Читать книгу The Great Pandolfo - William J. Locke - Страница 6

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Victor Pandolfo drove away from Hansel Mansions with a beaming face. The most beautiful woman in the world had received the shock of his announcement without wincing. That true steel quality of hers. The pure breed! A lesser creature would have gasped. By heavens! she was indeed worth the wearing! She had merely waved towards the dining-room:

"Your father would have joined hands in wonder with Benvenuto."

The adorable graciousness of her! He slapped his thigh, as he rolled up Knightsbridge in his car; he was essentially a man of action.

"The outside world," he had said, "matters to me not the hair on a fly's leg. What I am and whence I came is none of their business. But you must know me as I am."

She had drawn herself up in her glorious and ironical way.

"Will you be so kind as to tell me why?"

"For the most elemental reason that can enter the head of woman."

She had turned, fidgeted a drooping rose deeper into a glass vase. He had taken the other hand hanging limp and undecided, had carried it to his lips with a flourish and marched out. He was conscious of the artistic touch; the eternal canon of restraint. He had left her in the air.

The roar of Knightsbridge and Piccadilly received him like an applauded actor. The scene had been short, swift, dramatic; holding just the delicious suspense of decision. He rolled down the Haymarket, along the Embankment, City-wards, where he had an appointment with great financial personages. You cannot convert a notoriously Conservative and doubting world to enthusiastic faith in a new metal that will wipe out of human consideration tin, zinc, pewter, nickel, electro-plate, silver and platinum and, above all, steel, without spending vast sums of money in pure and simple cajolery. It was a repulsive psychological fact of modernity. Faith had to be bought in cash-payment. He could prove to Admiralties, Air Ministries, Ordnance Branches, Societies Royal, Metallurgical, Mineralogical, Chemical, Institutions of Civil and Mechanical and Electric Engineers, Institutes of Iron and Steel, vast corporations blowing futile furnaces the length and breadth of the land, that his new metal was the greatest gift to man since Prometheus brought down fire from heaven. It was a fact carrying conviction to elementary human intelligence; as little open to dispute as the superiority of an aeroplane over a bullock-cart as a means of locomotion. But you can prove things to people until you are blue in the face. They yield to every argument; they are convinced; and then you go away and something diabolical arises within them which calls you a liar. All of which was paradoxical and heart-breaking. Oh for the old ages of faith! Jonah goes to Nineveh with his whale story and the king believes him at once and sees to it that the Ninevites put themselves to amazing personal discomfort. Not an intellectual effort is attempted by the whole community. It was faith. Nowadays, nothing less than cinematographic advertisements could induce people to believe in Jonah; and in order to convince the government he would have to turn himself into a limited company with a well paid up capital behind him. Of course, Jonah was rather a dismal fellow, prophesying woe; so far the analogy did not hold good. But at any rate, he was a Man with a Message, just like Pandolfo. In the days of Nineveh he would only have had to deliver it and be acclaimed as public benefactor from palace roof to gutter, and the King would have thrown open his Treasure House and told him to help himself. Now he had to go grubbing for pence in the City of London. Pandolfo hated the City. It always wanted to see the channel of return for its money scoured out through social life. He had been known to describe it as a soulless ganglion of wealth.

At their last meeting the gang of exploiters, directors of joint-stock banks and other large and granite-headed corporations, had worried him to death because he had not found a suitable name for his new metal. Provisionally he had called it Acieto. One conspirator had said that the word suggested a patent food; another, a parlour-game.

"Call it after me, its inventor, its creator," he had cried. "Pandolphum—with a 'ph'—or Delphinium." The objection was raised that it sounded like a flower.

To the mercilessness of these unimaginative folk was he now going again to surrender himself. If he had rolled through Piccadilly amid applause, he entered the City to be greeted with silent derision. He did not fear the supplementary report of the expert metallurgist appointed by his tentative syndicate. The rule of thumb dullard had only to state an accumulation of dry scientific facts. He detested, though felt no alarm at, the prospect of cross-examination on the sordid vulgarities of commercial profit. His main worry proceeded from the continued failure of his inventive faculty in the matter of nomenclature.

