Читать книгу Gray youth - Oliver Onions - Страница 6

In Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, there used to stand, and may stand yet, a tenement of which the ground floor was a small “lock-up” greengrocer’s shop, and the remaining portions either dwelling-rooms or else rooms that, like the shop, were left at night and returned to again the next morning. The narrow entry to the right of the shop had once been white-washed, but was now so discoloured that the street boys had ceased to scribble on its walls the names of horses and other matters. It was full of the smell of apples and oranges and of the more suspect odour of earth and bruised rinds and decaying outer leaves, and there was usually a cat or two about, licking up the last splash left by the milkman’s can. When a new milkman took the round he was lucky if he did not come down all-fours at the bottom of the narrow winding staircase that turned off sharp to the right. The staircase itself was as black as the inside of a pair of bellows, and a piece of paper at the foot of it bore two names:

Miss Dorothy Lennard

Miss Amory Towers

These were followed by the words: “First Floor: if Out, leave Parcels at Shop.”

The landing of the first floor was slightly less black than the staircase itself, but the grey half-light filtered through, not from any window, but from the unhinged side of the door of the room rented by Miss Lennard and Miss Towers. As if the landing had been damp and the room beyond warm (which possibly was the case), this door, which was of thin matchboarding, warped inwards quite two inches at the top, and, indeed, seemed to be held only by the fastening in the middle. When the door happened to be locked the glimpse through this crack was always productive of a slight annoyance. It was as if Miss Dorothy Lennard or Miss Amory Towers was nearly in, or not quite gone away, or in any case must be returning in a few minutes. People often waited for quite a long time before finally giving up hope.

Early on an April afternoon some years ago there walked quickly into the entry and ran confidently up the dark stairs a tall young woman in a large black picture-hat and a long tea-coloured silk raincoat. On the first landing she pushed at the door with her foot. There was a short succession of flapping and shot-like sounds (for if the door skellowed inwards at the top it stuck correspondingly at the bottom), and then the door started open and the young woman entered.

“Amory!” she called loudly. “Where are you?”

The last words were superfluous, since (unless she had climbed out of the long front casement and on to the gutter) it was not possible for Miss Towers to be in hiding in the room. And out of the square aperture at the back, that commanded a view of washing, weeds, discarded bottles, the greengrocer’s “empties” and the back gardens of the west side of Oakley Street, she could not as much as have got her head. Nor did Miss Lennard wait for an answer. Down the chimney opposite the door there came a dense yellow cauliflower of smoke; Miss Lennard hastily closed the door again; and then, first looking for a moment this way and that, she strode to a black-and-white desk near the long casement and began to turn over the litter upon it. This, which was a foot and more high, consisted of magazines and ladies’ journals and tracing-paper and proofs, and it was surmounted, first, by a plate with a couple of bananas and a half-eaten bunch of grapes upon it, and secondly, by a glass of water, clear above, cloudy in the middle, and with a thick reddish sediment at the bottom. As she sought, Miss Lennard popped three or four grapes into her large O of a mouth, throwing the skins towards the fireplace, from which another opaque yellow cauliflower poured, though this time not quite so far out into the room. She had removed her gloves; her hands were large and firm and waxen and without rings; and one or other of them found its way of itself to the grapes while the other continued its search.

The smoking of the chimney had blackened the ceiling, which bellied downwards in the middle like the under side of a giant’s mattress; and it had also dimmed the surfaces of such of the brighter objects of furniture as the cheap working-room contained—the picture-glasses, the gate-legged table, a bowl full of dead daffodils, and some crockery. But Miss Lennard and Miss Towers frequently said that it was not for the inside of the room, but for the sake of the views from the long lattice in front, that they had chosen the place. These were for ever changing and charming. From a standpoint just within the door you looked over the Embankment Gardens and saw, through trees, lighters following the bullying tugs, or barges, their sails reefed to the sprits, resembling tall attenuated figures in the act of grasping punting-poles. Placing yourself in the middle of the worn floor you saw, crossed out as it were by the middle lattice, the Chelsea Jelly Factory and other buildings across the river. And standing quite by the fireplace you saw the lacy lines of the Suspension Bridge and the low grey-green trees of Battersea Park. As the chimney emitted more yellow curds, Miss Lennard, with an “Ugh!” opened the middle section of this window. The papers among which she had been searching were instantly whisked across the floor.

“Bother the thing!” she muttered. “How stupid if it’s at Oxford Street all the time! … I say, Amory, have you seen that Doubleday thing? You know—the Chemisettes. I was sure I’d left it here.”

The door had rattled again, and Miss Amory Towers had entered.

