Читать книгу The Last Bouquet: Some Twilight Tales - Bowen Marjorie - Страница 4

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Mme. Marcelle Lesarge and Miss Kezia Faunce quarrelled violently in the private sitting-room of an expensive Parisian hotel. The interview had begun with embarrassment, but decorously, and had proceeded through stages of mutual exasperation to final outbursts of recrimination that were without restraint. The disgust, contempt, and fury which each had cherished in their hearts for years rose to their lips, and rage at being involved in such a humiliating quarrel added force to the energy with which they abused each other.

Mme. Lesarge was a fashionable actress, beautifully dressed in a frilled interchangeable crimson and blue silk, with dark red feathers in the small hat exquisitely poised on her glossy curls. The reticule that dangled from the wrist of her white kid pearl-buttoned gloves was of gold mesh, and the handle of her parasol was carved ivory. There were real diamonds at her ears and in the costly lace at her throat. All her movements were graceful and well trained, at once impetuous and languishing.

Miss Faunce wore an ugly brown travelling dress frogged with black braid. Her hair was grey and brushed into a chenille net. Her gestures were brusque and her voice was harsh.

These two women, who seemed in everything dissimilar, were twin sisters. They had not seen each other for ten years.

A spiteful curiosity that thinly masked hatred had brought Miss Faunce to Paris, and the same emotion had induced Mme. Lesarge to call at her sister's hotel. Yet the first interchanges after this long silence had been civil enough. Miss Faunce had sent quite a friendly little note stating casually that she was in Paris for a few days, naming her hotel and adding how pleased she would be to see Martha again after so many years.

Mme. Lesarge replied in a letter written on an impulse of kindness and had accepted, quite warmly, the invitation to renew the relationship broken off so early and for such a great while, as it seemed, completely forgotten.

But, when they met, the first friendly conventionalities had soon changed into this bitter quarrelling. Neither woman could forgive the appearance of the other. Miss Kezia Faunce saw in the actress the woman who had attained everything which she, in the name of Virtue, had denied herself. She admired, envied and loathed all the manifestations of this unblushing Vice which had made such a profitable use of its opportunities. In this successful wanton who was really her twin sister Kezia Faunce saw the woman she would have liked to have been, and the realisation of this brought to a climax the smouldering anger of years. But, if she were enraged, no less deep was the fury of Martha who called herself Marcelle Lesarge, for in this plain woman with the grey hair, harsh voice, drab complexion, and clumsy clothes she saw herself, the woman who, without her affectations, her graces, her costly clothes, her paints and dyes, she really was.

It was true that she contrived to look thirty and that Kezia did not look a day less than fifty, but they were twins and their common age, forty-five, seemed to the actress to be written all over the red plush and gilt of the hotel sitting-room.

There was a pause in their fierce speech and they sat slack, exhausted by passion, staring at each other and each thought: 'It must never be known by any of my friends that that dreadful woman is my sister.'

'I should be ruined,' the actress said to herself. 'Everyone would think I am even older than I am. That hideous, middle-aged, dowdy bourgeoisemy sister! I should be laughed out of Paris. Why did she come here? Why was I such a fool as to see her?'

And Kezia thought:

'If anyone at Stibbards were to see her I should be ruined and I should never be able to hold up my head again. A great, blousy, painted trollop! I must have been crazy to come.'

The actress was the first to recover herself. Her rage had resolved itself into a steady fear that someone in Paris should get to know that this miserable English provincial was her twin sister.

Mme. Lesarge was not without rivals nor fears for the future. She had skilfully built up many legends about herself that even the whisper of the existence of Miss Faunce would destroy.

So, pulling at the large pearls that fastened her pale grey gloves she said, with some art:

'It is very stupid of us to quarrel. You should not have come and I should not have seen you. But now I suppose we have said all the unpleasant things we can think of. We had better try to forget each other again.'

'I wish I could forget, Martha, but you know perfectly well that one can't forget just because one wants to...I've tried to forget you time and again for years, but it's no use. You keep coming up in my mind—between me and my duty, between me and my prayers, sometimes.'

