Читать книгу Unsought Adventure - Howard Angus Kennedy - Страница 5

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The triangle sat drinking tea, and hatching undreamed-of adventures.

Not the common or roof-garden triangle, prelude to scandalous divorce, nor its chorus the five o’clock tea, when society feeds on large triangular scandals and small triangular sandwiches.

A perfectly proper triangle, drinking strong black tea from strong white cups. The latter end of a mid-day lunch in a heavily furnished dining-room.

An equilateral triangle, all three sides alike: in figure, moderately slim, and well set up; complexion, fair; eyes, blue; hair, red, or reddish; noses, tending very slightly to j-form; and teeth, in good repair. A family triangle, in fact: one good-looking young woman, Isobel Galt; two not ill-looking young men, her brother and second cousin, both named though not both now called John. To avoid confusion one had to be called Jack. The master of the house had a peace-preserving habit of deference to his cousin’s taste, and therefore answered to the name of John.

To say that conversation generally languished at their mid-day meal would exaggerate the vocal activity of the triangle. They did not “converse.” Isobel and John conversed at breakfast, three or four hours before Jack ever came down. At lunch and dinner they only ate, to a steady accompaniment of talk from Jack. Not being in love with their own voices, they had no objection to his monopoly. Isobel, if compelled to speak, would generally have disagreed with her brother’s opinions, and she hated controversy. John, more tolerant of Jack’s irresponsible views on things in general, allowed himself to be rather amused. Besides, listening without talking gave him time for the better mastication of the rigorous diet imposed by doctor’s orders.

At this particular lunch however Jack’s solo was syncopated, lacking in continuity, broken as it were by awkward intervals of static. With effort he pumped up a very occasional remark.

John and Isobel, having sat down in their usual receptive attitude, were vaguely disquieted. Unprepared to fill the gaps, they sat, drank tea, and thought.

Of adventures? Not at all. They had no idea they were hatching adventures, not the faintest desire to hatch them, no notion that the eggs were even laid. Yet when Isobel broke the silence with “A penny for your thoughts, John!” those thoughts crystallized suddenly into a phrase he could never forget,—“The Great Adventure.” He never spoke of it, but he knew how soon he had to face it.

“Adventures,” he answered quickly, with a careless smile.

“Adventures are only for the adventurous, I’ve heard.”

“I doubt that. Some are born to adventures, some have adventures thrust upon them. You never can tell.”

“You’re not yearning for adventures yourself, I hope,” said Isobel.

“Not the least little bit. A quiet life for the rest of my days, that would suit me to a dot.”

“Me too,” she said, nodding,—half from pity, to make him feel such a wish was no mere symptom of an invalid, but partly also expressing a genuine mood of her own.

“Oh, you oughtn’t to feel like that,” he said warmly. “You must be ready to swim the Straits of Dover by now, ADVEN-TURES BY PROXY

ride a Derby winner, command a battleship,—anything, after the dull life you’ve had for a year and more in a New York office.”

“I don’t find it dull. If you sat between two such girls as Lottie and Maisie, you wouldn’t either. The curious thing is, though they call it dull themselves they make it lively for me,—whenever I let them.”

“It’s a dull old house you come back to every night, anyway,—sitting in a library crammed with dull old books, playing crib and chess with a dull old cousin.”

She laughed gaily. “That was a great adventure yesterday when my red knight came tilting across country to carry off your queen, cocksure as anything, and the white bishop jumped up and bowled him over! As for books, why, they’re full of adventures.”

“If you read them. But that’s only other people’s adventures.”

“I make them my own. I’ve read a lot, and at home I always used to get on horseback or aboard ship with the book-people and have their adventures too, in imagination. I do still. Once I’ve read a book I only have to open it, sometimes only look at the title on the shelf, or even just think of it, and I can enjoy all the adventures in it over again,—as I do with my own real experiences, when I bring back in imagination the time I used to ride and swim so much.”

“You wouldn’t get much of that sort of thing out of the thousands of old books that father lined that library with, from floor to ceiling, bless his heart; it’s just as he left it.”

