Добавил:
ivanov666
Опубликованный материал нарушает ваши авторские права? Сообщите нам.
Вуз:
Предмет:
Файл:The Lost Girl
.pdf
THE LOST GIRL
“How, love?” he said, making a little grimace. “We like
her – we love her – as if she were a mother. You say love – ”
He raised his shoulders slightly, with a shrug. And all the time
he looked down at Alvina from under his dusky eye-lashes,
as if watching her sideways, and his mouth had the peculiar,
stupid, self-conscious, half-jeering smile. Alvina was a little bit
annoyed. But she felt that a great instinctive good-naturedness
came out of him, he was self-conscious and constrained, knowing she did not follow his language of gesture. For him, it was
not yet quite natural to express himself in speech. Gesture and
grimace were instantaneous, and spoke worlds of things, if you
would but accept them.
But certainly he was stupid, in her sense of the word. She
could hear Mr. May’s verdict of him: “Like a child, you know,
just as charming and just as tiresome and just as stupid.”
“Where is your home?” she asked him.
“In Italy.” She felt a fool.
“Which part?” she insisted.
“Naples,” he said, looking down at her sideways, searchingly. “It must be lovely,” she said.
“Ha —!” He threw his head on one side and spread out
his hands, as if to say – ”What do you want, if you don’t fi nd
Naples lovely.”
“I should like to see it. But I shouldn’t like to die,” she said.
“What?”
“They say ‘See Naples and die,’” she laughed.
He opened his mouth, and understood. Then he smiled at
her directly.
211
DAVID HERBERT LAWRENCE
“You know what that means?” he said cutely. “It means
see Naples and die afterwards. Don’t die before you’ve seen it.”
He smiled with a knowing smile.
“I see! I see!” she cried. “I never thought of that.”
He was pleased with her surprise and amusement.
“Ah Naples!” he said. “She is lovely – ” He spread his hand
across the air in front of him – ”The sea – and Posilippo –
and Sorrento – and Capri – Ah-h! You’ve never been out of
England?”
“No,” she said. “I should love to go.”
He looked down into her eyes. It was his instinct to say at
once he would take her.
“You’ve seen nothing – nothing,” he said to her.
“But if Naples is so lovely, how could you leave it?” she
asked. “What?”
She repeated her question. For answer, he looked at her,
held out his hand, and rubbing the ball of his thumb across
the tips of his fi ngers, said, with a fi ne, handsome smile:
“Pennies! Money! You can’t earn money in Naples. Ah, Naples is beautiful, but she is poor. You live in the sun, and you
earn fourteen, fi fteen pence a day – ”
“Not enough,” she said.
He put his head on one side and tilted his brows, as if to
say “What are you to do?” And the smile on his mouth was sad,
fi ne, and charming. There was an indefi nable air of sadness or
wistfulness about him, something so robust and fragile at the
same time, that she was drawn in a strange way.
“But you’ll go back?” she said.
“Where?”
212
THE LOST GIRL
“To Italy. To Naples.”
“Yes, I shall go back to Italy,” he said, as if unwilling to
commit himself. “But perhaps I shan’t go back to Naples.”
“Never?”
“Ah, never! I don’t say never. I shall go to Naples, to see my
mother’s sister. But I shan’t go to live – ”
“Have you a mother and father?”
“I? No! I have a brother and two sisters – in America. Parents, none. They are dead.”
“And you wander about the world – ” she said.
He looked at her, and made a slight, sad gesture, indifferent also. “But you have Madame for a mother,” she said.
He made another gesture this time: pressed down the corners of his mouth as if he didn’t like it. Then he turned with
the slow, fi ne smile.
“Does a man want two mothers? Eh?” he said, as if he posed
a conundrum.
“I shouldn’t think so,” laughed Alvina.
He glanced at her to see what she meant, what she understood. “My mother is dead, see!” he said. “Frenchwomen –
Frenchwomen they have their babies till they are a hundred –”
“What do you mean?” said Alvina, laughing.
“A Frenchman is a little man when he’s seven years old –
and if his mother comes, he is a little baby boy when he’s seventy. Do you know that?”
“I didn’t know it,” said Alvina.
“But now – you do,” he said, lurching round a corner
with her.
213
DAVID HERBERT LAWRENCE
They had come to the stables. Three of the horses were
there, including the thoroughbred Ciccio was going to ride.
He stood and examined the beasts critically. Then he spoke to
them with strange sounds, patted them, stroked them down,
felt them, slid his hand down them, over them, under them,
and felt their legs.
Then, he looked up from stooping there under the horses,
with a long, slow look of his yellow eyes, at Alvina. She felt unconsciously fl attered. His long, yellow look lingered, holding
her eyes. She wondered what he was thinking. Yet he never
spoke. He turned again to the horses. They seemed to understand him, to prick up alert.
“This is mine,” he said, with his hand on the neck of the old
thoroughbred. It was a bay with a white blaze.
“I think he’s nice,” she said. “He seems so sensitive.”
