Читать книгу Bring the Monkey - Miles Franklin - Страница 10

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I answered a knock on my door and found Captain Stopworth.

"There is a desire for Percy's reappearance in the lounge," he said with a slight twinkle of amusement in his eyes, "and as I was coming up, I have offered to act as his escort, and yours."

We went down the grand romantic staircase together. The Chief Inspector was charming--now if he instead of Swithwulf...

Me stood a moment looking down at the company lapt in that comfortable idle hour that stretches between tea and dressing for dinner, when men and women say the things that have to be said or listened to, in the hope of hearing or saying otherwise. The Elephant Hunter, by name of Brodribb, undertook to see to Percy so that he should not wreck the place. Deposited on the hearth rug, he was immediately another person. Studious, efficient, professional, he began upon his duties, the search for any unhygienic fleck or insect that might lurk within his reach. With his exquisite little hands he turned over the fur of a splendid bear rug which promised to occupy him indefinitely.

"You slip away and get your tea and amuse yourself downstairs," whispered Zarl.

"Don't miss your tea," Clarice added with a smile. "Your little pet seems as if he could do without you for a while."

Tea is a prosaic superfluity: a Tattingwood Hall as a hostelry, a rare enchantment. I had the wonderful place almost to myself for an hour, till the dressing bell should summon those responsible for the physical cleanliness of the people disporting themselves so banally in the great hall. I peeped into the drawing-rooms, peered along galleries lined with armour, took the noble vistas with an enjoyment that was compensation for existence. One could almost feel the emotions that must saturate the beams and stones of such a pile, half-hear bygone laughter, rage or grief, like the echo of an echo escaping along the stately passages.

What a theatre for lovers! How many had longed and lied there since the days of Elizabeth the Queen--from which in part it dated--to Clarice of soap, consoled for a dull lord by her handsome Chief Inspector. Well, great piles like Tattingwood Hall have been relinquished before to-day for romance, though such gambles are more glamorous when both parties to them are under thirty. Would the bulwark that Lady Tattingwood had secured against foolishness, hold?

I was too weary and cold to exert myself for my role in the comedy below stairs, so I slipped into Zarl's beautiful room where the big fire was so comforting. Zarl's things were spread towards the top of her bed, so without disturbing them I crept under the eiderdown at the foot, and aided by the warmth of the fire, set out to overtake some of the sleep which had of late eluded me. Just as I was gaining upon my desire. Lady Tattingwood entered from her room, accompanied by the Chief Inspector. Instead of passing into his own room, the Inspector turned the key in the door into the gallery and sat down with his friend before the fire. They sat in the glow of the coals which shone on the high wooden foot of the bed, but left me entirely in shadow under the eiderdown. They were comfortably settled before I had roused sufficiently to declare myself. I hesitated, and the only unembarrassing behaviour was to remain quiet hoping they would never know of my presence.

Clarice began to weep. She wept steadily and relievingly. Her companion let her alone for a few moments and then said "Well, my dear, you don't seem very happy to see me."

"Oh, but I am! The joy of having you here near me once more. Oh, Cecil, my darling!"

"We must be circumspect. This is very reckless of me now--if anyone came..."

"Oh, but they won't. They were all so entertained with that blessed little monkey. Did you ever see anything like it. And Zarl never rushes up to dress till the last moment. Her hair and skin and everything are so lovely and natural she doesn't have to spend hours in making-up."

"Well then, I brought those letters as promised, but I want you to reverse your decision and let me keep them--they are precious to me, and some day in the future may be the most treasured possession..."

Their actions were reflected in the mirror on the dressing-table. Clarice leant toward him, and he put a kindly arm around her. "You want happiness to be known someday. You are ashamed of it?"

"Oh, no. But your career has to be considered, and also Swithwulf's position."

"All that he asks is to be let alone on his own trails. He is perfectly indifferent."

"He might seem to be. But he is very cunning. He is not stupid...Oh, I'm so tired of Tattingwood and what it entails...I want to go away."

"That is why it is foolish to run risks."

"But I had to have something to carry me along...and this is a good opportunity...How is Denise?"

"More like her mother every day. She is always asking me about her mother. I have a struggle to evade her questions. Some day soon I must tell her the truth."

"Better not. Young people are so conventional. She would feel disgraced, and never forgive."

"A new generation has come since the war, and I am training Denise to have an open mind, so that she will be prepared. I discuss all sorts of things with her. I am teaching her to understand the romance of her parentage."

"I am so weary waiting."

"But I don't want to be marked as a fortune hunter. The money complicates matters."

"Are you sure you really want me without the fortune? I am old now, and I often wake up in the night terrified, because I have been dreaming that you were only ridiculing me."

"You must not make it difficult for me. You know there has never been any woman for me but you. Surely my life has demonstrated that."

"Oh, yes dear, and I am so grateful."

"Well, trust me with these," he tapped his pocket. "My life must be uncertain, and I'll put these away in some vault in a sealed and locked packet, with a letter."

"Oh, don't talk of that. It reminds me of the war. You can have the letters, but if Swith found them it would be fatal."

"Thank you Clarice...Ssh!"

The Chief Inspector was gone to his room, with amusing speed. Lady Tattingwood attended to the key into the gallery, and then returned to her own room with slightly less dispatch. There were voices in the gallery, and I had just time to slide off the bed and switch on the light when Zarl turned the handle of the door. She was attended by the Elephant Hunter and Jimmy Wengham, who were in charge of Percy so that finger nails would not injure Zarl's trousered suit. Jimmy could not forbear to tease animals and children, Percy, catching sight of me, laid his ears back for a desperate effort which carried him with a whack to my shoulder, where his nails would have lacerated my skin but for the high-necked uniform. I snatched the lead, and the little creature snuggled to me with murmurs of relief.

