Читать книгу Heirs Apparent - Philip Gibbs - Страница 6

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They did not talk very much while they walked. Audrey hummed a little syncopated tune now and then, with an acid tablet in her left cheek. Julian, who had an eye for colour, noted without remark the symphony of green and gold and silver along the way. The young beech trees were pale and bright against the tangled branches of oak trees not yet clothed in leaf. The hawthorne hedges were a flaming green, and here and there a chestnut tree was in full foliage, each leaf clean and sparkling after a night’s rain. The green of young larches was shrill like the reed notes in an orchestra. Some of the fields were silvered with daisies, and others splashed with the gold of celandines and dandelions. In wayside orchards twisted fruit trees, white-washed up to their branches, were smothered with pink blossom, and the breeze strewed some of their petals over the pathways like confetti outside St. Peter’s, Eaton Square, on a marriage morning.

“Give me England in May-time,” said Audrey.

“I’ve seen worse places,” said Julian. “Probably we’ll get snow before the journey’s end, or grey skies and arctic winds.”

“Pessimist! ‘Gather the rosebuds while ye may!’ ” laughed Audrey.

She gathered a daisy instead and put its stalk between her teeth with the flower dangling from her lips. Presently she took off her blue hat and swung it from one of its ribbons as she walked. The wind played with a few loose curls of her brown hair but could do nothing with its close coils.

“I don’t feel a bit as if I’d disgraced myself,” she said, a mile or two farther on.

“I shouldn’t worry about that,” said Julian. “It depends entirely on your sense of humour.”

“Oh, I’ve heaps of that. But one has to pay for it. Probably we’ll have to pay for this walk. The Old People make such a fuss about things.”

“That’s true,” said Julian. “They never understand.”

“Queer, isn’t it?”

Audrey laughed at the queerness of the Old People.

“They seem to forget their own youth. Utterly refuse to see things from our point of view, and won’t be taught even by the most patient explanations.”

“The obstinacy of intolerance,” said Julian.

Audrey harked back to the belief that there would be an unholy row because she had been sent down.

“As if it were my fault that Beatrice Tuck’s ridiculous nose got in the way of my fairy footstep!”

Julian laughed in his quiet way.

“Miss Tuck’s obtrusive nose was only one link in a chain of connected facts, beginning with Clatworthy’s party.”

“Anyhow this is good,” said Audrey, blushing a little at the mention of Clatworthy, who was supposed to be her most ardent cavalier.

“It’s good,” she said again ecstatically, “this white road, this sky, the smell of things.”

She recited a verse or two as she swung into a longer stride.

“ ‘Now the joys of the road are chiefly these:

A crimson touch on the hard wood trees

A vagrant’s morning wide and blue

In early fall, when the wind walks, too;

A shadowy highway cool and brown

Alluring up and enticing down,

From rippled water to dappled swamp

From purple glory to scarlet pomp;

The outward eye, the quiet will,

And the striding heart from hill to hill’ ”

“Tell me when you feel like tea,” said Julian.

She felt like tea in the village of Dorchester, near Benson, with its little old Tudor and Stuart houses, and its look of having slept in history since a Charles passed that way to set up his court in Oxford in the time of Revolution.

They went into a quiet inn which smelt of polished mahogany, old plaster, and faded rose leaves. There was a tea-garden behind, and they chose that instead of the parlour with closed windows.

Some people were there already—two obvious Americans belonging to a Studebaker they had seen outside, and a thin old lady with a middle-aged daughter and an over-fed spaniel. They didn’t matter. Audrey passed them without a glance and found a table for two at the end of a pergola of rambler roses—not yet in flower. It was close to a bed of white alison and forget-me-nots, and shielded from wind in an arbour of its own filled with the afternoon sun. There was a croquet lawn beyond, as smooth as velvet.

Audrey’s shoes were white with dust and her face had been touched by the sun and breeze. She drank four cups of tea and ate three chocolate éclairs, and then with a deep sigh of content lit one of Julian’s cigarettes and shifted to a deck chair in which she lay back with her eyes closed and a flickering smile about her lips. Julian noticed that she had rather humorous lips, and a straight little nose with two freckles on the bridge. Rather a good-looking kid, altogether.

“Life’s pretty good in spots,” said Audrey presently. “This is one of the spots, Julian.”

He agreed. There was nothing much wrong with it.

“A pity,” said Audrey, “we can’t make this walk last for weeks and months and years. Just walking on through little old villages, with restful moments in gardens like this.”

Julian thought over the idea with a faintly satirical smile.

“The weather wouldn’t hold out. And we should get bored with each other.”

“Not me,” said Audrey generously.

“After the first year or two our clothes would begin to fall off. Somehow or other we should have to replace them for decency’s sake.”

“Why?” asked Audrey blandly.

“Well, if not for that, for warmth’s sake. That would mean earning money somehow and interrupting the walk.”

“In any decent scheme of society—” said Audrey.

“In fact,” added Julian, as the brutal truth-teller, “we couldn’t afford the game for more than a week. I’ve five quid in my pocket at the most, and I understand you haven’t a bean?”

“I never have,” said Audrey. “It’s hellish.”

They were silent after that for some time. Audrey shut her eyes and seemed to sleep, but presently she opened them and laughed.

“You’re not really romantic, Julian, in spite of writing morbid verse for the Isis. You think things out and don’t let your imagination catch fire. At that binge last night you were as cold as ice.”

