Читать книгу The Great Pandolfo - William J. Locke - Страница 5

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Paula could only exchange a few hurried words with her much-engaged hostess.

"Am I off duty, Clara?"

"What a question!"

"I've really been good, and, please, may I play for an hour or two? I assure you he'll be all right. He's quite capable of looking after himself."

Again Lady Demeter proclaimed her a dear. She had set him going. Not that he needed much winding up, after all. Mrs. Winterton (the Bishop's wife) was enchanted with him. Paula could go and play with a free conscience and the meed of her gratitude.

So, when the men came in, and for the rest of the evening, Paula manoeuvred avoidance of the overpowering and obviously pursuing man, until she took refuge with Spencer Babington outside, in a corner of the summer-scented terrace.

The next morning, however, Pandolfo found her alone with a book, in the Italian garden. He approached her, hat in hand.

"Dear Lady, in what have I offended?"

She looked up coolly from her page. "I don't know what you mean?"

Said he: "I was dying to talk to you last night. What are the snatches of dinner conversation? A thimbleful of water to a parched man. And you gave me no chance. Was it fair?"

"Why should I give you a chance, as you call it?" making the obvious retort feminine.

He sat down with something of a flourish on the garden seat, by her side.

"Because I'm worth it. I really am. Nobody but I would have dared to tell you—and by you I mean you—Paula Field—forgive my using your Christian name, which I've made it my business to learn—but Paula Field signifies a vital being, whereas Mrs. Field is a polite abstraction—oh yes—" he held up a checking hand, and smiled luminously "—you need not fear. In addressing you, I shall always be abstractly polite. In thinking of you, or alluding to you, I defy you to forbid my concrete conception of you. Miss Kauffmann, who is she? Angelica Kauffmann—and the impersonal lady rends the veil and arises like a rose. My analogy—what have you to say against it?"

"That I'm a very humble woman, without any notoriety, thank goodness, who is known to her general acquaintances as Mrs. Field."

"I'll bet you a million pounds to a penny that you're not." He threw himself back on the seat, which rocked from the impact of his body. "The artistry of your personality makes you Paula Field to everyone who has known you for five minutes, or seen your portrait in the papers. Oh, I know," he said, bending forward, "that by your remark you intended to set me in my proper place. But my proper place is not where you think it is."

Paula, conscious of balance calmly kept, asked:

"Where is it? I should like to know."

He flickered a hand from ground to sky.

"Wherever I will it to be. Circumstances have not placed me. I have placed myself. Year by year, higher and higher. It's a matter of will, of self-appreciation. That's why—a moment ago—I began to tell you something and broke off.... Any semi-bred puppy can tell a commonplace pretty woman that she's the most beautiful thing in the world. But what real man—save me—" he smote his broad chest "—has ever had the audacity to make such an instantaneous declaration to Paula Field?"

"I'll admit," said she, "that you're unique."

"And so you're up against me. I'm not according to pattern. You can't fit me into one pigeon hole as you can Spencer Babington, or another like the dreary prelate of Dedminster, or another like the sex-ridden young woman who writes the awful novels. You shrink into your British shell of defensive armour. But you know very well that inside yourself, your mind, your soul, whatever it is, you are saying, 'Why shouldn't a human being be unique?' And, indeed, where's the crime?"

"It's not a crime, but it may be a discomfort."

He threw back his head and laughed good-humouredly. The infection caught her.

He asked: "Am I forgiven?"

She smiled. It was a golden day with a breeze in it and the shade was most restful, the man's voice pleasant, his attitude flattering. In answer to his question she said:

"I suppose so. At least, you will be if you talk about something else."

"I will talk with you," said he, "on any subject under the sun."

She made a laughing answer and so peace was made between them. She found that his boast was not so thrasonical as it seemed. His mind was stored with a wealth of knowledge coloured by a fervid imagination. With him picturesque and emphatic statement took the place of argument. Paula's feminine wit quickly discerned that the best of him went forth to the accomplished listener. When they rose, to move towards the house and preparations for luncheon, they were sworn friends. At least, so proclaimed Pandolfo, with a flourish, as they walked along.

