Kitabı oku: «The Devourers», sayfa 14

How had he got those five hundred dollars to give her? She knelt down suddenly beside the open trunk, and said a prayer for him, as he had wished her to do. When she rose and shut the trunk, she shut in it the memory of Aldo, that was not to be with her any more.

Anne-Marie hardly noticed her father's absence, talking of him occasionally in the airy, detached manner of children; but Minna went for a week with red eyes and swollen face. And after a while the accounts rose with a rush.

Nancy paid all her debts, bought some clothes, and gave Mrs. Johnstone notice. She engaged a suite in a fashionable boarding-house on Lexington Avenue. Peggy and George stayed with her the last day in the flat, and helped her with her packing; but in the evening they went back to their rooms, for they were expecting a friend—Mr. Markowski, a Pole—who was to come and make music with George.

Anne-Marie was asleep, and Nancy sat down in the denuded room where everything belonging to her had already been put away. The dead Mr. Johnstone looked sadly at her, and even the piano-lamp was bland and dulcet, shining on the roses that George had brought her.

The postman's double knock startled her, and she received from his hand a letter. Aldo? No. It came from England, and was addressed to "Miss Brown." She called the grinning postman in, and gave him half a dollar. Thank you. He would see that all them "Miss Brown" letters and any others were brought to her new address. She opened the letter; the large, well-known handwriting was pleasant to her eyes. The little crest of the Grand Hotel spoke to her of cheerful, well-remembered things. She seemed to look through its round gold ring as through an opera-glass, that showed her far-away things she knew and loved. "Hotel Métropole." She imagined the brilliantly lit lounge, the gaily-gowned, laughing women rustling past with the leisurely, well-groomed men; the soft-footed, obsequious waiters; the ready, low-bowing porter; the willing, hurrying pageboys; and beyond the revolving glass doors London, bright, brilliant, luxurious, rolling to its pleasures.

She sat down and answered the Unknown's letter:

"The room is closed and warm and silent. The lamp and the fire give a mellow glow to the heavy old-rose curtains, and to the soft-tinted arabesques on the carpet. Some large pale roses are leaning drowsily over their vase, and dreaming their scented souls away.

"I am smoking a Russian cigarette (with a soupçon of white heliotrope added to its fragrance), and writing to you.

"My unknown friend! Are you worthy of companionship with the scent of my roses and the smoke of my cigarette—such delicate, unselfish things?…"

A piercing cry from the adjoining room made Nancy leap from her chair. Penholder in hand, she rushed into Anne-Marie's room. The child, a slip of white, was standing on her bed, pale of cheek, wild of eye, one hand extended towards the wall. Her tumbled hair stood yellow and flame-like round her head.

"Listen!" she gasped—"listen!" And Nancy stopped and listened.

Clearly and sweetly through the wall came the voice of a violin. Then the piano struck in, accompanying the "Romance" of Svendsen. Anne-Marie stood like a little wild prophetess, with her hand stretched out. Then she whispered: "It is the lovely piece—the lovely piece that he could not remember!"

"It is a violin, darling," said Nancy, and sat down on the bed.

But Anne-Marie was listening, and did not move. Nancy drew the blanket over the little bare feet, and put her arm round the slight, nightgowned figure.

The last long-drawn note ended; then Anne-Marie moved. She covered her face with her hands and began to cry.

"Why do you cry, darling—why do you cry?" asked Nancy embracing her.

Anne-Marie's large eyes gazed at Nancy. "For many things—for many things!" she said. And Nancy for the first time felt that her child's spirit stood alone, beyond her reach and out of her keeping.

"Is it the music, dear?"

Anne-Marie held her tight, and did not answer. Nancy coaxed her back to bed, and soon tucked her up and left her. But the door between them was kept wide open, and the sound of Grieg's "Berceuse" and Handel's "Minuet" reached Nancy at her table, and helped her to add fantastic details to her letter.

The next morning they moved to the boarding-house in Lexington Avenue. They did not see George, who had already gone down-town to his shipping office; but Peggy helped them into the carriage, and with Minna ran up and down the stairs after forgotten parcels.

