The Grey Wig. Israel ZangwillЧитать онлайн книгу.
she said, rising in a flash. The words had the calm conventional cadence, and instantly extorted from him—amid all his dazedness—the corresponding "Good-by." When he turned and saw it was Mr. Glamorys who had come in, his heart leapt wildly at the nearness of his escape. As he passed this masked ruffian, he nodded perfunctorily and received a cordial smile. Yes, he was handsome and fascinating enough externally, this blonde savage.
"A man may smile and smile and be a villain," John thought. "I wonder how he'd feel, if he knew I knew he beats women."
Already John had generalised the charge. "I hope Cecilia will keep him at arm's length," he had said to Winifred, "if only that she may not smart for it some day."
He lingered purposely in the hall to get an impression of the brute, who had begun talking loudly to a friend with irritating bursts of laughter, speciously frank-ringing. Golf, fishing, comic operas—ah, the Boeotian! These were the men who monopolised the ethereal divinities.
But this brusque separation from his particular divinity was disconcerting. How to see her again? He must go up to Oxford in the morning, he wrote her that night, but if she could possibly let him call during the week he would manage to run down again.
"Oh, my dear, dreaming poet," she wrote to Oxford, "how could you possibly send me a letter to be laid on the breakfast-table beside The Times! With a poem in it, too. Fortunately my husband was in a hurry to get down to the City, and he neglected to read my correspondence. ('The unchivalrous blackguard,' John commented. 'But what can be expected of a woman beater?') Never, never write to me again at the house. A letter, care of Mrs. Best, 8A Foley Street, W.C., will always find me. She is my maid's mother. And you must not come here either, my dear handsome head-in-the-clouds, except to my 'At Homes,' and then only at judicious intervals. I shall be walking round the pond in Kensington Gardens at four next Wednesday, unless Mrs. Best brings me a letter to the contrary. And now thank you for your delicious poem; I do not recognise my humble self in the dainty lines, but I shall always be proud to think I inspired them. Will it be in the new volume? I have never been in print before; it will be a novel sensation. I cannot pay you song for song, only feeling for feeling. Oh, John Lefolle, why did we not meet when I had still my girlish dreams? Now, I have grown to distrust all men—to fear the brute beneath the cavalier. … "
Mrs. Best did bring her a letter, but it was not to cancel the appointment, only to say he was not surprised at her horror of the male sex, but that she must beware of false generalisations. Life was still a wonderful and beautiful thing—vide poem enclosed. He was counting the minutes till Wednesday afternoon. It was surely a popular mistake that only sixty went to the hour.
This chronometrical reflection recurred to him even more poignantly in the hour that he circumambulated the pond in Kensington Gardens. Had she forgotten—had her husband locked her up? What could have happened? It seemed six hundred minutes, ere, at ten past five she came tripping daintily towards him. His brain had been reduced to insanely devising problems for his pupils—if a man walks two strides of one and a half feet a second round a lake fifty acres in area, in how many turns will he overtake a lady who walks half as fast and isn't there?—but the moment her pink parasol loomed on the horizon, all his long misery vanished in an ineffable peace and uplifting. He hurried, bare-headed, to clasp her little gloved hand. He had forgotten her unpunctuality, nor did she remind him of it.
"How sweet of you to come all that way," was all she said, and it was a sufficient reward for the hours in the train and the six hundred minutes among the nursemaids and perambulators. The elms were in their glory, the birds were singing briskly, the water sparkled, the sunlit sward stretched fresh and green—it was the loveliest, coolest moment of the afternoon. John instinctively turned down a leafy avenue. Nature and Love! What more could poet ask?
"No, we can't have tea by the Kiosk," Mrs. Glamorys protested. "Of course I love anything that savours of Paris, but it's become so fashionable. There will be heaps of people who know me. I suppose you've forgotten it's the height of the season. I know a quiet little place in the High Street." She led him, unresisting but bemused, towards the gate, and into a confectioner's. Conversation languished on the way.
"Tea," he was about to instruct the pretty attendant.
"Strawberry ices," Mrs. Glamorys remarked gently. "And some of those nice French cakes."
The ice restored his spirits, it was really delicious, and he had got so hot and tired, pacing round the pond. Decidedly Winifred was a practical person and he was a dreamer. The pastry he dared not touch—being a genius—but he was charmed at the gaiety with which Winifred crammed cake after cake into her rosebud of a mouth. What an enchanting creature! How bravely she covered up her life's tragedy!
The thought made him glance at her velvet band—it was broader than ever.
"He has beaten you again!" he murmured furiously. Her joyous eyes saddened, she hung her head, and her fingers crumbled the cake. "What is his pretext?" he asked, his blood burning.
"Jealousy," she whispered.
His blood lost its glow, ran cold. He felt the bully's blows on his own skin, his romance turning suddenly sordid. But he recovered his courage. He, too, had muscles. "But I thought he just missed seeing me kiss your hand."
She opened her eyes wide. "It wasn't you, you darling old dreamer."
He was relieved and disturbed in one.
"Somebody else?" he murmured. Somehow the vision of the player-fellow came up.
She nodded. "Isn't it lucky he has himself drawn a red-herring across the track? I didn't mind his blows—you were safe!" Then, with one of her adorable transitions, "I am dreaming of another ice," she cried with roguish wistfulness.
"I was afraid to confess my own greediness," he said, laughing. He beckoned the waitress. "Two more."
"We haven't got any more strawberries," was her unexpected reply. "There's been such a run on them to-day."
Winifred's face grew overcast. "Oh, nonsense!" she pouted. To John the moment seemed tragic.
"Won't you have another kind?" he queried. He himself liked any kind, but he could scarcely eat a second ice without her.
Winifred meditated. "Coffee?" she queried.
The waitress went away and returned with a face as gloomy as Winifred's. "It's been such a hot day," she said deprecatingly. "There is only one ice in the place and that's Neapolitan."
"Well, bring two Neapolitans," John ventured.
"I mean there is only one Neapolitan ice left."
"Well, bring that. I don't really want one."
He watched Mrs. Glamorys daintily devouring the solitary ice, and felt a certain pathos about the parti-coloured oblong, a something of the haunting sadness of "The Last Rose of Summer." It would make a graceful, serio-comic triolet, he was thinking. But at the last spoonful, his beautiful companion dislocated his rhymes by her sudden upspringing.
"Goodness gracious," she cried, "how late it is!"
"Oh, you're not leaving me yet!" he said. A world of things sprang to his brain, things that he was going to say—to arrange. They had said nothing—not a word of their love even; nothing but cakes and ices.
"Poet!" she laughed. "Have you forgotten I live at Hampstead?" She picked up her parasol. "Put me into a hansom, or my husband will be raving at his lonely dinner-table."
He was so dazed as to be surprised when the waitress blocked his departure with a bill. When Winifred was spirited away, he remembered she might, without much risk, have given him a lift to Paddington. He hailed another hansom and caught the next train to Oxford. But he was too late for his own dinner in Hall.
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