Читать книгу Joshua's Vision - William J. Locke - Страница 4

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The door opened and a manservant announced Mrs. Dale. She came forward smiling, hands outstretched, like an old acquaintance.

“I know I’m first, but I came early to see if you wanted me for anything.”

Joshua thanked her. “The butler seems to think everything’s all right.”

“That’s good,” she said brightly. “You’ll forgive me if I feel a qualm of responsibility.” She sat by the fire and warmed her hands. “Can I have a cigarette?”

Joshua offered his case. “I’ve been longing for one,” he said.

She flickered a swift, ironic glance at him. He was new to her wide experience of the artist and the woman of the world, and sometimes puzzled her both by his queer reticences and his unconventional frankness. Why should he have longed for a cigarette in his own house? Being a woman of subtlety, she did not ask him the direct question. She would find out sooner or later.

“I’m awfully grateful to you for helping me, Mrs. Dale,” he said, bending over her with the lighted match. “I shouldn’t have known how to arrange all these stiff-uns round the table——”

She laughed. “The stiff-uns will be very useful to you and the young man Sutton. They’ll open doors for you”—she put up a hand—“oh, no, I know what you were going to say. I don’t mean doors of dukes and duchesses. Let us say the park gates of attractive avenues leading to places of human interest. You must join a club, mustn’t you? Not any old Noah’s Ark, but a club where you’ll get to know decent men. You were talking of golf the other day——”

“I suppose I’ll have to come to it,” said the old football gladiator and East Anglian champion middle-weight boxer.

“Of course you will,” she decreed. “And you’ll have to find people to put you up for a decent Golf Club. Same with racing, as you’re fond of it—Sandown and so forth. There are also attractive women in this little town of London.”

“I’m an old codger,” said he. “You can cut ’em out.”

She rose and laughed in his face. And, when Robina Dale laughed, it was a very frank and merry laugh. She was a tallish, big-boned woman, with a sufficient covering of flesh to save her from awkward angularity; swarthy, large-featured, with dark brown eyes, both piercing and humorous, and beautiful teeth set in a generous mouth. Her black hair was cropped behind according to the fashion of the day. A woman by no means beautiful; but gifted with an arresting personality, all feminine in her scrupulously tasteful and rich though unostentatious attire, and in the unexpected curves of her big-boned frame and in the adroitness of her mind and in the soft contralto of her voice, and yet masculine in her impression of independence and efficiency, and in a physical attribute or two, notably in the large hands with their spatulate finger-tips. She prided herself on never having been manicured in her life. One of the sayings of Joshua that had attracted him to her, in the course of the voyage to Colombo, was his artless criticism of the vermilion-nailed ladies on board:

“I hate to see women with sharp-pointed finger-nails who seem to have been scrabbling into live babies and pulled their fingers out all covered with blood, and with the fat sticking under the quick.”

She had laughed in her open way.

“Every woman does it—I’d do it if I hadn’t to puddle about in my trade.”

“So much the better,” he had replied stolidly. “I never look at those women’s nails if I can help it. They make me feel sick.”

The majority of normal men are of Joshua’s blatantly expressed opinion, and not a coward of them all dare give it forth in his home.

Joshua’s life at Trenthampton had been lived for many years apart from women. Those he had met had bored him exceedingly. For the most part they had been stencil reproductions of his wife, Arabella, who had no more thought of employing a manicurist than a beauty surgeon who should cut away skin and lift the muscles of her face. Practically, on his second Odyssey, he had entered a new world.

“Cut out women?” she cried. “In some ways I should like to, but not in the way you mean. If you think you’re going to lead the idle life of a perfectly young and well-to-do widower in London, and be remote from interfering women, you’re mistaken. We can’t cut ’em out, my poor friend.”

“Of course if they were all like you——” cried Joshua.

Whereupon she laughed again.

“After dinner is the time for making declarations. Before dinner there’s the danger of their being taken as serious.”

“You know what I meant,” said Joshua, somewhat embarrassed.

