Читать книгу The Venture Book - Elinor Mordaunt - Страница 4

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People use Marseilles as a jumping-off place; but to me it is an enchantment, a hot-pot of strangeness and beauty and villainies. The door of the East; the East itself done out, not in the hot colors of oil paint, but in pastels of infinite softness, hinting and beckoning, smiling, leering, threatening, enchanting.

The little streets run like outstretched fingers from the palm of the main streets, clutching the world, with every nationality and every tongue dripping through them; narrow streets with high white and cream-colored buildings on each side and green and blue outside shutters; incredibly narrow alleys with bister-colored houses, and rags of washing fluttering across them; but at the end of each the beauty of the hills or the sea, the harbor with its crowded shipping, its forests of masts and funnels, its quays with men of every shade and color thick upon them, the romances and p. 4horrors of a whole world written upon their faces.

Everywhere there are plane-trees; bare now, with a delicate lace-like web of twigs against a sky which has been an unclouded soft blue, that same pastel-like blue, throughout the three days which have passed since I came rushing down to the South, clear away without a break from the London fogs, to catch my boat, which is late in arriving from Bordeaux.

The fishermen’s church, La Dame de la Garde, stands high upon its rocky jag of mountain. I can see it from my bedroom window at the Hotel Terminus, set like the crowning point of a tiara, at the end of half the aspiring streets of Marseilles; most lovely in the evening when the sky is the color of the skies in very old Chinese prints.

At that time the streets are crowded with promenaders, as are the cafés which debouch upon them every few yards, crowded with, for the most part, staid revelers: little families; husbands and wives; young men with their sweethearts; groups of young men; groups of business men—all eating and drinking, moderately enough and yet with a relish, a delight, which is strange to us.

It seems to me, indeed, like a series of fête-days coming one on top of another, those days when one laughs at nothing in particular, drinks the p. 5health of every one, and no one in particular. But in reality it is nothing of the sort; it goes on just the same from day to day. It is the everyday life of the South, the sort of life which, whatever it may be, is most emphatically not English; infinitely far removed from the drinking of beer in frowzy bars, noisy men, furtive or bold-faced women in men’s caps, babies in prams upon the pavement outside.

The whole of the front of one large draper’s shop—displaying wax ladies of an almost incredible loveliness, standing tiptoe in wages-of-sin sort of undergarments—is aglow with an innumerable number of rose-pink electric lights. In front of this shop, and bathed in the pink lights, are flower-stalls piled high with narcissi, carnations, mimosa, hyacinths, and violets.

Fresh from the hands of the hairdresser at the Hotel Terminus, I sit on the open veranda of one of the cafés and sip my coffee. The dressing of my hair was in itself a prelude to adventure, a sort of sloughing off of the skin of everyday life. My request was for a simple and inexpensive shampoo, and that was all I was charged for. But the artist, an artist with a soul, plump as a rather overgrown Cupid, with large ox eyes, a brosse of dark hair, deprecating and persuasive hands,—an p. 6artist with, evidently enough, an eye for antiques,—was totally unable to leave it at that.

After washing my hair he tied up my head tight in a white towel, so that I looked like a religieuse, and massaged me, first with cream that smelt of lavender, then with three different sorts of powder. He was very short and fat, and I am very tall and thin. When he had almost finished he made me stand up and tilted my face this way and that, as though it had been nothing human, to get the light upon it at every angle. Never in my life have I seen any one so completely absorbed. As I was obliged to stoop, the whole effect, repeated in the manifold mirrors around the room, was odd beyond words; but like all true artists, this one was completely lacking in the faintest sense of humor.

His last touch was the most wonderful of all; for with some scented liquid on the tip of his forefinger he swept up the eyelashes on the upper lid of each eye and left them curling. Heavens above! and to think that I am now a middle-aged woman and never before have I had curling eyelashes; never before have I realized that my eyelashes were capable of curling. So many, many things come to one altogether too late in life.

p. 7A man with a wooden leg is sitting under the trees beneath my window at the hotel. It makes no pretense of being anything but a wooden leg, for there is a stump at the end of it, faintly Panlike—so easy to notch into a hoof! But this very dapper gentleman has not done that; instead, he has padded it where the ankle should be, and wears the upper part of a very neat—oh, but very neat!—patent-leather boot to match the one upon his other foot, the eyelets rimmed with white and laced with white silk ties.

To-night I dined with a man I met in London, who is also awaiting his boat, at Le Grand Restaurant Basso, famous for its bouillabaisse. I lived too dreadfully long and intimately at one time of my life with people who guzzled bouillabaisse as nothing else on earth can be sucked and gobbled, to go there for that; but there were many other things at Basso’s. I went, indeed, for the company and the delight of dining in the upper room with its glazed veranda, so like the upper deck of a ship, giving straight on to the lights of the harbor. The dinner, minus bouillabaisse, was beyond criticism and very carefully thought out: Soupe de Petit Marmite; a mixture of shellfish cooked p. 8with creamy white sauce in large flat shells and deliciously named Coquille de Fruit de Mer; pigeons; petit pois; Peche Melba banked round with chopped ice, and coffee—such coffee, redolent of all the perfumes of Araby! A dinner which rounded off to perfection my three days in Marseilles.