Читать книгу The Coming of Amos - William J. Locke - Страница 4

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BEHOLD me painting her.

There are two or three things which she can’t understand. First, why it is that I don’t pitch my easel in the great drawing-room, with its open south-west view of nothing but sea and sky and the long purple Esterel melting into the blue. There, says she, she can drink in beauty; with beauty would her soul be filled, and her face would be the register of the gladness thereof. I have to explain to her, in simple terms, such things as diffused light, tones and values, and why it is that the cold purity of my north-east studio, without any distracting view at all, is the only light in which to paint the human face. I don’t think she quite believes me. It is either too much trouble to transfer my clutter to the drawing-room or I’m a disagreeable person who dislikes the sun. So she wears a little mocking smile on her face—the most adorable thing she can do, from my point of view, although she knows it not—and yawns and wonders, out aloud, why on earth she ever consented to undergo so uninteresting an ordeal. She can’t even see what I am doing. I put a swing pier-glass behind me, so that she can view both herself and the canvas. She is horrified. Nothing resembling her can ever proceed from that chaos of smudges and smears—the stem, honest paint foundation on which I will live and die. Whereupon I shift the mirror so that she may find delectation only in her own mutinous reflection.

Another matter to her incomprehensible is my tyrannous choice of costume. She was all for sitting to me in an evening confection of greens and coppers and bronzes in which, under electric light and against the background of rioting colour provided by other women, she looked a magnificent little person; but in the cold glare of the studio a green, copper and bronze confection and nothing else.

“How,” I ask, “am I to get the gold of your hair and the green of your eyes and the pinks and coppers of your cheeks, as delicate as the bloom of a peach, if I have to hide them all with this barbaric tawdriness? I’m painting the Princess Nadia, not a fashion-plate to advertise Monsieur Poireneux—no peace to his soul!”

“I will wear, then, my mauve dress.”

“Which sucks the colour out of you. You will wear the black dress I saw you in last week.”

We argue. She calls me horrid names. But I prevail.

“I will wear my pearls.”

Her pearls are historic. Poor dear, she lives on them, selling one at a time, so that the famous necklace is shrinking fatalistically like the peau de chagrin of Balzac’s story.

“If you think, Princess, I’m going to waste my precious time——”

“Precious time—bah! You amuse yourself all day long.”

“If you think I’m going to waste the precious time,” I say sternly, “which I can devote to my own amusement, in the niggling and most laborious occupation of painting pearls, each one having its individual iridescence, you’re very much mistaken. Besides, they’re of no pictorial value. And,” in answer to a grimace, “your skin properly painted would make every pearl in the world look trumpery.”

“Flatteur, va! You only want to save yourself trouble.”

We both were right. We laughed. We are the best friends in the world.

“What you can wear is that wonderful chunk of jade brooch of yours, in your corsage.”

She came meekly on the day of the first sitting with the costume in a suit-case. When she appeared in the studio, I took her to the pier-glass.

“Look at yourself.”

“Poor little ghost,” she said dismally.

I don’t care what she thinks. It is I who am painting her. She is exquisite. I wish I could paint her in words. You see the sheer pale gold of her hair—a bit rebellious owing to its fineness of texture; the light bronze of her eyebrows overhanging great eyes which according to light and mood wavered exasperatingly between hazel and green; the complexion, now of a pure blonde, now of peach sun-warmed; the delicate high cheek-boned, somewhat broad contour of face; the humorous full-lipped young mouth; the dainty chin; and her small head set on a dainty neck, which flows into free curves of shoulder and bosom; to use the word again, a dainty creature, ancestrally hybrid of the Frisian hordes and the Tartar tribes that have made the Russian of the last few hundred years. Yet she is no wisp of a fairy, golden-haired thing. Although slightly built, she has an admirable solidity. The flesh proclaims itself in terms in which the modest and the generous are at courteous pains to yield each other precedence....

Beautiful? I don’t know. There is a puggishness about her rebellious nose which would disqualify her in a competition of Classical Beauty. And yet, this infernal little nose with its tip cocked up in the air, destroying the perfection of her gracious modelling, makes for her fascination in a painter’s eyes.... This, and the baffling combination of olive and peach and mother-of-pearl of her skin; and the alternating shafts of gaiety and shadows of sorrow which, passing across her face, are but indexes of the wavering fortunes of some strange warfare in her soul.

