Читать книгу The Rain-Girl - Herbert George Jenkins - Страница 3

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THE ROAD TO NOWHERE

NATURE discourages eccentricity!"

The ridiculous words rang in Richard Beresford's ears as he stalked resolutely along the rain-soaked high-road. They seemed to keep time with the crunch of his boots upon the wet gravel. The wind picked them up and, with a spatter of rain, flung them full in his face. The pack on his back caught the last word and thumped it into his shoulders.

"Nature discourages eccentricity!"

Where he had read the absurd phrase he could not remember, probably in some insignificant magazine article upon popular science. That, however, was no excuse for remembering it, and upon this of all days. It had not even the virtue of being epigrammatical; it was just a dull, stupid catchpenny phrase of some silly ass desirous of catching the editorial eye.

As he plodded on through the rain, he strove to ​confute and annihilate the wretched thing, to crush it by the heavy artillery of reason. Nature herself was eccentric, he told himself. Had she not once at least sent snow on Derby Day? Did she not ruin with frost her own crops?

"Na - ture - dis - cou - ra - ges - ec - ec - cen - tri - ci - ty!" crunched his boots.

"Ec-cen-tri-ci-ty," pounded his pack.

"Tri-ci-ty," shrieked the wind gleefully.

Confound it! He would think of other things; of the life before him, of the good pals who had "gone west," of books and pictures, of love and tobacco, of romance and wandering, of all that made life worth while. It was absurd to be hypnotised by a phrase.

No; the moment his thoughts were left to themselves, they returned precipitately to the little Grub Street absurdity. It clung to him like a pursuing fury, this nonsensical, illogical and peculiarly irritating phrase.

"Nature discourages eccentricity!"

He strove to recall all the eccentricities of Nature of which he had ever heard. Confute the accursed thing he would at all costs.

It was by way of fat women and five legged sheep that he eventually stumbled across his own family. In spite of the rain and of his own detestably uncomfortable condition, he laughed aloud. Every relative he had was eccentric; yet heaven knew they had not lacked encouragement!

From the other side of the hedge a ​miserable-looking white horse gazed at him wonderingly. Truly these humans were strange beings to find matter for laughter on such a day.

Yes, his relatives were eccentric enough to think him mad. There was Aunt Caroline, for instance, who rather prided herself upon being different from other people; yet she had married a peer; was extremely wealthy, and as exclusive as a colony of Agapemones. No one could say that she had been discouraged.

The thought of Caroline, Lady Drewitt, brought Beresford back to his present situation, and the cause of his struggling along a country road in the face of a south-westerly wind, that threw the rain against his face in vicious little slaps, on the most pitifully unspring-like first of May he ever remembered. Again, the day brought him back to his starting point: "Nature discourages eccentricity." In short, Lady Drewitt, the weather and the phrase all seemed so mixed up and confused as to defy entire disentanglement.

The weather could be dismissed in a few words. It was atrocious, depressing, English. Ahead stretched the rain-soddened high-road, flanked on either side by glistening hedges, from which the water fell in solemn and reluctant drops. Heavy clouds swung their moody way across the sky, just clearing the tree-tops. Groups of miserable cattle huddled together under hedges, or beneath trees that gave no shelter from the pitiless rain. Here and there some despairing beast lay down in the ​open, as if refusing to continue the self-deception. The tree trunks glistened like beavers; for the rain beat relentlessly through their thin foliage, in short, the world was wet to the skin, and Richard Beresford with the world.

His thoughts drifted back to the little family dinner-party at Drewitt House, and the bomb-shell he had launched into its midst. It was his aunt's enquiry as to when he proposed returning to the Foreign Office that had been the cause of all the trouble.

His simple statement that he had done with the Foreign Office and all its ways, and intended to go for a long walking-tour, had been received with consternation. He smiled at the recollection of the scene; Lady Drewitt's anger, his cousin, Lord Drewitt's lifting of his eyebrows, the snap in Edward Seymour's ferret-like little eyes, Mrs. Edward's look of frightened interrogation directed at Lady Drewitt, and her subsequent endeavour to mirror her aunt's disapproval. It was all so comical, so characteristic.

