Читать книгу The Old Bridge - William J. Locke - Страница 6

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Anthony Blake, orphan, faced the world, like Orlando, with “but poor a thousand crowns,” or pounds in this case, his heritage from the welter of his father’s affairs. What should he do with it? One of his sisters, married to the Head Master of a Public School, advised profitable investment. His other sister, the wife of a Major-General, and a woman of swashbuckling flippancy of outlook, said: “Blue it at once.” As neither of these counsels appealed to a young man standing mid-way in temperament between his two sisters, he rejected them off-hand. He had already broken away from the soul-building projects of Halliday Armstrong, and had spent some time in the Art School of the Royal Academy, where he learned the rudiments of drawing from the figure.

Prudence urged him back on bended knees to Armstrong, who combined a squeaky voice with a robust kindness of heart. Besides, he had gone through the Architectural school at Cambridge, and was well on his way to the Final Examination of the Royal Institute of British Architects. The gates of a liberal profession were open to him. Why not turn and enter them while yet there was time? But Anthony Blake exceedingly disliked falling down on bended knees. He had his pride. He also viewed, with profound distaste, the prospect of being even an eminent R.A.’s assistant on a very few hundreds a year for the rest of his life, unless there happened the absurdly fantastic: to wit, Armstrong’s offering him a partnership, or the winning of a gigantic competition which would enable him to put up a brass-plate outside an office of his own.

Originally, when he had set his face against the dreary dealing with stocks and shares, he had conceived Architecture as a congenial avocation for a gentleman of artistic taste and ample fortune. The underground drudgery, good for his soul according to the sensitive artist, Halliday Armstrong, who knew that in no form of art can the butterfly emerge except from the chrysalis stage of humility, was repugnant to his ideal of existence. He would not drudge; sooner die. For him the untrammelled life of brush or pencil. Here, there was no bending over drawing-boards, ruling lines by T-squares and drawing curves by geometrical formulæ, and measuring distances off finikin rules divided up into infinitesimal parts of inches, all for the guidance of a blockhead builder. Here one was free, with eye and arm and wrist and hand, to sweep lines and curves according to a man’s own bountiful inspiration. No setting off a sweep of body, millimetre by millimetre, with a pair of wretched dividers. A bit of chalk and a sheet of drawing paper, and the rest was whatsoever he chose to make it. He had a very pretty free-hand talent, and a cartoonist’s knack. His short career in the R.A. Schools was not without distinction. The prudent side of him tested a foundation for artistic hope. The flippant and devil-may-care side which he had in common with his sister, Gloria, dreamed the delicious dreams of youth.

“My dearest girl,” he said to her, towards the end of the discussion on the disposal of the heritage, “Ellen is impossible. She looks at me through Everard’s archpedagogic eyes, as a Small Boy in an Eton collar who has to be trained in the Christian Virtues, and the Proper Conduct of Life. The nerve of it! She’s only ten years older than I am.”

“And I’m twelve,” said Gloria.

“I’m fed up with you too, although you’ve got more sense, though not much more, than Ellen. According to you I should have a couple of months’ good time and then take the dole. Are you and Frank going to supplement it?”

“My dear boy! ...”

“Of course not. You’re a flaunting, extravagant quean. Poor old Frank’s up to his eyes in debt. As to Ellen—she’s off the map. If I went to her starving, and asked for a meal, she’d calculate it out in vitamines and calories. No, my dear; I’m not going to come down on either of you. I’m going into the wide world to seek my fortune and I shall husband my thousand pounds to the last penny. I’m going first to Italy to soak myself in the spirit of masterpieces. No one can be a painter who doesn’t know everything from Cimabue to Canaletto. My address for the next hundred years will be ‘care of Luck, Chance & Co., Earth, Cosmos. Please forward.’ ”

And that is how Anthony Blake came to Florence, and, in conspicuous dinner-jacket, arrived late for dinner in the Pension Toselli, and, in his light, generous and irresponsible way, turned the bewildered little head of Perella.

