Читать книгу The Smuggler's Cave - George A. Birmingham - Страница 5

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Sir Evelyn left the Anchor Inn, took his camera from the car and set out on the way which Hinton had described to him.

It was not a very pleasant way. It first passed along the village street which smelt of decaying fish and was strewed with empty lobster pots, broken spars and disused oars. Here he was stared at with unblinking hostility by a number of men who leaned against the walls of cottages with their hands in their pockets. He was surveyed apparently with amused dislike by women who came to the doors with babies in their arms. He would have been giggled at by children if they had not all been shut up at school at that hour.

Having reached the end of the street he skirted a slimy and very smelly boat haven beyond which he reached a space of coarse grass. Here nets were spread out to dry and long rows of geese paraded solemnly. Sir Evelyn picked his way among the nets and tried to be indifferent to the geese which stretched out their necks and hissed at him. Having crossed the grass he climbed the sea wall and dropped down on a stony beach. It was a disagreeable beach covered with round white stones. Some of these were about the size of potatoes. They rolled when Sir Evelyn trod on them and he ran some risk of spraining his ankles. Others were larger, about the size of field turnips, and they were coated with pale green weed. Sir Evelyn slipped when he walked on one of them.

At the back, the shoreward end of the beach, the cliffs rose abruptly to a plateau on which the church stood. A hundred yards or so from the village green was the cave. Sir Evelyn, stumbling doggedly on, reached it slightly out of breath.

A surprise waited him. Under the huge arch which formed the entrance of the cave is a pool, ten or twelve feet deep, large enough to hold a fair sized fishing smack. The rocks at the side of the pool are as steep as if they had been cut away to form a dock or a swimming bath. The water is bright green and so clear that the pebbles at the bottom can be plainly seen.

Sir Evelyn unstrapped his camera, preparing to photograph the entrance of the cave. He saw to his annoyance that he was not alone. A woman was standing at the far side of the pool. She wore a bright red bathing dress and a blue waterproof cap. At the moment when Sir Evelyn caught sight of her she was poised for a plunge into the green water.

An imaginative and slightly short-sighted man might have fancied himself unexpectedly blessed with a vision of a mermaid or some other kind of water nymph. The great arch of the cave, the gloomy hollow beyond it, the clear water and the shining rock, formed a natural and proper haunt for a marine damsel. But Sir Evelyn was not romantic. Men who rise to eminence in politics are almost always realists. And he was not short-sighted. He could see perfectly well that the lady on the rock had a sturdy figure and unusually thick legs. All nymphs, woodland or marine, are slim creatures and young. The lady on the rock was not very young, but if he had had any doubt about what she was her greeting would have dispelled it.

"Hallo!" she shouted.

Sir Evelyn, who was a courteous gentleman, took off his hat, bowed and apologised for his intrusion.

"I'm exceedingly sorry for disturbing you," he said. "If I had known you were bathing I should have waited until you had finished."

"Hold on a minute," said the lady. "I can't hear a word you're saying."

She plunged, a neat header with scarcely a splash. He saw the red clad form, curved stiffly from neck to heel, shooting through the clear water. The blue cap emerged, plump arms flashed and splashed. With incredible swiftness and all the grace of a swimming seal she crossed the pool. Grasping the rock at Sir Evelyn's feet she pulled herself half out of the water and looked at him with a gleaming smile.

"This is quite exciting," she said. "I don't think I ever saw anyone here before. Do tell me who you are and what you're doing."

The approach and the questioning which followed it surprised Sir Evelyn. This was not the way in which strangers usually sought to make his acquaintance. But though shocked and a little startled, he was not angry. It is almost impossible to be angry with a dripping, smiling, friendly lady who emerges from the water at your feet.

"My dear lady——" he began, rather pompously but quite kindly.

"My name," she said, "is Eames, Agatha Eames, and my husband is vicar of the parish."

"Dear me!" said Sir Evelyn a little startled.

He had a fairly clear idea in his mind of what the wives of our country clergy are like, an idea formed on the descriptions of these ladies given by our novelists. They are elderly, angular, severe, conventional in their outlook on life and morals, inclined to bitter speaking of a slanderous kind, clothed in body and equipped in mind after the fashion of provincial spinsters of fifty years ago. The lady who looked up at him in no way corresponded to his mental picture of what a country vicar's wife ought to be.

"My name," he said, "is Dent, Evelyn Dent."

"Evelyn Dent! But, of course, Sir Evelyn Dent. The Sir Evelyn Dent."

This prompt recognition of his eminence surprised Sir Evelyn. In political circles he was of course well known. Socially, as son, brother and uncle of three succeeding earls, he held a distinguished position. But he scarcely expected to find himself known to a plump lady bathing in a lonely pool. Recollecting Hinton's earlier recognition in the Anchor Inn, it occurred to him that this lady might at one time have been cook in the house of his father, brother or nephew. In the eighteenth century, according to Thackeray, the clergy often married upper servants. For all Sir Evelyn knew they might be doing so still.

