Читать книгу The Great Pandolfo - William J. Locke - Страница 4

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It was Lady Demeter's amiable foible to turn her West Hertfordshire house once a week into a den of lions. They arrived, sprucely maned and elegantly tailed, in time for tea on Saturday, and they were courteously yet firmly chivvied away before lunch on Monday. They could bring with them wives, husbands, trainers and other attendants. The house was large, with plenty of roaring space, so that if a second lion entering any apartment found the first occupant a bore (in the words of the poet) he could go forth and roar somewhere else to his perfect satisfaction. Lady Demeter, a fearless Daniel, moved among them tactfully. She had the gift of reconciling the all but irreconcilable. At Hinsted Park were contracted the most unlikely friendships and the least imaginable of matrimonial alliances. Now and then a timid little white-haired man would be seen creeping about, and the lions would ask one another who he was and what the deuce he did and, by dint of patient inquiry, would eventually discover he was Lord Demeter. Afterwards they recognized him as the man who, late at night, apathetically sought to know whether they would have brandy or whisky with their soda. He was dreadfully afraid of his wife's lions.

She was a burly, high-complexioned woman of capacious mind and bosom; a worthy lady, very bountiful and efficient; she sat, heavily, as chairwoman on many committees. She would give any new lion ten minutes at Hinsted and he would eat out of her hand.

In the hall or outer-den, a stately place staircased and galleried, did two lions meet that Saturday afternoon. They were the first arrivals, and they motored down on a day of summer drought, happening to pass and repass each other angrily, so that their throats were filled with mutual dust and their hearts with mutual dislike, especially when they arrived almost simultaneously at the same destination. One was Spencer Babington. He greeted his hostess with a prim "How d'ye do, Clara?"

Said the other: "My dear lady, what a delight to see you in this perfect setting."

Then Lady Demeter: "I wonder whether you two know each other——"

"We've seen a great deal of each other on the road. All the way from the Marble Arch," answered Babington.

"I got the best of you," cried his road rival with a great laugh. "My chauffeur's the most marvellous driver in Europe."

Babington's lips curled into the withered smile of the professional diplomatist. "Why not in the world?"

"Why not? No doubt he is. If I thought he wasn't, I'd sack him. I'll tell you about him one of these days."

"You can't until you're properly introduced," laughed Lady Demeter. "Sir Spencer Babington—Sir Victor Pandolfo."

"If I had known it was you," said Pandolfo, "I'd have——" he paused.

"What——?" Babington inquired.

"I'd have gone twice as fast, so that you wouldn't have been inconvenienced. She can do a hundred miles an hour as easily as twenty."

Babington's manner was of the coldest.

"Really?" said he.

"Just a cheap American car. I took her to pieces. Fitted her up with all sorts of contrivances of my own of which no one has got the secret yet. An experiment, you see. And as I tell you, she's a wonder. A bird on wheels."

"At any rate, after your experiences, you must both be very thirsty," said Lady Demeter, moving to the tea table. "Tea, Spencer?"

"If you please."

"Sir Victor?"

"May I take advantage of the promise of more cooling streams which I see over yonder?"

Pandolfo waved a hand to a table against the wall set with gleaming silver and glass and crystal jugs and ice and decanters.

The lady smiled hospitably. He turned half-way:

"Perhaps Sir Spencer will change his mind?"

"Thanks, no. Tea is more refreshing. One lump, dear Clara. A thousand thanks."

"Your lump doesn't clink like this, my dear fellow," said Pandolfo, coming forward with a great tumbler glad with the music of ice. "This is good, Lady Demeter. The concocter is almost a genius; but not quite. I'll give you a secret that will make him one. A dash—a mere dash of Fernet Branca."

"What is that? I don't know it," laughed Lady Demeter.

"If Sir Victor will excuse my saying so," Babington interjected, "it's the most obnoxious liquid—a kind of bitters—that only the perverted taste of modern Italy could have invented. It ties the tongue into knots and destroys the coat of the stomach."

"On the contrary, my dear fellow. It titillates the healthy tongue and stimulates the healthy stomach. It's one of Italy's priceless boons to mankind—mother of immortal boons that she is. Besides, you take it in drops, not in jorums like tea."

