Читать книгу The Woman Who Stole Everything and Other Stories - Arnold Bennett - Страница 6
ОглавлениеCANDER
Kearns left the train the next afternoon at Cander. It was a train crowded with passengers for a large seaside resort which lay at the river’s mouth twelve miles farther on. Kearns had spent an hour and three-quarters with two middle-aged men and a young one, and two gaudy, respectable, youngish women, one of whom was continually sighing about the heat and gazing anxiously at her face in a tiny mirror and powdering her nose or rouging her lips; while the other passed the time in half-heartedly trying to keep a pink cotton skirt below her knees.
Bags of golf-clubs, suit-cases, and hat-boxes littered the racks. The talk was of golf, tennis, hotels, food, revues, royalty, parties, and the dangerous folly of French politicians and of idle, grasping, misled British working-men; seasoned with dry giggles about suspected fornications.
Kearns had said nothing, but he was interested, even diverted. In the back of his mind dwelt Cora and Nick, but especially Cora; the compartment seemed to him to be an extension of the world which, according to Nick, was Cora’s favourite world.
He stepped down on to the sunlit platform, despatch-case in hand, and the next moment the train pulled out, having casually remembered and disdainfully forgotten Cander within the space of a few seconds.... The huge train was a spot on the distance; it vanished into the black orifice of a tunnel under the downs; it was silenced.
Two people gave up tickets to a red-cravated porter at the wicket. Kearns stood alone on the long, empty, glaring platform, and saw his two trunks lying on the springy asphalt of the platform forty yards off; the trunks were as solitary as himself. By magic the world of the compartment had given place to another world—of placid, sunstruck solitude. He looked up and saw the lace curtains of the station-master’s bedroom, which it was the life-work of the station-master’s wife to maintain in whiteness against the attacks of flying engine-soot. He saw the old station-master, who after thirty years of incessant attention to business had arrived at five pounds a week and a gold-braided authoritative cap. The station-master, connecting Kearns with the two trunks, waited uncertainly hovering, and in due course received a request from Kearns that the luggage should be sent by the carrier to “Pomegranates” in the village. The station-master, at the name of the house, recognised Kearns, whom his blinking eyes had seen only once before.
Kearns left the station and strode down the approach-road to the bridge which carried the railway over the highway. The village was a mile off; the station stood where it did, at the crossing of the main line and the highway to the sea, because it would have been accessible nowhere else; the villagers and visitors had to accept the mile with good grace. Kearns could just see the antique walls of Cander Castle beyond a mound of the landscape. In front of him was the old bridge which carried the highway over the tidal stream—whose name certainly ought to have been Meander, for it flowed for thirty miles to reach what the crow would reach in a dozen. The tide was slowly bearing rushes and seaweed northwards, and in a few hours it would be slowly bearing them southwards again, through the immense hayfield flats which once had been a sea-floor. A sign over a wooden shed said “Tea and boats”; but the shed seemed to be deserted, and the boats were moored cushionless in a row under the grassy bank. Two young persons lounged on the old bridge. The public-house, calling itself a hotel, lay under the burning sun as enchanted as the whole countryside. And not a vehicle on the road, while every avenue out of London was blocked with tens of thousands of motors! Henry Kearns set off to cover the rolling mile.
To the south, protecting the road from all the sea-winds except the prevailing south-west, rose the great green rampart of the downs, on whose lower slopes the wheat was turning. Kearns walked and walked, up one hill and down another, and walked and walked, wishing that he had had the trustfulness to confide his despatch-case also to the carrier. No shade anywhere. An enormous char-à-banc, roofed in summer hats, glided past him with the smoothness of a train; it was closely followed by six others. Then a small car rushed to meet him. Then solitude once more, and silence.
Then he descried the running white figures of cricketers. He stopped at the recreation ground (not styled the village green) to watch cricket over the hedge. On benches round the field sat the villagers, including mothers of families. In one corner were swings on which families were swinging. In another corner was a tennis-court; but at Cander cricket was still the premier game, and during a cricket match tennis might not be played. On the other hand, as Kearns had heard, tennis was lawful on Sundays, whereas the spectacle of cricket on Sundays would have raised a riot of outraged villagers. A middle stump flew out of the ground! Clapping! The bowler wore black trousers.
“ ’E’s been bowling for Cander for thirty years,” said a man in the way of gossip to Kearns, over the hedge, proudly. “ ’E’s one of the old uns.”
Kearns smiled and nodded.
“What a world!” thought Kearns. “Nothing changes in it.”
He was forgetting the tennis-court, absorbed as he was in the drama of the contrast between this world and the world which he had left in London and in the train.
Unwillingly he moved on towards the village.
Cander was one of the show villages of Sussex. Rapturous sightseers said that every cottage in it had a genuine old thatched roof: a statement about half true; half the cottages were thatched, with far-projecting eaves, and quite a dozen dated back five centuries; they had survived intact revolutions and civil wars and subtler national changes. The general aspect of the place was incredibly picturesque, and, in the way of picturesqueness, beautiful. Externally, it well exemplified the conventional dreams of an American tourist concerning rural England. But Henry Kearns had once inspected the interiors of two of the cottages, and been positively shocked by their twilit gloom, due to the overhanging eaves and the smallness of the dormers and the casemented windows, by the lowness of the bent ceilings and the narrowness of the stairs, by the stuffiness, and by the absence of water.