He had found it impossible to explain what had led up to his decision. He could not tell Lady Drewitt and the Seymours that the trenches had revolutionised his ideas, that a sort of intellectual Bolshevism had taken possession of him, that he now took a more detached and impersonal view of life, that things which had mattered before were not the things which mattered now. They would not have understood.

​H could not explain that "out there" everything had taken on a new value and new standards had been set up, that in a flash the clock had been put back centuries; food and life alone had mattered. A few yards away Death had lain in wait to flick them out with a disdainful finger, and every man, some consciously, others instinctively, was asking himself the great riddle—Why?

Instead of endeavouring to explain all this, Beresford had contented himself by saying that the War had made a difference, had somehow changed him, made him restless. He had been purposely vague, remembering Lady Drewitt's habit of clutching at a phrase as a peg for her scorn and ridicule. He had been conscious of making out a very poor case for himself, and mentally he cursed his cousin, Lord Drewitt, for his silence. He at least must have understood, he had been through it all.

Lady Drewitt listened with obvious impatience. At last she had broken out with:

"Richard, you're a fool." The words had been rapped out with conviction rather than acrimony.

"Logically I suppose I am, Aunt Caroline," he had replied, as he signalled to Drewitt to circulate the port in his direction.

"What are you going to live on?" Lady Drewitt demanded. "You've no money of your own."

"Perhaps he proposes to borrow from you, Aunt," Lord Drewitt had said, as he lighted another cigarette.

Lady Drewitt ignored the remark.

​"But, Richard, I don't understand." Mrs. Edward Seymour had puckered up her pretty, washed-out face. "Where are you going to, and what shall you do?"

"He wants to become a vagabond," snapped Lady Drewitt, "tramping from town to town, like those dreadful men we saw last week when motoring to Peterborough."

"I see;" but there was nothing in Mrs. Edward's tone suggestive of enlightenment.

"It's the war," announced Edward Seymour, a peevish-looking little man with no chin and a forehead that reached almost to the back of his neck, who by virtue of a post at the Ministry of Munitions had escaped the comb of conscription.

Lord Drewitt screwed his glass into his eye and gazed at Seymour with interest.

"Don't be a fool, Edward," snapped Lady Drewitt; and Mrs. Edward Seymour looked across at her husband, disapproval in her eye. It was hidden from none that the Seymours were "after the old bird's money," as Jimmy Pentland put it. It was he who had christened them "the Vultures," a name that had stuck.

"What do you propose to do when you have spent all your money?" Lady Drewitt had next demanded.

"In all probability," said Lord Drewitt, "he will get run in and come to us to bail him out. Personally I hate police-courts. I often wonder why they instruct magistrates in law at the expense of hygiene."

​Lady Drewitt had looked across the table with a startled expression in her eyes. It had suddenly dawned upon her that unpleasant consequences to herself might ensue from this rash determination on the part of her nephew to seek his future happiness amidst by-ways and hedges.

"It seems to me——" began Edward Seymour, in a thin, protesting voice.

"Never mind what it seems to you," said Lady Drewitt, whereat Edward Seymour had collapsed, screwing up his little features into an expression of pain. Mrs. Edward had caught him full in the centre of the left shin with the sharply pointed toe of her shoe.

At Drewitt House Mrs. Edward's feet were never still when her husband was within range. Lord Drewitt had once suggested that he should wear shin-guards, Mrs. Edward's methods of wireless telegraphy being notorious. Sometimes she missed her spouse, as other guests knew to their cost. Once she had landed full on the tibia of a gouty colonial bishop, whose language in a native dialect had earned for him the respect of every man present, when later translated with adornments by one of the company.

"If Edward had spent days and nights in the trenches," Lord Drewitt had said, as, with great intentness, he peeled a walnut, "he would understand why Richard shrinks from the Foreign Office."

"It would be impossible," Beresford said, "to ​settle down again to the monotony of a life of ten till four after after—the last four years."

"Unless, of course, you happen to be a fountain," Lord Drewitt had interpolated, without looking up from his walnut.

"I said it was the war," broke in Edward Seymour, looking triumphantly across at his wife, emboldened by the knowledge that his legs were tucked safely away beneath his chair.

