作者：Cross, Victoria
格式: AZW3, DOCX, EPUB, MOBI, PDF, TXT
Six Women试读：
I
CHAPTER I
Listless and despondent, feeling that he hated everything in life, Hamilton walked slowly down the street. The air was heavy, and the sun beat down furiously on the yellow cotton awnings stretched over his head. Clouds of dust rose in the roadway as the white bullocks shuffled along, drawing their creaking wooden carts, and swarms of flies buzzed noisily in the yellow, dusty sunshine. Hamilton went on aimlessly; he was hot, he was tired, his eyes and head ached, he was thirsty; but all these disagreeable sensations were nothing beside the intense mental nausea that filled him, a nausea of life. It rose up in and pervaded him, uncontrollable as a physical malady. In vain he called upon his philosophy; he had practised it so long that it was worn out. Like an old mantle from the shoulders, it fell from him in rags, and he was glad. He felt he hated his philosophy only less than he hated life—hated, yet desired as the man hates a mistress he covets, and has never yet possessed. "Never had anything, never done anything, never felt anything decent yet," he mused.
He was an exceptionally handsome and attractive individual, and though in reality forty years of age, he had the figure, the look, and air of twenty-eight. Masses of black hair, without a white thread, waved above a beautifully-cut and modelled face, of which the clear bronze skin, with its warm colour in the cheeks, was not the least striking feature. He was about six feet or a little over in height, and had a wonderfully lithe, well-knit figure, and a carriage full of grace and dignity. A bright, charming smile that came easily to his face, and an air of absolute unconsciousness of his own good looks, completed the armoury of weapons Venus had endowed him with for breaking hearts. But Hamilton neglected his vocation: he broke none. He got up early, and slaved away at his duties for the Indian Civil Government in his office all day, and went to bed dead tired at night, with nothing but a dreary consciousness of duty done and more duty waiting for him the following day, as a sleeping companion.
Hamilton's life had been ruined by an early and an unsuccessful marriage. At twenty, when full of the early, divine fires of life, he had married a girl of his own age and rank, dazzled by the beauty she then, in his eyes, possessed, and in that amazing blindness to character that make women view men with wondering contempt. His blindness, however, ended with the ceremony. On his wedding-night the woman, who, it must be admitted, had acted her part of loving submissiveness, of gentle devotion, admirably, mocked at him and his genuine, ardent passion.
How well he had always remembered her words to him as they stood face to face in the chilly whiteness of an English bridal chamber in midwinter! "It's no use, dear, I don't want any of this sort of thing. It seems to me coarse and stupid, and I don't want the bother of a dozen babies. I married because I wanted the position of a married woman, and a nice presentable man to go about with in society. Besides, things were not satisfactory at home, and I wanted a man to keep me, and all that. But I don't see why you should get into such a state of mind about it. I will keep house, and be perfectly good and amiable, and we can go about together, of course; only I want to keep my own room."
And how well he remembered her as she stood there, shattering his life with her cold, light words—a tall, slim girl, in her white dinner dress! She had been very fair then, with a quantity of soft flaxen hair, which shortly after she had taken to dyeing—a thing he had always hated. She had a small, heart-shaped face, so light in colour as to suggest anæmia, with a high, thin nose, of which the nostrils were excessively pinched together, a short upper lip, and a thick, quite colourless mouth, small when closed, when she laughed opening wide far back to her throat, showing, as it seemed, an infinite quantity of long, narrow, white, wolf-like teeth.
How hideous she had suddenly appeared to him in those moments, seen through the dark waves of passion she rolled back upon him! In the hot, rosy glow she had deliberately conjured up before his eyes of love and love returned he had thought her beautiful. Now, as she took the veil from her mean, base mind, it fell also from her beauty, and he saw her ugly, as she really was, body and soul. Stunned and amazed, loathing his own folly, his own blindness, condemning these more than he did her cruelty, Hamilton had listened in silence while she revealed herself. When the first shock was over, he had set himself to talk and reason with her. Naturally intensely kind and sympathetic, it was easy for him to see another's view, to put himself in another's place. He blamed himself at once, more than her, for the position he now found himself in. And patiently he tried to understand it, to find the clue, if possible, to remedy it. He reasoned long and gently with her, but she, knowing well the generous nature she had to deal with, yielded not an inch. Hamilton was not the man to use force or violence. The passions of the body, divested of their soul, were nothing to him. On that night she struck down within him all desire for or interest in her. He left her at last, and withdrew to another room, where he sat through the remaining hours of the night, looking into the face of his future.
