Читать книгу Golden Fleece: The American Adventures of a Fortune Hunting Earl - David Graham Phillips - Страница 6

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HONORIA took Frothingham to the Grand Central Station to meet Catherine, and he liked the very first glimpse of her as she came striding down the platform. She was tall and narrow, and she wore dresses and wraps that emphasised both these characteristics. She had a long, thin neck and a small, delicately coloured face, which she knew how to frame most fascinatingly in her hair, with or without the aid of her hat. She had dreamy young eyes, long and narrow, and her red lips and her slender, nervous fingers made it clear that she lived in her senses rather than in her intellect—that she would neither say nor think anything brilliant, but would feel intensely, and could be powerfully appealed to through her imagination. She was wearing a light brown, brightly lined coat that trailed to her heels; and she was holding up from the dust and close about her many folds of soft, fine materials, cloth and silk and linen and lace. In her wake came a maid and a porter, each laden with her belongings, an attractive array of comforts and luxuries of travel.

“I’m glad you brought a closed carriage,” she said, with a shiver, as they started for home. “It’s raw, and the sky seems to weigh upon one’s shoulders and head. This is a day to hide in the house, close by an open fire.”

Frothingham was surprised by this fairy-princess delicateness in so robust a creature. He thought the day mild, and as for the sky, why bother about anything that far away, so long as it sent nothing down to bother one?

“You forget we are English,” said Honoria. “We call this good weather. I must confess the closed carriage was a happy accident.”

“So like you, Honoria! Isn’t it, Lord Frothingham?” Catherine gave him a sweet smile. “She never permits one to keep agreeable illusions. Now, I was loving her for being so thoughtful for me.”

As Frothingham only stared, shy and stolid, through his eyeglass, the two girls began to talk each to the other—they had not met in two years, not since Catherine and her mother visited Honoria at Longview’s place in Bucks.

“What a beautiful place it was!” said Catherine. “I often dream of it. But then, I love England. It is of such a wonderful, vivid shade of green, and everything is so cultivated, and refined, and—and—like a fairy garden. Don’t you find the contrast very great, Lord Frothingham? We are very new and wild.”

“I’ve seen only people since I’ve been here. I must say the people—at least, those I’ve met—remind me of home, except that they speak the language differently. As for the city, it’s not at all as I fancied. It’s much like Paris—more attractive than London, not so gloomy.”

“Paris!” Catherine smiled, with gently reproachful satire. “Oh, you flatter us.”

“I like it better,” insisted Frothingham. “It’s Paris with English in the streets—I hate Frenchmen.”

“No, they’re not nice to look at—the men,” admitted Catherine. “But I adore what they’ve done. What would the world be without France?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Frothingham, with his cynical, enthusiasm-discouraging drawl. “They’re hysterical beggars, always exploding for no reason. It makes me nervous. I like quiet and comfort.”

“Lord Frothingham isn’t so sensible as he pretends,” put in Honoria. “He’s really almost as sentimental and emotional as you are, Catherine.”

“Oh, but I’m neither,” replied Catherine. “I don’t dare to be. If I find myself the least bit enthusiastic I catch myself up and look round, frightened lest somebody may have noticed. I’m such a liar—we all are over here. Don’t you like sincerity, Lord Frothingham?”

“I—I suppose so.” Frothingham looked vague. “What do you mean?” Catherine’s “intensity” confused him.

“I mean being true to one’s self, and not ashamed to show one’s self as one is, and never afraid to tell the truth.”

“But all of us do that, don’t we?” said Frothingham. There was a twinkle in his eye—or was it only the reflection of light from his glass?

Honoria gave him her “candid friend” look. “Nobody does,” said she. “That is, nobody who has temperament enough to lead any sort of life above an oyster’s.”

“But I can see at a glance that Lord Frothingham has temperament.” Catherine looked at him with intensely sympathetic appreciation. “Yes, men can be sincere and truthful. But women must always repress their real selves.”

Frothingham looked stolid and hopeless. Whenever conversation turned on abstractions he felt like a man fumbling and stumbling about in a London fog. “Really?” he said. “Really, now?”

