Читать книгу Anthony Adverse - Hervey Allen - Страница 40

Table of Contents

Anthony was not detained very long by the copying out of invoices and manifests. His first promotion in the world of affairs was to the desk of the correspondents or gentlemen writers. A copperplate hand that had been conferred upon him by Father Xavier, and his proficiency in languages were responsible. The arid years in the convent were now to a certain extent a positive advantage. He could never get enough of the life about him. He absorbed it at a remarkable rate, in gulps.

No thirstier horse had ever been led to water. So avid was he of the words and the experiences, emotions, and facts which he acquired through words that he was scarcely conscious of the barriers between languages. Words were simply the coins minted by the tongues of men with which realization could be purchased. Whether they were English, French, Spanish, or Italian he cared little. All of these, with an infinite variety of dialect, he heard in daily use all about him. The quays, the streets, the counting houses of Livorno, and even the Casa da Bonnyfeather itself were in a state of babel.

For a while language remained for him nothing but the common tongue of mankind. It was not until some months had passed that he began to understand differences. Now, without thinking about it, he instinctively tasted the various savour of words and through them life. He found it good.

Slowly English began to displace in his thought his strange jargon of hill-Tuscan and ecclesiastical Latin. He heard English talked constantly in the office. It was dinned into his ears at the table and in the house. It corresponded to the new and real experiences he was having. It was also an advantage, he found, to use it when employed as a messenger about the docks or to ship's officers. It got you instant attention. He began to realize that his physical appearance corresponded with it. He began to use it when he had some important problem to think out. He spoke it with a slight Scotch tang and a softening of the vowels. The burr had been softened to a purr. The combined effect was musical and rather arresting. It was impossible to tell whence he hailed. His verbal messages seemed to come from some self-cultivated Arcadian nowhere.

Toussaint was a potent force in all this. Mr. Bonnyfeather had been quick to see the advantage of French lessons. They did not long continue to occupy only the half hour before lunch. Before long they were removed to the old ballroom after dinner had been cleared away, and they went on in the afternoon.

Soon Toussaint and Anthony were reading books together. Some writing followed as a matter of course. Later Toussaint put Anthony to copying out correspondence with French firms. In a year he was able to answer letters that required no more than a perfunctory reply. Spanish followed.

At the table Anthony listened carefully. He had learned when in doubt how to resort to a grammar or a dictionary. In the section of correspondence in the office he would pass from stool to stool. Of the several gentlemen writers each was glad to find the boy by his side for the sake of his young and happy presence and for the chance to impress upon him the superlative importance of a particular department. That Anthony was under the special eye of the Capo della Casa all of them knew.

But Mr. Bonnyfeather was most careful about that. He never permitted Anthony to take advantage of it. It was a nice piece of tact. On one or two occasions the merchant had condescended to explain to the boy. There he learned something valuable.

"See and hear everything, but be careful what you do and say," admonished the old man. "Do not tell me that Garcia sleeps at his desk, I know it, I see him nod. If he thought you knew it, he would hate you. Knowledge which threatens anyone's bread and butter should be concealed if you wish to get on."

But there was something more to it than just that. Out of the several occasions when Anthony had been thus admonished he began to understand Mr. Bonnyfeather's careful, masculine sense of honour, the indignity of eavesdropping to all concerned, the pettiness of tattle. In short, that to mind his own business meant he must first possess his own tongue in dignity and peace. A discretion rather beyond his years was thus thrust upon him.

Once he had blurted out something he had heard at the big table while he was walking along the street with McNab. It was about the unexpected arrival of a ship from Smyrna laden with oil consigned to Mr. Bonnyfeather. A smartly dressed young lad standing on the corner had turned immediately and made his way through the crowd into the near-by door of a counting house.

"Did you see yon laddie gang off wi' your tidings?" asked Sandy. "He's Maister Nolte, the nevvy of a German marchant. In ten minutes they'll be sellin' oot a' their oil at the present prices. If you're no keerfu' you'll be takin' your victuals in the kitchen, laddie." They walked on, Anthony's cheeks burning.

"You'll not say anything to Mr. Bonnyfeather, McNab?" he ventured.

"I always hold my tongue," was the reply. It was a matter-of-fact statement with no scorn in it. But the boy wilted.

