Читать книгу Coloured Spectacles - Frederick Niven - Страница 11

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Occasionally old friends of my folks, from Valparaiso, looked in upon us and sometimes stayed a few days. Mr. Mackay, of the English school there, came twice in a few years. I remember going with him one day to the station to see him off and, a minute late, seeing the train glide away. He smiled after it and remarked easily, "Oh, well, there will be another one!" That, however, was not a boat-train. He was only going visiting for the day and was to be back in the evening.

On the day of one of his departures he moved about leisurely after breakfast and anon said that perhaps he had better pack. Off to his bedroom he went to the packing. Time passed. He did not appear. The cab was at the door to take him to the boat-train. Still he delayed. We had better, it was suggested by some one, go and help the old man.

We entered his room and there he was on his knees with paper and pencil. Neatly, all over the floor, were stacks of shirts, stacks of pyjamas, of underwear, suits of clothes perfectly folded. A row of suitcases stood along one side of the room, all open but empty.

"The cab is at the door, Tio," we told him.

He smiled up at us.

"I am just tabulating," he explained.

What a packing that was! Everybody helped, and off he went with a beatific expression on his face as though easefully considering that there is always another boat.

Tio Mackay one night, in Valparaiso, being waukrife (in the old Scots word), unable to sleep, rose and went down without a light to the pantry and fumbled out a handful of biscuits from a canister. He began to eat them as he walked back along the airy gallery and upstairs to bed. He must, he thought, have passed through a spider's web. He brushed his cheek with a sleeve, but more than web, it seemed, was on his face. He brushed again and then, coming into his lit bedroom, he discovered that ants had got into the tin. They were on the biscuits in his hand; they ran in his beard.

Talking of ants—I remember going across the patio in our home in Calle Abtao (all changed by now, I suppose) and looking in at Manuela, the Chilean cook, dark-eyed and copper-hued, who was clambering up from a chair to a table, a brush in hand. I wondered what she was doing. A flitch of bacon hung from a rafter. Up one wall was a dark line that continued along the ceiling to the bacon and then on to the opposite wall and down it. She drew the brush—it had been dipped in paraffin—across that band and promptly a space showed in it. It was of ants. They were going methodically up one wall and across the ceiling to the bacon, then on to the further wall and down it. At the smear of the brush that broke the line those approaching the flitch turned about and the ones behind them turned about also, and all returned by the way they had ascended. Beyond the bacon the streak of ants moved on its way, along the ceiling, down the wall. Manuela smeared the top of the twine by which the flitch hung and then, content, descended panting and, upturning a bucket at the kitchen door for a stool, sat down there to light her little pipe and have a whiff of tobacco.