Читать книгу The Lacquer Lady - Fryniwyd Tennyson Jesse - Страница 8

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NOTHING, thought Fanny, on board the S. S. Bengal, is like what you expect it to be. The weather had been rough till Sicily was passed and Fanny had felt and looked like a sick monkey. Since then she had emerged in the sunshine, and was an attractive young woman, but in spite of her draped and fluted skirts, her hair caught up on the crown of her head save for the two sausage ringlets tied by a bow at the nape of her neck, and her grown-up airs, people would insist on treating her as a schoolgirl. That was partly Agatha’s fault, of course, Agatha who was so absurdly raw in spite of being in reality two years older. It had been a disappointment to hear that Agatha was to come too. She had been useful enough at school, but somehow the fact that she also was going to Mandalay to join her missionary father, who had been transferred there from Southern India, seemed to take the edge off Fanny’s uniqueness—though of course it was a very different thing going out to a mere mission school, from going out to join your father when he was a great Court favourite and you yourself were bound to be summoned to Court. Still, there it was—undoubtedly the presence of Agatha, still full of interest in the dead-and-gone school-life and friends left behind, did drag into the exciting present much of the old Brighton atmosphere that had no longer any interest for Fanny. On the whole, how she’d hated it all ... !

The female missionary—no officer’s wife, alas!—who was chaperoning the two girls, was not liked even by the amiable Agatha, and was actively hated by Fanny. Mrs. Murgatroyd ... a harsh name and an ugly woman with a long pale nose, the end of which twitched all by itself, like the nose of a rabbit, when she was agitated. She said dreadful things, things that made you go hard and fierce and want to kill her. Don’t try and show off, Fanny. You must remember that you’re only an ignorant little girl. Let me see, Fanny, didn’t I hear of a certain little girl who pretended that something she’d got at a Brighton shop had come from the Queen of Ava.... And that she didn’t even pay for it? ... I think that girl should watch herself very carefully and pray for grace to withstand the terrible tendency to dishonesty she has inherited.... If you were only blessed enough to be completely English how much less you would have of this untruthfulness and spirit of boasting! Of course it’s not your fault, Fanny, and Heaven forbid you should be blamed for what is not your fault, that you have this temptation to tamper with the truth; Providence has seen fit to make you very largely a foreigner and we all know what foreigners are, but it should make you very, very careful....

The only consolation was that there were several gentlemen on board who took Fanny seriously as a young lady. There were the third officer and the stout Rangoon merchant at whom some of the other passengers sneered for being “eight annas in the rupee,” but who knew how to amuse Fanny, and there were a couple of young men going to Ceylon as tea-planters. They had all vied with each other in explaining to her all about the new Suez Canal as the Bengal passed through it. Mrs. Murgatroyd could say what she liked, but these people did not think of Fanny as a little schoolgirl. They thought her very beautiful and clever, and Fanny’s heart swelled happily. Agatha disapproved, but then poor Agatha, though she was quite pretty when her nose didn’t get pink, wasn’t that sort of girl.

Fanny, coming into the cabin she shared with Agatha late at night, her ivory cheeks flushed, her eyes glowing, Fanny tingling with life, with the lovely sense of power and skill that meant life ... made Agatha feel envious, yet censorious. She looks quite pretty although her nose is so flat, admitted Agatha, but she’s not good, not really, I’m sure. Looks don’t matter, it’s the heart that matters, but it doesn’t seem right she should look so lovely ... she isn’t really, not if you pull her to pieces, her face is too round and flat as well as her nose, and of course she does look foreign.... And the waves of femininity that came out of Fanny seemed to pass over Agatha’s shrinking flesh, and she felt her mouth going tight and hard. It was disgusting to be as Fanny was, so that she made you think, do what you would, of all the things that weren’t nice. Agatha shook with anger at the sense of sex that filled the little cabin on Fanny’s entry.

“You’ve no business to be so late,” she said sharply, “you know Mrs. Murgatroyd doesn’t like it.”

Fanny hummed a little tune and broke off to say she didn’t care what Mrs. Murgatroyd liked. Old cat! Fanny couldn’t think how anyone had ever married her.

“It isn’t right, Fanny, it isn’t really. Fanny, what do you do all this time on deck?”

“Oh, I talk; and they talk. To-night Mr. Jacobs showed me the Southern Cross.”

“Well, he ought to show it you by daylight.”

Fanny’s laugh rang out.

“Silly Agatha! It’s stars. You couldn’t see it by day.”

“Well, you know what I mean. And Mr. Jacobs too ... he’s so fat.”

Fanny widened innocent eyes at her.

“What has that got to do with me?”

“Then you don’t ... he doesn’t ...” Agatha stammered.

“Oh, Agatha, what a goose you are! I suppose you mean do I let him kiss me?”

Agatha blushed a slow painful blush that burned over her fair skin. It sounded awful said right out like that. Fanny thought for a second. Agatha would despise her if she knew that Mr. Jacobs had kissed her, and she didn’t like Agatha to despise her, she liked her to envy her. Impossible to explain to Agatha that there was something about the expert kisses of fat Jacobs that was more pleasing than the kisses of the young and handsome third officer.... Stout and middle-aged as Mr. Jacobs was, he had a message for Fanny’s flesh that the younger man had not. Fanny, at the very threshold of experimenting, found everything of interest, but it was no good trying to explain things to herself, let alone Agatha.

So—“Of course not, Agatha,” she said indignantly.

Agatha stared at her, feeling a curious excitement.

“Fanny,” she said, “Fanny ... you ... you don’t flirt, do you, Fanny?”

Fanny nodded, dimpling.

“Oh, Fanny ... how dreadful ...”

They stared at each other in solemn excitement.