Shortly after, he had left for India, the corpse of dead passion within his breast. He made a confident of no one, told no one of his secret burden, remitted half his pay regularly to his wife with that obedience to custom and duty as the world sees it, with that quiet dutifulness that is so astounding to the onlooker, but characteristic of so many Englishmen, and threw himself into his work, avoiding women and personal relations with them.
Such a life as this invariably calls down the anger of Venus, and Hamilton had worn out by now the patience of the goddess.
The tragedy of Euripides' Hippolytus is called a myth, but that same tragedy is played out over and over again, year by year, in all time, and is as true now as it was then. The slighted goddess takes her revenge at last. As he walked on, the sound of some tom-toms dulled by distance came to his ears. He hesitated at a crossing where a side alley led down towards the bazaar, then without thought or intention walked down the turning, the music growing louder as he advanced.
It came from a house some way lower down, before the open door of which hung a large white sheet with scarlet letters on it. Hamilton glanced up and read on it, "Dancing girls from the Deccan. Admission, six annas. Walk in." He stared dully at it till the red letters danced in the fierce, torrid sunlight, and the flies, finding him standing motionless, came thickly round his face. A puff of hot wind blew down the street, bringing the dust: it lifted a corner of the sheet and turned it back from the doorway. Within looked cool and dark. The entry was a square of darkness. He was tired of the sun, the heat, the noise, the dust and the flies. With no thought other than seeking for shelter, he stepped behind the sheet and was in the darkness; a turnstile barred his way: on the top of it he laid down his six annas, his eyes too full of the yellow glare of the outside to see whom he paid: he felt the turnstile yield, and stumbled on in the obscurity. A hand pushed him between two curtains. Then he found himself in a low square room, and could see about him again by the subdued light of oil lamps fixed against the wall. At one end was the small stage, its scarlet curtain now down; in front a row of tin lamps, primitive footlights, and the rest of the room was filled with rows of empty chairs. Mechanically and without interest, Hamilton went forward and seated himself in the first of these rows. The tom-toms had ceased: there was quiet, an interval of rest presumably for the dancers. It was far cooler than outside, and Hamilton breathed a sigh of relief as he sank into his seat. The dimness of the light, the quiet, the coolness all pleased him: he had not known till he sat down how tired he was. He might have sat there a quarter of an hour, his mind in that state of hopeless blank that supervenes on overmuch unsatisfactory thinking, when suddenly the tom-toms started up again with a terrific rattle, and the scarlet curtain was somewhat spasmodically jerked up, displaying a semicircle of girls seated on European chairs facing the tin lamps. Two of the seven were African girls, with the woolly hair and jet black skin of their race; they were seated one at each end of the semicircle, dressed in short scarlet skirts, standing out from their waist in English ballet-girl fashion, the upper part of their bodies bare, except for the masses of coloured glass necklaces covering their breast from throat to waist. The next pair of girls seemed to represent Spanish dancers, and were in ankle-long black and yellow dresses, little yellow caps with bells depending from them sat in amongst their masses of black hair, and they held languidly to their sides their tambourines and castenets. Next on the chairs sat two strictly Eastern dancers in transparent pale green gauzy clothing held into waist and each ankle by jeweled bands. Their pale ivory bodies shone through the filmy green muslin as the moon shines clearly in green water, and the jewels blazed like stars with red and blue fires at each movement of their limbs. Their heads were crowned simply with white clematis, and the glory of their straight-featured Circassian faces, together with the unrivalled contours of softly moulded throat and breast and perfect limbs, veiled only so much as a light mist may veil, would have taken the breath away of the most inveterate frequenter of the Alhambra and Empire in dull old England. Hamilton drew in his breath with a little start as he first saw the semicircle, but it was not on the Circassians that his eyes were fixed, but on the very centre figure of that beautiful half-moon. Set in the centre, she seemed to be considered the pearl amongst them, as indeed she was. The mist that enveloped her was not pale green as the veils of the other two, but white, and the beautiful perfect form that it enclosed was of a warmer, brighter tint than theirs.
