Читать книгу Gloria Mundi - Frederic Harold - Страница 5

Table of Contents

The meeting of the man and the woman—it is to this that every story in the world goes back for its beginning.

At noon on a day late in September the express train from Paris rested, panting and impatient, on its brief halt in the station at Rouen. The platform was covered with groups of passengers, pushing their way into or out of the throng about the victualer’s table. Through the press passed waiters, bearing above their heads trays with cups of tea and plates of food. People were climbing the high steps to the carriages, or beckoning to others from the open windows of compartments. Four minutes of the allotted five had passed. The warning cries of the guards had begun, and there was even to be heard the ominous preliminary tooting of a horn.

At the front of the section of first-class carriages a young woman leaned through the broad window-frame of a coupé, and held a difficult conversation with one of the waiters. She had sandwiches in one hand, some loose coin in the other. Her task was to get at the meaning of a man who spoke of sous while she was thinking in centimes, and she smiled a little in amused vexation with herself at the embarrassment.

“Deux sandwich: combien si vous plait, monsieur?” she repeated, with an appealing stress of courtesy. More slowly she constructed a second sentence: “Est un franc assez?” She proffered the silver coin to help out her inquiry, and the waiter, nodding, put up his hand for it.

On the instant, as the noise of slamming doors and the chorus of “Au coupé, s’il-v’-plait!” grew peremptory, one in authority pushed the waiter aside and pulled open the coupé door upon which she had been leaning. “Permettez moi, madame!” he said curtly.

Close at his back was a young man, with wraps upon his arm and a traveling bag in his hand, who was flushed and breathing hard with the excitement of hurry, and who drew a long sigh of relief as he put his foot on the bottom step of the coupé.

The young woman had grasped the door and was striving stoutly to drag it to her. “Mais non, monsieur!” she shouted, her voice quivering with vehemence. “Cette compartement est tout reserveé-engageé! J’ai donné sank franc soisante, en Paris, pour moi seulement! Je proteste!”

Sharp blasts from a horn at the rear of the train broke in upon her earnest if uncertain remarks. The official held up one warning hand, while with the other he wrenched the door wide open. He said something of which the girl comprehended only its arbitrary harshness of spirit. Brusquely thrusting a ticket into the young man’s hand, he pushed him up the steps into the compartment, and closed the door upon him with a clang. Arms were waving outside; the tin horn screamed; a throb of reawakened energy thrilled backward through the train.

“I assure you—I am so sorry,” the young man began, still standing by the door. His voice was gentle and deprecatory. His words were English, but the tone was of some other language.

“But I have taken the whole compartment-I paid for it all!” she burst out at him, her voice shaking with indignation. “It is an outrage!”

“I am afraid you are mistaken,” he started to speak again; “you obtained only one seat—I have a ticket for another. If there had been time, I beg you to believe—” The train was moving, and a swift plunge into utter darkness abruptly broke off his speech. After a few moments it became possible to discern vague outlines in the black compartment. The girl had huddled herself on the end cushion at the right. The young man took his seat in the corner to the left, and for three incredibly protracted minutes the tunnel reared its uncanny barrier of bogus night between them. The dim suggestion of light which remained to them revealed constrained and motionless figures drawn rigidly away from each other, and pale averted countenances staring fixedly into the gloom.

All at once they were blinking in a flood of sunshine, and drawing welcome breaths of the new, sweet air which swept through from window to window. The young man’s gaze, decorously turned to his left, was of a sudden struck with the panorama as by a blow. He uttered a little cry of delight to himself, and bent forward with eagerness to grasp as much as he might of what was offered. The broad, hill-rimmed basin of the Seine; the gray towers and shining spires of the ancient town; the blue films of smoke drifting through the autumn haze; the tall black chimneys, the narrow, high poplars, the splashes of vivid color with which the mighty moving picture painted itself—all held him, rapt and trembling, with his face out of the window.

Summarily the darkness descended upon them again. He drew back, settled himself in his seat and recalled the circumstance that he was not alone. It occurred to him to pull up the window, and then instinctively he turned to see if she had taken the same precaution on her side. Thus when the short second tunnel unexpectedly ended, he found himself regarding his companion with wideeyed and surprised intentness.

There were two vacant seats between them, and across this space she returned his scrutiny for a moment; then with a fine show of calm she looked away, out through the broad, rounded panes which constituted the front of the compartment.

