Джон Голсуорси
The Island Pharisees
CHAPTER II
ANTONIA
Five years before the journey just described Shelton had stood one afternoon on the barge of his old college at the end of the summer races. He had been “down” from Oxford for some years, but these Olympian contests still attracted him.
The boats were passing, and in the usual rush to the barge side his arm came in contact with a soft young shoulder. He saw close to him a young girl with fair hair knotted in a ribbon, whose face was eager with excitement. The pointed chin, long neck, the fluffy hair, quick gestures, and the calm strenuousness of her grey-blue eyes, impressed him vividly.
“Oh, we must bump them!” he heard her sigh.
“Do you know my people, Shelton?” said a voice behind his back; and he was granted a touch from the girl’s shy, impatient hand, the warmer fingers of a lady with kindly eyes resembling a hare’s, the dry hand-clasp of a gentleman with a thin, arched nose, and a quizzical brown face.
“Are you the Mr. Shelton who used to play the ‘bones’ at Eton?” said the lady. “Oh; we so often heard of you from Bernard! He was your fag, was n’t he? How distressin’ it is to see these poor boys in the boats!”
“Mother, they like it!” cried the girl.
“Antonia ought to be rowing, herself,” said her father, whose name was Dennant.
Shelton went back with them to their hotel, walking beside Antonia through the Christchurch meadows, telling her details of his college life. He dined with them that evening, and, when he left, had a feeling like that produced by a first glass of champagne.
The Dennants lived at Holm Oaks, within six miles of Oxford, and two days later he drove over and paid a call. Amidst the avocations of reading for the Bar, of cricket, racing, shooting, it but required a whiff of some fresh scent – hay, honeysuckle, clover – to bring Antonia’s face before him, with its uncertain colour and its frank, distant eyes. But two years passed before he again saw her. Then, at an invitation from Bernard Dennant, he played cricket for the Manor of Holm Oaks against a neighbouring house; in the evening there was dancing oh the lawn. The fair hair was now turned up, but the eyes were quite unchanged. Their steps went together, and they outlasted every other couple on the slippery grass. Thence, perhaps, sprang her respect for him; he was wiry, a little taller than herself, and seemed to talk of things that interested her. He found out she was seventeen, and she found out that he was twenty-nine. The following two years Shelton went to Holm Oaks whenever he was asked; to him this was a period of enchanted games, of cub-hunting, theatricals, and distant sounds of practised music, and during it Antonia’s eyes grew more friendly and more curious, and his own more shy, and schooled, more furtive and more ardent. Then came his father’s death, a voyage round the world, and that peculiar hour of mixed sensations when, one March morning, abandoning his steamer at Marseilles, he took train for Hyeres.
He found her at one of those exclusive hostelries amongst the pines where the best English go, in common with Americans, Russian princesses, and Jewish families; he would not have been shocked to find her elsewhere, but he would have been surprised. His sunburnt face and the new beard, on which he set some undefined value, apologetically displayed, were scanned by those blue eyes with rapid glances, at once more friendly and less friendly. “Ah!” they seemed to say, “here you are; how glad I am! But – what now?”
He was admitted to their sacred table at the table d’hote, a snowy oblong in an airy alcove, where the Honourable Mrs. Dennant, Miss Dennant, and the Honourable Charlotte Penguin, a maiden aunt with insufficient lungs, sat twice a day in their own atmosphere. A momentary weakness came on Shelton the first time he saw them sitting there at lunch. What was it gave them their look of strange detachment? Mrs. Dennant was bending above a camera.
“I’m afraid, d’ you know, it’s under-exposed,” she said.
“What a pity! The kitten was rather nice!” The maiden aunt, placing the knitting of a red silk tie beside her plate, turned her aspiring, well-bred gaze on Shelton.
“Look, Auntie,” said Antonia in her clear, quick voice, “there’s the funny little man again!”
“Oh,” said the maiden aunt – a smile revealed her upper teeth; she looked for the funny little man (who was not English) – “he’s rather nice!”
Shelton did not look for the funny little man; he stole a glance that barely reached Antonia’s brow, where her eyebrows took their tiny upward slant at the outer corners, and her hair was still ruffled by a windy walk. From that moment he became her slave.