The white films of the drapery fell from the base of her throat, leaving her arms quite bare, but softly clinging to breast and flanks, till a gold band resting on her hips confined it closely, and depressed in the centre, was fastened by a single enormous ruby, the one spot of blood-red colour upon her. Beneath the sloping belt of gold fell her loose Turkish trousers of gleaming white, transparent tissue, clasped at the ankles by bands of gold. On her feet were little Turkish slippers, on her brow—nothing, but the crown of her radiant youth and beauty. Hamilton, gazing at it across the footlights, thought he had never seen, either pictured or in the flesh, a face so beautiful, so full of the beauty, the goodness, the power and wonder of life.
The sight thrilled him. Like the power of electricity, its power began to run along his veins, heating them, stirring them, calling upon nerve and muscle and sense to wake up. He looked, and life itself seemed to stream into him through his eyes. The girl's face was a well-rounded oval, supported on the round, perfect column of her throat; the eyes seemed pools of blackness that had caught all the splendour and the radiance of a thousand Eastern nights. The fires of many stars, the whole brilliance of the purple nights of Asia were mirrored in them. Above them rose the dark, arching span of the eyebrows on the soft warm-tinted forehead, cut in one line of severest beauty with the delicate nose. Beneath, the curling lips were like the flowers of the pomegranate, a living, vivid scarlet, and the rounded chin had the contour and bloom of the nectarine.
She smiled faintly as she met the fixed gaze of Hamilton's eyes across the footlights—such an innocent, merry little smile it seemed, not the mechanical contortions one buys with pieces of silver. Hamilton's blood seemed to catch light at it and flame all over his body. He sat upright in his seat: gone were his fatigue, his thirst, his eye-ache. His frame felt no more discomfort: his whole soul rushed to his eyes, and sat there watching. In some men their physical constitution is so closely knitted to the mental, that the slightest shock to either instantly vibrates through the other and works its effect equally on both. Hamilton was of this order, and his body responded, instantly now, to the joy and interest born suddenly in his mind.
A moment after the curtain was rolled up, a huge negro, dressed in a fancy dress of scarlet, and with a high cap of the same colour on his head, came on from the side. In his hand he carried a small dog-whip, and as he cracked it all the girls stood up. Hamilton sickened as he looked at him: an indefinable feeling of horror came over him as this man stalked about the stage. He pointed with his whip to the two African girls at the end of the semicircle, and they came forward, while the rest sat down. A horrid uneasy feeling of discomfort grew up in Hamilton, similar to that which a lover of animals feels, when called upon to witness performing dogs, and all the fear and anxiety pent up in their fast-beating little hearts is communicated to himself. He watched the girls' faces keenly as the negro went round and placed himself behind the middle chair of the semicircle, while the two Africans danced. Hamilton hardly noticed their dance, a curious barbaric performance that would have been alarming to the British matron, but was neither new nor interesting to Hamilton. He kept his eyes fixed on the white-clothed girl in the centre, and the sinister figure behind her chair. She seemed calm and indifferent, and when the negro put his hand on her shoulder looked up and listened to his words without fear or repulsion. Hamilton, keenly alive, with every sense alert, sat in his chair, a prey to the new and delightful feeling, not known for years, of interest.
Yes, he was interested, and the energetic sense of loathing for the negro proved it. The music, loud and strident—an ordinary Italian piano-organ having been introduced amongst the Oriental instruments—banged on, and then abruptly came to a stop when the negro cracked his whip. The two African women resumed their chairs, there was some applause, and a good many small coins fell on the stage from the hands of the audience. The second pair of girls rose, came forward and commenced to dance, the organ playing some appropriate Spanish airs. After these, the two Indian girls who gave the usual dance de ventre to a lively Italian air on the organ. Then, at last, she rose from her chair and approached the footlights. The organ ceased playing, only the Indian music continued: wild sensual music, imitating at intervals the cries of passion.
To this accompaniment the girl danced.
Had any British matrons been present we must hope they would have walked out, yet, to the eye of the artist, there was nothing coarse or offending, simply a most beautiful harmony of motion. The girl's beauty, her grace and youth, and the slight lissomness of all her body lent to the dance a poetry, a refinement it would not have possessed with another exponent.
