Читать книгу Hans Frost - Hugh Walpole - Страница 5
ОглавлениеPRESENTATION
At this precise moment the Presentation was going on.
In the beautiful library Hans Frost was sitting and Mr. Frederick Osmaston, standing spiritually like a stork on one leg (he was tall and thin, untidy in odd places like a shaggy umbrella), was reading from his document:
'We, Your friends and admirers, feel that it is impossible to allow your Seventieth Birthday to pass without a sign from us of our affection and esteem.
'You have now for nearly forty years shown us all how Art may be nobly served. In an Age that offers continual evidence of the temptations to cheapness and hurry, you have with unswerving honesty and undoubting faith pursued the only honourable path. You have made it evident that the grand Art of Fiction is inexhaustible in her resources, is for ever opening new ways of adventure for those who follow in her train, and your wit, your gaiety of humour have proved again and again the generosity and wisdom of your known genius.
'But best of all, your knowledge of the human heart, your tolerance and generosity of spirit, have created for us a world of companions, enriching our lives with fresh and enduring characters. So long as the English tongue may last, the earth will claim for its noblest inhabitants the Duchess of Paradis and Hunter Clive, Isabel Praddon, Clarissa French, the King of Wizards, Mont St. Leger and the Queen of the Crystal Sea, Berenice. Whether in the green woods and glassy lakes of your world of magic or in the everyday streets of your earth-bound cities, the human note is never absent and the tender love for your fellow-men makes life happier for every one of us.
'May destiny allow you many more years in which you may add masterpieces to the English language and splendid hours to the lives of your friends.'
'That's pretty awful,' thought Hans Frost, and then immediately afterwards: 'Very jolly of them to take all the trouble.' Then a little later: 'They like doing it, though. Gunter's been in the Seventh Heaven. . . . "Follow in her train"--that's bad. . . . Whole thing too flowery. . . . Nice of them to do it, though. . . . Why does Osmaston always half shave himself? Better not do it at all.'
There was a pause. It was time for him to reply. He rose to his feet.
'I must say I think it's delightful of everybody. I don't feel like seventy, you know. But you make me realise that I've been an unconscionable time at the whole thing. It's all very well for you to say that you'd like me to go on for years and years, but we've got to make way for the young people, you know. . . .' (He looked across at the rather supercilious, thin young man in pince-nez, Maurice Follett, who represented in the deputation the Young Generation.) 'And yet it's hard to stop. I can't promise you that I will, and, as there are no reporters present, I may as well confess to you that I'd hate to stop. We're like that--eh, Gunter?--becomes a habit.' (He looked down at Martha, the notorious dachshund, who, her head on her paws, was regarding young Follett's thick and ugly shoes with arrogant suspicion.) 'All the same, I'm immensely touched by your taking this trouble. I've done what I can, but you know as well as I do that the thing's a snare and a delusion. I can only say at seventy what I wouldn't have said at thirty, that it's damned difficult to write a decent sentence and that the best things come, after all, by accident. . . . But you don't want me to preach to you. I can only thank you and all the friends whom you represent and to whom I hope to reply, for your goodness, kindness, generosity.'
He sat down. Martha looked up at him sharply as though to say, 'Not so bad. Might have been better,' and settled down to the ironical study of Follett's shoes again. But now the real moment had arrived. Sir Giles Gunter, K.C.B., rose rather ponderously from his chair and approached with grave solemnity towards a paper parcel lying on the table close at hand. Osmaston also gravely approached.
Gunter, pushing up his gold-rimmed spectacles, spoke with an odd bark that resembled nothing so much as an elderly seal at feeding-time:
'We took much counsel together and decided at length, my dear old friend, that the enclosed would--ahem--yes--would be more gratifying to your artistic feelings than anything else we could find for you.'
Gunter was moved, his emotion was choking him. He put his large hand on the shoulder of Hans Frost, who had risen and was approaching the parcel with the eagerness of a child. He had, all his life, adored presents. He got that, perhaps, from his German mother. Anything with paper round it.
His heart warmed to Giles Gunter, whom he had known for thirty years and with whom he had quarrelled a thousand times. Gunter's feminine nature adored quarrels, because of the reconciliations that followed them. And to-day Gunter really loved Hans Frost, a little because he loved him, a little because he was a great man and a good deal because he, Giles Gunter, was officiating at an important ceremony.
The other two members of the deputation stood modestly in the background, Peter Westcott because he was modest, and Follett because he was too arrogant and aloof to push himself vulgarly forward.
Osmaston produced a pair of large scissors. The string was cut. Gunter, his round, red face illuminated with a kind of sacred priestly fervour, lifted the object out of the paper and, with a bow and a triumphant smile as though he, and he alone, had just at great personal sacrifice given birth to this lovely thing, presented it to Frost.
