Aliens. William McFee

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СКАЧАТЬ a most creditable piece of work. It was in her estimate of the English character that she was, I venture to think, less successful, more narrow in fact. You see, she was naturally confused by two facts. In the first place the similarity of the English and American languages seemed to her to warrant a certain similitude between the two nations; and secondly, her intimacy with the English people was practically confined to us three, who had been in America nearly seven years, and who, in consequence, had shrouded our more salient insularities beneath a cloak of cosmopolitan aplomb. Neither our speech nor our outlook upon life could be taken as typical of our great and noble-hearted nation. Yet she did take us in that sense, with the result that in her conception of the United Kingdom it was a rather fantastic and clumsily-fashioned small-scale model of the United States.

      We had first met her, not in New Jersey at all, but in New York. After the earthquake, which I have mentioned as lifting us and many others from more or less comfortable sockets in San Francisco and scattering us over the Union, we found it a matter of some difficulty to rise to our accustomed level in New York. It really seemed, what with the failure of inspiration and our lack of suitable introductions, that the mighty mill-stream of Manhattan would bear us away and fling us over the rocks to destruction before we could ever get our heads above the surface.

      Of those first days in East 118th Street none of us are disposed to speak. We might have gone back to England—surely so dire a calamity, so utter a personal ruin, justified a relinquishment of our purpose. But we had not gone anyway. We could not contemplate the solicitous sympathy of friends who disliked America, who had protested against our emigration in the first place. We did not dislike America, nor did we blame her for our misfortunes. Our friends, even the painter-cousin, could not understand that we did not dislike America. They were misled by our occasional and quite natural sighs for a sight of the quiet English landscape, and our joking remarks about the customs regulations. So we stayed and fought, with our backs to the not over-clean walls of 118th Street. It was slow progress from 118th to 18th Street and from there to a real flat in Lexington Avenue, where it so happened that Miss Fraenkel had, and still has, a married sister. Bill and the married sister became warm friends, discovering in each other a common dislike of pink, and it was she who introduced us formally; though in a casual way Miss Fraenkel and I met occasionally on the stairs. And so it came about that when we felt able to abandon Lexington Avenue, in favour of a purer air and water supply, Miss Fraenkel chanted the praises of her own Netley in the Garden State, and Bill, journeying thither to spy out the land, returned an hour late for dinner, and incoherent with horticultural details.

      It will be seen that though undoubtedly competent to criticize Ostrovsky or Mrs. Carville per se, Miss Fraenkel's opinion of the painter-cousin's discovery would be interesting only for its novelty and irrelevance. I did not express my conviction quite as frankly as this, since my friend, though in sympathy with his wife's matrimonial plans, could not forbear to indulge in a mild hazing at my expense. I contented myself with opening the piano and pushing him into the seat. It is our custom to have music after dinner.

      Only those who have written verse professionally can realize the extent to which music acts as a solvent upon apparently insoluble difficulties of rhyme and sentiment. It had become a habit with me to leave any such problem of prosody to one side and take it up again only when my friend opened his piano. Having completed an opera some time before, I had at this time no such trouble, and so, as he broke abruptly into that prodigious composition, the Overture to Tannhäuser, I gave myself up to an unfettered consideration of the mystery of life and the complexity of our multitudinous contacts with one another. It is not enough, I reflected, to say that we make and pass. We make and remake, we pass and, pausing on the brink of oblivion, return to spoil our first fine careless raptures. We make and pass; but the early dawn of our making is reddened by the sunset of another's decline. We are agitated by the originality of our ideas, unaware that they are born simultaneously in a thousand minds, and are woven into the texture of our time-spirit in a thousand-times-repeated design. Von Roon, in Chelsea, used to say that "a man's mind was like a chamber papered with used postage stamps. Examine them separately and they were of no value; they were merely cancelled symbols of forgotten messages. View them as a whole and they formed an interesting and confusing composition." Time, and our proximity to other cancelled symbols is no guarantee of interior understanding. The Great Decorator has arranged us without regard for our individual merits or past intrinsic values, we are but points of colour in his immense and arbitrary arrangement. I was following up this thought, when the brass Canterbury Pilgrim that serves us for a knocker was vigorously sounded, and I sprang to open the door to Miss Fraenkel.

      She stepped briskly into the room, looked round and smiled.

      "Three times," she declared as I assisted her to remove her jacket. "But I forgive you if you'll only play that won—derful thing again!"

      In person Miss Fraenkel was of middle size, admirably proportioned and situated in tone on the borderland between the blonde and the brunette. By which I mean that her hair was brown, her eye a warm hazel, and her skin of a satiny pallor that formed an effective background for a delightful flush that suffused her piquant features whenever her enthusiasm was roused. And her enthusiasm was continually being roused. To us cold Britons the abandon with which she, in common with her countrywomen, gave herself up to the enjoyment of a picture, a book, a landscape, or for that matter of a person, was a most fascinating spectacle. American women strongly resemble champagne. At a certain age they are incomparably stimulating, but intimacy with them involves a sort of "headiness" that demands discretion; a nervous energy emanates from them that tends to relax the critical faculty. There is, moreover, a tendency to turgescence in their speech that leads the unwary into a false estimate of their intellectual range.

      It was some time before the conversation could be guided round to the subject which we three at any rate had at heart. Explosive cries of delight over Mac's last etching, Bill's new waist and a Chinese print I had recently acquired, were a matter of course. In deference to an unuttered request we adjourned to the studio upstairs, for Miss Fraenkel had been from the first candidly attracted by the suggestion of bohemianism in our ménage. It was not her romantic view of an artist's life, however, that distinguished her from any other young and romantic lady, but her frankness and eloquence in acknowledging it. "It must be grand," she had told me in Lexington Avenue, "to be a grisette." We had admitted that it must, but had been unable to share her regret that she had not been a man "so that she could see everything." She was very charming as she was.

      Of course she knew of the painter-cousin and indeed, as soon as she could think of it, gave us the needed opening.

      "I saw a letter with an English postmark for you," she observed, examining the bottom of a piece of china that rested near her shoulder. "Did you get it?"

      "We want you to give us an opinion about it, Miss Fraenkel," said Bill, bringing out the letter and giving it to her. She accepted the packet in some uncertainty.

      "I!" she said, "give an opinion? I don't get it, I'm afraid."

      "Read it," said Bill.

      And she did. We sat round her, as she sat on the broad flat box that Mac called a "throne," in a semicircle, and studied the varying expressions that crossed her face as her eyes travelled down the pages. It occurred to me after I had retired to my room that night, that an English girl of twenty-one would not have weathered the concentrated gaze of three strangers with such serenity of features. An observant and invisible critic might have imagined us to have been awaiting the decision of a young and charming Sibyl, so intently did we gaze and so neglectful was she of our regard. This apparent coldness was explained to me by Bill as a characteristic of the American woman. "They like to be admired," she told me. "And so they don't mind if you do stare at them."

      Miss Fraenkel looked up with a smile of comprehension.

      "What a perfectly lovely letter!" she exclaimed.

      Bill СКАЧАТЬ