Miss Towers did not answer at once. From a brown pudding-bowl of a hat with a silken cord round it, she drew out two enamel-headed hatpins, and hung the hat on a hook. Its removal showed her rich hair no longer in a plait, but wreathed round and round her head and interplaited until it resembled a vividly painted fir cone. She wore a peacock’s-neck-coloured blouse with several necklaces of iridescent shells at the collar; a roughened leather belt encircled the waist that would have been large had she herself not been so small; and, while the breeze from the open window rippled in Dorothy’s tea-coloured raincoat, it hardly stirred the folds of Amory’s heavier skirt of dusty-looking brown velvet.

She moved to the window. “I haven’t touched your things,” she said.

Then she stood, half leaning against the embrasure, gazing moodily across the river.

Certainly she was fetchingly pretty. As if you had looked at her through one of the very weak reducing-glasses illustrators use in order to see how their work will diminish, so her features had not only a special smallness, but somehow a special brightness of their own as well. The slight neck was white as a bluebell stalk; the faint flower-like stippling that never quite broke through into avowed freckles reminded you of a rubbed old miniature that might have been painted, not on ivory, but on a lamina of pale gold; and her inordinate hair lighted up the whole casement angle. But she was perturbed about something. She watched a string of lighters drift down with the tide, and then, without turning her head, said, “Dorothy——”

Dorothy, who had been once more searching among the scattered papers, rose from her knees. She held a piece of paper in her hand. “Got it!” she cried triumphantly. “I knew I’d left it here. … What?”

“Have you heard about Aunt Jerry?”

“Thank goodness I haven’t trailed all the way from Oxford Street for nothing! … Aunt Jerry? No. What about her?”

“She’s going to be married.”

Ordinarily Dorothy Lennard’s blue eyes were wide, receptive rounds; in moments of surprise they always seemed to open to twice their size. They did so now.

“No! … Oh, my dear, do tell me, quick.”

“Mr. Massey, at the boarding-house.”

“Mr.——? Not the safety-valve?” she cried.

“Yes.”

“My—dear! … But he’s forty if he’s a day,” Dorothy exclaimed.

“He’s forty-three. Aunt Jerry’s thirty-eight.”

“Oh, but she’s such a darling! Have they told people yet? May I write her a note? When are they going to be married?” Miss Lennard came as near to asking the three questions all in one as was physically possible.

“Write if you like. They’re getting married in July. I call it——”

But instead of saying what she called it Amory turned impatiently to the window again. She was biting the corner of her upper lip.

“Why,” said Dorothy, checked in her glee, “what’s the matter?”

But Amory did not speak. She had been about to say, if a thing so obvious needed to be said, that it was ridiculous (to say the least) for people of thirty-eight and forty-three to be thinking about marriage; but that was not all. There were other things, that, since Dorothy could not understand them even if she did say them, were perhaps not worth wasting breath over. Not that Dorothy was actually dull; but for all that Amory had almost ceased to hope that Dorothy would ever grasp her, Amory’s, true position. Their circumstances were so very different. Of course Amory was ready to concede that Dorothy, like herself, did contrive to live on what she earned; she earned from thirty to thirty-five shillings a week as a fashion artist; but it was one thing to make do on that, with people behind you to catch you when you stumbled, and quite another to have (as Amory had under her godmother’s will) a scanty thirteen pounds a quarter, to sell a sketch or a picture once in a blue moon, and to know that that is all the help you need look forward to. Dorothy would quickly have found out the difference had it been she, Amory, who had had the people with houses in town and places up and down the country, and herself, Dorothy, who had been the daughter of a poor and clever Cambridge practitioner who had died before he had managed to get on his feet, and had left his daughter to live with the only relative she had in the world in a hateful boarding-house in Shepherd’s Bush! And it was all very fine for Dorothy to joke about it, and to say that the fewer relatives she had the luckier she was. There was no getting away from it: these things did give a confidence to Dorothy’s stride, and an assurance to her glance, and an expectation of success to her eyes.

Therefore Amory did not answer when her friend asked her what was the matter.

But Dorothy, after a moment’s cogitation, contrived, though probably by accident, to hit on what was the matter for herself.

“I must write to her at once,” she said. “In July—so soon! I am glad! I do hope they’ll be happy! … And what’ll you do? Go on living at the boarding-house?”

Ah! (Amory thought), so Dorothy did see it from somebody’s point of view besides Aunt Jerry’s! She moved one shoulder petulantly.

“Aunt Jerry paid the bills there,” she said.

“Do you mean that you’ll go and live with them when they’re married?” Dorothy asked.

“No, I don’t,” said Amory with marked brevity. Dorothy hadn’t seen her aunt and Mr. Massey together or she wouldn’t have asked that. And one of them was thirty-eight and the other forty-three! Talk about the loves of the valetudinarians!

