Читать книгу The Tower of Oblivion - Oliver Onions - Страница 13

Part of the fuss my numerous friends made about my Knighthood was this desire of theirs that my portrait should be painted and hung up in the Lyonnesse Club. Whether in fact I shall ever look down from those buff-washed walls I am at present unable to say. That rests with Miss Julia Oliphant. I myself merely have the feeling that if she doesn't paint me I hardly wish to be painted.

Her name was not among those originally chosen by the Portrait Committee and submitted to me. It was Madge who, by half-past twelve the following day, had decided to include her. We were walking along together to Gloucester Road Station. Madge was going out to lunch.

"Well, go and see her," she said.... "But they ought to have let you sleep on, George. I wish I hadn't left you that book."

"Oh, I'm perfectly fit and fresh. The Boltons, you said? I shall go and see her this afternoon."

"You say you don't know her well?"

"I've met her once."

We entered the station. I took my friend's ticket. I saw her to the gate of her lift, and the attendant paused, his hand on the iron lattice.

"Well," she said, "I think you'll find that won't matter. Let me know how you go on. Good-bye—and you can tell the Bear from me that no decent person believes a word of it."

And with a wave of her hand across the grille she sank with the lift into the ground.

I walked to my Club, lunched alone, and then, in a corner of the smoking-room, busied myself with my rather scanty recollections of the lady I was going to see that afternoon. Though I had only actually met her upon one occasion, we had a sort of hearsay acquaintance in addition. She and Derwent Rose had been children together, and one does not begin quite at the beginning with the friends of one's friends. Moreover, there are these people whom one may actually meet only at wide intervals, but over whom absence does not seem to have its ordinary power. Nothing seems to ice over, you come together again at the point where you left off. Perhaps because you draw your nourishment from the same elements, you are able to take the gaps for granted.

Nevertheless, of my own single personal meeting with Miss Oliphant I could remember little but her eyes. I had been presented to her across a small dinner-table, with rosy-shaded electric candles, that had turned those great eyes pansy-black in the pinky gloom. I had guessed that in the daylight they were of the deep brown kind that, alas, so frequently means glasses for reading and distressing headaches; but what had struck me at the time had been their quiet readiness and familiarity, as if they said to me, "He's told me about you; I wonder what he's said to you about me!"

And now those same eyes, photographed in a leather frame, had watched me during the whole of the previous night. They had watched me as I had read that awful book. Darkly watchful and expectant, they had seen my first amazed incredulity, then my successive waves of anger. "But go on," they had seemed ever to urge me; "there's much more to come!"

And under the bedside lamp they had been still watching me when the maid had brought in tea and had flung the curtains aside, admitting the bright sunshine.

Then, when the book had dropped from my hand to the floor, they had said, "Don't you think it would be rather a good thing if you were to come to see me?"

I am not going to advertise that hateful book of Mrs Bassett's. If I could have torn it in two as Rose had torn it I should have done so. She had hardly changed his name—for what was "Kendal Thorne" but Derwent Rose? So I will merely say that to old memories she had added new and malicious inventions, and had produced a ridiculous grotesque of a vain and peevish childhood, an impossibly blatant youth, and a culmination born of her own distorted imagination. It was for her, and not for himself, that he had blushed. For her sake he would have torn up every single copy of it if by that means it could never have been. He could have scolded her, shaken her, smacked her, ashamed, angry and helpless as one is before an ill-conditioned child who nevertheless has claims on one. That there could ever have been any passage between them her book put entirely out of the question. And so much for The Parthian Arrow.

At half-past three that afternoon I was at the Boltons, ringing Miss Oliphant's bell. A tiny maid admitted me, and I was shown into a sort of alcove with a good deal of tapestry and bric-à-brac and brass about, the sort of things the artists of half a generation ago affected for the sake of their "colour." Nor was the studio into which I was presently shown much different from a hundred other studios I had seen. These glass-roofed, indigo-blinded, north-lighted wells, I may say, always depress me, and had I to live in one of them I should instantly have a side-window cut, so that I might at least have a glimpse once in a while of somebody who passed in the outer world.

But somehow the place suited Miss Oliphant. Perhaps it was the north light. Artists choose the north light because it varies little, and there was something about her that didn't vary very much either. She came through a portière-hung door, and as she stood there for a moment, not surprised (for I had telephoned that I was coming), but with that familiarity and expectancy once more in her dark eyes, I was able to check this cool and composed impression of her with my former one of over-lustrous eyes in the pinky gloom of the shaded lamps of the dinner-table.

