Читать книгу Twos and Threes - G. B. Stern - Страница 5

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The same evening, two girls were huddled in a doorway of His Majesty’s Theatre. They had drifted with the crowd down the stone steps leading from the Upper Circle, their brains struggling to return to reality from the world-that-is-not. Then a voice pierced bewilderment with the exclamation: “Why, it’s raining!” and they emerged on to an unfamiliar back street, pavements dark mirrors of glistening wet, something sinister about the hovering gnome-like figures who sprang alive at their elbows, offering in hoarse voices to fetch a vehicle. And then umbrellas began to slide up before their owners had even quitted the shelter of the outjutting porch; umbrellas with nasty vindictive spikes. Other people rolled away in landaulettes and taxi-cabs. It was essentially one of those occasions which cry out for the luxury of male protection; for the authoritative voice to say: “stay where you are for the moment, while I look for the car.” Then the beckoning summons, the dash to the kerbstone, an address given, a door slammed, the swift easy glide up the street: “Now we’re all right,” remarks the protective male, as he adjusts rug and window; “beastly night....”

Which is why Peter remarked suddenly, as they waited for one of the shadow-shapes to be faithful to the trust reposed in him: “We shall have to admit a man, Merle, because of the taxis. It’s all right to be a shivering outcast when you get home and think about it. It’s the present part of the business I object to. What on earth possessed your grandmother to want the use of her own carriage to-night?”

“It’s the birthday of an Ambassador,” Merle explained apologetically; “and she so hates going in four-wheelers.”

The crowd was thinning. Presently they would be the only two remaining in the doorway.

“It will be awful to be quite the last of all,” the elder girl went on apprehensively. “They won’t let us sleep in the theatre, I’m sure; not after the opera-glasses have been put away. And the backs of theatres aren’t in London at all; they’re in a horrible phantom neighbourhood of their own.”

—“’Ere y’are, lidies!” Their wheeled deliverance was at hand.

Peter was spending the night with Merle. She always appreciated the moment, when, softly closing behind them the door of the house in Lancaster Gate, she attended to the bolts and locks, while Merle pierced the rich blackness with the rays of a small electric lantern, which was to guide them burglariously up the thickly carpeted stairs. It was good, remembering their shivering moments in No-Man’s-Land, now to sprawl in luxury across the brocaded bed-cover, and watch Merle submit to the ministrations of the elderly French bonne, who maided Mademoiselle, and also had a great deal to say as to what was comme il faut for the latter’s general deportment.

“Bonsoir, Nicole. Et merci bien.”

“’Soir, Mesdemoiselles. And do not stay too long chattering; it is not good for the complexion.” Nicole retired.

“Good Heavens!” ejaculated Peter; “that I should live to own a friend who owns a maid. A maid and a dressing-gown. Can’t you do something about it? You know, it’s quite easy to pull off your own stockings, once you’ve learnt how.”

“Have you brought a comb this time?” Merle enquired with dangerous politeness.

“No, I haven’t. ’Cos why? ’Cos mine has only seven teeth left in its head, and I daren’t expose its nakedness to the eye of Nicole, since she will lay out the contents of my suit-case on the bed, as they do for the Lady Alice in novelette society house-parties.”

She brushed fiercely at her tangle of curling fair hair, that was not long enough for the need of hairpins, nor short enough to lie smooth to her head.

“About the comb,” she continued; “I always say: ‘don’t tell me they’ve forgotten to put it in again! That comes of letting Amy pack for me’—or Bertha or Marion or Pussy, or any other imaginary small sister I haven’t got. It quite deceives Nicole; she sympathises, lends me your second-best, and I daresay wonders at the multiplicity of my mother’s offspring.”

Merle laughed, and turning out the electric lights cunningly fitted into the three-tiered gilt candelabra, switched on instead the tiny red lamp which stood beside her Second Empire bedstead.

“Voilà! The appropriate lighting for the traditional girlish-chatter-while-they-brush-their-hair. Are you serious in proposing to admit a man to our duet?”

“Quite, if we can find one to suit. I want to try a trio; it might be interesting.”

