Читать книгу A Tangled Web - L. M. Montgomery - Страница 9

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Outside on the railing of the verandah Peter Penhallow was sitting, swinging one of his long legs idly in the air. A rather contemptuous scowl was on his lean, bronzed, weary face. Peter’s face always looked bored and weary—at least in scenes of civilisation. He wasn’t going in. You would not catch Peter mewed up in a room full of heirloom hunters. Indeed, to Peter any room, even a vacant one, was simply a place to get out of as soon as possible. He always averred he could not breathe with four walls around him. He had come to this confounded levee—a curse on Aunt Becky’s whims!—sorely against his will, but at least he would stay outside where there was a distant view of the jewelled harbour and a glorious wind that had never known fetters, blowing right up from the gulf—Peter loved wind—and a big tree of apple blossom that was fairer to look upon than any woman’s face had ever seemed to Peter. The clan wrote Peter down as a woman-hater, but he was nothing of the sort. The only woman he hated was Donna Dark; he was simply not interested in women and had never tried to be because he felt sure no woman would ever be willing to share the only life he could live. And as for giving up that life and adopting a settled existence, the idea simply could never have occurred to Peter. Women regretted this, for they found him very attractive. Not handsome but “so distinguished, you know.” He had grey eagle eyes, that turned black in excitement or deep feeling. Women did not like his eyes—they made them uncomfortable—but they thought his mouth very beautiful and even liked it for its strength and tenderness and humour. As Uncle Pippin said, the clan would likely have been very fond of Peter Penhallow if they had ever had any chance to get acquainted with him. As it was, he remained only a tantalising hop-out-of-kin, out of whose goings-on they got several vicarious thrills and of whom they were proud because his explorations and discoveries had won him fame—“notoriety,” Drowned John called it—but whom they never pretended to understand and of whose satiric winks they were all a little afraid. Peter hated sham of any kind; and a clan like the Penhallows and the Darks were full of it. Had to be, or they couldn’t have carried on as a clan at all. But Peter never made any allowances for that.

“Look at Donna Dark,” he was wont to sneer. “Pretending to be devoted to Barry’s memory when all the time she’d jump at a second husband if there was any chance of one.”

Not that Peter ever did look at Donna. He had never seen her since she was a child of eight, sitting across from him in church on the last Sunday he had been there before he ran away on the cattle-ship. But people reported what he said to Donna and Donna had it in for him. She never expected any such good luck as a chance to get square. But one of her daydreams was that in some mysterious and unthinkable way Peter Penhallow should fall in love with her and sue for her hand, only to be spurned with contumely. Oh, how she would spurn him! How she would show him that she was “a widow indeed.” Meanwhile she had to content herself with hating him as bitterly as Drowned John himself could hate.

Peter, who was by trade a civil engineer and by taste an explorer, had been born in a blizzard and had nearly been the death of three people in the process—his mother, to begin with, and his father and the doctor, who were blocked and all but frozen to death on that night of storm. When they were eventually dug out and thawed out Peter was there. And never, so old Aunty But averred, had such an infant been born. When she had carried him out to the kitchen to dress him, he had lifted his head of his own power and stared all around the room with bright eager eyes. Aunty But had never seen anything like it. It seemed uncanny and gave her such a turn that she let Peter drop. Luckily he landed unhurt on a cushion of the lounge, but it was the first of his many narrow shaves. Aunty But always told with awe that Peter had not cried when he came into the world, as all properly behaved babies do.

“He seemed to like the change,” said Aunty But. “He’s a fine, healthy child but”—and Aunty But shook her head forebodingly. The Jeff Penhallows did not bother over her “buts.” She had got her nickname from them. But they lived to think that her foreboding on this occasion was justified.

Peter continued to like change. He had been born with the soul of Balboa or Columbus. He felt to the full the lure of treading where no human foot had ever trod. He had a thirst for life that was never quenched—“Life,” he used to say, “that grand glorious adventure we share with the gods.” When he was fourteen he had earned his way around the world, starting out with ten cents and working his passage to Australia on a cattle-ship. Then he had come home—with the skin of a man-eating tiger he had killed himself for his mother’s decorous parlour floor and a collection of magnificent blue African butterflies which became a clan boast—gone back to school, toiled slavishly, and eventually graduated in civil engineering. His profession took him all over the world. When he had made enough money out of a job to keep him for awhile, he stopped working and simply explored. He was always daring the unknown—the uncharted—the undiscovered. His family had resigned themselves to it. As Uncle Pippin said, Peter was “not domestic,” and they knew now he would never become so. He had had many wild adventures of which his clan knew and a thousand more of which they never heard. They were always expecting him to be killed.

