Читать книгу Captain Nicholas - Hugh Walpole - Страница 15

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Romney, also, like his young brother, was finding his home not what it had been three weeks earlier. He had been for a long time finding life very queer and very difficult, but, unlike the majority of his own generation, he kept his troubles to himself—absolutely to himself—and it was not until a day early in May that he talked to anyone about himself. Of all people the confessor that he chose was his Uncle Matthew. The way of it was this.

He had suffered a severe disappointment on that afternoon. While he was sitting at his desk in the little room at the Churchill Galleries someone told him that he was wanted on the telephone. He knew who it must be—Harry Rait.

“Hullo.”

“Hullo, Romney, old man.”

“Is that you, Harry?” (He felt his heart hammering.)

“Yes, of course.” A little pause. Then Harry’s voice again. “I say, I’m most awfully sorry, old man, I can’t come tonight.”

(Romney had known it. He had known it all the time.)

Sick with annoyance, hurt pride, and a devastating sense of loneliness, he said sharply:

“Why not?”

(He knew so well the way in which Harry, who was not imaginative, paused while he summoned up excuses.)

“Why, you see, old man, it’s like this. I’d forgotten all about the Bromleys. Clean forgotten. I promised them weeks ago. It’s bridge, and you know what it is—if one doesn’t go, one ruins their whole evening and so——”

“Oh, all right,” Romney answered savagely and put down the receiver. He hadn’t intended to be savage. He hated to lose his temper with Harry, simply because Harry didn’t mind in the least if he did, and he, Romney, hated to realize that Harry didn’t mind. Harry wouldn’t mind now. Harry wouldn’t care if he never saw Romney again, and returning into the exhibition room, facing the celebrated sculptures of M. Kaminski which everyone admired and no one would buy, Romney swore, for the one hundred and second time, that he didn’t care if he never saw Harry again, either, and for the one hundred and second time knew that it was a lie.

The sculptures of M. Kaminski were very fine indeed. There were six—“Torso,” “Woman Running,” “Solar Plexus,” “Bird in Flight,” “Rabbit,” and the vast accumulation “Mother Earth” in the middle of the room.

Romney looked at these and hated them, although but an hour ago he had thought them magnificent. Behind them, on the walls, were the flower paintings of that promising young Frenchman, M. Paul Fléhot.

Two young women were standing there lost in admiration.

“These are the sculptures of Kaminski?” the more elderly of the young women enquired.

“Yes, madam. And the flower paintings are by Fléhot.”

(Idiot! She was holding a catalogue. Why enquire?)

“Very fine! Magnificent! Don’t you think so, Doris? They are for sale, I suppose?”

“Of course, madam.”

She gave the “Torso” a prod.

“What is the name of this one?”

“Simply ‘Torso.’ ”

“ ‘Torso.’ How fine! Isn’t it fine, Doris?”

“Absolutely divine, darling.”

“You should look,” Romney went on, “at Fléhot’s paintings. Many people think him the finest young painter in France. This one”—he pointed—“is especially magnificent. His sense of colour is really superb. Those reds, those greens ...”

“Yes,” he was thinking, “I’m damned if I’ll bother with Harry any more. He’s always doing this kind of thing. And I’d ordered the dinner.” He broke off. The woman was speaking.

“They are for sale, I suppose?”

“Oh, yes, they are for sale.”

She turned to her friend.

“Doris, aren’t they divine?”

“Simply divine, darling.”

He thought: “It’s only because I give in to him about everything. If I stood up to him a bit ...” But it wouldn’t be any use. If Romney stood up to Harry, Harry would simply fade away. He wouldn’t care. How to make him care? How to hurt him? How to——?

“What’s the name of that one?” the woman asked. “I like that one.”

“It’s called ‘Chrysanthemums.’ ”

“Oh, those are chrysanthemums, Doris, those are chrysanthemums. Aren’t they lovely?”

“Simply lovely. And I like that blue one over there. Don’t you like that blue one, darling?”

“Yes. Lovely. What’s that blue one called?”

“Oh, that’s called ‘Pansies.’ ”

“Pansies! How darling!”

“... If only I could give him up,” he thought. “If only, on my way home tonight, I could say: ‘Well, that’s the last time I bother with him. After all, he doesn’t care for me. Not a bit.’ ”

“Well, we must be going now,” the woman said. “They’re simply too lovely.”

