Читать книгу The Temptress (La tierra de todos) - Vicente Blasco Ibáñez - Страница 7

Robledo chanced to be standing behind them. Leaning against the door-jamb, he was half hidden by the hangings. The Countess meanwhile was declaiming with increasing fervor, so that, in order to carry on their conversation, the two women had to raise their voices.

“Instead of stuffing us with poetry, I wish she’d give us a decent supper,” one of them was saying.

The other protested. The Countess set a table that was dangerous, but certainly plentiful. Only the brave, not to say reckless, accepted her dinner invitations, for on these occasions the Countess herself prepared the courses. “And, my dear, by the time you reach dessert, you’re lucky if you only have to ’phone for the doctor, instead of the undertaker!”

Frequently interrupted by their own laughter, they rehearsed the Countess’s history. She had once been rich; some attributed this past wealth to her parents’ fortune, others to the fortunes—and fortunes—of her lovers. Her marriage with the Count Titonius had provided her with a title and the most insignificant of husbands, a fellow who, ruined by a stupid speculation, tossed up a coin to see whether he should blow out his brains or marry the Countess. And now, in her establishment, he occupied a position quite inferior to that of the servants. When the Countess’s nerves were in a state of tension because of the infidelity of some one of her youthful protégés, it was her habit to throw all the Count’s shirts and underwear over the banisters, after which with the air of an injured queen she would order him to leave her presence for ever.

A few days later, however, when the poetess was giving another party, the outcast would reappear, meek, and sad, and shrinking, as though fearful of occupying too much space in his wife’s rooms.

“I can’t imagine,” the other was saying, “why she persists in giving these receptions, when the woman is ruined! For instance, on the table out there where we’ll have supper in a little while, you’ll see large pastry pieces, and hot-house fruit—rented, my dear, rented for the evening, just like the servants. Everyone knows it, and no one dares take any of these show pieces, the Countess would be so furious—so all we’ll get will be tea and cakes, and we’ll have to pretend that’s all we want!”

They stopped a moment to applaud the Countess, who was emboldened by her apparent success, to begin declaiming a new poem.

Robledo, as little interested in the malicious gossipings of these two women as in his hostess’s recitations, took advantage of a moment during which the Countess was bowing to her audience, to leave the drawing-room and make his way to the alcove which had been the scene of his romantic passage with the poetess.

The meek and obsequious gentleman he had stumbled against earlier in the evening was now stretched out on the divan, smoking, and looking much like a laborer enjoying a few minutes of rest. He had been watching the spirals of smoke from his cigarette unroll in the heavy air, but when Robledo sat down near him, he felt it incumbent upon him to smile at the stranger. In a few moments he inquired,

“Are you bored to death?”

Robledo looked sharply at him before he answered.

“And you?”

The little man nodded sadly, and Robledo made a gesture which plainly said, “Let’s clear out, shall we?”

But the little man’s eyes seemed to reply, “If I only could!”

“You are living here in the house?” inquired Robledo finally.

And the little man replied breathlessly, with a jerk of his head and arms.

“This is my house. I am the Countess’s husband....”

After this revelation, Robledo thought it discreet to retire. Putting the cigar he had been about to light back in his pocket, he returned to the drawing-room.

A great burst of applause met his ears. The poetess had stopped! And convinced that she would recite no more that evening, her admirers were expressing some of their delight, while the Countess grasped the hands of the friends about her and mopped her damp brow, murmuring,

“I shall die.... Such emotion.... I am in a fever.... Art is like that. You shouldn’t have made me recite....”

Looking about as though searching for someone, she caught sight of Robledo and made for him.

“Your arm, Hero of the Pampas! You shall lead me out to supper!”

The guests, for the most part, made no attempt to conceal their joy as the door of the dining-room opened. There was a general rush for the buffet, some of the guests elbowing and trampling the others.

Leaning on her escort’s arm, the Countess was gazing at him with passionate eyes.

“Did you pay special attention to my poem, ‘The Rosy Dawn of Love’? Do you know whom I was thinking of as I recited those verses?”

Robledo turned away. A laugh was about to escape....

“How could I guess, Countess? I’ve lived in the desert so long, I’m nothing but a savage!”

