Читать книгу Alas! A Novel - Broughton Rhoda - Страница 6

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"If you will allow me, I shall have the pleasure of reading aloud to you some passages from 'Mrs. Lirriper's Lodgings,' by Charles Dickens. I do not know much about the book myself, as I have never read it. I dare say that you know more about it than I do; but I am given to understand" (with a glance at the page before him) "that Mrs. Lirriper was a lodging-house-keeper, that she kept lodgings in London. She was a very good sort of woman, I believe" (another hasty glance), "but she sometimes had trouble with her servants. I am told that servants are troublesome sometimes" (a slight nervous laugh, the more nervous because it does not seem to be followed by any echo from the audience). "If you will allow me then, as I say, and if you think it will amuse you, I will read you a little of what she says about these troubles."

The foregoing remarks are uttered in a loud, shy, dogged voice by James Burgoyne to the "Oxford Women's Provident Association." His voice is loud because, being quite unused to public reading, he does not know how to modulate it; it is shy from the same cause of unaccustomedness; it is dogged because he is very much displeased with his present occupation, and has not been successful in concealing that displeasure. When a man runs down to Oxford for a couple of nights, to see how the six years that have passed since he turned his undergraduate back upon the old place have treated her—runs down to a college chum unseen for the same six years—this is certainly not the way in which he expects to spend one of his two evenings.

"I hope you will not mind, Jim"—ominous phrase—the college friend has said; "but I am afraid we shall have to turn out for half an hour after dinner. It is rather a nuisance, particularly as it is such a wet night; but the fact is, I have promised to read to the 'Oxford Women's Provident Association.' Ah, by-the-bye, that is new since you were here—we had no Provident Women in your day!"

"On the other hand, we had a great many improvident men," returns Jim dryly.

"Well, the fact is, my wife is on the committee, and a good deal interested in it, and we give them a sort of entertainment once a month through the winter terms—tea and buns, that kind of thing, sixpence a head; they enjoy it far more than if we gave it them for nothing; and after tea we get people to recite and read and sing to them. I am sure I wish them joy of my reading to-night, for I do not see how I am to make myself audible; I am as hoarse as a crow."

"I know those Oxford colds of old," returns Burgoyne, with that temperate compassion in his voice which we accord to our neighbours' minor diseases. He is sorry that his friend has a cold; but he little knows how much sorrier he will be in the course of the next hour as he adds: "Do not distress yourself about me; I shall be quite happy in your den with a book and a cigarette. Mrs. Brown does not object, does she? And I dare say you will not be very long away."

As he speaks he realizes, with a sort of pang—the pang we pay sometimes to our dead pasts—that, though it is only three hours since he was reunited to his once inseparable Brown, he is already looking forward with relief to the prospect of an hour's freedom from his society—so terribly far apart is it possible to grow in six years. But, before his half-fledged thought has had time to do more than traverse his brain, Brown has broken into it with the eager remonstrances of a mistaken species of hospitality.

"Leave you behind? Could not hear of such a thing! Of course you must come too! It will be a new experience for you; a wholesome change. Ha! ha! and we can talk all the way there and back; we have had no talk worth speaking of yet."

Again it flashes across the other's mind, with the same pensive regret as before, that talk worth speaking of is for ever over between them; but, seeing that further attempts at evasion will seriously hurt the good-natured Brown, he acquiesces, with as fair a grace as he may.

While putting on his own mackintosh, he watches, with a subdued wonder, his friend winding himself into a huge white woollen comforter, and stepping into a pair of goloshes (he had been rather a smart undergraduate in his day), while outside the opened hall door the rain is heard to swish, and the wind to bellow.

"Had not we better have a hansom?" suggests Burgoyne, blinking, as the slant gust sends two or three stinging drops into his eyes.

"A hansom! nonsense!" returns the other, laughing, and with difficulty unfurling an umbrella in the teeth of the blast. "It is all very well for a bloated bachelor like you; but a man whose family is increasing at the rate mine is cannot afford himself such luxuries; come along, you are not sugar or salt."

Burgoyne feels that at this moment he can at all events conscientiously disclaim affinity with the first of the two.

