Читать книгу Too Old for Dolls - Anthony M. Ludovici - Страница 7

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On being dismissed from her mother's presence, Cleopatra did not go as she had been commanded to her mirror in order to remove the little shadow of down that adorned her upper lip. She retired instead to the library, and ensconcing herself in one of the large leather easy chairs, continued her reading of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility.

Occasionally while she read she would raise her eyes from the printed page to look at her unengaged hand as it rested on the arm of the chair she occupied, and for some moments she would be wrapped in thought.

There had been no lack of competition for that hand since the day when, at her coming-out dance, she had so eagerly extended it to Life for all that Life had to offer. It was not that it had come back empty to her side that made her sad. If occasionally she was moved by a little bitterness about her brief existence, it was rather because the kind of things with which her outstretched hand had been filled were so dismally unsatisfying. She counted the men she had been compelled to refuse. They numbered only two, but there were at least three others whom she had never allowed to get as far as a proposal.

Again for the hundredth time she passed them in review. Had she acted wisely? Were they so utterly impossible? Now, at the age of twenty-five, her worldly wisdom answered, "Nay," but deep down in her breast a less cultivated and more vigorous impulse answered most emphatically "Yea."

From early girlhood onwards Cleopatra had cherished very definite ideas about the man of her taste. In this she was by no means exceptional. But perhaps the circumstances that she had abided more steadfastly than most by the pattern her imagination had originally limned distinguished her from her more fickle sisters. The fault she found with the modern world was that it did not offer you man whole or complete, but only in fragments. To be quite plain, it offered you, from the athlete to the poet, a series of isolated manly characteristics, but it did not give you all the manly characteristics in one being at once, which constituted the all-round man of her dreams.

Whether it was that man had specialised too much of recent years, or what the reason might be, Cleopatra could not tell. But whenever she passed the men of her acquaintance in review, she always arrived at the same conclusion, that each represented only a fragment of what the whole man of her ideal was, and doubtless of what man himself had once been. It was as if she had been deposited among the ruins of a once beautiful cathedral. Fine pieces of screen architecture, exquisite portions of the capitals, delightful gargoyles, lay in profusion all around: but the whole building could be reconstructed in all its majesty, only by an effort of the imagination. This effort of the imagination she had made as a girl of seventeen.

To-day it seemed to her, you might choose the cleanly-bred, healthy, upright, jaunty athlete, and sigh in vain for a companion who could either sob or rejoice with you over the glory of a sonnet, a picture, or a statue; or else you might choose the slightly effete and partly neurotic poet or artist, and languish unconsoled, away from the joys of the fine, clean, stubbornly healthy body. The kind of fire that led to elopements, to wild and clandestine love-making, could now, with too few exceptions, be found only among ne'er-do-wells, foreign adventurers, cut-throats or knaves; while the stability that promised security for the future and for the family, seemed generally to present itself with a sort of tiresome starchiness of body and jejuneness of mind, that thought it childish to abandon itself to any emotion.

She was deep enough, primitively female enough to demand and expect a certain savour of wickedness in him who wooed her. But she was more accustomed to perceive the outward signs of this coveted quality in the waiters at the Carlton, or the Savoy, and among dust-men, coal-heavers and butcher-boys, than in the men of her mother's circle.

Had man been tamed out of all recognition? Or was her instinct wrong, and was it perverse to sigh for fire, wickedness, stability, cultivation, and healthy athleticism—all in the same man? She had read of Alcibiades, of men who were not fragmentary. Could such a man be born nowadays, and if born could he survive? Certainly the men she had refused had not been of this stamp.

It was miserably disappointing, and with it all there was her mother's untiring insistence upon the urgency of getting married. It was more than disappointing: it was a genuine grievance, but a grievance of a kind which most young women nowadays bury unredressed, and the former existence of which in their lives they reveal only by a tired, wasted look in their faces, which leads their husbands to consider them—"delicate."