With this idea in his mind he smiled in a friendly way. Mrs. Eames, no doubt encouraged by this sign of amiability, climbed out of the pool, sat down on a rock at his feet and began rubbing the water off her legs with curved palms.

"So you know who I am," he said, expecting a confession that she had in other days fried bacon for his breakfast.

But Mrs. Eames had never been a cook and knew Sir Evelyn only as a public man.

"Of course I know who you are," she said. "I have often heard of your splendid work in the Foreign Office—or if it wasn't the Foreign Office, the Treasury."

Sir Evelyn's splendid work had not been done either in the Foreign Office or the Treasury.

"Not quite right," he said.

"A Cabinet Minister, anyhow," said Mrs. Eames, "and frightfully important. Chairman of no end of Royal Commissions."

"Only three," said Sir Evelyn, as if modestly disclaiming a well deserved honour which had not been bestowed on him.

"Three seems no end of a lot to me," said Mrs. Eames. "In fact three is no end of a lot when it's Royal Commissions. Of course three cigarettes wouldn't be much or three apples. Was anyone else ever Chairman of three Royal Commissions?"

Sir Evelyn was not vainer or fonder of praise than most elderly and successful men. Vanity is supposed to be the besetting sin of young women. It is really the devil's most successful lure for old gentlemen, and Sir Evelyn had not escaped it. Long after the other six deadly sins have ceased to be dangerous, when the blood is too sluggish for lust, when bitter experience has taught the folly of gluttony, when there is little left in life with the power to move to anger, whenever avarice—though Byron calls it an old-gentlemanly vice—is a temptation of the past, then vanity attacks a man whose life has given any excuse for it, and he generally falls. With grey hairs and a measure of success there comes to most of us, as to Sir Evelyn, a strong sense of our own importance.

"I wonder," he said modestly, "how you come to be interested in my commonplace career."

"You mustn't think," said Mrs. Eames, "that because I live in Hailey Compton I'm interested in nothing except the parish pump."

"No doubt," said Sir Evelyn, becoming ponderously playful, "so omniscient a lady will be able to guess what has brought me here to-day."

Mrs. Eames took off her bathing cap and ran her fingers through her hair as if deeply pondering. Her hair was red and had been cropped by the village barber, a fisherman and only an amateur at hair-cutting, who had heard of but not actually seen the fashionable bobbing and shingling. The result was comfortable but not becoming. The absence of floating locks made Mrs. Eames's face look bigger than it was and her features did not bear exaggeration well. They gave the impression of having been rather hurriedly put into their places—eyes, nose, mouth and chin—by a modeller who had learnt his art through a correspondence class. The general effect was lumpy and, on closer looking, rather crooked.

"A little bird whispered to me——" she said.

"A little what?"

"Bird. Of course it wasn't really a bird. And even if it had been it wouldn't have whispered. Birds don't. They twitter. I ought to have said 'Lilith lisped to me——'"

"Lilith!"

"Surely you know 'The Lispings of Lilith,'" said Mrs. Eames.

Sir Evelyn had to confess that he did not.

"Lilith," said Mrs. Eames, "is my niece, Beth Appleby. My name was Appleby before I married poor dear Timothy. She does a column called 'The Lispings of Lilith' which comes out every week in about a dozen provincial papers. Syndicated, you know. I couldn't get on without it. It keeps me up to all that's going on in the great world outside Hailey Compton. Surely you've read it?"

"Never," said Sir Evelyn.

"You'd have liked last week's. There was a Lisping about you. 'Lilith lisps,' that's how every paragraph begins, 'that Sir Evelyn Dent, who has recently retired from public life, is devoting his leisure to a study of the history of English smuggling on which he is expected to produce a ——' Now what was it Beth called it? Either a monograph or a magnum opus."

Sir Evelyn was aware that some paragraphs, based on hints which he had given himself, had appeared here and there about his devotion to historical research. No doubt "Lilith" or Miss Appleby had copied one of them into the column of provincial lispings.

"Very annoying," he said. "Very annoying indeed. This craze for the publication of the personal affairs of private individuals is one of the crying evils of our time."

But Mrs. Eames, though talkative, was by no means a fool. She knew that Sir Evelyn did not find paragraphs in the papers about his historical work in the least annoying. He liked them. He would have liked them even if they had dealt with his favourite shaving soap. All eminent men like this kind of publicity. If they did not they would not get it. For journalists only advertise those who supply the advertisements. Mrs. Eames was wise enough to know this, but also wise enough to pretend she did not.

