LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

from his restless bed, and his bleared and tragic eyes appealed in vain for mercy from that high priest of correct demeanor. Mr. Samson looked at him as a justice of the peace, detained upon the bench when he should be at lunch and conscious that his services to the State are gratuitous, might look upon a malefactor who has gone to the length of being without visible means of subsistence. The doctor might wriggle and smile painfully and seek the obscurity of corners, but it could not serve him; there was no getting out of range of that righteous and manly battery while he stayed in the same room with it. Once, however, he spiked its guns. The glare across the tea-table, the unspoken sheer weight of rebuke and condemnation, seemed to suddenly break up the poisoned fog that clouded his faculties, and he lifted his face, shining a little as with sweat, in a quick look at Mr. Samson. Margaret, who saw it, recognized it; just so he had looked in his study when he questioned her on her case and bent his mind to the consideration of it. It was direct, expert, impersonal, the dehumanized scrutiny of the man whose trade is with flesh and blood. Something had stirred the physician in the marrow of the man, and from a judge and an executioner of justice, a drawing-room hangman, Mr. Samson had become a case. At the beginning of it, Mrs. Jakes, unfailingly watchful, had opened her mouth to speak and save the situation, but she too saw in time and closed her mouth again. Mr. Samson glowered and the hectic in his thin cheeks burned brighter.

      "You 've seen me before, Jakes!" he said, crisply.

      The little doctor nodded almost easily. "Your hand, please," he said. "Thanks."

      His forefinger found the pulse and dwelt on it; he waited with lips pursed, frowning.

      "As I thought," he said, dropping the stringy white hand again. "Yes! I 'll see you in the study, Mr. Samson, please – in half an hour."

      Mr. Samson gulped but stood up manfully. He was at his best, standing, by reason of a certain legginess which had been taken into account in the design of his clothes, but now those clothes seemed big for him.

      "What is it?" he demanded, throwing his courage into his voice.

      Dr. Jakes warned him with an uplifted finger.

      "Sit down," he said. "Keep quiet. I 'll see you in half an hour."

      He looked round at Margaret and the rest of them thoughtfully and went back to his place by the mantel-piece, sighing. It was his signal to them that his brief display of efficiency was over, and as though to screen his retreat, Mrs. Jakes coughed and hoped loudly that the rain would hold off.

      But Mr. Samson made his way to a chair and sat down in it heavily, grasping its arms with his hands, and Margaret noticed for the first time that he was an old man.

      Apparently the thing that threatened Mr. Samson was not very serious, or else the doctor had found means to head it off in time, for though he went from the study to his bed, he was at breakfast next morning, with a fastidious appetite and thereafter the course of his life remained unaltered.

      Breakfast at the Sanatorium was in theory a meal that might be taken at any hour from eight till half past eleven. In the days of his dream, Dr. Jakes had seen dimly silver dishes with spirit lamps under them and a house-party effect of folk dropping in as they came down and helping themselves. But Mrs. Jakes' thousand pounds had stopped short of the silver dishes and Mrs. Jakes herself could not be restrained from attending in person to see that the coffee was hot. Therefore, since it was not possible in any conscience to bind Mrs. Jakes to her post till noon, breakfast occurred between half-past eight and half-past nine.

