Читать книгу Aliens - William McFee - Страница 6

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Long before any of us three had seen him we had become aware of his existence, and our brains were continually busy about him. His appearance, his age, his gait, his history, his voice, even his ultimate destiny, we conjectured over and over again as one by one the evidences of his existence accumulated and developed in our consciousness. It grew to be quite a game with us, this collection of data, and filled in much of our leisure before we became acquainted with many of our neighbours.

I think Bill was the first to notice something unusual about the family next door, something neither English nor American. "What do you think!" she exclaimed, coming in one morning as I was busy writing. "She's got a little iron grate on legs, and there's charcoal burning in it."

"Who? Where?" I asked, coming out of my work with a start. I was composing an advertisement at the time.

"Mrs. Carville," said Bill, pointing to the window.

From the window, across the intervening plot of ground, we saw our neighbour stooping over one of those small portable affairs so popular in Italy and known as scaldini, mere iron buckets in which coke or charcoal burns without flame, and which are carried from room to room as occasion arises.

"I thought," I said, "that she was Italian. That is a scaldino."

"Is it?" said Bill. "They'll set the house on fire if they use that here."

My friend is rather hard on the Mediterranean nations, giving as a reason "they are so dirty," but meaning, I imagine, that they lack our habits of order and dignified reticence. Their colonies in American cities and country-side are not models for town-planners and municipal idealists. And Bill has, in addition, much of the average Englishwoman's suspicion of foreign domestic economy. The past glories of Greece and Spain and Rome are nothing to her if the cooking utensils of the present generation are greasy or their glassware unpolished. There is, when one gets well away from them, quite a Dutch primness and staid rectangularity about English ideals in the matter of front and back yards, hen-runs, flower-beds and the like. And although her own small tract of New Jersey woefully failed to come anywhere near those same ideals she had a weakness for the gentle disparagement of Latin untidiness and lack of finish.

But, firm believers as we were in the authentic picturesqueness of American life, if we only looked for it, we had been struck more than once by the fugitive glimpses of herself which our neighbour had so far vouchsafed to us. To tell the bald truth, we stood in awe of her. We discriminated between her and her environment. And we paid to her, in spite of our prejudices and limitations, a certain homage which beauty ever commands and receives, so potent is its inspiration to the hearts of men.

On revision, that word "beauty" scarcely stands its own in this connection, and for this reason. We three, deriving our entire sustenance from art in some guise or other, had widely divergent opinions upon the indispensable attributes of beauty per se. From my experience of artists, this condition of things is not unusual. We always agreed to differ, Bill rapturous among her flowers and revelling in their colour; Mac catching with a fine enthusiasm and assured technique the fugitive tints of a sunrise through a tracery of leaves and twigs; and I, quiescently receptive, pondering at intervals upon the sublime mystery of the human form, especially the grandiose renderings of it in the works of Michael Angelo. Thus it will be seen that I alone was unprejudiced in my predilections, and qualified, however inadequately, to do justice to Mrs. Carville. Mac was annoyed because she had cut down a tree. That it was her own tree made no difference. To cut down a living tree was, in Mac's view, a sacrilege. Bill had an additional grievance in the fact that Mrs. Carville not only grew no flowers herself, but permitted her chickens to wander deleteriously among ours.

A brief and passing glance from the street would have given a stranger no inkling of the state of affairs. Indeed, Mrs. Carville's domain and ours were un-American in the fact that there had at one time been a fence between us. Even now it is a good enough fence in front; but it gradually degenerated until, at the bottom of the yards, it was a mere fortuitous concourse of rotten and smashed palings through which multitudinous armies of fowls came at unseasonable hours and against which all Bill's ladylike indignation was vented in vain. As we watched behind the curtains a Dorking stepped through and began to prospect among the sumach and stramonium that Bill had encouraged along our frontiers, under an illusion that plants labelled "poisonous" in her American gardening book would decimate the fowls.

"I wish they wouldn't," said Bill sadly, and added, "It's rotten, you know. I shall speak to them about it one of these days."

For myself, though trained habit enabled me to make note of the Dorking, my whole conscious attention was riveted upon the little group round the scaldino on the back porch. Mrs. Carville was, as I have said, stooping over the brazier. Her movements were being watched not only by ourselves, but by her two children. Fortunately, they were beyond her, their legs planted far apart, their hands behind them, so that I could see without stint the magnificent pose of the woman's body. Her arms hovered over the vessel, the left resting at times upon it, the other selecting pieces of fuel from a box at her side. The line of her back from hip to shoulder seemed incredibly straight and long. The cold wind that was blowing gustily and which was the ostensible cause of her preparations, pressed her thin dress to her form and showed with sportive candour the fine modelling of bosom and limbs. Chiefly, however, I was attracted by the superb disdain in the poise of the head. It was a dark head, coiled heavily with black hair and set back in the hollow of the shoulders. Her face may be called dark too, the black eye-brows and olive skin being unrelieved by colour in the cheeks. Her whole expression was, you might say, forbidding, and I was not surprised when one of the boys received a push as he bent his head over the brazier. There was such an electric quickness in the gesture, such a dispassionate resumption of her former pose, that one involuntarily conceded to her a fierce and peremptory disposition. One felt that such a woman would listen with some impatience to complaints about predatory fowls, that she would stand no nonsense from her children either, that. …

The same thought flashed through our minds simultaneously, and in strict accordance with our differing temperaments Bill voiced it.

