Читать книгу Two Black Sheep - Warwick Deeping - Страница 21

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Vane left England in November.

It was a raw, grey day, and as he looked back on those diminishing cliffs he remembered that on the last occasion when he had seen them they had been very white in the sunlight, but that was long ago. They had been the cliffs of an illusion, and now on this November afternoon they suggested a vast expanse of dirty linen badly washed and hung up to dry. Dover the dreary. And since he was an indifferent sailor and the sea was rough, he went and lay down in the gentlemen’s saloon on a hard and shiny red couch with a hard and shiny red squab under his head. He was very much alone, and liking it. During those fifteen years of seclusion he had evolved an interior life of his own, and within him a grey-headed quietist walked to and fro with eyes downcast.

Someone was being sick.

He lay and listened unsympathetically to the other fellow’s qualms. It was a base and beastly performance but somehow human, and suddenly the sound linked itself to a memory. He remembered young Tallis being sick with funk at Loos and lying on his belly half in and half out of a shell-hole. Loos, that vast, experimental and bloody muddle. Yes, it was after Loos, and after the kind of bitter rage that it had bred in him, that he had come home on leave and found his wife pregnant with Belgrave’s baby. And he had shot Belgrave, and he had enjoyed the shooting of Belgrave. Another bloody muddle.

He closed his eyes.

He wanted to get away from things, away from humanity, and especially from humanity that made moist and ugly noises. He was quite alone, and his desire was to be alone in some place where the sun shone, and where nothing that was English mattered. A Wandering Jew. The phrase had stuck in his consciousness, and he played with it, and perhaps posed to it. He would go where he pleased and do what he pleased, and with a kind of dispassionate curiosity observe life and reflect upon it. He felt drawn towards old dead things, for dead things were silent. They waited for you to come and sit by them in silence, and when they spoke it was to the imagination. There was no vortex in history into which you could be sucked.

For he knew that he was afraid of life, and he feared it for so many reasons, and partly because he was obsessed by the thought that life—raw life—could give him nothing. He shrank from the red meat of it. He had a strange feeling of being half naked in the thick of a crowd, just as in one of those fantastic dreams when a man’s dream-self is discovered at a dinner-party in pyjamas. He did not belong. He had not the animal urge in him that could make him plunge a second time into the illusion of living. He was forty-six years old, grey at the temples, and beginning to stoop. He was shy of people, shy of traffic, shy of so many things, and the new world was not shy.

At Calais he heard French spoken for the first time after some fifteen years, and as for the landing arrangements, they dated from Noah. There was the same sheep-like herding, with French porters pushing through the crowd, the same congestion at the gangway, while the ship—like a sausage machine—extruded all this jostling humanity. Suit-cases and hand-bags—as of old—bumped the backs of legs. There was the same historic fool who had failed to grasp the uses of a landing-ticket, and who had put it away in an overcoat pocket, and who fumbled and blocked the gangway.

Vane tried his French on the porter. As a youngster he had been fairly fluent.

“Yes, the Golden Arrow. Things do not seem to have changed very much. That silly business of getting people off the boat.”

The porter had a jocund eye.

“And people are still sea-sick, monsieur.”

“It is a long time since I have travelled this way. Why don’t they use broader gangways?”

“Perhaps, monsieur, because people are still so much like sheep, and sheep have to be controlled.”

Yes, it was the same old Calais, draughty and grey and cold, and though he had not been sick, Vane had experienced chilly qualms. The porter found him his seat, and with a weather-worn smile over the tip, bustled off in the hope of picking up a second perquisite. Vane sat down and absorbed the warmth and the newness of the big Pullman car. Yes, this train was different, with its fauteuils and polished wood and its spaciousness. A plate of hot soup would have been acceptable, but when he stopped a white-coated attendant and made inquiries, he found that it was déjeuner or nothing. He asked for a whisky and soda, and was told that it should be procured when the business of settling the travellers in their seats had been attended to.

