Читать книгу The Garden of Vision - Elizabeth Louisa Moresby - Страница 9

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Thinking in this way, it was not displeasing to Bridget that when she came and let in the midday light Yasoma sat up and telephoned to Eleanor Ascham. “Can I see you today—this evening?”

“Certainly. But I thought you were engaged.”

“So I am, four deep. But what does that matter?”

“Nothing, if not to you. When will you come?”

“Nine. I want to say something important. Please don’t have anyone there. Especially Ito.”

“Poor Ito! Very well. Nine o’clock.”

The colloquy ended, and Yasoma lay back upon her pillows. Bridget “straightening the room,” as she called it, put in her opinion.

“Now that Mrs. Ascham—she’s a grand woman! There’s a breath like the north wind blows off her that’ll get you going like as if you had a glass of whisky inside you. If it had the grace of God running under it—”

“And how do you know it hasn’t, you old sinner?” Yasoma said, plaiting and unplaiting the great silken braid on the pillow beside her. “I don’t think you know the first thing about the grace of God and I’m sure I don’t! But I have a kind of notion it may be a very queer thing and behave in all sorts of ways that little Bridgets wouldn’t expect.”

Bridget shook her head and groaned. For her that river ran in a stagnant canal of peace, and the Tree of Life was planted in hundreds along its border as neatly as a privet hedge. To think of it as a rushing river pouring through dangerous places accessible to unrepentant sinners and feeding perilous countries was impossible.

“Perhaps there’s no such thing at all,” said Yasoma, composing herself on her pillows. “If Christian had stayed at home in the City of Destruction he might have saved himself trouble and given God less to bother about than when he went off on his own because he had got bored with being comfortable. Let me alone, Bridgie. I want to think.”

But Bridget could not abide this heresy. She quoted, she expatiated, while she arranged the armory of beauty upon the toilet table—an armory she loathed, for what rouge was needed for Yasoma’s golden and damask bloom and what lipstick for lips like a living rose? These were the wares peddled at wicked booths in Vanity Fair, and she saw the Devil’s claw-mark on each and all. But she said no more, and Yasoma pretending to sleep lost herself in stinging realizations.

That mood had not passed when she motored herself to Eleanor’s flat, but it was heavily clouded with doubt. She knew what she meant to tell and keep to herself, but Eleanor must take what she said exactly in the right way or there would be trouble. She was determined to escape Maxwell, but Eleanor must understand her flight from London as a gesture of boredom—no more. The very thought of suspicion turned her white. At Knightsbridge she swerved the car down the Brompton Road for a few minutes, half resolved to keep it all to herself and find some way out.

But where to go? Every place she knew was as 48 well known to Maxwell as to herself. He would take her very flight as a suggestion of pursuit. He knew all the doubles and turnings of any game she could invent.

And then, furious at her own hesitation, strong in the assurance that Eleanor would take the amalgamated fiction and truth blindly, she turned the car into the park and so along to Lancaster Gate, flashing through the serpentine rows of lamps. She had a moment of thought by herself, in the drawing-room where firelight and lamplight contended with moonlight on the mountains of the beautiful old Chinese picture, opposite to which Ito and many others must always sit because it fed their eyes with beauty. She stared at its ascetic loveliness now with a kind of repulsion. It seemed too calm a hearer of what she had to say. A world as far away as the moon. And she had ruined her own.

Eleanor came softly in, her entry so noiseless that Yasoma heard nothing until she spoke. They kissed each other, and the girl pulled a low chair by Eleanor’s and clasped her hands upon her knees, looking up with eyes so heavily fringed that they were like stars reflected in black water. The libidinous spell of the night before had slipped off her like a garment and left her cool and young and sad. A new note in Yasoma’s many-faceted nature. With quick instinct Eleanor prepared herself for change. The girl began abruptly:

“I want to speak to you terribly badly. Tell me—did things ever desert you suddenly? I mean—were you ever going on fairly comfortably, contented enough with yourself and all you had and did, and hoping for nothing better than to go on and on enjoying more and more until you got old or died—which is much the same thing? And then in a flash it all became 49 sickening—like seeing the skull under a beautiful face. And you loathed it. You felt you were tied up in a knot. You felt putrid. You thought—there are people in the world who are free and I’m tied. I want freedom more than dying men want water. . . . Did that ever happen to you? Did it?”