For the rest of the visit Paula endured his dominance with half-rueful acknowledgment. He interested her always; at times fascinated her; now and then, also, sent her back curiously shivering. The last sensation she resented, being accustomed to the cool and confident handling of men. Their homage had been hers since girlhood. She had the regal beauty that ensures it. She possessed, too, the common sense and the humour which presented her safe and pleasant conduct. In her own way, she was a man's woman. She had a frank love of the company of men, and, knowing them, walked among them fearlessly. Thus fear of a man, instinctive, feminine, was new and peculiarly disagreeable. It was not that Pandolfo overstepped limits of propriety in speech or action. His first tribute had been his most monstrous declaration. Behind his eyes, when he looked at her, there had been nothing of that with which her woman's equipment had always enabled her to deal. There was nothing, in fact, that could suggest him as a lover, ardent, devout or humble. He was too vehement and masculine to talk the disgusting twaddle of esoteric spiritual relationship. He had proclaimed her, once and for all, as a woman on his own plane of personality. It was splendid arrogance, colossal impudence, anything you like in the way of braggadocio. But there it rested. He had caught her up into the spheres wherein he professed to have his being and implicitly declared his intention of maintaining her there for ever; at any rate, in some such figurative style did she realize her position. She was afraid. And she could not conceive an ordinary, straightforward reason for her fear.

She was an ordinary, straightforward woman, impatient of subtleties. She had lived her life in the major key of love and death and courage. It was the very directness of the man that attracted her and compelled her. There must be some direct reason for her fear.

There was nothing remotely suggestive of the hypnotic about him. She said to herself that he was too vast. Still less was there anything of the vampiric; the quality of the creature who gets hold of you, gradually, remorselessly and sucks your vitality to feed its own thin-blooded necessities. Poor old Spencer—she repudiated instantly the ungenerous thought—was more of that type. This disturbing man made not the shadow of a claim. He was gradually self-sufficing. He gave lavishly of himself; took for granted her acceptance. She said to Clara Demeter:

"He swamps one. I feel like a bit of wood carried down by a river in spate. Of course I like him, my dear. But I like a quiet life better.... I'm not going to do any more lion taming for you," she said, after the give and take of talk had necessitated a change of metaphor. "It's too strenuous. Besides there are consequences."

There were, as she, wise prophetess, foretold. He insisted on motoring her to London on the Monday morning. In the first place a crowded train on a sweltering July day was not for a woman of her quality. Secondly, unless she drove with him she would be reckoned among the benighted billions of human beings—all mankind, in fact, save himself and his chauffeur sworn to secrecy—who had no idea of the potentialities of the inner combustion engine. There was also a new adaptation of springs, of cunning shock-absorbers, which made headlong progress over broken flints smoother than a crawl round Brooklands.

"It will please you," said he. "Why deny me the simple satisfaction of giving you pleasure?"

Indeed, what valid reason had she for refusal? A lift for a lone woman in a hospitable car was the most conventional thing in the world. She went. She had to agree that his boastings had not been vain. No gondola on the laziest Venice canals could have advanced with more languorous smoothness.

"Lots of people talk of the great things they're going to do," said he, "I don't until they're done."

Thus began a fascinating yet embarrassing intimacy. A few days afterwards he called on her, having telephoned for an appointment, with the model for the fastening of her barette. He declared it as fast as death, as eager as a child for her admiration. What could she do but entrust her brooch to him? He would yield, this time, to convention, and have the fastener executed in platinum.

"But why?" she asked diffidently. "This new metal of yours is most attractive."

"It isn't perfect," said he. "I aim at perfection. Nothing but that can come out of my hands to be laid at your feet."

Later, he called again, all in a hurry. Lady Demeter and one or two others had promised to lunch with him at his house in Chelsea. Would she come? What day, she asked. It was for her to name it, said he, thereby signifying that Lady Demeter and the others were attendant on her good pleasure. At random, for it was the fag end of the season, she suggested Tuesday. Tuesday should it be.

Meanwhile she collected odds and scraps of information concerning him. Before her meeting him at Hinsted, she had never heard his name; now it seemed to be familiar to most of her acquaintances. His reputation, she found, ran every gamut, from captivating gentleman to unmannerly boor; from irreproachable idealist to the grossest of evil livers; from genius to charlatan. Details were blurred, save those manifestly extravagant. No one seemed to know whence he had come. Knowledge of his achievement was vague. Some said that all the Admiralty's anti-torpedo appliances were due to his brain; others that he had come forward and grabbed his K.B.E. with the brazen assurance of the thief who, entering a jeweller's shop in broad daylight walks off with a diamond necklace. Worshippers of Mammon, as is their way, said that he rolled in the immense fortune brought to him by his inventions; the evil-tongued and envious, that he staggered on the brink of the adventurer's bankruptcy. One old-fashioned gentleman said darkly: "The man's an enigma."

Paula found at any rate, that his house was one, for all the reflection it afforded of its owner's character. It was as impersonal as a museum; as uninhabited and uninhabitable as the show apartments of a historic mansion. It was richly furnished, in the French style of Louis Seize and Empire. In the rooms hung a small but choice collection of pictures. To his guests he was the perfect cicerone, vaunting the qualities of his pieces, and not without justification.

