Читать книгу The Sun Cure - Alfred Noyes - Страница 5

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Basil Strode swept aside the proffered compliments and thanks. He said with truth that it did not take much of a man to deal with a half-starved weakling like Double Dick.

"But," he said, "I am really glad you thought I did the right thing in letting him go. You see, he's never been in prison yet, though I've no doubt he's deserved it scores of times, and John Richardson would have felt it terribly."

"And now," said Mrs. Camp, "you really must have a cup of tea with us. Without you, we should probably have had none at all."

Basil Strode thanked her, but feared he must be getting on. He had made up his mind to a ten-mile walk that afternoon, and barely four of the ten had been accomplished.

"You're fond of walking?" asked Miss Adela Bird, shyly.

"Oh, very. I always want to go on and on, seeing new country all the time. One of these days I shall be suddenly tempted to do it—right on until Sunday comes round again. Why not?"

Major Bongline, who was annoyed, resisted a temptation to say, "Do!" It had been the merest facetiousness on the curate's part, but the Misses Bird found it interesting.

"I notice that you take one of your new poets with you," said Miss Pansy Bird, who was the Honorary Secretary of the Helmstone Literary Society, and still read Christina Rossetti.

Basil Strode glanced at his side-pocket, and was slightly embarrassed to see that "Leap-Frog" was obtruding its flamboyant title. He wished somehow that he had chosen "Apples of the Moon" by the same author.

"Yes," he said, "one must keep abreast of what is being done."

"I am afraid I am rather old-fashioned," said Miss Bird, with eyes that looked like the dark innocent pansies of her name. "I like youth, and I like the real newness, which always seems to me to be a development out of the old—not a bombshell. But I'm not sure that some of the writers who are claiming those qualities today are as new and young as the elderly critics tell us. I feel surest of my young writers when I don't hear their joints creaking with the strain to be new."

"Isn't that rather the Victorian view, Miss Bird? Rather the Victorian view, I think," said Basil, showing his white teeth in the invulnerably superior smile to which his modernity entitled him. He was not an unintelligent man; but he had not really listened.

"Perhaps it is," said Miss Bird, "but—"

Basil interrupted her, as from above, gently and firmly. "We must remember how badly Keats and Shelley were treated in their day, mustn't we?"

"But the Della Cruscans, who were really bad, were sat upon, too, weren't they?" said Miss Bird. "And, after all, your argument would apply to bosh as well as to beautiful things."

"Victorian, Miss Bird, Victorian," said Basil, wagging a playful finger at her. He had never heard of the Della Cruscan poets, but it was one of his principles never to give himself away in such things. "The conventional mind is the enemy, you know, in this country. I always admire that fellow—what's his name—who dedicated his book in those six words: 'To the British Public, these pearls!' We must think for ourselves. We mustn't be too conventional, you know."

"But—that's exactly—I don't want to think what the fashion of the moment and the newspapers tell me I ought to think. At least, I don't want to do it mechanically. And I don't mean what you think I mean," stammered poor Miss Bird, blushing and puzzled at her inability to penetrate that superior armor with a perfectly sound and pointed weapon. The Helmstone debates had not yet taught her that you cannot argue with an alleged "modern" who is so pleased with himself (and so ancient a type) that he waives your own remarks and hears nothing but his own blood purring in his ears.

"Not too conventional," the curate murmured. Then, with the smile of the merciful victor, he changed the subject, and began to talk about tennis.

The change was partly due to the appearance of a small runabout car, lolloping and jerking like a rabbit over the turf on the more or less level ridge of the downs. It was driven by Barbara Lane.

She turned skilfully round a clump of gorse, and pulled up close to the picnic party.

"Sorry I'm late," she called, with a wave of her hand which somehow seemed to include everyone but Basil Strode. "It took me longer than I expected to get the strawberries and cream. Major Bongline, come and help me to unload."

Grinning his delight and looking remarkably like a white-faced cat with a red mustache, that had been dipped in an ash-pit, Major Bongline scrambled to relieve her of rugs, thermos-bottles, baskets of strawberries, and a large pair of marine glasses. These last belonged to the Admiral; and Barbara had been adjured by Miss Pettigrew to bring them for the detailed inspection of ships at sea. Miss Pettigrew had greatly enjoyed looking through those glasses on a former occasion, though it might have been noticed that, while her voice was rapturously describing the details she observed on distant ships, the glasses frequently dipped towards the more personal aspect of things—the little specks of humanity wandering along the coast, or over the gardens behind the coast-guard cottages.

