Колесо крутится. Леди исчезает / The Wheel Spins. The Lady Vanishe. Этель Лина Уайт

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СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">      But they had heard nothing.

      Miss Flood-Porter saw her garden, silvered by the harvest moon. She wondered whether the chrysanthemum buds, three to a pot, were swelling, and if the blue salvias had escaped the slugs.

      Miss Rose, briskly stacking shoes in the bottom of a suitcase, quivered at a recollection. Again she saw a gaping hole in a garden-bed, where overnight had stood a cherished clump of white delphiniums… It was not only the loss of their treasure, but the nerve-racking ignorance of where the enemy would strike next…

      The Vicar and his wife thought of their baby, asleep in his cot. They must decide whether they should merely peep at him, or risk waking him with a kiss.

      Iris remembered her friends in the roaring express, and was suddenly smitten with a wave of home-sickness.

      England was calling.

      Chapter five. The night express

      Iris was awakened that night, as usual, by the express screaming through the darkness. Jumping out of bed, she reached the window in time to see it outline the curve of the lake with a fiery wire. As it rattled below the hotel, the golden streak expanded to a string of lighted windows, which, when it passed, snapped together again like the links of a bracelet.

      After it had disappeared round the gorge, she followed its course by its pall of quivering red smoke. In imagination, she saw it shooting through Europe, as though it were an explosive shuttle ripping through the scorched fabric of the map. It caught up cities and threaded them on a gleaming whistling string. Illuminated names flashed before her eyes and were gone – Bucharest, Zagreb, Trieste, Milan, Basle, Calais.

      Once again she was flooded with home-hunger, even though her future address were an hotel. Mixed with it was a gust of foreboding – which was a legacy from the mountains.

      “Suppose – something – happened, and I never came back.”

      At that moment she felt that any evil could block the way to her return. A railway crash, illness, or crime were possibilities, which were actually scheduled in other lives. They were happening all round her and at any time a line might give way in the protective square in her palm.

      As she lay and tossed, she consoled herself with the reminder that this was the last time she would lie under the lumpy feather bed. Throughout the next two nights she, too, would be rushing through the dark landscape, jerked out of every brief spell of sleep by the flash of lights, whenever the express roared through a station.

      The thought was with her when she woke, the next morning, to see the silhouette of mountain-peaks iced against the flush of sunrise.

      “I’m going home to-day,” she told herself exultantly.

      The air was raw when she looked out of her window. Mist was rising from the lake which gleamed greenly through yellowed fans of chestnut trees. But in spite of the blue and gold glory of autumn she felt indifferent to its beauty.

      She was also detached from the drawbacks of her room, which usually offended her critical taste. Its wooden walls were stained a crude shade of raw sienna, and instead of running water there was a battered washstand which bore a tin can, covered with a thin towel.

      In spirit, Iris had already left the hotel. Her journey was begun before she started. When she went down to the restaurant she was barely conscious of the other guests, who, only a few hours before, had inspired her with antipathy.

      The Misses Flood-Porter, who were dressed for writing letters in the open, were breakfasting at a table by the window. They did not speak to her, although they would have bowed as a matter of courtesy, had they caught her eye.

      Iris did not notice the omission, because they had gone completely out of her life. She drank her coffee in a silence which was broken by occasional remarks from the sisters, who wondered whether the English weather were kind for a local military wedding.

      Her luck held, for she was spared contact with the other guests, who were engrossed by their own affairs. As she passed the bureau, Mrs. Barnes was calling a waiter’s attention to a letter in one of the pigeon-holes. Her grey jersey-suit, as well as her packet of sandwiches, advertised an excursion.

      The vicar, who was filling his pipe on the veranda, was also in unconventional kit – shorts, sweater, nailed boots, and the local felt hat – adorned with a tiny blue feather – which he had bought as a souvenir of his holiday.

      His smile was so happy that Iris thought he looked both festive and good, as though a saint had deserted his shrine, knocking his halo a trifle askew in the process, in order to put a coat of sunburn over his pallid plaster.

      Her tolerance faded as she listened to a dialogue which was destined to affect her own future.

      “Is that a letter from home?” called the vicar.

      “Yes,” replied his wife, after a pause.

      “I thought Grandma told us to expect no more letters…What’s she writing about?”

      “She wants me to do a little shopping for her, on our way through London. Some Margaret Rose silk. The little Princess, you know.”

      “But you’ll be tired. It’s not very considerate.”

      “No.” Mrs. Barnes’ voice was exceptionally sharp. “It’s not. Why didn’t she think?”

      Iris condoned her own ungracious conduct of the preceding night, as she left them to their discussion. She told herself that he was justified in protecting herself from the boredom of domestic trifles.

      As she strolled past the front of the hotel, she had to draw back to avoid trespassing on the privacy of the honeymoon pair, whose sitting-room opened on to the veranda. They were breakfasting in the open air, off rolls and fruit. The man was resplendent in a Chinese dressing-gown, while his wife wore an elaborate wrapper over satin pyjamas.

      The Todhunters annoyed Iris, because they affected her with vague discontent. She was conscious of the same unacknowledged blank when she watched a love-scene played by two film stars. Theirs was passion – perfectly dressed, discreetly censored and with the better profile presented to the camera.

      She felt a responsive thrill when the man looked into his bride’s eyes with intense personal interest.

      “Has it been perfect?” he asked.

      Mrs. Todhunter knew exactly how long to pause before her reply.

      “Yes.”

      It was faultless timing for he understood what she did not say.

      “Not perfect, then,” he remarked. “But, darling, is anything—”

      Iris passed out of earshot, while she was still slightly envious. Her own experience of love had been merely a succession of episodes which led up to the photographic farce of her engagement.

      The morning seemed endless, but at length it wore away. She had little to pack, because – following tradition – her friends had taken the bulk of her luggage with them, to save her trouble. An hour or two were killed, or rather drowned, in the lake, but she was too impatient to lie in the sun.

      After she had changed for her journey, she went down to the restaurant. The dish of the day was attractively jellied and garnished with sprigs of tarragon, СКАЧАТЬ