"And what do you propose to do?" Lady Drewitt had demanded, with the air of one who knew she had propounded a conundrum to which there is no answer.

"Oh," said Beresford airily, "I shall just walk into the sun. You see, Aunt Caroline," he said, bending forward, "I've only got one life and——"

"And how many do you suppose I have?" Lady Drewitt had demanded scornfully, snapping her jaws in a peculiarly unpleasant way she had.

"I repeat, Aunt Caroline," he had proceeded imperturbably, "that I have only one life, and rather than go back to the F.O. I prefer to——"

"Seek nature in her impregnable fastnesses," suggested Lord Drewitt, looking across at his cousin with a smile.

"Impregnable fiddlesticks," Lady Drewitt had cried derisively, "he will get his feet wet and die of bronchitis or pneumonia."

"And we shall have to go down to the inquest," said Lord Drewitt, "and lunch execrably at some ​local inn. No, Richard, you mustn't do it. I cannot risk our aunt's digestion."

Lady Drewitt always discouraged the idea that life contained either sentiment or ideals. To be intangible in conversation with her was impossible. She admitted of no distinction between imagination and lying. To her all extremes were foolish, optimists and pessimists being equally culpable. She pooh-poohed anything and everything that was not directly or indirectly connected with Burke (once she would have admitted "L'Almanach de Gotha"). Burke to her girlish eyes had always been the open sesame to happiness.

As for the Seymours, they were merely Lady Drewitt's echoes. Lord Drewitt had once said they reminded him of St. Paul's definition of love.

As Beresford smoked his own cigarettes and drank Lady Drewitt's excellent port, he was conscious that there were a hundred and one reasons that he might have advanced to any one but his aunt. It would have been foolish to tell her that within him had been awakened a spirit of romance and adventure, that the wanderlust was upon him.

She would merely have said that he must see Sir Edmund Tobbitt, her pet physician, and have forbidden him to use German words in her presence.

"And how do you propose to live whilst you are pursuing your ridiculous Nature, exposing yourself to all sorts of weather?" Lady Drewitt had next demanded.

"Well, I've got nearly two hundred pounds," ​Beresford had replied, "and by the time I've sold my books and things I shall have fully another hundred."

"You're going to sell everything," gasped Mrs. Edward Seymour.

"Yes, all but the clothes I wear and an extra suit I shall carry with me," Beresford had smilingly retorted, enjoying the look of consternation upon his cousin's face. "When I leave London there will not remain in it a shilling's worth of my property."

"Richard, you're a fool." Lady Drewitt seemed to find comfort in the phrase. "Your poor dear mother was a fool too. She——" Lady Drewitt broke off suddenly and gazed searchlngly at her nephew.

"When did this ridiculous idea first take possession of you?" she had demanded, with the air of a counsel for the prosecution about to make a great point.

"I've been a vagabond all my life," he had confessed with a smile. "I've never been really respectable, you know."

Lady Drewitt's jaws had met with a snap. Lord Drewitt gazed at her with interest. Neither he nor Beresford had ever permitted themselves to be overawed by their aunt. They were the only two relatives she possessed who were not ill at ease in her presence.

"You're Irish," she continued relentlessly, addressing Beresford in a voice that savoured of accusation.

​"Half Irish," Beresford had corrected.

"I remember now," there was a marked solemnity in her voice, "a week before you were born, your poor dear mother was greatly frightened by a tramp who had managed to get into the garden."

"Then," Lord Drewitt had said, "Richard must not be blamed. Like Napoleon, he is clearly a man of destiny."

"But," said Edward Seymour, screwing up his face as was his wont when asking a question, "I don't see why being in the trenches should make Richard want to become a tramp."

"You wouldn't, my dear Teddy," Lord Drewitt had said softly. "You see it's an A1 question and you are a C3 man."

Mrs. Edward had flashed a vindictive look at Lord Drewitt, then with a swift change of expression she turned to Lady Drewitt.

"Perhaps now that Richard knows how—how it would pain you, Aunt Caroline, he won't——"

"Don't be a fool, Cecily," snapped Lady Drewitt; whereat Edward Seymour had looked across at his wife with a leer of triumph.

