Читать книгу Head in Green Bronze - Hugh Walpole - Страница 12

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‘Well, then, that settles it,’ Mr. Preston said, biting the nail of his left-hand thumb in the way which she so especially detested.

‘Yes, that settles it,’ Mrs. Preston answered. ‘We’ve made a terrible mistake and had better admit it.’

‘What I don’t understand,’ he went on bitterly, ‘is why you married me in the first place. I’m no different. I’m just exactly the same man to whom you said only a year ago that you hadn’t believed such perfection of character ...’

She interrupted him angrily. ‘Oh, be sensible, Hamish. When one’s in love, one says the most ridiculous things and then afterwards one sees clearly. I could not have believed,’ she went on meditatively, staring at him, ‘that I should ever see anyone as clearly as I see you at this moment.’

‘And all about a haircut,’ he said sulkily.

Yes, it had been. The little, absurd episode had been a symbol. She had wanted him to go with her to the Cathedral and he had insisted that he must have his hair cut. Nothing more ridiculous. He needed it. She hated men whose hair was rough on the back of their necks, but why just then? And so she had told him that if he went and had his hair cut, she would divorce him. His refusal to please her seemed to stand for everything—his self-assertiveness, his selfishness, his egotism, his man-conceit, his deliberate lack of consideration for her. And after she had spoken that dreadful word ‘divorce,’ she felt sure he would give in, but he hadn’t. He had had his hair cut.

It was a hot July morning and they were sitting in the untidy, sun-glaring bedroom of the Barcelona hotel, he on the unmade bed, she holding the blind, which after all did not keep away the sun, a little aside. She was looking out on the narrow street, with the church and the wine-shop and the little bazaar that sold shawls and fans and castanets to simple-minded tourists. She knew it all so well although they had been in Barcelona only a week, but she knew him—oh, she knew him—still better. She turned back and looked at him, sitting humpishly on the bed, swinging his stout, thick legs (how could she ever have thought him handsomely built?), pulling in perplexity his short black moustache, whilst his little black eyes stared angrily in front of him. He looked like a child who had been desperately hurt, and as, for a moment, that occurred to her she had an instant of tenderness which was quickly checked. He might look like a child, but he certainly wasn’t one, with his meanness and bossiness and brutality. How he had hurt her last night after they had come back from the café! Bruised her wrist. She looked at it now and was surprised to find there was no mark on it.

‘Well, that’s final,’ he said again. ‘I’ll arrange everything. You had better go back to your mother to-morrow. I’ll stay on here, I think.’

He got up and was so stocky and square and, at the same time, so childishly disappointed in her that she burst out into violent protest. ‘Don’t look at me like that, as though it were all my fault. After all, I can’t help it if I’ve stopped loving you. It’s your character that’s the matter. No woman in the world could endure it.’ But she turned away from his steady gaze. ‘Oh, it’s been my fault, too, I know. I haven’t been very patient sometimes, and I’ve got a rotten temper, but all the same, let’s be sensible. The fact is that we don’t love each other any more. You don’t love me, and I don’t love you, and so it’s silly to stay together, isn’t it?’

His steady gaze never left her face.

‘Yes, I suppose it is. Well, I’ll be going along to Cook’s place and see about your getting off to-morrow.’

She did not answer. He had been sitting there in his shirt-sleeves. Now he put on his thin silk coat and went out.

He was at first so deeply preoccupied with this tragedy in his life that he noticed nothing. He really could not understand how it had all occurred. Only a year and a half ago they had been married in Edinburgh with, it seemed, every possible happiness in front of them. They were crazily in love—he was no fool, being thirty years of age, and he knew that here was the girl whom he wanted for life. And she was no fool either, being modern, wide-eyed about everything sexual, loyal by nature, but she had a devil of a temper and she had been spoiled by her old hag of a mother. That was why he had brought her away on this holiday, to see if something couldn’t possibly be done.

