Читать книгу The Great Pandolfo - William J. Locke - Страница 7

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The next day brought two new incidents into the life of Paula Field. First there came a couple of men, sent by Sir Victor to fetch away the Perseus, which, in the meanwhile, with the aid of the porter of the mansions, she had fitted into a dark corner of her dining-room. Out of the accusing glare of the full north-east light it comported itself with attractive decency of sheen. Willingly she bade the men enter with their new packing-case, but the moment their hands touched the statue, she experienced a queer revulsion of feeling.

"No. I've changed my mind," she declared. "Tell Sir Victor I'll keep it."

The spokesman said in rueful perplexity:

"Sir Victor's orders, madam...."

"Sir Victor's orders must give way before my wishes." She smiled pleasantly. "You may tell him so from me. Or, if you'd rather not, I'll write it down for you?"

"A kind of note would be more satisfactory for us, madam."

"Sir Victor is somewhat—arbitrary?"

The man laughed, yielding to her graciousness and made a gesture of assent. She scribbled the identic words of the message on a sheet of paper torn from the telephone block and sealed it in an envelope. He apologized for putting her to inconvenience.

"If his orders are carried out, there's no better employer in England than Sir Victor. But if they're not, there's trouble."

Alone, she immediately set herself to wonder why on earth she had kept the Perseus. Although it looked rather nice in its gloomy recess, she had been moved by no impulse of acquisitiveness. Indeed, for the last twenty hours she had been reviling it as a white elephant of obscure parentage, thereby identifying it with its maker, the son of an itinerant vendor of plaster of Paris images. No self-proclaimed suitor can throw such a bombshell of an announcement at the feet of a high-born lady without inspiring her, if not with scorn, at least with perturbation. Instinct, in this case the dictate of tradition, counsels the gathering of skirts together and flight from danger. But a woman of the modern world distrusts instinct. Her future relations with Pandolfo were the subject of cold and clear resolutions. During her talk in the car with Clara Demeter, hadn't she put her finger on the exact point of differentiation between him and Spencer Babington? His brutal revelation of ancestry had confirmed her diagnosis. She felt anger at having allowed herself to slip, even as little as she had done, out of her own hands.

He was a self-made man. That was the simple word of his enigma. More betoken, he had made himself rather badly; an essential or two omitted; just as he had made his Chelsea wonder-house badly; just as he had made badly the metal of the otherwise perfect statue of Perseus. In all three, man, house, and statue, there was undeniable greatness of conception; but there was failure of execution. The little more and the little less, etc., of Browning. She had been faced by the puzzle of crudity. Lo! the solution. Being a woman of imaginative temperament she almost saw the simple, grinning Angelo in the flesh.

"Please ma'am, Sir Victor Pandolfo has sent some men to take away the statue."

So had her maid announced. She had started up with a sincere "Thank goodness!" and two minutes afterwards had occurred this preposterous right-about-turn of her impulses.

The statue was there, the messengers had gone, and as compromising a scrap of paper as ever woman addressed to man was on its way to Pandolfo. But that the Perseus was too heavy to lift and, could she have lifted it, that it would have possibly slain innocent people on the pavement below, there came a moment when she could have thrown it out of window.

Why had she kept it? At first, she told herself, out of sheer soft-heartedness. He had spent on it so much of his enthusiasm, so much of himself. To have returned it without protest, would have been her acquiescence in his failure, a bleak discouragement. Then came the cold douche of "Sir Victor's orders." She rebelled against the orders of any man. Her words to the foreman were but humorous protest. When written they were both a defiance and an invitation. Almost a childish you-can't-catch-me sort of cry. Even worse; a suggestion of the mythological lady fleeing, with backward glance, through bracken and undergrowth.

She pursued her day's avocations under a cloud of annoyance at its first incident. The second was the receipt of a hand-delivered letter containing Pandolfo's card, and a cutting from the City news of an evening paper.

"We learn that a powerful syndicate has been formed to put upon the metal market the new alloy discovered by Sir Victor Pandolfo, the great inventor. Rumours of this have reached us for some time past. Now it has materialized under the name of Paulinium...."

