Читать книгу The Joyful Delaneys - Hugh Walpole - Страница 10

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Half Moon Street on a rainy afternoon in January has little aspect of beauty. It is true that to-day it has respectability—more than could be claimed for it even twenty years ago. Mr. Dare and Mr. Dolphin blaze and shimmer at the entrance as much as to say: ‘Here are shirts, ties and dressing-gowns so superb that, try as it may, Half Moon Street won’t, after you’ve looked into our window, be able to disappoint you.’ And the tobacconist, opposite Mr. Dare and Mr. Dolphin, shows you pipes so beautiful that, slender of purse as you are, you wish that Sir Walter Raleigh had never been born. There are gay bachelors, too, in 90 Piccadilly—gay and at the same time serious, responsible, knowing as they do that they are under the benevolent but autocratic supervision of John Jones, master of all gentlemen’s servants; morals and patriotism go, at this address, hand in hand with the rent.

Abutting on Number 90, moreover, there is a staid but elegant Club whose members constantly place their cars at the very portals of Number 90 to the aggravation of the aforesaid moral bachelors. All this is very well, and so far Half Moon Street has nothing to be ashamed of. Nor is there any very evident change as you advance. Excellent landlords, admirable landladies, bright fires seen between the curtains, cats, sleeker than the common or garden, rubbing their backs against area railings, a geranium or so, a glimpse of ‘The Stag at Bay’ above the friendly bookcase, a gentleman’s gentleman, bareheaded, wearing a stiff white collar and side-whiskers as though he were even now in the service of Major Pendennis, two bottles of milk, twin innocents, still on the doorstep, two young men delivering a table, a bassinet and a rocking-horse, a window high in the sky suddenly opening and a gentleman with a teapot in his hand calling out ‘Paper!’ a stout man in a bowler hat leading two Pekinese, authority, disgust, and a simple touching kind of loneliness fighting for victory on his pale and very unintelligent countenance; here is the life of Half Moon Street on any afternoon in the week. ‘On tiptoe for flight,’ you might imitate Mr. Keats by calling it, for it will not remain as it is much longer. There is ghostly scaffolding about the houses and the smoky-dusty-carpet-geranium-smelling -iron-bedstead-basement-toastmaking-damp-washing period is nearly over and ended. It doesn’t matter in the least, the number of the house where Mrs. Van Renn and her daughter Alice had their abode. Their rooms were on the middle floor—two bedrooms, bath-and sitting-room, meals sent up to order, service and electric light and coal extra.

The house must not be numbered here because, to tell the truth, it was a very poor, frowsty and uncomfortable house. Mrs. Van Renn took the rooms last year because the rent was low and the address good. It was one of her final desperate moves to get Alice off her hands, because if Alice didn’t marry money soon they’d be in the poorhouse. Mrs. Van Renn, it must be confessed, was very ugly, being more like a monkey than most monkeys manage to be, nor was she in any way an attractive character, but she adored her only child, although she was desperately afraid of her. If she did marry her off she would be so lonely an old woman that suicide would be the only way out; on the other hand, if she didn’t marry her off, why, then they would die in the gutter. So there you were!

Alice herself expressed no opinion in the matter. She didn’t care in the least what happened to her. That men were fascinated by her, her mother knew; that they never proposed marriage to her was also a fact.

‘Why don’t they, Alice?’

‘I’ve no idea, Mama.’

‘You give in to them too readily.’

‘I don’t give in to them at all.’

‘Well, perhaps you ought to.’

‘I don’t want to be married, Mama.’

‘Then we starve. That’s all. We positively starve.’

‘I’d rather starve than be married.’

‘Then what about me?’

‘I’m sorry, Mama, but you should never have allowed Papa to put our money in those mines.’

‘I didn’t know. I never knew what your father was doing.’

On an afternoon of driving rain Half Moon Street is really on the shabby side. Its resentment at bad weather is to be felt in all its bones: rheumatism, a sentimental melancholy for the past, and a waterproof that has known better days. Half Moon Street aches from head to toe; Mr. Dare and Mr. Dolphin give one look out of the window and for that afternoon at least decide that their residence is in Piccadilly.

Fred Delaney, seated on an uncomfortable chair in the Van Renn sitting-room, wished that he had not come. He had intended not to. He would write some letters, go and talk to the Pakes, wait finally for Meg to return from her visit to some old friends she had discovered who lived, of all inaccessible rainy-day places, in Surbiton.

