Читать книгу Time and the Hour - Howard Spring - Страница 29

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There was a lot to be said for Arcadia in April, Anthony Bromwich thought. His arrival there was sudden and unexpected. He had been granted no peep behind the scenes, nor, for that matter, had Uncle Horace. All that either of them knew was that on the Wednesday morning of Dick Hudson’s week in Bradford Aunt Jessie said casually at breakfast: “I’ll be out this afternoon. If I’m a bit late back, don’t worry.” She knew that Uncle Horace wouldn’t worry, because his birthday was at hand and he would assume that she was going to find a present for him in town, as she had done before. It was a good alibi; but Wednesday is matinée day in the music-halls, and when Dick Hudson came off he found her in his dressing-room waiting to talk to Harry Pordage.

She and Dick, the day before this, had met in Megson Street and had taken a turn in the park together. “That’s a glum lad—yon Pordage,” she had chanced to say; and thereupon Dick had unfolded Mr. Pordage’s story so far as he knew it, which was pretty well, for he had known Harry for a long time. He had watched the poor chap slipping down and down the music-hall bill, finally falling right through the bottom, all the time that he had been climbing up and up. He knew all about Harry’s clever brother—the sort of man he wanted Chris to be, with letters after his name and all that, and he said: “Harry went to see him last Sunday. He lives out in Darton-in-Craven—you know, a little place not far from Smurthwaite. Grand country that is. I used to walk all round there when I was a lad.”

It seemed that Mr. Septimus Pordage, in his middle age, was beginning to feel lonely, and had told Harry, a bachelor like himself, that he had been thinking of offering a home to a pupil if he could find the right sort of boy. “Not that he wants the money—he wants company like. It’s a quiet place is Darton.”

And this is what Aunt Jessie wanted to talk about to Harry Pordage; with the consequence that she and Anthony found themselves a month later in the train bound for Smurthwaite.

Anthony was far from happy. The house in Megson Street was the only home he had known, and it seemed hard to be leaving it now when the first dandelions were opening among the stone setts in a day of April blue. Auntie Jess and Uncle Horace were all he had known as relatives, and here he was now in the train, rolling out into the open country beyond Keighley, with Aunt Jessie talking rather breathlessly about a father of whom he had never heard, though he supposed he must have had one. “When all is said and done,” said Aunt Jessie, “he is your father, though your uncle and I have brought you up, and little thanks to him except for a bit of money now and then. Always on the trot he’s been, never satisfied with his own country, though I should have thought it was as good as most.” And now this rolling stone, it seemed, had bumped to a standstill in South America, “and a better job than I ever thought he’d land”; and in his new-found affluence he was beginning to think of his son whom he hoped to meet some day. “So there it is,” said Auntie Jess, helping herself to a sandwich, for she never took the shortest railway journey save in the expectation of starving before the end of it, “and if he says you must go to a tutor, that’s that. He’s your father, and he’s finding the money.”

It was all too sudden, unexpected and complicated for Anthony at twelve years old. He tried to understand, but gave it up. There were streams, and sunlight on white limestone, and a blue sky, and lambs in the fields. These things were immediate and uncomplicated, and he settled down to divide his attention between them and an enormous beef sandwich that was almost enough in itself to relieve the straits of a beleaguered garrison.