Читать книгу Run! - Dora Amy Elles - Страница 8

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There was a silence. James grabbed at the thing that had been bobbing up and down in his mind and caught it. This girl was the girl who had clutched him in the dark and said “Run!” And someone had started taking pot-shots at them, and they had run like the dickens. And she had borrowed his handkerchief to tie up a cut on her foot, and when he asked her how she had hurt it, she had said, “That blighted bicycle, I shouldn’t wonder.” She was that girl.

Nonsense! She couldn’t be.

What do you mean by she couldn’t be? How couldn’t she be?

It’s a coincidence.

James ran a hand violently through his hair, a thing Daphne had always been very strict with him about—she said it made him look exactly like Strewelpeter—but in moments of emotion he still did it. He didn’t know that he had done it now. He stared at the girl with the green eyes and said in an explosive voice,

“What bicycle?”

The girl looked down at her toes, which were encased in pale green slippers of the rather sketchy sort which consist chiefly of a heel, and a strap, and a diamond buckle. “Encased” is perhaps the wrong word, because a good deal of the toes showed through. They were pleasantly shaped and extremely flexible. She appeared to be twiddling them. James tried to imagine them tied up in his large and very oily handkerchief. He failed. He repeated his question rather more moderately, because if this wasn’t the girl, she was probably beginning to think that he was a dangerous lunatic.

“What bicycle?”

She said without looking up,

“It was the housemaid’s really, but I borrowed it. She’d have been frightfully sick if I hadn’t brought it back, because she saved up for it for two whole years. She put all her tips in a savings-box. Her name is Gladys White, and she’s got a young man in the motor trade. He’s a mechanic—horribly oily except on Sundays, but most attached and steady. Gladys says they’re all very steady in the motor trade. She ought to know. She says she tried six other trades before she settled down with Albert Wilson for her regular boy. They’re thinking of getting engaged in the spring.”

This was all with a gentle deliberation, a bit at a time, with some toe-twiddling in between.

James felt a just anger. If she thought she was going to put him off in that way—He gave an unwilling glance at his hands. Had she meant anything by that “horribly oily,” or hadn’t she? The hands were all right. He hoped she hadn’t seen him look at them. He said firmly and plainly,

“That’s not answering.”

“You did ask me what bicycle, you know, but perhaps you’ve forgotten. You forget rather easily, don’t you?” The words were impudent, but the tone was the merest murmur, and she never looked up.

James had never felt angrier with anyone in his life, but at the back of the anger there was the horrid niggling fear that she really might be Sally Something and a total stranger, and not yesterday’s soi-disant Aspidistra Aspinall, in which case he was making a fool of himself, and she was probably thinking he was a lunatic. He hesitated on the brink of a direct question, steadied himself there, and plunged.

“Do you mind telling me your name?”

He saw the green eyes for a bright moment. The brightness might have been laughter, or devilry. There was only a flash of it and the sooty lashes were down again.

“Didn’t you hear Daphne call me Sally?”

“Sally what?”

She gave a very faint laugh. He could swear that he had heard it before—in a hayloft.

“How fast you go! I’ve known people for months without bothering about their surnames.”

“Is yours Aspinall?”

She looked up at him as innocent as a kitten.

“Oh, no.”

“What is it?”

He wasn’t sure that she hesitated. He thought so.

She said, “West—Sarah Elizabeth West. Only I’ve never been able to get them to call me anything but Sally.”

“Not Aspidistra Aspinall?”

Her eyes went blank. The thin black line of eyebrow took an upward kink.

“Aspidistra Aspinall? What a peculiar name!”

“Very.”

“It doesn’t sound real to me.”

James spoke with whole-hearted conviction.

“It isn’t.”

“Then—I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

Suddenly James was quite sure. There wasn’t anything to make him sure, but all at once he stopped being afraid that he might be making a fool of himself. He also stopped being angry. He met the innocent green eyes with a friendly grin.

“All right,” he said, “nobody’s ever heard of Aspidistra. She’s a wash-out. Done. Dead. Buried. You’re Sally West. I’m still James Elliot—and the only person who ever called me Jimmy got a thick ear. Now how do we go?”

Sally went on looking at him for about a minute and a half. The kink in her eyebrows straightened out. Her eyes stopped laughing. They considered him in a serious way. James had the odd feeling that things were happening between them. It was as if she said “I want to come in and look,” and it was as if he opened his door and said “Here you are—you can look at anything you like,” and back of this the hope that things were reasonably clean and tidy.

So Sally came in.

He could feel her there, moving round, looking where she wanted to, touching things gently, straightening something here and there, as a woman does when she comes into a room. The oddest part of the whole odd business was that it all felt quite natural. She might have been there always. It might have been her room as well as his. The blood came up into his face. Sally went on looking at him, and said,

“Did you recognize me before I said that about the bicycle? I think it was very clever if you did, because I made my voice quite different—nice and gentle and modest. It’s Sarah’s voice really. I keep it for great-aunts, and traffic-cops, and the policeman when I’ve gone the wrong way round an island or butted in at the other end of a one-way street. But I can’t keep it up—not for very long, because I’m not really Sarah or Elizabeth—I’m Sally.”

