Читать книгу Simple Peter Cradd - E. Phillips Oppenheim - Страница 7

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PETER CRADD would have slept if he could, but a queer sort of nervousness possessed him. He lay stretched out, with a very large portion of his body exposed to the sun and the wind, and he listened to the flow of the sea and the screech of the gulls, and the murmur of the wind in the long grasses, but more than anything he was aware of the young woman who lay sleeping by his side. Her scanty costume revealed a body which was certainly the most beautiful he had ever seen. The suppressed artist in him gloried in the curves of her hips, in her long straight legs, in the slight but ample contour of her bosom. Unfortunately for Peter Cradd's self-respect, the man in him also took note of these things, took full and generous note. Hence the restlessness. There was a singing and a warmth in his blood which was certainly new to Mr. Peter Cradd of Number 17, Park Avenue, Ealing. His daily life had been such a dry-as-dust, dreary affair, that he had found no time for such thoughts as were now forcing their way into his consciousness. Only a few weeks ago, he had thought that such as life was, such as its possibilities were for him, he had found and outlived, and now here was something altogether different. Here was a different range of emotions, a new, strange recrudescence of the earlier passions of his youth. Something grossly improper, of course, in a man of his years—a married man too -?? but there they were. He had not sought them. They must have come as the result of something in him which had lain dormant during those long years of struggle. He turned his eyes away, with an effort, from that beautiful, young, sleeping body by his side, and, lying on his back, he speculated. Even in the narrow confines of his life, he had come across men who had managed to live what was called "the gay life"—bachelors, some of them, errant husbands others. He had never felt any inclination to follow their example. His fidelity to his drab and dreary wife he had taken for granted. He had experienced no spark of feeling for her for longer than he could remember. When he came to think of it, she had never sought to excite it, never by any movement or action or glance tried to capture his fancy or provoke an instant's admiration. What had happened between them had happened as a matter of routine, just because every one with a wife who lived in a terrace and went to business six days in the week, lay in bed a little later on a Sunday morning, and mowed the grass if he had a lawn, on one particular day, performed his other domestic duties with a similar lack of enthusiasm when the time arrived. In those years of struggle, Peter Cradd's imagination had grown grey, and the actual business of loving or being loved had no concern for him. The recent shortening of woman's skirts, the more lavish display of her person which had provoked an uneasy and deeper sense of sex amongst many of his friends, had left him entirely unmoved. He was Peter Cradd, with a family growing up, an insufficient income, with leather to sell in the daytime, and sleep to court at night, lest he should wake weary and unable to press with eager feet the treadmill of life on the morrow. Yet, as he lay there, he wondered whether he had ever known the real Peter Cradd, whether he had not been, after all, a crushed victim of circumstances.

Perhaps they were all like that, those men in his avenue, and in a hundred more avenues of the world— moral, unimaginative, grey, because the fight to keep their places in life absorbed every thought. If that were so, then, he reflected, morality was only relative. Perhaps he was going to start life as a sinner, or a would-be sinner. He turned his head once more, and he felt a little shiver of delight as he caught the faint smile upon her closed lips, watched the rise and fall of her bosom, glanced once more at the beautiful curve of her legs. Then, with a sudden start, he remembered his age. What an old fool to be harbouring such thoughts, and to be looking with a beating heart at a girl half his age! Of course she was attractive but what was that to him—a middle-aged leather salesman— even if he had stumbled into wealth—Her future was obviously to marry some rising young clerk or salesman, furnish a villa, feel all the transports of love in the springtime of life, the joy of having children, watching them grow up. That was what she was for. And supposing the struggle was hard, and she grew like Harriett? He shivered. It was a horrible thought. And yet, Harriett had been good-looking enough in her way when she had manoeuvred him into marrying her. It was a life which might lead to drabness, might mean the humdrum existence which was the great cemetery of imagination, the funeral pyre of all the finer joys of life.

A sudden perfume of wild lavender came floating down the breeze. The sun had begun to burn his legs, a strange bird was singing somewhere overhead. Peter Cradd's brief period of speculation was finished. His mind ceased to work, his senses, glowing with a new and vibrant warmth, took possession of him. Eileen had opened her eyes. She was leaning over towards him, laughing a little, her fingers buried in the cool sand.

"You're a funny man," she said. "I told you all about myself, and you listened, and scarcely opened your lips. Tell me about yourself."

"There is nothing to tell," he assured her, wondering at the sudden thickness in his speech.

She turned over a little nearer to him.

"You look at me as though you liked me," she murmured. "Do you?"

"Very much."

A cloud passed across her face.

"I used to enjoy it when men looked at me that way," she sighed. "I don't think I do so much now. I suppose— oh, well, what's it matter? Your name is Mr. Peter Cradd, you have just retired from business. Are you married?"

