Читать книгу Old Wine and New - Warwick Deeping - Страница 25

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Scarsdale had bought a new hat and a new overcoat. He had his card ready, and he presented it to the boy.

“I want to see Mr. Taggart.”

The boy did not trouble to look at the card.

“Got an appointment?”

“No; Mr. Taggart knows me.”

“Mr. Taggart doesn’t see people without an appointment. No use trying that game on me.”

He was a rude child whom the war had filled with a false sense of personal values.

Said Scarsdale—“You take that card up to Mr. Taggart. He expects me.”

The boy stared at him.

“All right. You stay here. Them’s my orders.”

He left Scarsdale in the passage to reflect upon the fact that methods and manners had changed. He could only suppose that the war had spoilt many people’s tempers, and that ration cards, and queues, and a shortage of sweet and fat foods, and fighting for seats upon buses, had produced chronic irritation. There had been scrambles and scuffles on the home front; too much money in some pockets, too little in others. People’s voices were louder. Even this sniffling little urchin had the face of a bully.

The boy reappeared. He condescended.

“You can go up. Second door on the right.”

“I think I know it better than you do, my child.”

Scarsdale had inflicted upon post-war youth the grossest of insults.

As he opened the glazed door of Mr. Taggart’s sanctum, Scarsdale saw the familiar, stumpy figure in black seated at its table. Yet Taggart was different. Mr. Taggart’s head had always been untidy, and in the centre of its grizzled frowsiness Scarsdale saw a pale patch of baldness. Mr. Taggart’s hair needed cutting; it fringed his collar. He sat hunched up in front of a table that was chaotic with letters, manuscript, newspaper cuttings, a paste pot, odds and ends of string. By the inkstand a half-empty medicine bottle showed a brown stain on its white label. Both Taggart’s figure and its surroundings advertised the slovenly, scribbling haste of a man who was worried and irritable, and overworked.

Taggart had been blue pencilling a proof. He turned in his chair. His sombre face with its bushy eyebrows and loose lower lip did not light up.

“Morning, Scarsdale. So you’re back.”

He had the air of possessing a grievance. Even Scarsdale’s reappearance grieved him.

“Sit down.”

Scarsdale sat down. Possibly he was ceasing to bridle at the unexpectedness of post-war England, and to wonder at the facile optimism of the returning soldier. Presumably Taggart should have jumped out of his chair, and caught him by the hand with a “Well, old man, glad to see you home.”

They looked at each other, but Taggart’s glance had lost its straightness. He seemed to peer up obliquely from under the bushes of his brows.

“Glad to be back, I suppose.”

Scarsdale smiled.

“Well, yes. And I suppose some of your people are not sorry to have us back. You must have been badly harried.”

He glanced at the slovenly table. And then he became aware of a silence, and of Taggart tapping the air noiselessly with his pencil.

“You want to come back here?”

“Well, yes.”

“Better warn you, bit precarious. Things are different.”

“Difficult?”

Then Taggart exploded. He got up out of his chair, and measured himself a dose of medicine in a dirty glass, and drank it as though he were taking poison. His face was bitter.

“Difficult! We have been going to the dogs for a year and a half. We’ve hung on. We have decided to hang on for another year.”

“Isn’t Sabbath selling?”

Taggart stared at Scarsdale as though he thought him a fool.

“Selling? Good lord! Can you conceive anything called the Sabbath selling in this—? Why, man—! Yes, if we produced a paper and called it ‘Sex’—there would be some business doing. Slump. Slump upon slump.”

He flung about the room, and then came and stood in front of Scarsdale’s chair, and waggled the blue pencil at him. He had become savagely and aggressively serious.

“Mark you,—it’s revolution. What I mean is—everything is upside-down. All the old values going, the old decencies. This is a damned, new, raw world, my lad, raw as a fresh rump-steak. Why haven’t you heard the gibe?”

“What gibe?”

“The war’s two great failures, religion and somebody’s mackintosh.”

He let out a sudden guffaw, a savage, uncouth, and ridiculous bray.

“Sabbath indeed! O, yes, come back if you want to. Morley and I are going to fight for another year. Come back and cook up nice little pious pifflings for the multitude. And what does the crowd want? Money and women and sensation.”

He waggled his blue pencil.

“Perhaps you can bring some real blood into the Sabbath, my lad. Brighter Sundays, what! A parade of pimps in Piccadilly Circus! Early services at the music halls.”

Scarsdale looked shocked.

He said—“Some of you people at home seem to have lost your heads a bit. Worry and overwork, and bad food. I’m not afraid to come back. I noticed the medicine bottle of yours, Taggart.”

Mr. Taggart gave him a strange, bushy, concentrated stare. Then, with a kind of ferocious deliberation he picked up the medicine bottle, smelt the cork, opened the window, and sent the bottle whirling into the narrow courtyard. They heard it smash.

“All right, if we smash we smash. Don’t blame me. I’ve warned you.”

“When shall I start?”

“O, next Monday.”