Читать книгу The Garden of Vision - Elizabeth Louisa Moresby - Страница 8

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Meanwhile Yasoma, contemptuous of herself and the rest of her world, did not find the Twelve Arts’ Ball amusing. It was the old crowd. She knew exactly the paragraphs which some of them would write for the weekly and Sunday papers, vibrating with the information that Lady Gampion in an exquisite turn-out as a peacock had been chatting to Mr. Chappie Meredith—a screaming success as Cesare Borgia. Already one or two had come up to take details of her own dress, and Jimmy Maxwell’s. Tomorrow it would appear that Miss Yasoma Brandon had excelled all previous successes as the Russian Yelena and Mr. “Jimmy” Maxwell had ridden into the Albert Hall on a white horse with a purple velvet saddle with silver nails. The horse appeared to her the only sensible one of the party. She sickened of them, the men and women, some of family, some newly arrived, who eked out their means or reputations for fashion by vulgarly affecting intimacy with all the petty world in which they were so proud to move. Little coteries of poets and novelists whose words would be forgotten long before the breath was out of their bodies, cheap little groups of artists strong in nothing but what they considered the artistic temperament, people indecent, depraved, disastrous, symptoms of the almost 32 mortal disease of their country, all surged past her, bubbling with empty laughter, sexual, unsexed, tedious the moment the glamor of novelty dropped from them; most unspeakably tedious in her eyes. But why had that glamor dropped? She had got along well enough before. She could not tell.

After their little special show she sat discontented, with Jimmy Maxwell, in a corner of the supper room veiled with banners and garlands, and looked on silently. He had suited her well enough hitherto, a good-looking man with hair as black as her own and insolent eyes, which to a certain extent had captured her by their audacity. Only to a certain extent—the final border was uncrossed, though there had been plenty of dangerous intimacy. He detested his wife. It seemed to him the most natural thing in the world that Yasoma should fill the very unaching void left by their alienation. He knew, and Yasoma knew, that their world gave them credit for an arrangement extremely natural and suitable which would certainly end in Jimmy’s divorcing his wife, or vice-versa and a light-hearted marriage between the survivors. That arrangement would have the more chance of lasting because her money was absolutely necessary to him and she was “an awfully good sort” about money. All the world knew that.

He sat now fanning her gently and noting with some amusement her slightly frowning brows as she watched the kaleidoscope pattern come and go about them. The latest to pass was his wife with a man better known than liked who had been her shadow for the last twelve months.

“Emerald’s going it tonight,” he said. “Thanks be! She’s grown to be such a little devil that things don’t click at all now unless she’s amusing herself. So I cheer her on. Philosophy, isn’t it?”

“Jolly good,” Yasoma answered without conviction. “But I say, Jimmy, have you come into a fortune? That’s a devastating frock she has on. It screams Paris at you.”

“Fortune be blowed!” he said, reaching for another cigarette. “As if I should spend my little all on Emerald when Kent Holland’s ready to do it for me. Besides, I haven’t got a dib. I’m about cleaned out.”

“Do you want me to lend you some, by any chance?” she said, yawning.

“Not such a rabbit by any manner of means, darling, but—”

“I wish you wouldn’t call me darling,” she interrupted irritably. “Everyone calls everyone ‘darling.’ This room is positively sopping with it. ‘Soma’ is good enough for you or anybody. Or you can take a chance on ‘Miss Brandon’ any day you like. Oh, Lord, how sick I am of all this! Give me some champagne.”

She never drank, and Jimmy Maxwell was joyously surprised.

“A very good move. Nothing like it for the blues. Have another?”

She took it, and still there was not the joyous reaction he expected.

“A really good cocktail is what you want. Goes to the spot at once. I’ll get you one.”

“That’s better,” she said at last with a sigh. “Get me another. Before I came here I had a shattering talk and I feel positively dank. I want things and I don’t know what they are. Look at this crowd for heaven’s sake! Look at that Pan and his Bacchantes and satyrs! The foulest, most disgusting creature that walks, and we all know it and endure him. And no joy in one of them. Nothing but half-drunken idiocy and the craving to be noticed anyhow. Look at Emerald! She’s half-seas-over with cocktails, and if I didn’t 34 loathe drink I should be the same. I’m as dull as ditch-water and you’re duller. The fools we are! Can’t you do anything to amuse me? You make me drink to keep myself awake.”