His car drew up at the block of buildings wherein lay the office of interview. He walked briskly to the lift. Ascending he glanced at his watch. He drew a breath of dismay. He, Victor Pandolfo, who prided himself on being the only punctual man in England, was five minutes late for his appointment. It was all Paula's fault. Had she not, in some witch manner, compelled him to his beau geste of declaration, he would have left her five minutes earlier. It flashed idiotically through his head to say: "Gentlemen, my apologies; I was detained by the most beautiful woman in the world. Paula. The one and only Paula..."

Suddenly he smote palm violently with fist and cried:

"My God!"

The astonished lift-boy thought him mad and missed the floor and went on mounting until Pandolfo, conscious of Empyræan flight, bade him descend.

He marched into the temporary board-room, waved hands both in greeting and in command of attention.

"Gentlemen," said he, "I have a name for the new metal. I decline to listen to a whisper of discussion. It is called Paulinium."

By a series of such dominant strokes of self-assertion had he succeeded in life. Over and over again had come crises in which the sole means of self-preservation was a conqueror's disregard of lesser men. The instinct had saved him, in his obscure childhood, from the absorption in the quagmire of Saffron Hill, where he was born and where his father, vendor of plaster of Paris Venuses and Apollos, had his malodorous habitation in the midst of the Italian colony of organ-grinders, waiters in lamentable restaurants, and various banditti, who eked out a precarious livelihood by knifing those who disagreed with them on questions of taste.

His father, Angelo Pandolfo, was a dreaming fellow, as mild as his name. He had come from Naples as a boy to find fortune in the City of Golden Wealth, as washer-up in a relative's Ristorante in a mildewed corner of Soho. He was slim and beautiful, with dim longings within him towards an æsthetic higher in scale than the perfume of stale cabbage, garlic, burnt fat and cheap game hovering on the verge of sanitary condemnation. A few pence a week made him member of a dreadful club, in which he spent the scanty hours of his leisure. There, occasionally, he would see enthroned in the mightiest seat, the splendid Emmanuele Bolla, President, Patron, Magnifico, Directing Deity of the club. He was the great man, the colossal artist, celebrated throughout the length and breadth of the land. His fame was legendary. He had vast studios, in which was set out in bewildering profusion, the statuary of all the ages. Did King or Emperor yearn for a copy, the same as the original, of some statue in the Museum of Naples or the Vatican, he went in person to Emmanuele Bolla, who with his mystical smile satisfied that King or Emperor's heart's desire. He wore a heavy gold ring with a devil of a diamond on his fat little finger. From the rest of his obese person he oozed opulence. He drank gin and water.

It happened one evening that the sweep of a gesticulating hand sent the half-emptied glass across the room. Young Angelo was one of the company who darted for it, but it was he who retrieved it and handed it back, like a consecrated goblet, to the great man. Emmanuele Bolla, a patriot in his way, was struck by the lithe and handsome grace of the young Neapolitan. He deigned to enter into conversation, learned the boy's lowly trade and his high ambition. His shrewd business mind caught opportunity by its curly black hair. Here to his hand was the ideal peripatetic vendor of his wares. He employed many, mainly to whose salesmanship he owed his comfortable paunch, his diamond ring, and his position in the Club of United Italy. But with this young man could none of them compare. Here was one who could soften the heart, and wheedle the pocket out of the sourest of elderly English virgins. On the spot he offered him the position; so much a week; so much commission on sales. On the spot Angelo accepted. The next morning he shook from his hands the grease of the awful kitchen, and hied him to the factory of plaster casts. He stood on the threshold of the dilapidated factory and beheld the interior as a Palace of Enchantment. A myriad little white gleaming things of beauty met his eye and instantly ministered to the satisfaction of his poor hungering soul.

