Читать книгу The Old Bridge - William J. Locke - Страница 4

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Perella Annaway found herself in Florence. She was one of those inconsiderable beings who find themselves in places almost without an act of conscious volition; who drift, like an autumn leaf, from spot to spot, at the wind’s caprice. Not that there was anything autumnal about Perella. She was young—three-and-twenty—accepting with youth’s cheerful fatalism the will of any wind.

Perella was pretty in a dark, Italian way. Her main cause for railing against Fortune was that there was so little of her. To herself she always seemed so small as to pass unperceived in a vast world. In a crowd she could see nothing but the lower part of the shoulder-blades of those in front of her. Wherefore she hated crowds. Her physical dislike had a moral correlation. She had grown up with a sense of her entire insignificance in the cosmic scheme.

Of her faded Italian mother she retained only childish memories. The photograph which she always carried about with her revealed a spiritual, frightened thing in an old-fashioned dress, who seemed to wonder why she was alive in a flabbergasting world. Sometimes, in moments of depression, she would kiss the photograph in sentimental sympathy. Never could she reconcile her parents one with the other. How had they come together? Her inexperience of life was a barred door to the solution of the question. For her father, John Annaway, still alive—robustiously alive—was as remote from this terrified slip of a mother as an ogre from a fairy. Of course she adored him. He had brought her up in a fashion of his own, and he stood in her serious eyes as a sort of rapscallion Jove. It never occurred to her that the daughter of the starving poet in Rome had, as inamorata and wife, been carried away by those very vividly male qualities that had bound herself as a daughter to the hairy and joyous pagan that was her father.

Perella sat in her little back room of the Pension Toselli on the Lungarno Torrigiani, and looked out on uninspiring chimney-pots, and grey desolate sky from which fell stern, pitiless rain. There is no gentle rain in Florence. She had just come in after her day’s work at the Uffizi, and was very wet and cold and miserable. The famously advertised central-heating of the Pension Toselli did not extend to the tiny back bedrooms. A radiator of three tepid pipes would probably pretend to warm the stuffy salon, where the old trouts (such was Perella’s maiden jargon) of Anglo-Saxonia sought to exhilarate their fishy blood with weak tea and strong scandal; but that wouldn’t dry her soaked shoes and wet stockings which lay forlornly on the floor awaiting the slatternly nondescript maid who was far too busy to take notice of back bedroom bells.... A dismal trickle from the poor little wet umbrella crept sinuously across the uncarpeted floor. Half-unclothed, barefoot, Perella looked anxiously at her hat. There was only a little soaked inch at the back. Perhaps it wouldn’t show, after all. She sighed. Hats were so dreadfully expensive, and, lured by the morning’s sunshine, she had put on her best. Why she had selected her newest Sunday-go-to-meeting hat just to go to her daily routine of copying the Franciabigio, she didn’t know. It was silly of her. But the early spring had sung a lilting song, and she had obeyed a blind instinct.

The stain would pass. She refused to contemplate heartbreak. Luckily the ribbon was untouched. She put the vanity tenderly on the deal chest of drawers. Her legs and feet were frozen. She debated for a moment. Should she re-attire herself in dry clothes and descend to tea among the old trouts who worried her because she was a painter, questioned her curiously because she was the daughter of a well-known journalist, and criticized her clammily because she was young and possibly good-looking, or should she sacrifice the tea which she wanted, and frankly go to bed and stay there in warmth until the hour came for the farinaceous and oleaginous evening meal? She decided on bed. After all, for the moment, she was mistress of her destiny. So, sticking her cold little feet into the arms of a woollen sweater, and dragging the body of it as far as it would go up her legs, she snuggled into bed, and gave herself up to philosophic reflection.

In ten minutes she was as warm and as physically contented as a stray kitten curled up before a casual fireside. Beyond this easy comfort she did not look. She had lived all her young life in cold back bedrooms, and been nourished on haphazard meals. When her father was busy on his copy, the delivery of which he ever put off to the last moment, he disregarded food. When he was idle, he preferred drink. She had lived in a series of poky flats in West Kensington, Putney, Battersea—one scarcely distinguishable from the other. Her father naturally had the best bedroom; one of the two reception rooms served as his study, the other as dining-and drawing-room; the spare bedroom at the back—always at the back, either overshadowed by the buildings on the other side of the dull courtyard or commanding a view of forests of chimney-pots—had been assigned to Perella.... She had been accustomed from childhood to look after herself; mainly through instinct of self-preservation. If she felt hungry she would go into the tiny kitchen and beg the unkempt servant to cook something for her, wherefore her main fare had consisted of kippers and bacon and tea. To look after her great, hairy, untidy father had been an impossibility. So long as his den was left undusted, his bed made for the night, and his morning repose held sacred, he scorned domestic ministrations. He spent most of his life at his clubs; one, when he was more or less respectably dressed and attuned to social amenities, being the Savage; the other (his favourite) a dissolute den cynically styled the “Fuddlers.” He was a man who cut himself adrift from responsibility. While Perella was a small girl, he gave her over to the care of a poor-spirited and impecunious cousin who came daily to the flat of the moment and gave the child elementary instruction. Later, when the conscientious Mentor recommended boarding-school, he bade her make inquiries. She reported. The fees demanded filled him with a sense of outrage. Good God! It would mean at least a couple more columns a week! He couldn’t do it. Education? So long as a child knew how to read a book, it could educate itself, and wasn’t his study crammed from ceiling to floor with books? What more was necessary? Of course she could have the run of his library while he wasn’t there, so long as she didn’t make a mess of the place.... And so was Perella educated....