The only comparatively elastic meal at the Pension Toselli was early breakfast. A plate supporting a hunk of bread and a pat of butter remained at a guest’s place at table from eight to half-past nine. At any time during that hour and a half the guest could ring, and Giuseppe, the melancholy serving-man, would bring coffee from some simmering vat in the kitchen. After 9.30 the table was cleared, and the would-be late breakfaster could press the electric button until the battery burst before anyone would take the slightest notice of him. Only the Brabazon ladies were privileged to breakfast in their own rooms. Those recklessly spendthrift or gluttonous, who craved a relish to the meal, had their own little half-consumed store of marmalade, jam, sardines or fruit set beside their plates. Two indecently de-shelled cold hard-boiled eggs marked the seat of the Rev. Mr. Grewson. Mrs. Grewson, pallid and severe, seemed to have a passion for potted anchovy.

She, sitting sternly beside the hard-boiled eggs of a sluggard husband, was scooping out the remains of a tin, when Perella entered, about half-past eight, and frigidly acknowledged the girl’s shy salutation. The American young women ate bananas, and squabbled over a map of Florence. The Basil Merrywethers, to judge by unclean remains, had been long since up and on their sturdy, pedestrian way. The Italian couple opposite ate morosely, and made obvious their non-appreciation of the coffee. Perella slipped into her seat, and, after the fashion she had learned in France, broke her bread into her coffee cup, saving up the pat of butter and a crust of bread as a last bonne bouche. She lingered over the meal, hoping that, through the open door of the dining-room, would appear the fascinating youth of the night before. But he came not. Mrs. Grewson, after much screech of chair against the tiled-floor, swept out with the air of a woman determined to tell her husband that his eggs were getting hot. The American girls went off in a clatter of tongues. The Italians called for fresh coffee, and, consigning it with expressive gestures to the sewer, made a Fascisti exit.

Perella alone, feeling, as usual, small in the big room, lingered wistfully, wondering what apostle of the bilious could have designed the dreadful wall-paper with its sickly yellow background and its dead blue trellis-work.

Mr. Grewson bounded in, wheezy and rubicund.

“My dear young lady. I am indeed fortunate. I thought I would have a solitary meal.” He sat down and helped himself to salt. “I hope you and that charming young fellow, who seems to be quite an acquisition to our circle, had a pleasant evening together?”

“Very,” said Perella.

She rose. From his end of the long table he held up a protesting hand.

“You’re not going?”

“I’ve finished, and there’s my work at the Gallery.”

She fled, her face aflame, conscious of a violent hatred of Mr. Grewson, and his waggish, clerico-paternal leer. He was the mouthpiece of all the cats and trouts, male and female, of the Pension. Her feminine instinct divined beastliness of innuendo. The moth-eaten salon had shrilled with cackle about her sudden elopement with the magnificent young man in a dinner-jacket. She rushed up to her back room, hating Anthony Blake, vowing that she would never see him again; or that, should he ever recross her field of vision, she would look at him without seeing him.... Yes, that was why Mrs. Grewson, who never smiled otherwise than acidly, had grimaced that vitriolic greeting. That was why the American girls had ostentatiously taken no notice of her.... Oh, the whole thing was damnable!

She sat on the edge of her yet unmade bed and cried over the desecration of the only wonder-hour of her life.

Soon afterwards she sat with easel and bedaubed canvas and painter’s paraphernalia before the miracle of paint she was trying to copy. She wished she knew more about Franciabigio, the friend of Andrea del Sarto. Obviously he was influenced by the Great and Faultless One, but he had his own conception of loveliness which redeemed his work from the charge of imitation. It had not the other’s quality of perfection which made you take a little quick breath as soon as one of his masterpieces first met your eyes. But it had infinite charm, and magical solace. To copy the Madonna del Pozzo was a joy. She felt that it lay within the limits of her comprehension. Had she been set before del Sarto’s majestic Madonna dell’ Arpie, her spirit would have failed, crushed beneath the sense of her littleness. But here was something exquisitely human. Just a pair of soft-fleshed babies, and the smiling Mother of Comfort. And, as she worked, she thought of Franciabigio, and wondered whether he was in Vasari.... She wanted to know more about him. But where could she find a Vasari? She thought of all kinds of technical and romantic things that hovered round about the central picture, in order to close her mind to any chance incursion of the young man, Anthony Blake.

