Читать книгу The House in Lordship Lane - A. E. W. Mason - Страница 6

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MORDAUNT stripped himself of his suède jerkin, his high sea-boots, and the rest of his defences against a gale, and slipped into the bath. After the buffeting of sea and wind, the velvet caress of hot fresh water was a delight for a Roman emperor. He shaved in it, soaped his limbs, and emptied his sponge again and again over his head, wondering whether there could be anything as good as living hard and bathing soft.

But it was Agamemnon’s bath. It is true that no lady with a meat axe was secretly opening the bathroom door, no lads of the village listening timidly in the road were wailing “Ai, ai! That was a nasty one!” as the axe was heftily administered. But it was still, in its way, fateful. Mordaunt lay and relaxed his sinews and steeped his limbs and closed his eyes—and opened them and closed them again. From far away there was a splash of sculls, the grating of a rowing boat against a ship’s side, and then a voice, thin and small, as though it spoke through a hundred folds of grey silk, but cheerful:

“So here you are, back again, Aggy boy.”

Mordaunt assured himself solemnly that Aggy Boy was not a name.

“I propose to see about that,” and he was apparently still proposing to see about it, when a hammering upon the door aroused him. The steward’s voice spoke urgently:

“Your breakfast’s getting cold, Captain Mordaunt.”

And Mordaunt realised that what was happening to his breakfast had happened to his bath. He climbed out of it with a shiver, and in a quarter of an hour, and in a shore-going blue suit, he was sitting down in the saloon to a breakfast fresh from the stove.

Mr. Ricardo at the other side of the cabin was smoking a cigarette.

“Do you mind this whilst you’re eating?” he asked, waving it.

“Not a bit,” answered Mordaunt. Suddenly he cried out: “Where is Devisher?”

“He has gone, I think.”

Mordaunt rose and called up the companion for Hamlin, and Hamlin came down, contentedly smiling.

“Mr. Devisher?” Mordaunt asked abruptly.

“It’s just like this, sir. The Customs didn’t come on board, knowing of us well, but just passed the time of day. The two gentlemen were down in the saloon, but soon afterwards the—I can’t fit my tongue to his name—the passenger from the foreign ship comes up. I was hauling down the yellow flag, and he asks what he should do now. I showed him the harbour-master’s office by the slipway, and he said he would go and report if he could be put ashore. There was a boatman sculling about for a job. So I called him up to the gangway and off the gentleman went.”

Mordaunt looked not too pleased.

“Just like that?” he said. “Without a word?”

“Oh, yes, sir. He said you were in your bath and not to be disturbed. He said he’d write to you.”

Mordaunt laughed.

“All right,” he said, and went on with his breakfast. “After all, he has saved us some trouble.”

“And some delay,” Hamlin added quickly. “We should have been kept here all day, telling the same story over and over.”

It was clear both to Mordaunt and Ricardo that the skipper had edged Devisher over the yacht’s side as soon as he got the chance, guessing that the last place Devisher would visit would be the harbour-master’s office, or the office of any other functionary of the port. Mordaunt, however, was really troubled—and once more to Mr. Ricardo’s surprise; Mr. Ricardo could see him at a cocktail party a year ago, overshouting some other gossip to tell his story with a sardonic amusement—lest he had let loose an equivocal person, if not a bandit, on the world.

“Well, he has gone,” said Mordaunt at last.

“With your letter to Mr. Septimus Crottle,” Mr. Ricardo added; and now Mordaunt laughed without any reservation.

“Old Septimus can take it,” he cried. “Besides, I shall see Septimus on Sunday night, and that’s before he will.”

Mordaunt took a cigar from a mahogany box and split the end of it by the squeeze of his finger and thumb. He lit it and sat back smiling, as if the picture of Septimus had banished the picture of a bandit.

“Do you know Crottle? The queerest old bird. Owns the Dagger Line, and was once a commander—a tyrant in a reefer jacket then, and a tyrant in a broadcloth frock-coat now. Choked off any young men who came after one of his daughters, not because they were gold-diggers, but because it was the business of maidens to wait upon their fathers.”

“Amiable patriarch,” said Mr. Ricardo.

“Patriarch, yes; amiable, no,” Mordaunt returned, and laughed again. “You should see him on his Sunday nights. In his glory! But he’s shrewd, too. And he’d do you a good turn——” Mordaunt paused, “that is, if you acted on his advice, of course. You see, he’s never in doubt.”

Mordaunt was no longer deriding the comic aspect of Septimus Crottle. Mr. Ricardo suspected, indeed, that he was to hear the explanation of that change in Mordaunt which had so perplexed him. There was a confusion, a hesitation, in Mordaunt’s manner.

