Читать книгу The Willow Cabin - Pamela Frankau - Страница 10

The lights were going down as Dennis Brookfield and his companion reached their places. The theatre was dark when Dennis opened his programme. He had a moment’s fear that he might be making this gesture uselessly and that the leading lady would be restored to health.

Probably he was the only person here who suffered such an emotion. He could imagine many whose spirits would droop as they detached from the programme the separate leaf of paper announcing that the part of Viola would be played at this performance by Miss Caroline Seward. The all-star production of Twelfth Night had a life limited to six weeks; nobody wanted to see the understudy; the role of Viola belonged by right to the most talented young woman on the London stage. He would have liked to think that her illness marked an upward change in Caroline’s fortunes; more, he was determined to precipitate this change, and that was why he had dragged Rokov here to-night.

He owed his acquaintance with Rokov to his illustrious brother Jay; who would have little sympathy for any project that might favour Caroline. Already Dennis felt opposition in the air; not from Jay, conveniently attending an opening in New York; not from Rokov, who was a spectacular novice to the London stage and who had never heard Caroline’s name until now. Rokov, casting his new play, was in furious search after the right young woman for the lead. Rokov would bless him if Caroline turned out to be the right young woman. The opposition came from one person only; from Caroline herself. He had an inkling that none of this was going to work out as he had planned. He was arguing indignantly in his head while Orsino’s spell-binding baritone demanded,

“How will she love, when that rich golden shaft

Hath killed the flock of all affections else?”

“How will she love?” Dennis sent the question pointing after Caroline and flung the answer back at Orsino: “Like a fool.” So that he was already reviewing and condemning the whole unhappy business when the curtain rose on the scene and he saw her standing there.

He tried to see her through Rokov’s eyes. In the trailing dark clothes she was, he thought, at a disadvantage. One of the most characteristic virtues of Caroline’s appearance was her long-legged grace. When he thought of her, he thought first of her walking to meet him or walking away. There was a beautiful smoothness in that stride, in the straight back and the carriage of the small head; now she was drooping like a sick bird and Rokov would have no hint of it. Nor, since the dark cloak muffled her about, could he get the look of her head. It was amusing, this; it was like presenting Caroline to Rokov in a parcel, waiting for the wrapping to come off and for Rokov to say, “How did you guess? It’s just what I wanted.”

The voice at least he could judge. It was a strong and vibrant voice, without a smile in it; the pitch was perfect. Framed by the dark hood, the face with the high cheekbones and the slightly hollow cheeks looked as though made for grief. He did not often find this thing in Caroline’s face; he was saddened to find it now.

He listened with infinite pleasure to the words spoken stripped of all lilting affectations and traditional Shakespearian overtones. It fascinated him to hear that Caroline could say, “Thou shalt present me as an eunuch to him,” with the same thoughtful, twentieth-century inflexion that kept other phrases alive in his memory: (“It would help enormously if I could borrow five pounds till the First”; “I think I could lunch to-morrow, if that’s all right with you.”) And as she said, “Only shape thou thy silence to my wit,” he heard another urgent appeal: “If anybody asks, for heaven’s sake say that I was with you.”

“She’s unusual,” said Rokov’s thick voice in his ear.

“Like her?”

“I am not sure. Do you?”

“No,” Dennis thought; “I love her, but that’s something else again. ‘Ein Jüngling liebt ein Mädchen, Die hat einen andern erwählt.’ The hell with it.” He saw none of the neat fooling of the next few moments; he was sitting in judgment on the man who had invaded Caroline’s solitude.

He wished often that he had known her before Michael knew her; he could imagine that mixture of steadfastness and perplexity, when it was directed towards no person and no creed; he could picture it when it was merely the quality of youth; the questioning spirit in a body that was consumed by more than the usual fires. Knowing her then, he guessed, it would have been difficult to distinguish between her animal and her spiritual needs.

Perhaps, of all the foolish sentimental games that he played in his mind about Caroline, this was the most foolish, the most sentimental; this hankering for a knowledge of her lost virginity, for the times and the places that he could never share with her. It still irked him that so simple a fact should have robbed him of the chance. He had been unable to attend a party at his sister’s house and it was at this party that Caroline had met Michael; just over two years ago, in the winter of ’36. So that when he did meet her, she was already Michael’s property.

It was curious in this hour to remember for how long he had been Michael’s friend; a shareholder in the family affection felt by the three Brookfields for Michael and Mercedes Knowle. Dennis knew that, of the three, he was the only one who had waned in affection when the marriage broke. Kate and Jay were on Michael’s side; they thought Mercedes an impossible person. He himself had never spoken in defence of Mercedes; he had continued, resentfully, to see Michael; to lose his resentment and become used to Michael alone. Now that old grudge looked remarkably like a prophecy of the time when he would meet the young woman whom Kate called “Michael’s girl” and stare at her and know that he was in love.

He could not see Michael as a person any more, he could see him only as a shadow fallen upon Caroline’s life. If they met in her dressing-room at the interval (“but it would be more like him not to be there”) they would talk as friends. Perhaps they would all three go to supper together. Dennis described himself frequently as a natural third; he looked back along the years and saw tables where he sat with Michael and Michael’s wife; with Michael and somebody else’s wife; with Michael and any one of the casual, short-term acquaintances who had ranged between Mercedes and Caroline.