She spoke with passion, in short breathless sentences, and her hands on Eleanor’s lap clutched one another as if to keep back and control a flood of revelation that might put her stripped soul at the other woman’s mercy. Suddenly she stopped, frightened at the ease of revelation and a passionate longing to tell the whole. Never—never! She looked up, her lip unbent and trembling.

Eleanor’s thoughts were quick as a swallow’s darts. It was astonishing in this arrogant brilliance. Yet she had always known Yasoma was wiser than her follies, and a fanatic of beauty. Some awakening was certain to come, but probably by the common road of human destiny. This suddenness made a crisis difficult to treat. She touched Yasoma’s hand—she must not be caressed—and said:

“You didn’t know this last night. You were yourself.”

“Yes, absolutely. No. I wasn’t. Not underneath.”

“Then what happened to crystallize it?”

“Nothing. Nothing more than has often happened before. But suddenly I saw it from the outside and I felt like a drunken fool gone sober in a flash. Danger ahead!”

“Danger?” The cool gray eyes considered her calmly.

“Yes. Nothing to write home about—only the danger of getting sodden with all the stuff I live in. They all looked such hopeless guinea-pigs jigging round and thinking themselves so grand and advanced. 50 The last word in modernity. The men were worse than the women—let Ito say what he likes! I suppose sexuality has some right place somewhere, but it’s simply a beastliness in the kind of world I live in. They torture and stimulate it until it screams. A man brought me back. I think he was half drunk. I let him kiss my cheek. It wasn’t the first time—other men too! I think I’m getting oozy in the brain, for I don’t believe I’m a bit that sort really. And then I jumped out of the car like mad and into the house, and there in my room all was quiet and Bridgie was reading her everlasting ‘Pilgrim’s Progress,’ and she looked up with the firelight in her dear old eyes and began babbling something about the stupid way I’m burning the candle at both ends. Well, I believe I am. I want to get away for a bit—somewhere safe. Or do you think I’m going soupy by any chance?”

A difficulty not unfamiliar to Eleanor Ascham is that these impulses are not infrequent in the modern world. They spring up, boiling and surging, flinging up the débris of the past like the geysers of Iceland. But also they subside. They have a kind of periodicity in people the world has used too well, and it is probable that after writing “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity,” Solomon returned immediately to the arms of the beautiful Shulamite, and wine was still red in the cup—until a fresh seizure of the world’s transience smote him and the next chapter of that immortal dirge of joy was written. These things may be only the birth-pangs of the soul for a far-off rebirth and with very little practical relation to this life. And yet they cannot be neglected.

But Eleanor, to whom many confidences came, thought this not negligible. After an interval of firelit silence she said:

“If I could suggest anything practical would you do 51 it? Are you in earnest? I don’t a bit want to bother with you if not.”

“Wouldn’t I! You bet!”

“But first—are you certain sure you’re tired of all this? That you won’t find life empty without it?”

“It’s as empty as a drum now. All noise and hollowness. Unless I’m sickening for something horrid. That may explain.”

“Then I’ll tell you what I know. You have gifts—”

“Good heavens, what! Don’t smash my faith in your judgment.”

“Great gifts of courage and obstinacy. And in art—and yes, even in conduct—you like the right things even if you don’t realize your good taste. Also you’re by way of having a brain.”

“No, that I deny with both hands! Who but a fool could live like me—with a pack of rabbits you couldn’t match in the universe? No—”

But Eleanor went on steadily: “In the narrow circle you live in—”

“Narrow! They think they’re the pick of the world.”