Barbara looked enchanting today, Basil thought, though he seemed only to get glimpses of her profile. It had the distracting effect upon him of being as oblivious of his presence as a wild flower, while it tugged his whole nervous system to attention, as the moon tugs the tides of the sea. He tried to look away from it by talking with forced animation to others; but, although he turned his back upon her, he found himself gradually drifting round and through the party until he stood at her side.

"Barbara," he said, in a low voice, "I hope we are at least friends again."

She looked up, and saw Miss Pettigrew watching them maliciously.

"My dear Basil," she answered, in a voice that could be heard by everyone, "if you won't stay for tea, you really must have one of these delicious strawberries."

She held out a basket to him, and he took one.

"I regard it as a token, a little symbol," he murmured again.

"So would Sir Willoughby Patterne," she replied. "A single berry doesn't make a dish of strawberries and cream. And you will observe that I have withheld the sugar. I hope you are going for a good long walk. All my best thoughts occur to me when I am walking alone on the downs."

"If I were to find you at the other end, I would walk round the world, Barbara."

"You needn't go as far as the waters of Israel, Basil; ten miles or so would be quite enough, if you really thought hard all the way."

"First, Sir Willoughby; then, Naaman, the Syrian," he exclaimed, a little heatedly.

"Not at all, Basil," she laughed. "As usual, you miss the point of my feeble remarks. You are not in the least like a leper. You are already almost as a little child; that's why I gave you the strawberry."

Major Bongline joined them at this unsatisfactory moment, and Barbara continued, a little mockingly, to Basil—as though it were a merely literary discussion:

"Do you remember that delicious poem about a child on the downs?—

"Still, still I seem to see her, still Look up with soft replies, And take the berries with her hand And the love with her lovely eyes."

"Took both?" chuckled Major Bongline, with military amusement at all such poetical matters. "Took both, eh? Greedy little beggar, eh, what?"

Basil turned away with his nose in the air.

"And how are you, Miss Pettigrew?" he said. "I was distressed to hear of your burglary last night. One has come to look upon Chalkdene as a little world apart, where such things don't happen. But, of course, your house on the outskirts of the village must be distinctly lonely at night. I hope it was not a great shock to you."

An acid smile suppressed Miss Pettigrew's sharp features.

"How thoughtful of you to remember my little troubles, Mr. Strode! But I am quite recovered, thank you. Fortunately the burglary took place while I was asleep, so that I was not aware of the burglar's presence. I was as unconscious as I was when I fainted at the harmonium."

"He—but surely the ruffian did not enter your room, Miss Pettigrew?"

"That is exactly what the ruffian did, Mr. Strode. He entered my room and took a number of things from a table at my bedside. He entered by the window. We found the gardener's ladder under the window in the morning, and we found the footmarks. He must have been in a great hurry, for he took everything indiscriminately from just the one table, and then absconded. The police think it can hardly have been a professional burglar. In fact, only spite can account for his having taken some of the things. Two were valuable; the others were of value only to myself."

"It really is too bad," said Pansy Bird, "after the rather jolly prescription the London specialist gave you—pineapple juice before breakfast, and no worries."

Basil Strode was not a humorist; but he suffered, often, from seeing a joke at the wrong moment. The conjunction of a burglary at the bedside with that doctor's prescription of "no worries" tickled him, and he began to laugh. "What are you laughing at?" said Miss Pettigrew, with asperity.

"I don't know. I really don't know," said Basil, laughing even more. Then the Misses Bird began to laugh, and Mrs. Camp, then Mr. Pepper swelled the chorus with a sudden high-nosed neighing, and Miss Pettigrew turned and rent him.

"Really, Mr. Pepper, you have a perfectly idiotic laugh. Burglary is not a laughing matter, even if the state of my nerves—"

"Oh, but it wasn't the burglary, Miss Pettigrew," said Mr. Pepper, who was a young man of resource, and, while he was endeavoring to save the situation, Basil Strode, still laughing, swept off his hat in farewell, and made his escape. He was on the ridge of the next down before Miss Camp had a chance to make her usual observation. She wondered when the engagement of Miss Lane to Basil Strode would be announced.

