Читать книгу Adrienne Toner - Anne Douglas Sedgwick - Страница 3

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“COME down to Coldbrooks next week-end, will you, Roger?” said Barney Chadwick. He had been wandering around the room, pausing once to glance at the César Franck on the piano and once at the window to look down at the Thames, and his voice now, though desultory in intention, betrayed to his friend preoccupation and even anxiety. “There is going to be an interesting girl with us: American; very original and charming.”

Roger Oldmeadow sat at his writing-bureau in the window, and his high dark head was silhouetted against the sky. It had power and even beauty, with moments of brooding melancholy; but the type to which it most conformed was that of the clever, cantankerous London bachelor; and if he sometimes looked what he was, the scholar who had taken a double first at Balliol and gave brain and sinew to an eminent review, he looked more often what he was not, a caustic, cautious solicitor, clean-shaved and meticulously neat, with the crisp bow at his collar, single eyeglass, and thin, wry smile.

There was a cogitative kindness in his eyes and a latent irony on his lips as he now scrutinized Barney Chadwick, who had come finally to lean against the mantelpiece, and it was difficult before Roger Oldmeadow’s gaze at such moments not to feel that you were giving yourself away. This was evidently what Barney was trying not to feel, or, at all events, not to show. He tapped his cigarette-end, fixing his eyes upon it and frowning a little. He had ruffled his brown hair with the nervous hand passed through it during his ramble, but ruffled or sleek Barney could never look anything but perfection, just as, whether he smiled or frowned, he could never look anything but charming. In his spring-tide grey, with a streak of white inside his waistcoat and a tie of petunia silk that matched his socks, he was a pleasant figure of fashion; and he was more than that; more than the mere London youth of 1913, who danced the tango and cultivated Post-Impressionism and the Russian ballet. He was perhaps not much more; but his difference, if slight, made him noticeable. It came back, no doubt, to the fact of charm. He was radiant yet reserved; confident yet shy. He had a slight stammer, and his smile seemed to ask you to help him out. His boyhood, at twenty-nine, still survived in his narrow face, clumsy in feature and delicate in contour, with long jaw, high temples and brown eyes, half sweet, half sleepy. The red came easily to his brown cheek, and he had the sensitive, stubborn lips of the little boy at the preparatory school whom Oldmeadow had met and befriended now many years ago.

In Oldmeadow’s eyes he had always remained the “little Barney” he had then christened him—even Barney’s mother had almost forgotten that his real name was Eustace—and he could not but know that Barney depended upon him more than upon anyone in the world. To Barney his negations were more potent than other people’s affirmations, and though he had sometimes said indignantly, “You leave one nothing to agree about, Roger, except Plato and Church-music,” he was never really happy or secure in his rebellions from what he felt or suspected to be Oldmeadow’s tastes and judgments. Oldmeadow had seen him through many admirations, not only for books and pictures, but for original girls. Barney thought that he liked the unusual. He was a devotee of the ballet, and had in his rooms cushions and curtains from the Omega shop and a drawing by Wyndham Lewis. But Oldmeadow knew that he really preferred the photograph of a Burne-Jones, a survival from Oxford days, that still bravely, and irrelevantly, hung opposite it, and he waited to see the Wyndham Lewis replaced by a later portent. Barney could remain stubbornly faithful to old devotions, but he was easily drawn into new orbits; and it was a new star, evidently, that he had come to describe and justify.

“What have I to do with charming American girls?” Oldmeadow inquired, turning his eyes on the blurred prospect of factory-chimneys and warehouses that the farther waterside of Chelsea affords. One had to go to the window and look out to see the grey and silver river flowing, in the placidity that revealed so little power. Oldmeadow lived in a flat on the Embankment; but he was not an admirer of Chelsea, just as he was not an admirer of Whistler nor—and Barney had always suspected it—of Burne-Jones. His flat gave him, at a reasonable cost, fresh air, boiling-hot water and a walk in Battersea Park; these, with his piano, were his fundamental needs; though he owned, for the mean little stream it was, that the Thames could look pretty enough by morning sunlight and—like any river—magical under stars. After Plato and Bach, Oldmeadow’s passions were the rivers of France.

“She’ll have something to do with you,” said Barney, and he seemed pleased with the retort. “I met her at the Lumleys. They think her the marvel of the age.”

“Well, that doesn’t endear her to me,” said Oldmeadow. “And I don’t like Americans.”

“Come, you’re not quite so hide-bound as all that,” said Barney, vexed. “What about Mrs. Aldesey? I’ve heard you say she’s the most charming woman you know.”

“Except Nancy,” Oldmeadow amended.

“No one could call Nancy a charming woman,” said Barney, looking a little more vexed. “She’s a dear, of course; but she’s a mere girl. What do you know about Americans, anyway—except Mrs. Aldesey?”

“What she tells me about them—the ones she doesn’t know,” said Oldmeadow, leaning back in his chair with a laugh. “But I own that I’m merely prejudiced. Tell me about your young lady, and why you want her to have something to do with me. Is she a reformer of some sort?”

