The Prisoner Part 42

XXIII

Jeffrey, in his working clothes, went down to Mill Street and found Andrea presiding over a shop exhaling the odour of pineapple and entrancing to the eye, with its piled ovals and spheres of red and yellow, its diversities of hue and surface. It was a fruit shop, and G.o.d had made the fruit beautiful and Andrea had disposed it so. His wife, too, was there, a round, dark creature in a plaid skirt and a shirt waist with islands of lace over a full bosom, her black hair braided and put round and round her head, and a saving touch of long earrings to tell you she was still all peasant underneath. A soft round-faced boy was in charge, and ran out to tell Jeffrey prices. But they all knew him. Jeffrey felt the puzzle begin all over when Andrea came hurrying out, like a genial host at an inn, hands outstretched, and his wife followed him. They looked even adoring, and again Jeffrey wondered, so droll was their excess of welcome, if he were going to be embraced. The boy, too, was radiant, and, like an acolyte at some ritual, more humbly though exquisitely proffered his own fit portion of worship. Jeffrey, it being the least he could offer, shook hands all round. Then he asked Andrea:

"Who do you think I am? What did Madame Beattie tell you?"

Andrea spread his hands dramatically, palms outward, and implied brokenly that though he understood English he did not speak it to such an extent as would warrant him in trying to explain what was best left alone. He would only repeat a word over and over, always with an access of affection, and when Jeffrey asked:

"Does that mean 'prisoner'?" he owned it did. It seemed to hold for the three the sum of human perfectibility. Jeffrey was The Prisoner, and therefore they loved him. He gave up trying to find out more; it seemed to him he could guess the riddle better if he had a word or two of Andrea's language to help him, and he asked summarily if they couldn't have some lessons together. Wouldn't Andrea come up to the house and talk Italian? Andrea blossomed out in gleam of teeth and incredible shininess of eyes. He would come. That night? Yes, he would come that night. So Jeffrey shook hands again all round and went away, curiously ill at ease until he had turned the corner; the warmth of their adoration seemed burning into his back.

But that night Andrea did not come. The family had a.s.sembled, Anne a little timid before new learning, Lydia sitting on the edge of her chair determined to be phenomenal because Jeffrey must be pleased, and even Mary Nellen with writing pads and pencils at the table to sc.r.a.pe up such of the linguistic leavings as they might. At nine o'clock the general attention began to relax, and Lydia widely yawned. Jeffrey, looking at her, caught the soft redness of her mouth and thought, forgetful of Circe's island where he had taken refuge, how sweet the little barbarian was.

But n.o.body next day could tell him why Andrea had not come, not even Andrea himself. Jeffrey sought him out at the fruit-stand and Andrea again shone with welcome. But he implied, in painfully halting English, that he could not give lessons at all. Nor could any of his countrymen in Addington.

Jeffrey stood upon no ceremony with him.

"Why the devil," said he, "do you talk to me as if you'd begun English yesterday? You forget I've heard you translating bunk.u.m up on the circus-ground."

Andrea's eyes shone the more enchantingly. He was shameless, though. He took nothing back, and even offered Jeffrey an enormous pineapple, with the air of wanting to show his good-will and expecting it to be received with an equal open-heartedness. Jeffrey walked away with the pineapple, beaten, and reflecting soberly, his brow tightened into a knot. Things were going on just outside his horizon, and he wasn't to know. Who did know? Madame Beattie, certainly. The old witch was at the bottom of it.

She had, for purposes of her own, wound the foreign population round her finger, and she was going to unwind them when the time came to spin a web. A web of many colours, he knew it would be, doubtless strong in some spots and snarled in others. Madame Beattie was not the person to spin a web of ordinary life.

He went on in his blue working clothes, absently taking off his hat to the ladies he met who looked inquiringly at him and then quite eagerly bowed. Jeff was impatient of these recognitions. The ladies were even too gracious. They were anxious to stand by him in the old Addington way, and as for him, he wanted chiefly to hoe his corn and live unseen.

But his feet did not take him home. They led him down the street and up the stairs into Alston Choate's office, and there, hugging his pineapple, he entered, and found Alston sitting by the window in the afternoon light, his feet on a chair and a novel in his hand. This back window of the office looked down over the river, and beyond a line of willows to peaceful flats, and now the low sun was touching up the scene with afternoon peace. Alston, at sight of him, took his legs down promptly. He, too, was more eager in welcome because Jeffrey was a marked figure, and went so seldom up other men's stairs. Alston threw his book on the table, and Jeffrey set his pineapple beside it.

