Читать книгу Work Suspended and Other Stories - Evelyn Waugh - Страница 10
1
ОглавлениеMillicent Blade had a notable head of naturally fair hair; she had a docile and affectionate disposition, and an expression of face which changed with lightning rapidity from amiability to laughter and from laughter to respectful interest. But the feature which, more than any other, endeared her to sentimental Anglo-Saxon manhood was her nose.
It was not everybody’s nose; many prefer one with greater body; it was not a nose to appeal to painters, for it was far too small and quite without shape, a mere dab of putty without apparent bone structure; a nose which made it impossible for its wearer to be haughty or imposing or astute. It would not have done for a governess or a ’cellist or even for a post office clerk, but it suited Miss Blade’s book perfectly, for it was a nose that pierced the thin surface crust of the English heart to its warm and pulpy core; a nose to take the thoughts of English manhood back to its schooldays, to the doughy-faced urchins on whom it had squandered its first affection, to memories of changing room and chapel and battered straw boaters. Three Englishmen in five, it is true, grow snobbish about these things in later life and prefer a nose that makes more show in public—but two in five is an average with which any girl of modest fortune may be reasonably content.
*
Hector kissed her reverently on the tip of this nose. As he did so, his senses reeled and in momentary delirium he saw the fading light of the November afternoon, the raw mist spreading over the playing fields; overheated youth in the scrum; frigid youth at the touchline, shuffling on the duckboards, chafing their fingers and, when their mouths were emptied of biscuit crumbs, cheering their house team to further exertion.
‘You will wait for me, won’t you?’ he said.
‘Yes, darling.’
‘And you will write?’
‘Yes, darling,’ she replied more doubtfully, ‘sometimes ... at least I’ll try. Writing is not my best thing, you know.’
‘I shall think of you all the time Out There,’ said Hector. ‘It’s going to be terrible—miles of impassable waggon track between me and the nearest white man, blinding sun, lions, mosquitoes, hostile natives, work from dawn until sunset singlehanded against the forces of nature, fever, cholera ... But soon I shall be able to send for you to join me.’
‘Yes, darling.’
‘It’s bound to be a success. I’ve discussed it all with Beckthorpe—that’s the chap who’s selling me the farm. You see, the crop has failed every year so far—first coffee, then sisal, then tobacco, that’s all you can grow there, and the year Beckthorpe grew sisal everyone else was making a packet in tobacco, but sisal was no good; then he grew tobacco, but by then it was coffee he ought to have grown, and so on. He stuck it nine years. Well if you work it out mathematically, Beckthorpe says, in three years one’s bound to strike the right crop. I can’t quite explain why, but it is like roulette and all that sort of thing, you see.’
‘Yes, darling.’
Hector gazed at her little, shapeless, mobile button of a nose and was lost again ... ‘Play up, play up,’ and after the match the smell of crumpets being toasted over a gas-ring in his study ...