A fresh English voice behind her, pleading hunger to a zealous friend, aroused her to a sense of time, whereupon she packed up her things and hurried through the great galleries and down the lift, and tripped quickly along the familiar road to the Pension Toselli.

She entered the dining-room a minute or two late. All the aquarium—the irreverent young man’s description would enter her head—were assembled, with the exception of the Basil Merrywethers. She saw Anthony Blake smiling at her from the far end of the table. Other folks seemed to smile at her, even Mrs. Grewson. Madame Toselli stopped her as she passed, and handed her a visiting card.

“You’ve had a caller this morning.”

“And a very distinguished one,” said the elder Miss Brabazon, with an air of patronage.

“Why didn’t you say you knew Mr. Gayton?” asked the younger.

Perella reddened, and said “Oh!” and looked at the card—that of Mr. Silvester Gayton—with an address in the Viale Milton.

She carried it in her hand and laid it beside her plate, as she took her seat beside Anthony Blake, to whose cheery greeting she replied distantly. But he was irrepressible.

“They’re all frantically excited about that,” said he, pointing to the card. “The Archangel Gabriel coming to make an Announcement wouldn’t have caused a greater sensation.”

“I don’t see why,” said Perella primly. “Professor Gayton is only a friend of my father’s.”

“But the old insect’s the greatest bug in Florence—don’t you understand that? Don’t you know his books on the gaudy place? If one fellow four hundred years ago jabbed a brush of paint on another fellow’s picture, he spots it at once. The Italian Ministry of Belle Arte grovel before him. The old pussies up there were once introduced to him after a lecture, and were purring about it when I came in.”

She helped herself to vague food.

“How do you know all about him?” she asked.

“How do I know about God and the Equator and Beecham’s Pills? Besides, I, humble worm that I am, have a letter of introduction to him in my pocket.”

She might have guessed it. If he had told her that he bore introductions to the King and the Pope, she would not have been surprised.

“Who gave it to you?”

“Old man Armstrong, of course,” he replied carelessly. “Who else?”

A cloud swept across her vision of his splendour. She had a quick little practical mind.

“But wasn’t Mr. Armstrong rather hurt at your leaving his office?”

“Not so much as I. I’ve made a point of blotting out of my memory the words he used to me.”

“Then,” said Perella, “it was very kind and forgiving of him to give you this valuable letter of introduction.”

“My dear Conscience,” said he, “I’m admiring you more and more every minute.”

Isolated by the deaf old lady on her right, and the morose Italians opposite, next whom were the vacant seats of the Merrywethers, they had all the talk to themselves. He described his morning in the City of Wonder. He had wandered about, and, by the aid of a map, had established his topography of Florence. He declared it a marvel of a place. At every street corner you were jostled by history. He had felt so sore and so black and blue that, after two or three hours of it, he had to crawl into Doney’s and have a cocktail.

“But that’s a most expensive place,” she cried. “Of course I’ve never been there.... Besides, how did you know where it was?”

Said Anthony, with his engaging smile:

“When you know me better, you will realize what a man of infinite resource I am. I was in fainting need of stimulant. I approached a florid gentleman glued to the window of an antiquity shop. I took off my hat in the manner of the Old School. ‘Pardon me, sir,’ said I, with unerring instinct. ‘Are you an American?’ He said: ‘I am.’ ‘Then,’ said I, ‘will you have the kindness to tell an English stranger where he can get a cocktail in this city?’ He smiled, and said: ‘I will’—and directed me to the Via Tornabuoni.”