Eleanor took no notice of the interruption. “—there’s no room to breathe. They ask for nothing but rubbish, and you dish it out by the ton.”

“Gospel truth! So I do!”

“Well, then, the cure is—know the world. You should be with people who care nothing for your looks and your money. You want to find your real level. You’re living on the most absurd estimate of your consequence.”

“Exactly. But at least my estimate of other people has never been exaggerated.”

Eleanor laughed. “So much the worse. Well, you should travel and get a better proportion of things. Not India. Not our own places. You’d meet people you know—”

Yasoma clenched her hands with joy. Coming! Exactly the advice she wanted and without a word from herself! She could have thrown her arms about Eleanor. “You really think so?” she asked with the right note of doubt.

“Certainly. Put Europe behind you for a bit. Go to Japan—”

And now indeed the pupil stared open-mouthed. “Japan? Gosh! Why?”

“Because China is too disturbed. Go there. Stay at least a year. I may be coming out again then. Live the life of a stranger whom nobody has any reason to think anybody. Stand on your own feet, not your money and good looks—for all I know the Japanese may not even think you passable. And notice things. And find out what life means to other people in quite other ways from those you know. Quite other values, I mean. Now, if you’re in earnest, do that. If not, shut up. I’m not interested in any decadent moods of despair.”

“But in Tokyo—”

“Not in Tokyo. None of the places idle rich tourists haunt. But the sort of places I love.”

“You love? But then you’re a Buddhist. You know Asia. You’re able to get in touch.”

“Nobody’s big enough to know Asia, but I am in touch. So can you be. But anyhow what you want is to break out of your set for a while. Then, if you still want it, come back to it. I’m for no wrenches—for no living in society above one’s own merits. It may be you’re only fit for where you live now, and in that case you’ll come back and do the best you can. I think you’ll find something else. Go and see.”

Would Eleanor have advised differently if she had known the facts? Yasoma wondered.

“Japan!” she mused, trying to visualize what lay 53 beneath that name so easily said, so full of quaint perfumed mystery. “But no one can ever get to know them. They’re a fish built like a nut, as the man said about oysters. I’m to sit looking into inscrutability for a year? I don’t think I begin to see myself. And what’s the good? What could happen?”

Eleanor laughed. “That will depend on whether you have the eyes to see through the charm that traps people so fatally that they think only in terms of pretty vignettes—kimonos, tea-houses, wistaria, cherry-blossom, and the like. All the treacle mush! The Japanese guard their secrets with that surface-stuff quite as effectually as with guns and forts. For all I know they may take you in as easily as they do the people who write ‘Letters from Japan,’ and ‘Chrysanthemum’ novels and all that stuff. But I think not. You do at least know a little of Japanese and Chinese art. And you’re good at jujutsu. So you have beginnings.”

“Jujutsu! But why?” cried Yasoma, all agape.

Eleanor evaded that issue. “I’ll try to get an introduction for you from Ito to a man called Arima and—”

“Ito?” Angry red flushed her cheek.

“Ito. Why not? Arima is a most remarkable man. You would learn a good deal if he gave you his sympathy. And otherwise you may only light among the Japanese who are fools like the rest of us. But I assure you there’s a world in Japan which gives you a wonderfully clear statement of things as they are. And they are not troubled with sentiment. If they take you up they won’t be tender with you. But they can teach you a splendid offensive and defensive for life. And jujutsu—it would be the chance of your life!”

There was subtlety in that speech, and she knew it. Again a firelit silence. Yasoma said slowly:

“I might like that. Is it because you know all this 54 that we’ve never trapped you? You only look on and laugh. You’re a stranger and a pilgrim in London. A pilgrim; that reminds me of poor dear Bridgie! How will she take her doom? Imagine her with chopsticks and pickled plums!”

