Aliens Part 31

It was between four and five when I boarded the Staten Island ferry once more. The wind had gone down with the sun, whose red globe flung long bars of ruddy gold athwart the still water. I took my stand on the upper deck. Once again I looked across the bay and beheld that wonderful vision of New York floating above a blue haze, a ma.s.s of glittering pinnacles and rose-pink walls flaunting snowy pennants of white vapour, and looped to the sombre vagueness of Brooklyn by the long catenary curves of the suspension bridges. As the steamer started I walked aft, that I might not see the dissolution of the phantasy. It may be a weakness; but there is to me, mingled with all perception of beauty, a feeling akin to pain. Often I have envied those more robust souls who can gaze with unfaltering eyes at the beauty of this world, and feel no pang. I am not so. I was absorbed in this thought when I saw a steamer with two red funnels coming round from the Kills. At the masthead blew a flag with a blue eagle. As she came across our track I saw that she was the _Raritan_. On the p.o.o.p-deck was a familiar figure, short, rotund and blue. I stepped to the end of the deck and waved my hand. Mr. Carville was walking back and forth, hands in pockets, his corn-cob pipe in his mouth. He paused and caught my signal, answering heartily. As the distance between us increased he resumed his promenade, and the _Raritan_, threading the Narrows, dwindled to a dark blot surmounted by a patch of vivid red. Once again I turned northwards, and the swift dusk of evening was falling. The sun had dropped behind the Jersey hills, and uprising behind Manhattan was a grey mist and a steely sky, ominous of snow.

As I walked up Pine Street to Van Diemen's Avenue the air was opaque and silent, while the thick, soft flakes that touched my face like chill fingers clung to my coat and balled under my feet. Winter, as we know it not in England, was come at last.

CHAPTER XIII

MISCELLANY

It has struck me often enough of late that, for an artistic and literary colony, ours is not very acute. For it is a sad and undeniable fact that, now the Carvilles are gone away to live on Staten Island, they seem to have ceased to exist as far as Netley is concerned. We alone seem to have attained to some small knowledge of Mr. Carville's peculiar record and essentially individual philosophy. We alone know the relationship with the celebrated and unfortunate Icarus who achieved international fame by crossing the Atlantic, only to crash to earth, as so often happens, in a comparatively trivial enterprise. Mr. Carville and his family never became the talk of the country club. They roused no interest at the soda-counter of Pakenham's drug-store or in the room behind the bar of Slovitzsky's Hotel on Chestnut Street. Our literary club makes no mention in its List of Authors who have lived in Netley, of Mr. Carville and his _Cameos of the Sea_. Happy the nations who have no history, they say, and no doubt the aphorism may be applied to families as well. Certainly, if Mr. Carville proposed, as no doubt he did, that his family should attain to felicity by a profound obscurity, he has attained his desire. It is left for Time to show whether Benvenuto Cellini and Giuseppe Mazzini, when they grow up, will emerge from that obscurity and astonish the world with some novel manifestations of the family genius.

But this is to antic.i.p.ate. The immediate point is that none of our neighbours--not even our own friends, like Williams nor Eckhardt, nor Wederslen nor Confield, which last has a sort of vested interest in Europe which is attested by his much-travelled bag--had any inkling of the story to which they saw us listening as they pa.s.sed our porch on certain afternoons that fall. How little does Mrs. Wederslen think, for example, that her surmise about the burnt aeroplane was grotesquely wrong! How little does Williams, when he brings us his water-colours, done in that fall-vacation at Bar Harbor, appreciate at its real value our etching of an aeroplane lying across an English hedgerow! Even Miss Fraenkel, I think, has no clear knowledge of Mrs. Carville's part in the tragedy of that New Year's Night. I remarked early in this narrative that Miss Fraenkel's importance in it was of the slightest. Her charming enthusiasm was ever an ignis fatuus leading her into unprofitable bye-ways of conjecture. We have, therefore, the superior position as regards the vanished family who lived next door. We know, as I have said, where they are gone; but we do not tell. It gives us a certain rare aesthetic pleasure to keep our own counsel.

And I think I may say we are qualified, after New Year's Day, to keep any secret, for we kept it from the Metropolitan Press when they invaded us, a dozen strong, to "take our statements." We laugh over it now, that sudden descent of New York "leg-men," breezy, businesslike, well-dressed young gentlemen of the "clean-cut" type; but we were glad enough when they were through asking for facts and photographs and impressions, and had gone, leaving the porch rather mussed-up and the snow in front as though a herd of buffaloes had trampled it. But even this is to antic.i.p.ate a little.

I have mentioned, somewhere, that our devotion to the purer and less remunerative branches of our respective arts led us occasionally to take a holiday. With a subconscious deference to the advice of our local doctor, that "sedentary folks should sell their automobiles and take long walks," our day's vacation sometimes took us into the country. We had no automobile to sell, unfortunately; but otherwise we carried out the venerable gentleman's instructions by starting early and returning home late in a condition approaching collapse. We thus came to know certain tracts of Pa.s.saic and Bergen Counties in a manner quite impossible to the motorist. We struck off roads and took to the wooded hills of the Deer Foot Range. We spent forenoons losing ourselves and then, having eaten our sandwiches and drained our flasks, would pa.s.s the rest of the day trying for a predetermined point, but generally emerging into some unknown and delightfully unsuspected valleys of quietness; Sleepy Hollows down which no headless hors.e.m.e.n had ever thundered to startle the wild-fowl sailing low in the evening twilight, and over which the moon would later pour her serene, unearthly radiance; while we, footsore, hungry, thirsty, and quite absurdly elated at our success, would press on towards some twinkle of light in the distance, which told us of refreshment, and possibly a welcome railroad journey home.

It was only natural that, on those rambles which we took after Mr.

Carville had begun his story and while he himself was rambling more extensively about the Western Ocean, my friend and I would discuss him and the highly stimulating outlook upon life which his original mind working in a novel medium had engendered. Indeed, it would not be too much to say that he monopolized our interest to the exclusion of Art. Or rather he, as a living and concrete example, became a kind of test, to which we brought a great deal we had thought and seen and read. To me he became significant of even more, for he contravened, in his own life and philosophy, so much that is generally taken for granted in fiction, that I grew doubtful both of him and the conventions he flouted. It had been obvious to me for some years that any advance in imaginative work seemed impossible inasmuch as the most advanced men had found nothing ahead but a stone wall, against which they advanced in vain. The theory that there was a hole in this wall somewhere, through which we could get into a freer air and less trammelled conditions, was attractive enough. We were all looking for this hole, but somehow it had eluded us. I, in my humble way, had groped and a.n.a.lyzed and plotted to find it, but without success, when suddenly it seemed to me I heard a voice from the other side, Mr. Carville's voice, telling us not only what the world looked like out there, but also how he got there. This is no doubt a fanciful picture; but one of Mr. Carville's salient points was the way he, the least fanciful of men, appealed to the fancy of others and painted pictures without the use of violent colours and futile superlatives. And the impersonal note which he maintained did really give to his story the effect of a voice coming over a wall.

So I looked at the matter, and so I explained it on our long walks through Pompton and on to Greenwood Lake. But my friend, though he accepted much of my theorizing as interesting, was struck most powerfully by Mr. Carville's strange att.i.tude towards his native land.

It was all very well, Mac urged, to get through a hole in the wall and show the way to freedom from conventions in art, though (to his mind) conventions were all right if you found the market--but to say that England was "on the crumble" was silly. And to harp on gentility ... Mac shook his head.

"But that is one of the stones he had to remove to make his hole in the wall," I argued.

"Then your wonderful hole in the wall is only our old friend the Door of Unconventionality," he retorted.

"By no means. He's the most conventional chap we have met since we left the Chelsea Arts Club. What singles him out from so many others is that he saw where he fitted. And it so happened that he fitted somewhere below that to which he would supposedly climb. Consider! Most of us never attain to the position to which we imagine it has pleased G.o.d to call us. We are perpetually struggling to succeed. We 'get on in the world,' it is true, but only comparatively. To hear some of us talk, you'd think the world itself wasn't made sufficiently large and well-furnished to supply us with the position we are designed to fill.

