Читать книгу Undertow - Arthur Hamilton Gibbs - Страница 9

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The interior of the Old Brown Cosey lived up to its Elizabethan exterior. Downstairs, under the beamed ceiling, was devoted to the sale of buns, cakes, jars of marmalade and honey; and was fragrant with the whetting smell of freshly baked bread. In the far corner a broad winding staircase led up into the tea room, oak-panelled, discreetly dim, arranged in many corners and cubicles. The windows were hung with chintz. The walls had here and there an antique sporting print. The red gleam of well-polished copper lit up the wide mantelpiece above the open fireplace. Each table had its glowing bowl of flowers; and one, against the wall, was covered with all the weekly and monthly magazines. The two girls who “waited” wore old-fashioned caps and aprons. A large black cat, sleek and well fed, moved delicately beneath the tables, or, curled on a chair, received homage with indifferent eyes.

Little by little the reputation of the place had gone beyond the boundaries of Uxminster. Passing motorists, on their way to and from London, had discovered it as an excellent spot at which to pause and get a bite. American families stepped immediately to the other side of the street and took its photograph, only to discover when they went inside that there were free postcards of it obtainable. Hundreds of these had been mailed to Boston, New York, and points west.

When Millicent came up the stairs that afternoon a few minutes before four-fifteen, there were already one or two couples having tea. She had not been there before, and as she stood, hesitating, a waitress came up with a smiling “Good afternoon!”

“Good afternoon,” said Millicent. “I’m waiting for ...” What should she say? Mr. Jocelyn? Perhaps they didn’t know him. A friend? She could hardly call him that.... There was only the slightest pause before she ended up her sentence lamely with the word “someone.”

The waitress nodded. “Then perhaps you’d like to sit down by the fire,” she said. “You’ll find chairs there.”

“Thank you,” said Millicent. What a fool she was not to have come later. With hot cheeks she went over to the chairs by the fire and picked up the first magazine. She didn’t read it however. Once seated, the chair became, in a sense, hers. She was immediately less conspicuous and therefore more at ease. She opened the magazine on her lap and, after a moment, let her eyes venture on a voyage of exploration around the room, broken at each new sound by a recall to the stairway.

It was little more than a minute or so before he came leaping up, two stairs at a time. He saw her almost before his hand had left the banister and he smiled as he went across the room. “How nice of you!” he said. “I hope I haven’t kept you waiting?”

Millicent rose, shaking her head. “I barely had time to sit down before I heard you on the stairs.”

“I should have been here at least five minutes ago,” said Philip, “if I hadn’t happened to run into the Headmaster just as I was leaving, and he insisted on talking.”

“Yes, I know,” said Millicent. “Things like that always happen just when you don’t want them to, don’t they? But you’re not really late, at all. I was early.”

As they stood there looking at each other, a sense of frustration came over Philip. It seemed to him that a fog of inanity was settling down upon them. Neither he nor she had come for that. They had come, indeed, to escape that, to embark together on a voyage of mutual discovery. What did “late” or “early” matter? What was the point of being rooted like a couple of idiots, mouthing imbecilities? “Well,” he said quickly, almost angrily, “here we are, anyhow. Let’s choose a table.... Would you like this one near the fire?”

The place that he indicated was a recess for two made by putting a couple of high-backed pews with cushioned seats at right angles to the wall. By sitting against the wall the cheery crackle of the fire would throw a glow on their faces. It was almost like being in a tiny room with the fourth wall down.

Wondering a little at his sudden gruffness, Millicent smiled. “I hoped you’d pick that one,” she said. “My idea of luxury had always been to have a log fire,—just to sit and watch it burn.” She took off her overcoat and dropped it on the pew seat, edged around the table and sat down facing the fire.

“She’s wearing the same hat that she had in church,” thought Philip. “It’s nice, but it’d be so infinitely more in the picture if she’d take it off. That jolly wave in her hair.... I wonder if I dare ask her....” He dropped his overcoat on top of hers and placed himself at right angles to her, so that he could look at her when she talked. “Aren’t you ...” Good lord, why shouldn’t he ask her? “Aren’t you going to take your hat off?”

Millicent’s eyebrows went up. “My hat?” she echoed. “Why on earth should I? Don’t you like it?”

“Yes, I like it awfully,” said Philip, “but I ...” He groped desperately in his pocket for his cigarette case ... “I thought you’d be more comfortable, that’s all.” You coward, he said to himself. You colossal ass!