She touched his shoulder. “Of course I did. You’ve remembered the cocktails, haven’t you?”

He tapped his forehead. “Yes, I wrote it down——How stupid of me! Have one now?”

“We can wait,” she said, checking his movement to the bell-push. “Let everything be done decently and in order.”

“It’s this damned order that worries me,” said Joshua with a grin. “If you hadn’t put it into my head I shouldn’t have thought of it. The big things I can do all right—at least I think so. I’ve been accustomed to ’em. It’s the little things. How was I to know, until you told me, that one didn’t wear a pin in the knot of one’s tie? I’d worn it like that from the day I was married—a diamond pin—a wedding present from my wife’s people. How was I to know?”

“You’ve got eyes, haven’t you?” asked Robina Dale.

“Yes; but not trained eyes,” he replied. “That’s the devil of it.” He spread himself out before her. “I hope I’m all right in this kit?”

She approved smilingly. “Immaculate evening dress.”

“I wonder,” he said thoughtfully, and made a half-turn and back, and threw the end of his cigarette into the fire. “I wonder why a woman like you should put herself to all this bother about me.”

Her face darkened and hardened, not understanding.

“What personal advantage I’m going to get out of it?”

“Good God, no!” he cried, scared by her look and her tone. “What on earth could you get?”

For a second her judgment had run astray, had skidded, as it were, like a motor-car. His question had been so easily open to intuitive interpretation: that of the suspicion of the self-made man, with bulging money-bags, thrown suddenly on society. What was she playing at? What did she want to get out of him?

His protest, blatant in its sincerity, cut her like a whip. She felt mean, realizing that his question had been put not in suspicion, but in humility. It was all a matter of seconds, during which she suffered considerable psychological readjustment.

“What could I get?” She smiled. “The friendship of an honest man.”

His momentary scare passed. He was mollified by her charming answer. The dark, little cloud between them vanished.

“I’m honest enough,” he said with a pleasant seriousness. “I don’t think I’ve done a dirty trick in all my life. My old father saw to that. He wasn’t very fussy or affectionate—demonstrative, if you know what I mean—but he brought me up in the fear of God and——” He passed his hand across the crease in his forehead—a gesture with which an amused and interested Robina was becoming familiar. “I’m getting his exact words—I’ve heard them since I was so high—‘The pointing finger of the world’s contempt.’ That’s a good saying, isn’t it? It sort of runs in one’s head. ‘The pointing finger of the world’s contempt.’ So I’ve done my best to keep clear of it. But I can’t see there’s anything more to me. Looking at it by and large, it’s just the pride of the class I sprang from. But, otherwise, I know nothing about anything except making boots, and I’m sick of that. That’s why I wanted to know why you should worry about me. I’ve been all round the world, and the more I’ve seen the less I know. I only know how to make boots, and that can’t interest anybody on God’s earth.”

Robina, who during his outburst had sat down again and lit another cigarette, looked up at him.

“You can do much better than that, my dear man.”

“What?”

“You can make friends,” said Robina.

“I’m afraid I haven’t made many,” he said ruefully.

“Because you haven’t taken the trouble. Neither boots nor friends are made by just sitting down and doing nothing.”

Joshua was assimilating the truth of this apophthegm when his guests began to arrive. Sir John and Lady Baldo, he an ex-Sheriff of the City of London, and both irradiated by an air of rosy prosperity; Mr. Fenton Hill, who hunted foxes and collected miniatures, and Lady Evangeline Hill, a pretty woman who took life humorously; Miss Sadie Groves, the light comedy actress; Victor Spens, a shrivelled, youngish man, with a puckish manner, ex-diplomatist and man about town; Sir Gilbert Illington, eminent architect, Lady Illington and their pretty daughter; the Archdeacon of Haxton and Mrs. Rogers, his wife; and young Sutton Fendick, home late from the leather-broking firm in Mark Lane in whose office Joshua, wishing to set his son within the wide horizon of London, had lately placed him.