Said Sir Spencer Babington, especially invited to inspect the Andrea Vaccaro:

"These fellows who talk so much—you always expect to find them tripping. He doesn't trip, confound him."

"Why should you want him to?" she asked.

"I don't like people so overpoweringly Jovian," said he.

This was after lunch. Pandolfo had recommended an 1892 Ayala, deprecating prejudice against midday champagne. But they would see. They would taste the perfection of light luncheon wines! Babington politely questioned the possibility of champagne surviving thirty years. Pandolfo smiled at him, with uplifted head. "My dear fellow!" said he. His glass was the first to be filled. He smelled and tasted it. He smiled again and waved across the table.

"Yours shall be the first judgment, a quiver of the nose or a wrinkle of the brow, and the bottle shall be poured away into eternity."

Babington smelt and sipped, and dry judge of wine and scrupulously honest according to his lights, bowed approvingly to his host.

"Of a past generation, of course," said Pandolfo. "Fragile but sound. With a lingering perfume—figuratively speaking—like lavender."

"It is truly so," said Babington, though in his heart he damned the cock-sure fellow for being right. "Not robust enough for dinner; but for luncheon exquisite."

Pandolfo turned to Paula. "The doubting Thomas," said he. "That's the tragedy of my life. I've got to convert the Didymites before I can get anything done."

Again had Babington been defeated—over a dish of quails, which he had refused.

"Babington, you horrify me," cried Pandolfo in large protest. "Diplomacy divorced from quails——"

"I'm sorry—but quails——"

"Ordinarily are just quails. I understand. The dreadful protocol. But these are miniature birds of Paradise. The creation is the result of a conference between myself and the chef of a recently discrowned head. Trust me and try."

So Babington, out of courtesy, tasted, and out of epicurean gluttony picked the succulent bird to its carcase, and had another.

Food, wine, service had been faultless. The host, the most flashingly gracious to every guest. Yet had Paula the sense of being entertained in a room wherein no one could dwell. Here and there in France and Italy has a stately house been converted into a hotel, the old dining-hall still preserved and swept clear of everything personal, even of haunting ghosts, and all the sweet old household gods that gave it the consecration of human emotions replaced by lifeless ornament. There was no offence against taste. But the room was dead, as though it had been the work of two pale and tired young experts from Bond Street and St. James's Street. And there was the vehement creature by her side enthusiastic over all these possessions. She agreed with the old-fashioned gentleman who had called himself an enigma.

To Babington, who had come prepared to sniff at the Andrea Vaccaro and found it a flawless example of the late Italian master, who had been converted against his will to appreciation of thirty years' old champagne and of a bird which he had hitherto detested, Pandolfo was an overpoweringly Jovian person who had the maddening gift of always being right.

As they drove away, Lady Demeter who offered Paula a lift in her car as far as Hansel Mansions, commended host and lunch.

"But," said she, "the man doesn't seem to have any private life."

Paula laughed. "Dear prim Spencer would harmonize more with that uninhabited drawing-room."

"The house wants a woman, my dear."

"And you're already hiring the Ritz Hotel and wondering whether it'll be big enough to hold all the people you're going to ask to the wedding reception."

Lady Demeter called her a most ungrateful woman. In her words Paula detected an unwonted sharp note of seriousness. She broke into remonstrance. Even the most incurable romantic in the world, which was Clara Demeter, could not conceive such a possibility.

"My dear Paula," said Lady Demeter, "short of a physical impossibility such as a gas-lamp running away with an armadillo, there's nothing impossible in this world of different sexes. Look at me, I married Demeter."

"Frank's a dear and a gentleman and he knows that you adore him."

"Quite so. It proves my point. Look at him and look at me. Who would have thought it?"

Paula looked inwardly and smiled. There seemed, indeed, little in common between the little, white, elderly, timid mouse of a man and his florid and opulently endowed lady. Yet her intimate knowledge of them assured her that they were the happiest married couple in the world. Clara, however, in her feminine way, had begged the question. Paula had qualified Lord Demeter as a gentleman, a term of significance. Her delicacy forebore to press the point. She said lightly:

"You're always thinking of marrying me off, Clara, but you won't do it. The state of widowhood isn't at all indecent."

Lady Demeter rested her hand on her friend's knee.

"With a woman like you, it is. It positively is."

A few minutes later, when Paula Field found herself alone in the stuffy drawing-room overshadowed by the red-brick mass of Harrod's Stores, and caught sight of her superb beauty in the mantelpiece mirror, and felt within herself the pulsations of glorious health and youth, and the stirrings of warm tentacles groping restless, persistent towards something, something rich, something of Life's eternal promise, she caught her breath and turned away, her hand on her bosom. The dear foolish, worldly Clara pierced deeper, perhaps, into human things than she knew.

