Читать книгу Exile - Warwick Deeping - Страница 15

Table of Contents

Oscar Slade had used Tindaro for the setting of one of his novels, but as a novelist Slade failed to satisfy, because of his lack of compassion for his characters. He was exquisite and sensual, more highbrow than human, unusually witty, sometimes spiteful. In his books, as in his daily affairs, he might use Eau de Cologne instead of soap and water, but after all, that was only being rather French instead of being English. Behaviour was the bed upon which his psychology reposed. He had amended the text “Man does not live by bread alone,” adding to it—“Throw in the wine, the women and the cash, and the whole thing’s settled.”

Slade had described Tindaro as “histrionic.” It posed. It had been so written up and raved over that like some Italian wench who had had her head turned by posing to artists, that it put on a gaily coloured scarf and some cheap jewellery and sat to be admired. It lived on the tourist and the winterer abroad. All that teeming, swarthy, southern underworld looked to the forestieri for the life-giving lira. Slade had written like a Parisian about Tindaro. He talked of its little, bawdy shops, and of its scenic effects that waited like painted women for the confiding tourist. Sometimes he would speak bitterly of Tindaro, as some men speak of their wives. He would call the town a flea-bitten hag wholly and shamelessly unwashed under a picturesque petticoat.

But Tindaro suited him. It allowed him his philosophy of “Do what you please.” It did not try to impose upon him a morality that was not of the South, and since he was a man of means it bowed and smiled. Oscar Slade was a person. He was an exile, but not like those other exiles who gathered daily round the tables of the Café Ceres on the Corso, unfortunates who were tied to Tindaro, and who could not go home.

Slade would say that the Circe legend still lingered in this southern town. He had discussed it with Burt the doctor, who knew Tindaro and its exiled English as only a doctor can know them. To Burt, Circe the enchantress and Climate the solvent of souls were synonymous. He could quote history, point to the Normans in Sicily, northerner becoming Orientalized, blazing from a sensual, perfumed pyre into nothing. He would call up the bastard Syrio-Greek decadence of Rome. Tindaro turned some people into beasts, unhappy creatures who had the voices of men and of women, and who were neither good English nor good Italian.

Burt saw them daily in the Corso, sitting at those marble-topped tables, and drinking their little drinks, and watching those other English, the English of the hotels who came and went and were respectable, and Burt was made to think of animals in a cage, gazing with a moody malice and homesick envy at those others.

Burt pitied them. He had doctored many of them, and while doctoring them had tried to talk to them of the fundamentals of health, but Circe was stronger than the healer. They wallowed. They were without hope. They lacked Julia Lord’s straight back, and her symbolical cult of the cold bath.

Regularly at eleven o’clock these people gathered at the Café Ceres on the Corso. They came from all the quarters of Tindaro. Frevick the artist, cramming his hat over his eyes and lighting a cigarette with trembling and stained fingers, slammed the door of his small villa in the Via Vittoria, and walked down the weedy path to a rusty iron gate. Old Ponsonby, with a smeary smile and a collection of dirty stories ready under his Panama hat, emerged from his flat and the pocket of his Neapolitan housekeeper. Major Mirleess laced up his surgical boot, and limped out with an air of raddled and blue-eyed insolence, a poor, hard-bitten little blackguard who had suffered from too much vanity. Sir Dyce Duxbury, sleekly globular, trundled down on his short fat legs from his bungalow above the chapel of San Sofario. Sadie Shone, a kind of cosmopolitan American, with the head of a bold and disillusioned boy, appeared in a bright yellow or carmine jumper. The Blaber women arrived from the Hotel Florio. The Baroness von Billing, with eyes like prunes in a chalked face, came sleekly to the rendezvous like a cat after cream. There were others. Tindaro, Italian Tindaro, knew them all by heart, and smiled, and shrugged its shoulders.

Slade thought them amusing, preferring the disreputable to the decorous. They set no standard. He found them more interesting than the untarnished dwellers in the big villas and the hotels, the nicely conventional people who were so afraid of each other. The coterie of the Café Ceres had no illusions as to social prestige, and had ceased to keep up any appearance of being anything but what it was.

“Poor devils.”

But, he spoke pityingly. He had seen so much suffering; he had watched so many muddled lives. He had no hard words for these pitiful people, provided that they let youth alone, and did not try to proselytize among the fit.

“Life’s eliminating them.”

Slade’s point of view was that of the realist. He was not interested in mental hygiene. These people amused him. He felt at ease with them; there were no social repressions, no reservations. You could say just what you pleased. It was like playing at the jolly beggar sitting in the sun with a group of unconventional scallywags to laugh at your jokes.

He would tease Burt.

“You’d like to bottle the lot of them in alcohol, doctor, and put ’em safely on shelves nicely labelled. I prefer to see them alive.”