“Mr. Shelton, do you know anything about these periscopic binoculars?” said Mrs. Dennant’s voice; “they’re splendid for buildin’s, but buildin’s are so disappointin’. The thing is to get human interest, isn’t it?” and her glance wandered absently past Shelton in search of human interest.
“You haven’t put down what you’ve taken, mother.”
From a little leather bag Mrs. Dennant took a little leather book.
“It’s so easy to forget what they’re about,” she said, “that’s so annoyin’.”
Shelton was not again visited by his uneasiness at their detachment; he accepted them and all their works, for there was something quite sublime about the way that they would leave the dining-room, unconscious that they themselves were funny to all the people they had found so funny while they had been sitting there, and he would follow them out unnecessarily upright and feeling like a fool.
In the ensuing fortnight, chaperoned by the maiden aunt, for Mrs. Dennant disliked driving, he sat opposite to Antonia during many drives; he played sets of tennis with her; but it was in the evenings after dinner – those long evenings on a parquet floor in wicker chairs dragged as far as might be from the heating apparatus – that he seemed so very near her. The community of isolation drew them closer. In place of a companion he had assumed the part of friend, to whom she could confide all her home-sick aspirations. So that, even when she was sitting silent, a slim, long foot stretched out in front, bending with an air of cool absorption over some pencil sketches which she would not show him – even then, by her very attitude, by the sweet freshness that clung about her, by her quick, offended glances at the strange persons round, she seemed to acknowledge in some secret way that he was necessary. He was far from realising this; his intellectual and observant parts were hypnotised and fascinated even by her failings. The faint freckling across her nose, the slim and virginal severeness of her figure, with its narrow hips and arms, the curve of her long neck-all were added charms. She had the wind and rain look, a taste of home; and over the glaring roads, where the palm-tree shadows lay so black, she seemed to pass like the very image of an English day.
One afternoon he had taken her to play tennis with some friends, and afterwards they strolled on to her favourite view. Down the Toulon road gardens and hills were bathed in the colour of ripe apricot; an evening crispness had stolen on the air; the blood, released from the sun’s numbing, ran gladly in the veins. On the right hand of the road was a Frenchman playing bowls. Enormous, busy, pleased, and upright as a soldier, pathetically trotting his vast carcass from end to end, he delighted Shelton. But Antonia threw a single look at the huge creature, and her face expressed disgust. She began running up towards the ruined tower.
Shelton let her keep in front, watching her leap from stone to stone and throw back defiant glances when he pressed behind. She stood at the top, and he looked up at her. Over the world, gloriously spread below, she, like a statue, seemed to rule. The colour was brilliant in her cheeks, her young bosom heaved, her eyes shone, and the flowing droop of her long, full sleeves gave to her poised figure the look of one who flies. He pulled himself up and stood beside her; his heart choked him, all the colour had left his cheeks.
“Antonia,” he said, “I love you.”
She started, as if his whisper had intruded on her thoughts; but his face must have expressed his hunger, for the resentment in her eyes vanished.
They stood for several minutes without speaking, and then went home. Shelton painfully revolved the riddle of the colour in her face. Had he a chance then? Was it possible? That evening the instinct vouchsafed at times to lovers in place of reason caused him to pack his bag and go to Cannes. On returning, two days later, and approaching the group in the centre of the Winter Garden, the voice of the maiden aunt reading aloud an extract from the Morning Post reached him across the room.
“Don’t you think that’s rather nice?” he heard her ask, and then: “Oh, here you aye! It’s very nice to see you back!”
Shelton slipped into a wicker chair. Antonia looked up quickly from her sketch-book, put out a hand, but did not speak.
He watched her bending head, and his eagerness was changed to gloom. With desperate vivacity he sustained the five intolerable minutes of inquiry, where had he been, what had he been doing? Then once again the maiden aunt commenced her extracts from the Morning Post.
A touch on his sleeve startled him. Antonia was leaning forward; her cheeks were crimson above the pallor of her neck.
“Would you like to see my sketches?”
To Shelton, bending above those sketches, that drawl of the well-bred maiden aunt intoning the well-bred paper was the most pleasant sound that he had ever listened to.
“My dear Dick,” Mrs. Dennant said to him a fortnight later, “we would rather, after you leave here, that you don’t see each other again until July. Of course I know you count it an engagement and all that, and everybody’s been writin’ to congratulate you. But Algie thinks you ought to give yourselves a chance. Young people don’t always know what they’re about, you know; it’s not long to wait.”
“Three months!” gasped Shelton.
He had to swallow down this pill with what grace he could command. There was no alternative. Antonia had acquiesced in the condition with a queer, grave pleasure, as if she expected it to do her good.
“It’ll be something to look forward to, Dick,” she said.
He postponed departure as long as possible, and it was not until the end of April that he left for England. She came alone to see him off. It was drizzling, but her tall, slight figure in the golf cape looked impervious to cold and rain amongst the shivering natives. Desperately he clutched her hand, warm through the wet glove; her smile seemed heartless in its brilliancy. He whispered “You will write?”
“Of course; don’t be so stupid, you old Dick!”
She ran forward as the train began to move; her clear “Good-bye!” sounded shrill and hard above the rumble of the wheels. He saw her raise her hand, an umbrella waving, and last of all, vivid still amongst receding shapes, the red spot of her scarlet tam-o’-shanter.
CHAPTER III
A ZOOLOGICAL GARDEN
After his journey up from Dover, Shelton was still fathering his luggage at Charing Cross, when the foreign girl passed him, and, in spite of his desire to say something cheering, he could get nothing out but a shame-faced smile. Her figure vanished, wavering into the hurly-burly; one of his bags had gone astray, and so all thought of her soon faded from his mind. His cab, however, overtook the foreign vagrant marching along towards Pall Mall with a curious, lengthy stride – an observant, disillusioned figure.
The first bustle of installation over, time hung heavy on his hands. July loomed distant, as in some future century; Antonia’s eyes beckoned him faintly, hopelessly. She would not even be coming back to England for another month.
.. I met a young foreigner in the train from Dover [he wrote to her] – a curious sort of person altogether, who seems to have infected me. Everything here has gone flat and unprofitable; the only good things in life are your letters… John Noble dined with me yesterday; the poor fellow tried to persuade me to stand for Parliament. Why should I think myself fit to legislate for the unhappy wretches one sees about in the streets? If people’s faces are a fair test of their happiness, I’ d rather not feel in any way responsible…
The streets, in fact, after his long absence in the East, afforded him much food for thought: the curious smugness of the passers-by; the utterly unending bustle; the fearful medley of miserable, over-driven women, and full-fed men, with leering, bull-beef eyes, whom he saw everywhere – in club windows, on their beats, on box seats, on the steps of hotels, discharging dilatory duties; the appalling chaos of hard-eyed, capable dames with defiant clothes, and white-cheeked hunted-looking men; of splendid creatures in their cabs, and cadging creatures in their broken hats – the callousness and the monotony!
One afternoon in May he received this letter couched in French:
3, BLANK ROW WESTMINSTER. MY DEAR SIR,
Excuse me for recalling to your memory the offer of assistance you so kindly made me during the journey from Dover to London, in which I was so fortunate as to travel with a man like you. Having beaten the whole town, ignorant of what wood to make arrows, nearly at the end of my resources, my spirit profoundly discouraged, I venture to avail myself of your permission, knowing your good heart. Since I saw you I have run through all the misfortunes of the calendar, and cannot tell what door is left at which I have not knocked. I presented myself at the business firm with whose name you supplied me, but being unfortunately in rags, they refused to give me your address. Is this not very much in the English character? They told me to write, and said they would forward the letter. I put all my hopes in you.
Believe me, my dear sir,
(whatever you may decide)
Your devoted
LOUIS FERRAND.
Shelton looked at the envelope, and saw, that it, bore date a week ago. The face of the young vagrant rose before him, vital, mocking, sensitive; the sound of his quick French buzzed in his ears, and, oddly, the whole whiff of him had a power of raising more vividly than ever his memories of Antonia. It had been at the end of the journey from Hyeres to London that he had met him; that seemed to give the youth a claim.
