Читать книгу Ashes of Empire - Robert William Chambers - Страница 12

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The household duties finished, the birds regaled with seed and water, Yolette went out, as she always did, into the tangled garden for a romp with Schéhèrazade, calling Hildé to follow. But Hildé had slipped away to her own silent chamber, where, in the half light, pale sunspots moved on the lowered curtains and one dusty sunbeam slanted through the dusk.

She sank into an easy-chair, head thrown back, eyes wide open, gazing at nothing—at the motes sifting through the bands of sunlight—at the tracery of a vine outside the window-sill, shadowed on the lowered curtain, that moved when breezes swayed the leaves. But she saw neither shadow nor sunlight, nor the white walls of the room, nor the white curtains of the bed. There was but one thing before her eyes—Harewood’s face, bending close to hers—closer still—and she lay back in the chair, breathless, fascinated.

Consternation for what she had done gave place to wonder. She strove to understand why—she attempted to begin at the beginning of things. The beginning of things, for her, was not far away—scarcely an hour back. And yet it was no use—no use to try to remember how it had happened.

A passing cloud blotted the dappled sunshine from the curtains; the room grew very dim and still. An apathy, mental and physical, fell upon her; her eyes drooped until the dark lashes rested on her cheeks, her limbs seemed heavy and numb.

Presently the shaft of sunlight stole across the dusk again; she raised one hand, touching her face with listless fingers. Her eyes and cheeks were wet with tears.

There was a niche in the wall over the bed where a faïence figure of Sainte Hildé of Carhaix stood, robed in blue and gold. She turned her eyes to the Sainte and leaned forward in the dusk; but perhaps she had nothing to say to this other Hildé of Carhaix; perhaps she did not know what to say, for her head drooped and she sank back in the arm-chair, idly twisting her white fingers. The tears dried quickly, for there was nothing of bitterness in her heart, only a constant wonder, an eternal childish question, “Why?” And always before her she saw Harewood’s face, touched with an indefinable smile, bending close, closer yet to her own.

Up stairs Harewood himself was sitting on the edge of Bourke’s bed, dispensing tobacco and liquid nourishment to half a dozen fellow countrymen who filled the room with pipe smoke and sprawled on the furniture, listening to Bourke.

Bourke finished speaking, modestly, looking at Sutherland for approval. The latter touched his grizzled moustache thoughtfully and gazed at the carpetless floor.

Speyer began to speak, but subsided when Sutherland looked up at him.

“What Bourke says,” began Sutherland, “is something I can neither deny nor approve. He affirms that it is not possible for the German armies to isolate Paris from the outside world; he says that if we remain in Paris we shall be able to communicate with our respective journals. Whether or not this turns out to be the case, I myself have decided to leave the city. Personally I don’t care whether I’m with the French or German army. If the Germans invest Paris and enter Versailles, I fancy it will change nothing as far as the censorship is concerned.”

“German censors are worse than French—if any one should ask you,” observed Winston.

“They’re all of a stripe,” grumbled Harewood, who had more red pencil on his despatches than the rest of the foreign correspondents put together.

Sutherland laughed, returning his pipe to the morocco case, and looked at Bourke with kindly eyes.

“As long as you and Harewood are expected to stick to the French army,” he said, “I suppose you ought to stay in Paris. As for Winston, and Shannon, and George Malet—they are free to go where they please, and if I’m anything of a prophet they had better steer clear of Paris.”

“You mean you think that there’ll be nothing much to see in Paris?” asked Harewood, anxiously.

Sutherland caressed his double chin.

“There will be plenty to see—perhaps more to see than there will be to eat,” he replied slowly.

Bourke raised his glass impatiently, saying; “Well, here’s to you, prophet of evil!”

Sutherland smiled at him, and picked up his hat.

“I’m an old codger,” said the great war correspondent. “I need the luxury of a meal at least once a week. Perhaps I’m unreasonable, but I’m not fond of horse flesh, either. Bourke, if you think you ought to stay in Paris”—he held out a heavy, sunburned hand—“I’ll say good-by, and good luck to you and to Harewood, the hare-brained suckling of journalism.”

In the laughter and shouts of “Here’s to you, Jim! Don’t let the censor bully you! Take away his red pencil!” Bourke jumped to his feet, and shook hands with them all, including Speyer.

“Good luck, all of you!” he cried heartily. “Jim and I will take our chances.”

“I don’t get my stuff through anyway, so if we’re blocked up here it won’t matter,” said Harewood. As he followed them to the door Speyer offered him a flabby hand.

“I wish you luck,” he said with a furtive sneer; “I know this house; you will be well lodged; the ladies are delightful.”

Harewood withdrew his hand roughly.

“What’s that?” he demanded. But Speyer hurried away down the stairs, arm in arm with Stauffer, whose weak blonde face was convulsed with laughter.

“Did you hear what he said, Bourke?” asked Harewood. “I didn’t know he’d ever been here. What a sneaking, sneering brute he is!”

“Who cares,” said Bourke, “we’re not obliged to see him, are we? Well, Jim, what do you think, shall we stay here or go with the others?”

“O, of course, if you insist on staying—”

“But I don’t,” laughed Bourke.

