Читать книгу Old Wine and New - Warwick Deeping - Страница 12

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To Scarsdale the street seemed darker than before, perhaps because he had been sitting in a lighted room, but when he had closed the gate of No. 53 Spellthorn Terrace, he felt suddenly and depressingly alone. He hesitated, and then, turning towards Spellthorn Square, he knew that his visit to Marwood’s house had both disturbed and disappointed him. But why? What claim had he upon those other Marwoods, that dark young woman with the enigmatic face and the boy her brother? He had been a mere bearer of letters, and yet something in him had come away unsatisfied.

But why? Was it that he had nowhere to go save to that cheap little hotel in Bloomsbury? Was it that he was realizing that at three and forty his old self, the familiar self of the last twenty years had lost its physical solidity, and was becoming dematerialized? The change was indefinable yet somehow startling. It was as indefinable as this new London cloaked in darkness, yet menacingly there like a sinister presence. Yes, sinister, that was the word. The war had stripped him naked, and in this new strange London he felt chilled and raw and vaguely scared.

He paused under the dark trees of Spellthorn Square. The pavement was slimed with dead and sodden leaves. Not autumn, brilliant and crisp, if strangely sad, but a sense of life falling, of decay, of old things gone, and of the darkness pregnant with some strange renewal. What would happen when the war was over? What would happen to him? Would he find himself sub-editing the Sabbath, and reviewing books for the Scrutator, and writing his weekly article for Harvest? The Sabbath? What a dead word! And his rooms in Canonbury Square, and all that pleasant and rather old-maidish routine!

Something in him felt frightened. He seemed to breath raw air. His very feet felt insecure on those slimy leaves.

He had strolled on. He stopped dead. Something was happening close to the railings. He got the impression of a struggle going on, of two bodies interlocked, of rapid breathing. And then one of those dark figures uttered a little spasm of a cry. It was like the low cry of an ecstatic, satisfied animal.

Scarsdale slipped past. He fled; he felt shocked, and surreptitious, yet strangely tantalized. He realized that he was walking very fast, and breathing hard like those two shadowy, interlocked figures. The damp darkness had grown muggy and hot.

This new, raw world! Or was it that he was seeing life afresh, as it was, reality? Had some conventional skin been stripped from him by the war?

And then he became conscious of a face, the face of Marwood’s daughter floating in the darkness, tantalizing, strange. It was like the face of the new world, enigmatical, vivid, disturbing, real. It was youth. And he—he was three and forty.