And it was a lovely thing! It was a very small oil painting and the artist was Manet.
The picture had for its subject two ladies and a gentleman outside a print shop in Paris. One lady wore a blue crinoline and the other a white; there was a little fuzzy white dog; the glass windows shone in the afternoon light, and beyond the pearl-grey wall of the old house there was a sky of broken blue and swollen white cloud. It was a very lovely little Manet. . . .
'Oh!' cried Hans Frost, and Martha gave a sharp short bark, because she perceived that something exceptional was happening.
'We thought you would like it,' said Sir Giles, fingering the old gold frame with proud, possessive fingers. 'We were fortunate that it turned up in the market when it did. The very thing, I said when I saw it, the very thing for my old friend.'
Meanwhile Hans Frost was unconscious of Sir Giles and of everyone present. He saw only the picture. He had always adored Manet, a painter closer to his soul than any other. He entered into the heart of a Manet at once, as though it had been painted for himself alone. He could be critical about everything else in the world (and was so), but not about Manet. When he was depressed or troubled by his liver he went and looked at Manet. . . . And now he would have a Manet all of his own, his very own--that deep and tender beauty, that blue crinoline, that fuzzy little dog, that white cloud against the gentle blue; these were his for ever.
His eyes shone with happiness as he turned round to his friends. He held out his hands to Gunter and Osmaston. He smiled beyond them to the friendly Westcott and the superior Follett. 'What am I to say? What can I say? That you should have thought of me at all--and then thought of this! I'm seventy to-day, as you remind me, and perhaps I shouldn't be thinking any longer of possessions, but how can I help it when you thrust under my nose such a lovely thing? I'm an acquisitive creature, I fear. I have always been. I love beautiful things, and I have a fancy that they return the affection that one gives them! But this! I can't say any more. . . . I'm overcome. . . . I truly am. I'm touched to the very heart.'
And he was. He had in his eyes the look of the child that knows, to the exclusion of everything and everyone else, that the immediate moment is supremely good. Generosity, ardour, unselfish delight, all the fine emotions were there, and there was nothing to cloud them.
Follett himself was touched. He rubbed his large shoes the one against the other.
'It's the least we can do--all of us--for what you have done for us.' And yet only the night before, to a chosen gathering, in his high falsetto voice, he had proclaimed:
'Frost! . . . The Dark Ages. . . . Fairy stories, I ask you.'
But Hans was not yet conscious of any of them. On his short, sturdy legs he went about the room, holding the picture at arm's length, propping it now against the Epstein bust on the mantelpiece, now against the blue Chinese clock, now against the marble lion--one of two book-rests--now against the drawing of his wife's head by Sargent.
Then, laying it down, he turned again to them, laughing:
'But after all, my friends, from whom is this lovely thing? Am I not to have their names?'
Osmaston, who by his right as secretary of the Authors' Society was the official head of the deputation, unrolled a large and handsome parchment.
'Here they are, Mr. Frost.'
And there they were, some three hundred and sixty of them, all neatly laid out in alphabetical order--ANKER, ALFRED L.; APPLEWARD, RICHARD; ARON, ARTHUR . . . yes, many of the finest names, not only of Great Britain, but of Europe and America as well.
He took the two sheets and smiled upon them. He would look at them carefully in a while. He put his hand on Sir Giles' massive shoulder.
'This has been an occasion. . . . I shall only realise it slowly. I'm a little overcome, to tell you the truth. Yes, just a little. I'm seventy, you know. You've said it yourselves. Giles, my wife's waiting downstairs to give you all tea. Lady Gunter's with her, I believe. Will you go down? I'll join you shortly.'
He beamed upon them all. They passed him down into the hall, where Bigges was waiting.
He stopped Westcott for a moment. 'Mr. Westcott . . . I was greatly pleased to see you here. I'd like to tell you, if I may, how immensely I enjoyed an article of yours--somewhere. I read it at the Club the other evening--an article on Henry Galleon.'
'Yes,' said Westcott, smiling. 'It was in the Westminster Monthly.'
'You knew him evidently?'
'Only very slightly, I'm afraid. I was at school with a son of his, and when I was a young man in London I had an evening with him--an evening I shall never forget.'
'No, he was a very remarkable man--a great man. He was a close friend of mine, one of my closest. There's not a day that I don't miss him. I'm glad you knew him. You got him wonderfully well in that article.'
'Thank you, sir,' said Westcott.
'And I enjoyed that last book of yours, Wandering House. I've watched you for a long time. A good book.'
'Thank you,' said Westcott again.
'Will you come and see me some time? Come in bachelor fashion and smoke a pipe.'
'I'll be proud.'
'All right, then. I'll get hold of you.'
Westcott closed the door behind him. The library was left to Hans and Martha.
