Читать книгу All Else Is Folly - Peregrine Acland - Страница 14

In the half-darkness of the port side of the deck two officers strolled. The length of the ship and back again … the length of the ship and back again. Adjutant and company commander side by side. And as they walked they talked.

Phrases from their conversation pricked to attention a figure recumbent on a deck chair in the deeper darkness of a corner, well back from the rail.

“… subalterns pretty young in this battalion. Now, in your company …” came the voice of the adjutant.

Down they strolled the length of the ship. Paused a moment to look at the stars, to listen to the lapping of the waters. Back they strolled the length of the ship.

“Oh yes, he’s a nice enough fellow,” the company commander replied to the adjutant, “but he’s too dreamy. He’ll never make a soldier.”

“I should have thought his Western experiences …” But the rest of the adjutant’s speech was lost in the darkness.

The figure in the deck chair rose as the deck before him cleared … strode down the ship … away from the adjutant and company commander … over to the starboard side.

The light that slanted down on his broad, khaki-clad shoulders showed the face of a man in his early twenties. It was a face with a sallow, almost a leathery complexion. The features were large. Thick, black eyebrows jutted out over a big, aggressive nose. A wide, sensitive mouth contrasted with a heavy jaw. The eyes were in shadow.

He, too, leaned over the rail and listened to the lapping of the waters against the ship’s side. He felt lonely, very lonely, but there was comfort in listening to the lapping of the waters, and more in looking at the stars — the same stars that he had watched so many nights on the prairie, stars under which he had ridden so many times before dawn.

Not many nights ago he had watched these stars from a canoe as he paddled slowly up the Humber River in Ontario. Silent, mostly. Talking, occasionally, in undertones to the small figure in white curled up on the cushions before him.… Phyllis Howard.

For all her Greek boy’s head, her Greek nymph’s body, Phyllis was neither naiad nor dryad. She was tomboy. Caught once dancing under old elms, she promptly converted the dance into somersaults and finished defiantly, thumb to nose. Always there was flippancy in her wit, roguery in her laughter.

Lying in the canoe, she had said: “I suppose you’re going as an officer because it’s safer.”

He, nettled, snapped back: “Of course. Why otherwise?”

“You must be very careful,” she said, “not to get your legs shot off. You look so well in a kilt.”

“Damn the kilt!”

“It’s such a lovely kilt.” He remembered how she had admired its purple and green, and the “cunning little line of silver running through it.” The gold sporran with the long black goat’s hair and the three white tassels.… She had said: “Won’t you leave the kilt and sporran to me in your will?”

“If you’ll wear them to my funeral.”

“That’s a go. But you must arrange to be buried in the summer.… What did your father say when he first saw his Socialist son in a kilt?”

“He said it was the only sensible thing I had ever done. I believe the sight of my bare knees beneath the MacIntyre tartan did him more good than a bull movement in stocks or a dose of digitalis.”

“Alec, don’t talk about him like that. He’s so nice. And his heart …”

I’m tired of hearing about his heart. Every time I have an argument with him, he holds his heart trouble over my head. And I’m beginning to think the sword will never fall — at least for another thirty years.”

“You are a loving son.”

“Oh, I like him.… But he’s so silly about his confounded heart. Why doesn’t he do what the doctors tell him? You’d think he’d get a reminder every morning when his shaving glass shows him his red face and his white hair. But he keeps on working heavily, eating heavily, smoking heavily, drinking heavily and playing the stock market for all he is worth. I have tried to tell him …”

“You are a great one for educating your parents, aren’t you?”

“Isn’t that the chief duty of children?”

Phyllis uttered a wail out of the darkness.

“Oh … can’t you feed me anything but warmed-over Shaw?”

Alec said: “Shaw? Really, I’m not modern at all, you know. I’m a sentimentalist. A devoted son and big brother.…”

“Yes, you have certainly humbugged your mother into thinking you an angel. As for your sisters …”

“You can’t say Betty and Ann have any illusions about me.”

“No, those children have wisdom beyond their years.”

They got along well enough that evening while they cheeked each other. But the moment he attempted to be serious, to deliver himself of the thought that had been germinating in him for weeks, they were both the victims of an appalling speechlessness.

At last he spurred up his courage.

“So far I have done nothing,” he commenced, “and everything ahead is so uncertain.”

But he stopped right there.

She, even younger than he in these matters, seemed embarrassed, gave him no encouragement to proceed.

As he looked down at the broad blackness of the St. Lawrence, he thought it had been, after all, a good point at which to stop speaking. What was the use of entangling this bright youngster in his destiny, whatever that might be …?

It was two days now since the MacIntyre Highlanders had embarked at Quebec. And still the ship rode at anchor in the St. Lawrence. He looked at the Heights above him, saw the dark mass of the all-but-impregnable Citadel outlined against the sky, noted the lights in the Norman-French towers of the Château which told of music and dancing.…

How long before the whole of Canada’s first division would have marched across gang-planks into transports? How long before the fleet would sail?

He took a leather cigar case from his pocket, picked out a cigar, rolled it meditatively in his fingers. Murmured to himself as he lit it and took the first long, satisfying inhalations: “So … a nice enough fellow. But he’ll never make a soldier.…”