Читать книгу The Coming of Amos - William J. Locke - Страница 7

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I AM convinced that the forties are the golden age of man. Then only can he gather the golden apples of wisdom. By fifty he has either exhausted the crop or it has withered into semblance of that of the Dead Sea.

My ripe wisdom counselled the summoning of Dorothea. Naturally, it justified itself. After a few days Amos followed her about like a bereaved puppy who has found a new mother. There was something pathetically absurd in his submission. She could have taught him dog tricks and he would unquestioningly have performed them. Various suits of clothes having come from the tailor’s, she shewed him how and when to wear them. She imposed upon him her dainty choice in neckties and handkerchiefs. She made him purchase a clouded cane and instructed him in its nice conduct. This appanage of attire amused him greatly; for what was the use of a stick purposed to beat neither beast nor man? She trained him patiently in table manners. She took him to her coiffeur in the Rue d’Antibes, who reduced to civilized proportion his riot of black, upstanding hair. On occasion, she sent him upstairs to wash his hands or brush his nails. So, I remember, did his mother, Dorcas, send me when I was a little boy; that she did not adopt the same procedure with Amos was a symptom of her strange social deterioration. Now Dorothea, however, took maternal charge. When I marvelled at her vast impudence, she said that one must do a thing thoroughly or not at all. How a grown man could brook her domination I was at a loss to imagine, until I hit upon the solution of the apron-strings. All his life had he been tied to them; he was used to them; knew not where he was without them; and evidently found those of Dorothea more pleasant than those of Dorcas. Consequently, to my external eye, he grew in grace day by day.

Occupied with my work and social duties, I saw little of Amos. Why should I have seen more? He was perfectly happy, in the perfectly capable hands of a young woman who was having the time of her life. Instead of wasting her life in the embroidering of vain bags, she was devoting her art to the embroidering of a real live raw product. I am afraid—so implicit was my trust in Dorothea—that, ever so little, I neglected him. You see, when she went about visiting her friends, of whom, in Cannes, she has many, she set him some task devised by her feminine ingenuity; the learning by heart of a poem by Wordsworth or Rupert Brooke, or a page of French verbs; or the perusal of a chapter of a Book of Etiquette which she had purchased ad hoc in London, and by manuscript corrections had warped into conformity with the usages of folk of ordinary sanity; or a series of errands among the vanity shops of this Vanity Fair of a place. Then, of course, her friends came to the Villa, chiefly to tea. I gathered, that acting under her instructions, and actuated by his own shyness, Amos silently filled the background and handed cups of tea and eatables with the awkward precision of the trained animal. Dorothea, as I have said, was enjoying herself prodigiously. I had her word for it. Periodically, en tête à tête, she joyously reported progress.

Once—fruit again of the wisdom of the mid-forties—I let fall a remark:

“As you know, my dear Dorothea, I’m not given to fulsome flattery, but you’re not devoid of attraction for the Untutored Savage. As a very modern woman you can’t be unconscious of a truth so blatant.”

“You talk like a book, Daddums,” said she. “A book written in the ‘nineties. That was when they rediscovered the fact of sex and made a terrible hullabaloo about it.”

“To continue to speak in that archaic tongue,” said I, “it is the primordial instinct of animal life. Amos dates much further back than the 1890 epoch. He belongs to any old age you please—when men were men.”

Perhaps she caught the serious note in my voice; she twisted her head and looked at me out of the tail of her eye.

“What do you mean, Daddums?”

“Exactly what I say. Here is the primitive animal confronted with a desirable female of his species. That proposition is 1920 enough for you, isn’t it?”

“Quite,” said Dorothea. “But it’s a self-evident proposition applicable to any two young people of the present day.”

“By no means,” said I. “You young modern people have developed a sexual code of intimacy. If not, the world has never known such moral corruption——”

“Daddums!” she cried, indignantly.

