Читать книгу Here's Luck - Lennie Lower - Страница 4

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I smoked for a while and then went downstairs after salvaging one of my ties which Stanley had borrowed and thrown under the bed with the rest of his discarded clothing. One thing about Stanley, he is a methodical boy and pitches his clothes on the floor in symmetrical heaps where they can be easily turned over with the foot when anything is required. The two women were waiting for me at the foot of the stairs when I came down. I felt like going back. Stanley's aunt folded her arms, shot a glance at the wife, pursed her lips, and shrugged her shoulders. Without speaking she managed to say that this was the plague they had been speaking about. I knew immediately that Stanley had seized his opportunity. He's like that. And his mother will back him up in any fool thing so long as I'm made to look ridiculous.

"What have you been doing to Stanley?" snapped the wife.

"Stanley who?" I asked.

Silly, I know, but I wasn't prepared.

"What's wrong with him?" I added.

"He is going away," wailed Agatha, "he is leaving his home!"

Aunt Gertrude spoke up. She has a voice like a knife that has been left stuck in a lemon too long.

"He is going to South Africa to hunt elephants," she said slowly in a hanged-by-the-neck-till-you-are-dead tone.

Elephants mind you! But I had got used to this sort of thing.

"Well, well!" I said, "I suppose he'll need to take his lunch; or perhaps he can get lunch over there. I think they do have that sort of thing. Mealies and kopjes and veldts and things. Of course, he'll find it a little different but—"

"John!" said my wife.

If there's anything I hate, it's "John."

"The poor boy is going to South Africa to try to forget. His hopes are blasted—"

"Agatha!" I said.

She blushed slightly.

"To think that the wife of my bosom—"

"Bosom your grandmother!"

There are times when the veneer of refinement peels off Agatha.

She led the way into the drawing-room. Stanley was there, standing with arms folded and a look of hopeless determination on his face—or determined hopelessness. Properly blasted. He was gazing out the window as if he already saw the elephants advancing with writhing tentacles.

Agatha sank into a chair, suddenly overcome.

"He is going to South Africa—to hunt elephants!" she whispered brokenly. "Elephants! He is going to hunt them in South Africa!" she moaned. "Elephants—Africa—South!"

"Hunt—going—to," I added, to help her out of the mess.

Aunt Gertrude sniffed.

Her sniffs remind me somehow, of the dried husk-like skin of a snake, after it has been shed.

"Ah, Stanley!" moaned the wife, warming up to the work. "Don't go to South Africa!"

It made me mad to see her pretending to take him seriously.

"I will. I am. I shall—must!" said Stanley.

I could see that with all the encouragement he was getting he had become rather taken with the idea.

"But, Stanley—it's so far away! Couldn't you go to the zoo?"

"Zoo!" hooted Stanley. "Zoo! What zoo!"

It sounded like the war-cry of the Randwick Rovers.

His eye-balls seemed to pop out.

"I don't want those lop-eared, peanut elephants! I want elephants that are wild! That crouch ready to spring and tear one limb from limb with their claws! Elephants!" he concluded with a shout of triumph.

"But, Stan; elephants don't have claws," said Agatha.

"They'll wish they had before I'm finished with them," said Stanley fiercely.

"Ah, let him go and hunt elephants if he wants to—the poor boy," put in Gertrude. "If he's brought home mangled beyond recognition perhaps he (me) will see what a heartless brute he is!"

Agatha seemed to think this over for a while and then with an air of comparative cheerfulness straightened her dress and remarked: "Oh, well; I suppose if he wants to go, he wants to go."

This seemed to me profound, but sound. There was absolutely no argument against it.

"Elephants!" muttered Stanley, gazing at me and licking his lips.

"Bah!" I exclaimed, turning to him, "what have elephants ever done to you that you should pick on them like this! Poor little elephants that never said a harsh word—who woke you up to this damned elephant rot, anyhow?"

"Well, Stanley, if you've made up your mind that's all there is about it," cut in Gertrude.

"Yes. Yes," sobbed Agatha.

I closed my mouth. It only needed me to object to all this rot; to put my foot down firmly and forbid it, and the pair of them would have bundled him off to South Africa immediately. I know women. That is, I know that much about them. Of course this elephant talk was all damned rot. Stanley's idea of amusement at my expense. Any unpleasantness where I was the goat could always command Agatha's and Gertrude's hearty support. I treated the matter as a joke—fool that I was.

Agatha went out of the room, presumably to cut a few sandwiches for Stanley to take to South Africa.

Gertrude walked over to Stanley and put her hand on his shoulder, "Stanley," she said, "be very careful in South Africa. Don't go rushing in among the elephants and hurting yourself."

"That's the way. One at a time," I said heartily. "I bet they laugh their trunks off when they spot him."

I got the snake-skin sniff again.

"And always wear your goloshes," she went on, "I'm sure those jungles are not properly drained—and flannel next to your skin, and be careful crossing the roads at intersections, and don't speak to any strange men."

