Читать книгу The Winding Stair - A. E. W. Mason - Страница 9

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“Ferguson wrote to me that you mean to return to your own race,” said Colonel Vanderfelt, when the ladies had withdrawn from the dining room. He was a small, wiry man, dark of complexion, with a sleek black head of hair in which there was not one visible thread of grey. His face too was hardly lined, so that it was not until one looked at his eyes that one got any impression of age. The eyes, however, betrayed him. Deeply sunken and with a queer set appearance, they were the eyes of an old, old man; and they provoked a guess that they had at one time gazed so desperately upon horrors that they could never again quite get free of what they had seen.

“Yes,” replied Paul. “Mr. Ferguson was not very sympathetic.”

“Then I think he was wrong,” said Colonel Vanderfelt heartily. “Philosophers and Labour leaders talk very placidly about throwing down the walls between nation and nation, as if it was an easy morning’s work. But the walls aren’t of our building. They are mother earth and climate and were there from the beginning of time. Some people can pass over them, of course—American women, especially. But very few men aren’t weaklings, I believe. To the men worth anything, their soil cries out louder and louder with each year that passes. A glass of port? Help yourself! A cigar? No? The cigarettes are in that Battersea box in front of you. It’s a fiction that tobacco spoils the flavour of port. Claret, yes! Port, not a bit.”

Colonel Vanderfelt took a cigar from a box upon a side table, lit it and resumed his seat. Paul brought him back to the subject of their talk.

“I am glad to hear you agree with me, Colonel Vanderfelt. I have been more and more convinced since I have sat in this room.”

Paul Ravenel looked about the dining room with its fastidious and sober elegance. Cream walls, upon which a few good prints were hung; a bright red screen drawn in front of the door; shapely old furniture with red upholstery, and heavy curtains of red brocaded silk at the one big bow window; a long, slender Sheraton sideboard against the wall; a fine Chippendale cabinet in a recess; and this round gleaming table of mahogany, with its candlesticks and salt-cellars of Battersea enamel, its silver equipment and its short tubby decanters with the blue tinge of old Waterford in the glass; in every aspect of the room grace was so wedded to homeliness, comfort to distinction that Paul could not but envy its possessors.

“I resume my race and with it of course my name,” he said, keenly watching Colonel Vanderfelt.

But Colonel Vanderfelt took his cigar from his lips only to ask a question.

“And then?” he enquired.

“Then I propose to try for a commission in the army,” Paul replied.

“Oh, yes,” said Colonel Vanderfelt, “but the Bar offers more opportunities to a young fellow nowadays, doesn’t it? Why the Army? There are other professions.”

“Not for me, sir.”

Colonel Vanderfelt shrugged his shoulders and stared at the shining table in front of him. It was a devil of a world—everything cross-wise and upside down and unaccommodating. Why must this youth with money and the world to choose from, choose just the one bunch of grapes quite out of his reach? And set his very heart on it too. There had been a ring in that “Not for me, sir!” which could not be stilled by argument. It was youth’s challenge to the elders, its “I know better” which there was no use in debating.

“Let me hear,” said Colonel Vanderfelt; and the lad’s ambitions were shyly revealed to him. Histories of campaigns, the lives of great soldiers, books of strategy too technical for him to follow—these had been his favourite reading. It was the actual work of the soldier which had fascinated Paul, not the glitter of the great days of parades and manœuvres, but his daily responsibilities and the command of men and the glory of service. Colonel Vanderfelt listened and nodded and remembered a phrase in Mr. Ferguson’s letter: “The boy’s of the right temper.” Surely he was, and the whole business was perverse and pitiful! He heard Paul closing his little apologia.

“So you see, sir, from the time when I began to think at all of what I should do in the world, this has always been my wish.” The lad was seeking to challenge and defy, but the anxiety which had tortured him during the last four days turned the challenge into a prayer. He searched Colonel Vanderfelt’s face for a sign of agreement. “I know of nothing,” he asserted, “of nothing at all which should hinder me from trying to fulfil my wish.”

“But I do,” replied the other. “I think, Paul, that it would be very difficult for you to take your father’s name and seek a commission in the Army here.”