"There's a breeze over here," said Alston, and they took chairs by the window.

For a minute Jeffrey looked out over the low-lying scene. He drew a quick breath. This was the first time he had overlooked the old playground since he had left Addington for his grown-up life.

"We used to sail the old scow down there," he said. "Remember?"

Choate nodded.

"She's down there now in one of the yards, filled with red geraniums."

They sat for a while in the silence of men who find it unexpectedly restful to be together and need not even say so. Yet they were not here at all. They were boys of Addington, trotting along side by side in the inherited games of Addington. Alston offered Jeffrey a smoke, and Jeff refused it.

"See here," said he, "what's Madame Beattie up to?"

Choate turned a startled glance on him. He did not see how Jeffrey, a stranger in his wife's house, should know anything at all was up.

"She's been making things rather lively," he owned. "Who told you?"

"Told me? I was in it, at the beginning. She and I drove out by chance, to hear Moore doing his stunt in the circus-ground. That began it. But now, it seems, she's got some devil's influence over Moore's gang. She's told 'em something queer about me."

"She's told 'em something that makes things infernally uncomfortable for other people," said Choate bluntly. "Did you know she had squads of them--Italians, Poles, Abyssinians, for all I know, playing on dulcimers--she's had them come up at night and visit her in her bedroom.

They jabber and hoot and smoke, I believe. She's established an informal club--in that house."

Alston's irritation was extreme. It was true Addington to refer to foreign tongues as jabber, and "that house", Jeffrey saw, was a stiff paraphrase for Esther's dwelling-place. He perceived here the same angry partisanship Reardon had betrayed. This was the jealous fire kindled invariably in men at Esther's name.

"How do you know?" he asked.

Alston hesitated. He looked, not abashed, but worried, as if he did not see precisely the road of good manners in giving a man more news about his wife than the man was able to get by himself.

"Did Esther tell you?" Jeff inquired.

"Yes. She told me."

"When?"

"Several times. She has been very uncomfortable. She has needed counsel."

Choate had gone on piling up what might have been excuses for Esther, from an irritated sense that he was being too closely cross-examined. He had done a good deal of it himself in the way of his profession, and he was aware that it always led to conclusions the victim had not foreseen and was seldom willing to face. And he had in his mind not wholly recognised yet unwelcome feelings about Esther. They were not feelings such as he would have allowed himself if he had known her as a young woman living with her husband in the accepted way. He did not permit himself to state that Esther herself might not, in that case, have mingled for him the atmosphere she breathed about him now. But Jeffrey did not pursue the dangerous road of too great candour. He veered, and asked, as if that might settle a good many questions:

"What's the matter with this town, anyway?"

"Addington?" said Choate. "You find it changed?"

"Changed! I believe you. Addington used to be a perfect picture--like a summer landscape--you know the kind. You walked into the picture the minute you heard the name of Addington. It was full of nice trees and had a stream and cows with yellow light on them. When you got into Addington you could take a long breath."

For the first time in his talk with anybody since he came home Jeff was feeling lubricated. He couldn't express himself carelessly to his father, who took him with a pathetic seriousness, nor to the girls, to whom he was that horribly uncomfortable effigy, a hero. But here was another fellow who, he would have said, didn't care a hang, and Jeff could talk to him.

"There's no such picture now," Alston a.s.sured him. "The Addington we knew was Victorian."

"Yes. It hadn't changed in fifty years. What's it changing for now?"

"My dear boy," said Alston seriously, because he had got on one of his own hobbies that he couldn't ride in Addington for fear of knocking ladies off their legs, "don't you know what's changing the entire world?

It's the birth of compa.s.sion."

"Compa.s.sion?"

"Yes. Sympathy, ruth, pity. I looked up the synonyms the other day. But we're at the crude, early stages of it, and it's devilish uncomfortable.

Everybody's so sorry for everybody that we can't tell the kitchen maid to scour the knives without explaining."

Jeff was rather bewildered.

"Are we so compa.s.sionate as all that?" he asked.

"Not really. It's my impression most of us aren't compa.s.sionate at all."

"Amabel is."

"Oh, yes, Amabel and Francis of a.s.sisi and a few others. But the rest of us have caught the patter and it makes us 'feel good'. We wallow in it.

We feel warm and self-righteous--comfy, mother says, when she wants to tuck me up at night same as she used to after I'd been in swimming and got licked. Yes, we're compa.s.sionate and we feel comfy."

"But what's Weedon Moore got to do with it? Is Weedie compa.s.sionate?"