Читать книгу Ancestor Jorico - William J. Locke - Страница 3

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I suppose, after all, I had better tell this story myself, the story of Toby and his three cousins, all descendants of a dreadful old gentleman, one Captain John Gregory Jorico, who died in 1830. It is mainly, however, the story of Toby, Major Wilfrid Tobin Boyle, D.S.O., M.C., and of Jones, his body-servant through whom Romance entered into Toby’s disgruntled post-war life.

The story, such as it is, might reasonably be entitled “A Family Affair.” I, who speak, am more or less of the Family, though not descended from Ancestor Jorico, and so is my cousin, Lady Jane Crowe, who plays an important part in the narrative. It is only, however, because I have shared in a common, mild adventure, and, as a patient and fairly amiable old buffer, have listened to the confidences, confessions, grievances, hopes and rigmaroles of nearly everybody concerned, that I dare bring myself into the story at all. I needn’t do it, of course; but you must bear with me while I try to do things in my own way.

So I must tell you first, very briefly, something about myself—“declare my authority,” as the winning opener of a jack-pot must do in the game of poker.

I am Lieutenant-General Sir Thomas Forester, K.C.B., et cetera. I have a wife and two daughters who have nothing whatever to do with the story, and so you won’t hear much of them. I am just a retired professional soldier, living on scraps. I cannot say that I’m comfortably off. I was discussing ways and means the other day with an old decayed fellow warrior, and he shouted: “Dammit, sir, no gentleman these days is comfortably off. It’s a contradiction in terms.”

At any rate, I must supplement my slender income. The pen, though perhaps not really mightier than the sword, is more useful than the poor darned old steel thing that can’t be pulled out of its scabbard for rust. So I write a bit. I write for anybody or anything, from the “Quarterly Review” to “Home Chat.” I’m not proud. A couple of years or so ago I published a novel—about Burma in the early days when I was a subaltern. Everyone said it was a jolly good novel. I think it was myself, seeing that, up to date, I’ve received two hundred and seventy-three pounds, seventeen and sixpence in royalties.

You see, I’m explaining myself as fast as I can.

Now Toby comes in.

“When are you going to write another novel, sir?”

“As soon as I can get an idea for one,” said I.

If you think you can go out into the hedgerows, no matter how figurative the word may be, and pick ideas like blackberries, you’re mistaken. You might just as well have asked me to find and engender an idea for the conversion of the paper on which I am writing into a negotiable million-pound bank-note.

“What about our little Jorico stunt?” said Toby. “It’s quite a tale.”

“Quite,” said I. “You were always a resourceful chap.”

He had been on my staff during the war, after wounds and gas and what-not had knocked him out of the trenches, and I had found him full of brains and enthusiasm. Besides, he was a sort of second cousin or half-nephew of mine, by marriage—I never can exactly determine which—and I had known him, off and on, since he was born.

“It might be a good yarn,” said Toby. “And I and all the rest of us will be only too happy to put you wise on details.”

“Very good of you,” said I. “I’ll think about it.”

Well, I have thought about it, and the following pages are the result of my investigation of the affairs of people which were influenced by the will of a slave-trading, buccaneering, piratical old sea captain, John Gregory Jorico, who died about a hundred years ago.

It was the fascination of Jones, however, that finally led to my momentous decision.

I don’t know whom to explain first, Toby or Jones. Toby in the war was a very gallant soldier. He was messing about in an Art School when the war came. But he held a subaltern’s commission in a fine Territorial Regiment. His keenness, in the days when the prospect of a European war seemed an absurdity to both the fat bourgeoisie and the intellectual doctrinaires of England, opened my heart to the boy. I would say to him: “Why the devil don’t you get somehow into the Regular Army?” But it was a question of family ways and means, and, also, there was the artistic side of him.

As far as ever I’ve been able to make out Toby, his conception of Valhalla would be the cleaving, for all eternity, of enemies from helm to chine with one hand, while with the other he drew pictures of young Valkyrie in engaging attitudes and diaphanous costume. He never inhabited a dug-out in France without papering it with the joy of all that was alien to the mud and blood in which the males of the race had to wallow.

