PART TWO 7 страница

He said:

“That isn't the amended version of the iambics. Wilamovitz Mö llendorf that we used…”

To interrupt him Mr Duchemin put his thin hand courteously on Macmaster's arm. It had a great cornelian seal set in red gold on the third finger. He went on, reciting in ecstasy; his head a little on one side as if he were listening to invisible choristers. Macmaster really disliked the Oxford intonation of Latin. He looked for a short moment at Mrs Duchemin; her eyes were upon him; large, shadowy, full of gratitude. He saw, too, that they were welling over with wetness.

He looked quietly back at Duchemin. And suddenly it came to him; she was suffering! She was probably suffering intensely. It had not occurred to him that she would suffer—partly because he was without nerves himself, partly because he had conceived of Mrs Duchemin as firstly feeling admiration for himself. Now it seemed to him abominable that she should suffer.

Mrs Duchemin was in agony. Macmaster had looked at her intently and looked away! She read into his glance contempt for her situation, and anger that he should have been placed in such a position. In her pain she stretched out her hand and touched his arm.

Macmaster was aware of her touch; his mind seemed filled with sweetness. But he kept his head obstinately averted. For her sake he did not dare to look away from the maniacal face. A crisis was coming. Mr Duchemin had arrived at the English translation. He placed his hands on the table-cloth in preparation for rising; he was going to stand on his feet and shout obscenities to the other guests. It was the exact moment.

Macmaster made his voice dry and penetrating to say:

“'Youth of tepid loves' is a lamentable rendering of puer callide! It's lamentably antiquated…”

Duchemin chewed and said:

“What? What? What's that? ”

“It's just like Oxford to use an eighteenth-century crib. I suppose that's Whiston and Ditton? Something like that…” He observed Duchemin, brought out of his impulse, to be wavering—as if he were coming awake in a strange place! He added:

“Anyhow it's wretched schoolboy smut. Fifth form. Or not even that. Have some galantine. I'm going to. Your sole's cold. ”

Mr Duchemin looked down at his plate.

“Yes! Yes! ” he muttered. “Yes! With sugar and vinegar sauce! ” The prize-fighter slipped away to the sideboard, an admirable, quiet fellow; as unobtrusive as a burying beetle. Macmaster said:

“You were about to tell me something for my little monograph. What became of Maggie… Maggie Simpson. The Scots girl who was model for Alla Finestra del Cielo? ”

Mr Duchemin looked at Macmaster with sane, muddled, rather exhausted eyes:

“Alla Finestra! ” he exclaimed: “Oh yes! I've got the watercolour. I saw her sitting for it and bought it on the spot…” He looked again at his place, started at sight of the galantine and began to eat ravenously: “A beautiful girl! ” he said. “Very long necked… She wasn't of course… eh… respectable! She's living yet, I think. Very old. I saw her two years ago. She had a lot of pictures. Relics of course! In the Whitechapel Road she lived. She was naturally of that class…” He went muttering on, his head over his plate. Macmaster considered that the fit was over. He was irresistibly impelled to turn to Mrs Duchemin; her face was rigid, stiff. He said swiftly:

“If he'll eat a little: get his stomach filled… It calls the blood down from the head…”

She said:

“Oh, forgive! It's dreadful for you! Myself I will never forgive! ”

He said:

“No! No! … Why, it's what I'm for! ”

A deep emotion brought her whole white face to life:

“Oh, you good man! ” she said in her profound tones, and they remained gazing at each other.

Suddenly, from behind Macmaster's back Mr Duchemin shouted:

“I say he made a settlement on her, dum casta et sola, of course. Whilst she remained chaste and alone! ”

Mr Duchemin, suddenly feeling the absence of the powerful will that had seemed to overweigh his own like a great force in the darkness, was on his feet, panting and delighted:

“Chaste! ” he shouted. “Chaste you observe what a world of suggestion in the word…” He surveyed the opulent broadness of his tablecloth; it spread out before his eyes as if it had been a great expanse of meadow in which he could gallop, relaxing his limbs after long captivity. He shouted three obscene words and went on in his Oxford Movement voice: “But chastity…”

Mrs Wannop suddenly said:

“Oh! ” and looked at her daughter, whose face grew slowly crimson as she continued to peel a peach. Mrs Wannop turned to Mr Horsley beside her and said:

