Читать книгу Two Black Sheep - Warwick Deeping - Страница 7

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Vane walked as far as the lower end of King’s Bench Walk, and beyond the railings he saw a woman sitting in a deck-chair with the autumn leaves falling round her. St. Luke’s summer had dried the grass, and two little people in blue were busy, one crawling, the other trailing a toy machine at the end of a string. The woman was sewing, and thinking her own thoughts while the children played in that protected place, and Vane saw them not merely as two young children at play, but as life in a blue jumper at the very beginning of things.

He saw the little, crawling fellow get upon his feet, toddle a few steps, and then with great solemnity fall flat upon his tummy. The woman made a quick movement in the chair, but the blue figure was picking itself up and preparing to begin all over again.

Vane’s eyes filled with crinkles of light. A new experience this—watching children at play. To be able to fall flat on your tummy and pick yourself up and try again! How possible it was at that age! And then a voice behind him said: “Mr. Vane, I believe.”

Vane turned a startled head. He found himself looking into a fat and sallow face decorated with horn-rimmed spectacles, and the eyes behind the spectacles were brown and glassy. Although the face was young, it had a smeariness. The mouth, soft and flabby, and suggesting pink rubber, was both insolent and weak.

“Yes.”

The young man smiled, and when he smiled his pink upper lip curled back.

“Just a few words, Mr. Vane. You’ll excuse me, but nothing like being frank. Yep—rather.”

He was voluble. He both fawned and patronized. He laid a little dirty hand against Vane’s sleeve.

“The Press, you know. Yes, we’re rather ubiquitous—what? No, don’t shy off. It’s always the human touch we’re after. Yep, sure.”

Vane stood very still.

“What do you want?”

He spoke sharply, and the young man smiled his rubber smile.

“Now don’t go off the deep end, old chap. Look here, you’re a human document. Yep. What about something biographical? It’s the stuff these days. Say—three articles in the Sunday Planet—‘My Life in—’”

Vane’s voice cut in.

“You have been following me.”

“Yep.”

“Who put you on this stunt?”

The young man looked knowing.

“That’s our business, you know. Inside information, yep. No, I’m not giving anybody away. We have to hunt copy.”

There was a stillness about Vane, the stillness of an intense self-restraint.

“So you want me to sell you my fifteen years, so that you can put it on paper?”

“Yep. Half and half. It’s a—”

“You go to hell!”

He was conscious of feeling the flare of his own sudden anger, and of the man’s flabby little face looking scared and offended. He turned and walked past the fellow.

“Better not follow me again.”

But the little journalist had no shame. He pursued Vane up King’s Bench Walk, and across a gravel space, and catching his man in a narrow passage, he accosted him.

“Look here, old chap, no use going in off the deep end. Better be polite. Yep—suggest fifty guineas might be useful. Besides, better keep in with the Press. I know your hotel. We could put in a nice little par. that Vane, the murderer, is staying at the Suffolk after his release. Yep, we’re powerful people.”

Vane turned on him, and putting the palm of a hand against the rubber face, sent the pressman backwards through a dark and convenient doorway. Then he made haste to get lost in the intricacies of the place and, finding himself back at the main gate, he escaped into the Strand.

He found himself becoming very conscious of the crowd. There was more of it than in the old days, and it seemed less purposeful, more dilatory and casual. He wanted to walk fast to get away from that little swine of a journalist, and the crowd dawdled and obstructed. And the amazing newness and prevalence of women! Of course he had heard rumours, but with a memory full of the old flouncy, petticoated days, his glances were almost oblique. So much leg and arm and neck, and in his innocence he had found himself thinking that the world’s oldest profession must have prospered enormously since the War. His first walk in the West End had perplexed him considerably. Mouths of cherry and magenta, and smoked eyes, and those funny little shaven necks. Every third girl had suggested the pretty lady. Also, the women looked so much taller, and they seemed to stride.

As he worked his way along the Strand, he felt that he did not belong to this new crowd, and that he did not understand it. Not only was he a kind of shadow man, but these people made him feel like a bewildered ghost. They seemed to move to a new rhythm, and to a strange under-chant, the devastating discords of the traffic. Almost they suggested to him mechanized figures, more jerky and spasmodic and restless than those of the old people.

Even the shop-windows were different. Post-war man seemed to go to bed in amazing pyjamas.

And suddenly he felt tired. He wanted to get away from the crowd and the possible recurrence of the little man with the rubber face. The fellow knew the name of his hotel, damn him! He would have to change his hotel. But did it matter? He paused and stood on the kerb, and an empty taxi drifting with the traffic suggested a method of escape.

He hailed the driver.

“Drop me at the bottom of Park Lane.”

He got in and slammed the door, and lying back in a corner, closed his eyes. This new world seemed so strange and multitudinous and exhausting.