He really didn’t know how it had all come about—the change from that passionate love to this anger and recrimination and stolidity. The change had been so gradual, first her temper and his obstinacy; then her aesthetic friends; then her taste in paintings like Cézanne’s and Renoir’s—music like Bach’s—books like that fellow Aldous Huxley’s. He just thought Huxley’s novels were plain dirt and that Bach’s music said the same thing over and over again, and that Cézanne’s pictures (she had dragged him all the way to the Tate Gallery to see a Cézanne painting of a hill) were like nothing real. You couldn’t say, not if you tried ever so hard, that nature was like that. But then he didn’t complain of her taste. It was everybody’s right to like what they liked, and he liked Puccini and Low’s cartoons and stories by Oppenheim. He really did not see why that should make her angry, but it did. And she got a lot of Cézanne’s reproductions and paid £4 apiece for them, and he said it was rotten extravagance and they had a most fearful row.

That was the beginning of it. And then the old mother, who always had a damp, furry look like a piece of blotting-paper, would come with her soft, sibylline voice and take her daughter’s side, so gently and so firmly that Hamish felt a most intolerable cad, and at the same time knew that he was right. But none of these things should have led to this catastrophe. After all, everyone was aware that the first year of marriage was a difficult one. They had been married a year and a half, and the difficulties had just gone on. Every married couple had them. What he could not understand was how they had ceased to love one another. One could be angry with someone and yet love her very dearly, but now they hated to be together and everything aggravated one or the other. It had been, of course, foolish to come to Spain in the hot weather, but they were going on to the sea at Malaga.

He stopped abruptly where he was, because, to his complete astonishment, a bullet went singing past his ear....

Nancy Preston stood at the window for some little while after her husband had left her. She was staring out, but not thinking of what she saw. When they had first come there she had loved this little street. It had seemed to her so Spanish. The little church with the figure of the Madonna and Child over the carved doorway had been so friendly, she had wondered whether after all the two of them might not come together again. But he had been, oh, so exasperating. The trouble with Hamish was, she reflected, that he would not talk. He had no vocabulary and his brain was so slow that long, long after she had finished a subject and was beginning on another one, he would arrive at the first one, and then when she chaffed him, not unkindly, about his slowness, he would look at her and say:

‘You married me for what I was, you know, not because I was a blooming centipede.’

And she would think how odd that was, for she had loved him at first for the very qualities which now she disliked in him so much. ‘Oh! it’s a shame,’ she thought, twitching the blind angrily. ‘Why should I have stopped loving him? I don’t want to stop.’ And at that moment, to her surprise, she saw running down the street a little company of men with guns in their hands. They gathered almost exactly opposite her window on the steps of the church and consulted together; otherwise everything was very quiet. In Spain, during the morning hours, everybody is sleeping. It was strange to see this group of men with guns, discussing so earnestly opposite her window. It was the stranger because there was no sound anywhere. Suddenly, as though they had decided something, they turned and ran up the steps into the church. A moment later there was a knock on the door, and that idiotic woman, Mrs. Furness, was standing there.

Mrs. Furness was like a great ripe plum, purple of face, very often wearing purple-coloured clothes, stout and hot and untidy and terribly muddle-minded. She had haunted them most obstinately from the very beginning of their journey. She had appeared on the train from Calais, and then at their hotel in Paris, and then at the Spanish border, where, of course, she had lost her passport, and then to their horror and disgust turned up at this very hotel where they were. She was looking, she explained to them again and again, for Mr. Furness, who had started with her on their holiday, but had been lost at Dover and was now apparently determined to go on being lost. She told them, with tears and desperate heavings of her enormous bosom, that she knew that he was not unfaithful, that she was certain that it was just absent-mindedness, he was such a careless man—a perfect darling, but terribly careless.

‘But I don’t see how you can lose a wife,’ Nancy Preston kept saying out of sheer exasperation, implying that to lose Mrs. Furness was surely something beyond anybody’s power.

‘Oh! you don’t know Edward,’ Mrs. Furness kept saying. ‘He’s been the same all his life long. Why, when he was quite small, he lost his father and mother for weeks.’

‘He is obviously very independent,’ Nancy Preston answered.

But now Mrs. Furness was not thinking of her husband. She was in a state of alarm.

‘Oh! do forgive me, Mrs. Preston, the last thing I wanted to do was to interfere, and I know you are always so busy, but there’s something dreadful going on.’

