Читать книгу Exile - Warwick Deeping - Страница 12

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Billy had supposed that Winnie Haycroft was applying irony to London and a November fog, but when Billy saw the other girl’s room she was made to think of a little England in Italy, Peter Robinson and Marshall & Snelgrove, and Cromwell Road, and Ken Wood on a day that was not a Sunday. Winnie had run down the stone stairs to meet her. She was a little flushed. She had lit a fire of fir cones and pinewood.

“I do hope you will like my room. I’ve made it as English as possible.”

She sat on the bed, and the blessed damosel fresh from England was made to occupy the one armchair. Miss Lord had said that Winnie Haycroft was difficult to know, but Miss Lord and Billy were not of the same generation, and Billy’s smile was like England to Winnie Haycroft. Her lips quivered. Her face had lost its look of dustiness. Almost she seemed to draw from the other girl a sudden new vitality, an English freshness, the exquisite sweet pain of April when birds sing.

She chattered. Her eyes were suffused with light. She appeared to forget Billy’s newness, and all her reticences.

“I suppose you are going to live over the library. I shall like that. There are so few people of one’s own age here——”

Billy was an observant young person, and while Winnie prattled she absorbed the atmosphere of Miss Haycroft’s room. There were two photos of young men in khaki on the mantelpiece. There were photos on the walls, and Rossetti’s “Dante’s Dream,” and an Annunciation, and Watts’ Harper asleep on a Blue Earth. Winnie was true to type in all her details, and Billy’s observings completed a mental inventory. White linen curtains with red roses stencilled on them, the World’s Classics, a sketch of Salisbury Cathedral, a tennis-racket in a press marked “W. H. Smythe’s House, Repstead School.” A cretonne-covered box. A photo of an English country rectory with three people sitting in deck-chairs under a tree. Two Toby jugs on the mantelpiece between the photographs. An English flowered almanac suggesting the cover of a seedsman’s catalogue.

They talked—though Winnie did the greater part of the talking.

“O, yes, I’ve been here five years. In summer we go to a little place above Florence. Only Italians. It costs so much to go to England. It’s dull.”

She would talk of nothing but England, and Billy wanted her to talk of Tindaro, and its people. She shifted the setting.

“What’s this place like?”

Winnie’s lips became tremulous. She showed a vagueness, an air of having lost the thread of her argument. Unlike Miss Lord, she was easily disturbed and did not complete her sentences.

“O, it’s very hot later on. And flies. And smells. I don’t sleep very well. You get slack, yes—rather.”

“But the people.”

“O, the people. Do you mean the hotel people? They just come and go.”

“But there are people who have to live in Tindaro, people like us.”

Winnie’s eyes grew round; they regained their frightened look.

“O, yes, the exiles. That’s what I call them. There is Dr. Burt, and his wife; he’s dear. And the villa people. Yes, and others. Quite awful, some of them. Quite——They make me feel frightened.”

“Why—on earth—should you feel frightened?”

“O—I don’t know. The feel of things. They make you feel that you are not yourself. Perhaps you won’t feel like that. You look so strong.”