"What's wrong with the kiddy? She don't look festive," said Peggy, handing a hoop and a one-legged policeman, survivor of the Schmidl's Punch-and-Judy show, into the carriage to Anne-Marie.

"Your music yesterday excited her very much," said Nancy. "She liked the violin."

"Oh, that was Markowski. He's a funny old toad," said Peggy; and she got on to the carriage-step to kiss Anne-Marie. But Anne-Marie covered her face, and turned her head away. She seemed to be crying, and Peggy winked at Nancy, and said; "She's a queer little kid." And Nancy said, "She does not like good-byes." Then Minna got into the carriage with the cage of Anne-Marie's waltzing mice, for she was going to the boarding-house with them to help unpack.

"Good-bye! Au revoir! Come and see us soon!" … The carriage rumbled off. Minna had counted and recounted on her fingers how many things they had, and how many things they had forgotten, when Anne-Marie raised her red face from her hands.

"I do like good-byes," she said. "But why did she say an old toad did the music?"

Nancy comforted her, and said it did not matter, and they were going to a nice, nice, nice new house.

The nice new house was expecting them, and a cheeky, pimply German page-boy took their packages up. He was rough with the hoop and the policeman, and held his nose as he carried up the waltzing mice. But the room they were to have was large and sunny, and everything was bright.

They went down to luncheon, and sat down at a table with many strangers. Anne-Marie, who thought it was a party, was very shy in the beginning and very noisy at the end of the meal. The boarders were the kith and kin of all boarding-house guests. There was the silent old gentleman and the loud young man; the estimable couple that kept themselves to themselves; and the lady with the sulphur-coloured hair who did not keep herself to herself. There was the witty man and the sour woman; there were the ill-behaved children, that quarrelled all day and danced skirt-dances in the drawing-room at night; and their ineffectual mother and harassed father. There was also the Frenchman, the two Swedish girls, and the German lady.

The German lady sat opposite Nancy, and, having looked at her and at Anne-Marie once, continued to do so at intervals all during lunch. Every time Nancy raised her eyes she met those of the German lady fixed upon her. They were kindly, inquisitive brown eyes behind glasses. Nobody spoke to Nancy at luncheon, the sulphur-haired lady and the witty man talking most of the time of their own affairs and their opinion of Sarah Bernhardt. Nancy was kept busy telling Anne-Marie in Italian not to stare at the two little girls, who seemed to fascinate her by their execrable behaviour.

In the evening Nancy went down to dinner alone. After the soup the German lady spoke to her.

"I hope the little girl is quite well," she said, nodding towards the empty place near Nancy.

"Oh yes, thank you. She has early supper and goes to bed."

"That is English habit," said the German lady. "Were you in England?"

"When I was a child," said Nancy.

Then the fish came; and always Nancy felt the brown eyes behind the glasses fixed on her face. At the mutton the German lady spoke again:

"I heard you speak Italian," she said. "Are you from il bel paese ove il sì suona?"

Nancy laughed and said: "My mother was Italian. My father was English. I was born in Davos, in Switzerland." For some unaccountable reason the German lady flushed deeply. She did not speak again until the sago pudding had gone round twice and the fruit once—very quickly.

"You speak German?" she said.

"I had a German governess," said Nancy.

Again the German lady's smooth cheeks flushed. Then every one rose and went into the drawing-room, and Nancy went to her room and wrote to the Unknown.

"You ask me to talk about myself. Nothing pleases me better; for I am selfish and subjective.

"I am a gambler. I went to Monte Carlo some time ago. Oh, golden-voiced, green-eyed Roulette! I gambled away all my money and all the money of everyone else that I could lay hands on. I laid hands on a good deal. I have rather pretty hands.

"I am a dreamer. I have wandered out in deserted country roads dreaming of you, my unknown hero, and of Uhland's mysterious forests, and of Maeterlinck's lost princesses, until I could feel the warmth welling up at the back of my eyes, which is the nearest approach to tears that is vouchsafed me.

"I am a heathen. I have a hot, unruly worship for everything beautiful, man, woman, or thing. I believe in Joy; I trust in Happiness; I adore Pleasure.