Mme. Lesarge laughed uneasily. The more she considered the situation the more she felt it imperative for her sister to leave Paris quietly and at once.

'Well, I can't help that, can I, Kezia? You must have got a morbid mind. I can't say I ever think of you, though I very well might. I might say that you got on my nerves.'

'That's impertinence,' put in Kezia sharply. Her lips were dry and trembling, and her flaccid cheeks quite pale.

'I don't see that it is impertinence. I ran away from home when I was sixteen, and I have had all manner of adventures since.'

'Pray don't relate any of them to me,' flung in Kezia.

'As if I should!' The actress smiled with a maddening self-complacency. 'You wouldn't understand them. They are quite out of the range of your experience. But, as I said, I left home when I was sixteen and I think it would be quite reasonable for me to feel that it was rather dreadful to think of you at Stibbards all that time—going on just the same, day in, day out. Doing everything exactly as mother used to do it. And grandmother before that, I suppose.'

'In other words,' interrupted Kezia, 'leading the life of a decent gentlewoman with a sense of honour and of duty.'

'How can you talk like that?' asked Mme. Lesarge with a vicious smile. 'Don't you realise how really shocking that sounds to me? But I suppose I ought to be sorry for you. You never had the strength to break away.'

Miss Faunce rose and walked to the window and peered down through the stiff, white, starched lace curtains into the narrow noisy street below and watched a baker's boy putting the very long powdered loaves into a handcart. She wanted to say what she had to say with the deadly effect of perfect calm. She realised that it would, perhaps, be better to say nothing at all, but she could not attain to that amount of self-control.

She must, clearly, and once and for all, get out of her heart and soul all her thoughts about her twin sister.

Mme. Lesarge was glad of this respite. She was sorry about the quarrel, which had been unbecoming and exhausting; she regretted that she had not had more power over herself. It had been a very long time since she had been in such a rage; she was, on the whole, a good-natured woman and not often crossed nor exasperated. Her life had been easy, full of facile success, light friendships and superficial adulation; she avoided everyone who disapproved of her, therefore this violent interview had been a detestable experience.

She rose also and went, not to the window, but to a mirror and there skilfully adjusted the smooth curls that should, perhaps, have been the same colour as the harsh locks of her sister, but which were very carefully tinted a glossy auburn. She took paint and powder from her reticule and made up her lips and her cheeks; she always looked at herself a little anxiously when she studied her face in the mirror, but never had she looked at herself so anxiously as she did now. For she seemed to see in her comely face, which had satisfied her well enough until the present moment, the ugly lines, the sour bilious tint, the creeping wrinkles, and the sagging folds that for the last half-hour she had been observing with fear and terror in the countenance of her twin sister.

She had thought, quite gaily, as she had come up the hotel stairs:

'I suppose Kezia will be looking a terrible frump by now.'

But she had been quite unprepared for what Kezia really did look like.

All the time they had been quarrelling she had been unable to take a terrified, fascinated gaze from the plain woman seated opposite her, and she had thought continuously, 'She is my age to the very minute.' Of course, no one would recognize that there was the least likeness between them; it was not only the dress and the paint and the dye and the acquired graces that disguised the actress. Although they were twin sisters their natures were absolutely different, always had been, but the fact remained that they were twin sisters, and Mme. Lesarge knew that she would feel deeply uneasy until she was assured that Kezia had left Paris and was not likely to return.

So, when she had a little reassured herself by that nervous, anxious contemplation of her reflection in the mirror (her figure at least was very good, and her taste in clothes excellent), she turned and said, with an attempt at conciliation:

'Let us part with some civility at least, Kezia. I wish you no ill will. It was a stupid mistake for us to meet. When are you leaving Paris?'

Miss Faunce turned round from the window. She felt she had herself well in hand now, would be able to say exactly what she meant without allowing her passion to betray her into useless abuse.

'I don't know that it was a mistake for me to come to Paris,' she said deliberately. 'I felt it my duty to do so. As I said, I have been thinking of you continuously for years. I live alone, as you know, and of course, there is plenty to do, I am never idle. But there is no other person beside yourself nearly connected with me. Say and think what you like, Martha, we are twin sisters, and I suppose there is some sort of bond,' she paused and added, 'even if it be a bond of hatred.'