He took his hat and hurried, to Blank Row. Dismissing his cab at the corner of Victoria Street he with difficulty found the house in question. It was a doorless place, with stone-flagged corridor – in other words, a “doss-house.” By tapping on a sort of ticket-office with a sliding window, he attracted the attention of a blowsy woman with soap-suds on her arms, who informed him that the person he was looking for had gone without leaving his address.
“But isn’t there anybody,” asked Shelton, “of whom I can make inquiry?”
“Yes; there’s a Frenchman.” And opening an inner door she bellowed: “Frenchy! Wanted!” and disappeared.
A dried-up, yellow little man, cynical and weary in the face, as if a moral steam-roller had passed over it, answered this call, and stood, sniffing, as it were, at Shelton, on whom he made the singular impression of some little creature in a cage.
“He left here ten days ago, in the company of a mulatto. What do you want with him, if I may ask?” The little man’s yellow cheeks were wrinkled with suspicion.
Shelton produced the letter.
“Ah! now I know you” – a pale smile broke through the Frenchman’s crow’s-feet – “he spoke of you. ‘If I can only find him,’ he used to say, ‘I ‘m saved.’ I liked that young man; he had ideas.”
“Is there no way of getting at him through his consul?”
The Frenchman shook his head.
“Might as well look for diamonds at the bottom of the sea.”
“Do you think he will come back here? But by that time I suppose, you’ll hardly be here yourself?”
A gleam of amusement played about the Frenchman’s teeth:
“I? Oh, yes, sir! Once upon a time I cherished the hope of emerging; I no longer have illusions. I shave these specimens for a living, and shall shave them till the day of judgment. But leave a letter with me by all means; he will come back. There’s an overcoat of his here on which he borrowed money – it’s worth more. Oh, yes; he will come back – a youth of principle. Leave a letter with me; I’m always here.”
Shelton hesitated, but those last three words, “I’m always here,” touched him in their simplicity. Nothing more dreadful could be said.
“Can you find me a sheet of paper, then?” he asked; “please keep the change for the trouble I am giving you.”
“Thank you,” said the Frenchman simply; “he told me that your heart was good. If you don’t mind the kitchen, you could write there at your ease.”
Shelton wrote his letter at the table of this stone-flagged kitchen in company with an aged, dried-up gentleman; who was muttering to himself; and Shelton tried to avoid attracting his attention, suspecting that he was not sober. Just as he was about to take his leave, however, the old fellow thus accosted him:
“Did you ever go to the dentist, mister?” he said, working at a loose tooth with his shrivelled fingers. “I went to a dentist once, who professed to stop teeth without giving pain, and the beggar did stop my teeth without pain; but did they stay in, those stoppings? No, my bhoy; they came out before you could say Jack Robinson. Now, I shimply ask you, d’you call that dentistry?” Fixing his eyes on Shelton’s collar, which had the misfortune to be high and clean, he resumed with drunken scorn: “Ut’s the same all over this pharisaical counthry. Talk of high morality and Anglo-Shaxon civilisation! The world was never at such low ebb! Phwhat’s all this morality? Ut stinks of the shop. Look at the condition of Art in this counthry! look at the fools you see upon th’ stage! look at the pictures and books that sell! I know what I’m talking about, though I am a sandwich man. Phwhat’s the secret of ut all? Shop, my bhoy! Ut don’t pay to go below a certain depth! Scratch the skin, but pierce ut – Oh! dear, no! We hate to see the blood fly, eh?”
Shelton stood disconcerted, not knowing if he were expected to reply; but the old gentleman, pursing up his lips, went on:
“Sir, there are no extremes in this fog-smitten land. Do ye think blanks loike me ought to exist? Whoy don’t they kill us off? Palliatives – palliatives – and whoy? Because they object to th’ extreme course. Look at women: the streets here are a scandal to the world. They won’t recognise that they exist – their noses are so dam high! They blink the truth in this middle-class counthry. My bhoy” – and he whispered confidentially – “ut pays ‘em. Eh? you say, why shouldn’t they, then?” (But Shelton had not spoken.) “Well, let’em! let ‘em! But don’t tell me that’sh morality, don’t tell me that’sh civilisation! What can you expect in a counthry where the crimson, emotions are never allowed to smell the air? And what’sh the result? My bhoy, the result is sentiment, a yellow thing with blue spots, like a fungus or a Stilton cheese. Go to the theatre, and see one of these things they call plays. Tell me, are they food for men and women? Why, they’re pap for babes and shop-boys! I was a blanky actor moyself!”
