Читать книгу The Strange Vanguard - Arnold Bennett - Страница 6

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They climbed up one storey and leaned speculatively side by side against the rail of the main-deck. The boat-deck, with the bridge and the captain’s quarters, was above them. The warm Neapolitan gloom, relieved now by only a lamp or so at the ends of the long deck, wrapped them softly round about. Not an officer, not a deck-hand to be seen. And nothing to be heard save the faint murmur of vibration ascending monotonously from the depths of the ship. A ship of mystery, enfolded in the magic influences of the universal enigma—and those banal idiots were all sweltering in a room downstairs, watching a film!

“I say,” said Mr. Sutherland, “you might tell me your name?”

He was aware of agreeable sensations. She was elegant, she was intelligent. He had made some progress with her during dinner—and she with him.

“Harriet Perkins.”

“Thank you.”

“Do you mean to say you didn’t know?”

“How should I? I never speak to anyone in hotels.”

“And quite right too! If you do, you may find yourself glued to a bore for the rest of your stay before you know where you are. What’s yours?”

“My what? Christian name?”

“Of course not,” she laughed. “Your size in gloves.”

“Septimius.”

She turned a glance on him and clapped her hands.

“I’ve won five hundred pounds,” she said.

“A bet?”

“Yes. But only with myself.”

“Oh!”

“I always knew you were the man in the City. You are, aren’t you? There couldn’t be two Septimius Sutherlands, could there?”

“No. I am in the City.”

“Everybody knows about you—except people who stay in hotels. How thrilling!”

He was flattered, and somewhat surprised.

“Then do you read about company meetings?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said. “And I read prospectuses and things.”

“Well, well!”

“I only read them for fun, like divorce reports. You like divorce reports, don’t you?”

“Oh, of course!” he admitted bluntly.

What he especially liked in the composition of Harriet Perkins was that you could talk to her as to a man. In his simplicity he had not grasped, or he had forgotten, that the first care of every young woman of the world is to be talked to as a man. The desire to be talked to as a woman comes later. Long ago, what he had liked in the composition of the delicious, maddeningly feminine creature who afterwards became Mrs. Sutherland was that he could talk to her as to a man. And it had not yet occurred to him that his daughters were constantly endeavouring to get themselves talked to as men by men.

“Some dinner!” said Miss Perkins reflectively.

“Yes,” Septimius agreed. “And it was a rather wonderful effort in organization, that dinner was! Thirty people, I suppose.”

“Twenty-three,” Harriet casually corrected him.

“Oh!” Septimius was a little disturbed by his error of thirty per cent. in a computation. “Well, twenty-three, then. It would be reckoned a biggish dinner in any household, wouldn’t it?”

“It certainly would!” Harriet eagerly assented.

“And considering that our friend the Count must have sprung it on his staff at a moment’s notice! Why, I understand that at seven o’clock nothing was known of any trouble in the hotel kitchens. And there couldn’t have been twenty minutes between our deciding to accept his invitation and our arrival on board, and when we got here everything was ready. I’ve always been interested in questions of organization, and I must say that to-night’s affair is one of the finest examples of sheer, rapid organization I’ve yet come across.”

“Have you ever had to organize a big dinner yourself?” Harriet suddenly demanded. She spoke cautiously, with respect, as though careful not to assume that he had not personally organized big dinners.

“I can’t say I have.”

“Because, if you had,” she proceeded, with less respect now, “you’d know for certain that a big dinner like to-night’s simply cannot be improvised in twenty minutes. Why, the soup we had would take at least half a day to prepare.”

“Would it!”

“It would.” Dogmatically.

“Do you realize, my dear Miss Perkins, that it follows logically from such a statement—I don’t dispute the statement for a moment—that the dinner was not improvised, that in fact it must have been all carefully prepared beforehand?”

“I realize it all right,” Harriet answered quietly.

“She’s no ordinary girl, and I knew she wasn’t,” said Mr. Sutherland to himself. And aloud: “Then how do you explain the matter?”

“I don’t explain it,” Miss Perkins dreamily murmured; then added with more liveliness: “The situation can’t be explained till it’s been explored. Suppose we explore the yacht a bit, shall we? Your idea, you know.”