Marriage. H. G. Wells

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СКАЧАТЬ it out and scored one, and after his list was exhausted all the surviving names on the next list were read over in the same way, and so on. The names had to be the names of dead celebrated people, only one monarch of the same name of the same dynasty was allowed, and Mr. Pope adjudicated on all doubtful cases. It was great fun.

      The first two games were won as usual by Mr. Pope, and then Mr. Wintersloan, who had been a little distraught in his manner, brightened up and scribbled furiously.

      The letter was D, and after Mr. Pope had rehearsed a tale of nine and twenty names, Mr. Wintersloan read out his list in that curious voice of his which suggested nothing so much as some mobile drink glucking out of the neck of a bottle held upside down.

      "Dahl," he began.

      "Who was Dahl?" asked Mr. Pope.

      "'Vented dahlias," said Mr. Wintersloan, with a sigh. "Danton."

      "Forgot him," said Mr. Pope.

      "Davis."

      "Davis?"

      "Davis Straits. Doe."

      "Who?"

      "John Doe, Richard Roe."

      "Legal fiction, I'm afraid," said Mr. Pope.

      "Dam," said Mr. Wintersloan, and added after a slight pause: "Anthony van."

      Mr. Pope made an interrogative noise.

      "Painter—eighteenth century—Dutch. Dam, Jan van, his son. Dam, Frederich van. Dam, Wilhelm van. Dam, Diedrich van. Dam, Wilhelmina, wood engraver, gifted woman. Diehl."

      "Who?"

      "Painter—dead—famous. See Düsseldorf. It's all painters now—all guaranteed dead, all good men. Deeds of Norfolk, the aquarellist, Denton, Dibbs."

      "Er?" said Mr. Pope.

      "The Warwick Claude, you know. Died 1823."

      "Dickson, Dunting, John Dickery. Peter Dickery, William Dock—I beg your pardon?"

      Mr. Pope was making a protesting gesture, but Mr. Wintersloan's bearing was invincible, and he proceeded.

      In the end he emerged triumphant with forty-nine names, mostly painters for whose fame he answered, but whose reputations were certainly new to every one else present. "I can go on like that," said Mr. Wintersloan, "with any letter," and turned that hard little smile full on Marjorie. "I didn't see how to do it at first. I just cast about. But I know a frightful lot of painters. No end. Shall we try again?"

      Marjorie glanced at her father. Mr. Wintersloan's methods were all too evident to her. A curious feeling pervaded the room that Mr. Pope didn't think Mr. Wintersloan's conduct honourable, and that he might even go some way towards saying so.

      So Mrs. Pope became very brisk and stirring, and said she thought that now perhaps a charade would be more amusing. It didn't do to keep on at a game too long. She asked Rom and Daphne and Theodore and Mr. Wintersloan to go out, and they all agreed readily, particularly Rom. "Come on!" said Rom to Mr. Wintersloan. Everybody else shifted into an audience-like group between the piano and the what-not. Mr. Magnet sat at Marjorie's feet, while Syd played a kind of voluntary, and Mr. Pope leant back in his chair, with his brows knit and lips moving, trying to remember something.

      The charade was very amusing. The word was Catarrh, and Mr. Wintersloan, as the patient in the last act being given gruel, surpassed even the children's very high expectations. Rom, as his nurse, couldn't keep her hands off him. Then the younger people kissed round and were packed off to bed, and the rest of the party went to the door upon the lawn and admired the night. It was a glorious summer night, deep blue, and rimmed warmly by the afterglow, moonless, and with a few big lamp-like stars above the black still shapes of trees.

      Mrs. Pope said they would all accompany their guests to the gate at the end of the avenue—in spite of the cockchafers.

      Mr. Pope's ankle, however, excused him; the cordiality of his parting from Mr. Wintersloan seemed a trifle forced, and he limped thoughtfully and a little sombrely towards the study to see if he could find an Encyclopædia or some such book of reference that would give the names of the lesser lights of Dutch, Italian, and English painting during the last two centuries.

      He felt that Mr. Wintersloan had established an extraordinarily bad precedent.

      § 10

      Marjorie discovered that she and Mr. Magnet had fallen a little behind the others. She would have quickened her pace, but Mr. Magnet stopped short and said: "Marjorie!"

      "When I saw you standing there and singing," said Mr. Magnet, and was short of breath for a moment.

      Marjorie's natural gift for interruption failed her altogether.

      "I felt I would rather be able to call you mine—than win an empire."

      The pause seemed to lengthen, between them, and Marjorie's remark when she made it at last struck her even as she made it as being but poorly conceived. She had some weak idea of being self-depreciatory.

      "I think you had better win an empire, Mr. Magnet," she said meekly.

      Then, before anything more was possible, they had come up to Daffy and Mr. Wintersloan and her mother at the gate....

      As they returned Mrs. Pope was loud in the praises of Will Magnet. She had a little clear-cut voice, very carefully and very skilfully controlled, and she dilated on his modesty, his quiet helpfulness at table, his ready presence of mind. She pointed out instances of those admirable traits, incidents small in themselves but charming in their implications. When somebody wanted junket, he had made no fuss, he had just helped them to junket. "So modest and unassuming," sang Mrs. Pope. "You'd never dream he was quite rich and famous. Yet every book he writes is translated into Russian and German and all sorts of languages. I suppose he's almost the greatest humorist we have. That play of his; what is it called?—Our Owd Woman—has been performed nearly twelve hundred times! I think that is the most wonderful of gifts. Think of the people it has made happy."

      The conversation was mainly monologue. Both Marjorie and Daffy were unusually thoughtful.

      § 11

      Marjorie ended the long day in a worldly mood.

      "Penny for your thoughts," said Daffy abruptly, brushing the long firelit rapids of her hair.

      "Not for sale," said Marjorie, and roused herself. "I've had a long day."

      "It's always just the time I particularly wish I was a man," she remarked after a brief return to meditation. "Fancy, no hair-pins, no brushing, no tie-up to get lost about, no strings. I suppose they haven't strings?"

      "They haven't," said Daffy with conviction.

      She met Marjorie's interrogative eye. "Father would swear at them," she explained. "He'd naturally tie himself up—and we should hear of it."

      "I didn't think of that," said Marjorie, and stuck out her chin upon her fists. "Sound induction."

      She СКАЧАТЬ