Читать книгу Jinny the Carrier - Israel Zangwill - Страница 39

Table of Contents

Will was sipping his porter piano, and the Deacon his rum strepitoso—the ferrets back in his pockets—when the door opened afresh, and a new figure protruded through it, likewise drawing back when the room which should have been empty at that hour was seen to be in occupation. This was, however, a very different figure from the Deacon’s: a figure jovial and ponderous, sporting a floral dressing-gown and carpet slippers, and with all the air of having just left an adjacent bedroom.

“Come in—don’t mind me,” called Will cheerfully.

The smoker’s invitation not being negatived by the muncher and bibber, the massive visitor padded forwards, revealing more clearly his heavy-jowled hairless rubicund face and the motley multitude of stains on his gay dressing-gown, and waving a roll of clammy-smelling posters. “Just come by the coach—and in the nick o’ time,” he observed genially. And espying in the reversed pictures a favourable background for his operations, he circumvented the table (not without surprise and disgust at the corner where the moleskinned man grunted, guzzled, and guttled), and hung up two of the bills on the nails without any observable astonishment at the state of the pictures or any apparent attention to anything but his own interests; stepping backwards to survey the effect with such absorption of mind that through the girdle of his dressing-gown his spine collided with the table.

“No, my boy!” he addressed Will. “They can’t print like that in Chipstone.”

From his arm-chair Will could easily read the more glaring headlines: