Читать книгу Here's Luck - Lennie Lower - Страница 6

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Stanley has made a complete mess of things. Better that I had reared a guinea pig. I knew he was like that. I knew it right from the first. When I first saw him, bald, florid and toothless in his nurse's arms and heard them mouthing that vile, age-old slander, "Isn't he like his father?" I shuddered. When he was crawling about the floor and I was falling over him in all directions, I said, "That child is a menace."

Later, when he came home from school and said the teacher caned him because he deserved it, I remarked to his mother, "There's something wrong with that boy. He's unnatural."

I was right.

I'll admit there have been one or two occasions when my judgment was wrong. One was when Mustard Plaster won the Carrington Stakes, in 1902, and I had my metaphorical shirt on Onkus, a retired cart-horse that couldn't beat a carpet. The other was when I got married. There may have been other slips but these two stick in my mind. Usually I am occasionally invariably infallible.

To get back to Stanley.

He came downstairs the morning after our little excursion, looking as if he had put in a heavy night in the bull-ring. He was a bit annoyed too. Said he had a stiff neck and that I needn't have tramped on him in the hall.

"Let bygones be bygones," I said, "What is a biff in the neck between father and son? You need a shave."

This last remark was a pure brain-wave. Since he was sixteen he has been searching his face for a hair to shave. A few months ago he discovered one, and after gazing at it as though a new planet had swum into his ken, he hurled himself, shrieking, on my shaving gear. He has been in a more or less continual lather ever since.

"Yes," he said, tenderly rubbing the down on his cheek, "I am a bit bristly. Suppose I'll have to shave every day soon. Pity a man has to shave." He looked unutterably bored at the prospect. "Ah, well. I'll have to grow a moustache, I suppose."

A sudden thought struck him.

"Do bull-fighters—I say, dad! Do you think Maureen—"

"Shut up, you fool!"

I caught him by the arm. "You were at the fight last night," I said meaningly.

"No, father. I went to the Stadium with you last night."

"True. True. So you did. Keep it at that. No need to tell a lie."

Agatha appeared at this juncture and the usual breakfast-time procedure was gone through. She indicated by an air of resigned martyrdom that breakfast had been ready for weeks and she would not be able to keep it from going blue-mouldy much longer; so we slowly dragged ourselves to the breakfast-table. Stanley fell into his chair and said he didn't want anything. I just said, "Chops again?" and sighed heavily. Gertrude butted in, of course.

"You're too well fed; that's the trouble with some people." ("Some people" is me.) "There's many a poor, starving Russian would be glad of half a chop, even the bone of a chop."

"Agatha," I said, "Wrap up a few chops for Gertrude to take to Russia."

There was no answer.

I mumbled my way through a plate of porridge, got up, rinsed my mouth out and sat down again. Gertrude brought up a sniff that shook her to the fetlocks.

"Stanley," said Agatha, breaking the seal of her tomb, "You must eat something. Are you ill? You look very pale."

"I feel just a trifle wonky, as it were, mother. I think it must be the result of going without dinner last night."

I chuckled. First score to our side. Agatha closed her lips firmly and gave me the sort of look that snakes mesmerize birds with. The chops came on.

"What greyhound was done to death to make this butcher's holiday?" I asked, pointing to the chop.

No answer. It was rather disheartening. I had tried my best to make conversation and be friendly, merely to be answered with looks which, had they been articulate, would have shouted the house down. Is it any wonder marriage is a failure?

Echo answers, "No. It damn well isn't."

Stanley was nibbling at a crust like some ascetic hermit bent on mortifying himself. He was gazing at the saltcellar, in one of his trances. Gertrude patted Agatha and said, "Poor dear," and added as if entirely ignorant of my presence, "you have a lot to put up with."

"My load is heavy," chanted Agatha in a clerical voice.

Stanley came out of his trance.