“You write, too, I believe, Mr Horsley. No doubt something more learned than my poor readers would care for…” Mr Horsley had been preparing, according to his instructions from Mrs Duchemin, to shout a description of an article he had been writing about the Mosella of Ausonius, but as he was slow in starting the lady got in first. She talked on serenely about the tastes of the large public. Tietjens leaned across to Miss Wannop and, holding in his right hand a half-peeled fig, said to her as loudly as he could:

“I've got a message for you from Mr Waterhouse. He says if you'll…”

The completely deaf Miss Fox—who had had her training by writing—remarked diagonally to Mrs Duchemin:

“I think we shall have thunder to-day. Have you remarked the number of minute insects…”

“When my revered preceptor, ” Mr Duchemin thundered on, “drove away in the carriage on his wedding day he said to his bride: 'We will live like blessed angels! ' How sublime! I, too, after my nuptials…”

Mrs Duchemin suddenly screamed:

“Oh… no! ”

As if checked for a moment in their stride all the others paused—for a breath. Then they continued talking with polite animation and listening with minute attention. To Tietjens that seemed the highest achievement and justification of English manners!

Parry, the prize-fighter, had twice caught his master by the arm and shouted that breakfast was getting cold. He said now to Macmaster that he and the Rev. Mr Horsley could get Mr Duchemin away, but there'd be a hell of a fight. Macmaster whispered: “Wait! ” and, turning to Mrs Duchemin he said: “I can stop him. Shall I? ” She said:

“Yes! Yes! Anything! ” He observed tears; isolated upon her cheeks, a thing he had never seen. With caution and with hot rage he whispered into the prize-fighter's hairy ear that was held down to him:

“Punch him in the kidney. With your thumb. As hard as you can without breaking your thumb…”

Mr Duchemin had just declaimed:

“I, too, after my nuptials…” He began to wave his arms, pausing and looking from unlistening face to unlistening face. Mrs Duchemin had just screamed.

Mr Duchemin thought that the arrow of God struck him. He imagined himself an unworthy messenger. In such pain as he had never conceived of he fell into his chair and sat huddled up, a darkness covering his eyes.

“He won't get up again, ” Macmaster whispered to the appreciative pugilist. “He'll want to. But he'll be afraid to. ” He said to Mrs Duchemin:

“Dearest lady! It's all over. I assure you of that. It's a scientific nerve counter-irritant. ”

Mrs Duchemin said:

“Forgive! ” with one deep sob: “You can never respect…”

She felt her eyes explore his face as the wretch in a cell explores the face of his executioner for a sign of pardon. Her heart stayed still: her breath suspended itself…

Then complete heaven began. Upon her left palm she felt cool fingers beneath the cloth. This man knew always the exact right action! Upon the fingers, cool, like spikenard and ambrosia, her fingers closed themselves.

In complete bliss, in a quiet room, his voice went on talking. At first with great neatness of phrase, but with what refinement! He explained that certain excesses being merely nervous cravings, can be combated if not, indeed, cured altogether, by the fear of, by the determination not to endure, sharp physical pain—which of course is a nervous matter, too! …

Parry, at a given moment, had said into his master's ear:

“It's time you prepared for your sermon to-morrow, sir, ” and Mr Duchemin had gone as quietly as he had arrived, gliding over the thick carpet to the small door.

Then Macmaster said to her:

“You come from Edinburgh? You'll know the Fifeshire coast then. ”

“Do I not? ” she said. His hand remained in hers. He began to talk of the whins on the links and the sanderlings along the flats, with such a Scots voice and in phrases so vivid that she saw her childhood again, and had in her eyes a wetness of a happier order. She released his cool hand after a long, gentle pressure. But when it was gone it was as if much of her life went. She said: “You'll be knowing Kingussie House, just outside your town. It was there I spent my holidays as a child. ”

He answered:

“Maybe I played round it a barefoot lad and you in your grandeur within. ”

She said:

“Oh, no! Hardly! There would be the difference of our ages! And… and indeed there are other things I will tell you. ”

She addressed herself to Tietjens, with all her heroic armour of charm buckled on again:

“Only think! I find Mr Macmaster and I almost played together in our youth. ”

He looked at her, she knew, with a commiseration that she hated:

“Then you're an older friend than I, ” he said, “though I've known him since I was fourteen, and I don't believe you could be a better. He's a good fellow…”

She hated him for his condescension towards a better man and for his warning—she knew it was a warning—to her to spare his friend.