Who is she? A widow. Heroine of a Russian tragedy that has come to be regarded as conventional. Married young, a child, during the war, she managed to escape like so many other women, with her jewels, from the land where her husband was murdered and his property confiscated. Last year she took permanent refuge with her aunt, her mother’s sister, who married in the beautiful long-ago an Italian Secretary of Embassy at the Court of St. Petersburg, the Marchese della Fontana. They have a villa in Cannes on the Croix de Garde. He is a crumpled little old man; she, the Marchesa, a horse-marine of a woman. It’s a dull and fusty villa, save late at night, when there are all kinds of goings on, and Nadia has the air of a flower growing among lichen. Nadia, I must tell you, is in the early twenties, about the same age as my step-daughter, Dorothea.

But to return to the portrait, the only thing with which I am concerned; for, otherwise than artistically, what concern have I with attractive young women?

She has grown used to the mirrored reflection of herself in her black dress with the huge Chinese monster carved in exquisitely coloured jade in her corsage. It is the repeat of her eyes. There she is, all golds and greens and nacre, with the black to set it off.

“What do you think?” I ask her.

“Pas mal——” but she is obviously pleased with herself.

“You’ll admit that a mere man can sometimes be right.”

“I don’t admit it at all. No man’s ever right. It’s the artist, not the man that I yield to.”

Once she asked: “What are you going to do with it when it’s finished?”

“I’ll exhibit it this year at the Royal Academy in London. After that I will lay it humbly at your feet.”

She expressed her thanks prettily enough; but behind them were signs of dismay. What was she, a poor little wayfarer living in an Innovation trunk, to do with a three foot by four oil painting of herself?

“You can hang it up in the Villa Miranda.”

Her eyes narrowed, as she looked at me.

“Your pictures are worth a lot of money?”

I made the appropriate gesture conveying a modest sense of my market value. She nodded her head in appreciation.

“When I travel I take my property with me. I don’t leave it at the Villa Miranda.”

“You mean the Marchese——?”

“I mean,” she said, “that you will put your picture wherever you like in your home and give me permission to come and look at it when ever I like.”

“Princess,” said I, “this house and all that is in it is yours.”

With an ironical grimace she quoted the Spanish formula: “A la disposition de Usted.”

“If you don’t take care,” I laughed, “I’ll put it at your disposal in a very blunt English fashion—and both of us will be infernally sorry.”

“Oh! A declaration!” she flashed amusement.

“Anything you like, if you’ll only keep still while I’m painting you.”

“Oh,” she said, “I’m just a subject and not an object.”

“Madame la Princesse,” said I, “is whatever Madame la Princesse pleases to be.”

I rose and did the portrait painter’s cat-crawl around the canvas, scanning it from all angles.

“The frivolous woman is snubbed,” she remarked.

“Utterly and hopelessly,” said I.

I sat down again. The impudence of her nose would not come right. One stroke revealed it as a deformity; another as a classical feature which robbed the portrait of likeness. I rubbed the nose out altogether, trusting to a future illumination, and putting on my heaviest frown worked on the gold of her hair. She was impressed, thinking, like most sitters, that I was intent on some fleeting expression of eyes or mouth, and sat stock-still. When the sitting was over, she came round to review progress. In her eyes there was none. There was retrogression, owing to the smudged-out nose.

“And it is for this that I’ve been wasting this beautiful morning of sunshine when I might have been walking with my dog on the Croisette. Viens, Chouchou, and see what Monsieur has done with your mother.”

Chouchou, a cynical orange Pekinese, who had been asleep on a far-off cushion, sat up at this appeal, yawned and cocked his little lion head to one side. She snapped her fingers.

“Viens!”

But he wouldn’t. The celestial dog of China suffers no mortal dictation as to his comings or goings. All he did was to wave a serene squirrel tail over his back. She addressed him in French.

“Viens, I say. Was it for this that I took you out of Russia from the Bolsheviks who would have killed and eaten you?”

He cocked his head again, at a different angle, as one who held in derision all the Lenins and Trotskys of the universe. Set in the midst of his tawniness, just below the ironical black eyes, gleamed his black, little Mongol nose.... Talk about the eagle beak of the Duke of Wellington, the fantastic appendage of Cyrano de Bergerac, the exquisitely haughty line of Cleopatra’s organ—no nose on earth could so express the don’t-care-a-damnativeness of disdain as that of Chouchou.

“My dear Princess,” said I, with a sudden inspiration of which she could not guess the source, “take Chouchou on your lap and sit for another ten minutes. I may be able,” I added, barefacedly mendacious, “to paint him in.”

Delighted, she swept the adorable bit of superciliousness from his cushion, and, returning to her chair, posed again. And I worked once more on her little disdainful Mongol nose.

