Читать книгу Those Folk of Bulboro - Edgar Wallace - Страница 4

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THE guide-books say that Bulboro lies on the Avel, but you must leave Bulboro behind to find that pleasant stream.

It is true there is a large and sluggish basin where grimy barges lie, but the water is soulless and dead and streaked with the gloomy iridescence which speaks eloquently of oil drums carelessly handled.

The banks are stark and rubbled, or overlaid with staging on which the clumsy cranes puff up and down, slowly and asthmatically.

There is, too, in the lower town, a short iron bridge, depressing in its ugliness, which spans a dark stream and is known as Avel Bridge, though, as a matter of absolute fact, no Avel, but a half-hearted canal, flows beneath.

You must travel outside Bulboro for a glimpse of the stream as the poets know it and the painters have shown it. Away from the tall chimneys of the glass works, and the woollen mills, and the overpowering obesity of the Bulboro Gas Light and Fuel Company’s monstrous gasometers; away from the clang and the jangle of the electric cars, the melancholy drone of innumerable sirens, and the everlasting rattle of Siggses Iron Works, you will find the river flowing in its serene and natural beauty.

Bulboro is a discoloration at the bottom of a great saucer. All the dregs of the Avel valley have drained into the town. Outside there is a beautiful land of soft breezes, of yellow cornfields (in the proper season), of ancient farm-houses, thatched and decrepit old cottages, masked by clematis and approached by the narrowest of paths, through flowers waist high, so narrow because the cottages could spare no more space for the foot of man. There are inns for the seeking, inns with low-roofed parlours and spacious fire-places. Summer or winter, the Avel valley is a joy to the stifled folk of Bulboro. Mist stealing over the hills and entangled like thinnest gossamer, means dense yellow fog in the town. Sunlight and shadow on the waving cornfields of the valley thicken to something which is neither sunlight nor shadow in the hot streets of Bulboro. Snow in billows of virgin white is black slush in the city.

But Bulboro is by far too busy to devote overmuch attention to such matters as the æsthetic aspect of meteorology. In Bulboro it is “hot” or it is “cold,” or it is adjectived hot or adjectived cold—and only the adjective employed varies.

It was cold when Anthony Manton came out of the station buildings overcoated to the chin. The porter informed him that it was cold. The fly-driver paused in the operation of stacking his luggage to tell him as much, the little newsboy at the stall had handed him a paper and his change, with the respectful intimation that it was “very cold.”

It was cold enough for this young man, with the brown, lean face. He shivered a little as an icy gust came swirling through the open door of the booking-office, and he pulled up the collar of his coat. He was tall and strongly built. He carried himself with the freedom of a sailor and had the sailor’s blue far-seeing eyes.

He was clean-shaven, save for a closely cropped moustache. His nose and the straight black eyebrows gave his features a T-square regularity. His chin was firm, and he was saved from nondescript handsomeness by a certain hollowness of cheek and an expression of severity which comes to the man who does not readily smile. Yet you might judge him to be capable of enormous laughter. There were possibilities of merriment in his solemn eyes and the uneven line of his lips.

Every man’s face has a message: a message which speaks with a great eloquence to the people who are wise in the reading of faces. Anthony Manton said some things plainly, offered grounds for speculation in others. He was the observer, keen, eager, patient. There was indifference amounting almost to contempt in the lips, inflexibility in the set of his jaw, concentration in the perpendicular lines of his forehead, shrewd sure reasoning power in the lift of his eyelids.

He might have found difficulty in offering an explanation for the more elusive qualities of his face. For the moment, at any rate, he was in no mood for self-analysis, for he agreed with the porter, the newsboy, and most emphatically with the fly-driver, that it was cold.

His companion, muffled up to the eyes, his neck thickly encircled with a great woollen muffler, said nothing. His brown eyes stared impassively from under his scarlet tarbosh at a peculiarly unattractive corner of an unpleasant land. His big brown hands were thrust into the depths of an enormous ulster and his feet were protected by two pairs of woollen stockings encased in large and strange boots.

“Ho, Ahmet!” said Anthony Manton, turning gravely to the other and speaking in the bastard Arabic of the Coast, “this is a world without comfort.”

Ahmet unthawed his voice huskily.

“God protect us,” he said, “for my marrow is frozen, and there is a pain in my ears as though all the tsetses in the world were drawing blood. Now I think this place is hell and I am being punished for my sins, lord. For never in my life have I been so sorrowful.”