Lady Demeter glanced anxiously at the clock. There were still twenty minutes before the train guests could arrive; and no one else was expected by motor. Never had she entertained two new lions more mutually antipathetic. She had hoped for the mixture of other elements. What, thought she, could be common ground for a famous inventor and a diplomatist not without celebrity? Furthermore: for a spacious creature of wide gesture and proclamation and a dry, thin-lipped apostle of secrecy? She talked rather wildly of the house and its artistic treasures. There was that Sassoferrato, for instance. Demeter, poor dear, had been persuaded to buy it, unframed and rolled up, by a Russian Grand Duke in whose family palace it had hung for a couple of centuries. But it was too pretty-pretty for her taste.

Babington crossed the hall, fingering the ribbon of his tortoise-shell-rimmed monocle, and examined the picture.

"A very fine example, indeed, with all the artist's exquisite finish. I don't hold with the people who profess to despise the later Eclectics. They carried on the torch, the sacred torch of Raphael. I have a Sassoferrato in my own little collection—but, I'm afraid, of doubtful authenticity." He turned, holding out the never-used eye-glass. "If Demeter should like to part with it—well, there's a congenial home for it in Eaton Square."

"If it depended on me, my dear man, you could tuck it under your arm and walk away with it now," said Lady Demeter, with a laugh. "But you've got to reckon with my money-thirsty husband."

Meanwhile Victor Pandolfo, mighty glass beaker still in hand, had inspected the picture. He strolled back to the tea-table.

"Splendid. Sassoferrato didn't reach achievement—who of us does? But he had the one and only idea. The vast conception alone and all by itself—that's the sea in which infinite geniuses have perished impotently. The maze of detail leading to some vague Purpose—millions of eager but blind souls have been lost and starved in it. It's the Great Thing ahead, with the details at command that matters. The Divine Gift of Combination—" his fingers flickered for a moment on his brow—"our friend Sassoferrato just misses it. Raphael had it. Sir Isaac Newton, Harvey, Pasteur, the chap—the simple sort of fool, just like you and me"—he bowed to Babington—"who built the Parthenon, all had it.... Anyhow, I'm glad you like the Eclectics. They were poor devils bursting to deliver a message, and no medium at their command but a worn-out formula. So I love 'em. I'd like to see your Sassoferrato. On the other hand I prefer their successors, the Naturalisti—Caravaggio—he's trying to do things in a new way—but he's one of the fellows that got overwhelmed in his own waves——"

"Pardon me," said Babington, "I've made a study of the post-Raphaelites—As a matter of fact I've published two little books on the subject..."

"Read 'em. Read 'em. Read 'em," said Pandolfo, with a smile and an airy wave of his hand.

"Well, my dear sir," said Babington, "you must see that I'm not quite at one with you——"

"But how good! How splendid!" cried Pandolfo, his arms wide apart—his left hand still clutching his empty glass. "Lady Demeter, you're like the lady of the Enchanted Castle. You've brought two knights together—thrown down your glove—your Sassoferrato picture—and we're going to hack each other to pieces about it.——"

The hall door was thrown open and the butler entered heralding vague forms of men and women. Lady Demeter rose and sailed forth in welcome. Pandolfo hooked Babington's arm and swept him away into a far corner of the hall, under the lee of the stately staircase.

"My dear fellow," said he, "in your books you're as right as rain. As right as any professional beggar of questions can be. But there's such a thing as universality. I've got an Andrea Vaccaro—one of the Naturalisti——"

"I'm aware of him," said Babington.

"Well, come and see it. If it explodes all your ideas I'll give it to you."

His compelling good nature was irresistible. Babington allowed himself to be beguiled.

"I confess," said he, "that to me it's a surprise—a most agreeable surprise—that a man whose name is associated with mechanical and utilitarian things should have, well, practically the same hobby as myself."

"Bless your heart," cried Pandolfo, "I've a million hobbies. Now, I should really like you to see my Andrea Vaccaro. Name any day. Whenever you like. Come and lunch. I'll show you lots of things."

Lady Demeter, dispensing tea to her guests, cast an eye into the far corner where the two lions were now conversing with indubitable amiability, and inwardly congratulated herself on her unfailing tact.