She sat, sweetly contented, thinking that I was painting in Chouchou, against the black of her corsage. Poor dear, how should she know that the painting of dogs is a specialist’s gift? While she held him against her bosom in what she thought to be his most fascinating attitude, I was intent on her nose.

Time passed.

There entered, canary vested and black sleeved, my valet de chambre, François.

It was one o’clock, and Amélie (my cook—and his wife) wanted to know whether she should serve the déjeuner for Monsieur that was commanded for half-past twelve.

One o’clock? The Princess Nadia rose in dismay, clutching an indignant Chouchou, who barked his gastronomic appreciation of the flight of time.

“My aunt also lunches at half-past twelve. Why didn’t you tell me?”

I made apologies and offered a seat at my frugal table. At least there was sunshine in the wine I could set before her, and nothing but view of blue sea and sky from the dining-room window. Being hungry, she accepted. Being a woman, and as such, curious as to the details of a lone man’s establishment, she would have accepted in any case. We lunched charmingly. To the lone man’s table she lent an all too rare graciousness. Free from the austerity of the studio and the consciousness of strange processes of creation, she expanded into gaiety, rattled off piquant paragraphs of the social chronicle of the villadom and casinodom of Cannes, and ate and drank with the youthful gusto so pleasing to an elderly host. During the meal I confessed abandonment of my project of painting Chouchou.

“It was only to keep me quiet?”

“That was all.”

Hence followed naturally an argument on the cynical guile of man and the more subtle wiles of woman. In the former, it appeared, there was always a certain brutality, an April Fool coarseness. For instance, the recent duping of herself and dog.

“Bark at the horrid man,” she commanded.

The Pekinese, on the chair by her side, upturned a cold, glazed eye. Having lunched delicately and fully, he had no further concern with the superficial whims of mankind. We laughed, in light mood. François served coffee and liqueurs. Nadia lit a cigarette.

I shall always associate Nadia’s delicate lighting of the cigarette with the Troublesome Event.

It was at that moment that I heard an impatient voice and something like a scuffle outside, followed by the throwing open of the door and the appearance of a gigantic young man behind whom François flashed gesticulating. The gigantic young man wore a bowler hat, which even in that instant of amazement I noted was too small for his head, and gripped in his hand the most ancient extant of Gladstone bags. Simultaneous with his incursion, I rose with a——

“What the devil——?”

He cut me short. “You’re Uncle David, ain’t you? That feller was wantin’ to take away my bag. I ain’t going to give it up until I’m sure.”

He grinned—a wide, disarming grin. Apparently he had not lost his temper with François. He was merely asserting his right of entry, in the most good-humoured way in the world. In a dazed way my mind went back to a similar type in the waiting-room of a little Texas station, years ago, who had lounged up to me with the same fatuous grin and asked me for the funny page of the Sunday paper I was reading. The Texan’s billycock hat was too small for him. Like the Texan’s, my visitor’s clothes were shrunken and sun-stained, his linen frayed, his uncouth hands glazed over freckles. I frowned. But he stood there with his grin, transparent honesty.

“My good fellow,” said I, “you’re making a mistake. You’ve come to the wrong house.”

He looked around, as though to identify it, and shook his head.

“If I have, Mister, I’m sorry. I thought you were my uncle, David Fontenay.”

“I’m Mr. Fontenay,” said I; “but who the deuce are you?”

“I’m Amos Burden,” said he, “and my mother’s dead and I’ve just come from Australia.”

“Good Lord,” said I; and, in order to gather my wits together, went on: “Take off your bag—I mean your hat—and sit down.”

My mind, cranked up, began to whirr. This must be a son of my sister Dorcas who ran away with the itinerant preacher. A vague memory, a casual line in a letter a quarter of a century old crossed my brain; a letter from Muriel to me in Paris: “Dorcas seems happy in her extraordinary way. She writes me that she has a baby.” From that day to this I had heard no more about the baby. I had forgotten there ever was a baby. Dorcas had become a dim abstraction, apart from the actualities of my existence. Now, apparently, poor woman, she was dead and this was her son, possibly the baby brought, for one fleeting instant, within my horizon.

During the swift period of my wit-gathering he had deposited his bag on the floor, himself on a chair tugged, with some noise, from the wall, and his bowler hat on the luncheon table. Nadia, still in her black evening dress—she had been too hungry to change—leaned back in her chair, watching him amusedly through the clouds of her cigarette smoke. Before I could speak again, I saw him catch her eye and gape at her. No doubt she was something for an Antipodean to gape at—considering the hour, two o’clock in the afternoon. I had never before realized the imperative conventions of times and seasons. In the studio she was but a model; in the evening she was a perfectly costumed woman of the world. In the golden light of this January afternoon, she seemed to be entirely nude save for the wisp of black chiffon scarcely veiling her bosom.