You see, I have to explain a double-sided Toby: an essential soldier and a youth captivated by an artistic facility in portraying draped and undraped female loveliness. He had an individual line, and a wonderful sense of drapery. I have some of his early drawings which, uncomfortably off though I am, I wouldn’t sell for any money. But at heart—and this I know; for not only do I love the boy, but as a professional who commanded a division in France with no discredit, may therefore claim the privilege of expert judgment—Toby was a soldier and nothing else but a soldier.

I repeat that I knew him as a keen Territorial before the war. As far as the hideous phantasmagoria, which was the mind of a man in high command during the war, allowed, I followed his career. If he hadn’t been knocked out he would have had his battalion. You may call it favouritism, nepotism—what you will—but when a hard-driven General of Division wants a smart fellow on his staff and finds a divinely-created member of his family waiting for a job, he would be a criminally conscientious lunatic not to send for him. That is how Toby and I became real friends.

Toby now is thirty-five. I am any age you like. Put it that my earliest memory was threading Noah’s beard with my baby fingers and asking whether the barnacles I found there were good to eat.

I had better begin with Toby.

You see him at a point when the story is about to open in his private office. It was the last kind of office in which anyone would have dreamed of seeing Toby at work. You must see him closing a door on a laugh and a scent of furs, and turning to a softly lit room all discreet greens on floors and windows, with a Louis XV writing-table and Louis XV chairs. Faintly coloured old French prints hung around the walls. It was supposed to be restful to the nerves of women agitated by the realities of a meaningless existence. So had said its investor, Toby’s mother, who had the cynical grain of muse inherent in the character of all great women.

On an ash-tray smouldered the cigarette-end which the departing visitor had left. He threw it into the fire behind his writing-seat, and pressed a bell. A door opened and a trim young woman entered with a pile of typewritten letters. He sat down; glanced through them; signed them.

“That all?”

“Yes, Major Boyle.”

“Thank God!”

“Mrs. Palmer begs me to tell you that the Honourable Mrs. Bemmerton is being fitted and would like to see you.”

“Damn,” said Toby. “What’s the matter?”

The secretary didn’t know. The appointment was entered on the card in front of him. Toby nodded. The secretary gathered up the letters and retired. Toby, referring to the Hon. Mrs. Bemmerton, damned the woman. He rose, rubbed both eyes with the tips of his fingers, a favourite gesture, and grinned helplessly. The forthcoming interview was a commonplace incident in his daily routine; yet custom could not stale his frantic dislike of Mrs. Bemmerton and her kind. They brought out the worst in him, though on the demonstration of that in him which was most suave depended the prosperity of “Palmyre,” and his own livelihood. For “Palmyre,” which, since his mother’s death, he owned and ran, ranked among the first dozen fashionable dressmaking establishments in London. It had branches in Paris, Deauville, Cannes.... Toby in an almost literal sense of the word was its presiding genius. He had the inspired eye for colour, material, line, drapery and all that goes to the creation of feminine costume. He had been unconsciously cultivating the gift during the war, when he covered dug-outs with dreams of female exquisiteness.

“I must look around for a job,” said Toby on demobilization.

“There’s one to your hand,” said his mother, who had manfully built up the business so as to support not only a post-war Toby, but a husband who, having passed most of his life in the service of a great Insurance Company, had retired on a pension of a few hundreds a year. “A job waiting for you. Come into the business and help with the designing.”

As nobody else in London, or Great Britain, or the British Empire, seemed to be clamouring for the services of a demobilized Major of Territorials, Toby fitted up a little studio in the back of the Hanover Street premises and began to earn his living. And now he owned the concern and put all his strength and his brain into its development—and loathed the sight and the sound and the smell of it.

