Читать книгу Wintersmoon: Passages in the Lives of Two Sisters, Janet and Rosalind Grandison - Hugh Walpole - Страница 6

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"I am asking you again to marry me as I did a fortnight ago."

Janet Grandison turned towards him and said:

"Yes. You've been very honest."

"I believe," he said, "honesty to be the only thing for us. From the beginning I have always known that you valued that—honesty I mean—more perhaps than anything. I value it too."

She smiled.

"I believe you do. But we all do. We make a fetish of it. It seems to me sometimes almost the only good thing that has survived the war. Well," she went on, "I have had the fortnight I begged for. A fortnight ago you asked me to marry you. You said you weren't in love with me but that you liked and respected me, that you thought we would get on well together.... You want me to be the mother of your children."

"Yes," he said. "I am not in love with you. I have been in love for a long while with somebody, somebody whom it is impossible for me to marry and someone who would not marry me even though it were possible. With the exception of this one person I would rather marry you than anyone in the world. I like you. I admire you. I think we could be good companions."

Her face was grave. "I don't know about that," she said slowly. "I have been very little with men in my life. I don't know how it would be. Giving you frankness for frankness the other day I told you that I did not love you in the least. But I like you. I would do all I could to make you happy if I married you. But my sister comes first—she will always come first. I loved my father—and I love my sister. Those have been the only two emotions in my life. Love her! I adore her. I am not exaggerating or using words without thinking about them when I say that I would die for her if it would give her what she wanted. And so if I marry you to give her what she wants, that isn't perhaps surprising so long as I tell you exactly how things are. And the way things are can't go on much longer. We've been alone now for ten years, she and I, and the last two have been—well, impossible. You promised me that if I married you she should always live with us. It should be her home."

"Of course. That is part of the bargain."

"Yes, it is a bargain, isn't it? Not romantic. But all my romance is for my sister. And yours——" She broke off, hesitating.

"Yes, mine is as I have told you. But how many marriages ever remain romantic? It is a platitude that they do not. The best thing that comes of a happy marriage is companionship. That I believe we shall have."

He hesitated, then went on:

"I want to put it all fairly before you. There isn't very much money. It won't be a gay life, you know, or a merry one. The place down in the country, although I love it, won't seem very lively to you or to your sister, I'm afraid. It's all in pieces, and I see no likelihood of my ever having money enough to do much to it. One day perhaps—for my son.... And then I am not at all what I should be in the country. I moon about. I don't do any of the things I ought to. I am an ass about affairs. And then so long as my father is alive we would have to be a good deal in London. We would have to stay in Halkin Street with them, and that, as you know, wouldn't be very lively either. You know exactly what life in Halkin Street is like. They'll be very glad—my father and my mother—if you'll marry me. They like you so much. You belong to the family. Your mother was one of my mother's greatest friends. But it will be no sort of escape for you—except for actual escape from money troubles. But we would all be kind to you and your sister. Everyone would be glad and would try to make you both happy."

"It will surprise everyone very much," Janet said slowly. "I have known you so little. You've been away so much."

"Yes. But we can trust one another. I'm sure of that."

"I believe we can."

Then, looking him honestly in the eyes, she said:

"I will marry you and I will be a good friend to you."

He took her hand.

"Thank you," he said. "You have made me very happy."

In old Lady Mossop's vast and draughty drawing-room life pursued its decorous way. There were perhaps a hundred human beings in the room, but had you listened at the door in the intervals of music the sound proceeding from their conversation would have resembled nothing so much as the stealthy spinning of a bemused and industrious top. No more and no less. A very large painting by Sir Edward Burne-Jones of Grecian ladies gathered about a well, portraits of a number of glazed Mossop ancestors, a huge fireplace of spotted marble, a great gold clock, a copy of Holman Hunt's "Scapegoat" (it gazed across the floor into the indifferent faces of the Grecian ladies), these held, as they had done for many a past year, command of the situation. No human being, however bold, however arrogant, would dream of antagonising them. And they knew it. All the guests of Lady Mossop would also have known it had they thought of it. They did not think of it.

