Free White Narcissus by Raymond Knister Page B

without seeming to have heard her daughter’s last words. Then with a sharp glance aside she took a chair, laughing.
    “Yes, you’ll have to see to dinner, now you’ve said you would.”
    “I’ve every sympathy with her intentions,” remarked Milne, “and I’m sure she can feel for us, since she has been out developing an appetite of her own.” He tried to put understanding and support into his smiling attitude toward the girl. She turned away to the kitchen, leaving the door open.
    Silence seemed to deaden the air of the room like a gas. There was nothing to be said to this lady, and the impression of the first seconds that she was an enemy returned to him, became conscious, so that he watched her critically.
    Her dress was not old-fashioned: timeless rather, so that it would have seemed to become her in any age or scene: a long black skirt, a white shirt-waist. Her hair was white, and though brushed straight back, so abundant that it seemed atangled mass. Her face was almost equally colourless, except for black eyebrows, dark burnt-out eyes. Her mouth kept up a constant movement of mood or, he considered, of calculated foiling of decipherment.
    Half purposely he waited, feeling that she might be driven to utterance. What things in her soul! A feeling of pity arose upon his reverence of the mystery of life. His eyes roved hither and thither about the room, as though unaccustomed to it, then, as if in resolved defiance, rested upon the narcissi. She opened her lips.
    “Look at them!” She extended her hand, smooth and well-kept. “Look at them. Aren’t they beautiful?” She laughed abruptly, as at an understatement so grotesque. “Beautiful!”
    “Your narcissi are very nice,” observed Richard Milne with sedate inflections, “and you have a good number of them too!” He did not veil the acid of his smile, behind firm eyes.
    Her silence became remote as she looked at the flowers, then she seemed to return to him, and finally she said, as though satirically:
    “They’re worth coming a long way to see, aren’t they, Mr. Milne?”
    He had to own himself beaten at the futile and childish game of discomfiture – what he called the feeling which gave rise to alarmed pity, carrying anxiety into his mind. Candour was better than such obvious perversity. There would have to be a reckoning, and he struck, with a directness which surprised them both.
    “Mrs. Lethen,” he contended in deliberate tones, “don’t you find something more beautiful in the souls of people about you than in these flowers? Something warmer at least, that concerns you, your own fate and your happiness, rather than a momentary pleasure of the eyes. Are you sure that youhave not raised up an idol? Are you not likely to waken some time and find that everything vital in your life is gone, and there is left only these wilted flowers to mock you? What of the happiness of your daughter? Have you ever thought that Ada deserved your support, all your effort now, to gain the happiness which the world, which life is saving for her, and which for reasons which you know it may be hard for her to discover? It is possible to look across the fields of everyday life to some mirage of mountains, longing to be there, and to find after years that one’s limbs are too worn even to gather the valley flowers of reality. And then the mirage dissolves; you are left with nothing who might have had all the sweets of reality without the empty yearning of thwarted longing for unseizable beauty. But how empty and cold is such beauty without the part fulfilled by others. Think how wonderfully different Ada’s life would be, and your own. Sacrifice is the badge of motherhood, and the honour of it finer than any flower.”
    Labelling himself a prig, he was consciously letting himself be carried away, so that, while at first his feeling had driven him to words, now the words were cumulating, carrying forward his emotion.
    “The world! Beauty! The soul! Idols!”