Her hair, like her eyes, was dark; but she had a habit rather than a style of dressing it. It was piled in a high mass over her white brow, quite neatly, but rather as if to have it out of the way and done with than as making the most of its rich glossy treasure. A dateless, but by no means inappropriate tea-gown of filmy grey with a gold thread somewhere in it showed her long harmonious lines of limb and allowed her breasts to be guessed at; and the ripeness of her shoulders set off her long and almost too slender neck. She had cool and beautiful hands, sleeved to the wrist; but the daylight added to her years. At our former meeting I should have said she was thirty-five. Now I saw that she could hardly be less than forty.

She took my hand for a moment, smiled, but without speaking, and began to busy herself at a Benares tray. She reinserted the plug of an electric kettle, which immediately broke into a purr. She listened for a moment with her ear at the kettle, and then suddenly filled the teapot. She spoke, once more smiling, through the little cloudlet of steam.

"Do sit down," she said, indicating a "property" curule chair. "Well, how's Derry? Have you seen him lately?"

I made a note of the name she too called him by, and said, Yes, I had seen him yesterday. "I'm sorry to say he seemed worried," I added.

"Oh? What's worrying him?" she asked, withdrawing the plug from the wall and popping a cosy over the pot. It was a French cosy, a dainty little porcelain Marie Antoinette, with a sac and a padded and filigreed petticoat, and I remember thinking that if Miss Oliphant ever went to fancy-dress dances the costume of her cosy would have suited her very well.

"Have you read that horrible woman's horrible book?" I asked her point-blank.

"The Parthian Arrow? Yes, I've read it," she said equably.

"Well, I should say that's one of the things that's worrying him," I replied. "I've just read it, and the taste of it's in my mouth still."

She considered the teapot. "We'll give it two minutes and then take the bag out," she remarked. Then, "Oh yes, I've read it. I don't think she need have written it either. But it is written, and there's an end of it. As for Derry, anybody who knows him knows that his whole life's been one marvellous mistake after another. He dodges it somehow in his books, but he knows nothing whatever about women in real life. Never did. Sugar?"

This was hardly what Madge Aird had led me to expect. I had gathered from her that Miss Oliphant and Mrs Bassett had more or less fallen out about that book; in fact Madge had definitely said, "I'm not sure that they speak now." But here was Miss Oliphant, Rose's friend, not only quite inadequately angry on the one hand, but on the other talking about Rose's ignorance of women almost as if he had been as much to blame as Mrs Bassett herself.... Moreover, when a woman tells a man that another man knows nothing about women, the man who is spoken to invariably tries the words on himself to see whether he too is included in the disparagement. My understanding of Miss Oliphant, such as it was, suddenly failed me. I looked at her again to see whether, and if so where, I had made a mistake.

She was doing a perfectly innocent little thing, one that at any other time I might have found charming. Her long fingers were slyly lifting the tops of sandwich after sandwich in search of the kind she wanted. A child does the same thing with sweets—and sometimes goes beyond mere peeping. But the infantility of the gesture jarred on me, and jarred no less when, her eyes meeting mine, she laughed, pouted, and said: "Well, after all, I cut them." I did not smile. Her coolness and unconcern when a friend was savagely attacked disappointed me. As for the portrait that was to have been the excuse for my call on her, I was glad now that it hadn't been mentioned. I now doubted whether I should mention it. I had supposed her to be a woman—not merely a female painter who gave a male sitter tea in her studio.

"I don't understand you," I said, a little curtly I'm afraid. "You speak as if that book was a mere point of view to which she's entitled."

Again she smiled at me, as if she liked me very much.

"Well, she has her point of view. It's evident that you don't know Mrs Bassett."

"Her book's told me all about her that I ever want to know."

"So," she laughed, "you're just showing how cross you can be?"

At that moment there came a ring at the bell. She was on her feet instantly, as if to forestall the little maid. With less tact than ever, I thought, her fingertips touched my shoulder lightly as she passed by me. It was only then that I noticed that the Benares tray held a third cup and saucer.

The next moment she had shown Mrs Bassett herself in.

I am going to show Mrs Bassett in and out of this story again with all possible speed. Only once have I set eyes on the lady since, and that was in a moment when I was far too occupied with other matters to give her more than a glance. She came in, a fluff of cendré hair, surmounted by a hat made of a thousand brilliant tiny blue feathers. This was intended to enhance the pallid blue of her eyes; as a matter of fact it completely extinguished it. She was a Christmas-tree of silver stole and silver muff, toy dog, and a pale blue padded and embroidered object that I presently discovered to be the dog's quilt. I was presented to her, bowed, and—suddenly found myself alone with her. Miss Oliphant had picked up the teapot and was nowhere to be seen.

