Читать книгу Old Pybus - Warwick Deeping - Страница 33

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Lady Pybus was a late riser. When the maid carried in the breakfast tray she would find that large, fair, overflowing creature yawning under her lace cap.

“Sir Probyn left for town, Wils?”

“Yes, my lady.”

“Where’s Mr. Lance?”

“I don’t know, my lady.”

“No letters?”

“No letters this morning, my lady.”

Dolly Pybus continued to ask questions as she had asked them as a round-eyed and tow-headed little egoist of five. Growth with her had been mere enlargement, a doubling or trebling of the little suburban ego. She had been a very healthy woman, without subtlety or reservation, an enlarged child with the mental make-up of a child who treated her menfolk like dolls. For years she had been full of healthy, human satisfactions, and thoroughly enjoying the climb and the various and expanding vistas it had provided. She had delighted in being Lady Pybus; she had been delighted with Windover; she had been delighted with her boy at Eton.

But life was not what it was. Fiftyish, she had begun to find life less amusing; and having no inward life of her own to compensate for her failing physical reactions, she was growing a little puzzled and querulous. Her doctor had dieted her. She was allowed only one lump of sugar in her tea. French pastry was forbidden, and when she rushed down to Cannes for six weeks in the winter she was supposed to be content with brown bread and butter. No eleven o’clock invasion of the patisserie shop. No cocktails, and she needed cocktails. And modern dancing was not what it was. She had taken Lance with her for three weeks last winter, and for some reason or other her son had refused to dance. He had been moody.

Lady Pybus put the breakfast tray aside, and got out of bed. She had become a heavy woman, and heavy in her movements. She went first to her mirror, and then to one of the windows. It was a beautiful morning; but can anything be more boring and suggestive than a beautiful morning, September sunlight, autumn, glimmering trees, youth that is not youth?

Dolly Pybus looked down at the foreshortened Dutch garden. She saw Lance there in an old blue and white blazer and flannel trousers. He was standing by the cistern staring at it, his hands stuffed into his pockets. He had his back to the house. He appeared to be absorbed in watching the gold-fish moving among the lily leaves, and the yellow flowers floating on the water.

His figure had a stillness.

His mother watched him. Lance puzzled her, baffled her. He was so “funny” at times. He had so little to say. He was always mooning off somewhere, or shutting himself up in his room. She could remember the time when she had boasted to her friends, “O, Lancie tells me everything.” He had been such a jolly kid, a boy whom you could take to Gunter’s and stuff with food, but now——

She was not a subtle person, and like many mothers when they discover the grown stranger in their sons she was both perplexed and resentful. Vaguely conscious of a sense of loss, she had attempted to grasp at that which was no longer given. She was fussily affectionate. She wanted to be able to feel and to say: “I and my boy are such pals.” She took babyish liberties with his young dignity, and was irritated when he treated her with a kind of dark reserve. He would look at her as though he were saying: “Mater, don’t be such a fool.”

She was always tweaking the hair of her stranger. She could not let him alone. She would not allow him to be silent or thoughtful. She twitted him, and was archly familiar.

“Hallo, solemn face! Who’s the girl?”

She was incapable of realising that she jarred upon her son, and that she was like a distracting, worrying child to a sensitive man. All that he knew intuitively she knew not at all. That little adjective “funny” described him to her. Men were funny about this, or funny about that, or funny about women. But how exasperating, just when a something in her craved inarticulately for the youth in him.

But he was not young. She was the primitive; while he was Paris and London and Trinity and St. Francis of Assisi, and Raphael and Blake, and moonlight on Lake Leman, and Bernard Shaw. She was quite incapable of coping with him.

That orange and black hammock bed for instance? What was the objection? The thing looked nice and bright in the Dutch garden. Besides—it was comfortable. And he had called it an atrocity.

Child of impulse that she was, incapable of keeping back anything that came into her head, she hailed him.

“Lan-cie—Lan-cie.”

He hated being shouted at, especially by his mother. She was still the common child of the back street, overblown and overgrown. “Mau-die, yer mother wants yer.” He did wish that his mother would give up shouting. She shouted at the gardeners, at her menfolk, at waiters, at the girls who came to play tennis. She talked over and through people.

“Lan-cie—Lan-cie.”

After an interval he turned and looked up at her window. His response was mute.

“Lan-cie—I want to go into Aylesbury.”

Which meant that she intended him to drive her into Aylesbury, and he was wanting to go to Castle Craven. All the urge of his swift, complex, and yet simple self was setting more and more towards Castle Craven.