The few shops specialised in picture-postcards, candles, lamp-oil and rat poison. Rats, indeed, were the chief and dominant inhabitants of the village. They bred as fast as unlimited bane could kill them. The night was theirs; in the night they scuttered across floors and beds and cots; they dragged clothing to and fro; they disported themselves under the hedges in the road; they made meals of poison; morning saw their dead bodies in hundreds; and the next night they were as rampant and voracious as ever. Kearns had heard that only two houses in the village were rat-free, the huge vicarage and his own. A great ruling race!
Unrecognised and scarcely saluted, Kearns passed slowly up the street under a blazing afternoon sun, amid playing, shrieking children, with flowery gardens and creeper-covered, ancient, half-timbered walls on either side. Insecure aerials were multiplying over the roofs; the villagers had growing contact with the world they had never seen and never would see, and when they chose could plainly hear Savoy Bands, excerpts from Die Walküre or Don Giovanni, or lectures upon the North Pole, or the manufacture of costly perfumes at Grasse. None could say that civilisation was not marching on.
He came to his own house, “The Pomegranates.” It was the largest in the village. Built by an American family in discreet, tasteful imitation of the picturesque-antique, it had a lovely tiled roof, many dormers and casements, a wrought-iron lantern above the front-door, copied precisely from a lantern in a Florentine palazzo, and a wonderful shoe-scraper to match. It stood back a dozen feet from the road, and the intervening space was populated with lilies in bloom. It had an artesian well, an electric-light plant, telephone-wires, a garage, a dovecot with real doves; but no aerial. Its windows were exquisitely curtained, and through the withdrawn curtains could be seen glimpses of artistic lamp-shades, “period” furniture, and old china.
Henry had bought the house complete with everything in it at a very low price, because the Americans were tired of it and a couple of thousand pounds more or less was naught to them. The Americans, it was said, had a palazzo in Rome, where they always wintered, continually improving and refining their taste in the arts and in the literatures of several nations. For years they had arrived in Gander punctually on the first of July, with a train of Italian servants, who leaned on gates and chatted among themselves in the evenings. And punctually on the thirtieth of September they departed again, having conscientiously spent the summer in ruralising, reading, motoring, and offering perfect meals to friends and acquaintances nearly as cultured as themselves. They had tried in all seriousness, and with a noble lack of humour, to improve and refine the taste of Cander, and—to put it briefly and crudely—they had failed. And so they had abandoned Cander and gone elsewhere to continue their summer lives of ardent self-perfecting and doing themselves extremely well. And Cander had forgotten them as casually and totally as Rome herself would one day forget them.
Kearns had a spasm of horrible misgiving as he walked under the archway which connected his house with his garage. For the first time he was ashamed of his ownership, and perceived the bad taste of it: a change of heart somehow brought about by the interview with his nephew-in-law. But why? How?
Nobody to be seen. True, he had only telegraphed that he would probably arrive some time that afternoon. Through the half-open doors of the garage he saw gleams of the eight-cylinder Packard. Then he was on the first lawn, admirably shaven, with a playing fountain in the middle and flowers all round. Three marble steps down to the second lawn, with an oblong marble-sided pool in the middle! Three marble steps down to the third lawn, netted for tennis. And then, below, the immense view, cunningly framed in foliage, of several miles of the Flats, under hay.
The view was unique; the meandering river, the thin strip of railway, dykes, rush-lined straight ditches intersecting the vast plain, cattle, mowing-machines and hay-wains and horses and men, diminished by the distance into midgets! On the horizon, blue hills of Surrey. It might be Saturday afternoon, but hay was being got, because it had to be got, diligently. A whole flock of children, just like doves, flew across the field eagerly to announce to their fathers the haymakers that they had had their tea and wanted to help in agriculture. The sun shone warmly and implacably on every square foot of the shimmering scene.
“Four bathrooms and central heating!” thought Henry Kearns disconnectedly. Strange man!
He thought he heard far off behind him the hoot of a motor; he took no notice—he was dreaming. Then his ear caught the sound of feet on the hard marble steps. He turned; a young woman in a flowing fawn dust-coat was standing on the steps. She hesitated, appeared to wish to retreat, but with a devil-may-care gesture approached him. A dark, handsome man was following her. As she came nearer he noticed that she was rather agitated and trying, without success, to be easy and natural.
“Uncle!” she cried, in an uncertain, semi-hysterical voice. “I’d no idea——!”
Yes, she was excessively perturbed. The man had stopped.
“Come along!” she called sharply to the man. “This is Uncle Henry Kearns.” And she pecked at Uncle Henry, and Uncle Henry sniffed her strong perfume. This was Cora; in the first moments of her onrush he had hardly recognised her, so altered and matured was she.
