Читать книгу Image of Josephine - Booth Tarkington - Страница 7

Table of Contents

Heat centered upon the city as if through a vast yellow burning-glass. Noon was dangerous anywhere out of the shade, and, toward two o’clock on this airless day of the thunderous summer of 1943, August reached its hottest. The passengers who’d sagged into the trackless trolley-car downtown were sorry for themselves; but one of them extended some of her compassion to a fellow-sufferer.

“Look at the poor thing!” this Christian woman said. She was one of a pair of housewives who sat, baskets on laps, fanning themselves with Noon Editions. “Thank goodness he found a seat when those children got off. I was afraid if he didn’t he’d drop flat and die on the floor.”

“Who you mean, hon?”

“You hadn’t noticed him? That poor soldier—the one four seats in front of us. See how thin the back of his neck is and between his shoulder blades. Must be terrible to come back wounded and limping to all this heat. Got quite a cultivated look, too, and see that nice brown hair. If he gets off before we do, you notice his face.”

Thus, when the car stopped at Twenty-first Street, both stared at the young soldier who came down the aisle trying not to limp. “Did you see, hon—that expression they get from what they’ve been through?”

“I’ll say! Those dark eyes all sunk back in his head looked as if he couldn’t get away from it even back here at home.” The car resumed motion. “Was he a lieutenant? I didn’t get his insignia or service ribbons, I was so busy gandering at his face. He certainly had that look, poor soul!”

The pitied young soldier had been left at a street corner in a neighborhood of elderly houses, some of them, smelling of recent noon meals for boarders and all of them less important than they once had been. He stood staring about him uncertainly; glanced back over one shoulder, then over the other with the pathetic distrust a lost dog shows upon ground always more and more perilously unfamiliar. Then, seeing that the two metal signs at right-angles on the corner lamp-post displayed each the name of a street, he peered at the names, sighed heavily and set off westward, limping more than a little upon the hot cement sidewalk of Twenty-first Street.

At the next corner he came to a north-and-south boulevard, crossed it and walked on before a lawn a full block in breadth. This lawn, shaped between bordering shrubberies, was the green approach to the stately long façade of an imposing building of pale grey limestone. A smoothly flagged path forty feet wide led from the sidewalk and across the lawn to the building’s great pilastered and pedimented central entrance; the soldier came to a halt, wiped his neck and forehead and looked long and troubledly at the architectural magnificence before him.

The noble edifice faced south, and its classic effect was enhanced by corresponding pediments and their supporting tall pilasters at the eastern and western ends of its front; but at the eastern end an incongruity puzzled the eye of a stranger. Here, umbilically attached to monumental grandeur by a short stone passage, stood a dwelling-house older than the great building apparently its parent, and this paradoxical house was not only brick but most illegitimately of a Tudor-like design often in favor among millionaires at the turn of the century. The young man, easing his lame leg by his halt upon the sidewalk, gazed plaintively at the inappropriate mansion, plainly making nothing of it. Then his eyes slowly turned again to what had first held their attention when he’d stopped. Above the superb central portal and below its crowning pediment there was an eternal-looking inscription carved in stone:

THOMAS OAKLIN MUSEUM OF THE FINE ARTS

Anno Domini MCMXXXVII

As the soldier again read this uncontradictable announcement his lips moved, though not as if following those formidable stone words on high; he was whispering to himself, “Get on with it, can’t you? You’ve got to! Get on!” He limped forward upon the flagged broad path, ascended the wide steps of the museum, passed between open ponderous bronze doors and found himself in a vast and stony hall floored with varicolored marble.

Before him, in the center of this space, there rose upon a black pedestal a single work of art: the sculptured stone figure of a youth, deeply pitted, footless and noseless but Archaic Greek. The museum, extending cavernously beyond open archways, seemed void of life; then in the wall at his right the young man perceived a cubbyhole with a narrow strip of lettering above it: Please Check Canes and Umbrellas. He went to the cubbyhole, looked through and saw a fragile old man asleep in a stiff chair. The soldier coughed deferentially; then more loudly, and, as this exertion produced nothing except itself, he spoke, though timidly.