It was an appeal, half insolent, half real. Before going to Eleanor Ascham’s she had stopped a moment in the long room which held her Chinese pictures, and their spiritual beauty had struck a nerve never numb in her and mysteriously responsive to something in Ito’s reserves and the coldness in his eyes that held her at resolute arm’s length. Why did the leap of a Chinese or Japanese waterfall from misty heights wake a kind of lost passion in one—a spiritual homesickness of which Western art had never known the secret? A memory? A hope? That rabble rout was a strange contrast to the lives of those other artists. Their grave lives of self-chosen poverty, carelessness of earthly reward, their sparse choice production. She had read of them. She knew.

“Oh, I’m sick of all this! Sick!” she said suddenly.

He put a hot hand on hers.

“Of course you are, darling. You and I are living the most confoundedly unnatural life ever known. It’s a frightful strain on us both; I can tell you my nerves are a mere razzle-dazzle and so are yours. Let’s be sensible. Let’s be happy while we can. Don’t you remember Clementi’s song—

“‘In delay there lies no plenty.

Then come kiss me, Sweet and Twenty!

Youth’s a stuff will not endure.’”

“I’ve never had any youth,” she answered, frowning still. “My mother chevied me from pillar to post—afraid I’d grow up and give away her age, I suppose. Well, she’s gone where growing old doesn’t matter. What a farce it all is!”

She looked in his painted face and doubted whether he were a man at all. Not certainly by any standard earlier than the after-war years.

“You look a monumental rabbit tonight, Jimmy,” she said politely, “and I can give you no points. Why do we come here?”

“Why indeed?” he said eagerly. “We should be a jolly sight more comfortable on the big sofa in your library. Come along—we’ve had enough.”

She looked at him and looked at herself in the little glass in her jeweled bag and touched her lips with unneeded red.

“Some champagne? No, nothing more. Won’t spoil my complexion. I don’t mind if we do go. Look at Alison’s dress split down to the waist. See what it is to have only one good point and stress it! Look at Ducie with the water-nymph melting in his arms. I hope she’ll hold herself together until they reach the dark corner where they’ve been half the night. Let’s have one more dance and go, unless you want to stay and look after Emerald. She wants looking after, I can tell you. I suppose, as her husband you’re responsible. Anyway you’re not in the dark as to her doings.”

“That’s certainly a humorous suggestion,” he said carelessly. “I should like to see myself looking after Emerald! And her face if I proposed it. Do come along. Let’s go.”

But she lingered: “Sometimes I wish, Jimmy, that we had the rouged and perfumed tricks of the old French court. They had grace at all events. This is too awful for words. Vulgarity—screaming to be noticed. Hideous! If they gave a prize for the peak of vulgarity here—everyone would get it.”

He would have agreed to anything she said. “Well—and very good fun! Come out of it. Give me your ticket and I’ll get your wrap.”

His eyes, hot and languid with wine, said what she could read perfectly well, and it did not matter. Was it worth her while to fight and hold men off for the sake of scruples long dead and buried? Why not go ahead and take all life gives and try to get some flavor out of it at last? After all—nothing counts but pleasing oneself, and like other women she might find some zest in a secret love-affair. She had skirted the edge so often—why not fall over and see what happened? And what she had heard of Ito’s letter stirred her to wild revolt. After all, women had as much right as men. . . .

Curiously, Ito’s face floated between her and the motley crowd, calm, inscrutable, neither interested nor contemptuous. A man of another race, a riddle insoluble. That kind of rabble neither amused nor repelled him—he was simply analytic. Yet he could laugh on the heroic scale when things stirred his humor. Laugh like a ridiculous boy.

Eleanor Ascham and he seemed to find eternal interests and energy in all the world about them. What was the secret and how could she hope to pluck out the heart of his mystery if she jeered at him every time they met? It was not surprising that a man of one of the great Asiatic races should be astonished at these casino manners, but what business had he to criticize? He hadn’t criticized? Well, what did that matter? It was easy to see what he thought. And Eleanor Ascham too. She had got into the way of haunting her flat because it was so interesting, even if her friends did call it damned highbrow. She wanted what Eleanor had though she did not even know its name.

