Читать книгу Marivosa - Baroness Orczy - Страница 7

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Timothy O’Clerigh, known to all his pals and his messmates as Tim O’Clee, stood by the open window polishing his boots, and he sang—sang in a full-throated baritone, gloriously out of tune—a song of the old country:

I know not, I ask not

If guilt’s in thy heart...

Tum, tum, tiddlee tum tum...

Then a long pause while the note, a full half-tone flat, rose in an ascending vibrato:

Whatever thou art...

And this last phrase he gave forth so lustily that the full-throated baritone seemed like a detonation out of a gun which went echoing and reverberating across the port and the bay from horn to horn, and away over the purple sea.

‘Listen to him!’ the little barefooted urchins said down below; and they looked up, gaping and wide-eyed, at the open window where a massive torso appeared above the sill, white and glistening from recent ablutions, with two powerful arms, one hand wielding a brush, the other buried inside a boot that had obviously seen many a better day.

Come rest in this boo-zum my own stricken deer....

‘The Englishman,’ was the dry comment made by a dark-skinned shock-headed youth who until this moment had been the centre of admiration of the crowd of street urchins. ‘They are so white—pah! ... always washing themselves ... and they are mad.’

Leaning against the railings, he was busy with a pocket-knife scooping out the inside of a luscious pomegranate, which he then transferred to his mouth. His star performance consisted in spitting out the many pips, some to an incredible distance, by an indrawing and outpouring of the breath: a skill which could obviously only be attained by the elect, and then only after considerable practice.

‘Measure that one,’ he commanded. ‘No, not that one ... the last.’

And obediently one of the young scamps grovelled on the road and with a long stick carefully measured out the distance that lay between the toe of the star performer and the last expectorated pip.

‘Three and a half!’ he gasped, awestruck with the magnitude of the feat.

‘I have done five,’ the star said negligently, and prepared for a repetition of the unheard-of feat.

But somehow the attention of the public had wandered. That mad, shiny, white fellow up there, whose voice rose above the rattle and the squeaking of the tramcar up the street, and who took the trouble on this hot afternoon to do something to his boots with a brush, was a greater, because a more novel attraction.

And now he put down boot and brush, and disappeared within the room, whence repeated sounds of splashing water and indeterminate snatches of song further roused the contempt of the local idol.

‘They must be dirty,’ he said, ‘or they would not wash so often. I don’t like those English.’

One of the urchins, a knowing-looking little chap with small round eyes like a ferret and a sharp uptilted nose, ventured on contradiction.

‘He is not English,’ he said.

‘Not English. I tell you...’

‘Fra Martino says he is Irish.’

‘Irish? What’s that?’

And this time, to mark contempt still more complete and more withering, the star performer expectorated lustily. The next moment a basinful of soapy water drenched his tousled head and soaked through his dun-coloured shirt.

‘I’ll have you know, my young friend,’ came, with a stentorian laugh, from up above in somewhat halting Portuguese, ‘that an Irishman—a real, fine, none-o’-your-mongrel Irishman—is the most magnificent product of God’s creation; and if you don’t believe me, you just come up here and we’ll have an argument about it, which will leave you with eyes so black that your own mother won’t know you.’

Timothy O’Clerigh, with the empty basin in his hands, his face and body glistening with moisture, his brown hair an unruly shock above his laughing face, waited at the window for a moment or two, not really in order to see whether his challenge would be accepted—for he knew it would not—but because he liked to watch the keen, fox-like faces of those little urchins grinning, yet hardly daring to grin, at the discomfiture of their idol.

‘So much for the loyalty of the public,’ he murmured to himself, put the basin down again and proceeded with his toilet.