Читать книгу Hans Frost - Hugh Walpole - Страница 8
ОглавлениеMA MARRIOTT
Martha stood up, looked in her master's face and yawned. Frost started. For how long had he been sitting there? He shivered. He was still permeated with this sense that some crisis had come to him, as yet veiled but in a moment to be revealed.
Ruth would be hurt at his not going down to her tea-party. But he would not go down. He did not want to see any of them or indulge in the silly, smirking kind of talk that would be provided with the tea and bread and butter.
Silly? Smirking? Were these the words to use about Ruth's tea-parties, those gentle, well-bred ceremonies instituted especially for himself? But tea-parties . . . things that no man should attend. And yet how many during these last years he had attended!
In his own house, of course. Coming into the dignified, cheery, curtained room a little late, a few chosen spirits all ready there, some silly woman murmuring as she rises, 'Ah, here is the Master!' Standing there, his cup in his hand, listening to the gentle almost whispering conversation, breaking in upon it with an occasional remark, stupid enough, but saluted by everyone as though it were an Olympian judgement. . . . Ruth in the background, beautiful, dignified, serenely pleased. Why now did the contemplation of this make him shiver?
He rose, stretching his arms, and yawned. Martha yawned too. She looked at him cynically, wagged her tail a trifle and examined the carpet.
He addressed her:
'Shall we go downstairs? What do you think? Are you also ashamed of society? You are always a little ashamed of me. Now I come to think of it, you have been ashamed for some time. Why? What have I done that's disgraceful? Or is it simply that you're bored with me and all my works? Well, I'm bored with them myself. They are beneath contempt perhaps. And you and I are beneath contempt too. The Manet is worth a hundred of us. What do you say, Martha? Shall we do away with ourselves and come out in a new incarnation? You as a Peke, perhaps, or a bulldog, I as a great newspaper magnate or a pimp in a small French watering-place. What does it matter as long as we have bellies in good working order and can have our eyebrows lifted?'
He swung round, and there was Henry Galleon surveying him from his gold frame, the wise broad brow, the kind benignant eyes, the slightly ironic mouth. 'Yes, you were a Master. . . . Not the kind of sham I am. But didn't you think yourself a sham? Hadn't you moments of ironic horror at yourself? No, you were a tranquil man. You liked your joke, but you were secure because you saw so far. But I . . . I . . . I'm myopic. I can't see my own hand.'
He stood feeling a distress and an agitation that he had not known, he fancied, for years. The room seemed to him overpoweringly hot. He was stifled. He must get out. But where?
He thought then of his mother-in-law. So uncomfortable was he that he wanted to add to his discomfort. He would rub salt into the wound. Despising himself as he did, he would inflict upon himself the most intolerable company he could find--and that was most certainly his mother-in-law's. He would spend ten minutes in her company, just to prove to himself how low humanity could sink!
He went into the passage, Martha following him.
How still the house was! Not a sound anywhere. The long, dusky passage seemed to invite him to mysteries. At the end of it, like an old witch brooding over her toad-and-snake cauldron, was his mother-in-law. Perhaps it was she who had thrown this spell over him. She would love to do him any kind of harm. He would go and investigate.
She had for some time now decided that she was an invalid and could move only with difficulty. He was convinced that there was nothing whatever the matter with her, save that she ate too much and did not take any exercise.
She was, it was true, an old woman, but had, he was sure, a sort of demonic good health, and the only way that she would ever disappear would be on a broomstick swinging through the night to Satanic revels.
How he hated her--and he was in the mood just now to spend time with someone he hated.
He went down the passage and knocked on the door.
A soft echo came from within the room.
'Come in.'
She had arranged her room according to her fancy, and her fancy was for everything dark and dingy. The window curtains were of some heavy dull brown material. The chairs and sofa were of a thick grey padded stuff, as though hippos had spawned their young. On the walls hung photogravures of 'Queen Victoria receiving the news of her Accession,' 'The Charge of the Guards at Waterloo,' and a large representation of Mr. Gladstone addressing the House of Commons.
She was taking her tea. She sat in a vast arm-chair over which her black silk dress billowed in multitudinous folds. Her face was yellow and peaked and lined, but her eyes were alive and bright. Her grey hair, spare and thin, was pulled back tightly over her scalp and parted in a sharp white line down the middle.
She wore black mittens and, when he came in, was peering into the teapot, as though she expected to find a hoard of gold there.
She greeted him very briskly and with a kind of coy amiability. She pretended always that she was devoted to him and that they were the best of friends.
She hated Martha and was offended when he brought her with him. So he always brought her.
'Well, Hans! Not having tea with Ruth?'
Her eyes were the only part of her that she could not control, and she gave him a bright, hostile glance before she again investigated the teapot.
He stood looking at her. 'No. It's my seventieth birthday, and I think that so important an occasion should be spent in monastic seclusion.'
She never knew whether he were laughing at her or no, which was one reason why she disliked him. 'Leaving poor Ruth to entertain all those gentlemen alone? Naughty, naughty!'