With all her fastidiousness in regard to the man of her desire, however, Cleopatra was not to be confused with the romantic idealist who craves for that which never has been and never can be possible on earth. To have misunderstood her to this extent would have been a gross injustice. She had built up her picture of her mate, not with the help of feverish and morbid fancy, but guided only by the hints of an exceptionally healthy body. Modest to a degree to which only great reserves of passion can attain, it was to her a dire need that her mate should have fire, because half-consciously she divined that only fire purified and sanctified the transition from girlhood to womanhood. Half-heartedness here, or the lack of a great passionate momentum, that carried everything before it, spelt to her something distinctly discomfiting, not to say indecent. And in this, far from being a romantic idealist, she was entirely right and realistic. This explains why her taste inclined more resolutely to the adventurous idea of love, to the impromptu element, to the wild ardour of first embraces that must perforce flee from the sight of fellow creatures, than to the kind of graduated passion which begins with conversation, proceeds to a public engagement with staring people all about you, and ends with the still more measured tempo of a Church wedding. All the waiting, all the temporising, all the toadlike deliberation that these various slow steps involved, ran counter to her deepest feeling, that her love must be a matter of touch and go, a sudden kindling of two fires, the burning not of green wood but of a volcano.

But where, these days, could she find the partner who was prepared, and above all equipped, to play his part to hers? This was her grievance. And again in justice to her it must be acknowledged that it was a genuine one.

The young man whom her mother was at present "running" for her, was a creature at whom, as a girl of eighteen, she would not have looked a second time. But how much more modest in its demands had her taste not become as she had advanced in years! How much more docile and unassuming! She saw other girls marrying men not unlike Denis Malster; so why couldn't she? She concluded that it must evidently be the fate of modern women to accept the third-rate, the third-best—in fact disillusionment as a law of their beings; and having no one to support her in her soundest instincts, she began rather to doubt the validity of their claim, than to turn resolutely away from marriage altogether.

And now there was to be a complication in her trouble. Leonetta was returning home for good—Leonetta, the child eight years her junior, Leonetta was now as fresh, as attractive, and as blooming, as she herself had been when she was just seventeen, and whom, from habit, she still called "Baby."

Quietly she had waited and waited for the man of her heart, and been able to do this without the additional annoyance of competition to disturb or excite her. Peacefully these seven years she had lain like a watcher on the shore, scanning the horizon with her glass, without even a nudge of the elbow from her younger sister. And now she was no longer to be alone. A distracting, possibly an utterly defeating element was going to be introduced into her peaceful though anxious existence, and she shuddered unmistakably at the thought.

As yet she had harboured no conscious hostility towards her junior, merely a desire to keep her as long as possible at a distance, in order that the one relationship of which she had the deepest dread—that of competitors in the same field—might be warded off indefinitely, or, better still, never experienced between them.

She did not yet fear Baby. The disparity in their ages seemed too great and too obvious for that: but in recollecting certain incidents in their childhood, and one or two things about Baby's appearance and behaviour during the last two years, Cleopatra could not entirely free herself from a perfectly definite feeling of vexation in regard to her sister. Baby had not troubled her at all as an infant. It was as a child of eight, when Cleopatra was just sixteen, that her sister had first revealed disquieting proclivities. She had, for instance, a command of blandishments which to her elder were a closed book. By means of wiles and cajoleries utterly inimitable, she could extract money and presents from adults from whom the haughty Cleopatra would not even have solicited a kiss. In five years Baby had received more boxes of chocolates and more dolls than her sister had received during her whole lifetime. This was not, however, because the younger child was in any respect more beautiful than the elder, but rather owing to the younger's extraordinary gift for securing what she wanted by any means that might come to hand.

For a long while Cleopatra had looked on, wistfully it is true, but not enviously at her sister's astonishingly successful career: for was not Baby only a child after all? And, from the age of eleven to fourteen, Leonetta had been so outrageously gawky and unattractive, no matter how beautifully she happened to be clad, that Cleopatra's feelings of uneasiness about her sister were laid to rest as if for ever during this period.

Then, all of a sudden—and the day was written indelibly on the elder girl's memory—on a certain spring morning, at the time of year when winter frocks are doffed for lighter and brighter confections, Cleopatra beheld a vision, the nature of which was such as in a trice to resuscitate all those anxieties about her junior which, to do her justice, she had long ago relegated to oblivion.

The event occurred in Mrs. Delarayne's bedroom. Cleopatra, then a girl of twenty-two, was discussing with her mother the details of the Easter holiday programme and with her back to the door and her face to the window, was as completely unconscious of the surprise awaiting her as the bedroom furniture itself.

All at once the door opened. At first Cleopatra did not turn round, and it was only when the exceptionally fulsome manner of her mother's outburst of joy awakened her suspicions that at last she looked round and was confronted by the vision.

