Читать книгу Human Nature - Edith Wharton - Страница 8

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Mr. and Mrs. Brown advanced across the beach. Mrs. Brown led the way; she walked with a light springing step, and if I had been struck by Mrs. Glenn’s recovered youthfulness, her co-mother, at a little distance, seemed to me positively girlish. She was smaller and much slighter than Mrs. Glenn, and looked so much younger that I had a moment’s doubt as to the possibility of her having, twenty-seven years earlier, been of legal age to adopt a baby. Certainly she and Mr. Brown must have had exceptional reasons for concluding so early that Heaven was not likely to bless their union. I had to admit, when Mrs. Brown came up, that I had overrated her juvenility. Slim, active and girlish she remained; but the freshness of her face was largely due to artifice, and the golden glints in her chestnut hair were a thought too golden. Still, she was a very pretty woman, with the alert cosmopolitan air of one who had acquired her elegance in places where the very best counterfeits are found. It will be seen that my first impression was none too favourable; but for all I knew of Mrs. Brown it might turn out that she had made the best of meagre opportunities. She met my name with a conquering smile, said: “Ah, yes—dear Mr. Norcutt. Mrs. Glenn has told us all we owe you”—and at the “we” I detected a faint shadow on Mrs. Glenn’s brow. Was it only maternal jealousy that provoked it? I suspected an even deeper antagonism. The women were so different, so diametrically opposed to each other in appearance, dress, manner, and all the inherited standards, that if they had met as strangers it would have been hard for them to find a common ground of understanding; and the fact of that ground being furnished by Stephen hardly seemed to ease the situation.

“Well, what’s the matter with taking some notice of little me?” piped a small dry man dressed in too-smart flannels, and wearing a too-white Panama which he removed with an elaborate flourish.

“Oh, of course! My husband—Mr. Norcutt.” Mrs. Brown laid a jewelled hand on Stephen’s recumbent shoulder. “Steve, you rude boy, you ought to have introduced your dad.” As she pressed his shoulder I noticed that her long oval nails were freshly lacquered with the last new shade of coral, and that the forefinger was darkly yellowed with nicotine. This familiar colour-scheme struck me at the moment as peculiarly distasteful.

Stephen vouchsafed no answer, and Mr. Brown remarked to me sardonically. “You know you won’t lose your money or your morals in this secluded spot.”

Mrs. Brown flashed a quick glance at him. “Don’t be so silly! It’s much better for Steve to be in a quiet place where he can just sleep and eat and bask. His mother and I are going to be firm with him about that—aren’t we, dearest?” She transferred her lacquered talons to Mrs. Glenn’s shoulder, and the latter, with a just perceptible shrinking, replied gaily: “As long as we can hold out against him!”

“Oh, this is the very place I was pining for,” said Stephen placidly. (“Gosh—pining!” Mr. Brown interpolated.) Stephen tilted his hat forward over his sunburnt nose with the drawn nostrils, crossed his arms under his thin neck, and closed his eyes. Mrs. Brown bent over Mrs. Glenn with one of her quick gestures. “Darling—before we go in to lunch do let me fluff you out a little: so.” With a flashing hand she loosened the soft white waves under Mrs. Glenn’s spreading hat brim. “There—that’s better; isn’t it, Mr. Norcutt?”

Mrs. Glenn’s face was a curious sight. The smile she had forced gave place to a marble rigidity; the old statuesqueness which had melted to flesh and blood stiffened her features again. “Thank you ... I’m afraid I never think ...”

“No, you never do; that’s the trouble!” Mrs. Brown shot an arch glance at me. “With her looks, oughtn’t she to think? But perhaps it’s lucky for the rest of us poor women she don’t—eh, Stevie?”

The colour rushed to Mrs. Glenn’s face; she was going to retort; to snub the dreadful woman. But the new softness had returned, and she merely lifted a warning finger. “Oh, don’t, please ... speak to him. Can’t you see that he’s fallen asleep?”

O great King Solomon, I thought—and bowed my soul before the mystery.

I spent a fortnight at Les Calanques, and every day my perplexity deepened. The most conversible member of the little group was undoubtedly Stephen. Mrs. Glenn was as she had always been: beautiful, benevolent and inarticulate. When she sat on the beach beside the dozing Stephen, in her flowing white dress, her large white umbrella tilted to shelter him, she reminded me of a carven angel spreading broad wings above a tomb (I could never look at her without being reminded of statuary); and to converse with a marble angel so engaged can never have been easy. But I was perhaps not wrong in suspecting that her smiling silence concealed a reluctance to talk about the Browns. Like many perfectly unegotistical women Catherine Glenn had no subject of conversation except her own affairs; and these at present so visibly hinged on the Browns that it was easy to see why silence was simpler.

