Читать книгу The Dean's Elbow - A.E.W. Mason - Страница 10

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Those were the great days of Henry Irving. He had triumphed alike over his deficiencies and the swarm of his belittlers. He had made attributes of his weak voice and his grotesque gestures. He had decorated his plays with splendour and with artistry. He lit them at will to the glare of noonday or the tender atmosphere of night. And over all lay the dominant magic of his own personality. He made of the Lyceum Theatre a temple, with himself its arch, unquestioned priest. He held a place in the social scheme unoccupied since Garrick died. He was the great interpreter. The reticence of his life and the delicate authority of his face crowned him with an aura of romance. Stories ran the town of his generous heart and caustic tongue. He was of a Florentine magnificence. He was almost inevitably the idol of middle-class youth. Admiring parents gathered their friends into suburban drawing-rooms to hear their sons recite Shakespeare in the Irving manner. Every normal youth in office or factory wanted to go on the stage and dignify a theatre with a replica of Irving—and Mark Thewliss like the rest.

That was the hidden thought which so charmed her, which drove her on, as she sat dangling her slim legs over the cockpit, to ask for scenes from "The Cup," for speeches of Cardinal Wolsey and for the arguments of tortured Hamlet. Mark Thewliss was on the same plane as the others of his years and class, none of whom would add another Irving to decorate the age, all of whom would in due course mate with their like, share with them their due assignment of joys and sorrows and ambitions and move on arm in arm with them to such achievement as that Santa Claus, the future, kept hidden away for them in his sack.

"More! More!" she cried, clasping her hands together between her knees and leaning forward with eyes so eager. "'Richard III' now! Please! 'Now is the winter of our discontent'"—she remembered a Saturday evening when she had stood for three hours under the low roof of the pit entrance of the Lyceum—"Oh, Mark, you do it divinely!"

Mona followed the sound old rule. If you are going in for flattery, lay it on with a trowel. Mona had her reward, since reward she considered it. Mark Thewliss expanded, glowed, hunched his shoulders, projected into his not very malleable features such a medley of venom and cunning as would justify his being hanged on sight—and recited. He gave Mona "Now is the winter of our discontent"—oh, and much more. He wooed Anne, plotted with Tyrrel the murder of the Princes in the Tower, started up from the vision of his assassinated victims and met his death on Bosworth Field.

Meanwhile the sun went down. Far away in the north-west the long bluff of Bury Head, now visible, ran out like a fortress wall into the Bay. Above it the sky had the tender colour of an amethyst. A flaw of wind crept from the south, ruffling and blackening the water.

"Let it hold and we can anchor at Torquay tonight," said Mark, and as the breeze reached the cutter he paid out his mainsail sheet and bore away to the north.

"But we shan't reach the harbour in time for dinner," he added. "And I'm glad, Mona. You're a cook to match my appetite, and that's no small praise, I can tell you."

Mona jumped down from her perch and stood for a moment looking forward. The rose of the sunset was fading from Bury Head. It looked to her a thousand miles away, a rock reef somehow wedged in the sky. Her eyes swept the horizon. Here and there a gull floated on outstretched wings or swooped to the sea. The slight breeze was dying away. The cutter with its tenants was alone.

Mona fried a couple of dabs; grilled a couple of lamb chops with tomatoes; baked some potatoes in their jackets; set out on the table a Cheshire cheese, some fruit and a bottle of Moselle; opened a tin of sardines as a hors d'couvre, and cried out:

"All ready!"

Mark Thewliss fixed the tiller in its appropriate clutch and stepped down into the cabin, whilst Mona lighted the candles in the sockets on the walls and enclosed them in their round glass funnels. They dined gaily; Mona still possessed by the enchanting notion that she had sitting next to her on the settee no great man in obscurity, no chrysalis soon to spread gorgeous wings, but just a grub like herself, an adorable grub but a permanent grub—her man; Mark, for his part, aware of a well-being hitherto unknown to him. It was produced by the whiteness of the tablecloth, the shining metal of the cutlery, the good cooking, all the daintiness that a woman contributes to a meal, and by the presence of this attentive, lively and lovely companion at his side.

"I used to spread a napkin on the green baize last year and take a cut from a cold ham with a loaf of bread and some pickles. Mona, this is the most wonderful holiday. May it be like this to the end!"

He lifted his glass and drank to her. She waited. She wanted to hear him add:

"And next year may we repeat it!"

But he did not. The wish, so easy of fulfilment, never indeed occurred to him. Mona set down her glass.

"I'll make some coffee."

Whilst she cleared the table, Mark uncovered a locker in the bows, brought up his port and starboard lamps, lit them and mounted them on their wooden stands in the rigging. When Mona came back from the kitchen into the cabin she saw him wrapped in a long thick rough blue overcoat.

"We shan't get to any harbour to-night, Mona," he said in a serious voice. "The wind has fallen altogether. We have the tide with us. I have set our course for the Start Point. We ought to get into Dartmouth to-morrow morning."

Mona nodded her head, whilst the blood mounted into her neck and face. Her eyes looked straight at him, charged with a mystery which quite baffled him.

