Читать книгу Old Wine and New - Warwick Deeping - Страница 29

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Scarsdale had lost his sense of the passing time; he had been walking and idling for two hours, and one o’clock had struck, and he should have been hungry. He walked slowly past the iron gates of Spellthorn Terrace with the feeling of a man exploring the beginnings of adventure; he glanced with a self-conscious shyness at the doors and windows. He confronted an imaginary situation. Supposing he were to meet Marwood’s daughter in the street, would she remember him, and should he stop her and revive the memories of that October evening?

He was within three yards of the gate of No. 53 when the thing happened, but not as he had expected it to happen. The door of No. 53 opened abruptly, and in the opening appeared the back of a youth or young man. It was a resisting and contumacious back, and it seemed to belong to a figure that was being forcibly extruded from the passage of No. 53. Scarsdale had paused to stare; he was not conscious of having paused. He just stood and stared, for the struggle in the passage revealed its duality, and the person of the other disputant. It was Marwood’s daughter. He recognized her pale, broad face, even more starkly determined than he remembered it. The lips were pressed together, the nostrils pinched, the eyes wide and angry and set. Extraordinary tableau! He saw that she had the hatless youth by the ears, and that his head was butting against her bosom. His shortish, thick legs resisted.

The struggle between them was silent. Their two young bodies were locked together, and above the insurgent, oily blackness of the youth’s head the face of Marwood’s daughter had a cold, white, furious purpose. She had forced the other figure to the top step, and was thrusting it down when Scarsdale saw the youth’s hands go up. One struck at the girl’s face, the other clawed at her forehead and fastened on her hair.

Scarsdale ceased to stand and stare. Something was unleased in him. He swung in through the gate and up the path, and got hold of the youth’s coat collar and the flesh of one arm. He pulled. The figures came apart, and Scarsdale and the youth blundered down the steps together. But youth turned suddenly upon middle age. There was a scuffle, the upward jab of a fist. It caught Scarsdale under the ribs and well and fairly in the pit of the stomach. He doubled up.