Читать книгу Daughters of Men - Hannah Lynch - Страница 5

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Given a young man of average resolution in force against an acknowledged and violently self-disapproved inclination, seated in a pleasant morning-room, with clear broad rays of December sunshine, as it knows how to shine in winter in Greece, pouring in through the lattice-work of the windows, every leaf in the garden singing and proclaiming that out-of-doors there is gladness of sight as well as gladness of sound, to soothe the mind of restless and melancholy youth. It will go hard with that young man to resist the temptation to get up, shake out the draggled plumes of thought, and canter away into the country—or why own an uncle who has a horse or two to be had for the asking? One cannot lock oneself away in a dismal chamber merely as a correction against one’s own irregular impulses. Besides, was not his resolution there to act as constable, and move them on if unruly subjects showed any tendency to loiter on the way? So Rudolph made himself look very spruce in a dark green riding coat he had bought in Vienna, and much more suited to the forest depths of Rapolden Kirchen than the high-road of a modern town, put on a pair of brown gauntlet gloves, also scenting too suspiciously of the forest, with long black boots, and he only wanted a forester’s plumed hat to complete the picture. But he looked exceedingly handsome, and as, abroad, all eccentricities of costume are credited to the English, he was taken as a fair young milord as he cantered briskly along the Partissia Road. Somebody met him and remarked afterwards to the Baron von Hohenfels that “he had had the pleasure of seeing his nephew on horseback got up like Gessler without the hat.”

On the youth rode, quite pleased with his green coat and his fine boots, flicking away an occasional fly from the ear of his bay with a dainty riding whip, and inhaling delightedly the soft odours of the winter landscape. He would have liked to whistle or sing.

“Decidedly, Athens is a charming place,” he thought to himself. “All my life till now I have been frozen at this time of the year, and here the sun is shining, the birds are singing, the sea is smiling out there its very bluest smile, and it would be impossible to paint the lovely colours of the landscape. Hills everywhere, with a long silver plain—the plain of Attica! I wonder where this road leads to? Somewhere out into the country, but it does not matter. I’ll ride to the end of it, and then I’ll ride back.”

It was an enchanting ride. He saw a little beer garden, and stopped to see if the beer of Athens were as refreshing as its air. Well, no; he thought on the whole that he had tasted better beer in Vienna, but the place was quaint, and, who knows? perhaps a centre of classic memories. He would look into Baedeker on his return. Certainly the waiters left much to be desired in manner, in attendance, and in personal appearance. Then he thought of riding back, paid his score, leaving what would have been considered a satisfactory tip for any one but a proverbially prodigal milord,—that article, with a proper respect for itself, not being thought guilty of a knowledge of coppers,—mounted his horse, and turned its head towards Athens.

His pace this time was not so brisk, nor did his face or the atmosphere seem quite so happy. A vague consciousness of what was awaiting him was slowly beginning to make itself felt through the recent satisfaction of moral superiority, and that consciousness weighted his horse’s step, as it weighted his own boy’s heart. And yet it was fate that was guiding him, and not his own will. Of course not. When does the will ever guide the unwilling, and where would any of us be in moments of complicated decision, if it were not for that convenient scapegoat and disentangler—Fate?

The museums afforded an excuse for putting off the evil moment, and a lad was found to hold the bay while Rudolph went inside to examine the curiosities. He did all that was to be done; stood gravely before Greek vase after Greek vase, each one the exact counterpart of the other, and while running the silver handle of his riding-whip along his lips, told himself that it was really curious that so many intelligent people should be found ready to go into ecstasies over this sort of thing, and prefer to look at a cracked red vase with mad figures on it, to a living pretty face, or a pine-fringed mountain, or the rain-clouds scattered across the blue heavens. And then he gazed at the coins; gazed at broken statues, and at whatever wearied and polite attendants were willing to show him.

“Well, I am not archæological, that is certain,” he thought, mounting his bay with an open alacrity that might be described as a silent “Hurrah!” and flew—not to the Austrian Embassy, but to Academy Street.

When he asked Polyxena in his blandest tones if her mistress was visible, that gracious minister unto art nodded, and pointed with her thumb over her shoulder:

“Go up there, you will find her about.”

“The Natzelhuber has picked up a perfect counterpart of herself,” Agiropoulos had remarked, which struck Rudolph as unpleasantly accurate.