"And I'll tell ye this," added McNab. "It's not only statements ye maun be keerfu' aboot, it's questions, too. Ye ask a warld too mony. Watch wi' yer ain eyes and see what happens. Then draw your ain concloosions. Dinna pay attention after ye ken what is gangin' on to what every zany may have to say."

They entered a warehouse and went to the desk of the shipping clerk. Anthony noticed that McNab let the clerk do all the talking, using only an apt prod now and then to his volubility. In five minutes the man had contradicted himself twice and proved himself in the wrong. McNab collected his bill and left.

"Ye see?" said he, peering down at Anthony. The boy never forgot. Mr. McNab blew his nose loudly into a scarlet handkerchief large enough to muffle a horn. That afternoon to the sound of his bugling they collected seventeen bills.

Distance had worked its inevitable negative magic with Father Xavier. For the first six weeks he had come rather regularly two or three times a week. Then for one reason or another his visits became irregular, the instruction desultory. It was finally dropped. The priest had done all he could. He felt that himself. New influences which he could not fully control were impinging upon his pupil's mind. The lives of saints, church history, Latin fables seemed enormously remote to Anthony now. Like the fountain in the convent courtyard they sounded in his ears as something speaking from a dream. Finally he saw Father Xavier only when Mr. Bonnyfeather confessed. This was not often. Then he heard that Father Xavier had gone to Naples. He received a letter and answered it. Another, and he forgot to reply.

Mr. Bonnyfeather's father had changed his religion to suit the Cardinal of York. Something of the old Calvinistic independence remained in the son. Secretly Mr. Bonnyfeather perused some of his grandfather's books on theology. The doctrine of predestination fascinated him. It was with a distinct struggle he persuaded himself that he had laid it aside. Several times he had been on the point of asking Father Xavier about it. Then he thought better of it.

The old man was growing a little rheumatic now. He was often cold and his feet went blue at night. The fireplace which caused so much astonishment to the servants--its like was not in the vicinity--roared constantly on cold, damp nights, which are not unknown at Livorno. Occasionally he would take supper in his room. The warmth and the blaze of the many candles were preferable to the chill and shadows in the great, hall. At such times he began to call Anthony in to dine. Over the cover the story of Mr. Bonnyfeather's family began to take shape in the boy's mind. The sudden flight from the old estate by the Scotch laird and his family to King James at St.-Germain's, the long, loyal service at the toy court of the exiles, the hope deferred, the honourable poverty--all this was with Mr. Bonnyfeather a favourite theme.

Then there was the merchant's father, "the second marquis," as the old man loved to call him. He had been invaluable to the Stuarts, a great stirrer-up of Jacobite intrigues. Louis the Great had settled a pension upon him. "Ah, those were great days!" As a very little boy Mr. Bonnyfeather remembered Versailles.

As a lad he had been dragged about the Highlands during the "'45." William McNab had come back with him then. The McNabs were faithful to the old lairds; had always sent the rent. They were family retainers. Mr. Bonnyfeather extolled them. Faith was half Greek, to be sure, but her mother's blood would tell. And then he would tell over again of how his father had fought at Culloden and barely escaped at Prestonpans. His face would light up with the old hope of the victory. Or his eyes would flash as he told how it felt to be the oldest son of a nobleman on his father's estates hunting the stag. At the last, fishermen had rowed them out to a French ship with Cumberland's dragoons sweeping along behind them over the reaches of a misty beach. That was their last glimpse of Scotland. He would sigh and take another glass of port.

"And now," he would say, placing both hands on his breast in agitation, "you see me here, the third marquis--in trade!" He would hasten on as if explanation were essential.

"It came about in this way. When the prince returned again to France my father still followed him. He had become a Catholic in all but name. Then Charles Edward died. We came to Italy to be near the last of the house of Stuart. My father was received into the church with all his family. He held a small place as chamberlain to the Cardinal of York. There he was still called marquis. His title and a small pittance from the cardinal was all that he had. The French pension was no longer paid. I should not forget the crucifix which the pope sent him. I saw how things were going and wrote to some of my Whig relatives in England. One, my mother's brother, smoothed the path for me. I alienated my father, however, by taking advantage of my uncle's offer. I went to England and attended college at Exeter.