Anthony’s lips twitched.

“Get into this carriage,” he said in the same language. “Afterwards we shall come to a place more pleasant, and you shall make me coffee of great heat and comfort.”

He closed the carriage door on his servant and looked round to say good-bye to his travelling companion.

He picked him out from a tangle of passengers, for it was two days before Christmas and there were many who called Bulboro “home” without shame.

Anthony walked swiftly to where the little man stood.

He was obviously Hebraic. The broad face, the heavy lids, the closely cropped beard were typical. He was not handsome, yet his brown eyes twinkled with good humour; his smile was quick to come, and you saw that life to him held none of the tragedy which is so unmistakably reflected on the Jew’s face. The world was a “funny place” to Ambrose Cohen. That was his favourite verdict.

He was well dressed in a long, fur-lined coat, that reached to his heels; his hat a white bowler, his cigar large and fragrant. The coat concealed most of his raiment, and you might suspect hidden brilliance of stone and precious metal to testify his wealth; but Ambrose Cohen was in many ways an extraordinary man. For the display which appealed to his compatriots he had no desire, though he was a very rich man, a magnate, even by Johannesburg standards.

Sentiment brought him to Bulboro, for in this tiny town he had first seen the day. His father, a working jeweller, was long since dead. Cohen lived in a beautiful house in West Hill, with a handsome wife and two little children whom he adored. The country attracted him because he was a keen horseman, rode regularly to hounds, and had so far overcome the prejudice of a conservative county, as to be one of the most popular members of the Hunt.

He saw Manton and came impetuously forward, offering his gloved hand.

“Good-bye,” he said, his eyes dancing with good humour, “you will see me again.”

“I hope not professionally,” said Anthony.

The other laughed.

“I have no fear,” he said. “I am so well that even a doctor could not injure me. Take my advice to heart”—he shook his gloved finger at the other jokingly—“if they want to know your religion say you’re a Jew, otherwise they will fight for your body.”

He spoke with a little lisp which was pleasant to hear. He could not sound his “r’s” distinctly, probably a habit acquired from a boyhood spent at Newcastle, where his uncle had controlled a coastwise line.

“I shall remember,” said Anthony, the ghost of a smile playing at the corner of his lips. He opened the fly door and stepped in, returning the farewell wave of the other as the fly clattered down the steep incline into the street.

Ahmet sat facing him, taking a more cheerful view of things and a faint interest in the neighbourhood. They drove over the well-paved streets; clanging tramcars passed and re-passed them; the thoroughfare was almost crowded from the standpoint of one who had lived in a country where white men are to be met at the rate of six a year.

They skirted the lower town, row after row of stone-coloured villas, through the even more crowded market street where the wives of Bulboro came to prepare a feast for their lords. Then the jog-trot of the fly slowed down to a walk as it began the steady climb of West Hill. Gradually they shook off the shops and entered a region of small detached houses which improved in quality as they mounted. The road twisted and turned so that in one place there was an undisturbed view of the smoke-dimmed panorama of Bulboro below.

“What think you of this place, Ahmet?” asked Anthony.

The Arab turned a long and dispassionate view on the scene at his feet.

“There are many good people,” he said; “for I see the towers of their mosques wherever I look. This must be a holy place.”

Anthony nodded.

They came at last to “Pilgrim’s Rest”; nobody knew who had named it so; certainly the doctor had taken it with its nomenclature established and had made no violent attempt to unfold the mystery of its name.

It was a small rambling house. Anthony remembered that he had likened it to a dog trying to chase its tail, and growing discouraged at the place where the stables stretched an archway across to the hot-houses. It was an inconsequent house, without any particular reason why any of it should have been built as it was. It represented in Anthony Manton’s mind tangible evidence that it had come down through the hands of a dozen generations temperamentally opposed, each a little contemptuous of its predecessor and desirous, in its own erratic way, of covering one fault of architecture with a fault more glaring.

Time had softened the blunders of its dead builders, nature had thrown over it a veil of ivy here, had hung a frieze of climbing roses there, had tempered this angle with an oak; that gap with a riot of flowering-plants. Nature may have been assisted, and probably was; but Anthony Manton, in his imaginative youth, had pictured a friendly but invisible familiar who had his habitation in a disused tool-shed at the end of the garden, and who employed himself in correcting the errors which the brick men and stone men of all ages had accumulated.