That night as they had walked away from Drewitt House, Beresford had explained more fully to Lord Drewitt what had led up to his decision to cut adrift from the old life.

"My dear Richard," he had said with a sigh of regret, "I wish I had the Aunt's courage and your convictions."

Beresford smiled at the thought of that evening. ​He paused to light his pipe. He looked about him, hoping to find somewhere a break in the clouds giving promise of fine weather—for the morrow. No; Nature's frown showed no sign of lifting. It was as if she had decided never to attempt the drying up of this drenched and dripping landscape.

He turned once more and faced the wind and rain. His thoughts returned to his family. He had always been something of a problem to them. As a standard by which to measure failure, he had been not without his uses. He had passed through Winchester and Oxford without attracting to himself particular attention, enviable or otherwise. He had missed his cricket "blue" through that miracle of misfortune, a glut of talent, and he had taken a moderately good degree. He had come down from Oxford and the clouds, loving sport, art, literature, and above all beauty.

Mrs. Edward Seymour had once remarked plaintively to Lady Drewitt that it seemed so odd that a man who had nearly got his cricket "blue" should be fond of roses and wall-papers, poetry and skylarks. "It seemed," she ventured to add, "not quite nice." Whereat Lady Drewitt had besought her not to be a fool; but to remember that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton. Mrs. Edward Seymour had gone away sorely puzzled as to her Aunt's exact meaning; but not daring to enquire.

Coming down from Oxford, Beresford had been shot unprotesting into the Foreign Office, which he ​had accepted as part of the enigma of life until that fateful August 4th, 1914, when he had enlisted.

That was four and a half years ago, and now, having thoroughly earned the disapproval of his aunt, he had turned his face to the open road, a vagabond; but a free man. The blue sky would be above him; he had pictured it all, the white flecks of cloud swimming across the sun day by day, and the winking of the stars by night. There would be the apple and the plum-blossom, the pear and the cherry. There would be the birds, the lowing of cattle and the bleating of sheep. Then there would be the voices of the haymakers, the throb of the mowing-machines and the rumble of the heavily laden wains, as they grumbled their way to the rick-yard. The night sounds, the sudden whirr of a frightened pheasant, the hoot of some marauding owl, the twitter of a dreaming thrush; he had realised them all, expected them all—everything but the rain.

He had foreseen rain, it is true, the storm, the flood even; but they had always presented themselves to his mind's eye with himself safely quartered in some comfortable old inn.

"Nature discourages eccentricity."

Nature was discouraging him by flooding the earth on the first day of his adventure.

"I wonder what Aunt Caroline would say if she saw me now?" he muttered.

He laughed aloud at the thought.

Suddenly he stopped, not only laughing, but ​walking, and stood staring in astonishment at a gate that lay a few yards back from the roadside.

In an instant Lady Drewitt, Nature, eccentricity and the weather were banished from his thoughts. Nothing that his imagination was capable of suggesting could have caused him more astonishment than what he saw perched upon this gate giving access to a wayside meadow. Had it been a griffin, a unicorn, or the Seven-Headed Beast of the Apocalypse, he would have accepted it without question as the natural phenomenon of an abnormal day.

It was not a griffin, a unicorn, or the Beast of the Apocalypse that he saw; but a girl perched jauntily upon the top bar of the roadside gate, meditatively smoking a cigarette. She seemed indifferent to the rain, indifferent to the wretchedness of her surroundings, indifferent to Beresford's presence, indifferent to everything—she was merely a spectator.

For some seconds he regarded her in astonishment. The trim, grey, tailor-made costume, knapsack, tweed hat with waterproof covering he mentally registered them all; but what struck him most was the girl's face. Nondescript but charming, was his later verdict; but now his whole attention was arrested by her eyes. Large and grey, with whites that were almost blue, and heavy dark lashes, they gazed at him gravely, wonderingly; but quite without any suggestion of curiosity.

For nearly a minute he stood staring at her in astonishment. Then suddenly realising the ​rudeness of his attitude, he slowly and reluctantly turned to the wind and continued his way.

"A rain-girl," he muttered. "I wonder if she knows that Nature discourages eccentricity?"