Читать книгу The Boy in the Bush - D. H. Lawrence - Страница 10

As he made his toilet, he heard a certain fluttering outside his door. He waited for it to subside, and when all seemed still, opened to go downstairs. There stood two girls, giggling and blushing, waiting arm in arm to pounce on him.

"Oh, isn't he beau!" exclaimed one of the girls, in a sort of aside. And the other broke into a high laugh.

Jack remained dumbfounded, reddening to the roots of his hair. But his dark-blue eyes lingered for a moment on the two girlish faces. They were evidently the twins. They had the same thin, soft, slightly-tanned, warm-looking faces, a little wild, and the same marked features. But the brows of one were level, and her fair hair, darkish fair, was all crisp, curly round her temples, and she looked up at you from under her level brows with queer yellow-grey eyes, shy, wild, and yet with a queer effrontery, like a wild-cat under a bush. The other had blue eyes and a bigger nose, and it was she who said, "Oh, isn't he beau!"

The one with the yellow eyes stuck out her slim hand awkwardly, gazing at him and saying:

"I suppose you're cousin Jack, Beau."

He shook hands first with one, then with the other, and could not find a word to say. The one with the yellow eyes was evidently the leader of the two.

"Tea is ready," she said, "if you're coming down."

She spoke this over her shoulder. There was the same colour in her tawny eyes as in her crisp tawny hair, but her brows were darker. She had a forehead, Jack decided, like the plaster-cast of Minerva. And she had the queerest way of looking at you under her brows, and over her shoulder. Funny pair of lambs, these.

The two girls went downstairs arm in arm, at a run. This is quite a feat, but evidently they were used to it.

Jack looked on life, social life inside a house, as something to be borne in silence. These two girls were certainly a desperate addition. He heard them burst into the parlour, the other one repeating:

"He's coming. Here comes Beau."

"I thought his name was Jack. Bow is it!" exclaimed a voice.

He entered the parlour with his elbows at his sides, his starched collar feeling very stiff. He was aware of the usual hideous room, rather barer than at home: plush cushions on a horse-hair sofa, and a green carpet: a large stout woman with reddish hair in a silk frock and gold chains, and Mr. George introducing her as Mrs. Watson, otherwise Aunt Matilda. She put diamond-ringed hands on Jack's shoulders and looked into his face, which he thought a repellent procedure.

"So like your father, dear boy; how's your dear mother?"

And in spite of his inward fury of resistance, she kissed him. For she was but a woman of forty-two.

"Quite well, thank you," said Jack: though considering he had been at sea for six weeks, he knew as little about his mother's health as did Aunt Matilda herself.

"Did y' blow y' candle out?" asked Mr. George.

"No he didn't," answered the tawny girl. "I'll go and do it."

And she flashed away upstairs like a panther.

"I suppose the twins introduced themselves," said Mr. George.

"No they didn't," said the other one.

"Only christened you Bow.—You'll be somebody or other's beau before very long, I'll warrant.—This is Grace, Grace Ellis, you know, where you're going to live. And her sister who's gone upstairs to blow your candle out, is Monica.—Can't be too careful of fire in these dry places.—Most folks say they can't tell 'em apart, but I call it nonsense."

"Ancien, beau, bon, cher, adjectives which precede," said the one called Monica, jerking herself into the room, after blowing out the candle.

"There's your father," said Mr. George. And Aunt Matilda fluttered into the hall, while the twins betrayed no interest at all. The tawny one stared at Jack and kept slinking about like a lean young panther to get a different view of him. For all the world as if she was going to pounce on him, like a cat on a bird. He, permanently flushed, kept his self-possession in a boyish and rather handsome, if stiff, manner.

Mr. Ellis was stout, clean-shaven, red-faced, and shabby and baggy, and good-natured in appearance.

"This is the young gentleman—Mr. Grant—called in Westralia Bow, so named by Miss Monica Ellis."

"By Miss Grace, if you please," snapped Monica.

"Tea's ready. Tea's ready."

They trooped into the dining room where a large table was spread. Aunt Matilda seated herself behind the tea-kettle, Mr. George sat at the other end, before the pile of plates and the carvers, and the others took their places where they would. Jack modestly sat on Aunt Matilda's left hand, so the tawny Monica at once pounced on the chair opposite.

Entered the Good Plain Cook with a dish covered with a pewter cover, and followed by a small, dark, ugly, quiet girl carrying the vegetable dishes.

"That's my niece Mary, Jack. Lives with Aunt Matilda here, who won't spare her or I'd have her to live here with me. Now you know everybody. What's for tea?"