"Yes."

She seemed a little surprised.

"Children?"

"Three," he answered. "Fifteen, sixteen and seventeen."

"Quite a family man," she remarked, letting the sand drip through her fingers.

"I suppose so," he admitted.

"What would they say if they saw you lying here with me?—both of us nearly half naked?" she went on, with a downward glance at her legs.

He reflected for a moment. Then he began to laugh, softly at first, until little lines spread themselves at the sides of his eyes.

"I don't know," he admitted. "Nothing of the sort has ever happened before. I can't imagine what they would think."

"Why are you taking your holiday alone?" she asked.

"Well, one reason perhaps is that they wouldn't care for this sort of holiday. They all have the same tastes. They like to go where there is a pier, and a cinema, and shops and crowds of people to look at. I have been wanting to do just what I am doing now, without perhaps ever realising it, all my life. It has just become possible."

"Kind of different from your folks, are you?" she asked.

"Entirely," he assured her.

She was lying upon her side now, facing him, with her elbow in the sand.

"I shouldn't have taken you for a salesman of anything," she said. "If you had told me you were one of these men from the colleges, or a schoolmaster, or something of that sort, I shouldn't have been a bit surprised. Sometimes you look as though you knew an awful lot, and sometimes you look like a baby."

"I know nothing at all," he told her slowly. "I know nothing of life itself, nothing of books, or art, or anything that counts. I am just a poor ignoramus who's groped his way through life, and suddenly come to a standstill."

"A standstill?" she repeated, her tone full of interest. "Tell me, please, what you mean, because I too—I am rather at a standstill."

"I have been a plodder," he explained, "just doing my day's work to try to keep a roof over my head, and at the end of the day too tired to do anything else, too tired to think, too tired to hope, too tired to try to look through any other window of life except the grimy panes of the one in front of me. Then—it seems a strange thing to make so much difference—money came."

"Money!" she exclaimed eagerly. "You are rich then?"

"Yes," he admitted. "For about a fortnight I have been a rich man."

"You don't look it," she ventured.

He smiled.

"I didn't stop to think much about clothes; I just arranged so that the people at home should have all they wanted, and I ran away."

"Do you mean to say," she demanded blankly, "that your people don't know where you are?"

"Haven't an idea," he assured her, with a twinkle in his eyes. "It's the first escapade of my life."

"Do you like it?"

"It's heaven."

She plucked a long blade of grass and sucked it thoughtfully.

"Seems quaint!" she observed. "Rich! Why didn't you go to one of the swell hotels and have a good time?" He eyed her meditatively. Her question somehow disappointed him, but it was quite serious.

"This happened to be just what I wanted to do," he confided. "You're having the same sort of holiday yourself." She nodded.

"That's true," she admitted, "but then, you see, I had to have this sort of one, or else—"

"Or else what?"

"Never mind. The real reason I chose this was because I wanted to get away from men."

"Then what about me?"

She laughed.

"Well, perhaps you're my failure," she confessed, "or perhaps you don't count very much. I mean," she went on, "it was the men all around one in the City whose eyes were always asking the same thing in the same horrid way, and who were always making the same stupid suggestions— as though a girl were a fool. It's all right at first—flattering and all that. I don't pretend a girl doesn't like to be asked out, but it goes on and on, until you know that every man who comes into the place and talks to you for five minutes, and every man you meet when you're out, is presently going to ask the same sort of question in the same sort of way—and I got damned well fed up with it, and that's why I'm here."

His eyes were full of gentle sympathy.

"You can't think out your way through life very well in a city," he observed.

"Oh, I haven't many thoughts," the girl acknowledged. "Sometimes I think I haven't got a brain at all. I'm just a sort of healthy human animal, I suppose, but there are times when one gets sick to death of being what one is, and of knowing what every one wants from you. Not shocking you, am I, Mr. Peter Cradd?"

"Not at all," he answered. "I'm very interested."

"Well, anyway," she concluded, "that's why I came away, and my holiday will soon be over, and I've loved it, and whatever happens to me afterwards, I shall still have loved it. What's the matter with old Large?"

The boatman came to them across the sandy ledges, shouting.

"Wind's freshening a bit, folks. We'd best be getting along, or we might have to draw round the narrows, and that will mean you won't be home until night."

They rose obediently. She stretched herself—her arms sunwards.

"I'll remember our little picnic spot," she sighed. "What a pity one can't bring a tent and stay here."

He made no reply. There was a little surge in his blood, a thickness in his throat, another wild chasing of ideas through his mind. He had an insane desire to say something which he felt would have somehow spoilt the whole glorious day, so he held his peace. Nevertheless she looked at him a little curiously, as they made their way down to the boat.