“In England,” he answered suddenly, “horses live a long
time, because they don’t live – never alive – see? In England
railway-engines are alive, and horses go on wheels.” He smiled
into her eyes as if she understood. She was a trifl e nervous as
he smiled at her from out of the stable, so yellow-eyed and
half-mysterious, derisive. Her impulse was to turn and go away
from the stable. But a deeper impulse made her smile into his
face, as she said to him:
“They like you to touch them.”
“Who?” His eyes kept hers. Curious how dark they seemed,
with only a yellow ring of pupil. He was looking right into her,
beyond her usual self, impersonal.
“The horses,” she said. She was afraid of his long, cat-like
look. Yet she felt convinced of his ultimate good-nature.
214
THE LOST GIRL
He seemed to her to be the only passionately good-natured
man she had ever seen. She watched him vaguely, with strange
vague trust, implicit belief in him. In him – in what?
That afternoon the colliers trooping home in the winter
afternoon were rejoiced with a spectacle: Kishwégin, in her
deerskin, fringed gaiters and fringed frock of deerskin, her
long hair down her back, and with marvellous cloths and
trappings on her steed, riding astride on a tall white horse,
followed by Max in chieftain’s robes and chieftain’s long headdress of dyed feathers, then by the others in war-paint and
feathers and brilliant Navajo blankets. They carried bows and
spears. Ciccio was without his blanket, naked to the waist, in
war-paint, and brandishing a long spear. He dashed up from
the rear, saluted the chieftain with his arm and his spear on
high as he swept past, suddenly drew up his rearing steed, and
trotted slowly back again, making his horse perform its paces.
He was extraordinarily velvety and alive on horseback.
Crowds of excited, shouting children ran chattering along
the pavements. The colliers, as they tramped grey and heavy,
in an intermittent stream uphill from the low grey west, stood
on the pavement in wonder as the cavalcade approached and
passed, jingling the silver bells of its trappings, vibrating the
wonderful colours of the barred blankets and saddle cloths,
the scarlet wool of the accoutrements, the bright tips of feathers. Women shrieked as Ciccio, in his war-paint, wheeled near
the pavement. Children screamed and ran. The colliers shouted. Ciccio smiled in his terrifying war-paint, brandished his
spear and trotted softly, like a fl ower on its stem, round to the
procession.
215
DAVID HERBERT LAWRENCE
Miss Pinnegar and Alvina and James Houghton had come
round into Knarborough Road to watch. It was a great moment. Looking along the road they saw all the shop-keepers at
their doors, the pavements eager. And then, in the distance, the
white horse jingling its trappings of scarlet hair and bells, with
the dusky Kishwégin sitting on the saddle-blanket of brilliant,
lurid stripes, sitting impassive and all dusky above that intermittent fl ashing of colour: then the chieftain, dark-faced, erect,
easy, swathed in a white blanket, with scarlet and black stripes,
and all his strange crest of white, tip-dyed feathers swaying
down his back: as he came nearer one saw the wolfskin and
the brilliant moccasins against the black sides of his horse:
Louis and Geoffrey followed, lurid, horrid in the face, wearing
blankets with stroke after stroke of blazing colour upon their
duskiness, and sitting stern, holding their spears: lastly, Ciccio, on his bay horse with a green seat, fl ickering hither and
thither in the rear, his feathers swaying, his horse sweating,
his face ghastlily smiling in its war-paint. So they advanced
down the grey pallor of Knarborough Road, in the late wintry
afternoon. Somewhere the sun was setting, and far overhead
was a fl ush of orange.
“Well I never!” murmured Miss Pinnegar. “Well I never!”
The strange savageness of the striped Navajo blankets
seemed to her unsettling, advancing down Knarborough Road:
she examined Kishwégin curiously.
“Can you believe that that’s Mr. May – he’s exactly like
a girl. Well, well – it makes you wonder what is and what isn’t.
But aren’t they good? What? Most striking. Exactly like Indians. You can’t believe your eyes. My word what a terrifying
216
THE LOST GIRL
race they – ” Here she uttered a scream and ran back clutching the wall as Ciccio swept past, brushing her with his horse’s
tail, and actually swinging his spear so as to touch Alvina and
James Houghton lightly with the butt of it. James too started
with a cry, the mob at the corner screamed. But Alvina caught
the slow, mischievous smile as the painted horror showed his
teeth in passing; she was able to fl ash back an excited laugh.
She felt his yellow-tawny eyes linger on her, in that one second, as if negligently.
“I call that too much!” Miss Pinnegar was crying, thoroughly
upset. “Now that was unnecessary! Why it was enough to scare
one to death. Besides, it’s dangerous. It ought to be put a stop
to. I don’t believe in letting these show-people have liberties.”
The cavalcade was slowly passing, with its uneasy horses
and its fl are of striped colour and its silent riders. Ciccio was
trotting softly back, on his green saddle-cloth, suave as velvet,
his dusky, naked torso beautiful.
“Eh, you’d think he’d get his death,” the women in the
crowd were saying.
