Читать книгу The Times Red Cross Story Book by Famous Novelists Serving in His Majesty's Forces - Various - Страница 9

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A south wind was blowing little baby clouds along a blue sky; lower down, the rooks were talking busily to each other in the tall elms which lined the church; and, lower down still, the foxhound puppy sat himself outside the blacksmith’s and waited for company. If nothing happened in the next twenty seconds he would have to go and look for somebody.

But somebody was coming. From the door of “The Dog and Duck” opposite, a tall, lean, brown gentleman stepped briskly, in his hand a pair of shoes. The foxhound puppy got up and came across the road sideways to him. “Welcome, welcome,” he said effusively, and went round the tall, lean, brown gentleman several times.

“Hallo, Duster,” said the brown gentleman; “coming with me to-day?”

“Come along,” said the foxhound puppy excitedly. “Going with you? I should just think I am! Which way shall we go?”

“Wait a moment. I want to leave these shoes here.”

Duster followed him into the blacksmith’s shop. The blacksmith thought he could put some nails in; gentlemen’s shoes and horses’ shoes, he explained, weren’t quite the same thing. The brown gentleman admitted the difference, but felt sure that the blacksmith could make a job of anything he tried his hand at. He mentioned, which the blacksmith knew, that he was staying at “The Dog and Duck” opposite, and gave his name as Carfax.

“Come along,” said Duster impatiently.

“Good morning,” said the brown gentleman to the blacksmith. “Lovely day, isn’t it?... Come along, old boy.”

He strode out into the blue fresh morning, Duster all round him. But when they got to the church—fifty yards, no more—the foxhound puppy changed his mind. He had had an inspiration, the same inspiration which came to him every day at this spot. He stopped.

“Let’s go back,” he said.

“Not coming to-day?” laughed the brown gentleman. “Well, good-bye.”

“You see, I think I’d better wait here, after all,” said the foxhound puppy apologetically. “Something might happen. Are you really going on? Well—you’ll excuse me, won’t you?”

He ambled back to his place outside the blacksmith’s shop. The tall, lean, brown gentleman, who called himself Carfax, walked on briskly with spring in his heart. Above him the rooks talked and talked; the hedges were green; and there were little baby clouds in the blue sky.

Shall I try to deceive you for a page or two longer, or shall we have the truth out at once? Better have the truth. Well, then—the gentleman who called himself Carfax was really George Crosby. You guessed? Of course you did. But if you scent a mystery you are wrong.

It was five years ago that Crosby took his first holiday. He came to this very inn, “The Dog and Duck,” and when they asked him his name he replied “Geoffrey Carfax.” It had been an inspiration in the train. To be Geoffrey Carfax for three weeks seemed to cut him off more definitely from the Fenchurch Street office and the Islington boarding-house. George Crosby was in prison, working a life sentence; Geoffrey Carfax was a free man in search of the woman. Romance might come to Geoffrey, but it could never come to George. They were two different persons; then let them be two different persons. Besides, glamour hung over the mere act of giving a false name. George had delightful thrills when he remembered his deceit; and there was one heavenly moment of panic, on the last day of his first holiday, when (to avoid detection) he shaved off his moustache. He was not certain what the punishment was for calling yourself Geoffrey Carfax when your real name was George Crosby, but he felt that with a clean-shaven face he could laugh at Scotland Yard. The downward path, however, is notoriously an easy one. In subsequent years he let himself go still farther. Even the one false name wouldn’t satisfy him now; and if he only looked in at a neighbouring inn for a glass of beer, he would manage to let it fall into his conversation that he was Guy Colehurst or Gervase Crane or—he had a noble range of names to choose from, only limited by the fact that “G.C.” was on his cigarette-case and his kit-bag. (His linen was studiously unmarked, save with the hieroglyphic of his washerwoman—a foolish observation in red cotton which might mean anything.)

The tall, lean, brown gentleman, then, taking the morning air was George Crosby. Between ourselves we may continue to call him George. It is not a name I like; he hated it too; but George he was undoubtedly. Yet already he was a different George from the one you met at Muswell Hill. He had had two weeks of life, and they had made him brown and clear-eyed and confident. I think I said he blushed readily in Mrs. Morrison’s boarding-house; the fact was he felt always uneasy in London, awkward, uncomfortable. In the open air he was at home, ready for he knew not what dashing adventure.

It was a day of spring to stir the heart with longings and memories. Memories, half-forgotten, of all the Aprils of the past touched him for a moment, and then, as he tried to grasp them, fluttered out of reach, so that he wondered whether he was recalling real adventures which had happened, or whether he was but dreaming over again the dreams which were always with him. One memory remained. It was on such a day as this, five years ago, and almost in this very place, that he had met the woman.

