Sea of Glass (Valancourt 20th Century Classics)
Page 9
I said: ‘She was worried, and a bit frightened too, I think.’
‘Medically we call it over-excitement,’ she said stubbornly.
‘That damned fellow was shouting at her like a bargee. I suppose that’s exciting in the same sense as being shot at, but it’s not the way I’d describe it.’
I had quite a lot more to say, but I never said it because Nurse Fillis had gone out of the room with tears on her cheeks.
After a few wet days the weather had again become fine and hot. At the beginning of my stay I had generally sat out on the roof-garden but lately I had taken to going down to the real one. I found it curiously attractive with its mingled smell of soot and flowers, and the noise of the London traffic coming through like the beat of an enormous waterfall. The proportions of the garden mingled impressively with those of the house; it was long and narrow, a strip of, say, a hundred and twenty yards by thirty, and this exaggerated the height and sheerness of those plastered cliffs. Lying in a deck-chair with half-closed eyes, one felt that one was looking up at a mountain with windows. The roof-garden seemed to hang halfway up to the sky. And indeed the impression was not entirely illusory, for there must have been a drop of over thirty feet between the second floor and the railings of the area.
Varvara did not come back for tea. But about half-past five her shadow fell silently across my chair.
‘How did it go?’ I asked.
‘I suffered,’ she replied sombrely. ‘Lord Jesus, how I suffered!’
‘Why?’
‘The women mocked me. They came out like slaves, but underneath I could hear them laughing.’
‘Damned rude!’ I said. ‘But perhaps you imagined it.’
Varvara continued morbidly: ‘My top clothes are not right. That I know. But they laughed also at my drawers. Only Andrew did not laugh.’
‘Surely he wasn’t there at the fitting?’
She chose not to answer.
‘At least,’ she said, brightening, ‘I shall soon be dressed so that I do not shame my friends. People will think that I am an English girl of breeding.’
I said: ‘I hope that doesn’t mean you’ll give up being yourself.’
‘That is what Andrew tells me. He says I must keep my personality because it is distinguished. Manners are being worn rather farouches this season,’ she said, obviously quoting.
‘Andrew has always had a line in flattery,’ I said.
‘And you, David, in spitefulness,’ replied Varvara calmly. ‘It angers you to see people doing what you cannot do, and being what you will not be. And yet you are too proud of yourself to change.’
I cannot remember any home-truth which, for the moment, hurt me more. Part of the impact was pure surprise. Hitherto I had always regarded Varvara as a kind of Valkyrie, a creature full, no doubt, of great thoughts and violent, headstrong, consuming hatreds, but not one to whom you would look for psychological insight. She probably saw that I was shaken, for in her next remark she relented a little.
‘I like you better than Andrew,’ she said. ‘But I do not admire you so much. I pray for you, David.’
‘Not for Andrew?’ I asked, trying to sound cynically indulgent.
‘It would be no good,’ said Varvara. She paused before reverting to an earlier line of thought. ‘With Andrew I shall make social advances.’
It was taking time and accumulation of evidence to make me realize that she cared about such things. The difficulty lay in overcoming the sentimental belief that noble savages do not envy the trappings of civilization.
Going into the house to dress for dinner, I found a cable for me in the hall. It was signed by my uncle, and it said:
‘Called home confer India Office week mid-July. Will notify arrival. Love self and Edna.’
This was most unexpected. Never before, so far as I could remember, had my uncle returned to England in between his spells of leave. Much as I liked him, my first reaction was fear lest my stay at Aynho Terrace should be cut short. Presently, however, I realized that if he had only a single week, and that mortgaged to official duties, it was most unlikely that he would want to disturb the existing arrangements. On that basis his presence would be pure gain.
About half-past nine when twilight was falling, we were sitting alone on the roof-garden looking over the parapet. On the lawn a fat cat was stalking birds. It did not adopt the usual feline method of getting down on the belly and relying on stealth to conceal hostility. This cat strolled towards the prey with an air of disengaged benevolence; when it was near enough, without any tensing or winding-up, it would give a curious stiff-legged bound straight at the victim. In this way it soon killed an unwary sparrow.
Varvara had been watching. Was it some symbolic association of ideas which suddenly caused her to say: ‘I suppose my uncle was here this afternoon?’
‘Yes, I saw him. I’ve something to tell you about that.’
‘He has tried to suborn you against me?’
‘More or less. . . . The point is, I’m afraid you were right, and he has some scheme for preventing you getting any of the family cash. It was damned clever of you to size the situation up so quick. Has your grandmother ever talked to you about her intentions?’
‘Intentions?’
‘What she means to do in her will.’
‘My grandmother,’ said Varvara, ‘would think that vulgar.’ It was true, of course. Only members of the lower middle classes went around dropping hints about legacies given and revoked in a pathetic desire to obtain respect for their latter years.
‘It’s rather a tricky position,’ I said, wondering without relish how I was going to explain the part about bastardy.
‘I am an heir,’ said Varvara in a stubborn tone. ‘Therefore my uncle tries to undo me.’