“Well, what will you do?” Dorothy asked again.

Again Amory turned to the window. She spoke with her back to Dorothy.

“What can I do? What is there left? Come and live here, as far as I can see,” she replied.

“Oh,” cried Dorothy at once, struck with the idea, “that’ll be jolly!”

(Jolly! With that warped door and that chimney! Jolly! Amory almost laughed.)

“Oh yes, very jolly,” she said, tossing the adorable little head.

But Dorothy caught the tone in which she said it.

“Oh, I don’t suppose it will be if you’re determined it shan’t, but don’t I just wish I had your talent and chances!” she replied cheerfully. “My hat, wouldn’t I swap! Why, think of what all the critics—Hamilton Dix at any rate—are saying about you! You’re going to have a show all on your own——”

“H’m! If I ever do! Don’t forget it’s been put off three times already.”

“Well, but each time it couldn’t be helped, and you’re going ahead working all the time, and it’ll be a tremendous leg-up for you when it does come. You ought to have my job, my dear, in the middle of a catalogue rush, or when you’ve drawn the lingerie ladies as like fishes as ever they can be, and you get letters complaining that you’re starting young men on the downward path—you’d come back to your pictures thankfully enough then, I can tell you! The fact is you don’t know what you do want. … Now I’m going to make a cup of tea and then I must fly back; I only came for that Doubleday thing. Have some?”

She crossed to the sink, emptied the leaves from the teapot on to the heap that already choked the trap, and filled the kettle and set it on the fire.

It always annoyed Amory when Dorothy told her that she didn’t know really what she did want, for she always did know—at any rate for the time being. True, she had worked in various styles in the past; to an unintelligent watcher she might even have seemed vacillating and changeable: but after all, what better course could a student follow than that? Youth was the time for bold experiment. Settled convictions too early arrived at were things to be distrusted. And there were indications that she really had “found herself” at last. She had swept aside, quite a long time ago, her earlier efforts of the days of the McGrath; she had outgrown, too, the Meunier-like figures, all muscle and hammers and leather aprons, that had first attracted Mr. Hamilton Dix’s attention; and all round that Cheyne Walk room were stacked the canvases of her latest and (she hoped) her finally settled phase—her Saturday night street-markets, her “character studies” worked up from sketches made in Whitechapel and Shoreditch, her scenes sketched in alleys and courts and during long waits in gallery-queues. Therefore she was a little annoyed with Dorothy now. … Dorothy was clearing the table and cutting bread-and-butter. Amory continued to look out of the window.

Then, while Dorothy still prepared tea, she moved from the window and walked to the little shelf of books that occupied the recess on the farther side of the fireplace. She took down a volume protected by a stout brown paper wrapper and began to read as she stood. Still reading, she sidled slowly back to the window, where the light was better, and mechanically turned the page. She could always pick up a book and lose herself at a moment’s notice like this. If at such times she was spoken to, she usually gave an “Eh?” or a “Yes—no, I mean,” and continued to read. She considered it to be evidence of her powers of mental concentration.

The book she was reading now was the first volume of The Golden Bough. Such a book, of course, was far too expensive for her to buy; therefore, in order that she might read it and its kind, she subscribed to a sort of private Association which was composed of herself and a dozen or so of her old friends of the McGrath. They bought the books as they were published, passed them (protected by the brown paper covers) from one to another, and after a time sold them back to the bookseller again at diminished (but still quite good) prices. None but rather expensive and abstruse books were thus bought; had The Golden Bough been procurable in the Bohn Library the Association would have felt that something of its choiceness had gone; and Amory hoped, when she had got through The Golden Bough, to be the next in rotation for certain of the Tudor Translations, and she did wish Laura Beamish would hurry up with Apuleius and the Golden Ass. These things contributed to breadth of outlook. It had for too long been a justly-founded reproach against artists that they had no general culture. Amory felt that, of all people, an artist certainly could not know too much; and what an artist knows will go, sooner or later, into his or her art. … She was still deep in The Golden Bough when Dorothy called, “Ready—come along, Amory——”

Reluctantly Amory laid aside the book and sat down at the little gate-legged table.

As the two girls took tea they talked of Miss Geraldine Towers’s engagement, of Amory’s own plans after the wedding, of the Exhibition that for various reasons Mr. Hamilton Dix had repeatedly postponed, and of one thing and another. Then Dorothy rose. She must get back to the fashion studio in Oxford Street.

“You’re going to work, I suppose?” she said, as she tucked the Doubleday thing into her belt and adjusted her hat before the little kitchen mirror.

