Читать книгу Peter Jameson - Gilbert Frankau - Страница 27

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Violet Rawlings, sprightly as ever, even more fluffily dressed than usual; and her husband Hubert, determined that ninety-six hours of personal suggestion should at last secure him some part of the Nirvana advertising account, arrived in time for lunch next day. The foxy-faced publicity agent lost no time in opening his campaign.

“We went to the Palace last night,” he began, almost before they had sat down to their meal. “On our way home I noticed that your new sign in Piccadilly wasn’t burning properly.”

“Really,” said Peter stiffly.

“Lobster mayonnaise, or some of these cold eggs?” asked Patricia, hoping to turn their conversation.

But her brother-in-law took no notice. “I’m somewhat of an expert on signs,” he continued. “And, frankly, I don’t think they have much selling value on a high-grade article like yours. I pin my faith to full pages in the six-penny weeklies. And of course, Punch. Although Punch is a humorous paper. …”

“I beg your pardon,” interrupted Francis.

“I said—although Punch is a humorous paper.”

Francis, feeling satire useless with a creature of this type, gave up the struggle. Hubert accepted an egg, as less liable than lobster to impede talk; and continued his harangue.

Peter, who knew that Rawlings, despite his personal unpleasantness, possessed knowledge, listened interestedly—asking a question every now and then. The others started a conversation on their own.

Said Violet, monopolizing it, “Oh but we never leave London while the ‘House’ is sitting. I think politics so interesting, Mr. Gordon. Don’t you? Though I suppose as an author—so clever, that last poem of yours—you take more interest in the affairs of the heart.”

She ruffled herself; rattled on.

“But of course, politics are the thing nowadays. I’m afraid”—her voice dropped to the confidential whisper of the person who has no news to impart—“we’re going to have trouble. Not with Servia, of course: but in Ireland. People are saying. …”

“Amazing,” thought Francis, “how a nice woman like Pat. can have such a sister.”

Smith, bringing the joint, interrupted the Rawlings duo in their monologues.

“I always wonder,” went on Hubert a few minutes later, “why you didn’t take your brother into partnership. He seemed an awfully nice fellow, the only time I met him.”

“Arthur?” queried Peter. “Why, Arthur wouldn’t take a partnership in Rothschilds! He ran away from school when he was fifteen; and he’s been running from somewhere or other ever since. The last time I heard from him, he was in the Dutch Indies—planting. Wrote to ask my opinion about tobacco prospects in Java. Beastly stuff, Javanese tobacco; though they use a lot of it for making so-called Borneo cigars.”

Luncheon over, Peter and Patricia challenged the two men at tennis: Violet, languid in a long chair, alternately watched the match; and picked her way expertly through The Tatler. To see her own photograph in that periodical, not once but regularly, was a small part of Violet’s many unrealized ambitions: which included a knighthood and a seat in the House of Commons for her husband, a Rolls-Royce limousine (painted black and white for preference) for herself, and all the usual appurtenances of the politico-parisitical set which both of them alternatively aped and envied. Neither she nor her husband belonged to the class who “didn’t want anything in particular”!

Peter, playing brilliantly at the net, and Patricia, backing him up accurately from the base-line, defeated their opponents in three straight setts. Followed tea, a languid paddle towards Shiplake, the dressing-gong, stiff shirts and low frocks, auction bridge. …

July the Thirty-first, Nineteen Hundred and Fourteen! And yet, not one of those fairly well-informed five dreamed the False Peace actually at an end. Already, the Beasts in Gray—murder, rape and plunder in their swinish eyes—were abroad. Already the Crime, so long premeditated, had been committed. Even as these four sat at their game, less than fifty miles away from them, up in London, the womanizers and the wine-bibbers of Westminster were scuttling hither and thither, incredulous, anxious to compromise, fearful. The scum which had floated to the surface! They trembled now, those false guardians. For they and they alone in all England feared the Beast. But more than the Beast, they feared their own People;—knowing them not, neither their strength, nor their courage, nor their infinite forgiveness.

But already (one man’s work!), silent, forethoughted, utterly equipped, the People of the Sea were wheeling to their battle-stations. Already, Anglo-Saxondom had flung its first bulwark across the world.

It was the commencement of the Great Cleansing!