The old servants were waiting to receive him, and with a nod left and right he went straight to the library, where a cheerful fire burned.

There he stood in the doorway, silent and thoughtful. Jocks, his uncle’s butler, was behind him. There was no need to ask any questions: he knew from the letter which had reached him at Teneriffe that in that old cosy chair to the right of the fire-place honest and kindly Jabez Manton had passed beyond the veil.

He had no qualms in seating himself in the chair. He was too much of a doctor to worry overmuch about the sentimental aspect of his return, too much of a man also, to pass without thought the significance of that empty chair. He sat for awhile thinking. Jocks came with a cup of coffee.

“The foreign person made it, sir,” he said punctiliously. “He had some difficulty in conveying his wants, but fortunately poor Dr. Manton——”

“Jocks,” interrupted the young man quietly.

“Yes, sir?”

“Do not refer to my uncle as ‘poor Dr. Manton’—it does not please me.”

The butler stiffened.

“I am sorry, sir,” he said; “it is only natural, I’m sure.”

“It isn’t natural at all,” said Anthony, “it’s sentimental. You can love a man without feeling sorry for him—you don’t feel sorry for Shakespeare, or for Lord Nelson, do you? However, go on with what you were saying.”

“The doctor,” said the ruffled servant, “had the apparatus which the native required—he does not speak English?”

“No,” said Anthony.

“That’s a great pity,” said Jocks.

It was as great a pity that Jocks had not a working knowledge of Arabic, but this opinion Anthony did not express.

At his request the servants brought in two of his trunks, which were filled with papers, memoranda, and such books as he immediately required. He spent a busy two hours settling himself in his new surroundings. There had been no other message for him other than the one he had received. Dr. Manton’s passing had been peaceable and painless: he had complained of faintness, and Jocks had gone to bring him a glass of water. When he returned, the old doctor was dead.

Bulboro had afforded him the magnificent funeral which the town felt was due to its dignity no less than to its sense of gratitude for favours past. For once the churches had combined with the friendly societies in the formation of a choice spectacle; and since the doctor had been something of a non-sectarian and had judiciously hidden his particular leaning in religious matters from the curious gaze of Bulboro’s elect, and no wish had been expressed in his will as to the method of his burial, all the churches of Bulboro had met at the graveside.

Anthony had learnt this from a very correctly written letter which had been dispatched to him en route by Jocks.

The entry of the young doctor into the life of the town was as undramatic as it could possibly be. At eight o’clock that night he walked into the consulting-room of the free dispensary established by his uncle, brusquely replied to the little address of welcome which the committee had thought it necessary to prepare, and devoted the evening to an examination of the applicants. His experience as a general practitioner had been practically nil, but he had doctored native people, and between the native mind and the mind of the civilized poor there is very little difference. They were equally garrulous, equally charged with an eager desire to describe their symptoms. Anthony Manton had a brief, sharp way with him and was disinclined to allow his new patients to follow the example of the committee.

“I’m sure we’re all very glad to see you, Dr. Manton,” said a pale-faced woman rocking a baby jerkily. “I’m sure, dear Dr. Manton——”

“Is it the baby or you?” asked Anthony.

“It’s the child, sir,” said the woman. “I have had a lot of trouble with him. I was saying to my sister——”

“Let me look at him.”

He cut short the personal reminiscence, so dear to the heart of the hypochondriac, with a sharp, almost brutal, diagnosis, sometimes to their discredit.

He had nearly finished when Dr. Painter, of whom his uncle had written, came in. He was a middle-aged florid man with an irregular beard and an abstracted manner. It had driven many an expectant father to the verge of madness, for, argued the distraught parent-to-be, what other reason for abstraction could there be than that “something had gone wrong”?

Anthony gave him a cheery welcome. He had a tremendous sympathy with his brother medicals, and the reserve which marked his intercourse with his fellows dropped away from him in their presence, and you saw something of the real man underneath.

They exchanged a few words about the dispensary.

“They’re an ungrateful lot of devils,” said Painter; “your uncle went to a great deal of expense and bother to get this dispensary fixed up, and naturally they think that he made a fortune out of it.”

“That’s the way of the poor, they never really understand charity in its best sense,” said Anthony. “They cannot understand the spirit of sacrifice.”

He left the dispensary with Dr. Painter, and they drove together back to the house.