Читать книгу Vanessa - Hugh Walpole - Страница 10

Table of Contents

April 3, 1883.

... so three days ago Vanessa and I moved to Fell House for a week or two. I am a very great deal better, can take a walk by myself and am not so utterly dependent on Will as I have been—how patient, tolerant and sensible he’s been no words can say, but I recognise sufficiently that two moments in my life have been supremely lucky—one when as a small boy I watched Will win a race through Keswick, the other when as Victoria returned crowned from Westminster I tumbled up against Caesar Kraft. The love of one man for another is an odd thing: it is bare of sex and yet does in certain moods surpass the love of woman. Maybe I have never been a sexual man. Looking back now I can see that it was not virtue kept me free in my youth but a certain fastidiousness that I got, as I got so much else, from my mother. I sometimes think that had I been the child of a street-woman and, say, a card-sharper, I could have been something of a writer. But no matter now. Never was anything of less importance. All the same, being what I am, I doubt whether any relationship could be finer than mine with Will. And it has been his fineness, not mine. Complete unselfishness, unsparing devotion and a deep, always by me perceptible, emotion under it all. With all that it has been always humorous, mixed with plenty of plain speaking. I cannot see that it has had any falseness in it anywhere. And, although I have no belief in immortality, it is hard for me, I confess, to imagine a state when Will and I will not be together and consciously together. Such a relationship as ours goes far beyond the body and, maybe, survives the body. There is this at least about it that it makes you think well of your fellow-men. It makes me wonder sometimes whether any country but England (and sometimes I wonder any county but Cumberland) could produce such a man as Will. He is altogether Cumbrian in his honesty, reticence, obstinacy. But this of course is nonsense. There are men like him, I don’t doubt, all the world over. My grandfather had such a one. Quixote found one, Montaigne had one; thank God the world is full of them.

Well, after this sentiment which no eye will ever see but my own, here is the other side of the shield. The only other visitor here but ourselves is Phyllis Newmark’s boy, Philip Rochester. Rochester, whom she married some thirty years ago, has something, I fancy, to do with railways and has amassed a nice fortune. Barney, I know, dislikes him and always calls him a humbug. As for Master Philip, I have seldom disliked a young man so much. He is thin and willowy, talks in a piping voice about the ‘Inevitability of Sin’ and that ‘Art is the only Moralist.’ It happens that in this very week’s Punch there is a little piece which I shall have great pleasure in showing him. It is apt enough to copy into this Journal:

TO BE SOLD, the whole of the Stock-in-Trade, Appliances, and Inventions of a Successful Aesthete, who is retiring from business. This will include a large stock of faded lilies, dilapidated sunflowers, and shabby peacocks’ feathers, several long-haired wigs, a collection of incomprehensible poems, and a number of impossible pictures. Also, a valuable Manuscript Work, entitled Instruction to Aesthetes, containing a list of aesthetic catch-words, drawings of aesthetic attitudes and many choice secrets of the craft. Also, a number of well-used dadoes, sad-coloured draperies, blue and white china, and brass fenders. To shallow-pated young men with no education, who are anxious to embark in a profitable business which requires no capital but impudence, and involves no previous knowledge of anything, this presents an unusual opportunity. No reasonable offer refused. Apply in the first instance to Messrs. Sucklemore and Sallowack, Solicitors, Chancery Lane.

A trifle sledge-hammer but it has got Mr. Philip exactly. I wouldn’t mind the young man’s effeminacy, his ridiculous clothes and his languor, were it not that he considers himself the Prince of the World. The scorn that he feels and expresses for everyone in this house is nauseating. Everyone but Vanessa, whom he condescends to admire, and talks of ‘a perfect du Maurier’ and how he wishes that Whistler could paint her. He would apparently make the attempt himself (for he paints the most atrocious daubs) ‘had he the time.’ Had he the time! When he never gets up before ten, wanders about the house like a misplanted lily, pecks at the piano and studies himself in the looking-glass. His morals would be, I have no doubt, revolting had he any blood in his poor body. He speaks of ‘soul-mates and the tyranny of the marriage laws’ and such disgusting nonsense. I should shudder whenever the children approached him, but they, unlike their elders, find him a kind of clown. Amazingly, Timothy and Violet are both rather impressed, and Vanessa, in her goodness of heart, is kind to him. How my mother would have dealt with him!