And this was the kind of arch ripple that proceeded from the author of The Parthian Arrow:

"Oh, how d'you do, Sir George? Really a red-letter day. Sir George Coverham and Julia Oliphant together. Quite a galaxy—or is galaxy wrong and does it take more than two to make one, like the Milky Way?—Oh, Puppetty, my stole!—You mustn't mind if I ask you thousands of questions—I always do when I meet distinguished people—peep behind the scenes, eh?—Puppetty, I shall slap you!"—a tap on the beast's boot-button of a nose. "So handsome, Julia is, don't you think? Not in a picture-postcard sort of way, perhaps, but such character (don't you call it?) and such a lovely figure! I know if I were a man I should fall head over ears in love with her! Do you mind, Sir George?"

She meant, not did I mind falling in love with Miss Oliphant, but did I mind taking the dog's cradle and quilt from her arms. I did so, made my bow as Miss Oliphant appeared again, and moved quickly towards the alcove where I had left my hat.

But it was Miss Oliphant herself who stopped me, and stopped me not so much by her quietly-spoken words—"I want you to stay"—as by the sudden command in her eyes. This was quite unmistakable. For the first time since I had entered her studio I saw the woman I had expected to see. That look was too imperious altogether to disobey. I sat down again.

I swear that Mrs Bassett wore that silver stole twenty different ways in as many minutes. The air about her was ceaselessly in motion. If Puppetty was in his quilted cradle she had him out; if he was out she put him back again and tucked him in. She kissed and scolded the wretched beast, and discussed Miss Oliphant's pictures and my own books. Only her own book she never once mentioned. And I sat, saying as little as possible, looking from one to the other of the two women.

Then, out of the very excess of the contrast between them, light began to dawn on me. All at once I found myself saying to myself, "This can't be what it appears to be. There's something behind it all. Look at them sitting there, and believe if you can that the one who's pouring out tea couldn't, for sheer womanliness, eat the other alive! Look at her! She's a whole packed-full history behind her, and one that's by no means at an end yet. It radiates from every particle of her. Of course Miss Oliphant cares just as much as you do when her friend's attacked. She's a different way of showing it, that's all. See if she isn't putting that other one through her paces now, and for your benefit. She's not keeping you here without a reason. Sit still and watch."

I repeat that I said this to myself.

And from that moment I knew I was on the right track.

At last Mrs Bassett rose to go. I assure you that I was on my feet almost before she was, for I knew that my talk with Miss Oliphant was not now to be resumed—it was to begin. The author of The Parthian Arrow was piled up with quilts, cradles and Puppetty again, and I need say no more about the thickness of her skin than that she gave me her telephone number and asked me to go and see her. I bowed, and Julia Oliphant towered over her as she showed her out.

Seldom in my life have I held a door open for a woman with greater pleasure.

The outer door closed, and Miss Oliphant reappeared and crossed slowly to the settee. I now knew beyond all doubt that I was right. She seemed suddenly exhausted. She passed her hand wearily over those too-lustrous eyes. Listlessly she told me to smoke if I wanted to. Then she continued to sit in silence.

At last she roused a little. She turned her eyes on me.

"Well—now you've seen the author of The Parthian Arrow."

I made no remark.

"And," she continued, "you did exactly as I expected—exactly what a man would do."

"What was that?"

"You'd one look, and then you turned away."

"One look was enough."

"Oh, you all think you've got rid of a thing when you've turned your backs on it. That's the way men quarrel. 'Oh, So-and-So's a bounder; blackball him and have done with it.' And so long as he isn't in your Club he doesn't exist for you."

I pondered, my eyes on her old-fashioned studio-trappings. "Well, say that's a man's way of defending his friend. What's a woman's?"

Our eyes met once more, and I knew a very great deal about Miss Julia Oliphant by the time she had uttered her next six words.

"A woman has her to tea," she replied.

Then, as if something within her would no longer be pent up, she broke into rapid speech.

"Oh, I know you men! You're all too, too kind! Forgive me if I say I think you like the feeling. It pleases you, and you don't stop to think that it puts all the more on us. You make your magnificent gesture, but we have to go round picking up after you. Do you think I'd let that woman out of my sight?... But I'm sorry I had to trick you a little."

"To trick me?"

"Yes, when you first came in. I saw you were puzzled and—disappointed in me. You see, when a person's coming to tea and may be here any moment you have to keep some sort of hand on yourself. It isn't the time to indulge your real feelings. So I took no chances. I'm sorry if I threw you off the track.... Well, you've seen her, and you've read her book. Tell me where you think the toy dog comes in."

She was speaking vehemently enough now. She did not give me time to reply.