Eleanor laughed confidently. “Ask her if she’d like to be left behind! She’d walk before you into a lion’s den. It isn’t for nothing she loves that book. Everyone who begins to think is a pilgrim, and Bunyan has got the map of the journey in spite of his appalling theology. Besides it’s the loveliest English. Bridget waked up long ago. What do you suppose she thinks of London?”

The door opened gently to Eleanor’s Chinese servant—an embodied fidelity who followed her like her shadow, but unlike a shadow lived a life of his own, apart yet attached and embodying much of the hidden beauty of Asia. He silently held out a scribbled visiting-card upon a little gold lacquer tray. She read and gave it to Yasoma, who read it aloud:

“I have a cable recalling me to Japan. I shall leave as soon as I can. Fong says you are engaged. May I come later?”

She would have sent “Tomorrow” for answer, but Yasoma interposed.

“No—no. Let him come up. I want to see his face when he knows I’m going to Japan. He’ll think I’m not worthy of the least tiny cup of tea there. That man simply gnashes his teeth at me. I want to make him angry. And then I’ll take myself off.”

“And you really do mean to go?”

“What I say, I do. I want to get away. Now send for him.”

“Bring up Mr. Ito, Fong.”

The door closed, and Eleanor laid her hand once more on those clasped on her knee. “Don’t spoil your 55 chances with Ito. I know no one who can open more wonderful doors to you there if you want what I think you want. If not—I can turn you over to Yasuda and Arimoto, and you’ll see a lovely Japan, but—”

“I’ll be myself,” Yasoma said obstinately. “Ito can take me or leave me at that. And I don’t want Yasuda or Arimoto. He can say what he likes and I’ll do what I like.”

It struck Eleanor at the moment, and forcibly, how much of the Oriental there was in the girl under all her English veneer. Her name struck a strangeness in the air like the sound of a little silver gong. It had the melody that is sonorous in the names of Japan. Her eyes, so long and dark that like the Princess Damayanti’s they might almost be said to touch her hair on either temple, had the beauty of Indian eyes that expresses the gentle trust of the animal and the highest dreams of the mystic and may be both and either at the same moment. The sweetness of her parted lips might shed the rubies of a verse of the Ramayana, and if they dropped the ugliest London jargon instead, that was only because she had been violently forced into an environment which never could be naturally her own.

Tonight she looked a true daughter of the East, though the deep crimson shading into faintest dawn-rose which clothed her had Paris stamped on every flying fold. About her throat she wore a heavy and beautiful necklace of most unusual design set thick with massed rubies, which, as Eleanor knew but Soma did not, was an ancient symbol of marriage in India. A splendid marriage ring worn about the throat instead of the finger. It had belonged to remote ancestresses, and was old when the princess who had brought it to England was young. Yes—Yasoma breathed full Orient tonight!

Ito entered, bowing to both.

“I ask forgiveness. But it was very important to me to see you, Mrs. Ascham. I need your opinion. I hope I may not disturb Miss Brandon, but—”

“She’s obliged to go soon, and you know how glad I always am to see you. Besides we want your opinion here.”

He bowed again, looking slightly bewildered. With Yasoma present the talks had always been an embattled line. Advice? No! That he could not comprehend. Even now she sat on guard with eyes aware and alert under a screen of silken lashes which to his Far Eastern taste were lovely.

“Miss Brandon is going to Japan very soon and for a considerable time. I can’t come myself at present, as you know. And I wondered whether you would suggest some place where she could be quiet with her maid—an elderly woman. She wants to study art. . . .”

That seemed the easiest way to put it, though it was only a collateral issue. Besides, the chilling of Ito’s expression halted her. She knew how he hated the invasion of the tourist and the infection of money-grubbing they carried with them as their shadow. She knew how he loathed the emphasis laid on the petty prettinesses, the patronizing admiration of the dear little Japanese dolls who were to figure and pose for the Westerners’ amusement, the cult of the geisha and the implications underlying it. She saw very well how he would place the rich beautiful girl, with her flirtations on the outbound boat, and her money to fling about in extravagant buying. What wonder? He knew enough of London to associate her with one of the most worthless sets and unforgivable license of behavior. Eleanor was really afraid that some irrevocable gesture or word might escape him and antagonize them forever.