“Yes, my dear. You’re the heiress of all the ages——”

“In the foremost files of The Times,” she said mockingly. “You can’t shock me. Go on.”

I went on. What Dorothea doesn’t know, as far as knowledge goes, isn’t worth knowing. But there’s all the world of difference between knowledge and wisdom. There was once a majestic poet—just quoted—world-famous in his day, but now despised, who put the whole matter in a nutshell: “Knowledge comes, but Wisdom lingers.”

“What I’m trying to get at is a thing that the cumulative experience of all the centuries hasn’t taught you. There’s an infinite difference between the primitive man and your modern dancing partner. I warn you, my dear, for your guidance, that Amos hasn’t danced his sex away.”

She sat down with some deliberation on a chair close by and fixed me with her candid brown eyes.

“Really, Daddums, you’ve put before me an original idea.”

I rose and waved a middle-aged hand.

“Well. That’s what it comes to, doesn’t it? You modern young dancing people—either you’re corrupt, which I don’t believe for one moment, or you have your tacit, unbreathed, yet recognized convention of asexuality. You have reduced yourselves to such a state of physical unsensitiveness that all sorts of complicated factors have to come into play before two young dancing things fall in love with each other——”

“You’re perfectly right,” she assented frankly. “We’ve progressed. We’re centuries ahead of your 1890.”

“And Amos, being centuries behind, isn’t a party to your convention.”

“I see,” she said. “Your argument is incontrovertible. But really, dear, you make things rather difficult for me. Oughtn’t you to have thought out this Freud-ish situation before you sent for me to dry nurse him?”

Holding me in a helpless corner, she smiled in gentle derision; then broke into gay laughter.

“I’ll put Amos in training and make him dance from morning to night.”

“Dorothea,” said I, “you’re nothing but an incorrigible hussy.”

The entrance of François, announcing a new sitter, the Comtesse d’Orbigny, put an end to this conversation.

Madame d’Orbigny is a beautiful and wealthy American, married to an elderly Frenchman of distinguished family and of impeccable breeding, and hides a world of neurosis behind a studied exterior which, I am certain, she characterizes to herself as poise. In short, a feminine type of peculiar interest to the portrait painter. I was painting her professionally: not for joyous foolery, as I was painting the Princess Nadia.

Which brings me to Nadia.

A day or two after this she came to the studio, all smiles.

“Mon cher, I have met the bear on the Croisette.”

“Dorothea has to let him loose sometimes,” said I.

“But he is a beautiful tame bear. I love him.”

In her picturesque way she described the encounter.

It was a forenoon of sunshine, all pale gold, turquoise and ultramarine. Down the broad pavement by the sea came the Princess, followed by the tawny Pekinese, Chouchou. In my perfect Cannes there is no such thing as the vulgar crowd of promenaders who make an ant-crawl of the Promenade des Anglais at Nice, or of the front at Brighton. The Croisette is used as a discreet and pleasant lounge. A thousand cubic yards of luminous isolation enveloped Nadia as she walked eastwards by the sea. Suddenly dashing into this cubic space at six perspiring miles an hour rushed Amos, his clouded cane over his shoulder as though a wallet at the back should have been suspended. He all but trod on Chouchou and skipped aside and stumbled. The shave from accident brought him to a halt and made him cry:

“Good gosh!”

Chouchou barked his aristocratic indignation. The Princess smiled and extended a gracious hand.

“I thought I was never going to see you again, Mr. Burden.”

“Gosh!” said he. “It’s your Royal Highness. But you look different. You were——”

“Yes,” she interrupted, with that mocking little smile of hers, and with expressive hands, “I was.”

“Oh!” said Amos.

“I don’t always go about in low-cut evening dresses in the day-time.”

“I thought you did it because you were a princess, your Royal Highness,” said Amos.

“I’m not a Royal Highness; I’m—or I was—a Serene Highness; but everybody calls me ‘Princess,’ just as you’d say ‘Mrs. Jones.’ ” She glanced around. “Don’t you think we might sit down?”