Moreover, though there was a certain ardour in her looks and gestures, in the way she yielded her limbs and body to the influence of the music, yet there was also a gay innocence, a bright naïve irresponsibility in it that contrasted strongly with the sinister intention underlying all the movements of the other two Indian dancers. At the end of the dance Hamilton took a rupee from his pocket and threw it across the tin lamps towards her feet. She picked it up smiling, though she left the other coins which fell on the stage untouched, and went back to her chair.
After her dance, the great negro came forward and did a turn of his own. Hamilton looked away. What was this man to the little circle? he wondered. He could not keep his mind off that one query? Were they his slaves? willing or unwilling? did they constitute his harem? or were they paid, independent workers? His mind was made up to get speech with this one girl, at least, that evening. This delightful feeling of interest, this pleasure, even this keen disgust, all were so welcome to him in the dreary mental state of indifference that had become his habit, that he welcomed them eagerly, and could not let them go. Beyond this there was rising within him, suddenly and overwhelmingly, the force of Life, indignant at the long repression it had been subjected to. Man may be a civilized being, accustomed to the artificial restraints and laws he has laid upon himself, but there remains within him still that primitive nature that knows nothing, and never will learn anything of those laws, and which leaps up suddenly after years of its prison-life in overpowering revolt, and says, "Joy is my birthright. I will have it!"
This moment is the crisis of most lives. It was with Hamilton now, and it seemed suddenly to him that twenty years of fidelity to an unloved, unloving woman was enough. The debt contracted at the altar twenty years before had been paid off. The promise, given under a misunderstanding to one who had wilfully deceived him, was wiped out. It was a marvel to him in those moments how it had held him so long.
Hamilton had one of those keen, brilliant minds that make their decisions quickly, and rarely regret them. He took his resolution now. That prisoner in revolt within him should be free; he would strike off the fetters he had worn too long and vainly. He was before the open book of Life, at that page where he had stood so long. With a firm decisive hand he would take the new page, and turn it over. That last page, on which his wife's name was written large, was completely done with, closed.
The old joyous spirit, the keen eagerness for love and joy and life, the Pagan's gay rejoicing in it, that had been such a marked feature of his disposition before his marriage, came back to him, rushed through him, refilled him.
His marriage, with its disillusionment, had crushed it out of him for a time, and, with that same decisiveness that marked him now, he had turned over the pages of youthful dreams and joys and loves, and opened the next page of work, of strenuous endeavour, of a hard, rigid observance of fidelity to the vows he had taken. And for a time work and its rewards, effort and its returns, a hard, practical life in the world amongst men, had held him. That now was no longer to be all to him.
His life, and such joy as it might hold for him, was to be his own again. The joy of the decisions filled him, elated him. He felt as if his mind had sudden wings, and could lift him with it to the roof.
Such a decision, when it comes, seems to oneself, as it seemed to Hamilton now, a sudden thing. It has the force and shock of a revelation, but it is not really sudden. The great rebellion nearly all natures—certainly some, and these usually the greatest and best—feel at the absence of joy in their lives had been gradually growing within him, gathering a little strength each day. It is only the climax of such feelings that is sudden—the awakening of the mind to their presence. The growth has been going on day by day, week by week, unmeasured, unreckoned with.
Immediately the curtain fell, Hamilton left his seat and went up to a door, reached by a few steps, on the level of the footlights, and at the left side of them. No one hindered him. The rest of the audience were going out. He pushed the door, which yielded readily, and he passed through. A narrow, white-washed, lath-and-plaster passage opened before him, at the end of which he saw a tin lamp burning against the wall and heard voices.
The passage led into a three-cornered room, where he found some of the dancers and an old woman who was huddled up on a straw mat in the corner. The negro was not there. The girls stood about idly; some were changing their clothes. They did not seem to heed his presence, except the one he was seeking, who came straight towards him. As she moved across the dirty, littered room, her limbs under their transparent covering moved, and her head was carried with the air of an empress. "Will the Sahib come with me?" she said in a low, soft tone. She raised her eyes to his face. They were wide, enquiring, like the deer's brought face to face with the hunter in the green thickets.
The other girls glanced towards him, and some smiles were exchanged, but no one approached him. They seemed to understand he was there only for the star of the troupe. Hamilton looked down into those glorious midnight eyes fixed upon him, and a faint colour came into his cheek.
试读结束[说明：试读内容隐藏了图片]