Читать книгу The Reckless Lady - Philip Gibbs - Страница 7

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It was Stephen who had introduced his sister to the American whom she had now monopolised. He had met the young man—he seemed oldish to Stephen—in the mountain village of Gourdon, near the Gorge des Loups, when sketching the old walls on a narrow ledge of rock with a sheer drop on either side. The American glanced at him with friendly eyes, as though wanting to talk, and Stephen, sitting on the edge of a stone wall with his sketch-block, gave him a chance by saying, “Steep climb!” The American with rather a slow smile agreed that it was not altogether flat.

“Must have been a strong position in old days,” he remarked surveying the steep ravine dropping down to the terrace vineyards below. “No good to-day against high-angle fire. A few howitzers would blow it off the map.”

Stephen was not much interested in that point of view. He preferred the jolly way it built up into a picture. And he liked to imagine the mediæval life in places like this, when some Italian Count, like Sylvia’s little Goldoni—the country wasn’t French in those days—lived in the castle up there, with his men-at-arms, and a troubadour or two, and ladies in horned head-dresses to whom they wrote sonnets in the style of Petrarch. There would have been a bit of fighting now and then with neighbouring nobles, but in a gallant, gentlemanly way. No high-explosives and poison-gas.

Presently the American asked if he were English and laughed when he said, “More or less,” explaining that he was English all right, but didn’t know much about England, as he had lived abroad mostly.

“Well,” said the American, “from what I hear, England isn’t in good shape after the war. Unemployment, strikes, bad trade. Isn’t that so?”

“Yes, the war made a bit of a mess,” said Stephen.

The American was amused again.

“It certainly did! I’ve been helping to clear it up a little here and there. In the A.R.A.”

“What’s that?” asked Stephen, mystified.

“The American Relief Administration. Feeding the kiddies. Since the war we’ve helped to keep a good few million alive in Russia, Poland, and other places. It was a job worth doing. I’m glad I’ve had a hand in it.”

“One doesn’t see much effect of war in Monte Carlo,” Stephen remarked, and that made the American laugh. He threw off rather a good phrase. “The play-ground of the profiteers,” he said, with his rather slow-lighting smile. Then he added that he mustn’t say too much about that as he was staying in the neighbourhood himself with his own people! Before walking off he handed Stephen a card and said, “Hope to see you again one day.”

On the card was the name Mr. Edward P. Hillier, and the address, Grand Rapids, Mich., U.S.A., which Stephen thought sounded wild and romantic. He imagined Indians there, with canoes, in which they shot down roaring cataracts.

It was on the next afternoon that he and Sylvia had met the American in the crowd round the bandstand, and Sylvia was surprised at their greeting.

“Who’s your serious-looking friend?” she had asked.

“An American. I met him up in the mountains. Rather a good sort. Spends his time feeding the starving poor of Europe.”

Sylvia seemed a little excited by that description.

“Why not introduce me? As one of the starving poor, Stephen, I’d like to make his acquaintance.”

Stephen had introduced them, and the American had said, “Charmed to meet you, Miss Fleming,” with a smiling shyness which had won Sylvia’s immediate approval. She had asked him up to the villa and introduced him to her mother as though he were an old and trusty friend, and after an anxious glance and a few words, Mrs. Fleming had decided in her good-humoured way—she never thwarted Sylvia’s little fancies—that he was “a nice-minded young man” and not at all dangerous. Now, after a week’s friendship, Sylvia had decided that the American was much more interesting than poor little Count Goldoni, and one of the most charming men it had been her good fortune to meet along the road of life. Curiously, as Stephen thought, the American—Mr. Edward P. Hillier, of Grand Rapids, Mich.—seemed equally taken with Sylvia. Her sense of humour seemed to appeal to him, and the gravity of his face was brightened considerably by the smile he gave every time she made one of her flippant little jests. Indeed there was a look of wonderment and admiration in his eyes, as though he thought Sylvia the most remarkable and attractive thing he had seen on his travels in Europe, though he must have seen a good deal, thought Stephen, in one way and another, including kids like Sylvia. Possibly to an American her type of prettiness, and her free-and-easy way of speech, and the habit she had of singing like a bird just to show that she was enjoying herself, was somewhat of a novelty. Anyhow, he seemed vastly entertained, and eager to introduce her to his people.

