Читать книгу Comedies and Errors - Harland Henry - Страница 9

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But the next afternoon, at about the same hour, Ferdinand Augustus found himself alone, strolling in the direction of the little stone bridge over the artificial lakelet; and there again was the woman, leaning upon the parapet, dropping bread-crumbs to the carp. Ferdinand Augustus raised his hat; the woman bowed and smiled.

“It’s a fine day,” said Ferdinand Augustus.

“It’s a fine day—but a weary one,” the woman responded, with an odd little movement of the head.

Ferdinand Augustus was perhaps too shy to pursue the conversation; perhaps he wanted but little here below, nor wanted that little long. At any rate, he passed on. There could be no question about her smile this time, he reflected; it had been bright, spontaneous, friendly. But what did she mean, he wondered, by adding to his general panegyric of the day as fine, that special qualification of it as a weary one? It was astonishing that any man should dispute her claim to beauty. She had really a splendid figure; and her face was more than pretty, it was distinguished. Her eyes and her mouth, her clear-grey sparkling eyes, her softly curved red mouth, suggested many agreeable possibilities—possibilities of wit, and of something else. It was not till four hours later that he noticed the sound of her voice. At dinner, in the midst of a discussion with Hilary about a subject in no obvious way connected with her (about the Orient Express, indeed—its safety, speed, and comfort), it suddenly came back to him, and he checked a remark upon the advantages of the corridor carriage, to exclaim in his soul, “She’s got a delicious voice. If she sang, it would be a mezzo.”

The consequence was that the following day he again bent his footsteps in the direction of the bridge.

“It’s a lovely afternoon,” he said, lifting his hat.

“But a weary one,” said she, smiling, with a little pensive movement of the head.

“Not a weary one for the carp,” he hinted, glancing down at the water, which boiled and bubbled with a greedy multitude.

“Oh, they have no human feelings,” said she.

“Don’t you call hunger a human feeling?” he inquired.

“They have no human feelings; but I never said we hadn’t plenty of carp feelings,” she answered him.

He laughed. “At all events, I’m pleased to find that we’re of the same way of thinking.”

“Are we?” asked she, raising surprised eyebrows.

“You take a healthy pessimistic view of things,” he submitted.

“I? Oh, dear, no. I have never taken a pessimistic view of anything in my life.”

“Except of this poor summer’s afternoon, which has the fatal gift of beauty. You said it was a weary one.”

“People have sympathies,” she explained; “and besides, that is a watchword.” And she scattered a handful of crumbs, thereby exciting a new commotion among the carp.

Her explanation no doubt struck Ferdinand Augustus as obscure; but, perhaps he felt that he scarcely knew her well enough to press for enlightment. “Let us hope that the fine weather will last,” he said, with a polite salutation, and resumed his walk.

But, on the morrow, “You make a daily practice of casting your bread upon the waters,” was his greeting to her. “Do you expect to find it at the season’s end?”

“I find it at once,” was her response, “in entertainment.”

“It entertains you to see those shameless little gluttons making an exhibition of themselves!” he cried out.

“You must not speak disrespectfully of them,” she reproved him. “Some of them are very old. Carp often live to be two hundred, and they grow grey, for all the world like men.”

“They’re like men in twenty particulars,” asserted he, “though you, yesterday, denied it. See how the big ones elbow the little ones aside; see how fierce they all are in the scramble for your bounty. You wake their most evil passions. But the spectacle is instructive. It’s a miniature presentment of civilisation. Oh, carp are simply brimfull of human nature. You mentioned yesterday that they have no human feelings. You put your finger on the chief point of resemblance. It’s the absence of human feeling that makes them so hideously human.”

She looked at him with eyes that were interested, amused, yet not altogether without a shade of raillery in their depths. “That is what you call a healthy pessimistic view of things?” she questioned.

“It is an inevitable view if one honestly uses one’s sight, or reads one’s newspaper.”

“Oh, then I would rather not honestly use my sight,” said she; “and as for the newspaper, I only read the fashions. Your healthy pessimistic view of things can hardly add much to the joy of life.”

“The joy of life!”. he expostulated. “There’s no joy in life. Life is one fabric of hardship, peril, and insipidity.”

“Oh, how can you say that,” cried she, “in the face of such beauty as we have about us here? With the pure sky and the sunshine, and the wonderful peace of the day; and then these lawns and glades and the great green trees; and the sweet air, and the singing birds! No joy in life!”

“This isn’t life,” he answered. “People who shut themselves up in an artificial park are fugitives from life. Life begins at the park gates, with the natural countryside, and the squalid peasantry, and the sordid farmers, and the Jew money-lenders, and the uncertain crops.”

“Oh, it’s all life,” insisted she, “the park and the countryside, and the virgin forest and the deep sea, with all things in them. It’s all life. I’m alive, and I daresay you are. You would exclude from life all that is nice in life, and then say of the remainder, that only is life. You’re not logical.”

“Heaven forbid,” he murmured devoutly. “I’m sure you’re not, either. Only stupid people are logical.” She laughed lightly. “My poor carp little dream to what far paradoxes they have led,” she mused, looking into the water, which was now quite tranquil. “They have sailed away to their mysterious affairs among the lily-roots. I should like to be a carp for a few minutes, to see what it is like in those cool, dark places under the water. I am sure there are all sorts of strange things and treasures. Do you believe there are really water-maidens, like Undine?”

“Not nowadays,” he informed her, with the confident fluency of one who knew. “There used to be; but, like so many other charming things, they disappeared with the invention of printing, the discovery of America, and the rise of the Lutheran heresy. Their prophetic souls——”

“Oh, but they had no souls, you remember,” she corrected him.

“I beg your pardon; that was the belief that prevailed among their mortal contemporaries, but it has since been ascertained that they had souls, and very good ones. Their prophetic souls warned them what a dreary, dried-up planet the earth was destined to become, with the steam-engine, the electric telegraph, compulsory education (falsely so called), constitutional government, and the supremacy of commerce. So the elder ones died, dissolved in tears; and the younger ones migrated by evaporation to Neptune.”

“Dear me, dear me,” she marvelled. “How extraordinary that we should just have happened to light upon a topic about which you appear to have such a quantity of special knowledge! And now,” she added, bending her head by way of valediction, “I must be returning to my duties.”

And she moved off, towards the palace.