Читать книгу The Disturbing Charm - Berta Ruck - Страница 6

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"Yet I am bewitched with the rogue's company; if the rascal had not given me medicines to make me love him, I'll be hanged; it could not be else; I have drunk medicines."

Shakespeare.

The letter said:

"... And this discovery, sent herewith, will mark an Epoch in the affairs of the world!

"Half the trouble in that world arises from the fact that human beings are continually falling in Love ... with the wrong people. Sir, have you ever wondered why this should be?"

The old Professor of Botany stood looking at this mysterious typewritten letter, addressed to him, with the rest of his large mail, at the hotel in Western France where he was staying in the fourth autumn of the War with his young niece and secretary. He smiled as he came to the last words. "Had he ever wondered!" How many nights of his youth had been wasted in stormily "wondering——?" Strangers who write to celebrities do stumble on intimate matters sometimes.

He read on:

"Why should one girl set her affections upon the man who of all others will make her the worst possible husband? All her friends foresee, and warn her. She herself realizes it vaguely. But to her own destruction she loves him. What has caused this catastrophe? Some small and secret Force; one microbe can achieve a pestilence."

"Yes, indeed," murmured Professor Howel-Jones, nodding his massive old white head. He had been on the point of tossing the letter into the waste-paper basket, but something made him read on.

"Another young man, why must he desire the one pretty woman who can never give him happiness? She is 'pure as ice, chaste as snow' ... dull as ditch-water; he, full of fire and dreams. He swears he'll teach her to respond to Passion; marries her. Another tragedy!"

How like himself again, the Professor mused, going back to the days when he had worn his Rugby International cap with more pride than he now wore his foreign degrees. That memory set him staring out of the big balconied window of his room, over the wide French lagoon, past the barrier of sandhills with their pointing phare, to where, miles away, the irregular white line of the Atlantic rollers crashed and spouted on the reefs. They had been crashing out those thunderous questions to the sands on his football days, they would be tossing their appeals to the sky long after his learning and his Nobel Prize were forgotten. Why, then, should an anonymous correspondent remind him of old unrest?

For all that, he went on reading:

"Each of us knows a list of these stories. How avert them? By seeking out and planting only in the right soil the root of good or evil, the Love-germ. All through the ages Man has recognized its existence; the ancients with their philtres and amulets. Shakespeare embodies it in an herb. We moderns accept it as an enigma; have you never heard it said of a woman, 'She is not actually pretty, but she has the Disturbing Charm, whatever it is'?"

"The Disturbing Charm!" ... Ah, he knew it! She had possessed it, the girl he had never married, the girl who had passed him over for his brother the sea-captain, and who had become the mother of Olwen, his niece. Olwen would be coming in a few minutes to straighten and sort all those drifts of paper on the roomy work-table which no hand but hers, in the whole of the hotel, was allowed to touch. He thought, half-amusedly: "Better not let that little Olwen get hold of this letter."

The letter ended:

"Sir, you shall not be worried with technicalities. Believe only this, that the life study of the writer of this letter has at last been crowned with success. In the small packet enclosed there is sealed up the result of years of Research, with directions for its use. The inventor lacks courage for experimenting. But you, learned Sir, you, the gifted author of 'The Loves of the Ferns,' will not shrink from responsibility in the cause of Science.

"Should you wish to procure more of the invention, there is enclosed the address of a box at a newspaper office where you may apply.

"With all good wishes from

"Your obedient servant,

"The Inventor."

A deep genial laugh broke from the old man's wide chest.

He threw the letter and its enclosure on to the table, on the top of his notes for the chapter on "Edible Fungi."

"Mad—sentimental mad!" he commented. "Most lunatics think themselves inventors, that's why most inventors are considered lunatics." He drew up a chair and began making hay of the papers before him, in search of the other file of notes.

