Читать книгу Gray youth - Oliver Onions - Страница 7

“Glenerne,” the boarding-house between Brook Green and Goldhawk Road in which Amory lived with her aunt, was really two large houses thrown into one; and, besides sheltering its twenty-odd guests, it served as a sort of academy for the teaching of English to foreign waiters. These came—German, Swiss, Danish, Belgian, even Turkish—without a word of our tongue, gave their services for several months in return for their food, and a year or so later were to be found in the restaurants of Frith and Old Compton Streets and the brasseries of Leicester Square, as English as you please. Perhaps in the manner of food they came off better than did the guests themselves, for, while the establishment provided four set meals a day, you had to sit down to all of these unless you would go slightly hungry. Miss one and you never quite caught up again.

But you forgot this slight nearness to the knuckle in the fullness with which Miss Addams’s advertisement in The Shepherd’s Bush Times—the one that began “Young Musical Society”—was redeemed. Every night there was something “on”; if it was not a whist drive or singing it was an impromptu dance in the large double drawing-room on the first floor, or charades, or a semi-private rehearsal by the Glenerne contingent of the Goldhawk Amateur Dramatic Society. The esprit de pension was very strong; it was as if a vow of loyalty to Miss Addams’s cruets had been taken.

The walls of the drawing-room were trophied with the photographs of former guests; these stood, framed or unframed, in groves on the mantelpiece (indeed, when Christmas came round with its cards, it was impossible to open a door without bringing whole castles of photographs and pasteboard greetings down into the fender); and, ranged on one special little whatnot between the Nottingham lace curtains and Millais’s framed and glazed supplement of “Little Miss Muffet,” were Miss Addams’s “grand-children”—the offspring of the three or four gentlemen or ladies who, at one time and another, had left the boarding-house to get married. About these translated ones something of the legendary, even of the grandiose, had grown up; and one particular chair in the dining-room, that on Miss Addams’s right hand, was still known as “Mr. Wellcome’s chair.”

At half-past eight on the evening of the day on which Amory had told Dorothy of her aunt’s engagement a suppressed gaiety pervaded the whole boarding-house. Dinner was over, and in the little greenhouse that prolonged the hall at the expense of the narrow back garden a few of the men were still smoking; but the drawing-room upstairs was filled with a twittering of anticipation of the guests knew not what. Except that it was to be in honour of Miss Towers’s engagement, Miss Addams had refused to tell what the evening’s entertainment was to be. But even those who had missed dinner had been told that that night Mr. Massey had been promoted to Mr. Wellcome’s chair, vice Mr. Edmondson, Glenerne’s youngest gentleman, who hitherto had occupied it in order to settle a disputed point of precedence between Mr. Rainbow and Mr. Massey himself.

So, until Miss Addams should deign to declare herself, it seemed as if whist or dancing might break out at any moment. Mr. Sandys, of the Lille Road Branch of the East Midlands Bank, seemed loaded with song on a hair-trigger, and had already cleared his throat once or twice; little Mrs. Deschamps, who played the accompaniments, needed but a look to remove her rings, set them in a neat row along the piano-top, give the stool a twirl, and ask Mr. Geake, the Estate Agent, to turn over for her; and young Mr. Edmondson, who was a booking-clerk, moved here and there, humorously complaining that it was a bit thick, his being ousted from Mr. Wellcome’s chair like that. He did not cease to pester Miss Addams to tell her little mystery. Miss Addams, huge and pyramidal in her black satin, only smiled over her tatting (she smiled frequently—the expression caused her slight moustache to pass for the shadow of a dimple), and told him to wait and see.

“You know how you can get your place back again—after July,” she said demurely.

Miss Geraldine Towers and Mr. Massey were not in the room, and their absence had already given rise to several of the rallies of wit that were characteristic of Glenerne. For instance, when the little widow, Mrs. Deschamps, had asked Amory with an air of great innocence where her aunt was, and Amory had replied that she thought she was writing letters, a ventriloquial voice, that might or might not have been that of Mr. Sandys, had been heard to ask whether Mr. Massey was licking the stamps; and again, when Mrs. Deschamps had asked Mr. Geake whether he would be so good as to fetch her book for her (it was on the chair by the aquarium), Mr. Geake had given the widow an intelligent look and had replied that he rather thought the corner by the aquarium was No Thoroughfare. Mrs. Deschamps had given a little apologetic cough and had said, How stupid of her! and young Mr. Edmondson, whose conversation was frequently a good deal beyond his years, had raised a laugh by stroking his smooth lip and saying that he supposed it was only Human Nature after all.