Robina Dale, sitting in the place of hostess, smiled with satisfaction on the gathering which had obeyed her vicarious summons. She had imagined the banquet. She had prescribed the form of invitation: “I have now settled down in my little bachelor house in London, and I can think of no more—to me—delightful a house-warming than that which would be given it by my friends of the ‘Carynthia.’ Will you therefore do me the great pleasure of dining with me on the 17th at 8.45? It will be an entirely ‘Carynthian’ gathering in which I hope we may all revive the pleasant memories of our travels.” Joshua (Robina duce et auspice Robina) had sent out eighteen invitations to scrupulously selected fellow travellers. Eleven had accepted: an eleven representative of the decent and influential in modern English life. They were fourteen at table, an ideal number for a dinner-party not over-ostentatious. Joshua, between Lady Baldo and Lady Evangeline, was happily engaged in talk. Everybody seemed to be pleased to meet everybody else. Robina felt the pretty thrill of one who has achieved a minor artistic masterpiece. All these diverse personalities met on one acknowledged common ground—in fact many grounds, including the deck of the “Carynthia” which had carried them all happily round the world. Joshua could exchange reminiscences with his neighbour of the Galle Face Hotel in Colombo, the dizzying streets of Yokohama, the surf of Honolulu, and the crude habits of unsympathetic fellow passengers.

Every one of the guests could be useful to Joshua in the ways which she had indicated; to Sutton too, from whom the voyage had knocked off many rough corners. Left to himself Joshua would never have thought of such an opportunity of shaping not only his social existence, but of reshaping any kind of existence at all. He knew nobody in London, not even people in the class into which he had married, and thenceforward had his provincial being. It was the pathetic loneliness of father and son on board the “Carynthia” that had first attracted her to them. She had frightened Joshua out of his life on the fourth day of the voyage by marching up to him and practically asking him what he was doing in that galley. Within an hour she had found an answer to her question. She had gone to Lady Baldo, in whose party she was travelling, with the news that she had found a pet lamb whom she was going to mother. The fact of her being about ten years younger than the lamb didn’t matter. She tied a blue ribbon round his neck and led him bewildered into the Baldo circle. Sir John vaguely remembered having met him during the war on some committee, and, with a mingling of jocularity and respect for the late head of a great business, introduced him to somebody else as a Captain of Industry. Thus, thanks to Robina Dale, he made his entrance into pleasant society. Sutton followed, with modern youth’s keener sense of values, in his wake. The boy had read, even in the past few months, more books than his father had read in his life. He had ambitions of which his father had never dreamed. He was acutely and self-consciously observant of the manners of the big world that lay calm in the assurance of its social perfection, far above the defiant yet uneasy conventions of Redesdale Road.

The boy, Robina judged, could look after himself; just a hint here and there sufficed for his guidance. But the father presented a different problem altogether. Why, in his own words that evening, she should take all that trouble about him, she scarcely knew. She was a woman given more to instinctive action than to thought. She loved management. Victor Spens had once said to Joshua: “When Robina Dale goes to heaven she’ll see to it that the poor little cherubim have hinder parts to sit upon.” Such criticism, of course, never reached Robina’s ears. She was aware, however, of the vast inefficiency of mankind and of her own practical grasp on human affairs. The state of the stray Joshua offered irresistible temptation. He was a man to be remade; a task which promised both interest and amusement. Just as her strong, capable hands could mould clay to the expression of her artist’s vision, so could she mould the dead yet plastic Joshua.

She looked down the table. Yes. This cheery and successful gathering was her work.... She had wasted more time than she could afford over a silver painted clay model of the “Carynthia,” which lay anchored on the length of the table in sea of gauze. She wished that she herself, and not the experts of the Eminent Firm, had taken in hand the decoration of the house, and wondered whether others would notice its bleak lack of personality, of love, of intimate touches, of things obviously cherished. Her architect neighbour, Sir Gilbert Illington, answered her thought.

“All this doesn’t seem to fit in with our host,” he said.