It was Baby—undoubtedly it was Baby; but certainly not the awkward child of a month, of a week, of a day, or even an hour ago. It was Baby transformed, nay transfigured, as if by magic. Whether the change had been gradual and imperceptible, or as sudden as Cleopatra imagined it to have been, the elder girl did not stop to think; she simply allowed her eyes to dwell almost spellbound upon the startling apparition facing her, and as quickly as a dart, before she was able to arrest it, a pang, a pain, or a convulsion of some sort, was communicated to her heart, the meaning of which she did not dare at first to analyse.

For Leonetta, from a Mohawk, from a sexless savage with tangled hair and blotchy features, from an angular filly devoid of grace and charm, had by a stroke of the wand become metamorphosed into a remarkably attractive young woman. It was startling: but it was also undeniable. It was not the vernal frock, of that Cleopatra was convinced; although Mrs. Delarayne had concentrated chiefly upon this feature in her transports of joy over her younger daughter's dramatic and spontaneous assumption of womanly beauty. Had it been only the frock Cleopatra was intelligent enough to have known that the pang she had felt would have been left unexplained. No, it was more fundamental than that. All the dress had accomplished was to set an acute accent over a development which, though already at its penultimate stage, had so far escaped the notice of Cleopatra and her mother. The picture had been present the day before, but it had not been quite perfectly focussed. The new frock had focussed it sharply.

Cleopatra remembered having asked herself whether Leonetta could be aware of the change that had come over her. But plainly her behaviour had dispelled this suspicion. Leonetta had behaved on that memorable occasion exactly as she had done throughout the previous week. Not even a sign of enhanced self-possession or assurance had betrayed the fact of an inward change, and somehow this unconsciousness of her accession of power only seemed to Cleopatra to make that power more formidable.

Events followed rapidly one upon the other after that. Everybody noticed the change and the improvement. Everybody commented on it. Mrs. Delarayne was doubly rejoiced, because although both her daughters were beautiful, Leonetta's features and style were more her mother's than Cleopatra's were. Cleopatra was a Delarayne, her beauty was if anything more severe and more stately than her mother's. Now the resemblance between Leonetta and her mother had become striking. But strangers were little occupied with this aspect of Leonetta's beauty. And when Cleopatra observed that the attention of men, in and out of doors, had become more marked towards her sister, and that they had begun even to turn round to stare at her in the street, the elder girl knew that her vision on that unforgettable spring morning had not been an hallucination: on the contrary it was a fact, and one to which she must do her best to reconcile herself.

Gradually the consequences of the change were forced upon the consciousness of Leonetta herself and her manner became correspondingly modified. Leonetta knew that she was a beautiful young woman. Leonetta realised that this meant power, and at last she gauged to the smallest fraction the extent of that power.

Then followed a mighty tussle in Cleopatra's heart. The influence the elder daughter had always exercised over the mother's mind now presented itself as a temptation, as a weapon she might use in a threatened struggle. But it must not be supposed that this temptation was yielded to without a furious conflict.

Leonetta did not know French well. French would give the stamp of finish to an education which, in the case of the younger daughter, with her constitutional disinclination for study, was little more than make-believe. Ought not Baby to be sent abroad? Was it not doing her the greatest service to speed her thither? Crudely Cleopatra concluded that she was really acting altruistically in warmly advocating this scheme—self-analysis is frequently as inaccurate as this;—besides, would not she, Cleopatra, in the interval become engaged, married, and an independent person outside her mother's home, and away from Leonetta's "pitch"? The programme was surely all in favour of the younger girl.

The plan was laid before Mrs. Delarayne, calmly, solemnly, with all the elaborate minutiæ of earnest concern about a sister's welfare that Cleopatra could summon. And the result was that within six weeks of that terrible Easter, arrangements had been made for Leonetta to spend at least a year in a large and expensive school at Versailles, where she could not only acquire the vernacular, but also become infected with the polish of the native.

Sublimely unsuspecting, Leonetta had embraced her sister passionately on the platform of Charing Cross station, and Cleopatra had even shed a tear of pious sorrow.

Her mother had pointed out to Cleopatra at the time that she herself had enjoyed none of the advantages which she urged with so much generous fervour on behalf of her sister. Cleopatra had replied that she had had other advantages, a University education, a classical training, the kind of cultivation for which Leonetta was unsuited and in the acquisition of which she would have been unhappy.

But worse was to come. At the end of the year Leonetta had returned; and, if it is possible to imagine the superlative surpassed, certainly Leonetta's appearance on her return, her increased vivacity, her perfect command of French, her new tricks with her hair and clothes, utterly eclipsed the Leonetta who had left her Kensington home a year previously.

