Читать книгу Two Black Sheep - Warwick Deeping - Страница 20

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Elsie’s mental picture of this first stage of the journey was full of confusion, like a puzzle that has had its pieces disarranged by some clumsy act of interference. Impressions interpenetrated and overlaid each other, and lay incongruously tilted. She was aware of the suburbs sliding by, interminable back yards with occasional splodges of colour, yellow houses, red houses, washing hanging out to dry. Yellow chrysanthemums in a garden, a row of Lombardy poplars glimmering gold, a broken and spacious sky.

She had the child opposite her, and she understood that she had become responsible for Miss Pym, to the relief of those other women who sat vis-à-vis behind her. She was conscious of having made a fool of herself, and that under no circumstances did those other women make public fools of themselves. Their clothes, so casual and so smart, were proof against criticism. That broadtail coat of Mrs. Pym’s must have cost two hundred guineas. She had found a pencil and a notebook and was trying to put on paper the financial aspects of all that flurry. How much had she paid the taxi-drivers? Two-and-six each or three-and-six each? She was aware of a preternaturally solemn Sylvia scrutinizing her over the top of a picture paper.

The child spoke.

“Your hat’s crooked.”

Oh, probably. She smiled. She could not explain to the child that in her agitation she had bent down to grab an attaché case just as a porter had been moved to perform the same act, and her hat and his cap had come in contact. Absurd incident. She smiled disarmingly at the child, and put a hand to her hat.

“How’s that?”

“You’ve got such a big forehead. Do you know an awful lot?”

“Perhaps.”

“I don’t want to have a big forehead.”

Open country, a man in a white coat coming to lay the table. Was she taking lunch? She glanced over a shoulder and met Miss Gasson’s eyes, and Miss Gasson nodded at her. Sylvia lolled and made sheep’s eyes at the man in the white coat, and scrutinized the wine list with an air of conscious precocity. “Mother will have a whisky. You see.” Yes, mother and Miss Gasson drank whisky, Elsie and the child drank water, and Sylvia still watched the attendant, but as though she was waiting for him to drop something. How splendid if the dish of meat slid into somebody’s lap!

Open country, green fields, woods, farms, but Elsie was becoming more and more conscious of the child opposite her. She felt that she and Miss Pym ought to enter into conversation, and Sylvia was behaving as an ominously goody-goody child, for occasional goody-goodiness could be a joke. You played it upon unsuspecting people just as you caressed the cat before giving the animal’s tail a tweak.

Elsie’s eyes rested on a high beechwood all ablaze. Her face softened. She smiled; she addressed Sally.

“Look at the beautiful trees, Sylvia.”

Sylvia, with her very red mouth full of chop, glanced at the wood as it sailed by.

“What are those trees, Sylvia?”

“Don’t know.”

“Beech trees.”

The child laughed and showed too much open mouth.

“Pebble trees.”

She stared at Miss Summerhays as though she had divined the sensitive fool in Elsie, and to Elsie the child’s eyes suddenly suggested pebbles, hard blue pebbles, baffling crystals.

At Dover the sea was calm, grey silk watered with pale sunlight, and anxious faces were reassured. It was to be a day without qualms. Mrs. Pym and Miss Gasson had a private cabin reserved for them, but Elsie and the child were to sit in one of those little cushioned alcoves with glass windows, that is to say if Sally chose to sit anywhere. Mrs. Pym called Elsie into the cabin.

“We had better settle up about the luggage? All right, take it out of this. Have you any French money?”

“No.”

“That’s not very useful, is it? I want you to look after all the details. Here’s another fiver. You can get it changed on board. And keep an account. I suppose your French is all right?”

“Oh—I think so.”

“As a matter of fact, there’s not much jabbering to do, but I don’t want to be bothered.”

Meanwhile there had been a trifling altercation in the gangway between Sally and Miss Gasson, for Sylvia had asserted that she was not going to remain in a stuffy old cabin; she was going to see the engines, and Miss Gasson had held Sally firmly by the wrist. “No you don’t, my dear. You wait for Miss Summerhays.” And Sally waited, for Miss Gasson—casual and calm and supercilious—somehow managed to control that little piece of proud flesh. She handed Sally over to Miss Summerhays, but Elsie lacked Miss Gasson’s grip.