To the eye of the young man, she was above all things English. Her garments, her figure, the pose of her head, the consciously competent repose of her profile, the very angle at which the correct gray hat, with its fawn-colored ribbon, crossed the line of the brow above—these spoke loudly to him of the islander. From this fact alone would be inferred a towering personal pride, and an implacable resentment toward those who, no matter how innocently and accidentally, offered injury to that pride. He knew the English well, and it hardly needed this partial view of her face to tell him that she was very angry.

Another young man, under these conditions, might have more frankly asked himself whether the face was a beautiful one. He was conscious that the query had taken shape in his mind, but he gave it no attention. It was the character of the face, instead, which had powerfully impressed him. He recalled with curious minuteness the details of his first glimpse of it—the commanding light in the gray eyes, the tightened curves of the lip, the mantling red on the high, smooth cheek. Was it a pretty face? No—the question would not propound itself. Prettiness had nothing to do with the matter. The personality which looked through the face—that was what affected him.

The compartment seemed filled in some subtle way with the effect of this personality. He looked out of his window again. A beautiful deep valley lay below him now, with densely wooded hills beyond. The delicate tints of the waning season enriched the tracery of foliage close at hand; still the tall chimneys, mixed with poplars, marked the course of the enslaved river, but the factories themselves were kindly hidden here by dark growths of thicket in the shadowed depths.

It was surpassingly beautiful, but its contemplation left him restless. He moved about on his seat, partially lowered the window, put it up again and at last turned his head.

“I am afraid that all the charming landscape is on this side,” he made bold to say. “I will change places with pleasure, if—if you would be so kind.”

“No, thank you,” was her spontaneous and decisive reply. Upon reflection she added in a more deliberate tone: “I should be obliged if you would take the view that conversation is not necessary.”

Some latent strain of temerity amazed the young man by rising to the surface of his mind, under the provocation of this rebuff, and shaping his purpose for him.

“It is only fair to myself, first, however,” he with surprise heard himself declaring, “that I should finish my explanation. You can satisfy yourself readily at Dieppe that your ticket is for only one seat. It is very, easy to make errors of that kind when one does not—that is to say, is not—well, entirely familiar with the language of the country. As to my own part, you will remember that I came only at the last moment. I took my coupé seat a half hour before, because I also wished to be alone, and then I went out to see Jeanne d’Arc’s tower again, and I was nearly too late. If there had been time, I would have found a seat elsewhere—but you yourself saw—”

“Really, I think no more need be said,” broke in his companion. She looked him frankly, coldly in the face as she spoke, and her words seemed in his ears to have metallic edges. “It is plain enough that there was a mistake. As you have suggested, my French is very faulty indeed, and no doubt the misunderstanding is entirely my own. So, since it is unavoidable, there surely need be no more words about it.”

She opened a book at this, put her feet out to the stool in front and ostentatiously disposed herself for deep abstraction in literature.

The young man in turn got out some pamphlets and papers from the pockets of his great-coat, and pretended to divide his attention between these and the scenery outside. In truth, he did not for a moment get the face of this girl out of his thoughts. More than ever now, since she had looked him fully in the eye, it was not a face to be pictured in the brain as other faces of women had been. The luminous substance of the individuality behind the face shone out at him from the pages he stared at, and from the passing vistas of lowland meadows, streams and mill-towns that met his gaze through the window.

He knew so little of women that his mind was quite devoid of materials for any comparative analysis of the effect she produced upon him. He evolved for himself, indeed, the conviction that really this was the first woman, in the genuine and higher meaning of the word, that he had ever met. The recognition of this brought with it an excitement as novel to him as the fact itself. Before ever he had seen her, clinging to the coupé door with her gloved hands and so bravely doing hopeless and tongue-tied battle with the guard, there had been things which had made this the greatest day of his life. He was in truth finishing the last stage of a journey into the unknown, the strange possibilities of which had for a week kept his nerves on the rack. The curtain of only one more night hung now between him and the revealed lineaments of destiny. To be alone with his perturbed thoughts, on this culminating day of anxious hopes and dreads, had been his controlling idea at Rouen. It was for this that he had bought the coupé seat, upon the rumor of the station that solitude was thus to be commanded. And now how extraordinary was the chance!

There had stepped into this eventful day, as from the clouds, a stranger whose mysterious appeal to his imagination seemed more remarkable than all else combined.

