Читать книгу Babes in the Darkling Woods - H.G. Wells - Страница 11

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HE was partly camouflaged as a layman. He wore a light-grey flannel suit and he was holding a Panama hat in his hand, but an unbroken line of collar round his neck reminded one that he was not quite of this world. He was tall and thin, with a bony, aquiline, ascetic face, and the natural earnestness of his countenance had evidently been subjected to intensive cultivation. He might have been of any age between thirty-five and fifty!

"I don't intrude, I hope," he said. "I do hope I don't intrude."

"Won't you sit down?" said Stella with a gesture that indicated most of the wide range of Mary Clarkson's sitting apparatus available in the room.

He ignored her invitation and remained standing.

"Charming room, this of Miss Clarkson's," he said. "Quite charming. Old-world and at the same time modern. Such a delightful contrast to—to houses in a different style. Quite.... I'm told you've been here a week or more."

"Yesterday week," said Stella.

"And beautiful weather it has been, Mrs Twain."

"My name," said Stella, leaning back on the settle, avoiding Gemini's probably horrified eye, sticking the offending wedding ring to the very bottom of her trouser pocket and trying to get it off, "is Miss Stella Kentlake."

She realised suddenly that she had lost her breath and took a large gulp. She felt exactly as though she was playing in a charade and that if she lost her nerve for a moment it would go altogether.

The clergyman altered the angle of his face slightly, so as to seem just a trifle more austere. "I understood," said he, "you were a young married couple."

"No relationship whatever," said Stella. "Just friends. He's Twain."

She nodded her head to indicate Gemini.

"Well, well," said the good man. He had heard of the wedding ring and was a little taken aback by her frankness. He had come all prepared to accept wedding ring conventions.

"Customs change," he said. "In my grandmothers time you young people might have been considered a trifle indiscreet, you know. But now—Honi soit qui mal y pense, I hope?"

"Exactly what I was going to suggest," said Stella, getting clear of the ring at last, sitting up briskly and behaving as much like a respectable hostess of forty as she knew how.

"And now Mr—?"

"Morton Richardson."

"Won't you sit down? We've had a perfectly lovely week down here, lovely sunshine and everything, and we'd love to hear something about its parochial life. And all that. We'd love to. My hus—, Mr Twain, I mean, is beginning to write and so on. That sort of young man...."

She glanced commandingly at Gemini, who was watching her with undisguised admiration and making no effort at all to assist. He took up his cue with a start.

"Unperformed dramatist, Sir, mute poet, indispensable clerk in the Penguin Press organisation, reserve literary worker for the Propaganda Department. Too lame for military service—leg crushed some years ago. But do please sit down. This rather large chair here has never failed anyone."

"Certain1y. Certainly. Though I can't promise to stay very long, you know."

"A little coffee perhaps? There's some in the kitchen. Mrs Greedle. Mrs Cree-dle."

Mrs Greedle appeared promptly and curtsied intimately to Mr Morton Richardson.

"Aah! Mrs Greedle, and how are we nowadays?"

"Never so well, Sir. I'm a patent for our new doctor. Them charcoal biscuits E gave me, they worked a miracle. Indeed they did, Sir. For the last three weeks I haven't know what gas was. It's gone. B'sorbed completely. Shall I bring fresh coffee, Mrs Twain, nice and hot?"

She disappeared.

"Mrs Twain," said the clergyman, as he lowered himself carefully into the large chair and extended his legs towards the open fireplace. "I'm glad that you didn't—. That you have been tender with her possible feelings. About the—er—the situation."

"Well," said Stella. "It's rather on my conscience. I'd be glad of your advice. Don't you think perhaps we ought to break it to her? After all, this calling myself 'Mrs,' it is, you know, lying."

The Reverend Morton Richardson became gravely thoughtful. He put his two long fine hands into an attitude of prayer and rotated them gently against each other. "I would do nothing precipitate," he said. "The situation so far as she is concerned has already been created. With me you have been charmingly frank—charmingly. I take it as a compliment. But-"

Mrs Greedle came back with the coffee and in the pause caused by her presence Gemini poured out for the vicar. "I'm interested in your view, Sir," said the young man, handing the little cup.

"I should do nothing precipitate," the clergyman repeated, when he had assured himself that the door of the kitchen had closed again on Mrs. Greedle. "And on the whole if you don't mind I would rather she did not know that I know of the exact nature of this—er—Platonic experiment of yours. Because you see that would make me a party, so to speak, in the—I think on the whole justifiable deception...."

At the word "Platonic" Gemini had raised his eyebrows slightly at Stella. But Stella remained modestly expressionless.

"But it is a lie, Sir," said Gemini.

"Probably it all began with your charming hostess. Before you came here at all. She may have used some expression.... She may have said 'a young couple' is coming down. 'That makes it a misapprehension rather than a deception. Mrs Greedle, I know, is apt to jump to conclusions. Almost too apt. If you try to clear things up with her now you may sow the seeds of distrust.... Suppose we let it rest at that. For the present at any rate...."

"You couldn't say fairer," said Mrs Greedle, ceasing to listen at the kitchen door. "So that's that."

She returned to her gas stove to make a reassuring clatter there. "Seeds of distruss, my eye! Charming 'ostess! As though I didn't know 'er. Through and through!... The things I've seen! Crikey! Seeds of distruss! If I tole him One Tenth!..."

A brilliant, rollicking but extremely improper thought came into Mrs Greedle's busy brain. She chuckled confidentially to the plate-rack. "But you can't say things like that to a parson, you know," said Mrs Greedle archly, putting a rinsed plate to dry. "They've an innocence.... Even babies 'ave a knowingness. Dirty little darlin's. But parsons—. Oh parsons! Don't even wet themselves. It isn't as though they was natural white paper; it's as though they'd been washed out. Sort of bleached.... Ne-o-o-w."

Mrs Greedle, featuring a distaste for a secondary and acquired innocence by a grimace of concentrated scorn and a haughty backward movement of the head, came within an inch of breaking a plate.