But she roused herself. Maxwell was coming back with her ermine wrap. Men’s eyes followed him wrathfully. They would gladly have been in his place.

They threaded their way through the people and went down to her car, where the tired-out chauffeur sat in a crumpled heap asleep and forgetting his vigil. He pulled himself together, and they rolled smoothly away.

The gray line of dawn was not yet touching the London roofs, and she was inclined to think those reflections had been a momentary brain-sickness.

“I suppose I drank too much of that beastly champagne, but anyhow it’s comfy now, and I feel all warm and drowsy,” she thought, sinking back luxuriously in the car and her great ermine wrap. She nestled her chin into it until only her great eyes shone out above the drifts of whiteness. Maxwell drew up close beside her and putting his arm about her drew her to him. She leaned her head on his shoulder. That too was part of the drowsy comfort, and he kissed her again and again with slow luxurious delight. It had happened before and meant little enough in their world, but tonight there was a difference known to both of them—an irresistible impulse drawing on and on to an inevitable end of the old relations and beginning of new. Drifting, she wondered what would be left, if anything, when the kisses had to stop, and the question did not seem worth answering. The indolent sensuous drifting was enough.

Suddenly he said: “I loathe Emerald. The very sight of her sickens me. Why, in God’s name did I tie myself hand and foot with a fool like that?”

“Oh, don’t bother! She does as well as anyone else. One gets tired of everyone. I’m getting tired of you, Jimmy. Dreadfully tired. Let me lie still. I want to be quiet with you. Shall we go for a drive?”

“No—no. I don’t want the man. I want to be quiet too. To be alone. Damn him! Why doesn’t he get on faster?”

She said nothing but drew close, not returning his kisses but accepting them as she had never done before.

The car drew up. She got out languidly, and Maxwell took the key she had given him and opened the door. They went in together, treading noiselessly. It was by no means the first time it had happened, and yet to each of them again there was something new. Something impossible to put in words yet significant. It was as if they had never been alone together before.

In the morning-room the brown and orange tints of the curtains flickered and changed in the light of the wood fire. The luxury of the room struck a note of its own in the illusion of passion that had immeshed her most worthless self.

They sat on the great divan facing the fire, and again the flames brought out the jewel-lights of the heaped brocaded cushions. She had thrown off her wrap, and her own jewels answered as she lay back among them.

“It’s rather nice to be here—together!” she said, as if to herself.

“Nice? It’s heaven!” he said thickly. “I love you. I’ve always loved you, Soma.” He had caught her hand, and she let it rest as if in utter languor.

“What about Emerald?” she asked with idle sarcasm. The obvious thing to say.

“Emerald? Don’t let’s remember her. What does it matter? Nobody troubles about that kind of thing nowadays.”

She laughed—a sardonic little laugh.

“I certainly shouldn’t trouble about it if I cared about you, Jimmy, but as a matter of fact I don’t. You’re rather a good-natured old rabbit. But that’s all. No—don’t drag me, and I’m tired of being kissed. 39 I assure you it leaves me cold. I don’t care one little tiny damn for you.”

But her mood left her half-yielding also, and not for one moment was Maxwell deceived. He knew the moment had come. That was all. If he reasoned it would be afterwards, when he could tell himself that even with Yasoma’s carelessness what had passed must make a bond that he could strengthen at his leisure. Nor did she reason as she lay in his arms. The moment was there, and if it suited her it could recur and if not it would be a closed page forever in the book of her life. If anyone’s life was his own to deal with it was hers!

These things that people used to make such a fuss about, what do they matter really? A gesture of the flesh—a dream to be dismissed at dawn. Things could be just the same between herself and Maxwell, and the dream need never recur unless it meant a great deal more to her than she could believe now.

Yet later—when her surrender had become dream-like even to herself—when Maxwell stood up in the first golden beam of sunlight through the nearly drawn curtains and taking her in his arms kissed her with the air of a master, his triumph struck her broad awake and furious. She thrust him back.