‘Dreadful?’ interrupted Nancy sharply. ‘What do you mean?’ For some strange reason her thoughts instantly ran to Hamish.

‘Oh! I don’t know, I’m sure. It’s just a feeling I have, and that nice Mr. Bannister I met yesterday says that they are working up for terrible things here—the Communists and the Fascists, you know. And the Government, he says, is really Communist although it doesn’t pretend to be, and the army is Fascist, and so there you are,’ she ended.

‘I wish you would tell me what you do mean,’ Nancy answered crossly. She had turned back to the window and was surprised to see that one of the young men, who had run into the church, had come outside again and was standing on guard at the top of the steps, his rifle in his hand.

‘Can I have a word with Mr. Preston?’ Mrs. Furness said. ‘I wouldn’t bother him for more than a moment, but I do want to get away and to get back to Paris if I can. I’m sure that’s where my husband is.’

‘Mr. Preston has gone out,’ Nancy said shortly.

‘Oh! gone out,’ said Mrs. Furness agitatedly, pressing her hand to her bosom. ‘I’m sure that isn’t wise this morning. I do hope he’s all right.’

‘Of course he’s all right. He can look after himself perfectly.’

And then there appeared at the doorway a big, tall, thin man, with a high, very spiky white collar, pince-nez with a cord attached, and a melancholy, rather severe, expression. This was Mr. Browne, the schoolmaster from the Midlands who, Mrs. Furness thought, admired her very much. It was Nancy’s opinion that he admired nobody but himself. She disliked him extremely and she turned on him a rather haughty stare.

He regarded her gloomily. ‘It’s no use your looking at me like that, Mrs. Preston,’ he said. ‘I know you don’t like me and would rather I were anywhere but here. All the same, I have come for your good. The sooner the lot of us get to the station, the better.’

‘The station?’ said Nancy. ‘Why, what’s the trouble?’

‘It’s every kind of trouble,’ Mr. Browne said. ‘They are fighting down on the quays now.’

‘Fighting?’ Nancy cried.

And Mrs. Furness said, ‘Oh dear, oh dear! It’s the first time I have been abroad for five years, and everything’s gone wrong from the very start.’

‘Now it’s no use making a fuss,’ Mr. Browne said sharply. ‘Facts are facts. What we’ve got to do is to find the hotel ’bus and get away as soon as possible. One thing leads to another,’ he added. ‘We may all be shot by the evening.’

‘My husband went out,’ Nancy Preston said slowly, ‘to see about some tickets.’

‘Went out?’ said Mr. Browne in his most melancholy voice. ‘Tchut! tchut!’ He had a most maddening fashion of clicking his false teeth together. ‘That was a great mistake. He may be arrested, and you’ll never see him any more.’

‘Arrested?’ said Nancy angrily. ‘What nonsense! He’s an Englishman, with his passport and everything.’

‘You may be as rude as you like, Mrs. Preston,’ Mr. Browne replied. ‘I won’t take any offence at all, but to be an Englishman may be in twenty-four hours from now as useless as being a Hottentot.’

Then they stopped and stared at one another in silence because, just outside the window and almost as clear as though it were in the room, there was a sound of two rifle shots.

‘Well, I’m damned!’ said Nancy, turning back to the window.

She had then a very odd experience, for the little street that she had known and loved was gone. Of course, in the physical sense it was still there. There was the window with the gaily-coloured shawls (a bright purple shawl, with dark red flowers, could be seen, a magnificent splash of colour, as clearly as anything from the hotel window), the small café, with four little chairs and two tiny tables outside, the church with the worn steps, the patient, pathetic Madonna and Child. All these were still there, but spiritually, in every way that really mattered, the street of ten minutes before was gone. The queer thing was that there was nobody to be seen, except the young soldier who had taken guard on the church steps with his rifle, and he now, instead of standing sturdily there, his dark, rather sallow face looking sternly in front of him, was lying flat on the step, one leg bent under him in a very unreal fashion. It was this figure that had in one moment changed the street. He was dead, and even as she looked the door of the church very cautiously opened. Two young soldiers came out, looked swiftly about them, and then dragged the fallen body into the church with them.