So she made it now, though a little late. Mr. Pepper conceded that Miss Lane was pretty enough, but—unfortunately—was not in his style.

The Major glared at the retreating figure of Basil Strode.

"I suppose," he said, "that's the type of what they call muscular Christianity."

Mrs. Camp wagged a playful finger at him, and asked what they called sentries who deserted their posts. But she helped the Major in his struggles with the spirit-lamp.

The elder Miss Bird, as she unpacked tea-things vigorously, said that it was splendid to see the way Mr. Strode dealt with that brute. "And all," she said, "with the most masterly ease and coolness." She had said it before, but her enjoyment in it was unabated.

"I wished he'd stayed," said her sister simply.

"He would have done if Barbara Lane had urged it," said Miss Pettigrew, maliciously but truly.

Meanwhile Mr. Strode, propelling himself by his own power at the rate of four miles an hour, was trying to recall where he had seen the scientific statement that the sunlight was the dire enemy of all evil microbes. He knew many scientific facts, and they were all derived from unscientific sources. His evening paper often used three or four to fill a column. Thus, and not otherwise, did Mr. Strode learn the difference between volts and amperes, and how much horsepower ran to waste annually at a waterfall, the name of which he had forgotten.

Certain it was that the glorious sunlight this afternoon was doing him good. He supposed that he was really taking a modified sun-bath, with his clothes on. The parish pin-pricks no longer lacerated him. His behavior towards Double Dick completely satisfied him. And there seemed to be some ladies in his parish at any rate who did not think so badly of him.

And then he looked over the wide sea, and the wide wheat-fields mellowing to harvest, and up at the limitless uncaring blue. And he saw that not only were the parish pin-pricks small, but his satisfaction with his own act and the feminine applause were, if anything, smaller. And he was not really a small-minded man. After all, should he look over Dalston's mad letter again? He had it in his pocket.

He had covered almost half a mile of up and down country when, in the heart of a quite deserted and untilled valley, he came upon a little ruined cottage. The southern wall—on the side of the sea—was down, and there was no roof. Tall grass waved around it, and thick bushes had sprung up in what had once been the living-rooms. Ruins always appealed to him, and he had confided this fact to Dalston a year before. Dalston had replied that his friend's choice of a profession had already indicated such preference. He entered pensively, and sat on a fallen fragment of the wall, gazing southward over some three miles of grass, thyme, poppies, and white chalk, to the end of the valley and the heat-shimmer of the sea. On the north, east and west, the downs rose abruptly from the boundaries of the cottage-garden, and gave fine shelter. The garden had gone back to the wild now; only in a far corner the rosemary remembered the children who had played there.

Yes, here indeed might one be as secure as Dalston in his special enclosure. Here, in far more beautiful surroundings one might go back to nature and drink the sunlight at every pore.

Double Dick removed his eye for a moment from the crack in the wall, behind which he had reposed after his bun, and straightened his back. Unseen, he had watched the parson for the last fifteen minutes, and so far the results had been quite unsatisfactory. The enemy had sat down, had stared at the scene before him in a way that to Double Dick seemed affected, had taken a long letter from his pocket and read it all through, had put the letter back again, and still sat there. There seemed to be nothing to be done. Double Dick shook his head sadly.

And then he heard Mr. Strode exclaim aloud and with determination: "I will! Here goes!"

In a flash Double Dick's eye was back at the crack of observation, and very extreme was his surprise. Mr. Strode was undressing himself rapidly and completely. Stripped, he was a fine figure of a man, as Double Dick admitted. "Gord! He's got shoulders on him," thought Dick to himself.

Basil Strode extended his arms once or twice, felt the warm glow all over him, and then picked his way gingerly over the stones of the ruined cottage until he passed out of sight. The requisite eighth of a chance had come, and Double Dick recognized it. The parson had apparently gone stark staring mad, but this hardly interested Dick. He was interested in revenge, and in clothes and methods of procuring them—good clothes with good things in their pockets, such as a watch and chain, a cigarette-case, a match-box, a sovereign-case, all of precious metal. And the sound as the garments had been flung down had shown Dick that there was plenty of loose silver in the right-hand pocket of the trousers. With extreme care and skill Dick began to reconnoiter.

