Читать книгу Blind Man's Year - Warwick Deeping - Страница 3

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The young man stopped to question a labourer who was mending a gap in a hedge.

“Am I right for Knoll Farm?”

The man in the field pointed with his billhook in the direction of a high wood of Scotch firs.

“Up there. First turning on your right.”

The young man thanked him and walked on. He carried a rather dirty brown mackintosh slung over his left shoulder, and the face under the grey felt hat was both cheeky and worried. Authority had said to him: “Go down and get an interview with Douglas Gerard. Difficult? I know. It’s up to you, my lad. She will never be interviewed or shot, and she’s news. Go and get something.”

The young man was not feeling happy about this adventure. He had a wife and two children and his position with the Metropolis was none too secure. Authority had been terse and sarcastic, and suggesting that editors judged you by the products of your pen. Miss Gerard’s pen had been exceedingly productive, and her latest book “A Pilgrimage of Pain” had gone all over the world as a poignant human document whose success had been all the more singular in that it had both captured the masses and pleased the critics. But Miss Gerard was an exceedingly shy and separative person, and her elusiveness made her all the more interesting and mysterious. She had snubbed the Press and repulsed all camera men, and gossip had become so imaginative that it had begun to hint that Miss Gerard was not woman.

Authority had put it rather coarsely to young Trevor Jones.

“Find out what’s under the skirts, my lad.”

Sensation! Yes, always and everywhere headlines and a shout.

“Famous Novelist Unveiled.” Yet, on this April morning, England was so very lovely that even a young man in search of an income and with a quarter’s rent unpaid was moved to other-worldliness. The banks were pied with primroses and wild violets. The gorse was ablaze, the green hillsides brilliant. “Polished plush,” thought young Jones, and made a mental note of the phrase. That wood of Scotch firs was like a high masted ship sailing the blue welkin. And then, the young man came to the lane which climbed to this old Sussex farmstead between oak trees with buds of burnished gold. Scattered larches were infinitely green, and so were the young leaves of the thorns.

The lane ascended, curved across a grass field and was suddenly and uncompromisingly occluded by a faded blue gate hung on stone pillars, between high dense hedges of yew. Young Jones stood and stared at the gate. Masses of shrubs and trees hid everything beyond, save one red brick chimney-stack crowned by three red pots. It was impossible to trespass either to right or left, for the hedges were reinforced against such divergings by a close meshed wire fence. Miss Gerard’s home was a veritable fortress.

The young man put a hand to the iron ring of the gate latch. The gate was bolted or padlocked on the inside, and the sudden consciousness of being thwarted after a three-mile tramp from Feldhurst village provoked in him qualms of fear and of irritation. Was he to return unprimed to the sarcastic and unsympathetic god in the chair and say: “The gate was locked”? Authority might reply: “You’re not much bloody use to us if you can’t gate-crash, my lad.”

Editors, like landlords, can preach a harsh determinism, and inspired by the dread of finding himself superfluous in a highly competitive world, the journalist dared to be impudent. Why not climb the gate and defy Miss Gerard’s defences? After all, Miss Gerard’s annoyance might be less expensive than his editor’s scorn. Moreover, was there not copy in the conception of penetrating the mystery of an eccentric woman’s seclusion? With a little imagination a highly spiced article might be his. Trevor Jones slung his mackintosh over the gate, pulled himself up and, straddling the gate, paused there for a moment. He saw a gravelled drive disappearing between banks of shrubs, forsythia and ribes in flower, daffodils massed along a turf bank, a flush of peach blossom against a very blue sky. The place was secret and still and steeped in sunshine.

“Well, here goes!” he thought, dropping to earth, and recovering his mackintosh he ventured up the drive. It appeared to have been carefully plotted in a double curve so that the house and garden should remain concealed. Young Jones chose to walk on one of the grass verges, and this stealthiness brought him surreptitiously and abruptly into the presence of two large yew trees, and between them a brick porch.

But there was another presence here, a crisis couchant in the shape of a large Alsatian dozing in the sunlight, his nose between his paws. The journalist hesitated, and the dog’s eyes opened. A moment later the young man from London was speeding towards the gate with that rude beast savagely pursuing. Young Jones took a flying leap at the gate. He got his legs over it, but the dog’s teeth snapped upon his trailing mackintosh and the thing was left as a sop to Cerberus.

Would that damned dog jump the gate? It could and might, and the scared intruder was about to resume his flight when he heard a voice calling the dog.

“Prince, Prince!”