"I wonder if they don't get on," she said.

"I wonder," I assented.

The brazier full, Mrs. Carville rose, the handle in her hand. Pointing to the box, she spoke to her children, who hastily removed it to a shed at the bottom of the yard. She turned to enter the house, her large black eyes swept our windows in a swift comprehensive glance of suspicion and then she vanished.

I retired hastily to my desk, acutely conscious that we had been, well, that we had been impolite! Bill went away without speaking, and for a couple of hours I was absorbed in my work. Growing weary of the thing, I took up my pipe and went upstairs to the studio.

"Just in time for tea," said Bill. "Have a cookie?"

The studio was in some disorder, and the atmosphere was heavy with the odour of printer's ink. The etching press had been dragged out from the wall, trays of water, bottles of benzine, rags of muslin, rolls of paper, palettes of ink, copper plates and all the matériel of etching were lying in considerable confusion about the room, and Mac himself, draped in a blue cotton overall, stood in negligent attitude against an easel, drinking a cup of tea. I had caught the phrase, "They're a funny lot," and I divined that Bill's hasty offer of cookies was a mere ruse to put me off the track of a possibly interesting conversation.

"Finished?" asked Mac, passing me a cup of tea.

"Not yet," I replied. "Another thousand words will do it, though."

Mac, in accordance with a vow made in all sincerity, and approved by us, set apart one day a week for etching, just as I was supposed to consecrate some part of my time to literature. At first we were to work together, select themes, write them up and illustrate them conjointly. This, we argued, could not fail to condense into fame and even wealth. Our friend Hooker had done this, and he had climbed to a one-man show in Fifth Avenue. But by some fatality, whenever Mac took a day off for high art, on that day did I invariably feel sordidly industrious. I might idle for a week, smoking too much and getting in Bill's way as she busied herself with housework, but as soon as the etching-press scraped across the studio-floor, or Mac came down with camera and satchel and dressed for a tramp, I became the victim of a mania for work, and stuck childishly to my desk. Personally I did not believe in Hooker's story at all. Hooker's mythical librettist never materialized. I was always on the look-out for a secondhand book containing Hooker's letterpress. It suited the others to believe in him, but even a writer of advertising booklets and "appreciations" has a certain literary instinct that cannot be deceived. And so I felt, as I have said, sordidly industrious and inclined to look disparagingly upon a man who was frittering away his time with absurd scratchings upon copper and whose hands were just then in a most questionable condition.

"I thought you were going to help me," he sneered over his cup.

"The fit was on me," I explained, and my eye roved round the studio. I caught sight of a piece of paper on a chair. Mac made a movement to pick it up, but he was hampered by the cup and saucer, and I secured it.

"Ah—h!" I remarked, and they two regarded each other sheepishly. "Very good indeed, old man!"

And it was very good. With the slap-dash economy of effort which he had learned of Van Roon, when that ill-fated genius was in Chelsea, Mac had caught the salient curves and angles of Mrs. Carville as she stooped over her scaldino, had caught to a surprising degree the sombre expression of her face and the tigerish energy of her crouched body. I studied it with great pleasure for a moment, and then it recurred to me that he had not been with us at the window. I say recurred, though I had known it all along, and my ejaculation, for that matter, was but a sign of triumph over catching him at the same game of peeping-Tom that we had been playing in the room below. Yet so quickly and over-lappingly do our minds work that at the same moment I had no less than three blurred emotions. I was pleased to find my friend was guilty, I was pleased with the sketch, yet puzzled to know how he had come to make it. Suddenly I saw light.

"You were on the stairs?" I said, and pointed with the paper over my shoulder. He nodded.

"Happened to look out," he remarked, setting his cup down.

It is my custom to risk a good deal sometimes by uttering thoughts which my friends are free to disown. They may not be quite honest in this, but none the less, according to the social contract, they are free to disown. So, in this case, when I said, "I wonder if they are really married," both of these generous souls repudiated the suggestion at once.

"But you must admit we have some reason for suspicion," I went on, looking into my cup. "Of course, I am not speaking now as a gentleman——"

"No," said Bill, maliciously. I continued.

"——but as an investigator into the causes of psychological phenomena. Placing them upon the dissecting-table, so to speak, and probing with the forceps of observation and the needle of wit——"

"Rubbish!" snorted the etcher rudely, turning to his plates.

"But, my dear chap!" I urged, "let me explain. I happened to be reading Balzac last night, that is all. You know how stimulating he is, and how readily one falls in with his plans for forming a complete Science of Applied Biology of the human race. Put it another way if you like. What are the facts? Item: A grass widow, obviously foreign, presumably Italian. Item: Two children indisputably American, one fair, the other dark. Item: A scaldino. Item: Male clothing on the line. Item: A reserved attitude toward her intelligent and cultivated neighbours. Item: Ignorance of the well-known fact that the Indian Summer is now setting in. Item:——shall I go on? Have we not here evidence sufficiently discrepant to warrant a certain conjecture?"