“What do you think would?”

“Something more Victorian. Bigger, friendlier, more comfortable. A snowy table-cloth, red damask wall-paper, with an oil portrait or two of portly gentlemen and insipid ladies and some dark studies of still life.”

“And plush curtains edged with little pompoms?”

“The mid-Victorians had very good curtains, my dear Robina. They lasted. Their furniture was solid and expressive. All this is excellent of its kind—the whole house—but psychologically in relation with our host it’s gimcrackery. I’ve been puzzled ever since I came in.”

“It’s his house and his taste, anyhow,” said Robina.

“Is it?” His tone was that of the man unconvinced. “How much had you to do with it?”

“Nothing whatever.”

“Well, I give it up,” he said.

She smiled ironically, loyal to Joshua, in that she would not betray his childlike faith in the Eminent Firm. The more enigmatic the qualities that Joshua seemed to display, the greater were his chances in the social world. He was a man so unassuming, so devoid of any touch of the war-profiteer’s blatancy, and yet vouched for by Sir John Baldo as one of England’s Great Industrial Leaders, that the “Carynthian” circle had overlooked his abysmal ignorance of the things that to them were household words, and comfortably took for granted hidden intellectualities that had made him a man of note. That was why Illington wondered how the man who had never heard of the Taj Mahal had managed to furnish an impeccably “period” house.

“You’re not a self-made man, on your own showing,” Robina had said to him during the early days of their friendship, when he had artlessly related to her the main outline of his life. “If you weren’t born with a silver spoon in your mouth, you had one shoved into it as soon as doesn’t matter. The self-made man can always get away on his stunt. He can say: ‘I started by selling papers in the street, and now, without anybody’s help, I control the biggest group of newspapers or fried-fish shops in the country,’ and people think what a wonderful fellow he is, and dukes ask him to do them the favour of marrying their daughters. But you can’t do that because it wouldn’t be true. You succeeded your father, in a perfectly natural way, as the head of a great business. That’s quite enough for anybody. So just take your stand on that and you’ll be all the happier, and it’ll certainly be better for your son who has got to start from where you leave off. This is sense and not snobbery.”

“I quite see your point,” he had replied. “You’re perfectly right. But I can’t help feeling such a fool among all these people.”

She had shrugged amused shoulders. “If you go about with a placard hung round your neck—‘I feel a fool’—they’ll naturally take you for one. By advertising you can make people believe anything. But, if you go among them just for what you’re worth—and, as I’ve said, you’re not worth the self-made man stunt—they’ll just take you at your face value and won’t worry about you except as a human being.”

He had made one final objection during this illuminating discourse of his newly discovered Egeria. He had had no education. How could he hide what was obvious?

“Don’t talk of things you know nothing about,” she had said oracularly, “and people will think you know far more about them than they do.”

And Joshua, who, for the first time in his life, had come under the influence of a Feminine Force, regarded her in a mentally blinking way as the most wonderful woman in the world, and had done his best to carry out her counsels. There grew quickly the legend around him of the man who had made all the stout and honest boots in which all the Allies had marched to Victory. He was kindly, pleasant-mannered and stimulatingly reticent. As he never talked of boots, of which his knowledge equalled that of any living man, how were folks to guess his ignorance on other matters concerning which he maintained an equally profound silence?

He had done his bit in the war. His two missing fingers gave credence to his admission of German unkindness. An athletic second mate on board, who fancied himself as an amateur boxer, had produced a set of gloves; whereupon Joshua had varied the usual games and entertainments by the institution of boxing competitions and had himself, though somewhat elderly and out of condition, scientifically defeated on points a leading stoker whose claim to be ex-middle-weight champion of the Mercantile Marine had been allowed by Joshua, expert in pugilistic literature.

Thus Joshua, in spite of himself, or because of himself—he maintained the one proposition, Robina the other—had been found pleasant in the eyes of the “Carynthian” inner circle, eleven of whom came in a friendly way to his house-warming.

