Читать книгу Ariel (A Shelley Romance) - Andre Maurois - Страница 10

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Alone in London, without friends, work, or money, Shelley fell into despair. He passed his time in writing melancholy poems, or letters to Hogg. Not knowing what to do with his evenings he went to bed at eight o’clock. Sleep alone stopped him from going over and over the story of his woes. The moment he let himself think, the image of his beautiful and shallow-hearted cousin rose to torture him. He tried to steel his heart against the painful vision by syllogisms.

“I loved a being,” he told himself. “The being whom I loved is not what she was: consequently, as love appertains to mind and not to body, she exists no longer.... I might as well court the worms, which the soulless body of a beloved being generates in the damp unintelligent vaults of a charnel-house.”

This appeared to him such excellent logic that he was astounded it brought him no consolation.

The money question grew serious. His father gave no sign of life. Shelley meeting him one day by chance, politely hoped he was well? All he got was a look black as a thunder cloud and a majestic “Your most humble servant, sir!”

Fortunately, his sisters did not forget him and sent him their pocket-money. It was all he had to live on. Elizabeth at Field Place was too well watched to do anything, but the younger girls were now at Mrs. Fenning’s Academy for Young Ladies on Clapham Common, and very soon Mrs. Fenning’s pupils made acquaintance with the fine eyes, the open shirt-collar and tossed curls of Hellen Shelley’s wonderful brother.

He would arrive, his pockets bulging with biscuits and raisins, and begin to discourse on ultimate themes to an adoring circle of little girls. He had undertaken to “illuminate” the prettiest amongst them. He could not endure the idea that so much loveliness should be abandoned to “prejudices.”

He admired most of all his sisters’ greatest friend, Harriet Westbrook, a lovely child of sixteen, with light brown hair and a complexion of milk and roses. She was small, slightly and delicately formed, and had an air of youthful gaiety, of delicious freshness. She came to the rescue when Mrs. Fenning, acting on the orders of Timothy Shelley, requested Percy to visit his sisters less often. Harriet, whose family lived in Chapel Street, Mayfair, often went home: the little sisters, therefore, entrusted her with the cakes and the money intended for Percy, and she taking these to the hermit of Poland Street, the two young people became naturally the greatest friends.

Harriet Westbrook’s father was a retired publican; he had made money, and desired to give his youngest daughter a genteel education. Her mother was dead, and she had been brought up by Eliza, a much older sister. One can easily imagine the interest which the Westbrook family took in the grandson of a baronet, the heir to an immense fortune, who was beautiful as a young god, lived in lodgings on bread and pudding raisins, and to whom the youngest of the Westbrook girls carried his sisters’ pocket-money to prevent him from starving to death.

Eliza being keen to see the hero, Harriet took her with her on the next visit. Shelley was somewhat intimidated by the elder Miss Westbrook, a mature virgin, dried-up and bony, with a dead-white skin seamed with scars, and fish-like eyes that stared without intelligence, the whole crowned with an immense crop of black hair. Eliza was particularly proud of her hair. Her affected manners were in striking contrast with Harriet’s spontaneous gaiety. But Bysshe soon forgot she was plain when he saw that her intentions were friendly. Not only she made no objection, as might have been feared, to Harriet’s visits to Poland Street, but she offered to bring her there, and on several occasions invited Shelley to come and dine with them when Mr. Westbrook was away.

She completely won the heart of the young philosopher by asking to share with Harriet in his teaching, and undertook to read the Philosophical Dictionary under his guidance.

Harriet’s walks with Shelley soon became the talk of the Young Ladies’ Academy. One of the mistresses thought fit to warn her: “Young Mr. Shelley is notorious for his advanced opinions, and it is probable that his morals are no better than his ideas.” Harriet had to give up a letter from him, filled with the most pernicious arguments, and for corresponding with an “atheist,” she was threatened with expulsion. The county gentlemen’s daughters gave the cold shoulder to the publican’s daughter, and life in the school was made exceeding bitter to her.

One night as Shelley sat alone, reading by his fireside, a message was brought him from Eliza to say that Harriet was sick, and would he come and keep her company. He found her in bed, very pale, but lovelier than ever, with all her chestnut hair spread about her.

Old Westbrook came upstairs to say “How-d’ye-do,” and Shelley was rather embarrassed on seeing him, for however free he was from convention, he could not help feeling that his presence at that late hour in a young girl’s bedroom was hardly discreet.

Westbrook, however, showed himself all geniality. “Sorry I can’t stop with you but I’ve got friends downstairs. Perhaps you’ll join us presently?”

Shelley thanked him and declined. The friends of Westbrook had no attraction for him. He sat beside Harriet’s bed, with Eliza near by. She was in eloquent vein, speaking at great length on the enthralling subject of Love. Harriet complained of a headache; she could not stand the noise of conversation.

“Very well then,” said Eliza, “I’ll go away.”

The two young things were left alone until long after midnight, while Westbrook’s friends drank and roared below.