“It might be dangerous,” Merle supplemented. She sat on the edge of the bed, hands clasped about her knees, the tapestried canopy casting a deep shadow on her delicately-cut features, flawless as a profile on a cameo, colourless as ivory. Something of the French château yet lurked in her quaintly courteous manners; something of the French convent in the soft voice, in the heavy eyelids swift to drop as an overweary flower. The des Essarts were of pure Gallic stock, though their devotion to the Royalist cause had half a century before caused them to seek a permanent dwelling in England. But Peter declared that Merle still carried about with her a permanent aura of white lilies in a cloister garden; that she should by rights always be clad in an Empire satin frock, high under the arms; and that if she followed her natural instincts, she would never enter or quit a room without a deep reverence.

She was certainly “of a loveliness,” as Nicole was wont to declare, morning and evening, like a Benediction.

“It might be dangerous,” Merle repeated thoughtfully.

“You mean, if one of us fell in love with him?”

“Or both.”

“‘The Man Who Came Between Them,’ or ‘The Eternal Triangle,’ 419th time of representation!” Peter flung round to face her companion, hands dramatically clutching at the toilet-table behind her.

“So, after all we’ve been to each other,” she declaimed, a long pause between each spitten word, “to let a man rupture our friendship!”

Merle took her cue instantly. She was accustomed to playing her part in whatever impromptu scene their conversation might evoke.

“We were fools,” bitter mockery curling her pretty lips; “if we hadn’t known beforehand—but we knew—we courted the danger. And it has worked itself out in the old old way.”

Peter crossed to the window, her back to the room, one hand holding back the velvet hangings, as she brooded out into the black dripping night.

“A man and two girls. What else could we expect? We’re only human beings, tho’ we did occasionally rise to immortality on the wings of swank.”

With an effort Merle retained her gravity: “Can’t we throw him out even now?” she pleaded.

But without turning, the other shook her head. “There would be a difference. Something smashed. It never looks the same after mending. And besides ... we’d miss the excitement.... Ner-no, Merle! once one admits the question of sex——”

“It’s ... rather a pity, though. Do you remember——” Merle broke off. In her voice lingered wistful regrets for the one-time careless happiness they themselves had set out to destroy. “I can’t make out,” she questioned, groping hopelessly, “when it all started, where, why. How we could have allowed it to go so far. If we hadn’t both clung to the pretence that nothing was wrong, we might have stopped it.”

And the harsh reply, so unlike Peter’s usual buoyant tones:

“Stopped his love of you, or my love for him,—which?”

Merle permitted herself an aside: “Oh, it’s to be that way, is it?”

“I think so,” and Peter also slipped for a moment out of the circle of limelight. “You, being the Beautiful One, are sure to come in an easy first. And I’d rather play the Unwanted Woman; it affords more scope for my histrionic abilities,” in proof of which, she continued her rôle in such a natural manner that Merle was not sure or not if the tragedy had been indeed resumed.

“I’m going. There’s no sense in dragging this on indefinitely. I shall want to come back and talk about it when I get to the foot of the stairs. It’ll be funny ...” a half-laugh here that might have been a sob, “funny to think of never coming back. We’ve rehearsed this sort of good-bye so often in jest—haven’t we?”

At which Merle flung herself back among the pillows, both hands pressed tightly to her forehead.

“Pax, Peter! pax! I give it up. You’ve twisted up a rehearsal inside a rehearsal, and I don’t know any more if I’m real. Peter, I give it up.”

Peter laughed; and returning from her bowed passage to the door, leapt on to the foot of the bed, drawing up both her legs beneath her, Turkish fashion.

“Now we can’t really quarrel, man or no man. This scene will act as a lightning-conductor, catch it on its way and render it harmless. Besides, anyhow we could never quarrel, because of your grandmother, not to mention my aunt; you know we would hear nothing but: ‘You never ask that charming Peter Kyndersley to tea, chérie, and you were once so fond of her’; and ‘There was a time when Merle des Essarts couldn’t be here enough’ (sniff), ‘I suppose you’ve had a tiff with her!’ A simply unbearable situation; in sheer self-defence we should have to combine forces again.”