"There I met the son of a cloth merchant, Francis Baring, whose friendship has been invaluable and abiding. You will see in this Protestant Bible where he has written a number of things which we then thought profound. And it was he who drew these three clasped hands on the flyleaf. The third hand was for John Henry Nolte, now a merchant at Hamburg. We were inseparable and it is not often that three people get on so well together. Years later, just before my daughter was married"--Mr. Bonnyfeather paused--"the three of us took a long journey together through England and Scotland. I saw then for the last time the estate of which there will be no fourth marquis. But I was nobly entertained by both John and Francis Baring in London. I have since prospered greatly as a merchant myself by remembering as a nobleman what a king once said, 'L'exactitude est la politesse des rois!' You should remember that, too."

Mr. Bonnyfeather invariably ended his oft-repeated story in that way. Something in the intonation of the last phrase, something in the man's attitude and expression as he rehearsed it, looking at the boy over the candles with a supreme earnestness, gradually impressed upon Anthony that for some reason or other here was a tradition he was expected to follow. Further than that Mr. Bonnyfeather dared not permit himself to go. Anthony remained silent. They would get up at last and go over by the fire.

It was at such times over his port that Mr. Bonnyfeather became most genial. He then jumped all doubts and scruples and secretly permitted himself the luxury of feeling that he was talking to his grandson. He had been lonely for years and to have so pleasant and bright a companion as young Anthony sitting before the fire sped their association mightily. He wrapped the boy in a haze of carefully concealed affection, but as time went on gradually opened his heart.

The intimacy and remote ramifications of his business and of the personalities connected with it were discussed as if Anthony had been years older and were the heir of the house. The boy sat and listened gravely. But upon occasion Anthony could also delight with a well-timed question, a smile of understanding, or a surprising reply. The voyages of ships were traced out on the map and globe. Anthony gradually became familiar with most of the great harbours of the world; what was to be had in them, the names and personalities of the merchants, market conditions; what, in a general sense, from politics to planting, was afoot in Europe and America. Nor was it a hardship to listen. With Mr. Bonnyfeather, he became lost in it. The little hectic spots glowed on the old man's cheek bones and the boy talked too, or listened with open lips and glowing eyes. An hour of this after supper, and they would sit down to write the letters resulting from the talk. These were of such a character that Mr. Bonnyfeather did not desire them to go across the desks of the clerks.

Thus Anthony rapidly stepped into being the old man's secretary. As time went on he was able and not afraid to suggest a better phrase here and there or a more trenchant approach. He strove always to see the men to whom the letters were addressed. He learned all he could about them from the captains who had dealt with them, or from the files of correspondence in the vault. There was a roomful. But before he was sixteen he had read nearly all of it. The net which the firm of Bonnyfeather and those that it dealt with cast over the waters of the world was surprisingly well integrated in his mind. Helping always to weave the meshes firmer and closer was the constant talk of the harbour front that daily flooded his ears. But it was not all business by any means which occupied these evenings.

In Mr. Bonnyfeather's room were his books. They were a strange assortment. The intellectual, political, and spiritual adventures of his family might be read in their titles. The Covenanters as well as the Jacobites were represented. The conversion of Mr. Bonnyfeather's father to Catholicism had not prevented his son from bringing back from Exeter a collection at which the Librorum Prohibitorum would have shied.

Anthony pored over these. He became lost in the maze of the Faërie Queene. The illustrations, and afterwards the text of Fox's Book of Martyrs first gave him some conception of the Protestant side of the controversy. He was amazed to discover it at all. Baxter's Saints' Rest scared him sick. It required Toussaint to reassure him. Father Xavier might have been amazed, to say the least, to have seen the pastures in which his pupil was not only wandering but feeding. Mr. Bonnyfeather had considerable Shakespeare by heart and was given to a little rodomontade in its recitation, especially of the first part of Henry IV, and The Merchant of Venice. It served to turn the trick for the boy who would scarcely otherwise have been able to understand at first the nature of the stage. The lonely island in The Tempest haunted him. Somehow he thought Mr. Bonnyfeather in his black velvet suit, leaning over the globe and conjuring forth cargoes, was like Prospero.

