Читать книгу The Tower of Oblivion - Oliver Onions - Страница 7

I think it is Edgar Allan Poe who says that while a plain thing may on occasion be told with a certain amount of elaboration of style, one that is unusual in its very nature is best related in the simplest terms possible. I shall adopt the second of these methods in telling this story of my friend, Derwent Rose. And I will begin straight away with that afternoon of the spring of last year when, with my own eyes, I first saw, or fancied I saw, the beginning of the change in him.

The Lyonnesse Club meets in an electric-lighted basement-suite a little way off the Strand, and as I descended the stairs I saw him in the narrow passage. He was standing almost immediately under an incandescent lamp that projected on its curved petiole from the wall. The light shone brilliantly on his hair, where hardly a hint of grey or trace of thinness yet showed, and his handsome brow and straight nose were in full illumination and the rest of his face in sharp shadow. He wore a dark blue suit with an exquisitely pinned soft white silk collar, to which, as I watched, his fingers moved once; and he was examining with deep attention a print that hung on the buff-washed wall.

I spoke behind him. "Hello, Derry! One doesn't often see your face here."

Quietly as I spoke, he started. Ordinarily he had very straight and steady grey-blue eyes, alert and receptive, but for some seconds they looked from me to the print and from the print to me, irresolutely and with equally divided attention. One would almost have thought that he had heard his name called from a great distance. Then his eyes settled finally on the print, and he repeated my last words over his shoulder.

"My face? Here?... No."

"What's the picture? Anything special?"

Still without moving his eyes from it he replied, "The picture? You ought to know more about it than I—it's your Club, not mine——"

And he continued his absorbed scrutiny.

Now I had passed that picture scores of times before and had never found it worth a glance. It was a common collotype reproduction of a stodgy night-effect, a full moon in a black-leaded sky with reflections in water to match—price perhaps five shillings. Then suddenly, looking over his shoulder, I realised where his interest in it lay. He was not looking at the picture at all. In the polished glass, that made an excellent mirror in that concentrated light, I had seen his eyes earnestly fixed on his own eyes, his cheeks, his hair, his chin....

Well, Derwent Rose had better reason than most men for looking at himself in a picture-glass if he chose. Indeed it had already struck me that that afternoon he looked even more than ordinarily fresh and handsome. Let me, before we go any further, describe his personal appearance to you.

He had, as I knew, passed his forty-fifth birthday in the preceding January; but he would have been taken anywhere for at least ten years younger. You will believe this when I tell you that at the age of thirty-nine, that is to say in the year 1914, he had walked into a recruiting-office, had given his age as twenty-eight, received the compliments of the R.A.M.C. major who had examined him, had joined an infantry battalion as a private, risen to the rank of company-sergeant-major, and had hardly looked a day older when he had come out again, with a herring-bone of chevrons on his cuff and a captain's stars on his shoulder—not so much as scratched. He was just over six feet high, with the shoulders of a paviour and the heart and lung capacity of a diver. Had you not been told that he wrote novels you would have thought that he ran a ranch. His frame was a perfectly balanced combination of springiness and dead-lift power of muscle; and to see those grey-blue eyes that looked into yours out of unwrinkled lids was to wonder what secret he possessed that the cares and rubs and disillusions of life should so have passed him by.

Yet he had had his share of these, and more. His looks might be smooth, but wrinkles enough lay behind his writing. From those boyish eyes that reminded you of a handler of boats or a breaker of horses there still peeped out from time to time the qualities of his earlier, uneasy books—the gay and mortal and inhuman irony of The Vicarage of Bray, the vehement, unchecked passion of An Ape in Hell. If to the ordinary bookstall-gazer these works were unknown—well, that was part of the task that Derwent Rose had set himself. It is part of the task any writer sets himself who refuses all standards but his own, and works on the assumption that he is going to live for ever. Only his last published book, The Hands of Esau, showed a fundamental urbanity, a mellower restraint, and perhaps these were the securer the more hardly they had been come by. I for one expected that his next book would rise like a star above the vapours where we others let off our little six-shilling crackers ... but his body seemed a mere flouting of the years.

And here he stood under the corolla of an incandescent lamp, looking at himself for wrinkles!