Little Felix Brun, seated uncomfortably on a little gilt chair, did not pretend to listen to the old lady with untidy white hair who was in the act of manfully demolishing Schumann's "Carnaval" at the enormous piano in the room's further corner. He was not listening. He was, as always throughout his life it had been his practice, observing. In earlier days he would have stood up against the wall whence he might more efficiently have taken his notes, but he was now seventy-six years of age and his legs too often defeated him. He was nevertheless intensely interested. He had seen nothing like this before.

He had not been in England for many years, not since the year 1911, and it was now the year of 1921. Ten years, and ten such years! The war had moved him to a patriotic participation that would have once seemed to him incredible. He had thought himself detached from his country—a cosmopolitan philosopher with Socratic vision. But the German invasion of Belgium had torn his Socratic isolation to ribbons, and for the next six years he had lived only in, and for, his beloved France.

Then with the disappointments and ironies of the Peace some of his cynical detachment returned. He was not wholly French—there was Austrian blood in his veins—and it was this same Austrian blood, perhaps, that led him, hating Germany as he did, to criticise France with a frankness that infuriated his Parisian circle. And so, rather happy that he had regained once more his impersonality, he returned to his once-so-beloved London.

The impression that he had had of it during his absent post-war years—impression gathered in the main from English novels and newspapers—was that his dear London was running swiftly to the dogs, the Upper Classes drinking cocktails and dancing eternally to the jazziest of music, the Middle Classes hopelessly and aimlessly impoverished, the Lower Classes rebellious, revolutionary, idle, and dole-fed.

He found, to his pleasure, his old rooms in Clarges Street vacant, and the stout, amiable Forrester, landlord, valet, and gossip, older but otherwise unchanged. The cost of living had doubled, of course, but so it had everywhere, and for the rest, in his first week's survey he could not, save for the congestion of traffic and the ruin of Regent Street, see that his London was very greatly altered. There were still the flower-women round the fountain in Piccadilly Circus, still the lions and Nelson, still the decent-looking fellows outlined against the freshness of the Green Park, still the sanctum by the fireplace under the stairs in St. James's Club, still Big Ben and the chastity of Curzon Street, the higgledy-piggledy of Shepherd Market, the Christian Science Church, and the cloistered shabbiness of the Albany. His superficial landmarks were all there.

He was taken after the theatre to a place where they danced, and it seemed to him extremely English and decorous. He could find in it none of the dazzling wickedness and abnormality that the English novels of his reading had led him to expect. The Unemployed, bursting into music in the streets, struck him with their exceeding rosiness and physical vigour. He remembered faces seen by him recently in Berlin, Vienna, and Prague that had besieged successfully even his cynical indifference. He saw no such faces here.

And then coming out one day of Colnaghi's in Bond Street he encountered old Lady Mossop, with her large spectacles and larger nose, her broad unwieldly figure, her hat a little askew, just exactly as she had been ten years earlier. She recognised him, told him in her deep, rather wheezy voice (she always talked like an old cab-driver whose life had been spent in rain and fog) that he was looking older, and asked him to her party.

So here he was to-night. He had realised at once on entering the room that for the first time since his return to London he was in the world that he had known before the war. Once in the old days of the South African War he had divided the English ruling classes into three parties—the Autocrats, the Aristocrats, and the Democrats. The Autocrats—the Beaminsters, the Gutterils, the Minsters—had been the people with whom, at that time, he had mostly lived. The old Duchess of Wrexe had been their queen, and for a time she had ruled England. She was long dead, and the Autocrats, as a party of power in England, were gone and gone for ever. The Democrats—Ruddards, Denisons, Funells, Muffats—there were plenty of them about, he supposed. The war and its consequences must have helped them to power. It was they, and the members of the old Autocratic party whom disaster and poverty had driven into their ranks, who danced and kicked their way through the illustrated papers. He didn't know and he didn't care. He felt in his bones that, at the present time at least, they were unimportant whatever they might become. He dismissed them with a shrug. They were food for the novelist who wanted dazzling pictures with post-impressionist colours and Freudian titles.

Remained then the Aristocrats—the Mossops, the Darrants, the Chichesters, the Medleys, the Weddons. He had once said of them, "I take my hat off to them. All those quiet decorous people, poor as mice many of them, standing aside altogether from any movements or war-cries of the day, living in their quiet little houses or their empty big ones, clever some of them, charitable all of them, but never asserting their position or estimating it. They never look about them and see where they are. They've no need to. They're just there."

