Читать книгу Iron and Smoke - Sheila Kaye-Smith - Страница 5

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A few minutes later he followed her indoors. He had not given himself much time to dress for dinner, so he did not try to find her again. He had all the rest of the moonlight and the evening in which to woo. He had drawn the main lines of the picture, and all that was left was the shading and stippling—such detail as he felt inclined to add in the interests of tenderness and security. She was sweet—that child. He looked forward to the moment when he should once more hold her softness in his arm, sniff the sweetness of an unscented skin, feel the frizz and fluff of her delicious hair. Bless her!—She was a darling.

But between him and his next kiss lay the vastness of dinner. He thought of dinner as a mountain range to be crossed—each course a different ridge. To the Bastows dinner was the massive and elaborate function it is to those who have only lately achieved it in their social progress, who still speak of it as Late Dinner, or even, as Mrs Bastow occasionally did in forgetful moments, as supper. Mallard did not despise a good dinner—on the contrary, when he had the opportunity he loved to spend more money than he could afford on some delicate feast for himself and his friends, some carefully chosen combination of fish and flesh and bird, with wines both ripe and dry, and a touch of the exotic in either the first course or the last. But the Bastow conception of dinner was richness and quantity—a procession of courses which included two successive sweets, both very rich and creamy, the whole served most dreadfully without a single drop of wine. Old Tom Bastow was a rigid teetotaler, and he who could have kept the best cellar in the three Ridings, kept instead a loathsome sticky brew of lemonade, all the more revolting because it was served in priceless cut glass to accompany luscious dishes. It debased the whole dinner to a schoolboy’s gorge, an affair of pastry, cream and lemonade—one could almost add the final vomit.

The dining room was like a magician’s cave, Humphrey told himself, now that the first shock of it was over—flowers and fruit magically out of season, a chandelier like the solar system, gold plate, and even powdered footmen. When had he last seen a powdered footman? For that matter, when had he last seen—or in some cases ever seen—a marble entrance hall hung exclusively with original Landseers? A stable with marble feeding troughs? A private coal-gas supply, complete with gasometer? A private bicycling track? A fifty-foot square library stocked solid with uncut books bound uniformly in gold and calf? Or any of the many other marvels to be found at Slapewath Grange?

The drawbacks of the meal were not much lessened by the company. Humphrey had been inclined to take pride in himself as a dinner-table talker, of restrained yet reliable wit, of tact, of information. But here conversation was not an art, it was just a habit, and subordinate to the eating, which though no more an art than the conversation, was less a habit than a business. Also his fellow diners did not live in his world. To them Leeds and not London was the centre of the universe—vain to ask them if they had read Kipling’s latest or seen “The Shopgirl.” Sussex seemed to him a land of culture by comparison. Not thus they talked at dinner at the Herringdales, or at Stream House, or Rushlake Manor, or at Old Mogador....

The Bastows’ talk was all either business or personal. Mrs Bastow had been to see her mother, and Aunt Gertie had looked in and they had discussed the burning question of Aunt Gertie’s Willie’s tonsils. Though Mrs Bastow lived literally in marble halls, slept in a Louis Quinze bedstead and ate off gold plate, her mother and unmarried sisters lived quite unenviously in a Middlesbrough street, often invited to Slapewath and lavishly entertained there, to go back to their front parlour and high teas and daily slavery, with nothing in their hearts but honest pride in their Lizzie’s splendour. Old Tom Bastow did not talk about his relations, and no one—least of all himself—knew what had happened to most of them. An iron-worker does not often become an iron-master unless he is able to lose sight of detrimental kin. It was understood that a regular remittance went to a brother in Australia, but only on the condition that the brother came no closer than that.

So Tom Bastow did not talk about persons, but about business. He discussed various problems of their craft with two iron-masters from Oselby and from Stockbridge, men who rode like himself on the crest of the iron boom, and with a retired iron-master from Southyat, whom five years had made so rich that he had shut down his works, dismissed his workmen and bought an impoverished Earl’s estate for his last years’ ease. The iron-masters’ wives talked with Mrs Bastow about relations and tonsils. From both conversations Mallard felt himself shut out. Jenny by his side was silent—nothing that he said could find her tongue for more than a word. There remained only an iron-master’s daughter, who preferred to join with the matrons, and the Bastows’ son, young Timothy.

Mallard liked Timothy, and had experimentally found him interesting. He had not been to a public school, but he was now at Oxford, though the place did not seem to have produced in him quite the effect one would have expected. He still remained uncivilised in many of his ideas, and though ready enough with his tongue when he and Mallard were alone, he held glumly aloof from both streams of table-talk, even maintaining his uncouthness after one of them had trickled away with the ladies into the drawing-room. Humphrey tried for a time to find out how much he hated the prospect of becoming a member of the firm of Bastow, Routh and Partners, to find out whether he harked back in spirit to his mother’s ambitionless kin, or derived some queer independent strain from his father’s roving brethren—but he was too preoccupied to try much. His mind was full of his resolution to seek Jenny, draw her back into moonlight and loneliness and finish what was begun. He must get the matter definitely settled before he left. He must go back to the Herringdales knowing that the place was saved—he must hear the hidden voices of the fields lifted to bless him.

Suddenly the thought came to him that he had not yet gone too far to draw back. What was begun could be left unfinished. It could stand as an impulse, an experiment, even a disgrace. He had not yet definitely committed himself.... But he had—and he must. He could not retreat. He could not face Jenny’s sorrowing eyes any more than he could go back to the reproachful voices of the fields.