Towards the end of the dressing-hour, she entered the room of Paula Field, who had arrived late, and embraced her fondly.

"My dear, with all this menagerie on my hands I haven't had a moment for a word with you. It's too sweet of you to come down and help me."

"With the poor lion who hasn't got a Christian? I hope I'll do."

Paula laughed, teasing and adorable, and glanced for a second into the pier glass before which she stood. It reflected a tall, delicately made woman, with wavy brown hair on a dainty head and a humorous smile behind blue almost violet eyes; a quality of style, in the sense of its application to a poem or a picture. A shimmering silver dress conveyed the impression of great stateliness.

Lady Demeter followed the glance.

"Always perfection," she sighed admiringly. She knew that she herself was the Dressmaker's Despair.

Paula chose to be rueful. "You've seen it before, Clara, and you'll see it again. Still, it is rather nice, isn't it? Well, what about the man? What's his name? Rudolfo?"

"Pandolfo. Sir Victor Pandolfo. You must have heard of him." Lady Demeter's voice grew plaintive.

Paula shook her head. "Sorry, dear."

"He's the greatest inventor of modern times and he's going to take you in to dinner. You see it was this way——"

Hastily she explained her embarrassing situation. Only yesterday had Pandolfo proposed himself, over the telephone, for this week-end. She had invited him for the next one together with a scientific crowd, half the Royal Society, all bulging with brains and other funny things like that, and she thought he would interest them and wake them up a bit. But he wasn't free. So, flustered, at the end of the telephone, she had to tell him to come down. And there he was, putting out the whole of her carefully selected party. Quite out of the picture, as she had told Paula. Why, that very afternoon, she had thought he was going to eat up poor Spencer Babington.

"Oh, he's here, is he?" said Paula, with a little grimace.

Lady Demeter nodded. Yes. Spencer, and George Brendon, the poet and Miss Dragma Winthorne who wrote the improper books, and the Bishop of Dedminster ("Who, I presume, reads them," Paula interjected) and the President of the Board of Trade and the Paraguayan Minister and a charming American singer. All delightful people. And, as far as Paula could gather, into this perfect den of leonine soul-mates, had leaped the disconcerting Pandolfo.

"I had to get another woman, of course. And you were the only one I could think of who could tackle him. And, Paula dear, I knew you wouldn't mind."

"Mind?" laughed Paula. "Don't be silly. When there's a chance of escaping from my stuffy little flat under the shadow of Harrod's stores and coming here, I throw every bit of pride out of the window and myself out of the door into the first taxi."

Lady Demeter drew a deep and buxom breath. "You're always such a dear, Paula. But I did owe you some apology."

"Tell me more about the man Pandolfo."

Lady Demeter became suddenly aware of the poverty of her knowledge. She had been constantly running up against him, in all sort of places, during the season. He had invented something during the war—an application of the tank system to submarines—she was not quite certain. Lady Demeter lived in a golden haze of general misinformation. Anyhow they had given him a K.B.E. And he was an authority on wireless telegraphy. Also, there was something about a new metal that could supersede steel. As far as she knew, it was the Duchess—that dear scatter-brained Lavinia—who had really set him going socially. And then the Daily—she snapped a finger's invitation to memory—the Daily—anyhow one of the Daily Horrors had begun to boom him—and so——"

"And so, what could I do, my dear? I had to ask the man down."

Equipped with this vague account of her predestined dinner-partner, Paula Field, a little later, entered the already humming drawing-room. With most of the house-party she was acquainted. Smiles and homage greeted her, as they have ever greeted woman with the gift of beauty and graciousness. Spencer Babington, spying her, gripped the ribbon of his eye-glass and crossing the room came up to her in his dignified way.

"A delightful surprise. Lady Demeter never told me I should meet you."

"Well, I'm here anyhow. You didn't tell me yesterday you were coming."

"My mind, as you know, was occupied with matters far more important."

"All the same, you seem to be glad to see me, and it's very nice of you. I wonder you don't hate the sight of me."

"You little know me," said he.

She was about to reply, when, just behind her a voice, not unpleasant in its resonance, rose above the polite din.