Yes, I shall have to go back again to tell you of her. Five years ago he had been staying at this same inn; it was his first holiday after his sentence to prison. He was not so resigned to his lot five years ago; he thought of it as a bitter injustice; and the wonderful woman for whom he came into the country to search was to be his deliverer. So that, I am afraid, she would have to have been, not only wonderful, mysterious, and holy, but also rich. For it was to the contented ease of his early days that he was looking for release; the little haven in Bedford Park had not come into his dreams. Indeed, I don’t suppose he had even heard of Bedford Park at that time. It was Islington or The Manor House; anything in between was Islington. But, of course, he never confessed to himself that she would need to be rich.

And he found her. He came over the hills on a gentle April morning and saw her beneath him. She was caught, it seemed, in a hedge. How gallantly George bore down to the rescue!

“Can I be of any assistance?” he said in his best manner, and that, I think, is always the pleasantest way to begin. Between “Can I be of any assistance?” and “With all my worldly goods I thee endow” one has not far to travel.

“I’m caught,” she said. “If you could——” Observe George spiking himself fearlessly.

“I say, you really are! Wait a moment.”

“It’s very kind of you.”

There—he has done it.

“Thank you so much,” she said, with a pretty smile. “Oh, you’ve hurt yourself!”

The sweet look of pain on her face!

“It’s nothing,” said George nobly. And it really was nothing. One can get a delightful amount of blood and sympathy from the most insignificant scratch.

They hesitated a moment. She looked on the ground; he looked at her. Then his eyes wandered round the beautiful day, and came back to her just as she looked up.

“It is a wonderful day, isn’t it?” he said suddenly.

“Yes,” she breathed.

It seemed absurd to separate on such a day when they were both wandering, and Heaven had brought them together.

“I say, dash it,” said George suddenly: “what are you going to do? Are you going anywhere particular?”

“Not very particular.”

“Neither am I. Can’t we go there together?”

“I was just going to have lunch.”

“So was I. Well, there you are. It would be silly if you sat here and ate—what are yours, by the way?”

“Only mutton, I’m afraid.”

“Ah, mine are beef. Well, if you sat here and ate mutton sandwiches and I sat a hundred yards farther on and ate beef ones, we should look ridiculous, shouldn’t we?”

“It would be rather silly,” she smiled.

So they sat down and had their sandwiches together.

“My name is Carfax,” he said, “Geoffrey Carfax.” Oh, George! And to a woman! However, she wouldn’t tell him hers.

They spent an hour over lunch. They wandered together for another hour. Need I tell you all the things they said? But they didn’t talk of London.

“Oh, I must be going,” she said suddenly. “I didn’t know it was so late. No, I know my way. Don’t come with me. Good-bye.”

“It can’t be good-bye,” said George in dismay. “I’ve only just found you. Where do you live? Who are you?”

“Don’t let’s spoil it,” she smiled. “It’s been a wonderful day—a wonderful little piece of a day. We’ll always remember it. I don’t think it’s meant to go on; it stops just here.”

“I must see you again,” said George firmly. “Will you be there to-morrow, at the same time—at the place where we met?”

“I might.” She sighed. “And I mightn’t.”

But George knew she would.

“Then good-bye,” he said, holding out his hand.

“My name is Rosamund,” she whispered, and fled.

He watched her out of sight, marvelling how bravely she walked. Then he started for home, his head full of strange fancies....

He found a road an hour later; the road went on and on, it turned and branched and doubled—he scarcely noticed it. The church clock was striking seven as he came into the village.

It was a wonderful lunch he took with him next day. Chicken and tongue and cake and chocolate and hard-boiled eggs. He ate it alone (by the corner of a wood, five miles from the hedge which captured her) at half-past three. That day was a nightmare. He never found the place again, though he tried all through the week remaining to him. He had no hopes after that day of seeing her, but only to have found the hedge would have been some satisfaction. At least he could sit there and sigh—and curse himself for a fool.

He went back to Islington knowing that he had had his chance and missed it. By next April he had forgotten her. He was convinced that she was not the woman. The woman had still to be found. He went to another part of the country and looked for her.

And now he was back at “The Dog and Duck” again. Surely he would find her to-day. It was the time; it must be almost the place. Would the loved one be there? He was not sure whether he wanted her to be the woman of five years ago or not. Whoever she was, she would be the one he sought. He had walked some miles; funny if he stumbled upon the very place suddenly.

Memories of five years ago were flooding his mind. Had he really been here, or had he only dreamed of it? Surely that was the hill down which he had come; surely that clump of trees on the right had been there before. And—could that be the very hedge?

It was.

And there was a woman caught in it.