Amory was sitting on a painted three-legged stool under a standard lamp, listlessly turning over the pages of a magazine. She hated this place and these people, and only ironically had she asked Dorothy that afternoon whether she would not like to come to this party. And she almost hated her aunt, who was probably still sitting in the little bead-curtained recess on the landing where the cloudy aquarium stood. It seemed to her that if Aunt Jerry must get engaged at thirty-eight, she might at least have done so without giving occasion for this kind of vulgar and familiar comment. But she supposed that that was what the “Young Musical Society” of Miss Addams’s advertisement really meant: gouty flirtations, ping-pong in middle age, having your toes trodden on during scratch dances by stout and breathless partners, and Progressive Whist with twenty-five-years-old stories told between the deals. Amory’s pretty mouth curled: she saw it all with merciless clearness. Glenerne seemed to her to be half ancients trying to be young, and half young people quickly getting old before their time. Oh, that terrible and affable Mr. Edmondson—that awful Mr. Geake—that impossible bank clerk, whatever his name was! And the place itself! These Nottingham lace curtains, with the dreary joke of the artificial spiders crawling upon them, and the macramé-hung mantelpieces, and the Japanese joy-bells tinkling on the chandelier, when, with plain brown or green paper, and a stencilled frieze in two colours, and a Japanese print or two put just in the right places, and a few chosen books here and there, even Glenerne might have been made quite passable! … She was glad she was going to Cheyne Walk. She would at least be among her own people and her own surroundings there!

She wished herself in Cheyne Walk at that moment when Mr. Edmondson walked up to her where she sat. It never seemed to occur to Mr. Edmondson that his company might not be at all times desirable, and she almost shrank from him as she found her great fir-cone of red-gold hair only an inch or two from his green knitted waistcoat. At a greater distance, she sometimes glanced at this waistcoat with interest, as if, in this place where the old became young again at the expense of their juniors, she expected Mr. Edmondson to become visibly stouter from day to day. Mr. Edmondson spoke now with idiotic cheerfulness.

“Looking at pictures, eh?” he said parentally. “Don’t you get a bit fed-up with ’em after a whole day of it?”

“No,” said Amory.

“Don’t you, really! Well, I must say illusterated papers have made great strides this last few years. Who’d ha’ thought of a Daily Spec a few years ago? And we think nothing about it now. I see ’em out o’ my little window once the morning rush slacks off a bit—the bookstall’s just opposight—they chuck their ha’pennies down one after another—‘Spec!’ they say—never think twice about it.”

“Oh?” said Amory. Mr. Edmondson might have been the historian of modern journalism, looking back. He continued.

“ ’Uge circulation it must have; why, I’ve known ’em get through as many as thirty-eight quires in a single morning at our place alone; somebody must make some money out of it! I forget what their divvy is.—But I wonder you don’t get fed-up with pictures for all that. It’ll be like me dealing out tickets instead of cards for whist.”

“Almost the same,” said Amory.

Mr. Edmondson looked at her for a moment suspiciously, as if he thought she was getting at him. Not very long before, Mr. Edmondson would have resented being got at by girls, especially in his green waistcoat; but he had grown soberer and more tolerant since then. He went avuncularly on.

“What d’you suppose Miss Addams is going to spring on us? I guessed French blind-man’s bluff for a start, with word-making and whist to cool off a bit on: but Mrs. D. says forfeits. … What, are you off?”

“Yes, I’ve a letter to write.”

“That’s the style: business before pleasure. I hope you write in a good light always: nothing worse for the eyes than writing in a bad light. It’s no good wishing you had your eyesight back again when it’s gone: the thing is to take care of it while you’re young. I saw a bit in the paper the other day—it was about reading in bed——”

But Amory fled.

As she dropped the portière of the drawing-room door behind her she encountered her aunt on the landing. She stopped. She was very angry with her aunt; she felt that her aunt was making of her, too, a laughing-stock. She turned her shallow brook-brown eyes, but hardly her head, as she spoke.

“I do think——” she began impetuously, and stopped. She stopped out of the sense that these things ought not to have to be said. In making it necessary for Amory to remark on them at all her aunt was putting her into a false position.

Miss Geraldine Towers had her hand on the knob of the door. She smiled, but did not turn the knob.

“What, dear?” she asked amiably.

“I do think you needn’t set them all talking the way you do. You might think of me a bit. Really, it’s rather much sometimes.”

For a moment Miss Towers turned pink, then she laughed. She was plump and personable; her new way of doing her hair had taken ten years off her age and if her high lace collar was rather tight and did cut her a little under her second chin, well, we all have our troubles, and there are worse ones than plumpness. She straightened her wisteria-coloured satin blouse so that the waist above the tailor-made fawn skirt looked its smallest, and tilted her laughing head back so that it seemed to rock on the two points of her collar-whalebones as if they had been gimballs.

“My dear,” she broke out, “don’t be so absurdly solemn! Try to enjoy yourself; you’ll never be younger than you are now! And I do wish you wouldn’t go about in those sad art-colours always. You look like a sparrow having a dust-bath. They may be all right for pictures, but it isn’t as if you sat in a frame all day. Good gracious, anybody’d think you were eighty to see you sometimes! Laugh and the world laughs with you, my dear. Come inside, and don’t be silly; we’re going to have great fun.”

