The Constant Nymph

by Margaret Kennedy

  12

  Jacob and Antonia did not consider that Uncle Robert made a very good third upon their wedding trip. His inconvenient sense of decency threw a guilty gloom over the whole affair. He insisted that Jacob should put up at a different hotel, and he could not stomach the idea of any combined pleasure parties.

  A growing partiality for his niece did nothing to mend matters. He had always been kind to her, and the pretty creature had taken it into her head to behave so charmingly to him that she was fairly irresistible. At the moment she was all for copying her cousin Florence, so that her manners in public did not shame him as much as he had feared. Her dress was neat and quiet, she drank little, laughed with circumspection, and took real pains not to talk with her mouth full. Robert was no longer tortured by the idea that she might be taken for his daughter; at the end of the fortnight he might almost have liked it. She had a way of crossing the crowded lounge of their hotel which might have deceived an expert, it was so quietly and competently British.

  Nothing occurred, however, to make him grow fonder of Jacob. On the contrary, since it was impossible for a man of Robert’s mind to be lenient towards the pair of them, every passing grace exhibited by Antonia threw a blacker shade of villainy upon her lover. Social intercourse between the three was in consequence very uneasy. Robert held himself ready to escort his niece upon shopping expeditions, and even showed an inclination to visit the opera, but he did not ask Jacob to come with them. Yet, as the pair were officially betrothed, it was but reasonable that they should occasionally be allowed to meet. Antonia was, therefore, permitted to entertain her cavalier at tea in the afternoons, while her uncle went for a walk by himself – a compromise which interpreted Robert’s notion of reasonable chaperonage.

  ‘But it’s stupid!’ said Antonia the day before the wedding. ‘Why can’t we all go about together and enjoy ourselves? We could have such fun.’

  ‘He cannot endure the company of a wicked man like me,’ said Jacob gloomily, searching his pockets for the brooch that he had bought for her that morning.

  He had nothing to do in the mornings except buy gewgaws for his love and every day he offered her something to console her for the tediousness of this interval.

  ‘He’s no business to then,’ said Antonia, bridling at any criticism of her property. ‘He hardly knows you!’

  Jacob laughed and produced the brooch, which he pinned into her dress with a display of sentiment which would have been very distasteful to Uncle Robert. Everybody else in the hotel lounge knew at once that the pair were betrothed, and that the young Jew had brought a gift for his bride, but Tony was not so English that she minded this.

  ‘I do think,’ she said, ‘that he might let you come when we go buying clothes. You will have to look at them, when I wear them, so I think you ought to choose them.’

  ‘And I am paying for them,’ he reminded her.

  She did not object to his paying for them now they were to be married. Nor did she wince at his frequent references to the fact. She just took it as one of the sort of things that Jacob was liable to say, the sort of thing that so palpably upset Uncle Robert.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But he doesn’t know that.’

  ‘That is very simple of him,’ observed Jacob. ‘Who should pay for them? He knows you have not a krone of your own.’

  ‘Florence gave me some from her father. And he has no idea of the value of things. I told him I had enough to buy all the things on the list she gave me, and he swallowed it.’

  ‘Your cousin has made you a list?’ asked Jacob eagerly. ‘That is good! She has style. Until you have more experience you cannot do better than to copy her. Later, I think, you should not dress quite so quietly. I shall take you to Paris in the Autumn and have you dressed in the way I should wish. Have you the list there? Let me see it!’

  ‘I began it,’ said Tony, ‘and then she looked it over.’

  She gave him the list, which began in her own childish scrawl and was finished in the neat, scholarly script of Miss Churchill. He chuckled when he saw that his bride had intended to buy ‘six or seven hats, one gold evening dress with a train, and shoes with red heels,’ but had overlooked the need for any underclothing. Florence had modified various items and added a detailed catalogue of lingerie.

  ‘Is two dozen chemises enough?’ he asked, planting a fat forefinger on the list. ‘When my sister married I remember hearing them speak of twelve dozen. You must have what is correct.’

  ‘She says it’s enough for an English girl.’

  ‘She should know,’ he agreed.

