Читать книгу The Drunkard - Thorne Guy - Страница 6

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GRAVELY UNFORTUNATE OCCURRENCE IN MRS. AMBERLEY'S DRAWING ROOM

"Μιοω μνημονα ουμποτην, Procille."

—Martial.

—"One should not always take after-dinner amenities au pied de la lettre."

—Free Translation.

Toftrees, at the head of the table, shifted his chair a little so that he was almost facing Gilbert Lothian.

Lothian's arresting voice was quite clear as he spoke to the butler. "That's not the voice of a man who's done himself too well," the novelist thought. But he was puzzled, nevertheless. People like Lothian behaved pretty much as they liked, of course. Convention didn't restrain them. But the sudden request was odd.

And there was that flourishing bow as the women left the room, and certainly Amberley had seemed to look rather strangely at his guest. Toftrees disposed himself to watch events. He had wanted to meet the poet for some time. There was a certain reason. No one knew much about him in London. He lived in the country and was not seen in the usual places despite his celebrity. There had been a good deal of surmise about this new star.

Lothian was like the photographs which had appeared of him in the newspapers, but with a great deal more "personality" than these were able to suggest. Certainly no one looked less like a poet, though this did not surprise the popular novelist, in an age when literary men looked exactly like every one else. But there was not the slightest trace of idealism, of the "thoughts high and hard" that were ever the clear watchwords of his song. "A man who wears a mask," thought Herbert Toftrees with interest and a certain half-conscious fellow-feeling.

The poet was of medium height and about thirty-five years of age. He was fat, with a broad-shouldered corpulence which would have been far less noticeable in a man who was a few inches taller. The clean-shaven face was fattish also, but there was, nevertheless, a curious suggestion of contour about it. It should have been a pure oval, and in certain lights it almost seemed that, while the fatness appeared to dissolve and fall away from it. It was a contour veiled by something that was, but ought not to have been, there.

The eyes were grey and capable of infinite expression—a fact which always became apparent to any one who had been half an hour in his company. But this feature also was enigmatic. For the most part the eyes seemed to be working at half-power, not quite doing or being what one would have expected of them.

The upper lip was short, and the mouth by far the most real and significant part of the face. It was small, but not too small, clearly and delicately cut though without a trace of effeminacy. In its mobility, its sensitive life, its approach to beauty, it said everything in the face. Thick-growing hair of dark brown was allowed to come rather low over a high and finely modelled brow, hair which—despite a natural luxuriance—was cut close to the sides and back of the head.

Such was Toftrees' view of Gilbert Lothian, and it both had insight and was fair. No one can be a Toftrees and the literary idol of thousands and thousands of people without being infinitely the intellectual superior of those people. The novelist had a fine brain and if he could have put a tenth of his observation and knowledge upon paper, he might have been an artistic as well as a commercial success.

But he was hopelessly inarticulate, and æsthetic achievement was denied him. There was considerable consolation in the large income which provided so many pleasures and comforts, but it was bitter to know—when he met any one like Lothian—that if he could appreciate Lothian thoroughly he could never emulate him. And it was still more bitter to be aware that men like Lothian often regarded his own work as a mischief and dishonour.

Toftrees, therefore, watched the man at his side with a kind of critical envy, mingled with a perfectly sincere admiration at the bottom of it all.

He very soon became certain that something was wrong.

His first half-thought was a certainty now. Something that some one had said to him a week ago at a Savage Club dinner—one of those irresponsible but dangerous and damaging remarks which begin, "D'you know, I'm told that so and so—" flashed through his mind.

"Are you in town for long, Mr. Lothian?" he asked. "You don't come to town often, do you?"

"No, I don't," Lothian answered. "I hate London. A damnable place I always think."

The other, so thorough a Londoner, always getting so much—in every way—out of his life in London, looked at the speaker curiously, not quite knowing how to take him.

Lothian seemed to see it. He had made the remark with emphasis, with a superior note in his voice, but he corrected himself quickly.

It was almost as though Toftrees' glance had made him uneasy. His face became rather ingratiating, and there was a propitiatory note in his voice when he spoke again. He drew his chair a little nearer to the other's.

"I knew too much of London when I was a young man," he went on with an unnecessarily confidential and intimate manner. "When I came down from Oxford first, I was caught up into the 'new' movement. It all seemed very wonderful to me then. It did to all of us. We divorced art from morals, we lived extraordinary lives, we sipped honey from every flower. Most of the men of that period are dead. One or two are insane, others have gone quite under and are living dreadful larva-like lives in obscene hells of the body and soul, of which you can have no conception. But, thank God, I got out of it in time—just in time! If it hadn't been for my dear wife …"

He paused. The sensitive lips smiled, with an almost painful tenderness, a quivering, momentary effect which seemed grotesquely out of place in a face which had become flushed and suddenly seemed much fatter.