“You don’t? What about our instructions to remain with the French army?”

“Pooh!” said Bourke. “We can cable that it’s impossible. Shall we, Jim? You were so anxious to go, you know—yesterday?”

“I wish,” said Harewood, in sudden irritation, “that you’d stop grinning. No, I won’t go! I’m not a confounded weather vane—”

“Except in love,” observed Bourke. “Don’t lose your temper, Jim, and don’t dangle around Hildé Chalais. Now I’m going down to the city to see what’s up. Want to come?”

“No,” said Harewood, shortly.

Bourke nodded, with unimpaired cheerfulness, and put on his hat.

“Anything I can do for you? No? Well, tell our hostesses I’m lunching en ville. I’ll be back to dinner at seven. By the way, I think I’d better sell our horses now, don’t you?”

“I don’t care a damn what you do,” said Harewood, sulkily.

Bourke nodded again, and went out whistling. He understood the younger man, and he would have laid down his life for him any hour in the day, knowing that Harewood would not do the same for him.

When he had gone, Harewood threw himself on the bed, both hands behind his head. Perhaps he was interested in the single fly that circled above the bed, sometimes darting off at a tangent, sometimes cutting the circles into abrupt angles, but always swinging back again as though suspended from the ceiling on an invisible thread.

He thought of Bourke—already wondering at his own bad temper; he thought of the war—the folly of Saarbrücken, the never-to-be-forgotten shambles of Mars-la-Tour, at least he imagined he was thinking of these things. In reality, a vague shape was haunting him, vague fingers touched his own, shadowy eyes questioned his, a name sounded in his ears, again and again, until the quiet beating of his heart took up the persistent cadence.

He roused himself, went over to the mirror and stared at his own reflection. Self-disgust seized him; he was sick of himself, of his own futility, of his life—so utterly useless because so absolutely selfish. That was the strange part of it to him; nobody else seemed to be aware how selfish he was. He himself knew it, but there was one thing he had not known, namely, that selfishness is the first step toward cowardice. True, he was cool enough under fire—he never hesitated to risk his skin when it came in the routine of his profession. He even risked it needlessly from sheer perverseness, and his reputation for recklessness was a proverb among his fellows. He had been known to bring a stricken comrade in from the fighting line. Thinking over the episode later, he knew that he had been actuated by no high motives of self-sacrifice; he had done it simply as part of the circus. He was rather surprised when they praised him, for everybody else was under fire at the same time, and he knew that if he had not been there in the line of his own profession, and any one had asked him to go out and risk his life in that way, he would have indignantly refused.

At times his recklessness amounted to imbecility in the eyes of his confreres. Sutherland, commenting on it one evening, observed that Harewood was troubled with an annoying malady called “youth.” But this recklessness, when he showed it, was not ignorance of fear; it was self-disgust. There were many other occasions when, being on good terms with himself, he had taken the tenderest care of his precious person. This self-solicitude was not normal prudence—it was a form of fierce selfishness that attacked him like an intermittent disease. Some day, he was thinking now, it might attack him at the wrong moment; and at such moments the hesitation of selfishness is known as cowardice.

As he leaned there, before the mirror, looking blankly into his own handsome eyes, something of this came to him in a sudden flash that shocked him; for the idea of personal cowardice had never entered his mind.

The bare possibility of such a thing made him loathe himself. He gazed, startled, at that other face in the mirror as though he had detected a criminal—a secret assassin of himself who had fawned and flattered him through all those years—a treacherous thing that now suddenly leered at him, unmasked, malignant, triumphant.

In that bitter moment, as he stared back at the face in the mirror, he realised for the first time in his life that he had detected himself. Hitherto his fits of depression and repentance had been followed by nothing but self-contempt, which led to recklessness. Now he saw more; he saw his own soul, warped and twisted with egotism; he saw the danger of the future, the possibilities of ruin and disgrace, the end of everything for a man in this world—detected cowardice!

And he realised something else, something still more amazing; he realised that for the last ten minutes there had been two faces in the mirror before him—one, his own, sombre and marred with boyish cynicism, the other a vaguer face, a face of shadows faintly tinged with colour—a dim, wistful face, pure and sensitive as a child’s—a face whose wide, brown eyes were fixed on his, asking a question that his soul alone could answer.

He straightened up with an effort. Presently he began to pace the room. Who was this girl—this child that haunted the solitude of his egotism—whose memory persisted among all the other memories? Had he harmed her? Had the idle caress of a moment left him responsible? In the impulse to answer this he turned to cynicism for aid, but it gave him no aid, and when he tried to understand why this thought should occupy him, it suddenly occurred to him that there existed such a thing as moral obligation. When he had clearly established this in his mind, he went further, and found that he himself was amenable to the moral law—and this surprised and attracted him. A girl, then, had certain moral rights which a man was bound to respect! The proposition was novel and interesting.

“If that is so,” he said aloud, “life is not an impromptu performance, but a devilish serious rehearsal!”

He lighted a cigarette and walked to the door. “If that is the proper solution of life,” he thought, “it’s not as amusing as my solution, but perhaps it wasn’t meant to be.” He blew a succession of smoke rings toward the ceiling. “Any way, seeing in that light, there does not appear to be much opportunity for introducing side steps of one’s own.”

