Читать книгу Time and the Hour - Howard Spring - Страница 28

Pordage—not Harry but his brother Septimus—had a three-storeyed mind. Schoolboys knew this well. Pordage’s First French Course, Pordage’s Second French Course, and Pordage’s Third French Course brooded over them immutably; and if they went in for Latin, Spanish or Italian, Pordage was there, too, to drive them through the subject with his three-in-hand.

Harry and Septimus were an odd pair to come out of one family. Their father was a prosperous grocer in Halifax, and his ambition was of the simplest: Harry and Septimus should be prosperous grocers, too. He would set each up in a neighbouring town, and perhaps each would have sons whom they could set up, so that in time, over the best grocers’ shop in every town of the West Riding the name of Pordage would glow with commercial rectitude. But things didn’t turn out a bit like that, and the name of Pordage now glowed on nothing but a marble slab, mottled like a slice of Mr. Pordage’s finest gorgonzola cheese, in Halifax churchyard, which did nobody any good, and on a gratifyingly large number of school text-books, which did Mr. Septimus Pordage all the good in the world. Harry was the first of the two to go, fired with ambition after paying a visit to the local theatre. He would never forget the morning after that visit, when a young lady, whom he had seen the night before driven by the schemes of a villain almost, but not quite, to make the supreme sacrifice, came into the shop and asked, as cool as you like, for a pound of sultanas. If she had asked for a pound of pearls or a league of lilies he would not have been surprised, and even sultanas, for a long time thereafter, hardly seemed to him mortal fruit.

Harry’s present status as dresser to Dick Hudson is all that need be called in evidence concerning the murder of his dreams by the villainous years.

Septimus was a clever boy at his books, and Mr. Pordage grieved to see that even in his earliest teens Cæsar’s Commentaries were more to him than the price of butter. There was nothing to be done about Septimus. You simply could not stop him from winning scholarships. He won them to the local grammar school. He won them to Oxford. He had a bee’s ability to rifle every flower that took his fancy. He might have written a three-decker work on some one-decker person like Cheke or Lodge or Skelton and so established himself as a don of parts and repute. But that was not what he wanted. He put in a year or two as a master in a public school, and the squeaky voice issuing from his robust frame, his loathing for any sort of exercise, and his inability to come to terms with the young barbarians in his charge, conspired to make those years hellish. His refuge was in compiling Pordage’s First French Course. Septimus could put on paper what he could not put in any other way. And now, in the middle age of Pordage, custom and ancientry had given his books prestige. In a thousand schools masters swore by him and boys swore at him and his portly self took its ease in Arcadia.