Читать книгу The Silver Thorn: A Book of Stories - Hugh Walpole - Страница 7

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Then, a few weeks before Christmas, Captain Ford discovered that something was the matter with him. The weather improved. The snow had fallen, and there came a succession of shining, crystal days when the colours of the sky were reflected in shadowed lights on the white ground, when the towers of gold and green and blue hung, on misty evenings, like rounded clouds about the stars, when the eccentric shapes and patterns of the Moscow streets were romantic roads leading into mysterious countries, when every ugliness took on beauty and every commonplace corner seemed to watch with a smile, half-hidden, half-pathetic, half-expectant. Captain Ford was uncomfortable. Entirely against his will he began to think of his young days when he had loved a lady in the Gaiety chorus, had thought her a model of virtue and modesty, had even written poetry to her. There had even been a summer night when he had driven her out to Hampstead in a hansom and had appealed to the moon to witness his devotion. Ah! how he had laughed at himself since then, and what fools other young fellows with an equal romantic folly had seemed to him! There had been a moment, after his marriage with Mrs. Ford, when he had been threatened with some return of this same nonsense. It had been Mrs. Ford herself then who had laughed at him: ‘Why, John!’ she had cried (they were at Monte Carlo on their honeymoon), ‘I had no idea you’d got that kind of rot in you!’

Afterwards, with a shadow of that same idealism, he had hoped for a son, but Mrs. Ford had thought it unwise of them to start a family when their income was still so slender, and they had decided to wait. They were waiting yet.

Now, in spite of himself, Moscow was making him uncomfortable. When, late after some dinner-party, he was driving home in his Isvoschik, he would curse the cold and the bumping roads and the slowness of his horse, and behind that cursing there would be stealing a strange, warm, happy feeling of contentment as the white streets ran in lines of light through the dark, uneven walls; the watchmen’s fires leaping at the street corners, the thin flames burning before the Ikons, the Russian peace of that vast Russian night that covers so spacious and silent a land touching him with its cool hand, whispering to him with its friendly voice. By Christmas he had told himself that, if he did not take care, he would one day be making a fool of himself, he would be actually growing fond of the country. Now this fear of making a fool of himself was a very real terror indeed, and was perhaps all the stronger in him now because he had shut himself up so tightly these last months. Christmas Eve was a hard day for him in this fashion: he bought presents for the Ivanoff children (fine presents, too), but would not come to the Christmas Tree. They, however, emboldened by this happy excitement, came into his room and thanked him, and Vladimir (aged five) wished to kiss him. From this, fortunately, she was prevented. He was very stiff with them and seemed angry at their little speeches.

‘Not at all. Not at all,’ he said. ‘Nitchevo. Nitchevo.’

Then at supper the family gave him presents: Mme. Ivanoff a copy of Tutchev’s poetry, Mr. Ivanoff a Russian tobacco box, and Uncle Anton a little brass Ikon. He was terribly embarrassed; he had nothing to say. ‘Thanks. Really—hum—blagardaryoo vass—hum—thanks.’ He wished with all his heart that he had arranged to dine that night with some English friends.

It happened then, in the early part of the year, that he saw performances at the Artistic Theatre, of ‘The Cherry Orchard’ and ‘The Three Sisters.’ He was moved unexpectedly and, as he told himself, quite unreasonably. He had not been at any time a student of the theatre, but he was used in England to a comfortable play that began at nine o’clock punctually, had a story that a baby could understand, with well-known performers in it, some of whom he knew at his club and others who came to have tea with his wife. Moreover, it was one of his theories that a play must not be depressing. ‘Worries enough,’ he would say to his friends, ‘in ordinary life without your books and plays being worrying too. That’s what I say’—and was apparently quite unaware that all his friends said the same thing. He had then no right to be anything but disgusted by ‘The Cherry Orchard’ and ‘The Three Sisters.’ Here were two plays depressing and inconclusive. Characters came in and out at their own pleasure, uttered remarks quite carelessly and without purpose, seemed to have no idea that they were in a play at all. At the end of the evening no one was settled for life—indeed anyone who, at the beginning of the play, was settled, was seen to be unsettled by the end of it. Moreover, none of the actors looked like actors nor had, apparently, any consciousness that the play would fall to pieces if they were not in it. It was all desperately unlike anything of which Captain Ford could be expected to approve, and yet he discovered in himself an increasing consciousness of disturbed alarm. It was exactly as though he were reconnoitring in some enemy’s country, was aware that a man, in ambush, was waiting for him and that every step might bring him leaping upon him. ‘One of these days I shall make a fool of myself if I’m not careful’ ... there was his enemy in ambush, an enemy serious enough in all conscience, because, having made a fool of oneself once, it is only too possible that one may do so again, and then again, and at last be a fool altogether. In the love of Madame Ranevsky, of Gayef, for their house and Orchard, in the burning passion of Musha and Versyenen that glows like a dark fire at the very heart of ‘The Three Sisters,’ he found the footsteps, the very secret marks of his enemy. Had he missed the whole purpose and meaning of life? Had he driven from him everything that life was intended to give to the soul of man? At that thought he shook himself as though he would wake from an evil dream. What had he to do with the Soul of Man? Was he not an English officer and a man of practical common sense? He might as well be that drunken old idiot, Uncle Anton, at once. He was stiffer than ever with the Ivanoff family....

But the worst of it was that Uncle Anton, whom it was impossible to rebuff, whose childlike trust and simplicity saw what they wanted to see and not what they were told to see, insisted on treating him as though he alone in real truth knew Captain Ford as, in the depths of his heart, he was.

‘You love this country,’ he said standing over him and putting a big dirty hand on his shoulder. ‘You love this country. It is stealing every day more deeply into your heart. I know that this is so and that after you have left us you will long always to return. You will have a great hunger ...’ a ridiculous way for one man to talk to another.

It happened, then, that as the weeks of the new year increased Captain John Ford longed every day more passionately to escape. He hurled himself at his Russian and made remarkable progress. The Ivanoffs, with the exception of Uncle Anton, were now really afraid of him, and felt his stiff unfriendliness like a cloud about the house. It could not be said that they awaited his departure with sorrow, nevertheless in their way they were proud of him. ‘You never saw such an Englishman,’ they would tell their friends, ‘so proud and stiff. He never opens his lips. The children are so quiet you wouldn’t know them—a fine man, a proper Englishman.’

Then Mrs. Ford wrote to say that in the course of her travels she had reached Sebastopol, would travel home through Russia, and would pick him up on her way. ‘I’m sure you’ll be glad to get home again,’ she said, ‘after all the queer people you’ve been seeing....’

Why was it that, in reading her letter, he had the strangest feeling that his wife wasn’t real? Oh, yes! He had certainly been out of England long enough. He awaited with impatience, and also with a strange anxiety, his wife’s arrival.