Читать книгу Time and the Hour - Howard Spring - Страница 19

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On the whole, Anthony was obedient to his Aunt Jessie, but he could not give way in the matter of Ackroyd Park. “You keep out of Ackroyd Park,” she used to say, and there was menace in her voice. But he was going to Ackroyd Park to-night, let her say what she would. Ackroyd Park was not a park. It was a street, running from Manningham Lane down to the valley bottom, the best toboggan-run, in Anthony’s opinion, that you could find anywhere in Bradford. There were not many houses in the Park, and they were—or seemed to the boy—palatial. At all events, they were large, and each stood in a bit of ground, with a carriage-path through bushes to the front door. During an excursion into this forbidden region on a winter’s night Anthony had seen one of those front doors open and a man-servant appear. That was the sort of place you meant when you said Ackroyd Park.

At half past six on that March evening Anthony’s home-made toboggan stood side by side with a taxi-cab outside Mrs. Wayland’s front door. Inside the house, Anthony, who had been complimented at school on his French composition, and who was trying to impress Lottie Wayland, was bogged down in the middle of a sentence.

“Madame,” he said, “je viens vous demander permission pour Christophe m’accompagner à ...” and then he stopped, feeling red all over, as well he might.

Lottie interpreted: “He wants to take Christopher tobogganing, Mummy”; and Chris said: “I hate tobogganing. I don’t want to go.”

The Great Hudson, who had ordered the taxi to be at the door to take him to the theatre, looked with anything but satisfaction at his son. “You go, Chris,” he said. “It will do you all the good in the world. I don’t mean the tobogganing, though that won’t hurt you, but being out with other lads.”

Chris said without enthusiasm: “All right. I’ll go.” And then, ungracious though this acceptance was, he made it worse. “Anthony Bromwich wouldn’t have asked me if he hadn’t wanted someone to pull the toboggan up the hill.”

He had so much wanted to know Anthony Bromwich, who had never before spoken to him, and now, when Anthony approached him, this is how he must go on! Plunging even deeper into gaucherie, he said: “Anyway, we’ll be able to talk English.” No one was pleased with him, and he was aware of it, and he enjoyed it.

Dick said: “Well, have a good time, lad. I must be off. I mustn’t keep that taxi waiting.”

Mrs. Wayland handed him a box, neatly tied. “Don’t forget your supper,” she said.

“Ay—I suppose it’s a good idea,” Dick said doubtfully.

Mrs. Wayland had shown a ladylike curiosity about Dick’s work. She was ignorant of the ways of music-hall performers, and when Dick said that there was a long stretch of time between his first and second performance and that he’d go to a hotel to get “summat t’eat,” all the scraping and saving years of her life in France rose in revolt. “You had a good meal at midday,” she said, and Dick had to admit that it had been better than he ever got from Mrs. Wyke, who had a fixation on cold meat and pickled cabbage, “and what you want at night is something light but excellent. You don’t need to squander your money in hotels. It’s high time,” she added, “that you, as well as Chris, had someone to look after you.”

“Well, Ah don’t know about that,” Dick said with caution, “but thanks all the same. Mercy, madam.” This damn thing is catching, he thought.

The boys watched the taxi-cab churn the snow and at last get a grip and move away. Anthony took up the rope of the toboggan, and Aunt Jessie, who was watching from the front door, shouted: “Mind you keep out of Ackroyd Park.”

They were soon in Manningham Lane, where the day’s traffic had flattened the snow. “Where are we going to?” Chris asked.

“Ackroyd Park. And not a word out of you to my aunt or to Mrs. Wayland.”

Chris was not the boy to accept his blessings without question, even those he had longed for. “Why did you ask me to come?”

“To pull the toboggan up the hill. That is, if we survive going down.”

“Why? Is it dangerous?”

“Well,” said Anthony comfortably, “I’ve known chaps break their arms or legs. If you swerve into a wall, I suppose you might even break your neck. But you wouldn’t know about that, so it wouldn’t matter.”

“If you did, and woke up in heaven, would you still have a broken neck?”

Anthony considered this. “I don’t think so,” he said. “If everybody in heaven is as he was when he kicked the bucket, it’d be a funny place, wouldn’t it? Look at soldiers, and people in railway accidents, and people who get drowned or burned to death. There have been millions of ’em, one time and another. So I suppose there must be something about heaven that puts all those things right. It must be like sawing a woman in two.”

“You can’t saw a woman in two.”

“Oh, yes you can. My Aunt Jessie told me about it. They do it in the music-hall. You put the woman into a long box like a coffin, and then you saw right through the box, woman and all. And then, when the box falls into two bits, the woman jumps out without a spot of blood on her. Well, that’s how it will be in heaven. Even if you’ve been sawn in two, you jump up as right as rain and start singing with all the rest.”

Having settled this point at least as satisfactorily as a medieval theologian could have done, the boys trudged on through the knifey air, beneath a wide glitter of stars. The snow under their feet was caked and rutted, but when they reached Ackroyd Park, which had been little disturbed by traffic throughout the day, they found the surface that Anthony had expected, smooth and reasonably soft, but already so many young sportsmen were upon it that it promised soon to be neither. With gay scarfs flying out like pennons behind them, boys and girls on hissing runners were hurtling down the roadway: from the great iron gates that aristocratically shut Ackroyd Park off from the main thoroughfare down to the valley bottom. In their excitement they were singing, shouting and screaming; and most residents in the Park were longing for softer weather, for rain that would clear the snow and put an end to this popular riot. It was not at all the sort of thing they liked to see staged within their exclusive enclosure.