Howard Phillips Lovecraft - Dreamer on the Nightside. Frank Belknap Long

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СКАЧАТЬ He had begun to blink and suddenly he was gesturing toward the apartment entrance for the second time.

      “Well, we’d better go inside,” he said. “My eyes seldom give me any trouble. But today I don’t know—the sun’s hot enough to burn holes in the pavement, so I suppose that has something to do with it.”

      The apartment looked just as I had imagined it would—modest but very tastefully furnished, with some interesting family portraits on the walls. Sonia was not in the living room, but I could hear her moving about in either the adjoining room or kitchen. A faint clattering sound, as if a cup or spoon had just been set down, suggested that it was probably the kitchen.

      I sat down on a sofa by the window and we talked for perhaps ten or fifteen minutes longer. Then Howard vanished for an instant, and when he reappeared he was accompanied by Sonia. She was still wearing a sun-shielding straw hat and was attired in a simple print dress that set off her dark beauty in an extremely becoming way. She was far more attractive than I had thought she might be, for her amateur journalism activities alone could have made Howard overlook plainness in a woman who was able to convince him that they had many interests in common.

      She came straight toward me across the room, smiling graciously, and I seem to recall that I was the first to extend my hand—an inexcusable lapse of etiquette which I doubt if I shall ever be able to overcome on rare occasions, when self-consciousness makes me unable to avoid a reflex action of that kind.

      “Belknapius,” she said, taking my hand and warmly pressing it. “Howard has told me all about you. His other grandson, Alfred Galpin, I met last year. He looks just a little older than you do, but I guess that’s because he’s read Nietzsche.”

      “I’ve read Nietzsche too,” I said. “Is that supposed to age you beyond your years?”

      “Sonia thinks so,” Howard said. “Alfredus wrote an article about him for The Rainbow that she finds it hard to believe could have been written by anyone younger than thirty-five or forty. Even by someone the same age as the old gentleman.”

      “Old gentleman!” Sonia said. “Did he always write about himself in that way in his letters to you?”

      “I’m afraid so,” I told her.

      “Well, he’s got to get over that. It’s just plain silly.”

      “She knows how old I am,” Howard said. “Thirty-two can be quite an advanced age if you’re born aged.”

      “He was no different from other children,” Sonia said. “I know, because both of his aunts told me he could go into temper tantrums and make as much trouble for people as any other perfectly normal, sweet little child.”

      It was at this point that something which at first had been a mere suspicion began to lodge itself more firmly in my mind. During the brief talk by the window Howard had dwelt at some length on Sonia’s meeting with his aunts and on two other occasions when they had spent considerable time together on New England terrain, with the Boston convention several weeks in the past.

      Could it be possible—It was possible, of course, and if Howard’s phone call had not made everything else seem of lesser importance than meeting him in person for the first time, I would have realized sooner that his relationship with Sonia had taken on what could only be thought of as a just-short-of-engagement character. It still was only at the friendship stage perhaps, but with the distinct possibility that it might soon become something more.

      What she had just said went a long way toward confirming this, for she had assumed a kind of proprietorship over his childhood years, as if reliving them with him might well become an almost daily occurrence in the years ahead. And the instant Howard had returned into the room with Sonia at his side, I could not dismiss the feeling that he was perfectly willing to have her regard him as just a little more than a temporary—if cordially welcomed—guest. Temporary on that particular occasion, of course. But occasions of that nature can very quickly undergo a change.

      The change was less swift than it might have been, for it took almost two years for the accuracy of my surmise to be confirmed in every respect. But in a letter to his aunts written shortly after his return to New York as a married man, he confessed that it could—and should—have happened at an earlier date and only his extreme conservatism had led him to put it off, a fault which Sonia had graciously forgiven, but which he found it hard to forgive in himself.

      Sonia was an extraordinarily attractive woman, of such striking dark beauty that it would have made her stand out in a social gathering with at least four or five only slightly less attractive competitors drifting about. I am not exaggerating here. Although she was thirty-nine at the time, she did not appear a day older than Howard’s actual age, and about thirty years younger than the fictitious age which he agreed was peculiar to himself, perhaps, but which could not be brushed off as lightly as she had just attempted to do.

      She was of Jewish ancestry and Russian-born. There was a very competent, practical side to her nature, and she had a lively sense of humor and a keenly observant mind. But despite her success as a millinery shop executive in the early 1920s, she was not in any basic way a worldly-minded or very sophisticated woman. She at times could be quite sentimental to an utterly naive extent, a trait of course which was not at all shared by Howard. But she had several qualities in common with him, not the least of which was a puritanical bias almost as pronounced as his own. I have often thought this may have been the quality which most appealed to him when they met in Boston for the first time. The four qualities which seem to me today to have been most pronounced in Sonia were kindliness, warmth, generosity, and graciousness. And if there are any more admirable qualities—apart from high artistic achievement which is on another plane—they have so far escaped my notice.

      Sonia could sometimes dramatize some particular event in her life out of all reason, in a wholly melodramatic way. I am indebted to Alfred Galpin for the following amusing story, which she related to him when they met in Madison, Wisconsin the year before.

      When she was in her early twenties a young admirer succeeded in convincing himself that her virtue was not unassailable. When she invited him to her home following a theater engagement for a cup of Russian tea, he made a daring proposal, with seduction uppermost in his mind. She had just turned from the window after throwing the casement wide, and the apartment was several stories above the street.

      Her immediate response was: “Ivan Ivanowich”—or whatever his name was!—“if you take one step nearer I shall hurl myself from this window!”

      I have never doubted that she might well have carried out the threat, and one can readily imagine into what a state of agitation that particular suitor must have been plunged. Allowance must be made, of course, for the sort of wildly melodramatic behavior that appears to have been far more common at one time in continental Europe than it has ever been in America, and the fact that Sonia had spent her childhood in Russia and had not arrived in the United States before the age of eight or ten.

      I cannot quite recall what we talked about for the remainder of that afternoon. I do remember leafing through The Rainbow and admiring its distinct literary flavor—it was a quite exceptional amateur journalism magazine—and I am certain we discussed Howard’s stories. I probably also quoted at least a hundred lines of Swinburne, since at that period I could seldom resist letting those wonderful, alliterative lines roll over me in great oceanic waves.

      Then Loveman and Sonia’s daughter returned from opposite ends of the Brooklyn compass at about the same time, and we sat around a long table while Sonia placed before us the kind of banquet Howard had mentioned over the phone. Sonia’s daughter was very pretty, with freckles that met across the bridge of СКАЧАТЬ