  And he continued to scrutinise the list, making very frank comments, until Uncle Robert wandered unhappily into the lounge, a grizzled, meagre presence, exhaling that mixture of superiority and suspicion which mantles some Englishmen abroad. Antonia, prompted by some sprouting social instinct, no sooner caught sight of him than she snatched the list away from Jacob with a hasty warning in a slang which Robert could not possibly understand. But their chaperon was too much disturbed to be aware of any byplay. He even forgot to be cold and stern to Jacob. He had found awaiting him, on his return from his walk, a letter from Florence which had upset him so much that he felt compelled to go and tell somebody about it, even though it should be Birnbaum. He lowered himself solemnly on to a sofa beside his niece and exploded his bomb.

  ‘Here’s a pretty state of things! Florence writes that she’s thinking of marrying this fellow Dodd.’

  ‘Florence!’ cried Antonia.

  ‘Dodd!’ cried Jacob.

  If Robert wanted to startle them, he succeeded. They both turned perfectly pale with astonishment and dismay, and sat looking at each other while he rambled on:

  ‘I can’t think what her father will say. If he’s got any sense, he’ll forbid it! He’ll forbid it! But I suppose he’ll blame me. How could I have prevented it? How could I have foreseen it? Who could have thought that Florence, FLORENCE, a sensible woman like Florence, not quite a young girl either, would dream of doing such a thing. A delicate-minded, well-bred girl, to take up with a wretched mountebank, a disagreeable, ill-conditioned young cub, with the manners of … of … well, he hasn’t got any manners. And goodness knows if he ever washes.’

  ‘Oh, but he does!’ interrupted Antonia, recovering speech. ‘I’m sure he does, Uncle Robert. I’ve seen him …’

  ‘Well, he doesn’t look as if he does. A shoddy Bohemian! One of these bad-blooded young ruffians who defy decency and call it art. No better than a hooligan! Oh, yes, I daresay he has done some very fine work, but that’s no reason why she should want to marry him. Good heavens! Isn’t it enough to have had one of them in the family? Couldn’t she have been warned? I should have thought the look of him would be sufficient; a sulky, impudent-looking fellow, who’s probably sprung from the gutter, without a single ….’

  ‘You are mistaken, Mr Churchill,’ put in Jacob. ‘I think that his family is very good. His father is Sir Felix Dodd. You have heard of him … yes?’

  ‘Dodd! Dodd! Good God!’ spluttered Uncle Robert.

  Jacob hastily produced all the details in his possession which could cast any light upon Lewis’s early career. Uncle Robert continued to call, at intervals, upon Dodd and God.

  ‘But what on earth can they think they are doing?’ asked Antonia. ‘They must be mad. Florence is so clever. And Lewis isn’t, a bit. And she’s very good too …’

  ‘But,’ broke in her uncle, ‘but, to my mind, this about his family makes it worse. Much worse, There must have been some very grave scandal before an English family would cut off …’

  ‘I do not believe there was a scandal,’ said Jacob, ‘and I think that he cut them off. I have never heard that it was their wish. He ran away because he did not like his father. He has lived a wandering life, but I think there has been no disgrace. I know he played the cornet once, with a circus … but …’

  ‘Completely déclassé,’ groaned Uncle Robert ‘No! I think his possessing a family makes
it worse. I remember now, I did hear that old Dodd had a scamp of a son who had run away from school. A tramp! A circus band! You tell me that he had the education and opportunities of a gentleman, and threw them away to play the cornet in a circus band? Then there’s nothing to be said for him, as far as I can see. I shall go out and telegraph. I shall wire to Florence that I don’t approve at all. I shall entreat her father to come out and stop it.’

  Tea hardly pacified him. He swallowed a little and then bustled off to despatch his telegrams. Jacob and Antonia mournfully discussed the event.

  ‘She can’t know what he is really like,’ said Antonia.

  ‘It is madness,’ agreed Jacob. ‘He has cut himself off from her world because he will not endure it. Will he now return to it? Or does he think that she will share his life?’

  Antonia conjectured that Florence did not know very much about his life. She remembered a conversation in which his name had been mentioned and said:

  ‘I think she rather admires his character.’

  ‘Admires!’

  ‘Yes. She said he was … what was it? An ascetic! What does that mean?’