“I wasn’t sure,” said James. “Something kept bobbing up, but I couldn’t get hold of it. Sally’s a nicer name than Aspidistra. I can’t think how you thought of a name like that in the middle of running away and being shot at.”

“Oh, but I didn’t. I’ve been Aspidistra since I was about six. I thought it was the loveliest name, so I had it for all my adventures. I used to tell myself a new one every night in bed—coral islands, and pirates, and flying to the moon, and a magic horse, and hunting for treasure—so the minute I had a real adventure it came quite natural to be Aspidistra. I really couldn’t be anything else.”

She had the prettiest soft colour in her cheeks. Her eyes were as bright as water. James felt a foolish strange desire to be a little boy again and go adventuring with her—on a coral island—in a pirate ship—on a flying carpet that would take them over the moon. He had always wanted to see the other side of the moon, because ever since he was about five he had had the sneaking feeling that perhaps it wasn’t there at all. He nodded and said,

“I see.” And then, “You said Sally West. I saw a thing in the paper the day we ran away. It said Lady Clementa Tolhache had left a lot of money to her great-nephew John Jernyngham West. I was at school with a John Jernyngham West—he was my fag for a year. J.J. we called him. You said you had an Aunt Clementa. I didn’t believe you until I saw the bit in the paper—”

“You’ve got a very unbelieving mind.”

“No, I haven’t—not any more than most people. Clementa on the top of Aspidistra was a bit steep, you know. I didn’t really believe it even when I saw it in the paper—Clementa Tolhache—”

“They call it Tullish. Such a pity, isn’t it, but they’re awfully stuck up about it.”

James frowned. The name still sounded so unlikely. He said abruptly,

“I was asking you about J.J. Is he a cousin of yours?”

All at once she was grave and a little pale.

“Oh, no—he’s my brother. As soon as you’d said your name and where you’d been at school, I knew all about you. Jocko used to talk about you a lot.”

James grinned.

“I can guess the sort of things he said. He was the cheekiest fag I ever had.”

“He’s a brat,” said Sally. “He always was, and I expect he always will be. He goes round asking for trouble—” Her voice tailed away. When she had said “trouble” it stopped altogether. She looked hard at James and said, “I’m awfully worried about him.”

“Why?”

“Because our old nurse used to say, ‘If you don’t trouble trouble, trouble won’t trouble you,’ and, ‘Let sleeping dogs lie.’ I don’t suppose Jocko will. I’m not very good at it myself.”

“I know. I shouldn’t think you were, or you’d have kept out of that house. Did you know there were sleeping dogs there?”

Her eyebrows did that funny little quirk again. It was very amusing.

“Well—I thought there might be, but I didn’t think they’d shoot.”

“How did you know I wasn’t one of them?” said James. “I mean, there we were in the dark. And I saw you because my torch picked you up on the stairs, but you couldn’t possibly have seen me, so how did you know it was all right to clutch me and say ‘Run!’?”

Sally made a face.

“I didn’t! How could I? I just chanced it. Because, you see, if you were one of them, I was done already, and if you weren’t, there was quite a good chance of getting away. Besides, I’d just about got to the point where I had to clutch someone. You can’t think how nerve-racking it was when your horrible ray came out from nowhere and hit me in the face. I don’t suppose I shall ever feel safe in the dark again.”

“What were you doing in the dark?” said James in a portentous voice. “What were you doing in that house at all? Don’t you think you had better tell me?”

“I did tell you. I told you I was looking for Aunt Clementa’s diamond necklace.”

James made the sound which is written Pish, or Tush, or Tcha.

Sally gurgled.

“Don’t you believe in that either? You do make it difficult, you know. You wouldn’t have believed in Aunt Clementa if you hadn’t come across her in a newspaper. I don’t believe everything I see in a newspaper myself, but there’s no accounting for tastes. And now that you’ve swallowed Aunt Clementa, I don’t know why you should boggle at her necklace. It’s frightfully valuable and completely unwearable, you know—the sort people wore when they had a nice cushiony shelf all pushed up in front with tight stays. Aunt Clementa had a lovely one. There’s a photograph of her with a waist about the size of your neck, and billows and billows of white satin, and the diamonds laid out on her shelf, and feathers in her hair, and a tiara, and a fringe right down to her eyebrows like the pictures of Queen Alexandra. I could show it to you if it would make you believe in the necklace.”

“Why do you want me to believe in it?” said James. He thought he had startled her, and he wondered why.

Her colour rose.

“I don’t want you to. You can believe just what you like. It doesn’t matter to me, and Aunt Clementa’s dead, so it doesn’t matter to her, though she would be most awfully annoyed if she could hear you not believing, poor old pet. She was most enormously proud of her necklace. It had about fifty large brilliants and a hundred middle-sized ones, besides masses and masses of little ones. She made me learn the numbers, but I’ve forgotten half of them.”

James felt that he was being got at. Why should he care if Lady Clementa Tolhache, pronounced Tullish, had had fifty diamond necklaces? And why should Sally West care whether he believed in one or more of them? And what in the world had all this got to do with the adventure in the dark house? He didn’t know, and he wanted to know. He very much wanted to know. He looked very straight at Sally West, and he said in his most Scottish voice,

“What’s the good of all this stuff about a diamond necklace? Why don’t you tell me what you were really doing in that house?”