But Mr. Carville looks, not higher, but lower. He espies the particular niche which suits him perfectly, and he calmly descends a few rungs of the ladder and steps off into oblivion. Not the niche, mind you, that the world might estimate as his, and which would procure for him the guerdon of wealth and fame and posthumous biographies; but the niche which he conceives to contain for him all that he, according to some highly original conception of ultimate justice, deserves. As for England being 'on the crumble,' I consider it a conservative description of what has been going on in that country for years. In most departments of life England has crumbled, literally crumbled away. What Mr. Carville omits is the emergence of the new England, an England he doesn't like, an England we shall probably find hard to a.s.similate and which may quite conceivably drive us to do what Mr. Carville has sagely done already--come back here and stop for good!"

So we talked! At least, I talked and my friend concurred, or demurred, or very often digested my wisdom in silence--the silence that, betwixt friends, means as much or even more than speech. And I remember, one still evening, the patches of dry snow lying on the gra.s.s of the sidewalk and the lawns, as we came wearily up Van Diemen's Avenue after a tramp to Echo Lake, there had been a long silence after I had been theorizing on the subject of Mrs. Carville. I am always listened to indulgently on the subject of women! It is tacitly taken for granted that my knowledge of the subject is exclusively theoretical. I do not contest this, because the converse of the proposition, that all married men are practical experts, is so absurd that n.o.body ventures to state it. I had been discussing Mrs. Carville and the probable effect of American life upon her when she should have more leisure to cultivate herself. My point was that she might possibly have some influence upon her husband. And this was followed, as I have said, by a long silence.

"No," said Mac, at length, "I don't think so." I had almost forgotten what we were talking about, for I could already see that the lamps in the dining-room were lighted and shadows moving on the blind.

"Oh!" I said. "Why not?"

"Well," he answered. "Of course, we don't know her very well, but we do know him. And I should say that the woman doesn't live who could shift him from what he proposed to do. You may not see it in the same way, but it is plain enough. His brother," went on my friend with a laugh, "hasn't all the devil in the family, and don't you think it."

And we came up to the door and sat down in the porch to take off our boots. I confess this view was to me entirely novel. I felt chagrined that I had been so lacking in intelligence as to miss so obvious a possibility. I had a faint, uneasy suspicion that my friend was laughing at me. But the idea was so pregnant with interest that I soon forgot my mortification. Before I had got my boots completely off I was away on a tour of this new and fascinating region. I leaned back in my chair and gazed pensively towards the faint glare of New York City. It was true, I reflected, that we had at the very first postulated a certain friction between our neighbour and his wife. But then we had not listened to the love story of our neighbour and his wife. I thought, as I sat there, that I saw the point I had missed. Mr. Carville, supposing he had what my friend called the devil in the family, would not exploit it while telling us the story of his life. And so I, who had abandoned myself to the enjoyment of his peculiar mentality, had forgotten that he might have, all the time, some of the "devil" after all, that he might, in short, be difficult to live with. I hesitated to use the word "faults."

Mr. Carville himself had seemed to imply that the ordinary matrimonial disagreements were as inevitable and as fundamental as cosmic disturbances. Perhaps they were. "Devil," however, was another matter.

"I wonder who's indoors," said Mac, getting up. Thus roused, I heard voices inside, with laughter from Bill. The next moment the door opened and Benvenuto Cellini and Giuseppe Mazzini were discovered behind it.

"What, visitors?" said Mac, touching the dimples in their cheeks; and they nodded and looked at each other in a very taking way they had. Bill came in hastily. "They came in this afternoon," she explained, "and asked most solemnly if they might have some tea. Ma was gone to New York, they said, and she might be late."

"'That so?" said Mac. "Well, we'll have 'em to dinner as well. What 'say, you chaps? Will you have dinner with us?"

Again they nodded and looked at each other, and Ben remarked gravely that they were hungry.

We went off to have a wash and a change.

They certainly were two pretty little men as they stood there in red jerseys and blue corduroy knickers. My friend's custom of s.n.a.t.c.hing open the piano and heralding dinner with a furious tornado of chords pleased them vastly.

"What's that for?" Beppo inquired expectantly.

"Chop," said Mac, rumpling their hair. "Pipe all hands to the galley.

Here comes the salt horse and the hard tack."

"Their father isn't a deck-swab," I remarked mildly.

"Perhaps not," he retorted, "but pipe all hands etcetera is in that comic opera I'm ill.u.s.trating and doing the costumes for, and I've got it on the brain. Have you noticed," he went on, "that Carville seems to have no professional slang?"