Before he left Livorno Anthony had whole passages of Religio Medici by heart. Milton's Italian poems first attracted him, then the Latin. It seemed perfectly natural to the polyglot nature of the boy that a poet should write in many tongues. As the music of English became more audible to him he went on to L'Allegro and Il Penseroso. Paradise Lost made him drunk. His own experience of visions and dreams at the convent made the scenes and images of the poem rise up for him as if fixed on his retina. The incandescent light, the lambent glooms of the blind poet's dramatic universe peopled by even brighter gods and darker heroes remained for Anthony always the supreme banquet of words in any tongue. There was nothing like the sound of it anywhere else, that great, perfectly controlled, almighty organ vibrating and filling with oceanic and cosmic harmony the cathedral of the mind. It made the Italian operas which he later went to hear at Livorno with Vincent Nolte seem ridiculous. Sometimes the contrast would come across him as he watched a romantic little cockchafer in red tights warbling and strutting melodramatically before his trilling ladybird while brigands supplied harmony. Or he thought of it when the meretricious, saccharine roar of the finale sounded. Then he would laugh, and Vincent, whose syrupy German soul was congealing into sweet crystals and beer, would hiccough with indignation.

Milton and Dante dramatized theology for Anthony. For him it could never be abstract. Even the Holy Ghost had personality. He had a comforting smile.

It was with this life-endowing quality of the mind that Anthony passed on from the poets and vivifiers of language to the necromancers of words. On the middle shelf was a long and daunting array of Catholic and Protestant polemics, theological treatises, works of piety and religion. Anthony had made up his mind to read all the books in the room. So he read these, too; Augustine to Calvin, Athanasius, Chrysostom, Origen, and the Reverend Adonijah Parkhurst. He strained his eyes over Kerson's Practical Cathechisme, plunged into Bishop Burton, and heard the remote noise of the sectaries through the years of James I to Charles II arguing somewhere in space. All were totally disconnected in time. They merely occurred on the shelf. All were in words, all were therefore about something.

A universe landscaped with the strange heavens of religious utopiasters; full of maimed souls thrillingly rescued from or delivered to the devil burst on his view. Innocent and inane first parents in delightful, tropical paradises; shining battlements of the City of God on hills clouded by lightning gleamed like oases amid the dark deserts of limbo, where old gentlemen with wigs like Mr. Bonnyfeather's and terrific names gibbered and twittered moral aphorisms and definitions while pouring dust on their own heads. Or they threw worm-eaten tomes at one another. Underneath, always underneath, were the hot, the cold, and the dry, the wet, the noisy, the silent hells. These he could see were logical pictures of indignant devices invented to punish in the other world ghastly extremes of conduct in this. In short, on the middle shelf of Mr. Bonnyfeather's bookcase was a fair cross-section of the Western mind which having lost its own religion was trying to confer Greek order on Semitic nonsense. All of these books were obsessed by one thought. They were perfectly sure that one God controlled everything. Yet Anthony read in one Nicole, "Dieu est la Diable, c'est-la toute la religion."

Fortunately for him, most of this curious babble was lost on the boy. Yet his mind retained queer snatches of it, voices that later on would shout advice about his conduct out of limbo. It seemed to him as if a troop of these disembodied theologians followed his earthly experience arguing. Occasionally some louder voice would make itself intelligible, shouting a distinct message to him out of the disputing crowd. In the meantime the gods and demons, the troops of angels, seraphim, and the apocalyptic landscapes were certainly fascinating.

Lowest of all on the shelves, but in big volumes like foundations of the edifice which they in fact supported, were the classics. They were all in Latin for Mr. Bonnyfeather read no Greek. Something in his accurate and precise Scotch mind loved Latin. But he was not scholar enough to carry this to a pedantic extreme. Roman life did not come to an end for him when Cicero ceased to fulminate. It and Mr. Bonnyfeather went on.

In his old age he had come to like Claudian better than Virgil. The hills of Sicily rolling their flowers close down to the sea, but always in a "wildly cultivated" manner, the absurd panegyrics of contemptible tyrants and defeated generals, which yet retained the method of true praise; all this seemed to him as he read Claudian to speak not only of Rome but of his own time. He too could feel the tang of something magnificent coming to an end with confusion to follow. The barbarians were so near.