Yes, yes, thought Fanny, I’m going to have lots and lots of men in love with me. I’m always going to get everything I want. And she felt a lovely warmth that was tingling throughout her frame, she was aware of her flushed cheeks and her shining eyes, she was the most living thing in the whole world, she was Fanny.... And Agatha, the first shock of Fanny’s avowal over, also felt a stirring of new interest, as though she were recognising something different about life for the first time. Was it possible that flirting—even that “it” itself provided, of course, you were married, mightn’t be so very wicked and disgusting after all ... ? Of course we all had to come into the world somehow, or there wouldn’t be any souls to save. It was all very confusing. Agatha was only vaguely aware of “something,” the big, looming “something,” that was never acknowledged by nice girls, but that was there all the time, in the background, waiting.... Of course if he were a good man that might make it all right, you had children and brought them up to be good Anglo-Catholics....

Fanny broke the spell by beginning to let down the masses of her shining black hair. Agatha saw its silken folds slip like water over Fanny’s slight shoulders and pour down below her waist, with a contraction of the heart. But—

“Oh, Fanny, your hair!” she ejaculated generously.

She never could help it. Fanny’s hair was magical. Fanny did not tell her that peasant women all over Burma might be seen by any wayside well with tresses as amazing. Perhaps Fanny had forgotten it in the wonder that her hair was to Brighton.

But the next night, when Fanny slipped into the cabin with her hair already about her shoulders, the old anger welled up in Agatha. Fanny was disgusting, horrible. No nice girl would have.... Agatha knew quite surely that a man’s fingers had been playing with those soft silken strands, that must be so deep, so different from her own thin locks, to plunge into.... She found herself trembling, speaking icily, contemptuously. Fanny, ever wishful to avoid blame, tried to justify herself. The pins had slipped out, her hair was so heavy, it hadn’t happened on purpose, and then it wasn’t worth while putting it up again.

“You’re lying,” said Agatha furiously.

“Oh, well then,” said Fanny, “what does it matter? You make such a silly fuss, Agatha. And anyway, you needn’t pretend you’re always so pi. What about the drawing you have in your Prayer Book?”

“Fanny! What do you mean? Why ...” Agatha began to stammer in her indignation as she remembered that her Prayer Book was always kept locked away in her glove-box with the Crystal Palace on the lid. Fanny must have deliberately stolen the key from the handkerchief sachet where it was kept and made an examination.

“It’s easy to see you’re not English!” cried Agatha. “You’ve been prying in my things. What a dishonourable thing to do.”

Fanny shrugged her shoulders.

“You shouldn’t always pretend to be so good,” was all she remarked.

Agatha rummaged in her handkerchief sachet with trembling fingers, found the key and unlocked the glove-box. There, under the gloves, lay the Prayer Book with the brass clasps; she seized it and opened it. The precious drawing was still there. It was a pencil drawing made by Agatha’s own not too skilful fingers, and represented a young man in a clerical collar, over which drooped a long fair moustache. Beneath was written—“My Confessor.”

Fanny, proceeding with her undressing, laughed a little maliciously.

“Did you think I had taken it? I don’t want your young man, Agatha! I can’t bear clergymen.”

“It’s not anyone,” said Agatha indignantly. “It’s not my young man, how can you be so vulgar? It’s just a drawing I made of someone I imagined.”

Fanny, who knew that Agatha always spoke the truth, thought this still sillier. Not even a real clergyman!

“Don’t you see,” went on Agatha, “if it were real he wouldn’t have a moustache? Priests shouldn’t have moustaches. I only drew him with one because I’ve always thought of Sir Galahad with one.”

“Who’s Sir Galahad? I didn’t know you knew any titled people, Agatha?”

“Oh, you don’t know anything!” said Agatha impatiently, “it’s no good being cross with you.”

She tore the pencil drawing across and across and, going to the porthole, dropped the fragments out into the darkness. Fanny, who disliked unpleasantness, cuddled up to her.

“I’m sorry I looked in your Prayer Book if you didn’t want me to,” she said, skilfully gliding over such matters as abstracting the key from the sachet and unlocking the glove-box. “I was hurt at your keeping it a secret from me. I thought it was a real young man, you see. And I have no secrets from you, Agatha ...”

Agatha, wishing to believe this, felt her face first melt and then re-set into its mentor look.

“You’re such a child, Fanny,” she murmured, feeling that to treat Fanny’s triumphs as the harmless escapades of a child was the best way to get out of having to envy her as a woman. “You’re so dreadfully thoughtless and unwise.”

“Oh, am I? Everyone doesn’t think so, I assure you. Gentlemen don’t think so.”

“Don’t be so silly and conceited. None of the gentlemen worth anything talk to you, only a vulgar merchant like Mr. Jacobs and those silly boys. You couldn’t get anyone like Mr. Danvers to talk to you if you tried.”

A dreadful pang shot through Fanny as she thought of the grave, clever, important Mr. Danvers and realised the truth of what Agatha said. From a sense of power she fell swiftly upon a knowledge of utter futility, of an inescapable cheapness. Her lips quivered. Her eyes brimmed with tears. Aloud she said:

“Oh, he’s dreadfully dull, Mr. Danvers. I should not bother to talk with him!”

And to herself she vowed that Mr. Danvers should be seen talking to her as soon as she could manage it. Mr. Jacobs, whose thick hands had trembled so in her loosened hair, the young planters, the handsome third officer with his uniform, ceased to interest her, they were nothing, she felt. Mr. Danvers was in the Indian Civil Service and an important man. Agatha should see ... but in her heart she felt that Mr. Danvers would not care twopence about her, and she hated Agatha for having made her face such a disagreeable truth.