"My little son," said the great Emmanuele, dragging him in by his coat collar, "before you sell you must know what you sell. This trade demands intelligence, love, and unscrupulousness. I give you a week to develop these qualities. If at the end——" the wave of a bediamonded hand towards the door completed the sentence.

Thus did Angelo Pandolfo begin his fascinating though not over-lucrative career. He learned with quick brain the formal history of his daily tray of little images; his inarticulate artistic soul loved them for their beauty; it was on the quasi-dishonest, commercial side that he failed. He had his minimum price fixed by Bolla. Below that, common-sense compelled him not to descend. But the maximum was at the command of his own engaging personality. Angelo, loving his images and swept away by any enthusiasm manifested by a would-be purchaser, seldom advanced much beyond his minimum. Yet he sold well and satisfied his patron.

The vendors had their districts. In the course of time and of accident—his predecessor having been put in gaol for stealing overcoats from the hall of a house into which he had been admitted—he was promoted to Bloomsbury, which at that period was the home of the simple, fat, and well-to-do. There were great square, broad thoroughfares to walk in, easy folk to accost. Angelo translated (in episcopal terms) from the vulgar scurry of Islington, expanded his chest with the air of one at last entering into his kingdom. Only those who have struggled upwards through stereotyped grades can appreciate the magic thrill of promotion. The young Neapolitan, possibly one of the last of his trade in London, strode or lounged or loafed—to a Neapolitan it is all one—around the Bloomsbury Squares, with the grace of a young god. Areas serving for the ascent, descent, or congregating of maids were not unappreciative.

There was one, Susan Cookson, a housemaid in Russell Square, who bought from him a cast of the Boy with the Thorn, which she stuck on the mantelpiece of her little back-attic bedroom, between the faded photographs of her dead father and mother. She was a comely, serious and thoughtful orphan. Her thoughtfulness suggested a resemblance between the exquisite boy of the cast and the young vendor. Her comeliness, after a few subsequent meetings with Angelo at the top of the area steps, made it manifest to her that she was beloved for its sweet sake. Her seriousness, after much interviewing and love-making, she eventually threw to the winds. She was the beautiful, dreamy, one and only Angelo's, and he was hers. It was a matter of sweet and honest love. This and that were what he could offer her, said he, conducting her to his bare room in Saffron Hill. And this and that, she cried with her woman's wisdom, could she do for her poor helpless Angelo, and make the bleak place a bower of delight.

So they married. A child was born whom they christened Vittore. His early childhood was passed among the cheery and not often washed progeny of the Hill. Angelo, promoted to a handcart and ambitious products of the studio, would take the small Vittore with him on fine summer days, to teach him, as he said, the business. His other joke was to point him out to possible customers as the only image not for sale. And thus, on the child's first waking conception of the world dawned as a vague alien place peopled, intimately, with dazzling little white forms.

In the course of time the eminent artist Emmanuele Bolla took the faithful vendor from the road and established him in the factory. For he had prospered and been able to improve the moulding of his casts and to acquire a clientele of a higher class than that touched by itineracy. Angelo became head salesman. He moved from Saffron Hill to luxurious rooms (in the plural) above a greengrocer's shop in Greek Street, Soho. Inhabitant of these realms of splendour, the six year old Vittore was chastised for undue familiarity with an organ-grinder's monkey who had been housemate and bosom friend a few months before.

All his life Victor Pandolfo remembered that day, when lying down resentful, sore, and necessarily prone, the first Great Conception stirred his spirit. A Giacomo (such was the monkey's name) was essential to his existence. If he could not hold communion with a living one, human injustice and unreason could not forbid his cherishing a counterfeit presentment. He was aware that such things could be bought in toyshops; but they cost money. He had a vague consciousness also, that they would prove unsatisfying to his needs, being but soulless parodies of Giacomo. The structure, features, fur of Giacomo were burnt into his brain. For some days he went about obsessed with the idea of creation; stored in a hiding-hole behind his bed a magpie's hoard of street and studio gleanings—bits of rabbit fur, tarred rope, rags, needles, thread, a stump of red pencil, a rusty pair of scissors (treasure of treasures) found amid the rubbish of the kitchen drawer, and two buttons surreptitiously torn from a soiled shirt of his father's, which, when blackened from the family inkbottle would do for eyes. And so, in secrecy, was the new Giacomo constructed, the tarred rope providing the magnificent finish of a tail.