Now and then his cronies came in to smoke pipes and drink whisky, eat bread and cheese and cold ham, and talk. They were writing-men, out-at-elbow painters, or black-and-white artists; now and then stray musicians who would thump out strange harmonies on the battered old cottage piano. Perella would sit for an hour or two and listen to the talk or the music, and regard them as demi-gods grouped around the feet of her Olympian sire, which was more or less true. With one or two satyr-like exceptions they were all younger men, he having fallen out of the race of his own generation. Anyhow, among them Perella felt herself the most infinitesimal of mortal atoms. She made mental notes of the books they talked about, and, having hunted them up in her father’s study, read as much of them as she could understand.

Then, one evening, a young man from Chelsea took up a girlish sketch or two which she had left lying about the careless room.

“Hullo, Annaway! Who did these? Perella?”

He took them over to the bearded Jove. Perella wished herself less than an atom, an invisible electron.

“Yes, I suppose so,” said her father casually.

“They’re jolly good,” said the young man from Chelsea.

He bored the Olympian dreadfully, but he set every nerve throbbing in Perella’s small body.

“Of course she can go to your rotten Art school if she likes,” said her father at last. “There’s only the bridge to cross.” This was the Battersea flat. “What about it, old thing?”

“Oh!” breathed Perella.

And that was the end, or rather, the beginning of it. She became an Art student in Chelsea, and, for the first time in her life mingled with youth of her own age.... Then, when she was twenty-one, all kinds of things happened. First, her Aunt Euphemia, a maiden lady whom she had seen but transiently and at long intervals, and who had renounced for many years John Annaway and all his works, died, and left her sixty pounds a year. Secondly, she sold some drawings. Thirdly, she found herself in Paris, she scarce knew how, with another girl. Fourthly, when she returned to the parental flat, she found installed there a lady who made no pretence of being her adopted sister.

“My dear,” said the Jovian reprobate, “I’m growing old and infirm”—he was on the sunny side of fifty—“and I need some one to look after me during my declining years. You have lived among the riff-raff across the river, and, to my knowledge, you have accepted the hospitality of ménages that it pleases the world to call irregular. So it would be hypocritical of you to be shocked.... Of course, my dear, my home, small as it is, is always yours; but I’m sure you would like to be independent. And why shouldn’t you? You have your own little fortune. You’re selling pictures like hot cakes. You have youth, ambition, hope. My God, how I envy you!”

He drank half a tumbler of whisky and soda, and, in accents of deep emotion, repeated:

“How I envy you!”

Upon which he gave her his blessing and a bewildering cheque for fifty pounds, and smiled her out into the wide world.

Over these things did Perella ponder as she lay thawing in bed in Florence. That morning she had received one of her father’s rare letters which brought back the past, so near in actual time, and yet so pathetically remote. He had said:

“Always thinking, my dear child, of your welfare, I have written to my old friend, Professor Gayton—the Silvester Gayton, you know—to ask him to do something for you. He once was very kind to me—so why shouldn’t he be kind to you?”

During her two or three years’ solitary drifting, she had learned something about the world, and the queer ways of the men and women that peopled it. Her Jovian sire no longer dwelt on Olympus. She knew him for what he was—a brilliant man, sodden with drink and self-indulgence, only whipped out of sloth by the necessity of earning the minimum livelihood adequate to his tastes.... The lady was still there, guiding the feeble footsteps of forty-nine.... Perella, although she knew that the Winstanleys and the Borrowdailes—good friends of hers—were not married, winced at the thought of the lady. As a matter of fact, as far as a diminutive waif can hate, she hated the lady. She knew not why; for, apparently, from all reports, she was a decent soul who had rescued him from the fumes of the Fuddlers’ Club. But why didn’t he marry her? Some Puritan atavism, exemplified by the late Aunt Euphemia, rebelled against the situation.

