Читать книгу The Road - Warwick Deeping - Страница 10

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Bonthorn came over the bridge. He observed, and was observed by young Tanrock and Shelp of the grey flannel trousers, and his impressions were as quick as his prejudices. Young Tanrock, though strange to him, was pleasantly English, but Shelp he knew, and the little he knew of him was sufficient. A greasy, truculent fellow, and somewhat fungoid. But he nodded at Shelp.

Shelp’s stare was an insult, and meant as such.

“Who’s the card?”

He explained to young Tanrock the refined offensiveness of Bonthorn.

“That! Fellow who grows flowers. Don’t you get the smell of him, Oxford and honeysuckle? So bloody superior. I had a chance to teach him something.”

“O—how?”

“In the way of business. Came into our office one day to tell us we had got our figures wrong.”

“And had you?”

“Not likely. He didn’t get any silver out of me.”

But Bonthorn was gathering other impressions, the shadows under the chestnut tree, and of Mrs. Binnie being tucked into a vermilion vehicle by one of her daughters, while the other daughter wound a handle. Mr. Prodgers in a doorway, smoking a pipe, and on the grass beyond the gate Mr. Prodgers’s red van. Bonthorn remembered the van and smiled at it. He had seen the professor in action on a warm July night in Lignor market-place, a preposterous and urgent figure in top hat, black tie and dinner-jacket, waving a white wand, and producing coruscations and flashes, oratorical and otherwise. A mountebank! And Bonthorn had loved him, and because of the joy the professor had caused him, he had pushed through the half ironical and gaping crowd and had bought a box of pills.

Nicholas Bonthorn walked on the grass beside a stretch of the old Roman road until he came to the lower lodge of Stella Lacey and the great avenue of beeches. They were in fullness of young leaf, and as he followed the park road under these towering trees he was glad of Gloriana Gurney. What a woman and what a name! Looking at life with her air of whimsical melancholy she had said to him: “After me—death duties and the deluge. And yet—the ghosts of these trees will stand.” Yes, he supposed that when she died these trees would fall to Demos, and to the Shelps of the new dispensation.

But what a woman! Dame Gloriana Gurney writing her book upon the Gardens of England! Gloriana. Even the name was archaic and incredible and splendid, like a page from Spenser, or an Arthurian sunset. Gloriana Gurney—Stanley Shelp. Stella Lacey and the new cubes in concrete.

He had her letter in his pocket.

“Dear Mr. Bonthorn,

“If you can spare the time do come and look at ‘Dame Isabeau.’ She is in full dress.

“And I wish you would cast an eye upon my phloxes. Lavender says it was the north-east wind last month, but I am afraid of something more serious.

“Yours sincerely,

“G. Gurney.”

Had he time to go to Stella Lacey? Assuredly, he would have walked up there on two wooden legs.

As to her phloxes, probably they were being attacked by eel-worm, and would have to be put on the bonfire, which was sad.