The guests were crowding around the table, casting hungrily admiring glances at the examples of the pastry cook’s art that occupied its centre, surrounded by pyramids of enormous fruit. The cakes and sandwiches looked pathetically insignificant beside them! The two servants who had been in charge of the cloak-room, and a butler, resplendent with a silver watch chain across his waistcoat, and side whiskers that made him look like an old diplomat, were defending the pastry edifice in the centre of the table, condescending to hand out only the trifles on its periphery; cups of tea or chocolate, small glasses of liqueurs, sandwiches and cakes.

The old fellow of the mufflers, whom the Countess hailed as “cher maître,” was trying vainly to make the servant understand that he wished him to deposit some of the pièce de resistance, or at least some of the fruit on the empty plate he was frantically extending. But the servant looked at him with a shocked expression, as though he were requesting something scarcely decent, and finally, after handing him a cake and a sandwich, turned his back upon him.

Robledo, standing near the table, found himself close to the hired “pieces” that the servants were so conscientiously defending. The Countess had dropped his arm for the moment to reply to congratulations on her remarkable reading. Relieved at being left to his own devices for a few minutes, he examined the table critically, and while the butler and his acolytes were attending to the needs of the crowd, he picked up a plate and knife and tranquilly carved a piece out of the most majestic of the pasties. He even had time to take one of the ruddy pears from the showy mounds of fruit, and cut it in two. But just as he was about to eat it, the mistress of the house, free for a moment from her admirers, turned an amorous glance in his direction, only to see a breach in the pastry edifice, and a handsome piece of fruit, ruthlessly sliced, on the barbarian’s plate....

A great change occurred in the sentiments of the poetess. At first she looked shocked, as though witnessing an act which transgressed all consecrated usages. Then came indignation, and finally rage.... It was she who would have to pay for this stupid destruction.... And she had believed for a moment that she had found—in this savage—a hero-soul worthy of her own!

Abruptly leaving her “Patagonian Bear,” she sought out the pianist who, circling round and round the table, was pleading with one servant after another for sandwiches and a little more wine....

“Give me your arm, friend Beethoven!” With a dramatic gesture she continued.

“One of these days I shall write a libretto for this young man, and then there’ll be a little less talk about Wagner!”

She took him along with her to the drawing room, now deserted, and made him sit down at the piano, while in clarion tones she declaimed to an accompaniment of arpeggios. But nothing could tempt her guests from the dining-room. They remained clustered round the table, maintaining however, the group distinctions which all Mme. Titonius’ efforts at Bohemian camaraderie were powerless to break down.

Robledo caught a glimpse through the crowd of the Marquis de Torre Bianca and his wife, who had just come in, having spent the earlier part of the evening at another party. He noticed that Elena was talking mechanically, murmuring phrases that had no meaning, as though she were thinking of something else. Convinced that his chatter annoyed her, he went off in search of Federico, from whom he obtained little attention for the reason that the Marquis was very busy describing to someone he had just met the important undertakings that his friend Fontenoy was engaged in, in various parts of the globe.

Bored, and not yet quite clear as to the reason for his hostess’s sudden desertion, he sank into a large armchair, and almost at the same instant heard someone talking behind him. Not the two women gossips this time, but a man and a woman, who, seated on a divan, were repeating the same things he had overhead before, as though no two guests in that house could do anything else but gossip about the Countess. He paid little attention to what they were saying until suddenly he heard the name Torre Bianca. The woman was saying,

“Did you ever see such jewels? Of course everyone knows that neither she nor her husband had to work hard to get them. Everyone knows that Fontenoy pays for all those little luxuries.”

The man had a different version.

“I was told that those jewels were paste, as pasty as those of our poetical Countess. The Torre Biancas kept the money the banker gave them to pay for the real gems, or else they sold the real ones and had these substitutes made.”

The woman sighed at the banker’s name,

“That man is nearly bankrupt—everybody says so! And some go so far as to talk about court proceedings and a prison sentence. What a bloodthirsty creature that Russian woman must be!”

The man laughed sceptically.

“Russian? There are people who knew her when she was a girl in Vienna, singing in music-halls. Also some one in diplomatic circles told me that she is Spanish, of an English father. No one knows her nationality, she doesn’t know it herself....”

Robledo got up from his chair. He couldn’t very well listen to any more such talk without speaking. But just as he was leaving the room he heard a double exclamation of surprise coming from behind him.