No doubt in Doljuk there was a simple standardized procedure for undoing heirs; say, with an axe or a horse-pistol.
I was not sure how far she would understand that in the West there were other techniques of spoliation.
‘Heir isn’t a word which means as much as it used to in English Law,’ I said tentatively. ‘Property in general isn’t bound in a line of descent. It’s disposed of at the will of its owner. And anybody who can control or influence that will . . .’
I need not have bothered about her comprehension. Once a few questions had cleared her mind of the patriarchal conception of society, she caught on surprisingly quickly to such complicated conceptions as settlements and Powers of Appointment. She may have thought them sissified, but she saw that in England they governed the physical possession of wealth, just as surely as did the sword elsewhere.
Presently, as was inevitable, we came to the crux of the matter, the contention on which Cedric relied to exclude her from Mr. Ellison’s will. I was relieved that she took the point so calmly.
‘Sometimes with men my mother was not married,’ she said. ‘Christ, how she repented! But with my father—yes.’
‘You could prove it?’
‘I know it in my heart.’
‘I suppose,’ I said hesitantly, ‘that facilities existed in Doljuk—for getting married, I mean?’
‘There was Harold,’ she replied after a pause.
‘Was he the English Chaplain?’ I asked, as if Doljuk had been Montreux or Rapallo.
‘Harold was an American missionary of the Church of the Unleavened Baptists. For ten years he went up and down the Gobi, preaching. But he preached always in the Chinese which he had learnt at the Missionary College.’
‘Ah,’ I said, pleased to be able to show my memory. ‘I suppose that annoyed the other chaps you were telling me about—the Turkis?’
But Varvara shook her head. ‘Nobody knew what language he was speaking.’
‘Didn’t he get discouraged?’
‘He had great faith. Besides it was once fortunate. Some of the Tungans came to kill him because they thought he was a spy for the government. Harold remained on his knees in prayer and saying, as he thought, “Peace be unto yo
u”. But the thing he said was, “Enjoyable fish”, over and over again. The men consulted and decided that it was an oracle. So they went away.’
I would gladly have let her continue her reminiscences of Harold who seemed to have been an evangelist well suited to his field. But a sense of practical urgency dragged me back to our original topic.
‘You do grasp what your uncle is up to? If he succeeds in convincing Mrs. Ellison that she must leave you out of her exercise of this Power and then she dies . . . well, you won’t have any remedy.’
‘Then what must I do?’
It was the first time that she had appealed to me directly for any aid or advice, and it was a gratifying sensation. After all, what did the latest fashions count against an inheritance which might run into myriads of pounds?
I produced the answer which I had been meditating during dinner.
‘We can’t tell where we stand without seeing your grandfather’s will.’
‘If my grandmother has it I will make her show it to me.’
She had never shocked me before. But now, catching the steely note in her voice, I was forced to see that hereditary characteristics are seldom entirely absent in any member of a family.
‘There is no need for that,’ I said rather coldly. ‘In England all wills are public. There’s a registry at Somerset House where we can look it up.’
Varvara was silent for several seconds, then she began to mutter too low for me to catch the words or even distinguish the language. At length she stopped, and seeing the look of inquiry on my face, she explained: ‘I was praying to God to damn the soul of my uncle . . . for the sake of my dear mother!’
In the failing light the tears glistened on her cheeks. I could understand how the sense of her own isolation must from time to time sweep over her, smothering the joy of battle, and how the very meanness of the tactics being used against her would produce fits of enervated disgust.
When she recovered, I said: ‘If it comes to some sort of legal showdown, you may be asked a lot of questions about your mother and father, so you might start putting your memories in order.’
The very unprofessional thought behind this suggestion was that she had better weed out anything which did not support her legitimacy: after all, we were dealing with a completely unscrupulous opponent. But Varvara understood my remark differently, as an invitation to rehearse what she knew of her parents’ story.
First she ran up to her room and brought down an old photograph set in a box of hard wood. It showed a woman with black hair reclining at full length on a couch. Against the dark wood and the yellowed musty background, her face stood out clear in its mixture of energy and sloth, its sensuality tinged with asceticism, and its melodramatic expression which seemed to be half-mocking itself. She looked a silly, intelligent woman. Her prettiness was the only quality which she had without contradiction. She was not as strictly handsome as Varvara, but I think that most men would have preferred her owing to the softer quality of her looks and her more manageable size.
‘She was a holy saint of God,’ said Varvara, kissing the photograph; and went on to prove in detail that it needed either another saint or a strong partisan to hold so charitable a view.
I have forgotten the maiden name of Serafina Filipovna; also the one which she took from her first (and perhaps her only) husband. She was the daughter of a government official who seems to have been rather like Dostoievski’s Marmeladoff, drunken, verbose, tearful, and shameless.
When she was sixteen and a half she raised the family fortunes by marrying the proprietor of a successful restaurant in St. Petersburg. He was an upright man but cold and excessively absorbed in his business. He could cope with Serafina Filipovna when she was virtually a child, but by the time she had matured she was too much for him.