Then the flesh had pricked as it is given to doing on a rainy day in London. A vision of Alice Van Renn’s exquisite white neck hung, like a materialization of ectoplasm, right in front of the William and Mary clock. He didn’t want it to be there. He turned his eyes away from it, but it followed him and in some mysterious way affected his stomach. It was exactly the same sensation as when, a small boy with no pocket-money, he had gazed in at a pastry-cook’s window. Not a very worthy reason for visiting Miss Van Renn; and, through the rain, stopping to buy an evening paper from the newsman who stood beside Miss Bonda’s archway, he cursed himself for a weak self-indulgent Irishman.

Inside the Van Renn castle, he decided, as he had already several times decided, that the girl was a complete fool. He tried her with the theatre. Did she like pantomimes? Had she seen Babes in the Wood and George Mozart?

‘Oh, I never go to pantomimes.’

‘No ... well, not by yourself of course. But it’s fun to take children.’

‘Oh, do you think so? Children always behave so badly when they are with me.’

Yes, they would, of course. They’d hate her. He was aware then, as tea was being brought in by a girl who had plucked eyebrows and was heavily powdered, he was aware, for the first time, that Mrs. Van Renn didn’t like him. Fred was not vain, but he did think that he was a big, jolly Irish gentleman and agreeable to most people. He had set out from the beginning to be charming to Mrs. Van Renn because of her beautiful daughter, and now all his efforts were wasted.

He didn’t know, of course, that Mrs. Van Renn looked now on any male admirer of Alice’s who was unable to offer her marriage as a danger. He didn’t realize either that Mrs. Van Renn found him physically most attractive and that when she thought that of any man a sense of isolation and misery attacked her; for she was an ugly brown-faced old woman and she knew it. Thirdly, he did not know that Mrs. Van Renn realized that her daughter was attracted also by this man, and that that was a rare and alarming portent.

He did know, however, that the tea was stewed, the madeira cake something only fit for the laundry, and the bread and butter faded and weary.

Alice got up and stood by the window, staring out at the rain. Then she turned and looked at Delaney. The faintest hint of colour touched her cheek. She was dressed in a very simple black frock. She was so thin and so pale and her features were so lovely and her body was so remote that he lowered his head and gazed at the carpet. For a wonder she spoke.

‘On a day like this in a street like this, Mr. Delaney, don’t you long for a gas-oven?’

‘Really, Alice!’

‘Well, of course, Mama.... It’s the sensible thing. Only I haven’t the courage.’

‘No, I can’t say that I do.’ Fred looked at her hands. ‘After all it won’t rain for ever.’

The impulse to get up and take her in his arms, there, in front of her old mother, was insane and almost irresistible. It was then that he was aware of the danger that he was in. It was a sharp warning, coming from within himself. ‘Get up and go! Go and never come back.’ He did get up.

‘I must be going, I’m afraid.’

He held out his hand and it enclosed Alice’s. She was drawn a little closer to him. Her hand was warm when he had expected it to be cold.

Mrs. Van Renn said: ‘Oh, must you go? It’s early yet.’ She had a habit of bending and twisting her thin brown fingers together.

He said to Alice: ‘You must come to a theatre some night.’

‘Thanks. I’d love to.’

The room was stifling and his heart was hammering.

Mrs. Van Renn said: ‘So nice to have seen you.’

As he went downstairs he was aware that he was carrying the scent of the room with him. There must have been, he thought, gas escaping somewhere; there was a smell of airlessness and as though a trap had been set baited with cheese and a mouse had been caught in it some while back.

He must walk. He must clear his head of the mouse-trap, Alice’s white neck. He must investigate this new and unaccustomed sense of danger.

He started down the Green Park. Just a short round to the Palace, Hyde Park Corner and back. The rain curled and coiled about him like a great spider’s-web. On an afternoon like this the London that he loved disappeared and became as indistinct as the blurred film in a cinematograph. It had no character, no place, no past nor present.