Mrs Wannop gave a distinct but not an alarming scream. Mr Horsley had been talking to her about an unusual fish that used to inhabit the Moselle in Roman times. The Mosella of Ausonius; the subject of the essay he was writing is mostly fish…

“No, ” he shouted, “it's been said to be the roach. But there are no roach in the river now. Vannulis viridis, oculisque. No. It's the other way round: Red fins…”

Mrs Wannop's scream and her wide gesture: her hand, indeed, was nearly over his mouth and her trailing sleeve across his plate! —were enough to interrupt him.

“Tietjens! ” she again screamed. “Is it possible? …”

She pushed her daughter out of her seat and, moving round beside the young man, she overwhelmed him with vociferous love. As Tietjens had turned to speak to Mrs Duchemin she had recognized his aquiline half-profile as exactly that of his father at her own wedding breakfast. To the table that knew it by heart—though Tietjens himself didn't! —she recited the story of how his father had saved her life, and was her mascot. And she offered the son—for to the father she had never been allowed to make any return—her horse, her purse, her heart, her time, her all. She was so completely sincere that, as the party broke up, she just nodded to Macmaster and, catching Tietjens forcibly by the arm, said perfunctorily to the critic:

“Sorry I can't help you any more with the article, but my dear Chrissie must have the books he wants. At once! This very minute! ”

She moved off, Tietjens grappled to her, her daughter following as a young swan follows its parents. In her gracious manner Mrs Duchemin had received the thanks of her guests for her wonderful breakfast and had hoped that now that they had found their ways there…

The echoes of the dispersed festival seemed to whisper in the room. Macmaster and Mrs Duchemin faced each other, their eyes wary—and longing.

He said:

“It's dreadful to have to go now. But I have an engagement. ”

She said:

“Yes! I know! With your great friends. ”

He answered:

“Oh, only with Mr Waterhouse and General Campion… and Mr Sandbach, of course…”

She had a moment of fierce pleasure at the thought that Tietjens was not to be of the company: her man would be outsoaring the vulgarian of his youth, of his past that she didn't know… Almost harshly she exclaimed:

“I don't want you to be mistaken about Kingussie House. It was just a holiday school. Not a grand place. ”

“It was very costly, ” he said, and she seemed to waver on her feet.

“Yes! yes! ” she said, nearly in a whisper. “But you're so grand now! I was only the child of very poor bodies. Johnston of Midlothian. But very poor bodies… I… He bought me, you might say. You know… Put me to very rich schools; when I was fourteen… my people were glad… But I think if my mother had known when I married…” She writhed her whole body. “Oh, dreadful! dreadful! ” she exclaimed. “I want you to know…”

His hands were shaking as if he had been in a jolting cart…

Their lips met in a passion of pity and tears. He removed his mouth to say: “I must see you this evening… I shall be mad with anxiety about you. ” She whispered: “Yes! yes! In the yew walk. ” Her eyes were closed, she pressed her body fiercely into his. “You are the… first… man…” she breathed.

“I will be the only one for ever, ” he said.

He began to see himself; in the tall room, with the long curtains: a round, eagle mirror reflected them gleaming: like a bejewelled picture with great depths: the entwined figures.

They drew apart to gaze at each other: holding hands… The voice of Tietjens said:

“Macmaster! You're to dine at Mrs Wannop's to-night. Don't dress; I shan't. ” He was looking at them without any expression, as if he had interrupted a game of cards; large, grey, fresh-featured, the white patch glistening on the side of his grizzling hair.

Macmaster said:

“All right. It's near here, isn't it? … I've got an engagement just after…” Tietjens said that that would be all right: he would be working himself. All night probably. For Waterhouse…”

Mrs Duchemin said with swift jealousy:

“You let him order you about…” Tietjens was gone. Macmaster said absently:

“Who? Chrissie! … Yes! Sometimes I him, sometimes he me… We make engagements. My best friend. The most brilliant man in England, of the best stock too. Tietjens of Groby…” Feeling that she didn't appreciate his friend he was abstractedly piling on commendations: “He's making calculations now. For the Government that no other man in England could make. But he's going…”

An extreme languor had settled on him, he felt weakened but yet triumphant with the cessation of her grasp. It occurred to him numbly that he would be seeing less of Tietjens. A grief. He heard himself quote:

“'Since when we stand side by side! '” His voice trembled.