  ‘It means a man who will practice a life of austerity for the cause of some great ideal,’ he told her.

  ‘O—o—oh! But …’

  ‘You would say that this does not describe Lewis?’

  ‘I never knew him go without anything he wanted.’

  ‘Nor I. It is true that he does not want very much. Perhaps she admires him for that. A wild savage would want even less than he does, yet she would not marry a wild savage. In some ways Lewis is not so much to be admired as a savage.’

  The wedding came off next morning at an early hour. Uncle Robert departed immediately afterwards, for he was in a hurry to catch a train back to Innsbruck and put an end to all this nonsense of Florence and that fellow Dodd. The wedded pair saw him go without much regret for, unceasingly distracted by the indiscretions of his nieces, he had assumed a most aggrieved air. Throughout the ceremony he stood over Jacob like a gaoler, as though he suspected him of refusing, at the last moment, to make an honest woman of Antonia. When it was over he kissed the bride with a sort of grudging melancholy and wished her happy in tones which prophesied inevitable calamity. He shook hands with the groom, averting his eyes, and popped into his taxi.

  Antonia and Jacob returned at their leisure to the opulent hotel where they intended to begin their honeymoon. After the constraint of the past weeks they felt very much like children on a holiday.

  ‘Do you know,’ said Jacob, as he hooked up his wife’s dress that evening, ‘I think that I am a little grateful to your uncle. It is so interesting that I have not seen any of these lovely dresses before. No! Do not wriggle! That is quite correct, how I have done it. I shall not get you a maid just yet! We shall do very well without one, for a little, nicht wahr?’

  ‘I’d be frightened of a maid,’ she said quickly.

  But he said, with some firmness, that she must have one, to keep her clothes in order. She wore black lace, which was a little old for her; in her desire to look like Florence she did not consider that sixteen should not dress like twenty-eight. But the gown gave her height and dignity, and Jacob felt very proud indeed as he followed her into the restaurant, and saw how men at other tables turned to gape enviously at her slender, delicate beauty.

  It was, perhaps, from her mother that she inherited her capacity for looking aristocratic. He had never felt more strongly this sense of having married his superior. She sat opposite him, gravely and slowly eating her dinner and looking so stately that he did not dare to press her foot under the table. Yet this was the barefooted gypsy who had conquered his heart in Genoa; the swaggering, brazen little creature whose ragged clothes had so greatly discomposed him in the Munich streets. She was, in these days, rather silent, and often he would have liked to know what was in her mind. He could never guess. He sat and watched her now, a little miserable for all his possessive pride, as she sipped her wine, thoughtfully, and with downcast eyes. The long lashes on her cheek, the soft curve of her neck, her white fingers, drumming on the table, with his ring shining upon one of them, all were like tiny stabs. His love could show him these, but he had no clue to her prisoned thoughts. If he asked her, she would say lightly that she was thinking of nothing at all. Or she would expound to him a long train of amazing, childish reflections. Only one thing he knew: she did not think of him as persistently, or as unhappily, as he thought of her.

  After dinner they went to the opera, there being nothing else to do. He could have wished that it had not been ‘Otello’, which they had heard in Munich. Echoes of their first disastrous adventure continually haunted him. But Tony seemed to have forgotten all about it, and enjoyed herself with energy. That earlier evening had passed so completely from her mind that he could not help wondering if she had been too drunk to remember anything. He hoped so; it was better that she should forget. He must remember, bearing the burden of it for both of them, how he had sat beside her, savagely counting the slow minutes, while on the stage an appalling drama of conquering hate swung on to its dire climax. He became so gloomy that she asked him, at last, if he was worried about anything. He assured her, instantly, that he was the happiest man in the world.

  And he was. At times he was almost bewildered by his own bliss in being there, with Tony, so terribly dear, beside him; really his own for the rest of his life. It was not her fault if the insatiable sorrows of an unequal love tormented him, the hungry demand for more, for a fuller return, for a feeling which it was not in her nature to give. As she leaned forward, absorbed in the passions staged beneath her, he felt suddenly that their box contained just himself and a wraith, a ghost; as if the real Antonia, whom he loved, was an imagined woman living only in his sad fancy.