Paul’s cigarette had gone out whilst he was speaking. He lit it now at one of the candles with trembling fingers. The gentleness of Colonel Vanderfelt’s voice made him think of some compassionate judge passing sentence.

“You will, I trust, make that clear to me,” he said.

“Of course,” returned the Colonel. “I admit to you that up to the last few minutes I had hoped to escape, and leave most of the story untold. And had you chosen another profession, why, very likely I should have spared you and myself, too.”

But though he had promised to be frank, he was reluctant to begin and he had ended on so evident a note of discomfort and pain that Paul Ravenel dared not interpose a word. The windows stood open upon the garden and let into the room the perfume of flowers and the freshness of the dew. Outside was the glamorous twilight of a summer night. It was very still. Occasionally a bird rustled the leaves of a branch; and across a field a cuckoo whose voice was breaking called incessantly. Paul was never to forget that background to these moments of suspense. All the bitterness was not with him on this night. Colonel Vanderfelt was back in the dark places of his life amongst old shames and miseries.

“Your father’s name was John Edward Revel,” he began, and the boy drew a long breath. “Yes, the infantry manual was his, some relic of the old days that he must keep, I suppose—some one small valueless thing—yes, I think that’s natural. He and I were friends. We passed out of Sandhurst together and met again in India. Years afterwards—Service brought us together.”

He named an outlying post in the hills to the northwest of Quetta where John Edward Revel and he lay beleaguered during one of the frontier wars. They were ordered to hold on to their position at all costs and help would come to them.

“We were neither of us youngsters, you must understand, pitchforked into commands we weren’t fit for. We had seen a lot of service and done well—both of us. That makes the matter worse perhaps. All the less excuse! That’s what they did say! We were losing men all the time, and we hadn’t many to begin with. Ammunition was running low, water still lower, we were attacked day and night, we two had no sleep, and the promised relief didn’t come. The Baluchis got into our outer court one evening and we had the greatest trouble to get them out. The same night one of our spies came in with the news that a fresh big force was hurrying to reinforce the Baluchis. We were pretty well at the end of our tether—Ravel and I—. Something snapped in both of us … we slipped out under cover of darkness, the whole force, and fell back in spite of our instructions, leaving this key-post unguarded. And the new enemy we fell back from was our own relief expedition which had marched night and day and turned the Baluchis’ flank. They found the fort empty, which we had been ordered at all costs to hold. You can guess what happened. We were arrested, court-martialled—cashiered! So you can understand perhaps now our queer reception of you in the drawing room this evening. When you startled us by calling me, ‘The man with the medals,’ it sounded like some bitter jibe from those bad days.”

“But I don’t understand,” Paul Ravenel stammered. “You were cashiered both of you, you and my father?”

“Both of us.”

“Yet I saw you coming from a dinner at the Guildhall, with your medals upon your breast. You are here in your own home, wearing your rank! How can that be, sir?”

Colonel Vanderfelt replied with a curious accent of apology to his young guest.

“I was lucky. I had served in India longer than your father. I had been more interested; and dialects came to me easily. More than once I had spent my leave living in the Bazaars, and as far north as Leh. Therefore it wasn’t so difficult for me. I disappeared. I’m a dark man naturally. I grew a beard. I joined a battalion of irregular levies. I served for three years in it on the frontier.”

“Did no one guess who you were?”

“I think one or two suspected and—winked. They were busy years you see. A good deal was going on all this time and men who knew anything about soldiering were valuable. Of course they were pretty rough, hard years for any one with delicate tastes, but there was so much to be perhaps regained,” and Colonel Vanderfelt pulled himself up quickly. “Well, after three years I was wounded rather badly. As you see I limp to this day. It looked then as if the game was up altogether and I was going out. So I sent a message in my own name to an officer on the border whom I had known. The Governor of Quetta came up himself to see me in hospital and the end of it was that my sentence was annulled. There, my boy, that’s the whole story.”

Colonel Vanderfelt rose from his chair and limping over to the window looked out upon that quiet garden, which he had lost, and after such unlovely years won back again. They were years of which he could never think even now without a shiver of disgust and a cold fear lest by some impossibility they should come again. None indeed had ever known the full measure of their abasement and squalor and degradation. Even with the great prize continually held in view, they had been hardly endurable. The chance of winning it had been the chance of a raft to a man drowning in the Pacific. The voice of Paul Ravenel who was still seated at the table broke in upon him.