Then in the glass he caught my eye, and flushed a little to have been caught attitudinising. He gave a covert glance round to see whether anybody else had observed him. A few yards away, in the doorway, Madge Aird was smilingly receiving the Club's guests, but for the moment Madge was looking the other way. Then he spoke in a muffled voice.

"Well? Notice anything? How do I look? How do I strike you? No, I don't want a compliment. I'm asking you a question. How do I look? I've a special reason for wanting to know."

I laughed a little, not without envy.

"How do you look!" I said. "Another ten years will be time enough for you to begin to worry about your looks, Derry. I know your age, of course, but for all practical purposes you may consider yourself thirty-five, my young friend."

Sadly, sadly now I remember the eagerness of his turn.

"How much?" he demanded.

"I said thirty-five or thereabouts, you Darling of the Gods. I'm fifty, but you make me look sixty, and when you're a hundred your picture will be in the papers with the O.M. round your neck. You'll probably have picked up the Nobel Prize too, and a few other trifles on the way. You've got a physique to match your brain, lucky fellow that you are, and nothing but accident can stop you. Don't go out and get run over, that's all. Well, are you coming in?"

But he hung back. And yet it was largely his own fault if in such places as this Club he felt like a fish out of water. It might even have been called a perverse and not very amiable vanity in him, and I had hoped he had got over this shyness, arrogance, or both. We have to live in a world, even if we are as gifted mentally and physically as was Derwent Rose. But it was no good pressing him. I remembered him of old.

"Then if you're not coming in?" I ventured to hint; and again his hand went to the soft collar.

"What have I come for, you mean? I want you to find out for me if there's a Mrs Bassett here."

"I don't think I know her."

"Mrs Hugo Bassett. Ask somebody, will you?"

"What's she like to look at?"

"Can't say. Haven't seen her for years."

"Wait a bit. Is it somebody called Daphne Bassett?"

"Yes, yes—Daphne," he said quickly.

"Who published what's called a 'first novel' some little time ago?"

Instantly I saw that I had said something he didn't like. The blood stirred in his cheeks. He spoke roughly, impolitely. And even up to this point his manner had been curt enough.

"Why do you say it like that?" he demanded. "'First' novel, with a sneer? She wrote a novel, if that's what you mean."

Yet, though he began by glaring at me, he ended by looking uneasily away. You too may have wondered why publishers so eagerly insist that some novel or other is a really-and-truly 'first' one. Your bootmaker doesn't boast that the pair of boots he sells you is his 'first' pair, and you wouldn't eat your cook's 'first' dinner if you could help it. You may take it from me that in the ordinary course of things Derwent Rose would have been far more likely to applaud the novel that ended an ignominious career than the one that began it. Yet here he was, apparently wishing to outface me about something or other, yet at the same time unable to look me in the eye.

"There's got to be a first before there can be a second, hasn't there?" he growled. "Jessica had to have a First Prayer, didn't she? And is there such a devil of a lot of difference between one novel and another when you come to think of it—yours or mine or anybody else's?"

It was at this point that I began to watch him attentively.

"Go on, Derry," I said.

"There isn't; you know there isn't; and I'm getting sick of this superior attitude. Why must everybody do the Big Bow Wow all the time? Can't somebody write something just for amuse—I mean must they always be banging the George Coverham Big Drum? As long as it doesn't make any pretence.... Have you read it?" he demanded suddenly.

"No."

"Then you don't know anything about it."

It was here that I became conscious of what I have called the Change. Whatever had happened to put him out, this was not the Derry Rose I had lately seen. Surely my remark about that "first" novel had been innocent enough; but he had replied surlily, unamiably, unfamiliarly.... "Unfamiliar?" No, that is not the word. I should rather say remotely familiar, recollected, brought forward again out of some time that was past. Just as in his resplendent physical appearance he seemed to be "too" well, if such a thing can be, so in his manner he seemed to be too ... something; I gave it up. I only knew that the author of The Hands of Esau would not have spoken thus.

"Well, will you find out for me if she's here?" he said in a softer one.

I fancy that already he was sorry he had not spoken more quietly.

"Why not come in and see for yourself?"

"Oh—you know how I hate this sort of thing."

"Not long ago you spoke of joining the Lyonnesse."

