Читать книгу Old Pybus - Warwick Deeping - Страница 24

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Lance had been writing.

This room on the third floor was very much his own, impulsively untidy, the room of a young man who with a freedom of gesture distributed his belongings where and how he would. Furnished much like a college keeping-room, it had an additional door which communicated with his bedroom, and a south and an east window, each filled with that green English landscape. For writing he used a deal table covered with a powder-blue cloth, which he could move from window to window as his mood shifted. The east window gave him more open country, the south the beech avenue, the park and the distant woods. The general colour of the room was a soft and indefinite rose. An oak bureau in which Lance kept his private papers stood between the passage door and the south window.

“My son writes—you know.”

Lady Pybus allowed the information to be broadcast. It was an interesting and refined fact, or a kind of gentlemanly trick which was allowable, provided it was not taken too seriously. Lady Pybus was a little proud of it. Lance helped to edit one of the Cambridge magazines. He spoke at the “Union,” gravely and a little fiercely on subjects that were in the empyrean so far as his mother was concerned. She had never read any of his work. He never showed it to her. He was funny and secretive about his scribbling.

That morning he had written at the top of a page——

“Who will hold up the sky for me when I go for the Apples of the Hesperides?”

What a question to ask! And for a Pybus! His mother would have looked brightly blank over it. If the apples were golden apples, and there was any difficulty about them, Lance had better ask his father to write a cheque.

But Lance himself had got no further with it that morning. He was standing at the east window looking down at a car that was standing on the gravel. So his father was taking the Buick. There were three cars in the Windover garage, the Daimler, the Buick, and Lance’s little Talbot. His father was going alone. Lance saw Wyman the chauffeur standing aside, and his father at the steering-wheel pulling on a pair of wash-leather gloves. It was unusual for his father to drive a car, especially so without Wyman beside him. Sir Probyn drove rather badly, and was helpless when trouble occurred.

To Lance the suggestion was irresistible. His father was driving over alone to Castle Craven to seek out old John Pybus and to persuade him to be respectably buried in some suburban villa. Youth confronted one of its problems. What manner of man was this John Julian Apostasius Pybus? The name had the flavour of old vellum. For to Lance the fiercedly sensitive, with his almost uncanny insight into the workings of his father’s mind, the discovery of his grandfather had quickened certain curiosities.

He watched the blue Buick slide into the black slot of the beech avenue. He was conscious of a restlessness. Standing idly beside the table and tapping it with his fingers, he looked at what he had written, and at the white space below it.

“Just what I am,” he thought, “a question and a blank sheet. What does one write on the page of one’s self? What can one write without knowing?”

He turned the page. He was in no mood to sit in a chair and scribble. Going down and calling one of the dogs, he made for the open country.