At the Gate of Samaria. William John Locke

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ is really very dreadful,” he said at last, looking at his daughter.

      “Something will have to be done soon,” replied the latter.

      “It is so horribly vulgar, Grace,” said the old man; “look at that boy's nose—and that drunken man—his face is a nightmare of evil. I really must begin to talk seriously to Clytie.”

      Mrs. Blather smiled somewhat pityingly. Since the earliest days of her long widowhood she had undertaken the charge of her father's house and the care of her two younger sisters, Janet and Clytie. Her familiarity, therefore, with the seamy side of Clytie's nature had been of long duration.

      “You might as well talk to that fender, papa,” she said. “Clytie has got it into her head that she is going to be an artist, and no amount of talking will get it out.”

      “It's all through her visiting those friends of hers, the Farquharsons. They are not nice people for her to know. I shall not let her go there again.”

      “If she goes on like this there is no knowing what will happen.”

      “Where did the child get these repulsive and ungirlish notions from?” the old man asked querulously.

      The conception of the picture was not that of a young girl, and though the execution was crude and untrained, there was a bold cruelty of touch that saved it from being amateurish. The canvas was divided into two panels. On the one was painted a tiny bully of a boy with his arm rounded across his throat, about to strike a weakly, poverty-stricken little girl. They were children of the poorest classes, the boy realistically, offensively dirty—the petit morveux in its absolute sense. Behind them was the open doorway of a red-brick, jerry-built cottage, showing a strip of torn and dirty matting along the passage that lost itself in the gloom beyond. On the other panel was the corner of a public house in a low slum, the window lights and a gas-lamp throwing a lurid glare upon wet pavement and the figures of a woman and a drunken man. The faces were those of the children in the first picture, and the eternal tragedy was repeating itself. The man's face was loathsome in its sodden ferocity; the woman, with a child in her arms, was reeling from the blow. The evident haste in which the panels had been painted, the glaring, unsoftened colouring, heightened as if by impressionist design the coarse realism of the effect. Above was written the legend, “La joie de vivre” and in the left-hand bottom corner, “Clytie Davenant pinxit.”

      “She has certainly grown much worse of late,” sighed Mrs. Blather, holding out her thin, short hand to shield her face from the fire.

      There was a pause of some moments. Mr. Davenant ceased nursing the picture and stood it on the floor.

      “Have you quite made up your mind, papa,” said Mrs. Blather at length, “not to let Clytie go to the Slade School in London?”

      “It is out of the question,” replied the old man.

      “I don't think so, papa. It would perhaps do her good. A year or so's hard work would take all these silly ideas out of her.”

      “I question it,” said Mr. Davenant. “They are not silly ideas. They are debased, degraded ideas.”

      “My dear papa, they are only fads. All young girls have them. Look how crazy Janet was to join the cookery classes. We let her join, and now she hates the sight of a pie-dish. With Clytie it is quite the same, only she wants to daub.”

      “Well, let her daub in a decent way at home,” replied the old man testily.

      Mrs. Blather shrugged her lean shoulders.

      “We have tried that and it hasn't succeeded, apparently,” she said drily. “You seldom come in her way; you don't know how unpleasant things are for Janet and myself. What do you think she had the impertinence to tell me this morning? She said that we were not real people. We were machines or abstractions based, I think she said, on a formula, or something of that sort. She was pining to live amongst living human beings. And then she is so rude to visitors. What do you think she said to the vicar, who came, at Janet's request, to talk to her about her shameful neglect of her religious duties? She said, if he was a pillar of the Church, she saw no reason why she should be a seat-cushion.”

      “Tut, tut,” said the old man angrily. He was vicar's churchwarden, and a power in the parish.

      “And then,” continued Mrs. Blather, “when I scolded her for her rudeness, she said that if she had been a man she would have sworn at him for his impertinence. Really people will soon be afraid of coming to the house.”

      “They will indeed,” said Mr. Davenant.

      Like a wise woman, Mrs. Blather did not press her point. She knew she had thoroughly alarmed her father and had shown him but one way out of the difficulty. His taking it, if left to himself, was only a question of time. She rang the bell for the servant to come and light Mr. Davenant's gas, and then she left him to his reflections.

      Mr. Davenant possessed some landed property, which he had occupied his life in mismanaging. Fortunately for him, his wife had brought him a small fortune which sufficed to keep up a position, modest when compared with that of the Davenants of former days, but still high enough to satisfy the social aspirations of his family. He had lived a colourless life, severe and respectable. Even his university days had passed in a dull uniformity, leaving no glamour behind them. He had walked honourably and blindly in the paths his parents had indicated, and, now that he was nearing the end of the journey, thanked God for having given him the grace not to err from them. He had married when still fairly young, and he had loved his wife in a gentlemanly, passionless way. She, poor thing, had filled up so small a space in life that she had faded out of it almost unnoticed—even by himself. He had no storms of joy or sorrow to look back upon. His thoughts, as he brooded over the fireside, generally wandered back to trifling incidents: ancient municipal interests, the mortgages on his estate, the boundary quarrels with the old earl, his neighbour.

      But lately he had been thinking anxiously over his daughter Clytie. She had suddenly developed out of a naughty, rebellious child into a problem. He assumed as a matter of course that he bore her the ordinary well-regulated parental affection, but in his heart of hearts he never really loved her. Until lately it had not occurred to him to think of her as anything but a child of his with a singularly unfortunate disposition which time would modify. But time, on the contrary, was accentuating it, and he realised at last that Clytie had a distinct individuality. His philosophy had left many things in heaven and earth undreamed of. He was mystified, puzzled. How could he and his delicate wife have brought this bright-haired, full-blooded, impulsive creature into existence? Her sisters were gentle, quiet women, possessing the virtues inculcated in his conception of life. Clytie seemed to possess none of them. The peasant woman in the legend could not have wondered more over her changeling. How could a daughter of his and a sister of Janet's scoff at sacred things, defy social rules, and have an imagination that ran riot in scenes of drunkenness and outcast life?

      Physiology might grant a solution to the old man's problem in the law of the alternation of heredity. His father's youngest brother had been a family black sheep, and being the only one of the generation who had led an eventful career, was naturally never mentioned by his relations, and the record of his life perished with him. But it is possible that the positive enthusiastic principle of Clytie's Puritan descent, reasserting itself once in every other generation, to the horror of the negative principle that otherwise ran through the race continuously, came out in her with all its strength and vigour. It brought her eager, panting up to the brink of our surging nineteenth century life, imperiously bidding her plunge in and take her part in the tumult.

СКАЧАТЬ