You see, he was the last fellow in the world you would have taken for a man dressmaker. He was an agreeably and attractively brown man. His hair was brown, his skin was light brown, and of that queer texture that encourages brown freckles. His eyes were brown, and the shaggy eyebrows were of a deeper brown. Without being hirsute there was a hint of brown fluff on his hands. He was fairly tall, loosely built; one of those men who look well in any uniform formally pre-arranged—military uniform, tennis or golfing kit, full evening dress—but the most lounging-looking fellow you ever saw in what is called a lounge suit. He could spot with accuracy the imperfections in a woman’s elaborate attire, but he seemed to be unaware that decently dressed men don’t go about with their collar-stud showing above their tie, their socks unsupported by suspenders and the laces straggling disgracefully over their shoes. Not all Jones’s earnest pressing could maintain the crease in the brown material of Toby’s trousers. Many women called him a bear; others, from another feminine point of view, a pet lamb. The latter he regarded with the greater distaste.

His hand felt a pipe in his jacket pocket. He would dearly have loved to fill it, light it, and, thus furnished with masculine attribute, confront the Hon. Mrs. Bemmerton. But gentlemen don’t interview strange ladies pipe in mouth, and Toby was a gentleman before ever he came to be a dressmaker. He was also, by nature, a cheerful gentleman with an ironical twist at the corners of his lips and a quiet gleam of humour in his eyes. I have, however, seen the quiet gleam of humour grow deadly. Warfare is apt to develop that sort of thing.

Toby passed out of his luxurious pseudo-Louis XV office on the first floor and descended to the show room, a sensuous hall of pile carpets, mirrors and women. Women of all sorts. Saleswomen in impeccably unobtrusive black. Women in furs fingering materials. A queenly woman in evening dress, a mannequin, showing off a cloak to two dull-looking elderly women. At the back was a row of fitting cubicles, and at the door of one stood the fitter on the look-out for Toby. He crossed at her beckoning.

The Hon. Mrs. Bemmerton, thin, dark, raddled, stood within surveying herself in the long mirror. She wore an evening dress of dead rose and old gold. She turned as Toby entered.

“I’m glad you’ve come, Major Boyle. Just look at it.”

She spun round.

“I see,” said he.

“It won’t do at all.”

“It’s rotten,” said Toby.

“I’m glad you agree,” she said acidly.

“It’s nothing to do with me,” said Toby. “If you’d kept to my original design it wouldn’t have been rotten. You insisted on modifications”—he went into details—“this is the result.”

“Well. What are you going to do about it?”

“Whatever you suggest, Mrs. Bemmerton.”

“I think it’s disgraceful not to be able to carry out my idea. What if I leave the dress on your hands?”

Toby shrugged his loose shoulders. Mrs. Bemmerton was both rich and influential and one of the few women he attended to personally. He vowed he would do so no more.

“To put things bluntly, Mrs. Bemmerton,” said he, “if you want your own ideas carried out, this isn’t the sort of place to come to. People come to me for my ideas. That’s my only reason for existence.” He smiled. “You must either leave it on my hands or return to the original design. I can’t let that thing go out under the name of ‘Palmyre.’ It would ruin my reputation.” He glanced at his wrist-watch. “I’m so sorry. I have an appointment.”

He bowed pleasantly and left her.

Mrs. Bemmerton wanted the dress. The colours suited her. It was for an early special occasion. She had told her friends about it. But she knew that Major Boyle wouldn’t send it to her in its present state. So she capitulated. She was one of the women who looked on Toby as a bear.

Toby, his day’s work done, walked home to his flat in Mount Street, no great distance. It was a fine, brisk evening, and he sniffed the pure air with enjoyment and rejoiced in the sight and sound of men on the busy pavements. He lit his pipe at a street corner. If he had posed theatrically to himself, he would have turned down a side street and drunk a mug of ale at a common pub, and talked man’s talk with frowsty loafers. But Toby was downright and honest, as much to himself—so far as it is granted me to judge the workings of another man’s soul—as to the world at large.

I mention this because it was once the subject of a talk between us.

“Sometimes I feel,” he said, “as if I should like to mix with the lustiness of cabmen and prize-fighters and racing touts—just for the sheer masculinity of it—as a reaction from the dreadful world of women in which I have to live. But that’s all lunatic. I couldn’t be happy outside my own social element.”

