Читать книгу The Education of Eric Lane - Stephen McKenna - Страница 11

"Lady Barbara! Lady Barbara! Are you listening to me? You mustn't cry—really. … It takes away all your prettiness. Now, you were fairly hard on me at dinner, weren't you? But I do possess some intelligence; I didn't need to have Lady Poynter shouting from the house-top that you were ill. You're worn out, you ought to be in bed and you ought to stay there, instead of exciting yourself. Lady Barbara, please stop crying! I don't know what I said, but I'm very humbly sorry. Won't you stop?"

She stiffened herself with a jerk and smiled as abruptly.

"It was my fault. I've not been well and I've been very miserable. Give me a little kiss, Eric, to shew you're not angry with me."

She leaned forward and put her hands on his shoulders again.

"Why should I be angry with you?" he asked with a defensive laugh.

Her hands dropped into her lap.

"You won't kiss me?"

"What difference would it make?"

"I ask you to. What difference would it make to you?"

Eric fumbled industriously with a cigarette.

"It so happens that I've never kissed any one," he said, "except my mother and sister, of course." Then, as she sat hungrily reproachful, he repeated: "What difference would it make?"

"You wouldn't understand … " she sighed. "And yet I thought you would. Where did you get that tray from, Eric? You've never been to India, have you?"

"It was given me by an uncle of mine. Lady Barbara—If it will give you any satisfaction. … "

He kissed her forehead with shame-faced timidity and became discursively explanatory.

"The candle-sticks were looted during the Commune," he began hurriedly. "I was given them as a house-warming present. The clock … "

Barbara was wandering listlessly round the room and paying little attention to what he was saying. She explored the book-cases, ransacked the writing-table and looked curiously at the horse-shoe paper-weight.

"You can give this to me, Eric," she suggested over her shoulder.

"I'm afraid it was a present. Given me on my first night."

"It would still be a present, if you gave it to me. I had one, but I broke it. All my luck's left me since then. Are you superstitious?"

"Not—in—the—least! I keep this for associations and a toy. If I could bring out a play on Friday the thirteenth——"

"If you're not superstitious, there's no excuse for not giving it to me."

She tossed the horse-shoe into the air and caught it neatly with her right hand.

"I'll see if I can get you another one," he promised, "but I don't know whether they're made in England."

"It might make all the difference to me," she pleaded, catching the horse-shoe with her left hand. "It's only a toy to you—a child's toy."

Eric shook his head at her. Barbara pouted and threw the horse-shoe a third time into the air, bending forward to catch it behind her back as it dropped. Eric, watching apprehensively, saw a flash of apprehension reflected for an instant in her eyes; then there was a tinkle of broken glass.

"Oh, my dear! I wouldn't have done that for the world!" she cried, pressing her hands against her cheeks. "I've destroyed your luck now! What a fool I was! Abject fool!"

"What does it matter?" Eric laughed.

"I wouldn't have done that for the world," she repeated with a white face.

"And you're living in the year of grace nineteen-fifteen? It's only—What did we call it? A child's toy. And, between ourselves, it wasn't a very efficient paper-weight. I can assure you I shan't miss it."

"Perhaps you will some day. And then you'll lift up your hands and curse the hour when you first met me."

Eric looked complacently at the airy room, the crowded book-cases, the soft chairs, the bellying curtains and the neat pile of manuscript on his writing-table:

"Aren't you perhaps exaggerating your potential influence on my life?" he suggested.

Barbara went back to her sofa and helped herself to a cigarette without hurry or fear that this time it would be taken from her; she smiled for a match—and smiled again when it was given her.

"Aren't you perhaps boasting too soon, my self-satisfied young friend? Your education's only just beginning."

Eric lighted a cigarette and sat down beside her. He no longer insisted that, for health or propriety, she must go home at once; and in some forgotten moment he had involuntarily taken off his overcoat.

"I wonder what you think you can teach me," he mused. "I wonder what you know, to start with."

"I know life."

"A considerable subject."

"I've had considerable experience."

The clock on the mantel-piece chimed one. Neither seemed to notice it, for Barbara was becoming autobiographical. Her story was ill-arranged and discursive, with personal characteristics of Lord Crawleigh sandwiched between her life at Government House, Ottawa, and a thwarted romance between her brother and a designing American. She flitted from her four years in India to Viceregal Lodge, Dublin, with a procession of damaging encounters with her father as stepping-stones in the narrative. (From her account it was Lord Crawleigh who sustained most of the damage.) He could never shake off a certain pro-consular manner in private life and had reduced his sons to blundering and untrustworthy aides-de-camp and his wife to a dignified but trembling squaw. Barbara alone resisted him.