When Rudolph, after a timid knock, opened the door, he found the pianiste lying on a worn black sofa, smoking a cigarette and reading a French novel, with three cats about her, one comfortably seated at her head, and one across her feet. On the hearthrug there were two dogs feigning to be asleep, in order the more conveniently to pry into the affairs of man, and ridicule together the secrets they had discerned between two blinks and a snap at a fly. The room was poorly furnished and disorderly. A piano which had seen battle and better days, a faded carpet; music on the floor, music on tables, music on chairs. Over the mantelpiece a large portrait of Liszt, under it Rubinstein, above Beethoven, and on either side Chopin and George Sand.

In this little group of portraits consisted the sole decoration of the bare white walls, and a table in a corner held all that its owner had amassed of precious things in her public career: her medals gained at the Conservatoire, the few gifts of gold-studded objects she had condescended in her most amenable moods to accept from grand dukes and duchesses, and other courtly and wealthy admirers. She looked at Ehrenstein without getting up, and said:

“What do you want?”

“Nothing,” he retorted, sitting down uninvited, and staring at her a moment in cold inquiry.

She was not handsome, nay, she was ugly, and he was glad of it, being still of the innocent belief that the face is the clear index of the soul, and that a fair exterior cannot possibly cover a foul interior. Then, too, the fact that she was unprepossessing made the course he was contemplating so much the easier, since, however sincerely he might regret the artist, he could not in conscience pretend it possible that he should regret her face.

“You are doing well, my young friend,” laughed the Natzelhuber, “excellently well, ’pon my soul. Not so long ago a convent girl could not beat you in humility, and to-day you’ve cheek enough to lend even Agiropoulos a little.”

“Oh!” said Rudolph, lifting his eyebrows, and then changing his tone, suddenly, “but I did not mean to be rude.”

“Then what the devil do you mean?” the artist cried, lighting another cigarette, with almost maternal precautions against disturbing her cats. “Is that the way to come into a woman’s room, making yourself at home without being asked, and impertinently saying you want nothing?”

“If it comes to that, I might ask, is it habitual for morning callers to be received by their hostess lying on a sofa, nursing three cats, smoking, and to be asked what they wanted?”

“A very reasonable attitude if it suits me, and a very reasonable question. But since you are so susceptible and cantankerous, I’ll do you the grace to change both to suit you,” she said good-humoredly, removing her cats and placing them back on the sofa when she stood up; then seating herself in an arm-chair, she added:

“Now, what have you come for?”

“To see you,” he said, smiling in spite of himself.

“Much obliged, I am sure. Well, look away, and in the meantime I’ll finish this chapter of my book.”

The method of being severe and renunciatory, with a suitable Byronic fold of the lip and stern compression of the brows—a kind of “fare thee well, and if forever” expression—with a woman like this! Fancy such a reception at twenty-one—when a young man is oldest, gravest, intensest, and slightly melodramatic—from the object of shattered dreams, the creature of agitated and complex feelings, and the cause of poignant humiliation and vexed wonder! Yet the Natzelhuber was unconsciously working most effectually for the boy’s good, and every stab was a definite step on the road to recovery, and to a full lifting of the veil of his own signal folly.

“What makes you look so unhappy, Ehrenstein?” she asked, after a considerable pause. “Have you been playing?”

“No, mademoiselle. I did not know that I looked unhappy,” Rudolph answered, colouring slightly.

“You do then. But there is no need to ask why you are unhappy. You wear your nature in your face, and that proves to me that you will never be happy—any more than my unlucky self.”

“Why?”

“Because you are too refined and too fastidious, and too everything else that goes to the making of a first-class irrational humbug. A man who wishes to make the best of life should be able to take a little of its mud comfortably, whereas you are ready even to turn up your aristocratic nose at a little elegant dust.”

“And you, mademoiselle? Why are you not happy?—for I cannot regard dust or mud as the impediment here,” said Rudolph sarcastically.

“Oh, for just the contrary reason. I am too gamine! It comes to the same thing, child. We are both mad, though reaching the condition by diametrically opposed roads. My life is ending, and it is too late now to change had I even the desire,—but yours is beginning. Get rid of all that superfluous refinement, and tell yourself that there are things more real and more absolutely necessary than sugar and ice-cream.”

“What you say is very true, and I will remember it. But have you no words of equal wisdom for your own case—although they say that doctors are always better able to treat cholera in an alien body than a fit of indigestion in themselves.”

“I could say much, but I could not be sure of finding an attentive audience in myself. You see I am a poor devil. Not so long ago I had the musical world at my feet—only two names above me, and the second Rubinstein, not so far away. Like this we were crowned,” she explained, making a dot on the cover of her book, and calling it Liszt, with a second lower down, on the right hand side, which represented Rubinstein, and the last, on the left, hardly more than a thought below the second—“there! the Natzelhuber. And turn from my fame to reality. An ugly old woman without a sou, alone, friendless, ill, the only companions of my solitude these cats and dogs, and that,” she added, pointing to a bottle of brandy.