They had an amusing evening with him at Mentone, though there were moments when Stephen was rather bored and thought it all rather silly. He was also slightly alarmed at the excitable behaviour of Sylvia, who not only flirted shamelessly with the young American, who seemed to like it, thought Stephen, but also with his father, who was knocked edgewise by her audacity. Still no one could say that Sylvia was lacking in a sense of humour!

She was vastly excited by the drive from Monte Carlo along the Grande Corniche road which she induced the American to take in preference to the lower and safer road. He had given her a warning about it.

“It’s a bit risky after dark, don’t you think? Your mother might object.”

“I like risk,” was Sylvia’s answer. “But of course if you’re out for safety first——”

That was a challenge to an American who had driven from the Middle West to San Francisco. He accepted it as such with quiet amusement.

“My nerve’s all right, in spite of the shattering effects of war and peace. I was thinking of yours.”

“You needn’t worry about mine,” said Sylvia, with the self-assurance of modern maidenhood. “Show us a bit of speed. And long live the Stars and Stripes!”

He had shown a bit of speed, though Stephen noticed that he was cautious also, and slowed down at the dangerous curves, and was courteous in turning out his headlights when another car approached.

Once he pointed to a gap in the low wall, and glanced sideways with a smile at Sylvia.

“See that hole? That’s where a Rolls-Royce went through, a week ago. A thousand-foot drop. Worse than falling from a sky-scraper.”

He was testing her nerve, in retaliation for her impudence.

She only laughed and squirmed round in the car to look at the lights of Monaco and Monte Carlo, thickly clustered below them, and behind, on the edge of the unruffled sea. Down the slopes the sharp edges of the palm-trees seemed to cut the skyline blackly, and all about them was that half-light just before the coming of a Riviera night when the sky is still blue and the darkness translucent. The first stars were out, not so bright as all those gleaming lamps in the cities of pleasure.

“O Life! O Beauty!” cried Sylvia, and she sang a bit out of some Italian opera in a shrill soprano, ignoring Stephen’s plea to give the birds a chance and not disturb the man at the wheel.

But the American had time to glance at things beyond his wheel and liked the look of them too.

“I’ll be sorry to leave little old Europe! A week or two in London—the fog season, isn’t it?—and then New York, Grand Rapids, Michigan, and work in my father’s factory. Some difference! Well, I suppose a holiday can’t last for ever. It’s the first I’ve had since the war.”

Sylvia was of opinion that life should be a continual holiday. She was endeavouring, rather successfully, with the help of an adorable mother and a sunny spirit, to make it so. Also, why work in a factory—a factory of all things!—in a country like the United States?

Why not stay on the Riviera and grow oranges, or even lemons? What was life without beauty?

“I agree,” said the American, smiling and turning to look at her.

“Why leave civilisation?” enquired Sylvia blandly. “It seems such a pity. Such a waste of life!”

“Well,” said the American, good-humouredly, “from what I’ve seen of civilisation in Europe—Russia, Poland, Armenia—we’re not so backward in the U.S.A.”

“From what I’ve seen of American life on the movies,” remarked Sylvia, “it seems to be made up of cattle-punchers, lovely vampires with big black eyes, and comic policemen. I prefer Monte Carlo. Forgive me, if I hurt your feelings, Mr. Hillier.”

His feelings were not hurt. He saw the impudence in her eyes.

“I’d like to show you American civilisation at its best,” he said. “You’d be surprised. It’s pretty good in spots!”

“I’m European!” cried Sylvia. “Europe! ... It’s in the heart and soul of me. Paris. Rome. Florence. London!”

“A precious lot you know of London!” jeered Stephen from the back seat. “We haven’t seen it for ten years.”