"And wash behind your ears and see if you can bring home an ant-eater," I said.

I pronounced it "aunt-eater" and, thinking that was good enough to exit on, I exited, with the honours of the last word thick upon me.

The next few hours I spent roaming about the house waiting for dinner. Stanley had gone out. I strolled into the kitchen two or three times. They were both sitting there; Agatha sobbing loudly behind her handkerchief each time I entered, and Gertrude eyeing me as she would a sick python, and saying, "Poor dear," to Agatha and patting her on the hand. It was impressed upon me that I was as welcome as a leprous gorilla at a wake, but it was some time before it dawned on me that there wasn't going to be any dinner!

This was over the odds! Even if all this tomfoolery was true, and Stanley was going to South Africa; and supposing everybody was all torn to shreds with sorrow, and that—a man's dinner is his dinner. A man must eat though the earth collapse and the heavens roll together as a scroll. There is a limit to everything. It struck me that it would be a pretty good idea to go to South Africa and take Stanley. A man could at least fry a slab of elephant to keep him going between meals. I was beginning to get a bit nasty tempered, when the front door opened and Stanley came in. He looked a bit down in the mouth.

"Look here, Stan," I said, going up to him. "Are there enough of these blasted elephants to go round? Couldn't we share them between us? We'd get on all right together, you and I. I could hold the elephants while you shot them."

"Or," I added, as he didn't seem to be too enthusiastic, "we could take a tusk each and tear them apart. I'm sure we could make a do of it. What about it, Stan?"

"I'm not going, dad," he said mournfully.

"Not going!"

Despite the fact that I knew he hadn't the faintest hope of going, I was surprised and a little disappointed. I had been thinking the matter over and the more I thought about it the better it looked. The thought of getting away from Agatha and snake-skin and living in the decent society of wild elephants had taken hold of me. Then of course, one wouldn't be with the elephants all the time. Most likely they'd have a bar in South Africa. Very likely a billiard-table too. A rough-hewn, stone affair, but still a billiard-table. Perhaps one could even teach the natives poker! And here were all my new risen hopes dashed to the ground and trodden on.

"Is that you, Stanley?" came a shrill voice from the kitchen.

"Come upstairs, dad," whispered Stanley.

We cat-footed up to his room.

"Dad," he said, as soon as he had shut the door, "I've just been around to say good-bye to Estelle."

"Who the hell's Estelle?" I asked. The phrase struck me at the time as a good title for a Fox-Buttom or something.

"Estelle? She's that knobby-kneed, enamel-faced giggling man-eater we were talking about a while ago."

"Oh!" I said, "the one with the sky-eyes and the bleeding lips?"

"Where is that damned thing!" he snapped savagely.

I handed him the poem from the dressing-table and he tore it about in a way that must have strained him from the waist up, and threw the pieces up in the air as if he was having a Venetian carnival all to himself. I waited. He burst out at last.

"You know that tripe-faced mug Oscar Winthrop?"

I nodded.

He paused and seemed to gather himself together; his eyes narrowed and he leered at me. Then slowly he hissed, "He's got a motor-bike and side-car!"

"Good God!" I gasped.

To say that I was stunned by this disclosure would be to put it feebly: moreover, it would be a lie.

"Got it day before yesterday," he explained, "and she's been riding out in it ever since. The mug!"

"Who?"

"Oscar," he said, sitting down on the edge of his bed.

"And little Oyster-mouth—what about her?"

"Now that I look back," he growled, "I can see that I was her ice-crearn fetcher, her target, her door-mat, her picture-show ticket. Mug!"

"Who?"

"Me."

"And elephants are off?" I said regretfully.

He snorted as he wiped the dust off his boots with the quilt.

"Think I'm mad!"

We looked at each other for a while.

"There's no dinner," I said.

"No dinner!" he cried, staring at me.

"Perhaps you could go down to your mother or your aunt and—"

He stood up and put his hand affectionately on my shoulder.

"Don't be silly, dad."

"Well," I said, "there's a place down in King Street where I usually go when your mother is like this. One can get steak and eggs—"

"Come on," he said, "and we'll go to the fight after."

He looked back as he made for the door.

"Of course, I'm broke, you know."

"That's all right," I said, "I've got a pound or two your mother doesn't know about."

While I brushed my hair I thought of Stanley. He's got sense, although it's pretty well camouflaged. He gets more like me every day. It was just possible that I might get him a job at Flannery's Crown and Anchor, as a useful. I know Flannery. Stan would be useful all right. It would be pretty hard lines if he wasn't useful to his poor old father in a job like that. At least, that was what I thought.

Still thinking, I got my hat and we sneaked out and headed for steak and eggs and freedom. I said steak and eggs, and freedom. Freedom we understand. It means letting one's beard grow and going without a collar. Freedom is what we wave flags for. But steak and eggs!