Читать книгу The Great Pandolfo - William J. Locke - Страница 3

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Paula Field was a woman who suffered most people gladly. Such is a gift, like that of song or painting or the solving of acrostics. Consequently she had many more friends, all over the world, who loved her than it was in human power for her to love in return. Now and then the jealous turned scorpion-wise and stung her. They called her insincere, which is the penalty of large-heartedness. Not that she ever promised more than she could perform; but the small-minded read into her sympathy more than she could think of promising. She was also a woman of peculiar personal attraction. Sir Spencer Babington, one of the coming men in post-war diplomacy, and a noted weigher of dry words, once remarked that, a century or so ago, she would have been a reigning toast. The fact of his being in love with her for years past did not detract from the accuracy of his diagnostic.

All kinds of men had fallen in love with her during her nearly thirty years of life. Only one had she selected, and that was a soldier man, Geoffrey Field, whose bones now lay in a prim little cemetery by the Somme. He was a gallant fellow; she had given him her heart; and to all suitors she would say in effect: "What is the good of a woman without the least bit of a heart left to give?" Some sighed and went away. Others gave her to understand that heart was not everything that they were looking for; and, as she had no fortune, in fact was hard put to it to make ends meet, she found herself in the position of the Lady in "Comus," and like her, dismissed the rabble-rout, but in terms less direct and more graciously ironical. To neither camp did Spencer Babington belong. As maid, she had suffered his adust wooing; as wife, she had proved him a loyal friend; to her, as widow, he remained a faithful swain; and smiling endurance of boredom in his company was her only means of expressing a sincere gratitude.

Still there were limits. A woman's nerves are not always under control. When the body is enmeshed in a network of sensitive microscopic strands, a certain petulance of expression may be forgiven.

They were in her little flat in Hansel Mansions, under the lee of Harrod's stores. It was a sunless, airless day in July, the kind of day in which she, big creature bred in open spaces, felt herself at her worst. Spencer Babington had come in casually for tea, and, uninfluenced by meteorological conditions, had asked her to marry him, just as though they had been wandering in scented hay fields, or sitting before the open mystery of the moonlit sea. Paula was conscious of dampness; of a wisp of hair sticking to her forehead. It takes a wise man to appreciate the folly of making love to a damp woman—especially when the love-making is uphill work. In the ways of women Sir Spencer Babington was not wise. Gently repulsed, he pressed his suit.

At last she said wearily:

"My dear Spencer, you would be a much pleasanter creature if you would take no for an answer."

"This, then, is final?"

"The finalest thing you can possibly imagine."

His fingers moved in the correct Englishman's miniature gesture.

"It's a pity," said he.

"What's a pity?"

Here the inevitable petulance. She sat up away from her cushions; somewhat combative.

"In the circumstances," said he, "it's rather an odd question."

"Not a bit. You've asked me for the fourth time this year——"

"The fifth," he corrected.

"Call it the nth. What does it matter? Once more I tell you I can't marry you—for the simple reason that I don't want to. You say it's a pity. I ask why? For a diplomatist the phrase is loose. It sounds as if you were sorry for me; as if in my pigheadedness I had missed something to my advantage."

He rose and stood before her, tall, lean, distinguished; clean-shaven, grave, just a bit bald; fingering a tortoise-shell-rimmed eyeglass that dangled from his neck by a broad silk ribbon. Although he was precisely dressed—for everything about Spencer Babington was precise—this eyeglass was the only sign of foppery about him. No man had ever seen him fix it in his eye. A vivacious lady had once said that he must use it exclusively in his bath to examine his conscience.

"Isn't that rather cruel, Paula?" he asked.

She replied that she was open to an explanation.

"It's a pity," said he, "that two old and tried friends like us can't unite our lives. It is I that miss all the happiness and comfort you could give me. To me the loss is a million pities. I have a position with no one to share it; a great house with no one to adorn it; thoughts, tastes, ambitions with no one on whom they can react. A very solitary life, I assure you."

She replied, a trifle irritably—he was so dry and she so damp: "In your forty years, you could surely have picked up a hundred female reagents in any quarter of the globe."

Again the tiny gesture—this time of despair.

"It pleases you to—wilfully—misunderstand me."

He split the infinitive with an air of deliberate sacrifice.

Paula laughed—and when she laughed, she was adorable in most eyes. "No, my dear, I don't misunderstand you. I've known you ever since I was a child. I'm awfully fond of you. You're the only real man friend I have in the world."

"Then," said he, "why on earth——?"

"That's it," she interrupted. "Why on earth do you want to convert a valued friend into an inconsiderable husband?"

"I object to the term," said he, drawing himself up stiffly. "After all, I'm a man of some consideration."