It is indeed a wet night, wet as the one immortalized by Browning in "Christmas Eve and Easter Day;" and who ever brought a wet night and wet umbrellas "wry and flapping" so piercingly home to us as he? The talk so cheerfully promised by Burgoyne's sanguine friend is rendered absolutely impossible by the riot of the elements. It is a good step from the suburban villa, which is the scene of Brown's married joys, to the room in the heart of the town where the Provident Matrons hold their sabbat; and by the time that the two men have reached that room there is, despite his mackintosh, little of Burgoyne left dry except his speech. They are under shelter at last, however, have entered the building, added their umbrellas to many other streaming wrecks of whalebone huddled in a corner, and exchanged the dark blustering drench for a flare of gas, a reek of tea, and a sultry stream of wet clothes and humanity. The tea, indeed, is a thing of the past—all its apparatus has been removed. The rows of chairs are all set to face the platform, and on those chairs the Provident Women sit, smiling, if damp, with here and there a little boy, evidently too wicked to be left at home, comfortably wedged between a couple of matronly figures.

The entertainment has already begun, and an undergraduate—damp, like everyone else—is singing, in a booming bass voice, something of a vaguely boastful nature about what he once did "In Bilboa's Bay." Burgoyne has for the moment lost sight of his chaperon, and remains standing near the door, looking upon the scene around him with an eye from which philanthropy is all too criminally absent. About him are grouped a few ladies and gentlemen—more of the former than the latter—who are obviously about to give their services, judging by their rolls of music and the books in their hands. His look passes over them indifferently—he has no acquaintance among them. He had never known many of the Oxford householders, and there is no place where a man becomes superannuated after so short a lapse of years.

Here are new arrivals. He turns his head mechanically as the opening door reveals the advent of more umbrellaed and mackintoshed waterfalls. Two men and a lady. As his eye alights on the woman, he does not start—we Anglo-Saxons are not apt to make our slow grave bodies the indexes of our emotions—but he is conscious of an odd and puzzling sensation. Where has he seen that face before?

"Bilboa's Bay" has come to an end without his perceiving it. He is putting his memory through her paces, trying to find some niche in his three happy Oxford years in which to place that strangely known yet unknown figure. There is no such niche. It is not an Oxford memory at all. What is it then? An earlier or a later one? His eyebrows are drawn together in the effort of recollection, making him look, if possible, crosser than before, when he is made aware of the return of Brown by finding his arm seized, and his friend's voice—a good deal hoarser even than when they left home—in his ear, "Jim, do you feel inclined to do a very good-natured thing?"

"Not in the least," replies Burgoyne promptly; "if anyone wishes to borrow £5 from me, I should advise him to choose a moment when I am drier about the legs."

Burgoyne has very often stood up to and over his knees in water for hours, watching for ducks among whistling reeds on winter mornings, and never thought himself at all to be pitied; but he is thoroughly vexed now at his moist trousers. Brown, however, is not so easily rebuffed.

"I should be awfully obliged to you," he says croakily; "you would be laying me under a very real obligation if you would——" He stops to cough.

"If I would what?" returns the other curtly, and looking apprehensively at a book which Brown is expanding before his eyes.

"If you would read instead of me."

"I!"

"Why, the fact is"—coughing noisily again as if to show that there is no imposition—"I suppose the fog must have got down my throat; but I find I cannot speak above a whisper. I should not be heard beyond the front row; come, old man, do a good-natured thing for once in your life."

There is a pause; Burgoyne is not very fond of being asked to do a good-natured thing. He can do a big one every now and then, but he is not particularly fond of being asked to do a small one.

"Surely there must be many people here much better suited for it than I am," he says presently, looking uncomfortably round in search of the little group of booked and musicked persons whom he had seen but now standing near him, but it had melted.

"That is just what there are not," rejoins Brown, pressing his point with the more eagerness, as he thinks he sees signs of yielding; "we are very short of hands to-night, and my wife has just heard that the girl upon whom she was counting for a couple of songs is in bed with influenza."

"Happy girl! I wish I too was in bed with influenza," says Jim sardonically, for he sees his fate about to overtake him.

And so it comes to pass that, five minutes later, as described at the opening of this chapter, he is seated on the platform with "Mrs. Lirriper's Lodgings" before him, rows of Provident Matrons' eyes fastened expectantly upon him, and horrid qualms of strange shyness racing over him.

Brown has indicated by a dog's-ear the page at which he is to begin; so he is spared indecision on this head. But has Brown indicated the page at which he is to stop? He is gnawed by a keen anxiety as to this point all through his performance. It is hot upon the platform, the smell of tea potent, and the naked gas-jets close above his head throw an ugly yellow glare upon his book.

