Читать книгу Two Black Sheep - Warwick Deeping - Страница 24

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Had Elsie been asked to define her concept of “A bad sort of woman” she might have understood the perplexities of some learned judge attentively listening to the technicalities of an expert on mental disease. In the modern parlance the problem was not one of ethics; it was completely and properly pathological.

An insufficiency of cells in the supra-granular layer of the cortex cerebri. Yes, something of the sort, and those rampant and inferior neurons splurging with weakly inhibited instincts, the greeds of the flesh; but Elsie had lived a somewhat sheltered life and things that were crudely elemental bewildered her. Instinctively she shrank from them, not because she was a prude, nor because of a thin and sterile niceness, but because of the texture of her temperament. And she would shrink without understanding the why and the wherefore, vaguely and defensively repelled, while thinking it her duty to overcome this repulsion. As a child she had suffered from strange, secret loathings. Fat meat had provoked in her a shrinking nausea, and she could never be persuaded to enter a butcher’s shop. She could remember being scolded by a stalwart, meat-faced maid who had taken her out shopping. “Don’t be so silly, Miss Elsie. What’s there to be so squeamish about?” And Elsie, with dark, round eyes fascinated by a bloody sheep’s head, had pleaded, “Oh, let me go out, Ellen. I can hear the dead things talking.”

Always, her hands had reached out to beauty, though beauty may defy definition, and even when her hands had been very small they had caressed a rose or the perfect plumage of a bird. She had been a very tender-hearted child, easily touched, quick in her penitence or her compassion, and since a sensitiveness to beautiful things demands delicacy of fibre, there was in Elsie tissue that could be easily wounded. She bruised where tougher skins would have reacted like rubber. She would dress up coarser natures in silk and be shocked and puzzled when they behaved to her in sackcloth. Like many serious and rather bookish creatures with a passion for beauty, she had blind spots in her mental retina. She could be egregiously innocent. Her reaction to the red end of the spectrum was incomplete. She was more tuned to the blues and the violets.

She was strangely innocent in her appreciation of Mrs. Pym, and also of Miss Sybil Gasson. She supposed that they were women of the world, wealthy, smart, rather sophisticated. She was inclined to dress people up like dolls, and once having dressed them to assume that they were what she supposed them to be. She had no proper realization of the difference between live flesh and sawdust. She had evolved certain conceptions such as “woman”—“child”—“man,” and when the raw flesh that was Sally began to contradict her conception of what a child was or should be, she was distressed and bewildered.

Meanwhile, Mr. Allabaster sat on a sofa in a corner of the lounge of the Hotel Elyseo, and was playfully amorous towards Mrs. Pym. He stood six feet one inch, and had a waist, and yet all of him was smoothly rotund, his face, the full brown eyes in their large orbits, the monocle, the head, the voice. His black hair might have been painted on his scalp like the hair of one of those old-fashioned Dutch dolls. He was mellifluous, waxy, slightly sententious, a well-preserved man of five-and-fifty, who cultivated gastronomy and his phrases.

“Precisely so, dear lady, life is pot pourri, a mélange.”

He made little dabs at Mrs. Pym’s person, patting her rather like an old black cat playing with a live coal, and to Sylvia peeping through the curtains of the lounge he was just like the cat in “Alice in Wonderland.” Or real Cheshire. And somehow his name was so apposite, alabaster, a waxy surface sacred to some ritual.

Mrs. Pym was animated.

“Oh, yes, the kid’s upstairs with Miss Summerhays. No, I don’t think I ought to—really.”

“Not really! Shall I argue the point?”

She touched his knee with the tip of a first finger.

“I never argue.”

“Quite superfluous. Obviously. You vanquish.”

“Don’t be absurd!”

Mr. Allabaster became veritable Cheshire.

“Dear lady, I am never absurd.”

The unsuspected child put out her tongue at him. Things like Mr. Allabaster suddenly arrived like a ghostly grin. Men were always arriving and departing from the precincts of Mrs. Pym, men of all sizes, ages and possibilities, and Sally could not say whence Mr. Allabaster had adventured. One day he had been non-existent, and the next he was there, nor did Rome know any more about Allabaster than Sally did. He was one of those well preserved and slightly enigmatic persons who float about Europe, and are equally endemic in Rome, Paris, Vienna or Monte Carlo. He might be abroad for his health, or even on business, or combining business with pleasure. He appeared to know everything that was to be known about wines and cigars. He could play a masterly hand at “bridge” or poker. He even gave you the impression that he could attend a mannequin parade, and discuss the frocks with the facility and fastidiousness of a fashion expert. He could talk intelligently about music, and precious stones and perfumes. He had technique. His phrases purred, and his Christian name was Montague, but to Sally he symbolized an old black, smirking tom-cat.

Her mother was dressed to go out, and when Mrs. Pym and Mr. Allabaster rose from the sofa, Sally left her observation post and scurried upstairs. A little black and white waiter was travelling along the corridor with a tea-tray, and he and Sally met outside the door of the suite. Patisserie! Sally grabbed a cake and laughed in the waiter’s face. With her mouth full of cream and sugar she dashed up the stairs to the fourth floor, but before she could use her fists on Elsie’s door the door opened.

“Tea—cakes.”

Obviously! Sally’s mouth was a cream bun, and as Elsie observed it she was moved to tell Sylvia that cakes should be consumed with a ceremony. But how was it that one was always saying “don’t” to a child? It was so very exhausting, and according to Elsie’s creed a gentle hint should have been sufficient. She ignored the incident. She took Sylvia by the hand.

“Let’s go and have tea.”

Sally allowed her hand to be held.

“Mother’s gone out with old Monte.”

“Monte?”

“Yes, Mr. Allabaster. She’s got her broadtail coat on.”

Elsie felt that she ought to make the occasion appear social and correct.

“Probably—they have gone to see some pictures. Mr. Allabaster is very fond of pictures.”

And Sally giggled. She gave Elsie an upward stare which said, “Pictures! How funny you are! Why, mother’s the picture.”