Читать книгу Sorrell and Son - Warwick Deeping - Страница 20

On the first floor of the Angel Inn, and at the end of a dark passage there was a little, dim drawing-room, musty and sad, with engravings of Landseer's pictures on the walls, and a Kidderminster carpet on the floor. On the hearth, behind the brass fender, stood a cheap Japanese screen in black and gold, the centre piece between a mock-mahogany coal purdonium on the one hand, and an occasional table on the other. The wallpaper displayed faded pink roses blooming in a strangely detached way on a dull grey background. There were a few books on an octagonal table, a Dunlop guide, bound copies of the Illustrated London News twenty years old, Tennyson's poems and a Latin grammar. How the Latin grammar had got there– heaven alone knows, but it remained there because no one troubled to remove it. A gilt clock that had not ticked since Queen Victoria died, escaped the dust by standing on the white marble mantelpiece under a glass case. Two bronze gentlemen on horseback, mailed and armed, menaced each other from opposite ends of the mantelpiece. The arm-chairs were of that bastard breed in which each wooden arm bears an excrescence of padding covered tightly with a material that is reminiscent of a footman's breeches sixty years ago.

People rarely entered this room. The windows remained closed, and it lived shut up with its own dark mustiness. Occasionally some lone woman sat in it, and knitted, and looked at the books and put them back again, but the women who sat in this room had no men attached to them. Any man chancing to open the door, looked in, stared, and, feeling the room's unwedded deadness, fled. No one ever left the door of this room open. They closed it carefully, as though the room's emptiness were best sealed up.

Sorrell was coming down the stairs when he heard strange sounds drifting from the dark passage. There was a piano in the drawing-room and someone was playing it, and playing it extraordinarily well, feelingly, and with a strong, rich touch. Sorrell paused. Music, such music was so unknown in this haphazard house that he felt like a man in a factory yard who suddenly hears a blackbird singing. It gave him a moment of exquisite pain. He stood with quivering throat, and a sense of strange and deep emotion stirring in him.

The pianist was playing Chopin. He or she was in the midst of the First Prelude when Sorrell first paused to listen. Then came the Berceuse, and after the Etude in A Flat. Sorrell, leaning against the wall, felt his memories going back to the days of his youth when he had sat and dreamed in Queen's Hall. Romance. Those days when he had imagined–

But who was the pianist? A car with two or three women in it had arrived an hour ago, and Sorrell had carried up their luggage, but these ladies had suggested rag-time rather than Chopin. He felt curious. He approached the drawing-room door, telling himself that it would be easy for him to enter the room as though in search of some visitor. He could wait for an interlude.

Leaning against the wall opposite the door, he let the surge of those sweet sounds go through him. A pause came. He was about to slip across the passage when the door opened.

It was Mr. Roland who opened the door. His face had a kind of radiance, a happy rapture.

"Hallo!"

Sorrell had straightened up.

"Sorry, sir. I was listening. Was it you?"

"Yes."

The two men looked at each other, and the light on Thomas Roland's face seemed to have spread to Sorrell's. They were together for a moment in a transcendental world of mystic sounds and symbols. And life was drawing them nearer.