"My dear Bishop—the Comacine masters—I don't believe in 'em. One of the myths of the Middle Ages. Your Cathedral was conceived by an Englishman inspired direct by the Almighty. Never an Italian had anything to do with it."

She turned and beheld a man smiling, sweeping with free gesture bishops and Comacine masters and every one who disagreed with him off the face of the earth. She beheld him as an arresting personality; olive-skinned; dark and luminously eyed; rugged and pronounced of feature; with a high forehead from which swept back thick bronze hair scrupulously trimmed according to the day's fashion. His only conscious concession to personal idiosyncrasy was the low shirt collar revealing a thick and powerful throat. He might have been a singer. His strong hands and nervous fingers were eloquent in gesture.

Instinctively she asked—although she guessed the answer as soon as the words died from her lips:—

"Who on earth's that?"

"Sir Victor Pandolfo. I've been with him most of the afternoon. Quite an interesting man."

And then came Lady Demeter with a swoop tearing Pandolfo from the Bishop and introducing him to Paula. After a word or two she took off Babington. The two were left alone. Paula was about to make one of the commonplace openings of conversation when she became conscious of his eyes fixed upon her. Then of an embarrassed span of silence. At last she broke it and said with lame challenge:

"Well?"

"You're the most beautiful woman I have ever seen," said he.

She flushed to her hair at the suddenness of the crude tribute. Felt ever so little afraid; also urged by swift instinct of woman on the defensive to ask Clara to find her another dinner-partner. At once, however, civilized habit gripped her. She laughed.

"Your experience must be very limited."

"By no means," said he. "It's as vast as the sun which shines on the just and the unjust, on the plain and the beautiful. I have made observations in all the four quarters of the earth."

"Doubtless, the same observation," said Paula.

He bowed. "You have wit. But let it pass. I'm afraid I've none. I'm a slave of accuracy. If I weren't accurate, the Seven Seas would be paved with the bones of British sailors. You think I paid you an idle and unmannerly compliment."

"The formula's yours," she answered, regaining the weapon of her dignity.

"I beseech you not to believe it. Why should I pay women idle compliments?"

"It's the foolish way of ordinary men," said Paula.

"But good God alive, dear lady, I'm not an ordinary man. What do you take me for?"

"For the man," said Paula, noticing the general surge towards the door, "who is ticked off to take me into dinner. Let us go." She laid a couple of fingers in the crook of his arm. "I hope we shan't quarrel too violently."

"People like you and me can't quarrel. It's a psychological impossibility."

They took their places in the paired procession.

"Why?"

"That's for the little folk," said he. "We're too big."

And so it went on during the conventional intervals of the stately meal. Up to now Paula, a childhood friend of Clara Demeter and a widow of recently reduced fortune, had found a peculiar æsthetic enjoyment, during her visits to Hinsted, in the setting of the old seignorial dining-room. She relived her life passed among such surroundings. She loved the old oak panellings; the majestic Sir Joshuas and Raeburns in their proud gilt frames; the gleam of statuary in the recess of the bay window; the perfect table into which heavy silver and exquisite glass cast their deep reflections as into a pool; the diamonds and pearls of choicely arrayed women set off, each one, between the dead black and white of men; the panorama of keen human faces; even the mystery of the grey-liveried serving men who floated like ministering and impeccable ghosts around the table. And she loved the luxury of the Sèvres dinner-service and the frothing and curling and bubbling of champagne in her glass. It was her dainty delight to have this same glass replenished a little finger's breadth full, every time the golden necked bottle appeared over her shoulder in the white gloved hand of the ghostly serving-man.

But, to-night, for the most part, her usual enjoyment of things loved and lost, was, as it were, wiped out by a fascinating hatred of her overwhelming partner. Over and over again she turned to the poet on her right, only to listen blankly to his divagations on golf and Monte Carlo systems and the only polish for brown boots and such other topics as form the staple conversation of modern self-respecting poets, while she caught with the back of a maddeningly jealous ear, the sonorous voice of Pandolfo engaged in juicy talk with his left-hand neighbour, the Bishop's wife. She was angry with herself for returning to him with freshly stimulated interest.

