Читать книгу The Old Bridge - William J. Locke - Страница 9

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For a young Orlando with scant heritage, Anthony Blake found life exceedingly pleasant. He had fallen in love with an elfin thing responsive to any chord he cared to strike, yet reserving in the depths of her all kinds of delicious and delicate mysteries which, he knew, she would shyly, gradually, yet never completely reveal during a lifetime. He was an honest youth, and a poet in his way. It did not occur to him that his dainty lady had made unconditional surrender on the first magical night of their meeting. In his masculine way he gave never a thought to her half-starved and a-hungered emotions. In the days of his prosperity he had been on the modern hail-fellow-well-met terms with a hundred young females of his class. Some were good friends whose disconcerting frankness precluded sentimental relations. Others, with a frankness equally disconcerting, offered themselves to him—they were his for the marrying—and, when he declined, gave him to understand that he was rather an ass, but bore no further malice. Living cleanly (for all that mattered), loving the bubbles of life in healthy fashion, he passed through the galaxy of nymphs unscathed. Time to marry when he was thirty, by which time he would find the one and only girl in the world.

He argued it out once with his eldest sister, Gloria, who had up her sleeve, so to speak, a desirable and desiring damsel. He would live, said he, all being well, till he was at least seventy. Married at thirty, he would have forty years to live with the same woman, supposing for the sake of argument she was as tough as himself. Well, didn’t the dear thing see that he wasn’t going to gamble away his existence except on a certainty? On the one hand, he refused to go bald-headed for a girl who obviously didn’t care a hang for him, but who might marry him on account of the position he could offer; and, on the other, young women who threw themselves at his head made him positively sick. If social law allowed the trial trip, all would be well. At the end of a year or so, if it didn’t work it would be, on both sides, “Good-bye, old thing. Sorry. Better luck next time.” And so da capo. All might be exceedingly well. He would go so far as to say that it might be a succession of fascinating experiences up to the various snag-times. But no. All these young things expected you to take them on—on sight—for forty years. It couldn’t be done. Of course there were such things as divorces—but those were beastly. You didn’t marry a girl with the mirage of divorce shimmering behind the parson in his white surplice. Forty years! It took a lot of thinking about.

Thus Anthony, passim. Said Gloria, a comfortable lady, in love with life:

“I was engaged to Freddie after a three weeks’ acquaintance, and married him after seven.”

“And look at the poor devil now!” exulted Anthony.

Of course, said he, she had sat up and begged for it. Her concerns were beside the question. His own were under discussion. Did she know her Rabelais? No. Did Freddie? She replied that modern Major-Generals with their hands full of armies and wives hadn’t time to fool about with stuffy old French classics.

“If only he had occupied the seven weeks you talk about,” said he, “in studying the arguments between Pantagruel and Panurge on the advisability of Panurge marrying, you’d be having a very thin time now, my dear.”

Heart-whole, his head a medley of delights over material and spiritual things—from broiled lobster to Michael Angelo—he arrived in Florence, sat down at the dreadful Toselli table, and there, next to him, was a tiny something in a wisp of an old mauve frock with a sensitive little face and adorable little hands, and a pair of quiet dark eyes, which was like nothing he had seen or thought of in the world before....

He remembered her first utterance—in answer to his question if she was English. “Yes, of course.” The dainty music of it!

And her shy woodland ways!

He disdained the thought, almost the knowledge, that she had spent her life in back bedrooms overlooking bricks and mortar.

And her name—Perella—it might be the name of a bird.

There was, indeed, something bird-like about her. “And all a wonder and a wild desire.” What damned useful people poets were!

Anthony was in love, as much as a healthy and poetical and artistic young man can be. He discovered new beauties and reticences and delicate veins of humour and wisdom in Perella day by day. When, in pursuit of his making crayon portraits of the opulent, he was not retained to lunch, they often met for their midday meal in a haunt remote from the atmosphere of austere decay of the Pension Toselli. This was a restaurant running through the cellars of a house or two. You dived off the pavement into a dark hole, passed hissing, steaming, bubbling pots and pans, presided over by white-capped cook and myrmidons, and emerged into yellow-washed vaults furnished with tables and rough appurtenances, and adorned with flaming posters. The food was good, the wine was cheap, and the company of endless variegation. To pay twice over for a meal was sinfully wasteful, but alluringly extravagant. They ate coarse dainties such as Madame Toselli would not dare offer to her genteel guests, and smoked between mouthfuls, a joy forbidden by the stern etiquette of the Pension. Indeed, the Brabazon ladies manifested displeasure if anyone lit a cigarette before the last woolly mouthful of the last wizened apple was eaten, and only tolerated the smell of tobacco for the few moments necessary for the consumption of their tepid coffee. Here, on the other hand, at Fratello’s, was freedom of body and speech. They could talk as loud as their neighbours—louder, if they were wise—for then they had the chance of hearing each other across the table.

