Читать книгу Joshua's Vision - William J. Locke - Страница 7

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Joshua went about for some time in a subdued frame of mind. The more he saw of Robina the more did she appear to enfold within herself the insoluble mystery of woman. The knowledge of the real secret of her life increased his adoring admiration, but it also kept him dumb. His moral instincts still threw back to the Little Bethel of Trenthampton and its strict morality and inelastic sanctions, according to which there was no difference in heinousness between breaches of the sixth, seventh and eighth commandments. There had also been rubbed into his religious consciousness the uncomfortable Gospel extension of that seventh commandment to a pure and simple affair of the eyes. The general disregard of this awful and almost heathenish tabu of his tradition, as a tabu, and the acceptance of the principle merely as a convention keeping the body social together, was one of the phenomena of the new polite world into which he had been thrown. Robina was a married woman. Therefore she was tabu. But why she supported the rotten little drunkard in East Africa, who had afforded her a hundred clear grounds for perfectly respectable divorce, he couldn’t make out. He forgave her generous misrepresentation of her conjugal affairs. That came naturally from her character. She did things greatly; or, at least, so thought Joshua.

He saw a good deal of Robina. He was transparent enough for her to divine these elementary workings within him, and she found it safe to mother him all the more. It was not only the mothering of a middle-aged babe discovered tossing on the waters of strange social seas; it became the fascinating task of developing the artistic germ that had been darkly latent for more than half a lifetime in a human being. Frankenstein though she might have been in desire, the growing artistic monster was none of her creating.... The purchase of the Old Crome was but the beginning of the gradual transformation of the soulless house into a place of beauty and comfort. To have ordained, taking things in hand after the manner of the original Expert of the Eminent Firm, would have spoiled the charm of mothering processes.

“I want something here, Robina,” he would say. “What would you suggest?”

And she would answer:

“You’ve heaps of time. Run about and find a bit of self-expression.”

A year ago the term would have conveyed as much meaning to him as an undistributed middle or a quaternion or pailletted tulle, but now he understood. So he hunted about London, like a dog in search of truffles, and having found one to his sense, laid it at her feet. Whereupon she either praised or condemned; counselled acquisition or rejection; in which way she retained command.

Robina was a rock to which he always returned after floundering in strange waters. His floundering was inevitable. Now and then he was lost in a welter of unfamiliar and frightening emotions.

He performed many actions, after which, sitting alone in his house still in its stage of creation, he wondered whether he, Joshua Fendick, or some other fellow who had crept in under his skin, had been the performer. The man of lifelong routine had fallen into an existence of ramshackle hours. There were days when awful loneliness oppressed him; when he could think of nothing to do; other days when he worked through the daylight at his newly found art; other days when the perfection of the plaster model of some masterpiece eluded his prentice craftsmanship, and he lived in a despair by no means divine (though perhaps, indeed, it was), but of hellish agony, racking his soul with the proclamation of imbecile incompetence; other days when he could sweep along perfect roads to a race-course and see horses glorious not only in their speed, but in his newer vision of their beauty; other days when he lunched and drank and dined and supped and danced (coming home at all hours) with his gradually growing acquaintance; other days of rain, of wanderings about the house, of half-hearted work in his studio, of dreary lunches at an unsympathetic Cock-Pit, of uninspired visitings of picture-shows; days of solitary afternoons at theatres; days when he cursed July for not being December, so that he could draw the curtains, sit before the fire and dream like a dog. And the nights the same.

The young man, Sutton, was no companion. The boy’s serious thoughts were atavistic. Business was business; a solemn matter; the acute scent on the main chance; the making of money for the sake of money-making. A boy who would go far. Of his ambitions and his strenuousness Joshua had no doubt. That was one extreme view of Sutton. In the middle distance, he appeared a pleasant courteous youth, who blessed his father for lifting him from the provincial horrors of Trenthampton, but at the same time regarded his excursions into the realm of art as the meanderings of a harmless lunatic. At the other extreme, he was the modern young man of queer modern pleasure. He had his own by no means disreputable life to lead, perhaps the least disreputable life that a young generation in search of sensation has led for centuries. A hundred years ago Sutton would have been the boon-companion of Corinthian Tom and his abominable friend, Jerry; later he would have got drunk with Captain Costigan and bawled obscenities at Colonel Newcome. Later still he would have haunted the Promenade of the Empire, and supped with venal ladies at the Continental. Sutton spent most of his spare time in crowded, blaring, beastly places, it is true; but in the company of young men and women of his own respectable class. They drank a certain amount of champagne by necessity; a vaster quantity of orangeade and such liquid innocuities by choice; danced until they were dog-tired, and then crept virtuously home to bed.