"He's not typical of his cla.s.s," I admitted. "Any more than his wife is of her's, I suppose. Moreover, he knows we know nothing of his work and explains it in simple language. Does it not occur to you," I inquired, "that his avoidance of slang and dialect and foreign words and profanity is part of the freedom of the other side of the wall? Think of what we have lived through in the last twenty years! We have listened to a tale of the ends of the earth and the teller of it neither foams at the mouth nor talks in a strange technical jargon n.o.body ever spoke and n.o.body can understand. Without naming any names, isn't it a relief? Isn't it refreshing? After the terrible experiences we have had in the past!"

"Did mother tell you to come in?" he asked the children after nodding to me.

"Yes," said Beppo, thrusting out his chin and working his neck slowly as Bill tied a napkin round it. And he went on in a thin, clear, little voice: "We ha'nt any help in our house, an' Ma she had to go to the stores, so we said we'd like comin' in here to see you till she comes back."

"Well, that's awfully nice of you, old chap. Next time you'll bring mother too, eh?"

They looked at each other at this, and then at their spoons as they leaned over the soup.

"Anyhow, you'll ask her, won't you?" coaxed Bill. "Say, how pleased we shall be if she comes in some evening."

They smiled, and Beppo said, "Sure, we'll ask her," and then we all laughed. I suppose we were a trifle fatuous about them and treated them more as delicious playthings than as human beings. They bore it very well, however, and after dinner, when my friend, in spite of his long tramp and a "job" half done upstairs in the studio, played the piano, and did conjuring tricks with a handkerchief and a gla.s.s of water, and then got out a concertina which had often wakened the echoes of King's Road, Chelsea, in the small hours, they were in raptures. The concertina certainly impressed them as "a divine box of sounds." After "Church Bells in the Distance" they jumped and clapped their hands and said "Bully!" A new and appreciative audience is always stimulating to an artist. My friend surpa.s.sed himself. He told them about the London costers, how they had hundreds of pearl b.u.t.tons and velvet collared coats and wide bell-mouthed trousers, how they played the concertina so beautifully that the policemen in the streets wept into their helmets and the King came out of his palace and danced a jig with the Lord Mayor outside the Mansion House. And he told them how it sometimes chanced the coster got drunk on his way home, and this made him play very pathetically indeed like this ... and then the broken strains of "Two Lovely Black Eyes" came forth, but ended abruptly in a squeak. That, they were told, was his wife, Eliza, who had come out and slapped him.

Eliza had joined the Salvation Army and sang only hymns. This was the prelude to "Where is My Wandering Boy To-night?" rendered in a way, Bill remarked _sotto voce_, calculated to keep him wandering. But Beppo and Ben sat on the edge of their chairs, entranced. It was evidently a novel evening for them. We put the concertina away and got a drawing-board with a sheet of paper and a stick of charcoal, and everybody had to draw a pig blindfold. The usual fragmentary animals appeared, some so embryonic as to be unrecognizable by their designers, some with tails in their ears, others with too many legs. My own efforts were adjudged the best, which led Bill to express surprise that a man who couldn't draw anything at all with his eyes open should be able to draw a pig blindfold. Tired of this, Mac put on a pair of castanets and danced a Spanish fandango. He hung up a sheet in front of his studio lamp and performed an amazing series of shadow-pictures representing the "Hunting of the Snark." When our small visitors saw the Tub-Tub, "that terrible bird," flapping horribly about with his three-cornered eyes glaring at them, they grasped our hands and shouted with the most exquisite mingling of horror and delight. They were consoled with a wrestling match to which my versatile friend challenged himself. Having shaken hands with himself, he then grasped himself in the most approved catch-as-catch-can manner, struggled desperately to throw himself and finally triumphed by flinging himself in the air, turning a somersault and coming down on the carpet with a b.u.mp. Getting up and falling exhausted into a chair, he was greeted with loud cries to "do it again."

"No, indeed, you won't," said Bill emphatically. "You must be crazy to do it at all after walking I don't know how many miles. Children, do you want to kill my husband?"

