Читать книгу The Challenge of Love (Musaicum Romance Classics) - Victorian Romance Novel - Страница 5

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People with a sense of the picturesque, who drove for the first time over Tarling Moor and saw Navestock—the town of the southern midlands—lying far-away in the green valley below them, thought of it as a dream town, hidden away among innocent, wooded hills. Even in later years, when a more restless generation began to run about the world in a mad hurry to admire anything that was “antique” and “quaint,” Navestock remained the quintessence of “quaintness.”

Artists came to paint its old inns, its stretches of red roof, and the mellow gloom of its alleys. It still kept much of its mystery, much of its crowded colour, much of the “quaintness” that earnest and dreamy persons seek so loyally.

From the distance Navestock looked like a red heart transfixed by a silver bodkin, red roofs on either side of the River Wraith. It was compact, and crowded, all mellowed to a warm maturity, from the garden houses on Peachy Hill to the hovels by the river alleys. The Builder Beast of the late ’sixties and the ’seventies had not then scented the town and scattered filth in the fields and gardens.

Those people who were in search of old-world quaintness found pieces of many centuries jumbled together like the pieces of a puzzle. Georgian gentlemen might still have strutted in the market square, their coats of red and green and blue brightening the grey cobbles, the powdered heads the colour of the clouds that floated over the town. In Bung Row and Bastard Alley by the river loitered those broad-hipped, snub-nosed slatterns whom Hogarth would have painted. If you desired a setting for some sweet serial in a Sunday magazine, you had but to walk past the Brandon Almshouses and along Green Street where the timber and plaster houses overhung the road. Noble young cavaliers came riding by, and sweet Dorothies flung red roses out of the casement windows. Then bells tolled by St. Jude’s Church, and Grey Friars came sweeping along, two by two, hairy, barefooted men, with hungry faces and wolves’ eyes. Let but a trumpet blow and young Mortimer clashed by in full war gear upon his great white horse, the tall spears of his men-at-arms moving after him like the masts of ships in a Dutch town. One artist, who came to paint Navestock’s queer corners, swore that if he watched the green doors in the red houses at Vernor’s End, he saw sentimental young women in huge bonnets and loose muslin gowns glide out and shake their curls at him in the sunlight. But this artist was a very impressionable man. He painted Navestock as a town of horsemen and of coaches, of blue wagons thundering along the narrow streets at the tails of huge, black horses. He painted it also as a town of gables and dormer windows, of high brick walls with roses and fruit trees showing over the tops thereof, of rich unsuspected gardens, of still more unsuspected foul, back yards. Strangers thought Navestock a sweet, innocent, peaceful old place where quiet and kindly people lived quiet and kindly lives.

It is to be feared that Romance hides a number of dirty garments under her gay-coloured cloak, and that Navestock was a thoroughly dirty and corrupt old town. She may have had pots of musk in her windows, but her back yards, her alleys, and her lanes were full of many odours. Nor was the town’s morality particularly clean. In the river alleys children swarmed like cockroaches, and family relationships were a matter of speculation. Inns and little beer-houses were plentiful. They leered at people round unsuspected corners and winked knowingly at the thirsty.

Behind the gardens belonging to the houses on the north side of Mulberry Green ran Snake Lane, and from Snake Lane a passage branched off between high brick walls that were topped with broken glass. A black door, with “Surgery” painted upon it in white letters, opened out of this passage. Daily, between the hours of nine and ten and six and seven, the sickly lees of the life of this old town oozed into Dr. Threadgold’s surgery. Threadgold had no rival in Navestock, and so far as his practice was concerned, his patients were divided into the blessed and the damned. To his assistants—such as they were—had been given the river alleys and their hovels, the sots and incurables, the miserable old men and women, the strumous, rickety children. Dr. Threadgold moved in the upper regions. He did not climb dirty stairs and knock his head against sloped ceilings. That chubby little hand of his went gliding up mahogany banister rails, and felt pulses under skin that was white and clean.

“Mr. Wolfe, sir, have you nearly finished with that case?”

There was some asperity in the elder man’s voice as his head and one check-patterned leg appeared round the edge of the door that led from the consulting-room into the surgery. Wolfe was seated on a chair by the window with a baby howling on his knees. A thin woman stood beside him, blinking away tears, and the crowded bottles on the shelves seemed to blink in sympathy.