The word was underlined in pencil. She felt a shock of outrage; then a maddening consciousness of impotence. To injunct him privately or publicly would be ridiculous. It was as good a name for a metal as any other, Aluminium, Rubidium, Rhodium.... Should she grow vehement, he had but blandly to retort that she had no copyright in the name borne by the austere Apostle.

After all, crude or not, it was a compliment, a tribute; an identification of herself with a great conception of the human mind. Paula secretly gloried in being one of the few women in the world endowed with a sense of justice. She must give the devil—this devil of a Pandolfo—his due. All the same, the situation was complicated and disconcerting; tinged too with an element of peril. What should she do? Too proud, and also too conscious of the absurd, to seek advice, she did nothing.

A couple of days afterwards came a bushel of flowers, "With humble gratitude to Egeria."

"Who brought it?"

"Sir Victor's chauffeur, madam."

"Is he there now?"

"Oh no, madam."

That is the worst of these lightning times. In old days of spacious leisure, the messenger would have been refreshing himself after his journey, in kitchen or buttery. The chatelaine would have swept in, cast the bouquet on the floor, with a "Take these back to your master," and swept out with a majestic swirl of velvet train. But nowadays what could a lady do? To wrap them up in brown paper and return them by parcel post was a proceeding lacking in dignity. Of course, she could tell Simkin, her maid, to do with them what she willed; and she could write curtly to Pandolfo to bid him cease sending gifts to an unresponsive recipient. Perhaps, that would be the best course; to finish with the man once and for all. She sat down at her writing desk, drew a sheet of paper before her and took up her pet fountain pen. It scratched blank, needing refilling. Its deputy proved itself equally dry. She reached for the ink-bottle. It was empty. It is only the lonely (men as well as women) who are suddenly plunged into circumstances of such petty and grotesque desperation. She rose and rang the bell. On her way from the door she passed the vast paper cone of roses. Something caught her senses. She deliberated in front of them, and, according to Mr. Addison's adage, she was lost. Compelled, she bent her face to the mass of just opening faint orange blooms—she recognized them—Madame Ravary—and drank in the exquisite perfume of the old tea rose; the scent that God decreed when He first planted a garden; the fragrance of girlhood's thoughts; the odour of remembered promises of long ago.

When the maid entered, she bade her fill the ink-bottle. When the maid returned, with ink-bottle filled, she disregarded the satisfaction of her requirements. Instead, she gave new orders to set out in the pantry such vases as would be necessary for the arrangement of the roses.

And all through the drying up of the springs of a fountain pen! Ce que c'est que de nous! What are we! If we weren't all, men, women, and children, the sport of circumstance, we might be spared much suffering; but after all, we should miss the whole delicious fun of life.

A respectable bachelor, at a seaside resort, dives innocently from a spring-board. Arising from the depths, he bumps his head against the body of a perfectly respectable young female swimmer. Apologies, laughter, acquaintance, love, marriage: two destinies and that of untold generations settled by that sub-aquam and fortuitous bump. Looking at life from another angle, did not that dismal, unhumorous dog, Arthur Schopenhauer, say that, if the propagation of the species was a matter of pure reason, the human race would cease to exist?

She refilled her pen and sat down and wrote Pandolfo a correct little note of thanks for the flowers, in which she expressed the hopes that the choice of her name for his metal would not bring it ill-luck and that they would meet some time in the autumn when everybody was back again in town.

The very next day, joining a luncheon party at the Carlton, she came upon him in the lounge in eager talk with her hostess.

"Fate wills us to meet before the autumn," he laughed. "When are you flying?"

"In a day or two."

"And whither?"

"First on a round of visits and then,"—vaguely—"abroad somewhere."

He drew her imperceptibly a foot or two away from the standing group of guests.

"Why try to hide from me?"

She flushed angrily and met bantering eyes. "I haven't the remotest intention of doing so."

She was about to turn when he laid a light detaining touch on her arm.

"Before you go, let me tell you how gracious it was of you to keep the Perseus. I sent for it, I know; but I should have been hurt if you had let it go."