Peter looked about her for a cigarette; then, remembering where she was, abandoned the search, and gave her whole attention to the subject in hand:

“To return to the man——”

“Is he to bring any qualifications besides a magnetic attraction for taxis?”

“Waiters,” promptly. “Knowledge of the exact shade of tone in which to address a waiter; neither jocose, nor frigid, nor yet deprecating.”

“Then suppose you station yourself near the buffet at our dance; and listen carefully to the demands for claret-cup.”

“Your dance!” snatching at the words; “Merle, you’ve hit on the exact setting for the introduction of our Extra Element of Excitement. When is it?”

“Next month. The invitations went out this morning.”

“And who’s coming? Men, I mean.”

“A hundred and twenty-two in all,” Merle murmured; “do you want their names? I’m sleepy.”

“Don’t be sleepy, then, while I’m playing at the Fates, and Destiny, and the Will of Heaven, all in one.” She reached out to the escritoire, and grabbed pencil and paper. “I’m going to make a catalogue; fire away! You know these hundred and odd males; I don’t. Fling me the most likely ones, and I’ll run them through an informal examination. Such as: ‘will you play Pirates nicely?’ ‘do you mind damp socks?’ ‘can you talk nonsense earnestly, and of earnest matters nonsensically?’ Above all, ‘do you feel equal to the manipulation of a trio?’”

“I shall enjoy watching from afar the face of your partner, while you treat him to all that. Put down Justin Carruthers, for a start.”

Peter scribbled the name: “Special distinguishing marks?”

“Black waistcoat where other people elect to wear white, and a tendency to serious intentions. Logan Thane owns a country-seat with grapes and antlers, and will, if properly trained, stand up by a mantelpiece and slash with his riding-whip. Bertie Milligan, youthful and intense, now in the clutches of a designing female; the Oxford voice—and can use it to imitate ducklings. Grey Rubinstein, fat, and the son of a judge—but with possibilities of humour. Armand Drelincourt has just bought another motor-car. Always. And will tell you about his fatal temperament. Roy Clarke, a due sense of his own importance, and could be brought to develop a sense of ours; one-steps like seven devils. Mark St. Quentin——” Merle broke off the catalogue with a laugh; “you know Mark; he was the means of bringing us together; I don’t think we’ll place another responsibility upon his soul. José di Gasparis vibrates like a cinema when he dances; and the blacking of his shoes will come off on your satin ones. Won’t that do? I can’t think of any more.”

Peter had been scribbling furiously. She glanced with critical eye down the list.

“I’ll bring this with me on the 18th, though I can’t say the material is promising. I like Logan Thane best.” She mused awhile over the names. “Yes, Merle, I think it will be Logan Thane.”

But Merle’s straight black lashes already shadowed her cheeks. She was, if anything, lovelier asleep than awake. Peter glanced at her with a certain whimsical tenderness—then crept in beside her, and switched off the crimson light.

“We do need the taxi-man,” was her last coherent thought; “she more than I. She’s more feminine. Or at least, she’s somehow allowed to show more feminine.”

Pepita Kyndersley lived with an aunt at Thatch Lane, some half an hour’s distance by rail from London. Her mother was dead. Her father, responsible for her name, a tenor ballad-singer; sometimes in evening-dress, at a private entertainment; oftener in a red hunting-coat with gilt buttons, at a pier concert. At all times, a disreputable but attractive personage, never to be mentioned by Peter’s aunt; treated by Peter herself, when she chanced to meet him twice or thrice in the year, with good-humoured and tolerant amusement, as from one man to another. Nor would she have found objection in attaching herself permanently to the “Idol of all the Capitals of Europe,” as the leaflets were wont to declare him after a tour of the watering-places between Margate and Beachy Head; such an erratic existence was not without its charms; but the Idol shook his head at her suggestion:

“I would not have the bloom brushed from your girlhood, my Pepita,” tenderly.

Peter laughed: “The ladies who find your voice so full of tears and your hair so full of wave, would lose some of their enthusiasm if they saw you forever accompanied by a grown-up daughter. Is that it?”

