Читать книгу Aliens - William McFee - Страница 12

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I folded up the thin crackling sheets of paper and handed them to Bill, who took them without comment, and for some time we sat rocking in the twilight, absorbed in our own thoughts. It must not be imagined for a moment that we, and least of all I, an experienced and professional author, accepted this contribution to our investigations without reserve. A lengthy apprenticeship to life warned us that "things do not happen that way." But just for a few moments (and this was the cause of our silence) we revelled in the delicious sensation of having beheld in one of its most incredible gestures the long arm of coincidence. Swiftly we sketched out the story. Eagle-faced adventurer—marries his mistress—casts her off—leaves her penniless in New York—she blackmails him—he grants her an income—agent in New York takes charge of letters—yes, it hung together—it hung together, coincided!

Personally I was a little disappointed after the first flush of excitement. I thought it a little melodramatic and I abhor melodrama. I wanted something finer, something with a touch of great sentiment, something commensurate with the beauty and dignity of the woman's bodily frame, something that would explain and gild with delicate interest the expression of sombre and uncommunicative melancholy that hung like a cloud over her face. I felt reluctant to delve further into a history that was footed upon so unsatisfactory a foundation as this enigmatic creature who had blazed suddenly upon the painter-cousin's vision, a mere spendthrift man of pleasure, inarticulate save in his startlingly decadent behaviour. After all, what had he done, this fine gentleman with an eagle face and iron will? Sold a few automobiles to the aristocracy. Pooh! In America he would pass as a hustling business man with unconventional ideas. In grey, feudal old London, no doubt, he appeared as a meteoric genius, a veritable Napoleon of salesmanship, a marvel. But here——!

"Well," I said, at length, "what do you think of it?"

Bill slipped out of her chair and prepared to go in and get the dinner ready. We dine at six.

"I think," said she, "that there is nothing in it. It's hardly likely that—well, is it?" she asked, vaguely.

"No," we agreed, "it isn't."

"Still," I added, "it is a most interesting commentary upon our own little problem. It only shows how indefinitely one might extend the ramifications of a trivial tale. Of course, the children believe implicitly in the statement that he is at sea. If that be a legend, it is clever. But then—it is impossible."

"It's not a common name," remarked Mac, filling his pipe.

"It's a very easily assumed one," I argued. "It's a name you can't argue about. It might be Irish, French, Italian, Spanish or American. It tells you nothing."

Bill paused at the door.

"I don't suppose he had anything to do with giving the children those awful names," she suggested.

"Oh, as for that, I have known plenty of mothers who claim that right," I responded. "That does not amount to much. No. There are two points that seem to me to invalidate the claim of this gentleman to any connection with our neighbours, but that is not one of them."

"What are they?" inquired Mac. Bill opened the door and went in. I cleared my throat.

"First," I said, "there is the entirely fanciful argument that such a man as Cecil has described would not be attracted by such a woman as—Mrs. Carville. I can't explain in so many words why I think so, but I do. I don't believe she would attract him. If you consider a moment, you will see it. The English gentleman of good family and birth, when he has once broken out of his own social world, does not show much taste and discrimination in the choice of a wife or mistress."

"Well," said Mac.

"Second, we have the incontestable fact that Benvenuto Cellini, though sharing his illustrious brother's features and histrionic talent, has blue eyes and fair hair. Where did he get them?"

"Something in that," my friend admitted, throwing his match into the darkness. "We'll have to hunt round for a tertium quid, so to speak."

"You put it pithily," I asserted. "Personally I am coming to the conclusion that Cecil's story, while certainly interesting in itself, does not help us at all with our own difficulty. I am inclined to think that he is of our nation and fair complexion. Really, when you reflect, it is unjust to assume your tertium quid and complicate the story—yet. We have no actual evidence of her—obliquity."

"No," said Mac. "Let's wait."

"We must," I replied. "The children themselves will no doubt provide us with plenty of food for conjecture if they go on as they have begun. We are good friends now, they and I."

"You surpassed yourself as an Indian," he laughed.

"Hostile," I corrected. "Did you notice the realistic way in which Giuseppe Mazzini fell?" He nodded.

"You'll have to be a cow-boy to-morrow," he remarked. "You might suggest rounding up their confounded chickens and set them to repairing that fence."

"I shall be a cow-boy with enthusiasm," I said. "Under my breast beats an adventurous heart, believe me. As for the fence, I would rather not get into trouble by interfering with their affairs."