He was well placed between Lady Baldo and Lady Evangeline Hill. With the one he could discuss the exotic food of strange lands; with the other he shared a common interest in the Turf. The prowess of young men in the delicate conduct of a big inflated ball with their feet, and the relative speed of highly trained horses, always occupied, apart from considerations of earning a personal living, the deepest thoughts of most inhabitants of Trenthampton. They were matters of national, vital, intimate concern. Did the men of the County Regiments in the first frozen, muddy, bloody trenches of the war curse the slackers who stayed at home and played football? Not a bit of it. They tore, one from the other, the faded pink local evening newspapers, sent by their friends, in order to learn the fortunes of The Wanderers, the really glorious. It was only afterwards ... well, nothing happened; for the really glorious were pitched themselves into the trenches, and acquitted themselves no less gloriously. But in a Trenthampton man’s heart of hearts war wasn’t a serious matter. Football was. And next to it in importance, paramount over human affairs, was horse-racing. Any child of eleven could tell you a likely one for the 3.30 at Gatwick, to say nothing of the Derby, the Leger, the City and Suburban, and such-like Holy National Celebrations.

No one can live his life in this mephitic, intellectual atmosphere and remain a man of free and independent intelligence. To Joshua, Newmarket, Downing Street and Buckingham Palace were co-existent and equal symbols of England’s greatness. A prudent man—most Trenthampton men are prudent—and by temperament no gambler, he rarely put more on a horse than a pound each way, less as a financial venture than as a backing of his own considered judgment; but he was an almost unconsciously fine authority on form. He took it for granted that a knowledge of the life-history and varying kinetic achievements of a thousand four-legged animals, which, from the point of view of those not financially or otherwise personally interested in the enormous and fascinating Racing Industry, appears the most futile and idiotic of human concerns, must be, of necessity, the mental equipment of a reasonable man who has the privilege of being born on English soil. Only England and her queer enfant terrible, Australia, can produce such a fantastic psychological phenomenon. Except for his artilleryman’s days, when horses were horses and beings to be loved and cherished and trained in gallantry, for they meant men’s lives and shared men’s deaths, he had never had anything to do with horses. He had never owned a hack, far less a race-horse. He had never met—as far as he was aware had never seen—the owner of a race-horse. His bets were as trivial as his tossings for drinks. He had attended less than a dozen race-meetings during his busy and sequestered life, and yet ... and yet he talked to the delighted racing Lady Evangeline with the authority of an editor of “Form at a Glance.”

“We must go into partnership, you and I,” she laughed. “What with your knowledge and my instinct, there’s a fortune in it.”

“I’m afraid there isn’t,” he said bluntly, raising his maimed hand in an Englishman’s clumsy gesture. “I only bet in half-crowns.”

She was blonde, pretty, thin-faced and shrewd. She gave him a swift sidelong glance, and decided that he must be intimately involved in Higher Turf Finance; a subtle and silent man to be carefully tended.

In such unconscious ways did Joshua acquire Reputation.

As acting hostess Robina bade farewell to the departing guests, among murmurs of thanks and congratulations. Joshua beamed. He had made several pleasant, informal engagements during the evening. He was to dine soon with the Baldos, to lunch on Thursday at the St. James’s Club with Victor Spens and to find a seat in Lady Evangeline’s box for the Grand National. Sutton, too, had received invitations to more frivolous entertainments.

“A great success,” Robina declared. “A perfect dinner. Perfect service. Everybody enjoyed themselves.”

Joshua agreed. It had been far pleasanter than he had anticipated. For one thing, he hadn’t known what these brand-new servants were capable of. And then——

“And then, what?” she asked.

He shrugged his shoulders. Sutton was lounging on the arm of a sofa.

“Dotley was with the Earl of Petersham for ten years until the old rip died,” said the young man. “So as far as buttling goes that’s good enough for me—I didn’t worry.”

“Neither did I,” said Robina. “Nor about anything else.”

She lingered awhile in idle talk; then announced her departure. Sutton moved to the door.

