Bealby; A Holiday. Герберт Уэллс

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СКАЧАТЬ and a large but still select Sunday lunch to let in the countryside to the spectacle of the Laxtons taking their (new) proper place at Shonts. …

      It was not only the sense of her own deficiencies that troubled Lady Laxton; there were also her husband’s excesses. He had—it was no use disguising it—rather too much the manner of an employer. He had a way of getting, how could one put it?—confident at dinner and Mergleson seemed to delight in filling up his glass. Then he would contradict a good deal. … She felt that Lord Chancellors however are the sort of men one doesn’t contradict. …

      Then the Lord Chancellor was said to be interested in philosophy—a difficult subject. She had got Timbre to talk to him upon that. Timbre was a professor of philosophy at Oxford, so that was sure to be all right. But she wished she knew one or two good safe things to say in philosophy herself. She had long felt the need of a secretary, and now she felt it more than ever. If she had a secretary, she could just tell him what it was she wanted to talk about and he could get her one or two of the right books and mark the best passages and she could learn it all up.

      She feared—it was a worrying fear—that Laxton would say right out and very early in the week-end that he didn’t believe in philosophy. He had a way of saying he “didn’t believe in” large things like that—art, philanthropy, novels, and so on. Sometimes he said, “I don’t believe in all this”—art or whatever it was. She had watched people’s faces when he had said it and she had come to the conclusion that saying you don’t believe in things isn’t the sort of thing people say nowadays. It was wrong, somehow. But she did not want to tell Laxton directly that it was wrong. He would remember if she did, but he had a way of taking such things rather badly at the time. … She hated him to take things badly.

      “If one could invent some little hint,” she whispered to herself.

      She had often wished she was better at hints.

      She was, you see, a gentlewoman, modest, kindly. Her people were quite good people. Poor, of course. But she was not clever, she was anything but clever. And the wives of these captains of industry need to be very clever indeed if they are to escape a magnificent social isolation. They get the titles and the big places and all that sort of thing; people don’t at all intend to isolate them, but there is nevertheless an inadvertent avoidance. …

      Even as she uttered these words, “If one could invent some little hint,” Bealby down there less than forty feet away through the solid floor below her feet and a little to the right was wetting his stump of pencil as wet as he could in order to ensure a sufficiently emphatic fourteenth cross on the score sheet of the doomed Thomas. Most of the other thirteen marks were done with such hard breathing emphasis that the print of them went more than halfway through that little blue-edged book.

§ 5

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      The arrival of the week-end guests impressed Bealby at first merely as a blessed influence that withdrew the four men-servants into that unknown world on the other side of the green baize door, but then he learnt that it also involved the appearance of five new persons, two valets and three maids, for whom places had to be laid in the steward’s room. Otherwise Lady Laxton’s social arrangements had no more influence upon the mind of Bealby than the private affairs of the Emperor of China. There was something going on up there, beyond even his curiosity. All he heard of it was a distant coming and going of vehicles and some slight talk to which he was inattentive while the coachman and grooms were having a drink in the pantry—until these maids and valets appeared. They seemed to him to appear suddenly out of nothing, like slugs after rain, black and rather shiny, sitting about inactively and quietly consuming small matters. He disliked them, and they regarded him without affection or respect.

      Who cared? He indicated his feeling towards them as soon as he was out of the steward’s room by a gesture of the hand and nose venerable only by reason of its antiquity.

      He had things more urgent to think about than strange valets and maids. Thomas had laid hands on him, jeered at him, inflicted shameful indignities on him and he wanted to kill Thomas in some frightful manner. (But if possible unobtrusively.)

      If he had been a little Japanese boy, this would have been an entirely honourable desire. It would have been Bushido and all that sort of thing. In the gardener’s stepson however it is—undesirable. …

      Thomas, on the other hand, having remarked the red light of revenge in Bealby’s eye and being secretly afraid, felt that his honour was concerned in not relaxing his persecutions. He called him “Kicker” and when he did not answer to that name, he called him “Snorter,” “Bleater,” “Snooks,” and finally tweaked his ear. Then he saw fit to assume that Bealby was deaf and that ear-tweaking was the only available method of address. This led on to the convention of a sign language whereby ideas were communicated to Bealby by means of painful but frequently quite ingeniously symbolical freedoms with various parts of his person. Also Thomas affected to discover uncleanliness in Bealby’s head and succeeded after many difficulties in putting it into a sinkful of lukewarm water.

      Meanwhile young Bealby devoted such scanty time as he could give to reflection to debating whether it is better to attack Thomas suddenly with a carving knife or throw a lighted lamp. The large pantry inkpot of pewter might be effective in its way, he thought, but he doubted whether in the event of a charge it had sufficient stopping power. He was also curiously attracted by a long two-pronged toasting-fork that hung at the side of the pantry fireplace. It had reach. …

      Over all these dark thoughts and ill-concealed emotions Mr. Mergleson prevailed, large yet speedy, speedy yet exact, parroting orders and making plump gestures, performing duties and seeing that duties were performed.

      Matters came to a climax late on Saturday night at the end of a trying day, just before Mr. Mergleson went round to lock up and turn out the lights.

      Thomas came into the pantry close behind Bealby, who, greatly belated through his own inefficiency, was carrying a tray of glasses from the steward’s room, applied an ungentle hand to his neck, and ruffled up his back hair in a smart and painful manner. At the same time Thomas remarked, “Burrrrh!”

      Bealby stood still for a moment and then put down his tray on the table and, making peculiar sounds as he did so, resorted very rapidly to the toasting fork. … He got a prong into Thomas’s chin at the first prod.

      How swift are the changes of the human soul! At the moment of his thrust young Bealby was a primordial savage; so soon as he saw this incredible piercing of Thomas’s chin—for all the care that Bealby had taken it might just as well have been Thomas’s eye—he moved swiftly through the ages and became a simple Christian child. He abandoned violence and fled.

      The fork hung for a moment from the visage of Thomas like a twisted beard of brass, and then rattled on the ground.

      Thomas clapped his hand to his chin and discovered blood.

      “You little—!” He never found the right word (which perhaps is just as well); instead he started in pursuit of Bealby.

      Bealby—in his sudden horror of his own act—and Thomas fled headlong into the passage and made straight for the service stairs that went up into a higher world. He had little time to think. Thomas with a red-smeared chin appeared in pursuit. Thomas the avenger. Thomas really roused. Bealby shot through the green baize door and the pursuing footman pulled up only just in time not to follow him.

      Only just in time. He had an instinctive instant anxious fear of great dangers. СКАЧАТЬ