“I remember it,” said Sylvia. “It’s waiting for me.”

The American slowed down for another curve in that high road with a precipice on one side and the hills rising sheer on the other.

“We could give you a good time in New York,” he said. “I’d like to see you down Fifth Avenue on a May morning. It would be nice for Fifth Avenue.”

Sylvia seemed pleased with his way of putting things. After that they were silent most of the way, except for Sylvia singing her Italian stuff, snuggled back in the car, with her knees tucked up in a big rug, looking very happy with herself, while the cool breeze blew the songs from her lips and teased her hair.

Edward Hillier’s father and mother were waiting for them in the Amirauté restaurant just above the tramway at Mentone where it rounds the curve to the bay of Gavarni, and below the gardens of the Grand Hotel. It was supposed to be a smart place and was certainly expensive, but Stephen saw at a glance that it was filled with the usual crowd of elderly ladies and grey-haired men who spend six weeks at Mentone each year to escape the east winds in England before the coming of spring, and to live economically in pensions and cheap hotels. He knew their type, and had made his mother and Sylvia scream with laughter at his caricatures of them, these austere-looking English ladies—astoundingly ugly some of them—who disregarded fashion and walked resolutely with big sticks up the winding mule-roads behind the coast to remote villages in the hills where they astonished the Italian-speaking peasants by their masculine appearance in short skirts and heavy boots.

Stephen had met them at incredible distances in those hill-top villages which he loved to draw. And occasionally he had been accosted by them in execrable French or worse Italian. Their husbands or their brothers were invariably retired colonels, generals, or admirals, who played golf all day and rejoined the ladies in dinner-jackets for table d’hôte, when they deplored the wickedness of the working-classes, the abominable weakness of the Government—“those damned politicians, sir!”—and seemed to think that England was doomed, slowly but surely.

To-night they were in festive mood, “living up to the spirit of the Carnival.” It was a gala night at the Amirauté, and all the guests had been provided with paper caps and balloons and, worst of all, with squeakers, which they blew vigorously and untiringly, so that the din was terrific. It was into this clamour of ear-splitting squeakers above the noise of a jazz band and the shrill laughter of the elderly English ladies that Stephen and Sylvia entered with Edward Hillier.

“My father is living up to Europe,” said young Hillier in a somewhat embarrassed way. “I hope you don’t mind! The older generation must have a night out sometimes.”

Mr. Hillier was a benevolent-looking gentleman with almost white hair and a fresh-complexioned face with very bright, humorous, twinkling eyes, behind tortoise-shell rims. He wore a paper crown, in a rakish way, and was blowing a squeaker until he caught sight of his son’s guests, and waved his hand to them.

“We’ve secured a table, Edward. Uncommonly near the band, worse luck! ... And what do you call this dive? Talk about Bohemia and the Latin temperament! However, when in Rome, do as Rome does!”

He took Sylvia’s hand and made a little bow over it.

“My son tells me he met you and your brother in Monte Carlo. And your beautiful mother. It’s delightful to have you here to-night, and you can trust me to look after you in this den of iniquity.”

Sylvia laughed and glanced round the room in search of iniquity. But she only saw the retired colonels and their ladies enjoying themselves a little boisterously.

“It seems to be a very respectable place,” she said graciously. “And anyhow I’m old enough to take care of myself.”

Mr. Hillier did not seem quite sure.

“Life in foreign countries seems to me highly dangerous,” he said. “It scares me. Fortunately you have that tall young brother of yours to look after you.”

“Oh,” said Sylvia, “I have to look after him. He’s going to be an artist, and is cultivating temperament.”

“Shut up, Sylvia!” said Stephen.

Mr. Hillier laughed loudly and shook hands heartily with Stephen.

“Glad to meet you, my lad. My ancestors came from Yorkshire. Good English stock. I’m proud of it.”

He drew him closer and whispered to him:

“Say! She’s a beauty, that little sister of yours! Fairy-like!”

