Название: Sinister Street
Автор: Compton Mackenzie
Издательство: Bookwire
Жанр: Языкознание
isbn: 4064066394707
isbn:
It was very exciting to stand on tiptoe in the kitchen while Mrs. Frith cut the string and displayed the canaries in all the splendour of their cage.
"Beautiful things," said Mrs. Frith. "I'm that fond of birds."
"Don't they hop!" said Annie. "Not a bit frightened they don't seem, do they?"
"What are their names?" Mrs. Frith enquired.
Michael thought for a long time.
"What are their names, Mrs. Frith?" he asked at last.
"That's your business," said Cook.
"Why is it?" Michael wanted to know.
"Because they're your birds, stupid."
"One's Stella's."
"Well, Stella isn't old enough to choose for herself. Come along, what are you going to call them?"
"You call them," said Michael persuasively.
"Well, if they was mine I should call them——" Cook paused.
"What would you?" said Michael, more persuasively than ever.
"I'm blessed if I know. There, Annie, what does anyone call a canary?"
"Don't ask me, I'm sure. No," simpered Annie.
"I shouldn't call them nothing, I shouldn't," Mrs. Frith finally decided. "It isn't like dogs."
"What's the matter?" said Nurse, bustling into the kitchen. "Has one got out? Has one got out?"
"I was telling Master Michael here," said Cook, "as how I shouldn't call neither of them nothing. Not if I was he."
"Call what? Call what?" Nurse asked quickly.
"His new dicky-birds."
"Must have names. Yes. Yes. Must have names. Dick and Tom. Dick and Tom."
"But one's a girl," Michael objected.
"Can't be changed now. Must be Dick and Tom," Nurse settled, blowing rapidly as usual.
The decision worried Michael considerably, but as they both turned out to be hens and laid twenty-three eggs between them next spring, it ceased to bother him any more.
The Miss Marrows' School and Kindergarten, kept by Miss Marrow and Miss Caroline Marrow assisted by Miss Hewitt and Miss Hunt, struck Michael as a very solemn establishment indeed. Although its outward appearance was merely that of an ordinary house somewhat larger than others on account of its situation at the corner of Fairfax Terrace, it contained inside a variety of scholastic furniture that was bound to impress the novice.
At twenty minutes past nine on the first day of the autumn term, Nurse and Michael stood before a brass plate inscribed
The Misses Marrow School and Kindergarten |
while a bell still jangled with the news of their arrival. They were immediately shown into a very small and very stuffy room on the right of the front door—a gloomy little room, because blinds of coloured beads shut out the unscholastic world. This room was uncomfortably crowded with little girls taking off goloshes and unlacing long brown boots, with little boys squabbling over their indoor shoes, with little girls chatting and giggling and pushing and bumping, with little boys shouting and quarrelling and kicking and pulling. A huddled and heated knot of nurses and nursemaids tried to help their charges, while every minute more little boys and more little girls and more bigger girls pushed their way in and made the confusion worse. In the middle of the uproar Miss Marrow herself entered and the noise was instantly lulled.
"The new boys will wait in here and the new girls will quietly follow Helen Hungerford down the passage to Miss Caroline's room. Nurses need not wait any longer."
Then a bell vibrated shrilly. There was a general scamper as the nurses and the nursemaids and the old boys and the old girls hurried from the room, leaving Michael and two other boys, both about two years older than himself, to survey each other with suspicion. The other boys finding Michael beneath the dignity of their notice spoke to each other, or rather the larger of the two, a long-bodied boy with a big head and vacant mouth, said to the other, a fidgety boy with a pink face, a frog-like smile and very tight knickerbockers:
"I say, what's your name?"
The pink-faced boy gulped "Edward Ernest Arnott."
"What is it then?" asked the long-bodied boy.
"Arnott is my surname. Edward and Ernest," he gulped again, "are my Christian names."
"Mine's Vernon Brown. I say, what's your father?"
"A solicitor," said Edward. "What's yours?"
"A cricket—I mean a critic," said Vernon.
"What's that?"
This seemed to upset the long-bodied boy, who replied:
"Coo! Don't you know what a cricket is? I mean critic. You must be a kid."
Michael thought this was the most extraordinary conversation he had ever heard. Not even Mrs. Frith and Annie could be so incomprehensible.
"I don't believe you know yourself," said the pink-faced boy, deepening to crimson.
"Don't I? I bet I do."
"I bet you don't."
"I know better than you anyway."
"So do I than you."
Michael would have found a conversation between two fox-terriers more intelligible. It ended abruptly, however, with the entrance of Miss Marrow, who waved them all to follow her to the severity of her own room. Edward Arnott and Vernon Brown were despatched upstairs to take their places in the class above the Kindergarten for which Michael was destined and whither he followed Miss Marrow, wondering at the size and ugliness of her. Miss Marrow's base was a black bell, on which was set a black cushion, above which was Miss Marrow's round beetroot-coloured face. Miss Caroline was like a green curtain through the folds of which seemed to have burst a red face like her sister's СКАЧАТЬ