Читать книгу The Road - Warwick Deeping - Страница 19

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She could hear the gramophone playing dance-music, and before showing herself to her mother and her sister she looked in through one of the windows. Supposing her over-confident, bullying lover had sneaked in to show his wounds and tell a tale? But that was not very likely, and as she stood there in the shadow of the tree she felt as she had never felt before about men, or about that sort of man. Pawing, slobbering beasts! Not that she was unaware of those passionate urges that are locked up no longer in secret cupboards, but like a cat she felt that she would wish to keep the body of her passion clean for the man to whom she could give it.

That beast! The insolent assumption that she——!

She looked in, and saw Rhoda, turning over old records. Her mother, spectacles on nose, was reading the daily paper. Mrs. Binnie’s lips moved, for when she discovered some item that interested her, she could not keep it to herself. She would read out a whole paragraph, though her daughters said: “Yes, mother,” with the tolerance due to a child.

Moreover, Mrs. Binnie’s items of interest were so unexpected.

“Unfrocked priest married in mid-ocean. Well—really!”

She liked her head-lines well emphasized so that her own particular protest could come out pat.

Rachel went in. No creature could have looked more casual. She locked the door, put up a hand to a yawning mouth, and had an eye for the clock.

“Any news——?”

Her mother glanced at her anxiously, but asked no questions. She was discovering the uselessness of asking her daughters questions.

“Buns are coming in again.”

“Then you’ll be in the fashion, mumsie.”

Rhoda put on a record and wound the handle.

“Did you see Stanley? He put his head in here.”

Rachel yawned.

“Yes. I’m bored with Stanley. I sent him home.”

Mrs. Binnie nodded.

“I don’t like that young man. He’s much too——”

Rhoda supplied the word.

“Too Shelpish. Nasty bit of work. Don’t mind me being candid, Rachie.”

“I don’t. Supposing we leave it at that. I’m sleepy; I’m going to turn in.”

The conversion of the Mill House to the religion of progress had left the wheel and machinery intact, but Mrs. Binnie had managed to transmute the big storeroom into bedrooms. The mill-wheel and the grinding plant were curiosities and so was that black oubliette under the floor where water dripped and trickled. Even the world on wheels sometimes liked to look at this other wheel, and to discover how England came by its flour before the days of steel rollers, elevators and cheap trans-Atlantic transport. The mill as a mill was part of Mrs. Binnie’s stock-in-trade, like the “Ye” on her notice boards. Also, those improvised bedrooms were let on occasions to the right sort of people, married couples preferred, and neither too old nor too young. Children were not accepted. Mrs. Binnie liked her boarders to be of the order of chastity, decent creatures who went for country walks, and were vaguely interested in the picturesque and the historic, and who would take out light lunches and visit Hurst Castle and Hartfield Abbey. Once a month the grounds of Stella Lacey were open to the world.

But the new promiscuity left Mrs. Binnie cold. In spite of the tolerance of her daughters she would have nothing to do with those sports-model people, adventurous week-enders out to share a sensation. It might all be very rational and natural, but she had not been brought up that way. She was her own censor where too much leg and lipstick suggested the new candour.

“They can go up to the ‘George.’ I’m not going to be mixed up in their affairs.”

She called such couples “French Honeymooners,” having the conventional English idea of morality across the Channel. Her obstinacy in such matters was eloquent and emphatic.

Rhoda might argue—“After all—it’s nothing to do with us, mater. Most people are like that these days. If a man and a girl want to be natural——”

Mrs. Robinia would not accept the naturalness of this attitude to sex.

“Where would you have been, my dear, if your father and I had been natural. Yes; I know more about it than you think. Doing what you want—without any of the obligations. Children——”

Rhoda might point out that the country was becoming like a fly-paper, and that though children could be regarded as potential realities, sex was a reality.

“We used to call it love, my dear,” said her mother. “But then—of course—I’m an old woman. But I won’t have these mock marriages in my house. These Hoity-Toities! Reminds me of Humpty Dumpty, and all the King’s Horses and all the King’s men. I dare say they would like to sneak in here because they don’t have to register, but I’m not having any, so there.”

Incidentally, the interior complexities of the Mill House made Rachel’s going to bed an affair of many steps and the carrying of a candle. She had chosen to lodge herself in one of the attics of the old house, because it pleased her, and did not open its window on the road. A generation ago the young of her order would have spoken of this attic as “Quaint” or “Picturesque,” but Rachel’s adjectives were less facetiously self-conscious, perhaps because her generation was more conscious of the realities and less affected by imaginary refinements. She was neither very secretive nor sentimental. She liked to be physically clean, and her inwardness corresponded with that prejudice. She and her sister had insisted upon a bath-room, though the plumbing had had to be dispensed with, and hot water carried to it by hand.

She shut the door, put her candle on the chest of drawers and went to the dormer window. It had the cheapest of curtains, but they were full of colour. Rachel liked her colours rich, deep yellows, grass greens, cerise. She stood at the window. She saw the swell of the river and the moonlit meadows and the willows like silver filagree, and the mysterious valley narrowing to the glooms of the high woods. She could distinguish the hedges of the lane, and pick out that great mound of moonlight and of shadow, the beech tree opposite Bonthorn’s hedge and gate.

“Christ is risen!”

Almost she reverted to her mother’s protest. Well, really! And yet the fantastic and the mystical in that utterance of his had most strangely captured her. Yes, that and his sudden fierceness, his flailing of the sex-monger in Shelp, and again his sudden gentleness.

But not wholly so. A part of her was angry with him. Are rescued maidens always grateful to the hero who arrives at those raw moments when indiscretions turn up for payment? She had let her fooling with Stanley become a little too casual. Stanley! Beastly name. She should have known—— But then—did one suppose that a man——? No, hardly—— She had undervalued the primitiveness of things.

She was still conscious of flushes of anger, though her fear had passed. She had made a beastly fool of herself before Mr. Nicholas Bonthorn.

Damn Nicholas Bonthorn!

She left the curtains undrawn and proceeded to go to bed.