"I am a savage—an overcivilized, hypercultivated savage with some of the growls and the hankerings after feathers still left in him. I adore jewels. I have some diamonds—diamonds with blue eyes and white smiles—as large as my heart. No, no! larger! I wear them at all seasons and everywhere; round my throat, my arms, my ankles, all over me! I like men to wear jewels. If ever I fall in love with you, I shall insist upon your wearing rings up to your finger-tips. Do not protest, or I will not fall in love with you.

"I am feminine; over-and ultra-feminine. I wear nothing but fluffinesses—trailing, lacey, blow-away fluffinesses, floppy hats on my soft hair, and flimsy scarves on my small shoulders. I have no views. I belong to no clubs. I drink no cocktails—or, when I do, I make delicious little grimaces over them, and say they burn. They do burn! I smoke Russian cigarettes scented with white heliotrope, because surely no man would dream of doing such a sickening thing.

"I am careless; I am extravagant; I am lazy—oh, exceedingly lazy. I envy La Belle au Bois dormant, who slept a hundred years. Until Prince Charming....

"Good-bye, Prince Charming.

"Eve."

XI

The next day at luncheon the German lady stared again, and looked away quickly.

Anne-Marie asked her mother: "What is Irish stew when he is alive?" Nancy smiled and dimpled. Then the German lady, who had seen the dimple and the smile, said in a sudden, loud voice, over which she had no control: "Is your name Nancy?"

Nancy looked up with a start. "Yes!" she said. And everyone was silent.

"My name is Fräulein Müller," said the German lady, taking a pink-edged handkerchief from her pocket and making ready for tears.

"Fräulein Müller! Fräulein Müller!" said Nancy dreamily. "You read Uhland to me, and Lenau, and … 'shine out little head sunning over with curls.'"

Then Fräulein Müller wept in her handkerchief, and Nancy rose from her seat and went round and kissed her. Then it was Fräulein Müller's turn to get up and go round and kiss Anne-Marie; whereupon the sulphur-haired lady remarked how small the world was; and the witty man said they would next discover that he and she were brother and sister, and had she not a strawberry mark on her left shoulder?

After lunch Fräulein Müller asked Nancy to her room, and she held Anne-Marie on her lap, and had to say the baby rhyme, "Da hast du 'nen Thaler, geh' auf den Markt" about fifty times, with the accompanying play on Anne-Marie's pink, outstretched palm, before she was allowed to talk to Nancy. Then she told them all about the years she had passed in an American family after leaving the Grey House, and about the little house she had just rented on Staten Island—a tiny little house in a garden, where she was going to live for the rest of her life. She was furnishing it now, and it would be ready next week.

"You must come to see it. You must stay with me there," said Fräulein Müller, looking for a dry spot on the sodden handkerchief. "Oh, meine kleine Nancy! My little Genius! Und was ist mit der Poesie?"

The following week Fräulein Müller left Lexington Avenue for her "Gartenhaus," as she called it, and three days later Nancy and Anne-Marie went to stay with her for a fortnight.

"What for an education has the child?" inquired the old governess, when Anne-Marie had been put to bed after a day of wonders. What? Strawberries grew on plants? Anne-Marie had always thought they came in baskets.

"She seems to know nothing," said Fräulein Müller. "I tried her with a little arithmetic. Did she know the metric system? Oh yes, she said she did, and wanted to speak about something else. But I kept her to it," said Fräulein sternly, "and asked her: 'What are millimetres?' Do you know what the child said? She said that she supposed they were relations of the centipedes!"

Nancy laughed, and told Fräulein Müller about the Sixth Avenue School. Fräulein clasped horrified hands.

"I will educate her myself. I suppose she is also a genius."

"No, I am afraid not," said Nancy, shaking her head regretfully. "I wish she were!"

The two women were silent; and from the little bedroom upstairs, through the open window, came Anne-Marie's voice, like tinkling water.

"She is singing," said Fräulein Müller.

"Oh yes; she always sings herself to sleep. She likes music." And Nancy told her about the violin.

"We shall buy her a violin to-morrow," said Fräulein Müller.

And so she did. The violin was new and bright and brown; it was labelled "Guarnerius," and cost three dollars. Anne-Marie pushed the bow up and down on it with great pleasure for a short time. Then she became very impatient, and took it out into the garden, and looked for a large stone.

