Читать книгу The Old Bridge - William J. Locke - Страница 5

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During the course of her Art studies in Chelsea and that of her driftings in London and Paris, Perella had come across many young men—clean, dirty, vehement and modest. With none of them, however, had she been on terms of comradeship, lingering, as she was, under John Annaway’s Olympian spell. She translated the masculine into terms of her father, and shrank, in a shy woodland way, from a dominant sex. For which reason, self-centred young men, accustomed to facile friendship with unreserved young women, passed her by as a young female of no account. Sometimes, in half-hours of poetic meditation, she envied the bolder of her sisters who, with the splendid air of goddesses conferring favours, went alone with young men to tea-shops, cinemas and theatres. She pictured to herself the thrilling experience. But, on awaking to prosaic life, she knew that these were crazy dreams, and that none of her men acquaintances would be bored with her for more than five minutes at a time. So she shrugged her little shoulders and went her little lonely way.

The easy young man with the irreverent outlook, sitting next to her at table, was a revelation. He talked to her not out of perfunctory politeness, but because he appeared to enjoy her company. He had the manners of a prince travelling incognito, and gave her the feeling that he found her of birth so kindred as to include her in his sphere of remoteness from the other guests of the Pension.

“It’s all very well to say you’re living here,” he remarked, “but what are you doing here save living?”

“Trying to earn it,” replied Perella audaciously.

He laughed. “I wish you’d tell me how to do it. That’s what I’ve come for. What do you do?”

“I’m a copyist.”

“Painter? Yes? How great! Splendid! I’ve come to paint or draw, or do something, I don’t quite know what. You’ll put me right. I’ll stay here for ever and sit at your feet. Now that I come to look at you, you have the painter’s face—the wide-set eyes, you know. I’m sort of half-trained as an architect. If it was all art, designing cathedrals and mausoleums and casinos, I’d love it. But nowadays it’s a matter of stresses and strains and ferro-concrete and drainage systems and sticking in hot-water pipes so that a cook can wash up greasy dishes without any trouble. You don’t call that art, do you?”

“It’s all very necessary,” said Perella.

“Then let’s leave it in the hands of the Necessarians.”

“Why not be one?”

“Can’t,” said the young man. “I went into Armstrong’s office, you know—Halliday Armstrong, R.A. Thought I was going to help him in International Competitions, Designs for Palaces in Siam and Sweden, all pediments and pinnacles—that’s just a pretty figure of speech, because they don’t gee together.” Perella smiled. “But you see what I mean. I wanted to be an artist, and the last job the beastly fellow put me on to was the working drawings of the sub-basement of a Monster Hotel. Can you imagine it? Every conceivable horrible pipe, tube, furnace, boiler, ventilating shaft, hygienic cockroach pen.... I went to the Great One in modest expostulation. I was born to higher things. He had the nerve to say—he’s one of those nasty, precise people with a squeaky voice: ‘Young man, you were born to do that which is good for your soul. Clear out and go back to your work.’ ”

“And you cleared?” asked Perella, vastly entertained.

“Eventually. I couldn’t stick it. I put it to you, as a practical, sensible girl, quivering, at the same time, like me, with the sense of beauty, the beauty of line and colour, I put it to you—could you have stuck it?”

Never had man made to her an appeal so personal as this frank and mirthful youth. She coloured adorably, and laughter shone in her eyes.

“So long as I didn’t have to draw the cockroaches.”

He laughed again at this mild jest, helped himself to the veal which, after tasting, he declared to be the sweated calf, the right portion for prodigals. She asked him when he had arrived. That very evening, he said. He had put in a day or two at Milan to see the Cathedral and the Brera. Being broke to the wide, he explained in his lucid English, he had asked a Florentine resident to recommend him a hole where he could eat and sleep at minimum expense. The friend had paved his way to the Pension Toselli.

“When I came to the dining-room, my first impulse was to bolt like a rabbit who finds himself in a den of foxes, but you make all the difference. Now that we’re on intimate terms, do tell me your name. Mine’s Blake—Anthony Blake.”

“Miss Annaway,” she replied primly.

“Annaway?” He flicked association-seeking fingers. “Anything to do with the John Annaway who writes that column in the Sunday-what-d’ye-call it?”

“He’s my father.”

He radiated delight.

“How splendid to know all about you at once! What’s your Christian name? I’ve told you mine.”

“It’s rather odd. Perella.”

“Odd? It’s unique. You must be the only Perella in the world.”