Finding no suitable response, Perella went on with her eating.

“If you’re a good little untroublesome Conscience, I’ll take you to tea there.”

She shook her head. She had to work.

“But you can’t work after the galleries close. They turn you out. Just in time for tea.”

“I don’t like that kind of tea.”

“But why?”

“Because——” said Perella.

He noted an impatient gesture of her shoulders, and a tiny look of distress in her face; and a glimmer of her reasons dawned on his careless man’s mind. Who went to Doney’s otherwise than in furs and silken hose and dainty shoes? She confirmed his intuition by adding:

“I’ve looked through the windows and don’t care for the kind of people I’ve seen there.”

“We’ll avoid it then, like the plague,” he said. “All the same,” he continued, “I’m glad I went in. I’ve had an adventure.”

In his glad, picturesque way he told her the history of a chance encounter.

Sitting at a small table in the crowded middle room, along one side of which runs the bar, was an old Cambridge friend, Charlie Dent, entertaining a charming American lady. “Oh, quite an elderly lady, Conscience dear—let us say, in motor-jargon, nominal thirty-five.” It was Dent who had recommended the Pension Toselli. Anthony had thought him still in Rome, whence he had last heard from him. Dent was a very clever fellow, an engineer with an unhealthy passion for numismatics. Having come into much money, he had abandoned the bridge-maker’s trade and found the Meaning of Life in dangling over ancient coins and modern tea-cups.

“The desperate fellow was drinking chocolate,” said Anthony.

“I love chocolate,” said Perella demurely.

“But you’re not a numismatical engineer who has run off with a proctor’s cap. It’s a great come-down for Charlie.”

Of the nature of a proctor and the sacrosanctity of his cap, Perella had but a vague idea. She accepted meekly the condemnation of Charlie Dent.

This was by no means the end of the Adventure. Who should walk in when he was half-way through his second cocktail—Perella’s subtle mind could gather that he had been entertained at Doney’s free of expense—but the very American of whom he had asked his way, with a “Hullo, Beatrice, hullo, Charlie,” and sit down at the table. His name was Cornelius Adams, and he had a villa outside Florence. Anthony was going to see him one of these days.

He rubbed his hands together.

“Pretty crowded morning, wasn’t it?”

“And the lady?” asked Perella.

Anthony thought she lived in Florence. A Mrs. Ellison. Answered, according to the Adams man, to the name of Beatrice. She was off by car to Paris on the morrow, but hoped to see him when she came back.

Perella crumbled her bread, and looked depressedly at the black and grey banana on her plate. He had already mounted into the Doney sphere that was his own, peopled by butterfly numismatical engineers, American millionaires who owned villas, and wealthy women, all furs and pearls and violets, who thought less of taking motor-cars to Paris than she of taking tram to the Cascine. For all his gay and intimate talk, he seemed piteously remote.

But soon afterwards she found herself accompanied by him on her return walk to the Uffizi; more than that—to her easel in front of the Franciabigio, in spite of almost tearful protest. But his frank and vehement admiration comforted her artistic soul. She was the most amazing little tame Conscience that ever was. Henceforward he would follow her the world over, humbly holding up her train. He went off by himself to see the glories of the gallery, and returned towards closing time to the earnest little dark-eyed figure putting in the last few touches of the day.

“Now we’re going to be really happy,” said he. “We’ve got hours and hours in front of us. The world is ours—to say nothing of Florence.”

“Don’t you want to go to your friends?” she asked.

“When you’re about I snap my fingers at the whole lot of them.”

He had a merry eye and a persuasive laugh and a lithe young figure, and the impression she had of his dress was a careless yet elegant harmony of blues and browns. All her men acquaintances were distinguished by sloppy and untidy shoes. Anthony’s shoes were as neat as those best brown ones of hers which she had saved up for months to buy. And, as they walked together, she glanced, with an idiotic pride, at the young man’s shapely feet.