But the impenetrable reserve of the Japanese was salvation. He looked gravely at Yasoma and said 57 politely that he hoped his country would have the good fortune to please her. It would be cold if she were going soon. She would anticipate the earliest plum-blossom, not to mention the cherry-blossom. But—

“But I’m not going just to see pretty things,” she broke in, and then was herself bewildered. She knew that she was flying for her life, but what else was she going to do? Indeed she did not know! She and Ito alike looked to Eleanor for explanation. It was forthcoming.

“Miss Brandon wants to make a real study of Japanese and Chinese art and also to learn as much of the colloquial as she can. She’s very quick at languages. She has learned Latin and Greek and can read both. She speaks French and German. Now she wants to add an Asiatic language to her store.”

But Ito gazed with astonishment that even his courtly training could not hide. Yasoma as a scholar—that vivid butterfly of the electric lights! He could not realize the educational opportunities that the English girl has thrust upon her at school and in the university, and since every word Eleanor said must be true he saw Yasoma as the seeker after learning, deep-dipped in the wisdom of the ages. Surprise left him inarticulate but still no sympathy was awakened. He was certain that he did not want her money, her learning, or her personality in Japan. When he could speak he said stiffly:

“Such learning is astonishing in a young lady, but would it not be—of course I only offer a suggestion—but would it not be more natural and useful if she studied the languages of the British dominions? Let us say, India. Sanskrit for scholarship and Hindi for colloquial. I know Professor Lalpat Ram and—” He stopped and added politely, “But you know best.”

Eleanor knew best inasmuch as she was certain that 58 nothing would be achieved while Yasoma sat fixing him with those challenging eyes. She looked for a moment at her with that all-speaking expression which a candid woman uses as effectually as the schemer. It said: “Do go—this very minute! Can’t you see I can do nothing with him while you are here?”

And Yasoma, reading, rose instantly, and woman-like nearly wrecked her chances with a parting shot.

“Well, I must go. The Grantleys are taking me to ‘The Merry Eden.’ I quite realize that Mr. Ito thinks I may contaminate Japan. He had better have me declared contraband at Yokohama.”

Ito shuddered almost visibly. Six performances of “The Merry Eden” were being given by a small society which apparently existed for the purpose of sampling privately the worst that could be said and done on the stage before diluting the concentrated essence for general consumption. Very often the essence was a split cup of the gods too ambrosial for a world unawakened to its opportunities. Sometimes it succeeded, and the result would be a play over which the censor hovered with yearning pencil and then with a harvest of erasures passed on to purify still further the popular taste. As a distinguished visitor who knew everybody, Ito had been invited to the first performance of the current production, and though Japan is by no means squeamish had left at the end of the second act for the simple reason that it disgusted him physically to see men and women acting in such a play together. The actress is a late importation in Japan, though now securely established, and his taste, trained in a very different school, shied at the situation. And now this young woman was going merrily off to see what had revolted him against the people who could write, act, and see such a play. In that moment he believed her utterly worthless.

Nevertheless, with iron politeness he took her to the lift and bowed as she waved a careless angry farewell. She could partly guess what he was thinking, though understanding none of the reasons for it, and it hardened her determination to go to Japan. Japan indeed! Its only merit to her was that she could scarcely get farther from England. Was it his freehold, that he should resolve to keep her out of it? She would do exactly as she pleased. And if she did not go to “The Merry Eden,” it was certainly not because he had opened his eyes on her for that astonished moment. It was because a shock met her when she reached home. A note from Maxwell, who had called twice in vain.