He worked this out, painstakingly, with little sidelong glances from time to time toward where she sat buried in her book, to check the progression of his reasoning. When he reached the conclusion that she was really playing this predominant part in the drama of the day, its suggestion of hysterical folly rather frightened him. He looked with earnestness out of the window, and even be gan to count the chimneys of the landscape as an overture to returning sanity. Then he looked less furtively at her and said to himself with labored plausibility that she was but an ordinary traveling Englishwoman, scarcely to be differentiated from the Cook’s-tourist type that he knew so well; she had not even a governess’ knowledge of French, and there had been nothing in her words and tone with him to indicate either mental distinction or kindliness of temper. Why should he bestow so much as another thought upon her? He squared his slender shoulders, and turned with resolution to his book.

A minute later the impossibility of the situation had mastered every fiber of his brain. He put down the volume, feeling himself to be a fool for doing so, yet suffering himself with an unheard-of gladness.

“If I anger you, I shall be much pained,” he said, with a set face turned not quite toward her, and a voice that he kept from breaking by constant effort, “but I am going to England for the first time, and there are some things that I am very anxious to ask about.”

She seemed to reflect a little before she lifted her head. Now again he was priviledged to look squarely into her face, and he added swiftly to his store a new impression of her. The ruling characteristic of the countenance was a certain calm and serious reasonableness. The forehead was broad and comely; the glance of the eyes was at once alert and steady. The other features were content to support this controlling upper part of the face; they made a graceful and fitting frame for the mind which revealed itself in the eyes and brow—and sought to do no more. Studying her afresh in this moment of her silence, he recalled the face of a young Piedmontese bishop who had come once to his school. It had the same episcopal serenity, the same wistful pride in youth’s conquest of the things immortal, the same suggestion of intellectuality in its clear pallor.

“I should dislike to seem rude,” she said, slowly. “What is it that you want to ask?” What was it indeed? He searched confusedly about in his mind for some one question entitled to precedence among the thousand to which answers would come in good time. He found nothing better than a query as to the connection between New Haven and Brighton.

“In this little book,” he explained, “there is a time for New Haven and for London, but I cannot find a mention of Brighton, yet I am expected there this evening, or perhaps, early to-morrow morning.”

“I am sure I cannot tell you,’” she answered. “However, the places are not far apart. I should say there would certainly be trains.”

She lifted the book again as she spoke, and adjusted her shoulders to the cushions. He made haste to prevent the interview from lapsing.

“I have never seen England,” he urged dolefully, “and yet I am all English in my blood—and in my feelings, too.”

A flicker of ironical perception played for an instant in her eye and at the corner of her lip. “I have heard that a certain class of Americans adopt that pose,” she remarked. “I dare say it is all right.”

He did not grasp her meaning all at once, though the willingness to give umbrage conveyed in her tone was clear enough. He looked doubtfully at her, before he spoke again. “Oh,” he began, with hesitation—“yes, I see—you thought I was American. I am not in the least—I am all English. And it affects me very much—this thought that in a few hours now I am to see the real England. I am so excited about it, in fact,” he added with a deprecatory little laugh, “that I couldn’t bear it not to talk.”

She nodded comprehendingly. “I thought that your accent must be American—since it certainly isn’t English.”

“Oh, I have too facile an ear,” he answered readily, as if the subject were by no means new to him. “I pick up every accent that I hear. I have been much with English people, but even more with Americans and Australians. I always talk like the last family I have been in—until I enter another. I am by profession a private tutor—principally in languages—and so I know my failings in this matter very well.” She smiled at some passing retrospect. “You must have had an especially complete sense of my shortcomings as a linguist, too. I have often wondered what effect my French would produce upon an actual professor, but I should never have had the courage to experiment, if I had known.”

He waved his hand—a pale hand with veined, thin, nervous fingers, which she looked at in its foreign gesture. “Too much importance is attached to languages,” he declared. “It is the cheapest and most trivial of acquirements, if it stands alone, or if it is not put to high uses. Parents have so often angered me over this: they do not care what is in their children’s minds and hearts, but only for the polish and form of what is on their tongues. I have a different feeling about education.”

She nodded again, and laid the book aside. “You are coming to a country where everything will shock you, then,” she said. “I would rather do scullery work, or break stones by the roadside, than be a schoolteacher in England.”

“Oh, it’s the same everywhere,” he urged. “I would not think that the English were worse than the others. They are different, that is all. Besides, I do not think I shall be a teacher in England. Of course, I speak in the dark; for a few hours yet everything is uncertain. But as the old American senator at Monte Carlo used to say, ‘I feel it in my bones’ that I will not have to teach any more.”