“Some of them look exciting enough: ‘Adventures of a Turkish Spy in the Courts of Europe’, ‘Adventures of Dr. Syntax in Search of a Wife’,—I suppose the Turk had a dozen, but none to spare,—‘Les aventures d’un capitaine de flibustiers dans la Nouvelle France’, otherwise Old Canada, where you were born.”

“Yes, father always picked up anything he thought he could afford about old Canada, though he never tried to collect first editions, and nothing else seems to count much nowadays.”

“I must dust them off and see what they’re like inside, one of these days, if I get really dull. But think of the adventures the really old books must have gone through themselves, in the wild centuries since they were printed; when robber barons sacked each other’s castles, for instance, and carried off the books they couldn’t read, to endow a monastery by way of atonement for the blood they had shed!”

“Great imagination!” murmured Jack,—his first contribution in ten minutes.

As a rule it was Isobel who dismembered the mid-day triangle, having to get back to the office by two. This time Jack was first to leave the room, after his second cup.

John looked uneasily at Isobel. “What’s wrong with Jack?” he said. “Under the weather? It’s bad enough.” Indeed, the house fronts across the street were barely visible through the rain.

“I’ve no idea, John. Maybe he’ll tell me.”

“Hope I haven’t done anything to offend him.”

“You couldn’t. You’re too considerate, if anything,” she said as she passed out of the door.

Left alone, John Galt pushed back his chair and walked to the window, frowning. He looked out, but saw nothing,—nothing visible, nothing but his own furious thoughts. Isobel had offered a penny for them. What would she have given him to take them back, if he had told them?

How she would pity, and sympathize! He shivered.

THE PITY OF BEING PITIED

An object of pity? To avoid that, he had carefully concealed his approaching fate. There were other reasons, to be sure, for selfishness was the least of his failings. If he himself could no longer enjoy life, he certainty would not lessen cousin Isobel’s enjoyment of it. He had invited these English cousins over to share his home for his own sake, left solitary on his father’s death, but Isobel in spite of him persisted in feeling grateful, as if it was for their sake too,—which indeed it was.

The girl knew of course that he had to be particular about his food,—he could not eat in secret, worse luck,—but he always made a joke of that ridiculous diet, and persuaded himself that his cousins had no inkling of the ghastly cause. If Isobel discovered the whole truth, her tender heart would be torn with anxiety, though she would be too careful of his feelings to express her own in many words.

He turned impatient from the window, and stood before the fire-place. The row of silver cups and trophies on the mantel-shelf, relics of school and college pride, were doubled by reflection in a Victorian expanse of mirror. He had wanted to stow them away out of sight, these constant reminders of exuberant strength now gone for ever; but Isobel had protested, not knowing.

That towering trophy emblazoned a three-fold victory,—the half-mile, the long jump, and the shot-putting,—all of them records at the time, and rarely beaten since. He smiled. He was racing now to his death, and nothing could check his speed. The jump at the end—well, it would not be a long one, for he could easily cut it short.

Yes, easily. Crossing in the ferry to Staten Island, where his father had left a bit of real estate,—standing carelessly by the rail,—a convenient fainting spell,—a fall overboard; quite natural, it would seem. No slur on the family name.

He pictured the little incident; saw himself slipping, toppling over the side. But then he pulled himself up straight, proud and defiant. A whole gallery of youthful pictures rose before him now. At school, among the crowd of youngsters from every other European race, his chief pride had been to show what a chip of the old original block was made of. That had spurred his somewhat jog-trot ambition to win prizes even for book-work, which appealed to no other craving in his boy nature. He had not only won but suffered for his pride. When a bully had twisted both arms behind his back, till he fainted with agony, he had clenched his teeth and uttered not one cry. And later on, at college, had he ever grudged the Spartan training that led to victory, or plunged into luxurious reaction when the victory had been won?

Would he play the coward now, and quit the race because he could not win?

There was another inheritance he was proud of, too,—more intimately human than the glory of the tribe,—the level-headed good sense of his family. Of his father’s family, that meant. He realized unwillingly that he was the son of a mother as well, a mother mysteriously vanished and almost forgotten in the distant past. But if he had to admit that some erratic strain might have mingled in him with the steady blood-stream of the Galts, he was all the more determined to resist every impulse of surrender and prove himself as immune to weakness as the strongest of his strong paternal line.