“In one minute, sir.”

“My carriage has been waiting for half an hour.”

“I can’t leave the child for the moment, sir.”

Nor could he, since he was in the act of snipping an over-tight ligament that tied down the baby’s tongue.

Wolfe found Dr. Threadgold warming his feet at the fire. He turned briskly, and began to speak with a certain forced rapidity.

“Mr. Wolfe, I have drawn you out a list of patients who will be under your charge. And since you are new to the place I have ordered Samuel, the surgery boy, to go round with you and act as guide. Here are the list and the addresses.”

Threadgold handed Wolfe a strip of paper, and turned rather hurriedly towards the door. There were some twenty names on the list, and against each name Dr. Threadgold had written a diagnosis—in red ink.

“I shall be glad if you will be guided by my experience, Mr. Wolfe. If you have any suggestions to make as to treatment, I shall be pleased to consider them.”

He swung the door open, and then turned as though he had suddenly remembered something.

“And, by the way, sir, Mrs. Threadgold has asked me to tell you that she cannot allow the smell of tobacco about the house.”

Wolfe glanced up from the list that he had been scanning.

“Mrs. Threadgold, sir, is exceedingly sensitive to the smell of tobacco. Moreover, this house is a house of very frequent entertainment. In fact——”

Wolfe cut him short.

“I quite understand, sir. I’ll smoke in the garden—or in the stable.”

Threadgold gave a mild stare.

“Anywhere you please, Mr. Wolfe, in private. But of course not in public. I could not see a representative of mine walking the streets of Navestock——”

“No, sir, I quite understand you.”

Threadgold bounced out like a timid man who has been ordered to say his say, leaving Wolfe standing by the window with a queer and thoughtful smile upon his face.

The people of Navestock stared a good deal at John Wolfe as he spent his first morning striding about the town with fat Samuel plodding at his side. Most of the patients on the list that Dr. Threadgold had given him belonged to the lanes and alleys near the river. The very names of these places were suggestive—Bung Row, Bastard Alley, Dirty Dick’s, Paradise Place. The lanes were mere crevasses into which very little sunlight fell, and in winter, when the Wraith was in flood, half the low-lying ground would be under water. The whole neighbourhood was like a rabbit-warren, full of winding ways, black holes, and dark entries, and to judge by the condition of the yards and gutters—the art of scavenging was unknown.

Wolfe had to visit three cottages in Bung Row, and he felt himself back in the familiar London slums. In the first cottage, he found a frowsy woman sitting before a bit of fire, holding a baby to her breast, and trying to smother a cough. Wolfe sat down on a chair that had lost its back and talked to her with the ease of a man who is too interested and too much in earnest to be self-conscious. The woman was pitiably servile, and seemed surprised that this new doctor was not in a curt and casual hurry.

“It’s me soide, sir, I’ve got such a pain in me soide.”

She reiterated the cry, screwing her mouth into a queer triangular slit, so that Wolfe, struck by some ludicrous memory, had to get up and appear interested in her back.

“Much coughing?”

“It’s the coughing as pulls me to bits, sir. I coughs until I retches, and the pain in me soide, sir, is fair awful. Sleep? Wish I could, sir. It’s cough, cough, cough the whole blessed night. And my man—he’s that disagreeable, talks of stuffing a stocking in me mouth. And I’m getting that thin.”

A lean girl of twelve came and took the baby, and Wolfe examined the woman’s chest. Dr. Threadgold had given a diagnosis of bronchial catarrh. Wolfe very soon satisfied himself that the woman must have been suffering from consumption for months.

“Ever spat blood?”

“Blood, sir? Pints, sir.”

“You told Dr. Threadgold?”

“He only saw me once, sir, and he was that hurried. It was after Mr. Timmins left. He didn’t thump me and listen, like you do, sir.”

“No?”

“He said I’d caught a bit of a cold.”