"Male clothing, you said?" remarked Bill, a certain respect for my perspicacity in her manner; "When?"

"The last time I came home with the milk," I replied. "The moon was shining with some brilliance. As I looked out of my window before getting into bed I saw some one moving over there. A further scrutiny revealed to me a number of undeniable suits of pyjamas which were being taken hurriedly from the line."

"You didn't say anything about it before?"

"No, because I attached no significance to the fact before. To tell you the truth, I was under the impression that they were doing laundry work and that, to conceal the fact more effectively, they were doing the male garments at night. We had not then heard the item I was waiting permission to enumerate."

"Is it one we know or one you're going to spring on us?" inquired the lady, reaching out for my cup.

"You may know it," I replied. Mac was bending over his plate, rubbing the ink in with deft fingers, and I saw his lowered glance flutter in my direction for a moment.

"You mean Mac knows and you don't feel sure whether he's told me," interpreted Bill, shaking the tea-pot. I laughed.

"Into that we will not go," I said. "Suffice it that if he knows it was because I told him."

"I knew it was something you were ashamed of," she exclaimed, triumphantly. "Go on: out with it!"

"How can I be ashamed of it since I am about to tell you?" I demanded, incautiously.

"Why, because your love of scandal is so tremendous that you sacrifice even yourself to it!" she answered.

"Thank you," I said. "Here is my item: They correspond."

"That's nothing to go on!" cried the lady. I dared no more than smile. Mac grinned as he lifted the plate from the gas stove and, giving it a final polish, carried it to the press. "Oh, well!" went on Bill, irrelevantly, "let us all be honest and say we're interested. If he exists, he will come along some time."

The press creaked and the spokes turned. We both paused involuntarily as Mac bent over and lifted the blankets. This is always a moment of anxiety. It was a theory among us that when Samuel Johnson wrote "The Vanity of Human Wishes" he had been pulling proofs from copper. Bill had confessed to me that she could not help holding her breath, sometimes. Her husband turned upon us with a smile of satisfaction.

"If we're all going to be honest," he remarked, "we all ought to know as much as each other, eh? Well then, tell us about the correspondence, old man. What do you know?"

"Miss Fraenkel … " I began, and Bill breathed, "I knew it!"

"In the course of a casual conversation," I continued, "Miss Fraenkel mentioned to me the fact that letters pass between them. In a way, I suppose, she shouldn't do it. A post-mistress is in a delicate position. And yet why not? One may say without prejudice that a certain man writes to his wife. We might even have assumed it, since we see the postman deliver letters with our own eyes. Miss Fraenkel, however, overstepped the bounds of prudence when she implied something wrong. Her exact words, as far as I can remember, were, 'It is funny he writes from New York.'"

"Does he?" said Bill.

"So Miss Fraenkel says. So you see, your … our unspoken thoughts were justified, to say the least. We may recast Item one and say, A grass widow, undoubtedly Italian, with a husband in New York, twenty miles away."

"Well, in that case it's no business of ours," said Mac, as he spread the heavy viscid ink upon a new plate. "They may have their troubles, but it's pretty clear they don't need our sympathy, do they?"

"No," assented Bill.

"But what becomes of our inquiry?" I protested. "My dear Mac, this does credit to your kind heart, but since we are agreed to be honest, let us have the fruits of our honesty. Consider that anyhow we are doing them no harm. You are too gentle. Indeed, I think that we have been stand-offish. Why should not Bill call and—er—leave a card?"

"Me! Call on an Italian?" The voice was almost shrill.

"A neighbourly act," I remarked. "And we may find out something."

"We're a pretty lot, us and our honesty," put in Mac, in some disgust, rubbing his nose with the back of his wrist.

"My dear friends," I said, "I give you my word of honour that is how modern novels are made. If you put an end to espionage the book market would be given over entirely to such works as 'The Automobile and How to Drive It' and 'Jane Austen and Her Circle.'"

"Then it's a very shady trade, mean and dishonourable," said Mac.

"We agreed upon that, you remember, when my novel was refused publication," I said, laughing.

"Yes," said Bill. "But when they accepted it, you got very stuck-up and refused to write any advertisements for a fortnight and said that whoever had written a good book was one of a noble company, and a lot more of it. It depends on the point of view."

"Of course it does, ma mie. In this case, the honest point of view is the one we must take. We must forget for a moment that we are English lady and gentlemen——"

"Never!" said Bill, firmly, lighting a cigarette.

"——and remember that we are students of life. What would Balzac or Flaubert have known of life if they had been merely gentlemen? Nothing! What does a gentleman know? Nothing. What does he do in the world? Nothing. Of what use is he beyond his interest as a vestige of a defunct feudalism? This is the Twentieth Century, in the United States of America, not the——"

"Oh stop, stop!" she said, laughing. "Go down and get that thousand words finished."

I went.