He didn't remember, of course, that he had ever said that, but it was what he still at this day, twenty-two years later, felt. And they were of infinitely more importance now than they had been then. They were all—positively all—that was left of the old Aristocracy of England, that Class and that Creed that, whether for good or ill, had meant a great deal in the world's history. They were (he couldn't as yet be sure but he fancied that he felt it in the air about him) engaged now in a really desperate conflict. This might be the last phase of their Power, or it might lead through victory to a new phase of Power, greater than any they had yet known. If they were as poor as mice then, twenty-two years ago, they were, they must be, a great deal poorer than any reasonably fortunate mouse now. He fancied that he could see something of that too as he looked about him. But they would say nothing at all about it. They would have, above everything else, their dignity and self-respect, qualities that the Democrats had lost long ago.

The possession of those qualities might make for dullness, but a little dullness was sometimes not a bad thing.

He had reached this point in his commentary when the untidy lady buried the "Carnaval" with a sigh of relief and everyone rose to the surface of the room. Brun turned to discover his neighbour and saw (on the gilt chair next to his) a nice young man whose face seemed familiar to him. A moment later someone from behind them bent forwards and said, "Hullo, Seddon! How goes it?" and the young man, amiability all over him, turned back to talk.

Seddon ... Seddon ... Seddon....

Little Brun swept his brain. The name was familiar enough, the face too. Ah! he knew. He had it. He turned to the boy, who was about to get up and go, and said:

"I beg your pardon. Forgive an old man a liberty. But I heard you addressed.... I have not been in London for many years; I am quite out of touch with everyone. But I once, twenty years ago, had two friends, Sir Roderick Seddon and his wife. You resemble her a little. My old affection for them, the memory of their goodness to me, makes me perhaps impertinent.... Pray forgive it...."

The boy smiled.

"Yes," he said. "That must be my father and mother. I'm Tom Seddon."

Brun held out his hand.

"It's very exciting to me," he said, "to meet Rachel Seddon's son. It's a good omen for my happy return to London. You tell your father and mother when you see them that Felix Brun took this liberty with you, and that he is going to call if he may."

"My father's dead, sir," the boy answered. "He died before the war. But of course I know your name. When I was quite a kid I used to hear mother say that you knew more about European politics than anyone in Europe. At that time," he smiled delightfully, "I didn't know I was going into the Foreign Office, where as a matter of fact I am—the only thing I wanted was to play the Australians at cricket—so what mother said didn't mean as much to me as it ought to have done. But it means an awful lot now. You could tell me some things I most frightfully want to know."

The boy was so charming that little Brun was entirely captive. He had been so long away from England that he had a little forgotten how pleasant a pleasant Englishman can be. Young Seddon, with every turn of his head, every spoken word, every smile, brought back to Brun a world of memories. Here was something that he could find no where else in Europe. He had been, yes, surely he had been too long away.

"You know," young Seddon confided. "This is a jolly dull party. Wasn't that woman awful on the piano? I wouldn't be here if it weren't for a special reason ..." He paused for a moment looking eagerly about the room. "There's somebody here I'm looking for ... Ah! excuse me a moment ... One moment...."

He was off, threading his way across the room through the little gilt chairs. Brun followed him with his eyes. Two girls were standing talking to Lady Mossop. They were striking enough standing there together. Striking even by contrast. They were both tall, but one was very dark and the other very fair. The dark one seemed to be the older of the two; she was very tall, and held herself magnificently. Her face expressed great sweetness; the eyes, the mouth showed so striking a spirit of kindliness and gentleness that Brun, arrested by this, for a time forgot everything and everyone else in the room. He would like to know that girl. He was no sentimentalist, but kindliness and goodness of heart had their value in this world, their positive international value. And this was English kindliness (the girl was so English that it was almost shocking), a little dull perhaps but restful, reliable in a degree that during these late unstable years of his life had seemed non-existent. He would like to know that girl—she would be courageous, faithful, simple, perceptive of only a few things, but seeing those things clearly without a tremor of her dark protecting eyes.

