Читать книгу Mr. Emmanuel - Louis Golding - Страница 10

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The train that brought Mr. Emmanuel to Bruno arrived at Salisbury, ten days later, at four-thirty in the afternoon. There were two women awaiting his arrival on the platform; he recognized them at once, though the train was still travelling quite rapidly as it passed them. He thrust his head out of the window and waved to them energetically. “Rose!” he cried out. “Miss Cooper!” The movement of the air put his little white beard awry. His pince-nez swung out dangerously. Beard or no beard, he looked like an excited schoolboy; and it had been a long journey, from Doomington round by Euston and Waterloo.

The train drew up. The nice soldier with whom he had maintained an animated conversation all the way from Andover lifted his suitcase from the rack. It was very big and heavy.

“God should bless you!” said Mr. Emmanuel. “You shouldn’t have to go to any wars!”

A porter came up. The soldier handed the suitcase down. Mr. Emmanuel came bustling down from the carriage.

“Bit on the ’eavy side,” said the porter jocularly. Mr. Emmanuel’s smile was infectious. “Any dead bodies?” The porter upended the suitcase to get the balance better adjusted. A long, low wail issued from its bowels. “God a’mighty!” exclaimed the porter, almost letting the suitcase fall. He looked up quickly into Mr. Emmanuel’s face. Strange things had been left in station cloakrooms. But suspicion and that face were not kinsmen. “Some gadgets for the kids, eh?” hazarded the porter, smiling broadly.

The two women had come up by now, Rose preceding, both hands outstretched.

“Rose!”

“Mr. Emmanuel!”

He took both her hands, then stooped towards her, and kissed her first on the right cheek, then the left.

“Not one day older!” he pronounced. “Not one day older! And this is Miss Cooper! Oi, Miss Cooper, how nice it is you should come to meet me! One from each side of Magnolia Street, eh?”

(“He is never far from Magnolia Street,” each of the women thought. “He carries Magnolia Street about with him!”)

“I am so glad to see you, Mr. Emmanuel! Welcome!”

He looked from Miss Cooper to Rose, then back again. “Like yesterday!” he was burbling. “Like yesterday!”

“Where to, madam?” the porter asked Rose. The old gentleman was clearly not capable of giving a coherent reply.

“There’s a car outside! Come!” cried Rose, seizing Mr. Emmanuel’s elbow. “You’ll be wanting a cup of tea!”

“But those boys!” he exclaimed. He looked up and down the platform. After all, delightful as it was to meet two ladies from Magnolia Street, it was to give a hand with those poor refugee boys that he had been summoned from Doomington. “Where are those boys?”

“Oh, there’s time enough for them!” said Rose breezily. They were at the ticket-barrier by now. “You’ll have all you want of the boys! That’s our car, porter, over there! We’ll have to strap it on at the back, I think.”

Mr. Emmanuel stopped. His jaw fell.

“What!” he exclaimed. “It cannot be such a thing! Two little boys like that!”

There were two boys in the back of the car. One, very young, was standing up. The other sat in the corner, a black spaniel on his knee, his face pressed against the window.

“No, no!” laughed Rose. “The little one’s Dick, my son and heir!”

“Oh, Dick! Your son! Of course! What a beautiful boy!” (I will not, a voice within him insisted peremptorily. I will not remember! It was once another Dick Cooper! If the tall one sees I remember, it will be like a stab inside her. Perhaps, please God, she has forgotten. Who knows?) “Just like his father, God bless him!” he exclaimed. And indeed he was, the same grey eyes, the same square chin with the cleft in it.

“This is Uncle Emmanuel, Dickie. Say how do you do.”

“How do you do?” asked Dick. He lifted his hand and projected it across the window-rim. “I’m vewy glad to meet you.” The only son of the family, with a father away for a good deal of the year, he could play the host quite neatly when occasion required.

“And that one?” asked Mr. Emmanuel. He could not see the boy clearly, for his pince-nez was lop-sided, and the inside of the car was overshadowed by a van on the other side. But the boy was foreign. He gathered that from the cut of his clothes, and from the mode of his greeting. He was making efforts at an outlandish salutation, much constricted by the shape of the car. He was, of course, a German boy, one of Rose’s young refugee guests.

“He is one ... he is from your party, yes?” Mr. Emmanuel brought out the words with difficulty; pity and anger were like birds’ wings beating in his throat. The boy’s face as a face underwent further obliteration. It had no quality, fair or dark, sympathetic or displeasing. It was the face of a boy who, because vast powers had willed it, vast as the sea and cruel as a wildcat, had been uprooted from his own place, and sent forth to be among strangers, a boy who should be at this moment beside his mother, among his friends, in the streets or the green fields where he had been reared.

“Yes, that’s one of our boys,” said Rose breezily. “His name is Bruno. We thought the run would do him good. Be quiet, Tessa! Will you get in the other side, please, Mary?”

“I hope you are well, Bruno, yes?” Mr. Emmanuel said, extending his arm through the window. “Can you play mouth-organs? I have brought three mouth-organs.” Apparently Mr. Emmanuel did not intend to mark time in the execution of the duties that had been assigned to him.

