Читать книгу Old Wine and New - Warwick Deeping - Страница 33

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Mr. Taggart and Sabbath were but a part of the post-war plan, and Scarsdale remembered that it would be necessary for him to call on Jewell the literary editor of the Sunday Standard and on Snape of the Scrutator. But some part of him had loitered and procrastinated, and, like a boy let out of school, he had found himself in no hurry to return to the desk. There had been a four years’ interlude, and the familiar routine had been broken, and now that he was at liberty to sit on the same stool he was not so eager to sit on it.

For the war had inflated other things besides the currency, and in Scarsdale’s pot of tulips there burned a little flame of symbolism. Romance! Like many other men he had a feeling that he could do other things and that he could do them differently, and perform more eminent and gallant deeds, and despise the dull old sesquipedalian tramping. The Spring of 1919 invited man to dance, to play games, and to go out as he pleased into God’s own country. He felt himself a more lordly creature, with fairy gold in his pocket, and that woman was woman and never more desirable and disturbing.

Scarsdale crossed the passage to the door of Taggart’s room, and opened the door as though it represented no sacred screen. In the old days Mr. Taggart had taken himself and the Sabbath very seriously, but Scarsdale was taking neither of them too seriously. He had his hat on.

He said—“I am just going round to see Jewell.”

Mr. Taggart, hunched morosely before a new medicine bottle, looked over a black shoulder.

“Jewell?”

“Yes. He will be wanting me to take up some of the books.”

Mr. Taggart’s wet pink mouth opened to say something, but before he could say it Scarsdale closed the door. And Taggart sat staring at the closed door; he frowned at it, but the frown changed into a cynical, sombre smirk. He jabbed at a proof with a stumpy blue pencil, and supposed that old Scarsdale was just like the rest of the returning warriors, a little hyperborean, and full of pink flushes and barbaric self-importance. They were so young and dramatic—these ex-service men; they had lost touch with peaceful reality; they seemed to be a little contemptuous of the oily and smutty business of being civilized. They had strange misconceptions about money and work and their market value.

Mr. Taggart’s inner man reverberated. He heaved in his chair, and was aware of his breakfast. He grunted cynically to his inward soul. Well, Scarsdale could stroll out in search of Jewell. Like other men from France and Palestine and Macedonia, Scarsdale could find things out for himself. Some of those precious stones had dropped from their setting. Mr. Taggart, in the presence of his medicine bottle, doubted the validity of things precious and otherwise.