I record his words here on account of their relation to after events in Toby’s life.

Toby, although he had a latch-key, rang the bell of his Mount Street flat. The door was opened by one who had the aspect of the perfect manservant; a man of about Toby’s age, thin, of medium height, with a sallow, rather finely cut, intelligent face, and astonishingly quick, light blue eyes. He smiled as he took Toby’s hat and stick. Toby made a few passes in the air. The man shook his head and made the first few movements of a man dealing cards. After the rapid interchange of a few more signs, Toby received the information that his father, Mr. Wilfrid Boyle, was at the Athenæum, where he played bridge most afternoons, and would not be home for dinner. The man preceded his master, and threw open the door of what, in most aristocratic Mount Street flats, would be the drawing-room, but in this case was Toby’s own room, equipped with every article of furniture and adornment that woman would most abhor. His father said it looked like the stranger’s smoking-room of a third-rate club. I never could agree to this, seeing nothing third-rate about Toby. The leather-appointed, anyhow-equipped, loose yet comfortable place was a fit setting for Toby’s clothes, and Toby’s clothes, apart from uniforms, were Toby himself.

He threw himself into a chair before a blazing fire. The man touched his shoulder with a delicate finger. Toby looked up. With twinkling swiftness the man sketched three ideas: the motion of raising a cup; the thumb motion of squirting soda from a siphon; the shaking of a cocktail. Toby smiled and made the thumb gesture. The man departed and returned quickly with a tray on which was whisky decanter, glass and siphon half clouded from its stay in the ice-box. He poured out the drink. Toby made a questioning sketch in the air. The man, in lightning pantomime, informed him that his host at dinner expected him to wear the dress-coat and white tie of ceremony.

“Oh, damn!” said Toby.

The man didn’t hear, but smiled pleasantly; and, drawing from his pocket one of those patent tablets on which you can write and from which you can erase by a slip of the hand, drew with a rapid stroke what was, practically, the ideograph of a woman. Toby took it from him and drew an ideographic hand holding a pistol at the woman’s head. Then they both laughed. It was Toby’s little joke. Mutual comprehension had been perfect. Communication by speech might possibly have taken longer. The man retired. Toby took up the evening paper that had been laid on the club fender-seat to air, refilled his pipe and gave never another thought to Jones.

For this bright-eyed, swift-witted deaf and dumb man was Jones, but for whom this history would never have been written.

In these days I know, except on privileged occasions, one does not mention war to ears polite. The last one was rather a vulgar and messy business, and nice people agree that we should regard it as not having happened. We don’t talk of ropes in the house of a man who has been hanged. A matter of taste. Also, it’s a bit old-fashioned. My old father served as a subaltern in the Crimea and in the Indian Mutiny. He bored my boyhood stiff. I, an old soldier, confess it.

But I can’t explain Jones without dragging in the war, for it made Jones what he was—a Mystery. I’ll be as brief as I can. Toby has told me all about it. He can be picturesque at times when the artist gets hold of him. He also has the soldier’s gift of accurate statement.

You must imagine a hell of a summer dawn on the Western front, cloudy, threatening rain. Attack, counter-attack along a big sector of the line, artillery thundering, a mine explosion on what we hoped was an impregnable position to our left. Hell let loose. You’ll find the engagement recorded in any history of the war. But I’m not going to record it. All that concerns my story is that Toby, then a captain, got back to his trench with a handful of his Company. Our barrage stopped the counter-attack. Stretcher-bearers went out and brought in the wounded. It was a mess, as I say, all along the sector. The rain came down and the mud mingled with the blood in every trench. It was a stalemate of an engagement, anyway, in that we kept the line; but the casualties were horrible....