He located his enemy lying at full length on a couch of moss and wild thyme, his eyes fixed on the little clouds that voyaged slowly across the blue. And presently the eyelids flickered and then closed.

Double Dick moved now with a speed and activity that would have astonished any of his previous employers.

Basil Strode had not actually slept, but he recognized that he was becoming very drowsy. He had had at least half an hour of his sun-bath, and had enjoyed it more than he had thought possible. He seemed possessed of new vigor. His skin felt fresh and clean. But the heaviness and stickiness of clothes were to be endured again. Only he promised himself that this should not be the last time. He would return here again, and bathe in the sun again. And—yes—he would admit to Dalston that there were gleams of reason in his madness.

He made his way back to the cottage. And there he stood erect, and stared. There was no mistake about it. His clothes had gone; not so much as a shoe-lace was left. All had been stolen. He was as one newly come into the world, for—the phrase came back to him—one brought nothing into the world. The thief might be a mile away, in any direction, and pursuit was hopeless.

Rage passed and dismay followed. If it ever became public knowledge that he had been in this predicament, his career was ended. He saw in imagination a congregation with lips twitching in suppressed mirth as he passed up the aisle, and he wilted under it. He must think, and quickly.

The first thought that occurred to him was not hopeful. If it had happened on the seashore, there would have been less risk of his appearing utterly ridiculous, though a parson without even a bathing-suit would have to be discreet, even then, in his search for help. But, on the seashore, if he could have concealed himself until it was possible to accost some lonely male and explain his predicament, it would have appeared as a more or less normal disaster of the bathing season. The seashore almost seemed to clothe you. It was a very different thing—a dreadful predicament—to be running about naked, in the open country, miles from the sea. It was especially dreadful on the downs, where there were no hedges, and he could be seen for miles if he emerged from his hiding-place. He might have crawled along a hedge, if it had existed, and popped his head up, at the right moment, to ask a suitable passer-by for help. But there was no chance of any such discreet approach here. If he wanted help on the downs he must be blatant and unashamed. The coast seemed to be his only hope, if he could reach it and find that lonely male. They were usually paired off, appallingly so, at Helmstone, in the summer. Still, he might attract the attention of the coast-guard.

Unfortunately, the nearest point of coast was at least two miles away, and the main road, with a constant stream of motorcars, conveying silk-stockinged maidens to and fro, ran parallel with the coast and was an insuperable barrier by daylight. Moreover, there were footpaths over the downs, along which lovers wandered at dusk. He might even run into the picnic party—Mrs. Camp, Miss Bird, and the rest. What an anticlimax to the heroic affair of this afternoon! He could imagine the chuckle of Major Bongline. Still, the coast seemed the best, although he would have to wait till after dark.

And on the heels of dismay came determination. There was no situation so desperate that the will of man might not deal with it. The friendly night would come and bring counsel. He would think out a way. In a few hours, at worst, workers and wanderers would have gone home, and he might venture forth to explore. Quite near, some favoring chance might wait him. If only nobody knew—if only the secret was kept and his dignity with it—then the loss of his clothes and valuables was as nothing.

He was about to settle down for the necessary period of waiting, when, a few yards away from his crumbling wall, he observed a bright patch under a gorse-bush. A wild momentary hope flashed upon him. Could any of his clothes have been dropped there by the thief in the hurry of his flight? He must take the risk of leaving his hiding-place and find out, at once.

He scanned the line of the downs against the sky. There was nobody in sight, but one had to be careful, in these days, of field-glasses, and someone might crest the ridge at any moment. He hastily scurried out on all fours to the gorse-bush, and was petrified with disappointment. The bright patch was no more than the book of new verse in the flamboyant boards. The title, "Leap-Frog," in large red letters seemed to leer at him mockingly as he crouched on his hands and knees staring at it. The thief was no critic, perhaps, but he had undoubtedly dropped it there, and it was all that he had dropped. Basil Strode crawled twice round the gorse-bush to make quite sure. He peered anxiously into its withered heart. There was nothing else—nothing. So he scurried into the shelter of his ruined walls, taking the forlorn relic of his modernity with him. He had a hiding-place, at least, and sunlight, and the book would perhaps distract his thoughts till the dusk came, and he could really do something. It was not till he settled down in a well-screened corner and began to turn the pages that the irony of his discovery seemed to annoy him.