Marston came towards them and stopped them. Marston was so very clever; he could make people buy the most unlikely things, things that they didn’t want and would for the rest of their lives detest. Marston had all the qualities that Romney hadn’t. He was charming to everyone alike, he was never cross or put-out. He had in fact no private life at all, but existed only for the Churchill Galleries. His broad handsome figure, his smart, alert walk (a little automatic, as though a screw were turned in the back), his pleasant, easy, very English voice (so English that you must especially believe that he was speaking the truth when he praised foreign pictures)—all these things charmed visitors, reassured them and made them in the end proud of themselves (for he would say: “Well, it’s funny you should pick that one out. Martigue himself thinks that’s his best, but you’re the first one here to see how good it is”). He had all the gifts that Romney lacked, but Romney had the taste. Marston had no taste at all. He simply did not know one picture from another; when a discerning visitor appeared it was Romney who dealt with him. For Romney had a true flair. What is taste? Is there such a thing? Only Time and Mr. Clive Bell can decide. But Romney knew in his bones—somewhere in the middle of his spine—when pictures and sculptures were alive and when they were not. Alive for him, for him alone? Surely that says nothing? But his opinion was shared by the Tasters. The happy men whose lives are occupied in tasting different blends of tea know when tea is good. So the Tasters of Art. Romney was a Taster by instinct.

Today, however, he could taste nothing. Life was sour on the tongue. He was going home.

“I’m off,” he said to Marston.

“Oh, I say—are you? It’s early. Cardiff said he might be in and buy one of the Fléhots.”

“Well, if he comes tell him Numbers Three, Nine and Fourteen are the best. He doesn’t know. But Number Nine is a beauty really. Tell him it will be double its price one day. That will fetch him.”

As he went out he put in his pocket a small wood-carving of a young negress. It was tiny, but beautifully alive and made of a lovely bronze-coloured wood (that gold bronze that is also amber). It was carved by a young sculptress who, living in Kingston, Jamaica, occasionally sent work to their Galleries—work always original, brilliant, and strong. She had sent two or three large pieces and one or two of these small figures.

She was not known yet in Europe, but she would be. He had bought this for himself after it had been on show some six weeks. He loved it. The wood glowed like metal, and the face of the young negress, carved though it was in only a few lines, had in its gaze something ardent, wondering, poignant.

As he passed into Leicester Square he felt that his personal history had reached a crisis. Something must be done and done immediately about a number of things, and especially about his friendship with Rait. He had known Harry rather more than a year now. He had met him first when a friend, Dick Armour, had invited him to luncheon at the Junior Army and Navy. Unexpectedly Rait had been there. Romney had at first resented it, for he had wished to talk to Armour alone, but during the meal he had fallen a victim to Harry’s charm. What was his charm? Wherein did it lie? For Romney it was at first perhaps that Harry was so ordinary—Romney spent so much of his life with the eccentrics. Harry was square, solid, monosyllabic, a proficient at games, a stockbroker and a contemner of all the Arts. He was as simple-minded as the bulldog that he kept in his rooms. He was altogether a perfect hero for one of the more moving poems of J. C. Squire. He was Georgian Poetry personified, splashing through the mud of a country lane, cheering his side at a Rugby match, smoking his pipe contentedly in a tempest of rain on an English hillside and saying with kindly but patronizing assurance: “What you want to spend all your time mucking about with those bloody pictures for, old boy, I can’t imagine. But thank God all this art means nothing to me.”

Very irritating, you might imagine. But not to Romney, for Harry was free entirely from all those complicated obsessions, that dim edgeless pessimism, that half-insane inanition, that beset and befogged almost all of Romney’s set. Harry asked no questions of fate. Once assured that his digestion was working properly, that he made money enough for his simple needs, that his golf did not deteriorate, he was at peace with the world. He was kindly, generous, and never out of temper. He had bright blue eyes, a ruddy complexion, and when he laughed he was a joy to see. He was as yet a bachelor, but awaited the right girl with a serene assurance. And when he married he would have three children, would have a cottage near Sunningdale and as many dogs as the cottage would hold.

That is the kind of man he was, and Romney loved him. Romney was greatly disturbed about his own sexual nature. He had had as yet no physical relationship with any women; he did not know what it was to be in love with a woman. He knew, however, very well, that he was not sexually abnormal. Everyone everywhere nowadays spoke quite openly of these things. In his own set especially you were considered to be intellectually superior if you had somewhere a sexual twist. A number of men like Forrester, Bancroft, Hudson, made no attempt to conceal their abnormality. But Romney disliked the company of abnormal men and women. He judged no one; he accepted the modern view that these were matters of psychological and not moral decision. It was simply that the sexually abnormal dwelt in a world that could not be his. Their passions, their preoccupations, seemed to himself the passions and preoccupations of maimed and defective people, as though they lacked a limb or were deaf or blind. He would have been truly sorry for them had they in any way needed his pity, which it was evident that they did not. They were, on the whole, he perceived, happy and contented with their lot and would not change it if they could. He was as foreign to their world as though they had been Chinese, having their own tongue, manners, customs, and traditions.

At the same time there was ever increasing in him a horror of casual physical love. He felt this to be priggish and prudish. He hid it from everyone, but he knew that his friends perceived it, speculated about it. The loneliness that sprang from it was often very bitter indeed. He had a romantic and obviously quite foolish view of the possibilities of human relations. He could see that very often people ruined their relationships with one another by being greedy and possessive; also that views changed when the novelty of physical passion died. Yet once and again he saw magnificent human relationships, relationships that burnt steadily with an inner flame. This glorious thing existed—then why not for him?