By this time he had reached the head of the stairs outside the landing. “No side steps,” he repeated; “no gags, no specialties. I’m to keep time to the fiddle—that’s my business.”

His mind was clear now—his heart lighter than the zephyrs that blew fitfully through the open shop door. Life in earnest should begin for him—a life of renunciation, self-suppression, an even, equitable life, orderly, decent, and, above all, morally unselfish.

As he set foot on the last stair, preoccupied, entranced, hypnotized at the spectacle of his own moral regeneration, Hildé turned the corner of the hallway. She blushed when she saw him and hesitated, a distracting picture of perturbation.

He had made up his mind to ask forgiveness, to assure her of his esteem for her, to acknowledge his inexcusable fault. That’s what he had come down stairs for. But now, when he looked at her, he realised that it was too late. There was nothing he could say which would not hurt her. The quality called tact is highly developed in the selfish. This is not a paradox; generosity has nothing to do with tact. Harewood’s regeneration had not as yet robbed him of his tact; so he said:

“I was going into the city; have you any commission that I could execute?”

“Thank you,” said Hildé, faintly.

“Perhaps mademoiselle, your sister—”

“Thank you, monsieur.”

He acquiesced with a bow. “Monsieur Bourke and I would esteem it an honour to be entrusted with any commission from you,” he said, stiffly, and marched down the steps into the street.

“But, monsieur, you have forgotten your hat!” cried Hildé.

In the absurdity of the situation his dignity collapsed, and he turned around, hot with chagrin. Hildé stood in the doorway, scarlet with confusion; for a second they faced each other, then gravity fled, and a gale of laughter swept the last traces of embarrassment away.

“Is luncheon ready?” asked Harewood, reascending the steps. “My feelings are hurt,” he insisted; “an omelette is the only balm I will consider.” Hildé smiled a little, and took courage.

“The balm is ready,” she said; “Yolette and I have finished luncheon. Will you come into the dining-room?”

The luncheon was a modest affair; a bottle of white wine, a frothy omelette, a bit of rye bread, nothing more. But to Harewood, sitting there opposite Hildé, it was enough. If Hildé appeared charming in embarrassment, she was delightful in her shy mirth. Moreover, he had never believed that he himself could be so witty—for surely he must have been exceedingly witty to stir Hildé to laughter as capricious and sweet as the melody of a nesting thrush.

Yolette came in from the garden, smiling and wondering a little.

“Hildé,” she exclaimed, “what is so funny?”

“I suppose I am,” said Harewood, “the laughter of Mademoiselle Chalais is as melodious as it is disrespectful. Ah, but now I must ask your advice on a very grave question. How are we to address you—which is Mademoiselle Chalais and which is Mademoiselle Yolette, or Mademoiselle Hildé?”

“You may take your choice,” said Hildé, with a bright smile, “because you see we are twins. Only,” she added, “I feel millions of years older than Yolette.”

Yolette protested indignantly, and for a moment they all three chattered like sparrows in April, laughing, appealing to each other, until Yolette fled to the garden again, her hands pressed over both ears.

“Well,” said Harewood, “nobody has answered my question after all.”

Hildé’s eyes were brilliant and her cheeks aglow as she watched Yolette through the window.

“Perhaps it would be simpler,” said Hildé, “to call us both by our first names.” She rose and opened the window that faced the garden.

“Yolette?” she laughed softly.

“What, dear?”

“Shall Monsieur Harewood call us both by our first names?”

“Yes,” replied Yolette, “but he must be very formal with Schéhèrazade!”

Harewood looked around at the girl beside him, at her brilliant colour, at her eyes, vague and sweet under their silken fringe.

“Then I am to call you ‘Hildé,’” he said. He had not meant to speak tenderly.

“O,” stammered Hildé, “it is merely a matter of convenience, isn’t it?” She had not meant to say that either.

“Of course,” he replied.

They closed the window and stepped back into the room. After a moment’s silence Hildé said; “If you are going into the city, will you do something for me?”

“Indeed I will,” he answered quickly, touched by the sudden confidence. She handed him a coin—a silver franc; her face grew serious.

“It is for the ambulance,” she said, “we could not give it last week. The bureau is opposite the Luxembourg palace. Will you drop it into the box?”

“Yes,” he replied gravely.

“Thank you. Shall you come back to dinner?”

He said, “Yes,” lingering at the door. Suddenly that same impulse seized him to take her in his arms again; the blood stung his cheeks as his eyes met hers. Her head drooped a little; he knew she would not resist; he knew already she felt the caress of his eyes; the colour deepened and paled in her cheeks, but he did not stir.

Presently he heard a voice—his own voice, saying: “Then—adieu, Mademoiselle Hildé.” She answered with an effort: “Adieu, monsieur.”

A moment later he was in his own room, standing before the mirror, facing his own reflection with a lighter heart than he had carried for many a day. “Damn it,” he said, shaking his fist at the mirrored face, “I’ll show you who is master!”

The form in the glass smiled back, shaking a clenched fist.