Читать книгу The Road - Warwick Deeping - Страница 7

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The cupola clock at Stella Lacey struck five, and Mrs. Buck glanced at her own clock in the tea-room. It had been a quiet day, so quiet that the girls had gone up to Lignor on an adventure of their own.

The red van arrived with a gentle surreptitiousness, and parking itself on the piece of grass beyond the gate, extruded a human figure, something round and bald, with large spectacles and much shirt-front. The redness of the van was sacred neither to the G.P.O. nor to advanced propaganda. It was nothing more and nothing less than an itinerant pill-shop.

Its owner toddled across to the bridge and stood for a moment in contemplation of the mill-pool, meadows and trees. He removed his spectacles and polished them as though to do justice to this piece of England, the flickering pool, the water brimming and tumbling at the weir, the sedges and water-flags in gentle movement.

“Marvellous!”

He used youth’s adjective but he used it differently, and though his smile was full of artifice as to the teeth, his sense of atmosphere was sound. The noise of running water and its coolness! He faced about, and crossing the tarred high-road, stood for a moment under the chestnut tree. Being something of a peripatetic philosopher on wheels he could take off his hat to progress.

“Well—Mrs. Binnie.”

Robinia was darning a hole in a tea-cloth. She had been engaged in exactly the same piece of work six months ago, sitting up rather like a squirrel with a nut in her hands and black eyes alert. To the owner of the red van she was woman mending an eternal tea-cloth.

“Bless us, it’s you!”

She had used just the same expression on previous occasions. The little man crinkled his eyes at her, and removed his hat.

“Always at it. How’s business?”

“Come in, Sam. No, I can’t grumble.”

“And the girls, bless ’em?”

He gathered that the girls were much as usual.

Mrs. Buck was pleased to see him, not because he or his preposterous pills were anything to be proud of, but because she had known him for some thirty years and had found in him a listener. As a rule no one listened to her. It had been a habit of Mr. Buck’s to make the remark from behind his paper: “Still talking, Binnie?” and her daughters—though fond of her—were equally inattentive. Sam Prodgers listened. He was like a little stout white jug of a man into which gossip could be poured. He was interested in people. He had a bright eye, and a sense of humour, but he could keep his sense of humour from getting under a woman’s feet and tripping her up. Also, he was a distant relation, though Tom Buck had spoken of him habitually and scathingly as a mountebank.

Mrs. Binnie was up and active.

“You’ll take some tea, Sam?”

He would. He sat down in one of the basket chairs, and surveyed the room. It had been re-decorated during the winter, and in the style of Rhoda-Rachel, and not of Mrs. Robinia. The roses of Edwardianism had fallen. The walls suggested a series of sunsets separated by black pilasters. The spaces between the rafters were speckled with purple and orange stars. Also, there was a small dance floor amid the chairs and tables.

Mr. Prodgers had never exceeded the redness of his van, but when the van was in action he did indulge in coloured lights and cracklings and coruscations. Professor Prodgers’s Electro-Magnetic Pills! He showed the public his pills being treated electrically in large glass tubes.

“Say, Binnie, you’ve crowded in some colour.”

Mrs. Buck, pausing on her way to the kitchen, apologized for the room.

“The girls’ idea. I’d have had it all white.”

“That’s not noisy enough, Binnie.”

“It almost gives me a headache. And what with the wireless, and the gramophone——!”

“Have to be up-to-date, you know.”

Mrs. Buck’s lips quivered.

“Up-to-date, Sam. Things seem to change every five minutes, like the tunes. I feel I get out of breath—sometimes—trying to keep up with them.”

Mr. Prodgers nodded.

“Yes; everything’s on wheels.”

He could speak with authority. For more than twenty years he had been trundling about England, exploiting cathedral cities and market towns. In his early days he had travelled at the tail of a horse and had been able to talk confidentially and sociably to the beast. “Now then—Sequah—get along, old lad.” The petrol engine had changed those leisurely, ruminant days. Mr. Prodgers never felt friendly towards his engine. He damned it on occasions, especially when it refused to fire late on a Saturday night when some market-place was full of darkness and debris, and he felt hoarse and tired. “Curse you and your sanguinary plugs.” In a sense he was the slave of pills, progress and the machine. In pre-war days he had managed to make a living in ten counties, and mostly south of the Thames and the Severn, but now the red van carried as far as York and Chester. Education—competition, cash chemists. He had to cover more ground and shout more lustily—he had taken to a megaphone—in order to live.

Mrs. Binnie appeared with a tea-tray.

