Читать книгу Two Black Sheep - Warwick Deeping - Страница 26

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An agency had reserved a room for Mr. Henry Vane on the fourth floor of the Hotel Elyseo, for he had requested them to recommend him an hotel that was not too large and not too English, and to put him nearer the sky than the street.

Arriving very late at night Vane found Rome sleeping, but a little restlessly so, for Mussolini’s Romans seem never to sleep. Taxis and private cars made of the night a bowl of black glass that was shivered upon the pavement of progress. But Vane was tired and ready for bed.

In passing through the lounge he became aware of a very golden lady sitting on a black sofa, with a glass at her elbow, and a cigarette pendent from a flesh-coloured mouth. She stared at Vane; she appraised him; and he, supposing her to be something both up to date and very old, passed on unpiqued to the lift. A polite and sleepy-eyed little clerk ascended with him to the fourth floor and introduced Vane to his room.

“It is rather small, sir, but you wished to be on the fourth floor.”

“Yes, that’s quite all right. This will do excellently.”

His luggage was carried in by a vast and asthmatic Roman in an apron and striped vest, and Vane tipped him and locked the door, and, unpacking only the necessities, undressed and got into bed. He was tired, and the bed comfortable, and he slept in spite of unsilenced motor-cars and argumentative Latins.

He woke with a feeling of freshness. He slipped out of bed, and unfastening a shutter pushed it back to uncover a miraculous picture. The stealth of the dawn still glided in and out among the trees. He found himself looking over a length of the old Aurelian wall into the greenness of the Borghese gardens with their grassy spaces and towering trees. The sunlight was dispersing a thin white mist. It shone upon the tops of the stone pines, upon the cypresses and ilexes. Dim hills floated against a sky of blue vapour.

Vane stood and gazed. His lips moved.

“Wonderful!”

Yes, it was very wonderful, and for the first time since his liberation he was conscious of a little spasm of pain, a kind of vague yearning. It was like watching the birth of a world, something that was young and fresh and untarnished, and he had no wish to go back to his bed. He was in Rome, a pilgrim and a stranger, and Rome was eternal and timeless. He crossed the room and rang the bell, and returning to the window watched the sunlight on those Roman trees.

Someone knocked at his door.

“Hot water, please.”

He had much French, but little Italian, and young Italy does not ask to be addressed in French. It can cope with American English.

“’Ot water. At once—sir.”

The immediateness was relative, but Vane did get his hot water at the end of twenty minutes, and he ordered coffee. He was shaving when he became intimately and newly aware of his face as his own face. He had looked at it in a mirror each morning, but on this Roman morning he was moved to look at it differently. So—this was the face of the person called Henry Vane, the mask of that strange yet familiar thing—himself.

“I’m alive,” he thought; “it ought to be good to be alive.”

Petit déjeuner arrived, and the tray was placed on a table by the open window. He could smell hot coffee, and he felt hungry, and having finished shaving he sat down at the table and enjoyed the coffee and rolls, while beyond the Wall of Aurelius the sunlight grew stronger and the sky more blue. Somewhere below a man was singing, and Vane rose and looked out of the window to discover the singer. Between the street and the old red wall a florist had his garden, and a gardener in patched blue trousers was carrying out pink and white azaleas and placing them in a row ready for transport to some shop. The man was singing, and Vane felt that he had every right to sing.

He sat down and finished up the butter and the coffee. Yes, they might have brought him more butter. He would speak to the waiter about it.