Flower o' the Peach. Gibbon Perceval

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ a confidential undertone – "he 's not strong."

      She nodded past Margaret's shoulder at Jakes, who was drinking from his cup with precautions against noise. He caught her look over the rim of it and choked. Ford smiled faintly and turned to the window again.

      "The Karoo does n't suit him a bit," Mrs. Jakes went on. "Too bracing, you know. He 's often quite ill. But he won't leave."

      "Why?" asked Margaret. The doctor was busy with his handkerchief, removing the traces of the accident from his waistcoat.

      Mrs. Jakes looked serious. "Duty," she replied, and pursed her pale lips. "He considers it his duty to remain here. It 's his life-work, you know."

      Ford's eye caught Margaret's again, warning and inviting. "It 's – it's very unselfish of him," she said.

      "Yes!" said Mrs. Jakes. "It is." And she nodded at Margaret as much as to ask, "And now, what have you got to say?"

      The doctor managed the tea stains to his satisfaction and came across the room, replacing the cup and saucer on the table with a hand that was not quite steady. In the broad light of the window, he had a strained look; one familiar with such matters would have known that the man was raw and tense with the after effects of heavy drinking. He looked down at Margaret with an uncertain smile.

      "I must have a little talk with Miss Harding," he said. "We must find out how matters stand. Will you bring her to my study presently, my dear?"

      "In a quarter of an hour?" suggested Mrs. Jakes. He nodded. Ford did not turn from his idle gazing through the window and old Samson did not cease from looking at him with an arrogant fixity that seemed on the point of breaking into spoken denunciations. He looked from one to the other with a hardy little smile, then sighed and went out.

      His going was the signal for the breaking up of the gathering. Old Samson coughed and walked off and Ford disappeared with him.

      "And what would you care to do now?" asked Mrs. Jakes of Margaret. "I have some very good views of Windsor, if you like. You know Windsor?"

      Margaret shook her head. Windsor had no attractions for her. What interested her much more was the fact that this small, bleak woman was on the defensive, patently standing guard over privacies of her life, and acutely ready to repel boarders who might endeavor to force an intimacy upon her. It was plain in the rigor of her countenance, set into a mask, and in each tone of her voice. Margaret had yet to undergo her interview with Dr. Jakes in his study, and till that was over, and she definitely enlisted for or against him, Mrs. Jakes would preserve an armed neutrality.

      "I think," said Margaret, "I 'd like to go out to the veranda."

      "We call it the stoep," corrected Mrs. Jakes. "A Dutch word, I believe. By all means; you 'll probably find Mr. Ford there and I will call you when the doctor is ready."

      The stone hall held its cathedral shadows inviolate, and from it Margaret went forth to a westering sun that filled the earth with light, and painted the shadow of the house in startling black upon the ground. She stood between the square pillars with their dead and ruined vines and looked forth at a land upon which the light stood stagnant. It was as though the Karoo challenged her conception of it. She had seen it last vague with the illusions of the dawn, hemmed in by mists and shadows that seemed to veil the distances and what they held. Now these were stripped from it to reveal only a vast nakedness, of red and red-brown and gray, all ardent in the afternoon sun. The shadows had promised a mystery, the light discovered a void. It ran from before her yet in a single sweep to a horizon upon which the blue of remote hills was a faint blur, and in all the far prospect of it there was not one roof, no single interruption to its still level. Margaret, quickly sensitive to the quality of her environment, gazed at it almost with a sense of awe, baffled by the fact that no words at her command were pliant enough to fit it. It was not "wild" nor "desolate" nor even "beautiful"; none of the words allotted to landscapes, with which folk are used to label the land they live upon, could be stretched to the compass of this great staring vacancy. It was outside of language; it struck a note not included in the gamut of speech. "Inhuman" came nearest to it, for the salient quality of it was something that bore no relation to the lives – and deaths – of men.

      A sound of coughing recalled her from her contemplation of it, and she walked along the stoep towards it. Behind a pillar near the corner of the house, Ford sat on a camp-stool, with a little easel before him, and smudged with his thumb at the paint on a small canvas.

      He looked up at her with no token of welcome, but rather as though he withdrew himself unwillingly from his picture.

      "Well?" he said, motioning with his head at the wide prospect before them. "What d'you think of it?"

      "Oh, a lot," replied Margaret, refusing to commit herself with adjectives. "Can I see?"

      He sat back to give her room to look. She had in her time spent sincere days at one of the art schools which help Kensington to its character and was prepared to appreciate expertly. It was a sketch in oils, done mostly with the thumb and palette-knife, a croûte of the most obvious – paint piled in ridges as though the artist would have built his subject in relief upon the canvas, perspective improvised by the light of nature, crudities, brutalities of color, obtruded in the effort for breadth. They were all there. She stared into this mist of blemishes in an effort to see what the painter saw and could not set down, and had to give it up.

      In the art school it had been the custom to tell one's fellows the curt, unwelcome truth.

      "You can't paint," said Margaret.

      "Oh, I know that," answered Ford. "You weren't looking for that, were you?"

      "For what, then?" asked Margaret.

      He hitched himself up to the canvas again, and began to smudge with his thumb at a mess of yellow ocre.

      "There 's something in it that I can see," he said. "I 've been watching this – this desert for more than a year, you know, and I try to get in what I see in it. You can't see anything?"

      "No," said Margaret. "But I did try." She watched his unskilful handling of the ocre. "I could show you a thing or two," she suggested.

      She had all a woman's love for technique, and might have been satisfied with more skill and less purpose. But Ford shook his head.

      "No, thank you," he said. "It's not worth while. I 'm only painting for myself. I know what I mean by these messes I make; if I could paint more, I mightn't be so pleased with it."

      "As you like, of course," said Margaret, a little disappointed.

      He worked in silence for about a minute.

      "You didn't like the looks of Dr. Jakes?" he suggested suddenly. "I saw you wondering at him in there."

      "Well," Margaret hesitated. "He seemed rather out of it," she answered. "Is there anything – wrong – with him?"

      Ford was making an irreparable mess of his picture and did not look up.

      "Wrong?" he repeated. "Well, depends what you call wrong. He drinks."

      "Drinks!" Margaret did not like the matter-of-fact way in which he said it. "Do you mean – "

      "He 's a drunkard – he goes to bed drunk. His nerves were like banjo strings this afternoon; he couldn't keep his hands still. You noticed it? That was last night's drinking; he didn't get to bed till daylight. I heard him struggling up the stairs, with Mrs. Jakes whispering to him not to make a noise and helping СКАЧАТЬ