“I beg your pardon. May I trouble you, please? Would you kindly tell me where——”

The slumber of the custodian continued to be sound. The soldier, thus easily disconcerted, turned away, glanced toward the sunshine beyond the bronze doors as if considering a retreat from the building; but again urgently whispered to himself and walked toward a majestic stairway opposite the entrance. He seemed about to ascend to a skylighted region where sculpture in marble could be glimpsed from below, white figures set against mellow tapestries; then more uncertainty prevailed and he went to an archway at his left.

Here he examined a small bronze tablet set into the wall, ORIENTAL ART, before he limped dubiously through the archway and was in a great room that disturbed him with its contents—human-like shapes, large and small, in scarred gilt bronze, in stone, in marble, in glazed baked earth and in carven wood. Many retained color and some of them were bland; others were illimitably ominous. They stood spaced against the walls, and after he’d advanced a few steps he stopped with a physical flinch, stood irresolute. He flinched again as a tremulous voice spoke to him and a stooping but fat old woman, with a soft feather dust-brush in her hand, came out from behind a life-sized Kuan-yin.

“Is there something I could show you?” she asked, beaming upon him through horn-rimmed spectacles. “We’re delighted to have soldiers interested in our collections. Maybe you’ve been in the Orient, so this gallery especially appeals to you? I’m Mrs. Hevlin, Curator of Oriental Art nowadays. I used to be——” She paused and laughed apologetically. “Well, that’s neither here nor there. Was there something in particular you wanted to see?”

“I was looking for—for——”

“Maybe something in the gallery beyond this one?” she asked with a hurrying eagerness. “It’s so seldom I have a chance to show anybody our treasures nowadays. You see, I was in retirement; but the war’s got the museum so short-handed they’ve had to send for me.” She renewed her apologetic laughter a little cacklingly. “Oh, yes, even for me! We have a beautiful room just beyond, if you’re looking for ceramics or—or jade? Our jade is heavenly—all in glass cases of course; but if there’s any piece your soul just screams to touch—well, you’re one of our soldiers and I’d gladly open the case and——”

“No. Thank you very much; but I’m trying to find Mr. Rossbeke.”

“Oh, I’m sorry! I didn’t understand. If you’re a friend of Mr. Rossbeke’s——”

“Well—no,” he said. “I don’t—I’ve never met him. I have an appointment with him, though.”

“Oh, I’m sorry!” Mrs. Hevlin repeated this flutteringly and in a vague way seemed agitated and a little soured. “Of course I don’t mean I’m sorry you have an appointment with Mr. Rossbeke—the great Mr. Rossbeke! Of course as he’s the Director of the Museum we all have to think he’s a great man! No doubt he is; I scarcely know him. You see, when I was retired and he took charge of everything—well, I needn’t go into that. Visitors to the museum aren’t expected to be interested in these details.”

“Well, I——” The young soldier looked helpless; this fat old woman-curator seemed as nervous and scatter-minded as he was, himself. “I found the museum all right—a hotel clerk told me how to get here; but that old man in the checkroom’s asleep and I didn’t like to—I mean, as you say, that’s another of these details not expected to—I don’t know why I’m talking about it—not important.” He paused, aware that this conversation between two strangers in a gallery of Oriental Art was becoming too peculiar. “I—I believe I ought to be finding Mr. Rossbeke if I can.”

“Oh, certainly!” Mrs. Hevlin was abruptly prim. “Go straight back, cross the big vestibule, then go through the Gallery of Mediæval Art—you’ll see the tablet—and you’ll come out in the east corridor. The first door in that corridor will take you into the Director’s office.”

“Thank you.”

The young man returned by the way he’d come, crossed the vestibular hall, passed through an archway tableted MEDIÆVAL ART and was again among disturbing shapes. They were as exotic as those he’d just left but more angular and austere. Traces of ancient red and blue and gilding lingered upon some of the carved grim Madonnas, gaunt saints and narrow angels; color was even violent upon a few of the embossed panels and framed mosaics here and there on the walls. Then, as the soldier limped along, he came less uneasily into an area of monastic benches, old black choir stalls, stained glass, and glass cases displaying browned illuminated manuscripts and marginally illustrated psalters and missals. Beyond loomed another archway, and, passing through it, he was in a transverse corridor and saw in the wall opposite him a paneled old oaken door somebody had left ajar.