Mrs. Brown, I may as well confess, bored me acutely. She was a perfect specimen of the middle-aged flapper, with layers and layers of hard-headed feminine craft under her romping ways. All this I suffered from chiefly because I knew it was making Mrs. Glenn suffer. But after all it was thanks to Mrs. Brown that she had found her son; Mrs. Brown had brought up Stephen, had made him (one was obliged to suppose) the whimsical dreamy charming creature he was; and again and again, when Mrs. Brown outdid herself in girlish archness or middle-aged craft, Mrs. Glenn’s wounded eyes said to mine: “Look at Stephen; isn’t that enough?”

Certainly it was enough; enough even to excuse Mr. Brown’s jocular allusions and arid anecdotes, his boredom at Les Calanques, and the too-liberal potations in which he drowned it. Mr. Brown, I may add, was not half as trying as his wife. For the first two or three days I was mildly diverted by his contempt for the quiet watering-place in which his women had confined him, and his lordly conception of the life of pleasure, as exemplified by intimacy with the head-waiters of gilt-edged restaurants and the lavishing of large sums on horse-racing and cards. “Damn it, Norcutt, I’m not used to being mewed up in this kind of place. Perhaps it’s different with you—all depends on a man’s standards, don’t it? Now before I lost my money—” and so on. The odd thing was that, though this loss of fortune played a large part in the conversation of both husband and wife, I never somehow believed in it—I mean in the existence of the fortune. I hinted as much one day to Mrs. Glenn, but she only opened her noble eyes reproachfully, as if I had implied that it discredited the Browns to dream of a fortune they had never had. “They tell me Stephen was brought up with every luxury. And besides—their own tastes seem rather expensive, don’t they?” she argued gently.

“That’s the very reason.”

“The reason—?”

“The only people I know who are totally without expensive tastes are the overwhelmingly wealthy. You see it when you visit palaces. They sleep on camp-beds and live on boiled potatoes.”

Mrs. Glenn smiled. “Stevie wouldn’t have liked that.”

Stephen smiled also when I alluded to these past splendours. “It must have been before I cut my first teeth. I know Boy’s always talking about it; but I’ve got to take it on faith, just as you have.”

“Boy—?”

“Didn’t you know? He’s always called ‘Boy.’ Boydon Brown—abbreviated by friends and family to ‘Boy.’ The Boy Browns. Suits them, doesn’t it?”

It did; but I was not sure that it suited him to say so.

“And you’ve always addressed your adopted father in that informal style?”

“Lord, yes; nobody’s formal with Boy except head-waiters. They bow down to him; I don’t know why. He’s got the manner. I haven’t. When I go to a restaurant they always give me the worst table and the stupidest waiter.” He leaned back against the sand-bank and blinked contentedly seaward. “Got a cigarette?”

“You know you oughtn’t to smoke,” I protested.

“I know; but I do.” He held out a lean hand with prominent knuckles. “As long as Kit’s not about.” He called the marble angel, his mother, “Kit”! And yet I was not offended—I let him do it, just as I let him have one of my cigarettes. If “Boy” had a way with head-waiters his adopted son undoubtedly had one with lesser beings; his smile, his faint hoarse laugh would have made me do his will even if his talk had not conquered me. We sat for hours on the sands, discussing and dreaming; not always undisturbed, for Mrs. Brown had a tiresome way of hovering and “listening in,” as she archly called it—(“I don’t want Stevie to depreciate his poor ex-mamma to you,” she explained one day); and whenever Mrs. Brown (who, even at Les Calanques, had contrived to create a social round for herself) was bathing, dancing, playing bridge, or being waved, massaged or manicured, the other mother, assuring herself from an upper window that the coast was clear, would descend in her gentle majesty and turn our sand-bank into a throne by sitting on it. But now and then Stephen and I had a half-hour to ourselves; and then I tried to lead his talk to the past.

He seemed willing enough that I should, but uninterested, and unable to recover many details. “I never can remember things that don’t matter—and so far nothing about me has mattered,” he said with a humorous melancholy. “I mean, not till I struck mother Kit.”

He had vague recollections of continental travels as a little boy; had afterward been at a private school in Switzerland; had tried to pass himself off as a Canadian volunteer in 1915, and in 1917 to enlist in the American army, but had failed in each case—one had only to look at him to see why. The war over, he had worked for a time at Julian’s, and then broken down; and after that it had been a hard row to hoe till mother Kit came along. By George, but he’d never forget what she’d done for him—never!