“You’re not to think you have any hold over me. You have none—none, I tell you! If you aren’t careful I shall loathe you. If you ever dare to remind me—” Again she flung him away savagely.

“Go. Get away. I hate you!” she said in a fierce whisper. “I tell you—let me go or you shall pay for it. Never let me see you again! I’m my own. Not yours.”

Incredibly to herself she suddenly longed to see him drop dead at her feet. What had she yielded—what done? The hateful room. The fire was smoldered 40 ash. Dust lay thinly on the lacquered table beside her with his half-smoked cigarette. Brandy and soda stood on it with a half-empty glass. Everything looked jaded, used out, shabby; and he the most of all. A loathsome presence.

Half stunned by the change, he stared at her with loose lips.

“This is a nice way to treat a man!” he said. “You give yourself to me, and then—”

“I said I didn’t love you and now I loathe you!” she said. “I would sooner drop dead than see you again. Go, I tell you. Go.”

He tried a caressing tone which infuriated her the more. She would realize the thing better next day, she would remember. She would—

She sprang to the door and throwing it open ran upstairs. There he dared not follow. He stood a moment or two in the room grown gray and hateful as sin as the morning gold crept in to disclose its nakedness, then slowly picked up his coat and put it on. But of course she would come round—not to tenderness, one could not expect that of Yasoma—but to the old camaraderie with this new bond to strengthen his hold. He had always meant it should end like this, and now the future demanded the most careful consideration, that he might make no false step on the new road of their relations. In his own mind he had set marriage as the goal, for reasons many and good, and now the flying opportunity had swept him he was determined to use it for all it was worth.

He waited and heard a door close upstairs, waited five minutes more for the sound of light returning feet, and in vain. Then he went cautiously into the hall, opened and closed the door noiselessly, and was gone. He would write to her at once.

She locked her bedroom door securely and went on 41 into the large dressing-room where she knew the one center of light in the sleeping house would be awake for her. She needed that companionship now beyond any need in her life. It would strengthen and steady her until she had time to think.

Yes, the firelight threw mystic shadow-shapes up the white walls and one nickering and huge was that of Bridget Conran, her nurse from birth, an Irishwoman fifty years old. She was not asleep. A little lamp burned beside her, and in her lap lay a very well-worn “Pilgrim’s Progress,” the daily Bible and guide of her Protestant soul. But she never forced her faith on Yasoma, and Yasoma had intellect enough to appreciate and love the greatest of English parables of the Way. She had dwelt in the House of the Interpreter as a child and heard its shining stories. She had trembled in the Valley of the Shadow and had with joy beheld the clear shining hills of Beulah at sunset and the roar of the rejoicing river which is the last barrier between man and the City of Peace. It was like a return to real life from some brief fever-dream of folly to see the quiet waiting figure. She could not think yet, but it seemed these things mattered little. A dream of the night dissolving in dawn. One could feel exactly the same as before.

So it befell that when she stooped over Bridget and kissed her, her first thought was to gain time to screen herself. Bridget’s eyes could be keen—she must baffle them.

“And what are you reading now, Bridgie?”

Bridget smiled at her with perfect understanding.

“’Tis the place where Christian’s burden fell off his back, child, and sure he was the glad man to be rid of it, though ’twas he packed it full of fooleries himself and hoisted it upon him. It warmed my heart to think how gay and light he went on without it. 42 Sure a harp to be singing your songs to is the only baggage worth carrying, and a bit to eat tied up in the handkerchief in your hand.”

Yasoma sat down and stretched out her feet to the fire. She had kicked off her jeweled shoes, and Bridget was removing the diamond head-dress from her hair with soft skilful fingers. It was like coming into the heart of quiet to be at home in the flitting firelight, with Bridget’s contented voice murmuring of things unseen as she unknotted the black coils and smoothed them with a brush before braiding them. But she herself had brought cruel disturbance with her.

“Sure ’twas he was the light one then!” said Bridget with a kind of tender exultation, “and him legging it along the road like a hare at dawn when the grass will have diamonds on it like your mama’s that you had set into them feathers. But the men you’d meet nowadays isn’t like him, so they’re not! You didn’t meet a man yet, my heart’s darling, and ’tis that’s the reason why you’re as full of scorn and pride as the princess that made the young man serve seven years’ hard labor before she’d so much as open her eyes to have a look at him.”