Millicent’s eyes fastened upon him interrogatively. Could it be that ... Her eyes changed their expression. After a breath of hesitation she pulled off the hat with a quick gesture, shook her head so that the curls became loosened, and then patted them with both hands. “There!” she said. “Do you like that better?”

As Philip looked up and saw what she was doing, his face lighted. “I hoped you would!” he said. “It makes all the difference really. With your hat on, it was so ... so formal, somehow. And besides, your hair ... Er, won’t you have a cigarette?”

Millicent ignored the case he held out to her. She tried to meet his eyes and failed, dropped hers and asked, “What about my hair?”

Philip took a deep breath and made the plunge. “Well, if you must know,” he said, “I think it’s perfectly lovely. It’s so absolutely alive, so soft and deep. When you touch it with those white hands of yours, they seem to disappear in it and ...” He broke off, seeing her cheeks begin to flame. “Good lord, I hope I ...”

With a catch in her throat, Millicent interrupted. “No, don’t unsay it. You ... you surprised me, that’s all.”

Philip’s confusion was as great as hers. He turned away, leaned out of their recess and began peering in all directions. “Where on earth is that confounded waitress?” he muttered. “Does she think we don’t want any tea? ... Ah, here she comes!”

As though the waitress were an ally bringing overwhelming numbers to cover his retreat, he turned and faced Millicent once more,—to become immediately aware that their relationship was on a wholly different plane from the sterile moment of their meeting. In these brief minutes they had established an identity: they already had, as it were, a past,—the link, the memory, of a shared emotion. To his own surprise, the confusion began to ebb out of him. He felt comfortable with her, a warming sense of familiarity.

He laughed. “They have the most succulent toasted buns here,” he said. “Don’t you think this is just the moment?”

Millicent smiled back. “Nothing else would taste quite so good.” She took his cigarette case in her hand, held it for a moment studying his initials engraved in the corner, and then extracted a cigarette. “This looks as if it had seen service,” she said.

Philip struck a match for her. “Rather! My father gave it to me on my twenty-first birthday. I’ve used it ever since.”

The waitress appeared at his elbow with a tray on which were tea, sugar, cream and cups. She laid it in front of Millicent and said, “What would you like to eat?”

“Toasted buns, please,” said Millicent.

As the girl departed, Philip’s eyes were still smiling, at ease. “By Jove,” he said, “I maligned her. I thought she’d forgotten all about us.”

Millicent took the large teapot in both hands. “How do you like your tea, Mr. Jocelyn?”

Mr. Jocelyn! ... damn it. It put it all back again on an Uxminster footing,—“at home first and third Wednesdays”, suburbia rampant! Much better have called him nothing at all, simply said “How do you like your tea?” ... She was waiting, the pot poised. “Oh, excuse me,” he said. “Strong, one sugar and lots of milk, please.” As he watched her pour it, he went back to his thought. Mr. Jocelyn ... Miss Sampson,—how futile! He didn’t think of her as Miss Sampson. He thought of her as “you” or “she.” That “Mr.” was like a barbed-wire fence. Everywhere you turned there was always another one of those damned contraptions to rip you.... Surely they didn’t need to rip each other. Perhaps, if he pointed it out to her, she’d be willing to pull it down ... like her hat.... “Thanks most awfully,” he said, taking the teacup she held out to him. To take a teacup from a woman! How ordinary a gesture it sounded. And yet it was a miracle, a respite from isolation, from hardness and indifference. It implied gentleness, not barbed wire. It carried with it the suggestion of a grand piano with music on it, of soft lights and an armchair, of familiar rooms upstairs, of sounds in the background that required no translation because their regularity had made them a part of one’s fiber, impregnated with mutual knowledge and growth.... He looked up at her as he stirred his tea. The fire was sending gleams through her hair.

“Do you know,” he said, “I’ve got a strong feeling that this is really about the millionth cup of tea you’ve handed me, instead of the first? I suppose it’s got something to do with what they call race-memory,—you know, a sort of projection of an habitual gesture of all one’s ancestors from one’s subconscious into the present moment; but still entirely personal to you and me. And yet, the odd thing about it is the helplessness of it all, the feeling that it is all entirely out of our control. What I mean is that for the last ten years I’ve been vegetating here, and you, presumably were in Winchester. Until yesterday you and I were unaware of each others existence; and now here we are this afternoon together as if the rest of the world didn’t exist.... What made me ask you to tea? And what made you come? And, more importantly still, even if you don’t know the answer, are you glad you did come?”

