Читать книгу The Road - Warwick Deeping - Страница 12

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Shelp and young Tanrock had remained on the bridge at Monks Lacey, for the conciliation of Mrs. Buck had been unexpected, and though Rhoda and Rachel had every right to console the old lady, youth saw no reason why it should be balked.

“May as well wait till they come back.”

Tanrock had agreed. If he desired Rhoda he did not desire her as Shelp desired Rachel, purely for himself and like a glutton with a dish of delicacies. His association with Shelp was fortuitous, and if a magnanimous but shy ardour in him resented Shelp’s too familiar splurges, that was somehow to his credit. For Shelp had proposed to speak with gross intimacy on certain matters, and young Tanrock had gone hot.

“O, shut up.”

“You’re one of the sentimental kids, Fred.”

“I don’t keep a butcher’s shop.”

Inevitably there had been a pause, a constricted silence, while Shelp sulked, and the fair boy watched the water for possible fish. Shelp’s sallowness sulked easily, but not for long. He was too full of what young Tanrock would have described as hot air. You might deflate the fellow for five minutes, but like the perpetual gasbag that he was he would recover his turgidity and bump against you. A disconcerting, uneasy devil, like a fellow on a soap-box spluttering and declaiming and raging about revolution. He could not let things alone. He possessed a kind of malignant and glib speciousness.

Shelp, with his fat thighs pressed against the parapet of the old bridge, was sighting Stella Lacey. He could distinguish the tops of the cedars, two high chimneys, a Jacobean gable, and even as Stella Lacey had looked at the Mill House, so—Stanley Shelp observed Stella Lacey. It offended him. There were glutinous movements of his fat back, a kind of angry squirming.

He pointed with the stem of a pipe.

“We’ve got to pull that sort of thing to pieces.”

Tanrock, head in air, eyed him mistrustfully.

“What sort of thing?”

“Why—that. Pirated property. That park.”

“What’s the matter with Stella Lacey?”

“Matter? That sort of thing’s going to be smashed.”

So, the fellow was off again, and Tanrock, who had seen Shelp try to play football and lose his temper, egged on the argument.

“What for?”

Shelp sucked the stem of his pipe. He had moments of turgid emotion, silences, bursts of hysterical truculence.

“My father was a butler in a house like that. Supercilious, superior swine. Gentlefolk!”

Yes, Shelp was off again.

“But all that is going sky-high. We know things—now. We know where the money is, and we know how to get it. Call us tax-mongers, do they? We’re their bosses, we reds in the offices. Let ’em talk about putting their money out of the country. We’re ready for that game. We shall have ’em all marked and locked up till they disgorge.”

Tanrock looked bored.

“There’s not much money in Stella Lacey.”

“Yes, but we’ll have the land. We’ll have the old woman out of it. All those damned trees.”

“What’ll you grow, radishes?”

Shelp seemed to swallow.

“Swine! With their parks and their pictures and their patronage. But they’re finished. We’ve got ’em cold. We’re going to make a new England——”

He was very much off, high on the soap-box; but young Tanrock, whose father had evolved the most prosperous business of its kind in the neighbourhood out of a back-street cycle shop, had other views. He was shy but shrewd. If England fell to the soap-boxes and the Shelps——! And Stanley caught him smiling.

“What’s the joke?”

“Hot air! You’re just like a balloon, old lad, with a fellow scattering pink pamphlets.”

Shelp’s sulkiness returned.

“O, you’re a toff in the making, are you! Sir Frederick Tanrock!”

Tanrock laughed.

“What price Sir Stanley Shelp? I’m going in to have a talk with old Prodgers. He’s a card.”

“That old pill pedlar! Why can’t you be serious? That’s the whole trouble with this damned country. It’s got too much grin.”

“Supposing we are made that way? Try Russia, old chap. Grow a beard and bite it.”

Hands in pockets he went off whistling, unseriously serious, and provocatively English in his sanguine tolerance.