Читать книгу The Incredible Honeymoon - Эдит Несбит, Nesbit Edith - Страница 7

AN earnest and prolonged struggle with Charles now occupied Mr. Basingstoke. Charles was determined to stand on the seat with his paws on the side of the car, to look out and to be in readiness to leap out should any passing object offer a more than trivial appeal. His master was determined that Charles should lie on the mat in the bottom of the car, and, what is more, that he should lie there quietly. The discussion became animated and ended in blows. It was just at the crisis of the affair, when Edward had lightly smitten the hard, bullet head and Charles was protesting with screams as piercing as those of a locomotive in distress, that the car wheeled into the highroad and narrowly missed a dog-cart coming up from Seaford. As they passed, Edward's hand went to his hat, for the driver of the dog-cart was Miss Davenant.

Charles, partially released, leaped toward the lady, only to hang by his chain over the edge of the car. By the time he had been hauled in again and cuffed into comparative quiescence Miss Davenant was left far behind, a little, gesticulating figure against the horizon. Her gestures seemed to Edward to be gestures of recall. But he disregarded them. It was not till later that he regretted this.

A final struggle with Charles ended in victory, not because Edward had enforced his will on that strong and strenuous nature, but because Charles was now exhausted and personally inclined to surrender. He lay at last on the floor of the car, his jaws open in a wide, white-toothed smile, and his pink tongue palpitating to his panting breaths. Edward sat very upright, his hands between his knees, holding the shortened chain of Charles. Mile after mile of the smooth down country slipped past, the car had whirled down the narrow, tree-bordered road into Alfreston, past the old church and the thirteenth-century, half-timbered Clergy House, where three little girls in green pinafores were seeking to coerce a reluctant goat along to Polegate and across the railway lines, and still Mr. Basingstoke never moved. His mind alone was alive, and of his body he was no longer conscious. He thought and thought and thought. Why had she left the farm? Had she been frightened? Had she been captured? Where had she gone? And why? And behind all these questions was a background of something too vague and yet too complicated to be called regret – or something which, translated into words, might have gone something like this:

"Adventures to the adventurous. And three days ago the world was before me. I had set out for adventures and I found nothing more agitating than the pleasant pleasing of one little child. Then suddenly the adventure happened. And now no more charming wanderings, no more aimless saunterings in this pleasant, green world, but rush and worry and hurry and dust, uncertainty, anxiety… the whole pretty dream of the adventurer shattered by the reality of the adventure."

Suddenly, and without meaning to do it, he had mortgaged his future to a stranger. The stranger had fled and he was – well, not pursuing, but going to the place she had named as that from which he might gain a clue and take up the pursuit. It was not exactly regret, but Mr. Basingstoke found himself almost wishing that time could move backward and set him in the meadow where the red wall was, and give him once more the chance to fly or not to fly his aeroplane. Perhaps if he had the choice he would not fly it. But all this was among the shadows at the back of his mind. In the foreground was the small, insistent cycle of questions: Why had she left the farm? Had she been frightened? Had she been captured? Where had she gone? When? How? Why?