Читать книгу The Road - Warwick Deeping - Страница 21

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Mr. John Osgood carried a Saxon name, but he belonged to the little people. He should have been a relic of Andred’s Wold, some puckish thing out of the primæval past, a creature of the Crock of Gold, no blond, blue-eyed Nordic. His very legs were mischievous, little, toddling pegs in absurd trousers. He wore huge white collars and black ties; his bowler hat was a round barrow, or rather—a big toadstool from under which his little eyes peered and twinkled. He chuckled. He was both malicious and magnanimous, sly and wise, like a child in his tricksiness and his love of display, but in a garden amid the things of the soil he was Puck equipped with passion. The pruning shears and the budding knife seemed to grow out of his hands.

Bonthorn called him “Old Mischief,” and mischief he was, but with reservations. The presenting of a box of pills to a valetudinarian partner might be the gesture of a gnome, and no sacrilege—but the thieving of goblin gold—that was another matter. Sacrilege in a garden, some trampling beast, rabbits, boys!

This leprechaun would get out of bed at half-past four in the morning, boil his own kettle and make his own tea, and arrive at Yew End when the world belonged to the birds and the rabbits. Bonthorn was an early riser, but the gnome was part of the dawn. On occasions he would arrive under Bonthorn’s bedroom window and chant a little song.

“Did you remember to order the raffia, sir?” or

“Slugs have been at Blue Glory.”

The soil at Yew End being a heavy loam with a clay subsoil slugs were rampant and unashamed. No birth control appeared to have been instituted in the slug world, and Bonthorn’s precious delphiniums had to be ashed early in the year before the first shoots had appeared. The leprechaun waged war on slugdom. On early summer nights a little twinkling light could be seen moving, Osgood with a lantern and a pair of scissors, snipping the succulent thieves in half.

Bonthorn had just opened his eyes when he heard Osgood’s voice under his window.

“Mr. Bonthorn, sir—Mr. Bonthorn.”

“Hallo.”

“There’s bin murder.”

Bonthorn rolled out of bed.

“Murder! What’s the matter, John?”

“All they young delphs, the new hybrids, cut to pieces.”

“What!”

“Aye, cut to pieces, murder——”

There was no note of mischief in Osgood’s lament, and Bonthorn hurried into shirt and trousers and laced on a pair of shoes. Osgood had disappeared, but Bonthorn found him at the gate of the nursery, the sacred precinct, his fingers busy in his beard.

“Did y’ever see the like? Summun’s gone mad in the night.”

It was so. The long border in which Bonthorn’s precious delphiniums grew looked as though it had been attacked by some insensate yokel with a flail. Those spikes of all shades of blue and mauve and lavender lay flat. Even the stakes had been smashed. It was obvious to Bonthorn that there had been method and deliberation in this sabotage, for the man with the big stick had gone up and down and left not a single clump erect.

He was shocked, not only by the devastation, but by the ugliness of the deed. The spikes had just been coming into flower; they were the children of three years of careful crossing, and some of them were blooming fully for the first time. For days Bonthorn had been watching the flowers open, on the alert for some new and precious prize, something that was nameless but would be named if its glory sufficed. All this work and wonder smashed in an hour by some malicious and merciless fool!

“Incredible!”

Old John watched his face.

“Some enemy hath done this, sir. When I cummed up here and looked over t’gate—I felt like—spewing.”

Bonthorn was moving among the dishevelled and flattened spikes. Here and there it might be possible to rescue a flower stalk and set it erect, but most of them had either been pulped or bent and fractured. He searched for one particular plant, a hybrid that had promised to be the year’s find, a gorgeous thing of peacock-blue shot over with greens and purples. His one eye gave a gleam. He bent down.

“John, we’re in luck.”

Old Osgood peered.

“Surely! She’s just pushed over. She’ll stand——”

“By God, the devil missed our prize! Yes, she’s sound. Only one spike too.”

He was on his knees feeling the half-prone stem. It lay propped upon a sheaf of other stems.

“Get a stake, John.”

Osgood pottered off on his pegs of legs, and came back with a green stake and a hank of bass.

“In here. That’s it. Tie while I hold.”

Very gently and carefully he raised the year’s queen of beauty, and Osgood tied her to the stake.

Bonthorn stood up. His face had a fierceness, and yet he smiled.

“I boasted, John, that I’d show California something. Well, I shall—this—and this——”

His arm swept in a half circle.

“Would anyone believe——? Now, who was it?”

Osgood fingered his beard.

“Who could it be? Just spite. This be’nt mere mischief.”

Bonthorn nodded.

“It was done in the night with a heavy stick. The fellow went up and down. Do you see those boot marks.”

The gnome bent double, peering.

“Man’s boots. No hobnails. Gent’s boots—in a manner of speaking.”

And Bonthorn laughed.

“Gent’s. Obviously.”

Osgood had raised himself to his five feet one inch. He rubbed his hands on the seat of his trousers.

“I’d like to have caught he. I’d like to have had a gun. A dose o’ sparrow shot in t’bum. But who could t’chap be?”

He looked at Bonthorn.

“Summat you’ve said or done, Mr. Bonthorn?”

“I suppose so.”

“A slug of a chap.”

He watched Bonthorn’s face. He guessed that Bonthorn must know who the man might be, but Bonthorn told him nothing.

“We can’t prove it, John.”

“Them there boot-marks. I’d get the police in. Not that they be much to talk about.”

“The police can’t mend those broken stems, John.”

“That’s gospel——”

“We’ll look over the crop and see if there is anything else to be saved. Where it’s hopeless we’ll cut down and mulch, and hope for second spikes.”

The gnome grunted.

“An’ I’ll keep a gun handy. If I get a god’s chance to get the blackguard’s backside!”

“You’d be for it, John.”

“So’d he be—the dirty swine.”