Then people did die! They were shot right in front of you in a perfectly ordinary street, in the middle of an ordinary shopping morning. She turned back, looked at the room, and saw that Mr. Browne and Mrs. Furness were gone—she was alone.

What about Hamish? She hated him. She was divorcing him. She would, in all probability, never see him again after to-morrow, save for one or two horrid little meetings at the lawyers’. And yet most certainly she did not wish him to be shot. For a moment the thought came to her that he had deserted her, seeing how difficult things were going to be, and then almost as swiftly as the thought was the certain knowledge that whatever she did, even though they were going to be divorced within a week or two, he would never leave her in a hole, or indeed anyone for whom he had the slightest responsibility. And at that she would have begun to feel proud of him again as she had used to do were it not that there he was, standing in the doorway, carrying a small paper parcel.

‘Oh! you’ve come back, have you?’ she said angrily. It was the strangest thing, that the sight of him, thick and stubborn and obstinate, roused all her animosity again. The sight of the pale, hair-cropped back of his neck exasperated her still more. If he had not insisted on that haircut they might, by this time, be out of this horrible town.

‘Of course I’ve come back,’ he said quickly. ‘We’ve got to get out of this. They are fighting near the post office and there are several churches on fire. The thing for us to do is to get to the Consulate as quickly as possible.’

‘Aren’t you being rather melodramatic?’ she said haughtily.

‘No, I’m not. I’m exaggerating nothing. It’s a revolution, my dear, and not only here, but all over Spain.’

She looked at him as though she detested him. He irritated her so intensely, behaving as though he still owned her after all that had happened.

‘Well,’ she said slowly, ‘if you are frightened, that’s no reason why I should be. You can go to your Consulate.’

He made a movement as though he would. When he was very angry all colour left his brown cheeks and his black eyes turned darker. She had thought, in the old days when she loved him, that this was really some kind of proof of personal immortality, because it was exactly like a lamp going out, the lamp of his personality. His soul had withdrawn because it was so deeply hurt that it was indecent to look at it. He made a half-movement as if to go, but he did not.

‘You can say what you like,’ he answered; ‘there’s real danger and I’ve got to look after you.’

Then she lost her temper altogether. ‘You haven’t got to look after me. You haven’t, you haven’t! That’s why the trouble always came, you’re so damned bossy. You think that I’m an infant still. I can look after myself perfectly.’

But she stopped because he was gone.

The room seemed most remarkably empty, and while she looked about it in a kind of bewildered fashion, she heard very clearly the pit-pat, pit-pat of a machine-gun. She looked out of the window again and saw that now, at one end of the street, a number of men were building up a kind of barricade. They had an upturned taxi there and some big pieces of wood, which looked as though they had been torn out of the streets. Their eyes seemed to be fastened on the little church. She went to the door of her room, opened it, and stepped out into the passage. There was not a sound anywhere and the deathlike stillness of the hotel frightened her more than anything else had done.

She looked down the long passage, which had so often resounded to the merry bustle and traffic of waiters and tourists and friends. There was no one there at all. A blind somewhere was tapping against the window. She had never felt so hopeless in her life. ‘What ought I to do?’ she thought, and then, in spite of her resolve to remain calm, she moved back a few steps hurriedly into her room, and instinctively shut the door because the pit-pat of the firing was suddenly much louder, right in the street below her window.

She stood there thinking, and, oddly, what she was thinking was not about herself, but about Hamish. What she wanted, she discovered, more clearly than anything else, was to prove that he had not deserted her, and her desire to prove that irritated her, because, after all, her life with him was finished, and whether he deserted her or not was of no matter. And yet it was of terrible importance to her that he did not desert her. It looked like it. There was the hotel, so silent, fighting in the street beyond the window, and herself quite alone in the world. Had she irritated him so profoundly that he had really decided never to think of her again? And at that thought there was an uneasy sensation of loss, and the silence of the hotel irritated her. There must be people about somewhere. She could not be the only person alive in the whole hotel. She would go and find someone. So down the passage she went, down the stairs, into the hall. Still there was no one within sight. She opened the side door beyond the dining-room and looked into the little street.