The young man, as I say, gaped at her open-mouthed, then turned to me with staring blue eyes and grinned. He stretched out a long pointing arm.

“That my aunt?”

She flushed to the roots of her pale gold hair; less, I fancy, from outraged modesty than from suppression of hilarious emotion. I recovered swiftly.

“Madame,” said I, in what I hold to be my grand manner, “is the Princess Ramiroff. Princess, may I present Mr. Amos Burden.”

He did not rise from his chair which he had brought near the table, but just stared at her, as though flabbergasted by the title. She leaned forward with extended hand, every kind of enchanting malice in her eyes. Suddenly he gripped it in his huge paw.

“How d’ye do, mum?”

He held on to her until I saw her wince. Meanwhile, in his brain, a worrying thought found expression.

“I beg your pardon, but I suppose I ought to have said Your Royal Highness.”

She smiled sweetly, as she strove to withdraw her crushed fingers.

“I’ll tell you exactly what to call me when your uncle allows us to be better acquainted.”

This gave me an opening.

“In the first instance, young man, you’ve got to give me some proof that I am your uncle.”

He released the hand of Nadia and regarded me more in indulgence than in indignation.

“You’re Mister David Fontenay, ain’t you?”

“Yes,” said I.

“And you had a sister, Miss Dorcas Fontenay, what married my father, Mister Ezra Burden? And her father was the Reverend Edward Fontenay what lived in Great Shepperton, Somersetshire?”

“That’s him,” said I.

“Then you are my uncle,” said he amiably, “and what’s the good of saying anything more about it?”

“What indeed?” cried Nadia, with one of her crystal laughs. “You have the most delightful uncle in the world. I only wish I had one like him.”

“I wish he’d give me something to eat,” said Amos. “I’ve had nothing since seven o’clock this morning.”

I rang the bell, ordered François to provide food for Monsieur, also to remove Monsieur’s bowler hat from the table. Nadia took the opportunity of asking him to send her maid up to the dressing-room. Amos eyed him suspiciously as he disappeared with his property.

“I got a letter,” said he, routing one out from a greasy note-case. “Mother wrote it just before she died. Said I was to give it to you.”

I exchanged a glance of permission with Nadia and opened the letter. It was of considerable length—but it was from my sister Dorcas. Politeness forbade my reading it at that moment, so I put it in my pocket. At any rate, there seemed no reason to doubt that this gigantic young savage was my nephew.

“When did your poor mother die?” I asked in a more conciliatory tone.

“Five months ago.”

“Dear, dear,” said I. “I’m very sorry. But”—after a perplexed pause—“how did you manage to find out my address?”

“Aunt Muriel. I wrote to her, you know, as soon as it happened.”

“But how did you know I was here?”

“Folks are generally supposed to be where they live, ain’t they?”

“I mean, I might have been in England.”

“Well, you ain’t,” said he.

The Princess laughed, extinguished the stub of her cigarette on the ash-tray and rose. Naturally I rose too. Amos remained seated.

“The Princess is going.”

“Oh,” said he.

She smiled on him graciously. “No, don’t get up. You must be tired after your long journey from Australia.” And she disappeared through the door which I held open for her.

I followed her into the hall and regarded her with the wrinkled brow that denotes a craving for sympathy.

“It’s rather alarming, isn’t it?” said I.

“Enchanting!” she cried. “When will you let me come round and play with it?”

“Never,” said I.

She tossed her head and waved a farewell and tripped upstairs to find the maid who should array her in the decent garments of the afternoon.

“Young man,” I said, on entering the dining-room, “it seems to me you have a good many things to learn.”

“Mother said I was to come over here and learn ’em,” he replied amiably.

“The first thing is that you mustn’t remain seated when a lady gets up.”

“Oh,” said he. “Yes. I’ll try to learn that.”

“Would you care to have a wash up before lunch?” I asked.

“What for? I washed this morning.”

Then it was I who said: “Oh!”

François appeared with the beginnings of the meal.

“What will Monsieur drink?”

“Tea,” said he.

“No wine, whisky and soda ...?” I asked.

“Never touched the wicked stuff in my life.”

I let the adjective pass. Our acquaintance was far too young for me to begin a temperance argument. He plunged with voracity into his food and engulfed two eggs sur le plat and a roll almost before I knew they were there. Then he attacked a great dish of ham and beef and galantine.