They shook their heads solemnly. At that moment they evidently thought him quite the most wonderful person in the world. I often think so myself and I know his wife holds that view always. So I at once inaugurated a story-telling compet.i.tion. I told them of an extraordinary affair that had once happened in England, where I was eking out a wretched existence as a hunter of buried treasure. I had received information about a tomato-can full of diamonds hidden in a beef-steak pie which would be served at a certain old inn on the sh.o.r.es of a lake far away towards the North Sea, and I was just packing up my patent can-opener, a box of candy and a packet of gum for refreshment on the way, and a pair of silver-mounted pistols like those in the studio upstairs, when an old woman with bright red hair tapped at the door ...

tap-tap! Ben and Beppo both looked at the door, and Bill said in a low voice, "Don't frighten them; you'll make them dream." But they were watching me once more with their round, expectant eyes, and I was racking my brains to discover the purport of the old woman with the bright red hair--for I am always inventing fascinating characters about which I know nothing!--when the bra.s.s Canterbury Pilgrim was lifted twice and we heard a real knock on a real door ... tap-tap!

It was Mrs. Carville. She stepped quickly into the room so that the door might be closed on the cold night air, and looked round with an unwonted gaiety in her mien. As her gaze fell upon the two little boys, who stood close to my knee and hampered my rising, I fancied the expression of her fine dark eyes hardened a little. It may have been only fancy, but it made me wonder if the cause of her elation lay beyond the family circle. At first I had a twinge, for when a woman, whose husband is in some Mediterranean port, is elated by something beyond her front door, the world (and I belonged to the world, after all) looks grave. I suppose I myself looked grave as I bowed, for she regarded me--her eyes coming back to my face for a moment--with a certain gallant challenge, as though she read my shadowy thought and defied it. And then, sitting back in my chair again and watching her respond to the charm of my friend's manner, I could not help wishing that Mr. Carville had seen fit to give us a little more of his wife's character in his narrative. It seemed to me that the dry, clear light of his recondite mind would have thrown into admirable gleams and shadows, gleams of humour and shadows of blind fate, the brilliant creature who sat before us. There was nothing material in her manner as she let her glance fall again upon the children. The gaiety super-imposed upon her customary staid gravity seemed to have made her, not younger or less mature, but less domestic, more complex and mystifying. And I found myself recalling Mr. Carville's contemptuous moralizings upon the illusory nature of love. I tried, foolish as it may seem, to place myself intellectually in the place of a woman like Mrs. Carville, to conceive her probable fundamental att.i.tude towards her offspring, trodden smooth and firm by the daily round of ch.o.r.es, an active, vigorous mind in an active, vigorous body.... Well, this was journeyman's work, I suppose, for a novelist; yet for me it had a freshness and spice that led me on until I pulled up sharply and felt the pang of shame. I am continually torn in the conflict between realism and what are called "unworthy thoughts." If it were not for a fear of traducing my own character by an ambiguous phrase, I would confess to many "unworthy thoughts" of many worthy people. I suppress them, of course, as I suppressed these concerning Mrs. Carville's trip to New York and the secular gaiety that now sat like a diadem on Mrs.

Carville's forehead; but I have them all the same.

I was roused by Mrs. Carville's rising and saying that the children must go to bed.

"Let them come in again soon," said Mac. "We would like to say 'any time,' you know, but we're like parsons and doctors, we work at home and we can't have holidays every day."

"I am glad they have been no trouble," she replied, regarding them with a preoccupied approval.

"Trouble!" My friend was indignant. "We haven't enjoyed ourselves so much in years, I a.s.sure you, Mrs. Carville. You've had a good time, you chaps, eh?" he asked them and they nodded with reminiscent delight shining in their eyes. "Bully!" said Beppo, and Ben, more taciturn, added an expressive glance at his brother that signified profound a.s.sent. I found their scarlet woolen caps while my friend expatiated upon the delightful privilege of having two such fine little chaps.

Mrs. Carville at first sought, by a quick glance at her hostess, some sympathy for her own soberer feelings in the matter. But Bill, though not caring for children to madness, had fallen in love with these two, and gave to them much of the credit for their pretty ways and well-bred habits that by right belonged to their mother. And so Mrs. Carville, seeing only corroborative enthusiasm in Bill's expression, turned to me.

"To us they are angels," I explained, laughing, "and you must permit us to love them in our own way. It is so easy to love without responsibility, you know."