"…It made ugly voices at me," she said, standing small and unrepentant by the broken brown pieces, while Fräulein Müller and Nancy shook grieved heads at her.

"I do not think that music is her vocation after all," said Fräulein Müller. "But we shall see."

XII

"Good-morning, my tenebrious Unknown. I am in the country, perched up on a stone wall with nothing in sight but vague, distant hills and sleepy fields. Queer insects buzz in the sun, and make me feel pale. I dread buzzing insects with a great shivery dread.

"Why are you not here? I am wearing a large straw hat with blue ribbons, and a white dress and a blue sash, like the ingénue in a drawing-room comedy. And there is no one to see me. And the fields are full of flowers, and I pick them, and have no one to give them to. Surely it is the time in all good story-books when the heroine in a white dress and blue sash is sitting on a wall for Prince Charming to pass and see her, and stop suddenly.... But life is a badly constructed novel; uninteresting people walk in and walk out, and all is at contra-tempo, like a Brahms Hungarian Dance.

"Prince Charming, why have you gone three thousand miles away?"

"Good-morning again.

"This is a divine day—cool winds and curtseying grasses.

"I am still here, living on herbs and sunsets and memories of things that have not been. You are a thing that has not been. Perhaps that is why you are so much in my thoughts. I have many friends whom I seldom think of. I have a few lovers whom I never think of. And I have you who are nothing, and whom I always think of. It is absurd and wonderful.

"My lovers! You ask me who they are and why I have them. I have them because they make me look pretty. I look pretty when I laugh. A woman's beauty depends entirely upon how much she is loved. Did you not know that? The best 'fard pour la beauté des dames' is other people's adoration.

"My lovers therefore have their use, but they are not entertaining. They are uniformly sad or angry. Yet I am good to my lovers. I let them trot in and out of their tempers like nice tame animals that nobody need mind. I do not require them to perform in public; I sit and watch their innocent tricks with kind and wondering eyes.

"Et vous, mon Prince Charmant? What of you? Who are you making to look prettier? Whose cheeks are you tinting? Whose eyes are you brightening? Whose heart are you making to flutter by the hurry of yours? Who smiles and dimples and blushes for your sake? I suppose you are falling in love with your fair countrywomen—tall, tennis-playing English girls, with cool, unkissed mouths and white, inexperienced hands. Ah, Prince Charming, whom do you love?

"Eve."

He replied: "You have spoken. Whom do I love? Eve."

She was glad. She lived a life of fevered joy. She was not Nancy. She was the Girl in the Letters; and the Girl in the Letters was a wild, unfettered, happy creature. Nothing seemed sweeter to her than this subtle amor di lontano—this love across the distance. Ah, how modern and piquant and recherché! And, again, how thirteenth-century! Was it not Jaufré Rudel, the Poet-Prince, who had loved the unseen Countess Melisenda for so many years?

 
"Amore di terra lontana,
Per voi tutto il core mi duol,"
 

and who at last, coming to her, had died at her feet? Could they not also love each other across the distance, wildly and blindly, without the aid of any one of their senses? Surely that was the highest, the divinest, the most perfect way of love!

So Nancy lived her dream, and tossed the tender little love-letters across the ocean with light hands.

"Cher Inconnu,

        "I write to you because it is raining and the sky is of grey flannel. You will say that I wrote to you yesterday because the weather was fine and the sky was of blue silk.

"Ah, dear Unknown! It is true. You have grown into my life, like some strange, startling modern flower, out of place, out of season, yet sweet to my unwondering eyes. You are a black and white flower of words, growing through your brief wild letters into the garden of my heart.

"What a garden, mon ami! What a growth of weeds! what a burst of roses! what a burgeoning of cabbages! An unnatural, degenerate garden, where the trees carry marrons glacés and the flowers are scented with patchouli.

"Into this luxuriance of perversity, this decadent brilliance of vegetation, you have blossomed up, strange and new, for the delight of my soul. That you should say you love me, you who have never seen me, is sweeter perfume to my sated senses than the incense of all the thousand seraph-flowers that bow and swing at my feet.

"Good-bye. My name is Nancy."

To this letter he replied by cable: "Nancy, come here at once."

