Читать книгу Those Folk of Bulboro - Edgar Wallace - Страница 5

Table of Contents

A RAW, grey day had grown to a night of cold rain and sleet. Somewhere, where the air was purer, where great grey angry seas beat upon the rocky headlands, a sou’-westerly gale scalloped the bosom of the ocean and slashed the tops of the waves into a wild fan of steaming spray.

Here in Bulboro only whimpering echoes of the storm came in spasms. It was lost and baffled in the narrow streets, under high walls of factory and mill, in the culs-de-sac where it fought in little mad circles for escape, rattling the frail windows of cottaged workers, blowing open incautiously unfastened doors, extinguishing oil lamps and slamming interior doors with thunderous noise.

In the High Street it came swirling round corners, driving the drenching rain before it; yet High Street was tolerably full, and the tramcars were loaded.

Wednesday night was always a little crowded in Bulboro. There was service or an evening of mild amusement at St. Peter’s; the chapels had service also, and earlier in the evening three Band of Hope meetings were held in various parts of the city.

This Band of Hope question was a serious one. Attendance and membership were on the decrease, and there were open accusations of proselytizing made by two of the sects which controlled the children’s organizations.

Pastor Childe had permitted himself the luxury of a righteous rage, and this publicly, when he charged “the secret servants of the Scarlet Woman” with enticing the youth of Bulboro to “the image-worshipping orgies of furtive papistry.”

The Church complained in more sober and less direct language of the “unfortunate influences” which were being brought to bear upon the children, but named no names, for the attitude of the Church was that peculiar to a long-established newspaper in its dealings with obscure and impotent contemporaries—it ignored frankly, and reproved so sweepingly as to bring into the net of its reprobation not alone the object of its displeasure but every other which could by every stretch of the imagination be regarded as remotely antagonistic.

The Wesleyans blamed nobody save their ministers, which is a way Wesleyans have.

The Congregationalists were not particularly affected, because the energies of the Church were directed elsewhere. Their members were far too occupied by the question of Land Proprietorship, which was to free the country from the curse of poverty, sin, drunkenness, and the encyclopædia tale of misery which comes—so the propagandists say—in the trail of land poverty. Moreover, to the consternation of the leading Congregationalists, the Church had almost suspended its evangelistic work, and the political spirit had so invaded the pulpit as to make Sunday morning and evening two periods which the earnest politician of Bulboro looked forward to with something akin to joyous anticipation. Before the church were notice-boards which gave a hint of the character of the forthcoming services.

In the morning the Rev. Hartburn Gray (of Woolwich) would deliver an “address” on “If Peter were a member of the House of Lords,” and in the evening the Rev. Valentine Stope would discuss “The Devil and the Whigs.”

Little time had the good Congregationalists for such futilities as the Band of Hope. The “Men’s Hour” on Sunday afternoon had almost destroyed the Sunday schools, which had dropped in point of attendance from four hundred to seventy during the ministry of the fiery young Radical.

Yet it was due neither to the proselytizing of Baptist, nor to the allurement of ritual, nor yet, it must be confessed, to the enlarging of Congregationalist political activities, that the growth of juvenile apathy might be traced. A new decade had witnessed the arrival of cinema palaces, had seen great white structures, for all the world like exaggerated wedding-cakes, grow out of old and unlettable shops.

A new interest had come into the lives of Bulboro’s young citizens; a new world opened before their eyes. Drama there was of a healthy kind—drama, with revolvers and cowboys galloping in dusty bunches and mannish girls riding astride. But there were serious instructive pictures. Object lessons more delectable than science masters could demonstrate, with the veritable cities of the empire before your eyes and their strangely clad, scowling citizens. There was history filmed by a French house, with gallants in hose and doublet, historical happenings breathlessly portrayed.

There you followed Napoleon from triumph to triumph, grew sad over the fate of a tangible Christopher Columbus, watched Cortés at his work, lived with Leonardo da Vinci, supped with the Most Christian kings of France. The pictures were insidiously harmless.

The two theatres, the Grand and the Royal, had never drawn the youth of Bulboro from its pleasant devotions. The antagonism between Nonconformity and the theatre was rather a matter of hereditary enmity than the growth of modern sentiment. Little Nonconformists were born with the inbred knowledge that the theatre was an evil thing, and the first breakaway from a rigid observance of the pure life was usually associated with a defiant son or an incoherent daughter “owning up” to the possession of theatre tickets.

But the cinema craze had grown with such rapidity that parents had had no time to formulate their views and ministers had given no lead in the matter.

Cinema exhibitions had come originally in the guise of entertainments in church and chapel “halls,” and since churchwardens and circuit stewards had offered no objection to this type of entertainment in its original shape, they were somewhat embarrassed by its growth and popularity.