Then he introduced his wife—Edward’s mother. She was a white-haired lady with a shrewd humour in her eyes, as though she watched life with amusement and was not to be surprised by any of its absurdities. But she smiled at Stephen and Sylvia, in a motherly way.

“You’ll find it rather noisy here. That band thinks it’s playing jazz!”

It was noisy, and Stephen found it rather difficult to listen to Mrs. Hillier, who talked to him while Sylvia danced with the younger Hillier once or twice before the arrival of the hors d’œuvres from waiters who scurried about with a lot of conversation but no immediate results.

She asked him if he had been in the war, and said “Lucky!” when he told her that he had been too young, and in Paris all that time, studying art.

“I lost my eldest,” she said. “Edward’s brother, and a noble young man. There’s a golden star on a banner in our public hall—that’s in Grand Rapids—and I’ve a grudge against the Germans. All the same, I’m for peace, my dear. At the Women’s Club in Grand Rapids I do my best for the League of Nations—rather unpopular just now.”

Stephen saw a little moisture in her eyes when she spoke about her dead son, and felt embarrassed and pitiful. He had had similar pangs of pity when he had talked with other mothers, French and Italian and English, who had confided their grief to him. What a gruesome business it all had been! As a boy in Paris, Rome, Florence, and other cities—his mother was always roving!—he had been conscious in a childish way of the great drama of the war. He had followed it at first on a map, moving little flags, until trench warfare began, when the line never moved. He had seen the mobilisation in Paris, the weeping women, the silent men going so quietly. He had been in an air-raid or two, not frightened, rather pleasantly excited. Sylvia and he had stood out on the roof in their dressing-gowns, watching the Zeppelins like silver fishes in the searchlights. Sylvia had cried “Magnifique! Superbe, ça!” and he had called her a little silly and told her that she might be killed at any moment. His mother had been frightened. That was why they had left Paris and gone to Avignon for six months....

Only lately he had been thinking about the war and the meaning of it, and life generally. War, love, art. Those were the things that mattered most, it seemed, according to the books he read, Italian, French, English. Well, he knew a little about art—though not much yet. The war? He couldn’t make head or tail out of it. He was all for France, though England seemed to be favouring the Germans. Amazing, that! And love? An utter mystery as far as he was concerned. It seemed to muck up people’s lives. A kind of disease in a way, he supposed, like measles and other things. Probably he would have to go through it some day. Sylvia seemed to be experimenting already and finding it amusing.

He glanced over to her now, dancing with the young American, teaching him a new step, or something. She was certainly a graceful kid, even a brother must acknowledge that, and devilish pretty, as she jolly well knew. She was laughing up at Edward Hillier, who was half a head taller and ten years older. Funny that a man who had been through the war—he had mentioned that at Gourdon in the hills—should be so taken with a bit of a thing like Sylvia, hardly more than a schoolgirl, though very knowing for her age! He was blushing up to the tips of his ears and had a worshipful look. Very American and honest-looking, with rather good eyes—straight and friendly and simple.

“We’re sorry for Europe,” said Mrs. Hillier. “It’s not pulling out as well as we hoped. Too much politics, I’m sure. That son of mine has been helping in the famine area ever since the war, and we’re terribly proud of him! It’s made him look older than he was at Harvard. Now we want him home again. Only fair, I think. The girls are asking for him in Grand Rapids.”

She looked over at her son and smiled, and then turned to Stephen again.

“I expect you’re still at college. Oxford, isn’t it? Have you thought what your work is going to be?”

Stephen shifted in his chair, uneasily, and laughed.

“Painting pictures, if I get the chance. Of course I don’t expect people to buy them.”

“Well,” said Mrs. Hillier, in a tolerant way, “I daresay there’s something in art. Edward says so, and I’m prepared to believe it. But to tell you the truth, these art galleries in Europe make me tired, my dear, though I shouldn’t say so in a loud voice! Those Greek statues, and undressed young women! We don’t hold with that kind of thing in Grand Rapids!”

“What happens in Grand Rapids?” asked Stephen.

Mrs. Hillier laughed quietly.