It was not a course of life for Mentor to recommend to Telemachus, but it was not such as could incur Joshua’s stern disapproval, although he met his son at dinner in Eaton Terrace about once a week.

The fact remained, however, that, in spite of living under the same roof, Joshua and Sutton moved in separate spheres. So for a hundred different reasons Joshua was a lonely man....

And the devil of it was that if he had been a dull dead dog of a lonely man, it wouldn’t have mattered, even to himself. But within him was stirring the newly awakened spirit of a very vital man. A man suddenly confronted with the spiritualities, the colours, the fascinations of existence which he ought to have discovered a quarter of a century ago. He was restless, frantically impelled to make up for lost time. But how to do it, even under the auspices of Robina, Lady Evangeline, and Victor Spens, he didn’t know. He was like a water spaniel running up and down a spring-board longing to dive into the sea, yet unable to choose the spot for taking off.

Now and then other people, for reasons of their own, gave him a push and over he went. A wealthy, healthy, young-looking man of five-and-forty, of ingenuous countenance and ingenuous modesty, carries about with him no veil or emblem, such as a Lama’s robe and begging-bowl, rendering him sacrosanct to a predatory sex....

There was the affair with Mrs. Reggie Blackadder, for instance, a widow called by the old-fashioned but significant name of Dora. Gifts. She lived by them. She also gave in return. That’s why her friends, in her own queer social circle, regarded her as an honest woman. Joshua met her at a country-house party near Newmarket, during one of the late meetings. The lady had but to turn a propeller and set whirring the unsuspected machinery of God knows what artistic cravings, reachings towards beauty, vital impulses within Joshua, and Joshua sailed up heavenwards. It was a wonderful experience, breathless, exhilarating; but he crashed very badly when there swam before his eyes a moneylender’s account for fifteen hundred pounds which, if left unpaid, would bring immediate disaster to his companion in Cytherean airs.

“It’s too terrible,” said the lady. “A bolt from the blue.” He didn’t quite know what a bolt from the blue was—nor does anybody else. “Only came this morning. And with it a letter from my stockbrokers.”

She spun the usual tale of confidently expected dividends from suddenly depreciated shares.

He said in his honesty: “This is only a bluff. Leave me those sharks’ letter. I’ll deal with ’em.”

“But I must have the money to pay them with, my dear.”

“Not a bit of it,” said Joshua. “Here’s the very man that will help us.”

Victor Spens, precise, dark, saturnine, passed across the terrace in front of the morning-room by whose open French windows they were standing. She seized his wrist, stared at him in agony.

“Nobody but you must see that.”

“Two heads are better than one. Victor’s a sound chap. Trust to us.”

He went out. “Victor!”

Victor Spens halted and strolled to the window. The lady called to Joshua:

“You damned fool, come back!”

“What’s up?” asked Victor Spens.

“Mrs. Blackadder’s in trouble, and, seeing you, I thought I’d consult you, as a friend and a man of the world—but it seems——”

“It seems,” cried the lady, “that you’re no more use than a sick headache. Give me the letter and don’t you dare say anything about it until I tell you to. Promise?”

“Of course,” said the bewildered Joshua, giving her the paper, which she snatched away.

“Word of honour?”

“Word of honour.”

“I’m in no kind of trouble at all, Victor. Joshua belongs to the middle of the last century and has discovered a mare’s nest.” She laughed, and quickly reconstituted herself the amazing courtesan, and lightly smacked Joshua’s cheeks.

“You silly old idiot. Who has got a cigarette?”

Victor, more nervously quick than Joshua, supplied her needs. She changed the talk for a moment or two, and with a secret menacing glance at Joshua went away, leaving the two men on the terrace.

Victor Spens watched her pass through the far open door of the morning-room and turned to Joshua.

“How much this time?”

Joshua cried in sudden indignation: “What do you mean?”

“A couple of thousand? The moneylender stunt?”