But he was saved from considerable anxiety for the moment by giving his attention to it; for he had no sooner begun to examine the verses than three young women of Helmstone surmounted the distant ridge called Little Barn Down, and advanced gaily towards the ruined cottage, which lay directly between them and the village. All three of them sang in the choir like nightingales, and chattered in the village like magpies. Even if he had known of their approach, he could have done nothing, unless he bolted across the open country in full view. He had already chosen the best-concealed corner of his ruin, unless he preferred to crawl into the tall grass, of which several great clumps whispered near him. It was just as well, therefore, that he should be spared five minutes of mental torture; and that, as the village girls came down the slope with their baskets of blue cornflowers and poppies, the unfortunate curate should be reposing his snowy limbs on a sunlit bed of bracken, and devoting his attention to the solemn pages of "Leap-Frog."

One section of the book was entitled "Locked Bedrooms." It contained a "Pink Room," a "Yellow Room" and a "Blue Room"—one poem to each. Basil tried the Pink Room first. It went thus:

Pink sandals and pink feet

Pink columbines that fleet

With fluffy muslin cries

Like twittering butterflies

Through flowers that croon and bleat,

Because the cricket said,

Harlequin is dead.

My stockings once were pink.

Let all the ladders rip!

Let tears, like candles, drip!

My heart's a skating rink

Where gnats go round and round,

Like spelling-bees in hell,

Making a grass-green sound,

Since the gray cricket said

(What is that pale blue smell?) Harlequin is dead.

"It eludes—it certainly eludes one," Basil thought, "but in circumstances that make concentration so difficult"—he delivered a blow with his book at a wasp that seemed to be obsessed with a desire to settle on his unprotected body—"it would be unfair to say that there is nothing to seize in these poems, eccentric as they appear at first sight. Hasn't a famous critic said that even Shakespeare was probably thought to be mad by the conventional persons of his day, when he used phrases like 'the whips and scorns of time'? We must remember how Debussy was misunderstood. One does catch glimpses, in spite of Dalston—"

The young women were considerably nearer now. If a skylark had not been singing madly overhead, Basil would probably have caught some of their chatter.

He turned a page and read "The Yellow Room."

The Princess lolls at ease,

Among forgotten sins,

A dragon clasps her knees,

A Queen with forty chins,

Looks down at her. Chinese.

The bed is like a bun,

(So full of little crumbs

That she can never sleep).

The kettle hums and hums.

And hums. Uriah Heep.

O humming-bird of brass,

Where have we met before?

The sunset, like an ass,

Neighs through the open door.

What of her eyeballs? Glass.

Nebuchadnezzar knew

Those chins in other days.

The Fourth Dimension, too,

Is bulging through her stays.

Where did we meet? The Zoo.

Basil felt vaguely irritated.

"This really does not seem very helpful," he thought; but, as there was nothing else to do for the moment, he turned to the "Blue Room."

Arabesque is the theme of the Blue Room.

One white star in the water jug

Kisses the nose of the lapping pug.

He curls through the scheme of the Blue Room.

His rose-leaf tongue in a fat black dream,

Licks that mirrored star like cream.

The hair-brushes gleam in the Blue Room.

Meek silver brushes for big, bald brows,

The Colonel snores and dreams of cows.

Arabesque is the dream of the Blue Room.

But wide awake, at the Colonel's side,

Croons mad Jemima, his rice-faced bride.

And blinks at the moon in the Blue Room.

She lies and blinks with her skinny feet

Twittering over the Polar sheet.

Jews flow like a stream through the Blue Room.

They brush their beards with her silver brushes.

They fade like ghosts through the gooseberry bushes.

Their dark eyes gleam in the Blue Room.

Over the housetops flitters the bat

Kee-kweeking, "Babylon town lies flat."

There's a big black beam in the Blue Room.

Babylon's gone, and Helen of Troy!

But Jemima waits for the gardener's boy.