She led him to a green garden seat that faced the gold and azure splendour of the sea; whereon they sat, with a whipped-up Chouchou between them.

“I don’t understand, mum,” said Amos. “Ain’t you a king’s daughter?”

In answer to her wrinkled brow of question he went on:

“I thought all princesses were kings’ daughters.”

“My husband was the great-great-something-great-grandson of the Emperor Peter the Great.”

“Golly!” said Amos. “An emperor’s a bigger boss than a king, isn’t he?”

She sighed. “There’s only one emperor left in the world now.”

“Who’s that?”

“Your king. King George. The Emperor of India.”

“That’s the war. It was bad for emperors, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, very bad. You see, the war has changed everything.”

In a few words she sketched her fallen fortunes. He listened open-mouthed. Never had she listener so sympathetically entranced. She had no need to pile up agony. Her simple tale of murder and anguish and terror was tragedy enough.

He turned and clamped her little shoulders with his great hands, regardless of her Serene Highness-dom, and cried:

“Good gosh! And there are men living that have done all that to you. Tell me where they are—and they’ll have to reckon with me.”

What happened after that I don’t quite know. It was the dramatic end of Nadia’s story, and she was too finished an artist, in her way, to spoil it by anti-climax.

“So, you see,” she said, “the poor little exiled Princess has found a champion out of a fairy tale to restore her to her kingdom. That’s why I say I love him.”

This talk took place at her last sitting. At the end of it she was pleased to express her approbation of the portrait. Apart from pictorial value, it was a good likeness. The mutinous little Tartar nose that had given me so much trouble had come out deliciously right. I was boyishly delighted with it. And the good, patient paint had finally interpreted the baffling mother-of-pearl over peach-bloom of her flesh; and I had caught, I know not how, the sorrowful mischief in the hazel and green elusiveness of her eyes.

We stood, side by side, looking at the canvas. Presently her hand crept under my arm.

“It’s strange,” she said, “I feel like a re-created being.”

I smiled down on her and asked her what she meant.

“You know well,” she replied with a little pressure of her fingers. “That is just as much of a living thing as I am; so there are two of us, and of one of us you are the creator—and in that capacity I am afraid of you, you whom I tease and jest with. That is the Nadia who has seen sad things which she strives to forget and who tries to smile at the unknown things that life holds for her. You must forgive all my foolish words and frivolous behaviour of which I am now ashamed——”

“My dear child,” said I, drawing her arm close to my side—the moment was not unemotional—“if you hadn’t been just your adorable self all through the sittings, how the deuce do you think I could have painted you?”

“Mais encore——” she began.

“But yet,” I interrupted, “if you had got it into your head that you were going to be re-created, as you call it, you would have sat solemn, with a face like Madame la République Française who mourns on every monument in the country.”

She sighed. “I suppose you know best, cher maître.”

“Of course I do,” I laughed, “in painting. It’s my trade. But all the same, I wouldn’t have you afraid of me for any thing in the world.”

She turned up her delicate face. “And why?”

“Perfect—friendship—casteth out fear.”

“And you wish so much to be friends with me?”

“Would I have spent my heart on that if I didn’t?”

“That’s true,” she said, and took a cigarette from a box on the table. “I’m glad. I have not many friends. And, in Cannes, a woman like me can have many enemies.”

“Let me meet them,” said I, “and——”

“And they’ll have to reckon with you?” Her face lit up with merriment. “That is what Monsieur Amos said. So I have found two champions in one day.”

Have I or have I not a sense of humour? I don’t know. All I know is that, in my heart, I damned Amos to the full extent of my efficiency.