In the pages of Ammianus Marcellinus the groans and weariness of the great Roman machine rumbling to its end were audible. Yet how great were those heroes and emperors who repaired its disintegrations with the bones of their bodies and the virtue of their souls! How terrible were the selfish tyrants feasting in the midst of catastrophe! Mr. Bonnyfeather would stride up and down reading from the great book, intoning it, while Anthony leaned forward. The story of Julian fascinated them. Ah! how much Europe needed someone like that now, someone to thrust out the sick new things and bring back the strong old gods as they were. Prussian Frederick could not do it, said the merchant. But there was this man Buonaparte. Some people thought . . . at any rate from the roof they had seen the cannon flashing one night over the horizon and ships on fire. The English did not want him. The old man shook his head. Perhaps they are wrong, those islanders. "I, you see, have had my feet on the mainland for some time now," he would say. Then he would end by reading an ancient description of the valley of the Moselle :

Immemorial vines embower the pleasant, white villas. The cup of the valley receives the bounty of the sun god, the gratitude of man rises in pious incense from the hills. The dead are honoured in the households of the living, and the spirit of the distant emperors in the towns. The magistrates punish vice with the approval of the many virtuous. The rich desire no roses in January; they enjoy them with the peasants in the spring. In the amphitheatres the extreme rage of the barbarian provides spectacles for the multitude and laughter for the cultivated; in the fields his chained vigour enhances the crops. The songs of the tenants are heard upon the estates of great landlords. Fortune is seldom invoked, for no change is desired. Through all the valley winds the River Moselle in three reflecting curves.

Anthony understood from the tones of Mr. Bonny feather's voice that he was yearning for something he had lost, trying to find a country where he could be fully alive and at ease at the same time. The book of Marcellinus and that of Jean-Jacques Rousseau which he and Toussaint were reading both placed that country in the past. It was also there in the Bible and in the theologians--that happy garden! Everybody seemed to have lost it and to be trying to get back to it. He himself at times already regretted the convent garden.

The madonna had come from there. He had brought her along with him. She was still in his room. He could return to her at night as an orphan wanderer from the old convent courtyard, or like an exile from the garden or the valley of the Moselle--or whatever it was he lost in the daytime--and be at peace again. The madonna understood. She listened to him. He could tell her of his troubles during the day. Books could not take her away from him, let them say whatever they might. All those crowds of people talking about God stayed outside in the desert. Those who argued could not enter this oasis. He knew! They spent the night howling outside, pouring dust on their own heads. As though from the living boughs of paradise he felt the bright face of the madonna looking down upon him while he slept.

Faith would invariably be waiting for him when he left Mr. Bonnyfeather's room and crossed the hall to go into his own. It was part of her routine to see that the house was closed and that all were asleep. At night she felt better and more awake than in the daytime. To watch all the others retire, leaving her to darkness, gave her a sense of superiority and freedom in which she revelled. She prowled, silently. She picked over a chicken and sipped a glass of wine in the kitchen. The embers of the dying charcoal looked at her with small red eyes. She sat in corners and contemplated.

Anthony would find her sitting just behind her own door which was opposite his. He did not see her. He became aware of her. The darkness there was slightly disarranged. Its folds seemed to blend, as the jade lamp burnt dimly, with the distorted shadows of the wings and hour-glass carved above the lintel of Mr. Bonnyfeather's door. Whether she watched him or not he did not know.

After he had gone to bed, she would come in, fold up his clothes, rearrange the covers and bid him good night. There was a hint of affection when she touched him, as she did often, which he felt it wrong to repulse but from which he almost shrank. In the balance he remained passive. From the time she had nursed him just after his arrival, she had thus speciously kept the key of his room as it were in her apron pocket. Sometimes she would sit down by the candles on his dresser and talk.

There was a smooth quality in her voice that soothed him. As she talked, always of personalities about the office and yard, he would watch a curious finger-play of shadows that took place at the foot of his bed on the white wall. Perhaps it was the shadow of the curtain or the flow of the candle. He and the madonna looked at it. Long, black fingers, semi-transparent here and there, kept twitching wantonly at an inflamed point of light. As this went on and her voice accompanied it, he would slowly drift into sleep. Sometimes he would awake a little after she had gone, rise, and close the door to be alone with the madonna. Another presence interfered. He found it necessary to keep it out. As the months slipped by and all became a matter of habit, he grew less sensitive to such feelings. He began to take the real world to bed with him. Only the lashes when they at last rested on his cheeks finally allowed nothing real to pass.

In the cope over the madonna's head the little stars twinkled as the great ones did above the house. The madonna kept looking past the child in her arms into the shadows and darkness of the room as if something were there. Anthony had not noticed that yet. To discover it, her expression must be carefully studied in the light as Don Luis had once done. Don Luis had understood how to use light and shadow only too well.

What was in the darkness bided its time silently.