"What can he do?" she asked. "He whipped me till I was ten, but I'm too big for that now. He can't very well lock me in my room, because the servants would leave in a body. They adore me. If he'd tried to stop my allowance, I should have gone on the stage—we've settled that point once and for all with Harry Manders, half-way through the stage-door of the Hilarity. Now I've got my own money. Mind you, I adore father, and he adores me; most people adore me; but I must do what I like. You see that now; but I had to shew you, I had to break my way in here by main force."

Eric looked up in time to catch a glint in her eyes. It was unexpected and disconcerting. He had been imagining that she was merely over-indulged; but the glint warned him that Barbara would make a bad enemy, cruel perhaps and unscrupulous certainly. The next moment she was again like a child, grown haggard with fatigue; and he gave her a slice of cake and some milk, which she accepted obediently and with a certain surprised gratitude.

"Where d'you imagine all this is going to end?" he asked her, though the question was addressed more to himself. "You're twenty-two, you've been everywhere, seen everything, met everybody. You're utterly uncontrolled and so sated and restless that, rather than go to bed, you'll compromise yourself by sitting talking to me half the night in a bachelor flat."

"Poor Val Arden used to talk like that. He always called me Lady Lilith, because I was older than good and evil. I'm sorry Val's dead; he was such fun. 'In six years' time—one asks oneself the question. … ' It wasn't 'rather than go to bed,' not altogether."

"It's a nervous disease," Eric interrupted shortly.

"Because I cried just now? I was very unhappy, Eric."

"My dear Lady Barbara, you live in superlatives. You don't know what happiness or unhappiness means. You were badly overwrought then, so you cried and said you were miserable."

She looked at him and raised her eyebrows without speaking.

"It's wonderful how wrong quite clever people can be," she said at length. "I was miserable, I wanted to be kissed, I was hungry for the smallest crumb of affection. I wanted to be happy. … And you can only see me as neurotic. D'you feel you're a good judge?"

"Of happiness?"

Eric smiled complacently and again glanced lovingly round the room. Barbara sighed in pity and looked at her watch.

"I seem to have come in the way rather," she interrupted.

"The butterfly that settles on the railway track may be said, I suppose, to come in the way of a train. … I'm going to take you home now."

"You're not sorry I came? I'm not."

"It was worth while meeting you," he laughed.

As Eric struggled with the sleeves of his coat, she twined her arms round his neck. The scent of carnations was now faintly blended with the deeper fragrance of the single rose behind her ear.

"And you'd never kissed any one before," she whispered.

It was nearly day-light when they found themselves in the street. Two special constables, striding resonantly home, looked curiously at them; but Barbara had again pulled up her shawl until it covered half her face. Piccadilly was at the mercy of scavengers with glistening black waders and pitiless hoses; otherwise they seemed to have all London to themselves.

With a head aching from fatigue, Eric tried to reconstruct the fantastic evening. Little detached pictures jostled their unconvincing way through his brain—Lady Poynter's formal dining-room and the barren, self-conscious literary discussion; Lord Poynter's wheezing confidences about the wood port which should properly be taken as a liqueur. He saw again the bridge-table with Gaymer, neat, immaculate and repellent, calling in a high nasal voice for Barbara to rejoin them. The drive home was a blank until he was galvanized by her leaning through the window and directing the coachman to Ryder Street. Thereafter facts gave place to emotions, and the other emotions to an incredulous elation that Barbara Neave should have thrown herself at his feet. Perhaps, of course, she was only emotion-hunting. … But she had lain at his mercy. … Perhaps that, too, was an emotion to be wooed, enjoyed and recorded. Any one less artificial could at least be glad that they were passing out of each other's life, as they had come into it, without expectation or regret.

"You'd better not come any farther," she advised him, as they reached the end of Berkeley Street. "If anybody should be awake and looking out of the window … "

He nodded and held out his hand.

"You have your latch-key?"

"Yes, thanks. Good-night, Eric."

"Good-bye, Lady Barbara."

"Between men on the Stock Exchange it is a platitude that you can only get a price in selling what some one else wants to buy; between men and women outside the Stock Exchange this is often considered a paradox."—From the diary of Eric Lane.