The appeal was so human and childish that once more she forgave him.

"I'm on the track of the real silver quality for that sort of thing," said he. "I'll get it, never fear. Failure in your eyes is like a whip of scorpions. I was in my laboratory till four o'clock this morning."

"Where is your laboratory?" she asked.

"Chelsea. The back of the house. That's where I live most of the time. Which reminds me. Our hostess has been—shall I say—importuning me to take her over my Bermondsey works. I'll accede on one condition. Come with her." Before she spoke, he swept aside her conjectured protest. "Don't say you haven't the time before you leave London. The more your occupation, the more your real leisure. Fix day and hour. What are you doing to-morrow at three?" He waited for a second, then flashed. "Nothing. Of course you're doing nothing."

He strode to his hostess. "Mrs. Deverill, Mrs. Field and I have fixed up a Bermondsey visit to-morrow afternoon on condition of your joining us."

"I should love to," said Mrs. Deverill.

Paula talked abstractedly to her neighbours at luncheon, Pandolfo being far away. Now and again diagonally across the table she caught his glance and secret smile. Whatever else he might be, his heavily featured face, so mobile in expression, his broad brow, and his bright dark eyes proclaimed him a personality compared with whom all the other men around the table were conventional dummies. Against her will she found herself returning the secret smile of mutual confidence.

The next afternoon Pandolfo's car whirled her across the river, through a few dreadful streets and deposited her at the gate of the dingy yellow brick building that was the factory. He was waiting for her at the door. He crossed the waggon-beaten strip of ground between factory and gate and helped her out of the car.

Fate was again kind to him, he declared. That very minute, less than a minute ago, Mrs. Deverill had cried off the engagement. Important business. Probably bridge. He showered benedictions on the little lady's general irresponsibility. He would have the tutelary goddess of the establishment all to himself.

Paula laughed. "Do you think an old modern widow woman like me needs a chaperon?"

"Would you have come if I hadn't held out the bait of the other lady?" He halted, and with outstretched arm pointed an accusing finger. "Honest?"

"Perhaps I shouldn't," she admitted.

Her frankness delighted him. He touched her elbow to aid her up the steps.

"This is all in miniature. A factory of experiment. The real factory, in the Midlands, will cover many acres. In a few years it will be the biggest metal-works on earth."

"This is enormous enough for me," said Paula, standing on the threshold of the vast, gloomy shed and looking into it as into a suddenly disclosed new world.

It whirred with machinery and the flap of great leather bands; it clattered with the noise of hammers; it was alive with grimy men and women doing ordered work at benches; it reeked with the acrid odour given out from the mouths of earthenware retorts and from the surface of molten metal which men pulled about with clippers and flattened out between the rollers of steel machines. From the side of one retort ran a fiery stream into the mouth of another.

To this Pandolfo dragged her the length of the factory through busy rows of benches.

"Just in time. Watch. It's my application of the Bessemer process."

As he spoke, a faint amethistine haze hovered over the mouth of the receiving retort. An intent, bespectacled man in a linen blouse held up his hand. The feeding stream grew thinner and suddenly ceased and the haze grew into a lambent topaz glow.

"How lovely!" cried Paula.

"Isn't it? It's the nearest we've got as yet." Pandolfo in excitement left her to clutch the arm of the bloused man. They talked unintelligibly, by her side, of pressures and temperatures and unknown substances. Presently he turned to her. "The vapour should be clear pale gold. I get it in the perfect appliances of my laboratory. The problem is perfection on the great scale. The conversion of the ideal into terms of the real. You understand?"

"Philosophically I do," Paula smiled. "But scientifically I'm lost. All I can gather is that you're boiling something in this, you pour a boiling something else into it until you get a pretty light."

He threw up his hands in admiration of her deductions. "Of course. That's all there is to it. Except the result. Look."

Two workmen standing below opened the vent of the retort, and the stream of metal flowed from a funnel into a tank.

"That," said he, "is Paulinium. Your metal. Your very own. If you'll give me a couple of hours I'll tell you the secret."

