The Complete Novellas & Short Stories. Bennett ArnoldЧитать онлайн книгу.
not more.'
So he went into the bedroom as into a church, feeling a fool. The nurse, miraculously white and starched, stood like a sentinel at the foot of the bed of mystery.
'All serene, May?' he questioned. If he had attempted to say another word he would have cried.
The pale mother nodded with a fatigued smile, and by a scarcely perceptible gesture drew his attention to a bundle. From the next flat came a faint, familiar sound, insolently joyous.
'Yes,' he thought, 'but if they had both been lying dead here that tune would have been the same.'
Two months later he left the office early, telling his secretary that he had a headache. It was a mere fibbing excuse. He suffered from sudden fits of anxiety about his wife and child. When he reached the flat, he found no one at home but the cook.
'Where's your mistress?' he demanded.
'She's out in the park with baby and nurse, sir.'
'But it's going to rain,' he cried angrily. 'It is raining. They'll get wet through.'
He rushed into the corridor, and met the procession—May, the perambulator, and the nursemaid.
'Only fancy, Ted!' May exclaimed, 'the perambulator will go into the lift, after all. Aren't you glad?'
'Yes,' he said. 'But you're wet, surely?'
'Not a drop. We just got in in time.'
'Sure?'
'Quite.'
The tableau of May, elegant as ever, but her eyes brighter and her body more leniently curved, of the hooded perambulator, and of the fluffy-white nursemaid behind—it was too much for him. Touching clumsily the apron of the perambulator, the stockbroker turned into his doorway. Just then the girl from the next flat came out into the corridor, dressed for social rites of the afternoon. The perambulator was her excuse for stopping.
'What a pretty boy!' she exclaimed in ecstasy, trying to squeeze her picture hat under the hood of the perambulator.
'Do you really think so?' said the mother, enchanted.
'Of course! The darling! How I envy you!'
May wanted to reciprocate this politeness.
'I can't tell you,' she said, 'how I envy you your piano-playing. There's one piece——'
'Envy me! Why! It's only a pianola we've got!'
'Isn't he the picture of his granddad?' said May to Edward when they bent over the cot that night before retiring.
And as she said it there was such candour in her voice, such content in her smiling and courageous eyes, that Edward could not fail to comprehend her message to him. Down in some very secret part of his soul he felt for the first time the real force of the great explanatory truth that one generation succeeds another.
The Sisters Qita
The manuscript ran thus:
When I had finished my daily personal examination of the ropes and-trapezes, I hesitated a moment, and then climbed up again, to the roof, where the red and the blue long ropes were fastened. I took my sharp scissors from my chatelaine, and gently fretted the blue rope with one blade of the scissors until only a single strand was left intact. I gazed down at the vast floor a hundred feet below. The afternoon varieties were over, and a phrenologist was talking to a small crowd of gapers in a corner. The rest of the floor was pretty empty save for the chairs and the fancy stalls, and the fatigued stall-girls in their black dresses. I too, had once almost been a stall-girl at the Aquarium! I descended. Few observed me in my severe street dress. Our secretary, Charles, attended me on the stage.
'Everything right, Miss Paquita?' he said, handing me my hat and gloves, which I had given him, to hold.
I nodded. I could see that he thought I was in one of my stern, far-away moods.
'Miss Mariquita is waiting for you in the carriage,' he said.
We drove away in silence—I with my inborn melancholy too sad, Sally (Mariquita) too happy to speak. This daily afternoon drive was really part of our 'turn'! A team of four mules driven by a negro will make a sensation even in Regent Street. All London looked at us, and contrasted our impassive beauty—mine mature (too mature!) and dark, Sally's so blonde and youthful, our simple costumes, and the fact that we stayed at an exclusive Mayfair hotel, with the stupendous flourish of our turnout. The renowned Sisters Qita—Paquita and Mariquita Qita—and the renowned mules of the Sisters Qita! Two hundred pounds a week at the Aquarium! Twenty-five thousand francs for one month at the Casino de Paris! Twelve thousand five hundred dollars for a tour of fifty performances in the States! Fifteen hundred pesos a night and a special train de luxe in Argentina and Brazil! I could see the loungers and the drivers talking and pointing as usual. The gilded loungers in Verrey's café got up and watched us through the windows as we passed. This was fame. For nearly twenty years I had been intimate with fame, and with the envy of women and the foolish homage of men.
We saw dozens of omnibuses bearing the legend 'Qita.' Then we met one which said: 'Empire Theatre. Valdès, the matchless juggler,' and Sally smiled with pleasure.
'He's coming to see our turn to-night, after his,' she remarked, blushing.
'Valdès? Why?' I asked, without turning my head.
'He wants us to sup with him, to celebrate our engagement.'
'When do you mean to get married?' I asked her shortly. I felt quite calm.
'I guess you're a Tartar to-day,' said the pretty thing, with a touch of her American sauciness. 'We haven't studied it out yet. It was only yesterday afternoon he kissed me for the first time.' Then she bent towards me with her characteristic plaintive, wistful appeal. 'Say! You aren't vexed, Selina, are you, because of this? Of course, he wants me to tour with him after we're married, and do a double act. He's got lots of dandy ideas for a double act. But I won't, I won't, Selina, unless you say the word. Now, don't you go and be cross, Selina.'
I let myself expand generously.
'My darling girl!' I said, glancing at her kindly. 'You ought to know me better. Of course I'm not cross. And of course you must tour with Valdès. I shall be all right. How do you suppose I managed before I invented you?' I smiled like an indulgent mother.
'Oh! I didn't mean that,' she said. 'I know you're frightfully clever. I'm nothing——'
'I hope you'll be awfully happy,' I whispered, squeezing her hand. 'And don't forget that I introduced him to you—I knew him years before you did. I'm the cause of this bliss——Do you remember that cold morning in Berlin?'
'Oh! well, I should say!' she exclaimed in ecstasy.
When we reached our rooms in the hotel I kissed her warmly. Women do that sort of thing.
Then a card was brought to me. 'George Capey,' it said; and in pencil, 'Of the Five Towns.'
I shrugged my shoulders. Sally had gone to scribble a note to her Valdès. 'Show Mr. Capey in,' I said, and a natty young man entered, half nervousness, half audacity.
'How did you know I come from the Five Towns?' I questioned him.
'I am on the Evening Mail,' he said, 'where they know everything, madam.'
I was annoyed. 'Then they know, on the Evening Mail that Paquita Qita has never been interviewed, and never will be,' I said.
'Besides,' he went on, 'I come from the Five Towns myself.'
'Bursley?' I asked mechanically.
'Bursley,' he ejaculated; then added, 'you haven't been near old Bosley since——'
It