Now and then Anthony brought his friend, Charlie Dent, a fresh and pleasant youth who, knowing the betrothed relations of the pair, treated Perella with a gay deference which pleased her mightily. Now and again, too, Perella brought Monica Despard, a vague girl who had been a fellow-student in Chelsea, and whom she had run across in Florence, vaguely continuing her art studies. Once or twice Charlie Dent entertained them at Betti’s, and took them afterwards to his queer apartment in order to feast their eyes on his collection of Roman coins. Perella, so long as she was with Anthony, would have gazed with rapture on a collection of skeleton ribs of beef, and been perfectly happy; but Anthony, in his masterful way, consigned Roman coins to Hades, strummed the newest airs from musical Comedy on the piano, and turned the scientific gathering into a vocal orgy. Then they walked home together lover-wise.

“Anthony dear, will you always care for me like this?”

All the grim palaces of Florence, which had listened to lovers’ impassioned vows for centuries, heard her and smiled cynically.

They were engaged. He bought her a ring—an exquisite onyx intaglio set in a thin rim of gold. But the engagement, they decided, should not be announced, in view of its prospective inordinate length. The Pension Toselli must be kept in abysmal ignorance, wherefore Perella wore the ring on any old finger except the one of significance. Their ambitions were modest: a little Montparnasse flat in Paris, a bungalow on the river, within easy reach of London, a handy little car, and a faithful, hard-working Italian cook who would follow them everywhere. There would be studios in both places where they would work, one at each end. Perella’s copying drudgery would be over. She would paint figures from the live model, and make much money; while he would portrait himself into celebrity. What could be wrong with the plan? They furnished the flat and the bungalow twice over with treasures seen through the windows of the antique shops of Florence the Beautiful.

Anthony wrote to his sister, Gloria, a letter of extraordinary length and conscientious rhapsody, to which she replied by telegram: “Dear silly ass!”

This made him very angry; for he had minutely explained that, though Perella would marry him to-morrow without thought of the future, such being her unique, unprecedented character, yet it would be wicked of him to take advantage of her ultra-human trust until he could provide adequately for her comfort.

“I’m through with Gloria,” said he. “I thought she was my friend. I’ll never speak to her again.”

“You must have written her awful drivel, dear,” said Perella.

“Oh, you sympathize with her, do you?”

Perella nodded. “Do write to her again, and tell her I’m dying to meet her. I think she must be the dearest thing in the world.”

“She’s just a cat of no intelligence,” said Anthony.

Thus Anthony and Perella. Meanwhile the days lengthened through the sweet of May into the flame of June. In July Florence began to grow comfortably warm, whereupon many residents fled to the imaginary climatic perfection of London or Paris, leaving the pencil of a young portraitist ready but idle.

Now, things had happened. No one who, within three or four months, has established for himself a happy vogue in making portraits of the nobility and gentry of an important locality can pass through such a social range like a ghost untouched by adventure. Anthony’s facile art, and his gay manner had carried him through Florentine society. He had made influential friends. As he told Perella, he wallowed in advice.

Among his main advisers were his first friend, Cornelius Adams, and the American lady, Mrs. Beatrice Ellison, whom he had met for a few fleeting minutes on his first entrance into Doney’s.

Mrs. Ellison returned to Florence at the end of April. She lived in an historical villa on the way to Fiesole, where she entertained the select world of Italo-Anglo-American Florence.

Thither in early May was Anthony conducted by Cornelius Adams and Charlie Dent.

It was afternoon. On a marble loggia, south of aspect, from which could be seen, through soft blue mist, the fairy cupolas and towers of Florence, tea was being served to an elegant company. Dissemble the lower parts of ladies in sweeping trains, accentuate those of men by parti-coloured trunk-hose, substitute cool silver flagons for china tea-cups, and there might have been seated Pamfilo and Filostrato and Dioneo and Pampinea and Filomena and Elisa, the immortally delectable idlers of the Decameron.

The analogy was Anthony’s in talk with his hostess. The conceit pleased her, for she had gaiety and imagination. She declared that she must inaugurate a series of symposia on Boccaccian lines, one story per symposium.

“But where,” bewailed Anthony, “are the exquisite amateur tellers of stories? All that—such is the modern spirit of commercialism—has fallen into professional hands, and the modern professional wouldn’t dream of giving out his stories except at his market rate of so much per thousand words.”