He gave her tea, not at Doney’s, but at the establishment of a humbler and more discreet panderer to British superstition. Apparently unknown, it wore a dismal and stale appearance. Only two tables were occupied, each by drooping tourist women. But to Perella, with Anthony’s gay smile opposite her, it seemed a Palace of all the Lovely Verities. And a flush came to her pale cheeks, and a light in her eyes. And at last Anthony, looking at her whimsically, said:

“Do you know, Miss Perella Conscience, that you’re jolie à croquer?”

“What’s that?” she asked, for, though she had roamed solitary about Paris, her French seemed to be deficient.

“Pretty enough to eat—like a chocolate out of an expensive box.”

Which, though exceedingly silly, pleased Perella more than any heretofore recorded utterance of man; and it deepened the gold of the afternoon sunshine when they went out into the street, and, when they emerged into the Piazza del Duomo, invested Giotto’s Campanile in the pink of porphyry soaring into the Empyrean.

She mounted the fusty stairs of the Pension in a dream.

“It’s rotten,” he said, “that I’ve got to go out to dinner to-night. Charlie Dent asked me. You see,” he added hurriedly, “I’ve got to earn a living somehow, and he may put me in the way of it. It won’t do to miss chances.”

“Of course you must go,” she said, as though she were already responsible for his career.

“But you?”

“I’ve had such a lovely tea,” said Perella.

She was content. To ask more from the high gods than what they had given her that day would have been presumption such as in the mythical times of which she had read would have been punished by some peculiarly unpleasant metamorphosis into a toad or a stinging-nettle or a Mrs. Grewson.

“I’ll pick you off your little stool at the gallery to-morrow morning,” he said, as they parted on the landing.

In the dark passage leading from the salon to the dining-room was fixed the screen where the guests’ correspondence was hung in clips. Now, few human beings are so forlorn that they abandon hope for a message from the outside world. Perella, as she passed the end of the corridor, cast an instinctive wistful glance at the screen. And there, in very truth, was a letter.

It was written in a small, beautifully clear, pointed, scholarly hand. She turned the page to find it signed: “Yours sincerely, Silvester Gayton.” It ran:

Dear Miss Annaway,

May I introduce myself as an old friend of your father, who wrote to me a day or two ago telling me that you were in Florence? He did me so many a good turn in the years gone by, that, if it is in my power to be of any service to his daughter, I shall be only too pleased to render it. There is much to be seen in Florence that is closed to the general public.

I was so sorry to miss you this morning when I called, but I was comforted by the information I received that you were at work at the Uffizi.

I wonder whether you will do me the pleasure of taking tea with me to-morrow afternoon? I am diffident in asking you, for the Viale Milton is a long way from the Lungarno. But, if I hear by telephone that you accept, you will find at four o’clock, standing outside the Uffizi public entrance, a car with a royal purple handkerchief spread over the steering-wheel. If you will honour me by entering it, the chauffeur will do the rest.

I have one or two things in my little collection which I hope may compensate you for your journey.

Perella dined, not disconsolately, talking across the table to the dusty Basil Merrywethers who had travelled by tram, train and on foot God knows where; and, after the meal, suffered gladly the facetiæ of the Rev. Mr. Grewson and the newly-stirred curiosity of the Brabazon ladies, who deferred for twenty minutes their sacred evening rubber of bridge in order to impress upon her mind their knowledge of what the eminent Professor Gayton knew about Florence.

She went to bed early, a very happy Perella, trying to reconcile the long white beard and the patronizing manner with the tenor of the letter which she had just received. The final touch of puzzledom was the royal purple handkerchief on the steering-wheel. No stuffy, snuffy old fossil could have thought of such a thing. There was something imaginative, simple, childlike about it.

It was comic. She laughed. But it was very, very kind. She snuggled into her hard and nubbly little bed. It was almost a sacrilege to blot out all this Wonder of Life in animal slumber. She must live the day over again.

Whereupon, in order to do so, she turned over with a happy sigh, and slept the profound, happy sleep of youth through the livelong night.