In and out of the rain figures were constantly moving, but figures like germs in a medical chart. This was because, he often thought (for he studied London and all its moods with constant delight), under storm and rain London was not a city, but rather gladly returned to its original marsh-world. He had noticed how a bird flying through the air on a rainy day in London seemed gigantic, portentous, masterful, how men and women shrank to non-identity, and the long stretch of Piccadilly covered with the motionless wet-gleaming cars and omnibuses was like a river of mud and slime between rocky barriers. When the rain, as to-day, was clinging and web-like, and the chill air wrapped you in damp underclothing, he rushed to some interior, for once be within walls on a London wet day and you were twice as comforted, consoled and reassured as you would be in any other place. It was as though on every side of you fortresses had been planted against the enemy. Once inside, you could, from the warmth, light, security, look out and mock the marshes and the gleaming dark-running river, the gigantic birds, the quagmires and the prehistoric beasts.

To-day, however, he realized that his attraction to Alice Van Renn belonged to the marshes and the gigantic bird. There is a world of physical passion which has no contact anywhere with common sense, morality, thought for others, friendship, nobility of character. All that you can say to a man is that he must keep out of it, for once he has crossed the border and breathed its unnatural air he will not listen to any warning voices, any threats of public disgrace or private hell, any stern implication of the law. That is why one is so often astonished by bizarre, macabre, abnormal occurrences revealed suddenly, planted there in the normal, colourless life of man like bright exotic poisonous flowers.

Delaney’s attraction to Alice Van Renn was not as yet mature enough to seem so portentous, but, walking now in the rain, he realized quite clearly that it might become so, that it belonged to that crazy, dangerous world, that it was a sort of fever in the blood that led to deliriums, sleep-walkings, and acts that were destructive, without reward, comfortless.

This was not the first time that he had been beguiled by the flesh, but he had hoped that these crazy, inevitably disappointing episodes were beginning to fade from his life. For he liked to be kind, jolly, generous and honest, and he loved Meg with all his heart and soul.

Then, with a flash, he realized that he was attracted to Alice Van Renn partly because she was, in physical type, the exact opposite of his wife. He was attracted sensually by the spare, the delicate, the remote, the silent. He had loved Meg passionately, he had passion for her still, but for some reason women of her type had always been easy of conquest for him. They had liked his health and sturdiness and joyfulness as he had liked theirs. He looked on Alice Van Renn as a collector of Chinese pottery sees a splendid horse in the Eumorfopoulos Collection. Her power over him lay in her remoteness from possession. That was why this obsession was so essentially foolish. If he didn’t get her he would be exasperated, and if he did get her he would be disappointed. To all the other Figures in the Rain he cried out: ‘There is nothing in this but folly, bitterness and unhappiness to others. Let’s run from the marshes to dry ground.’ He shook his shoulders with relief when he found himself safely once again within the walls of the Charles Street house.

There was a message that Captain Pullet would like to see him when he came in. He ran up the stairs, humming, feeling all the old buoyancy, his physical fitness, his freedom from alarm.

‘Well, Smoke, what’s the trouble?’

‘Have a drink.’

‘Thanks, I will. Not too much whisky.’

‘What a filthy day!’

‘Yes, isn’t it? I had a walk but it was nasty. Not the right sort of rain. Glad to get in.’

‘Smoke’ Pullet was very trim, his face hollowed and sharp. He looked an Army officer and a discontented one. Or rather the puckered lines in his forehead stood for trouble more than discontent. He had lost a leg in the War. The sitting-room of the Pullets was furnished in the best modern fashion; the chairs had arms of steel, the carpet had a design of black and white squares, there was a Marie Laurencin lady in silver and pink over the fireplace, the walls were white and the curtains black. Fred Delaney thought the place hideous, but that was not his business. He liked Smoke and Dodie immensely. He felt for them like a father. He thought Smoke one of the bravest and least intelligent men he had ever known. Dodie was clever, but Smoke had no brains at all, only instincts. He had therefore been a great success in the War and had been awarded both the D.S.O. and the M.C.

He was so honest, so courageous and so stupid that he was not at all fitted for the economic storms that he was trying to weather.

He looked at Delaney with great affection and said: ‘I’m sorry, old boy, but I’m afraid I have some bad news for you.’

‘What’s that?’

‘It seems that Dodie and I will have to move. We are planning to sleep on the Embankment. Dodie’s out now seeing about a pitch.’

This was what Fred had feared, but he showed no disturbance. His cheerful countenance beamed on his friend.