Joshua gaped. “Stunt? How did you know? There’s no stunt about it. Mrs. Blackadder’s in a tight corner and she came to me for advice—I saw you——”

“You said so before, my dear fellow,” said Victor Spens. “But if you’ll allow me to say so, without any danger of fisticuffs”—Joshua was regarding him angrily with hands tightly clenched by his sides—“for you’re a noted amateur boxer, and I’m not—if you’ll listen quietly, I’ll tell you, that the last thing the dear lady wanted was advice. She wanted money.”

“Naturally—to pay the moneylender.”

Victor Spens, dry and immaculate in grey flannel suit and Old Etonian tie, sat on the low parapet of the terrace and lit a cigarette.

“You called me into this business, my dear friend. I didn’t butt in. Why the lady should have asked your advice in her financial concerns is no affair of mine. But she did. You said so. Would you still like me to give you what’s loosely called a friendly lead?”

Joshua reflected. The lady had called him a damned fool, in a peculiarly unpleasant tone. No woman on earth had ever called him a damned fool. Never had he seen such hard hatred and threat in a woman’s eyes as he had caught in hers the moment before her exit. He passed his hands over a perplexed brow. For all the darkness and inhibitions of his life, Joshua was not a fool. The calm, cool, ironical man sitting on the low parapet before him, his bust outlined clear against the green and sloping lawn, in the limpid summer air, the man whose life was passed in dealing with the singular relations of England with Poland and China and Mexico and God knows where, had been, from their first meeting on the “Carynthia,” consistently his friend. Why, he couldn’t make out. Joshua was a modest soul. But there it was. Victor Spens, C.B., C.M.G., and everything else but K.C.B., to which eminence, in the natural course of promotion, every one said he would rise six months hence, had, as far as he, Joshua, was concerned, no axe to grind, no fish to fry. Victor just liked him as a human being. It was funny, but he couldn’t assign any other reason for Victor’s continued little acts of friendship.

It was one of those moments that mean much in a man’s life. To Joshua an explosive moment—a silly sort of explosive moment suggestive of the puffing flash of magnesium while being photographed at a public dinner. He almost shook his head and blinked and blew the smoke from his nostrils.

“Friendly lead? Yes.... Anyhow, I’ll believe what you say. You’re trying to tell me that the moneylender’s letter wasn’t genuine.”

Victor nodded. “You’ve got it right, if not first time, at least soon enough. She worked it off on Charlie Woolff, who ought to have known better. Anyone can get note-paper printed with a correct-looking letter-heading. Anyone can type a communication. And anyone can sign a fictitious name. Anyone can have a letter posted to herself. Did she show you the envelope?”

“No.”

“You weren’t even worth that trouble, my dear fellow.”

“But the woman’s a——”

“Whatever you like to call her,” said Victor, calmly interrupting.

“But if so,” cried the scandalized Joshua, “why is she here in this house? Why am I here? And, damn it all, why are you here?”

“You think the last question’s a poser, don’t you?” said Victor with a thin smile. “It really isn’t. Listen. I’m going to be damned impertinent. But it’s for your good. You can kick me into the middle of the lawn if you like, and I shan’t resist.... Will you?”

“Oh, get on,” cried Joshua.

“Well.... To answer your three questions. One. Dora Blackadder’s here because it’s here that she belongs. You must have seen for yourself.... Our hosts, the Etheringtons, are charming enough people in their way. But the crowd round them is corrupt. The tainted end of the society joint. Have you heard anything in this house that hadn’t a gamey flavour? You must see for yourself that you don’t find such people at houses like Fenton Hill’s, although he and Evangeline seem to do nothing else but hunt and race. I mention them because they’re common friends. With them, as with the enormous mass of decent folk, everything’s clean and sweet. Think it’s clean and sweet here? No. Reason for Dora Blackadder’s presence. Question Number Two. Why are you here? Because you’re supposed to be rich and they think you a mug. A specializing mug. You know far more about racing form than anyone of them could take the trouble to learn. You don’t bet yourself, but you can give them valuable information. They also regard you as a nice sort of fellow to live upon. They’ve been trying to persuade you to buy a yacht and take ’em all on board, haven’t they?”

“They have,” said Joshua.

“You’re the most potentially useful thing they’ve come across for a long time. So that’s why you’re here.”

“And you—knowing all this——?”

Victor rose and threw away his cigarette. “Question three. That’s a bit difficult.” His dark lined face grew serious as he looked directly into Joshua’s candid blue eyes. “They had the infernal impudence to ask me down. They try to rope in anybody they can. I’ve refused heaps of times. Then I heard you were coming. So did Lady Evangeline. She said, ‘For God’s sake, go.’ So I accepted.... I’m glad I did....”

