Читать книгу The Man Without Nerves - E. Phillips Oppenheim - Страница 6

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Tyssen returned from the dressing rooms of the lawn-tennis pavilion just after Mr. Huitt had taken a dignified leave of the little company. The young man glanced at the disappearing figure of the bank manager with an air of disappointment. He paused in his almost ceaseless task of rolling dark-coloured, unappetising-looking tobacco into ill-shaped cigarettes, and for a moment seemed about to follow him. Anthony Sarson, who was seated with Sybil Cresset and his sister, and who was really a very good-natured young man, beckoned to him.

“Our president is a little huffy to-night, Tyssen,” he said, “I should leave him alone. He hates to be questioned, anyway. You have not met my sister formally, I think? Pauline, this is Mr. Tyssen, who is spending his summer vacation down here.”

The Sarsons were certainly a very good-looking family. Pauline, with the flawless complexion and clear brown eyes of her father and brother, possessed on her own account the attractions of deep yellow hair and a slim but most desirable figure. She was of a smaller type than her male relatives, with greater subtlety of feature and expression.

“I have heard about Mr. Tyssen,” she said, as she shook hands. “How did you come to find us out in this backwater?”

“I wanted a perfectly quiet place,” Tyssen explained.

“You have certainly succeeded in finding it,” Pauline assured him. “Is Mr. Huitt an old friend of yours?”

“I saw him for the first time to speak to this afternoon,” the young man confided. “I called at his bank.”

Anthony Sarson grinned.

“I’ve been there once or twice,” he confided. “Seems scarcely human when he’s in that magnificent inquisitorial chamber of his. He’s not a bad old sort, though.”

“I find him,” Tyssen observed, “a little reserved.”

“He is certainly not what you would call expansive,” Pauline remarked. “He has very strict ideas about everything—the etiquette of tennis, the etiquette of conversation, the etiquette of life. I have never danced with him, but I could imagine that he would have a diagram on the dancing floor with the exact positions marked where he meant to place his feet.”

“Bank managers,” Anthony said, “have to be precise in their habits. Are you going to play again, Tyssen?”

“I should be glad to, if there’s room for me anywhere,” the young man replied, with his eyes fixed upon Pauline. “I am rather a rabbit, unfortunately.”

“You had better play with Pauline,” Anthony suggested, “against Sybil and me.”

“If your sister will be kind enough to take me,” Tyssen accepted eagerly.

“I shall like to,” the young woman remarked, rising to her feet. “Most of the men I play with—Mr. Greatley for one and Anthony for another—poach abominably. If you really are out of practice, Mr. Tyssen, perhaps I shall get my share of the play.”

“I am not so much out of practice,” Tyssen confided, as they strolled off towards the courts, “as a very indifferent player. I played cricket as a boy. Since then—well, I’ve not had much time.”

“You write things, don’t you?” she asked.

“I try,” he admitted. “I started as a journalist. I want to write a novel. Just now I am studying life and character, so far as I can.”

“You have come to a queer place for that,” she laughed.

“I suppose so,” he admitted doubtfully. “Yet there are plenty of adages about the quiet places, aren’t there? Unexpected things happen sometimes. For instance, the tragedy of last night!”

She sighed.

“Too dreadful.... Shall I serve?”

“If you please.”

The set turned out to be a very interesting one. Tyssen exerted himself more than on any previous occasion, although it was obvious that he had no great knowledge of the game. The four drank lemonade on the porch afterwards. Pauline was smiling quietly to herself, as she listened to her partner’s rather clumsy compliments on her prowess.

“Shall I tell you one thing I have noticed about you, Mr. Tyssen?” she said.

“If you please,” he begged.

“You play, at any rate, with more energy when our president is not here. Is he by any chance a bête noire of yours?”

Tyssen frowned slightly. He was already rolling one of his innumerable cigarettes, and the process seemed to demand more concentration than usual.

“No,” he replied. “I don’t know that I have any feelings concerning Mr. Huitt—as a man. As a type, he interests me rather.”

“A bijou Robot type, I would call him,” Pauline remarked, smiling. “I cannot imagine any one ever making him act upon impulse, saying or doing an incorrect thing. I should love to hear him swear just once.”

“You never will,” Anthony assured her. “He is encased in the invisible armour of an invincible propriety.”

“He ought to have married,” Sybil Cresset observed. “Marriage might have made a human being of him.”

“Considering Mr. Huitt for the first time as a human being,” Anthony meditated, “one cannot help wondering what effect he would have had upon any ordinary woman who became his wife and what his children would have been like!”

