Читать книгу Captain Nicholas - Hugh Walpole - Страница 5

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Safely outside she climbed onto the upper part of an omnibus. Gazing through the window at her side, she marvelled that the world could be so beautiful. It was one of those hours when by a trick of light and sun London appears to be surely the queen of the world. She is not, of course, and we all know how, at the bidding of a tiny cloud, she can sink into primeval slime, but this afternoon she thought that she would let herself go. Through the window Fanny saw the spring evening at liberty. Carried through a rosy air, everything below her was unsubstantial, veiled in a mist that was primrose-coloured, and then deep in violet shadow–mists and shadows that seized messenger boys and ladies shopping and butchers at their reeking doors and antique shops with here a Persian rug and there a bowl of crimson, and newspaper placards, murderous and sporting–all these things were as whimsical as a play by a Scotsman or a children’s poem by a member of the Athenæum. Somewhere around the chimneys the shadows failed, and above them the sky was as pale as the feathers of young canaries. Was it blue or white like a sea shell?

“If you wouldn’t mind,” said the lady in the seat with her. “You are sitting on my coat.”

Fanny was never comfortable on the outside of one of those seats that are ironically designed for the sensitive egotism of ordinary-sized persons. Fanny was too large, and she could not see from the window as she would, so that it was delightful when the lady (who held herself stiffly as though Fanny had the plague or the chicken pox at least) departed and allowed her to command the scene. And command it she did! For now she could see all the humours of the street as though they were directed by her. She had only to move a finger and that lady with the parcels stayed where she was, imprisoned in the sunny haze, or the stout man trying to hail a taxi (he had a flower in his buttonhole) remained for ever hailing, an eternal figure in a master’s landscape. And now they were in Piccadilly Circus where Eros, temporarily restored, caught the sunlight in his wings, and below the ground people dropped pennies into machines and slid down mechanical stairways. Here there was a hush. Everything moved softly, and the sky was exposed, a whole square piece of it, lit into infinity with one star quietly inquisitive. Then they went down the hill, saw people already on chairs outside His Majesty’s Theatre, looked at the Trafalgar Square lions, considered the pictures separated from the spray of the fountains by that grimy wall of stone, down the hill again into a world of bells and legislators, of policemen and trees and hidden streets and small boys wearing top hats....

Into Fanny’s world, for she lived with her family in Smith Square.

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