"It must be most trying," she said. "That's the worst of being famous. Now what about your photo of the cave? I mustn't interrupt you by chattering here. Would you like me to pose for you as a pirate? I mean to say a smuggler. A real live smuggler seated on a stone at the entrance of the cave would be rather a catch in your book, wouldn't it?"

Sir Evelyn did not think it would, and tried to say so politely.

"I see what you mean," said Mrs. Eames. "My figure, of course. It's too plump for even a well-to-do smuggler. What you want is someone lean. Now if poor Timothy were here—— But he's too mild-looking for a smuggler. It is a pity about my figure."

She surveyed her own legs with a good-humoured smile.

"It's not that," said Sir Evelyn, though it was. "All I meant to say is that I'd like to take a separate photograph of you afterwards, a portrait."

He felt that he had been rude, and there was nothing he disliked more than failing in courtesy to a woman.

Mrs. Eames clapped her hands.

"For publication, of course," she said. "'Mrs. Eames takes a dip at Deauville.' We must say Deauville. Beth knows all about these things, being a journalist herself; and she says that this sort of photo practically must be at Deauville if it's to get into any really smart paper."

"But do you want that?"

"Of course I do," said Mrs. Eames, "and it won't do to say 'Mrs. Eames taking a dip,' even at Deauville. We'll say 'Agatha Eames,' and then if people don't know who I am they'll feel they ought to and pretend they do. Or perhaps 'Lady Agatha Eames.' I don't think there'd be any harm in that, do you? 'Lady Agatha Eames in the smartest of chic bathing suits taking her morning dip at Deauville. Photo'd by Sir Evelyn Dent.' You'd like that, wouldn't you?"

"I don't think I should," said Sir Evelyn, rather alarmed. "In fact, I'm sure I shouldn't."

Mrs. Eames was a little downcast, but bore her disappointment well.

"I quite understand," she said. "My bathing dress isn't really chic, and it's centuries old. Of course, you wouldn't like to be associated with it in any public way."

"It's not that," said Sir Evelyn feebly.

"And my figure," said Mrs. Eames. "It is unfortunate about my figure. And you wouldn't believe the amount of exercise I take in order to keep it down. I quite see that it wouldn't do for a Deauville bathing photo. I'll just slip off behind a rock and get my clothes on while you're photographing the cave."

She put on her bathing cap and plunged into the pool again. A few swift strokes took her to the other side. Sir Evelyn watched her disappear into the cave with a bundle of clothes and a bathing towel in her arms. He adjusted his camera and took three photographs.

A quarter of an hour later Mrs. Eames came scrambling over the rocks at the mouth of the pool. She was dressed, but it struck Sir Evelyn when he saw her that her clothes tended rather to emphasise than disguise the defects of figure she complained of. On the upper part of her body she wore a low-necked, entirely sleeveless knitted jumper of a bright yellow colour. A blue cotton skirt barely reached her knees. Her stockings, which seemed stretched to their uttermost, were of the colour called "nude" by hosiers, and it was impossible to help looking at them because her shoes were very white and caught the eye.

"Now for lunch," she said. "You'll lunch with us, of course."

"I fear," said Sir Evelyn vaguely. "I fear that to-day—— Perhaps some other day——"

"Oh, but you must," said Mrs. Eames. "Think of poor Timothy. He hardly ever has the chance of meeting anyone. Not that he wants to, poor darling. In fact he hates it. But it's so good for him."

This tangled account of the vicar's feelings about strangers confirmed Sir Evelyn in his determination to go back to the Anchor Inn for luncheon. He had no wish to force his company on an unwilling host, and did not feel it in any way his duty to be "good" for the Rev. Timothy Eames.

"I have made arrangements," he said a little stiffly, "to lunch at the inn."

"Oh, that'll be all right," said Mrs. Eames, "I'll explain to James Hinton. As a matter of fact, he'll quite expect you to lunch at the vicarage. Everybody who comes to the village does. Not that anyone ever does come. At least, very seldom. But if anybody did—and, after all, you have—he would lunch at the vicarage. James Hinton knows that quite well."

James Hinton did. Sir Evelyn remembered that.

Further refusal became impossible when Mrs. Eames hooked her arm through his and began to tow him across the stony beach.

"There's only cold lamb," she said. "But as soon as we get home I'll dart into the kitchen and make some pancakes. I'm sure you like pancakes. Don't you like pancakes?"

"Oh, quite," said Sir Evelyn.

"And scrambled eggs. Scrambled eggs don't take a minute. After photographing the cave you're sure to be hungry. I know I am. Gladys can run down to the inn for a jug of beer."

"Gladys!"

"Gladys," said Mrs. Eames, "is our cook, which she can't, not even scrambled eggs; and housemaid, which she won't, though she could if she liked. But she can and will go down to James Hinton's for a jug of beer when I tell her to."