Things aren't what they seem in the Blue Room.

Her father, the Duke, though his health is poor,

Watches all night for her paramour.

He gapes like a bream at the Blue Room.

All night long in his water-proof,

He clings with his nails to the slippery roof.

Like a Demon over the Blue Room.

But his exquisite Chinese nails, alack,

Are a manicured decalogue, bending back,

As he slips, slips over the Blue Room.

Like a Gaga Gargoyle, crack! He is gone!

Slap over the edge—to Babylon!

Right over the eaves of the Blue Room.

Bang on the head of the gardener's boy

And sends him home—to Helen of Troy!

There's a long white scream from the Blue Room.

And the Colonel snores, but Jemima lies

With fifteen Helens in her eyes,

And her twittering feet in the Blue Room.

And each of her toes, like the key of a spinet

Chirrups as wild as a love-sick linnet.

For the gardener's boy in the Blue Room.

Till the moon grows blue, and the sheet grows blue,

And her feet grow blue in the blueness, too.

Blue, blue as the theme of the Blue Room.

"Really," the Reverend Basil Strode muttered to himself aloud, "this book may be unconventional, but for a man bereft of all his clothes, it is rather a White Elephant."

He closed the book, and thought for a moment. Locked Bedrooms, indeed! He had a vision of his own comfortable bedroom—the can of hot water waiting for him, the towel neatly folded over the top. In the sitting-room below, the table was laid for tea. The silver urn was hissing. There was honey in the comb and brown bread—

What on earth was he to do? With an exclamation that sounded far from clerical (sounded, in fact, almost like Dalston) he suddenly flung "Leap-Frog" right over the farther wall of his hiding-place. He would not have confessed it to Dalston; but, aided by the sudden shock of this predicament, the ruffian had already conquered on the question of "bug-house poetry."

What was the next? he asked himself a little acidly. He was to study a small bug in the grass, was he? and get what Dalston called religion. For a moment he had an eery sense of having been taken by the scruff of the neck (almost as he had taken Double Dick) and being compelled, for his own good, to do all kinds of things that he did not like; an eery sense, too, of being watched, through the great blue lens of the sky, by a Gargantuan humorist. He felt like (what did Sartor call the naked biped?) a little forked radish, running about under an immense microscope. Rubbish! There was nothing for it! He would get up like a man, and stride across the downs, and explain his plight to the first person he met—

He actually rose to his feet with that intention when, to his horror, he heard silvery feminine voices—three of them—all talking at once, passing behind the biggest wall of his ruin. Instantly he flung himself down, and crawled like a snake into the thickest and tallest clump of grass.

He recognized the voices. One of them belonged to Laura Smith, the daughter of a churchwarden, a peppery little upholder of the proprieties, who had recently been agitating the local council with purple-faced protests against the visitors who walked through the village street in their bathing-suits. The three voices were obviously discussing the matter.

"Of course," said Laura Smith, "we mustn't be too conventional." (Basil winced in his hiding-place.) "I don't believe in being very Victorian, and all that. But if you give them an inch, as father says, you've got to give them an ell, and you don't know what they'll be doing next."

"I think he's quite right. It's time somebody stood up for decency," replied the vicar's nursery governess. "I say, Laura, let's explore the ruined cottage. Somebody told me the old man who lived here used to hide his money away in all sorts of odd corners. We might find something. Come on. Let's have a treasure-hunt."

The curate's veins curdled. He didn't feel at all like buried treasure; though, if he were discovered, the story would all too certainly be what these creatures would call "priceless."

"No, come along. We shall be late for tea. We're late already," called the daughter of the leading local dissenter, and to Basil's infinite relief the advice was taken. The footsteps thudded into silence over the turf, and in half a minute the chatter had died away in the distance also. But five minutes had passed before Basil's heart resumed its normal beat. The narrow escape had brought his predicament home to him. It was madness to think of emerging in daylight if he was to remain at Helmstone. He must think, think, think of what exactly he was to do when the friendly dark arrived with what he hoped would be his opportunity. This was a matter in which he could not waive the difficulties in his usual manner. There might be very great difficulties—even after dark. He could foresee that. He was not debating the conventions with Miss Bird now. He must concentrate. He must think.