"You don't seem to have much wind," she remarked. "Is your heart groggy?"

"Feels like it to-day," he admitted.

The wind fell away, and they drifted home in quiet and pleasant fashion. The girl seemed entirely inanimate. Peter Cradd had the feeling of having passed through a queer turbulence of thought and sensations, impossible to tabulate, or even to understand. They lay supine, with the salt spray sometimes falling in wet flecks upon their faces, the wind now less exciting, the sun low in the sky. Before them lay the long stretch of wooded country, the ripening corn fields, the haycocks, the flower-wreathed hedges, and on each side the long stretches of marsh land, studded with glittering pools, mauve here and there, with patches of wild lavender, yellow in one particular spot with great clumps of golden buttercups. Halfway down the estuary, she sat up.

"Did you say you were going to take me to tea?" she asked.

"It would give me great pleasure," he replied.

"Then we'd better get into our clothes," she suggested.

He rose carefully, steadying himself by the mast. She leaned forward and he caught a glimpse, between the rough sweater and the skirt, of something faintly pink, a quaint little garment such as he had never seen before in his life. Or had he not seen it once before, he wondered, on the waxen lady whose fixed eyes had mocked him as he hurried past to his bus? He staggered away aft to where Large was enjoying his lazy afternoon pipe, the tiller in his hand almost a dumb thing.

"Going to change my clothes," Peter Cradd explained. The boatman nodded.

"We'll be in, in half an hour, sir," he volunteered. Tea, curiously enough, was a somewhat constrained meal. It was sufficiently plentiful, served at the one big hotel of the place, a simple, unpretentious-looking building, by a moderately attentive waiter who gauged with the correctness of his class the status of his customers, but knew nothing about Mr. Peter Cradd's latest stroke of luck. The window looked over the sea, and the girl's eyes kept straying there. Presently she asked her companion a question.

"What are you going to do with all your money?"

"I wish I knew," he replied. "Just at present I feel that more than anything else in the world I should like to buy Ben Large and his boat, and the cottage I'm living in, and stay here for the rest of my life."

"You couldn't buy Ben Large's boat without me," she declared. "I'm part of it. He wouldn't let it to any one else whilst I was here."

"Then I think I should like to take you too," he decided. She looked at him across the table.

"I daresay you'd be quite nice," she said abruptly. "Up to now, I like you very much, Mr. Peter Cradd."

"I hope you always will," he answered.

"I hope I shall."

"I am developing," Peter Cradd remarked, as he helped himself to strawberry jam, "a great curiosity in life, now that I have a little time to think about it. Why do you like me, Miss Eileen? I am plain of feature and halting in speech. I have read no books—I am very ignorant. I know nothing about taking young ladies around. I even forgot to order a table in the window until you reminded me."

"I think I like you," she pronounced deliberately, "because you're different. You have nice, quiet, blue eyes, and the one thing I've grown to hate I haven't seen in them once. You've talked to me nicely too. You didn't even try to hold my hand when we were on the island. If you only knew," she sighed, "how tired I am of people who always want to hold my hand."

"It may have been only shyness, not niceness," he ventured.

"Then I love you for the shyness," she laughed.

Afterwards he walked with her to the cottage where she lodged.

"What about to-morrow?" he asked.

It seemed to him there was a touch of regret in her tone as she answered.

"I'm going for a picnic with my landlady and her two nieces. They invited me a week ago. We are going to a farm where some of the family live."

"Can I have your boat then?"

She made a little grimace.

"So it was the boat you wanted, and not me."

For a moment he was silent. If only she could have known how great was his disappointment, how wonderful had seemed to him the idea of another long day with her, the sailing, the lunch in their wet bathing clothes, whilst the sun warmed their bodies, all the small intimacies of those few marvellous hours. Concerning these things, however, he was tongue-tied.

"I owe you a meal," he reminded her, before they parted. "I took half your lunch. Will you come and have supper with me to-morrow night when you get back?"

She hesitated for quite a long time, for so long indeed that he began to realise how much he wanted her to come. She looked at him and saw the eagerness in his face.

"You don't want me really," she said. "The sandwiches were nothing."

"I want you very much," he assured her. "I should like to show you my little country home. The garden is quite wonderful. 'The Old Vicarage' they call the place. It's just around to the right—the house with a walled garden."

"What time?" she asked.

"Any time you say."

"Half-past seven?"

"I'll be at the gate."

The door before which they were standing was suddenly opened, and a tall young man glowered out at them.

"Supper's ready, Miss Bates," he announced. "Aunt says will you come, because the kids have got to go to bed."

She laughed understandingly at Mr. Cradd as she bade him good-bye.

"Even here," she whispered, under her breath.