Читать книгу Exile - Warwick Deeping - Страница 4

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She had been christened Barbara Irene. But, since the family name was Brown, she had taken to herself in the nursery the more intimate and characteristic name of Bib, and as Bib she had continued to be known until the irreverent affection of a rough and tumble girls’ school had named her Billy.

As Billy Brown, aged six-and-twenty, she stood upon the platform of Tindaro, and also upon the threshold of adventure, with a suitcase at her feet, and her fingers searching her bag for a luggage ticket. An Italian porter with the smudge of a three days’ beard making his face look yet more swarthy, attended upon her deliberate fingers. A little excited she might be, and travel-stained, and innocently English, but her poise was that of the hockey field.

“I want a taxi.”

She passed the man her luggage ticket, but kept hold of her suitcase. She had a way of not letting things go. She followed the slouch of his round figure towards the station buildings, where a solitary electric light made the shabbiness of the place momentarily visible. A little crowd oozed through a doorway. The blue night hung overhead.

She sat in the open car while the porter was collecting her trunk. She was very much on the edge of her adventure, and feeling the thrill of it, and Tindaro, up above there, was like a hill town to be stormed and taken. She had the veneer of masculinity that characterizes the modern young woman, and the phrases of a game-playing generation, but she had much more. A tennis-ball cannot eclipse the moon.

Tindaro, as expressed by its railway station when darkness had fallen, was frankly disappointing, being a collection of shabby sheds and buildings and litter and casual mounds of road-metal and mud. A hideous cripple kept poking a withered arm at her, and assailed her with supplications and an odour of garlic. The driver of the taxi stood and stared with large, round, animal eyes, his lips retracted over strong white teeth. Billy grew tired of the beggar. He was an importunate shape getting in the way of her impressions and symbolizing life as an unpleasant odour and a withered limb. But at last the porter arrived with her trunk, and he and the taxi-driver attached it to the rear of the car with odd pieces of string and much conversation. Billy was to discover that Tindaro was full of such improvisations.

They started. The railway and its clutter fell away. The road rose steeply, and almost the car was like a climbing plane soaring gradually out of the obvious into the mysterious. The sea appeared, and a sudden galaxy of lights like sequins flung by the handful against soft, dark surfaces. The whole hillside glittered, and in the distance there were other swarms of lights that flickered and twinkled. To Billy they suggested pin-points pricked in black cardboard, or yellow burrs on black velvet. Mystery. She sat there conscious of a little inward shiver. Something in her trembled like the lights.

The car went up and up, and not too swiftly. The road ran in great loops and zigzags. It slid along under the walls of perched houses, houses that were dimly grey and white, and under hanging pines, and past sheaves of black cypresses. Green growth foamed over stone walls. The sea became a great black surface. And always there were the lights, and the softer glow of shuttered windows and little mysterious paths and steps going here and there into the darkness. The sky was still a profound blue, and pricked with stars.

The girl sat alert to the adventure. Her face turned this way and that. Her hands were clasped firmly together. She was full of an inarticulate delight in all this mysterious newness, this Italy that unfolded itself upon the hillside. She felt its darkness and its glitter, the peering, elusive strangeness of the unknown. But to-morrow the unknown would be knowable. She had an active spirit. She had come to Tindaro to earn her living.