Читать книгу The Anxious Days - Philip Gibbs - Страница 7

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Most of these people seemed to know each other. They moved about from one group to another, greeting friends, exchanging forecasts of the Election results, resuming conversations broken off an hour ago or a week ago.

But one man stood for some time without moving on the edge of the dancing-floor, watching the scene with a kind of puzzled smile. It was Commander Stephen Compton of the Malay States. He was in evening clothes like the rest, but they hung a little loosely on him, as though his body had shrunk after his last visit to the tailor.

Five weeks ago or less he had been sitting in a bungalow with a fellow who was quietly but steadily drinking himself to death. A Malay boy was lying on the mat at the open door, and beyond, out there in the luminous night, were little twinkling lights through open doors in the native kampong. Some of the Tamil coolies were playing their musical instruments to the interminable thudding of a drum. In the bungalow, open to the verandah, a beetle whirred round the Aladdin lamp with a suicidal mania and a loud droning buzz. A lizard which had crawled up one of the beams was catching mosquitoes. On the threshold, an old toad, as big as a kitten, blinked its beady eyes and thrust out an elongated tongue with its horned cone, catching innumerable flies with a small, sharp thud on the floor, caused as its tongue found each victim. The room reeked with the acrid smell of smoky rubber in the kampong and with the sweet scent of hibiscus blossoms on a hedge outside the verandah. Duggan, that poor drink-sodden assistant, who had made such a mess of things, was playing Patience and cursing his cards. Five weeks ago, or thereabouts. Now this scene at Horridge’s.

The people, especially the young people, belonged to an England he didn’t quite know. He had never learnt to know the post-war crowd really well. He didn’t know what they were thinking about; what purpose they had, if any; what they were going to make of things. They were a good-looking lot on the whole. Amazingly beautiful some of these long-frocked damsels. The last time he had been in England they had worn frocks above their knees. But they didn’t wear more clothes, above the waistline, than their darker sisters. The Malay women were more draped, as a rule, in their white sarongs, unless they were carrying rubber with one breast bare. It was astonishing that these English girls could carry on in a cold, damp climate without any protection for their lungs.

But it was a middle-aged crowd mostly, and this lonely man looked around for someone he might know. All their faces were unfamiliar to him. He was a stranger here. He felt like Rip Van Winkle. He couldn’t even see old Bartlett, who might have introduced him to a friendly soul. Some of the people who passed glanced at him standing so still in the eddying swirl. Elderly women, some of them with jewels in their hair, looked back at him with a suddenly arrested interest, as though wondering whether they had known him in years now gone—a type of man they had liked in their girlhood, their lovers of the nineties. Even some of the younger women smiled over their white shoulders at him with friendly eyes. He looked interesting, this lean, bronzed-faced man with an empty sleeve. One of these girls nudged the boy by her side.

“Nice-looking man that! The sort of man I should like to make love to me. A sahib!”

“What, that old bird? Old enough to be your grandfather, my chicken!”

“Well, I didn’t say he wasn’t. I like men old enough to be my grandfather. They’re more interesting than baby boys at Oxford.”

Once Stephen Compton caught the glance of one of these girls and looked at her searchingly, and then came forward with a kind of eagerness.

“Surely it’s Gracie? Grace Amersham!”

The girl laughed. She was a tall thing with straw-coloured hair and blue eyes.

“My mother,” she said. “She’ll be flattered when I tell her.”

That was a hard knock for a man of fifty-two. It was twenty-five years since he had danced with Grace Amersham on the quarter-deck of a battleship in the Bosphorus off Constantinople.

“I beg your pardon,” he said hastily. “I forgot—well—the flight of time, you know.”

“Don’t mention it. Horrid thought!” said the girl.

She smiled at him over her left shoulder as she moved away with a young man who looked bored.

Stephen Compton, late of the Malay States, had taken a knock. That mistake about mother and daughter was a sharp reminder of advancing age, and most unpleasant. Sometimes he felt preposterously young. Sometimes he had an idea that he looked ten years younger than his real age. Once or twice lately—well, more than that, to be strictly honest—he had wondered whether he wouldn’t do well to marry again, if he could induce some friendly female to take an interest in him. On the boat there had been that vivacious lady who had relieved the boredom of a long voyage. The captain had chaffed him a bit about it. One night on the boat-deck, under a sky full of stars, he had become sentimental and found the experience surprisingly pleasant for a one-armed man subject to malaria. She didn’t seem to mind. She rather liked it, it seemed. She had made him forget his age by a charming flirtation which flattered his vanity, before she gave him her hand, with a little squeeze, as their boat crept into Tilbury Dock, and said, “Thanks so much for looking after me so nicely.” Perhaps he had been rather foolish about it.

Now, in this Oxford Street shop on Election night, he was looking at all these young beauties with a kind of envy of the men who led them to the dancing-floor. How good to be young again, and to have the adventure of love—but not for him! He was a withered old bird. It was astounding that he should have made that mistake about Grace Amersham; skipping twenty-five years as though they were a day or two, and taking a girl for her own mother! A bit awkward really.

That kid must have thought him a doddering old fool. What a pity Madge was away on tour! He felt as lonely as death among all this crowd, not one of whom he knew.