Bertram Kyndersley deprecated; met the said daughter’s eye—and slowly winked his own; an inexcusable loss of moral equilibrium, atoned for by the rich sobriety of his next remark:

“You are a great comfort to me, my little girl. Your poor mother said you would be a comfort to me,” for by this manner of speech did he seek reminder of his surprising parenthood, a factor he was otherwise liable to forget, but to which he fondly clung for the sake of its unanswerable link with respectability. Then he borrowed her quarterly dress allowance, and went with it a-wooing.

So Peter dwelt with her mother’s elder sister at Thatch Lane. That is to say, they had bedrooms in the same house, and took their meals together. But Miss Esther Worthing’s universe consisted of herself, wearing a high linen collar and carrying an umbrella; surrounded by houses containing each a county family—particular county a matter of indifference; surrounded in turn by churches—orthodox, of course; English public schools, mostly Eton; the whole encircled by a high wall, beyond which dwelt foreigners, Jews, artists, and suchlike. Peter being distinctly suchlike, knew herself well beyond the wall, and was quite content to abide there. Occasionally she made concessions to her aunt by allowing herself to be exploited in county circles; county in this case consisting of Thatch Lane. She had exhausted the resources of Thatch Lane practically at the outset; wrung from the place and people all they contained of stimulation; zigzagged like a streak of lightning through the lives of the young men of the neighbourhood, finished them off before they were well aware of being started; remaining still avid for something that could wear out her marvellous brain and superb body; tear from her that bright defiant liberty she claimed as her chief right; someone who could tire her ... tire her? at times she felt more weariness for lack of battle than defeat could ever have brought in its train.

Particular occupation she had none; but took her days unlinked, in something of the true vagabond spirit, each one for what it would bring her. Days that began with dawn and ended with darkness, and naught of connection between darkness and dawn. Neither did she own a knit coterie of friends; but had picked up a random assortment, and darted in and out of their separate spheres of life, as the need or the careless fancy took her. So that there was a certain lack of rhythmic swing, of cohesion, in her twenty-three years, till she met Merle des Essarts.

They flashed together at a charity subscription dance in the Assembly Hall at Thatch Lane. Merle had been motored thither by some acquaintances, forced into an extensive purchase of tickets. Peter was on the committee; and had donned for the evening an appropriate voice and expression. For she took pride in her powers of outward adjustment to whatever part she was called upon to play, while able to regard her motley the while with amused and appreciative detachment.

They happened with their respective partners at the same supper-table.

Merle’s partner cut his thumb.

“I wonder if I ought to bind it up.”

“I shouldn’t like blood-poisoning to set in.”

“It’s not worth making a fuss. I hate making a fuss.”

“I’m not saying much about it, but as a matter of fact, I’m in considerable pain.”

“Look, Miss des Essarts!”

Merle did not want to look, but the thumb of Mark St. Quentin was thrust upon her.

“It is bad, isn’t it?” courteously.

Presently she was invited to look again; and again she took an intelligent interest. It was just sufficiently bad to spoil her entrée.

“I’m not saying much about it——”

“Let me tie it up for you,” quoth Peter suddenly, noting the other girl’s lack of appetite.

Peter produced a dainty square of lawn and lace. Peter bent her boyish halo of hair in deep absorption over the injured member. And both her own partner and the victim supplied all the obvious patter about the “healing touch,” and “it was worth while to have suffered,” and “some people have all the luck,” and (of course) “will you let me keep the handkerchief?”—unutterable meanings in the request.

“‘When pain and anguish wring the brow,’” Merle murmured to her plate, as a very flushed ministering angel raised her head from the act of mercy.

Peter tossed her a look of indignation, and afterwards waylaid her in the corridor:

“See here,” hotly, “I don’t know who you are, but I made an ass of myself so that you should enjoy your sweetbreads, and then you rag me about it!”

“I’m sorry,” Merle replied, very penitent. “And I am grateful to you, really. But you didn’t see his ecstatic expression while you bound up the wound. Please forgive me—and let me replace the handkerchief.”

Peter liked this girl with the curious foreign lilt in her accent, and the demure sense of humour. And when a few days later a half-dozen of finely embroidered handkerchiefs arrived, together with a formal invitation to take tea with the sender, she went with a foreknowledge of having at last discovered someone who could speak her peculiarly twisted language.

She found a French bonbon in an exquisite bonbonnière; she found a jewel in its pink-lined casket; she found a dainty little lady, guarded and cherished as is only a “jeune fille” of French extraction; exquisitely dressed; very much in the picture, whether in the Louis-Seize drawing-room, or the Empire boudoir, or on the front seat of her grandmother’s roomy and old-fashioned barouche. And buried deep beneath these ornamentations, she found more of herself than she ever thought to encounter in a fellow-being. So much of herself, that it was almost a shock to vanity.

They did not become Best Friends in the sense of choosing each other’s hats, and walking with interlaced arms. They walked instead with interlaced lives. And from a series of vivid and incongruous patches, Peter now saw it possible to weave the pattern of her existence and Merle’s, so that the minutes were linked to the hours, and the seasons pursued one another the round of the calendar, and every haphazard personage was given a meaning, and every group of persons. And they planned undertakings and carried them through always; and robbed fiction of adventure, to place that wild-haired lass in the setting of things-that-happen. Journeys did they plot, preceded by an elaborate structure of deception for the benefit of Miss Esther Worthing, and an entirely different édition de luxe to satisfy Madame des Essarts; thus necessitating great play for the exercise of their ingenuity. If one mood led them to revel in utterly childish delights, such as raising the golden-syrup spoon high above the plate, so as to let the shining liquid drop in coils and patterns upon the bread, a swift change of circumstances showed the twain in ultra-luxurious furs and ultra-spotless white kid gloves, setting forth solemnly, and with the moral support of a card-case, to “pay calls.” They arranged imaginary “parties,” one for the other; of which Merle’s favourite showed stately Madame des Essarts playing a prominent part with Bertram Kyndersley of the Melting Eye; though Peter inclined more to a fanciful alliance she had promoted between the Sphinx and the Albert Memorial—with dire results to the white flower of a blameless statue’s life.

Merle caught Peter’s infectious trick of light brilliant patter-talk, so that the likeness between the twain was marvellous to those who could not pierce beneath exterior resemblances. It was Peter who invariably started the vein of nonsense, Merle who capped it at the finish. Merle did not breathe the atmosphere as a matter of course; she had too long been nourished in hot-house solemnity, and her witticisms tumbled out with a surprised little lift in the voice, as if in astonishment at their escape from bondage. Nor could she ever learn sublime disregard of the feelings and conveniences of others, but would linger to propitiate the breathless fragments scattered by the swift onrush of Peter’s imperial passage; continued, in spite of her friend’s laughing remonstrances, to pay reverential homage to white hairs, and display a certain polite hauteur where persons of inferior station were in question. One jested, yes,—mais pas avec les autres! “You deserve to die on the guillotine,” quoth Peter.

But she gave in, notwithstanding her leadership, before the chill of Merle’s little reserves. For—and here lay the sting of the matter—instinct would not lead her exactly to where these reserves lay hidden; she would stumble on them unawares, without the remotest notion for what reason just that particular mention or sally or point of view, should call forth in the other a mood resembling cold water, finely sprayed. Merle herself, thus argued Peter, could on occasions be as daringly demurely blasphemous, so why....

But Peter knew well enough that the careless years she had spent knocking about with her parents and their shoddy coarse-grained good-natured associates, had done their destroying work. It is always absurd to suppose, in the popular fashion, that whatever a girl’s surroundings, her outlook can remain pure and flower-like and uncontaminated. Certain words had to be checked on her tongue; the itch for a cigarette was ever in her fingers; she was familiar with what she termed the “man-look,” and recognized too soon the dawning of intentions that needed to be checked. Other traces there were: a cool disregard as to the state of undress in which circumstances might chance to discover her straight young limbs; meanings of the under-world that attached themselves to perfectly innocent phrases. Not a very profound under-world; just below the glazed surface. And experiences had been hers, squalid enough to give pleasure in the recollection, when balancing a fragile teacup at some opulent afternoon reception.

These after-effects could hardly be considered serious; merely annoying to have perceptions so far blunted as to give no warning on the rare occasions when Merle’s greater fineness was in danger. “I would not have the bloom brushed from your girlhood, my Pepita!”—it amounted to that, after all.