Читать книгу The Anxious Days - Philip Gibbs - Страница 3

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The Rajputana—that good ship of the P. and O.—crept into Tilbury Dock at half past six in the evening. The voyage from Singapore had seemed incredibly long while it lasted. Now it seemed incredibly short. Less than three weeks ago the passengers had sweltered in tropical heat, lying about in deck-chairs, sipping iced drinks, overcome by languor, and shirking bed-time in the Red Sea because of the stifling atmosphere below deck.

Now they were back in England, with an east wind blowing up the Thames and lengthening the ribbons of smoke from factory chimneys and small tugs. The sky was grey and dirty above the wharves. The river was mud coloured. The buildings beyond the wharves were black with soot. It was all very cheerless to people in whose recent remembrance the sky had been of an unfathomable blue, deepening as night came over the sea until it was pierced by a myriad stars, intensely bright. They had been steeped in light and colour, ever changing, infinite in their range and rhythm, from shining gold to sparkling silver, from sunlight to moonlight, in tropical seas where the water was iridescent and the air shimmered with heat.

Now, on a May evening over old River Thames, there was no colour of any warmth or richness or delight. It was an etching smudged in its printing on a human retina.

Most of the passengers had got off at Plymouth, but a few stood on the boat-deck at Tilbury, waiting for the liner to creep into its berth.

Two of them—a man and a woman—stood apart from the others, staring towards the docks. The man had an empty sleeve tucked into the pocket of his overcoat, and his collar turned up, hiding the rake of his jaw, but with a lean, bronzed face showing below his felt hat. The woman shivered in her fur coat.

“Ghastly!” she cried. “The same old climate. ‘Oh, to be in England’ and all that nonsense! Not for me, Commander Compton, sir! Why didn’t we go native and resist the horrors of Western civilization?”

The man with the empty sleeve smiled without looking at her.

“I’m keen to be back. London again, after five years’ exile! Thank God for grey skies and an east wind!”

The woman in the fur coat slipped her hand through his arm—not standing on the side of his empty sleeve.

“You’ll catch pneumonia,” she warned him. “Why do you want to get back to filthy old London, especially now that everybody’s broke, and wailing about the income tax and unemployment and bad trade and general hopelessness?”

The man with the empty sleeve—Commander Compton, she had called him—turned his head this time to glance at her with a quick smile. He had a naval-looking face with good-humoured lips.

“I’ve a pretty girl waiting for me,” he said. “I want a bit of home life. You know how I feel about it.”

The woman in the fur coat laughed, with her head turned against the east wind.

“Sentimentalist! If it hadn’t been for your daughter Madge, I believe you might have made love to me more ardently. Well, you’ve lost your chance, my dear! Here we are in Tilbury Dock, and there, if my eyes don’t deceive me, is my faithful but austere husband. See that legal-looking man with pince-nez? Of course he can’t see me, bless him. As blind as a bat!”

She waved to him and called out, “Coo-ee!”

“I’m afraid Madge isn’t there,” said Commander Compton. “Not that I really expected her.”

The woman next to him had taken her hand from his arm to wave to her husband. But now she turned and held out her hand.

“Good-bye, Stephen. You’ll let me call you Stephen, won’t you? Thanks so much for looking after me so nicely. I’m sorry I scared you once or twice—shy man! But you’ll come and see us in South Kensington, won’t you?”

She laughed, as though remembering amusing episodes on this voyage, under a sky full of stars, when it’s pleasant to be sentimental, and perhaps a little dangerous, even for a married woman with a faithful but austere husband, and a man of fifty-two longing to see a daughter in London.

He took her hand and held it for a moment.

“We had a wonderfully good voyage,” he said. “You were very kind to a one-armed man.”

She raised her hand to him and laughed again, and then hailed a porter who had come on board. It was the end of the voyage.

There were other partings and farewells between men and women who had made those shipboard friendships which do not always last beyond the docks at journey’s end. There had been a rather hectic love affair between a young woman and the ship’s doctor. Commander Compton had watched it with amusement and sympathy. They were having a few last words now. Then the purser came up and said the usual kind of things.

“Glad to be back, I expect? No place like old England, after all. The Election results will be out to-night. I hope those Labour laddies will get a whopping. Well, good-bye, Commander. I hope we made you comfortable?”

“Oh, rather. Best thanks, Brown. I expect it’s my last time out East.”

He grabbed a handbag, gave the porter some orders about the rest of his luggage, and lagged behind a moment at the gangway until an ayah passed with a small boy in her arms—Wee Willie Winkie, sent home for health’s sake from the Malay States, where his mother would miss him, like other young mothers exiled from their children. Most of the other passengers had people to meet them. Commander Compton searched around for a pretty face like a photograph he carried in his breast pocket. He hadn’t seen his daughter for five years, but he would know her again at a glance, although she must have grown from girlhood to womanhood.

No luck! That telegram must have missed her. He would ring up her rooms as soon as he reached the club. He might be just in time to take her out to dinner. A wonderful thought that! Dinner with Madge at some little restaurant in Jermyn Street or Soho. He had been looking forward to it while he dined with rubber planters in wooden bungalows on the edge of their plantations.

Singapore ... Penang ... Borneo.... A long way from Tilbury Dock, and already receding into the background of his mind like a feverish kind of dream, very vivid while it lasted, but now no more than a memory.