Tono-Bungay, H. G. Wells [reading like a writer .TXT] 📗

them all, was a Breton. There was some subterfuge about our position on board⁠—I forget the particulars now⁠—I was called the supercargo and Pollack was the steward. This added to the piratical flavour that insufficient funds and Gordon-Nasmyth’s original genius had already given the enterprise.

Those two days of bustle at Gravesend, under dingy skies, in narrow, dirty streets, were a new experience for me. It is like nothing else in my life. I realised that I was a modern and a civilised man. I found the food filthy and the coffee horrible; the whole town stank in my nostrils, the landlord of the Good Intent on the quay had a stand-up quarrel with us before I could get even a hot bath, and the bedroom I slept in was infested by a quantity of exotic but voracious flat parasites called locally “bugs,” in the walls, in the woodwork, everywhere. I fought them with insect powder, and found them comatose in the morning. I was dipping down into the dingy underworld of the contemporary state, and I liked it no better than I did my first dip into it when I stayed with my Uncle Nicodemus Frapp at the bakery at Chatham⁠—where, by the by, we had to deal with cockroaches of a smaller, darker variety, and also with bugs of sorts.

Let me confess that through all this time before we started I was immensely self-conscious, and that Beatrice played the part of audience in my imagination throughout. I was, as I say, “saving the situation,” and I was acutely aware of that. The evening before we sailed, instead of revising our medicine-chest as I had intended, I took the car and ran across country to Lady Grove to tell my aunt of the journey I was making, dress, and astonish Lady Osprey by an after dinner call.

The two ladies were at home and alone beside a big fire that seemed wonderfully cheerful after the winter night. I remember the effect of the little parlour in which they sat as very bright and domestic. Lady Osprey, in a costume of mauve and lace, sat on a chintz sofa and played an elaborately spread-out patience by the light of a tall shaded lamp; Beatrice, in a whiteness that showed her throat, smoked a cigarette in an armchair and read with a lamp at her elbow. The room was white-panelled and chintz-curtained. About those two bright centres of light were warm dark shadow, in which a circular mirror shone like a pool of brown water. I carried off my raid by behaving like a slave of etiquette. There were moments when I think I really made Lady Osprey believe that my call was an unavoidable necessity, that it would have been negligent of me not to call just how and when I did. But at the best those were transitory moments.

They received me with disciplined amazement. Lady Osprey was interested in my face and scrutinised the scar. Beatrice stood behind her solicitude. Our eyes met, and in hers I could see startled interrogations.

“I’m going,” I said, “to the west coast of Africa.”

They asked questions, but it suited my mood to be vague.

“We’ve interests there. It is urgent I should go. I don’t know when I may return.”

After that I perceived Beatrice surveyed me steadily.

The conversation was rather difficult. I embarked upon lengthy thanks for their kindness to me after my accident. I tried to understand Lady Osprey’s game of patience, but it didn’t appear that Lady Osprey was anxious for me to understand her patience. I came to the verge of taking my leave.

“You needn’t go yet,” said Beatrice, abruptly.

She walked across to the piano, took a pile of music from the cabinet near, surveyed Lady Osprey’s back, and with a gesture to me dropped it all deliberately on to the floor.

“Must talk,” she said, kneeling close to me as I helped her to pick it up. “Turn my pages. At the piano.”

“I can’t read music.”

“Turn my pages.”

Presently we were at the piano, and Beatrice was playing with noisy inaccuracy. She glanced over her shoulder and Lady Osprey had resumed her patience. The old lady was very pink, and appeared to be absorbed in some attempt to cheat herself without our observing it.

“Isn’t West Africa a vile climate?” “Are you going to live there?” “Why are you going?”

Beatrice asked these questions in a low voice and gave me no chance to answer. Then taking a rhythm from the music before her, she said⁠—

“At the back of the house is a garden⁠—a door in the wall⁠—on the lane. Understand?”

I turned over the pages without any effect on her playing.

“When?” I asked.

She dealt in chords. “I wish I could play this!” she said. “Midnight.”

She gave her attention to the music for a time.

“You may have to wait.”

“I’ll wait.”

She brought her playing to an end by⁠—as school boys say⁠—“stashing it up.”

“I can’t play tonight,” she said, standing up and meeting my eyes. “I wanted to give you a parting voluntary.”

“Was that Wagner, Beatrice?” asked Lady Osprey looking up from her cards. “It sounded very confused.”

I took my leave. I had a curious twinge of conscience as I parted from Lady Osprey. Either a first intimation of middle-age or my inexperience in romantic affairs was to blame, but I felt a very distinct objection to the prospect of invading this good lady’s premises from the garden door. I motored up to the pavilion, found Cothope reading in bed, told him for the first time of West Africa, spent an hour with him in settling all the outstanding details of Lord Roberts β, and left that in his hands to finish against my return. I sent the motor back to Lady Grove, and still wearing my fur coat⁠—for the January night was damp and bitterly cold⁠—walked to Bedley Corner. I found the lane to the back of the Dower House without any difficulty, and was at the door in the wall with ten minutes to spare.