She waggled a finger at him and then poked a teaspoon into the teapot.
'Oh, they'd had enough of me. They've been making me speeches.'
'Speeches?' she echoed, her voice muffled by the teapot.
'Yes. Telling me I'm a wonder. Which of course I'm not, as you very well know, but they must have their little bit of fun.'
She poured herself out some more tea, drank it thirstily, shrugged her old shoulders.
'Ruth thinks you're a wonder,' she said at last. 'And what have you come to pay me a visit for?'
He smiled.
'I like a word with you once and again.'
'What can you see in a stupid old woman like me?'
'I see all sorts of things.'
'Not nice things, I'll be bound. Oh, I know what you think of me. You needn't pretend.'
'And what do you think of me?' he asked her, laughing.
'I don't think of you--except in relation to Ruth. When an ordinary old woman like me has got an extraordinary daughter, a wonderful, marvellous daughter, who is always so good and kind to her, the most unselfish creature in the world, why, then, the old mother wants only her happiness. So long as you make Ruth happy I'm content.'
'And don't I?' he asked her.
'It isn't you that makes Ruth happy. It's her character. She's so noble and fine that she's bound to be happy.'
There was something genuine here. He hadn't reached his seventy years without knowing that there was fineness in the worst of human beings, and this old woman, nasty though she was, was not the worst by any means.
At that moment there came to him something that Coleridge had said about Sterne: 'There always is in a genuine humour an acknowledgement of the hollowness and farce of the world and its disproportion to the godlike in us,' or something of the kind.
Well, there was a scrap of the godlike in old Mrs. Marriott, only a scrap, but still something.
'But still I don't make her unhappy.'
'Nobody could make her that. She's got too complete a command of herself. She's proud of you. That makes her happy.'
He looked at Martha.
'She's proud of the position she's made for me. But do you think she's proud of what I've done?'
There was a new note here. The old lady pricked up her ears. This sounded strangely like a criticism of her dear daughter.
Her voice rang sharp as she answered. 'Well I never. . . . What a thing to say! Of course she's proud of what you've done.'
'I wasn't sure,' he answered, smiling. 'I'm not very sure of anything this evening. My seventieth birthday has upset me. Didn't you feel that a little on your seventieth birthday?'
She eyed him sharply. Again she didn't know whether he were laughing at her or no. Her eye, in its suspicious whirl, caught the dog. She was sure that Martha was laughing at her.
'I can't think what you want to bring that dog around with you everywhere for. Dogs are messy things, in my opinion. . . . No, I don't think my seventieth birthday upset me. One birthday's like another.'
'That's just where you're wrong. One birthday isn't like another. Every birthday's one nearer the end.'
She eyed him with hatred. He knew how deeply she resented to be reminded of her dissolution. It was an insult to her egotism. 'You must trust in God more,' she said.
He leant forward, resting on the back of a chair and staring at Victoria in her nightdress.
'He, too, has changed with my birthdays,' he answered. 'Seventy is a lot for Him to take an interest in.'
She recovered her pretended amiability. 'You're a very clever man, Hans, far too clever for me. I've never been clever. I'm an old woman, as you say, and should be preparing for my end. It will come soon doubtless, and no loss to anybody.'
She fished in his eyes for a contradiction (she had a very determined vanity), but she caught nothing. He wasn't for the moment thinking of her.
'I don't feel old,' he said. 'That's the devil of it. I feel as though I were just beginning life, which is absurd. I want to be taken out of myself. I'm as sick of myself as any young man of twenty can be. Books . . . silly, futile things, unless you're not a writer of them. And then anything can do the trick. The Family Herald just as well as Adonais, if you're in the proper receptive mood.
'Well, well, I'll have a bath and dress at my leisure. There's nothing pleasanter.'
He could see that she was uneasy. There was something unusual about him to-night, and this something unusual might threaten her daughter. She sniffed peril to Ruth, as the native sniffs the tiger. There was something in this old man's eye that boded ill. And, in any case, what was he doing up here instead of entertaining Ruth's guests downstairs? Why hadn't he gone down?
She hated him. He made her restless. Always thinking of himself. But she smiled at him, her dry, wintry, withered smile.
'Ruth's waiting for you all this time downstairs. You should go down and help her.'
'They've gone, or at least I hope so. I'll send Martha down to see.' Martha, at the sound of her name, looked up hopefully. She detested this room. She knew that no one loved her here.
'Martha! Really, the way you go on about that dog! One would think that she was a human being.'
'A human being! She's far finer. Devoted and wise. She's elegant and humorous and knows what she wants. She doesn't change with every wind. My seventieth birthday is neither good nor bad news to her. I'm a fixed object to her. Were my face all boils she'd love me just as much. Of how many humans can that be said?'
Mrs. Marriott shook her black silk.
'You never say what you mean. I think it's a pity myself.'
He shook his head at her, laughing.
'Perhaps I do--more than you think. Good night. Sleep well.'
He went.