He was not in love physically with Harry Rait, and yet it gave him physical satisfaction to be with him, to see him move, smile, speak. This came, he fancied, from a kind of deep hero worship, hero worship not so much of Harry in person as of the things for which Harry stood—his courage, imperturbability, kindliness, common sense. The more he saw of him the happier he was to be with him and the more thoroughly he realized that for Harry this was an ordinary casual friendship, that Harry could not conceive that men should have emotional feelings for one another, and that he would be dumb with disgust did anyone suggest it. And yet at this time Romney’s love for and admiration of Rait was the mainspring of all his finer feeling, it was mixed in with his passion for art, his love of his family and even, dimly, his apprehension of God.

For here were the other two emotions that separated Romney from the set in which he lived. The three things that Romney’s friends most thoroughly despised were family relationships, religious beliefs, and patriotism. They had good reasons for their scorn of all these things and were quite fair and temperate in their attitude. Almost without exception they regarded their parents as poor, stupid old muddlers who had made a mess of life not only for themselves but also for everyone else.

Only the other evening at a cocktail party at Ben Johnson’s, Peggy Furnival had declared: “Well, would you believe it?—Mother actually tried to insist on my staying in. She said I’d promised. Of course I’d done nothing of the kind, and as I explained to her I never could have promised to be in at one of the family dinners. They are simply too awful for words! She got quite excited and talked of all that I owed to her and Father. ‘Well, really, Mother,’ I said, ‘did I ask to be brought into the world? I’m here simply because you and Father were in love with one another. You’ve brought me into a world that’s a complete mess, and a mess that your generation have made.’ I didn’t want to be unkind. They really are pets, both of them, but this idea that we owe them something—it’s really too fantastic!”

Romney knew well enough that everyone did not feel like this—there were exceptions—but, looking around him, it was difficult to find anywhere a family that was a family. Often enough it was the fault of the parents. Women like Mrs. Montague, who was fifty if she was a day, dressing to look younger than her daughters, and old men like Clay Robinson, a grandfather if you please, chasing young girls about London quite notoriously.

But nowhere did Romney see any family devoted in the way that his family was devoted. He did not know whether in their case it was family feeling, for he was sure that if anywhere he had met them—his mother, his father, a girl like Nell, a boy like Edward—he must have thought them delightful. His mother of course belonged to her own time and generation. She said silly things sometimes, she was impulsive, but where in the whole of London would you discover anyone so warm-hearted, so touchingly honest, so generous-natured? They were all bound together by a deep emotion of trust and confidence. They liked to be together. They looked forward to the evening when they would, all of them, warm and cozy inside the Westminster house, share their experiences. Why should this be so unusual a phenomenon? Even Uncle Nicholas plainly thought it very odd and, because he thought it odd, Romney began himself to question it—for Uncle Nicholas was a jolly, fair-minded man of the world who had seen more of life than they had.

Finally there was Romney’s apprehension of God. This was the most doubtful of all his emotions, for, in truth, he could be sure of none of it. Among his friends there were two Roman Catholics—Wilfred de Cordova and Larry Whyte. These two believed in and practised their religion.

But for the rest—and outside his own family—he had not a friend in London who had not, entirely and completely, discarded the old absurd notion of a God, a First Cause, or whatever you pleased to call it. One or two of them quite frankly regretted that it was no longer possible for a sane human being to believe in anything at all.

“It must have been jolly in the old days when you thought that someone was looking after you and that, if you were good enough—even at the very last moment—you were in for a splendid Eternity.”

They did not give themselves airs because they were wiser than their grandfathers, but Romney noticed that their stern and fatalistic conclusions were, as a rule, founded on very little. The vastness of the planetary system, the waste and ruin of the late war, some catch phrases and a sort of very genuine personal humility—as though each one said: “Well, I’m not very much myself—an unimportant arrangement of chemical matter. It would be really too arrogant of me to presuppose an immortality for myself. And if there is a God, well, then, He must be pretty ashamed of Himself by this time.”

Romney did not know why it was that he had this persistent sense of religion. It certainly did not come from any family influence. He loved his mother, but her childish beliefs seemed to him too simple for words. Uncle Matthew was the religious member of the family, but Romney had never had with him an intimate talk about anything. Uncle Matthew led a life quite apart from the rest of them. He was a dear old boy, never out of temper, generous to a fault, but he had his own life absolutely, visited by his own friends (and queer enough some of them looked!), and subject, it was said, to dreams and visions that, although they did no harm to anyone, certainly marked him out as not quite right in his head.

No, Romney was not a visionary. He was quite practical; he did not believe in visions. It was simply that there was something within himself that would not let him alone. “Indigestion, old boy,” Harry Rait would say. “What you want is a pill.”