  She saw that he was troubled. She took his hand and held it, glancing at him sometimes with an exquisite, gentle compassion which mitigated that solitude of spirit which she could not share. In the last entr’acte she said:

  ‘What will Tessa and Lewis do, if he marries Florence?’

  ‘Tessa?’

  ‘Yes. She loves him.’

  ‘I never knew that.’

  ‘Didn’t you? Just think.’

  He thought and decided that she was quite right. In the light of his own trouble he was very sorry for Teresa, robbed thus of her friend by the lady from England. He said so.

  ‘Florence hasn’t taken him away,’ said Tony decidedly. ‘Nobody could do that.’

  ‘But Tony … this must be the end of it, for Lewis and Tessa. It will part them.’

  ‘Never, while they live. But Florence will be rather a complication. Listen!’

  The lights went down and the first bars of the Willow Song, a plaintive murmur of warning, stole out into the dark house. Antonia sank back into a dream. Jacob, still inattentive to the fate of Desdemona, reflected throughout the last act upon the encounter of this strange three … Lewis . . Tessa … and Florence, their wild history still before them, their tragedy still unplayed. It seemed to him possible that they might never meet. So many perils threatened this crazy marriage and any one of them might wreck it.

  He sighed deeply, being in the mood to be sorry for everybody. His sigh was echoed by Tony, since the tragic loading was over. The Moor, dying, had in his arms the fair woman he had destroyed – was taking his last, sad kisses. The curtain, slow and silent like an approaching fate, slid down over the love, the mad despair, and the whispered cry: ‘Un bacio … e un altro bacio!’ Violins swung through their final poignant arpeggios, and the lights went up. Jacob said:

  ‘I give it a year.’

  Antonia, pale, rapturous and blinking, had to be reminded; she was still contemplating a mock death bed.

  ‘Florence and Lewis?’ she said. ‘Do you think as long as that?’

  The night was fine and they walked home. She was still dreamy and excited, and at every crossing she shook his nerves by a total disregard of the traffic. The San
gers were like that, he remembered; they always did their best to get themselves run over after a concert. Himself, he never suffered in that way, even though, at the performance, he might have shed tears of delight.

  When they got to their hotel she went straight up to bed, but he paused to get a drink. There was, in the vestibule, a flower stall and he bought a handful of roses, stiffly wired into a bouquet, before proceeding to the oppressive gorgeousness of their bridal suite. The lift was lined with looking glass, so that as he shot upwards he got an endlessly reduplicated vision of himself, stout and nervous, a light cloak flung over his shoulder and white flowers in his hand: an infinitely long row of gentlemen carrying offerings to an unforgiving past.

  BOOK THREE

  THE SILVER STY

  13

  Charles annoyed Robert by talking as though the worst part of the business was the bond which Florence had forcibly established between himself and Fulsome Felix.

  ‘Now I shall never be able to get rid of that fellow and his confounded cordiality,’ he complained. ‘My son-in-law, by your account, is an unprepossessing rascal. But Florence, not I, will have to suffer for that. As is perfectly proper. I could have endured him very well if he had been the son of another father. As it is, my daughter’s marriage will be the cause, I can foresee, of great personal inconvenience to me.’

  Which Robert thought very flippant. Privately he regarded himself as the chief victim in the affair, for Florence and Lewis, having got themselves married with all possible speed, stayed behind in the Tyrol and left to him the appalling task of escorting the three children back to England.

  The whole family had urged Charles to go out in person and forbid the banns. But he, knowing his daughter, refused to give himself so much useless trouble. He sent a few remonstrative telegrams, so wise and so witty that she quite disliked having to tear them up. And, for a long time, he unobtrusively held himself in readiness to rush off and fetch her home at an hour’s notice, should she summon him. But no message came. During the first month of her married life she wrote every week to say how happy she was; then, for a time, her letters came almost daily and he interviewed the idea of going to her without waiting for any direct appeal. But in the Autumn she seemed to settle down. She wrote less often and more tranquilly. Lewis, it seemed, was at work again on that Concerto which Sanger’s death had interrupted. They had migrated to a little fishing village on the Mediterranean where he could be quite quiet and finish his work in peace. Later, they were to return to England, move into the house which Florence had bought, and launch themselves upon musical society in London.