"Of course you are, you dear foolish Spencer." She laughed again. "Where's your logic? Who said you weren't? I was speaking of you not as a man, but as a husband. An unloved husband, must, qua husband, be inconsiderable. Mustn't he?"

Obstinate, he declined to agree with her proposition.

She saw that he was hurt. But he always had been hurt when she refused to marry him. And her heart was always pricked with remorse for hurt inflicted. There was monotony, however, in the recurrence of the pangs.

She rose and, as tall as he, a slim and stately woman, laid her hands on his shoulders.

"I have a hundred good reasons for not wanting to marry you, but a thousand for not wanting to spoil precious life-long relations."

Could woman let down man more graciously? But he went on arguing.

"Our points of view are different. It's only a matter of reconciling them; of bringing our spiritual vision, as it were, into a common focus. I can't conceive the possibility of those relations being spoiled. Quite the contrary. You twitted me just now about remaining a bachelor. I should have thought that, perhaps, in a woman's eyes, fastidiousness might be a merit. I couldn't pick up other women by the hundred, for the simple reason that you happened to exist. That you knew in the years gone by. I had hopes. But the gods—and yourself—thought otherwise."

He turned away, not without feeling and dignity, and stared across the street at the display of perambulators and invalid chairs in the opposite floor-window of Harrod's stores. She followed him and said softly:

"How can I help it if the gods—and I—are still of the same opinion?"

He swung back. "Then you've made up your mind never to marry again?"

She nodded. "I'll never marry again."

"That's one grain of comfort, at any rate," said he.

When he had gone, she moved restlessly about the small close drawing-room. It was too early to dress for the dinner-party to which she was bidden. The sense of loneliness oppressed her. Did she really mean that, all through the years that stretched before her, in bleaker and bleaker perspective, she would be content to remain faithful to Geoffrey's memory? Supposing she lived till seventy. That would be forty-one years. Forty-one years all alone. Alone always, with no one to greet her when she entered her home at night. Alone, save for a maid or two, for her household must ever be modest, all night long for forty years, in flat or villa. Alone, when, in the morning, she faced the day. Alone, as she was now, even for an hour, with naught for company but sorrowful memories.

Yet now, in the pride of her beauty and birth and position, all was fairly well. Social distractions beguiled that dreadful consciousness of solitude. But in the years to come, when her beauty should fade, as fade it must—even though she bejezabeled herself like hundreds of faded women of her acquaintance—a generation must arise that knew her not, and pass her by, having no use for her. The aforesaid elderly women, clinging passionately to past beauty, carried on because they were rich. It was a ghastly and degrading thought. But one must face actualities. Their means maintained them in the statu quo terribly ante. But who in twenty years' time would want or seek from charity or even think of the painted harridan—there can be no crystal globe more fuliginous with inspissated gloom than the soul of a woman confronted with the possible decay of her beauty—who had to think twice before she could ask two or three people to dinner and give them a drinkable bottle of champagne.

She brushed her hair impatiently from her damp forehead. She had not the remotest desire in the world to be a painted harridan. She adored the dears who grew old gracefully. She saw herself—twenty years hence, at forty-nine—a pleasant grey-haired old lady, living out a peaceful old age in a Gloucestershire village, with a resident cat and a visiting curate.

Of course she could go on with her writing. She had the knack of dainty description and for some time had contributed a couple of weekly articles to sound journals. She had written a novel, of which (genteelly reviewed) she had sold nearly four hundred copies. Perhaps, if she persevered, she might acquire an absorbing interest in life together with a tidy income. But all that didn't do away with the loneliness.

There had been a girl child born of her brief and war-accidented married life; as healthy a baby as could owe its existence to superb parentage. It had contracted some infantile malady and died. Had it lived, there would have been supreme reasons for existence. She could have faced the years to come unfalteringly. All that, however, was over and done with long ago; almost forgotten; hidden only in the sacred depths of memory. She stood, where Spencer Babington had stood, by the window gazing absently across the way, and, becoming conscious of the perambulators, turned with an absurd little pain in her heart.

A social letter or two lay on her writing table awaiting answers. She sat down and took up pen and paper. At present her life was full; she would be ungrateful to complain; but it was full of vain and unsubstantial things. A silver framed photograph of her late husband stood on the railed top of the table; a frank and gallant fellow in the familiar uniform. There is scarcely a home in Great Britain without some such poignant reminder of stricken flower of manhood. If we forget that for which these died, we deserve the curse of whatever God there be who rules our destinies.

For a time, Paula, elbows on table and chin in hands, communed dumbly with the portrait. Would he think it worthless, selfish, wicked of her, to marry again? Just some kind, plain man who would give her companionship and save her from the nightmare of decrepit solitude. He knew that she had been his, body and heart and soul. She had tried to be brave and face the world with an air and a flourish, just as he had faced the enemy; but she was a coward; a splendid show and nothing more.

