Читать книгу Old Wine and New - Warwick Deeping - Страница 32

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Miss Gall happened to be looking out of one of the first-floor windows when she caught sight of the familiar figure of Mr. Spenser Scarsdale crossing the square. She had seen him go out in the sombreness of overcoat and bowler hat, and very much the Mr. Scarsdale of the Sabbath and the Scrutator, a middle-class figure in quest of a middle-class living. Miss Gall respected Mr. Scarsdale, and her respect was tinged with affection and pride. He was literary and so clever, and always the gentleman. But on this April afternoon Mr. Scarsdale returned with a patch of colour over his heart. He was carrying a pot of red tulips, bought from a barrow at Highbury Corner, and the pot was swathed in blue paper.

Miss Gall hastened downstairs, for Mr. Scarsdale would be ready for his tea. She heard the latchkey in the lock. Mr. Scarsdale came in with his pot of tulips, and it seemed to Miss Gall that his face had a sort of sheen.

He smiled at her.

“Bought these from a hawker. Pretty, aren’t they?”

Miss Gall agreed with him. Certainly it was pleasant to have flowers in the house, and if Mr. Scarsdale could afford to buy flowers, well—the world was looking up. She had known Mr. Scarsdale for years as a man of serious good temper, a plant of steady growth, but she had never known him gaillard or gay.

“They do look pretty, sir. Shall I take the pot from you?”

“Oh, I can manage.”

He went upstairs almost with the air of a man humming a song, and when Miss Gall ascended with the tea-tray she found Mr. Scarsdale posing the pot of tulips on his desk in the window. He had removed the blue paper, and had inserted the vessel of common red clay into a white and gold pot. His face had a dreaminess.

During the week that followed, Miss Gall gathered other indications of the coming of spring. The lilacs came into leaf, and the buds of the young chestnut trees burst their sticky brown capsules, and sparrows flew about with pieces of straw. Also, there arrived for Mr. Scarsdale several large cardboard boxes, and he appeared on the Sunday morning in a suit of blue cloth with faint white lines running through it, and wearing a new type of collar and a blue bow tie with white spots on it. Also, he was wearing new brown shoes instead of boots, and dark blue socks with silver clocks to them.

Miss Gall was a little troubled. Mr. Scarsdale had not been a dressy person, and before the war she had seen him in grey or in black, and distinctly loose at the backs of the shoulders and baggy as to the knees. Even when he had departed for his holiday on one of his walking tours in the Lakes, or to Derbyshire or Sussex he had taken with him a prosaic knickerbocker suit of a stuffy brownness, stockings of the same colour, and massive boots. She understood that he had photographed all the churches in Sussex, and that he knew the downs from Beachy Head to Old Winchester Hill. He had written a poem on Chanctonbury. Miss Gall had read it and had thought it very nice.

Also, she detected in Mr. Scarsdale a potential if not an active restlessness. In the old days she had known his habits as exactly as she had known the ways of the kitchen cat. He had sat about a great deal, and had liked to get into his slippers, and his room had been littered with books, most of them with little slips of white paper protruding from between the leaves. He had been untidy and busy and enveloped in tobacco smoke, an absentminded yet calculable creature. Now he was always going out and going out with an air of briskness and a sense of stir and excitement. He carried a neat little cane. Miss Gall had watched him from a window and had seen him go round by the railings and tap them with his stick. He did not mooch in meditation round the square; he walked with his head up and his hat at a slight cock as though he was set most definitely upon adventure. Miss Gall was troubled, for any variation in the functioning of her precious patron was of financial importance to her, and as a bachelor he had been flawless.

Miss Gall, with a little austere and awesome pointing of the lips, could not refrain from whispering to herself—“Girls.” The very suggestion of such frailty shocked her, though the new world was full of such seismic disturbances. Sex and all that. But Mr. Scarsdale! Surely he did not go hunting in the garish streets with that new, feverish, short-skirted crowd? Or was it matrimony? Miss Gall felt very depressed. Her one and perfect celibate blossoming like that pot of tulips, and getting a wife, and going elsewhere, because another woman in the house was not according to Miss Gall’s tradition!

“O, drat the war!”

She knew that—always—she had managed to make Mr. Scarsdale very comfortable, and he was what she had called a comfortable man. You had known just what he would do in those black-booted, sober, Sabbatarian pre-war days. And somehow she had the feeling that Mr. Scarsdale was less comfortable, and less comfortable with himself. He looked restless, as though he were searching for something, and had not found it.