"I shouldn't be a bit the wiser."

He insisted. "You've got to be the wiser! Your life's going to be the history of Paulinium. You mayn't think it, but it is." He swept her away, in his vehement fashion, before she could formulate an indignant answer. "There are all kinds of other things I must show you. This has yet to cool and then go through many tests. The microscope among others. Here's the metal being worked."

They halted in front of a red-hot mass which a steel cutting machine was shaving, as though it were cheese, into some sort of cylinder. He explained, going flamboyantly into details, until her unmechanical brain was benumbed. All she could gather was that here, in this side of the vast, grimy, clattering, suffocating, whirring phantasmagoria of a shed, were parts of a car being constructed entirely of the new metal instead of steel. She heard him vaguely amid the din in the burnt air, as in a dream.

"The first of its kind—all Paulinium—engine my own invention—same as the car in which I drove you down from Hinsted—Remember? My patent. The Rolls-Royce people and the Daimlers and Fords will all be sitting up and begging for Paulinium. New idea, too, in springs. I've designed a body which will be unique for I shall tear up the drawings and specifications—and when the chassis is finished and the engine tested, I'll clap it on—and it shall be yours. It's your car that you see being made—all for you—out of your metal."

She passed a hand over throbbing eyes.

"I'm afraid I'm rather tired. I'm not used to the fantastic. It's very interesting, but entirely absurd."

"What else is Life?"

"Something more comfortable than this," she laughed. "I think I must go."

"Not till you accept the most trivial of offerings."

He led her away across the factory to the row of benches. Samples of what could be done, he explained, with a negligent wave. At one bench, where stood a man with a burnisher, he stopped. The man paused in his employment.

"I think you'll find this all right, sir."

"Beautiful. The joy in the making. Nothing like it. My dearest lady—this trifle."

He held it out to her. Fitted into an old carved ivory Florentine dagger handle, was a paper-knife blade, pliable as fine steel, shining with the true richness of silver.

"My own forging. In my laboratory." And, as she was examining it—"Is it a success?" he asked.

"I'm afraid it is," she said.

A fraction of a second afterwards she gasped, wondering what imp of unreason had induced her to make such an idiotic remark.

"Do you like the inscription?"

She turned the knife over and saw at the base of the blade her name, "Paula," tinily engraved in old Italian cursive script, with correct and exquisite flourishes.

"No biting in with acids. Your devoted servant and a diamond point."

She looked up at him, in instinctive admiration.

"You——?"

"It will take you a lifetime to learn all the funny things I can do. Now let us go out into God's sunshine."

The factory workers saw depart only a beautiful lady, who seemed to embrace them all, as she went out, in a gracious smile of leave-taking. They had no notion of the hundredfold bewildered woman who passed them by, unconsciously gripping the haft of the gleaming paper knife as though it were a weapon of defence.

The car waited by the factory gate. Pandolfo waved courteous invitation. She entered. How else could she get home from this dreadful Bermondsey district?

With his foot on the step, Pandolfo gave the brief order to the chauffeur:

"Ranelagh."

Paula started. "I don't know that I want to go to Ranelagh."

"I do," said he.

He climbed in beside her. "The fresh air and the grass and the trees will do you good."

Once more she surrendered. It would have been easy to plead an engagement; less easy, but more effectual, to decline to go to Ranelagh on the ground that she had had quite enough of his company for the afternoon. But her will power seemed to have deserted her. The lawns of Ranelagh allured; and, beyond nursing her loneliness, she had not a thing to do.

"I'll go," she said, "if you'll not talk to me until we get there. You must let me get the whirr of machinery out of my brain."

She felt physically tired. The whirr of the machinery had something to do with it; but consonant with that same whirr was the remorseless clanging of the man's personality. She closed her eyes, seeking rest. The stifling scenes of the past hour danced in crazy pageant before them. She had been caught up by a centrifugal force and whirled around a weird environment with which she found herself amazingly identified. The strange metal that streamed out of the retort was called by her name; the inchoate medley of parts that were being assembled, was her car in the making—he had taken her acceptance gloriously for granted, and it occurred to her for the first time that she had uttered no word of deprecation; she still clutched in her hand the gleaming little dagger, intensely personal, by its carved Florentine hilt.