She did not speak.

He drank his coffee in an embarrassment.

"I didn't mean..." he said. "With the wind as it was this morning we looked like crossing the West Bay in good time."

"I want you to tell me something," she asked.

"Yes?"

"Why did you want to go on the stage?"

Mona had come back to her first urgent question. Mark Thewliss gazed at her in surprise. The question seemed trivial, even childish, at this hour and in this place.

The cabin doors stood open, held back upon their hooks. Mark glanced through the opening. The last of the daylight had long since gone. A moon three days old was spreading a silver radiance across the world. Though Mark's eyes saw only the cockpit yellow in the streaming candlelight, the butt of the tiller held fast in a notch of its gleaming rack, and the sheets of the mainsail sloping upwards from the traveller towards the boom, he had a picture in his mind of the quiet floor of the sea empty from rim to rim except for this little ship, where a young man and a young woman stood face to face in a tiny lighted cabin. The question was trivial—yes. But he looked back to Mona. She was not trivial. She was not childish. A smile made her mouth tender, her big dark eyes watched him steadily; and both the smile and the grave eyes were a riddle to him and a mystery.

"I'll tell you."

Mark Thewliss sat down upon the settee and filled his pipe.

"It hadn't anything to do with art. Oh, no!" He spoke exculpating himself hastily and vigorously from any suspicion that he was concerned with any leaning so open to derision. "But when I noticed the extraordinary hush in a theatre full of people, when I saw those people of all degrees, from the man with the muffler round his throat in the gallery, to the fine disdainful lady in the stalls, leaning forward so that their eyes might not miss a movement, nor their ears an intonation—people lost to the world, helpless under a spell—I used to wonder whether anything else could give to any man such a sensation of sheer power as that spellbound house must give to the actor on the stage."

He laughed a little brokenly and moistened his lips with his tongue. He betrayed himself at that moment. He laid naked the violence of his ambition and its weakness. Power, not as a lever, but as a sensation. Power not as a means to some greatly-planned achievement but as achievement itself, self-sufficient, an emperor's diadem. He savoured it now. The look of his face was voluptuous.

Gradually, however, his mood changed. Delight was succeeded by uneasiness. It took him a minute or two before he realised that his uneasiness was due to an extraordinary stillness in the cabin. Mona stood as if turned to stone. Did she find something to censure in his confession of faith, he wondered—and wondered rather resentfully. But he did not look at her. If he had he would have seen that the smile had passed from her lips, but that her eyes still watched him with their tremendous mystery and quietude. But he did not; and suddenly, to his amazement and discomfort, he was absurdly conscious of a suspicion that of the two of them, the girl, in spite of—nay, perhaps because of—her clear recognition of what could be and could not be, and the uncomplaining submission which sprang from it, had the higher pride, even the nobler spirit.

He could not endure so wounding an idea. He flushed red and broke out fretfully:

"Did you ever read Disraeli, Mona?"

"No."

"I'd have him taught in schools, if I had my way. A long chalk more useful than Xenophon. He's the guide for young men. There's a novel called 'Endymion.' Listen to this, Mona. It's an extract from it—a text to be printed in big black letters on a white background and hung up in one's bedroom where one's eyes must see it, the moment they opened in the morning. Listen!"

And he recited, no longer with any mimicry of Henry Irving, but in the voice of one weighing out slowly the final words of human wisdom:

"Power and power alone should be your absorbing object, and all the accidents and incidents of life should only be considered with reference to that main result."

And now he did lift his eyes to Mona's face, and lo! once more she was smiling. Mark's first surprising answer to her question had struck her down, a blow from an iron mace. It was the formulation by him of all the fears, the heart-sinkings, the sudden forebodings which had robbed her of her peace and kept her aching—more than the formulation of them. It set upon them the seals of truth. Even at that moment she was clear-eyed and clove to the very heart of his meaning with a superb instinct.

"For real power," she said to herself. "For the power to do some great long-planned thing, a mate like me, one with him, might help—yes, in the end might be of service. But for the sensation of power, the luxury of continual evidences of power—a great house, famous men at your table, deference and the doffing of caps—not one man in a million would look to me for help there."

But Mark had not left the matter so. He had gone on to quote Disraeli with a curiously naïve and boastful petulance—just like a schoolboy captured by some splashy, grandiloquent sentence to be found somewhere in any notable book. She loved his plea that Disraeli should supersede Xenophon. She felt that it was absolutely right, not because she knew anything of the respective merits or suitabilities of those two authors, but because it revealed in him once more to her the adorable boy for whom every woman looks in the man she loves, but no woman more ardently than this lovely gambler on the Sea Flower.

"If you come out," said Mark, opening a long cupboard by the door and taking out a second overcoat, "you'll put this on, won't you? There's a heavy dew falling."