“I can’t give you buttered toast, Sam. There’s no fire.”

“Never you mind. Toast and oil stoves don’t harmonize. I ought to know.”

He observed two cups on the tray. So, Robinia had not lost her love for tea, though probably it gave her indigestion. But why worry? To attempt the alleviation of life’s little sins and their dyspepsias is to burn incense before a great illusion. And though he was pedlar of pills he had never attempted to work off a box upon Robinia. He snuggled into his chair.

“Well, you ought to be doing pretty well here, Binnie. You deserve to.”

She fussed over the tea-tray, and Samuel supposed that she would fuss in heaven and make restless flutterings with her wings. But he had affection and respect for Robinia Buck. She turned her wheel. She kept clucking bravely in a farm-yard that was to her a place of pother, progress and confusion. She might appear perpetually flurried and bewildered, but she carried on.

“Two lumps, Sam?”

“As usual.”

He sat and wondered at her. Tom Buck had left her two daughters, some furniture, and about fifty pounds in cash. To begin with she had taken to dressmaking, and had run a small tea-shop in Lignor. She had taken a still larger shop, saved money somehow, and then—with a kind of restless sagacity, and seizing what had appeared to be her opportunity, she had sunk all her capital in the Mill House at Monks Lacey. A mixture of whimsicality and wisdom? And if anything she looked more worried than ever. Well, probably, that was her fate.

“Girls out?”

“They’re gone to Lignor.”

“You’re rather lucky, Binnie, as things go.”

She sat perched like a bird, her head on one side.

“There’s one thing that worries me, Sam.”

“What’s that?”

“I do wish they weren’t quite so good-looking.”

The philosopher dealt with a mouthful of bread and butter.

“Is that all? And—after all—it’s a lot. Paradise and the Pyramids.”

“It worries me, Sam.”

“Things do. You wouldn’t be—— Besides, it’s an asset.”

“Now, don’t say that.”

“I do say it. A couple of good-looking——”

“Honey pots, Sam. I used to say to Tom that it was a girl’s misfortune—looks.”

“And he didn’t agree with you, did he? You weren’t a bad-looking girl yourself, my dear.”

But her anxiety was authentic, and over the tea-table she passed it to Samuel Prodgers, while with an occasional flick of the hand she denied three predatory flies the right to settle on the sugar or the cakes. All through life she had been at war with Beelzebub in his multifarious manifestations, only to suspect that Beelzebub had been playing peep-bo with her at every corner. She confessed to being bothered, bewildered, worried. She did not understand her daughters. She did not understand their new world and its tendencies. She asserted that there were times when she had a feeling of horrible insecurity, that the whole structure was a paper sham, and the Book of Common Prayer a mediæval relic.

“Well, and so it is, Binnie.”

She was shocked. She wanted the skeleton of her old world re-clothed in the familiar flesh, and here was Sam too seeing it as a skeleton.

“Sam, I did think you’d agree with me.”

“And so I do, but I live on wheels. Change and decay, no—not quite. We’re not so lugubrious as some of the old hymns. After all, it’s all a sort of sham, isn’t it? Self-suggestion. We just pretend. And I gather that the young things do less pretending.”

Mrs. Binnie exclaimed: “It’s their morals, Sam.”

“Morals——!”

“They’re so easy about the—— No sense of responsibility. It worries me dreadfully.”

Mr. Prodgers passed her his cup.

“The fact is, Binnie, we used to fuss too much. We used to lock the cupboard, pocket the key, and bluff human nature. God in a top-hat and wearing a beard, a sort of Divine scarecrow. Well, there isn’t any God these days, or not that sort of god. The young things don’t think any more of Him than they do of Father Christmas. Possibly they’ve pulled the false beard off our morality.”

Mrs. Robinia was so discouraged that she forgot to re-fill his cup.

“Sam, are you serious?”

“Not so serious as I used to be, my dear. There is something in the modern point of view. The war was a pretty bad crash for the conventions. We got up looking blue and bothered. We saw all sorts of naked things lying about, the dolls we’d dressed up. Well—what’s happened? The new generation laughs. It makes a joke of our old wax-work show. Everything’s a joke; sex, marriage, even my pills. I suppose we were getting too smug and serious, and someone had to shy green apples at us.”

Mrs. Binnie noticed the empty cup and re-filled it. But she forgot the sugar; she even forgot to wave aside the septic flies.

“Sam—what does it say somewhere about green fruit, and people’s teeth being on edge?”

“O, yes, my dear, there always will be green fruit, and pains in the world’s tummy. These young things——”