"She didn't seem any too friendly."

"Hostile would describe it better."

"Still, if you could get a word with her, it might elucidate the mystery?" "Yes," I said, as the gong tinkled within.

"Chop," said he, and we went in to dinner.

We had reached the cheese and celery before Bill contributed a piece of news that impressed us in different ways.

"I 'phoned Miss Fraenkel this morning," she said, "and asked her to come up after dinner this evening. She said she'd be tickled to death to come."

I said nothing at first, and Mac, annexing an unusually large piece of cheese, grinned.

"Say," he said, "suppose we get Miss Fraenkel's opinion of the chap with the hooked nose. She's American; she'll be sure to have an opinion."

"No doubt," I conceded. "We shall see whether we have not taken too much for granted. There's only one thing, and that is, are we not exposing Miss Fraenkel to temptation by exciting her curiosity yet more about her neighbour?"

"Oh, bunk!" said Mac. "Women don't have to be led into that sort of temptation. They take it in with their mother's milk."

"You cynical old devil!" exclaimed Bill, indignantly.

"Well, it's true," he defended himself stoutly. "I'll bet you a quarter Miss Fraenkel's already tried them and found them guilty."

"Of what?" demanded Bill.

"Oh, ask Miss Fraenkel," said he. "How should I know?"

"I think," I said, gently, "you are making a mistake. Consider! Miss Fraenkel is no doubt interested in her neighbours, like any other woman. But you make a big mistake if you imagine that ordinary people, people who are not professionally concerned with human nature, are accustomed to draw conclusions and observe character, as—as we do, for example. I have always thought," I went on, stirring my coffee, "that Jane Austen made this same mistake. She takes a small community, much like Netley, N. J., and suggests, by the conversation of the characters, that they are all as observant and as shrewd as herself. We feel it was not so. Nay, we know it was not so, for Jane's genius in that direction was almost uncanny. Now there is, I am safe in saying, nothing uncanny about Miss Fraenkel."

"She's very nice!" said Bill, nodding blithely at me over her cup.

I am loth to give any colour to the suspicion that I am about to confuse my narrative with extraneous details; but I must confess that Bill's laconic benison had for me a personal appeal. She was, I felt, entirely and generously right. She had not overstepped the mark at all. Miss Fraenkel was very nice, but—it has nothing to do with my story. It is a point of honour with me to put Miss Fraenkel in her place, if I may express it so without discourtesy, and that place is certainly modest and inconspicuous. Miss Fraenkel's light was very clear and very bright, but illuminated only a small area. She wrote an admirable paper and read it clearly and impressively at the Women's Club on "The Human Touch in Ostrovsky." Indeed, for one who had read so little of Ostrovsky it was a most creditable piece of work. It was in her estimate of the English character that she was, I venture to think, less successful, more narrow in fact. You see, she was naturally confused by two facts. In the first place the similarity of the English and American languages seemed to her to warrant a certain similitude between the two nations; and secondly, her intimacy with the English people was practically confined to us three, who had been in America nearly seven years, and who, in consequence, had shrouded our more salient insularities beneath a cloak of cosmopolitan aplomb. Neither our speech nor our outlook upon life could be taken as typical of our great and noble-hearted nation. Yet she did take us in that sense, with the result that in her conception of the United Kingdom it was a rather fantastic and clumsily-fashioned small-scale model of the United States.

We had first met her, not in New Jersey at all, but in New York. After the earthquake, which I have mentioned as lifting us and many others from more or less comfortable sockets in San Francisco and scattering us over the Union, we found it a matter of some difficulty to rise to our accustomed level in New York. It really seemed, what with the failure of inspiration and our lack of suitable introductions, that the mighty mill-stream of Manhattan would bear us away and fling us over the rocks to destruction before we could ever get our heads above the surface.

Of those first days in East 118th Street none of us are disposed to speak. We might have gone back to England—surely so dire a calamity, so utter a personal ruin, justified a relinquishment of our purpose. But we had not gone anyway. We could not contemplate the solicitous sympathy of friends who disliked America, who had protested against our emigration in the first place. We did not dislike America, nor did we blame her for our misfortunes. Our friends, even the painter-cousin, could not understand that we did not dislike America. They were misled by our occasional and quite natural sighs for a sight of the quiet English landscape, and our joking remarks about the customs regulations. So we stayed and fought, with our backs to the not over-clean walls of 118th Street. It was slow progress from 118th to 18th Street and from there to a real flat in Lexington Avenue, where it so happened that Miss Fraenkel had, and still has, a married sister. Bill and the married sister became warm friends, discovering in each other a common dislike of pink, and it was she who introduced us formally; though in a casual way Miss Fraenkel and I met occasionally on the stairs. And so it came about that when we felt able to abandon Lexington Avenue, in favour of a purer air and water supply, Miss Fraenkel chanted the praises of her own Netley in the Garden State, and Bill, journeying thither to spy out the land, returned an hour late for dinner, and incoherent with horticultural details.

