Читать книгу Exile - Warwick Deeping - Страница 10

Table of Contents

Miss Lord appeared at the breakfast table wearing a black hat and a dark blue tailor-made suit, and ready for the business of the day. Firm of flesh and white of hair, her hands busy with coffee-pot and milk-jug, she was Britannia in exile.

She asked Billy how she had slept.

“O, splendidly.”

The girl looked it. Most certainly she was a very healthy young woman who came down to breakfast with an adventurous face. Miss Lord passed Billy her coffee, and was conscious of a feeling of relief, for Julia Lord was a rather tired woman, in spite of her very straight back. She had lived in Tindaro for twenty years, and Tindaro was not Tunbridge Wells, and Miss Lord’s attitude to life had remained aggressively English.

“Two lumps of sugar?”

“Please.”

Billy chose a roll, and helped herself to two little twists of butter, and saw that there was English marmalade on the table. Maria’s coffee smelt good, and tasted as good as its perfume. And the first day was beginning.

She said, “I got up and saw the sun rise. Rather different from Ealing.”

Miss Lord observed her after the manner of a “head” estimating the character and capacity of a new mistress. In Tindaro the tendency was to lie late in bed, but Miss Lord had never allowed herself to succumb to the sensuous, save in the loving of her garden. If you succumbed in Tindaro you succumbed too thoroughly. Physical and mental hygiene were apt to go together, and if Tindaro did call the lady of the Villa Vesta “Miss Cold Bath,” it had every reason to respect her.

“There are other differences.”

Billy supposed that there were. You could not rush into rhapsodies over Ealing, but Tindaro took your breath and held it.

“I’ve never seen anything so beautiful.”

Miss Lord sat poised.

“Yes, perhaps—never so much so as at the first glance.”

She allowed Tindaro its beauty as she would have allowed a certain sort of woman her reputation for good looks, but she was impartial, and Billy took another roll, and helped herself to marmalade, and was sure that there could be nothing amiss with Tindaro when the sun rose like dripping gold out of a purple sea.

“And your garden.”

Miss Lord’s eyes seemed to soften.

“O, yes, a hobby of mine.”

“You made it?”

“I have been making it for ten years.”

Almost there was a note of tenderness in her voice. It trembled for a moment like a candle flame, but almost instantly regained its steady brightness.

“Necessary to have interests here. Yes, seriously so. I suppose you play tennis?”

Yes, Billy played tennis. She played the game very well.

“Exercise. And I rather believe in a cold bath each morning. These southern places, not quite like England.”

And then, with a matter-of-fact air, she began to speak of their mutual relations, and of the work they were to share.

“I thought it better that you should stay with me for a week. You will soon get the hang of things. I’ll show you the bedroom and sitting-room over the library. The women there will cook for you. I should like you to watch the work for a week. The library opens at ten and closes at twelve, and on three afternoons a week we open from three till four. That doesn’t satisfy all the old ladies, but it is fatal to give way to grumblers. The tearoom is open at 3·45. We get busier each year. We make our own cakes, and our own jam and marmalade. Also—we sell flowers. I keep a waitress, and two helps in the kitchen—Italians. They need a good deal of supervision. Pilfer anything unless you keep a check on the stores and linen and china.”

Billy’s brown eyes were attentive and sympathetic.

“What a bore. I can’t stand people who pinch. I’ll watch things carefully.”

“Can you speak any Italian yet?”

“Not much—but I’ll begin lessons. I suppose there is someone——?”

“I’ll put you on to Winnie Haycroft at the lace shop. By the way—you mustn’t mind being told things—to begin with.”

“I shan’t mind.”

“It won’t be in public.”

Their eyes met in a smile.

“And try and remember faces and names, especially the faces and names of the constitutionally discontented.”

Billy laughed. The phrase pleased her, and displayed Miss Lord as a woman of understanding.

“Yes—I suppose that is rather important.”

“And suppose we take it understood that when the official working hours are over you do as you please.”

Billy finished her coffee.

“Thank you. That’s the sort of fairness that one does appreciate.”

Punctually at five minutes to nine Miss Lord left the Villa Vesta for the house in the Corso. She and Dr. Burt, the English doctor, were perhaps the only punctual persons in Tindaro, and though the English colony might call this exactness affectation, it was but a part of a personal protest against an insidious, southern slackness. Billy Brown accompanied Miss Lord, and as they descended the lane with its grey walls and terraces planted with vines and olives the notes of a pipe shrilled out like the piping of a bird hidden in a thicket.

Billy’s chin went up. She paused. On that morning everything was delightfully and mysteriously new.

“What’s that? Not a bird?”

Had she been looking at Miss Lord’s face, she would have seen the firm surface of it momentarily disturbed.

“Someone piping.”

“Just like Pan.”

