Читать книгу Gray youth - Oliver Onions - Страница 5

A girl of seventeen, with a knitted tam-o’-shanter cap and a thick cable of red-bronze hair hanging down her back, walked along a gallery of the Louvre, looking for her aunt. The eyes that turned whenever she heard a footfall or, passing a statue or case, saw a fresh vista before her, were of a light brown, with just such a hint of gold in their irises as you see when some opals are turned and catch a different light; and they were confused and overfilled with the treasures on which they had rested. She was an art-student, and must return to London on the morrow in order to resume her studies at the McGrath.

It was her first visit to Paris, and she had spent the whole of her three weeks at the Cluny and the Luxembourg, at the Louvre and Versailles. Now, drenched and sated with beauty, she still could not bear to leave it all. A few minutes before, passing through the Salon Carré, where an elderly lady had been copying the Entombment, she had wished that she too might be old and white-haired if only age might so enlarge her capacity for loveliness, that even youth would be well lost for it. Already she loved the highest when she saw it, and, being an artist, she needs must attempt it too.

The girl found her aunt near the spot where the Antinöus stands on its pedestal, and walked along by her side, neither speaking nor listening to the elder lady’s remarks on the objects they passed. They did not seem to her to be worth listening to. She knew that for her aunt art had reached its comble on the day when the late Sir Noël Paton had affixed his signature to “The Man with the Muckrake,” and she had got out of the way of trying to explain that much water had flowed under London Bridge and many students flowed through the McGrath since that time. Besides, she did not want to talk. She wanted this last high hour in the Louvre as much as might be to herself. She wanted to taste the full emotion of it, not even analysing it, if only for once analysis would cry a truce. At the end of the gallery they turned and walked back again.

It was as they passed the Antinöus for the second time that the girl felt her young bosom rise almost painfully. She could not have told why, without premeditation, she suddenly lingered, so that her aunt passed a little ahead. She watched her disappear behind some plinth or pedestal or other, and then stopped opposite the marble bust.

There was no knowing when she might find herself in this wonderful place again, and it seemed to her that her farewell of it now required some symbol. She gave a furtive glance round. Neither visitor nor gardien was to be seen, and again something seemed to rise in her throat. Noiselessly she stole to the pedestal. For a moment she wondered whether she dared; the next instant she had risen—in her low-heeled brown shoes she was hardly more than five feet high—she had risen on tiptoe.

She crushed her lips against the Antinöus’s marble cheek.

What it was she really kissed she had no idea. They say that male artists have been known to kiss the pallid mask of the Girl said to have been found in the Seine, but probably they have kissed, not the senseless plaster, but some more glowing inner image. But the girl thought of no young man, Greek and dead or modern and alive. Perhaps by her act she set young men expressly aside, adoring the imperishable expression instead. It was the first kiss she had ever given. There was no sex-impulse in it, and yet it was a gesture of sex. She would not have known what other gesture to employ.

With a fluttering heart and a heightened colour she rejoined her aunt, and on the following day returned to London. For days after that a nameless wistfulness still lingered in her shallow brook-brown eyes.

A fortnight after her return they gave a fancy-dress dance at the McGrath, and the girl made one of a supper-party of a dozen or more who, during the interval, in one of the smaller painting-rooms, settled on the floor in a wide ring, with plates of sandwiches and jelly and cakes and blancmange making a rapidly disappearing parterre of food in the middle. The ring was as noisy as a merry-go-round of painted horses on a Bank Holiday, and they played Hunt-the-Slipper, and perhaps in the scuffling there was a little crude hand-holding—though nobody held the girl’s hand. Then they went back again to dance in the Antique Room, where the tall casts, the “Discobolus” and the “Gladiator,” the “Germanicus” and the great writhe of the “Laocoön,” had been wheeled back against the walls, and stood, like so many sightless servitors, holding wraps and shawls and the fans and oddments that had been put down on their plinths. The girl danced again.

