Читать книгу Captain Nicholas - Hugh Walpole - Страница 11

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On the way downstairs he met the servant Janet coming up. He paused to let her pass.

“Mustn’t pass on the stairs, Janet,” he said cheerfully. “It’s unlucky.”

But she didn’t answer; only, her tall figure drawn to its full height, quietly went by.

“She detests me, that woman,” he thought, and for a moment considered someway in which he might vex her, for, like all egotists, he hated, like a child, to be disliked.

They all went down to dinner. Nicholas sat between Nell and Grace, and he made himself charming to both of them. Family meals had become something quite different since Nicholas’s arrival. Before, they had been a little dull—homely, comfortable, but a little dull. Nell and Romney were often out, and the older people asked one another questions about the day and concentrated on their own personal well-being. Grace always had plenty to say, but nobody listened. Old Mrs. Carlisle came down sometimes, but lately had had, very often, her dinner in bed. It was noticed that now that Nicholas was here she came down every night. Fanny was quiet, seeing that everyone had what they wanted.

The food, Nicholas thought, was good for English food. He was pleased about that, and Charles had some good wine in his cellar. Before Nicholas came it had been only on special occasions that it appeared, for neither Charles nor Matthew cared much about it. But now Nicholas said: “Jolly good claret, old man,” and Charles was pleased.

Romney and Nell had agreed in the past that family meals were pretty awful, but now everything was different. Everyone drank more, and Nicholas’s stories were wonderful.

“The amount he knows,” Romney said to Nell. “The places he’s been and the things he’s read.”

“Yes,” said Nell, who had not surrendered yet. “When you spend your life living on other people you have plenty of time to notice things.”

Nevertheless she herself admitted that he was wonderful company. But she didn’t like him. Why, she was not sure. It was the way that he looked at her, almost as though they shared some secret together. And she had told him nothing. He couldn’t know about Hector Collins, for instance.... Not that there was anything to know, of course.

The only one of them all who did not like these gay meals as much as the old ones was Fanny. She had enjoyed the quiet comfortable coziness, and both Charles and Romney, she thought, drank too much. And Grace was silly sometimes. Nicholas seemed to want her to be silly.

And then, after a thought or two like this, she blamed herself. How ungracious when Nicholas was so kind and jolly, when he had made himself so quickly at home with them all! They had never had so gay a time ... no, they had all needed waking up and here was Nicholas doing it for them. Dear Nicholas, the same clever, generous, irresponsible, warm-hearted boy that he had always been. As she listened to him she felt a wonderful pride in him. He was her brother, and she was sure that he was cleverer than anyone else in London. So clever was he that she found herself now a little shy of speaking in the rash careless way that had always been her habit. He was never unkind or rude, but sometimes now when she said something it did seem foolish, and she fancied that the others thought so, too. Only her sensitiveness, and it did not really suit her to be careful. Her considered remark was sometimes as silly as her spontaneous one, she was afraid. She wished that she had had a better education, but she and Grace really learnt nothing at that school in Wiltshire. Young people today knew so much about everything. She wondered, in fact, that Grace had so little fear of exposing herself. She never seemed to see that the others were laughing at her, or if she saw she did not care.

So she watched to see that everyone was happy, and said as little as possible. And then after a while she was afraid lest they should think her too quiet. So she joined in.

“The fact is,” said Nicholas, laughing, “that Einstein doesn’t care whether his theory is right or not. What he wants to do is to learn the violin.”

“Well,” said Fanny, “I know that Romney thinks he’s wonderful, but there was a picture in one of the papers the other day of his ‘Genesis’ and I’m sure no one could——”

Of course they all laughed at that, and even Grace cried triumphantly: “You mean Epstein, darling—the man who put that thing in the Park. They said it was meant for the birds to drink out of, but I’m told the birds won’t go near it—frightened of it, and I’m sure I don’t wonder....”

“We’re two silly old women, Grace and I,” Fanny thought, and wished that Charles at least had not laughed. He did not know much about Epstein himself, come to that.

But it was Nicholas who said:

“It’s all very well your laughing at your mother, Nell. The next generation will be laughing at you very soon.”

And that did not really make it better because, until he said that, Fanny had not thought that Nell was laughing at her.

They talked about what they would do after dinner. Now that Nicholas was there they played bridge—Nicholas, Nell, Romney, and Charles. They did not talk and read books round the fire any more. Matthew went to his room, and Grace and Fanny read, but they felt self-conscious. And Nicholas was so good at bridge. Charles and Romney lost money every night.

However, this evening it was not to be.

“No. I’ve got to go out and see a friend,” Nicholas said.

They were all sorry.

“Yes, an old friend. I knew him in Italy.”

“Ask him to a meal,” said Charles.