Nothing had happened to Cleopatra in the meantime, and the elder girl, after having rapidly adopted subtly modified imitations of her sister's style of coiffure, was once again thrust hopelessly into the very position against which her nobler instincts most heartily rebelled. She refused to remain in a relation of tacit, covert, and ill-concealed rivalry to one whom the whole world, including her mother, expected her to love. It was ignominious; it was intolerable. It poisoned her to the very marrow. It made her ache at night when she ought to have been sleeping. Had she been less like Leonetta than she was, had she possessed less passion, less beauty, and less desire than her sister, she could have endured it. As it was the position entailed a perpetual upheaval of her peace of mind.

She was at her wits' end. To face her mother with another scheme for Leonetta's welfare was out of the question. What could she do?

Fortunately for Cleopatra, Leonetta herself brought about the unravelment in a manner sufficiently satisfactory to her sister.

Charming and, in many ways, irresistible as she was, Leonetta had brought back a will of her own from Versailles, and a tongue, too, by means of which she secured that will's highest purposes. During her absence from London, however, her mother had acquired certain habits and tastes, the pursuit of which now frequently clashed with her own plans and ran distinctly counter to her notion of what a mother should be and should do. For Cleopatra had made singularly few claims upon her mother's time all this while, and had never questioned her absolute right to seek her enjoyment when and where she chose.

After a year of this novel experience, during which Mrs. Delarayne had discovered new haunts and new households in which she could behave, even if she were not accepted, as a person who was not of "mediæval antiquity," her taste for this kind of life had developed. Enamoured as this sprightly quinquagenarian had always been of the other sex, and resolute as she was to show that an old war-horse could prance as bravely as a colt to the stirring trumpet call of youth, she had entered heart and soul into an existence which her late husband would have deprecated as strongly as he had once admired the spirit which led her to do it.

Now the sudden intrusion of a full-grown, wilful and extraordinarily vigorous girl of fifteen and a half years upon these newly acquired habits, proved a source of some vexation to the widow; and, love Leonetta as she might, she very quickly discovered that the peace of mind and freedom of action that Cleopatra had allowed her unstintingly were to be despotically withheld by her younger and more exacting offspring.

Cleopatra watched and understood all this. It seemed that Mrs. Delarayne and Leonetta were inevitably heading towards a catastrophe; nor did the elder girl take any steps, either by word or deed, to guide either of them to a peaceable adjustment of their differences.

Gradually Leonetta grew to be deliberately rude with her parent, would refuse to fetch and carry for her, was quickly bored over any little personal service performed for her, and did her best in every way to cramp the widow's ever freshly sprouting affection.

At last Cleopatra felt she must put in a word. Her mother was very highly strung, in any case too much so to be exposed constantly to irritation and sorrow. Could she help? Could she speak to Baby?

It was then that Mrs. Delarayne had opened her heart to Cleopatra. No, she had made up her mind. Reluctantly she had been forced to the conclusion that Leonetta must go away—to a school of domesticity, or of gardening or something—where she could acquire not only information, but also the discipline which would save her from growing up an impossible woman.

Cleopatra had given vent to a sigh of relief, and with decent slowness and hesitation had ultimately agreed.

A somewhat acrimonious quarrel between Mrs. Delarayne and Leonetta, a day or two after this conversation had taken place, proved to be the determining factor. In her passion Leonetta had declared that she would be as glad as anything to go, if only for company, as it seemed to her that her mother was eternally "gadding about"; and it was only when she was alone in a first-class carriage travelling northward that she regretted this hasty and ill-considered speech.

Another year had passed in this way; Leonetta had by now become, according to the domesticity school reports, an accomplished housekeeper, and, as a girl of seventeen, was on her way home. Coming home!—Cleopatra had dwelt on this homecoming every wakeful hour of the last thirty days, and again she felt that pang, or pain, or strange convulsion of the heart, which she loathed because it humiliated her, and which she combated because it threatened to master her.

Thus did Cleopatra meditate over her lot as she examined her fine, strong, disengaged hand, as she sat in the study on that afternoon in June; and Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility had little to offer her either in comfort or enlightenment.

It was a fine hand she looked at. The fingers were well-shaped, long and even, without any of those thicknesses at the joints which so often mar the beauty of hands even in men. The finger-nails were not too long, and there was a sort of "well-upholstered" fulness of the fingers and palm which spoke of health and latent efficiency. It was not a small hand, or in any case, not too small a hand, and on the inside it possessed those soft corrugations that denote artistic sensibilities.