There was a horrible insincerity about that self-conscious smile—the more horrible because, at the moment, Toftrees saw that Lothian believed absolutely in his own emotion, was pleased with himself sub-consciously, too, and was perfectly certain that he was making a fine impression—pulling aside the curtain that hung before a beautiful and holy place!

The smile lingered for a moment. The light in the curious eyes seemed turned inward complacently surveying a sanctuary.

Then there was an abrupt change of manner.

Lothian laughed. There was a snap in his laughter, which, Toftrees was sure, was meant to convey the shutting down of a lid.

"I like you," Lothian was trying to say to him—the acquaintance of ten minutes!—"I can open my heart to you. You've had a peep at the Poet's Holy of Holies. But we're men of the world—you and I!—enough of this. We're in society. We're dining at the Amberleys'. Our confidences are over!"

"So you see," the actual voice said, "I don't like London. It's no place for a gentleman!"

Lothian's laugh as he said this was quite vague and silly. His hand strayed out towards the decanter of whiskey. His face was half anxious, half pleased, wholly pitiable and weak. His laugh ended in a sort of bleat, which he realised in a moment and coughed to obscure.

There was a splash and gurgle as he pressed the trigger of the syphon.

Intense disgust and contempt succeeded Toftrees' first amazement. So this, after all the fuss, was Gilbert Lothian!

The man had talked like a provincial yokel, and then fawned upon him with his sickly, uninvited confidences.

He was drunk. There was no doubt about that.

He must have come there drunk, or nearly so. The last half hour had depressed the balance, brought out what was hidden, revealed the fellow's state.

"If it hadn't been for my dear wife!"—the tout! How utterly disgusting it was!

Toftrees had never been drunk in his life except at a bump-supper at B.N.C.—his college—nearly fifteen years ago.—The shocking form of coming to the Amberleys' like this!—He was horribly upset and a little frightened, too. He remembered where he was—such a thing was an incredible profanation here!

… He heard a quiet vibrant voice speaking.

He looked up. Gilbert Lothian was leaning back in his chair, holding a newly-lighted cigarette in a steady hand. His face was absolutely composed. There was not the slightest hint that it had been bloated and unsteady the minute before. Intellect and strength—STRENGTH! that was the incredible thing—lay calmly over it. The skin, surely it had been oddly blotched? was of an even, healthy-seeming tint.

A conversation between the Poet and his host had obviously been in progress for several minutes. Toftrees realised that he had been lost in his own thoughts for some time—if indeed this scene was real at all and he himself were sober!

"… I don't think," Lothian was saying with precision, and a certain high air which sat well upon him—"I don't think that you quite see it in all its bearings. There must be a rough and ready standard for ordinary work-a-day life—that I grant. But when you penetrate to the springs of action——"

"When you do that," Amberley interrupted, "naturally, rough and ready standards fall to pieces. Still we have to live by them. Few of us are competent to manipulate the more delicate machinery! But your conclusion is—?"

"—That hypocrisy is the most misunderstood and distorted word in our mother tongue. The man whom fools call hypocrite may yet be entirely sincere. Lofty assertions, the proclamation of high ideals and noble thoughts may at the same time be allied with startling moral failure!"

Amberley shook his head.

"It's specious," he replied, "and it's doubtless highly comforting for the startling moral failure. But I find a difficulty in adjusting my obstinate mind to the point of view."

"It is difficult," Lothian said, "but that's because so few people are psychologists, and so few people—the Priests often seem to me less than any one—understand the meaning of Christianity. But because David was a murderer and an adulterer will you tell me that the psalms are insincere? Surely, if all that is good in a man or woman is to be invalidated by the presence of contradictory evil, then Beelzebub must sit enthroned and be potent over the affairs of men!"

Mr. Amberley rose from his chair. His face had quite lost its watchful expression. It was genial and pleased as before.

"King David has a great deal to answer for," he said. "I don't know what the unorthodox and the 'live-your-own-life' school would do without him. But let us go into the drawing room."

With his rich, hearty laugh echoing under the Waggon roof, the big man thrust his arm through Lothian's.

