Читать книгу The Road - Warwick Deeping - Страница 4

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Martha came out of the green porch carrying the wickerwork table pressed against her stout bust. She was one of those solid women who seem to absorb comfort and satisfaction from the inevitableness of habit. Her black eyebrows were as decisive as her mouth. If Mr. Bonthorn chose to be an oddity, she accepted his oddness because it had a reasonable and sweet quality. She allowed him genius of a sort, which was infinite and sympathetic condescension. She allowed him tea in the garden on Sunday when the weather was as reasonable as her workaday soul. She would have allowed him anything that a sensible woman of five-and-fifty can allow a man who can sprawl on the grass like a boy.

For Mr. Bonthorn was lying flat on his chest playing with those two young animals. That was the sort of game that was pleasant to watch, the six-foot man with his intense, brown face, and one very blue eye balanced by the black patch over the other socket, rolling those two furry little creatures over and over on the grass. Mrs. Martha might wonder about things, but she did not ask bathotic questions. She may have wondered why the ex-soldier had never mounted a glass eye, but she had never asked him for reasons. He was sufficiently himself to satisfy her.

Martha laid the table under the cherry tree. The kitten, in a sudden access of energy and joy, shot up the trunk of the tree with hair erect and all claws spread. The dog, as though comprehending that joyous, furry fury, stood bearded and with ears erect, barking applause. Mr. Bonthorn took his floppy old hat off and threw it to the dog. Rollo commenced a furious conflict with the hat.

Martha regarded them with beneficence.

“You’ll spoil that dog, sir.”

The one blue eye rallied her.

“Never do it yourself, do you, Martha? What about that sacred garment you let him whisk off into the currant bushes?”

“That was what—in a manner of speaking—might be called an act of God, sir.”

“Or an act of dog. I bet you sat up mending it.”

“But hats, Mr. Bonthorn. It’s the only decent one——”

“True. Here—you young devil, deliver up that hat.”

To Bonthorn, tea out of doors somehow retained the spell of adventure, especially with the bees busy in the cherry blossom and the black kitten lapping milk. Martha gave him buttered scones and home-made cake.

“None of your grocer’s stuff, sir.”

And she would tell him how those Buck women who gave teas to the motoring crowd down at the old Mill House on the Lignor road would sometimes be left with pounds of stale cake spotted with sickly cherries. “Trifle for a whole week, sir, that’s to say if you can call a yellow mess of grocer’s cake and custard powder anything but a trifle.”

Yes, even Martha’s cake and her bread and butter had a spell.

England in May on a day when the bees found the cherry blossom very white and sweet in the sunshine, an England that was full of those faint perfumes that eschew the highroads. Bonthorn lit a pipe, and lying at ease in his deck chair, felt himself part of the place and its loveliness. Yew End. The coral arils of the yew. The lane going up past his holly hedge to the secret meadows of Beech Farm. A green cleft under the blue sky and the white clouds. The long, golden buds of the beeches unfolding millions of emerald fans. High woods with bluebells thick in them and glimmering wind-flowers, and steep, grassy slopes brilliant with broom. Hedges ready to break into the blossom of the thorn, a fragrance that the wild honeysuckle would repeat. Bracken crooking through. The misty willows and murmuring aspens where the stream ran down to the Mill House. The great cedars of Stella Lacey, and its Scotch pines red-throated to the sunset. Birds. The complex confederation of the grasses, poas, fescues, foxtails. And behind him that funny old white cottage, with its green shutters, vines, roses, glycine, a low, lovable cottage, sitting rather like some white bird deep in a green nest. In the hall a clock went tick-tock as though it understood the relativity of time. The rooms had a kind of exquisite, faded dimness.

Bonthorn lay and looked up through the branches of the cherry tree. What strange differences there were in this mysterious and diverse world. Why should the bark of a cherry tree be unlike the bark of a pear? Why should people rush to and fro along those miles of tarmac? Why should Rollo be Rollo? Did it matter if the soul of this most mysterious world was somehow the soul of your secret, happy self? To grow flowers instead of discords, Politics! Good God!

The dog began to play with his shoe, and while rolling the Cairn to and fro on the grass, Bonthorn dreamed, though his dreams were like the threads of a tapestry wilfully woven. If you dreamed of new flowers, cunning was needed to create them. But that was his job in life, work for the eye and the hand, the planned mating of pollen grain and ovule, even the cheating of the bee. Three acres of garden, a garden that was the workshop of the hybridist, the canvas of the artist, the laboratory of the chemist, a little corner in the conception of God.