Sally bolted, and the steamer was under way before Elsie cornered Miss Pym behind one of the boats on the upper deck. She appealed to Sally. “Now let’s say good-bye to Dover. We shan’t see it again for months and months—you know.” She insisted on holding the child’s hand, and Sally played the goody-goody game for five minutes, and they stood by one of the white rails and watched England diminish under that northern sky. Elsie was thinking of other things, and there was a little thickness in her throat.

Sally, intrigued, watched her governess’s face. It had a funny, shimmering look, just as though Miss Summerhays was going to blub, and Elsie came out of her dream to hear the child asking her a question.

“Are you going to be sick?”

Elsie’s lower lip quivered.

“I don’t think so. Why?”

“You had such a funny face. Last time I saw lots of people sick. They did look silly.”

Calais. An assault by blue-bloused porters with metal badges, shouting and hustling, Sally insisting on carrying her own yellow landing-ticket and delivering it to the official at the gangway, and then the solid and sumptuous coaches of the Flèche d’Or. Mrs. Pym, in a new and golden temper, sleeked herself like a cat into her chair.

“Good to be out of all that dog-fight. Can’t think, my dear, why the idiots don’t pay the extra and travel decently.”

Miss Gasson, with an alert dark glance at male figures entering, crossed her legs.

“Because they haven’t got it. No grouse here. We should be crowded out if they had.”

And suddenly Miss Gasson smiled, and Mrs. Pym, understanding the significance of that smile, turned a brassy head and became vivid and vivacious. Two well-dressed, well-fed men were moving to the seats on the other side of the gangway. They were seats reserved for Elsie and the child, but readjustment was in the air. Mrs. Pym and her friend had been parading on the boat—hence acquaintances.

“Hallo—”

“All merry and bright.”

“There you are. My governess and the kid can swap with you. Where were yours?”

“Next coach. All in order?”

“Absolutely.”

So Elsie, returning from checking the hand-luggage and tipping the porters, found herself relegated with Sylvia to another coach. She was not sorry. She wanted to try her French on the attendants and her powers of persuasion on the child. She was realizing Sally as something new and strange and ominous.

Sally jigged up and down on her chair.

“Mother’s got a man.”

Elsie looked shocked.

“You mustn’t say things like that.”

“Shall—if I want to. Besides, it’s true.”

Elsie retreated upon dignity and silence. She thought that a period of shocked aloofness might produce some effect upon Miss Pym. She sat and looked out of the window and watched the grey and red of Calais change to those open, rolling fields. France, the English Pale, the Field of the Cloth of Gold, Henry and Francis, Mary with her broken heart. She sat and thought of that other Mary, and then she felt herself kicked.

“Sylvia!”

“What?”

“Don’t do that.”

“What?”

“You know very well.”

“I just jigged. Don’t you ever get the jumps?”

“People are looking at you.”

“Well, they can.”

A kind of hostile, watchful silence settled. More rolling fields, an interminable landscape, a vast quarry, horses ploughing in a field, a sky that was grey and blue. Then—tea, and Sally watching the preparations with a kind of inward stare as though some project was maturing behind those pebble blue eyes. Elsie, still putting faith in silence and hauteur, poured out Sally’s tea and her own, and hid her disapproval behind a book. Sally had rolled a piece of newspaper into a tube, and was slowly and surely thrusting the end of it across the table.

Elsie jumped. A clatter, something hot in her lap, the contents of her teacup.

“Sylvia!”

The child’s face gloated.

“Didn’t you feel the train bump?”

Elsie looked at her. She had surprised the paper tube in the process of withdrawal. The act had been deliberate, and yet—for a moment—she could not believe it.

“Sylvia—how dare you do such a thing? My dress—!”

“I didn’t do it. The train bumped.”

Elsie was fumbling for a handkerchief. A disapproving voice from the other side of the coach suggested that little girls shouldn’t tell lies.