The large room which the Professor had had cleared of the bed and most of the other furniture was full of air and sunshine and of that polished cleanliness which few English rooms achieve. White walls and parquet floor shone like mirrors, mirrors like diamonds; the glass of the open windows was clear as the morning air that lay between the hotel and the pine-forest on the one side, the lagoon on the other. The resinous sigh of the pines mingled with the warm, lung-lifting breath of the sea. It was a glorious morning—too glorious for work indoors....

Professor Howel-Jones looked hard at his notes, but for once he scarcely saw them. He knew that the letter he had just read was the work of a sentimental lunatic, but for all that it had set a string vibrating. As the old man sat there, his brown eyes abstracted under the thatch of hair as white as seeding clematis, he looked like some clean-shaven modern Druid seeing visions. He did, at that moment, see a vision.

He saw an endless procession of those people who have loved or married (or both) the wrong person.

He saw the lads who have chosen out of their class; barmaids, "bits of fluff."

He saw the girls who have married out of their generation.

He saw the flirts, who wear an attachment as they wear a hat, tied for life to the affection that is true as steel. (Dreadful for both of them!)

Also the young men who treat Love as a cross between a meal and a music-hall joke, plighted to the shy idealists.

He saw the Bohemian married to the curate.

Likewise the attractive young rake, fettered to the frump.

He saw the women born for motherhood, left lonely spinsters for want of charm to attract.

He saw the mothers who sighed for freedom, resenting the nursery.

He saw the Anything, wedded to the Anything But.

Yes; he saw for that moment nothing but the wholesale gigantic Blunder of the mis-mating of the world.

No doubt it was all crystallized for him in one tender image; Olwen's dead mother, the girl he should have married. He sighed and smiled.

"Pity there's no putting things right, as that lunatic suggests," he thought. "There would be an invention worth boasting about! Wireless wouldn't be in it, or X-rays. Pity it isn't all true...."

A tap at the door interrupted his musings. The softest of girl's voices asked, "Are you ready for me, Uncle?"

"Yes!" he called out, jerking himself back into the world of realities. "Come in, Olwen."

Olwen Howel-Jones came in.

A small, but daintily made girl of nineteen. Just a handful of softness in a skimpy one-piece frock. A pale, three-cornered morsel of a face set off by sleek hair as black as her little French boots. Large eyes that seemed sometimes brown, sometimes grey; a mouth tremulous, but vivid as a red carnation—such was Olwen. She brought a ripple of Youth into that bare temple of Science that was her uncle's study. Something else she brought—a breath of tension, of impatience. A man would have passed it over; not so a woman. Already one woman in the hotel had said to herself, "I wonder who it is that child's so desperately in love with?"

Had she been in the room at the moment, that woman might have seen the answer to her question flame suddenly into the young girl's face as she stepped up to the table by the window. Under the balcony there was a sound of footsteps. Olwen pushed aside a great jar full of arbutus that stood at the further edge of the table.

"That's in your light, Uncle," she said.

The Professor's back was to her as the figures passed quickly out from below the balcony. He caught a glimpse of the two wounded British officers swinging off towards the plage. He caught the gleam of scarlet on khaki; heard a snatch of the rather husky boyish laughter of one of them; a scrap talk of the other. In a resonant voice with that particularly dominant form of accent, Scots with a dash of Canadian, there floated up through the clear morning air this somewhat arrested announcement:

"I'm the finest judge of women in Europe."

This the Professor caught, vaguely. What he did not catch was the sudden, still alertness into which there seemed to spring the whole body of the girl behind him. She was "aware" from head to foot; her white throat seemed to stretch, her whole being to strain; listening. The footsteps passed, the husky charming laugh of the one, the loud confident voice of the other.... Life relaxed again in Olwen; mechanically her hands began sorting papers. No; the Professor had not noticed, her male relatives being avowedly the worst observers of a girl's psychology ... even had he seen, he probably would not have guessed which of the two young men who had gone by was responsible for that sudden transitory illumination of his niece's face; whether it was the black-eyed Staff Captain who had lost an arm, or the blonde R.F.C. pilot who had been shot down last April.... Well, they'd both gone now; nothing more of them to be seen until the déjeuner....