It was only long after, when the wounded had been cleared from the trench, and the roll of his Company was called with the pitiful response whose memory even now haunts Toby, that he became aware of a stranger, apparently physically fit, in spite of a blood-congealed contusion on the side of his head, who, in the scurry of the retreat, had fallen into the trench. He wore a hacked and horrid tunic of Toby’s regiment. But he was not of Toby’s regiment. Toby learned that he had huddled himself, naked to the waist, in the first tunic to hand that had been stripped from a desperately wounded man. He had fallen into the trench, as I say, half naked. His boots and puttees had gone. A slight abrasion of the skin showed that his identity disc had either been torn or shot away. His clothing consisted solely of a pair of khaki breeches and a sort of bag of stout, old, blackened pigskin, together with the oval medal of the Virgin which most Roman Catholic English soldiers wore under their shirts, slung by a steel chain around his neck. He was deaf and dumb; could give no account of himself. Toby tried the deaf and dumb alphabet on his fingers in vain. By his gestures Toby gathered that he had been blown up in the mine explosion, and concluded that he must have been stripped as dead by enemies of the baser sort, who, however, had the decency to leave him his breeches and the superstition not to remove his medal or the thing that looked like some sort of reliquary. Toby wrote on a writing-pad. The man wrinkled his brow and shook his head. Whether he was illiterate—an uncommon, but far from unknown thing in the Army—or whether the mine explosion had knocked the power of reading and writing out of him, Toby had no means of determining. He certainly had not lost his memory. He had only lost means of self-expression. When Toby tried to discover his regiment a bright idea struck the man. He took Toby’s pad and pencil and sketched a rough but comically adequate map of England. He made three dots, one on the west coast, one in London, one somewhere in the eastern counties. His gestures showed that he was born in the first, worked in the second, and, confirmed by the sign of a scrabbled skeleton man carrying a gun, that he belonged to an eastern county regiment. As his wounded skull seemed to give him no trouble, and he appeared to be only hungry and somewhat cold, Toby had him clothed and fed, and bothered no more about him. The medical staff had their hands full. So had he. Then something hit him on the head and stunned him. It was nothing serious; but it knocked him out. When he recovered consciousness an hour or two later, he found the man, as batman, attending to his wants. “The chap would have it, sir,” said the only surviving sergeant of Toby’s Company, “and so I let him.”

Well, that was how Jones dawned on Toby.

As I say, it was one of our little messes in the war. The people that ought to have relieved the front trenches got messed up themselves. Only the bluff saved the situation. The thinnest of front lines was held for some hours, until the line was relieved. Toby got his D.S.O. for it, though modestly he could never tell why.

All this, I repeat, is with the sole purpose of telling you about Jones.

He accompanied Toby like a faithful dog to more or less comfortable billets of rest behind the lines. And then, of course, Toby had to send the poor fellow back to England, a deaf and dumb man, who can only communicate with his fellows by means of savage gestures and coarse ideographs on paper, being a none too useful soldier in time of war. But Toby, who liked the bright-eyed, efficient and obviously grateful fellow whom he christened Jones, went to some pains to assure a personal touch with him, no matter into what hospital he might be drafted. Toby, as a soldier, was one of the thorough people. He left nothing to chance. That’s why I loved him as a staff officer. He set his nets wide to catch the poor solitary fish, Jones, adrift in the welter of the hospital system of Great Britain. His most direct scheme was to supply Jones with twenty stamped and addressed envelopes, the significance of which the intelligent Jones clearly understood. For Jones and Toby kept up together a queer correspondence. When Toby’s envelopes had come to an end, Jones had obviously requested the hospital authorities to type him a fresh supply. Sometimes the nurses wrote themselves to Major Boyle. They said that mental specialists were most interested in Jones. Complete deafness, the breaking of ear-drums by explosives, aphasia induced by some lesion of the brain, the outward sign of which was the wound in the head, all complicated by common illiteracy; but in other respects a normal intelligence. He was a show case. The ordinary aphasiac could be got at through his ears. But Jones was stone-deaf. Writing was no use. He couldn’t read. He was one of the few cases of complete aphasia, or loss of expression in words. So great specialists, and ordinary doctors and nurses, petted and spoiled Jones, and gave him an exceeding good time in hospital.