"There are two girls dying to talk to the poet!" he said. "That I happen to know! My daughter Muriel reads your books in bed, I believe! and her friend Miss Wallace was saying all sorts of nice things about you at dinner. Come along, come along, my dear boy."

The two men left the dining room, and their voices could be heard in the hall beyond.

Toftrees lingered behind for a moment with young Dickson Ingworth.

The boy's face was flushed. His eyes sparkled with excitement and the three glasses of champagne he had drunk at dinner were having their influence with him.

He was quite young, ingenuous, and filled with conceit at being where he was—dining with the Amberleys, brought there under the ægis of Gilbert Lothian, chatting confidentially to the great Herbert Toftrees himself!

His immature heart was bursting with pride, Pol Roger, and satisfaction. He hadn't the least idea of what he was saying—that he was saying something frightfully dangerous and treacherous at least.

"I say, Mr. Toftrees, isn't Gilbert splendid? I could listen to him all night. He talks like that to me sometimes, when he's in the mood. It's like Walter Pater and Dr. Johnson rolled into one. And then he sort of punctuates it with something dry and brown and freakish—like Heine in the 'Florentine Nights'!"

With all his eagerness to hear more—the quiet malice in him welling up to understand and pin down this Gilbert Lothian—Toftrees was forced to pause for a moment. He knew that he could never have expressed himself as this enthusiastic and excited boy was able to do. Ingworth was a pupil then! Lothian could inspire, and was already founding a school …

"You know Mr. Lothian very well, I suppose?"

"Oh, yes. I go and stay with Gilbert in the country a lot. I'm nearly always there! I am like a brother to him—he was an only child, you know. But isn't he wonderful?"

"Marvellous!" Toftrees chuckled as he said the word. He couldn't help it.

Misunderstood as his chuckle was, it did the trick and brought confidence in full flood from the careless and excited boy.

"Yes, and I know him so well! Hardly any one knows him so well as I do. Every one in town is crying out to find out all about him, and I'm really the only one who knows …"

He looked towards the door. Thoughts of the two pretty girls beyond flushed the wayward, wine-heated mind.

"I'm going to have a liqueur brandy," Toftrees said hastily—he had taken nothing the whole evening—"won't you, too?"

"Now you'd never think," Ingworth said, sipping from his tiny glass, "that at seven o'clock this evening Prince and I—Prince is the valet at Gilbert's club—could hardly wake him up and get him to dress?"

"No!"

"It's a fact though, Mr. Toftrees. We had the devil of a time. He'd been out all day—it was bovril with lots of salt in it that put him right. As a matter of fact—of course, this is quite between you and me—I was in a bit of a funk that it was coming over him again at dinner. Stale drunk. You know! I saw he was paying a lot of compliments to Mrs. Amberley. At first she didn't seem to understand, and then she didn't quite seem to like it. But I was glad when I heard him ask the man for a whiskey and soda just now. I know his programme so well. I was sure that it would pull him together all right—or at least that number two would. I suppose you saw he was rather off when the ladies had gone and you were talking to him?"

"Well, I wasn't sure of course."

"I was, I know him so well. Gilbert's father was my father's solicitor—one of the old three bottle men. But when Gilbert collared number two just now I realised that it would be quite all right. You heard him with Mr. Amberley just now? Splendid!"

"Yes. And now suppose we go and see how he's getting on in the drawing room," said Herbert Toftrees with a curious note in his voice.

The boy mistook it for anxiety. "Oh, he'll be as right as rain, you'll find. It comes off and on in waves, you know," he said.

Toftrees looked at the youth with frank wonder. He spoke in the way of use and wont, as if he were saying nothing extraordinary—merely stating a fact.

The novelist was really shocked. Personally, he was the most temperate of men. He was homme du monde, of course. He touched upon life at other points than the decorous and above-board. He had known men, friends of his own, go down, down, down, through drink. But here, with these people, it was not the same. In Bohemia, in raffish literary clubs and the reprobate purlieus of Fleet Street, one expected this sort of thing and accepted it as part of the milieu.

Under the Waggon roof, at Amberley's house, where there were charming women, it was shocking; it was an outrage! And the frankness of this well-dressed and well-spoken youth was disgusting in its very simplicity and non-moral attitude. Toftrees had gathered something of the young man's past during dinner. Was this, then, what one learnt at Eton? The novelist was himself the son of a clergyman, a man of some family but bitter poor. He had been educated at a country grammar school. His wife was the youngest daughter of a Gloucestershire baronet, impoverished also.

Neither of them had enjoyed all that should have been theirs by virtue of their birth, and the fact had left a blank, a slight residuum of bitterness and envy which success and wealth could never quite smooth away.