“I don’t know why women fancy they must be liars,” said Honoria. “Do you mind dining at Sherry’s to-night?” Catherine in her psychological moods bored her. She sometimes ventured on aërial flights, but had no fancy for aërial flounderings.

“Sherry’s? That will be delightful! I like dining at restaurants—I’m very American in that respect.”

“But so do I,” said Frothingham. “That is, in your restaurants here. The people are interesting, and they talk a lot, and loud enough so that one hears every word and isn’t annoyed by missing the sense. And how they do waste the food!”

“Food!” Catherine repeated the word with a smile that was half-humourous, half pleading. “Please don’t use that word, Lord Frothingham. It always makes me shiver. It sounds so—so animal!”

Frothingham put on the blank look behind which he habitually sheltered himself when he did not know what to say, or to do, or to think. Honoria was disgusted with him and with Catherine. “They’re not going to like each other, not even enough to marry,” she said to herself. “And it’s a pity, as they’re exactly suited. If Catherine only wouldn’t pose!”

She was, therefore, somewhat surprised when, immediately she and Catherine were alone, Catherine burst into rhapsody on Frothingham. “What a fine, strong face! So much character! What a sincere, sensitive, pure nature. He’s a splendid type of true gentleman, isn’t he, Nora? How well he contrasts with our men! Doesn’t he?”

Honoria smiled to herself. “She wants to marry him,” she thought, “and she’s building a fire under her imagination. I might have known it. She’s the very person to weave romance over a title and imagine it all gospel. What a poser!” To Catherine she said: “He’s a decent enough chap, Caterina. And you’ll admire him more than ever when you’ve read him up in Burke’s Peerage and looked at the pictures he’s given me of Beauvais House.”

“How do you spell it? B-e-v-i-s?”

“No, that’s the way you pronounce it. You spell it B-e-a-u-v-a-i-s.”

“Isn’t that interesting? It’s so commonplace to pronounce a word the way it’s spelt, don’t you think?”

“I never thought of it, my dear. Why not marry him?”

“You are so abrupt and—and practical, Honoria,” said Catherine plaintively. “But you are a dear. I should never marry a man unless I loved him.”

Honoria looked faintly cynical. “Certainly not. But surely you can love any man you make up your mind to marry. What is your imagination for?”

At Sherry’s that night, besides Honoria, Catherine, Longview, and Frothingham, there were at Longview’s table Mrs. Carnarvon, of the hunting set, and Joe Wallingford—he hunts and writes verse, both badly, and looks and talks, both extremely well. Honoria devoted herself to Wallingford and so released Catherine and Frothingham each upon the other—she listened for a few seconds now and then to note their progress.

“It’s a go,” she said to herself with the matchmaker’s thrill of triumph, as the cold dessert was served. She saw that Frothingham had ceased to listen, and so had ceased to puzzle; his eyeglass was trained steadily and sympathetically upon Catherine’s fascinating beauty—why weary the brain when it might rest and enjoy itself through the eyes? Catherine was talking on and on, quoting poetry, telling Frothingham of her emotions, telling him of his emotions—he did not have them, but she was so earnest that he was half convinced.

“When you said this afternoon that you liked things quiet and comfortable,” she said, “I felt that it was splendidly in keeping with your character. I saw that you hated all this noise and display, that you like to get away in your own corner of your beautiful England and live grandly and quietly—near Nature.”

If Catherine had not been beautiful and rich he would have said to himself, “What rubbish!” But, as it was, he thought her profound and spiritual. And he said, trying to touch bottom and get a firm stand upon firm earth, “I think you’d like Beauvais.”

“I’m sure I should,” replied Catherine with enthusiasm. “Honoria was showing me the photographs of it. I admire the great, stately old house. But I liked best of all the picture of the woods and the brook. It reminded me of those lines of Coleridge’s—they are so beautiful—where he speaks of the brook—

“‘In the leafy month of June

That to the sleeping woods all night

Singeth a quiet tune.’