“Oh, thanks very much, but I don’t think you’d like him. He’s one of my bad friends.”

Everyone laughed. Nicholas and his bad friends! It sounded most romantic.

Abel Mandez was lodging at a hotel called “The Prince Regent,” off Victoria Street.

“Like his cheek,” Nicholas thought when he read his badly written, badly spelt note, “to get as near as he can.” But indeed Abel had been quick this time! How the devil had he known? Nicholas himself had decided to throw himself on the family only a day or two before his actual arrival. At the shabby little hotel in Paris where he and Lizzie had been staying, Abel had made no appearance.

“He knew that I hadn’t a bean,” Nicholas reflected. “He thinks now that I’ve come into cash again. But I haven’t yet. The day that we turned up in London I positively hadn’t a sou. And all next day only that scrap of change I picked off the table.” But last night Charles had lent him fifty pounds—and that was only a beginning. Young Romney and his pictures, Matthew and his kind heart, Grace and her sentimentality. Oh! there was lots to be done here!

“And so Abel jolly well knows. I shouldn’t wonder if he’s got the whole family at his finger ends already. Marvellous fellow!” As he walked from the house down the little silent street, past the school, under the archway into the lights and bustle of Victoria Street, he felt, with a warm almost animal pleasure, his other life streaming in upon him—the life of risks and adventures, rascals and scoundrels, the life without law or principle that was really his. Once upon a time this had been a world rather thinly peopled and exceptional enough to be almost melodramatic. The high lights in it—the flight from Jamaica, the death of his wife in Paris, Bawtrey’s suicide in Monte Carlo, the thieving in Rapallo, Saunders’s death in Venice, these might once have been called melodrama. Novelists threw bright colours on just such incidents as these, drab and unromantic though they always were in reality, comprised of discarded tram tickets, the week’s washing, wine splashed on a marble-topped table, a barber’s impertinence, a fit of indigestion, a woman’s cold.... Yes, once exceptional enough to be lurid, but now the whole world was composed, it seemed to Nicholas, of just such figures, just such incidents. He moved surrounded by a constant company of men, out of a job, ready to do anything for money, by suicide, murder, and robbery with violence. One figure led to another. Touch Abel and you found Marston, have a meal with Marston and he introduced you to Likiadopulos, drink with Likiadopulos and he asked you to meet Mme. Balzac.... Always a little lower....

Certainly, during those last months in Italy, he had kept some queer company, and on the whole it was as well that he had pulled himself out of it when he did. But the thing that he loved was the contrast of these two worlds. To pass, as he was now doing, from the English domesticity of the house in Westminster, the quiet old-fashionedness of those people who all felt so safe, who lived, even in these days, with the habits and morals and blind security of old Victorian England, to appear to be one of them, to mimic their tones (but was it mimicking? he was by birth and breeding one of their very selves), to compel their trust, to make them fond of him and proud of him—and then, with one step, to pass into this other real world where society was disintegrating into chaos, where there were no laws, no rules except that the cleverest collared the booty—yes, this was a sensation that stirred his blood!

It would be fun tonight, sitting in the shabby little room with the aspidistra and the smell of drains and stale tobacco (he knew the room before he had seen it), to tell Abel in his own humorous fashion that this time he should not have a penny from him, that he could hang on as long as he liked and starve for all Nicholas cared, and then to see Abel, as so often before he had seen him, smile and roll one of his poisonous cigarettes and say that he didn’t care, that he was in London for his own pleasure, that he had written to Nicholas only to send him a friendly greeting, and so on and so on....

But then (for now he was nearing the street) Nicholas for a moment paused. He really, this time, did not want Abel’s company. He liked this place—it was new and refreshing, this simple and childlike atmosphere. It was good for Lizzie. He felt an affection for all of them, the Old Lady, Fanny, Grace, Charles, Matthew, the children. For a time at least he would try and behave. It would be amusing for a while to play at being one of themselves. Although everything in which they believed was nonsense, that very fact made them, for the present at least, rather touching to him. It was so long since he had seen people like this, living, breathing people who believed in God and the family and wedded bliss. Fanny was as strange to him, after all these years, as some queer bird in a zoo. Over and over again in these last days, listening to her innocent prattle, he had had to pinch his mental self to persuade it that this was actual.

That they believed in him and trusted him touched him very little, for, in these days, that anyone should believe in anyone implied an imbecility that deserved almost any punishment!

But he was, in truth, grateful to them for giving him a new sensation, and while it was new he did not intend to spoil it. So—let Abel keep off! He would jolly well see to it that he did!

So, murmuring to himself:

“The gates of my house are built of yellow gold,

The hall of my house is paved with white jade,”

he entered the portals of the Prince Regent.