The expression of her face seemed somehow not to invite autobiography at the moment. “The prospect of not having to work any more for one’s living,” she mused at him—“how curiously fascinating it always is! We know perfectly well that it is good for us to work, and that we should be woefully unhappy if we did not work, and yet we are forever charming our imagination with a vision of complete idleness.”

“I would not be idle!” the young man broke forth, enthusiastically. He leaned forward in his seat, and spoke with eager hands as well as words against the noise that filled the swaying carriage. “I have that same feeling—the longing to escape from the dull and foolish tasks I have to do—but I never say to myself that I would be idle. There are such a host of things to do in the world that are worth doing! But the men who have the time and the money, who are in the position to do these things—how is it, I ask myself, that they never think of doing them? It is the greatest of marvels to me. Then sometimes I wonder, if the chance and the power came to me, whether I also would sit down, and fold my hands, and do nothing. It is hard to say; who can be sure what is in him till he has been tested? Yet I like to think that I would prove the exception. It is only natural,” he concluded, smilingly, “that one should try to think as well as possible of oneself.”

The young lady surveyed his nervous, mobile face with thoughtful impassivity. “You seem to think, one way or another, a good deal about yourself,” she remarked.

He bowed to her, with a certain exaggeration in his show of quite sincere humility which, she said to herself, had not been learned from his English-speaking connections.

“What you say is very true,” he admitted with candor. “It is my fault—my failing. I know it only too well.”

“My fault is bad manners,” she replied, disarmed by his self-abasement. “I had no business to say it at all.”

“Oh, no,” he urged. “It is delightful to me that you did say it. I could not begin to tell you how good your words sounded in my ears. Honest and wise criticism is what I have not heard before in years. You do not get it in the South; there is flattery for you, and sneering, and praise as much too high as blame is too cruel—but no candid, quiet judgments. Oh, I loved to hear you say that! It was like my brother—my older brother Salvator. He is in America now. He is the only one who always said the truth to me. And I am glad, too, because—because it makes you seem like a friend to me, and I have been so agitated this whole week, so anxious and upset, and all without a soul to talk to, or advise with—and the pressure on me has been so great——”

He let the wandering sentence lose itself in the clamor of the train, and put the rest of his meaning into the glance with which he clung to hers. The appeal for sympathetic kindliness of treatment glowed in his eyes and shone upon his eager face.

She took time for her answer, and when she spoke it was hardly in direct reply. “Your business in England,” she said, as unconcernedly as might be—“it is that, I take it, which causes so much anxiety. Fortunately it is soon to be settled—to-morrow, I think you said.”

“I wish I might tell you about it,” he responded with frank fervency. “I wish it—you cannot imagine how much!”

The look with which she received his words recalled to him her earlier manner. “I’m afraid—” she began, in a measured voice, and then stopped. Intuition helped him to read in her face the coming of a softer mood. Finally she smiled a little. “Really, this is all very quaint,” she said, and the smile crept into her voice. “But the train is slowing down—there is no time now.”

They were indeed moving through the street of a town, at a pace which had been insensibly lowered while they talked. The irregular outlines of docks and boat-slips, overhanging greenish water, revealed themselves between dingy houses covered with signs and posters. At the barriers crossing the streets were clustered groups of philosophic observers, headed by the inevitable young soldier with his hands in the pockets of his red trousers, and flanked by those brown old women in white caps who seem always to be unoccupied, yet mysteriously do everything that is done.

“This is Dieppe, then?” he asked, with a collecting hand put out for his wraps.

The train had halted, and doors were being opened for tickets.

“We sit still, here, and go on to the wharf,” she explained.

“And then to the boat!” he cried. “How long is it?—the voyage on the boat, I mean. Three hours and over! Excellent!”

She laughed outright as she rose, and got together her books and papers.

“I thought you were a Frenchman when I first saw you,” she confided to him over her shoulder. “But no Frenchman at Dieppe ever yet shouted ‘Excellent!’ with his face turned toward the New Haven steamers.”

The mirth in her tone was so welcome to him that he laughed in turn, without any clear idea of her words. He gathered her handbag up along with his own, and when she demurred he offered her gay defiance.

“It is the terrible boldness of a timid person,” he prattled, as he helped her down the steps, “but you must perceive that in the face of it you are quite helpless. Since I was born, I have never really had my own way before. But now I begin to believe in my star. After all, one is not an Englishman for nothing.”

“Oh, it is comparatively easy to be an Englishman in Dieppe,” she made answer.