      The freshness, the exuberance, of the morning were not for her; already she wore the aspect of one who has done a stage of the day's journey and shed the bloom of her vigor upon it. The sunlight, waxing like a tide in flood, was powerless to lift her prim, black-dressed personality from the level of its cares and functions. She made to each as he entered the same mechanical little bow across the crockery, smiled the same formal smile from the lips outwards and uttered the same small comment on the blaze of day that filled the earth without the window. She had her life trimmed down to a routine for convenience of handling; she was one of those people – they are the salt of the earth! – whose passions are monosyllabic, whose woes are inarticulate. The three who sat daily at meat with her knew and told each other that her composure, her face keyed up like an instrument to its pitch of vacant propriety, were a mask. Sometimes, even, there had been sounds in the night to assure them of it; occasionally Jakes, on his way to bed in the small hours, would slip on the stairs and bump down a dozen or so of them, and lie where he fell till he was picked up and set on his way again; there would be the rasp of labored breath as he was supported along the corridor, and the mumble of his blurred speech hushed by prayerful whispers. A door slammed, a low cry bitten off short, and then silence in the big house, and in the morning Mrs. Jakes with her coffee pot and trivial tinkle of speech and treble armor of practised bearing against the pity of those who knew! The sheer truculence of it held them dumb; it was the courage of a swashbuckler, of a bravo, and it imposed on them the decorum of silence.

      The doctor, she gave them to understand, suffered from the climate.

      "He never was strong," she would say, with her eyes fixed on the person addressed as though she would challenge him to dispute or question it. "Never! It 's the sun, I think; he suffers from his head, you know. He used to take aspirin for it when we were first married, but it doesn't seem to do him any good now."

      The three of them would nod sympathetically and look hastily elsewhere, as though ashamed to be the spectators of her humiliation.

      Poor Mrs. Jakes! Seven thousand miles from the streets of Clapham Junction, an exile from the cheeriness and security of its little decent houses, she held yet with a frail hand to the skirts of its beatitude. In the drawer in her bedroom which also contained Jakes' dress suit, she kept in tissue paper and sincere regard a morocco-bound mausoleum of memory – an album. Only two or three times in Mr. Samson's experience – and he had been an inmate of the Sanatorium for four years – had she brought it forth. Once was on the night before young Shaw died, and when no soothing would hold him at peace in his bed, he had lain still to look through those yellowing portraits and hear Mrs. Jakes tell how this one was doing very well as a job-master and that one had turned Papist. But Margaret Harding had seen it. Mrs. Jakes had sat on her bed, quelling Fat Mary with her eye, and seen her unpack her clothes, the frocks new from dressmakers and tailors in London, the hats of only a month ago. Margaret had been aided in buying them by a philosophic aunt who had recently given up vegetarianism on the advice of her hairdresser. "My child, play light," had been the counsel of this relative. "Don't surprise the natives; they never like it. No frills; a vigorous vicarage style is what you want." And she had brought considerable powers of personality and vocabulary to bear on Margaret's choice, so that in the result there predominated a certain austerity of raiment which Margaret found unexciting. But Mrs. Jakes received them as canons of fashion, screwing up her mouth and nodding gravely as she mastered saliencies.

      "I can't quite imagine them in these styles," she said; "the people in the Park, I mean. I suppose it's this golf that's done it."

      In return for the exhibition, she had shown Margaret her album. It had many thick pages with beveled gilt edges, each framing from one to six portraits or groups, and she had led her hearer through the lot of them, from the first to the last. They sat side by side on the bed in Mrs. Jakes' room, and the album lay open on their laps, and Mrs. Jakes' finger traveled like a pointer among the pictures while she elucidated them in a voice of quiet pride. These pale and fading faces, fixed to the order of the photographer in more than human smiles, with sleek and decorative hair and a show of clothes so patently reserved for Sundays, were neither pale nor faded for her. She knew the life behind them, their passions and their strength, and spoke of them as she might have spoken had they been waiting in the next room.

      "That 's my sister," she said, her finger pausing. "Two years older than me, but she never married. And what she used to suffer from indigestion, words can't tell. And here 's my Aunt Martha – yes, she died seven years ago. My mother's sister, you know. My mother was a Penfold – one of the Penfolds of Putney. You 've heard of them? Ah, and here 's Bill Penfold, my cousin Bill. Poor Bill, he didn't do well, ever. He had a fancy for me, once, or so they said, but my father never could bear him. No harm, you know, no real harm, but larky – sort of. This one? Oh, that 's nobody – a Mr. Wrench, who used to collect

Скачать книгу