It will be seen that though undoubtedly competent to criticize Ostrovsky or Mrs. Carville per se, Miss Fraenkel's opinion of the painter-cousin's discovery would be interesting only for its novelty and irrelevance. I did not express my conviction quite as frankly as this, since my friend, though in sympathy with his wife's matrimonial plans, could not forbear to indulge in a mild hazing at my expense. I contented myself with opening the piano and pushing him into the seat. It is our custom to have music after dinner.

Only those who have written verse professionally can realize the extent to which music acts as a solvent upon apparently insoluble difficulties of rhyme and sentiment. It had become a habit with me to leave any such problem of prosody to one side and take it up again only when my friend opened his piano. Having completed an opera some time before, I had at this time no such trouble, and so, as he broke abruptly into that prodigious composition, the Overture to Tannhäuser, I gave myself up to an unfettered consideration of the mystery of life and the complexity of our multitudinous contacts with one another. It is not enough, I reflected, to say that we make and pass. We make and remake, we pass and, pausing on the brink of oblivion, return to spoil our first fine careless raptures. We make and pass; but the early dawn of our making is reddened by the sunset of another's decline. We are agitated by the originality of our ideas, unaware that they are born simultaneously in a thousand minds, and are woven into the texture of our time-spirit in a thousand-times-repeated design. Von Roon, in Chelsea, used to say that "a man's mind was like a chamber papered with used postage stamps. Examine them separately and they were of no value; they were merely cancelled symbols of forgotten messages. View them as a whole and they formed an interesting and confusing composition." Time, and our proximity to other cancelled symbols is no guarantee of interior understanding. The Great Decorator has arranged us without regard for our individual merits or past intrinsic values, we are but points of colour in his immense and arbitrary arrangement. I was following up this thought, when the brass Canterbury Pilgrim that serves us for a knocker was vigorously sounded, and I sprang to open the door to Miss Fraenkel.

She stepped briskly into the room, looked round and smiled.

"Three times," she declared as I assisted her to remove her jacket. "But I forgive you if you'll only play that won—derful thing again!"

In person Miss Fraenkel was of middle size, admirably proportioned and situated in tone on the borderland between the blonde and the brunette. By which I mean that her hair was brown, her eye a warm hazel, and her skin of a satiny pallor that formed an effective background for a delightful flush that suffused her piquant features whenever her enthusiasm was roused. And her enthusiasm was continually being roused. To us cold Britons the abandon with which she, in common with her countrywomen, gave herself up to the enjoyment of a picture, a book, a landscape, or for that matter of a person, was a most fascinating spectacle. American women strongly resemble champagne. At a certain age they are incomparably stimulating, but intimacy with them involves a sort of "headiness" that demands discretion; a nervous energy emanates from them that tends to relax the critical faculty. There is, moreover, a tendency to turgescence in their speech that leads the unwary into a false estimate of their intellectual range.

It was some time before the conversation could be guided round to the subject which we three at any rate had at heart. Explosive cries of delight over Mac's last etching, Bill's new waist and a Chinese print I had recently acquired, were a matter of course. In deference to an unuttered request we adjourned to the studio upstairs, for Miss Fraenkel had been from the first candidly attracted by the suggestion of bohemianism in our ménage. It was not her romantic view of an artist's life, however, that distinguished her from any other young and romantic lady, but her frankness and eloquence in acknowledging it. "It must be grand," she had told me in Lexington Avenue, "to be a grisette." We had admitted that it must, but had been unable to share her regret that she had not been a man "so that she could see everything." She was very charming as she was.

Of course she knew of the painter-cousin and indeed, as soon as she could think of it, gave us the needed opening.

"I saw a letter with an English postmark for you," she observed, examining the bottom of a piece of china that rested near her shoulder. "Did you get it?"

"We want you to give us an opinion about it, Miss Fraenkel," said Bill, bringing out the letter and giving it to her. She accepted the packet in some uncertainty.