It was a woman’s voice, anxious and vibrant. It seemed to come drifting down between the flowering shrubs to the blue gate where the dog was worrying poor Trevor’s mackintosh. “Prince, heel, heel.” The young man hesitated. He was moved to react against that shameful, scrambling exit. One might lose a mackintosh and one’s dignity, but might not opportunity be here?

Above the sound of the dog’s growlings and the rending of material he heard footsteps on the gravel.

“Prince, come here. What have you got?”

The journalist was moved to answer that question.

“He’s got my mackintosh.”

The dog had turned with a dog’s smirk to assure his mistress that he too had a sense of humour. She held him by the collar.

“Who is that?”

Mr. Jones was recovering his courage. He was extracting a card from his pocket-book, and he dropped it over the gate.

“I have come to interview Miss Gerard.”

She had picked up his poor mackintosh, but she did not trouble to collect his card.

“Miss Gerard does not grant interviews.”

“The editor of Metropolis—”

“I think you must have heard what I said.”

“But the public is very interested in—”

His mackintosh flew over the gate.

“I’m afraid the dog has torn it. It was very indiscreet of you to trespass. Please assure your editor that Miss Gerard does not appreciate attacks upon her privacy.”

“Excuse me, are you Miss Gerard?”

Two hands appeared on the top of the blue gate. He was inexcusably eager to seize this opportunity.

The dog growled.

Said the voice: “Please stay where you are, or I will let the dog loose.”

The hands were withdrawn.

“You are not very kind to your admirers, Miss Gerard.”

“Too much admiration can be embarrassing.”

So it was Miss Gerard on the other side of the gate, and her voice was the voice of a woman. That would dispose of the absurd canard that she was more Douglas than her pseudonym.

“I quite understand,” said he, “but couldn’t you make an exception?”

“No.”

“It really is rather important to me. You see, editors are rather touchy people, and I’ve got a wife and two kids.”

She was stroking the dog’s head.

“But don’t you realize, Mr.—”

“Trevor Jones.”

“Don’t you realize that you are obtaining an interview?”

“You mean?”

“How old are the children?”

“Molly’s three and Derek one.”

“And how long have you been married?”

“Four years. Life’s rather a struggle, you know.”

Poor young thing! And that ruined mackintosh! Could she offer him money for it?

“I think you are obtaining some quite unusual material, Mr. Jones.”

“You mean I may use it?”

“Perhaps.”

His face was a shimmer of excitement.

“How splendid of you. May I say that I was chased out of your garden by your dog?”

“Certainly. It will discourage others, will it not?”

“I say, that’s marvellous! And that I interviewed you through the gate?”

“Yes.”

“Without seeing you?”

“Yes.”

“Thanks most awfully, Miss Gerard. It’s a real scoop. And would you mind telling me how you came to write ‘A Pilgrimage of Pain’?”

“It wrote itself. It’s the biography of a woman I know.”

“A real person?”

“Yes.”

The young man had his notebook out and was scribbling in it.

“A human document, what. And is it true, Miss Gerard, that the book has sold nearly a million copies in England and America?”

“I believe so.”

“And been translated into every language?”

“With the exception of Russian and, I think, Chinese.”

“And what was your reaction, Miss Gerard, over the gigantic success of this book?”

She hesitated.

“Oh, well, it enabled me to put radiators into my house.”

His puzzled pencil remained poised.

“Radiators? But—”

“Yes, and buy the land right down to the sea, and plant millions of bulbs. You see, Mr. Jones, I am a very selfish person.”

He was gallant.

“I don’t accept that, Miss Gerard. I’m sure you must have done—”

“Nothing that has caused me any privation. There is one thing I must insist on.”

“Yes.”

“You will submit proofs. And you will make your article a warning to others.”

“Of course, Miss Gerard. I quite understand.”

“I’m so sorry about your mackintosh. Would you allow me to—”

“On no account, Miss Gerard. This interview is worth all sorts of things to me. I might almost call it a test case so far as my editor is concerned.”

“I am glad. My love to the children, and my coldest compliments to your editor. Good morning, Mr. Jones. I must get back to my gardening.”

“Thanks most awfully, Miss Gerard. I will make sure that the proofs are submitted. I do hope you will pass them.”

“It’s a promise.”

“Thank you so much.”

Instinctively he raised his hat to the blue gate, and picking up his forlorn mackintosh turned to go.

“My compliments to Prince, Miss Gerard, and tell him I regret that it could not have been my trousers.”

“Prince has a nice sense of property, Mr. Jones.”

“He has. I’ll put that down.”