“A proper savage one, that. Makes your blood run cold – ”
“Ay, an’ a man for all that, take’s painted face for what’s
worth. A tidy man, I say.”
He did not look at Alvina. The faint, mischievous smile uncovered his teeth. He fell in suddenly behind Geoffrey, with
a jerk of his steed, calling out to Geoffrey in Italian.
It was becoming cold. The cavalcade fell into a trot, Mr. May
shaking rather badly. Ciccio halted, rested his lance against
a lamp-post, switched his green blanket from beneath him,
fl ung it round him as he sat, and darted off. They had all disap-
217
DAVID HERBERT LAWRENCE
peared over the brow of Lumley Hill, descending. He was gone
too. In the wintry twilight the crowd began, lingeringly, to turn
away. And in some strange way, it manifested its disapproval of
the spectacle: as grown-up men and women, they were a little
bit insulted by such a show. It was an anachronism. They wanted a direct appeal to the mind. Miss Pinnegar expressed it.
“Well,” she said, when she was safely back in Manchester
House, with the gas lighted, and as she was pouring the boiling water into the tea-pot, “You may say what you like. It’s interesting in a way, just to show what savage Red-Indians were
like. But it’s childish. It’s only childishness. I can’t understand,
myself, how people can go on liking shows. Nothing happens.
It’s not like the cinema, where you see it all and take it all in
at once; you know everything at a glance. You don’t know anything by looking at these people. You know they’re only men
dressed up, for money. I can’t see why you should encourage
it. I don’t hold with idle show-people, parading round, I don’t,
myself. I like to go to the cinema once a week. It’s instruction,
you take it all in at a glance, all you need to know, and it lasts
you for a week. You can get to know everything about people’s
actual lives from the cinema. I don’t see why you want people
dressing up and showing off.”
They sat down to their tea and toast and marmalade, during this harangue. Miss Pinnegar was always like a douche of
cold water to Alvina, bringing her back to consciousness after
a delicious excitement. In a minute Madame and Ciccio and all
seemed to become unreal – the actual unrealities: while the
ragged dithering pictures of the fi lm were actual, real as the
day. And Alvina was always put out when this happened. She
218
THE LOST GIRL
really hated Miss Pinnegar. Yet she had nothing to answer.
They were unreal, Madame and Ciccio and the rest. Ciccio
was just a fantasy blown in on the wind, to blow away again.
The real, permanent thing was Woodhouse, the semper idem
Knarborough Road, and the unchangeable grubby gloom of
Manchester House, with the stuffy, padding Miss Pinnegar,
and her father, whose fi ngers, whose very soul seemed dirty
with pennies. These were the solid, permanent fact. These
were life itself. And Ciccio, splashing up on his bay horse and
green cloth, he was a mountebank and an extraneous nonentity, a coloured old rag blown down the Knarborough Road
into Limbo. Into Limbo. Whilst Miss Pinnegar and her father
sat frowstily on for ever, eating their toast and cutting off the
crust, and sipping their third cup of tea. They would never
blow away – never, never. Woodhouse was there to eternity.
And the Natcha-Kee-Tawara Troupe was blowing like a rag
of old paper into Limbo. Nothingness! Poor Madame! Poor
gallant histrionic Madame! The frowsy Miss Pinnegar could
crumple her up and throw her down the utilitarian drain, and
have done with her. Whilst Miss Pinnegar lived on for ever.
This put Alvina into a sharp temper.
“Miss Pinnegar,” she said. “I do think you go on in the most
unattractive way sometimes. You’re a regular spoil-sport.”
“Well,” said Miss Pinnegar tartly. “I don’t approve of your
way of sport, I’m afraid.”
“You can’t disapprove of it as much as I hate your spoilsport existence,” said Alvina in a fl are.
“Alvina, are you mad!” said her father.
“Wonder I’m not,” said Alvina, “considering what my life is.”
CHAPTER VIII
CICCIO
Madame did not pick up her spirits, after her cold. For two
days she lay in bed, attended by Mrs. Rollings and Alvina and
the young men. But she was most careful never to give any
room for scandal. The young men might not approach her save
in the presence of some third party. And then it was strictly
a visit of ceremony or business.
“Oh, your Woodhouse, how glad I shall be when I have left
it,” she said to Alvina. “I feel it is unlucky for me.”
“Do you?” said Alvina. “But if you’d had this bad cold in
some places, you might have been much worse, don’t you
think.”
“Oh my dear!” cried Madame. “Do you think I could confuse you in my dislike of this Woodhouse? Oh no! You are not
Woodhouse. On the contrary, I think it is unkind for you also,
this place. You look – also – what shall I say – thin, not very
happy.”
It was a note of interrogation.
“I’m sure I dislike Woodhouse much more than you can,”
replied Alvina.
“I am sure. Yes! I am sure. I see it. Why don’t you go away?
Why don’t you marry?”
220
Соседние файлы в предмете [НЕСОРТИРОВАННОЕ]