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Swirling Waters. Max Rittenberg
Читать онлайн.Название Swirling Waters
Год выпуска 0
isbn 4064066194635
Автор произведения Max Rittenberg
Жанр Языкознание
Издательство Bookwire
Yes, that was assuredly the solution.
CHAPTER VII
A SEAT BY THE ARENA
Rivière had bought fresh clothes and other necessities at the suburban shops of Neuilly. He had shaved off his moustache; arranged his hair differently; put on a new shape of collar. It is curious how the shape of a collar is associated in most minds with the impression of a man's features. To change into another shape is to make a very noticeable difference to one's appearance.
He had also bought travelling necessities. His intention was to wander for a couple of months. It would help him to clear his brain from the tangle of financial matters which still obsessed it against his will. He wanted to sweep out the Hudson Bay scheme, Lars Larssen, Olive, and many other matters from the living-room of his mind. He wanted a couple of months in which to settle himself in the new personality; plan out his future work in detail; set the mental fly-wheel turning, so as to concentrate his energies undividedly on the work to come.
In the afternoon, old Mme. Dromet entered the villa to scrub and clean. She had a standing arrangement to come two or three afternoons a week.
"Are you going away from Paris?" shouted old Mme. Dromet to her employer, seeing the portmanteau and the other signs of departure. She was stone-deaf, and in the manner of deaf people always shouted what she had to say.
Rivière nodded assent, and produced a paper of written instructions. These he read through with her, so as to make sure that she thoroughly understood. Then he gave her a generous allowance to cover the next few months.
Later in the afternoon, he was seated with his modest travelling equipment in a cab, driving to No. 8, Rue Laffitte. He mounted to the offices of the financier and, in order to test the efficacy of his changed appearance, asked to see Mr. Clifford Matheson.
For a moment the clerk stared at the visitor. The resemblance to his employer was certainly very striking. Yet there were differences. Mr. Matheson wore a close-cut moustache, while this man was clean-shaven. The commanding look, the hard-set mask of the financier were softened away; there was joy of life, there was freedom of soul in the features and in the attitude of this visitor.
"I am Mr. John Rivière, his half-brother. Will you tell him that I am here?"
The clerk felt somehow relieved. That of course explained the striking resemblance. He replied: "Mr. Matheson has not been at the office to-day, sir. I fancy he has left for Monte Carlo. I am not sure, but I believe that was his intention."
"Has he left no message for me?"
"I will see, sir. Please take a seat."
Presently the clerk returned. "I am sorry, sir, but there doesn't seem to be any message left for you."
"Tell him I called," said Rivière, and went back to his cab. In it he was driven to the Gare de Lyon. At the booking-office he asked for a ticket for Arles. His intention was to travel amongst the old cities of Provence, and then make his way to the Pyrenees and into Spain. There was no definite plan of journey; he wanted only some atmosphere which would help him to clear his mind for the work to come. In the Midi the early Spring would be breathing new life over the earth.
About midnight the southern express stopped at some big station. The rhythmic sway and clatter of a moving train had given place to a comparative stillness that awoke John Rivière from sleep. He murmured "Dijon," and composed himself to a fresh position for rest. Some hours later there was again a stoppage, and instinctively he murmured "Lyon-Perrache." The phases of the journey along the main P.L.M. route had been burnt into him from the visits with Olive to Monte Carlo.
In the morning the strange land of Provence opened out under mist which presently cleared away beneath the steady drive of the sun. The low hills that border the valley of the Rhone cantered past him—quaint, treeless hills here scarped and sun-scorched, there covered with low balsam shrubs. Now and again they passed a straggling white village roofed with big, curved, sun-mellowed tiles. Around the village there would be a few trees, and on these the early Spring of the Midi had laid her fingers in tender caress.
The air was keen and yet strangely soft; to Rivière it was wine of life. He drew it in thirstily; let the wind of the train blow his hair as it listed; watched greedily the ever-changing landscape. The strange bare beauty of this land of sunshine and romance brought him a keen thrill of happiness.
It was as though he had loosed himself from prison chains and had emerged into a new life of freedom.
In full morning they reached Arles, the old Roman city in the delta of the Rhone. It clusters, huddles around the stately Roman arena on the hill in the centre of the town—a place of narrow, tortuous ruelles where every stone cries out a message from the past. In the lanes, going about the business of the day, were women and girls moulded in the strange dark beauty of the district—the "belles Arlésiennes" famous in prose and verse.
Yet chiefly it was the arena that fascinated him. All through the afternoon he wandered about the great stone tiers, flooded in sunlight, and reconstructed for himself a picture of the days when gladiators down below had striven with one another for success—or death. The arena was the archetype of civilized life.
Now he was a spectator, one of the multitude who look on. It was good to sit in the flooding sunlight and know that he was no longer a gladiator in the arena. There was higher work for him to do, away from the merciless stabbing sword and the cunning of net and trident.
At intervals during the afternoon a few tourists—mostly Americans—rushed up in high-powered, panting cars to the gateway of the arena; gave a hurried ten minutes to the interior; and then whirled away across the white roads of the Rhone delta in a scurry of dust.
Only one visitor seemed to realize, like himself, the glamour of the past and to steep the mind in it. This was a woman. Her age was perhaps twenty-five, in her bearing was that subtle, scarcely definable, sureness of self which marks off womanhood from girlhood. She climbed from tier to tier of the amphitheatre with firm confident step; stood gazing down on her dream pictures of the scene in the arena; moved on to a fresh vantage-point. She wore a short tailored skirt which ignored the ugly, skin-tight convention of the current fashion. Her cheeks were fresh with a healthy English colour; her eyes were deep blue, toning almost to violet; her hair was burnished chestnut under the soft felt hat curled upwards in front; a faint odour of healthy womanhood formed as it were an aura around her.
All this John Rivière had noticed subconsciously as she passed close by him on the ledge where he sat, walking with her firm, confident step. Though he noted it appreciatively, yet it disturbed him. He did not want to notice any woman. He had big work to do, and on that he wanted to concentrate all his faculties. He had had no thought of a woman in his life when he broke the chains that shackled him to the Clifford Matheson existence. He purposed to have no call of sex to divert him from the realization of his big idea.
Presently she had climbed to the topmost ledge of the amphitheatre, and stood out against the sky-line of the sunset-to-be, deep-chested, straight, clean-limbed, a very perfect figure of a modern Diana.
It is a dangerous place on which to stand, that topmost ledge of the amphitheatre, with no parapet and a sheer drop to the street below. Almost against his will, Rivière mounted there.
But there was no occasion for his help, and they two stood there, some yards apart, silent, watching the red ball of the sun sink down into the limitless flats of the Camargue, and the grey mist rising from the marshes to wrap its ghostly fingers round this city of the ghostly past.
Twice she looked towards him as though she must speak out the thoughts conjured up by this splendid scene. It wanted only some tiny excuse of convention to bridge over