He was reassured by her returning gaiety, as she by his boyishness; and he thanked her by a tenderness in his voice which she took for the music of the spheres. He went up the steps into the cockpit. He had hauled the boom of the mainsail in amidships whilst they dined, and he now loosened the sheet and paid it out. But there was still no wind, and only the weight of the sail kept it outstretched over the sea. Between the open doors of the cabin he saw Mona busily clearing away the plates and the dishes, the cutlery and the glasses, into the little cuddy beyond; washing them; setting the crockery on its rims in the racks, the glasses in their stands, the knives and forks and spoons in their drawers; returning to the cabin; folding up the tablecloth, putting it away; taking sheets and blankets from lockers at the back of the settees and making up the beds. He noticed that though she moved without haste the work was very quickly done. He sat admiring the deftness of her movements. Viewed from where he sat with the tiller in the crook of his arm, even at that short distance Mona and the interior of the cabin were seen in miniature. Thewliss had the impression that he was looking on at some pleasantly homely scene in a little play.

"Yes," he reflected, "I like that. I must marry one of these days." His eyes went to Mona Lightfoot, as she now stood tall and slim with her back towards him, whilst with her arm gracefully lifted she raised a glass globe from a candle to blow the light out. "Yes, and before it's too late..."

Thus he admonished himself to make his way in the world quickly, so that before age put a tarnish on his dazzling qualities he might pluck from some helpfully great family a wife with the low, broad white forehead and mysterious dark eyes of Mona there—yes, rather like Mona—very like Mona—in fact Mona born in a castle, aired in her perambulator under pergolas, and pruned and trimmed in the drawing rooms of Mayfair.

Mona put out the candles, slipped on the capacious overcoat and joined Mark Thewliss in the cockpit. The sickle of new moon had set and the stars had taken the sky by storm. All about the ship, infinite darkness and a hush which the girl thought it would have been sacrilege to break. Thewliss buttoned the coat close at her throat and, setting an arm about her, caught her against his breast. The air was warm. The red and green side-lights shone comfortably from the side rigging, and here and there a pathway of pale gold ran out across the sea to meet a planet. The magical holiday! Mona played with the fancy that the little ship itself was a star in space with Mark and herself for its only inhabitants, and two colours of light, green and red, to baffle and astound all the astronomers at their telescopes.

Thewliss looked steadily southwards and Mona, following the direction of his eyes, breathed a sigh. Out there the mirrored stars were trembling in the water. In a few moments a faint wind stirred the curls of her hair. The sail towering into the night flapped like a great bird's white wing and the sea tinkled against the cutter's planks.

Mona waited in suspense, but with the acquiescence which was the mark of her. Here was one of the fatalities which neither will nor effort could alter or direct. Either the breeze strengthened and turn by turn they sailed their ship to the Start, or this one enchanted night was given to her. She sat very still. The sound of water splashing into a glass died away; the great sail, its white shading upwards into black, towered spectral and shadowy against the sky. Darkness and silence once more embosomed the little cutter and its tenantry. They fell to talking in low voices, both of them with a fancy that a malevolent spirit might strike at them in jealousy if it discovered them floating upon the bespangled mirror of the sea in the perfection of the summer night.

"I should like to be sailing in the Pacific on a night like this," said Mark.

"Could it be more wonderful out there than it is here?" Mona Lightfoot asked.

"So many big bright stars, they say," he whispered, "we should never find our way amongst them."

Then his voice changed.

"Look!"

A golden fragment slid down the sky, curving with a lightning swiftness, and vanished.

"There goes a world."

"Not ours!" Mona cried in a low voice; and she breathed a prayer from her heart. "Not for a month—"

All the wonders that were marching out to greet her at each hour of her expedition—she could not spare one of them. They were to make the prelude to a fine, exacting, fruitful life at the best—at the worst they were to be woven into a deathless memory, so that she could lie at night in her darkened bedroom and in an instant sail out of Poole Harbour to the west. She must see the sickle of new moon round to a red disc and wane again and be blotted out. The last lightship on the edge of England must ring its bell within her hearing.

"Not till this month be passed!" she prayed, and her voice broke. Thewliss drew her close within his arm.

"Mona!"

She rubbed her cheek against the rough cloth of his coat, cool and damp with the dew.

"Mark!" and the name was whispered so low that only the movement of her lips told him that she had spoken his name. The new yachting cap tumbled off on to the floor of the cockpit.

"There goes more than a world," said Mark.

She felt his lips upon her forehead. His arm slid up to her shoulders, his hand tilted her chin Her upturned face in the darkness was wan and grave and very tender. Mark kissed her on the lips.

"It is time," he whispered.

There was an orison in the clasp of his arm, an answer in the quietude of her body. She let a few moments pass. Then she disengaged herself, rose and went down into the cabin, closing the doors behind her. Mark saw the light of the candles stream out through the side windows above the level of the deck for a little while. Then the candles were put out again and the doors opened from within.

The tide was running to the west. The green light of a ship steaming up Channel moved across in the distance. In that hush he could hear the pulsation of her screw with an extraordinary clearness. He made fast his tiller and, hooking back the doors, went into the cabin.

"Mona!"

He stooped over her bed. She was awake; her eyes shone in the darkness. Her arms closed about his neck. He felt her breath warm upon his cheek; and in the whisper of her voice he heard the loud cry of her young heart.

"Mark! My Mark!"