"Where in the world did you get that thing from?" asked his mother one day, her immediate maternal devotion having been diverted from him to the needs of a sickly baby sister.

"I made it," he cried defiant, clutching the abortion to his breast.

"You're a funny boy," said his mother placidly.

"Funny?" cried his father. "But son of mine, let me see." He held up Giacomo II and gazed at it in rapt admiration. "Funny? He is an artist, a creator. You shall come with me to-morrow, Vittore, to the studio and show it to the padrone."

That was the childish beginning of things. He had discovered in himself the gift of making; of adapting commonplace means to extraordinary ends. He was not a creative artist, as Angelo fondly proclaimed. It had been the material form and not the artistic semblance of the monkey with which he had been intensely concerned. His father, a simple and adoring person, and through his very simplicity a great trial to a happy and efficient wife, gave him a couple of white mice in a cardboard box. Susan saw the palatial apartment in Greek Street overrun with white mice. The infant Vittore allayed her fears by constructing a cage, the wiring for which, inclusive of many ladders and rings he obtained from the refuse soda-water bottle corks at a neighbouring restaurant. His mind worked towards the practical, although queer yearnings of his soul were satisfied when Angelo allowed him to wander at will through the great gloomy shed stacked with the gleaming effigies of the sculptured masterpieces of all time.

Vittore went to a Board-school. The Italian name evoked the mockery of his school-mates. He was sturdy and as English as you please. Had not Angelo, at Susan's instigation, gone through the formality of naturalization? Having inflicted on a small scorner an unpleasant facial disfigurement of mingled blood and tears, he announced that henceforward his name was Victor. It conveyed a good sound English meaning. Coming home with gladiatorial traces on his knuckles which he was careful not to rub off, he defeated his father in vainglorious argument.

"At any rate," said he to Susan, "Victor is our mother Latin."

"So long as he doesn't go and get knocked about by horrid big boys, I don't care what he calls himself," said Susan, thus veiling her ignorance of what, in the name of Italian imagedom, mother Latin might be.

The young Victor Pandolfo, being a youth of keen intelligence, walked through the dullard school like an angel of light. At the end of a school year he came home groaning triumphantly beneath a load of prizes. He experienced his first thrill of self-assertive power, when once, his mother having expressed a desire—unattainable as that of the moth for the star—for a "flinger"—namely a necklet of fur thrown twice round the neck, with depending ends—he sold his prize volumes (having previously stored their message in his memory) and purchased, with the proceeds, the coveted strip of dyed rabbit skin. He was fourteen.

"Mother," said he, "here is your flinger. Whatever you want, that father can't give you, come to me for it."

She wept and kissed him and even at that time, half believed him. He was an amazing boy. She could not find it in her heart to reprove his boasting. The vivid little wretch never bragged of that which he could not achieve.

"This gas bill is half of last quarter's," said Angelo one day. "And it's the winter quarter. How does it happen?"

"You only have to tap the main," said young Victor, who, unconfessed to mortals, had discovered enormous interest in the convolution of gas-pipes, and by simple, yet secret, boring and soldering, had almost arrived at the solution of the problem of free gas-supply. Airily he explained his process.

"The wonder! The miracle!" cried Angelo, casting hands to heaven.

"But when it's found out, Angelo, you'll go to prison," said Susan.

The ardour of father and son was damped.