"I know. I thought I would. But I've decided it's out of my line."

"Then at least come and be introduced to Mrs Aird. She'll know whether Mrs Bassett's here or not."

The blue-grey eyes gave mine a quick and critical glance.

"Is that the Mrs Aird who writes those bright books about young women and their new clothes and how right their instincts are if you only give them plenty of pocket-money and leave 'em alone?"

I smiled. Perhaps it was a little like Madge. But I noticed his sharp distinction between the novels of one woman and the "first" novel of another. It began to look as if behind Mrs Hugo Bassett the novelist lay Daphne Bassett the woman.

"Well," I sighed, "I'm to ask for Mrs Hugo Bassett. What's the title of her book?"

"The Parthian Arrow."

"Mrs Hugo Bassett, author of The Parthian Arrow. Very well——"

I approached Madge, but before I could ask my question she had drawn me inside the doorway.

"Who is he?" she whispered ardently in my ear. Her plump ringed hand clutched my sleeve, and there was the liveliest curiosity in the dark eyes that looked up at me from under her nodding hat with black pleureuse feathers.

"Is there a Mrs Bassett here—Daphne Bassett?"

"No. But——"

"Has she been, and is she likely to come?"

"She hasn't been, and nobody'll come now. But George——"

"I'll see you presently; just let me get rid of my message," I said; and I returned to Rose.

A glance at my face was enough for him. He may have muttered a "Thank-you," but I didn't hear it; he had spun on his heel and in a moment was half-way to the cloakroom. I hope he got his own hat, for he was out again almost instantly. I had a glimpse of his magnificent back as he hurried along the passage, then a flying heel at the turn of the stairs and he was gone. Turning, I saw that Madge had watched his departure with me. She almost ran to me.

"Quickly, George—who, who is your Beautiful Bear, and why have you been keeping a superb creature like that from me?" she demanded. "I knew he was waiting for a woman. Every skirt that came in——" at the swing of her head the feathers tossed like an inky weeping-elm in a gale. "But," she added, "I confess I never saw a man admire himself quite so openly before."

My friend has scored off me often enough in the past. This time I scored off her.

"Derwent Rose always was good-looking," I remarked.

She fell a step back.

"George!—Derwent Rose! You don't mean to say that that was Derwent Rose?"

"I always thought you knew everybody in London."

"That was Derwent Rose!" Then she added, with inexpressible conviction and satisfaction, "Ah!"

I am always a little uneasy when Madge Aird says "Ah!" in that tone. She was Madge Ruthven before she married Alec Aird, and I have often wondered whether in the past any of her Scottish forbears had any traffic with France. I am not now thinking of the air with which she always wore her clothes, from whatever it was on her head to the always irresistible shoes on her tiny feet. I mean the workings of her mind. There is none of our northern softness and hesitation and mystery about these. All she thinks and says has a logical completeness and finish that somehow always seems just a little too good to be true. Few things in this world are so neatly right as that. But wrong though her conclusions may be, they are always dazzlingly effective, and you have to swallow them or reject them whole.

"Ah!" she murmured again, with the intensest self-approval; and I wondered what unreliable imperfection she was meditating now. You never know with her. She sees so many people, goes to so many places, hears so much. Often the mere mention of a name is enough to touch off that instantaneous fuse of her memory that leads straight into the heart of heaven knows what family history or hidden scandal.

"And what do you mean by 'Ah'?" I asked her.

"The gorgeous creature! I never dreamed—but this makes the situation perfectly fascinating!"

"What situation?"

"Why, of him and Daphne Bassett. But poor old George, I keep forgetting that you're the noblest Roman of them all and don't listen to our horrid petty little scandal. And evidently you haven't read The Parthian Arrow."

"I haven't. Tell me what it's about."

"But you've read An Ape in Hell?"

"Of course. Tell me what the other's about."

But at that moment she was claimed. Her next words came over her shoulder as, with a wisk of her ribboned ankles and another gale in the shake of feathers, she was off.

"Not now—another time. I shall be in fairly early this evening if you're staying in town. It's quite an interesting situation. And if you'll bring your Beautiful Bear to see me some time, I'll——"

I understood her to mean that in that case she would bring Mrs Hugo Bassett also.