With such stimulating discourse did he hold her attention to the end of the meal. She learned odds and ends of his ingenuous history. Harrow had prepared him for Cambridge, and Cambridge had prepared him for the perfect enjoyment of hedonistic existence. His father, a partner in the old-established firm of Blake, Bislett and Smith, stockbrokers, had reserved a seat for him in the decorous office. He described it to Perella, in an exaggerated way, as a place of horror, nerve-racking with the rattle of type-writers, the clicking of tapes, the clang of telephones, the epicene roarings of distant bulls and bears; the whole filthy place a tangle of unintelligible arithmetic. With perfect filial courtesy, of course, he had turned it down. The best day’s work, he said, that he had ever done in his life.

At this point of his story, dinner being over, Madame Toselli rose, and the company filed out of the dining-room, back to the moth-eaten salon.

On the threshold he apostrophized the Deity and seized Perella’s wrist.

“I can’t stand it. I should go mad. What do they do? ‘Sit and hear each other groan’ like the gentlemen in Keats? What do you do?”

“I get into a corner and read up Florence for an hour, and then I go to bed,” said Perella. “Or else I listen to Mr. Grewson talk.”

“But suppose you want to talk yourself?”

Perella blinked at the startling suggestion.

“I don’t,” she murmured.

“But I do,” he declared. “I love talking.”

“Well, go in and try,” she said, her heart ever so little a-flutter. “They’ll love to listen to you.”

“I like to choose my audience,” he said. “I want to go on talking to you. Where the Hades can I do it?”

“Here,” said Perella helplessly.

He shivered. “In this awful draught? Isn’t there some dreadful, deserted Picture Palace in the town where one can gossip in comparative warmth?”

From fluttering, her heart progressed to beating hard. The crazy dream was coming true. A young man—and, to boot, a young man of elegant accomplishment and fascination—was for taking her out, all by herself, to the Cinema. Hitherto, on male-escorted picture jaunts, she had been dragged as a third party, damping undesirable ardour. He misunderstood her blushing effort to collect confused wits.

“Won’t you come with me? Really I’m quite harmless. Or are you afraid that, when you get back into the Aquarium, the dreadful fishes will tear you to bits?”

“Oh, they don’t matter!” said Perella.

“What does, then?”

“Nothing,” said Perella.

“Come along, then. We’ll hat and coat ourselves and meet at the bottom of the stairs.”

They met. She had put on her one smart coat over her flimsy evening frock—it was very thin—and her one little bit of fur round her neck, and the precious hat on which the rain-stain (oh, beneficent Providence!) no longer showed. He was smoking a cigarette in the dim hall. She drew a quick breath.

“Oh, I haven’t kept you waiting?”

He took out his watch and consulted it by the dim light.

“Thirty-five seconds,” he said.

The rain had ceased, and given place to a night of scudding cloud and watery half-moon and a vapoury air through which Florence across the river rose luminously fantastic. They walked up the quiet Lungarno Torrigiani and the Via de’ Bardi, Anthony Blake talking into enchanted ears. But, once on the Ponte Vecchio, conversation, save in confidential staccato, became impossible. As one inured to the conduct of damsels, he tucked his hand under her arm, and guided her through the welter of the crowd that, from time immemorial, has ever found its vagrant yet sheltered pleasure in the public streets. Horse and motor traffic divided it perpetually, as though ploughing a way through dry sand; and, as perpetually, the sand of humans closed in again, unconscious of disturbance.

“Isn’t it fascinating?” he said, with a little squeeze of her arm. “Must have been just like this when Savonarola was a boy. I’ve often heard of it—never seen it. I wonder where we’re going to?”

“Don’t you know your way?”

“Lord, no! Didn’t I tell you I struck the place only two hours ago? I’m a babe in your hands, crying for a picture-palace with nobody in it.”

“If we go straight on and follow that tram,” she said, with a new sense of authority, “we’ll come to the Piazza Vittorio Emanuele, where all the cinemas and things are. That’s modern; but if you’d like to go a little bit out of your way, down this street here, you may see something quite as good as a cinema.”

“Nice and warm and gossipy?”

She chuckled happily. “You’ll see.”

The short Vacchereccia brought them into the comparatively quiet Piazza della Signoria. The moon, escaping from tormenting cloud, spread sombre majesty over the dimly lit expanse of wonder. The young man, Anthony Blake, dropped the girl’s arm, and stood agape. There, in the mysterious light, loomed the grim, gigantic, heavily machicolated and battlemented mass of the Palazzo Vecchio, surmounted by its grim machicolated and battlemented campanile. There in shadow gleamed, mysterious and compelling, the fountained Neptune of Michael Angelo. A turn, and full and serene in the moonlight stood the cloister of the Lanzi, delicate-coloured, round-arched, spandrel-decorated, with its frieze of proud yet gracious heraldry; and, below, the baffling mystery of its immortal dwellers in bronze and stone.