“Ah yes! ” came in her deep tones: The beautiful lines… They're true. We must part. In this world…” They seemed to her lovely and mournful words to say; heavenly to have them to say, vibratingly, arousing all sorts of images. Macmaster, mournfully too, said:

“We must wait. ” He added fiercely: “But to-night, at dusk! ” He imagined the dusk, under the yew hedge. A shining motor drew up in the sunlight under the window.

“Yes! yes! ” she said. “There's a little white gate from the lane. ” She imagined their interview of passion and mournfulness amongst dim objects half seen. That she could allow herself of glamour.

Afterwards he must come to the house to ask after her health and they would walk side by side on the lawn, publicly, in the warm light, talking of indifferent but beautiful poetries, a little wearily, but with what currents electrifying and passing between their flesh… And then: long, circumspect years…

Macmaster went down the tall steps to the car that gleamed in the summer sun. The roses shone over the supremely levelled turf. His heel met the stones with the hard tread of a conqueror. He could have shouted aloud!

Tietjens lit a pipe beside the stile, having first meticulously cleaned out the bowl and the stem with a surgical needle, in his experience the best of all pipe-cleaners, since, made of German silver, it is flexible, won't corrode and is indestructible. He wiped off methodically, with a great dock-leaf, the glutinous brown products of burnt tobacco, the young woman, as he was aware, watching him from behind his back. As soon as he had restored the surgical needle to the notebook in which it lived, and had put the notebook into its bulky pocket, Miss Wannop moved off down the path: it was only suited for Indian file, and had on the left hand a ten-foot, untrimmed quicken hedge, the hawthorn blossoms just beginning to blacken at the edges and small green haws to show. On the right the grass was above knee high and bowed to those that passed. The sun was exactly vertical; the chaffinches said “Pink! Pink! ”; the young woman had an agreeable back.

This, Tietjens thought, is England! A man and a maid walk through Kentish grass-fields: the grass ripe for the scythe. The man honourable, clean, upright; the maid virtuous, clean, vigorous: he of good birth; she of birth quite as good; each filled with a too good breakfast that each could yet capably digest. Each come just from an admirably appointed establishment: a table surrounded by the best people: their promenade sanctioned, as it were by the Church—two clergy—the State: two Government officials; by mothers, friends, old maids… Each knew the names of birds that piped and grasses that bowed: chaffinch, greenfinch, yellow-ammer (not, my dear, hammer! amonrer from the Middle High German for “finch”), garden warbler, Dartford warbler, pied-wagtail, known as “dishwasher. ” (These charming local dialect names. ) Marguerites over the grass, stretching in an infinite white blaze: grasses purple in a haze to the far distant hedgerow: coltsfoot, wild white clover, sainfoin, Italian rye grass (all technical names that the best people must know: the best grass mixture for permanent pasture on the Wealden loam). In the hedge: our lady's bedstraw: dead-nettle: bachelor's button (but in Sussex they call it ragged robin, my dear): so interesting! Cowslip (paigle, you know from the old French pasque, meaning Easter); burr, burdock (farmer that thy wife may thrive, but not burr and burdock wive! ); violet leaves, the flowers of course over; black bryony; wild clematis, later it's old man's beard; purple loose-strife. (That our young maid's long purples call and literal shepherds give a grosser name. So racy of the soil! )… Walk, then, through the field, gallant youth and fair maid, minds cluttered up with all these useless anodynes for thought, quotation, imbecile epithets! Dead silent: unable to talk: from too good breakfast to probably extremely bad lunch. The young woman, so the young man is duly warned, to prepare it: pink india-rubber, half-cooked cold beef, no doubt: tepid potatoes, water in the bottom of willow-pattern dish. (No! Not genuine willow-pattern, of course, Mr Tietjens. ) Overgrown lettuce with wood-vinegar to make the mouth scream with pain; pickles, also preserved in wood-vinegar; two bottles of public-house beer that, on opening, squirts to the wall. A glass of invalid port… for the gentleman! … and the jaws hardly able to open after the too enormous breakfast at 10. 15. Midday now!