Amory yawned. That was another thing Dorothy never seemed really to grasp—that while she, Dorothy, might sit down to her absurd attenuated fashion figures as it were with the striking of a clock, Amory’s work was rather different. Dorothy, of course, always professed to admire Amory’s painting enormously; in a sense she had no choice but to do so, unless she wished to write herself down an out-and-out fool: but she never really understood, in spite of the pains Amory had taken with her. It was rather pathetic. … Amory yawned again.

“Oh, I don’t suppose I shall do very much. This about Aunt Jerry’s put me quite off. And”—she grimaced slightly—“there’s to-night. They’re having a party, or a celebration, or something at our boarding-house. I expect that’ll be rather ghastly. Want to come and see?”

But Dorothy only laughed.

“To-night? A party? Me? I shall be lucky if I get away by eleven. … And oh, I say, Amory,”—her tone changed suddenly, and all at once she seemed embarrassed—“I nearly forgot—there’s something—it had almost slipped out of my head—I hope you won’t mind my suggesting it——”

It was part of Amory’s cleverness, helped of course by her wide reading, that she often knew what people were going to say almost before they knew it themselves. She knew what Dorothy was going to say now. And it was not true that Dorothy had nearly forgotten; that was merely false delicacy and a roundabout way of approaching the subject. Amory smiled.

“You see,” Dorothy went on, “there’s a job of sorts going—not a fashion—not exactly a fashion, that is—more like a painting—and I think the price could be screwed up to fifteen pounds for it—Mercier would get twenty-five; but then he’s Mercier. So I wondered——” She paused diffidently.

It was not the first time she had tried to put work into Amory’s way. And Amory knew that she was perfectly right in refusing it; it was Dorothy who did not know that the commercially acceptable thing is separate in kind, and not a dilution of a different excellence. Dorothy, by rising, might in time attain to the heights of the great Mercier, who did “Doubleday Spring Covers,” but Amory, stooping, would only have stooped for nothing. She lifted her golden eyes to her friend. She was half amused at the success of her guess, and half sensible of Dorothy’s well-meaningness and kindness of heart.

“It’s awfully good of you—but you know I simply shouldn’t know how to begin,” she said. “I think perhaps I’d better stick to my own job.”

“Not if I gave you tips?” said Dorothy, almost wistfully.

“I’m afraid not.”

Dorothy openly admired her. The two girls had been at the McGrath together, and Dorothy’s admiration was the homage that artistic vice (fashion-drawing) paid to artistic virtue (street-markets and an impending one-man-show).

“I say, Amory, you are plucky!” she exclaimed.

Amory knew that she was not plucky in the least, but it did not displease her to let it go at that. She murmured something about “Absurd!” and Dorothy, with a wave, was off. Amory heard her step in the entry below; then the sound died away on Cheyne Walk.

Left alone, Amory set on the kettle again for washing-up; then, until it should boil, she looked anew round the room in which, for all she could see to the contrary, she would soon be living. And tea had now put her into a rather better humour. After all, it might not be so bad. Not that it was not all very fine for Dorothy to talk; anybody could talk lightly about living over greengrocers’ shops who had people who rode in cars with tea-baskets and bridge-tables inside them and lived in houses with eight-foot baths and electric lights in the wardrobes so that they could see which frocks they were taking down; nevertheless, it might not be so bad. Cosimo Pratt would help her. Cosimo was so good at arranging things. If anybody could make this single dingy room with the lovely view comfortable, Cosimo could. And Cosimo, unlike Dorothy, really did understand her painting. …

She did not pick up The Golden Bough again; instead, she stood in front of a photograph of the Gioconda that was pinned to the plaster wall. It was one of a row—a Rembrandt, a Corot, the Infante, and others—which she had bought in Paris four years before. She had Pater’s description of the Gioconda by heart, as also she had that of Richard Jeffries of the Accroupie underneath it; and she was murmuring the passage, when, with a great burst of steam, the kettle boiled over. She set about her washing-up.

It was a task she loathed. All domestic work she loathed. In pouring the boiling water on to the cups and saucers, with the kettle held out at arm’s length so that she should not splash herself, she got hold of the hot part of the handle; and when she had run cold water on to the utensils she dipped her fingers into a scalding cup in a corner of the tin that had not been cooled. The butter on the plates was horrid, and instead of the proper drying-cloth she got hold of a painting-rag, with turps on it. A knife-handle came off in the boiling water, and, incautiously drawing too near the sink, she splashed the brown velvet skirt after all.

It was as she was washing her greasy hands afterwards that she became conscious of a vague and familiar odour. From what part of the house it came she did not know—perhaps from the greengrocer’s downstairs, perhaps from the rooms overhead. It came up the pipe, and it was the smell of water in which cabbage had been boiled.

Hitherto it had not been worth complaining about, but now, if she really was coming to live in this room, something would have to be done. What it was that would have to be done—well, she would ask Cosimo.