“Of course you can’t see it now, but that’s the Perseus of Benvenuto.”

His hand sought hers, and, like fairy-tale children in an Enchanted Castle, they wandered round the square in awed silence. After a while he said:

“Now we’re at it, let us see it all.”

“All what?”

“Florence.”

“It would take a year at least.”

“We’ll do it. You and I together,” he said. “But let us see all we can to-night.”

She felt herself growing more audacious every minute.

“That wouldn’t be fair to Florence. It’s a bit trippery, isn’t it?”

“Eh? I, a tripper?”

He smote his chest in protestation.

“That’s why. You’re not. You can afford to see it bit by bit. I rushed around when I first arrived, and I couldn’t sleep for two nights. Everything went round and round, and got hopelessly mixed up. But perhaps you’ve got a stronger head.”

They came out into a patch of watery moonlight, and he became aware of her little pale face.

“I’ve got a stronger body, and I’m a selfish brute. You’ve been standing up all day in some frowsty place before a horrid easel, and you’re dead tired.”

She protested valiantly that exercise was the one thing in the world she needed; that the grounds of her counsel had been purely æsthetic. Why not keep this one wonderful impression, instead of muddling it up with a hundred others?

“Perella,” said he, “I adopt you as my artistic conscience. We will now take a cab to the ghastly warm Palace of our dreams.”

But cab she refused. Was he a millionaire to take cabs, on a moment’s whim, to drive but a few yards? Said he:

“To-night I feel the Lord of the Earth!”

She gave him a little upward, fleeting glance. The proclamation was an echo of her father in his uplifted moments. But these moments had been ever uplifted by spirituous liquors, whereas her companion had drunk nothing but the thinnest of red wine, and sparingly, because it was not over-alluring. She became half conscious of a quick blacking out, as on a film, breaking the sequence of high romance. Her practical little mind worked swiftly. Lords of the Earth dwelt in Grand Hotels, not Pensions Toselli. Besides, had he not confessed to being broke to the wide, and to seeking a modest hole? She must check this magnificent but spendthrift boy on the road to ruin.

“We walk, or I don’t come,” she declared.

“So long as you come,” he said, “I’ll crawl on all fours.”

She laughed, and the film of romance flashed out again. They set forth on their quest of comfort. On their way they came to the half-arch of the Or San Michele. He paused, looked on either side at the phantasmagoria of sculpture in the confused light.

“You must blindfold me, or I’ll have no further use for you as a conscience.”

Again she laughed. “I’m so glad you feel like that about it. Beauty is something isn’t it? Just Beauty?”

“It’s everything,” he proclaimed.

“All these people at the Pension talk of Florence as if it were a collection of postage-stamps.”

“My dear Conscience,” he said, joining her after a forced separation by half a dozen free young Florentines, “more than ever do I desire to make your better acquaintance.”

Around the approaches to the great Piazza the crowd grew thicker. It was mainly composed of men; but of men, not hurrying feverishly in pursuit of tram-cars, girls, wives, homes, dog-dealers, and other pleasures, but standing, lounging, strolling a step or two and then returning; and talking, talking, smoking, spitting, taking their curious jostled ease, and, as casually individualistic as their ancestors, indifferent to the convenience of would-be passing man, woman, or child. Only the hoot of a car, or the crack of a cabman’s whip, and the familiar curse on his tongue, caused the resentful movement of self-preservation.

They emerged into the Piazza di Vittorio Emanuele, once the most picturesque, squalid, ancient, and fascinating network of fever-and assassin-haunted slums in Europe, but now a vast square blazing with electric light; and surrounded by those square blocks of commercial buildings put up by Italian engineer-architects which make one ædile say to another: “We are citizens of no mean city.” And there are electrically lighted shop-fronts, and glittering open-air cafés, and illuminated, multi-coloured entrances to Picture Palaces. And in the middle of it, on a prancing horse set on a monstrous plinth, sits King Victor Emanuel, obviously agreeing with the ædiles.

“You’re quite right,” said Anthony Blake. “We’ve done the only thing possible. This is the acid, or whatever it is, that fixes the photographic plate—the other Piazza, you know.”

“Of course I know,” said Perella.

They entered the cinema portal—no mere door was ever equipped with its gorgeousness. He took tickets. They passed through turnstiles, and mounted carpeted stairs, and a torch-equipped attendant took them through a curtained doorway into the high tier of a dim amphitheatre. The benches were sparsely occupied. Perella whispered reproachfully:

“These are the most expensive seats.”

“If you think one can get warmth and privacy for nothing, you’re mistaken. How could we talk down there?”

