Читать книгу The Road - Warwick Deeping - Страница 25

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Bonthorn walked back alone, and coming within sight of the bridge at Monks Lacey he saw a girl leaning over the parapet and looking at the water. A yellow knitted coat, dark hair, dark legs, the same figure that had floated over a piece of stretched string. And from the Mill House itself came sounds of music, syncopated stridencies, cheerful and active and crude, youth’s music. And Bonthorn wondered, following the birdlike flight of Mrs. Gloriana’s gentle cynicism. Had youth been much the same eighteen hundred years ago. Had British girls loitered at the ford to see Roman legionaries go past, and remark upon the fashion of a centurion’s sandals? Probably. And perhaps there had been music, an improvisation upon trumpets and cymbals, and the soldiers had danced with the girls.

How like a centurion he was he did not suspect, or that there might be something of the eternal Roman in him, even in the nose and the carriage of the head. One of Cæsar’s veterans. A nasal voice emanating from the Mill House gramophone asked the eternal question with the flavour of God’s Own Country.

“Why do I love you? Why do you love me?”

But Bonthorn came to the bridge, ready with a hat and a greeting, and all in the course of the day’s goodwill. “Good evening, Miss Buck.” Yet, before he had uttered the salutation he realized that the girl was both seeing him and not seeing him. He had caught the sidelong trail of a glance, and received the impression of hunched shoulders and wilful unawareness.

He paused. He too could be wilful, and playfully so.

“Good evening.”

She faced him for a moment with an assumption of surprise.

“O, good evening.”

“By the way, do you know if Mrs. Gurney’s car——?”

“O, yes—it went back half an hour ago.”

Her attitude was both farouche and casual. He was not being encouraged to loiter, and he wondered. Youth was so temperamental.

He smiled.

“Congratulations on that jump.”

She gave a flick of the head. Almost it said: “O, shut up. We’re not in the same category.” But a voice from the Mill House interrupted the interplay. The lad with the buttered head and the laughing eyes stood in the doorway.

“Hallo, Rachel. Come on—show a leg.”

The invitation to the dance! She turned with an air of languor, and without looking directly at Bonthorn, passed over the road towards the shadow of the chestnut tree.

“Evening, Mr. Bonthorn. I’m wanted.”

He nodded. For a moment his blue eye was as whimsical as Mrs. Gurney’s brown ones. He walked on over the bridge and turned into the lane. He had been rebuffed and he knew it, and he was sufficiently man to pursue the proposition. Had he been what the Americans call “A buttinsky”? Had her nay been a veiled yea? He was conscious of a little qualm of disgust. Sex was so incalculable. It might be piqued by some slimy, sensual cad, by a lust—that when balked—sneaked out with a stick and smashed flowers. He reacted against that little spasm of disgust. No, that wasn’t quite credible. The solution was more sensitive, more subtle. He remembered her with that dying dog. She was not mere obvious flesh. She was shy of him just because of that very incident and its crudeness, as though he had surprised her naked, and the soul of her was a little resentful. He had—as it were—forced upon her an uneasy intimacy—and she drew back behind a young reserve, and was difficult—awkward.

Someone had once said to him: “O, yes, you’re such a sanguine devil. If you see a silk stocking you don’t suspect the hole in the heel. One of the world’s optimists. Human nature is full of holes.”