And, while he ate, I smoked a reflective cigar and watched him.

He was not ill-looking in his lumbering way. His features, heavy and coarse, were redeemed by blue eyes of a childlike innocence behind which gleamed the possibility of a shrewd intelligence. His hair was black and bristly and stood up straight on his head and came down to a peak on his forehead. Like his hands, his face was glazed by the sun over the freckles of a lifetime, so that it was impossible to determine his original complexion. He had great breadth and depth of shoulders, and beyond his shrunken sleeves protruded thick hairy wrists.

Either he was too ravenous for speech or it was not his habit to talk while eating. It was only when François brought the tea—the finest China, which I and those of my friends who really love me smuggle from England—and he sipped it, that he spoke.

“What’s this stuff?”

“Tea.”

His features expressed disapproval. “Don’t you know how to make tea in this country?”

I remembered youthful reading of wild life in the bush.

“I’m afraid we haven’t got a billy.”

“Thought not. And it hasn’t drawn.”

“I think I understand,” I said. He craved black Ceylon, syrupy, potent, boiled in a pot and left to stand for several hours. He should have his abomination; he who had the impudence to call my wine wicked stuff. “To-morrow, I’ll give you what I think you’ll relish.”

He raised his eyebrows and grinned innocently.

“Ain’t I going to have supper?”

“Do you drink tea at supper too?”

“Why, yes.”

To anticipate a few hours’ history, I may say that I gave him, at dinner, his throat’s desire. The brew would have killed the most hardened Mothers’ Meeting in an English parish. He smacked his lips and pronounced it good. His inside must be as muscular as his biceps.

He ate, as I said, vastly of the cold viands. I noticed that he spat out the first mouthful of potato salad, the unfamiliar oil not suiting his palate; and when he came to a newly cut wedge of Gruyère cheese, fresh, with the little dewdrops in the holes, I thought he might reject this also. But he liked it, cut off chunk after chunk which he conveyed to his mouth with his fingers, until he had devoured the whole. François, judge of time, like the excellent servitor that he is, coming in with the coffee, blinked drunkenly at the empty space where he had left a demi-kilo of Gruyère. But, well trained, he recovered his nerve.

“Monsieur, désire-t-il du café?”

Amos looked at me, jerked an interrogatory thumb at the dainty cup—I have a choice Sèvres service——

“Coffee,” said I. “I hope you’ll find it stronger than the tea.”

“My sakes,” said he, with a laugh. “Do you folks call this coffee?”

He tossed it down. His throat must have been of triple brass; for Amélie would sooner die than serve coffee imperfect in temperature. He grinned again.

“That gets a feller,” he admitted. “But I’d like some more. In a big cup. Big.” He looked up at François, and with his hands indicated a vessel about the size of a bowl of gold-fish.

François questioned me mutely. I said to him in French:

“One of the bols that you and Amélie use for your café au lait in the morning.”

François retired bearing with him the impression that the world had gone mad. I learned afterwards that he put it down to the war.

My nephew, Amos, leaned back in his chair, with a sigh of content.

“I hope you’ve enjoyed your lunch,” said I.

“Thank you, Uncle David,” he replied. “I’ve had a square meal.”

I pushed the box of cigarettes towards him and opened my cigar case.

“No, I’ll smoke my pipe.”

He pulled out pipe and pouch and soon the azure coast reeked with obscenity of odour. It was a gorgeous day and the big south-eastern French window was wide open. I rose and threw wide the western casement through which came the freshening breath of the Mistral. Then carefully selecting a chair out of the draught—I beg you to remember my cultivation of the Perfect Egoism—I addressed him blandly.

“My dear fellow. An hour or so ago, I was practically ignorant of your existence. Will you kindly tell me why you are here and what I can do for you?”

I could not be expected to clasp my newly found nephew to my bosom; there is nothing inherent in mere nephewdom to rake frantic emotional chords; and this particular nephew, who, by putting his horrid hat on my lunch table and spitting out on his plate an unpalatable potato and spurning my exquisite Ceylon tea—to say nothing of his behaviour to ladies, his ungrammatical speech, his nerve-shattering accent, a blend of Whitechapel, the slums of Greenock, the New York Bowery and the Larrikin quarter of Sydney—betrayed an unimaginable ignorance of social usages, was not one to stir one’s soul with the trumpet call of family pride. He had fallen, I confess, into my neatly ordained life like a hulking disaster. I looked on him with the blackest and most sardonic disfavour.

But my outward urbanity I am sure you must admit.