Читать книгу Clayhanger - Arnold Bennett - Страница 35

Thus, when it was announced that father had been called out unexpectedly, leaving an order that they were not to wait for him, she said gaily that they had better be obedient and begin, though it would have been more agreeable to wait for father. And she said how beautiful the tea was, and how beautiful the toast, and how beautiful the strawberry-jam, and how beautiful the pikelets. She would herself pour some hot water into the slop basin, and put a pikelet on a plate thereon, covered, to keep warm for father. She would not hear a word about the toast being a little hard, and when Maggie in her curious quiet way ‘stuck her out’ that the toast was in fact hard, she said that that precise degree of hardness was the degree which she, for herself, preferred. Then she talked of jams, and mentioned gooseberry-jam, whereupon Clara privately put her tongue out, with the quickness of a snake, to signal to Maggie.

“Ours isn’t good this year,” said Maggie.

“I told auntie we weren’t so set up with it, a fortnight ago,” said Clara simply, like a little angel.

“Did you, dear?” Mrs. Hamps exclaimed, with great surprise, almost with shocked surprise. “I’m sure it’s beautiful. I was quite looking forward to tasting it; quite! I know what your gooseberry-jam is.”

“Would you like to try it now?” Maggie suggested. “But we’ve warned you.”

“Oh, I don’t want to trouble you now. We’re all so cosy here. Any time—”

“No trouble, auntie,” said Clara, with her most captivating and innocent smile.

“Well, if you talk about ‘warning’ me, of course I must insist on having some,” said Auntie Clara.

Clara jumped up, passed behind Mrs. Hamps, making a contemptuous face at those curls as she did so, and ran gracefully down to the kitchen.

“Here,” she said crossly to Mrs. Nixon. “A pot of that gooseberry, please. A small one will do. She knows it’s short of sugar, and so she’s determined to try it, just out of spite; and nothing will stop her.”

Clara returned smiling to the tea-table, and Maggie neatly unsealed the jam; and Auntie Clara, with a face beaming with pleasurable anticipation, helped herself circumspectly to a spoonful.

“Beautiful!” she murmured.

“Don’t you think it’s a bit tart?” Maggie asked.

“Oh no!” protestingly.

“Don’t you?” asked Clara, with an air of delighted deferential astonishment.

“Oh no!” Mrs. Hamps repeated. “It’s beautiful!” She did not smack her lips over it, because she would have considered it unladylike to smack her lips, but by less offensive gestures she sought to convey her unbounded pleasure in the jam. “How much sugar did you put in?” she inquired after a while. “Half and half?”

“Yes,” said Maggie.

“They do say gooseberries were a tiny bit sour this year, owing to the weather,” said Mrs. Hamps reflectively.

Clara kicked Edwin under the table, as it were viciously, but her delightful innocent smile, directed vaguely upon Mrs. Hamps, did not relax. Such duplicity passed Edwin’s comprehension; it seemed to him purposeless. Yet he could not quite deny that there might be a certain sting, a certain insinuation, in his auntie’s last remark.