"Well, it doesn't seem to trouble you much," he said.

Ingworth laughed. He was unconscious of his great indiscretion, frothy and young, entirely unaware that he was giving his friend and patron into possibly hostile hands and providing an opportunity for a dissection of which half London might hear.

"Gilbert's quite different from any one else," he said lightly. "He is a genius. Keats taking pepper before claret, don't you know! One must not measure him by ordinary standards."

"I suppose not," Toftrees answered drily, reflecting that among the disciples of a great man it was generally the Judas who wrote the biography—"Let's go to the drawing room."

As they went out, the mind of the novelist was working with excitement and heat. He himself was conscious of it and was surprised. His was an intellect rather like dry ice. Very little perturbed it as a rule, yet to-night he was stirred.

Wonder was predominant.

Physically, to begin with, it was extraordinary that more drink should sober a man who a moment before had been making exaggerated and half-maudlin confidences to a stranger—in common with most decent living people, Toftrees knew nothing of the pathology of poisoned men. And, then, that sobriety had been so profound! Clearly reasoned thought, an arresting but perfectly sane point of view, had been enunciated with lucidity and force of phrase.

Disgust, the keener since it was more than tinged by envy, mingled with the wonder.

So the high harmonies of "Surgit Amari" came out of the bottle after all! Toftrees himself had been deeply moved by the poems, and yet, he now imagined, the author was probably drunk when he wrote them! If only the world knew!—it ought to know. Blackguards who, for some reason or other, had been given angel voices should be put in the pillory for every one to see. Hypocrite! …

Ingworth opened the door of the drawing room very quietly. Music had begun, and as he and Toftrees entered, Muriel Amberley was already half way through one of the preludes of Chopin.

Mrs. Amberley and Mrs. Toftrees were sitting close together and carrying on a vigorous, whispered conversation, despite the music. Mr. Amberley was by himself in a big arm-chair near the piano, and Lothian sat upon a settee of blue linen with Rita Wallace.

As he sank into a chair Toftrees glanced at Lothian.

The poet's face was unpleasant. When he had been talking to Amberley it had lighted up and had more than a hint of fineness. Now it was heavy again, veiled and coarsened. Lothian's head was nodding in time to the music. One well-shaped but rather red hand moved restlessly upon his knee. The man was struggling—Toftrees was certain of it—to appear as if the music was giving him intense pleasure. He was thinking about himself and how he looked to the other people in the room.

Drip, drip, drip!—it was the sad, graceful prelude in which the fall of rain is supposed to be suggested, the hot steady rain of the Mediterranean which had fallen at Majorca ever so many years ago and was falling now in sound, though he that caught its beauty was long since dust. Drip, drip!—and then the soft repetition which announced that the delicate and lovely vision had reached its close, that the august grey harmonies were over.

For a moment, there was silence in the drawing room.

Muriel's white fingers rested on the keys of the piano, the candles threw their light upwards upon the enigmatic maiden face. Her father sighed quietly—happily also as he looked at her—and the low buzz of Mrs. Amberley's and Mrs. Toftrees' talk became much more distinct.

Suddenly Gilbert Lothian jumped up from the settee. He hurried to the piano, his face flushed, his eyes liquid and bright.

It was consciously and theatrically done, an exaggeration of his bow in the dining room—not the right thing in the very least!

"Oh, thank you! Thank you!" he said in a high, fervent voice. "How wonderful that is! And you played it as Crouchmann plays it—the only interpretation! I know him quite well. We had supper together the other night after his concert, and he told me—no, that won't interest you. I'll tell you another time, remind me! Now, do play something else!"

He fumbled with the music upon the piano with tremulous and unsteady hands.

"Ah! here we are!" he cried, and there was an insistent note of familiarity in his voice. "The book of Valses! You know the twelfth of course? Tempo giusto! It goes like this …"

He began to hum, quite musically, and to wave his hands.

Muriel Amberley glanced quickly at her father and there was distress in her eyes.

Amberley was standing by the piano in a moment. He seemed very much master of himself, serene and dominant, by the side of Gilbert Lothian. His face was coldly civil and there was disgust in his eyes.

"I don't think my daughter will play any more, Mr. Lothian," he said.

An ugly look flashed out upon the poet's face, suspicion and realisation showed there for a second and passed.

He became nervous, embarrassed, almost pitiably apologetic. The savoir-faire which would have helped some men to take the rebuke entirely deserted him. There was something assiduous, almost vulgar, a frightened acceptance of the lash indeed, which immensely accentuated the sudden défaillance and break-down.

