The Constant Nymph. Margaret Kennedy Kennedy
in the Summer she would have a cornet, and, hidden in the mountains, she would play lovely tunes and give terrific shocks to lonely travellers toiling over the pass with their knapsacks. For nobody should know of the little house.
She climbed a knoll, the highest point near by, and stared round her. In every direction she could see for miles and miles, but the view was simple, a succession of serene ranges sticking up into emptiness. The moon had painted them all a uniform black and white, and the sky was no colour at all. It was a simplification which delighted her; she needed it. There were, usually, too many things. The people and colours and noises crowded her mind with ideas and confused her. Often she felt that she saw nothing clearly, but here, where there was so very little to see, it might be managed. She turned round to the Königsjoch, which hung almost above her, and took a good look at it. Its stony crags, its snowfields, and the smooth, bare outline of its summit seemed almost near enough to touch, yet she knew them to be miles away. She stared hungrily, trying to stamp this image on her mind and thus secure it for ever and ever. She became entranced with it. As she looked she had an idea, a passionate hope, which took her breath away. If she could ever see but one thing properly she might quite easily see God.
The thought so moved her that she flung herself down on the short wind-blown grass and gazed up into the sky above her, waiting, rigid in an effort to reach singleness of mind. Nothing happened. In a few minutes she became painfully exhausted and very cold. The wind in her hair came straight off the snowfields. She began to think more kindly of her exasperating family down at the Karindehütte. She would go back to them.
She pulled herself together for the descent, aware that a frightful weariness was aching in all her bones. Glancing down towards the path she saw that a man was standing there, staring at the mountains in a kind of lost trance, as if he had discovered the secret thing which had escaped her. It was Lewis. She blew a loving little kiss at his unconscious figure thinking how well she was acquainted with the shape of his head at the back. She could have drawn it with her eyes shut; she had sat so often watching him while he conducted symphonies to which she did not always listen. And in this place he did not look more solitary than he always seemed in crowded concert halls.
Presently his vision seemed to break up, and he took to walking about, in a distraught frenzy, stumbling sometimes, and often almost running. She knew what ailed him and was very sorry. Living in a family of artists she had come to regard this implacable thing which took them as a great misfortune. Oddly enough it had missed her out; alone of the tribe, she was safe from it. She did not believe that she would ever be driven to these monstrous creative efforts. She desired nothing but to be allowed to look on at the world; and the result of her observations had been that she rated the writing of music as an atrocious and painful disease. She pitied her friend when it assailed him as much as if he had fallen down and broken his leg. To her the thing was a hidden curse, a family werewolf, always ready to spring out and devour them all. It was at the bottom of most of their misfortunes. Its place in her scheme of things was approximate to the position which the devil might hold in the mind of a better instructed little girl.
‘Poor Lewis,’ she murmured. ‘I thought as much! He’s been looking like a broody hen all the week.’
She guessed that he must not discover her and was for stealing off down the far side of the hill when he caught sight of her. Immediately he hailed her, bounding up the slope very quickly, so that she could not get away.
‘Tessa! What are you doing here? Aren’t you cold?’
He spoke almost mechanically, as if he hardly knew what he said. She saw that he was shaken and unhappy at being caught off his guard. She said that she had come up to look at the moon, and he smiled rather sourly.
‘It’s a pity to go moon gazing at your age,’ he told her. ‘But I suppose it’s a symptom.’
‘What of?’
‘The green sickness.’
‘What’s that? It sounds very disagreeable.’
He looked as if he meant it to be disagreeable. He insisted upon explaining himself with a bitterness which said to her, as plainly as possible, that she was not to suppose he was come to these moonlit mountains because he found them at all beautiful, or that he had any regard for the feelings of anyone else who might happen to think so. She felt that he deserved to be teased a little, and when he had done she said:
‘What a ray of sunshine you are! It was the green sickness, I suppose, brought you up here. I thought at first you’d come to look for that sixpence we lost two years ago. I saw you running round in rings.’
‘How long have you been up here?’ he asked suspiciously.
‘Longer than you. You disturbed me.’
‘Why didn’t you say so?’
‘I didn’t want to be disturbed. I was busy thinking I was just going off quietly to a less crowded part of this mountain when you must needs interrupt me.’
She was edging away from him. He saw suddenly that she was really afraid of him. Something that he had said must have hurt her. He laughed and asked what she was thinking of, whereat she took to her heels, ignoring his shout that she should stop. Wildly she fled down the hill, terrified, hearing him gain upon her, and seized by the primitive panic of the hunted. When, quite soon, he caught her, she screamed loudly.
‘Damn you! Why can’t you stop when I call?’ he panted. ‘Now tell me … My God, Tessa! What’s the matter?’
‘Go away!’
‘Have you got a handkerchief?’ he asked presently. ‘Because I lent mine to Tony, who also needed it tonight.’
At the mention of Tony her tears ceased abruptly. She turned away from him with a slight, wounded gesture, and was silent.
‘This seems to be a habit in your family,’ he jibed. ‘If you’ve got a handkerchief, perhaps I’d better retire.’
But he did not offer to go. He stood still, watching her intently, full of a sort of compunction. She was nearer than he liked to the rocky edge of the path, which dropped away to a sea of clouds below. He had an apprehension that she might spring over if he moved or touched her. He waited and was startled to hear her speaking in a low voice, almost to herself:
‘Tony’s been crying all the evening.’
‘Oh, Tony!’ he exclaimed impatiently.
And he took a short turn along the path, away from her, as if he was afraid that she would force upon him some piece of information about Tony. He did not want to hear anything about Tony. She was a white flower, cast into the pit. He had been very fond of her when she was a little wild thing, like Tessa, a delicate, audacious creature, trapped now in the inevitable mill. No man endowed with heart and imagination could care to contemplate such a spectacle.
Lewis had both these commodities in a distressing degree. He spent his life in running away from them, and his cruelty was a kind of instinctive defence which he had set up against them. His refuge had been a sombre arrogance which denied to the rest of the world capacities for suffering equal to his own. He hurt his friends by way of demonstrating for his own satisfaction their comfortable insensibility. He really wished to convince himself that the majority of mankind is too stupid to apprehend anything keener than physical pain, and he nourished this illusion by a perverse frequenting of the company of people who were, for the most part, more brutal than himself.
Even so, he was not altogether safe. On the occasions when, despite his resistance, some sorrow of the outer world pierced the armour of his egotism, he was, out of all proportion, disturbed, simply because he would not admit that tears are the common lot. He fled from his own compassion.
He had done his best, of late, to avoid Antonia, and, if it had been possible, he would have avoided Teresa while she was thus shaken with the reverberations of her sister’s evil fortune. Only that he could never fly from Teresa. She was a darling, simply, and must always be comforted, even though his own ineptitude had done the damage. She was the sweet exception to all the young, fierce generalisations with which