Still, she couldn’t help adoring him, his smiling geniality, his imperturbable good-nature, his splendour of intellect when he was at his best, his giant’s baby-helplessness, ever fascinating to woman; all his qualities, as she thought of them, warmed her heart. And then this trouble to which he had put himself—to write to Professor Gayton.... Yes, she adored him in spite of everything. In spite, too, of the introduction to Professor Gayton. She had seen pictures of Professors in the comic papers, and once a prototype had visited the flat in Battersea. The latter (like the pictures) was stuffy and snuffy, and wore a white beard reaching down to his middle. She was very young, ten years old, at the time, and he had kissed her; but the smell of snuff and stale white beard had lingered in her memory. If he had worn a full growth, strong and ruddy, like her father, it wouldn’t have mattered. But the Professor had a long, soiled, clean-shaven upper lip, which seemed to make a world of difference. She sighed, having little use for white-bearded professors. Then, the reflection that nowadays she was too mature for casual oscularity brought consolation, and she gurgled a little comfortable laugh. The world was not a bad place, after all. Rosenstein, the dealer in the Rue Bonaparte, had promised her two thousand francs for a copy of the Madonna del Pozzo on which she was now engaged, if it came up to the sample of her work at the Louvre. Perhaps, after all, that was why she found herself in Florence. Payment in thousands conveyed splendid suggestion.... She felt quite warm now. Sweater arms were the only wear for cold toes.... Had she got the little St. John’s thighs all right? Of course in Franciabigio’s original picture they were hopelessly out of drawing. Wouldn’t the accurate reproduction rather glare in the copy? On the other hand, to put the Immortal Master right—the easiest thing in the world to do—would not only be an act of unpardonable presumption, but might put the whole of the picture wrong. The Infant, though, was lovely. She thought she had got Him—especially that little adorable bit where the Madonna’s hands pressed into the tender baby flesh ... and the sweet little puckers in the legs.... Two thousand lire! She could afford a couple of pairs of silk stockings, and another best hat if this one was ruined, and she could buy “A Wanderer in Florence.”

The clatter of a cracked gong dimly heard from far below aroused her from vagrant musing. Seven o’clock already? She rose, made her ablutions in the fitted wash-basin—running-water, hot and cold, in every room, as per advertisement—shrinking a little from the ice-cold stream that poured out of the hot tap, put herself into some sort of flimsy semblance of an evening frock—she had but two, one faded mauve, the other yellowed cream; she chose the mauve—and hurried down three flights of stairs to the salon, where the inmates assembled before dinner.

It was a stark, moth-eaten room, and the guests had the appearance of being somewhat the worse for wear, and of braving it out with forlorn perkiness. The two Miss Brabazons had lived there for fifteen years. They were the authorities on Florentine History, Topography and Art. It was considered a breach of etiquette to contradict them. The Rev. Edward Grewson and his wife were five-year-old pillars of the establishment. He was squat and asthmatic, and perspired freely in cold weather; he also did an occasional clerical turn at Holy Trinity or St. Mark’s, being an amiable and much-respected man. Mr. Enderby, a sprightly young man from Cook’s, also regarded himself as a pillar. The others were birds more or less of passage. Two or three American girls in feverish chase after culture, and a vague Rumanian widow; also a young English garden-city honeymoon couple, both sandy-haired, with whom Perella had formed a timid acquaintance. The last seemed to spend their days tramping over Tuscany, bare-headed, with weird luggage strapped to their backs. The young man wore his collar outside his jacket, the lady conformed so far to convention as to attire herself for the evening in a shapeless green garment with holes cut for head and arms. They had inscribed their names on the register as Mr. and Mrs. Basil Merrywether.

They greeted Perella as she shyly entered. They had walked to Fiesole and back.

“A glorious excursion,” said he.

“And the lovely cathedral. And the Roman Theatre. Too fascinating for words,” said she. “You know it, of course?”

Perella sighed. There was so much in Florence for her yet to see, and the copying of the picture took up so much of her time. She looked at the privileged couple in admiration.

“You don’t mean to say you went all the way up there in this pouring rain?”

“We did,” said Basil Merrywether triumphantly. “It was splendid—so fresh, so exhilarating.”

Said Mr. Grewson, who was standing by:

“You believe then in always taking the rain of the country?”

Perella caught a waggish eye, and laughed. Mrs. Merrywether looked at him blankly.

“My husband’s holiday is limited, and we must see as much as we can, rain or fine.”

Mr. Grewson mopped his forehead. “Quite so, quite so, my dear lady. We must make the best of things. Otherwise what would be the function of Divine Providence?”

“That’s very true,” she acquiesced.