“I say, darling, I could have sworn you’d fix up a meeting today. Are you going to ‘The Merry Eden,’ with the Grantleys, because if so we could get away before the last act and go to the club and then back together. I don’t even try to put over what I’ve been feeling all day, but you know because I can swear you’re feeling the same. Ring up when you get this—don’t lose one minute. I have something tremendous to say. Now ring.

J. M.”

It was Bridget who gave her the note. To Bridget she turned when she had thrown it into the fire.

“If Mr. Maxwell ever comes here again tell them to say ‘Not at Home.’ I am not at home! I’m not going out tonight. I have things to think of—”

She sat by the fire, shaking with cold loathing and hatred. The brute! And into such hands she had put herself. If Eleanor and Ito could know the truth what would they think! At all events it mapped her future. London was over for good and all.

Bridget brought in her bedtime drink of lemon-water and then sat stitching lace of spider-web fineness on softest silk for her wearing. Everything that the general public did not see must be made by her own hands for her child. Paris and London might care for the outside, but the invisible was love’s own work. Yasoma watched her moodily. Bridget’s presence never bored or irritated her any more than that of a beloved dog. It was always soothing, understanding, and unpenetrating. It guarded the gates but did not follow into the sealed chambers.

After a while she said as casually as she could:

“Bridgie dear, we’ve never traveled out of Europe except that time we went to Algiers and Egypt, and you liked that. What would you say if we went to Japan for a year? It’s very pretty and there are lovely things to buy.”

Bridget did not even interrupt her work.

“Well, I heard say they’re the queer little people entirely, with their idols and their chopsticks, and still they have the sense of the world in their heads for all! Maybe they’re only pretending, all said and done! Maybe they know a lot they don’t tell, for I’m told they have a silence on them that they wouldn’t break, not if you took a whip to them, unless it pleased themselves. But what put it into your head to go to that queer place, my lamb?”

In this portrait of a people Yasoma could certainly recognize Ito. That was the way with Bridget. You mentioned a subject you could swear she knew nothing about, and she had already arrived and was sitting all unconscious at the heart of it. “I heard say,” she would reply, and after all no one had told her. It was inspired mother wit. She sat there now, calm, florid, and unruffled, as unquestioningly ready for Japan as for death if Yasoma led the way; not profoundly interested in 61 the adventure, for her spiritual experience transcended all earthly oddities, but contented and prepared. Yet Yasoma felt the need of buttressing her own decision.

“Mrs. Ascham wants me to go, Bridgie. She thinks I’ve had enough of London. She thinks I shall be wiser if I see the world. Do you?”

Bridget laid down her work.

“Well, if it was the last word to pass my lips I’d say Mrs. Ascham has the sense of six, for as quiet as she is. If ’tis she says it I wouldn’t care how queer they are but I’d be off like a redshank. When will we go, my lamb?”

The Japanese had now become a desirable potion to be swallowed as quickly as possible. But Yasoma persisted:

“Do you think I’ve had enough of London, Bridgie?”

“Do I think it!” With huge scorn—“Do I know it! What have you to do with the likes of men that isn’t men and women that isn’t women? God be good to me, sure some of them would make a decent person sick to see the way they’d be play-acting and not a word of sense coming out of their mouths. ’Tis Mrs. Ascham has the sense, and more power to her! Leave them kicking up their heels like donkeys, and be off!”

Exactly Yasoma’s own opinion of her friends, clinched by the two she valued most in all the world; Japan was clearly indicated.

“Well, you may be right for all I know or care, and anyhow I’m tired of London. Look up the boats for Japan and take cabins for the first sailing. That’s settled. And now I’m going to bed.”

She gave that side of it no more thought, for Bridget was an accomplished courier. Next morning she set forth on her errand and engaged a suite in the Japanese boat in which Ito had secured his passage home. 62 That was a trick of Fate which Yasoma would certainly have averted. The possibility that Ito should imagine she was thrusting her company upon him would have filled her with fury.