“Here is Fontenoy! How strange to see him here! He never comes, for fear the Countess will ask him for a loan.... Something unusual must be going on!”

Robledo recognized Fontenoy in one of the groups. He was just at that moment bowing to the Torre Biancas. Robledo noticed that he was smiling, and seemed as serene as usual. More than that, he had lost his usual abstracted air that always made him look as though he were thinking of a note due the next day. He seemed calmer and more confident than Robledo had ever seen him look; in fact the only remarkable thing about his manner was the exceptional affability with which he greeted the people about him.

From afar the American watched him and noticed a brief glance that passed between him and Elena. Whereupon the banker, with a slightly bored expression, left the group he had been with and slowly made his way to the small room that had witnessed the scene between Robledo and the Countess.

As he went towards it he absently pressed the hands held out in greeting and in the hope of capturing him for a moment’s conversation. “Happy to see you here,” he murmured, and passed on.

Forcing to his lips his habitual smile of kindly protection, he nodded to Robledo, but scarcely had he done so when the smile vanished.

For in that moment the two men had faced one another, and Fontenoy saw something in the Spaniard’s expression which made him drop his smiling mask. His own soul seemed to be looking out at him from those eyes....

That glance, rapid as it was, he would never forget, thought the Spaniard. He and this man scarcely knew one another, and yet there had been in Fontenoy’s eyes an expression of complete trust, as though he were showing him, in that brief moment, all that he had ever thought and felt.

Then he saw Elena skillfully making her way, without appearing to do so, towards the same room. A curiosity of which he was ashamed pricked him. He had no right to take part in the affairs of these two people. At the same time it was impossible for him to be indifferent to the unwonted event which, he knew intuitively, was even then about to occur....

The banker must have found it urgently necessary to speak to Elena—only this supposition could explain his seeking her at the Countess’s.... What were those two saying to one another?...

Pretending to be absorbed in reflection, he passed by the door.... Elena and Fontenoy stood talking; their lips scarcely moved as they faced one another, standing very straight, as though they had resolved that no one must guess, from the curves of their lips, what they were saying....

Fontenoy’s rapid glance at him made him regret his curiosity; for this glance moved him as the other had done. It told him so plainly that the man who was looking at him in this fashion was passing through one of the most critical moments of his life. He could almost believe that there was a reproach in his eyes.... “Why does what happens to me interest you if you cannot help me?...”

So he did not walk past the door again. But yielding to an unexplainable impulse that was stronger than his will, he remained close to it, listening.... No, his conduct was not gentlemanly. He was behaving like any one of those scandal-mongers he had been overhearing. Apparently his surroundings were demoralizing him....

It wasn’t easy to catch what those two people on the other side of the door were saying.... In one of the rooms the guests were dancing, in another someone was pounding a piano.... But a few confused words reached him. Fontenoy and Elena were speaking louder now, perhaps because the noise of the piano bothered them, perhaps because of increasing tenseness....

“Why waste words in dramatic phrases?”—It was Fontenoy’s voice. “You couldn’t go away! That is for me to do—that is the only thing I can do!”

The noise made by the dancers and the pianist filled the eavesdropper’s ears. But as the musician grew more merciful he caught the words another voice was saying—Elena’s voice—sounding as though it came from a long weary distance....

“Perhaps you are right. Oh, money! money! For people like us, who know what it means in our lives, what a horror to be without it!”

Shame of his spying overtook Robledo, driving out the curiosity which had for a moment controlled him. If these two people had sought one another out, it was for him to respect their secret. Anyway the mystery would be short-lived. Perhaps it would not last through the evening....

Going back to the dining room, he found Federico there, still engaged in conversation with his new acquaintance, an old gentleman who displayed the rosette of the Legion of Honor in his buttonhole, and looked like a retired government functionary.

Federico had at last terminated his extensive description of Fontenoy’s enterprises, and the old gentleman was saying,

“I haven’t the slightest doubt whatever of your friend’s integrity, but I should think twice before putting any money into his schemes. It strikes me that he takes unnecessary risks, that he invests his funds too far from home. Maybe everything will be all right, at least as long as he holds the confidence of the share-holders. But I am not so sure that even at the present moment he isn’t losing it. And on the day when the share-holders decide that they want figures and facts instead of fine hopes, on the day when Fontenoy has to show just where he stands in his business, well, on that day, I am not so sure.... I am not so sure....”