Читать книгу Seven Men Came Back - Warwick Deeping - Страница 22

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Standing between the snouts of two secondhand cars, a wistful, whimsical and slightly shrunken Sherring looked at the flowers in the shop window across the way. Great Rutland Street was draughty and cold in March, and little eddies of wind and dust would dance into the open shop and play round the feet of the gentleman in the black coat and vest and striped trousers. Sherring looked neatly shabby. That buccaneer, old Bliss, had accepted him as a commission man, and the bloom had faded on the secondhand car market.

The flowers over yonder did not fade. Narcissi, violets, anemones, hyacinths, tulips, sprays of mimosa, they came from that southern coast to which the fortunate few fled. Once during the war Sherring had been hurried to Italy with his division and those flowers called up memories of a blue sea, and a blue sky, olive trees and mountains, little white towers brilliant against blue horizons. There was nothing shabby or secondhand about those flowers. They blazed their colours and their beauty at him. They were like lovely children in this grim, commercial street where business gritted its teeth and was plausible and unctuous.

Mr. Bliss was always preaching at Sherring.

“Why don’t you tell them the story? Shove in a little colour. Tell ’em the old bus could do sixty at Brooklands.”

Sherring was not very good at telling a story. Not that he had any great respect for the world’s veracity, but certain inexactitudes stuck in his throat. He could not produce the proper, professional bombast. Had he been appointed to sell the world’s best car he would have sold it with success and like a gentleman. In pushing what was second best he was a creature of fastidious inhibition.

There was a patch of blue sky overhead when the girl swung round the corner on her long, slim legs. Sherring peered up at that shred of blueness rather like a bird in a cage, and then looked at the girl. His eyes had a certain shyness. She passed that way every morning, and usually she paused outside the flower shop window.

He wondered about her.

She was rather like a dark violet, pale, with smoky eyes, and very black hair. She did not look quite English. Her movements were quick and vibrant and almost birdlike. The curve of her chin was beautiful, and so was the sweep of her neck. She interested him. She dressed smartly but quietly in black, with a touch of cerise in her bosom. Her lips were red threads. She had for him the quality of mystery, the allure of those flowers. He noticed that she did not look at people, but would sail away with a suggestion of self-conscious aloofness. Her temperament seemed both dark and vivid. She had the pallor of her pride.

On this particular morning, as though becoming conscious of the pressure of his gaze, she turned and looked at him. It is possible that she looked at him longer than she need have done. Her eyes were dark and unsmiling. Then, with head up, she passed upon her way, mysteriously moving from the whence to the whither.

Sherring’s hand gently caressed the hard, cold radiator cap of one of the cars.

The girl interested him.

Moreover, the dark mirror of her youth had flashed no message, but he interested her.

An invisible thread had joined them across the street. It trembled. The spring was near.