"I'll tell you. You and Derry—all the decent men—a toy dog fetches you every time. You're all so, so kind! You see tragedies and empty cradles and all the rest of it straight away. And perhaps once in a while you're right. But you can take it from me you're wrong this time. I've known her all my life, and I don't believe she ever for a single moment wanted a child. She'd never have put up with the bother of one. So Derry's worrying all about nothing. All that sticks in her throat is that she imagines she's been pilloried as not being able to have one. Her vanity was hurt, not her motherhood at all. Now that she's got rid of that bookful of bile I think she's a perfectly happy woman. Her days are just one succession of shopping and matinées and calls and manicuring and Turkish baths and getting rid of Bassett's money. It was just the same during the war—flag-days and driving convalescents about, and bits of canteen-work and committees by the score.... Oh, Derry needn't worry his head; tragedy's quite out of the picture! Let's have the truth. No weeping Niobe—just scents and powders and Puppetty and an imaginary grievance—that's her."

I think it is my own sex that is the merciful one, at any rate to woman. Man has made radiant veils for her, has shut his eyes to this or that stark aspect of her, because the world has to go on by his efforts and he cannot afford to begin his scheme of things all over again every time he sees the red light of the prime in a woman's eyes. Julia Oliphant had spoken cruelly, ruthlessly, without decency; and I now knew why. No woman cares that a wrong is done in the abstract. Her bitterness and hate ever mean that someone dear to her has been subjected to indignity and pain. And suddenly I rose from my seat, crossed to the settee, and, sitting down by Julia Oliphant's side, did a thing I am not in the habit of doing upon a short acquaintance. I took both her hands into mine.

With as little hesitation as I had taken them her fingers closed on mine. And I fancied the quick strong pressure answered the question I was going to ask her before ever my lips spoke it. It had all been there months before—all prepared and promised in that first steady intimate look across the rosy-shaded candles of that dinner-table. I spoke quite quietly.

"Isn't there something I'd better know—and hadn't you better tell me now?" I said.

Again that firm cool pressure of the fingers. The tired eyes looked gratefully into mine.

"I always knew you'd be like that if only——"

"Then tell me. Because when you've done I've something to tell you."

God knows what fires were instantly ablaze in the depths of the eyes.

"About him?" broke instantly from her lips.

"You tell me first."

The fires died down, and the voice dropped again.

"Tell you? I don't mind telling you.... Of course; all my life; ever since we were children together. Not that he ever gave me a thought. But that made no difference."

And having said it she had said all. I saw the beginning of the fires again. She went straight on. "Now what were you going to tell me?"

Remember it was not yet eighteen hours since Derwent Rose had thrust me out of his door, torn between an angel and a devil within himself. But what are eighteen hours to a man who has two scales of time? To him they might represent years of experience. He had clung desperately to his better man, but—who knew?—already he might be less accessible to the angelic. If I was not already too late, to catch him while he was of that same mind and will was the important thing. If this woman who had just told me with such touching simplicity that she had loved him all her life was indeed his good angel, it seemed to me that here was her work waiting for her. I saw her as none the less loving that she could vehemently hate for the protection of her love. That she would fly to him the moment her mind grasped his story I had not an instant's doubt. Nor did I stop to consider that I might be betraying something he did not wish known. It was no time for subtleties. Remembering his anguish, I did not think he would refuse any help that was to be had. Here by my side was his cure if cure there was to be found.

Still with her hands in mine, I took my plunge.

The first time she interrupted me was very much where I had interrupted him. She wanted to know, apart from mere imaginary changes that might have been due to variable health, what visible proofs there were of all this. I wished to spare her those two ( )'s on Rose's neck, but she smiled ever so faintly.

"Yes, you're all nice dears. But I know perfectly well the kind of thing it might be. So don't let that trouble you. It's important, you know."

So I told her. She merely nodded. "He never did know anything about women," she said. "Go on."

Her next interruption came when I spoke of his tearing the book, though this was more of a confirmation than a true interruption.

"He was a perfectly glorious athlete," she remarked calmly, "but he always hated pot-hunting, and later of course his books interfered with his training a good deal. I remember once ... but never mind. I wonder if we shall have all that over again?"

"Then you've managed to swallow the monstrous thing so far?" I said in wonder.

"I told you his life had been one marvellous mistake after another. Go on," she replied.

But as I proceeded her calm became less and less assured. I was purposely omitting from my account such elements as might tend to agitate her, but she seemed to divine this, and perhaps she thought I suppressed more than I did. Suddenly she broke out:

"Never mind all that about ratios. I don't know anything about ratios. The point is, when does he expect the next—attack?"

