Читать книгу Exile - Warwick Deeping - Страница 25

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Billy still turned enthusiastic eyes upon Tindaro, and her enthusiasm was as innocent as that of the average tourist, who, having been told by the people who write travel books that you should admire this and that, revels in the same old adjectival stuff. Billy sent picture postcards to her mother. “This is the duomo.”—“View of the ruins of the Roman theatre.” And her adjectives were there, though modernized. She used “priceless” in place of picturesque, and “marvellous” instead of romantic.

Tindaro was adventure. She saw it in the sunlight between sea and sky. There were the mountains, sometimes grey and sometimes blue. There were dramatic dawns and sunsets, moonlight and soaring cypresses, and the sea seen very blue through the blackness of Mediterranean pines. She liked the strange little streets and the wandering passages, and the stone stairways disappearing into the darkness. Shutters gave such secrecy to the houses. Tindaro was beauty, native and unconsidered. Often about sunset and after her work she would climb to the ruins of the Roman theatre, and gaze and gaze. She could see the ship of Ulysses, and Cyclops on some black headland, hurling rocks. And Calypsos island. And Atlas returning through the purple sea, bearing the golden apples of the Hesperides.

So much for the legendary and the marvellous.

The Café Ceres was reality. It presented its little round, marble-topped tables and its green chairs, and an orchestra that sent forth the tinklings of mandolins and the twangings of guitars. It possessed a gentleman with a goatlike face, who throated forth “Sole mio” and “Funiculi funicula.” It supplied strange little drinks, and toothpicks, and bad coffee. It had a window full of cakes; exotic, smeary, pink and yellow pastry swarmed over by numberless sleepy flies. When it rained, an awning was let down to shelter the tables and that odd collection of humans. That they were odd was obvious to Billy. They sat and stared, as though the Corso was a stage upon which Madam Convention trailed a respectable and absurd petticoat. They made obvious fun of all those other English. Whenever Billy passed those tables she was made to think of people sitting round a dancing-hall and quizzing the dancers.

But it was not happy fun. She snatched other glimpses. There was Frevick’s sombre and suffering face, and the blue eyes of Major Mirleess, insolent and miserable. Even the Shone woman’s huge mouth caught in the midst of laughter was a circle of despair and of horror. One old man seemed to sniff perpetually with an expression of quaint mistrust. You saw faces suddenly slack and naked, fallen in open upon themselves, hopeless with ennui. There were mouths that yawned. Dashkoff the Russian, who was paid to dance with English women at the Elyseo, would sit picking his teeth with an air of profound and melancholy abstraction.

The Café Ceres was not beautiful. It aroused in Billy a sense of something tragic, and a vague feeling of curiosity. She was stared at, commented on. Had she been less wholesome the Café Ceres might have made her shudder.

She was surprised to see Slade there. He appeared to be one of the regular loungers. His ironic, brown face, with its startling eyes, was always catching her glances. It was as though he waited and willed her to look at him; as though he expected it.

Yes, no doubt the Café Ceres mocked at life. It kept a journal in which its jibes were recorded. It encouraged Slade to produce Limericks upon the local worthies.

“There was an old lady named Pipp

Who was a little bit thin in the lip.

Said her husband—‘No thanks.

I’ve no use for the branks.

I suffer too much from the pip.’ ”

Upon the top of one of the marble tables Slade had scribbled doggerel upon the Lady of the Villa Vesta.

“There was an old vestal named Lord

Whose virtue was sharp as a sword.

When she sat in her bath

As lean as a lath,

Jehovah said, ‘Julia, I’m bored.’ ”

Sadie Shone would open her huge mouth and scream with laughter. “Say, that’s cute. Make me one about the new girl, Oscar.” And Slade, with a cigarette hanging negligently, had produced a Limerick upon Billy.

“There was a young lady named Brown

Who came to this flea-bitten town

With a smile and a racket,

And a skirt with no placket,

A skirt most impeccably brown.”

But to Billy it was evident that the little world of the Café Ceres was a world apart, for none of those people were to be met at the Tennis Club or at the villas of the blessed. They remained apart, like the damned or the unclean, drinking their little drinks and talking their little talks. They were rather like the cakes in the café window where the flies buzzed and crawled.

Billy wanted to ask questions, but there were some subjects upon which Miss Lord was not to be interrogated. Anything that suggested gossip made that firm mouth of hers grow yet more firm. There had been an occasion when she had suffered from the idle curiosities and adjectives of the crowd, and it had roused in her such a scorn and hatred of all looseness of tongue that she was silent upon the reputations of others.

Winnie Haycroft had no such reticence. Questioned by Billy as to the antecedents of the Café Ceres coterie she looked both frightened and severe.

“Oh—one doesn’t mix—at least—not more than one can help. Though when you meet in the Corso—every day, it’s rather awkward.”

“I should think it was.”

“They keep rather to themselves.”

“For reasons?”

“That’s why they live out here.”

“That little man, for instance, with the angry face and the lame foot?”

“O, Major Mirleess. O, he’s really terrible.”

“But what did he do?”

“I believe he went about after the war wearing uniform and decorations which he hadn’t won. I believe he pretended to be a V.C. And the police——Yes, a month in prison—I believe. And then they say there were other things, getting money.”

Billy looked very grave.

“But what made him do such an utterly silly thing?”

“He’s an awfully vain little man.”

“Good lord—just swelled head! Well, it might be. Wanting to swank when there was nothing left to swank about.”

She asked about some of the others, and Winnie fidgeted and looked uncomfortable.

“The very fat old man?”

“Sir Dyce Duxbury. He swindled people or something. Company promoting. He looks rather harmless.”

“Quite. Rather like a white bunny rabbit. And the woman with the big mouth?”

“Mrs. Shone. O, she’s a horrible woman. She—O—well—she’s just horrible.”

“I see. Just like that.”

It occurred to Billy to wonder why Oscar Slade allowed himself to be mixed in that mélange. Was it his protest against the Middle Classes, or a pose? Or did he find the damned more interesting and amusing than the world’s beatified? Or was it swank? He might be a celebrity among the uncelebrated, the prince among the beggars. But she wondered, and without realizing that her frank curiosity had any other inspiration. She did not use Winnie Haycroft’s adjectives; she might dub people rotten or futile, but she did not call them horrible. She had the tolerance of strength, the confidence of youth innocent of wounds.

But most certainly Oscar Slade was not futile. He had a queer face and queer eyes, and suggestions of audacity that are unexpectedly troubling to the most unexpected of women. He was sexed, and a woman may react to sex while the rational and educated part of her is pretending that a certain personality is unusual and interesting and arrestive. Slade’s thin, brown, ironic face with its flat cheeks and sensuous mouth and intelligent eyes, was singular and vivid. In its lighter moods it had a whimsicality, a rather pleasing and mischievous shimmer. It was so alive.

Billy had also noticed Frevick, sombre and sodden and shabby, Slade’s usual vis-à-vis. The two men were so vividly contrasted. Slade’s face was like an edge of light, Frevick’s a pit of shadow.

Again, the juxtaposition was intriguing.