He was dangerously clashing the knife on the steel. Then lifting the cover, he disclosed a young pig roasted in all its glory of gravy. Mary meanwhile had nodded her head at Jack and looked at him with her big, queer, very black eyes. You might have thought she had native blood. She sat down to serve the vegetables.

"Grace, there's a fly in the milk," said Aunt Matilda, who was already pouring large cups of tea. Grace seized the milk jug and jerked from the room.

"Do you take milk and sugar, as your dear father used to, John?" asked Aunt Matilda of the youth on her left.

"Call him Bow. Bow's his name out here—John's too stiff and Jack's too common!" exclaimed Mr. George, elbows deep in carving.

"Bow'll do for me," put in Mrs. Ellis, who said little.

"Mary, is there any mustard?" said Aunt Matilda.

Jack rose vaguely to go and get it, but Aunt Matilda seized him by the arm and pushed him back.

"Sit still. She knows where it is."

"Monica, come and carry the cups, there's a good girl."

"Now which end of the pig do you like, Jack?" asked Mr. George. "Matilda, will this do for you?" He held up a piece on the fork. Mary arrived with a ponderous gyrating cruet-stand, which she made place for in the middle of the table.

"What about bread?" said Aunt Matilda. "I'm sure John eats bread with his meat. Fetch some bread, Grace, for your cousin John."

"Everybody did it," thought Jack in despair, as he tried to eat amid the hustle. "No servants, nothing ever still. On the go all the time."

"Girls going to the concert tonight?" asked Mr. George.

"If anybody will go with us," replied Monica, with a tawny look at Jack.

"There's Bow," said Mr. George, "Bow'll like to go."

Under the she-lion peering of Monica, Jack was incapable of answer.

"Let the poor boy rest," said Aunt Matilda. "Just landed after a six thousand mile voyage, and you rush him out next minute to a concert. Let him stop at home quietly with me, and have a quiet chat about the dear ones he's left behind.—Aren't you going to the concert with the girls, Jacob?"

This was addressed to Mr. Ellis, who took a gulp of tea and shook his head mutely.

"I'd rather go to the concert, I think," said Jack under the queer yellow glower of Monica's eyes, and the full black moons of Mary's.

"Good for you, my boy," said Mr. George. "Bow by name and Bow by nature. And well set up, with three strings to his Bow already."

Monica once more peered tawnily, and Mary glanced a black, furtive glance. Aunt Matilda looked down on him and Grace, at his side, peered up.

For the first time since childhood, Jack found himself in a really female setting. Instinctively he avoided women: but particularly he avoided girls. With girls and women he felt exposed to some sort of danger—as if something were going to seize him by the neck, from behind, when he wasn't looking. He relied on men for safety. But curiously enough, these two elderly men gave him no shelter whatever. They seemed to throw him a victim to these frightful "lambs." In England, there was an esprit de corps among men. Man for man was a tower of strength against the females. Here in this place men deserted one another as soon as the women put in an appearance. They left the field entirely to the females.

In the first half-hour Jack realised he was thrown a victim to these tawny and black young cats. And there was nothing to do but bear up.

"Have you got an evening suit?" asked Grace, who was always the one to ponder things out.

"Yes—a sort of a one," said Jack.

"Oh, good! Oh, put it on! Do put it on."

"Leave the lad alone," said Mr. George. "Let him go as he is."

"No," said Aunt Matilda. "He has his father's handsome presence. Let him make the best of himself. I think I'll go to the concert after all."

After dinner there was a bustle. Monica flew up to light his candle for him, and stood there peering behind the flame when he came upstairs.

"You haven't much time," she said, as if she were going to spear him.

"All right," he answered, in his hoarse young voice. And he stood in torment till she left his room.

He was just tying his tie when there came a flutter and a tapping. Aunt Matilda's voice saying: "Nearly time. Are you almost ready?"

"Half a minute!" he crowed hoarsely, like an unhappy young cock.

But the door stealthily opened, and Aunt Matilda peeped in.

"Oh, tying his tie!" she said, satisfactorily, when she perceived that he was dressed as far as discretion demanded. And she entered in full blow. Behind her hovered Grace—then Monica—and in the doorway Mary. It seemed to Jack that Aunt Matilda was the most objectionable of the lot, Monica the brazenest, Grace the most ill-mannered, and Mary the most repulsive, with her dark face. He struggled in discomfort with his tie.

"Let Mary do it," said Aunt Matilda.

"No, no!" he barked. "I can do it."

"Come on, Mary. Come and tie John's tie."

Mary came quietly forward.