“And that’s the whole story, sir?”

“Yes, Paul.”

Paul shook his head.

“The whole story, sir, except that what you did—my father didn’t. Therefore he lived and died an outcast,” and the young man’s voice died away in a whisper.

Colonel Vanderfelt turned back to him and laid his hand upon Paul’s shoulder and shook it in a gentle sympathy.

“There’s another question I would like to have answered,” said Paul. He was very pale, but his voice was firm again.

“Yes?”

“The disgrace, I suppose, killed my mother?”

“I have no right to say that.”

“The truth, sir, please!” and the appeal came so clearly from a man in the extremity of torture, that Colonel Vanderfelt could not but answer it.

“It did. She was in India when this shameful business happened. She came home and died.”

In a few moments Paul began to laugh. The laughter was pitched in a low key and horrible to hear; and there was such a flame of agony burning in the boy’s eyes and so dreadful a grin upon his white face that Colonel Vanderfelt feared for his reason.

“Steady, Paul, steady!” he said gently.

“I was thinking of the fine myth by which I explained everything to the honour of the family,” Paul cried in a bitter voice. “Our seclusion, the antagonism between my father and me, the change of name—it was all due to a morbid grief at the loss of a wife too deeply loved. That’s what I believed, sir,” he said wildly, but Colonel Vanderfelt had already learned of these delusions from Mr. Ferguson. “And shame’s the explanation. Disgrace is the explanation. He killed my mother with it and now the son too must hide!”

“No,” said Colonel Vanderfelt with decision. “There’s a good way out of this tangle for you, a way by which you may still reach all you have set your heart on—your career, your name and an honoured place amongst your own people.”

Paul lifted incredulous eyes to the other man’s face.

“Yes,” insisted the older man. “You don’t believe me. You young fellows see only the worst and the best, and if the best doesn’t tumble into your hands, you are sure at once that there’s nothing for you but the worst. Just listen to me!”

Paul took hold upon himself. He was ashamed already of his outburst.

“You are very kind, sir,” he said, and some appreciation of the goodwill which the older man had shown to him, in baring his own wounds, and drawing out into the light again old humiliations and guilt long since atoned, pierced even through the youth’s sharp consciousness of his own miseries. He rose up from his chair. He was in command of his emotions now, his voice was steady.

“I have been thinking too much of myself and the distress into which this revelation has plunged me,” he said, “and too little of your great consideration and kindness. What you have told me, you cannot have said without pain and a good deal of reluctance. I am very grateful. Indeed I wonder why you ever received me here at all.”

“You would have found out the truth without my help.”

“That’s what I mean,” said Paul. “I should have found it out through an enquiry agent, and the news would have been ten times more hideous coming in that way rather than broken gently here. Whilst on the other hand you would have spared yourself.”

“That’s all right,” Colonel Vanderfelt answered uncomfortably, and to himself he added: “Yes, old Ferguson wrote the truth. That boy’s clean and a gentleman.” He pressed Paul down into his chair again.

“Come! Take a glass of this old brandy first—it’s not so bad—and then we’ll talk your prospects over like the men of the world we both are—eh? Neither making light of serious things nor exaggerating them until we make endeavour useless.”

He fetched to the table a couple of big goblets mounted on thin stems within which delicate spirals had been blown, and poured a liqueur of his best brandy into each.

“I have an idea, Paul. It has been growing all the time we have been talking together. Let’s see if it means anything to you.”

He held his goblet to his nose and smelt the brandy. “Pretty good, this! Try it, Paul. There’s not a cough nor a splutter in it. Well, now,” he went on when Paul had taken his advice, “in the first place, you are eighteen.”

“Yes,” said Paul.

“And a man of means?”

“Pretty well.”

“You have property in Casablanca, in Morocco?”

“Yes, sir,” said Paul, wondering whither all these questions were to lead.

“And you lived there for some years?”

“Yes. Before I went to school in France and my father built his house in Aguilas.”

“You know Arabic, then?”

“The Moorish dialect, yes.”

“And by nationality you are French?”

“Yes,” answered Paul reluctantly.