"Dad," he said, grabbing the only decent chop off my plate and falling on it like a famished wolf, "What was that one Daisy told us last night about the old man who bought the jazz-garters? Something about elastic—elastic something—"

"Who!" shrieked Gertrude. Agatha had a mouthful of bread, but her ears waggled. I looked at Stanley. Figuratively, he had sunk. Only one despairing hand showed for a moment before he was engulfed in the enormity of his folly.

Agatha had swallowed her bread.

"Who, may I ask, is—er—Daisy?"

Her voice was a chill breath from the Antarctic. The chop bones trembled on my plate like live things and Stanley, the coward, said that he felt sick, tottered from the room, dashed upstairs, and, as he told me later, crawled underneath the bed.

"Daisy?" I said nonchalantly. "Oh, he's a real decent chap. Got a wife and four kiddies. Works down a mine. Stan and I met him at the Stadium last night. His name is Day, really, but all the boys call him 'Daisy.' Funny how a nickname sticks to a fellow. I remember when we went to school, we were both in the same class. One day—"

I stopped abruptly. They were both listening like lawyers. "My God, those chops were rotten!" I said. "Surely, with me bringing home money week after week, week after week, never complaining, going about with holes in my socks and my trousers held up with nails, surely it's little enough to expect a meal from you! But, no! It's chops, chops, chops, chops, and nag, nag, nag. Chops, nag, chops, nag—" I was backing out the door, keeping time with my feet and had grabbed my hat and escaped before they knew what I was doing. I hastened up the street wondering to myself why I hadn't tramped Stanley to death the previous night when I had the opportunity. It was a good getaway I thought. They'd have had me if I'd kept on. That's, the trouble with me. When I get started on a lie I must carry it on. Artistic pride, I suppose. The creative instinct. I keep on adding little adornments here and refinements there until I stand on a motley but magnificent mound of pure fiction; from which, nine times out of ten, my wife will pick the keystone, so to speak, and bring me swooping to earth with a smothered but undeniable thud. I was thinking how dexterously I had diverted the conversation and was just wheeling into the Crown and Anchor, when I remembered that Stanley was at their mercy. They had only to lay a conversational tentacle on Stanley and information would ooze from him without him being aware of it. Gertrude, especially. She could ask you what you thought of the weather, and gather from your answer your name and address, favourite poet, next of kin, and form shrewd suspicions that you were keeping two homes going. I drifted, stricken, into Flannery's.

"Well, Mister Gudgeon; how are y' this mornin'?"

"A double whisky, Flannery; closely followed by another double whisky. No. Give me a mug of whisky and have one yourself."

"Flyin' bulldogs! Wasser matter with y'?"

I proceeded to tell him, and when I had finished we gazed for the third time on empty mugs.

"Jack," he said, and the tears stood in his eyes, "If so be it you have to murder the three of 'em you can always hide in the cellar of your old pal, Bill Flannery."

I pressed his hand. Here was sympathy! Here was fellowship and a friend in time of need.

"Bill," I said, "I'm going back to the house. Leave the cellar door ajar." I had another drink and then with a final handclasp, turned away and left him sobbing on the counter. I was so overcome with emotion, so steeped in sorrow, that my poor grief-stricken brain could scarce control my legs, and I wandered from one side of the road to the other, singing mournfully.

It was pitch dark when I woke up lying on my back inside the gate. Overcome with misery and mental anguish, I must have collapsed at last beneath the strain. Somebody had been kicking my hat about the road and I noticed that the gate hung by only one hinge. I felt tired and sick and worried. I got to my feet and walked wearily toward the door and leaned against it. Stanley opened it and I fell flat on my face in the hallway. He was startled but soon regained his normal nimbleness of mind. Swinging his foot he kicked me deftly in the back of the neck.

"What," he said oracularly, "is a biff in the neck between father and son?"

He then tramped on me, shut the door, tramped on me again and so out to the kitchen. I sat up.

"Stanley," I called.

Silence.

"Stanley, bring me the axe."

No answer.

"Stanley boy, bring father the axe, there's a good boy." I listened in vain.

"Ickle Stanley bing daddy axey-paxey?"

No good. No good at all. Useless to try to murder him without an axe. I took off a boot and composed myself to slumber.