Miss Lord seemed disinclined to loiter, and Billy, after looking for the piper and failing to find him, followed her friend. The piper was squatting against a wall some twenty feet above the lane, a bald-headed old scoundrel the colour of a medlar. A little, yellow dog lay at his feet. He twiddled his two fingers on the pipe, and watched the two Englishwomen, and when they had disappeared he ceased to pipe, and sat grinning. His flat nose grew flatter, and his teeth showed as three yellow fangs.

A herd of goats was being driven up the Corso, brown goats, grey goats, black goats, with a mongrel dog and a goatherd in velveteen trousers and a Joseph’s coat at the tail of the procession. The little, pattering hoofs, and the bearded heads with their cold and stony eyes went by in the shadow of the high houses. Billy noticed that Miss Lord kept close to the wall, and she wondered whether Miss Lord disliked goats. But Billy was more interested in all the newness of Tindaro than in Miss Lord’s personal idiosyncrasies. This street was a new world with its beasts and its people, asses laden with firewood and vegetables, fishermen carrying baskets on their heads, women busy at shop doorways, little swarthy boys running barelegged over the grey stones. The high, white houses confronted each other with shutters of green, of brown, and of blue. There was a cheerful hubbub. A fat little man in blue trousers was polishing the tops of the tables outside the Café Ceres. The shops were as various as the perfumes, all the tired, warm odours of a southern town.

Overhead wavered the blue ribbon of the sky. It broadened where the Corso joined the Piazza del Duomo, and a hundred yards from the piazza Miss Lord’s English Library and Miss Haycroft’s lace-shop faced each other. Miss Lord’s house was all grey, both within and without, and being referred to by the frivolous as “Our Lord’s House,” maintained some of the solemnity of a temple. It felt chilly, and smelt of soap. Hands, with the index finger extended, were painted on the walls of the vestibule—“Library,” “Tea Room.” Dogs were not admitted.

The library was perhaps a little less dismal than the average English library in foreign parts. Certainly it suggested the vestry of a church, and that surplices would be found hanging in one of the cupboards. The cases of books had the usual, dull, flat, anonymous look, for even books in a crowd become less interesting. Magazines, periodicals, catalogues, and Miss Lord’s ledgers were laid out on a long and narrow table. Spaced around the room were six rush-bottomed chairs.

A bowl full of violets gave to that most utilitarian table a touch of colour and of life, and Miss Lord, after looking round the room, bent down and smelt the flowers. Obviously, Miss Julia loved flowers, and not as Billy loved them, for Miss Lord’s loves were impersonal; they could no longer be wounded.

She pulled back one of the chairs, and its legs squeaked on the red tiles.

“I’ll just run through the routine.”

But instead of entering upon immediate and practical affairs she opened one of the ledgers, and allowed her eyes to rest upon the bowl of violets, while Billy stood waiting beside her chair. Miss Lord appeared to lose herself in looking at the flowers. Her thumb plucked absently at a page.

She was thinking of those other young women who had stood beside her chair to be initiated into the business of issuing books. They had begun the life much as Billy had begun it, and had developed a passable efficiency until Tindaro had initiated them into other mysteries. Should youth be warned? Could youth ever be warned? Miss Lord turned a page, and became practical.

Her system was simple and efficient. Billy had assimilated the details at the end of two minutes. Human nature—as usual—was the problem. The greedy and the selfish and the inconsiderate had to be dealt with in a library as everywhere else.

“There are some people who want all the new books at once, and keep them when they have got them. No new book is allowed out for more than three days.”

“I see.”

Miss Lord looked amused.

“But do you? If we let a new book out for a week it would be touring all over Tindaro, passed on to people who aren’t subscribers. The very wealthy are the worst sinners. They’ll spend ten pounds on a dinner, and try to get a seven-and-sixpenny novel for nothing.”

Billy laughed.

“So—I’m to be firm?”

“Always. I don’t stand any nonsense.”

From the library they went to the tearoom with its pretty loggia, and its panels of blue treillage holding the blue of the sky and the green of the cypresses and the brown tints of old roofs like living frescoes. The tearoom was a cheerful place. Its tables were painted blue. The white basket chairs had covers of English cretonne. The tiled floor was blue and white. Billy felt much more at home in the tearoom.

“It’s really lovely. And that view!”

“You’ll like working here.”

“Rather.”

Miss Lord paused in the loggia, with her lips compressed. She was never dull or bored when she was working, but these young things were so temperamental. They did not stay put. They wanted to flutter out through the windows and explore and experiment with life.

Miss Lord’s firm lips parted. She appeared to be about to say something personal and intimate, but she changed her mind.

“By the way, we charge extra for home-made jam and marmalade. Now, I’ll show you the kitchen and the waitress’s pantry. As I warned you—you will have to watch the sugar and the spoons.”