"I!" she said, "give an opinion? I don't get it, I'm afraid."

"Read it," said Bill.

And she did. We sat round her, as she sat on the broad flat box that Mac called a "throne," in a semicircle, and studied the varying expressions that crossed her face as her eyes travelled down the pages. It occurred to me after I had retired to my room that night, that an English girl of twenty-one would not have weathered the concentrated gaze of three strangers with such serenity of features. An observant and invisible critic might have imagined us to have been awaiting the decision of a young and charming Sibyl, so intently did we gaze and so neglectful was she of our regard. This apparent coldness was explained to me by Bill as a characteristic of the American woman. "They like to be admired," she told me. "And so they don't mind if you do stare at them."

Miss Fraenkel looked up with a smile of comprehension.

"What a perfectly lovely letter!" she exclaimed.

Bill took the sheets and thrust them into the envelope.

"He must be a very interesting man, don't you think?"

"Surely! Oh, I should give anything to see his home. You've described it to me, so I know all about it. Gainsborough landscape, and red tiles on the cottages!" She clasped her hands.

"I mean the man my cousin met," said Bill, gently. "Carville."

"Oh, him!" Miss Fraenkel looked at each of us for an instant to catch some inkling of our behaviour.

"Same name as——" and Mac jerked his thumb over his shoulder.

Miss Fraenkel's face did not clear.

"We thought," I said heavily, "that this man in England, you know, might have——" I stopped, dismayed by her lack of appreciation. She seemed unable to grasp the simple links of our brilliant theory. We had omitted to calculate upon the indifference of the modern American temperament to names. A foul murder had been committed a short time back by a gambler named Fraenkel, yet she would have laughed at the suggestion that such a coincidence should cause her any annoyance.

"I don't get it," she said, smiling, and we saw plainly enough that she did not get it. We were crushed. I explained in more detail the reason for which we had ventured to connect the two stories. We could see her trying to understand.

"You mean—just as if it was a photo-play," she faltered.

It does not matter now, and I admit that this put me out of humour. And yet it was true. We were really no nearer an actual and bona fide solution of Mrs. Carville's story than if we had simply tried to make, as Miss Fraenkel said, a photo-play. The others laughed at my downcast countenance.

"Well," I said, "you said Miss Fraenkel had tried them and found them guilty, Mac."

"What I meant was, Miss Fraenkel had formed her own opinion of the business."

"Yes," she said, "I have."

"Now we shall hear something," chirped Bill.

"Listen," said Miss Fraenkel. "It's very likely an assumed name."

It was our turn to look bewildered.

"Yes?" said Bill. "What then?"

"And——" went on Miss Fraenkel, making little motions with her hands as though she were trying to catch something that eluded her grasp. "And—oh! he's being held for some game in New York. She's got away with it, you see."

Miss Fraenkel waited for this appalling development to sink into our minds. I don't think it was given to any of us at the moment to divine just what had happened to Miss Fraenkel. Even seven years in the country were not sufficient training in American psychology to realize it at once. We sat and looked at her, temporarily dazed by what we took to be a story built upon exclusive information. And she sat and looked at us, as pleased as a child at the success of her manœuvre.

"Why," stammered Bill, blankly through her glasses, "how do you know?"

"I don't know," replied Miss Fraenkel. "I just made it up, same's you." And she included us all in a brilliant flash of her hazel eyes.

We changed the subject after that. In self-defence we changed the subject, for it was plain that when it came to making photo-plays we held a very poor hand. Moreover, we saw that Miss Fraenkel did not and could not take our ponderous interest in Mrs. Carville seriously. To argue that she ought to was no better logic than to say that since she was crazy about Chinese prints, she ought to be friendly with the Chinese laundryman in Chestnut Street. We regarded the nations of Europe as repositories of splendid traditions, magnificent even in their decay. Miss Fraenkel regarded them as rag-baskets from which the American Eagle was picking a heterogeneous mass of rubbish, rubbish that might possibly, after much screening, become worthy of civic privilege.

The wisdom of our action was proved by Miss Fraenkel herself, for not only did she make no further mention of Mrs. Carville before she rose to go, but even when I remarked (I escorted her to her home) pointing to the great lantern in the Metropolitan Tower, twenty miles away, shining like a star above the horizon, "that light shines on many things that are hidden from us," she failed to apply the sententious reflection to her own story, merely looking at me with an appreciative smile. She had forgotten our discussion utterly, and I was quite sure that unless we mentioned it, she would not refer to it again.