That’s all I know of the clinical side of the man’s affliction. You will find his case, which has nothing to do with shell-shock or amnesia—loss of memory—recorded in the “Lancet.” I have only to do with the man as I have known him and his relations with Toby.

It fascinated Toby for a couple of years to correspond pictorially with Jones. The slightest indication of outward form seemed to react on the intelligence of the stricken man, who responded in kind. Between them, almost insensibly, they invented an ideographic system of communication, which tended to become as formal as Egyptian hieroglyphics. No man with a kindly heart and a decent brain could have resisted the joy of the experiment, seeing that the subject, a patient, was in desperate earnest to respond.

Afterwards, when they came together, they could do their ideographs by forefingers moving in the air. This I never could follow. I could generally make myself understood to Jones by my clumsy graphic ideographs and he, as though he were speaking to a child, would convey his ideas to me in simple drawings. And, naturally, there were the ordinary elementary gestures by which the least talented of mortals make their primitive wants known to those who do not speak their language. After that, I am done. The swift ideogrammic air-speed which Toby and Jones have invented between themselves is a mystery that is secret to themselves alone.

Well, perhaps Ruth has it, more or less. I have seen her talk to them both with flickers of fingers.... But I can’t tell you about Ruth yet. I shall explain her later. I never realized, until I sat down to tell what appeared quite a simple tale, what a lot of things and people there were to explain.

At any rate, at the risk of offending your intelligence, I must emphasize the fact that this queer sign language in which Toby and Jones communicated with each other was utterly remote from the deaf and dumb alphabet. Jones, as far as medical science could conjecture, had the full equipment of English words necessary to formulate his thoughts to himself. He had only lost the means of expressing them, could not be taught to recognize them by movement of the lips.

The history of Toby and Jones up to the point of the beginning of my story is simplicity itself. When Toby was demobilized, he sought out Jones and, liking the man exceedingly, engaged him as manservant. With what other human soul was Jones in so close communication as Toby? I think that in those early post-war days Jones must have regarded Toby as a kind of god. What other chance of salvation from madness had the fellow? I put it to you from a material point of view, apart from the natural gushing of human gratitude.... On the one side was life for ever in some post-war home for incurables, as an interesting case—the real interest of which no one could be at the trouble to convey to his mind—occupied like the blind, or like the semi-imbecile, in trivial art and craft handiwork or whatnot; on the other, the freedom of the great world in the service of the only human creature who had what, to Jones, must have been the God-sent genius to establish a living line of thought-transference. As to the rough communications of life, he could be explanatory to nurse and comrades, or to myself, when I came to know him. But, as far as my psychological efforts can go, it was to Toby alone that he felt himself related in the realm of the abstract idea.

Can you wonder that he regarded Toby as a god?

He went into his service. It became one of Toby’s delightful interests in life to invent means of communication with Jones. He discovered, for instance, that Jones, although stone-deaf, was in his body sensitive to certain electrical vibrations. He went to much trouble to rig up such an attuned apparatus in his flat. That was why, in order not to hurt Jones’s feelings, and also to keep him in practice, he generally rang his front-door bell, instead of letting himself in with his latch-key.

And then, as soon as they lived together as master and servant, the pencilled ideograph began to develop into the sign language which I call their aerograph. From this Toby learned that Jones was an orphan, that his father had followed the sea, that he had been brought up as a Roman Catholic—which accounted for the medal respected by looting enemies—and that, having survived many evil days, he had joined up in the war. Many other details, necessarily vague, of his past life did he disclose to Toby. But his own name was beyond his power of ideographing and remained a mysterious secret locked up in his memory.

Toby read his evening paper, smoked his pipe and drank his whisky and soda and dropped off to sleep in front of the fire. Presently Jones appeared, and, waking him up, informed him that it was time to dress, and that his bath was ready. Toby swore. He didn’t want to go out to dinner; especially to one where the presence of ladies ordained the wearing of dress-coat and white tie. He would greatly have preferred to go, just as he was, to his club, and talk with casual men and, perhaps, play a sober game of bridge.

But the dinner was an important one, as you shall see.