No, it was not what others thought of him that mattered, only what he thought and knew of himself. It was not for praise that he would play the man, for no one else would be aware of his temptation to weakness. Yet he was mightily fortified and cheered by the knowledge that he would be earning, though he would never claim, the warm approval of—Félice and Isobel.... He might possibly have put Isobel first, if he had had any future to plan for; but the future had been settled without his planning. The one ray of sunshine he hoped for now was a vision of Félice beside him at the end.

SISTER ISOBEL SPEAKS OUT

Isobel’s brother came out of his room when she knocked. He shut the door quickly behind him, but not before she had seen an open trunk, a black bag and suit-case, and clothes piled up on chairs.

“Are you going away, Jack?”

“If you must know,—yes. Back to England.”

“Got something regular to do there? I hope to goodness you have; though you might have got a job here if you’d tried.”

“Nothing to suit me. I’ll get something over there, right enough. Can’t stand this sort of thing any longer.”

“Well, you might have told John, after all he’s done for us.”

“Sorry. But that’s just it: we’ve been sponging on him for a year and more, and—”

Isobel fired up. A marvelous fine girl when roused, Jack said to himself.

“Sponging? Speak for yourself, Jack. I pay my own way. I tried to make him take board, but he wouldn’t hear of it,—said it was worth more than my board to have me keep house, which was true enough.”

“Well, and he said it was worth more than my board to have me for company, didn’t he, when he asked us over on a visit as his only relations? But what does he want with company now, when he can’t go out nights for fear of his lungs or something?”

“When a man has to stay in, that’s when he needs company most. All you care for his company, then, is to have him take you everywhere and pay for both, is it?”

“Thank you! Anyhow, he can’t pay as he did, even if he could knock around as he used to. He isn’t as rich as we thought him. Not now, anyway. He thinks of selling his father’s library, but that won’t last long. It’s mostly trash.”

“Mostly, perhaps, though there’s one book worth hundreds of dollars if he really has to sell it. He doesn’t want to, for his father meant to give it to some public library. But how do you know he thinks of selling? Been asking him for money again? That’s one thing he always avoids telling me, but if he has lost money you’ve helped him to do it, borrowing—you call it borrowing—for the horses, and flutters on Wall Street I guess, besides your clothes and everything else. And now that you think you’ve got all you can out of him—”

“Well, you haven’t. If you play your cards well, and do your hair better, you can get—everything.”

Her hand flashed out at his face. With a stinging red cheek he backed swiftly into his room and shut the door. He therefore missed the pleasure of observing both her cheeks take on the flaming hue she had given one of his.

“You cur!” she said. “The sooner you get out of this house, the better!”

He made no answer, but hurried to powder his face. She turned and went down. Then he opened the door again and listened. “I was a fool to rile her,” he admitted to himself. “Wonder what sort of a black eye she’ll give me with Cousin John? He might have come across with something worth while, as a parting gift, if I’d played the grateful cousin on him. Oh well, what’s the odds?” All the same, he crept halfway down the stairs, then stopped and listened.

No, she did not even enter the dining-room. Putting

A GREEN AND GRAVEN INSULT

on her coat and hat in the hall, she just opened the door an inch to say: “I can’t wait, John. See you at dinner.”

“Half a minute, Isobel,” John called out, plunging into his boots. “I’m coming with you. I was going to a matinée anyway.” So they went out together.

“That’s a relief,” thought Jack. “He might have asked me to go with him.... Well, she can say what she pleases. I’m never likely to see him again. I’ll spend the evening out, and slip off before they come down in the morning.”

He pulled out his pocket-book, and his jaw dropped. All he could find, besides the small change in his pocket, was one petty, paltry, miserable hundred-dollar bill. To petty, paltry, miserable folk like you and me it might be something, but to expansive and expensive Jack it was nothing. Worse than nothing. It was a green and graven insult. It wouldn’t pay for his steamer ticket.

“Oh hell,” he groaned, “I forgot last night’s game. I lost the hundred he gave me yesterday. And I could have doubled it, if I’d taken a drop less. ‘The last he could spare me for some time, he regretted to say’,—damn him! Have I got to play the grateful and penitent cousin after all?”