In the big drawing room no one spoke at all.

Then there was a sudden movement and stir. Gilbert Lothian was saying good-night.

He had remembered that he really had some work to do before going to bed, some letters to write, as a matter of fact. He was shaking hands with every one.

"I do hope that I shall have the pleasure of hearing you play some more Chopin before long, Miss Amberley! Thank you so much Mrs. Amberley—I'm going to write a poem about your beautiful Dining Room. I suppose we shall meet at the Authors' Club dinner on Saturday, Mr. Toftrees?—so interested to have met you at last."

… The people in the drawing room heard him chattering vivaciously to Mr. Amberley, who had accompanied his departing guest into the hall.

No one said a single word. They heard the front door close, and the steps of the master of the house as he returned to them. They were all waiting.

When Amberley came in he made a courtly attempt at ignoring what had just occurred. The calm surface of the evening had been rudely disturbed—yes! For once even an Amberley party had gone wrong—there was to be no fun from this meeting of young folk to-night.

But it was Mrs. Amberley who spoke. She really could not help it. Mrs. Toftrees had been telling her of various rumours concerning Gilbert Lothian some time before the episode at the piano, and with all her tolerance Mrs. Amberley was thoroughly angry.

That such a thing should have happened in her house, before Muriel and her girl friend—oh! it was unthinkable!

"So Mr. Gilbert Lothian has gone," she said with considerable emphasis.

"Yes, dear," Mr. Amberley answered as he sat down again, willing enough that nothing more should be said.

But it was not to be so.

"We can never have him here again," said the angry lady.

Amberley shook his head. "Very unfortunate, extremely unfortunate," he murmured.

"I cannot understand it. Such a thing has never happened here before. Now I understand why Mr. Lothian hides himself in the country and never goes about. Il y avait raison!"

"I don't say that genius is any excuse for this sort of thing," Amberley replied uneasily, "and Lothian has genius—but one must take more than one thing into consideration …"

He paused, not quite knowing how to continue the sentence, and genuinely sorry and upset. His glance fell upon Herbert Toftrees, and he had a sort of feeling that the novelist might help him out.

"Don't you think so, Toftrees?" he asked.

The novelist surveyed the room with his steady grey eyes, marshalling his hearers as it were.

"But let us put his talent aside," he said. "Think of him as an ordinary person in our own rank of life—Mrs. Amberley's guest. Certainly he could not have taken anything here to have made him in the strange state he is in. Surely he must have known that he was not fit to come to a decent house."

"I shall give his poems away," Muriel Amberley said with a little shudder. "I can never read them again. And I did love them so! I wish you hadn't asked Mr. Lothian to come here, Father."

"There is one consolation," said Mrs. Toftrees in a hard voice; "the man must be realising what he has done. He was not too far gone for that!"

A new voice broke into the talk. It came from young Dickson Ingworth who had slid into the seat by Rita Wallace when Lothian went to the piano.

He blushed and stammered as he spoke, but there was a fine loyalty in his voice.

"It seems rather dreadful, Mrs. Amberley," he said, quite thinking that he was committing literary suicide as he did so. "It is dreadful of course. But Gilbert is such a fine chap when he's—when he's, all right! You can't think! And then, 'Surgit Amari'! Don't let's forget he wrote 'The Loom'—'Delicate Threads! O fairest in life's tissue,'" he quoted from the celebrated verse.

Then Rita Wallace spoke. "He is great," she said. "He is manifesting himself in his own way. That is all. To me, at any rate, the meeting with Mr. Lothian has been wonderful."

Mrs. Toftrees stared with undisguised dislike of such assertions on the part of a young girl.

But Mrs. Amberley, always kind and generous-hearted, had been pleased and touched by Dickson Ingworth's defence of his friend and master. She quite realised what the lad stood to lose by doing it, and what courage on his part it showed. And when Rita Wallace chimed in, Mrs. Amberley dismissed the whole occurrence from her mind as she beamed benevolently at the two young people on the sofa.

"Let's forget all about it," she said. "Mrs. Toftrees, help me to make my husband sing. He can only sing one song but he sings it excellently—'In cellar cool'—just the thing for a hot night. Joseph! do as I tell you!"

The little group of people rearranged themselves, as Muriel sat down at the piano to accompany her father.

"Le metier de poëte laisse a désirer," Toftrees murmured to his wife with a sneer which almost disguised the atrocious accent of his French.