“Furniture mostly, and all the time. Mr. Hillier has the biggest factory in the United States—bedroom stuff, apartment sets, every kind of thing in that way.”

She glanced round the restaurant of the Amirauté and laughed again at an idea that came to her.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if these chairs and tables came from Grand Rapids. Mr. Hillier exports them everywhere.”

Sylvia came back with Edward Hillier. She was holding his hand, and he looked as though he liked it but hoped people wouldn’t notice.

“I’m going to be bold enough to ask you to dance with me, Miss Fleming,” said the elder Mr. Hillier, giving his paper crown a more rakish tilt. “In the United States we don’t leave it all to flaming youth. Do we, mother?”

“You go ahead,” said Mrs. Hillier. “I’m waiting for an invitation myself.”

It was a hint to Stephen which he could hardly refuse, and he was surprised to find that Mrs. Hillier danced almost as well as his mother—though not as well as Sylvia, of course—in spite of her white hair. But he hoped that he would not be observed by the other people. It was rather absurd to be careering round with a lady old enough to be his grandmother, though she was rather amusing and not at all disagreeable.

The elder Mr. Hillier was dancing round with Sylvia like a two-year-old, looking absurd in his paper crown, but happy. He clapped his hands when the band stopped for a moment and then resumed with enthusiasm and winked as he passed Stephen and his wife, as though to say, “Life in the old dog yet!”

That, indeed, was inevitably what he did say when he came back, flushed and rather breathless, with Sylvia, who was cool and untired.

“She dances like a fairy,” he remarked to Stephen. “And—gosh!—how all these people envy me! I’ll say they do.”

Certainly all the people smiled at Sylvia with admiring eyes, as Stephen noticed, not without a little pride in his sister. But she was getting over-vain about herself. He would have to take the conceit out of her a bit.

When dinner came at last, Sylvia competed with the elder Mr. Hillier in the blowing of squeakers, and she won. Edward Hillier was plainly annoyed with his father, in a good-natured way, for monopolising her so much, but had his own back when dancing resumed. Mrs. Hillier confided to Stephen that her husband was still a boy at heart. She liked him to keep young.

Stephen had the next dance with Sylvia. They danced together with the rhythm of long companionship, knowing each other’s steps, doing the “twiddly bits,” feeling the music. People turned their heads to watch them.

“You dance almost as well as our American friends,” said Sylvia graciously. “Thanks to my tuition.”

“Yes, but you don’t make eyes at me in the same way,” said Stephen.

“It’s not the same thing—brother and sister,” answered Sylvia blandly.

“No, so it seems. You had better be careful, young lady. I don’t like the way you’re beginning to carry on with men-folk—old or young.”

“I can’t help my good looks,” said Sylvia calmly. “And I like to make them happy.”

“Well, I warn you,” said Stephen. “Don’t say I didn’t tell you.”

At the end of the dance there was a professional exhibition. “Extremely professional!” said Sylvia, with an excited little laugh. Two young ladies appeared under the title of the “Undressed Dolls,” and lived up to that name, to the amazement of all the old colonels and the scandal of their ladies.

“Outrageous!” said one elderly lady next to the Hilliers’ table, but she put up her lorgnettes to see more perfectly.

Mrs. Hillier was quietly amused.

“We’ll keep this quiet in Grand Rapids,” she told her husband, who said “Gee!” and readjusted his tortoise-shell rims.

“Oh, it’s nothing!” Sylvia assured her. “People who live abroad think nothing of that. Why should they, after all? It’s far more ‘shocking’—for those who want to be shocked—at Trouville or Paris Plage in the bathing season.”

“I agree,” said Edward Hillier, but he looked embarrassed.

The elder Mr. Hillier registered surprise, and rebuked his son, with a twinkle in his eyes.

“So these are the foreign dives you frequent, Edward! Time you came home, young feller! We’ll have to give you some moral uplift at the Rotary Club after all this European rough-stuff!”

He regarded the professional dancers with interest and sympathy.