'Hatred,' repeated the actress, with an elegant shrug, 'that's an ugly word to use, isn't it? Why do you bother about me at all? I don't hate you, I assure you.'

'Oh, yes, I think you do,' said Miss Faunce. 'I think you do, Martha. I saw hatred in your eyes all the time we were talking together. You were thinking that I was old and ugly and your twin sister.'

'Did you read me as clearly as that?' smiled Mme. Lesarge, rather pale under the careful tinting of powder and rouge. 'Well, perhaps some such thought did come into my mind. You've let yourself go, you see, terribly, Kezia. You look fifteen years older than you are. I suppose you rather revel in it.'

'I've let myself alone,' replied Miss Faunce. 'I am as God made me. My hair is the colour yours ought to be, my face looks as yours would look without all that stuff you've got on it.'

'Not quite, I think,' said Mme. Lesarge. 'We have different thoughts, different minds. We live very differently. I don't suppose if we were stripped side by side we should look in the least alike.'

'Don't you? Well, I think that if we were stripped, people would know us for twins, but that's not what I want to argue about. And I don't want to hear about your life, which I am sure is vile and disgusting. It was thinking of your life and how horrible it was that brought me here. I felt it was my duty to try and save you.'

'Oh, for pity's sake,' murmured the actress. She picked up her gold-mesh bag and her ivory-handled parasol. 'You are really becoming absurd, ridiculous. Save me—from what?'

'You know quite well what I mean, and I really do want to save you. I dare say that, as you boast, I don't know as much of the world as you do, but I know what happens to women like you when they are not young. I suppose you haven't saved anything?'

'No, and I am in debt,' smiled the actress.

'I thought so. What are you going to do when you can't any longer get parts—when you can't find any friends?'

'That is many, many years ahead,' replied Mme. Lesarge. 'You need not concern yourself about my future, my dear Kezia. Even if I do live to be old I shall—'

'Well, what will you do?'

Miss Faunce leaned forward eagerly.

'I shall repent, of course. Either marry some good man and go and live in the country or go into a convent. You know I am a Roman Catholic?'

Miss Faunce shuddered.

'You are the first of our family to become that,' she said with real distress.

Mine. Lesarge laughed. She was uneasy and wanted to escape.

'Did you really come to Paris to say these silly things to me?' she said. 'You have wasted your time and your money.'

'I have plenty of both,' replied Kezia, 'you know Grandmother Tallis died last year. She left me all her fortune. Half of it would have been yours if you had been—a different sort of woman. I'd give you what would have been your share now, if you'd like to change your way of living.'

'Repent—I suppose, is what you wanted to say, Kezia. This is all so hopeless. We don't even talk the same language. I don't want Grandmother Tallis's money nor any of yours. Though you must admit,' she added, a little grimly, 'that it has been fortunate for you, from a practical point of view, that I did take—the primrose path, I suppose you'd call it, eh? You had everything, didn't you—the house, the lands, the money, father's fortune, mother's fortune, Grandmother Tallis's fortune. To whom are you going to leave it when you die?'

'To charities,' replied Kezia Faunce sternly. 'Every penny of that money will be left to do good to someone. I am quite prepared, as I said just now, to give you all you need, if you leave the stage—leave Paris.' Then, on another note, she added, 'Don't you ever feel homesick, Martha?'

Mme. Lesarge reflected. The words did take her back to certain broken dreams and odd moments of nostalgia. She had run away from home when she was sixteen, a schoolgirl home for the holidays. She had eloped with a subaltern from the neighbouring garrison. They had gone to India and in three years she had been divorced ignominiously. There had been another marriage with a husband who drank and ill-treated her, and this time a separation without a divorce. Then, a long connection with Adrian Lesarge, the French actor, who had taught her his language and his art, given her the place which she had contrived to hold since. For she was industrious, clever, and talented, and had a rare charm and radiance in her personality.

It seemed a long time ago since she had fled from Stibbards, with a veil down over her bonnet and a small case in her hand. It was very early summer, she could recall the scent of the flowering currant bushes as she had hurried through the kitchen garden to let herself out by the back door in the red-brick wall where the apricots grew.

