Читать книгу Old Pybus - Warwick Deeping - Страница 13

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After his tea each evening, John Pybus fed the pigeons. White fantails, blue rocks and half-breeds, they came to him from the red roofs of the inn’s stables and outhouses, and from the ruins of the castle. They swarmed and fluttered about the old man, alighting upon his shoulders and his hands, and often his white head would be crested with one of the birds. He fed them with bread-crumbs and odd handfuls of corn. With his short pipe stuck in his mouth he would stand in the midst of these wheeling, fluttering, strutting birds, and so thick were they at times that he appeared as in a cloud of living snowflakes.

Any time of the day he had only to take his stand in the stone-paved yard or broad passage between his cottage and the inn garden, and whistle his pigeon call, and half a dozen birds would come to him. There were some of them ready to follow him into the cottage, but since the fantails shed white feathers and John Pybus had a passion for tidiness, he allowed them as far as his doorstep, but no farther.

The cottage was half stone, half red brick, with a pantiled roof. The kitchen faced the inn. The window of the living-room looked out over John Pybus’s patch of garden, and beyond it to the green slopes of the castle field and to the castle itself with its walls tufted with wallflower and snapdragon. Some very old ash trees grew among the ruins. The Hart Royal tower still showed its crenellations black against the sunset. Beyond it the ground fell steeply to the river, the banks deep with the shade of beeches, and always there was a murmuring of water and the play of the wind in the trees.

Mr. John Backhouse had put Mr. John Pybus into the cottage. In the old days the head ostler had occupied it, but since hardly a horse came into the inn yard, and the garage attendant had seven children and lived out in Bridge Street, the cottage was at Mr. Pybus’s service.

Mr. Backhouse had—with characteristic abruptness and a twitching of his grey eyebrows—announced the fact to Mr. Pounds.

“I’m putting Pybus into Castle Cottage.”

That was in the days when Charlie Pounds had believed that as manager of the Saracen’s Head he had a right to argue with Mr. Backhouse.

“I thought of sleeping the girls in it. There are three rooms, counting the sitting-room——”

Mr. Backhouse did not argue. He was laconic, and wasted no breath. If a person disagreed with a statement of his he just repeated the statement.

He said: “I’m putting Pybus into Castle Cottage.”

Pounds, who had a face rather like a cake of Castile soap, with two sultanas for eyes, had begged to object.

“It’s waste of good room, sir.”

Mr. Backhouse had twitched his long eyebrows, and had asked Mr. Pounds if he happened to be deaf.

“Did you hear what I said?”

“I did, sir.”

“Well, don’t waste my time.”

John Pybus made his own bed. It was a very simple affair, a camp-bed of green canvas with one army blanket below and one above and a pair of cotton sheets between them. His furniture, too, was of the simplest; a couple of Windsor chairs, an oak table very worm-eaten, a five-tier deal book-case full of books, a basket chair with a red cushion, a square of green cord carpet to cover the floor. His bedroom floor had no carpet. On the living-room mantelpiece in front of a little gilt-framed mirror he kept a calendar, his pipes, a tobacco tin, and three photographs, the photos of his wife and his two sons. It was an ironic yet human touch.

He fetched in his own water and swept his own floors, though help was available. The women liked John Pybus. He was a clean and handsome old man. They spoke of him always as Mr. Pybus, and in an irreverent age that was no light tribute. One of the chambermaids—Sally Summerscales, a sturdy little dark-eyed thing, insisted on occasional tidyings up, more for the love of the thing than because the cottage needed it. But she darned John Pybus’s socks, and patched his shirts, and fussed over him as some women fuss over a man for the sake of human self-expression. She was a mixture of shrewdness and of unsophisticated curiosity. Mr. Pybus was an oddity, but to Sally he was an interesting and picturesque oddity. She chattered to him and told him about her love affairs, and asked his advice about them, and never took it when it was given.

From the first she had been interested in the photographs on Mr. Pybus’s mantelpiece. She had asked about them.

“My wife—Sally.”

“She’s dead, is she?”

“Thirty years or more.”

“And who are the gentlemen?”

“My two sons. They were killed in the war.”

“Poor fellows,” said Sally, going closer to look at Conrad and Probyn, and stroking her square chin with a crooked first finger. “They are not a bit like you, Mr. Pybus.”

“They took after their mother.”

“So you’re all alone?”

“Yes, quite alone, Sally.”

“It does seem hard.”

“No company is better than poor company.”

Sally supposed that it was. And Mr. Pybus was not quite like ordinary men. She had discovered the gentleness in him, but it was the gentleness of some stout old tree sunning itself in the light of a tranquil evening. He had his thoughts and his books, and the belief that nothing could matter to him very seriously any more. He put on spectacles to read with.

He read a great deal by the light of a paraffin lamp with a green shade, sitting in the basket chair with the red cushion, and wearing horn-rimmed spectacles. He read poetry and philosophy. He was a great admirer of Blake. He was both classical and modern. He subscribed to one of the London libraries, and each month he had a box of books sent down. He was amazingly up to date in his knowledge of social tendencies and of scientific thought. His interest in life as life was deep and unabated.