‘It was like throwing shrimps to a seal,’ said Varvara with her usual frankness, quoting, I think, from the person who should have known best.
The customers, who included some of the best society in Tsarist Russia, soon began to notice her. Though she did not work about the restaurant, she was expected to make the gracious appearances of a patronne. She had an ascending scale of lovers, ending with a millionaire and two princes. Nevertheless she cannot have been a mercenary woman. When she ran away it was with a simple army colonel and not even one who carried much military glamour. Igor Igorovitch Prespykin was the head of a branch of the Military Survey. Although he was married, the elopement did not finish his career; it merely caused him to be sent to Vyernyi near the borders of Siberia and Sinkiang. There in the heart of Asia he and his mistress led a life of comfortable idleness unbroken by any serious surveying . . . until the Russian War Department decided to lend his services so that the Khan of Doljuk might have a map of his domains.
At that time Russia was showing one of those fits of interest in Sinkiang which recurred whenever she herself was free from embarrassment and the Chinese hold on the province appeared to be more than usually weak. Colonel Prespykin no doubt had orders which went far beyond map-making. But he never carried them out, for when he had been in Doljuk about a fortnight he caught one of the mysterious fevers which infested the place, and he died.
Serafina Filipovna had accompanied him on his mission. She even carried faithfulness so far as to catch the same disease. She did not die, but she was very ill. For three weeks she lay semi-conscious. When she recovered she found that Prespykin’s second-in-command, a dour Puritan who loathed her, had marched off with the rest of the survey party. It was a truly awful situation to be penniless, homeless, speechless in a city where infidel women were on the same level as stray dogs. She did the only possible thing in seeking out the single other European who was at that time in the city. This happened to be Fulk Ellison.
That strange union, whether sanctified or not, was a roaring success. Roaring is the word. Neither was a person backward in expressing his or her feelings. The high windowless room, lit by mutton fat burning in a silver bowl, would echo simultaneously with Fulk’s curses and Serafina’s analyses of her own spiritual condition—two occupations to which they were respectively much given. As soon as she was old enough, the little Varvara would make her voice heard. Nobody specifically listened to anyone else, but out of the tumult and the confusion and the violence were forged bonds whose strength put to shame many relationships between husband and wife, parent and child that had grown up in an easier climate.
The one thing about which Serafina and Fulk seriously disagreed was religion. The latter was an aggressive atheist; whereas she cherished an excitable, slightly erotic devotion to the two First Persons of the Trinity. At a later stage I shall have more to say about her daughter’s inheritance in this respect. There was a time when I thought that Varvara’s religion was a pure emotional luxury. This view did not prove altogether tenable, but I am still sufficient of an unspiritual pragmatist to distrust a faith which seldom has the slightest effect on conduct. Indeed, it would have needed very little to persuade her to adopt that distinctively Russian heresy which taught that the more the sins, the merrier, on account of the increased opportunities for repentance.
Presently, alas, it was evident that the story must bring us again to that horrible death by the venom of spiders. In her overstrung state, it would do Varvara no good to dwell on her mother’s end. I therefore interrupted her at the first opportunity.
‘I’m going to bed.’
We climbed the stairs together.
Outside her room I was seized by a curious mixture of desires: to have pleasure, to assert myself, not to miss my opportunities.
I put my arms suddenly round her and kissed her on the lips. At first her mouth was hard, but rather, I felt, from inexperience than insensitivity. Probably she had never before received a passionate kiss. At least she did not seem to resent it.
‘You don’t mind?’ I murmured—the standard cry of the undergraduate.
‘My father said that I should stay chaste until it seemed worse than death.’
It was some while before we parted; when we did so it was once more at her abrupt dictation. She simply pushed me aside without warning and ran into her room, shutting the door.
From that close encounter I took away two impressions, one pleasant, the other less so, but both mildly embarrassing. First, though she used no scent, Varvara smelt nicer than any woman I had known; second, she was probably physically stronger than I.
5
‘Straight!’ said Turpin. ‘As true as I’m here! Back into the bottle it went, every drop.’
He was telling me an anecdote about old Mr. Ellison, the money-spinner. In his later years he had some sort of minor eye trouble for which the doctor prescribed a lotion. Three times a day he bathed his eyes. Other people who earned hundreds where he earned scores of thousands would unhesitatingly have thrown away the contents of the used eye-bath. Mr. Ellison did not see why the same liquid, costing all of half-a-crown a bottle, should not serve him over and over again. So he poured it back into the bottle. The pleasing end to this story was that the stuff finally became polluted and set up inflammation, which made necessary a long and expensive course of treatment.
Cedric had inherited the same fantastic meanness.
‘I reckon his poor bloody wife stopped the worst of it,’ said Turpin. ‘Once when they was staying here she said to me: “I’d stay in Hell to get away from those ’ouse’old accounts!” . . . I don’t reckon they ’ad to carry ’er kicking and screaming to ’er eternal rest!’
‘I didn’t know Cedric was a widower.’