“God's England! ” Tietjens exclaimed to himself in high good humour. “Land of Hope and Glory! —F natural descending to tonic C major: chord of 6-4, suspension over dominant seventh to common chord of C major… All absolutely correct! Double basses, cellos, all violins: all wood wind: all brass. Full grand organ: all stops: special vox humana and key-bugle effect… Across the counties came the sound of bugles that his father knew… Pipe exactly right. It must be: pipe of Englishman of good birth: ditto tobacco. Attractive young woman's back. English midday mid-summer. Best climate in the world! No day on which man may not go abroad! ” Tietjens paused and aimed with his hazel stick an immense blow at a tall spike of yellow mullein with its undecided, furry, glaucous leaves and its undecided, buttony, unripe lemon-coloured flowers. The structure collapsed, gracefully, like a woman killed among crinolines!

“Now I'm a bloody murderer! ” Tietjens said. “Not gory! Green-stained with vital fluid of innocent plant… And by God! Not a woman in the country who won't let you rape her after an hour's acquaintance! ” He slew two more mulleins and a sow-thistle! A shadow, but not from the sun, a gloom, lay across the sixty acres of purple grass bloom and marguerites, white: like petticoats of lace over the grass!

“By God, ” he said, “Church! State! Army! H. M. Ministry: H. M. Opposition: H. M. City Man… All the governing class! All rotten! Thank God we've got a navy! … But perhaps that's rotten too! Who knows! Britannia needs no bulwarks… Then thank God for the upright young man and the virtuous maiden in the summer fields: he Tory of the Tories as he should be: she suffragette of the militants: militant here on earth… as she should be! As she should be! In the early decades of the twentieth century however else can a woman keep clean and wholesome! Ranting from platforms, splendid for the lungs: bashing in policemen's helmets… No! It's I do that: my part, I think, miss! … Carrying heavy banners in twenty-mile processions through streets of Sodom. All splendid! I bet she's virtuous. But you can tell it in the eye. Nice eyes! Attractive back. Virginal cockiness… Yes, better occupation for mothers or empire than attending on lewd husbands year in year out till you're as hysterical as a female cat on heat… You could see it in her: that woman: you can see it in most of 'em! Thank God then for the Tory, upright young married man and the suffragette kid… Backbone of England! …”

He killed another flower.

“But by God! we're both under a cloud! Both! … That kid and I! And General Lord Edward Campion, Lady Claudine Sandbach, and the Hon. Paul, M. P. (suspended) to spread the tale… And forty toothless fogies in the club to spread it: and no end visiting books yawning to have your names cut out of them, my boy! … My dear boy: I so regret: your father's oldest friend… By Jove, the pistachio nut of that galantine! Repeating! Breakfast gone wrong: gloomy reflections! Thought I could stand anything: digestion of an ostrich… But no! Gloomy reflections: I'm hysterical: like that large-eyed whore! For same reason! Wrong diet and wrong life: diet meant for partridge shooters over the turnips consumed by the sedentary. England the land of pills… Das Pillen-Land, the Germans call us. Very properly… And, damn it: outdoor diet: boiled mutton, turnips: sedentary life… and forced up against the filthiness of the world: your nose in it all day long! … Why, hang it, I'm as badly off as she. Sylvia's as bad as Duchemin! … I'd never have thought that… No wonder meat's turned to prussic acid… prime cause of neurasthenia… What a beastly muddle! Poor Macmaster! He's finished. Poor devil: he'd better have ogled this kid. He could have sung: 'Highland Mary' a better tune than 'This is the end of every man's desire'… You can cut it on his tombstone, you can write it on his card that a young man tacked on to a paulo-post Pre-Raphaelite prostitute…”

He stopped suddenly in his walk. It had occurred to him that he ought not to be walking with this girl!