“Good,” said the Colonel, warming to his theme. “Now listen to me. The French must move in Morocco, as we moved in India, as we moved in Egypt. It isn’t a question of policies or persons. It’s the question of the destiny of a great nation. The instinct of life and self-preservation in a great nation which sooner or later breaks all policies and persons that stand in the way. There’ll be the timid ones who’ll say no! And there’ll be the intriguers who’ll treat the question as a pawn to be moved in their own interest. But in the end they won’t matter.” Colonel Vanderfelt had a complete and not very knowledgeable contempt for politics and politicians like most of his calling until they have joined the ranks of the politicians themselves.

“Morocco can’t remain as it is—a vast country with a miserable population, misgoverned if governed at all, with a virgin soil the richest in the world, and within a few miles of Europe. Somebody’s got to go in and sort it up. And that some one’s got to be France, for she can’t afford a possible enemy on her Algerian frontier. Yes, but there’ll be trouble before she succeeds in her destiny, trouble and—opportunity.” The Colonel paused to let that word sink into Paul’s mind. “Why not be one of those who’ll seize it? They are great soldiers, the French. Join them, since that’s your way of life. Go through the schools, get your commission in France and then strive heart and soul to get service in the country whose language you know, the country of opportunity. Then, in God’s good time, if you still so wish it, come back here, resume your own name, rejoin your own race!”

Paul Ravenel, from his solitary dreaming life and his age, was inclined to be impressed by thoughts of sacrifice and expiation and atonement. He was therefore already half persuaded by Colonel Vanderfelt’s advice. It would be exile, as he had come to think, but it would also be a cleansing of his name, an expiation of his father’s crime. And after all, when he looked at the man who gave him this advice, and remembered what he had endured with a hope so much more infinitesimal, the course proposed to him seemed fortunate and light.

“Thank you,” he said. “I should like to think over your idea.”

Colonel Vanderfelt was pleased that there had been no flighty hysterical acceptance, no assumption that the goal was as good as reached.

“Yes, take your time!”

Colonel Vanderfelt rose and, removing the shades, blew out the candles upon the dining-table.

“I don’t know what you would like to do?” he said, turning to the lad. “You will follow your own wish, of course. And if you would rather go straight now to your room, why, we shall all understand.”

“Thank you, but I should prefer to join the ladies with you.”

Colonel Vanderfelt smiled very pleasantly. The anticipation of Paul’s visit had caused him a sleepless night or two and not a little pain. How much should he tell? The question had been troubling him, so that he had more than once sat down to write to Mr. Ferguson that he would not receive the boy at all. He was very glad now that he had, and that he had kept nothing back.

“Come, then,” he said.

In the drawing room Phyllis Vanderfelt sang to that little company some songs of old Herrick in a small, very sweet, clear voice. Paul sat near the long, open window. The music, the homely friendliness within the room, and the quiet garden over which slept so restful a peace were all new to him and wrought upon him till he felt the tears rising to his eyes. Phyllis’ hands were taken from the keys and lay idle in her lap. In the high trees of the Park upon the far side of the road the owls were calling and the cuckoo still repeated his two notes from the tree beyond the field. Paul rose suddenly to his feet.

“That throaty old cuckoo means to make a night of it,” he said with a laugh which was meant to hide the break in his voice and did not succeed. He stepped over the threshold and was out of sight.

“Let him be!” said Colonel Vanderfelt. And a little later, when Phyllis had taken herself off to bed: “I liked him very much. The right temper—that’s the phrase old Ferguson used. He’ll do well, Milly—you’ll see. We shall see him home here one day carrying his sheaves,” and as his wife remained silent he looked at her anxiously. “Don’t you agree with me?”

“I don’t know,” Mrs. Vanderfelt answered slowly. “I hope so with all my heart. But—didn’t you notice his looks and a sort of grace he has?”

“Well?” asked the Colonel.

“Well, we have left out one consideration altogether. What part are women going to play in his life? A large one. Tom, I have been watching Phyllis to-night. A day or so more, and we should have an aching heart in this house.”

“Yes, I see,” returned Colonel Vanderfelt. “Women do upset things, don’t they?”

“Or get upset,” said Mrs. Vanderfelt. “And sometimes both.”