Wolfe sat in silence a moment, his grave eyes fixed on the woman’s face. One of those flashes of understanding that strike suddenly across a man’s mind touched him as he looked at her. He realised what it was to be in the hands of an indifferent, bungling, careless old man, to have one’s miserable life curtailed amid such miserable surroundings. It was as though Navestock lay betrayed before him in the body of this woman; betrayed with all its inward sores, its ugly outward blemishes. Wolfe was a man who was very open to impressions, and almost like an artist in the way he caught the atmosphere of his surroundings.

“Did Dr. Threadgold give you any medicine?”

“Some pinky stuff, sir. But it’s the pain in me soide!”

Wolfe no longer had any desire to laugh. He gave the woman what advice he could, picked up his hat, and went out into Bung Row.

It seemed that his first impressionist sketch was to have the details blackened in that morning with heavy and emphatic lines. In three more cases Wolfe found that old Threadgold had blundered badly. The picture of the plump, spruce, affable little man kept jigging before Wolfe’s eyes as he realised how people were doctored in these Navestock alleys. He began to get a surer grip of Dr. Threadgold’s character. He could imagine this soft and incompetent little man pottering here and there with affable indifference, bungling glibly, too easily satisfied with the good things of life to realise perhaps that he was bungling. How did a man come to such a state? Wolfe, with all his grim and almost fanatical thoroughness, could hardly glimpse the psychology of the thing.

Genial cynicism! He supposed such a state of mind existed. And in such a town as this! And it was here that another side-gleam of understanding struck slantwise across his consciousness. Ignorance and cynical indifference may produce identical results, and the dirt and the insanity squalor of these Navestock lanes were facts to be laid at somebody’s door. Who was responsible? Who owned these rat holes in the river bank? Wolfe asked himself these questions, and in the asking the beaming face of Dr. Threadgold assumed another meaning. He remembered the good lady’s remarks in the drawing-room over night. Old Sir Joshua Kermody was her ideal—was he? And Navestock was the most Conservative of towns! Faugh! His nostrils contracted as he followed fat Sam past a slaughter-house yard that was an abomination even in winter.

He turned into Bread Street, and stopped to glance at Dr. Threadgold’s list and to consult with Master Sam. Bread Street ended at the river in a narrow old red-brick bridge that gave room for only one cart to pass at a time. At this moment the bridge happened to be choked with a group of children who had gathered round a girl who was wheeling a couple of infants in a very battered “pram.” A straight road bordered with willows cut across the meadows on the other side of the river, and a boy on a black pony was cantering along it towards the bridge.

Wolfe, who was looking towards the river, saw the boy on the pony brandish a switch and ride straight at the bridge as though he were charging the crowd of children there. They scattered like rabbits, the girl with the perambulator making a dash for Bread Street, the iron wheels bumping over the cobbles. One youngster refused to budge, standing sturdily with his back to the parapet, his fists thrust into his trousers pockets. The boy on the pony slashed this upholder of liberty across the face with his switch as his pony cantered past.

Bread Street was a dirty street, pitted with large puddles, and about thirty yards from where Wolfe stood a little servant girl in a clean print frock was picking her way over the cobbles. The boy on the black pony saw another chance of amusing himself. He made his pony swerve, and, cantering close to the girl when she was on the edge of a puddle, splashed the muddy water over her dress.

Wolfe stepped out into the road. The mannikin on the black pony came cantering up the street, glancing back once or twice to laugh at the servant girl’s rueful face. He was dressed like any dandy of thirty, in neat little trousers, a green waistcoat, a well-cut coat, and a high hat. A gold watch chain and gold seals showed on his waistcoat. The child was not more than twelve years old, and yet had all the airs and assurance of a very complacent man. His flat and colourless face with its faded blue eyes and impertinent nose had a queer resemblance to the face of some old roué.

The boy rode straight at Wolfe, waving him aside with his silver-handled switch.

“You, there, out of the way.”

He looked greatly astonished when Wolfe caught the pony’s bridle and pulled the beast up. The little gloved hand raised itself threateningly, but the man’s eyes met the boy’s, and the switch fell cowed.

“Hadn’t you better ride a little more quietly, Master Tommy?”

Master Tommy, indeed! This—to Aubrey Brandon, Esq., of “Pardons,” who in a certain number of years would have half Navestock in his pocket.

“What the deuce d’you mean, sir! Let go of my bridle.”