The car rolled up to the club doorway. Said her host:

"Can I speak now?"

She smiled gratefully. "You've been very kind. Now I'm equal to anything."

"And there are people who say that I'm a sort of bellowing buffalo without an ounce of tact."

His childish appeal for commendation won her laughter. They passed through the club-rooms to the lawn. It was the end of the season. The last polo match had been played the day before. The tea-tables were sparse. Still, there were enough people to dress the pleasant scene. The red coats of the waiters afforded stimulating flashes of colour. Pandolfo in his imperial way commanded one of these myrmidons to seek cool and shade. They were conducted to the coolest and shadiest vacant table. The next was occupied by Lady Demeter and Spencer Babington.

Paula nearly fell into Clara's arms. Now that the floodgates of Pandolfo's speech were released, her short passage from club entrance to lawn had been one of considerable trepidation. Anything might happen: even the unreasonable swirling away of herself on the torrent. Clara, square and solid, was an islet of refuge. Spencer, too, a port of safety. Join them? Of course. Chairs were set, fresh tea ordered.

"I've been dragging our dear lady," said Pandolfo, "through the inferno of my Bermondsey factory. In this hot weather it's like the cave of the Nibelungs. There was nothing for it but to bring her into these sylvan glades."

"What do you make in your factory?" Spencer Babington asked drily.

Pandolfo gripped him by the shoulder and replied heartily: "The fortune of mankind."

The talk wandered idly on that idle lawn beneath the shade of the grand trees. The hurry and scurry of hard-by London was forgotten. Here reigned the elegant leisure of a century ago.

"In a day or two there'll scarcely be a soul here," said Lady Demeter. "An empty paradise. Such a waste."

"It can't be helped," said Babington. "Whoever heard of people staying in town in August?"

Paula laughed. "It's the divinely appointed month for the human engine to be sent away for overhaul, isn't it, Spencer?"

"I've gone to Aix every August for many years," said Babington stiffly—he was but little over forty—"and to the treatment at Aix I owe my perfect health."

"Which reminds me, Paula dear," said Lady Demeter, "that I've got our reservations for Tuesday."

"Reservations?" Pandolfo leaned forward alert.

"Paula and I are going to Rênes-les-Eaux. Don't you know where it is? In Savoy. The only place where they can really take off fat. Demeter and Sir Spencer are going to Aix-les-Bains to cure gout."

If ever the sweetest-natured of women yearned to commit instantaneous amicicide it was Paula Field. She turned to listen to whatever Spencer Babington was saying; but she felt Pandolfo's questioning and somewhat humorous eyes upon her. She had veiled her summer movements in such gossamer vagueness. Country house visits; somewhere abroad. And now came the tactless Clara trumpeting her immediate plans. She heard Pandolfo say:

"Rênes-les-Eaux? My dear Lady Demeter, you have given me an inspiration. I have long suspected that I'm heavier than I should be."

"You, Sir Victor?" Buxom Lady Demeter chuckled as she glanced at the strongly knit figure. "What do you want to reduce for?"

"Ah!" said he. "That is my secret."

She put her head close to his and murmured: "Are you so sure?"

"Absolutely."

But an exchange of glances caused him to exult in the discovery of an ally. A valuable one, he thought, who would guide him by trim little paths and save him from having to crash through the forest like a rhinoceros.

"Would you mind if I joined you at Rênes-les-Eaux?"

"Mind?" she cried. "To two lone women you'd be a godsend. Paula—do you hear that? Sir Victor's coming to Rênes."

"I'm sure Aix is much better for whatever you may be suffering from," said Babington, fingering the broad ribbon of the monocle.

"There is just that possibility," Pandolfo replied. "What do you think, Mrs. Field?"

Paula, for the second time, apostrophized, said with an assumption of laziness:

"Mont-Dore in the Auvergne is quite a good place."