"Figlio mio," said Angelo—in intensive moments, such as this, when he realized the horrible danger which he ran, he reverted to his native tongue—"I know you're a clever boy, the delight of my existence, and I see in your genius the prop of my old age; but, for the love of God, go at once and disconnect all that apparatus that will bring into contact with the police an honest man who has only once had to do with them, and that was when I hit a man hard for plucking one of my statues from my tray—it was a Venus de Medici—and throwing it at the Lord Mayor's Show. He was drunk and I was sober. The policeman decided in my favour and took him away. But it was a very unpleasant experience, for I had to give evidence and a red-faced man in a wig accused me of being a merchant of pornography. Ah no! My son, undo, at this moment, all that you have done——"

Thus did he receive during his boyhood encouragement of invention and inculcation of virtue. From the Board-school he went, with a scholarship, to a Technical College. Thence to the Royal School of Mines. Meanwhile, Emmanuele Bolla, growing more obese and idle, Angelo became manager of the studio, and the family moved from Greek Street, Soho, to a little house in the neighbourhood of Walham Green which for years had been the queer West End of Mrs. Pandolfo's social aspirations. Young Pandolfo, prize student once more, left the School of Mines with flying colours and immediately found a position with a firm of metallurgists. Whereupon Angelo, as though of joy at seeing his son launched on the flood of success, incontinently died.

On the dreary journey to Fulham cemetery, Susan declared her intention of joining her husband as quickly as possible.

"Before you do that, mother," said Victor, "you'll be riding in your own carriage."

"Who's to give it me?" asked the despondent widow.

"I will," said Victor.

He kept his word, though it took him some years to do it. And then he gave her a neat motor-car with a liveried chauffeur who used to touch his cap as she issued from the funny little red-brick Walham Green villa where she insisted on living for the remainder of her days.

"I'm going to be a great man," he would assure her. "I'm going to invent machines that will turn this topsy-turvy old world down-side up again. I'm beginning to make my fortune. You must live in a style befitting Victor Pandolfo's mother."

But she maintained her quiet woman's inflexibility. She was proud of her son, but she would continue to live in the style befitting Angelo Pandolfo's wife.

"If I didn't know that I derived all my strength of character from you," said he, "I should call you an obstinate old woman."

He had to content himself with filling her house with labour-saving gadgets of his own invention. When she died he gave her the most superb funeral that local undertaking talent could devise. The hearse and horses moved in an impenetrable cloud of plumes and half Covent Garden covered the coffin.

"She never dreamed, poor dear," said he, to his one co-mourner, an elderly nondescript who had succeeded his father as manager at Bella's, "she never dreamed that she would have such a funeral."

Evidently he thought of her as looking down on him with gratitude, from whatever sphere she inhabited in the Other World.

He passed onward through life, a man of big impulses, swift decisions and essential vanities. He postured—it was his nature—like a charlatan, trumpeting the incredible; and yet, so calculated was his belief in himself that act seldom belied promise. He lived lonely, for his fellows feared his young and eager dominance. What did it concern an ignorant lay world that his Electric Coupling would reduce all such other devices to the leaden scrap-heap? It did, as a matter of fact; and his patent brought him in considerable money, so that he emerged from the dingy obscurity of Westminster purlieus into the blaze of a splendid office in Victoria Street. But no one would regard him as a benefactor to the human race. Only those to whom electric couplings were a matter of vital concern ran the gamut of interest; disgust—this quack of the fair again; compelled and annoyed attention; sniffing distrust; a damn-the-fellow-there-may-be-something-in-it attitude; a realization of indubitability on paper; and so on until demonstration of a working model evoked their grudging enthusiasm. But to other human beings on whom he yearned to shower the benefits of Electric Couplings, he was but a thunderstorm from which it behoved the prudent to take refuge.