“There is one position in life,” Tyssen said, “which I imagine he fills to perfection and that is the position of a bank manager.”

“That’s what the Dad says,” Anthony remarked. “He has him over to dinner sometimes and Dad isn’t himself until the evening’s over. Then he lights a pipe, has a whisky and soda and looks around at the rest of us. ‘Anyway,’ he declares apologetically, ‘he may not be the man for a sociable evening, but he’s the man to leave your money with.’ ”

“That,” Tyssen admitted, “is a great deal. It is something to be able to trust your financial advisers.”

“How poor old Jesson must have worried him,” Anthony went on. “So unaccountable, you know, getting rid of all those large sums of money. I can almost hear his prim, grave questions.”

“I’m sure he would hate to part with it,” Pauline observed. “By the by, Mr. Tyssen, there’s something for your book. A man has to part with large sums of money like that, suddenly and without explanation, and then commits suicide!”

Tyssen pulled his hat a little lower over his forehead. Although the evening was passing, the sun was still hot.

“I suppose there might be a mystery in it,” he meditated. “Probably a very sordid one. I wonder whether Mr. Huitt has any idea about it really.”

“I wonder,” Pauline echoed.

“You called him just now a bijou Robot man,” Tyssen remarked. “Queer, but that’s exactly how he appeared to me, when I was shown into his sanctum.”

“Are you going to bank with him?” Anthony asked carelessly.

“I may,” the young man replied. “I am not quite sure whether he would not consider my affairs too small, however. Seven o’clock,” he went on, listening to the chime of a distant church clock. “I must go. Mrs. Foulds has all the virtues but she has also the vice of punctuality.”

Tyssen took his leave, a little ungainly in his movements and his farewell speech. They watched him on his way towards the gate.

“Seems a queer sort of fellow,” Anthony Sarson observed. “I can’t exactly place him.”

“Eton and Oxford wouldn’t, I suppose,” his sister said, smiling.

“He seems rather dreadful at first, I thought,” Sybil Cresset remarked. “Afterwards, one wonders.”

“One wonders,” Pauline said, “because he changes so much. I’ll tell you a discovery I’ve made concerning that young man. I’m rather interested in him. After all, it may be I who will write the novel!”

Anthony Sarson filled his pipe with leisurely fingers.

“Out with it, Pauline,” he begged.

“Mr. Tyssen,” she said deliberately, “is not the same person when Mr. Huitt is about. To me, it seems just as though he were acting a part at times. When he was alone with us, he was quite natural and though, of course, he’s shy and in a way uncouth, there is much more of the man about him. Directly Mr. Huitt is within speaking distance, he is a changed being.”

“I daresay you are right,” Anthony observed indifferently. “I think it is only decent to be civil to a stranger, but the young man doesn’t appeal to me very much. Has any one seen ‘the beautiful lady’ to-day?”

Sybil indulged in a little grimace.

“If you are going to rave about your divinity again,” she pronounced, with the faintest touch of acerbity in her tone, “I may as well go home. No, I have not seen her.”

“I saw a glimmer of white in the distance,” Pauline confided. “If you want something to dream about, Tony, I believe she is wearing white to-day!”

“She would look marvellous in anything,” the young man declared. “We ought to have talked to Tyssen about her. If he’s really idiot enough to think he can write a novel, there is the perfect heroine.”

Sybil rose to her feet with a pout.

“After the attentions you have paid me during the last few weeks, Anthony—” she began.

He patted her hand.

“Serious attentions, my dear Sybil, I assure you,” he said. “Madame is a creature of one’s dreams. One cannot imagine her coming to life. You, on the other hand, are the girl I am going to offer to take to the dance at Godalming to-morrow night.”

“You are forgiven,” Sybil declared. “Are you sure that Pauline doesn’t want to go?”

Pauline shook her head.

“I have not the least inclination,” she said. “Anthony dances far too well for me to find it any pleasure.”

“First time I’ve heard it put like that,” the young man murmured.

“A sister’s attitude,” Pauline pronounced, “is always different. To me you represent monotony. You play tennis far too well, and your golf has just the same irritating qualities. It is absolutely perfect. Every drive right down the middle—every putt well on the line. One might worship it in some one else. In a brother it is monotonous. No wonder Lord Milhaven insisted on your election to the Paradise Golf Club.”

Sybil smiled as they all rose to their feet. She was a very pretty girl and Anthony was her idea of perfection.

“I really think,” she declared, as they moved off together, “that Mr. Tyssen is the type of man Pauline is looking for!”