"'Come here at once!' The arrogant words go with a shock of pleasure to my heart. I am unused to the imperative; nobody has ever bullied me or told me to do this and that. I think I like it. I like being meek and frightened, and having to obey.

"'Come here at once!' I find myself timidly looking round for my hat and gloves, and wondering whether I shall wear my blue or my grey dress on the journey. I am nice on journeys. I am good-tempered, and wear mousie-coloured clothes that fit well, and I have a small waist. All this is very important in travelling, and makes people overlook and forgive the many, many small packages I carry into the compartment, and the hatboxes I lose, and the umbrellas I forget. When I am tired I can put my head down anywhere and go to sleep; I sleep nicely and quietly and purrily, like a cat.

"I am really very nice on journeys. Also I am very popular with useful people, like conductors and porters and guards. They take care of me and give me advice, and open and shut my windows, and lock my compartments even when it does not matter; and they bring me things to eat, and run after all the satchels and parcels I leave about.

"Your last letter says you are going to Switzerland. How nice! I should like to be with you, throbbing away on excitable little Channel steamers, puffing along in smoky, deliberate Continental trains, driving the bell-shaking horses slowly up the wide white roads that coil like wind-blown ribbons round the swelling breasts of the Alps; table-d'hôting at St. Moritz; tennis-playing at Maloya; clattering and rumbling over the covered bridges near Splügen; wandering through the moonlike sunshine of Sufer's pine-forest, where beady-eyed squirrels stop and look, and then scuttle, tail flourishing, up the trees. I am friends with every one of those squirrels. Greet them from me.

"Nancy."    

New York.    

"Amor mio di Lontano,

        "I am in the city again the horrible, glaring, screaming city, all loud and harsh in the uncompromising July sun. How I long to-day for the shade of the closed Italian houses, the friendly, indrawn shutters, the sleeping silence of the empty streets, and, far-off, the cerulean sweep of the Mediterranean!

"And a new lover at my side! A brand-new lover, whose voice would sound strange to my ears, whose eyes I had not fathomed, whose feelings I did not understand, whose thoughts I could only vaguely and wrongly guess at, whose nerves would respond strangely, like an unknown instrument, to the shy touch of my hand.

"Your letter is brought to me. Written at the Hotel Bellevue, Andermatt. Andermatt! How cool and buoyant and scintillant it sounds. It falls on my heart like a snowflake in the humid heat of this town.

"I have opened the letter. What? Only three words!

"Again: 'Come at once.' Again the words, with their brief, irresistible imperiousness, thrill my lazy soul.

"If you write it a third time … by all that is sweet and unlikely, I shall come!

"Will you be glad? Will you kiss my white hands gratefully? Shall we be simple and absurd and happy? Or shall we fence and be brilliant, antagonistic, keen-witted? No matter! No matter! The fever of my heart will be stilled. My eyes will see you and be satisfied."

A cablegram to Andermatt. Reply paid. (Money borrowed from Fräulein Müller.)

"Dreamt that you had long black beard. Tell me that not true.—Nancy."

Reply from Andermatt:

"Not true. Come at once."

Nancy did not go at once. She had no money to go with; and, of course, she never intended to go at all.

He wrote: "Will you meet me in Lucerne?" and she replied: "Impossible."

He: "I shall expect you in Interlaken."

She: "Out of the question."

He: "I shall be in London in October. After that I am off to Peru."

So in September she wrote to him again.

"I lay awake last night dreaming of our first meeting. It will be framed in the conventional luxury of a little sitting-room in a Grand Hotel. It will be late in the afternoon—late enough to have the pretty pink-shaded lights lit, like shining fairy-tale flowers, all over the room. Then a knock at the door. And you will come into my life. What then, what then, dear Unknown? My hands will lie in yours like prisoned butterflies; my wilfulness and my courage, my flippancy and effrontery will throb away, foolishly, weakly, before your eyes. What then? Will Convention guide the steed of our Destiny gently back into the well-kept stables of the common-place? or shall we take the reins into our own hands, and lash it rearing and foaming over the precipice of the Forbidden, down into the flaming depths of passionate happiness?

"Good-bye. Of course I shall not come."