Shelton listened with mingled feelings of amusement and dismay, till the old actor, having finished, resumed his crouching posture at the table.
“You don’t get dhrunk, I suppose?” he said suddenly – “too much of ‘n Englishman, no doubt.”
“Very seldom,” said Shelton.
“Pity! Think of the pleasures of oblivion! Oi ‘m dhrunk every night.”
“How long will you last at that rate?”
“There speaks the Englishman! Why should Oi give up me only pleasure to keep me wretched life in? If you’ve anything left worth the keeping shober for, keep shober by all means; if not, the sooner you are dhrunk the better – that stands to reason.”
In the corridor Shelton asked the Frenchman where the old man came from.
“Oh, and Englishman! Yes, yes, from Belfast very drunken old man. You are a drunken nation” – he made a motion with his hands “he no longer eats – no inside left. It is unfortunate-a man of spirit. If you have never seen one of these palaces, monsieur, I shall be happy to show you over it.”
Shelton took out his cigarette case.
“Yes, yes,” said the Frenchman, making a wry nose and taking a cigarette; “I’m accustomed to it. But you’re wise to fumigate the air; one is n’t in a harem.”
And Shelton felt ashamed of his fastidiousness.
“This,” said the guide, leading him up-stairs and opening a door, “is a specimen of the apartments reserved for these princes of the blood.” There were four empty beds on iron legs, and, with the air of a showman, the Frenchman twitched away a dingy quilt. “They go out in the mornings, earn enough to make them drunk, sleep it off, and then begin again. That’s their life. There are people who think they ought to be reformed. ‘Mon cher monsieur’, one must face reality a little, even in this country. It would be a hundred times better for these people to spend their time reforming high Society. Your high Society makes all these creatures; there’s no harvest without cutting stalks. ‘Selon moi’,” he continued, putting back the quilt, and dribbling cigarette smoke through his nose, “there’s no grand difference between your high Society and these individuals here; both want pleasure, both think only of themselves, which is very natural. One lot have had the luck, the other – well, you see.” He shrugged. “A common set! I’ve been robbed here half a dozen times. If you have new shoes, a good waistcoat, an overcoat, you want eyes in the back of your head. And they are populated! Change your bed, and you’ll run all the dangers of not sleeping alone. ‘V’la ma clientele’. The half of them don’t pay me!” He, snapped his yellow sticks of fingers. “A penny for a shave, twopence a cut! ‘Quelle vie’. Here,” he continued, standing by a bed, “is a gentleman who owes me fivepence. Here’s one who was a soldier; he’s done for! All brutalised; not one with any courage left! But, believe me, monsieur,” he went on, opening another door, “when you come down to houses of this sort you must have a vice; it’s as necessary as breath is to the lungs. No matter what, you must have a vice to give you a little solace – ’un peu de soulagement’. Ah, yes! before you judge these swine, reflect on life! I’ve been through it. Monsieur, it is not nice never to know where to get your next meal. Gentlemen who have food in their stomachs, money in their pockets, and know where to get more, they never think. Why should they – ’pas de danger’. All these cages are the same. Come down, and you shall see the pantry.” He took Shelton through the kitchen, which seemed the only sitting-room of the establishment, to an inner room furnished with dirty cups and saucers, plates, and knives. Another fire was burning there. “We always have hot water,” said the Frenchman, “and three times a week they make a fire down there” – he pointed to a cellar – “for our clients to boil their vermin. Oh, yes, we have all the luxuries.”
Shelton returned to the kitchen, and directly after took leave of the little Frenchman, who said, with a kind of moral button-holing, as if trying to adopt him as a patron:
“Trust me, monsieur; if he comes back – that young man – he shall have your letter without fail. My name is Carolan Jules Carolan; and I am always at your service.”