Читать книгу Doomsday - Warwick Deeping - Страница 21

Colonel Sykes had finished his tea, and was standing at the window of the "Simla" dining-room, lighting a cigarette, and looking uncommonly complacent over it. He was tallish and slim, with a birdlike head and a high colour and very English blue eyes. He wore an eyeglass. His hair, growing thin, was of a dubious and yellowish brown, and most carefully spread like thin butter on a brown loaf. He looked youngish for eight and fifty, because of his slimness and his colour, but when that colour was examined more closely it lost much of its youthfulness, being a stippling of minute and twisted blood vessels. His appearance must have caused Colonel Sykes to pay much attention to detail. He shaved twice a day, so that he should never be caught with an incipient crop of grey stubble upon his chin. He was mostly seen in golfing clothes, grey, very baggy as to the knickers, with a blue and yellow "pull-over" under the coat, the stockings a soft fawn. He was alert, loquacious, and emphatic, and at emphatic moments he would drop his eye-glass out of his eye. His friendly loquacity was such that at times he would talk to his own reflection in a mirror.

Colonel Sykes was a bachelor. Behind him his cook-housekeeper was clearing away the tea things from the oak table. An immensely tall woman, and incredibly ugly, with a broad flat colourless face, a black moustache, and grey hairs on her chin, she had been with Colonel Sykes for seven years. Her name was Death, Mrs. Jane Death. "Cheerful name" as the colonel put it—"and safe." Having lived the life, he appreciated safety. No chance of any romantic foibles being attached to Jane Death. "Might as well consider a little riskiness with Cleopatra's needle."

Colonel Sykes completed the lighting of his cigarette and threw the match into a brass ash-tray on his writing table. The woman was still clearing the table, and he glanced a little testily over his left shoulder. What a time she was about it!

The door closed upon the straight immensity of this black figure and china jiggering on a metal tea-tray. The colonel faced about and dropped his eye-glass. The thought had been recurring of late that Mrs. Death was becoming a little too authoritative. "Knows too much about me, damn it!" Which she did. Also, there was another reason for Toby Sykes' reaction against the funereal finality of the woman's name. Death? Not a bit of it. He was feeling young, sentimentally and benignly young, a well-tailored Orpheus capable of leading life back out of the shades, a bachelor Orpheus whose young old fingers were fidgeting to twang the strings of a romantic and domestic lyre! The inspiration piqued his mature youthfulness.

Over the mantelpiece hung a mirror of the Regency period, and Colonel Sykes wandered firewards to look at himself in the mirror, carefully and with a certain complacent primness. He passed a hand over the back of his head, and gathering his eye-glass, adjusted it into his left eye.

"Capital, capital! Splendid, splendid!"

Notable words during the war, for the junior members of his mess had caught their colonel on one occasion in this very same pose, and addressing his own reflection. Irreverently they had christened him the "Parrot." Those words served him in every sort of crisis, or when he was feeling young, or had accepted a cigar, or wished to be sporting at golf, or to praise some noble sentiment.

"Splendid! Capital!"

He returned to the window, and from it he could look down the cinder Via Sacra he had created, and command the various homesteads, and by shifting his position a little he was able to obtain a view of a portion of the Viners' back garden. The Jamiesons had planted a golden privet hedge against a portion of the boundary fence and over the top of this hedge Colonel Sykes beheld a deck chair and a young woman sitting in it. It was an April day and warm, but the young woman was all wrapped up, April herself convalescing after March.

The Colonel's eyes grew sentimental.

"Poor child—poor little Mary."

Twenty-six was she! And he felt less than forty, and was quite sure that he could pass for forty-five. Splendid, splendid! Capital, capital! A pretty, affectionate, dark-eyed creature was Mary Viner, a young woman who stayed at home and did her job, God bless her, without much jam on her bread. The poor old Viners were very dull people, anecdotal sit-by-the-fire folk, and the woman Death would have made a much more suitable nurse for them than a pretty girl who ought to have been eating chocolates out of a box.

Colonel Sykes stroked his chin and considered the girl in the deck chair. Poor little Mary! Life was rather hard for her, nothing but the filling of hot water bottles for a couple of amiable old bores; and there she was sunning herself after a nasty bout of 'flu. She needed a month at the seaside or in Switzerland, away from Harold Coode's patched shirt and his devotion, and the voices and the strawberry jam faces of the Jamieson children. Blatant people those Jamiesons. Sorry he had sold the land to them. And Coode was the sort of fellow who took off his hat when he met a funeral. Quite right—of course—and proper, but Coode would do it with too much nobility, or as though it was the one and only funeral he had ever met.

