Читать книгу Exile - Warwick Deeping - Страница 17

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Frevick, when completely sober was not a stimulating neighbour, becoming more and more like a melancholy sack into whose dark interior all jibes and playfulnesses disappeared and were swallowed up. He was the Woe of the World, Prometheus with alcohol torturing his liver, a man painfully and acutely conscious of what was and what was not. He would neither laugh nor weep, and Slade had seen Frevick weep, and had not been shocked as he should have been. Psychologically Slade found emotional disturbances interesting.

But Frevick was behaving like a Sabbatarian, and Slade took his coffee and his cigar out to the loggia where a long chair waited for him, and Frevick, looking lost and disconsolate, knew that he was boring Slade. For when Slade became polite to you, you could be sure that he had sucked you dry for the moment.

“Going round your garden.”

“Everywhere and anywhere you please, Thomas. If you find me asleep——”

Frevick went out into the sunlight and stood there with an air of not knowing which path to take. There was no particular path for him, and none that mattered. Slade saw the untidy length of him disappear down the terrace steps. He seemed to sink, and vanish into a pool of sunlight, his shabby hat remaining in view for a moment above the edge of a marble step.

Frevick drifted. He was aware of Slade’s garden as the pleasance of a man who insisted upon life being sensuous and amusing. The Villa of the Flute! The Pipes of Pan! And Frevick, finding that his legs had carried him into the classic theatre with its marble seats and white pillared proscenium sheltered by its cypress wall, and with the blue of the sky for a velarium, sat down where the sun had warmed a stone bench. He was on the edge of one of these moods of illumination when fragments of the past and present fall into place like the tesseræ of a mosaic.

This Italian sky! But he was haunted by other memories; yellow daffodils swaying in a wet west wind, the green plaintiveness of an April day, Paris, the Gardens of the Luxembourg, children playing, Hampstead Heath on a Sunday, a whelk stall, plumed hats, someone playing a concertina. O, those Hampstead days when he had been young, with a clean eye and a clean tongue! And now——?

Just sottishness, mental squalor. To sit hopelessly at a little marble-topped table with other hopeless people; to listen to old Ponsonby’s dirty stories and the Shone woman’s screams; to know that a man like Slade regarded you as a sort of grotesque study, a pathological specimen, a tragi-comic mask! And to know that the end was inevitable, and that Burt with his gentle fierceness had told you the truth.

Frevick put up a hand and felt his chin. He had not shaved. He had had a morning horror of that bright steel blade.

What a mess!

And Slade scoffed at Julia Lord and her cult of the cold bath, and at her Englishness, at her stiff back. But Julia Lord had guts. Vulgar simile, and the expression of Frevick’s eyes changed. He had other memories of Julia Lord, of a woman whose eyes had looked at him softly until he had made her realize his hopelessness. She had tried to rescue him. The absurd, splendid magnanimity of some women.

Yes, wounds. Life was nothing but wounds. You gashed yourself, and others bled. Life laid a whip across your shoulders and you shrugged them, and just went on drinking.

But Slade? Slade had never been hurt. He amused himself. He treated things like toys, and when he was tired he threw them away.

But surely that was the great sin, to go through life like a faun, dancing, and piping with a garland of vine leaves shading your mocking eyes? To give wounds—casually and with a sort of pagan grace, and to get no wounds. To observe, and grin and scribble, and not to feel.