Homesick—for those sixteen years in an English village! She remembered it as always afternoon and always sunny, quiet, with the smell of hot jam coming from the kitchen.

Kezia was watching her keenly.

'You are homesick,' she said, 'you are. Martha, why don't you come back?'

Mme. Lesarge looked up quickly, as if she wondered if these were the accents of love. Love? How could it be, or any touch of affection or any kindly feeling? Curiosity, envy, fused into hatred gazed out of Kezia's dull brown eyes. And Mme. Lesarge knew that this expression was reflected in her own gaze. Yes, envy too. There was something about Kezia's life and character which she envied; when she looked at her sister she thought of things that she had missed, just as Kezia thought of lacks in her own existence when she looked at her sister.

Each woman hated and envied in the other what she might have been—it was a complex and terrible emotion.

The actress contrived to speak lightly.

'Return! Impossible! And you know it is. You would not wish to have me at Stibbards.'

'No, I suppose not,' agreed Miss Faunce. 'You're quite right, it would be a scandal—intolerable. Unless some story could be made up or you came as a penitent.'

Mme. Lesarge laughed.

'I suppose you really are crazy enough to think that might happen—that I might come with a made-up story behind me, or as a penitent, and that you would be able to torture me day after day! We're both going crazy, I think. Let's try to talk of real things.'

She spoke with a good deal of resolution and with far fewer graces or affectations than she had used on her entry into this gilt and plush sitting-room. She was becoming indeed, though she did not know it, more like her sister in manner than she had been for years, more familiar with her own language that she had not spoken for so long, more like Kezia in abrupt gestures and straight looks.

'You know that I am not coming back. You know that I am not going to take any of Grandma Tallis's money. You know that I don't want ever to see you again. If you should come to Paris again, pray don't disturb me.'

She grasped the ivory-handled parasol so tightly that it seemed it might break. Kezia Faunce watched her very curiously.

'I daresay you think that I am completely degraded, but pray don't waste any such pity on me. I am successful—I always have been successful. I am, in a way, triumphant over everything, over the usual conventions, the traditions that bind women, over the usual stupid emotions that cause them to waste their hearts and lives; over all the pettifogging duties and obligations that wear away a woman like you. Yes,' she repeated, with a shrill note creeping into her voice, 'I am in every way successful and triumphant, and I beg that you will not think of me with any compassion or believe that I have or ever could have any regrets.'

Miss Faunce's contemptuous smile had deepened as she listened to this flaunting speech.

'And the end?' she asked. 'What is the end to be?'

'I beg you not to concern yourself about that, Kezia. I daresay my end will be as comfortable and as edifying as yours, and at least, it is a long way off.'

'You are not so secure as you think,' said Miss Faunce. 'I was in Paris two or three days before I let you know that I was here, and I made inquiries, and I read things for myself. You are not so popular as you were. Although you deliberately blind yourself, people do realise that you are getting old.'

The actress gave a painful smile.

'A woman like myself is never old.'

'Oh, that is very easy to say, Martha, and I have no doubt that it consoles you. You are forty-five. It will not be very long before you are fifty. There are younger women, and I know that you do not get such good parts as you did. And the men don't run after you like they used to. That you have lost one or two wealthy—protectors, don't you call them? That you go about now with very much younger men, quite young boys in fact.'

'So you have been spying on me!' cried Mme. Lesarge, who looked quite livid. 'You who call yourself an honest, honourable woman!'

'No, I haven't been spying on you, Martha. It wasn't difficult to find out these things. Just a word here and there at the dressmakers, the perfumers, in the foyer of the theatre itself. Oh, I've been to see you two or three times. You act quite well, but you're getting tired, aren't you—very tired?'

'Your talk is ridiculous, inspired by envy. We are both of us in the prime of life. You need not look an old woman. If you had ever lived you would not do so, it is because everything has been dried up in you—always, you have faded without blooming.' Then, in desperation, almost with a note of appeal, Mme. Lesarge added: 'Why could you not let me alone? I haven't thought of you for years. When your note came I did have an impulse of kindness.'