He pointed to an unfastened diamond barette in her corsage.

"You'll lose that," said he, "let me see it." She put it in his hand. "Yes. The sort of fastening you see on Japanese jewellery in a Christmas cracker. The world is divided into fools, damn fools and Insurance Companies. They actually insure a thing like that. Do you want to lose it?"

"It's my most precious possession."

"Then I'll contrive a hinge, pin and catch for you. It'll put me on the track of a modification of my new metal for delicate purposes. They've been carrying on with this sort of foolery since the days of ancient Knossos. I'll send you a model next week. If you like it, I'll fit it on to your brooch." With deft strong fingers he straightened the platinum pin and twisted the catch. "This will last for the time being."

She thanked him, compelled to admiration of his exquisite touch. A jeweller would have done the same work with patent pliers. Civility bade her remark:—

"You mentioned your new metal, Sir Victor?"

"It's going to revolutionize the world," said he. "It will be brighter than burnished silver, untarnishable like platinum, which anyway looks like tin, harder than diamond, unbreakable; a sixteen-inch gun made of it will go on for ever without re-rifling, and the seamstress's finest needle will never blunt or snap."

"What it is called?"

"Ah there, I'm waiting for an inspiration. Already you see I'm your humble servant for life; but give me a name and I'll be your devoted slave for eternity. Have you ever met an inventor before?" he asked suddenly.

"Not to my knowledge."

"Well, now you've met one, what do you think of them?"

"I should say they were quite well-meaning folk," 7replied Paula.

He laughed. "Also a bit mad, eh? Well, you can't live in a perpetual romance and retain the stately equilibrium of Babington over there. An inventor is a vagabond not only on the high roads of mankind's aspiration, but through the bye-ways of human needs and infirmities over meadows of pleasantness."

"Interesting, yes," she smiled, "but romantic...?"

"When—in the sanctity of your retirement, you wash your hair—tell me—I ask out of curiosity—how do you dry it?"

"If you want to know," she said amused, "my maid connects a little machine with an ordinary electric plug in the wall, and something whirrs hot air round my head. Oh, don't ask me to explain——"

"What's the name of your little machine?"

"The—the—oh something 'Perfecto.'"

"There!" said he. "I suspected it. What could I conceive more romantic than to have the privilege of drying your beautiful hair?"

She fell down, with a laugh, from her high estate.

"No? Really? How funny that you should have invented it. What put such a concession to woman's vanity into your head?"

"I escaped from hideous factories where Moloch commanded that dreadful reeking things should be made dry, dry, dry in five seconds, and flew into a sylvan glade, and threw myself down on a mossy bank by the side of a stream. And water-nymphs crept shyly around me. And I said: 'You are very comely of feature and shapely of form; but your long wet straight hair is decidedly unbecoming.' And one of them replied: 'Tell us how to dry it quickly, for it gives us such a headache to sit in the sun.' I had a bright idea and invited them to Moloch's factory where they could get as dry as Bombay ducks. The usual feminine answer: 'My dear, I've nothing to wear.' So, being a good-natured fellow, I said: 'If you won't go to Moloch, Moloch shall come to you.' And there, my dear lady, you have the romance in a nutshell."

She laughed. "You're a bit of a poet too."

"A bit? A complete one. A maker of things out of dreams. Could you have a better definition?"

"Heaps," replied Paula, who was not to be browbeaten.

"To-morrow, then, I'll challenge you. Definitions are important. The night brings counsel."

Again their respective neighbours claimed them. She turned to her professional poet. The impudence of the man to suggest that she should stay awake all night in order to equip herself with argument against him! She put the question to the poet Brendon who talked in vague discomfort. He was fresh faced, young, British and rather shy; was conscious that the beautiful lady whose name he had not caught, because, in abstraction she had turned her name card maddeningly upside down, took little or no interest in him. He professed himself, ingenuously, to be a very humble person. Whereupon Paula, quick to react, realized her unkind preoccupation and spread her graciousness over him to the end of the dinner.

The ladies rose; Pandolfo swung back her chair.

"You'll get used to me in time," he said with a smile in his bright eyes.

"I hope not," she replied ironically.