Don’t you think those lines fine? Do I quote them right?”

“Yes—I think so—that is,” stammered Frothingham, “it’s a jolly brook, but we call it a river.” Then to himself: “What an ass she’ll think me!” But the starting sweat stayed, for she asked him no more questions; and he, freed from the anxiety of having to try to soar with her, was able to sit quietly and enjoy her beauty, and the murmurous rush of her low, musical voice—“It’s like the brook that brute she quoted wrote about,” he thought.

He did not drive home with his party, but accepted Wallingford’s invitation to walk in the fresh night air to his club. “Your American women are tremendously clever,” he said, as they were strolling along. He was feeling dazed and dizzy from the whirl of his emotions, the whirls and shocks Catherine Hollister had given his brain.

“Yes, they’re clever,” replied Wallingford, “but not in the way they think they are. Take Kitty Hollister, for example. She’s all right when she wants to be. She thinks sense. But what a raft of fuzzy trash she does float out when she gets a-going. I pitied you this evening. She laid herself out to impress you. You’re staying in the house with her, aren’t you? I suppose she whoops it up whenever you’re round?”

“I find her very clever—and interesting,” said Frothingham somewhat stiffly.

“Of course she is. I’ve known her for seventeen of the nineteen years she’s gladdened the earth—and I ought to know her pretty well. But she’s like a lot of the women in this town. They haven’t any emotions to speak of—nothing emotional happens. But they think they ought to have emotions such as they read about, and so they fake ’em. Then, they’ve got the craze for culture. They haven’t the time to get the real thing—they’re too busy showing off. Besides, they’re too lazy. So they fake culture, too. Oh, yes, they’re clever. And they look so well that you like the fake as they parade it better than the real thing.”

“We have that sort in London,” said Frothingham.

“So I’ve observed. But it’s done rather better there—they’re older hands at it. If you weren’t an Englishman, I’d say it fitted in better among the other shams. I suppose you’ve noticed that many people here are imitation English or French? You’ve seen the tags ‘Made in England,’ ‘Made in France,’ ‘Made in England, finished in France’?”

“I’ve noticed similarities,” replied Frothingham tactfully.

“It’s all imitation stuff—the labels are frauds. We over here don’t know how to be gracefully idle and inane, as your upper classes do. It’s not in us anywhere. We haven’t the tradition—our tradition is all against it. Whenever we do produce a thoroughly idle and inane person, he or she goes abroad to live, or else loses all his money to some sharp, pushing fellow, and drops out of sight. All this aristocracy you see is pure pose. Underneath, they’re Americans.”

“What is an American?” asked Frothingham. “Every time I think I’ve seen one, along comes some native and tells me I’m wrong. Are you an American?”

“Underneath—yes. On the surface—no. I used to be, but now I’m posing with the rest of ’em. You’ll have to get out of New York to see Americans. There are droves of ’em here, but they’re so scattered in places you’ll never go to that you couldn’t find them. You’d better go West if you wish to be sure of seeing the real thing.”

“It’s very confusing. How shall I know this American when I see him?”

“When you see a man or a woman who looks as if he or she would do something honest and valuable, who looks you straight in the eyes, and makes you feel proud that you’re a human being and ashamed that you are not a broader, better, honester one—that’s an American.” And then he smiled with his eyes so queerly that Frothingham could not decide whether or not he was jesting.

At the club Wallingford introduced him into a large circle of young men, seated round two tables pushed together, and covered with “high balls,” and bottles of carbonated water, and silver bowls of cracked ice. He said little, drank his whiskey and water, and listened. “It’s the talk of stock brokers and tradesmen,” he said to himself. “Yet these fellows are certainly gentlemen, and they don’t talk business in the least like our middle-class people. It’s very confusing.”

After he left the others were most friendly, and even admiring, in their comments upon him.

“He’s monotonous, and poor, and will never have anything unless he marries it,” said Wallingford. “If he were a plain, poor, incapable, rather dull American, is there one of us that would waste five minutes on him?”

There was silence, then a laugh.