'Neither of those statements is true,' interrupted Kezia Faunce with a force that held the other woman utterly silent. 'You know that you have thought about me, again and again, and of Stibbards, and of the life I lead, of your own childhood and our own father and mother and all our neighbours and friends. Yes, we are twins, there is some affinity between us, and in a way we do know each other's thoughts, and I know you have thought of me—that I have haunted you like you have haunted me. That is the truth, is it not, Martha?'

With a half step threateningly forward the actress, with a shrug pulling at the pearls fastening her pale gloves, admitted sullenly:

'Yes, I suppose it is true. You have rather haunted me. And that is why I came. But what is there in it? Why do we talk about it or think of it?'

'And the other thing you said is not true, either,' continued Kezia coming still closer to the other woman. 'You didn't come here in a fit of kindness. You hate me as much as I hate you. You can't endure to think that I am existing in Stibbards, any more than I can endure to think that you are existing in Paris.'

'It does get on my nerves, sometimes,' admitted Mme. Lesarge, 'but I don't know why it should. It is a mere accident that we're sisters—twin sisters. We're quite different women.'

'I wonder,' said Kezia Faunce, with great bitterness. 'Perhaps we really are the same kind of woman, only in you one side, and in I the other, has got the uppermost. Well, it's no good talking about that. I, at least, have behaved myself, and you haven't. I've every right to scorn you, but you've no right at all to scorn me. You've been a bad woman since you were a young girl—bad daughter, bad wife. Not fulfilling a single duty or obligation, while I did everything that was expected of me.'

Mme. Lesarge echoed these words with an accent of mockery.

'Everything that was expected of you—poor Kezia!'

'It's all very well to jeer, but I stayed behind. I nursed mother, I nursed father, I didn't get married when I might have got married, because it meant leaving them. There were all kinds of things that I would have liked to have done, but I didn't even think about them. And when father and mother were dead I felt a duty towards Stibbards, to the name, the position we held.'

Mme. Lesarge interrupted this with great gusts of laughter, half-hysterical laughter. She turned towards the door.

'I really think I shall go mad if I stay here and listen to you any longer. I do hope you will leave Paris soon. And please don't try to see me again.'

'No,' said Kezia sourly, 'I won't try to see you again, it's too horrible. The worst of it is that I shan't be able to avoid thinking about you.'

'I suppose not.'

Mme. Lesarge had her hand on the door-knob. The two sisters were looking at each other very intently and in the utter unself-consciousness of that moment of passion the likeness between them was quite strong. The dyed curls of the actress and the harsh grey hair of Kezia Faunce seemed mere details in the general resemblance, which was one of shape and structure.

'Are you going to act tonight?' asked Miss Faunce.

'Yes. I hope you won't be there to see me. It would make me nervous if I thought you were watching.'

'I've watched you twice, as I told you. I shan't come again. I suppose there'll be bouquets?'

'I suppose so. It is rather an especial occasion. Why did you ask?'

Kezia Faunce did not reply. She had grown flowers, profusion, multitudes of flowers all her life, she had given away flowers for village weddings and funerals, to the poor, the sick, to charity, to church festivals; she had plucked flowers by the armful, the basketful, to adorn her room, but she had never had as much as a single rose or lily given her, and all her life Martha had been receiving bouquets.

'Well,' she said, 'one kiss has got to be the last kiss, you know, and one bouquet the last bouquet. I wonder if you've ever thought of that?'

'Yes, I've thought of it,' replied the actress coolly. 'I daresay we have a good many thoughts in common. Never mind, my dear, I daresay I shall repent, as you call it, in time. I shall marry, as I said, some old respectable man, and keep house for him to the best of my ability. Or I shall go into a convent, or, I might die suddenly. In any of these cases there would be no more kisses nor bouquets, and I suppose you would be satisfied, Kezia?'

'Satisfied? I don't know. But I should like to think that the kind of life you are leading had come to an end. I shall watch the papers, Martha—the French papers.'

'Whatever I do won't be in the papers,' laughed Mme. Lesarge. 'I shall keep it secret.'