He knocked upon the door but had no answer. Venturing to open it more widely, he found before him what seemed to be a short hallway leading to another oaken door, which also stood ajar as if somebody’d lately passed through both of these doors in haste. Beyond the second a strip of fine interior could be seen—darkened wood panelings, diamond-shaped leaded panes of glass in a deeply recessed window, rising shelves of richly bound tall books. Evidently this farther door led into somebody’s library.

He advanced, knocked again, and an angry-looking girl appeared in the aperture. He had an impression of blonde hair, lipstick, a diamond clip near a tanned throat, grey eyes that didn’t look upon him as a person.

“Haven’t you sense enough to know nobody’s permitted through this way?” she said fiercely, and she added the sound “Uff!” as if the public’s stupidities were spoiling her life.

The door was banged—at his face—and there was the intentional clatter of a bolt upon the other side. He comprehended that the hallway in which he stood was the stone passage he’d seen from outdoors, the link between the museum and that attached incongruity, the overshadowed brick mansion.

He went back, and, again in the corridor, saw facing him a more office-like door, half of opaque white glass. Small-lettered upon the glass was the name “Mr. Rossbeke.” A woman’s voice, “Come in,” responded to his abashed tap here, and he entered a spacious room dominated by a long table laden with big books and portfolios; but what he saw first, through wide windows, was an inner court just outside where trees grew and a fountain played—a pink marble old Italian fountain that sprayed iridescence coolly high into the hot air. He wished that he could stand in the falling water, stay in it till after dark.

He glanced but flickeringly at the middle-aged woman who sat at a desk in sole occupancy of the room. “I think—I think Mr. Rossbeke’s expecting me,” he said in a low voice. “I——My name is Bailey Fount.”

She was a pleasant-looking woman and proved affable. “Yes, Mr. Fount. There’s a caller; but I think he’s about going.”

“Thank you.” Bailey Fount, already made aware by vehement sounds from an open inner doorway of the office that there was indeed a caller, went to a spindle-legged settee against the wall, sat and fanned himself with his cap.

The excited voice from Mr. Rossbeke’s private room grew louder. “I am beink made seek! Can I go on liffing in a such atmosp’ere of bossness? Rossbeke, I comed to spik a little with you as a colleague in the arts and poum-bang! who boops in, sees me, what happens? I would not comed here except I think they are out of town all summer.”

Another voice, also a man’s, uttered a melancholy laugh and spoke. “She’s only home for a day. That’s a great advantage. She’ll be off for the St. Lawrence again to-morrow, so——”

“Rossbeke, Rossbeke, one day is too long! You heard. Shouts me, ‘Parannik, Parannik! Parannik, take care; last season you played too much classics.’ Too much classics! Is it a persecushion!”

The other voice was placative. “Oh, well! You heard what she just said to me, too.”

“Did I hear? You, Rossbeke, the Director of the Museum, how can you listen and still be patient? Me, I can’t do it; I can’t be polite. I must conduct a symphony orchestra in a city only two-hunder-fifty-souzand people and when it’s war. If I play what she tells me, who comes? Can I play wizout somebody listen? Is my orchestra for her alone? I say no; I say no like hell! Where is my hat?”

“You’re going, Parannik?”

“Home to my bass-tub. Crazy people doctors put in bass-tubs to quietenate them. I was crazy hot and now I am crazy crazy. I am runnink to bass-tub! Good-bye!”

Parannik, a lean blond man in limp white clothes, his hair disordered, brilliant eyes agonized under imperceptible eyebrows, came forth stampingly, strode through the outer office, paused at the corridor door to shout “Oh! Oh!” and departed.

The middle-aged woman at the desk glanced companionably at the young man upon the settee, hoping that he was as amused as she; but he was looking into his cap, unaware of his privilege in being witness to an intimate mood of a celebrated personage. “Ah, yes,” she thought. “Coming out of it must be harder for too many of them than even getting into it was.” She spoke cordially: “I’m sure Mr. Rossbeke’ll be glad to see you now, Mr. Fount.”