The car was very hot, and he got out and walked up and down the platform, and when he returned to the coach he found himself in the presence of his vis-à-vis. It was young and French and feminine, and of so exquisite and vivid a texture that almost he felt shy of placing himself opposite it, and slipped into his seat with self-effacing stealth. Obviously, the rough sea passage had not impaired the creature’s bloom. It had covered the table with various properties, and when Vane sat down it smiled at him and politely withdrew some of its possessions.

“Pardon, monsieur.”

He felt vaguely disturbed. Was he going to travel all the way to Paris in such propinquity? But he need not have worried, for the creature’s poise was as exquisite as her loveliness, and the very perfection of her person was like a screen of glass. She never appeared to look at him again after that one polite smile. She read a book, she took tea, she attended to her complexion, though such culture was like powdering the lily.

But the very perfection of her somehow fascinated Vane. Only the French product could have so mingled artifice and nature, and yet she did not impress herself upon him as woman. She was a flower shop, confectionery, perfume, a bunch of lilies, silk, and both cool and luscious. Her eyes were like brown grapes, though he could not say that he had ever seen a grape that was brown. Her mouth and skin were the perfection of sensuousness.

She had a peculiar effect on him. She was both real and not quite real. He could not rationalize the idea of clasping and kissing such a creature. Incredible, impossible! Would anyone dare? And yet he supposed that some passionately audacious youth would both dare and be welcomed. Exquisite embraces—! And suddenly he realized how matters stood. His reaction to her was that of a shy and sensitive boy or that of an old man from whom the urgencies of sex have passed. She symbolized life, youth, the sun at the zenith, and he was afraid of life; he could only sit and watch.

Something had withered in him. He had dried up, and he was conscious of a feeling of self-depreciation, a subtle self-mistrust. He could look but not touch. The very exquisite aroma of life drifted to him and evoked a peculiar fastidiousness, a sensitive shrinking. He seemed to be sitting in front of a fire whose glow did not penetrate and warm his vitals.

Yes, that was it. Differences, gaps, the faint feeling of inferiority that youth can instil into middle age, and to elude the challenge middle age tries to look fatherly. An interlude of fifteen years. Did appetite atrophy? Or was it that the secret self stood in grey fear of some tragic and futile recrudescence, cold—self-consciously cold and mum? Absurd and grizzled wings trying to flutter like youth’s to the candle?

He sat and looked out of the window and watched the dusk furl up the French landscape and put it away. The human window opposite him, with its fruit and its flowers, seemed to grow dim, and when the lights of Paris showed he was aware of a curious feeling of consent. He did not look at the girl again. All that was finished.

Vane had had a room reserved for him at the Imperial, and he had chosen this particular hotel because Blagden had told him that it was large and anonymous and cosmopolitan. Moreover, it was not his intention to stay in Paris more than three days. He dined in the restaurant and allowed himself half a bottle of Nuit St. George, and he began the meal with oysters. Afterwards he went and sat on the sofa in the kind of glazed peristyle that surrounds the courtyard of the Imperial. He wanted to smoke a pipe, for he was getting back to a pipe, something at which you could bite and pull. A cigar was too soft and sensual. But would he dare to light a pipe in the Imperial? He did dare. His sofa stood with its back to the glass in a narrow and less frequented part of the broad corridor. Writing-tables and chairs were ranged opposite him along the wall.

He smoked and meditated. No one interfered with him, and almost he forgot that he was in Paris. He was a man on a sofa feeling rather sleepy, and pulling hard at his pipe. A smart person in a little black hat came and seated herself at the writing-table exactly opposite him. She was restless, alert, a little surreptitious. She lit a cigarette, and between her scribblings kept glancing at Vane.

He remained unaware of her and of her sexual significance, and the silent invitation went astray. She saw him yawn, and her very red lips moulded themselves to a word that should have been Bête. She tore up a sheet of paper, threw the fragments almost contemptuously into the waste-paper drum, rose, and whisked herself off.

Vane yawned again. He was feeling sleepy and tired. He decided to go to bed, for the one really friendly conception in the world was a comfortable bed. It accepted you, gave you warmth and protection. You relaxed, fell asleep, forgot.