“We needn’t feel too sore about it. I daresay those two young ladies are quite respectable. Probably lead a nice quiet home life, with a dear old mother. It’s very likely they’re Russian princesses escaped from the Bolsheviks and earning a few dollars to keep themselves alive. I feel sorry for them. There’s a lot of tragedy in Europe.”

So the evening came to an end, because Stephen and Sylvia were taking the last tram back to Monte Carlo.

“Thank you so much for a delightful time,” said Sylvia to the elder Mr. Hillier.

“It was our pleasure,” said the old gentleman, with great courtesy. “And if ever you and your brother come to the United States we’d give you a bully time, and feel proud to have you stay with us. Wouldn’t we, Mother?”

“That’s certainly true,” said Mrs. Hillier.

She held Stephen’s hand a moment, and squeezed it.

“I hope you’ll succeed with your art. It must be great to paint pictures, and I’m not such a Philistine as I pretended just now—though I do get tired of all those galleries!”

She kissed Sylvia’s cheek and whispered a word or two with a motherly smile.

“You’ve won the heart of my men-folk. I’m jealous! Time I took them home.”

“What’s all that?” asked her son suspiciously, but with a smile for his mother which Stephen liked to see.

Sylvia gave him her hand.

“We’ve had a topping evening! When are you coming to Monte again?”

“To-morrow,” he said promptly, “if there’s a chance of seeing you.”

There seemed to be a very good chance, judging from Sylvia’s eyes, which held an invitation.

They were silent on the way home in the crawling tram. Sylvia slept a little, with her head against her brother’s shoulder. There were some peasant-girls with their baskets, jabbering in their patois to two soldiers, and a lady and gentleman in evening dress looking tired and vexed with each other, and an old English colonel—certainly a colonel—who drummed with his fingers on a brown-paper parcel, and made impatient little noises in his throat, and glanced sideways at Sylvia now and then with a fatherly smile. Stephen stared out of the tram at the passing scene, painting imaginary little pictures—that bit of an old street with pierrot clothes hanging outside a lighted shop with a little low doorway—that view of Monaco in the moonlight, under the stars, so white and ghostly—that woman in evening dress standing on the steps of a hotel, with her face in darkness and one white arm touched by the lamplight. The world was full of pictures—every yard of it. His fingers itched to draw them or have a shot in colour. Too difficult! ...

At the tramway’s end they walked up the steep road to the Villa Margherita. Sylvia yawned, sang a little, danced a little.

“Priceless evening!” she said. “I like that American more and more. And what a sporting old father!”

They went quietly up the garden path, and Stephen was careful with the latch-key in case his mother was asleep. But she was not asleep. As he stole into the little hall, he saw her standing in the room to the left of it, their tiny dining-room. There was a lamp on the table and she was fumbling with her bag. On the table lay a few white “chips” which are used for money in the Casino at Monte Carlo. Stephen saw her face in a little gilt-framed mirror over the mantel-piece. For a moment it startled him, she looked so ill and white. She was staring strangely, with a queer look in her eyes—a look of fear.

“Mother!” said Stephen. “Aren’t you well?”

She turned at once, with a laughing cry.

“Good heavens! I never heard you come in! Did you have a merry time?”

“Hilarious!” said Sylvia. “All the old ladies as gay as gay!”

Stephen put his arm round his mother’s waist.

“Feeling all right? Nothing wrong?”

“Right as a trivet ... but oh, so sleepy! I went down to the Sporting Club with old Lady Wandle. A wicked old woman, and so boring with tales of her youthful conquests!”

“Poisonous old cat!” said Stephen. “I should give her a miss, if I were you, Mother.”

“Oh, it takes all sorts to make a world!”

He was relieved at the sound of her laughter. The lamplight had played a silly trick in the mirror. His mother was just the same as usual. Just as jolly and untiring. She insisted on making them some tea before going to bed. She had some funny stories to tell, in her comical way. But Stephen wondered why, before shutting her bedroom door, she put her arms round Sylvia and him and held them a moment longer, a little tighter, than usual in her embrace.