Читать книгу Five Silver Daughters - Louis Golding - Страница 26

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All that day Esther couldn’t get a thing done in the house. She dropped cups and plates as if she were doing it for a living on the stage. When Joe came in and bumped against a table, she nearly bit his head off. She was, in fact, throughly put out.

It was very much the sort of mood in which she liked to go down to Oleander Street and put things straight. In fact, that was the mood in which she had started the day, and the mood got sultrier and sultrier, precisely because she couldn’t decide whether her interview with Smirnof had left things straighter or crookeder.

And then she remembered her sister, May, and the young man, Harry Stonier. She remembered them with a snort of triumph. She planted her feet wide, placed her arms on her hips, and stood there snorting with triumph for two or three seconds. Then she strode forth to the hallstand and seized her hat and coat.

It was an odd thing that her nostrils should have been twitching for a quarry since about twelve o’clock and should only now have registered the scent of May and Harry. But it was not so odd if you knew May and Harry. They were so unobtrusive a couple. It was easy, of course, to be unaware of them when the kitchen was full of people. But it was also easy when there was practically nobody else there. They would sit in their corner of the kitchen, May on her immemorial metal stool and Harry on a low chair beside her. They talked a little now and then, of course, but they preferred to go out to do their talking. More often they read a book—the same book, quite frequently—Harry with his right arm round May’s shoulder and his other hand holding May’s hand, as if they were a couple of children.

When they wanted to talk they would go out. To talk! Esther quickened her steps towards Oleander Street. To talk! That’s how they themselves described it. But a woman of the world knows what talking leads to, if it hasn’t led there already. They went out into the country, to the woods, the moorlands.

Esther hadn’t been to a wood or a moorland for a long time. She was a respectable married woman and had no need to go to woods and moorlands. May was seventeen, nearly eighteen, but in many ways she was a baby yet. If Harry Stonier wanted to, what was there to stop him? He wasn’t very big, maybe, but undoubtedly he was as strong as a horse. He had fair reddish hair, with a little curl in it. They are the sort of people you’ve got to be most careful of. They know you wouldn’t think it of them, so they take advantage of it.

Ho, they do, do they? They think they can pull the wool over our eyes by all this talk about talk in woods and moorlands? We’ll show them, Mr. Stonier! A little Jewish doveling! We’ll show them!

Esther was lucky when she arrived in the Silver kitchen. Harry Stonier was sitting exactly where she would have placed him, as a boxer sometimes finds his opponent standing exactly in the position he has hoped for, exposing himself to just the lead he delights in. He had, in fact, his right arm round May’s shoulder, and in his left hand he held her left hand. And, what was more, her chin was cuddled down into the hollow of his right palm. It was a disgraceful exhibition. Her mouth twisted bitterly. Perhaps there was still time to save May. But she must go warily. She must attack the enemy from the flank. She sidled up to the young pair to look over their shoulders and see if the book they were reading might add an arrow or two to her quiver. It did more than that. It loosened an arrow which hit her between the teeth. The book was a work entitled The Imitation of Christ.

So the young blackguard was not only trying to seduce her, he was trying to convert her. She spat. Then she turned upon her father. She let loose, in the usual Esther manner, invective piled upon invective. Her bosom heaved. Her foot pawed the ground like a horse’s. But so deeply absorbed were May and Harry that all her shouting no more deflected them from à Kempis than if she were a rainstorm beating against the window, trying vainly to get in. Perhaps, in order to have them understand who were the objects of all this eloquence, she would have been forced, fifteen or thirty minutes later, to march up to the young pair, tear the book from their hands, and stand directly facing them, rehearsing all she had said. But before the necessity for that had arisen she reached the limit of Silver’s patience.

“Be quiet,” he cried at the top of his voice. “Be quiet! I tell you I’ll not hear one word more!”

The pain in his voice broke short the thread of May’s absorption. She lifted her head. So, too, did Harry. But not for one moment did it slacken the pace of Esther’s vituperation.

“A Jewish daughter,” she repeated, for there was nothing she said she had not said half a dozen times before. “And for why does he come round smarming all over her? He thinks we don’t know! We know what he’s after! Look at his hands now! How do you know where he had his hands last night, when they were out on Baxter’s Moor together?”

They knew now whom it all concerned, this uproar that had struck against the walls of their seclusion as remote and faint as a bluebottle on the further side of a window. Their eyes were large with horror. The blood went out of Harry’s face. He became green as a man in dire sea-sickness.

But May’s face flamed like a peony, May who was wont to be as pale as a wood-anemone. She flung herself at Esther’s face like a beast with bared claws. She dug them into her black heaped hair and pulled and pulled and tore.

“You wretch! You wretch! You wretch!” she shrieked; and fell to the floor, and wept and wept, and beat the floor with her fists.

“Go home, Esther!” implored Mrs. Silver. “Please please, go home!”