Millicent leaned back with a laugh. “You really are a most extraordinary person!” she said. “You ask a girl to tea, tell her she has lovely hair, then say you don’t know why you asked her, and on top of that demand to know if she’s glad she came! I begin to see why my uncle said you were not a bit like the other masters at the school.”

A frown came over Philip Jocelyn’s face. To be reminded of the school at such a moment! Was the girl completely out of key?

Millicent saw the change in his expression. She went on quickly. “I can answer your last question though. I am glad I came!”

“Good!” said Philip. “All the other things don’t really matter.” He drank his tea in two gulps and held the cup and saucer out. “May I have some more? Heavens, here are the buns and we’re letting them get cold. I didn’t even notice that the girl had brought them. Let me pour the tea while you eat.”

“I don’t think you’re to be trusted with a teapot,” said Millicent. “You’d spill it all over the tray.”

Philip laughed. “If you could see me negotiating cocoa on a spirit lamp in my room any time after midnight, you’d have to take that back.”

“After midnight?”

“Rather!” said Philip. “That’s the best time of the day, the only time I get to myself. You see, I have to correct the boys’ work after dinner and that takes me till about ten. From that time on I cease to be a nursemaid. I can think what I like, write what I like, read what I like,—and cook cocoa at any hour I like. You’re a night bird too, of course?”

Millicent shook her head as she handed back the cup refilled. “If I weren’t fast asleep by eleven every night, I should do nothing but yawn all next day.”

“Oh? ... Really?” Once more that sense of jolt. It was strange how they seemed to get along swimmingly for a while and then, suddenly—flop! Like a plane going into an air pocket. Was it because they were just beginning to find out about each other, and therefore the flops seemed to be emphasized, or was it something more basic? ... No, that was absurd, out of all proportion. Besides, if there were flops, they were more than compensated by her ... how should he put it? ... by the sheer magic of womanhood,—the droop of her body, the curve of her throat that had all the softness of velvet.... Books were an anodyne, a release to the soul. They took you out on wings, gave you the freedom of all cities. But in comparison with this, they were merely the residue of some one else’s experience, largesse to the mob. This was your own, most privately your own, and every time she touched her hair or smoothed down her skirt with those white hands gave you something that no book could give,—a feeling of wonder, almost of awe, of impending spaciousness and depth, of being touched for a moment by life....

Her laugh, rather oddly pitched, broke in on his thoughts. “May I have one more cigarette while you finish your dream? Then I must go.”

Philip came to with a start. “Cigarette? Oh, good idea.” He began to grope in his pockets for the cigarette case.

“It’s on the table,” said Millicent shortly.

“Oh, of course,” said Philip. “Here!”

Millicent’s eyebrows went up. “Do you often get ... bored like that?”

“Bored?” Philip blinked with surprise. “What on earth do you mean?”

Her only answer was to pick up her hat and pull it on, extinguishing her hair. Then she reached out for her coat.

Every gesture made it all too clear that he had offended her, piqued her small vanity. He wanted to laugh, because it was ridiculous, because she was so far from understanding. He wanted to tell her so, roughly; but some inner need took fright and drove him leaping in. “Oh, please!” he said. “Don’t go! I’m most awfully sorry I went off like that. It shows you what an ass I am. But I ... I took you with me ... really! I was thinking about you, all sorts of things about you. Won’t you put down your coat and give me just one more cigarette?”

For a definite moment the muscles of her arm remained rigid,—a moment which stretched itself out before them like a fork in the road. And again an inner prompting made Philip speak. “It’ll mean so much,” he said, wondering at his own voice, at the choice of words which was not his.

Visibly the hard arm became soft, dropped away from the coat and relaxed at her side, palm upward upon the leather seat.

For two pounding heartbeats Philip remained staring at that submissive hand, struggling to call back his imagination which went leaping ahead. “Very well,” said Millicent. “You shall have your one cigarette.”

He looked up quickly. She was smiling at him,—as though she hadn’t been annoyed at all, as though it was just a trick. Damn it, was it a trick? Ought he to get angry and tick her off? ... His eyes became caught at her throat. He nodded, almost humbly, and said, “Thank you!”