She came up to me again—she had, I forgot to tell you, slipped on the black evening gown, so that I could have my last critical survey of values—and laid her fingers on my arm. She can be childishly caressive when she pleases. On the other hand, I have seen her freeze up into the iciest little green glacier at the approach of the undesirable. Only a few nights before had I seen the phenomenon—in the Casino, when she stood talking with one Ramon Garcia, a Latin American of sorts, a friend of Madame d’Orbigny, and received everywhere. I didn’t like the fellow, oiled and perfumed and bejewelled and mustachioed, with manners too good to be true; but I shivered in sympathy with him as he drifted away, frost-bitten from head to foot.... Nadia, I say, came up to me—a quick cloud veiling the mischief in her eyes.

“Seriously, cher maître, I value your friendship above everything. Things are difficult for a woman in my position. The slanderous tongues. Sometimes it seems even worse if I continue to live with my aunt and my uncle than if I braved everybody and lived alone. It is not gay at the Villa Miranda—you know.”

I did. It wasn’t at all gay in the home of the old Marchese della Fontana, where bridge was played for high stakes from afternoon to midnight, and where tables of chemin de fer and roulette found frequenters till the early hours of the morning.

She drew up her slim figure. “There are people who know who I am, yet who dare to treat me as though I were an adventuress—déclassée. There are men whom I can’t trust. There are women who hate me—I don’t know why except that I am young and pretty and attractive. I play at the tables and I win, and there are black looks all around; I lose, even the value of one of my precious pearls, and I see in their hearts they are rejoicing. Ah, je suis bien seule. Aidez-moi—voulez-vous? You can do it with your artist’s power here and your English probity.”

I don’t know whether she talked French or English. She used to run indiscriminately from one language into another. Now I come to think of it, I seem to hear the echo of the phrase: “votre fière probité anglaise.”

She stretched out at full length her bare, shapely arm, that melted, undisturbed by strap, into the curves of shoulder and neck, and looked at me, her body swaying, her head at an appealing half-turn. I took the hand held palm downwards, and, bowing over it, kissed it, in conventional manner, below the wrist.

“My dear Nadia,” said I, “you can count me always as your most obedient and loving servant.”

“I am sure I can,” she cried. And before I knew where I was she broke the pose, put up her lips so close to me that I felt her breath on my cheek, and whispered: “You are the man I love and trust most in the world.” After which she bade me gay adieu.

I stood again and looked at the practically finished picture—there was little else to do besides the finishing off of the background—and wondered, in spite of my conviction of living in man’s golden age of wisdom, whether I had been wise, I will not say in wasting, for no time devoted to artistic creation can be wasted, but in expending so much of myself on this portrait of the Princess Nadia. She had complained once that I treated her only as a subject; whereby she meant a living abstraction, only important in so far as she could be translated into terms of paint. She was perfectly right, at the time. She was a subject and nothing else. I have explained how I had been driven to paint her.... Was she still the same to me? I knitted my brow at the question. How much self-expenditure had I bestowed on the transference to canvas of the green and amber mysteries of the Princess Nadia Ramiroff, and how much on the very warm and human bit of flesh and blood that was Nadia herself? There was nothing at all subjective in the lingering touch on my cheek of warm breath, the sound of sweet words in my ears and the fragrance of her nearness in my nostrils. And I swear that her eyes looking at me mockingly out of the canvas said:

“My dear David, I don’t in the least see why you shouldn’t make a fool of yourself, if such is your good pleasure.”

And those were the eyes that I myself had painted.

It was with some reluctance that I shewed the picture to the Comtesse d’Orbigny at her next sitting. Of course she had heard of it. Things have to be done in a very dark way, in a very dark room, on a very dark night, not to be heard of on the Riviera. And even then the black-beetles come out and whisper them to the flies and the flies buzz them about the kitchens, and from the kitchens they come to the drawing-rooms distorted through the successive prisms of black-beetles, flies and kitchen folk. Everyone on the Côte d’Azur, although we had bound ourselves in a mutual oath of secrecy, knew that I was painting the Princess Ramiroff. I had to stand the portrait on the easel for Madame d’Orbigny’s inspection. It pleased her to fall into platitudinous ecstasy. What it was to be a great artist! How he taught the world the things it heeded not! No one would ever have suspected all that soulfulness behind the poor little Princess, who seemed to do nothing but gamble and dance—and yet, looking at the portrait, one guessed what the little thing had gone through—those Bolshevik horrors. It made one shiver to think of them, if her story was true. Luckily she had escaped. Of course there were people in Cannes who declared that neither her title nor her pearls were real——