“Rather bored,” said Julian. “I hate repetitions.”

“I think you’re groping towards high ideals,” said Audrey. “Trying to find an answer to the little old riddle of life. Tell me.”

He looked down at her with a guarded expression in his grey eyes.

“If you mean I haven’t a notion what to make of things, you’re right. Have any of us? Have you?”

“Not much,” said Audrey. “One ought to get such a lot out of life. I’m greedy! But it’s a muddled business. Too many restrictions. ‘You mustn’t do this!’ ‘You mustn’t do that!’ ‘Keep off the grass!’ An awful nuisance.”

“I know,” agreed Julian. “That’s why I’ve cut Oxford. Partly. It’s a cramping institution designed to turn out character in certain moulds.”

Audrey sniggered.

“It hasn’t moulded me! You men conform more easily, I find.”

“Perhaps,” said Julian. “Our ideas are shaped on the conventional lines of English life a hundred years ago. Prehistoric now.”

Audrey gaped a little.

“How do you mean, Julian, dear?”

“Caste ideas,” said Julian, “when the caste has broken down, more or less. Learning for leisured gentlemen with comfortable estates and ready-made professions, when the late unmentionable war and other things have destroyed their privileges. It seems to me we’re pretending things are the same when they’re all different. Other things have come along or are coming.”

“What things, dear child?”

“The mass mind. Labour. All sorts of damn things which spoil our kind of life.”

Julian smiled through his cigarette smoke.

“Of course I’m talking rot. Anyhow Oxford’s a backwater, out of the tide of life.”

“Gloomy Dean!” said Audrey. “I’m not worrying about the state of the world. It’s very messy! It’s the personal side of things that afflicts my sensitive young soul at the moment. Parental prohibitions. Large desires and small means. Poverty. Above all, poverty!”

“It’s not nice, I suppose,” said Julian.

“It’s horrid. I happen to know! My father wallows in it. A country parson with four kids! He’s had to give up ’baccy and the more expensive kind of books to provide me with a college education. Imagine his sense of tragedy when I tell him I’ve been sent down. Another hope blasted! Another little maid gone to the devil instead of going to a High School as assistant mistress!”

“What about getting on?” asked Julian.

“Forty winks first.”

She curled herself up in the deck chair and slept with her face in the sun. Julian smoked another cigarette and thought out the end of a verse he was writing.

Audrey was just waking up with a yawn when the old lady and the middle-aged daughter and the over-fed spaniel, who had been taking tea at the other end of the pergola, appeared down the garden path.

The middle-aged lady, dressed in a short tweed skirt with jacket to match, stopped in front of Audrey. Julian noticed that she had short hair cut like a boy’s and rather watery eyes which did not look straight at the object of vision but wandered uneasily.

“Surely,” she said, with an air of delight, “this is Miss Nye of Hartland?”

Audrey sat up without dignity and with a somewhat hostile expression.

“How do you do, Miss Raven. Been having tea?”

“Yes. Such a delightful tea! ... Mother, this is Audrey Nye, our dear Vicar’s daughter.”

The old lady beamed.

“What a pleasant coincidence! We are motoring down to see my grand-niece, Nancy Burbridge. And you are taking a little jaunt this afternoon, as a respite from your studies, no doubt?”

“Yes,” said Audrey. “Just a little respite!”

She threw a laughing glance at Julian which was intercepted by Miss Raven.

“Your brother, I suppose?” she asked. “Mr. Frank, is it not?”

“Not a bit like Frank,” said Audrey. “Mr. Julian Perryam.... Mrs. Raven, Julian. Miss Raven. From Hartland.”

Julian acknowledged the introduction.

“Nice day,” he said politely.

“Can we give you a lift back to Oxford?” asked Miss Raven. “Unless of course you have your own car? But of course you have! How silly of me!”

She gave a shrill, nervous laugh, and her vision wandered between Julian and Audrey.

“I had a car once,” said Julian. “But it’s broken down. We’ve decided to walk.”

“Oh, no! You must let us give you a lift. Such a pleasure! And such a long walk!”

“As a matter of fact,” said Julian curtly, “we’re walking in the other direction. Excellent walking weather, don’t you think?”

Miss Raven agreed that it was wonderful walking weather. But she did not quite understand—it was foolish of her!—how they could be walking away from Oxford. Would it not be rather difficult to get back? Such a long way already!

“That’s all right,” said Julian. “We’re walking back to Surrey. Taking it leisurely, you know.”

Miss Raven did not hide her surprise in which there was a note of dismay.

“Oh, surely not! My dear Miss Nye—”

“And as it’s quite a way,” said Audrey hastily, “we’d better be starting off again. Good afternoon, Mrs. Raven. Good afternoon, Miss Raven. Come along, Julian!”

She gave them an affable, smiling nod, and swinging her blue hat marched up the pergola followed by Julian, after his bow to the two ladies.

“A bit too abrupt, weren’t you?” he asked, after he had paid his bill and joined Audrey in the porch.

Audrey was amused but slightly flushed.

“And you were a bit too candid,” she answered. “That woman, Alice Raven, has raised more scandals in Surrey than you can find on a Sunday morning in the News of the World. She’s a ferret.”

“Looks like it rather,” said Julian. “I don’t like the way she wears her hair.”

“Let’s forget her,” said Audrey. “What a topping evening for a walk! See those long shadows across the road, and the crimson feathers in the sky? I’m good for twelve miles before the stars come out.”