At the end, on her right, she saw the barricade, a lifeless, ugly thing, the upturned taxi, piles of wood, no human being. Nobody was in the street, and then, quite suddenly, as though someone had given a command, the church door opened, a man carrying a rifle ran out. He dashed down the steps, turned, and started down the street in the direction opposite the barricade. Instantly there was a sound of a machine-gun, although nobody was in sight. The man, who was a stout, thick fellow, gave a jump in the air and turned round. For a second of time Nancy saw his face quite close to her, staring at her, and it had on it an expression of extreme astonishment. She was surprised that she was able to photograph it on her brain so clearly. She would never forget it again, a broad, rather plump face, with black eyebrows. There was one stare of astonishment and then the whole body crumpled as though some inside support, an iron pole or something of the kind, had been taken away from it.

The body lay in the middle of the street, both arms spread out as though in crucifixion. She stared, horrified. She had an amazing revelation, because she saw that she loved Hamish with every part of her being and that if it had been he who was lying in that crumpled heap, her life would be over and ended. That was no sentimental exaggeration. She was not posing. She was not wishing for something she had not got. It was exactly as though she had been looking at a parcel and thinking that the paper wrapper was the important thing, as though she had said: ‘I don’t like the wrapper. It’s a nasty, dirty colour. I won’t have anything to do with it.’ And then someone had torn the wrapper away and she had found inside a marvellous treasure. Something far better than anything she had ever hoped to possess. And that was Hamish. Their quarrel had been completely unreal, a host of little things, like flies, had obscured the window through which she looked into reality. Their life had been so easy, so conventionally pleasant, that trivialities had punished them by seeming important. She knew that she had been living a completely unreal life, and in this instant of revelation (because it was only an instant) she saw why it was that some men, after the war, although maimed and wounded, had told her that they had found something of value there. She understood now what they meant.

She looked at the dead man in the road in a kind of stupor, but her anxiety for Hamish was far greater than her consciousness of anything else. Her own death seemed nothing. That the whole of Barcelona should be blown up, that Spain should be reduced to a red ruin—none of that seemed to matter.

She ran back into the hotel, and inside the hall, close by the table where the porter ought to be, was Mrs. Furness, who at once gripped her arm.

‘Oh, thank God, thank God!’ she said over and over again. She was shaking from head to foot. She reminded Nancy of a cow she had once seen in a pen at a country market. The cow’s eyes had been so bitterly terrified that Nancy had gone up to it and stroked it. She did not want to stroke Mrs. Furness. She did not mind how frightened she was. She wanted only one thing in the world—to know where Hamish might be. Mrs. Furness burst into tears. Her sobbing was almost a howl.

‘They’re shooting, everywhere, all round us. They’ll be burning the hotel down. Where are we to go? What are we to do?’

‘You had better come up to my room again.’

She dragged Mrs. Furness up the stairs. She felt that in her room she might think more sanely, and also that it would be there that Hamish would come if he returned.

They had hardly reached her room, and closed the door, when there was an explosion so terrible that a looking-glass fell forward and crashed, a jug on the wash-stand lopsided over, and the horrible picture of a sacred bleeding heart, that had hung above the bed, slithered down the wall as though it were alive. Mrs. Furness fell on her knees and at an ordinary time would have been a figure for laughter as she waved her arms in the air as though she were swimming.

Nancy drew the blind aside again and looked through the window. She saw that some kind of a bomb had been thrown at the church, that the roof was beginning to blaze. A great fountain of smoke burst into the air as though it had been captured for years and was frantically happy at its release, and flames began to blaze about, raising their heads here and there, and then, emboldened by their success, growing larger and larger. The fierce light of the fire fought the fierce light of the day and filled Nancy’s bedroom with an angry glare. There was a noise like huge sheets of paper being torn up by an angry man.

Mrs. Furness shrieked, ‘There are men inside the church. Men, men, they’ll be burnt.’

Nancy thought, ‘Hamish is in the town somewhere. Perhaps he is dead.’

She turned back to Mrs. Furness, speaking very quietly. ‘Get up and sit on the bed. Nobody’s going to touch you. If I were you, I’d go quietly out of the hotel, walk down the main street, and find your way to the British Consulate. Nobody’s going to harm you. Anyway, you’d better not stay in the hotel. If they throw another of those things, it won’t be pleasant. As it is, the fire’s only the other side of the street. I’ve got to find my husband.’