Joshua walked up and down the flagged terrace, his arms behind his back. The past hour had been an amazement and a bewilderment. Oh yes, he thought, he had crashed right enough. The lady who had carried him heavenwards belonged, beyond human doubt, to the race of which “The Scarlet Woman” of his religious childhood had been the awful prototype. He had been inveigled into her snares like any callow stripling. He had been a mere mug.

He pondered over Victor’s last words, and thanked him. All the while he had been uneasily aware that Victor wasn’t of the same class as the rest of the house-party....

“It was damned good of you—and damned good of Lady Evangeline to have thought of it. I’ll never forget.” He made one or two paces. “At the same time, why didn’t you give me a hint?”

“There are some things a fellow can do, and others he can’t.”

Joshua met Victor’s smile. “I see,” said he. “And now what shall I do?”

“Get your traps packed; order your car, write the most grateful and regretful of notes to your hostess, and clear out—called away on sudden business.”

“But Mrs. Blackadder?”

“A bit of jewellery from Bond Street has been known to have its elegant consolations. Do you remember the exiled king in Daudet’s book, who always settled these little affairs by sending the lady a ouistiti? She’ll sell yours at once and bear you no malice.”

“That sounds rather beastly and cynical,” said the perplexed Joshua.

“This is a beastly and cynical atmosphere we’ve got ourselves into,” replied Victor. “I’ll cut the racing—it’s the last day—and motor up with you if you like.”

“Splendid,” said Joshua.

Thus came to an end the affair with Mrs. Reggie Blackadder. She wrote a charming letter of thanks for the Bond Street gewgaw, calling it divine—a word which Joshua, in spite of his illiteracy, had begun to shiver at, and the next time she met him—in a London restaurant—cut him dead; and in that kind of death Joshua found soothing of a troubled spirit.

There were other occasions, of course, when unexpected pushes sent him over. But he learned to walk warily. He learned to distinguish the decent folk, with whom, in the words of Victor Spens’s harangue, everything was clean and sweet, from the small tainted crew of degenerates and blood-suckers who are supposed to be the ordinary types of English society. All the same, what it matters to record is that Joshua discovered a new zest in life, and felt within himself the youthful impulse towards many adventures. He longed to see again the world which he had but lately beheld with unseeing eyes. So he spent the summer in travel. Against the attractions of a pair of sparkling eyes and trim legs encased in flesh-coloured stockings may be set the no less vehement attractions of cold immortal beauty in marble before which he could stand in wonder in the galleries of Rome and Florence. Trenthampton and Swan & Co. and the Redesdale Road and boots and the pallid, lifeless Bella seemed very far away.

He got into the habit of dashing to places, by aeroplane as far on his way as he could, and filling himself full of them for an excited week, and then dashing back again, so as to digest them in his home in Eaton Terrace.

Robina had once told him of Anatole France’s definition of criticism: adventures among masterpieces. Why not, she had said, include Life with Art? Why not adventures among masterpieces of humanity? Joshua, in his sober way, thought it sound doctrine. It extended imaginatively the lesson taught by Victor Spens. It was his nature to ponder seriously over such suggestions. When he had asked where human masterpieces could be found, among which to have the aforesaid adventures, she had replied, perhaps rather platitudinously—for every word that drops from an Egeria’s lips can’t be a priceless pearl of wisdom:

“Any old where, from a Garden Party at Buckingham Palace to the crowd round a fried-fish stall in the Whitechapel Road.”

“I’d have to get introductions to both sets,” said he. “To say nothing of all in between. But I do see what you’re getting at,” he added hastily, lest she should be hurt by his unusual flippancy. “ ‘The rank is but the guinea-stamp.’ Who said that? Shakespeare?”

“Burns.”

“I’ll remember it,” said Joshua.

He remembered many things, having the tenacious memory not only of the highly trained man of business, but that of the newly awakened man eager to store his mind with facts and sensations.

In the meanwhile, during all this search for adventures among masterpieces both of art and humanity, he became vaguely conscious of a craving to create some masterpiece of his own. In his untrained mind issues became confused. Criticism was one thing, Creation another. In a dim way he haggled with a Truth. If criticism was an adventure among other people’s masterpieces, creation of one’s own masterpiece must be the Supreme Adventure.

Then one day the semi-lunatic thought electrified him. Why shouldn’t he be a creator?