The Longest Journey. E. M. Forster

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ his nose, but really I must speak to someone, and he has neither father nor mother. His nose! It poured twice with blood in the Long.”

      “Yes?”

      “It’s a thing that ought to be known. I assure you, that little room! … And in any case, Mr. Elliot’s a gentleman that can ill afford to lose it. Luckily his friends were up; and I always say they’re more like brothers than anything else.”

      “Nice for him. He has no real brothers.”

      “Oh, Mr. Hornblower, he is a merry gentleman, and Mr. Tilliard too! And Mr. Elliot himself likes his romp at times. Why, it’s the merriest staircase in the buildings! Last night the bedmaker from W said to me, ‘What are you doing to my gentlemen? Here’s Mr. Ansell come back ‘ot with his collar flopping.’ I said, ‘And a good thing.’ Some bedders keep their gentlemen just so; but surely, miss, the world being what it is, the longer one is able to laugh in it the better.”

      Bedmakers have to be comic and dishonest. It is expected of them. In a picture of university life it is their only function. So when we meet one who has the face of a lady, and feelings of which a lady might be proud, we pass her by.

      “Yes?” said Miss Pembroke, and then their talk was stopped by the arrival of her brother.

      “It is too bad!” he exclaimed. “It is really too bad.”

      “Now, Bertie boy, Bertie boy! I’ll have no peevishness.”

      “I am not peevish, Agnes, but I have a full right to be. Pray, why did he not meet us? Why did he not provide rooms? And pray, why did you leave me to do all the settling? All the lodgings I knew are full, and our bedrooms look into a mews. I cannot help it. And then—look here! It really is too bad.” He held up his foot like a wounded dog. It was dripping with water.

      “Oho! This explains the peevishness. Off with it at once. It’ll be another of your colds.”

      “I really think I had better.” He sat down by the fire and daintily unlaced his boot. “I notice a great change in university tone. I can never remember swaggering three abreast along the pavement and charging inoffensive visitors into a gutter when I was an undergraduate. One of the men, too, wore an Eton tie. But the others, I should say, came from very queer schools, if they came from any schools at all.”

      Mr. Pembroke was nearly twenty years older than his sister, and had never been as handsome. But he was not at all the person to knock into a gutter, for though not in orders, he had the air of being on the verge of them, and his features, as well as his clothes, had the clerical cut. In his presence conversation became pure and colourless and full of understatements, and—just as if he was a real clergyman—neither men nor boys ever forgot that he was there. He had observed this, and it pleased him very much. His conscience permitted him to enter the Church whenever his profession, which was the scholastic, should demand it.

      “No gutter in the world’s as wet as this,” said Agnes, who had peeled off her brother’s sock, and was now toasting it at the embers on a pair of tongs.

      “Surely you know the running water by the edge of the Trumpington road? It’s turned on occasionally to clear away the refuse—a most primitive idea. When I was up we had a joke about it, and called it the ‘Pem.’ ”

      “How complimentary!”

      “You foolish girl—not after me, of course. We called it the ‘Pem’ because it is close to Pembroke College. I remember—” He smiled a little, and twiddled his toes. Then he remembered the bedmaker, and said, “My sock is now dry. My sock, please.”

      “Your sock is sopping. No, you don’t!” She twitched the tongs away from him. Mrs. Aberdeen, without speaking, fetched a pair of Rickie’s socks and a pair of Rickie’s shoes.

      “Thank you; ah, thank you. I am sure Mr. Elliot would allow it.”

      Then he said in French to his sister, “Has there been the slightest sign of Frederick?”

      “Now, do call him Rickie, and talk English. I found him here. He had forgotten about us, and was very sorry. Now he’s gone to get some dinner, and I can’t think why he isn’t back.”

      Mrs. Aberdeen left them.

      “He wants pulling up sharply. There is nothing original in absent-mindedness. True originality lies elsewhere. Really, the lower classes have no nous. However can I wear such deformities?” For he had been madly trying to cram a right-hand foot into a left-hand shoe.

      “Don’t!” said Agnes hastily. “Don’t touch the poor fellow’s things.” The sight of the smart, stubby patent leather made her almost feel faint. She had known Rickie for many years, but it seemed so dreadful and so different now that he was a man. It was her first great contact with the abnormal, and unknown fibres of her being rose in revolt against it. She frowned when she heard his uneven tread upon the stairs.

      “Agnes—before he arrives—you ought never to have left me and gone to his rooms alone. A most elementary transgression. Imagine the unpleasantness if you had found him with friends. If Gerald—”

      Rickie by now had got into a fluster. At the kitchens he had lost his head, and when his turn came—he had had to wait—he had yielded his place to those behind, saying that he didn’t matter. And he had wasted more precious time buying bananas, though he knew that the Pembrokes were not partial to fruit. Amid much tardy and chaotic hospitality the meal got under way. All the spoons and forks were anyhow, for Mrs. Aberdeen’s virtues were not practical. The fish seemed never to have been alive, the meat had no kick, and the cork of the college claret slid forth silently, as if ashamed of the contents. Agnes was particularly pleasant. But her brother could not recover himself. He still remembered their desolate arrival, and he could feel the waters of the Pem eating into his instep.

      “Rickie,” cried the lady, “are you aware that you haven’t congratulated me on my engagement?”

      Rickie laughed nervously, and said, “Why no! No more I have.”

      “Say something pretty, then.”

      “I hope you’ll be very happy,” he mumbled. “But I don’t know anything about marriage.”

      “Oh, you awful boy! Herbert, isn’t he just the same? But you do know something about Gerald, so don’t be so chilly and cautious. I’ve just realized, looking at those groups, that you must have been at school together. Did you come much across him?”

      “Very little,” he answered, and sounded shy. He got up hastily, and began to muddle with the coffee.

      “But he was in the same house. Surely that’s a house group?”

      “He was a prefect.” He made his coffee on the simple system. One had a brown pot, into which the boiling stuff was poured. Just before serving one put in a drop of cold water, and the idea was that the grounds fell to the bottom.

      “Wasn’t he a kind of athletic marvel? Couldn’t he knock any boy or master down?”

      “Yes.”

      “If he had wanted to,” said Mr. Pembroke, who had not spoken for some time.

      “If he had wanted to,” СКАЧАТЬ