Читать книгу Two Black Sheep - Warwick Deeping - Страница 14

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A man came into the smoking-room and without looking at Vane began to rummage among the magazines on the table, and he made such a fuss about it that Vane looked at him over the top of his paper. He saw a clergyman with a baldish head, short stout legs, and a massive neck. Moreover the clergyman’s head had grown bald in a particular style of its own, and the hair that remained was carefully parted from the crown to the nape of the neck. Its colour was a sandyish grey. Two very florid and fleshy ears stuck out rather like handles on a jug.

Vane’s attention was challenged. There was something familiar about the back of that head, though he had to allow memory a lapse of fifteen years. He could remember just such a baldness, and a persuasive and almost pedantic parting of such sandyish hair. Also, the set of the ears, and the fellow’s fussy movements were familiar. And then while he was trying to revive some associative link, the man faced about suddenly, and eyeing Vane’s paper, spoke.

“Excuse me, is that your Morning Post?”

Vane knew him at once. It was a cousin of his, the Rev. Theodore Vane, who, fifteen years ago, had been a curate at a West End church. Theodore had always been a social person, oily and anxious and progressive. His baldness had suggested the tonsure. He had had a fine, rolling voice, and he had always spoken of God as “Gud.”

Vane sat and stared at this face. It seemed to grow more round, the blue eyes, the pink little pucker of a mouth, the chin. Theo was recognizing him, but he was recognizing him with inward reservations and with a growing awareness of the awkwardness of the occasion. Almost Vane could watch the mind of the man at work. It had exclaimed, perhaps it had exclaimed “Good God!” and instantly had dropped a smothering pillow upon the inward ejaculation. It stood and stared and savoured this embarrassing encounter. It indulged in silent comments upon it.

Vane felt a little twinge of shame, and this shame was tinged with scorn. The face of his cousin was so socially significant. Theodore in a surplice intoning the Litany! And he made haste to break the rather clogging silence, conscious of an acrid smell of humour. How extraordinary that he and his cousin should have blundered up against each other in this hotel room! Blundered. Yes, that was the very word. Theodore had the look of a man into whom some other fellow had blundered heavily in the street.

“Is this your paper?”

He did not move from his chair. Almost he could hear his cousin’s round mouth uttering the words: “So you are out? Extraordinary, but I had forgotten. Wasn’t it twenty years?” He was aware of the other man moving slowly towards him like a large black bubble. What happened when such a human bubble burst? He let the paper sink to his knees. It made a rustling sound.

“Surely—?”

Vane saw a white cuff and a pink hand. He moved in his chair.

“Yes.”

“Extraordinary! My dear Harry—”

He stood looming over Vane, carefully confronting the inevitable. Almost he was an edifice, an institution, whose delicate fabric was the product of thirty conventional years. And somehow Vane got the impression that Theodore had prospered. He had the plumpness and the polish of a little dignitary up from the country, and unaccustomed to such disconcerting occasions.

“My dear Harry—”

He sat down suddenly in one of the leather chairs. He looked turgid, swollen. His collar cut into his fat neck. He was sententiously equal to normal crises, but in the thick of this situation he seemed to perspire. And Vane observed him. Theo was like a gooseberry that had never ripened. He provoked a sardonic puckishness. But how significant! To feel the rumblings of a shocked embarrassment, to appreciate the providence of that carefully parted hair, and the perplexities of that high, bald forehead.

Suddenly they found themselves talking. Theodore had always been a talker. Set him rolling and he seemed to go on smoothly, like a rubber ball rolling down a groove. Perpetual motion; oiled, gentle bumpings over obstacles. He was a man who put on platitudes like a succession of sacerdotal vestments and felt happy in them, and reassured.

“You must really forgive me, but I had not been prepared. You see—I understood—I presumed—”

“It was twenty years.”

“Ah—twenty years.”

“I was excused five years.”

“I see. Good—conduct?”

His soft pink mouth seemed to boggle the words. His blue eyes had a vagueness. He was groping, and groping inwardly, trying to dissociate words and feelings. He was so dependent upon words, academic and resonant words, revelation, mystery, convocation, beneficence. He could not get on without words, and somehow no words seemed adequate. He kept giving this social outcast little blinking glances. He was thinking of the other man as a social anachronism, and that was his trouble.

“Really, most extraordinary—our meeting like this. I suppose you have just—”

“A few days. I came here this morning.”

His cousin made a soothing and suggestive movement with one hand, as though stroking the air.

“Quite. I understand.”

He continued to flounder, but he was recovering a sense of direction. He wanted to be kind, and he also wanted to be careful. Ursula was a very exacting and upright person. Also, there were the children. And he was a rural dean.

“My dear Harry, one feels oneself rather in the air. To you, if I may say so—this emergence must be particularly—Yes—I quite understand. The abnormal tension of those days. Tragedies—”

But he was growing inquisitive, sympathetically inquisitive, and anxious. It was natural that he should regard Vane as a live shell left over from the period of the War. Such shells sometimes exploded if they were tampered with. Careful handling—tact.

“Tragedies. It is necessary to understand life. I rather wish you had warned me. If you had written—”

Vane lay back in his chair with his eyes half closed. He looked apathetic, weary.

“One doesn’t write, you know. Better not. I don’t wish to link up. I have money to live on. After all, one is a ghost.”

“Then—I take it—”

“But I’m not a ghost that haunts people. You may postulate a certain sort of pride. I should prefer to disappear.”

He saw that his cousin was relieved. The tightness of his pink skin seemed to relax. He grew almost genial.

“I think I understand. A kind of rebirth—rehabilitation. An admirable attitude. I suppose—you will go abroad?”

Vane’s eyes were mere slits.

“Yes, probably. Naturally one has to look around, try to get one’s bearings. It’s a very new world.”

His cousin boomed like a signal gun.

“A prodigiously new world. But—after all—that makes some things more possible. Evolution—”

And suddenly he pulled out his watch.

“It’s a great pity. I have to catch the 12.50 from St. Pancras. Yes, lunching on the train. Yes, that was my copy of the Morning Post. I came in here to collect it. Most extraordinary coincidence.”

He stood up.

“No, please keep the paper. Now, between man and man, if I can do anything—”

Vane’s eyes were almost shut. He rose and went to the window and opened the lower sash a foot.

“Thanks. But to be frank—I would prefer—annihilation. I presume you believe in hell—Theo. I don’t. Except perhaps—in the hell of old associations. Yes, good-bye. You mustn’t miss your train.”

He stood thinking. Hadn’t Theodore suggested that he should go abroad? Why shouldn’t he go abroad?