“She’s a wonderful person, really,” said Barney, availing himself with eagerness of his opportunity. “Not a reformer. Only a sort of mixture of saint and fairy-princess. She cured Charlie Lumley of insomnia, three years ago, at Saint Moritz. Nothing psychic or theatrical, you know. Just sat by him and smiled—she’s a most extraordinary smile—and laid her hand on his head. He’d not slept for nights and went off like a lamb. Lady Lumley almost cries when she tells about it. They thought Charlie might lose his mind if he went on not sleeping.”

“My word! She’s a Christian Science lady? A medium? What?”

“Call her what you like. You’ll see. She does believe in spiritual forces. It’s not only that. She’s quite lovely. In every way. Nancy and Meg will worship her. The Lumley girls do.”

Oldmeadow’s thoughts were already dwelling in rueful surmise on Nancy. He had always thought her the nicest young creature he had ever known, nicer even than Barney; and he had always wanted them to marry. She was Barney’s second cousin, and she and her mother lived near the Chadwicks in Gloucestershire.

“Oh, Nancy will worship her, will she? She must be all right, then. What’s her name?” he asked.

Barney had given up trying to be desultory, and his conscious firmness was now not lost upon his friend as he answered, stammering a little, “Adrienne. Adrienne Toner.”

“Why Adrienne?” Oldmeadow mildly inquired. “Has she French blood?”

“Not that I know of. It’s a pretty name, I think, Adrienne. One hears more inane names given to girls every day. Her mother loved France—just as you do, Roger. Adrienne was born in Paris, I think.”

“Oh, a very pretty name,” said Oldmeadow, noting Barney’s already familiar use of it. “Though it sounds more like an actress’s than a saint’s.”

“There was something dramatic about the mother, I fancy,” said Barney, sustained, evidently, by his own detachment. “A romantic, rather absurd, but very loveable person. Adrienne worshipped her and, naturally, can’t see the absurdity. She died out in California. On a boat,” said Barney stammering again, over the b.

“On a boat?”

“Yes. Awfully funny. But touching, too. That’s what she wanted, when she died: the sea and sky about her. They carried her on her yacht—doctors, nurses, all the retinue—and sailed far out from shore. It’s beautiful, too, in a way you know, to be able to do that sort of thing quite simply and unself-consciously. Adrienne sat beside her, and they smiled at each other and held hands until the end.”

Oldmeadow played with his penholder. He was disconcerted; and most of all by the derivative emotion in Barney’s voice. They had gone far, then, already, the young people. Nancy could have not the ghost of a chance. And the nature of what touched Barney left him singularly dry. He was unable to credit so much simplicity or unself-consciousness. He coughed shortly, and after a decently respectful interval inquired: “Is Miss Toner very wealthy?”

“Yes, very,” said Barney, relapsing now into a slight sulkiness. “At least, perhaps not very, as rich Americans go. She gave away a lot of her fortune, I know, when her mother died. She founded a place for children—a convalescent home, or crèche—out in California. And she did something in Chicago, too.”

And Miss Toner had evidently done something in London at the Lumleys’. It couldn’t be helped about Nancy, and if the American girl was pretty and, for all her nonsense, well-bred, it might not be a bad thing, since there was so much money. The Chadwicks were not at all well off, and Coldbrooks was only kept going by Mrs. Chadwick’s economies and Barney’s labours at his uncle’s stock-broking firm in the city. Oldmeadow could see Eleanor Chadwick’s so ingenuous yet so practical eye fixed on Miss Toner’s gold, and he, too, could fix his. Miss Toner sounded benevolent, and it was probable that her presence as mistress of Coldbrooks would be of benefit to all Barney’s relatives. All the same, she sounded as irrelevant in his life as the Wyndham Lewis.

“Adrienne Toner,” he heard himself repeating aloud, for he had a trick, caught, no doubt, from his long loneliness, of relapsing into absent-minded and audible meditations. The cadence of it worried him. It was an absurd name. “You know each other pretty well already, it seems,” he said.

“Yes; it’s extraordinary how one seems to know her. One doesn’t have any formalities to get through with her, as it were,” said Barney. “Either you are there, or you are not there.”

“Either on the yacht, or not on the yacht, eh?” Oldmeadow reached out for his pipe.

“Put it like that if you choose. It’s awfully jolly to be on the yacht, I can tell you. It is like a voyage, a great adventure, to know her.”

“And what’s it like to be off the yacht? Suppose I’m not there? Suppose she doesn’t like me?” Oldmeadow suggested. “What am I to talk to her about—of course I’ll come, if you really want me. But she frightens me a little, I confess. I’m not an adventurous person.”

“But neither am I, you know!” Barney exclaimed, “and that’s just what she does to you: makes you adventurous. She’ll be immensely interested in you, of course. You can talk to her about anything. It was down at a week-end at the Lumleys’ I first met her, and there were some tremendous big-wigs there, political, you know, and literary, and all that sort of thing; and she had them all around her. She’d have frightened me, too, if I hadn’t seen at once that she took to me and wouldn’t mind my being just ordinary. She likes everybody; that’s just it. She takes to everybody, big and little. She’s just like sunshine,” Barney stammered a little over his s’s. “That’s what she makes one think of straight off; shining on everything.”

“On the clean and the unclean. I see,” said Oldmeadow. “I feel it in my bones that I shall come into the unclean category with her. But it’ll do me the more good to have her shine on me.”