“Well, it’s a way mothers have with their sons,” I remarked.

He flushed under his bronze tanning, and said simply: “Yes—only you see I didn’t know.”

His view of the Browns, while not unkindly, was so detached that I suspected him of regarding his own mother with the same objectivity; but when we spoke of her there was a different note in his voice. “I didn’t know”—it was a new experience to him to be really mothered. As a type, however, she clearly puzzled him. He was too sensitive to class her (as the Browns obviously did) as a simple-minded woman to whom nothing had ever happened; but he could not conceive what sort of things could happen to a woman of her kind. I gathered that she had explained the strange episode of his adoption by telling him that at the time of his birth she had been “secretly married”—poor Catherine!—to his father, but that “family circumstances” had made it needful to conceal his existence till the marriage could be announced; by which time he had vanished with his adopted parents. I guessed how it must have puzzled Stephen to adapt his interpretation of this ingenuous tale to what, in the light of Mrs. Glenn’s character, he could make out of her past. Of obvious explanations there were plenty; but evidently none fitted into his vision of her. For a moment (I could see) he had suspected a sentimental tie, a tender past, between Mrs. Glenn and myself; but this his quick perceptions soon discarded, and he apparently resigned himself to regarding her as inscrutably proud and incorrigibly perfect. “I’d like to paint her some day—if ever I’m fit to,” he said; and I wondered whether his scruples applied to his moral or artistic inadequacy.

At the doctor’s orders he had dropped his painting altogether since his last breakdown; but it was manifestly the one thing he cared for, and perhaps the only reason he had for wanting to get well. “When you’ve dropped to a certain level, it’s so damnably easy to keep on till you’re altogether down and out. So much easier than dragging up hill again. But I do want to get well enough to paint mother Kit. She’s a subject.”

One day it rained, and he was confined to the house. I went up to sit with him, and he got out some of his sketches and studies. Instantly he was transformed from an amiably mocking dilettante into an absorbed and passionate professional. “This is the only life I’ve ever had. All the rest—!” He made a grimace that turned his thin face into a death’s-head. “Cinders!”

The studies were brilliant—there was no doubt of that. The question was—the eternal question—what would they turn into when he was well enough to finish them? For the moment the problem did not present itself, and I could praise and encourage him in all sincerity. My words brought a glow into his face, but also, as it turned out, sent up his temperature. Mrs. Glenn reproached me mildly; she begged me not to let him get excited about his pictures. I promised not to, and reassured on that point she asked if I didn’t think he had talent—real talent? “Very great talent, yes,” I assured her; and she burst into tears—not of grief or agitation, but of a deep upwelling joy. “Oh, what have I done to deserve it all—to deserve such happiness? Yet I always knew if I could find him he’d make me happy!” She caught both my hands, and pressed her wet cheek on mine. That was one of her unclouded hours.

There were others not so radiant. I could see that the Browns were straining at the leash. With the seductions of Juan-les-Pins and Antibes in the offing, why, their frequent allusions implied, must they remain marooned at Les Calanques? Of course, for one thing, Mrs. Brown admitted, she hadn’t the clothes to show herself on a smart plage. Though so few were worn they had to come from the big dressmakers; and the latter’s charges, everybody knew, were in inverse ratio to the amount of material used. “So that to be really naked is ruinous,” she concluded, laughing; and I saw the narrowing of Catherine’s lips. As for Mr. Brown, he added morosely that if a man couldn’t take a hand at baccarat, or offer his friends something decent to eat and drink, it was better to vegetate at Les Calanques, and be done with it. Only, when a fellow’d been used to having plenty of money ...

I saw at once what had happened. Mrs. Glenn, whose material wants did not extend beyond the best plumbing and expensive clothes (and the latter were made to do for three seasons), did not fully understand the Browns’ aspirations. Her fortune, though adequate, was not large, and she had settled on Stephen’s adoptive parents an allowance which, converted into francs, made a generous showing. It was obvious, however, that what they hoped was to get more money. There had been debts in the background, perhaps; who knew but the handsome Stephen had had his share in them? One day I suggested discreetly to Mrs. Glenn that if she wished to be alone with her son she might offer the Browns a trip to Juan-les-Pins, or some such centre of gaiety. But I pointed out that the precedent might be dangerous, and advised her first to consult Stephen. “I suspect he’s as anxious to have them go as you are,” I said recklessly; and her flush of pleasure rewarded me. “Oh, you mustn’t say that,” she reproved me, laughing; and added that she would think over my advice. I am not sure if she did consult Stephen; but she offered the Browns a holiday, and they accepted it without false pride.