Having offered his prefatory observations in the manner I have indicated, he rushes in media res. "Girls, as I was beginning to remark, are one of your first and your lasting troubles, being like your teeth, which begin with convulsions, and never cease tormenting you from the time you cut them till they cut you, and then you do not want to part with them, which seems hard, but we must all succumb, or buy artificial." (Do his ears deceive him? Is there already a slight titter? Have the simile of the convulsions and the necessity for a râtelier already struck a chord in the matrons' breasts?) "And, even where you get a will, nine times out of ten you get a dirty face with it, and naturally lodgers do not like good society to be shown in with a smear of black across the nose, or a smudgy eyebrow!" (Is he managing his voice alright? Is he mumbling, or is he bellowing? He rather inclines to a suspicion of the latter. Why did not they laugh at the "smudgy eyebrow"? They ought to have done so, and he had paused to give them the opportunity. Perhaps it is among them too familiar a phenomenon to provoke mirth.) "Where they pick the black up is a mystery I cannot solve, as in the case of the willingest girl that ever came into a house, half-starved, poor thing; a girl so willing that I called her 'Willing Sophy;' down upon her knees scrubbing early and late, and ever cheerful, but always with a black face. And I says to Sophy, 'Now, Sophy, my good girl, have a regular day for your stoves, and do not brush your hair with the bottoms of the saucepans, and do not meddle with the snuffs of the candles, and it stands to reason that it cannot be.'" (Ah! what welcome sound is this? "Willing Sophy" has produced an undoubted giggle, which Burgoyne hears spreading and widening through the room. Heartened by this indication, he goes on in a more emphatic and hilarious voice:) "Yet there it was, and always on her nose, which, turning up, and being broad at the end, seemed to boast of it, and caused warning from a steady gentleman, an excellent lodger, with breakfast by the week."

There can be no mistake about it now; the giggle has changed into a universal resonant laugh, which goes on swelling and rising, until, in the final roar of approbation which greets the concluding paragraph, the reader's voice is drowned. The matrons have all along been ready to be amused; it is only that, owing to the gravity of his face and solemnity of his manner, it was some time before they recognised that his intention was comic. As soon as they do so, they reward that intention with more than adequate mirth. Burgoyne has reached the second dog's-ear, that dog's-ear which his eye has been earnestly searching for throughout. His task then is ended. He heaves a deep sigh of relief, and, with a reflection that, after all, he is glad he was obliging, is preparing to shut the volume, when he feels the inevitable Brown's hand on his shoulder, and his husky voice in his ear.

"Capital! you got on capitally! Could not be better; but you will not mind going on a little longer, will you? You have only read for ten minutes. I want you to try something different this time—a little pathos, for a change. I have marked the page. Here!"

What is there to do but acquiesce? Burgoyne, complying, finds himself at once in the middle of a melancholy tale of a poor young woman left ruined and deserted in Mrs. Lirriper's Lodgings, and only rescued from suicide by the efforts of that good lady, who, however, is unable to save her from a tragic and premature death. The reader has reached the point at which Mrs. Lirriper has met the poor creature on her way to the river.

"'Mrs. Edson, I says, my dear, take care! However, did you lose your way, and stumble in a dangerous place like this? No wonder you're lost, I'm sure.'" (What is this sound? Is it possible that the giggle is rising again? the giggle which he was so glad to welcome a little while ago, but which is so disastrously out of place here. He redoubles his efforts to put an unmistakably serious and pathetic tone into his voice.) "She was all in a shiver, and she so continued till I laid her on her own bed, and up to the early morning she held me by the hand and moaned, and moaned, 'Oh, wicked, wicked, wicked!—-'"

What can the Provident Matrons be made of? They are laughing unrestrainedly. Too late Burgoyne realizes that he had not made it sufficiently clear that his intention is no longer comic. The idea of his being a funny man has so firmly rooted itself in his hearers' minds, that nothing can now dislodge it. Such being the case, he feels that the best thing he can do is to reach the end as quickly as possible. He begins to read very fast, which is taken for a new stroke of facetiousness, the result of which is that the last sigh of the poor young would-be suicide is drowned in a storm of hilarity even heartier and more prolonged than that which greeted "Willing Sophy's" smudged nose. In much confusion, greatly abashed by the honours so mistakenly heaped upon him, Burgoyne hastily leaves the platform. Twenty thousand Browns shall not keep him there!