Anthony came through the chill and drizzle of the High Street buttoned up to his neck. He had been called to a case of influenza, and, to the scandal and indignation of the patient’s parents, had diagnosed the case as one of scarlet fever.

“Scarlet fever, doctor?” said the stout lady of the house incredulously. “I have been a mother now for twenty years, and if I don’t know scarlet fever when I see it——”

“You may be a mother, madam, for two hundred years,” said Anthony in his dry way, “and still fail to qualify at the College of Physicians.”

“I’ll have to see another doctor,” said the father.

He had been a silent but resentful listener, in accordance with the practice and tradition of a class in which the women have the monopoly of all private conferences with the family doctor.

“Certainly,” said Anthony. “I think you would be wise to do so if you have any doubt on the matter—in the meantime, I must notify the case.”

“Are you entitled to do that?” asked the man.

He was, Anthony learnt, a well-known figure of Bulboro society, being one of the lay preachers and orators of the Congregational Church.

“I am not only entitled, I am compelled,” said Anthony patiently.

The man saw him to the door.

“Your uncle,” he said bitterly, “was known as the poor man’s doctor—he didn’t go notifying diseases.”

“Please don’t talk rubbish,” said the young doctor, and thereby struck from his register one of the old doctor’s trying cases.

No, thought Anthony, as he made his way back through the thronged street and across the windswept little oval which marked the centre of the town and for some reason bore the name of “The Chad,” there was little difference between the aboriginal of the cannibal forests and the aboriginal mind of Bulboro. He stopped outside the theatre to read the bills and examine the photographs.

As he did so a girl came hurriedly through the vestibule, followed by a boy of fourteen.

The girl’s face arrested him.

It was singularly pretty—that prettiness which is made up of black and white—glowing black of eye, dead black of arched eyebrow and lustrous black of hair. Her face was of that peculiar pallor which betrays city dwellers. But here there was no unhealthy patchiness in the white, and the lips were rose-red.

She hesitated fearfully in the vestibule and looked out into the street and back at the boy.

She was so close to the doctor that he took a step back, thinking that she wished to pass him.

She came down one step and as swiftly went back with a startled “Oh!”

Then she turned back and fled the way she had come, leaving the boy, bewildered and uninformed as to the cause of her panic.

“Dr. Manton.”

Anthony swung round.

Tanberry, the parent of the scarlet fever patient, was standing behind him, an angry frown on his face. But the frown was not directed towards the doctor—it went past him and smote the abashed boy who still stood at the entrance of the theatre vestibule.

“John Gill,” said Tanberry sternly, “what are you doing in this devil’s house?”

The boy opened his mouth to speak, but no word came; he was hypnotized by the awful knowledge of his sin, by the terror of detection.

“Does your father know that you are here?” asked Tanberry.

The boy muttered something which the other took to be a negative.

“Who has enticed you here—are you alone?”

“Yes,” said the boy doggedly.

Anthony created a diversion.

“Did you want to speak to me?” he asked.

“Yes,” said the man shortly, “but my heart is heavy with sorrow to see this——”

“I am afraid I cannot share your condemnation with the boy,” said Anthony, with a little smile. “I’m rather in a hurry, though you may not think so.”

The man turned his attention from the boy, and out of sheer pity Anthony Manton led the other on past the theatre to give the boy (it was the girl he was thinking of) a chance to escape.

“I want to ask you, doctor,” said the man hesitatingly, “if this is scarlet fever, is there any danger—to me?”

“If you have touched the child—yes,” said the doctor; “not a great danger, but still a danger. You can never be sure with infectious diseases.”

Tanberry looked unhappy, stroking his short yellow beard.

“It would be a great misfortune if I contracted scarlet fever,” he said. “You probably know, doctor, that I, under God and by His divine mercy”—he looked up at the sky swiftly—“am a leader of our little Rescue League and the secretary of the Brotherhood—in fact, it would be disastrous if I were removed from the sphere in wh——”

“It would also be disastrous if your wife were similarly removed,” said Anthony brusquely; “or your children or any of your neighbours. I don’t suppose you’re two inches bigger in the eyes of God than anybody else. You’ve got to take your chance.”

“If I went away, do you think?” suggested the other, too anxious to resent the offensive tone of the doctor. “I have a brother in London who’d be glad to put me up for a week or so.”

Anthony’s lip curled.

“I am afraid that would be fatal—to your work,” he said softly. “Stay here, my friend, and labour in the vineyard, for as the good book says: ‘He who fights and runs away, never lives to say hooray!’ ”

He left Mr. Tanberry staring after him.

“An atheist,” said Tanberry at last, turning toward his stricken home. “Soften his heart, O Lord, and let him see the Light. Give him under Thy guidance, Grace and Faith.” And he went on his way to call in another doctor, for he was by no means satisfied that Dr. Anthony Manton knew his business.