There was a “take-it-or-leave-it” attitude about Michael. Dennis had seen it at the time when the marriage broke; he was aware of the same challenge now, concerning Caroline. “And, like an idiot, I take it,” Dennis thought. “Do I like him more than I realise? Am I afraid of him? At least I’m not here to-night because of him; I am here because of her. Determined to fight them all, Jay included, with my conviction that she’s a genius; that however badly she may have damaged her own career so far, she has a chance of achieving greatness. And this conviction has nothing to do with loving her. Hasn’t it, though? Am I not aiming for two targets? If she became an established success that would be one in the face for Michael, who is the sole cause of her failure.”

He forced himself away from the sour sadness to look at the stage; feeling guilty because so much expensive talent was waving itself before his eyes unheeded. He thought that he liked the stylised set, that was all bluish columns and draperies of deep red; yet, as soon as he was aware of this he was again in danger, because Michael’s wife had amused herself for some years by designing stage-sets and stage-clothes, and this scene had a touch of her idiosyncratic method about it. Unnecessary, he knew, to assure himself that the set could not be Mercedes’ work. In all probability, the likeness was to be found only in his own mind, another signal that all his thoughts were now fixed and forever running along the same rail, like the electric hare at the White City.

The clowns pranced away. Caroline walked between the bluish columns. For a moment Dennis let himself be still and contemplate her without pain; it was not difficult to do this, he thought, when your love was playing Viola in a black and silver doublet.

It was always easy for Viola to look like a principal-boy in pantomime. He tried to see how Caroline avoided that look; perhaps because she had truly boyish legs, growing thinner above the knee; her buttocks did not curve at all; she was flat as a board behind. Nor did she move with the traditional swagger; it was her own smooth, loping walk; and her head, for all the tight sheen of the short curls, remained obstinately Caroline’s head, as he saw it on other backgrounds.

Rokov hunched forward. “What does he make of that face now?” Dennis wondered. “I know what I make of it; the narrow face and the wide eyes; that loose lock falling on the forehead; always the shadow where the cheek thins, and the straight blunt nose, the jut of the square mouth. It is—what? A touch Slavic; a touch Byronic; impossibly gay when the laugh slants her eyes and impossibly stricken when the light goes out of them. She is an exaggeration in all that she does.”

He was impatient with the scene, because it kept her hanging around (“as Michael keeps her hanging around; oh stop this——”). He listened hardly at all to Orsino, the outsize West End lion; he sucked the loveliness of her voice out of the few lines allotted her, and saw her go and could not tell what impression she left. Rokov said nothing. The clowns took over; Dennis was bored until the moment of Olivia’s entrance with Malvolio. The actress playing the part was one of his early stage-loves. She looked magnificent in the variation of black and silver that clothed each of the cast; she had a high tranquil forehead and her hair was red. After a few lines he began to find her dull also; she had acquired too much polish and too much tinkle.

Olivia veiled her face and was seated. Caroline strode across the stage. He liked the gruff, shy growl with which she brought out, “The honourable lady of the house, which is she?” There was an exquisite satisfaction afterwards in hearing the half-gay, half-melancholy notes begin. He thought, “Only when she has been talking a little while do you become aware of her clear, pure diction. At first there is always that roughness in the voice, as though it had been silent a long time and were grown rusty.

“How good is she? Rokov will tell me. I can’t tell; I am nervous for her now; too much with her; reading genius into every syllable that she speaks and every movement that she makes. Or is it really there? Surely it is there.”

He watched her draw in her breath when Olivia lifted the veil; it was a palpable and natural gasp of astonishment, and he thought that it was a trick of genius to put what was almost a stammer into the hackneyed, copy-book words:

“ ’Tis beauty truly blent, whose red and white

Nature’s own smooth and cunning hand laid on.”

She said it as an amateur courtier might have said it, marvelling and transfixed. Then the bewilderment in the voice was the sulky bewilderment of a boy.

“Lady, you are the cruellest she alive,

If you will lead these graces to the grave

And leave the world no copy.”

As one who had suffered from an overdose of school Shakespeare and from many platitudinous productions around London and Stratford, Dennis shook a puzzled head at his own rapture. He did not want to look at Rokov, in case he saw too clearly that this enthusiasm was his private affair. He heard the voice, now grim and rebuking:

“If I did love you in my master’s flame,

With such a suffering, such a deadly life,

In your denial I would find no sense,

I would not understand it.”

“In your denial I would find no sense.” The phrase formed in his imagination her own challenge to Michael; the spearhead of her love; the hopeless crusade.

Now as Olivia asked, “What would you?”, Caroline lifted her chin and stared into space. As though sighting her own hopeless destiny, she let her lips droop in a small and rueful smile; it was a look whose sadness wrung his heart. (“Terrifying,” he thought, “when a cliché becomes true; there is an actual pain stabbing at my ribs.”) He did not know for how long she held the mask of sadness before her face. He saw her smile suddenly and differently; as she spoke, full-voiced, a flaming conviction seemed to run after that sorrowful fear and grasp it by the throat and throttle its life out. The words rang triumphantly:

“Make me a willow cabin at your gate,

And call upon my soul within the house;

Write loyal cantons of contemned love

And sing them loud even in the dead of night;

Halloo your name to the reverberate hills,

And make the babbling gossip of the air

Cry out ‘Olivia!’ Oh, you should not rest,

Between the elements of air and earth,

But you should pity me!”

No, he was not alone in his belief; he could feel that the magic wind blew to the ears of all the dullards round him; blew and stirred their hair.

When Olivia spoke, she sounded abashed:

“You might do much.”

It was damnably coincident; it was everybody’s condemnation of Caroline; it was his own. He lost the rest of Olivia’s speech because Rokov leaned close and said in a harsh whisper, “God!—you were right about this girl.”