Читать книгу Buried Alive + The Old Wives' Tale + The Card (3 Classics by Arnold Bennett) - Arnold Bennett - Страница 42

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One night, in the following June, Priam and Alice refrained from going to bed. Alice dozed for an hour or so on the sofa, and Priam read by her side in an easy-chair, and about two o'clock, just before the first beginnings of dawn, they stimulated themselves into a feverish activity beneath the parlour gas. Alice prepared tea, bread-and-butter, and eggs, passing briskly from room to room. Alice also ran upstairs, cast a few more things into a valise and a bag already partially packed, and, locking both receptacles, carried them downstairs. Meantime the whole of Priam's energy was employed in having a bath and in shaving. Blood was shed, as was but natural at that ineffable hour. While Priam consumed the food she had prepared, Alice was continually darting to and fro in the house. At one moment, after an absence, she would come into the parlour with a mouthful of hatpins; at another she would rush out to assure herself that the indispensable keys of the valise and bag with her purse were on the umbrella-stand, where they could not be forgotten. Between her excursions she would drink thirty drops of tea.

"Now, Priam," she said at length, "the water's hot. Haven't you finished? It'll be getting light soon."

"Water hot?" he queried, at a loss.

"Yes," she said. "To wash up these things, of course. You don't suppose I'm going to leave a lot of dirty things in the house, do you? While I'm doing that you might stick labels on the luggage."

"They won't need to be labelled," he argued. "We shall take them with us in the carriage."

"Oh, Priam," she protested, "how tiresome you are!"

"I've travelled more than you have." He tried to laugh.

"Yes, and fine travelling it must have been, too! However, if you don't mind the luggage being lost, I don't."

During this she was collecting the crockery on a tray, with which tray she whizzed out of the room.

In ten minutes, hatted, heavily veiled, and gloved, she cautiously opened the front door and peeped forth into the lamplit street She peered to right and to left. Then she went as far as the gate and peered again.

"Is it all right?" whispered Priam, who was behind her.

"Yes, I think so," she whispered.

Priam came out of the house with the bag in one hand and the valise in the other, a pipe in his mouth, a stick under his arm, and an overcoat on his shoulder. Alice ran up the steps, gazed within the house, pulled the door to silently, and locked it. Then beneath the summer stars she and Priam hastened furtively, as though the luggage had contained swag, up Werter Road towards Oxford Road. When they had turned the corner they felt very much relieved.

They had escaped.

It was their second attempt. The first, made in daylight, had completely failed. Their cab had been followed to Paddington Station by three other cabs containing the representatives and the cameras of three Sunday newspapers. A journalist had deliberately accompanied Priam to the booking office, had heard him ask for two seconds to Weymouth, and had bought a second to Weymouth himself. They had gone to Weymouth, but as within two hours of their arrival Weymouth had become even more impossible than Werter Road, they had ignominiously but wisely come back.

Werter Road had developed into the most celebrated thoroughfare in London. Its photograph had appeared in scores of newspapers, with a cross marking the abode of Priam and Alice. It was beset and infested by journalists of several nationalities from morn till night. Cameras were as common in it as lamp-posts. And a famous descriptive reporter of the Sunday News had got lodgings, at a high figure, exactly opposite No. 29. Priam and Alice could do nothing without publicity. And if it would be an exaggeration to assert, that evening papers appeared with Stop-press News: "5.40. Mrs. Leek went out shopping," the exaggeration would not be very extravagant. For a fortnight Priam had not been beyond the door during daylight. It was Alice who, alarmed by Priam's pallid cheeks and tightened nerves, had devised the plan of flight before the early summer dawn.

They reached East Putney Station, of which the gates were closed, the first workman's train being not yet due. And there they stood. Not another human being was abroad. Only the clock of St. Bude's was faithfully awakening every soul within a radius of two hundred yards each quarter of an hour. Then a porter came and opened the gate--it was still exceedingly early--and Priam booked for Waterloo in triumph.

"Oh," cried Alice, as they mounted the stairs, "I quite forgot to draw up the blinds at the front of the house." And she stopped on the stairs.

"What did you want to draw up the blinds for?"

"If they're down everybody will know instantly that we've gone. Whereas if I--"

She began to descend the stairs.

"Alice!" he said sharply, in a strange voice. The muscles of his white face were drawn.

"What?"

"D--n the blinds. Come along, or upon my soul I'll kill you."

She realized that his nerves were in active insurrection, and that a mere nothing might bring about the fall of the government.

"Oh, very well!" She soothed him by her amiable obedience.

In a quarter of an hour they were safely lost in the wilderness of Waterloo, and the newspaper train bore them off to Bournemouth for a few days' respite.