Читать книгу What Not - Macaulay Rose - Страница 15

They arrived at the End House, about which there is little to say except that it lay just beyond the straggling village, was roomy, comfortable, untidy, full of dogs all named after revue stars, and was an interesting mixture of the Grammont taste in art and decoration, which was the taste of clever people several of whom were artists, and of Pansy's taste, which is most shortly indicated by mentioning that if you saw the house before you saw Pansy you were surprised, and if you had seen Pansy first you were not. The drawing-room floor was littered with large and comfortable and brightly-hued cushions, obviously not mistakes but seats. This always a little flurried the vicar and his wife when they called; it was, as Mrs. Delmer observed, so very Eastern, and suggested other habits belonging to the same dubious quarter of the globe, some of which there was only too good reason to believe had been adopted. The chimney-piece was worse, being adorned by photographs of Pansy's friends—her loving Tottie, hers everlastingly, Guy, warmly Phyllis and Harry, and so forth. (There was even hers Jimmie, which, if Mrs. Delmer had known rather more of Pansy's domestic circumstances than she did, would have struck her as being in very doubtful taste.) Some of these ladies and gentlemen, fortunately, had elected to be taken head and shoulders only (and quite enough too, thought Mrs. Delmer, wondering how far below the bottom of the photograph the ladies' clothes began) and some showed the whole figure. ("I should think they did!" said Mrs. Delmer, on her first call, nervously retreating from the chimney-piece. It may be mentioned that Mrs. Delmer was not in the habit of witnessing revues, and was accustomed to an ampler mode of garment. These things are so much a question of habit.)

These photographs, and the excellent painting in the hall of Pansy herself in her eel dance, were among the minor reasons why Ivy Delmer was not allowed to enter the End House. There were three reasons why her parents did so; they might be stupid, but they were of an extraordinary goodness, and could not bear to leave sin alone, anyhow in their own parish, where it set such an unfortunate example, when they might, by sufficient battling, perhaps win it over to righteousness; also they had kind and soft hearts, and did not like the idea of Pansy alone all day with her infant son and the two most notoriously ill-behaved young servants in the village; and finally they were Christians, and believed that the teaching of their religion on the subject of sociability to sinners was plain. So, swallowing their embarrassed distaste, they visited the End House as one might visit a hospital, but kept their children from it, because it was a hospital whose patients might be infectious.

Into this house, standing hospitably open-doored in the May evening, its owner and his friends entered. It affected them in various ways. Anthony Grammont was proud of his house and garden, his Pansy and his Cheeper. He was young enough to be vain of being head of a household, even of an ambiguous household, and of course anyone would be proud of the dazzling and widely-known Pansy, whose name had always been one of the two in large type in advertisements of the shows in which she figured (she was as good as all that); and he was tired enough, mentally and physically, by his life of the last few years, its discomforts, its homelessness, its bondage, its painful unnaturalness, to sink with relief into Pansy's exotic cushions and all they stood for.

Kitty found the house and household inordinately cheering and entertaining; the mere sight of Pansy's drawing-room could rouse her from any depression.

Vernon Prideaux shuddered a little at the row of photographs—he detested photographs on chimney-pieces—and the Eve design on the chair covers; he was not so good at the comic-opera touch as Kitty was, and had a masculine sense of propriety and good taste, and had always preferred revue stars on the stage to off it. He had also, however, a wide tolerance for the tastes of others, and was glad that Tony Grammont had found domestic happiness.

Amherst's thoughts were brief and neat, and might be summed up thus: "Forces of Darkness—number 8. The expensive, conscienceless, and unthinking female."

Pansy went upstairs to put the Cheeper to bed, and Kitty went with her to see her nephew in his bath, putting both his big toes into his mouth at once.

The only other event of importance which happened before dinner was the arrival of Cyril Grammont, a brother of Anthony's, a Cambridge friend of Prideaux's, a Roman Catholic, a writer of epigrammatic essays and light verse, and a budding publisher. He and Pansy usually quarrelled. He had spent the war partly in Macedonia, as a member of the Salonika Force, digging up fragments of sculpture from Amphipolis and the other ruined cities of those regions, tracking what he then held to be the pernicious influence of St. Paul with the help of a pocket atlas of his journeys and the obviously evil habits and dispositions of the towns which had received his attentions, and partly in Palestine, where he had taken an extreme dislike to both Jews and Turks, had become convinced that they must be so wrong about everything that mattered that Christians must be right, and was forthwith converted from atheism to Christianity. He considered that war-time is no time for Christians, they have to do so much either explaining or protesting or both, so he had waited till the war was over, and had then proceeded to investigate the various forms into which Christianity had developed (they all seemed a little strange to him at first), in order to make his choice. An impartial friend with whom he discussed the subject told him that he would find Roman Catholicism best suited to his precise, clear-cut, and Latin type of mind, provided that he succeeded in avoiding all contact with the more luscious forms of Roman devotions, which, he was warned, would disgust him as much as patchouli, or Carlo Dolci. "And anyhow," added his friend, probably erroneously, "it will outlast the other churches, for all its obscurantism, so if you want a going concern, join it."

So Cyril enquired into Roman Catholicism, found that, in its best cathedral forms, it satisfied his artistic sense, and, in its sharply-cut dogma, his feeling for precise form (his taste in art was violently against the post-bellum school, which was a riot of lazy, sloppy, and unintellectual formlessness), and so, accepting as no stranger than most of the growths of a strangely sprouting world the wonderful tree which had grown from a seed so remarkably dissimilar, he took a firm seat upon its branches, heedless of the surprised disapproval of most of his friends, who did not hold that any organised religion could be called a going concern, except in the sense that it was going to pot.

So here was Cyril, at the End House for Sunday, neat, handsome, incisive, supercilious, very sure of himself, and not in the least like the End House, with its slatternly brilliance, its yapping dogs, its absurdities, its sprawling incoherence, its cushions, and its ambiguity.

In the evening Pansy danced her willow-tree dance for them. Her hair tumbled down, and she ceased to look like the Sistine Madonna and became more like a young Bacchanal. Some of her jokes were coarse (you have to be coarse sometimes in revue, and cannot leave the habit entirely behind you when you come off the boards) and Amherst, who was refined, was jarred. Then she quarrelled with Cyril, because he remarked, with his cheerful and businesslike air of finality, that of course if the Cheeper were not baptised he would go to hell. Upon her violent remonstrance he merely observed that he was sorry, but facts were facts, and he couldn't get them altered to please her. He talked like this partly to annoy Pansy, because it amused him to see her cross, and partly for the pleasure of unobtrusively watching Amherst's expression when the word hell was mentioned.