“Petulant and sweet—petulant and sweet.”

Some thrush’s variant and over the grass the footsteps of Martha coming to clear away the tea. She had a quiet voice and quiet movements. She seemed to fit into his lonely life like a shadow into the hollow of a hedge.

She made a remark as she folded up the cloth, and it was to the effect that the London-Lignor road was noisier than usual. Bonthorn had not noticed it, but he supposed that it could be so.

“So long as they don’t come up our lane.”

Mrs. Martha patted the cloth.

“No, we shouldn’t want them up here, should we? And us not daring to let the dog out of the gate. But I can remember that road on a Sunday, a few lads on bikes with bunches of flowers tied to the handlebars, and people going to church.”

Bonthorn echoed her.

“People going to church! How strange!”

She tucked the cloth over an arm and picked up the tray.

“Sort of makes one feel old, sir. Not getting the feel of all these new things.”

“Yes, the feel of them. Need one?”

“But that road! Funny—the notions that come into one’s head. One used to walk on a road. There’s that story in the Bible about the legion of swine——”

“Not swine, Martha.”

Softly he laughed, and she remained there for a moment with the tray.

“Well, I tell you one thing, sir, that place down there is the new sort of church.”

“You mean the Mill House?”

“Sure-ly. Goings on. Blue tables with pink cloths.”

“Yes, pink is provocative, Martha.”

“And yellow umbrellas, and a loud-speaker shouting, and all those young women and lads. If they serve one tea on a Sunday they serve a hundred. That’s Sunday.”

She made a kind of clucking noise and departed with the tray, and Bonthorn sat and listened to the distant discords of the London-Lignor road. It did not disturb him; it was too far away; in fact it seemed to emphasize the secrecy and the seclusion of his own celibate corner. Almost, it was like the hum of another planet, or some heated—meteoric phenomenon that would pass and burn itself out. It was steel not protoplasm. Life for him centred about the secrecy of the cell.

Dreamer he might be, but also he was the man of routine. His rhythm was of the earth and of the things that grew. A puff-ball might be both a weed and a mystic clock. Had any man or woman in that crowd down yonder ever looked closely at one of those furry, perfect parachutes? When the whole world did begin to look at such things——!

He got up out of his chair. He spoke to the wise little eyes of the dog.

“Come on, you little thing. Parade.”

The Cairn’s hairy and alert face brisked itself. There were three sharp barks, and then silence. They set off together along a path under drooping lilacs. The dog had learnt to adapt himself to the larger and more mysterious activities of the man. Parade. There was the close boarded gate in the thorn hedge that had rabbit wire protecting it. The sacred precinct, no scratchings and furious rushes here, and never a rabbit. The man-god kept strange treasures in this place, green things that grew out of the ground, plants that would sometimes wear queer white gossamer veils. As usual the man-god went round past the potting shed with its old red-brick wall and the green water-butt at the corner. Then came that other queer and exciting building with a funny old white cupola and a weather vane, its doors a faded blue. Rollo was moved to sniff at those doors. Mysterious interiors, rats, mice, elusive smells.

Then, a broad path with bricks on edge dividing stretches of earth in which things grew. There were white slips of wood. Obviously, Mr. Bonthorn was infatuated with this strange place where a dog had to behave as though the whole of it was one clean, kitchen floor. Mr. Bonthorn might have buried innumerable bones here. It suggested the presence of strange, fascinating smells.

Rollo might be sympathetic to a point, sitting on a stumpy tail with an air of docile puzzlement. He did not know that one of those Beaded Irises—“Bayard” had brandished a blazing standard as far as California. “Dame Georgiana,” a great lady among the delphiniums in the early stateliness of her growth, had travelled back from London with a gold medallion round her throat. The strange preoccupations of man! Bending over those green things, touching them, caressing them! One blue eye sending deliberate and wise glances here, there and everywhere.

And in those solitary places on a Sunday, Rollo might sit and turn a head this way and that, and paw tentatively and apologetically at some tempting stone.

“No, my lad, no rampagings here.”

But afterwards the dog would have his hour, delirious moments chasing an old rubber ball on the grass verges of the lane.