Читать книгу The Erratic Flame - Ysabel De Teresa - Страница 5

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With the death of her husband, freedom had descended upon Anne like a gift of the gods. A divine ointment, it penetrated her bruised spirit, allaying the stored-up bitterness of years. Her heart emptied itself of poison and welled with compassion for the pitiful ending of a futile life. As her husband lay back upon the pillows, broken beyond all aid, unbelievably aged, she almost forgave the insult to her youth that their common life had proved. If it had only been a case of disparity of age, no question of forgiveness would have existed at all. The twenty odd years between them might have been forged into the strongest instead of the weakest link that bound them together. It was this very disparity, in fact, which at first had attracted her to him, with the enormous flattery it implied. Her immaturity had thrilled to the condescension as it could never thrill for the horde of barbaric youngsters who formed the guard-gallant of her first New York season. Emerging from an environment entirely continental, she was accustomed to the attentions of men belonging to an older race, whose suave courtesy had its roots in the antique. From the consulates in Rome and Florence which her father had occupied ingloriously but with utter content, she had brought an old-world respect and appreciation for maturity utterly foreign to young America of even fifteen years ago. And in these respects Julius Schuyler had satisfied her entirely. In her eyes he was not only a polished, traveled and well-read man of the world, he was brilliant. He dominated. His sketches were not the mere fads of a supremely idle and blasé man. They flamed with talent. Their very unfinished condition proved it. When so much can be suggested by the mere sweep of a line, why satiate the spectator further? So she had accepted him at her own adolescent valuation, glowing dewily beneath his tired, vivacious gaze.

For it was his forte to be sprightly. The ready repartee was ever on his lips, nor was the pun scorned. No matter how trite, how forced the shaft, it played the most important rôle in his armory. To the ears of eighteen the pompous straining was inaudible, the weary dissatisfaction which it served to conceal, practically invisible. It was not until the forcing-house of marriage, the constant companionship, had opened her eyes that she glimpsed the actual man through the shallow smoke-screen behind which he strove to cover an aching ennui, an intolerable insufficiency.

Meanwhile his admiration had gone completely to her young head. The fumes of it were sweet to her unaccustomed nostrils. Almost before she was aware of it, she had consented to marry him. So it came about that before the end of her first season she had acquired a husband twenty-five years her senior, still active, distinguished in appearance, although already gray, and incidentally wealthy, besides whose fortune her father’s very comfortable means dwindled ludicrously.

And yet perhaps it had not been so bad in the long run. After all, Julius Schuyler had been a gentleman and always acquitted himself as such. For Anne there had been no brutality, no animalism to encounter. Only the monotony of an endless and artificial vivacity, the ever forcing of herself to keep up her rôle of amused and humble spectator and playmate.

He was so small, so finicky, with his endless devices for passing the time. His double solitaire, his dominoes, his checkers which he would always produce at the hint of an empty half hour. Multi-subterfuges for cheating the gnawing ennui which with the years had fastened itself upon him like a cancer. Disliking all games intensely, Anne had at first absolutely refused to share in these puerile feints against time. But, after a while, when all effort at conversation languished in the anæmic soil of his irritating triteness, she had capitulated. They played checkers in Amalfi, his back turned to the glorious bay, her subconscious bathing in its blue flame; dominoes in Luxor with the Tombs of the Kings beckoning on the glamorous horizon line; two-handed bridge on the terrace of their villa in Florence, while the setting sun tinted the Arno and set afire the mammoth dome of the old cathedral.

However, there had been compensations. The silver lining to her cloud had provided a background of decided luxury. Travel brought contact with a cosmopolitan, ever-changing, group who gave the beautiful American that delicate homage, tinged with desire, which is stimulating to a feminine ego, dissatisfied and unawakened. Intervals between tête-à-tête games were sometimes brilliant and prolonged. The buying of the villa in Florence was a joy, almost unmitigated by the fussy alterations of Julius who imagined he understood old furniture, and the Cinque-Cento. It was sheer rapture to return to Florence, to resume old friendships, revisit in stealth old haunts.

But her vitality was sapped by Julius’ greedy monopoly. He clung with the persistency of an âme damnée. He accompanied her to the dressmaker, where she was draped according to his finicky conception of her type. He chose her hats. He bought her underwear, all of the very finest, of course. But when she wore it beneath his complacent eyes, self-consciousness became an agony which habit refused to dull. If passion had underlain the complacence, she would not have minded even this. But Julius never forgot himself in his love for her. His natural diffidence was a perpetual audience, the unwelcome third in all their intercourse. Never impulsive, his caresses lacked the white heat of passion which is clean because spontaneous. Beneath his touch, Anne felt herself perpetually under the microscope. It seemed as if he were vain, not of his prowess, but of still being capable of harboring sensation at all. And habit made her quick to notice that these lapses into anæmic appetite usually followed the prodding of some erotic book or play, and were seldom occasioned by her own desirability. She became practiced in the art of retreat and withdrawal, so that the whole nature of love was distorted. Still, a sort of pity for his maimed spirit kept her silent. She closed her eyes and tried deliberately to become callous. However, she made up her mind that if so precious a commodity as freedom ever came within her grasp again, she would never permit it to escape.

And now that this freedom had been hers for almost five years, its realization had exceeded her keenest expectations. Evading every opportunity of remarriage, she had skilfully apportioned her seasons between the United States and Europe. The New York season was invariably followed by a few weeks in Egypt or the Riviera and capped by three sensuous months in the Florentine villa. And this was the best-loved time of all, in which she renewed body and soul, absorbing peace and serenity from the olive-crusted hills upon whose sides multi-colored villas gleamed like jewels in dark tresses.