“Besides, I like the rain,” her husband declared. “It sets the atmosphere of the landscape just as often as the sunshine. To see everything in the sunshine is to go away with—well, not false, but unrectified impressions. Impressions in life are the things that matter.”

“My husband,” said Mrs. Merrywether, by way of supplement, “has written a play from that point of view. It’s going to be produced when he gets back at our new theatre at Goldstead Park.”

Perella eyed her with awe.

“I didn’t know Mr. Merrywether was a dramatist.”

“I’m not,” he replied heartily. “I wish to goodness I were! I’ve got to toil and moil at sordid things all day long. But my nights belong to myself, and then I try to express myself, as my wife says, impressionistically.”

“And I must encourage him, you see,” said Mrs. Merrywether. “An artist’s wife is no wife unless she’s prepared to make sacrifices.”

Mr. Grewson mopped his forehead again, and, not daring, this time, to let Perella catch his waggish eye, turned away to the elder Miss Brabazon.

Madame Toselli, dark, plump, smiling, but with deep and anxious perpendicular lines between her brows, entered the room. Why an Englishwoman who had married an Italian (now defunct) should be addressed as “Madame,” no one knew. Mr. Grewson, always humoristic, would whisper that it was because she once had an aunt who had divorced a Portuguese Admiral. It is true that she always spoke of “my uncle, the Admiral,” with an air that compelled respect. Her lips smiled greetings, but her eyes were busy counting heads. The perpendicular lines deepened. She turned suddenly and went out of the room, returning presently on the stroke of the cracked gong. Dinner was served. The company drifted into the bleak dining-room, where the old-fashioned custom of the long common table was retained. Punctuality was the essence of economic service. A guest who arrived late must forfeit the courses he had missed. If he strolled in when the meal was over, he had no meal. Median and Persian were the laws of the Pension Toselli.

Madame Toselli took her place at the end of the long table flanked by its double row of yellow backed cane chairs, and meagrely adorned by a few vases of artificial flowers set on the central line. The old custom of seniority prevailed. The Misses Brabazon sat one on each side of the hostess. Then came the Grewsons. And so in order. Perella, the last comer, stole into her chair at the very end. Her neighbour was a deaf old lady who, according to Madame Toselli’s reiterated assurances, belonged to a Swiss noble family, but ate spaghetti in the fresh and joyous way in which a certain nation recently tried to wage war. As Perella couldn’t talk Swiss, and couldn’t have been heard even if she did, she let her neighbour eat her food in (figurative) silence, and retired into the funny world of her own thoughts and sensations. Her opposite neighbours across the narrow table were an elderly Italian couple, who disregarded the existence of the other alien guests. Thus it will be seen that, up to the present, Perella’s meals had been rather lacking in convivial charm.

But on this evening, when she sat down beside the deaf old lady, she noticed a vacant place below her, whose set-out for a new-comer was made startlingly conspicuous by a clean, fan-wise folded napkin stuck in a tumbler. Her own napkin wore the reproachful dinginess of days. She felt a mild thrill of excitement. She was no longer the last new girl at this elderly sort of boarding-school. Some newer girl was coming. She hoped she would be English and nice and companionable. She dreamed of suave possibilities, and her thin soup was swept away before she had half finished it; whereupon she resolved to concentrate her mind on the ravigioli which was beginning to be handed round at the far-off head of the table.

Then the door opened. In came a careless young man in a dinner-jacket—solus mortalium, alone thus vested of men who were dining there—who, after standing for a disconcerted moment, strolled up to Madame Toselli. Madame Toselli looked up at him rebukingly, and pointed down the room. He smiled and nodded, advanced, and, taking his place beside Perella, unfolded his fan-folded napkin with the air of one accustomed to clean and freshly folded napkins at every meal of his life. Before sitting down, however, he met the stony Italian stare of his opposite neighbours, and made them an easy bow, to which they responded punctiliously. To Perella, too, he made the faintest little suggestion of a salutation. Then, while waiting for the slowly advancing dish, he scanned the table in a humorous glance.

He was a clean-run, brown-haired, blue-eyed youth, who gave Perella a queer magnetic sensation of pulsating life. The ravigioli was served; she wondered whether he would speak to her. She noticed that he ate his ravigioli with a very healthy appetite. Suddenly he said to her:

“Do you happen to be English?”

She smiled shyly. “Yes, of course.”

“Why of course? By the look of you, you might be a gipsy or anything.”

She coloured. He went on:

“What are you doing here?”

“I’m living here,” said Perella.

“Since when?”

“I came here a week ago.”

“None of these people are your friends?”

“Oh, no,” said Perella truthfully.

“Then look at them,” said the young man with an engaging smile. “Cast your eye up and down them. Did you ever see such a job lot of fish in your life?”