Two thoughts ran concurrently in her mind. Someone inside herself said to her: ‘Whatever happens, whether you find him or not, you must never forget this moment of experience. If you do find him, and everything goes well again, and you pass once more into ordinary life, say to yourself often, “It’s very easy to live a life of entire unreality. It’s very easy for all your values to be wrong. Let no small things in your relationship with him ever disturb you again. Remember the burning church and the man lying in the road. And if you do not find him, if you never see him again, remember you lost him because you were so foolish as to let little things matter—a haircut, for instance.” ’

With that voice, there was also her own voice, saying: ‘Now you must be practical, quite definite. I must quietly think out what is the best way to find him.’

The best way obviously was to go to the British Consulate. He might very possibly be there, trying for some way of helping her, or he might even have been there and they could tell her something about him. She was so calm that she patted Mrs. Furness on the shoulder and said to her:

‘Now come with me. We’re quite all right. Nobody’s going to touch us.’

They went through the hotel and still there was nobody to be seen. They could hear a dog howling somewhere, and all the time there was that constant, angry whispering sound as of someone tearing paper, and the smell of burning, which seemed now to penetrate everything. They reached the street and saw a number of people running towards them—women screaming and waving their arms. They stood quite quietly on the pavement, watching the people run by. No one paid them the least attention.

‘I don’t know exactly where the Consulate is,’ Nancy said. ‘I haven’t even got its address.’

Mrs. Furness said nothing, but stood breathing quickly, her mouth a little open, and in her eyes that idiotic stare, as though she were seeing nothing. All she said was, with a little shiver, ‘How horrid everything smells.’

Nancy herself was bewildered. The world was on fire and she turned round a corner of the hotel, into the little street which now was wildly illuminated with the burning church. The flames were roaring to heaven, but there was no other sound, no rifle fire, no sign of anybody. Yes, there was someone. She moved forward into the middle of the street, regardless of any possible risk, because there, lying flat on his face, his legs spread out, quite obviously dead, was Hamish. She stood transfixed where she was, a roaring in her ears beyond the shout of the flames. It was Hamish, his thick, broad body, his strong legs, his jet-black hair, his thin silk coat. She had seen him lie exactly like that when, waking early, she had turned and found him with his head in the pillow, his arms bent under his face—and as she looked, she knew that she was on the edge of absolute madness. It would take something as slight as the blowing of a straw to make her go dancing and singing up the street, waving her arms and shrieking, not caring for anything in the world. She drew a little nearer. She bent down, and with that movement was already swinging over into insanity, because she planned to pick him up in her arms and sit there in the street, with the church burning above her, crooning to him, wiping the dust off his face, just sitting there with him in her arms until eternity.

She stared at him, at his broad shoulders, his stiff legs, the neat brown shoes, and then she saw that the back of his neck was covered with black hair, thick, low down, curling a little over his blue soft collar. The man lying there had not had a haircut for weeks.

She got up and walked slowly back to Mrs. Furness. Standing beside Mrs. Furness, supporting her with a stout hand, was Hamish.

‘You didn’t really think I’d left you, did you?’ he said sarcastically. ‘I’ve been waiting in the hall at the hotel. I knew you would come down, and then when you went out, I followed you.’

She kept her dignity. All she said was: ‘I’m sorry. I’ve been a perfect fool.’

‘That’s all right,’ he said quickly. ‘As a matter of fact, I was going to tell you that I was the fool in our room just now, but you wouldn’t let me. I’ve got a car at the back of the hotel.’

They got into it with surprising ease. Nobody was there. There was shouting in the distance, the sky was lit up in places as though by an unsteady searchlight, the reflection of fires. Otherwise they might be in a sleeping world. They drove off.

Mrs. Furness began to sob hysterically. ‘You must excuse me,’ she said, her big bosom heaving, ‘but I don’t know quite what I’m saying.’ She looked at Hamish. ‘You’ve had a haircut,’ she said idiotically.

He took one hand from the wheel and patted Nancy’s cheek with it. ‘Yes,’ he said, smiling; ‘but it was yesterday, a long time ago.’