“What would you suggest then?” smiled the lady, for Anthony was one of the fortunate youths on whom ladies smiled instinctively.

“A perfect communion of chosen souls, where speech would be forbidden. You would be much happier—wouldn’t you?—if, instead of being bored to death by me whom you’re so indulgent as to talk to, you could sit just there and look at the black cypresses against the blue sky, and the shimmering city, and know that beside you some one sympathetic was feeling exactly the same things and was saving you the worry of polite conversation.”

“It sounds lovely,” she laughed, “but I’m afraid in modern Italy it wouldn’t work. The Fascisti would get to hear of it, and, as they couldn’t conceive such a party was not under the influence of drugs, they’d arrest us all for dreadful people trafficking in cocaine.”

Anthony left behind him a favourable impression, and carried away, in a jubilant head, a commission to make a portrait of his hostess, in her setting on the loggia, as one of the Queens of the Decameron.

A commission from Beatrice Ellison would have flattered any young and ambitious artist. Not only was she a beautiful woman, but also one of those aristocratic ladies to whom Americans, secretly hating their self-condemnation to Main Street democracy, point with pride and unquestioned justification as the finest product of modern civilization. With the ripe experience of the world which a woman has gathered by her early forties, she was at the height of her influence and charm. Like most women of her class, she devoted certain pains to the preservation of her youth, whereby she remained young in health and looks and enjoyment of life. She reigned somewhat as a queen in Florence, holding a position in the social world analogous to that of Silvester Gayton in the world of Art and Letters. The two were friends; but when they met it was generally in pleasant quietude.

Anthony Blake made the most graceful little finished sketch of Mrs. Ellison. The lady proclaimed her delight. Her Court paid tribute to the artist. In her pose he had divined the irony of her languor and the truth of her authority. Without using colour he had, by some trick of legerdemain, conveyed the sense of the blueness of her eyes and the fresh pink of complexion beneath the mass of black hair. Anthony took rank, at once, among the Illuminati who formed the nucleus, the Household, as it were, of the Court of Beatrice Ellison. His position, within modest limits, was honourably lucrative. It was also one of great social value; for, by its virtue, exclusive doors were thrown open to him. He began once more to move among the great and wealthy. He would apologize now and then to Perella for apparent neglect.

“Often I’m bored to tears, bird of my soul,” said he one day over lunch in the cellar restaurant, “but it’s the only way to establish my connection. People don’t come to a young man who lives on the top of an inaccessible mountain or at the bottom of a coal mine, begging him, for God’s sake, to paint their portraits. He must be there on the spot, in the midst of them, so that a fellow happening to catch sight of him says: ‘Hullo, that’s young Blake who did Jones’s wife so well. I wonder whether he’d do mine. By George! I’ll ask him.’ And he asks, and young Blake puts on dog and condescends to take the order and sticks the money in the savings-bank against the day when he can carry off Perella for a honeymoon in a bungalow on the Thames. That’s how it’s done.”

And Perella, dazzled by his magnificent prospects, agreed that nothing could be better done by the best of all possible lovers.

“You’re such a miracle,” said he. “So big in your tininess. You never reproach me for leaving you so much to yourself, and you scorn jealousy.”

She replied, with one of her elfin smiles: “I’m too happy to be jealous. But sometimes I wonder.”

“What?”

“How you can leave princesses in palaces for Cinderella in a kitchen.”

“Cinderella’s going to have a Taj-Mahal palace of her very own, and wear nothing but diamond slippers.”

A most comforting assurance. It made the cheap Chianti, which he poured into her glass from the vast, long-necked fiasco swinging in its cradle, glow with the fire of Love and Rubies consummating their union.

Mrs. Ellison commissioned a second portrait—just a head and shoulders—a sketch for her daughter Emilia, a girl of eighteen who was taking a course of Theoretic Motherhood at a university in Minnesota.

“This time make me respectable. The other was too Decameronian to send to a girl of a lamentably critical temperament.”

One morning, while she was sitting to him, there drove up Silvester Gayton, in his rattling old car. Invited to lunch, he had arrived early, so as to enjoy the coolness of the country air. He would not interrupt the sitting, said he, for worlds. He would walk the grounds. Anthony laughingly wiped the chalk from his hands. By no means; Mrs. Ellison was already tired. He would come again, his time being always at her gracious disposal. But the lady had planned that the young artist should stay for lunch. Her word, both in and out of her own house, was law. She could sit for another half-hour, during which her dear Silvester could rest just there—she waved to a neighbouring seat—and when he was sick of the sight of his eternal Florence in the blue distance he could occupy himself in watching a work of art in process of creation.

Silvester put down his bowler hat and drew off his grey suède gloves, and sat on his appointed chair just behind the artist.

“The old school and the new school—and—what am I? the in-between school. It’s rather interesting,” said the lady.

“There’s only one school, dear Beatrice, don’t you think?” he said diffidently, “and that is the True school. I don’t see much difference in method between the sketches of the quattro-centisti and that of our friend here....”

Anthony flushed red, and turned quickly round.

“I know what you mean, sir. You’re not comparing my work in value to the old people—it’s just the method. But that’s a tremendous compliment.”

“Well,” returned the Professor, rather pleased, “I did intend to be agreeable. It’s always nice to be that and truthful at the same time. All I meant was that you had the simple desire to draw a thing as you see it, and the gift of the free line in order to do it. So you belong to the one and only school, founded by the first primitive man who scratched the outline of a reindeer on the walls of his cave. You know,” he turned to Mrs. Ellison, “some of these cave drawings are tremendous works of art. The reindeer live.”

Beatrice Ellison smiled.

“According to you, that’s the only criterion—Life.”

“Yes, my dear,” said the Professor, bending forward, “you can test everything by it. Even a Stilton cheese.”

The drawing progressed. After a while, Anthony rose and stuck his drawing on his chair, and looked at it from a distance.

“That’s all I can do for to-day. The time comes when one doesn’t know whether one sees too much or too little.”

Mrs. Ellison murmured admiration of the likeness. Silvester Gayton peered at it through his thick lenses.

“Quite good. Yes, quite good. But”—he bent a thumb “if you’ll pardon my venturing to criticize, don’t you think that shadow on the cheek is a bit heavy? A question of values. A thing like this should give the impression of being done in an inspired instant. Nobody should be conscious of the agony and sweat that goes to it.”

Anthony nodded, looking anxiously at his drawing. Mrs. Ellison laughed.

“Professor Gayton’s nothing if not a Counsellor of Perfection.”

Anthony flashed in his charming way.

“Has there ever been a Teacher in this world who wasn’t?”

Lunch-time approached. Ten minutes for washing of hands and powdering of noses, said the hostess. She disappeared. The men went together into the house.

“I’m very grateful to you for your kindness, sir,” said Anthony.

After lunch Mrs. Ellison left them alone for a while. She knew her Silvester and what fruits a discreet whisper in his ear would bear. This time Anthony had made a favourable impression. He had conducted himself with deference and humility—no longer the young man knowing most things and on the eve of knowing all that were left, who had at first driven the sensitive Professor far back into his shell. The compass needle, carefully set by Mrs. Ellison at the young man’s prospects, remained steady.

“Your work is quite good and interesting,” said Silvester Gayton, after preliminary talk. “But have you thought what it will lead to? You can’t go on making crayon portraits all your lifetime.”

Anthony supposed he couldn’t. But what would the Professor suggest?

“The obvious career for a portraitist is that of a painter.”

“I wish to goodness I could paint,” cried Anthony. “But when I get a brush in my hands, it’s such a clumsy thing that I can only make a beastly mess. Of course I know that if I went into a studio in Paris, say, and threw my heart into painting, I’d get the hang of it. It’s really a matter of technique. Pencil or brush—after all—well—— But I can’t afford a couple of unprofitable years. Here I am beginning to make a lot of money in a modest way.”

“Quite so—quite so. But soon you’ll exhaust your public—numerically, I mean, of course. And then?”

That was the devil of it. The thought had worried Anthony exceedingly every night for five minutes before he went to sleep, and for five minutes between awakening and jumping impatiently out of bed.

The wise Professor counselled the two years’ sacrifice in Paris. Anthony urged the possibility of fame and fortune from black and white.

“Pardon me, my dear Mr. Blake,” said Gayton, “but why do you clamour for fame and fortune so soon? Believe me, there’s the greatest joy in waiting, if faith and hope are strong enough.”

Anthony gave meek assent. He realized somewhat ruefully, as many millions of men have done, that the best advice in the world has been given on insufficient data, and therefore, logically, is valueless. Now, if he had told him about Perella! But he couldn’t bring in Perella, even though he knew that Gayton, departing from instinctive habit, had taken Perella under his special protection. A new and incomprehensible shyness inhibited reference to Perella. The timid little great man imposed himself on the habitual irreverence of his youth. He feared reproach, however delicately veiled, for penniless impudence. He took it for granted that Gayton saw Perella, through his eyes, as a thing of elfin flame, not to be desecrated by vulgar breath.