He was Peter Pan, with a difference. He liked his pirates and his Indians and his Captain Hook and the crocodile, but his Peter Pan world did not include a Wendy or a Tinker Bell. To Burt he appeared an irresponsible and peculiarly dangerous person, an overgrown and mischievous boy who would have played Guy Fawkes and blown up the House of Convention just for the fun of the thing.

On that peerless morning Slade was early. He found Frevick alone at one of the tables, and sitting as he always sat, like a sack crumpled upon itself. His tie bulged; his collar was not too clean; his waistcoat lacked a button, and he had not shaved. He was a big man, loose and long of limb, with a grey face under a slouched black hat. There were times when Frevick looked like some big, dumb animal in pain. He had not much to say, but he said it with a kind of swift yet stammering ferocity. His eyes were the only clean things left to him.

Slade sat down at Frevick’s table, and Frevick drew in his feet. If there was any sympathy between these two it was the sympathy of craftsmen and nothing more. Frevick could still paint some sort of a picture in spite of his trembling, nicotine-stained hands. He might have been a very considerable craftsman but for the Café Ceres and a thirsty heritage.

Slade was playful in a crowd, and one listener could make a crowd. Also, he rather liked baiting Frevick, who would look at him with those melancholy, brooding eyes, and sometimes smile very faintly.

“Anything new, my lad?”

Frevick yawned.

“Would there be?”

“Our Julia might have put on a new halo.”

Frevick yawned again, and one end of his cerise-coloured tie escaped from his waistcoat, and Slade, with a neat and playful thrust of his stick, made the loose end more obvious.

“You’ve had that tie seven months.”

“Probably. It comes to hand each morning.”

“Why not vary the scenery?”

Frevick yawned again, and replaced the end of his tie.

“Let it alone. One can’t sleep in this damned place. It’s like lying in a bath—shallow water. One can’t get in deep.”

“You get in at the wrong end—probably.”

“End! There’s no damned end to anything. Nothing but infernal sequence of things happening.”

“Like your tie, my dear. Just taking it off and putting it on. Why not scrap it?”

“Haven’t the courage. Hell—you ought to know that scrapping things means courage.”

“I use the waste-paper basket sometimes.”

“Might put a match to oneself. Burning paint stinks, Slade.”

“I’ve never smelt it.”

The others arrived as habit and the herd instinct moved them. Mirleess always limped straight down the middle of the Corso, looking the whole world in the face with an air of defiant insolence as though daring anybody to call him a broken soldier, a quarrelsome and vain little devil. Old Ponsonby had a stealthiness that was like his smile; you would find him suddenly beside you, and ready with some dirty story, and yet old Ponsonby had his virtues. He had an absurd passion for babies and very small children, and if he met an Italian baby being carried he had to stop and poke a finger at it and make ridiculous noises. Moreover, the babies appeared to approve of his large, round, white face and his noises. Sadie Shone usually was heard before she was seen, talking at the top of her voice, and shouting at the shopkeepers, with whom she was very popular. Her huge mouth was like a hole in a classic mask, and her voice had a torn edge to it. She shouted at everybody; she threw money about; she was disreputable and lavish.

“Say, Papa, where’s my little drink?”

She called Georgio, the proprietor of the Café Ceres, papa and his funny thin face would crinkle up into smiles. She had to hail everybody. Slade called her the “Megaphone.”

“Hallo, Archie!—Say, Oscar,—I want you to make me another Limerick. Mrs. Sudbury Smith was a woman of pith! O, my dear, what does one do when your coffee gets spilt over a new frock? Papa—say—papa.”

Usually she sat herself down next to Slade, because he made her laugh, and poked wicked fun at the solemn English of the hotels as they passed by, and had no reverence for anything. Like a noisy and bold child she liked to shock people. She had been known to sit at one of the tables wearing Frevick’s deplorable hat, and smoking the largest cigar that Papa Georgio could find for her. Yet there were days when her grey-green eyes were shut up, and her large mouth was mute and flaccid.

The others were less spectacular. Duxbury would sit as though silently warming his globular stomach. The von Billing, who could not be trusted at a bridge table, looked at life with oblique eyes, and was careful to count her change. The Blaber woman talked fiercely to anyone who would listen. But the remaining half-dozen were the figures in a chorus that was led by Slade or by Sadie, though Mirleess, if he happened to be in a worse temper than usual, would begin some recitative in an angry and throaty voice.

On this particular morning Billy passed by on her way home to the Villa Vesta just before the Café Ceres dispersed its characters for the midday meal. She was observed. She became conscious of being observed, and glancing casually at the little crowd seated at the round tables, met the appraising stare of Slade’s eyes. They were ironic and smiling, and she set her chin straight forward, and passed on.

Someone asked the obvious question.

“Who’s the girl?”

Miss Prince, a little sandy woman, who was a subscriber to Miss Lord’s library, was able to answer it.

“Julia’s new young woman.”

Slade drew in his long legs, and observed Billy’s departing figure. He spoke to Frevick.

“Strapping young person. Girl Guide type—I think.”

Frevick grunted.

“She knows how to move.”