Wolfe smiled in his face.

“You have got a big voice for your years, Tommy. If I were you I should go back and tell that girl you are sorry you dirtied her dress.”

“Confound you, it’s no business of yours.”

“Cut along, then, Master Cub; I’m not your tutor.”

He let the bridle go, but still looked at Master Brandon in a way that made the boy feel angry and discomfited.

“And who the dickens are you, sir, stopping gentlemen in the public streets?”

“Oh—I’m nobody, Tommy.”

“You look like it, sir—you look like it.”

Wolfe gave a quiet, yet hearty laugh.

“It’s a pity someone does not give you a thrashing,” he said; “but as you say—a cub’s manners are no concern of mine.”

Young Master Brandon went trotting on up Bread Street his sallow face a little flushed and frightened. No one had ever interfered with him in Navestock before, save once on Peachy Hill, where old Josiah Crabbe’s Calvinistical gardener had threatened him with a thrashing for knocking over a little girl. Most of the Navestock folk were afraid of the youngster and his mother, and had agreed to regard his little arrogances as the ebullitions of the spirit of youth.

Wolfe turned to Sam, the surgery boy, who was looking up at him with comical respect.

“Who was that youngster, Sam?”

“Lor’, sir, that was young Master Brandon.”

“Brandon, and who’s he? Lead on to Paradise Place, Sam. It is marked down as being near Bread Street.”

Sam led on.

“That was young Master Brandon, of ‘Pardons,’ sir, Mrs. Brandon’s only son.”

“Big people, are they?”

“Tip toppers.”

“Own much of the town?”

“About half, sir, so I’ve heard say.”

“Mr. Brandon seems to do as he pleases.”

“Lor’, sir, who’s to stop him? I’ve seen him ride his pony half into Mr. Hubbard’s shop and swear like a lord at the old gentleman.”

Wolfe looked amused.

“Do lords swear so very furiously, Sam?”

“Sure, I don’t know, sir. I don’t know as I ever seed one.”

“And there is no Mr. Brandon?”

“Father—you mean, sir?”

“Yes.”

“No, sir. He died a sort of idiot quite a long while ago.”

They had made their way up a back street to Paradise Place, a row of brick and timber cottages, each with a small square of garden spread like a mat before it. How the place had earned its name it would be difficult to say, unless the person who had christened it had been blessed with a sardonic sense of humour. The bits of gardens were mere patches of dirt, and the casement windows, many of them stuffed with rags, looked out on the high brick wall of Miller Hansell’s great wagon-shed. A pump stood in an enclosure half-way up the place. People called it the “Paradise Pump,” though how many cesspools leaked into the well below no one troubled to consider.

Wolfe spent an hour in Paradise Place, and ended it with an inspection of the Paradise Pump. He decided that he would have a sample of that water, and examine it. An analysis might explain sundry phenomena that he had observed in the neighbouring cottages.

Walking homewards towards Mulberry Green he cast a critical eye over the fat boy and confessed to himself that the lad looked particularly healthy.

“You take plenty of physic, Sam?”

“Me, sir?”

“Yes.”

“Ain’t had a drop of physic since the measles five years ago.”

“Whereabouts do you live?”

“Up Peachy Hill, sir.”

“You’re a rogue, Sam! Many people get ill, living near the peaches?”

“Not much illness our way, sir. It’s mostly down along the river.”

“And who’s your landlord?”

“Mr. Crabbe.”

“And who is Mr. Crabbe?”

“Why, Mr. Josiah Crabbe, sir.”

Sam was out of breath, since Wolfe had been striding at full speed up Market Hill. He gasped out information between heavings of the chest.

“Does Mr. Crabbe own much property?”

“All about Peachy Hill, sir.”

“And the places we have been to this morning?”

“Part, Brandon’s, sir; part, Mr. Turrell, the brewer’s, so far as I know.”

“I expected as much. You are getting pumped, Sam, in more ways than one. What’s that striking? One o’clock! I shall be late for dinner.”

But Wolfe did not hurry himself. He appeared to be thinking hard all the rest of the way to Mulberry Green, and Sam, who was a lethargic lad, was content to wonder whether the cook at Prospect House had made a jam-roll for dinner.