“I’ll see about a taxi for you.”

“I’ll do that,” said his father. “You get off to bed.”

The boy laughed, took leave of Robina, as he held open the door for the two elders to pass out. They went down the soft-carpeted stairs. A servant stood in the hall.

“Taxi, madam?”

“Not just yet,” said Joshua. “You don’t mind, do you? Just a quarter of an hour’s peace and a quiet drink in the library?”

She assented graciously. It was early and she had nothing to do. She entered the formally though comfortably furnished room and took up her position on the high, leather-covered fender-seat, while he busied himself with the mixing of whisky-and-sodas. She glanced around.

“I suppose you know you’ve got some quite good Morlands here.”

“I didn’t know. What are Morlands?”

“Morland was the great genre painter from whose pictures all these coloured prints were taken.”

“Thanks,” said Joshua, handing her a glass and pushing a little table within her reach. “I’m deadly ignorant. I don’t let it out to other people, but I do to you. Morland.” He scanned one or two close by for some moments. “You say he was a great fellow. Well, do you know, I like ’em. By gum, yes! I hadn’t bothered to look at ’em before.” He sat beside her. “Do you really think the dinner was a success?”

She smiled. “Of course I do. Why not?”

He passed a hand over his thatch of short, red hair, and the furrow deepened across his brow.

“I suppose it was, in a way. Anybody with money and good-will and a friend like you can give people enough to eat and drink and pair them off properly.... It’s not that.... It’s something to do with myself. I’ve been to a good many men’s dinners. When the host’s a dud, the thing falls flat. When he’s alive and has his touch on everybody there it goes with a swing....”

“It went like a whole combination of swings and roundabouts,” she assured him, whereat he laughed.

“Well, I wish I could say what I mean.” He pondered for a moment. “I’m with these people, but not of them. When once we get off our narrow common track, I feel lost. They have something which I haven’t. It isn’t the three B’s—birth, breeding and brains. I can muddle along without them. It’s something else.” He rose with an impatient gesture. “And I’m damned if I know what it is.”

Robina lit a cigarette. “How long have you felt like this?”

“Ever since I saw that white palace in India which I’d never heard of and everybody talked so much about—wait a bit—the Taj Mahal.”

The woman and the artist suddenly felt cold and drew a short breath, as at an inspired thought.

“Look at those Morlands again.”

“Eh?”

“Look at them.”

He obeyed mechanically.

“What do you think of them?”

“I’ve told you. They’re lovely.”

“So is the Taj Mahal, and Michael Angelo’s Pietà—the Virgin with the Dead Christ on her knees—in St. Peter’s at Rome, which you didn’t seem very interested in, and the sea-gulls flashing over that bit of cobalt blue I remember pointing out to you in the Indian Ocean. That’s one thing all these people, or most of them, have got instinctively, which you don t seem to have—an ordinary sense of beauty. A sense of beauty as necessary to decent life as air, or water, or pity, or fear....”

“I’ll have to think that out,” said Joshua seriously.

She laughed, and, being a woman of tact, turned the conversation to more comfortable topics until she took her leave. When she had gone, Joshua had one more scrutiny of the Morlands and then lit an old pipe and sat down before the fire until it was long extinct, reviewing the forty-odd drab and colourless years of his life and seeming to stand half-baffled on the brink of a new and rosily nebulous world.

There had always been a deep, inner dissatisfaction with existence; a dim subconsciousness of something unknown towards which he had groped.... He remembered he had tried in vain to find it at a hectic revivalist meeting many years ago. Beauty ... the Taj Mahal ... white wings against a blue sea ... These warm old prints of the great fellow, Morland. He spent half an hour looking into them. Yes, by God! There was something about them that hit him somewhere. Why hadn’t he been hit before? Then there rose up from the mists of Time a queer fact. He had won a prize at school for Freehand Drawing.... Surely there was some connection....

Shivering with cold, he went up to bed, not knowing what to make of an unprecedented experience.