“I never told you how I came across old Septimus, did I? But, of course, I didn’t. I was on this ketch in the Helford river. A great sailor of small boats had built his home there, and a few of us used to anchor about his house for his birthday. There were four or five yachts anchored in the pool above and below and opposite to Helford village. Septimus came in a schooner with more draught than any of our boats, and anchored down the river at Passage. Well, that evening—I don’t know what made me do it—I had seen him in the garden that afternoon, an old boy, straight as a flagstaff, without any inhibitions; and there he was, once the commander of a ship, now the owner of the Dagger Line. So that night I sent an excuse from a party on one of the yachts, dined alone, and afterwards sculled in my dinghy down to the schooner at Passage.”

He had found Septimus seated in the shelter of his deck-cabin, with a rug about his waist and a trifle suspicious that an upstanding young fellow should row away from a golden company to pass an hour with a solitary old crab-apple. Septimus Crottle did not ask his new companion why, but he gave him a large Havana cigar and, as Mordaunt drew a lighter from his pocket, he objected.

“Will you use the box of wooden matches at your elbow, please.”

Mordaunt turned round. A small table had been placed noiselessly beside his chair with an ashtray upon it and a box of Bryant and May’s matches. So much reverence for a cigar seemed to Mordaunt to call for a response, and as he smoked, it certainly did.

“This really is a wonderful cigar, Mr. Crottle,” said Mordaunt, pitching his praise high.

“It is the best,” returned Mr. Crottle, simply and sufficiently. “It’s mine.”

Philip did not feel that his impulse had been fruitful. On the other hand, the old man, with his sharp nose and his lean chin, seemed quite content that the younger man should sit by his side and say nothing. The tide sang against the planks of the schooner. Up in the pool by Helford village the lights of the yachts threw out from their skylights a glow of jewels cased in black velvet. From one, a woman’s voice, fresh and clear as a blackbird’s in the dew of the morning, soared in a delight which knocked against the stars; and Mordaunt found himself pouring out in a low voice the story of his distress, the twistings and turnings in a world where he had lost his way.

He had resigned his commission when one of the youngest captains, after the 1914-18 war, meaning to think over his life and plan what he should do. He might go into Parliament. He had a house and land in Dorset where there was an opportunity. Or he might go into business—big business—in the City. Or he might write—a comedy which would endure with “The Way of the World”; an epic, perhaps, which would stand on the same shelf with “The Ring and the Book” a novel which would make people cry Fielding Redivivus. Meanwhile, he did nothing. Some day he would begin, when he was quite sure of the road which led to greatness. But meanwhile he ran about from party to party, talking with other young men and women of the fine thing he was going to do. But one after another the young men passed him into a different and busier country. One was elected to the House of Commons, and made a first speech which was the talk of the town. A second wrote a play which stirred the critics and filled the theatre for a year. A third wrote a book which was bought as well as read. They would all come back, of course, as their squibs flickered out. But they didn’t come back, and there was he, still wandering from party to party, jealous, dissatisfied, hollow as an empty tin. Septimus Crottle listened whilst the stars slid down the sky and the lights went out in the yachts in the pool. Then he said quietly:

“Great authors! To me they are the loud-speakers of God.” He turned to Mordaunt. “Are you of their company?”

“How should I know?” Mordaunt asked after a pause.

“They have their labels.”

“For instance?”

“They think less of the name they make than of the work they do.”

Mordaunt laughed curtly. Admit that, and he was ruled out! But how could he not admit that?

“Well, I asked for it,” he told himself, and thought that he might just as well, like Oliver, ask for more. So he said, rather arrogantly:

“Perhaps there are other labels.”

Old Crottle was quite unimpressed by his young friend’s curling lip.

“Of course.” And after a glance at Mordaunt, Septimus looked out over the dark water, selecting the one which would be most suitable.

“They don’t nurse long grievances,” he said. “They are too busy creating. They curse and damn for five minutes and then they get on with their job.”

For the second time that night Philip Mordaunt took it on the point of his chin. He took a whisky and soda afterwards and hoped that he had not obtruded too long between Mr. Crottle and his repose.

Mr. Crottle, however, confessed to having been flattered by Philip Mordaunt’s visit.

“Besides,” he said, standing at the gangway, “everybody enjoys giving advice, as long as he’s quite certain that the advice isn’t what the advised had come to hear.”

Mordaunt halted on the first rung of the ladder and stepped on board again.

“Yes,” he said in some surprise, “the curious thing is that I’m not discouraged. On the contrary, I am relieved.”

The sense of relief stayed with Mordaunt as he sculled back to his yacht, and was no less strong the next morning. Old Septimus had banged the door on a good many dreams which of late were darkening into torments. He had left Mordaunt to find another door for himself, and it was evident to Mr. Ricardo that somehow Mordaunt had succeeded.

Philip looked up at the clock on the wall behind the stove as he ended his story.

“You’ll want to catch the Torbay Limited,” he continued. “There it is, in Kingswear station. Hamlin will land you at the steps and put your bag in your carriage. I am sorry that I couldn’t give you a better passage from France.”