‘Stuff! Leave here? I should think not!’

‘Oh, but it’s so, old boy. You know that Dodie’s been helping Hazel Groom in her dressmaking place. Well, she’s left. They had an awful row. There’s only my pension and we’re up to our eyes in debt. We simply can’t afford even this rent.’

Delaney said nothing. He couldn’t offer a lesser rent because one penny less and the whole place went under.

‘I think,’ Smoke said slowly, ‘that the best thing I can do is to get out of this altogether.’

‘Get out of it?’

‘Yes. Bung off. Visit another world. Make a call on old Saint Peter.’

‘My dear chap——’

‘Yes, I know all about it. I’m not very bright, you know, and ideas move slowly. All the same, I get there in the end. Anyway, lots of chaps are doing it. You read about one or other of them every morning in the paper ... and Dodie would be a lot better without me. She’d marry again. She’s darned attractive and some smart feller would want her. Sure to.’

‘You blithering fool,’ Delaney said. ‘She adores you.’

‘Yes, she’s fond of me. She’s a good girl. She’d miss me a bit at first and then she’d see what a good thing it was. This isn’t a world, old boy, for a chap with a wooden leg, no cash and no brains. Then he added slowly, staring in front of him: ‘I’ve tried for every sort of thing. Nobody wants me.’

Delaney was silent. He had a lot to think about.

‘You’ve no idea, old boy, of the kind of life that Dodie and I’ve been leading in the last year. We’ve cadged deliberately on everybody we know. We’ve angled for meals, been everywhere and anywhere with the chance of getting something for nothing. We’ve spent days and nights with the most awful people to be safe for food and drink. It can’t go on for ever. For one thing, we can’t stand it. For another, I bore nearly everybody. There are only a few old stupids like yourself can stand me. Almost all the people we really like are as poor as we are. And that’s another reason I’d be better away. Dodie amuses them. She’s bright and gay. Without me she would have no end of a time. If I ever did have any ideas they are gone now because my brain goes round and round about the Bank worrying us and the debts and the rent and the debts and the Bank.... So we must move out, old boy. Sorry, but there’s nothing else for it.’

Fred stretched his thick legs out, patted his stomach, pulled at his tie, looked in front of him. Here was another Figure in the Rain. Unless something happened Smoke would do just as he said. And perhaps it would be the best thing for him. That was the real problem at the heart of the trouble. There was no place in this present world for the Smoke Pullets unless there was a World War again—then they would be admirable.

Before 1914 they had played a very necessary part; they were a real need in English life and had been so for centuries. They had been the Squire and the Squire’s son; some property, possibly a seat in Parliament, beneficent, tyrannical, understanding in their country community, conforming, traditional, safe and sound. So it had been since the Wars of the Roses; from Agincourt 1415, say, until Serajevo 1914. And now, within the space of twenty years, they had become only a burden, and a wearisome burden at that. There was no future of any kind for Smoke, and he without a leg which he had lost in the service of his country. Probably a nice gas-oven (who had been talking of gas-ovens that very afternoon?—oh yes! Miss Alice Van Renn!) would be the best thing.

And yet Delaney had only to look at Smoke to know that he would do anything in his power to help him—save only to lower the rent. That he must not do for the sake of the house. The house! The house! And then he heard Smoke saying:

‘And the Pakes may have to do the same thing. Their income’s gone down like anything.’

So there it was! The battle had been joined! Nineteen-thirty-four was already showing what she could do, and January not ended! He realized from the start, however, that it was Smoke with whom he had immediately to deal. Let him think of the house afterwards! Over Smoke’s thin obstinate face there was a strange shadow as though he were half-way towards Saint Peter already!

‘Look here, Smoke—don’t be a bloody fool. No, I mean it. Killing yourself doesn’t help anything. I’ll speak to Rex Bennet, in the War Office. He’ll think of something. Great friend of mine. And we’ll manage about the rent. I’ve got to get it in somehow because we’re running on a narrow margin as it is. There are so many things want doing to a house like this. You’re right, though, in one thing. Fellows like you and me who haven’t been brought up to doing anything particular aren’t much use in this new world. You’ve got to be efficient at something these days if you’re to get a job, and the public schools are still turning out heaps of young chaps who aren’t any more efficient than we are. There are more young men hanging round London doing nothing to their parents’ despair than ever before, and they don’t want to do anything either. They’ve been to Eton or Harrow or Winchester and think they’re swell. They look down on everybody, their parents first of all—and yet they’re quite incompetent. They don’t give a damn for their country. Patriotism is bunk, and so is religion and so is hard work. I don’t like the Fascists and the Nazis, but I will say they give their young men something to be keen about....’

