Читать книгу The Passionate Year - James Hilton - Страница 18

Table of Contents

He woke with a sensation of intense chilliness; the sun had gone in and even its approximate position in the sky could not be determined because of the heaviness of the clouds. He looked at his watch; it was ten minutes past one; he must have slept for over an hour.

The sky was almost the most sinister thing he ever saw. In the east a faint deathly pallor hung over the horizon, but the piling clouds from the west were pushing it over the edge of the world. That faint pallor dissolved across the sky into the greyness deepening into a western horizon of pitch black. Here and there this was shot through with streaks of dull and sombre flame as if each of the hills in that dark land was a sulky volcano. It was cold, and yet the wind that blew in from the gloom was strangely oppressive; the grasses bent low as if weighed down by its passing. Deep in the cleft by Parminters the river gleamed like a writhing venomous snake, the sky giving it the dull shimmer of pewter. To descend across those dark meadows to the coils of the stream seemed somehow an adventure of curious and inscrutable horror. Speed stood up and looked far into the valley. The whole scene seemed to him unnatural; the darkness was weird and baffling; the clouds were the grim harbingers of a thunderstorm. And to him there seemed momentarily a strangeness in the aspect of everything; something deep and fearsome, imminent, perhaps, with tragedy. He felt within him a sombre presaging excitement.

It began to rain, quietly at first, then faster, faster, and at last overwhelmingly. He had brought no mackintosh. He stuffed the essays into his coat pocket, swung his bicycle off the turf where he had laid it, and began to run down the hill with it. His aim was to get to the village and shelter somewhere till the storm was over. Halfway down he paused to put up his coat-collar, and there, looking across the meadows, he saw again that girl in the pale-blue dress. He was nearer to her now and recognised her immediately. She was dressed in a loose-fitting and rather dilapidated frock which the downpour of rain had already made to cling to the soft curves of her body; round her throat, tightly twined, was a. striped scarf which Speed, quick to like or to dislike what he saw, decided was absolutely and garishly ugly. And yet immediately he felt a swift tightening of his affection for her, for Millstead was like that, full of stark uglinesses that were beautiful by their intimacy...She saw him and stopped. Details of her at that moment encumbered his memory ever afterwards. She was about twenty yards from him and he could see a most tremendous wrist-watch that she wore—an ordinary pocket watch clamped on to a strap. And from the outside pocket of her dress there protruded the chromatic cover of a threepenny novelette. (Had she read it? Was she going to read it? Did she like it? he wondered swiftly.) She still carried that bunch of grasses, now rather soiled and bedraggled, tightly in her hand. He imagined, in the curiously vivid way that was so easy to him, the damp feel of her palm; the heat and perspiration of it: somehow this again, a symbol of secret and bodily intimacy, renewed in him that sudden kindling affection for her.

He called out to her: "Miss Ervine!"

She answered, a little shyly: "Oh, how are you, Mr. Speed?"

"Rather wet just at present," he replied, striding over the tufts of thick grass towards her. "And you appear to be even wetter than I am. I'm afraid we're in for a severe thunderstorm."

"Oh well, I don't mind thunderstorms."

"You ought to mind getting wet." He paused, uncertain what to say next. Then instinct made him suddenly begin to talk to her as he might have done to a small child. "My dear young lady, you don't suppose I'm going to leave you here to get drenched to the skin, do you?"

She shrugged her shoulders and said: "I don't know what you're going to do."

"Have you had anything to eat?"

"I don't want anything."

"Well, I suggest that we get into the village as quick as we can and stay there till the rain stops. I was also going to suggest that we spent the time in having lunch, but as you don't want anything, we needn't."

"But I don't want to wait in the village, Mr. Speed. I was just going to start for home when it came on to rain."

Speed said: "Very well, if you want to get home you must let me take you. You're not going to walk home through a thunderstorm. We'll have a cab or something."

"And do you really think you'll get a cab in Par-minters?"

He answered: "I always have a good try to get anything I want to."

For all her protests she came with him down the meadow and out into the sodden lane. As they passed the gate the first flash of lightning lit up the sky, followed five seconds after by a crash of thunder.

"There!" he exclaimed triumphantly, as if the thunder and lightning somehow strengthened his position with her: "You wouldn't like to walk to Millstead through that, would you?"

She shrugged her shoulders and looked at him as if she hated his interference yet found it irresistible.