Would he mind if ever——? And, as she looked, the stern lips seemed to smile, and in her ears there seemed to come the sound, from infinite distance, of the well-remembered voice murmuring consolation.... "Dear old thing, how can you think me such a lunatic dog-in-the-manger? You're in the flesh with which I have nothing to do, except to wish for your happiness. I'm in the spirit, and in the spirit you're mine eternally, no matter how many rotten old husbands you have." She heard his careless laugh.

She rubbed her eyes, stretched out her arms and again took up her pen.

"What a silly fool I am," she said.

She rattled off her notes in a bold and generous hand and tried to read a novel. But her thoughts wandered. Why all this pother of emotionalism because dear old Spencer had asked her, once again, to marry him? She had known him all her life; the same dry stick of a man. A faithful friend; yes. And she, should he need her ministrations as counsellor, agent, nurse, would, so as to afford them, willingly cross seas and continents. Loyal as was her regard, distinguished as was his career, she could not marry him were he the last man left on earth. There was no question of his distinction. From his rooms in Balliol he had absorbed all the honours that the University of Oxford had to bestow. He had but to appear in the Foreign Office, as a young man, to glimmer in his impressive lambent way, as the perfect, God-created private secretary. And since those early days he had gone far. Paula had ever watched his path with amused interest. But a short while before, at an official reception, when he had come up to her, his lank person ablaze with decorations, and she saw impending in his glance the (n-1)th proposal, she had shielded her eyes and begged him, a magnanimous Jove, to spare poor Semele. Unless he came upon her, as to-day, in an irritable mood, she could never regard Spencer Babington unhumorously. Of what there was in him to arouse the Comic Spirit she was not aware. The little Imp of Mischance, whose delighted business is the exploitation of human infirmities, had something, but not everything, to do with it. The aforesaid Imp, finding Paula's maid and Babington's valet together in the same country house had locked their heads together in mutual confidence. As a result, the former, devoted, invaluable, yet irrepressible remnant of her girlhood's ease, had informed her mistress of a few of Sir Spencer's lighter idiosyncracies. Paula had a short way of repressing Simkin's gossip. But Simkin had a lightning way, born of practice, of conveying it. Before Paula could shut the fountain tap, she learned that Sir Spencer had a highly developed system of underwear. He had a dozen suits of flannel pyjamas numbered from one to twelve, which must be served to him in exact rotation according to the linen book kept in his own handwriting. A mistake and the wheels of his household were declared to be out of gear, the domestic economy of the country to be a thing past praying for, and the whole of Europe to be in a state of Bolshevist disruption.

"Hold your tongue, Simkin. How dare you tell me such disgusting tittle-tattle?"

So would Paula flame indignant and for the moment blast further confidence. But Simkin had got in first with her lightning flash, and had impressed imperishable pictures on her mistress's mind.

Thousands of women maintain the happiness of married life by dint of viewing their husbands through the God-given prism of a sense of humour. But they have got to be married first—before God gives it them. When He gives it to women beforehand, ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine out of a hundred thousand, recognize it is a Warning and turn the gentleman over to less gifted sisters. The Imp of Mischance may have had something to do with Paula's refusal of Babington; but, as before stated, he had not everything. Even when circumstances would have warranted, and Paula herself, like any reasonable woman, would have pardoned impassioned eloquence, his utterances were marked by an incongruous frigidity. And one definition of a sense of humour, as good as another, is a perception of the incongruous.

Again, why should this eminent and irreproachable gentleman's repeated proposal of marriage have sent her off her balance? She could not say. If every woman knew exactly what was going on within herself the earth would be a less secure planet than it is even at present.

By the time she had dressed for her dinner party she had recovered her serenity. After all, there were still cakes and ale in the world, agreeable to the palate. And she had beauty and health and young blood coursing through her veins. It was to be a stuffy and politico-financial party. But her old hosts, she knew, held her in sincere affection, and their broad and welcoming smiles would be compensation for any after dullness.

She was waiting, lightly cloaked in her drawing-room, for a summoned taxi to be announced, when the telephone bell rang. A servant's voice. Mrs. Field? Lady Demeter wished to speak to her. Would she hold the line? Then:

"Is that you, Paula dear? It's Clara speaking. Can you come down to-morrow for the week-end?"

Paula laughed. "What's the matter?"

"This eleventh hour invitation? Do be an angel and come and I'll tell you all about it."

"Anybody dead or bolted?"

"No, no. An unexpected odd man. And he'll be entirely out of the picture. You'll come, won't you?"

"Yes. But I must come down late. Do I know the man? What's his name?"

"Pandolfo. Sir Victor Pandolfo."

"Never heard of him," said Paula.