She ordered tea, to pull herself together, and then went off into another fit of loneliness. The telephone bell clanged horribly on sensitive nerves. She rose and crossed impatiently to the blatant instrument.

"Yes. Yes."

"Darling——" came the voice of Lady Demeter.

And darling was to know that Victor Pandolfo was over head and ears in love with her, and what was she going to do about it?

"Ask him to lunch at your horrid club and poison him," replied Paula, breaking off the connection.

If all women were angels the terrestrial globe would cease to be populated.

She was angry with Clara. Clara, the dearest thing in the world, whom she had known since childhood, who, serene elder girl had mothered her, a gawky thing at school, presumed too much on her position of keeper of the Temporary Den for Lions. Victor Pandolfo was bracketed with Spencer Babington as the last man on earth she would think of marrying. Besides, what ground had Clara for her crude statement? Even supposing the man was in love with her—save for the not wholly unpleasurable worry to which every woman is put in the ridding herself of an unwelcome suitor—what concern was that of hers? For the rest of the day Lady Demeter buzzed about her like a buxom gadfly.

Two mornings afterwards came the brooch, exquisitely fitted with inescapable platinum pin. Also, not a bouquet, but a bower-ful of roses; and a note:

"The pin for the bosom, the flowers for the feet of the most beautiful woman in the world."

Practically a declaration in form, thought Paula. Whether in good or bad form was another matter.

With a curl of her humorous lips she wrote him the primmest little letter of thanks. He called the next day. She was, literally, not at home. A week passed. Then came a mighty packing-case, with a written line of explanation:

"An offering of first-fruits."

The porter of the mansions had to be summoned with hammer and screw-driver to open the case. Out of straw and other packing emerged a silvery metal casting of Benvenuto Cellini's Perseus holding the Medusa's head. She had seen the original bronze in the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence. She had seen, like most other people, reproductions here and there. But never had she seen one in, apparently solid silver. For want of place from which to view it she had it set on her dining-room table. For a while she regarded it perplexedly. A silver statue was an embarrassing gift for modest widow to receive from a stranger; to say nothing of the encumbering discomfort to the said widow's household gods. Yet it was not quite silver. It dawned upon her that it was Pandolfo's boasted new metal. His words were "first fruits." She reasoned rightly that it was the result of his first experiments in the application of his metal to the grand artistic.

The casting had been exquisitely done. Pains almost equal to Benvenuto's historical travail had been bestowed on it. But in this white metal that shone with the dull hopelessness of burnished pewter, it lacked the mystery of the bronze. The magical lights of silver might have saved its beauty through sheer bravado. This new thing, for all its technical perfection, loomed metallically dull. It was at once so perfect and so impossible. Her heart sank.

He burst in upon her during the afternoon.

"Did you get it? What do you think of it? Months and months, my dear, it has cost me, to say nothing of a small fortune. But I can do all the statuary of the world in it. Once on the market, a hundredth the price of bronze. The art of all the ages"—he held up both arms with hands outstretched—"within reach of the lowliest. For a few shillings, a trifle—and the poorest can fill their homes with imperishable, untarnishable beauty. Bronze, as I've hinted, is expensive. No one can buy bronzes but the rich. The less well off buy plaster casts and stick them on their mantelpieces or in their little gardens and the ears come off and the noses get chipped and the weather and housemaids combine to render them objects of derision. But now, what do you think? Haven't I solved the whole thing? By the way"—he looked around the drawing-room—"where is the Perseus?"

"On my dining table," replied Paula, who forebore to say that it was her one dumping spot.

"Splendid," said he, in his vast manner. "A site of honour. Benvenuto must be flinging you his florid gratitude from Paradise. And I, too, am complimented. It's something to be Benvenuto's translator. Let me see how it looks. Do you mind?"

Smilingly she led the way into her little dining-room; softened by an absurd pity for this vehement child who took for granted her absorbed interest in his sand-castle. He circled around the statue perfectly lit from the room's northeast window and scanned it with bent brow.

"It's too grey. It's dead. Looks like a corpse. I'll try again and send you another. I told you it was an experiment, didn't I? I'll take it away now."

"You'll do no such thing," said Paula, "I love it."

"I hate to give you anything of myself that isn't perfection," said he.

"I'll keep this anyhow, until the perfect thing comes along," she replied.

They passed into the drawing-room.

"What made you think of statuary in your metal?"

"Heredity," said he, with an air of triumphant challenge. "My father used to hawk a tray of plaster-casts about the streets of London."