"Let me do it for you, Bow," she said in her quiet, insinuating voice, looking at him with her inky eyes and standing in front of him till his knees felt weak and his throat strangled. He was purple in the face, struggling with his tie in the presence of the lambs.

"He'll never get it done," said Monica, from behind the yellow glare.

"Let me do it," said Mary, and lifting her hands decisively she took the two ends of the tie from him.

He held his breath and lifted his eyes to the ceiling and felt as if the front of his body were being roasted. Mary, the devil-puss, seemed endless ages fastening the tie. Then she twitched it at his throat and it was done, just as he was on the point of suffocation.

"Are those your best braces?" said Grace. "They're awfully pretty with rose-buds." And she fingered the band.

"I suppose you put on evening dress for the last dinner on board," said Aunt Matilda. "Nothing makes me cry like Auld Lang Syne, that last night, before you land next day. But it's fifteen years since I went over to England."

"I don't suppose we shall any of us ever go," said Grace longingly.

"Unless you marry Bow," said Monica abruptly.

"I can't marry him unless he asks me," said Grace.

"He'll ask nobody for a good many years to come," said Aunt Matilda with satisfaction.

"Hasn't he got lovely eyelashes?" said Grace impersonally.

"He'd almost do for a girl," said Monica.

"Not if you look at his ears," said Mary, with odd decision. He felt that Mary was bent on saving his manhood.

He breathed as if the air around him were red-hot. He would have to get out, or die. He plunged into his coat, pulling down his shirt-cuffs with a jerk.

"What funny green cuff-links," said Grace. "Are they pot?"

"Malachite," said Jack.

"What's malachite?"

There was no answer. He put a white silk muffler round his neck to protect his collar.

"Oh, look at his initials in lavender silk!"

At last he was in his overcoat, and in the street with the bevy.

"Leave your overcoat open, so it shows your shirt-front as you walk," said Grace, forcibly unbuttoning the said coat. "I think that looks so lovely. Doesn't he look lovely, Monica? Everybody will be asking who he is."

"Tell them he's the son of General Grant," said Aunt Matilda, with complete satisfaction, as she sailed at his side.

Life is principally a matter of endurance. This was the sum of Jack's philosophy. He put it into practice this evening.

It was a benefit concert in the Town Hall, with the Episcopalian Choir singing, "Angels Ever Bright and Fair," and a violinist from Germany playing violin solos, and a lady vocalist from Melbourne singing "home" solos, while local stars variously coruscated. Aunt Matilda filled up the end of the seat—like a massive book-end: and the others like slender volumes of romance were squeezed in between her and another stout book-end. Jack had the heaving warmth of Aunt Matilda on his right, the electric wriggle of Monica on his left, and he continued to breathe red-hot air.

The concert was a ludicrous continuation of shameful and ridiculous noise to him. Each item seemed inordinately long and he hoped for the next, which when it came, seemed worse than the last. The people who performed seemed to him in a ghastly humiliating position. One stout mother-of-thousands leaned forward and simply gurgled about riding over the brow of a hill and seeing a fair city beyond, and a young knight in silver armour riding toward her with shining face, to greet her on the spot as his lady fair and lady dear. Jack looked at her in pained amazement. And yet when the songs-tress from Melbourne, in a rich contralto, began to moan in a Scotch accent:

"And it's o-o-oh! that I'm longing for my ain folk,

Though the-e-ey be but lowly, puir and plain folk—

I am far across the sea

But my heart will ever be-e-e-e-e

At home in dear old Scotland with my ain folk,"

Jack suddenly wanted to howl. He had never been to Scotland and his father, General Grant, with his mother, was at present in Malta. And he hadn't got any "ain folk," and he didn't want any. Yet it was all he could do to keep the tears from showing in his eyes, as his heart fairly broke in him. And Aunt Matilda crowded him a little more suffocatingly on the right, and Monica wriggled more hatefully than ever on the left, and that beastly Mary leaned forward to glance appreciatively at him, with her low-down black eyes. And he felt as if the front of his body was scorched. And a smouldering desire for revenge awoke deep down in him.

People were always trying to "do things" to you. Why couldn't they leave you done? Dirty cads to sing "My Ain Folk," and then stare in your face to see how it got you.

But life was a matter of endurance, with possible revenge later on.

When at last he got home and could go to bed, he felt he had gained a brief respite. There was no lock to the door—so he put the arm-chair against it, for a barricade.

And he felt he had been once more sold. He had thought he was coming to a wild and woolly world. But all the way out he had been forced to play the gentlemanly son of his father. And here it was hell on earth, with these women let loose all over you, and these ghastly concerts, and these hideous meals, and these awful flimsy, choky houses. Far better the Agricultural College. Far better England.