Название: At the Gate of Samaria
Автор: William John Locke
Издательство: Bookwire
Жанр: Языкознание
isbn: 4057664619655
isbn:
Clytie checked an impulse of impatience at the platitude, and answered with great gentleness of voice and manner:
“This is not my lot in life, dear. It is quite different. You and Janet can bear it, because your natures crave this tranquillity. Mine craves movement, excitement, strange faces. Oh, Gracie, it is no use talking—I must go away, or I shall begin to hate Durdleham as I used to do. There is nothing for me to do here. I am too bad for it, perhaps. I don't know. I can't explain it to you; you have never felt it.”
“My dear Clytie, that is all nonsense,” said Mrs. Blather, who prided herself, above all things, on being a woman of common sense. “As a matter of fact, you can't go to London, because you would have no one to live with, and you would only have your hundred a year to support you, as papa has lost a great deal of money lately and can hardly afford to give you an allowance. When your aunt was alive it was a different thing. The whole idea of going to live alone in London is silly. So there's an end of it.”
Mrs. Blather went on with her sewing, with mingled feelings of content at having done her duty and disappointment in the failure of promise of reform in Clytie. She would have judged her sister mercifully had she been able. She was naturally a gentle woman, full of kindness. But her canons of duty would not allow her to encourage or condone wilfulness, caprice, and a tendency to wrong-doing. She earnestly believed it was for Clytie's good to stay in Durdleham. The girl's wider needs she could not understand.
Clytie turned from the hearthrug, where she had been standing, to the drawing-room window, and looked out blankly at the rain. Her young face was set rather hard; her lips quivered a little; her heart beat quicker than usual. A struggle was taking place within her—the struggle between the girl and the woman. She felt that the great moment of her life had come. She must choose. Which should it be: the dazzling light with its weird shadows of things unseen, or the gray, easeful glimmer in which the familiar realities cast no shadow? Which should it be: daughterly duty and maidenly retirement, or the sundering of home ties forever and going out, one woman, to battle with the world?
She turned away from the window at last and called to her sister. The latter looked up and was filled with foreboding as she saw the girl's pale face.
“Yes. What is the matter, Clytie?”
“I have made up my mind, Gracie,” she said a little huskily. “I am going to London to live by myself. I can share lodgings with one of the girls I know at the Slade School. There will be no difficulty. I can earn money; I have already earned a little. As for mamma's money, I am of age now, and it is my own to do what I like with it—as you and Janet do. Let this be an end of the discussion, Gracie. I am going.”
CHAPTER III.
Few people, in an outburst of enthusiasm, would select the King's Road, Chelsea, as an ideal locality to reside in. It is an important thoroughfare, no doubt, but it lacks nobility and distinction. There are isolated, quiet spots in it, with houses lying back from the road; and from the upper windows of favoured residences one can obtain a view over Yeitch's or Bull's extensive hothouses, and catch dim shadows of great tropical palms and a mellowed dash of brilliant red and yellow. There are others which look over Portman Square or St. Luke's Churchyard. But on the other hand, there are long stretches of dreary shops and factories, grit and general uncomeliness. Without being squalid, it has a careworn, untidy appearance, as if it was far too much harassed with the petty worries and strain of workaday life to think of cheerful adornment. Few people, except errand boys whose sense either of aesthetics or duty is usually undeveloped, saunter casually along the King's Road. A stranger tries to get out of it as fast as he can; a frequenter has his business to attend to. Fashion does not pass along it, except on tearing drags bound for Hurlingham. It is essentially a small bourgeois part of London, with all the small bourgeois unpretence and honest, if somewhat dismal, solidity.
It was in the middle of such a dreary stretch of the road, some half mile west of Sloane Square, that Clytie found a lodging. The fact that a green-grocer's shop, owned by the landlord of the house, occupied the ground floor was compensated, in a measure, by the existence of a small studio at the back, on the first floor, originally constructed by a struggling photographer, who had since worked his way upwards into a more fashionably perfumed atmosphere. One of Clytie's favourite fellow-students, Winifred Marchpane, who lived in Lower Sloane Street, and whose family obtained their potatoes and salads from Mr. Gurkins, had recommended the establishment, and offered to share with her the expenses of the studio. The cheapness of the rooms suited Clytie's modest purse, and the prospect of pleasant companionship in the studio was an additional attraction. It is true that the acrid smell of the potatoes, when the side door from the shop on to the private entrance lobby was left open, ascended the stairs, together with a vague odour of cooking, bearing upwards, as it were, on savoury breath the disputes of Mrs. Gurkins with the shopboy and the cries of her apparently ever-youthful progeny. The incessant rumble, too, of omnibuses, drays, and furniture vans, and the peculiarly aggressive rattle of tradesmen's carts, shook the floor and the windows and shivered the lustres of the chandelier. There were many drawbacks to elegant life, but Clytie, borrowing some philosophy from a talk with Mrs. Farquharson, proceeded to disregard those she could not eliminate. The sitting-room, when the door was shut and the curtains drawn of an evening, was cosy enough. The pictures, nicknacks, hangings, and other minor accessories of furnished apartments Clytie had returned to Mrs. Gurkins' keeping, on the plea that she scarcely had room for her own—which was true; and, by some miraculous art of persuasion, she had induced Mr. Gurkins to remove the nerve-shattering chandelier, on the ground that she could not work by gaslight—which was not true. She hung thick curtains over the door to keep out noise and odour, broke up the rigidity of the furniture by screens, small tables, and plants, and painted a long panel for the old cottage piano that made it look fresh and companionable. When all the arrangements were completed the room appeared dainty and homelike, bearing, however, here and there, in bold notes of colour, folds of drapery, and odd bits of semi-impressionist painting, a peculiar impress of its tenant's personality.
She was living at last the life she had so passionately longed for. There was not a human being to control her actions, not a conventionality to check the utterance of her thoughts. During her early days here she almost felt tempted to hang up her latchkey over the mantelpiece as a glorious symbol of liberty. It seemed not only to serve to give her entrance to her own modest home, but to be the power that would unlock the heart of the great London that lay before her.
From the first she had little difficulty in finding work. Dealers bought small pictures and gave her orders. She also pleased a firm of publishers to whom she had gone with letters of introduction and specimens of her draughtsmanship, and obtained work in the way of book and magazine illustrating. Her earnings were not large, but there was the promise of success to come. At the end of two years her income was large enough to have enabled her to move from the King's Road into a more refined locality; but she had grown accustomed to its noise and rattle, and to the hurried, joyless stream of life that flowed along it day by day. And Mrs. Gurkins understood her tastes and habits, a quality in a landlady appreciated by women as well as men. So she stayed on.
She read widely during these years, learned much. Between the ages of twenty-two and twenty-four a woman is capable of vast assimilation of ideas. They can flow into the freshly opened, unpolluted channels of her being, as yet unclogged by the refuse of sorrows and wearinesses. Her rejection of the old formulas, and the paramount necessity of gaining knowledge wherewith to provide herself substitutes, checked in her any impulse towards moral or artistic idealism. She read deeply, instinctively seeking after the roots of life, the СКАЧАТЬ