The Brass Bed
- Автор: Флора Флетчер
- Год: 1956
- Язык: английский
- Год: Lion Books
- Жанр: Романы для взрослых
Электронная книга - «The Brass Bed». Краткое содержание книги:
...and the root of it all lay hidden in the secret of THE BRASS BED.
He finished his survey of the cans and turned back to Jolly.
“What happened when he fell out?”
“Well,” she said, “he came up, and the boat had drifted away from the place he came, and I jumped in to help him, but he was obviously terribly frightened and unreasonable, and he fought me and was too strong to handle. He got away in the current and was gone, and I swam over to the bank and came back here after waiting long enough to make sure he didn’t come up again anywhere that I could see.”
“He didn’t come up again?”
“I didn’t see him.”
“All right. There’s something else that bothers me, though. After he fell in, why didn’t you just stay in the boat and stick out an oar for him to get hold of, or why didn’t you row the boat over so he could crawl back in? Seems to me either of those things would have been easier and maybe better than jumping in after him.”
“I don’t know. I suppose I was a little excited and merely did the first thing I thought of to do.”
“I can see that you might have been excited, and it’s nothing I can blame you for. The truth is, I’ve been admiring your self-control. You aren’t hysterical like you might expect a woman to be after she’d watched her husband drown, and as a matter of fact you don’t look to me like you’d even been crying any. Personally, I admire a woman who can keep herself in hand.”
It was another one of those comments that might have implied more than its literal meaning, or on the other hand maybe no more at all, and it was impossible to be sure about it from his looks or inflection one way or another. He was pretty good at that, to be truthful about it, saying things that left you wondering, and it made you very uncomfortable. No one said anything, and he looked around at the empty beer cans again and popped five knuckles.
“I guess I’d better go down to the river and look things over,” he said, “but I don’t suppose there’s anything much to see. I’ve got a crew coming out here soon, and we’ll start working to recover the body. That may take a long time, though, and in the meanwhile you people may as well go back to town if you want to.”
By this time he had followed the cans with his eyes until he’d come around to Jolly again, and he lifted his eyes and looked at her directly.
“I’ll get in touch when I’ve got any news,” he said. “I’m sorry for what happened, but I can’t help it, and I hope I haven’t distressed you any because of the questions I had to ask.”
He turned and went across the clearing and into the trees. Fran got up slowly from the ground where she had been sitting all this time.
“No one introduced me,” she said. “Why didn’t someone introduce me to the sheriff?”
“Never mind,” Sid said. “What I think is, I had better take Jolly home.”
Jolly didn’t seem to hear. She came over to me and took one of my hands and held it against her cheek. Her own hands were cold.
“I always seem to get you into trouble,” she said.
“It’s not my trouble,” I said. “It’s yours.”
“Nevertheless, you are somewhat involved, and I’m sorry.”
“As for me, I think Sid’s idea is a good one. I think you had better let him take you home.”
“Do you want me to go?”
“Yes, I do.”
She took her cheek off my hand and looked at me, and it was remarkable but true that even after jumping into a river and being badgered by a sheriff she was still incredibly lovely and somehow untouched and possessed of a kind of pathetic dignity.
“If that is how you feel,” she said, “I suppose I will have to go.”
She walked over to the Caddy, and Sid followed her. Fran turned to Harvey and shook her head regretfully.
“Under the circumstances,” she said, “I will have to go also.”
“It looks like it,” he said.
The Caddy left. I sat down on the ground, and Harvey sat down beside me, and the cabin and the clearing and the river were no longer the familiar features of a fine and comforting place to fish, but the strange and threatening remnants of an ugly, ending world.
“Do you mind my saying that I think you were pretty rough on Jolly under the circumstances, old boy?” Harvey said.
“Yes, I do. I mind.”
“Well, you are upset, and I must say it’s no wonder. I guess this place will never seem the same again, will it?”
“I guess it won’t.”
He looked off across the river and thought about something for a while. Then he stood up. “I think I’ll pick up a few of the cans,” he said.
10
We returned to town that evening, and it was dusk when Harvey let me out in front of the house I lived in. The street lamps were on, and the lights in the houses, and there were live things making noises in the trees. “Won’t you come up?” I said.
“No,” he said, “I think I had better get along if you don’t mind.”
“It’s all right. I don’t mind.”
“I’m sorry for what happened, old boy.”
“I’m sorry too, but it can’t be helped now.”
He drove away with the boat on the trailer behind the car, and I went upstairs to the apartment. I opened the windows, and the dead air stirred, the cooler night air moving into it from outside, and I undressed in the dark room and put on a robe and went down the hall to the bathroom and had a shower. When I returned, the room was already considerably cooler, and I put on a clean pair of shorts and sat on the bed in the shorts in the dark, feeling the air move on my skin and staring at a white blur in the corner of the room which was a blank sheet of paper in my typewriter. I wondered if the novel about the goliard would ever get finished, which didn’t seem at all likely the way things were going, and I wondered if it would ever get published, even if it got finished, and this also seemed very unlikely in the general run of luck as it was.
It is possible that it happened just the way she said, I thought. It is entirely possible. Perhaps he stood up in a spirit of anger or of amorousness and started toward her and simply lost his balance and fell. Perhaps the boat had drifted far enough away by the time he came up so that he could not reach it, and perhaps, as she said, the first thing that occurred to her was to jump in after him and try to save him, and if that is what she thought and tried to do, it was really a brave and commendable thing, though possibly mistaken. He was very big and strong, much too big and strong for so slight a woman, and if he was terrified and fought her, as frightened people are supposed to do in the water, it is certain that she could not have held him or helped him or prevented his slipping away.
This is what I thought. I lay on my back on the bed and tried to hold the thought in my mind until it became strong and secure and sure of itself, but I began to think in spite of myself of how she had wished that he would die, and how she had said that he was afraid of the water and could not swim, and how right afterward in time that seemed far too short he had in fact died, as she had wished, of drowning, as she had mentioned. I closed my eyes, and at once behind my lids I saw her bend forward in the boat and say something to him and motion him to come to her, and he stood up precariously and moved toward her in the boat, and when he came very near she rose suddenly and pushed him, and he went over into the dark water. I opened my eyes to erase the sight, but the figures only moved out into the darkness of the room above me, and they seemed somehow to be illuminated so that the darkness did not obscure them, and he was in the water reaching for the boat, and she took one of the oars and struck at him, and he disappeared and was gone.
It was impossible to lie there and see these things and to think of what she had said and what had happened, and so I got up after a while and decided that it would be helpful to listen to some music. I had always listened a great deal to music, though I had no musical talent myself, but lately I had got out of the habit because of various things that interfered, and now I went over to the automatic phonograph in the dark and got out the albums of Beethoven from memory. The symphonies were in numerical order, and I selected by touch the odd numbered ones, the third and the seventh and the ninth, excluding the fifth, and I played these softly in ascending order, and this took quite a long while, especially because of the ninth, which is a very long symphony even as symphonies go. I was right in thinking that they might be helpful, and by the time the ninth had finished playing I had decided that there was something that I would do. I thought at first that I might do it right then, that night, but then I decided that I would do it instead in the morning, and what I thought I would do was to go to Jolly and ask her directly how it had happened, and whatever she told me was what I would always believe afterward. After deciding this, I felt relaxed and much better, and I lay down on the bed again and was able after a while to go to sleep.