Within her small but cherished garden, rose a terrace paved with bricks. One attained it by a narrow flight of moss-grown steps. Here she would sit for hours, basking beneath the sun which rode the heavens like an impartial god, while beyond the pallid balustrade, cypress-studded hills merged into the horizontal purple.

Here it was that she received her friends for tea, listening indulgently to lascivious, Tuscan, gossip. Then, alone once more, after her late dinner, or companioned by the man of the hour, it was here she would pace up and down in the sweet-scented dusk while myriads of fireflies like a flaming milky way disbanded at her approach. And high above the swarthy cypresses the sun’s paramour, the moon, shamelessly flaunted in his reflected rays.

Those were enchanted nights into which Julius’s memory intruded like the sordid wraith from another existence; a warning wraith with finger on lips, whose image tempered Anne’s blood. Not that she was discreet, for that was a quality Anne had never troubled to acquire. In fact, her dealings were so recklessly above-board that she was suspected of untold depths of wickedness. A beautiful woman who paces under the stars at midnight with now one man, now another, cannot hope to escape slander.

Although perfectly aware of this fact, Anne chose to ignore it. Even the nominal chaperonage of some poor, but genteel, relative seemed insupportable to the fierce and rapturous reaction through which she was passing. She remained defiantly alone. Her charm, her elegance, and most certainly her wealth (in that way Florentines are most human) carried her through. But rumor was building a wall of eccentricity about her and she was rapidly becoming known, both on the Continent and in America, as rather terrifyingly individual, and an image-breaker.

The most conservative began to drop off almost imperceptibly, leaving a large circle of spirits who prided themselves upon a freedom akin to looseness, and a small band of intimates too close to be affected by the whispers of the scurrilous. Among the latter, the Marchese Torrigiani and his mother refused steadfastly to believe anything but the best of Anne. Their friendship of years continued undisrupted, and both mother and son looked forward with eagerness to the day when Anne would weary of her precarious liberty, and consent to become Vittorio’s wife. But although she admitted to an affection for Vittorio which at times flickered into transient tenderness, her marriage with Julius had developed a complex which made it impossible for her to contemplate the subject without a shrinking horror. Meanwhile the Marchese waited, hoping almost against hope, that with the passing of time the lacerating memory would fade away. But so far it had refused to do so and there were hours when it seemed to the steadfast man as if the scar were branded into Anne’s very soul. Accepting his homage as a matter of course, she had continued to drift along the path of least resistance.

But latterly, a new restlessness was creeping in, and life had somehow lost its savour. The New York season was becoming a grind. Her friends were either blatantly rich, meretricious and over-fed, mere excitement chasers, or else pretenders, art fainéants, who dabbled in cubes and sex. Neurotic composers who dribbled mediocrities over the piano keys. Pseudo writers who reveled in the drab, perhaps because any further flight was beyond their stunted wings. Anne was growing to hate them all, and herself the most, because she had remained too indolent or too powerless to rise above their level. There were superior beings, of course, who were achieving the real thing somewhere. But they dwelt on a different plane, in a workers’ world of their own, whose fastnesses she had never as yet been able to scale. Her music was good, even excellent, almost professional, but that irritating adverb “almost” rose like an impassable Chinese wall, thrusting her forever into the destinationless region of the dilettantes.

Beautiful, brilliant, talented, she remained negligible in her own hypercritical eyes.

To oust this growing dissatisfaction which had sifted into the indolent drift of her life and was gradually embittering it, Anne had literally taken to her heels. Two weeks alone with the mountains had brought a certain serenity. Already the miserly future looked less blank. Soothed by solitudes and distance, her inflamed ego was content to sink into the great whole. After all, there were compensations. She might not be a genius, but that did not prevent genius from existing! And personality was only an illusion after all, a hollow shell, within which the Great Spirit differentiated. Who was she to grumble in the the face of this universal oneness, into which her littleness merged so superbly? The healing breath of the forest swept her clean of vanity. Her soul rejoiced in the vigor of its new-found simplicity. She spent her days roaming in the woods, or paddling about in a canoe on the unrippled waters of the chaste little lake. She re-read one or two favorite books, but all the time her mind remained contentedly empty and receptive, like an airing room whose windows are unclosed to the winds of heaven.

It was in this mood she had come upon the hut and Alexis. Her sleeping self had reawakened and once more taken her into possession. But it was a rested and less inverted self, a younger and more ingenuous self, who still admitted the futility of happiness but dimly craved it. In her present chastened mood she was determined to oust the personal factor. There had been too much of that in all her previous dealings with men. It had always been to that quality of pervasive femininity to which they had succumbed, and consciously or unconsciously, she had never failed to assert it. She was going to change all that. Here was a boy, probably ten years her junior, whose plight would arouse the sympathy of the veriest egotist. Whose unhappiness, combined with his genius, stirred the stagnant pool of her soul. Her quickened spirit responded to his need with almost complete self-forgetfulness. That genius should come to her door in the guise of a postulant, just as she herself had become resigned to her own lack of it, seemed the culminating miracle to her new-found peace of mind. To heal this bruised spirit and send it back to the world in the glory of renewed splendor was her job. And nothing less than success would satisfy her. For once she would step out of the amateur class and prove that she could do one thing thoroughly and well, even if it were so infinitesimal a thing as the rescue of a soul.