"You bad man. My little Percy he notta like you," I said. After a little banter, the two men went away to dress. Percy had subsided and was lashed to the coal scuttle. He sat on the floor squawking softly and rubbing his nose with his hand. He was a trifle hungry, kept so expressly in order to be open to bribes.

Zarl was to wear my new dress, and no decorations whatever but Percy, just to contrast with Ydonea, who was to drip with trillions and crocodillions of jewels.

"I haven't a working wit, so I'm in the hands of my maid," smiled Zarl, whose amenability makes her a delightful companion. The dress was a soft velvet, which glinted greenly in certain cross lights; a wrapped wisp to the knees, below which it flowed in undulations. It would disclose Zarl's perfectly fashioned arms and torso with barefaced but well-grounded optimism, and heighten her "ginger."

"I hate my freckles," she protested.

"There are none below the belt, so to speak," I remarked, laying out her implements of toilet.

"You don't like Jimmy Wengham," she commented. "You would have liked him less had you seen him downstairs. He started cutting Percy's nails with that horrid dirk till they bled. I don't know what has come over Jimmy. He seems so brutal--I don't know how I could have carried on with him even for a minute."

"Did you?"

"You don't suppose he'd lug Percy all the way from Africa in an aeroplane for me unless he had been infatuated. But he wants to go to excessive lengths in love."

"How far?"

"Don't be such a peanut! He's sheerly sloppy. I've been telling him to reserve such mush in case he comes down in a desert atmosphere. England is mawkishly damp already. He always wants to go the whole engine!"

"Merely the usual, isn't it, nowadays?"

"It's carrying a cocktail like love altogether too far. Some men carry even a kiss too far, if they are not curbed. It shows a deplorable lack of imagination."

"How far do you consider love can be carried without being too far?"

"Just to that point where the final demonstration to a person of imagination, would be a clog upon imagination."

"I see...and the anticipation...you like that to inspire an expedition to the Antarctic or the Pole of Cold...I'm thankful Jimmy did not quite recognise me."

"He wouldn't split if he did. Swithwulf has been telling me that he was right on the rocks. Clarice had to salvage him, and Cedd put him in the way of this job with the Zaltuffrie, to tide him over. He's mad to do a world flight, but he's such a cracked-brained thing that the aeroplane people won't trust him. He'd be likely to take off without his petrol or something like that."

I confided to Zarl that I had found Clarice weeping when I came up. Seeking to discover if Zarl knew her secret, I asked "Do you suppose it hurts her when old Swith tries to be gay?"

Zarl laughed right out. "Really, you are too middle-class for a lady's maid among the best people. It comes of carrying respectability too far. Clarice is not such a goat with a cast-iron throat...If ever she did care, except from the point of hygiene and expense, she would have outgrown it long ago...Much more likely that Cecil has said something to her. I'd like to ravish that man myself, only I would never be mean to Clarice; but you've only got to look at them to see it could not hold up--why, she looks like his grandmother, and doesn't try to mitigate it."

"If she had her face lifted, and dyed her hair, it would show weakness."

"Clarice is weak. That is what makes her so lovable and kind."

"Is this from Woolworth's, do you think?"

I showed her the tiepin. She knows a little about jewels and antiques.

"It looks like a platinum setting, and if the pearl is as real as it looks it could be anything from fifty pounds to a thousand. Where did you get it?"

"Swithwulf George St. Erconwald Spillbeans Tattingwood gave it to me for mes beaux yeux. So, while you have been adventuring, I too have not been idle. He has named a trysting place for this evening."

"The colossical old reprobate! Clarice told me once that he humiliated her by his selection of ladies. She said if only he would choose someone like me she would not feel it such a reflection, but I didn't think..."

"You didn't think it was so bad as a coolie on Percy's string."

"I did not think he would have such discernment, or else your incognita is satisfactory," bubbled Zarl. "I'd just hang on to the pin if I were you. You are entitled to adventures among the best people. Their lives are an artistic struggle to escape from the drabness of carrying respectability too far."

"You say that you picked it up, and return it to Clarice."

"What are you going to do about the tryst?"

"What do you think?"

"That his optimism is barefaced, like the gallant Captain's who picked me for his lady for the voyage. Clarice will revel in this when the time comes to reveal it."

"If ever it should."

"We'll skip off home to-morrow. This mouldy collection of oddments doesn't contain one man who could be pried loose from a life-size cigar or a bar parlour, except the Elephant Hunter or Jimmy, and each of those is more stony broke than the other, and each more luny. With people like that it takes altogether too much effort to keep them in the platonic form, whereas the nice professor scientists don't know what is the matter with them but it works just the same..."

"Yes, like a donkey being lured on by a bundle of carrots on the end of the shaft, even unto the Arctic seas."

"Exactly, but I did not construct the universe, and all things are there for our use. The difference between you and me is that I accept the world as it is and you want to mess around and change it, and think it would or could be different if only this or that wasn't what it is."

She was a delectable established fact in the green velvet. Her petite form had a lissom outline. Percy was attired in his black velvet evening shorts, specially designed for him by Madame Mabelle, with a white silk knitted singlet. We could not have buttons on the sides of the trews because he chewed them off, but there were glass buttons at the back to fasten the tabs over his lead.

Clarice entered to have a little chat with her friend before she descended to dinner. She wanted Percy to be present, and said that I could arrange for that with the butler. I agreed with alacrity. "You are fortunate to have a maid so devoted to your little pet," she remarked to Zarl, as I went out.