The girl beside her was prettier, younger, far more sexually disturbing. They were sisters. That was assured by the resemblance of the forehead, carriage of the head, general pose and attitude to the world. The fair girl was beautiful, which the dark girl was not. The fair girl had the English beauty of a Reynolds or a Gainsborough. Everything was fair and fresh and gentle, a little old-fashioned perhaps in the abundance of the hair and the simplicity of the frock. She was not naked, as now so many English girls were, so much more naked than complete nudity. But then of course in this set, in this room, nudity would not be fashionable.

Young Seddon was talking to these two with great animation, talking to them both but looking always at the fair girl even when his eyes were turned to the older sister. That was his reason, then, for coming to this stuffy party. Little Brun felt a gentle stir of romantic, if rather cynical, pleasure. He wished him luck. They would make a handsome pair.

And then someone clapped him on the shoulder.

"Felix ... Old Felix! It is! After these years!"

He turned round and looked up and there was old Johnnie Beaminster—Johnnie Beaminster, eighty or ninety or a hundred surely, but looking as neat and as round and as complete with his white hair and rosy unwrinkled face as he had been twenty, thirty, forty years ago! How these English people didn't change! It was, one must suppose, the lives they led or didn't lead, their baths and exercises and simple innocent minds! But Felix was delighted. There had been times, in the old past world, when he had found Johnnie Beaminster a bit of a bore, but now in this new, unfaithful, hysterical world old Beaminster was a pearl of great price, and it was a beautiful, round, shining, gleaming pearl that he looked, his smooth, good-tempered, stupid face crinkled into smiles.

"And you've been here ever so long and you've never told me. I call that too bad. You could have found me in a minute."

"No, but, Johnnie, I haven't been here so long. I'm only now settling in. I'd have bothered you soon enough. And I'm old. Mon dieu! how old! And snappy ... You don't know how snappy. I'm kind to keep out of people's path."

"You were always snappy." Beaminster's chair leaned over to Brun's. He had his arm on the other's shoulder. "I'm damnably glad to see you. It's old times come back. I daresay they weren't really as good as we fancy them now, but it's an odd world these days. One would be lost in it if it weren't for a few good fellows. Still taking notes, Felix? There's lots for you to be observing nowadays."

Brun laughed. "The old Duchess has gone, though."

Beaminster's face crinkled again. "Yes. She wouldn't work now. It's all too exposed. You couldn't carry on a mystery stunt like that these days. That's young Tom Seddon over there, Rachel's boy."

"I know. He's just been talking to me. Real English. None of Rachel's Russian complexities."

"Oh, he's a good boy. There isn't a nicer in town. I'm leaving him my goods and chattels. He doesn't know it, though. He's got brains. He'll go farther than poor Roddy ever did."

"And who are those girls he's talking to?"

"Miss Grandisons. Janet and Rosalind. Rosalind's a beauty and Janet's a treasure. Nicest girls in London. They are poorer than poor. Their mother was a Ludley. Can't think why they don't marry. They've been orphans for ten years now."

"And who is that—just joined them? Good-looking."

"That's Wildherne Poole. Old Romney's son. It's a pity he doesn't marry, but there's been some affair ... The old Duke's always pressing him to. He's the only son and there's got to be an heir."

"Romney ... Poole." Brun sorted the names. "I don't remember when I was here ..."

"No, you wouldn't. Romney came into the thing very late. His elder brother had it. And he was always down at the place in Wiltshire. The present man doesn't cut any figure socially. They are poor and Church of England. Parsons, soup-kitchens, mufflers for the old women. Their house in Halkin Street is deadly. All the same he's a dear old boy. Too good and simple for these days."

The music began again.

After a sleepy while Beaminster and Brun stole away. As they passed down the stairs to the cloakroom the stir and whisper of the music faintly, wistfully pursued them. The hall-door opened for an instant and a vision of snow and a muffled amber lamp swept in with a rush of cold biting air. The door closed. Brun, fumbling for his cloakroom ticket, looked up at a huge, naked, badly-jointed Hercules that stuck out over the racks of coats and hats. It had its fig-leaf, but it had been pushed into that corner years ago because it wasn't quite decent. The only sound in the house was the faint tinkle of the piano and the unhurried ticking of a marble clock on the other side of the hall.

"It is jolly to be back," Brun confided to Beaminster. "Very touching. I could cry for two-pence."