Next day Harriet was quite well.

⁂

Shelley’s exile was less hard to bear from the moment he could receive the visits of a young girl and “illuminate” her soul. Nevertheless, he suffered from being separated from his sister Elizabeth. She no longer even answered his letters. Could she be shut up in her room? He determined at all costs to make a secret visit to Field Place so as to see her. At times he thought of a pacific invasion. What could happen to him, after all, if one evening he turned up there without notice, and opposed a Quaker-like silence to the cursings of his father? But the adventure was simplified when Captain Pilfold, a brother of Mrs. Shelley, offered his nephew most opportunely a jumping-off place for his attack on Field Place.

Pilfold was a hearty and jovial old sea-dog who, under Nelson, had commanded a frigate at Trafalgar. He infinitely preferred his fantastic nephew to his solemn brother-in-law. That Percy were an atheist or not, the Captain did not care a hang. The boy had energy, and that was the important thing. He invited him to run down to Cuckfield, ten miles from Field Place, and received him with open arms.

Shelley, out of gratitude, offered to “illuminate” his host, and the Captain proved such an apt scholar that at the end of ten days he staggered the Rector and the Doctor by his fiery syllogisms.

At Cuckfield, Shelley made acquaintance with Miss Kitchener, a school-teacher, from the neighbouring town of Hurstpierpoint. She was rather good-looking, had a Roman nose, and was in her twenty-ninth year. She was a republican in politics, and enjoyed the reputation of being sentimental and conceited. She, on her side, lamented that there was not one who understood her. Shelley having admired as was natural to him the nobility of her attitude, perceived with regret that she was still a deist. He proposed “a polemical correspondence,” in the course of which he undertook to cure her of this infirmity. She agreed.

Captain Pilfold, meanwhile, set off courageously to grapple and board Timothy Shelley. He had the bright idea of enrolling in the cause the Duke of Norfolk, chief of the Whig party. Snobbism triumphed over paternal tyranny. Shelley walked back into Field Place with all the honours of war. He was given £200 a year unconditionally.

⁂

He could now again see Elizabeth, but he was overwhelmed by the change he found in her. She was livelier, and gayer, than formerly, but had become incredibly frivolous. He remembered her serious, enthusiastic; he found her apathetic to everything but dancing, trivial amusements, and silly chatter. She lived now for nothing but society.

He wished to read to her Hogg’s letters as he had been used to do.

“Oh, you and your ridiculous friend! Every one I know thinks you are both mad.”

On this she spoke of matrimony: she thought of little else, and nothing disgusted Shelley more. She seemed to have forgotten all they had read together on the subject, and all Godwin’s elevated ideas.

“Marriage is odious and hateful,” he told her. “I am sickened when I think of this despotic chain, the heaviest forged by man to shackle fiery souls. Scepticism and free love are as necessarily associated together as religion and marriage. Honourable men have no need of laws. For heaven’s sake, Elizabeth, read over the Marriage Service and ask yourself if any decent man could wish the girl he loved to submit to such degradation.”

“Yet you want me to marry your friend Hogg?”

“Yes, but not by a clergyman nor according to man’s laws, but freely and with Love only as high priest.”

“This then is the honourable advice of a brother?” said Elizabeth with disdain.

It was useless to hope to make any impression on a character become futile beyond any possible cure. “Why should I deceive myself? She is lost, lost to everything. She talks nothing but cant and twaddle. What she wants of me is that, like a fashionable brother, I should act as a jackal for husbands, well, I refuse! I refuse emphatically.”

He had returned to Field Place merely to see Elizabeth. There was no good in remaining. Invitations elsewhere were not wanting. Captain Pilfold would have been glad to have him again at Cuckfield. Westbrook was going to pass the summer in Wales, and his daughters pressed Shelley to join them. Hogg wanted him to come for a month to York; it was this last idea which tempted him most. But his father, who doubtless saw a symbolic value in the separation of the two Oxford criminals, would not have tolerated it, and as the first quarter’s allowance was due on the first of September it was better to be patient. Hogg wrote jestingly that it was easy to see the lovely Harriet took precedence over old friends.

“Your jokes amuse me,” Shelley answered.

“If I know anything about love I am not in love. But I have heard from the Westbrooks, both of whom I highly esteem.”

While he still hesitated where to go, Thomas Grove, a cousin of his mother’s, invited him to Cwm Elan, a wild corner of Radnorshire. Here he could economize while awaiting his allowance. He accepted the Groves’ invitation.

On his way through London he would have liked to have seen Miss Kitchener and have taken her to lunch. But the school-teacher with the Roman nose feared this would not be quite a proper thing to do, there was such an immense social difference between her and Mr. Shelley. Indignant at the mere idea, Shelley wrote her a long letter on equality, in which he addressed her as “his soul’s sister.” Miss Kitchener began to think that Lady Shelley was a fine name and to study her reflection in the looking-glass.