It was in about this period—his early thirties—that he swept up unto himself a wife. His restless mind already on the track of the new metal, he went out to Brazil. A mechanical inventor by instinct, by training he was a metallurgist. There were mines and workings that he must visit. On the homeward voyage he met a timid little English governess, unable to cope with the insolence of wealth, who was returning in disgrace and poverty. She had everything that is conceivable in pink and white English prettiness. Pandolfo, hearing her pathetic little story, waved indignant arms and swore that, though she might land penniless at Southampton, he would see to her installation at least in a ducal household. His Jovianism overpowered her. She listened bemused to his lyrics of patent rotary pumps and electric couplings and his epics of new metals that would revolutionize the world. She thought him God's Great Wonder and, poor child, was too ingenuous to conceal her thoughts. He caught her up, fair and flowerlike thing, and saturated her with his tremendous personality. As soon as was possible, after his landing at Southampton, he married his Emily. After less than a year of dazed apotheosis she died of a still-born babe. Every fable springs from the grain of immortal birth. Even that of Semele. The only thing to spoil this modern application of it was the non-survival of a modern Dionysus.

Pandolfo went about with wideflung arms hurling the everlasting Why? at gods and men. No answer being vouchsafed, he became confirmed in a poor opinion of both categories of beings and sank deeper into his own sympathetic depths. Other women had flitted through his robust life, some in helter-skelter fear, others with heads turned back in lingering fascination. They remained but as pale ghosts in his memory. The tumultuous fierceness of the war confronted him and he plunged into the welter, body and brains. He served, not without distinction, in the Navy; and he had not boasted idly of his torpedo-detection device which, adopted by the Admiralty and distributed throughout the British shipping, had undoubtedly saved thousands of lives. The Government, which, in spite of futile sarcasm, used as few razors to cut butter as possible, plucked him from the perfectly congenial occupation of pitting himself against elemental forces as second in command of a destroyer, and set him down to scientific work in Whitehall.

When the war was over, they rewarded him with a knighthood of the British Empire. The happiest hours of his life were passed at the first subsequent public function when he moved among the mighty of the land with the purple ribbon, cross dependent, round his neck. He was a fine, distinguished figure of a man and attracted notice. He shook distinguished persons, men and women, by the hand. The Great World was his friend. He longed to tell it that once his only friend in the world—great in another significance—was an organ grinder's monkey in the unsavoury slums of Saffron Hill. He exulted. Io son io. He was he himself; once carried round the Bloomsbury Squares, enveloped in dubious blankets on a handbarrow laden with plaster casts and wheeled by the humble, smiling, future-disregarding Neapolitan that was his father; and now Sir Victor Pandolfo, K.B.E., with a purple ribbon distinguishing his shirt-front, and—giddy climax—presented to naval Royalty, who greeted him with a "We all owe you a debt of gratitude"; and then, in the course of the few minutes conversation remarked: "I'd give anything to have an inventor's brain like yours." Pandolfo himself would have given anything to be able to tell him the story of his first invention. The fervid Angelo impelled; the calm and foreseeing Susan restrained.

Coming into the great world, he realized the interest excited by his sudden leap from obscurity. Whispers of legends hinted in his ear, fostered his sense of the romantic. He had dropped from the clouds, a presumable demi-god. Why undeceive these wondering and incredulous folk? To no mortal creature did he reveal the secret of his birth or even his less remote antecedents.

It was only when Paula Field stood before him at Lady Demeter's, in her brown and silver majesty, and he knew, in a flash, that she was the only woman in the universe worth his while to conquer, that his shrewd Italian brain registered the conviction that Truth, flung like a javelin, at the right moment, was the only sure weapon.

He rolled away from his meeting in the City to his house in Chelsea, smiling like the Conqueror of his soul's convictions. He had imposed, without question, the name Paulinium upon his syndicate; their wealth was behind him. The works in Bermondsey, across the river, at present languishing for lack of funds, could now go full-time ahead. In a day or two the prospectus of the new company would be issued. There would be a thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand shares cast at her feet. His thoughts ran:

"Accept this and immortality from Victor Pandolfo, who is the great Pandolfo, only because his father sold plaster of Paris images in the streets of London."

And again:

"Io son io. I am I. And, by God, she knows it."