As they rose from table the Professor said:

“I hope you don’t mind my prying into your private affairs in this way, but there’s my good friend, Halliday Armstrong, originally, and now our dear hostess—I knew her husband, poor chap—much older than her, you know.... He was the greatest living authority on Italian stained glass, and that’s how I came to know him. Well, I’m afraid I’m getting mixed up. What I wanted to say was that two friends, Armstrong and Mrs. Ellison, have been responsible for my indiscretion—to say nothing of my opinion of the work of yours that I’ve seen.”

Said Anthony, responsive to the elder man’s courtesy: “I’m only too fortunate in having you take any notice of me at all.”

They joined Mrs. Ellison in the loggia, when coffee and liqueurs were served.

“Has he given you sound advice?” she asked Anthony.

“The wisest and the kindest,” replied the young man with a bow.

A while afterwards she offered the artist another hour’s sitting. Silvester Gayton took his leave, one glove on and the other off, in the old-fashioned way, and his jacket closely buttoned.

“You’ve won his heart; I’m so glad,” said Mrs. Ellison. “It’s a heart of gold, but it takes some winning.”

He started to draw, but presently threw down his crayon. The light was wrong. There were all sorts of shadows and conflicting tones. She must change the sitting to some room with a quiet, north light. She avowed herself too lazy to move. He could come, if he liked, to-morrow morning. Meanwhile, the drowsy afternoon lent itself to comfortable talk.

She lay back in a cane chair, slim and graceful, and drew a cigarette from her case. He bent over her with a lighted match. A little earnest pucker of her brows relaxed, and she looked up at him with a nod and a charming smile of thanks. Perhaps, for the first time, he looked upon her with a non-professional eye, and realized her as a very beautiful woman.

“I want to know more about you,” she said. “I don’t mean your pedigree, or even your past, however interestingly dreadful it may be—but your present and your ideas for the future. Does it bore you to talk about yourself?”

He made the obvious modest reply. She laughed.

“If I were doing penance for my sins, the last mortification I should dread would be boredom.” She gave him a lead. “What has my good Silvester to say?”

They sat in the colonnaded marble loggia, a slant of sunshine across the far end, but they in secure cool shade. It was the blue and golden afternoon of early Italian summer. Away below dreamed the domes and towers of the city, man’s immortal handiwork consecrated by the smile of God. On the loggia, everything seemed far away and delicate. A touch of the scent of magnolia was in the air, but the tree was not near enough to drench the senses. Far off, too, a cicada made dainty music to his mate. A cowbell on the mountain above tinkled just perceptibly in the still air. From far away at the back of the house came now and then the notes of a manservant singing, as every Italian must when he is finding joy in his work. All the horns of Elfland were faintly blowing. The young man living, who, invited in such conditions by a beautiful lady, near and yet remote, to make the very most and best of himself, does not respond, is a young man with no music in his soul, and, as the poet tells us, is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils, and must not be trusted even to watch the tin can of a blind man’s dog. As a tulip unfolds its heart to the sun, so did Anthony unfold his life to the Lady....

She listened intently, throwing in, here and there, a soft and humorous word. She had the great gift of making men—and women too—feel that, to her, they were the most important factors of the universe. Unconsciously he surrendered to her enchantment. Little Perella seemed far away, mingled somehow with the shimmer of temples, and the elusive perfumes of flowers and the far-flung music of fairy bells away up on the side of the scented mountain.

Loyalty strove to wrest her from the ambient fairyland and set her there on the loggia, warm and human, before the lady. But a curious fear froze loyalty into an inactive block; the intuitive fear of the man, ignorant of being born to the love of many women, yet sensitive to their touch. Instinctively he knew that the hour was golden because the woman lazily holding him with her dark blue—here and there in shadow almost violet—eyes, had willed its transmutation into gold.... She had lured him from the commonplace into talk of beauty and emotion and God knows what. He spoke, and she wove grace around his utterances. For the first time in his clean and careless life, he found himself under the spell of woman. Perella, an alien elf, would have broken a spell too sensuous to be broken.

The butler came in with a jingle of silver and china on a tray. Beatrice Ellison rose from her long chair.

“I am dying for tea.”

She busied herself with the dainty ceremony of the futile meal. The talk fell to common earth. At last, however, she said with a sigh:

“I suppose one of these days you, like the rest of you, will be mad to marry some flibbertigibbet of a modern girl, and you’ll wave your hand to all your friends—Bonsoir la compagnie—and off you’ll go. But, if you re a wise man, you’ll realize you’ve still half a dozen years of sense in front of you. Have a cucumber sandwich?”

How could young man say: “Madam, I will not have a cucumber sandwich, because I have already the girl of my heart”?

He laughed, in a silly sort of way, and accepted the sandwich.