“Mouth-organ?” the boy asked a little blankly. He thought for a moment or two. “Oh, Mundharmonika! Yes!” he admitted. “I do not play so very badly!” There was quite an edge of brightness to his voice.

“A bull’s eye first time, Mr. Emmanuel!” exclaimed Rose. “Well, I think we ought to get along. The bag all right, porter? Thank you. Will you get in beside me, Mr. Emmanuel? That’s right. Are you all right, there, Mary? How about a nice cup of tea?”

They had tea in a teashop in Salisbury. As they sat down, Rose breathed a word of condolence in Mr. Emmanuel’s ear. He muttered a word of thanks, but the subject of his bereavement was not touched on again, not here and now, in the presence of two children. Rose poured tea; Bruno passed it round. There was so much to ask, so much to say, they found it quite impossible to decide who should begin first, and at what point. They had not, in fact, met for about eighteen years, and had hardly written to each other, except at the conventional times of greeting. Yet they had remained friendly, very much aware of each other. During most of that period John Cooper’s sister Mary had lived in Magnolia Street. Rose’s sister Ada lived there still. There had been other contacts, direct and indirect, from time to time.

Yes, there was much to ask, much to say. Divining the difficulty, Mary decreed that the tea-party be devoted chiefly to tea. Certain major facts, none the less, emerged. It was established that the three Cooper girls were as presentable, in their various ways, as their small brother Dick; they had carried off the other four German boys for a long tramp through the Forest, taking picnic lunch with them; Rose’s sister Ada, up in Magnolia Street, was very well; so were her two children—Annie, the married one, and Leo, who had passed his first medical examinations. The conversation then turned to plans for the immediate future. It was stated that no excursion for the German boys had been arranged for the next day. Everything had, of course, been held up pending Mr. Emmanuel’s arrival.

“And what do you think we should do tomorrow, Bruno?” asked Mr. Emmanuel, turning guiltily to the small boy beside him. He and Rose had been so busy rattling away about this and that, he had quite forgotten the boy’s existence all this time. (A fine one! he reproached himself. I am asked here I should be nice to the refugee boys, and I forget them like there isn’t any Hitler any more.)

The boy bent his head and speculated.

“If I am having a Mundharmonika, I like to go out into the trees and play,” said Bruno.

“Into the trees and play?” repeated Mr. Emmanuel, in a rising tone. The picture etched itself upon his mind, a boy going out all by himself among trees to play a mouth-organ. This must be a sad boy, a lonely boy, his quick sensibility told him. Why should he want to go out, all by himself, so young a boy? He adjusted his pince-nez and took a furtive glance at the boy’s face. No, it was not a happy face. Why that droop about the corners of the mouth? There was pain in those eyes. A boy with a mouth-organ ...

“Like my David!” he exclaimed suddenly. A memory of another lad had arisen that superseded the sharp imagination of this one, his own lad, hardly older than Bruno, who had died in the Great War. “He too played mouth-organs. He would sometimes go out to Sefton Park and play by himself all afternoon. He could play lovely.” He stopped. He could not remember his David, in the presence of Mary Cooper, without remembering also another youth, her brother, who had died about that time, not during the War, but shortly after. He looked up from under his eyelids, and saw Mary’s head had fallen forward, her eyes tightly shut. “Forgive me,” he breathed. “I should not bring it up again about the old time.”

There was silence among the grown-ups for some moments. Then Mary Cooper spoke. Her voice was cool and grave. Her eyes were open again. They were fixed on Bruno.

“He is not at all unlike your David, as I remember him. He was a dear child.”

It was only Mr. Emmanuel who seemed to be aware of Bruno’s embarrassment, the faint flush spreading across the cheeks. If Mary Cooper was aware of it, she would not allow it to perturb her; there would be always something detached about her, something not quite human, in all things not pertaining to the dead or the living Dick.

“You are right maybe,” he said hurriedly. Then he changed the subject. He asked for news of Mary’s sister Enid. He gave news of his own son Max, the painter, away in Mexico somewhere. He talked in rapid succession of certain Magnolia Street personalities who had impressed themselves on all their memories.

But however busy his tongue was, his heart was with the small refugee boy, humped over the blue and white tea-plate. And when the lad raised his head and turned his eyes for one swift moment upon him, he knew it was a sign of gratitude for his understanding, a forlorn gaze of friendship from a boy with nothing to give to an old man with hardly more.

Perhaps he is like my David, the thought was running in his head. Maybe. But should I have liked it if my David when he was fifteen should have to go to a foreign country away from everybody? From his mother, from his father, from his brothers, from his friends? This little one is missing his mother something terrible. I know it. I know it....

“I beg your pardon, Rose? Another cup of tea? No, thank you, please. Such a nice place! All real oak, eh? It’s wonderful. Isn’t it a wonderful place, Bruno?”

He placed his hand fleetingly on Bruno’s shoulder as he rose. But he felt the boy would not miss the significance of the gesture. It meant, translated into words: “Whether you are like my boy or not like him, does that matter? But we shall be friends. Yes, Bruno?”