“And did he do it?” Yasoma asked. “It’s only in fairy tales they do that kind of thing.” She kept her face turned to the fire.

“And why would it be any other way with them nowadays when the girls does all the hard labor for them and they giving themselves as cheap as cheap that a young man would only have to lift his finger and they running after him and flying like chickens when you’d be feeding them? And still, for all that—”

She paused a moment in braiding the proud black hair into noble braids that fell to the waist and lower. The girl winced a little. She thought of that half-drunken arm about her, the wine-laden breath on her 43 cheek. She thought of Ito’s cool examining gaze as if he had been actually there, and what she had done sickened her. She had laughed at other people’s amours with the best, but now that the thing was hers it had become horrible. Into what hands had she thrust herself, and what hateful alliance had she made with what she despised? He would write—he would come. It would leak out as everybody’s affairs did in the circle she lived in—“the vicious circle,” as they called it laughing. And now these thoughts coursed through her like liquid shame while Bridget babbled on.

“Ah, ’twas Christian was the man for keeping on keeping on when the world was agin him. ’Twas no wonder when he got there that they turned out the guard and let fly the guns and trumpets. Sure the young men in London that comes to this house—’tis talk, talk, talk, with them from morning till night, and never a thing done but blethering how grand they’ll do it once they take hold. But do you go to bed, my lamb, for the sun’s rising, and I’ll pray God give you a husband that’ll go on his way and you walking after him to be ready when he gives you a look over his shoulder.”

It was not the London ideal by any manner of means, and Yasoma with her head on the pillow pulled down Bridget’s and kissed her with a smile that stung herself.

“If you dare! I’ll pray myself to be a happy old maid with you to tuck me up every night till I live to be a hundred! And now be off with you!”

And Bridget went off to bed in the little room at hand where she slept every night, jealous to keep watch over her treasure. There was much more under her words than appeared, for she was not at ease. Yasoma at sixteen had had never a thought that she hid from Bridget. There was a strange poetic fiber 44 that thrilled in each, though very different music moved it. But Yasoma at twenty-four was a riddle not to be read. She had flown away into countries where Bridget could never follow. And returning from these expeditions she was always harder, colder—though not to Bridget—more daring, more cynical.

What did she believe in? In nothing apparently but what was mysteriously called having a good time—by the really detestable young men and women who filled the house with noise and empty gaiety. Detestable, that is, in Bridget’s eyes. In Yasoma’s they were the only possible companions for a young person of spirit. But the mischief was well afoot before her mother’s death. Her father she had never really known—a disappointed man, cold and proud, with a temper that broke loose at terrifying intervals and drove everyone before him. Perhaps it was because her mother had been such a beautiful frivolous fool that he had decreed Yasoma should be her own mistress at the age of eighteen. He had foreseen something strong and proud in her that would never submit to her mother’s little empty humors. And after all that had been a needless precaution—a motor accident while she was driving alone at night with a man who was openly her lover ended her frivolities, and Yasoma was owner of all the dangerous goods and evils her people had prepared for her.

There was only one influence in which Bridget had any hope and that was Eleanor Ascham’s. She liked her reserve and trusted her affection for Yasoma, yet trembled to think that it was only intellectual. She would not have put it in that way of course. She would have said of Mrs. Ascham: “Sure she’s a good woman and she has the decent pride of a lady that’ll make people watch out what they’ll say before her, and ’tis known she can master them with a look and a 45 word. But ’tisn’t the grace of God when all’s said and done—’tis the cold knowledge that’s shut betwixt the leaves of a book, though ’twill go as far and farther with a fool than the other. God be good to us, that’s not what my child wants, though ’tis better than nothing!”

But she slept in peace now while Yasoma lay and watched the coming of the sun with wide sleepless eyes. She shuddered with hatred of the thing she had brought upon herself, and for the first time in her life felt the sharp eyes of fear. And it is a strange truth that the thought that stung more sharply than any other was Ito. His ironic triumph and contempt. “Young women devoid of modesty and wisdom.”

“It’s because I hate him,” she said.