“My dear Comtesse,” said I, “anybody in Cannes with a real title or real pearls—No. Any little lady of nothing-at-all can have real pearls for the asking from the millionaires of Latin America—but anybody of real noblesse, to whom the Almanach de Gotha is not a vain compilation, knows that the Princess’s title is authentic and her pearls—historic—are genuine. The Russian Grand Dukes, here, may accept out of courtesy, and perhaps political necessity, the acquaintance of all sorts of cosmopolitan people, but they don’t receive on a plane of equality spurious Russian Serene Highnesses. It’s just as idiotic as to suppose that King George of England would invite a gentleman calling himself the Duke of Shoreditch to Buckingham Palace. So if you hear this cruel and beastly slander again, just refer the slanderer to the Grand Dukes—or”—I lost my temper for a moment—“or, hang-it-all, to me.”

The Comtesse d’Orbigny—once Rosamund Leete, daughter of Senator Joseph P. Leete of Arkansas—raised her beautifully shaven eyebrows.

“My dear David Fontenay, what a tirade! Why fire it off on me? My title’s genuine, I suppose—and so are my pearls. Gaston’s got parchments that carry him way back to Charlemagne, and I’ve got a warranty for my pearls from the Rue de la Paix. I haven’t the slightest doubt as to the poor little Princess—I was only deploring common gossip.”

“Why do you persist in calling her the poor little Princess?”

I was irritated—perhaps at the condescension of wealth. Nadia had behind her the tradition of centuries. Madame d’Orbigny’s grandfather slept with pigs in a Galway cabin. That I know. My old friend, Sir Patrick Murfree, owns or used to own the cabin. He is eighty now, and lives in Bury Street, St. James’s; but he remembers the emigration of barefoot Daniel Leete; and to this day in and out and round about the cabin are uncles and aunts, grand and otherwise, and cousins in all degrees of affinity, of this very interesting and beautiful but hybrid product of Ireland, Scandinavia and the United States. For it was the clever son of the ignorant peasant, deriving his brains from a Swedish mother, who had made the Leete millions. Of course Rosamund, having nothing to do with Irish grandfather and Swedish grandmother, claimed pure American descent; which everyone, save perhaps representatives of the New England or Southern families, was prepared to grant her, not caring one way or the other, and which I granted her with all the good-will in the world, when she did not question the unquestionable antecedents of other people.

The Comtesse d’Orbigny replied, with her rather tired smile:

“I won’t, my good friend, if you want to have all the pity to yourself. People who know her well say she’s most fascinating.”

“Those are the very people,” said I, “to go to for accurate information.”

But somehow I felt that I had bungled matters. Madame d’Orbigny would go forth and proclaim to Cannes that I was in love with the Princess Nadia Ramiroff. Quod erat absurdum. Damned absurdum. So I swore, in my vain self-confidence. For what regard could I, a man getting on to fifty, have for young women in their twenties, save that which was purely paternal? Youth to youth was the eternal law. Middle age (man’s) to—well, say to the mid-thirties when a woman has learned to be comfortable. Not that I wanted a woman at all—in the way of romantic conjunctivity. That was all over: I had lived my life. As I remarked in the opening pages of this confession, I desired nothing in the world but to be left alone, as I was.

Hitherto my name in Cannes had been coupled with that of women by not even the frailest gossamer breath of gossip—to say nothing of scandal.

And now I had sent out the Comtesse d’Orbigny with a pretty story.