Colonel Sykes collected copies of Punch, and the Graphic, and the Bystander. Not that he needed an excuse to wander into the "Green Shutters" garden, and stand with an air of tender distinction beside Mary's chair. How was she to-day? Better? Capital, capital; splendid—splendid! For he was beginning to feel himself a veritable Lochinvar destined to snatch her up and carry her off to a world of sentimental happening. He was sure that she would make a sweet wife. He would buy a new car, teach her to play golf, and rid himself of the Death woman.

Pausing with his bundle of magazines he looked with sentimental blue eyes in the direction of the gentle lady. Someone was coming up the cinder road, a man in a grey green suit, and wearing new brown boots that glistened. That fellow Furze—"Captain Furze!" To Colonel Sykes there was no incongruity in the reverting of a temporary captain to the status of a milkman, but when he saw Furze stop at the "Green Shutters" gate he felt challenged. What did the chap want there? Had he called for his money? The Viners were never anything but hard up. And the fellow could not be allowed to dun the household when Mary was lying there convalescing.

Obviously—no! Colonel Toby had begun to think of her as his Mary. He settled his eye-glass, tucked the magazines under one arm, and went out for kindly intervention should intervention be necessary. He rather hoped that it would.

Reaching the "Green Shutters" gate he saw no one on the doorstep. Had the fellow pushed his way in? Colonel Sykes deliberated, and then cut neatly round the house to the patch of grass at the back of it, to find Furze standing beside Mary Viner's chair. H'm, damned cheek! Surely—?

He was very much the great gentleman. He arrived convincingly on the other side of Mary's chair, eye-glass glimmering, magazines at the present, his heels together.

"Well, how are we to-day? Better? Capital, capital! Brought you a few things to look at."

Very properly, when he had paid his homage to the lady, he attended to the man.

"Afternoon, Furze."

Furze smiled and nodded.

"Good afternoon, sir."

The next few moments were a little awkward, for Furze remained on the other side of the chair with an air of having as much right to be there as had Colonel Sykes, yes—and more right. He was twenty-five years younger; he had come in the spring of the year to this April woman; he made the Colonel look like a withered old chanticleer. Moreover, he had ease, and the repose of a strong thing rooted on that grass patch, a little shy and reserved, but capable of smiling.

Colonel Toby did not feel like smiling. He dropped his eye-glass, picked up one of the magazines, and discovering a particular picture, displayed it before Mary's eyes.

"See that. Sir Carnaby Jackson. Knew him in India. Used to play polo together."

"How interesting."

She looked at the photo of Sir Carnaby, and Colonel Sykes looked at her. What was the matter? Frightened? Yes, she looked frightened, distressed. Surely, that fellow had not come to present a bill for milk and eggs? He glanced under his yellow-grey eyebrows at Furze who was staring intently and with a puzzled gentleness at Mary's feet. Tucked up in the rug they had fidgeted themselves free, and one shoe was half off. The colonel was shocked. He saw Furze bend down as if he was doing the most natural thing in the world, he slipped the shoe back on to Mary Viner's foot, and readjusted the rug.

"Damn the fellow!" thought Colonel Sykes.

He replaced his eye-glass, and discovered blushes, a glowing quivering face, and eyes that were veiled. No wonder! Infernal cheek of the chap! He felt excessively hot and annoyed. Capital, capital, splendid, splendid! No, not exactly. And Furze had his hands in his pockets, and was looking down at the rug-covered feet, and was smiling as in a dream.

Colonel Sykes cleared his throat. Something needed saying—and the remark that arrived had to be directed to old Hesketh who appeared with a trowel and a trug basket containing—well—of all things—the scrapings of the chicken house.

"Ha—Viner, active again—I see."

Captain Hesketh was one of God's most simple creatures.

"A little something for my sweet peas, Sykes."

"Capital—capital!"

But the surprise was yet to come. The big fellow appeared to wake out of his dream. He was smiling at old Hesketh and taking the trug from him, and though they had only approached each other over milk bills, they went off together like a couple of dogs who understood each other from the first mingling of their doggy sense of smell. Furze was saying something to the old man. They walked on past the six blackcurrant bushes and the two scraggy pyramid apple trees to where old Hesketh cherished his sweet peas.

Colonel Sykes' eye-glass fell out of his eye, and he bent devotedly and just a little deprecatingly over the April woman.

"My dear little lady—I do hope—ahem—that that fellow has not been—"

She went the colour of June.

"I don't quite understand."

Her brown eyes were all blurred. Colonel Sykes smoothed the air with a suave hand.

"You really must excuse me, little lady. I am concerned. The fellow has been worrying you—"

She was almost voiceless.

"Worrying?"

"Yes, with some wretched milk bill—or other."

Her face seemed to sink into an extraordinary and blank silence. She was groping for something—her handkerchief. She found it and pressed it over her mouth.