The door opened and Dodie Pullet stood there, as smart and thin and straight as a wand cut from the willow. Delaney, looking at her, thought as he often thought: ‘Where do they put all their figure to? Nothing either in front or behind. It must all be somewhere.’

But he was extremely fond of Dodie. She came and kissed him, ruffled his hair a little, and, in her mouse-grey frock with carnation at the neck and wrist, stood, with her arm around her husband’s waist, looking very beautiful.

‘Well, darling, have you told him?’

‘Yes, I have.’

‘And what does he say?’

‘Oh, that it’s all nonsense of course.’

‘It isn’t. Fred, sweet, we’ve got to go. That is unless I become a woman of sin and spend a weekend with—oh, never mind who! But I’ve had a very good offer.’

She was joking, she was talking nonsense, and yet the trouble in Smoke’s eyes ever so slightly deepened.

‘Now, you two children,’ said Delaney, getting up and straddling on his strong legs. ‘Leave it all to your uncle. He’ll think of something.’

‘I don’t know what it is about you Delaneys,’ Dodie said. ‘You haven’t any money yourselves and you none of you do anything for a living and you aren’t very intelligent and yet you are a comfort. There’s no denying it. You are a comfort. Someone was calling you ironically the other night “the joyful Delaneys” and saying they detested your good spirits. But I don’t know. It’s as though you saw farther than the rest of us and knew there was a good place somewhere. I like you. I must honestly confess I like you. But you’re getting fat, Fred. You must watch out for it. The Hay Diet. That’s the thing.’

Later in the evening, in the middle of his happiness, he thought of the Pullets. But they were different now. Figures in the Rain, but the rain was shut out, and all that marsh-world was unreal. For, by an extraordinary piece of good fortune, all the Delaneys were in that evening—Fred, Meg, Kitty and Bullock. Not only did they all have dinner together, but they stayed together after dinner, all of them, until they went up to bed. Of how many families of their class in London that evening could that be said? They had one of Fred’s favourite dinners, as Meg knew well—petite marmite, sole, mutton with currant jelly and baked potatoes, and apple pudding.

‘Americans shudder at our food,’ Fred said. ‘And yet, how beautiful, how natural, how full of flavour.... Dodie Pullet says I’m getting fat.’

He reflected that it was strange that they always seemed to gather this happiness from one another. Trouble was brewing for himself, Meg had something on her mind, and Kitty—hadn’t, in the last few days, something been happening to Kitty? but inside this room, close together, loving one another, they were conscious, perhaps, as Dodie said, of a happiness not dependent on the events of the day or material things.... He didn’t know. Food and wine made him sentimental.

‘And how was Surbiton?’ he asked Meg.

For an instant—so swift that no one but he in the whole world would have noticed it—she pulled up her guard. She looked at him over the top of it with her large black eyes, as though she would say: ‘Are we moving into a new episode? Have I got to be careful?’ for no marriage, however long-lived, however intimately enjoyed, is ever static. It changes colour, shape, balance of strength and weakness with every striking of the hour. No one knows anyone else sufficiently ever to be certain of safety.

‘Surbiton? ... Oh dear, such a wet day! I walked up an endless road. Just imagine! The house was called “Happy Nook”.’

‘Called what?’

‘ “Happy Nook.” Really. Of course my friend hadn’t named it. It was like that when they took it.’

‘Did you like them?’

‘Of course it’s funny after so long. The wife’s a dowdy. He’s so very clever.’

‘Ah, that must be a change after your own dear family.’

‘And what have you been doing on this very wet day?’

‘Oh, nothing ... had a little walk in the rain ... waited for you to come back.’

Afterwards they sat in extreme comfort round the fire. Once Kitty said:

‘Anyone ever heard of a painter called Braque?’

‘Who, darling?’

‘Braque—B-r-a-q-u-e.’

‘Lord, no! What a funny name!’

‘I have,’ Bullock said. ‘Play you at backgammon, Kitty.’