"I hardly know—I rather think——" I began, now quite violently holding her hands, which she had tried to withdraw. She had also attempted to rise.

"Soon? A month? A week? To-morrow?" she demanded.

"He's not sure himself, but I'm rather afraid——"

She allowed me to say no more. She plucked her hands from mine and ran out of the studio. I heard the single faint "ting" of a telephone-receiver being lifted from its fork, and a moment later, "Is that the taxi-rank? The Boltons—Miss Oliphant—as quick as you can."

Three minutes later she reappeared. She had thrown a wrap over her tea-gown, and was hurriedly tying a scarf under her chin.

"Isn't that taxi here yet? How long should it take from here to Cambridge Circus?"

"Twenty or twenty-five minutes."

"You'd better come with me. You can tell me the rest on the way.... What a time he is taking! Wouldn't it be quicker to pick one up outside? Listen—no, that's only letters. Perhaps the man's waiting and hasn't rung—let's wait at the street entrance—here's your hat——"

She opened the inner door, kicked aside the letters on the floor, and sped along the corridor. The taxi glided up as we reached the entrance.

The next minute we were on our way.

The streets were full and our progress was slow. People were hurrying to their homeward tubes, running along in knots of a dozen or a score at the tails of the slowing-down omnibuses.

"Surely there ought to be a quicker way than along Oxford Street at this hour!" she exclaimed petulantly. Then she threw herself back in the corner. Apparently she had forgotten all about the rest of my story. One idea and one only possessed her—haste, haste. I am perfectly sure that had she been in the driver's seat not an uplifted blue and white cuff in London would have stopped her.

And her restlessness communicated itself to me. I too felt that in talking to Madge Aird the previous evening, in reading that wretched book all night, in not having told Miss Oliphant straight away what I had to say, I had lost precious time. Some step ought to have been taken quicker—immediately——

"Damn!" I said as another extended arm stopped us; and Julia Oliphant sank back, biting her lip.

Then an endless wait at the corner of Charing Cross Road....

But even that taxi-drive had to come to an end.

"It's just near here, isn't it?" she asked, her hand on the door; and I sprang out. It would be quicker to walk the last few yards. These few yards, however, nearly cost Miss Oliphant her life, for I only just succeeded in dragging her out of the way of a newsboy's bicycle that darted like a minnow from behind a heavy dray. We stood at Rose's door.

I pressed the button of his bell, which was the third of a little vertical row of four; but even as I did so I noticed something unusual about its appearance. The little brass slip that bore his name had gone. I was unable to say whether it had been there on the previous evening, as he himself had admitted me, but gone it was now, and from certain indications it seemed not to have been unscrewed, but wrenched off. My heart sank, but I was careful to conceal from Miss Oliphant the foreboding I felt.

"He may be out," I muttered. "I'll ring for the housekeeper."

To fetch Mrs Hyems up from her basement took more time, but at last she appeared, and a look of mingled perplexity and relief came into the eyes that met mine.

"Mr Rose?" I said.

"Aren't you the gentleman as came last night, sir?" she said. "Didn't he go out with you? I heard you come down; about eleven o'clock it would be; and he didn't seem to be not a minute after you——"

"Hasn't he been back since?"

"I can't make it out, sir. He hasn't been to bed, and there was a note for me on his table this morning. Paid all up he has, but not a word about his milk nor his washing nor his letters nor when he's coming back. And he left his door open, which that isn't his way. Perhaps you'd like to come up, sir?"

We followed her up the stairs. His door still stood wide open, and as far as I could see his room was exactly as I had left it last night. The medicine-ball still lay where it had rolled on the floor, the cushions of the sofa still bore the imprint of his body. I turned to the caretaker.

"You say he's paid you, Mrs Hyems?"

"To the end of the week, sir, except for his washing and ceterer."

"And he's left no address?"

"No more than I tell you, sir."

"Then," I said briskly, "I should just tidy his room and close his door. He'll probably be back to-night. If he isn't let me know. Here's my address."

But as I said it I seemed to see again those marks where his name-plate had been. Derry always carried, suspended in his trousers-pocket by a little swivelled thong, one of those fearsome-looking compendium knives that consist of half a dozen tools in one. The plate had not been unscrewed; what he had done had been to thrust one of these blades behind it and to rip it bodily from its bed. I pictured it all only too clearly. Myself carefully watched out of the way—a cheque hurriedly written—a gulp of whisky perhaps and the call of the streets—a dash downstairs with his door left open behind him—a minute's feverish work over the plate.... He had left his books, his papers, his furniture, his medicine-ball. But his name he had taken away, and I did not think that those rooms in Cambridge Circus would see Derwent Rose's face any more.