But again Amory turned away.

More than once she had had a wild wonder whether that trip to Paris had not had something to do with her aunt’s preposterous rejuvenescence; but no, it was hardly possible that while she herself had wandered in the museums Aunt Jerry had given herself to secret and wicked pleasures. No, it was the boarding-house and the young musical society again. That clever advertisement had really made Aunt Jerry think that she was young. … It did not occur to Amory that perhaps these ancient ones, of forty or fifty or more, had earned a rest. It did not occur to her that life might have bruised and scarred them, and that they laughed a little loudly and stridently for fear of worse, and that there was hardly one of them whose eyes had not rested on sadder and more sordid and tragic scenes than her own had ever seen. She saw them, as it were, in the flat, as a mere human pattern, and when she was bored with it, Glenerne was a thing to be shut up like one of its own photograph albums. Their manners offended her, and she inquired no further. … In the meantime, however, flirtatious little Mrs. Deschamps would sit in a corner with anybody, and her aunt entered into an engagement at an age when she really might have been expected to be thinking of serious things, and the whatnot in the corner, with its photographs of Glenerne’s grandchildren, was a source of mirth that seemed never to run dry, and if Amory must be misunderstood, well, it was better to be misunderstood than to be understood by these terrible people.

Amory went to her room and took down a volume of Pater.

But she had hardly opened the book when there came a tap at her door, and, in response to her “Come in,” her aunt’s middle-aged fiancé entered.

Dorothy Lennard had called Mr. Massey the safety-valve because he always seemed to use three times as many “s’s” in his conversation as anybody else. These escaped over a neat little row of very white lower teeth like those of a bulldog. The dark hair that grew up the sides of his head always reminded Amory of the elastics of an old pair of boots, and his cropped dark moustache did not interfere with his perpetual gentle hissing. He wore gold glasses and a closely-buttoned frock-coat; he was an educational bookseller in St. Mark’s Road; and it had now been known for some hours in the boarding-house that he, a man of some substance, had been moved to come to Glenerne first of all by the sight of Miss Geraldine Towers shaking the crumb-tray out of the window to feed the birds.

“My dear Amory,” said Mr. Massey, “Geraldine has asked me to come and see whether you won’t join the rest of us in our little celebration. I need not say that it would be pleasant if you would assist.”

Without (she thought) too open an appearance of resignation, Amory closed her book again. She supposed she must. … “All right, if you like,” she said, without fervour.

“Thank you,” said Mr. Massey gratefully. “I was sure you would not absent yourself.—And since I am here, I wonder whether I might say a word for which occasion has not hitherto presented itself?”

Amory was silent, noting the educational bookseller’s periods. He continued.

“It is perhaps a little too early to speak of it, but it might set your mind at rest. When Geraldine and I are married, in July if all be well, I do not want you to feel that any difference to yourself will be made. Your home, if you wish it, will still be with us.”

Amory broke out a little quickly, as if not to leave it for a moment in doubt that she was properly grateful, “Oh, thank you so very much, Mr. Massey——”

“George—or Uncle George——” said Mr. Massey gently.

“—Uncle George—and I do hope you won’t think me horrid—but I thought of living in my studio——”

Mr. Massey made a little calming gesture with his hands, as if to say that all should be exactly as she pleased. He nodded several times.

“I understand; your art; you know best; don’t think I wish to put the least constraint on you. I only want to assure you that your aunt’s house is always at your disposal,” he said kindly.

“Thank you so much,” said Amory hurriedly; and there was a sudden pause.

“It will probably,” Mr. Massey went on deliberatively, as if he passed a succession of desirable dwellings in mental review, “be on the Mall. Yes, Chiswick Mall. One sees such sweet sketches there, especially of sunsets. But in case you do elect to occupy your studio, there will be a little business we shall have to arrange. It may even include a little money. But we can talk of that later.—Shall we join the others, my dear?”

He was genuinely fond of her. When she touched her hair before the little white-draped glass he discreetly turned his back, almost as if he wished to reassure Amory about any stray jest she might have heard about the aquarium corner; and then after a moment he punctiliously gave Amory his arm. They returned to the drawing-room.