Olwen dragged her eyes back to the disorder of the writing-table; she tossed up her head with a rather forced sprightliness, and laughed.

"What a mess! Worse than ever, and I'd put everything so beautifully tidy last night! You are dreadful!"

"Never mind, Olwen fach," he said, with a hand on her shoulder. "There won't be much work done this morning. I'm going into the woods. Just hand me my specimen-case ... ah, here. And file the June numbers of that Danish magazine—where on earth did I put 'em?—ah, there. Then there are a couple of letters to copy into the book, and that's all. You can come on and find me; I shall be where we went yesterday with Mrs. Cartwright and that young What's-his-name, the flying officer."

He set aside the two letters to be copied, planting upon them, as a paper weight, one of the enormous pine-cones that he had picked up in the forest. Then he slung on his specimen-case, took up his indented grey hat, smiled and nodded to the girlish figure at the table, and went out.

Olwen, left alone, stretched her arms over her head. "Oh!" she sighed, desperately. She moved the jar of arbutus into place again; picked out a spray, dark-leafed, berried with scarlet and orange, tried it against the dull serge of her frock. Then she tilted her chair back so that she could just see herself in one of the gilt-framed mirrors. It showed her a forlorn little face.

"He'd never look at me, I know," she told herself.

She thrust the spray of arbutus back into water and turned to her work listlessly enough.

Half an hour later the listlessness had finished.

A miracle had begun to work!

For the Professor's niece and secretary was pouring breathlessly over a letter that she had found on the table under a file of notes for J. Howel-Jones's great work on Agarics.

With shining credulous eyes she turned from that typewritten letter to the little packet that had been enclosed in it. Then she turned to the letter again. She read:

"Half the trouble in the world arises from the fact that human beings are continually falling in love ... with the wrong people."

She read the astonishing suggestion:

"Each of us knows a list of these stories. How avert them? By seeking out and planting only in the right soil the root of good or evil, the Love-germ."

She read further, this profoundly hopeful comment:

"Have you never heard it said of a woman, 'She is not pretty, but she has the disturbing charm, whatever it is'?"

Finally she read this, the sentence that set her trembling:

"In the small packet enclosed there is sealed up the result of years of Research, with directions for its use."

It lay in her hand, the packet which she had taken up as gingerly as if it had been turpinite, or something else capable of blowing her out through the window and past the long wooden pier, across the sparkling Baissin, over the sandhills with their lighthouse and into the Bay of Biscay where those rollers foamed and roared....

The old Scientist had said "Madness!" This girl longed to accept every word of it; partly, perhaps, because every loving woman secretly believes there must be some Power of this kind, could she but find it—the power to compel the love she covets. Here it was.

Hastily she broke the wrapping; it disclosed an inner packet and a paper. In small characters there was written on the paper:

Directions for Use.

"This charm must be worn, hidden, about the person of him or her who wishes to test its efficacy.

"It may be hidden about the dress or person of someone who does not know of its properties; its power will work, nevertheless.

"A small portion of the charm will suffice.

"Constant use does not wear away its power."

Olwen, bending closely over the inner packet, sniffed at the pleasant musky scent that rose from it.

"Oh!..." she breathed.... Were those steps outside the passage?... She sprang up.... Swiftly, almost guiltily, she dragged down the low collar of her frock; she thrust the packet and paper into her bosom. They crackled against the soft mauve ribbons of her underbodice.

"Supposing I'd got it!" she thought, and her whole heart lifted. She pressed her hands to her breast.

Supposing that under her own small and fevered hands (dimpled, faintly stained from the carbon of her typewriter) she held it, that recipe for setting right the Blunder of the world! Ah, if she'd got hold of it really, the Love-germ, the microbe of mischief and delight!

The Disturbing Charm itself!

Then what would come of it?