“He’ll be clapped into a cooking-pot some day,” said Drowned John, but he did not say it to Peter, for the simple reason that he never spoke to him. There was an old feud between those two Penhallow families, dating back to the day when Jeff Penhallow had killed Drowned John’s dog and hung it at his gate, because Drowned John’s dog had worried his sheep and Drowned John had refused to believe it or to get rid of his dog. From that day none of Drowned John’s family had had any dealings, verbal or otherwise, with any of Jeff Penhallow’s. Drowned John knocked down and otherwise maltreated in the square at Charlottetown a man who said that Jeff Penhallow’s word was as good as his bond because neither was any good. And Peter Penhallow, meeting a fellow Islander somewhere along the Congo, slapped his face because the said Islander laughed over Thekla Dark having once flavoured some gingerbread with mustard. But this was clan loyalty and had nothing whatever to do with personal feeling, which continued to harden and embitter through the years. When Barry Dark, Peter’s cousin and well-beloved chum, told Peter he was going to marry Donna Dark, Peter was neither to hold nor bind. He refused to countenance the affair at all and kicked up such a rumpus that even the Jeff Penhallows thought he was going entirely too far. When the wedding came off, Peter was hunting wapiti in New Zealand, full of bitterness of soul, partly because Barry had married one of the accursed race and partly because he, Peter, being notoriously and incurably left-handed, had not been accepted for overseas service. Barry had been rather annoyed over Peter’s behaviour and a slight coolness had arisen between them, which was never quite removed because Barry never came back from the front. This left a sore spot in Peter’s soul which envenomed still further his hatred of Donna Dark.

Peter had had no intention of coming to Aunt Becky’s levee. He had fully meant to leave that afternoon en route for an exploring expedition in the upper reaches of the Amazon. He had packed and strapped and locked his trunk, whistling with sheer boyish delight in being off once more. He had had a month at home—a month too much. Thank God, no more of it. In a few weeks he would be thousands of miles away from the petty gossips and petty loves and petty hates of the Darks and Penhallows—away from a world where women bobbed their hair and you couldn’t tell who were grandmothers and who were flappers—from behind—and in a place where nobody would ever make moan, “Oh, what will people think of you, Peter, if you do—or don’t do—that?”

“And I swear by the nine gods of Clusium that this place will not see me again for the next ten years,” said Peter Penhallow, running downstairs to his brother’s car, waiting to take him to the station.

Just then Destiny, with an impish chuckle, tapped him on the shoulder. His half-sister Nancy was coming into the yard almost in tears. She couldn’t get to the levee if he wouldn’t take her. Her husband’s car had broken down. And she must get to the levee. She would have no chance at all of getting that darling old jug if she did not go.

“Young Jeff here can take you. I’ll wait for the evening train,” said Peter obligingly.

Young Jeff demurred. He had to hoe his turnips. He could spare half an hour to take Peter to the station, but spend a whole afternoon down at Indian Spring he would not.

“Take her yourself,” he said. “If the evening train suits you as well, you’ve nothing else to do this afternoon.”

Peter yielded unwillingly. It was almost the first time in his life he had done anything he really didn’t want to do. But Nancy had always been a sweet little dear—his favourite in his own family. She “Oh—Petered” him far less than any of the others. If she had set her heart on that confounded jug, he wasn’t going to spoil her chance.

If Peter could have foreseen the trick Fate had it in mind to play him, would he really have gone to the levee, Nancy to the contrary withstanding. Well, would he now? Ask him yourself.

So Peter came to the levee, but he felt a bit grim and into the house he would not go. He did not give his real reason—for all his hatred of sham. Perhaps he did not acknowledge it even to himself. Peter, who was not afraid of any other living creature from snakes and tigers up, was at the very bottom of his heart afraid of Aunt Becky. The devil himself, Peter reflected, would be afraid of that blistering old tongue. It would not have been so bad if she had dealt him the direct thwacks she handed out to most people. But Aunt Becky had a different technique for Peter. She made little smiling speeches to him, as mean and subtle and nasty as a cut made with paper, and Peter had no defence against them. So he thankfully draped himself over the railing of the verandah. The Moon Man was standing at the other end, and Big Sam Dark and Little Sam Dark were in the two rocking-chairs. Peter didn’t mind them but he had a bad moment when Mrs. Toynbee Dark dropped into the only remaining chair with her usual whines about her health, ending up with pseudo-thankfulness that she was as well as she was.

“The girls of to-day are so healthy,” sighed Mrs. Toynbee. “Almost vulgarly so, don’t you think, Peter? When I was a girl I was extremely delicate. Once I fainted six times in one day. I don’t really think I ought to go into that close room.”

Peter, who hadn’t been so scared since the time he had mistaken an alligator for a log, decided that he had every excuse for being beastly.

“If you stay out here with four unwedded men, my dear Alicia, Aunt Becky will think you have new matrimonial designs and you’ll stand no chance of the jug at all.”

Mrs. Toynbee turned a horrible shade of pea-green with suppressed fury, gave him a look containing things not lawful to be uttered and went in with Virginia Powell. Peter took the precaution of dropping the surplus chair over the railing into the spirea bushes.

“Excuse me if I weep,” said Little Sam, winking at Peter while he wiped away large imaginary tears from his eyes.

“Vindictive. Very vindictive,” said Big Sam, jerking his head at the retreating Mrs. Toynbee. “And sly as Satan. You shouldn’t have put her back up, Peter. She’ll do you a bad turn if she can.”

Peter laughed. What did Mrs. Toynbee’s vindictiveness matter to him, bound for the luring mysteries of untrod Amazon jungles? He drifted off into a reverie over them, while the two Sams smoked their pipes and reflected, each according to his bent.