Perhaps Miss Addams herself had become a little anxious about her promised surprise, and had decided to make sure of something else in case it failed her, for they had begun to dance. Every boarder was there, including M. Criqui, the Frenchman; and, ranged inseparably against the wall, were the three Indians whose faces resembled olives with white moving eyes. Mats and rugs had been pushed back to the walls; M. Criqui “turned” for Mrs. Deschamps; Mr. Edmondson was waltzing with pretty Miss Crebbin, the typist; and Mr. Sandys danced with Miss Swan, of the Preparatory School near the tram terminus. The window looking on to the back garden was open; the screen of pock-marked coloured glass had been drawn in front of the fire; and the pictures on the walls moved slightly in the draughts. Mr. Geake had placed himself on point-duty near the folding-doors, and was shepherding couples past the awkward place; and from a group of men who conspired out on the landing came sudden bursts of laughter from time to time. Mr. Massey, the hero of the occasion, left Amory, and moved here and there, patting backs, touching elbows, and ever and anon beaming with mild delight about him and rubbing his hands.

The waltz ended, and another began; and Mr. Edmondson, who seemed to have shaken off his seriousness and to have lapsed into youth again, came up to Amory and asked her whether he might have the pleasure. Amory, resolved to go through it now that she was here, placed her hand on his arm. “Might as well have one of these while there’s any left,” he said genially, snatching a paper fan from the mantelpiece as they passed; “I wonder what those blighters are up to!” He indicated the group that conspired near the door. … “You ain’t interested in football, I s’pose? I’m going to the Final at the Palace on Saturday—special leave, what oh!—Donkins’ll take my place—and it won’t half be a squeeze, I give you my word! Funny place to go for a squeeze, eh, Miss Amory?”

Mr. Edmondson was now quite the Mr. Edmondson of the green waistcoat, not to be got at by girls if he knew it.

And still the inscrutable Miss Addams, with her eye drifting a little more frequently towards the door, gave no sign.

“Here, I say, come orf it!” Mr. Edmondson grinned as he and Amory passed M. Criqui and Mrs. Deschamps for the fourth time. They were talking French. “No taking advantage, Criqui! … I don’t call that playing the game,” he continued to Amory. “But you talk French, of course?”

“A little,” said Amory.

“Hanged if I can make out half what them blighters say,” Mr. Edmondson continued cheerfully. “In English, I mean. One of ’em came up this morning—8.45—right in the thick. ‘To-tnm-co-croad!’ he says, just like that; and if I don’t give him a brief for Tott-n-m C’t Road and the right change before you can say knife I’ve got Aspinall down on me like a cartload o’bricks. It ain’t no tea-party, my job ain’t, not in the thick, you take my word for it! Chap tried to ring a bad two-bob on me this morning; broke in two in the clip—you’ve seen the clips we use, haven’t you? What, you haven’t? Just you notice some time!—Broke in two—like that—and him barging there with twenty people behind shouting ‘Hurry up’ and prodding him with their sticks and brollies. Oh, it’s a pinch, I don’t think!”

But still Miss Addams’s surprise didn’t come. After that waltz Mrs. Deschamps flatly refused to play again until she had had a dance, and so Miss Crebbin, the typist, played, to calls of “New ribbon, Miss C——! Mind the visible writing!” Then Mrs. Deschamps sat, first by the door, where she told M. Criqui that all Frenchmen had such dreadful reputations, and next at the open window at the back, where she asked him what “In the Spring a Young Man’s Fancy” was in French, and then disappeared altogether. Aunt Geraldine, laughing, moved everywhere, with Mr. Massey following her with his hands clasped behind his back, and if she had to show her half-hoop of diamonds once she had to do so a dozen times. Then Mrs. Deschamps came back, crying over her shoulder, “If you tell, M. Criqui, I’ll never speak to you again!” but M. Criqui did tell, of how Mrs. Deschamps, venturing into the greenhouse downstairs that was used as a smoking-room, had been detained almost by force until she had smoked half a cigarette.

Nor was it Miss Addams’s surprise even when one of the group of men who had been conspiring by the door handed an envelope to Mrs. Deschamps. “A note for you, Mrs. D.,” he said, and Mrs. Deschamps turned it backwards and forwards and said she wondered who it could be from. She tore the envelope open and then fell back with a shriek, while the circle of men about her roared and slapped one another on the shoulders. A small object had leapt from the envelope with an angry buzz, and now lay still on the floor.

“The Kissing Bee!” shouted elderly Mr. Rainbow, making a reckless attempt to assume the voice of a Ludgate Hill hawker.

“Causes ’eaps o’ fun and roars o’ laughter!” Mr. Beeton, of the cycle-works, cried.

“Don’t go ’ome wifaht it!——”

“One penny!——”

“Knocks the jam-splosh and the spill of ink silly, eh, what?”

“Here, let’s have a look—where do you get ’em?”

“Oh, you wretches!” pouted Mrs. Deschamps.

And then, in the very midst of the hubbub, Miss Addams’s surprise was upon them. A Belgian waiter stood in one of the doorways. He held himself more erect than usual against the wall; save that the tips of his fingers were turned in to prevent his too loose cuffs from falling too far down, his attitude would have been that of perfect “attention.”

“Mis-tairr——Ooell-come!” he announced.