“Is that not a very bad companion in solitude?” asked Rudolph, pained.

“Not so very bad when it keeps you from cutting your throat in a morbid moment.”

“Mademoiselle, command me—command all your true friends, for surely it is impossible that genius such as yours has gathered no honest friendship along its path, as well as empty honours. Whatever my shortcomings may be in the way of entertaining, I will prove a better counsellor than your present one,” he urged, forgetting all about himself in his anxiety to save her from the approach of certain degradation.

She looked at him sharply, and then a curious softened light came into the yellow eyes, making them once again beautiful and fascinating with their old charm. She placed her two powerful little hands on his shoulders, and seemed to gaze down into his very soul.

“My dear boy, I believe you are sincere. You are as good as you look, and that is saying much. A tired old woman thanks you with all her heart, but it is too late. Some demon fixed himself in that old woman’s head when she was born, and never could manage to find its way out ever since.”

Rudolph was on the point of protesting, when the door opened, and a woman in black, followed by a young girl entered. The Natzelhuber wheeled round brusquely, and demanded:

“Who are you, madame? and what brings you here, pray?”

The woman, who was stout and hot, stared anxiously, gasped, clutched in vain at her scattered ideas, and murmured something relative to the great honour the illustrious Mademoiselle Natzelhuber had done her in consenting to teach her daughter Andromache, the interview having been arranged for to-day.

“All very well. But that does not explain how you came to enter my room unannounced,” cried the pianiste.

“Your servant sent us up, madame.”

“Polyxena!” roared the Natzelhuber, holding the door open.

Rudolph, ready to sink with shame at the unpleasantness of his position, and eager to beat a hasty retreat, happened to look at the girl who was staring from the stormy musician to him with large dark blue eyes, dark fringed, and full of beseeching anxiety and fright. She was a very pretty girl of somewhat exotic type: olive tints, blue-black hair, with a thin, sedately arranged row of curls upon the forehead. A face of meagre intelligence, without a shade of those subtle and tremulous surprises, that delicate eloquence of opening sensibilities and wonder, that make up so much of girlish beauty in northern races. But Andromache was very touching in that moment of perplexity and humiliation, and having looked at her once, Rudolph felt constrained to look again—which he did willingly enough, though he blushed scarlet at his own audacity.

“Polyxena, who the devil gave you leave to send me strangers when I am engaged?”

“How was I to know you were engaged? Haven’t I my work to do without looking after your danglers? Do you think I’m going to walk up here every time your bell rings to find out what I am to say? Ah, then, and upon my word, you’d have first to go into treaty with my Maker to fashion me another pair of legs,” retorted Polyxena, turning on her heel.

“That is the way she always answers me,” said the Natzelhuber, smiling. “But I am fond of servants. They are the only part of humanity that has retained a bit of originality or naturalness. When she is in a good humour that girl delights me with the extraordinary things she says,” she remarked to Rudolph. “So, madame, this is the young woman you want me to turn into an artiste,” she exclaimed, menacingly, standing before the trembling Andromache with her hands joined behind her.

After a long scrutiny, she thrust up her chin, and muttered:

“Pouf! she doesn’t look very bright.”

“Everybody says she is very clever, mademoiselle,” the girl’s mother ventured to plead humbly, “and she plays really well.”

“Who is ‘everybody’? half a dozen brutes of Athenians who couldn’t tell you the difference between C major and F sharp. If you have come here to cite me the opinion of that distinguished and discriminating critic, Everybody, madame, instead of waiting to hear mine, you and your daughter may go about your business, and see what your Everybody will do for you.”

Rudolph made a movement towards the door, hoping to escape unnoticed, but the Natzelhuber, having had enough of her last visitors, detained him with an invitation to smoke a cigarette, and drink a glass of brandy.

“Wouldn’t you like me to play you something?”

“Not to-day, thanks. Another time. It’s just breakfast time,” he said hurriedly.

She turned her back on him without another word, and opening the piano, pointed to Andromache to sit down before it. The girl’s hands shook as she removed her gloves, and Rudolph, going downstairs, could hear how unsteady and timid were the first notes that she played.

“Weber’s ‘Invitation à la Danse.’ She will surely fly into another rage when she hears that,” he thought. “But I do wish she would be kind and encouraging to the poor girl. Such pretty eyes as she has! I have never seen prettier. Just like the March violets in Rapoldenkirchen that I used to gather for my mother.”