She was dressed this time as a porcelain shepherdess, in a hooped skirt of tender pink with tiny sprigs of green sown throughout it. She had borrowed the dress from one of the other girls. At supper, sitting in the ring, she had resembled a rose-peony that had been taken by its stalk and pressed down on the floor. About the slender hyacinth-stalk of her neck was a black velvet ribbon with a locket, and the thick mass of her hair peeped over the shoulders of her partners like an irregular knob of bronze lustre. Her shallow ribboned hat was on “Homer’s” head, between the “Gladiator” and the “Greek Slave.”

Some time during the later part of the evening, she was induced by a young man in evening-dress, with restrained manners but a hardy eye, to descend the stairs, and, passing the hall-porter’s little glass box and pushing at the outer swing-doors, to take a walk in the courtyard of the School. The McGrath is only part of a larger institution. In the forecourt are grass plots enclosed by low swinging chains, and, tall and dim, with many broad steps and Corinthian columns, the pediment of the great main portico towers over the court on the eastern side. The girl and her cavalier crossed the grass plots, ascended the steps, and stood within the gloom of the pillars.

There, without warning, the young man suddenly stooped and kissed her.

She knew that these things happened, and daily; but tears of misery and revulsion and shame started into her eyes. It seemed—she did not know what—a soilure, a coarseness, a bringing down of some lovely and to-be-dreamed-of thing to mere brutal demonstration. The young man was not even one of her companions of the McGrath; he was a medical student, he had told her, and so perhaps naturally insensible to the finer emotions. With a sudden pained “Oh!” she started from him, her hands crushed with horror against her pretty cheeks and mouth. She thought she heard him say, “Why, what’s the matter?” but she was not sure; she was sure of nothing in this moment but of her own sense of miserable outrage. She left the young man calling softly behind her, ran quickly down the steps, and reached the dancing-room again.

Near the door as she entered two men stood, looking on. Both were men of forty-four or forty-five, and one of them was Jowett, the McGrath Professor of Painting. His companion had just asked him a question; he tugged at a ragged and grey-streaked moustache before replying.

“Art students? What becomes of ’em? God knows! You might as well ask what becomes of people who eat their meals in restaurants or little girls who learn to play the piano. They aren’t a class. Perhaps one in a thousand or fifteen hundred comes to something, but the rest—well, what this place really is, if you want to know, is a sort of day nursery for the children of the well-to-do middle class.”

“You mean they marry and then drop it?” the other asked.

Jowett tugged again at the unkempt moustache. He spoke patiently and wearily.

“Oh yes; and co-educate their offspring; and by and by I suppose we shall have evolved a sort of intermediate sex, half women who make a hash of doing men’s work, and half men who put flowers in their hair and talk about music. It always seems to me that these girls ought to be sewing or baking, and the men drinking beer and singing limericks in a canteen.—There’s a girl, now——”

The small creature dressed as a shepherdess had just run past. The eyes of both men followed her. Jowett continued.

“Miss Amory Towers. She’s the pick of ’em; one of the clever ones, I mean; and as far as my experience takes me, that means she’s just a little too clever for a woman and not nearly clever enough to make a really satisfactory man. But, of course, she’s young, and I may be wrong. … I put her straight into the Life when she came here, but what she really needs is somebody to put her into Life in another sense. But I doubt if anybody here’ll do it. These fellows don’t see other men enough; too much squiring these young women about.—Eh? Harm in it? Not a ha’porth; they’re too dashed blameless altogether. Sometimes it’s positively unnatural; it seems to me to raise the very questions it’s supposed to suppress. Probably these youngsters will grow up to be fifty, and then discover all the follies they’ve had the chance to commit and haven’t committed, and then they’ll go about preaching doctrines about it all. Really, they scare me sometimes. I’m not naturally gross, but they do drive a fellow——”

But here the other interrupted him. … “Hallo, your little shepherdess seems to be going early.”

Amory Towers, her tiny figure wrapped in a hood and cloak and her young heart one unhappy ache to know the meaning of these two first kisses of her life, was hurrying away.