‘All right. What do you know about him?’

‘Oh, he paints squares and cubes and nonsense like that. You aren’t going highbrow, my darling sister, are you?’

‘Of course not. Why should I be highbrow just because I ask an intelligent question?’

Bullock kissed her.

‘You look very beautiful to-night, as though you were in love or something.’

Meg tried to read a novel for a brief while. She put the book down. ‘I know I’m not clever,’ she said, ‘but I can’t read modern novels. If they’re intelligent they’re about the nastiest people and take the gloomiest view of everything. If they’re about nice people and end well, they’re stupid. What I want is an intelligent happy novel. It’s not much to ask.’

Later, from his very small dressing-room off their bedroom, he called out:

‘Meg!’

‘Yes, dear.’

‘What stage are you at?’

‘I’m in bed.’

He came in, in a superb dressing-gown of black silk with a purple collar and cuffs—a birthday present from Larry after he’d made a lucky deal in some Waterford glass. Fred called it his Waterford. He sprawled over his bed and drew her into his arms.

‘Meg, dear.’

‘Yes. What is it?’

‘I think I’m a little in love with the Van Renn girl.’

‘I know you are.’

‘And the Pullets and the Pakes may be leaving.’

‘Oh dear, oh dear!’

‘Yes—altogether I feel as though things are going to happen. You’re not quite yourself either.’

‘Of course I am, darling.’

‘Not quite.... Not quite.’ He leaned his cheek against hers. ‘What I want to say is—dearest, are you listening?’

‘Of course I’m listening.’

‘Whatever happens, whatever happens, we’ll see one another through everything. We know, don’t we, that no one, nothing, ever and ever can mean to us what we mean to one another?’

‘Yes, we do.’

‘That’s why we’re happy if we have to beg in the streets.’

‘I shan’t mind begging in the least if we’re together.’

He drew back from her a little. He put his hand under her chin.

‘Even your old flame—who’s very very clever, isn’t he?—won’t take you from me?’

Meg laughed quite hysterically.

‘Fred, what an absurd idea! Why, he’s got white hair.’

‘And you love me, love me, love me?’

‘I adore you.’

Meg looked at him, smiling. Then she said slowly:

‘If—for a day, a night, a minute, a second I were unfaithful—how would it be?’

‘It would be as we said at the beginning it was to be. We agreed then that we should both be free—absolutely.’

‘Yes, but you would love me less?’

‘I don’t know how it would feel.’

‘People would think it disgusting if you didn’t.’

‘We’ve nothing to do with people,’ Fred said, ‘or anyone else’s rules.’

But Meg was thinking:

‘Yes—but I’ve a kind of wildness in me—always have had, and one day perhaps before I’m an old woman and everything’s over I might—just to be kind, to smell a whiff of adventure—I might be too kind.’

‘That would be up to you,’ Fred answered. ‘What I couldn’t be responsible for would be my own feelings. But we’d be honest with one another and I think we’d go on loving one another whatever happened.’

‘Yes,’ Meg said. ‘But not in the same way. I think there’s nothing more horrible than for people to have rights over one another. Horrible, horrible! We’re free, as you say, you and I! But, put laws and religion and tradition and what conventional people think all aside, love between husband and wife follows the same instincts as it did ten thousand years ago. Love can be damaged.’

‘Has ours,’ he asked quickly, ‘by my—well—weaknesses?’

‘Yes, I think it has—a little. I love you just as much, but a little differently and not quite so finely. Of course,’ she went on rapidly, ‘we aren’t very fine people—not as fine people go. We’re happy people, which is quite another thing. If we were finer we wouldn’t be quite so happy maybe. There’s a little bit of the guttersnipe in both of us, Fred. In Larry, too. In Kitty a little. But not in Bullock, I think.’

She got up, looking at him.

‘All the same our love for one another is grand. And it would be silly—for some little quick sensation—to spoil it. People do—often. But I’m not to be trusted—not for another while or so. No other man but you has made love to me for years and it is so agreeable!’

He looked at her and then beyond her. ‘We’re free. Our love’s based on that.’

‘Perhaps we shouldn’t be free. Maybe we’re going to find that out.’

But he was never any good at serious discussion.

‘Wait a minute,’ he said. ‘I’ll be back.’

He went into the dressing-room to clean his teeth.