The Grey Wig. Israel ZangwillЧитать онлайн книгу.
most punctilious stickler for convention, he felt, could deny that Mrs. Grundy's claim had been paid to the last minute.
The publication of his new volume—containing the Winifred lyrics—had served to colour these months of intolerable delay. Even the reaction of the critics against his poetry, that conventional revolt against every second volume, that parrot cry of over-praise from the very throats that had praised him, though it pained and perplexed him, was perhaps really helpful. At any rate, the long waiting was over at last. He felt like Jacob after his years of service for Rachel.
The fateful morning dawned bright and blue, and, as the towers of Oxford were left behind him he recalled that distant Saturday when he had first gone down to meet the literary lights of London in his publisher's salon. How much older he was now than then—and yet how much younger! The nebulous melancholy of youth, the clouds of philosophy, had vanished before this beautiful creature of sunshine whose radiance cut out a clear line for his future through the confusion of life.
At a florist's in the High Street of Hampstead he bought a costly bouquet of white flowers, and walked airily to the house and rang the bell jubilantly. He could scarcely believe his ears when the maid told him her mistress was not at home. How dared the girl stare at him so impassively? Did she not know by what appointment—on what errand—he had come? Had he not written to her mistress a week ago that he would present himself that afternoon?
"Not at home!" he gasped. "But when will she be home?"
"I fancy she won't be long. She went out an hour ago, and she has an appointment with her dressmaker at five."
"Do you know in what direction she'd have gone?"
"Oh, she generally walks on the Heath before tea."
The world suddenly grew rosy again. "I will come back again," he said. Yes, a walk in this glorious air—heathward—would do him good.
As the door shut he remembered he might have left the flowers, but he would not ring again, and besides, it was, perhaps, better he should present them with his own hand, than let her find them on the hall table. Still, it seemed rather awkward to walk about the streets with a bouquet, and he was glad, accidentally to strike the old Hampstead Church, and to seek a momentary seclusion in passing through its avenue of quiet gravestones on his heathward way.
Mounting the few steps, he paused idly a moment on the verge of this green "God's-acre" to read a perpendicular slab on a wall, and his face broadened into a smile as he followed the absurdly elaborate biography of a rich, self-made merchant who had taught himself to read. "Reader, go thou and do likewise," was the delicious bull at the end. As he turned away, the smile still lingering about his lips, he saw a dainty figure tripping down the stony graveyard path, and though he was somehow startled to find her still in black, there was no mistaking Mrs. Glamorys. She ran to meet him with a glad cry, which filled his eyes with happy tears.
"How good of you to remember!" she said, as she took the bouquet from his unresisting hand, and turned again on her footsteps. He followed her wonderingly across the uneven road towards a narrow aisle of graves on the left. In another instant she had stooped before a shining white stone, and laid his bouquet reverently upon it. As he reached her side, he saw that his flowers were almost lost in the vast mass of floral offerings with which the grave of the woman beater was bestrewn.
"How good of you to remember the anniversary," she murmured again.
"How could I forget it?" he stammered, astonished. "Is not this the end of the terrible twelve-month?"
The soft gratitude died out of her face. "Oh, is that what you were thinking of?"
"What else?" he murmured, pale with conflicting emotions.
"What else! I think decency demanded that this day, at least, should be sacred to his memory. Oh, what brutes men are!" And she burst into tears.
His patient breast revolted at last. "You said he was the brute!" he retorted, outraged.
"Is that your chivalry to the dead? Oh, my poor Harold, my poor Harold!"
For once her tears could not extinguish the flame of his anger. "But you told me he beat you," he cried.
"And if he did, I dare say I deserved it. Oh, my darling, my darling!" She laid her face on the stone and sobbed.
John Lefolle stood by in silent torture. As he helplessly watched her white throat swell and fall with the sobs, he was suddenly struck by the absence of the black velvet band—the truer mourning she had worn in the lifetime of the so lamented. A faint scar, only perceptible to his conscious eye, added to his painful bewilderment.
At last she rose and walked unsteadily forward. He followed her in mute misery. In a moment or two they found themselves on the outskirts of the deserted heath. How beautiful stretched the gorsy rolling country! The sun was setting in great burning furrows of gold and green—a panorama to take one's breath away. The beauty and peace of Nature passed into the poet's soul.
"Forgive me, dearest," he begged, taking her hand.
She drew it away sharply. "I cannot forgive you. You have shown yourself in your true colours."
Her unreasonableness angered him again. "What do you mean? I only came in accordance with our long-standing arrangement. You have put me off long enough."
"It is fortunate I did put you off long enough to discover what you are."
He gasped. He thought of all the weary months of waiting, all the long comedy of telegrams and express letters, the far-off flirtations of the cosy corner, the baffled elopement to Paris. "Then you won't marry me?"
"I cannot marry a man I neither love nor respect."
"You don't love me!" Her spontaneous kiss in his sober Oxford study seemed to burn on his angry lips.
"No, I never loved you."
He took her by the arms and turned her round roughly. "Look me in the face and dare to say you have never loved me."
His memory was buzzing with passionate phrases from her endless letters. They stung like a swarm of bees. The sunset was like blood-red mist before his eyes.
"I have never loved you," she said obstinately.
"You—!" His grasp on her arms tightened. He shook her.
"You are bruising me," she cried.
His grasp fell from her arms as though they were red-hot. He had become a woman beater.
THE ETERNAL FEMININE
He wore a curious costume, representing the devil carrying off his corpse; but I recognised him at once as the lesser lion of a London evening party last season. Then he had just returned from a Polar expedition, and wore the glacier of civilisation on his breast. To-night he was among the maddest of the mad, dancing savagely with the Bacchantes of the Latin Quarter at the art students' ball, and some of his fellow-Americans told me that he was the best marine painter in the atelier which he had joined. More they did not pause to tell me, for they were anxious to celebrate this night of nights, when, in that fine spirit of equality born of belonging to two Republics, the artist lowers himself to the level of his model.
The young Arctic explorer, so entirely at home in this more tropical clime, had relapsed into respectability when I spoke to him. He was sitting at a supper-table smoking a cigarette, and gazing somewhat sadly—it seemed to me—at the pandemoniac phantasmagoria of screaming dancers, the glittering cosmopolitan chaos that multiplied itself riotously in the mirrored walls of the great flaring ball-room, where under-dressed women, waving many-coloured paper lanterns, rode on the shoulders of grotesquely clad men prancing to joyous music. For some time he had been trying hard to get some one to take the money for his supper; but the frenzied waiters suspected he was clamouring for something to eat,