He pointed to the crowded floor-space; then took her hand, and groped to the highest and most desolate corner.

On the screen, the monochrome human shadows performed their pale and dismal antics. Square-jawed men sat at roller desks and talked telephonically to each other. Large-eyed pseudo-maidens, difficult to distinguish one from the other, registered sorrow and joy. Automobiles dashed up to modest wooden clipper-built houses, whose interiors, vast and stately, would make Knowle or Longleat fade into the drab of a third-rate hotel. There were horses which slept and ate at galloping speed; there were old homes with cradled babies whose venerable grandmothers must have been well over seventy when their mothers were born; there was every flatulent negation of Truth as interpreted through the medium of Art, that commercial imbecility at its most nervous tension could conceive. The drugged public accepted the inanity in stupefied content. The orchestra played “Madame Butterfly” while a brave little two-seater car, driven by a big-eyed girl, swam a boiling river.

“This is just the place for us,” said Anthony, as they took their seats. “Now we can talk like people in a Dostoievsky novel. You’ll tell me all about you, and I’ll tell you all about me; and then we’ll compare notes, and find we haven’t been listening to each other at all, and we’ll have to do it all over again, which will be lovely, won’t it?”

“You begin,” said Perella.

But youth is youth. And the irony of youth is that the subjective fades before the insistent objective. The idiot story, all the more unintelligible because it was half told when they entered, gripped their delighted and satirical attention. When the end came, they eagerly awaited the re-unfolding of the reel, so as to see the joys which they had missed. It was only when they caught up with their first scene that interest waned. They remained silent for a time. The projected talk would not come spontaneously. Perella suggested the lateness of the hour.

“And we can’t watch this dreadful thing going on over and over again. We’ll go mad!”

He rose. “You’re right. You’re always right. But it seems to me as though I should never be able to tell you the story of my life.”

Yet, when they found themselves in the narrow, thronged streets, again, and he took her arm under his in a protective, companionable way, Perella felt a delicious sense of intimacy, of a vast Highest Common Factor of existence between them. Their souls had throbbed in unison before the majesty and beauty of the Past; and now their common modernity had rocked in sympathetic laughter. And then he said:

“It doesn’t matter, dear Miss Conscience. We’re having a splendid time.” He hailed a victoria. “So splendid that I’m not going to let you get dog-tired and hate me. If there’s one thing I hate, it’s being hated.”

She yielded meekly, too happy for argument. The drive was the sensuous end of the most amazing chapter of her life. She shivered a little, more from realization of wonder than from cold. Whereupon he pulled off his coat and threw it over her, and tucked it up around her as far as it would go. Her protests rang feeble and unconvincing.

“Except when I came from the station, this is the first time I’ve driven in Florence.”

“We’ll drive like this together every day and all day,” he declared.

“I don’t see how you can afford it,” she said.

“Neither do I.” He laughed gaily. “But think of the joy of doing things one can’t afford! I often wonder whether I’m a very lucky chap or the son of Misfortune. It all depends on the way you look at it. Here was I brought up in luxury. Just had to stick both hands in my dear old father’s pockets, and out came all the money I wanted. And then, suddenly—everything went phut. There wasn’t a bean among the lot of us. It killed my poor old father. I’ll tell you about it some day.”

Her hand instinctively crept beneath the overcoat and sought his.

“Oh, how dreadful!”

He squeezed her hand. “You’re a dear. It was. We were great pals, you know. Well—what was I saying? Oh, yes. The problem. One fellow says that it’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. Another, that sorrow’s crown of sorrow is remembering happier things. I don’t know. At any rate, I’ve learnt how to enjoy life when I get the chance.” He squeezed her hand again, and, bending forward, smiled into her face. “I’m enjoying it now.”

They came out on the Lungarno, by the Palazzo Tempi. The scudding clouds had cleared, and opened out a night of stars. Florence stretched away across the river. The dome of the Duomo loomed vague and far away; but Giotto’s campanile leaped gleaming into the firmament. Below them, the river ran dark with many shadows.

The cab drew up at the door of the Pension Toselli.

“My dear Lady Conscience,” he said, when they entered the fusty vestibule, “let us shut our eyes and run upstairs and go to bed, and never open them again until all is cool and beautiful darkness.”

The foolish yet romantic phrase rang in Perella’s ears as she lay in the darkness of her little back room, wide awake for most of a wonder-whirling night. Towards dawn she fell asleep, and—alas, for Michael Angelo and Benvenuto and Giotto! or, on the other hand, they may have had a great deal to do with it—her last drowsy sensation, with the rough blankets drawn up close under her nose, was the comfortable smell of a rough tweed overcoat.