'How am I to know then? I don't want you to write to me. I don't want a French letter to be seen at Stibbards.'

'Oh, I shan't write to you, but you'll know, somehow. I'll send you my last bouquet, Kezia.'

She pulled the door open, and with the swiftness of one well versed in dramatic effect was gone.

Kezia Faunce sat down, trembling; the palms of her hands and her forehead were damp. How hateful this interview had been! What a mistake—this hideous visit to Paris! She had certainly satisfied a curiosity that had haunted her for years; through all her monotonous, orderly, placid life had always run the question 'What is Martha like? She had sometimes woken up in the middle of the night after a dream that had been of some other subject and sat up in bed and said to herself, half-aloud: 'What is Martha doing now? What is she wearing? Who is her present lover? What part is she playing? How many people are drinking her health or sending her presents? What does she look like and how much money has she got?' And all these questions had been like so many arrows piercing her in the dark. She had felt that her own life was poor and mean before the opulence and splendour of Martha's life and yet at the same time, by a maddening paradox, she had felt intensely proud of her own virtue, supremely scornful of her twin sister's wickedness.

Nobody ever spoke of Martha in Stibbards. It was nearly thirty years since she had run away and Miss Faunce hoped that she had been forgotten through the sheer force of never being mentioned. Many people, surely, believed she was dead, and a great many more, even if they did occasionally read the newspapers and see the name therein of a certain famous actress, would not associate the name of Marcelle Lesarge with that of Martha Faunce. But always in her twin sister's mind she had been alive, vital, and exasperating, until this suppressed emotion had not been any longer endurable and Miss Faunce, under some excuse, more or less feasible, had left Stibbards and come to Paris and sought out and really seen Martha.

And now it was over, that momentous interview, and it had been nothing but recriminations, a bitter and humiliating quarrelling and an intensifying of her deep emotion of mingled contempt and envy. She sat stiffly in the red plush empire chair and rested her head on the back and closed her eyes and imagined herself in Martha's place.

She saw herself as Mme. Marcelle Lesarge stepping out into her little phaeton with the smart groom in a smart livery on the box, and some comely, well-dressed gentleman beside her. She saw herself being swept over the cobbled Paris streets, laughing, chattering, bowing to acquaintances, and so to her sumptuous apartments.

Why hadn't Martha asked her to her apartment, why hadn't she, Kezia, insisted on going there? Merely through lack of courage. Because she had been ashamed of herself as much as of her sister. She would not have known how to behave to the people whom she might have met in Martha's bijou little house.

Ah, what was it like, that little house? Very different from Stibbards, Kezia was sure, full of gilded furniture, of pictures and statuary, all presents from her lovers, no doubt. And these lovers, who and what were they? Kezia Faunce had heard many rumours, many scandalous tales. She did not know which of them to credit. But what did that matter, the lovers were there, and she might imagine them as she pleased.

She opened her eyes and sat up. She found that this identification of herself with her twin sister was a dangerous pastime. Tomorrow she would return to England and to Stibbards. Everything would be as it was, outwardly, at least. She would not soon be able to forget, perhaps she would not be able to ever forget the interview in this hateful, gaudy room, with the vulgar, red plush and gilt furniture, the great mirrors, wreathed with coarse carvings that rose to the ceiling. Neither of the sisters would influence the other by one iota. Their tragedy was that neither could forget the other.

Her last bouquet!

What did she mean by that? How could she say anything so absurd?

'Send me her last bouquet!' Kezia Faunce could not get that out of her excited mind. She, who all her life had never had a posy sent her, to receive that bouquet which would mean that her sister's life of sin was over! The idea was as exasperating, as ridiculous as it was hateful.

Miss Faunce left Paris the next day. Her progress to the station was rendered hateful by constant glimpses of her sister, pretty, provoking, and elegant, smiling at her in red and black paint from the bill posters. In one of these she was depicted as holding an enormous cluster of scarlet roses in a stiff white paper frill, and Miss Faunce, staring at the vivid drawing which had in the set of the nose and chin a grotesque likeness to herself, repeated with bitter vexation:

'Her last bouquet! Her last bouquet!'