Pandolfo waved her a hand. "Abana." Another to Babington. "Pharpar." To Lady Demeter he made a little bow. "Jordan. You have prevailed."

The summer day began to wane. Lady Demeter learning, on enquiry, the lateness of the hour, started up in alarm. She was doing something that evening; what it was she couldn't remember; but she was sure there was something. It compelled her to the crime of leaving Arcadia.

"And split up our delightful little party?" said Paula.

"Couldn't we all go back together?" said Babington in his dry voice. "So charming a quartette. Lady Demeter's car is as vast as her heart."

Paula smiled on a baffled Pandolfo. "Your chauffeur can find his way home without you, can't he?"

"So long as I am with you," said Pandolfo, "my chauffeur is as the dust in the desert."

Lady Demeter dropped Paula, Babington, and Pandolfo at their respective homes and then drove back to Hansel Mansions.

She found Paula brooding in the dusk of her drawing-room.

"I'm glad to see you're ashamed of yourself."

Paula drew herself up majestically.

"What do you mean, Clara?"

"No woman who isn't ashamed of herself can have sulks in a chair without taking off her hat."

Paula skinned the thing off and threw it on a little table and smoothed her hair.

"Oh, friendship has its limits."

"I'm not exceeding them," said Lady Demeter comfortably. "You made use of my car so as to avoid driving back alone with Sir Victor. You let him down publicly before Spencer and myself, and put me into an awkward position."

"What about me?" asked Paula.

"Why can't you marry the man and have done with it?"

"If I married him I should only begin with it."

"Begin with what?"

"If you can't see for yourself, it's no use my telling you."

"He comes of an old Italian family."

Paula started and pounced. "Did he tell you that?"

"No. But someone else did. Who was it?" She searched a tricky memory. "No matter. But he does, I assure you."

"If it comes to essentials," said Paula, "everybody's descent must date back to the beginning of time."

"I know all that. It's silly," said Lady Demeter. "We're talking about birth in its recognized sense. The Pandolfos were quite big people in the sixteenth century—Ferrara, Ravenna, Taormina—no, that's Sicily—Toronto——"

"That's Canada."

"How stupid of it! Well somewhere, darling. Sixteenth century Italy is like the cinema film of an opera—you can't make head or tail of the thing. Anyhow they quarrelled with the Pope and settled down in England about a hundred years ago."

"Why didn't they go back sixty years ago, when Italy became a United Kingdom and the Pope was shut up in the Vatican?"

"Because they became English, my dear," replied Lady Demeter. "Once English, always English. What had they to do with silly Italian affairs?"

"And Papa Pandolfo? Who was he?"

"A wealthy merchant. Stock Exchange—money market. Well, you see for yourself. He rolls in money."

She was so good, so trusting, so convinced in her deliciously vague way, that all was for the best in the best of all possible worlds, that Paula's irritation fell from her like a garment. She emerged all smiles. Who could be really angry with Clara Demeter?

"My dear," she said, "I wouldn't marry Victor Pandolfo if he had the blood of all the Colonnas and Orsinis and Sforzas in his veins."

"And why?"

"Because——" she said, and all her radiant beauty smiled.

"And what about Rênes-les-Eaux?"

Paula made a counter-gesture of irritation.

"He's coming. Nothing on earth can prevent him," said Lady Demeter.

Paula took a cigarette from a box, deliberately lit it—Lady Demeter being a notorious non-smoker, there was no lapse of hospitality—and towered majestically in front of her friend.

"What has that to do with me?"

"For what you've done and said and hinted, my dear," replied Lady Demeter, who had more shrewd moments than an indulgent world gave her credit for, "I've gathered that you're a bit afraid of Victor Pandolfo."

"Afraid?"

The word was an outrage. The pink and plump and kindly Clara sitting lumpily in front of her, dared to suggest the cancelling of an engagement on the grounds of fear. Ancestral valour spoke.

"I'm afraid of no man alive! Good God! What do you take me for?"

Lady Demeter was wise enough not to take her for anything except her prized travelling companion.

"So Tuesday stands?"

"Of course it does," said Paula.