“But damn it all, ” he said to himself, “she makes a good screen for Sylvia… who cares! She must chance it. She's probably struck off all their beastly visiting lists already… as a suffragette! ”

Miss Wannop, a cricket pitch or so ahead of him, hopped over a stile: left foot on the step, right on the top bar, a touch of the left on the other steps, and down on the white, drifted dust of a road they no doubt had to cross. She stood waiting, her back still to him… Her nimble footwork, her attractive back, seemed to him, now, infinitely pathetic. To let scandal attach to her was like cutting the wings of a goldfinch: the bright creature, yellow, white, golden and delicate, that in the sunlight makes a haze with its wings beside thistle-tops. No; damn it! it was worse; it was worse than putting out, as the bird-fancier does, the eyes of a chaffinch… Infinitely pathetic!

Above the stile, in an elm, a chaffinch said: “Pink! pink! ” The imbecile sound filled him with rage; he said to the bird:

“Damn your eyes! Have them put out, then! ” The beastly bird that made the odious noise, when it had its eyes put out, at least squealed like any other skylark or tom-tit. Damn all birds, field naturalists, botanists! In the same way he addressed the back of Miss Wannop: “Damn your eyes! Have your chastity impugned then! What do you speak to strange men in public for? You know you can't do it in this country. If it were a decent, straight land like Ireland where people cut each other's throats for clean issues: Papist versus Prot… well, you could! You could walk through Ireland from east to west and speak to every man you met… 'Rich and rare were the gems she wore… ' To every man you met as long as he wasn't an Englishman of good birth: that would deflower you! ” He was scrambling clumsily over the stile. “Well! be deflowered then: lose your infantile reputation. You've spoken to strange pitch: you're defiled… with the benefit of Clergy, Army, Cabinet, Administration, Opposition, mothers and old maids of England… They'd all tell you you can't talk to a strange man, in the sunlight, on the links, without becoming a screen for some Sylvia or other… Then be a screen for Sylvia: get struck off the visiting books! The deeper you're implicated, the more bloody villain I am! I'd like the whole lot to see us here: that would settle it…”

Nevertheless, when at the roadside he stood level with Miss Wannop who did not look at him, and saw the white road running to right and left with no stile opposite, he said gruffly to her:

“Where's the next stile? I hate walking on roads! ” She pointed with her chin along the opposite hedgerow. “Fifty yards! ” she said.

“Come along! ” he exclaimed, and set off at a trot almost. It had come into his head that it would be just the beastly sort of thing that would happen if a car with General Campion and Lady Claudine and Paul Sandbach all aboard should come along that blinding stretch of road: or one alone: perhaps the General driving the dog-cart he affected. He said to himself:

“By God! If they cut this girl I'd break their backs over my knee! ” and he hastened. “Just the beastly thing that would happen. ” The road probably led straight in at the front door of Mountby!

Miss Wannop trotted along a little in his rear. She thought him the most extraordinary man: as mad as he was odious. Sane people, if they're going to hurry—but why hurry! —do it in the shade of field hedgerows, not in the white blaze of county council roads. Well, he could go ahead. In the next field she was going to have it out with him: she didn't intend to be hot with running: let him be, his hateful, but certainly noticeable eyes, protruding at her like a lobster's; but she was cool and denunciatory in her pretty blouse…

There was a dog-cart coming behind them!

Suddenly it came into her head: that fool had been lying when he had said that the police meant to let them alone: lying over the breakfast-table… The dog-cart contained the police: after them! She didn't waste time looking round: she wasn't a fool like Atalanta in the egg-race. She picked up her heels and sprinted. She beat him by a yard and a half to the kissing-gate, white in the hedge: panicked, breathing hard. He panted into it, after her: the fool hadn't the sense to let her through first. They were jammed in together: face to face, panting! An occasion on which sweethearts kiss in Kent: the gate being made in three, the inner flange of the V moving on hinges. It stops cattle getting through: but this great lout of a Yorkshire-man didn't know: trying to push through like a mad bullock! Now they were caught. Three weeks in Wandsworth gaol… Oh hang…

The voice of Mrs Wannop—of course it was only mother! Twenty feet on high or so behind the kicking mare, with a good round face like a peony—said:

“Ah, you can jam my Val in a gate and hold her… but she gave you seven yards in twenty and beat you to the gate. That was her father's ambition! ” She thought of them as children running races. She beamed down, round-faced and simple, on Tietjens from beside the driver, who had a black, slouch hat and the grey beard of St Peter.

⇐ Предыдущая 4 5 6 7 8910 11 12 13 Следующая ⇒