woman by the hand.
Married comradeship, that most difficult and blessed of comradeships, can be made so easy, but Ramsden was one of those men to whom the sentiment of life is no more than the unseen oil in the machine’s bearings. He took things for granted, and his wife was among the things.
She felt that she had lost him, the real, conscious, comradely self of him, and that nothing would give him back to her. His work had absorbed him. And sometimes there is humiliation as well as heart-ache in a woman’s loneliness.
“I’m no more use. And yet—why should I think of being a mere useful thing? A woman has rights.”
Rights—yes! But what are rights, elusive personal perquisites which we wring from life and try to believe them ours. For things come of themselves, haphazard, unexpectedly. Plan, and you are deceived. She knew it. She knew, too, that the only wisdom may be in waiting, and that the flower fades in the clutching hand.
His face looked dark and thin, and obscure, when he came back to her one evening. She wondered. A woman does so much wondering. He stood a moment beside her chair before going in to his bath, but he told her nothing. That was his way now.
When he came in to dinner she saw that he was wearing a suit of drill. She observed it, and said nothing, and watched him eat like a worried man in a hurry. She felt on edge, and the meaningless words that passed between them were like sand-grains rubbed into a raw surface.
“Going out again?” she asked at last.
He stared at his glass.
“Got to.”
“Nothing wrong?”
“News from up-country. Storms. They work down the river—usually.”
“Rains? Flood water?”
He nodded curtly.
“Yes—that’s it.”
And then he added savagely:
“A month too early, before the time. Just like my luck. Start to build something and you provoke the Devil.”
Certainly, the devil of Nature’s casual inevitableness was upon the builders of the Saaba Bridge weeks and hours before they had calculated upon her wet interference.
Ramsden was away half the night, and came back morosely ti
red, with news of rising water and the work that would have to be done on the morrow; and when Grace Ramsden looked out from her window over the Saaba Valley she saw that the river had spread, and that its tawny width was oozing into other channels.
Ramsden, on the stoep, was looking up with a face of thunder at an ominous sky, and biting hard on his pipe. She joined him there, and his moroseness was like the moroseness of some man before a battle.
“Look at that!”
He pointed with the stem of his pipe.
“All that lumber to be cleared away above flood level before nightfall! And the sky getting angry—already. We should have had another month.”
He went down to his labours, teeth showing behind tight lips, and all through the day the river channel swarmed with little black figures clearing away timber dumps and piles of stores, but some hours before darkness fell the storm burst upon them. It seemed to come out of a thundering and purple sky with the suddenness of a mighty bomb exploding, bringing darkness with it and lightning and a roar of wind and rain.
Ramsden’s wife had never seen such rain. It steamed and rattled on the iron roof; it blotted out everything. The shutters, blowing loose, creaked and clashed. Outside in that deluge she could picture the yellow Saaba River lifting a tawny head.
Hours passed, and the darkness of the storm became the darkness of the night. No message came to her. The howling valley below would be full of desperate and striving men; the woman would be forgotten.
The Chinaman, looking like a scared and sandy cat, brought in dinner, but she could not touch it. She sat on and on, wondering, vaguely aware of some crisis in her life, their lives.
About midnight, a queer silence fell—comparative silence—though she fancied that she could hear the hoarse voice of the river. The rain and the wind had ceased. A surprising glimmer of moonlight flickered down.
She was standing in the doorway when she heard voices, a muffled muttering, and the squelching of feet in the soaked soil. She was aware of a stillness within her, a sudden vivid presentiment.
The Short Stories of Warwick Deeping Page 36