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The British Barbarians. Allen Grant
Читать онлайн.Название The British Barbarians
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Автор произведения Allen Grant
Жанр Зарубежная классика
Издательство Public Domain
A moment’s reflection, however, sufficed to save the ingenuous young man from the pitfall of so serious a social solecism. It would be fatal to accost him. For, mark you, no matter how gentlemanly and well-tailored a stranger may look, you can never be sure nowadays (in these topsy-turvy times of subversive radicalism) whether he is or is not really a gentleman. That makes acquaintanceship a dangerous luxury. If you begin by talking to a man, be it ever so casually, he may desire to thrust his company upon you, willy-nilly, in future; and when you have ladies of your family living in a place, you really CANNOT be too particular what companions you pick up there, were it even in the most informal and momentary fashion. Besides, the fellow might turn out to be one of your social superiors, and not care to know you; in which case, of course, you would only be letting yourself in for a needless snubbing. In fact, in this modern England of ours, this fatherland of snobdom, one passes one’s life in a see-saw of doubt, between the Scylla and Charybdis of those two antithetical social dangers. You are always afraid you may get to know somebody you yourself do not want to know, or may try to know somebody who does not want to know you.
Guided by these truly British principles of ancestral wisdom, Philip Christy would probably never have seen anything more of the distinguished-looking stranger had it not been for a passing accident of muscular action, over which his control was distinctly precarious. He happened in brushing past to catch the stranger’s eye. It was a clear blue eye, very deep and truthful. It somehow succeeded in riveting for a second Philip’s attention. And it was plain the stranger was less afraid of speaking than Philip himself was. For he advanced with a pleasant smile on his open countenance, and waved one gloveless hand in a sort of impalpable or half-checked salute, which impressed his new acquaintance as a vaguely polite Continental gesture. This affected Philip favourably: the newcomer was a somebody then, and knew his place: for just in proportion as Philip felt afraid to begin conversation himself with an unplaced stranger, did he respect any other man who felt so perfectly sure of his own position that he shared no such middle-class doubts or misgivings. A duke is never afraid of accosting anybody. Philip was strengthened, therefore, in his first idea, that the man in the grey suit was a person of no small distinction in society, else surely he would not have come up and spoken with such engaging frankness and ease of manner.
“I beg your pardon,” the stranger said, addressing him in pure and limpid English, which sounded to Philip like the dialect of the very best circles, yet with some nameless difference of intonation or accent which certainly was not foreign, still less provincial, or Scotch, or Irish; it seemed rather like the very purest well of English undefiled Philip had ever heard,—only, if anything, a little more so; “I beg your pardon, but I’m a stranger hereabouts, and I should be so VERY much obliged if you could kindly direct me to any good lodgings.”
His voice and accent attracted Philip even more now he stood near at hand than his appearance had done from a little distance. It was impossible, indeed, to say definitely in set terms what there was about the man that made his personality and his words so charming; but from that very first minute, Philip freely admitted to himself that the stranger in the grey suit was a perfect gentleman. Nay, so much did he feel it in his ingenuous way that he threw off at once his accustomed cloak of dubious reserve, and, standing still to think, answered after a short pause, “Well, we’ve a great many very nice furnished houses about here to let, but not many lodgings. Brackenhurst’s a cut above lodgings, don’t you know; it’s a residential quarter. But I should think Miss Blake’s, at Heathercliff House, would perhaps be just the sort of thing to suit you.”
“Oh, thank you,” the stranger answered, with a deferential politeness which charmed Philip once more by its graceful expressiveness. “And could you kindly direct me to them? I don’t know my way about at all, you see, as yet, in this country.”
“With pleasure,” Philip replied, quite delighted at the chance of solving the mystery of where the stranger had dropped from. “I’m going that way myself, and can take you past her door. It’s only a few steps. Then you’re a stranger in England?”
The newcomer smiled a curious self-restrained smile. He was both young and handsome. “Yes, I’m a stranger in your England,” he answered, gravely, in the tone of one who wishes to avoid an awkward discussion. “In fact, an Alien. I only arrived here this very morning.”
“From the Continent?” Philip inquired, arching his eyebrows slightly.
The stranger smiled again. “No, not from the Continent,” he replied, with provoking evasiveness.
“I thought you weren’t a foreigner,” Philip continued in a blandly suggestive voice. “That is to say,” he went on, after a second’s pause, during which the stranger volunteered no further statement, “you speak English like an Englishman.”
“Do I?” the stranger answered. “Well, I’m glad of that. It’ll make intercourse with your Englishmen so much more easy.”
By this time Philip’s curiosity was thoroughly whetted. “But you’re not an Englishman, you say?” he asked, with a little natural hesitation.
“No, not exactly what you call an Englishman,” the stranger replied, as if he didn’t quite care for such clumsy attempts to examine his antecedents. “As I tell you, I’m an Alien. But we always spoke English at home,” he added with an afterthought, as if ready to vouchsafe all the other information that lay in his power.
“You can’t be an American, I’m sure,” Philip went on, unabashed, his eagerness to solve the question at issue, once raised, getting the better for the moment of both reserve and politeness.
“No, I’m certainly not an American,” the stranger answered with a gentle courtesy in his tone that made Philip feel ashamed of his rudeness in questioning him.
“Nor a Colonist?” Philip asked once more, unable to take the hint.
“Nor a Colonist either,” the Alien replied curtly. And then he relapsed into a momentary silence which threw upon Philip the difficult task of continuing the conversation.
The member of Her Britannic Majesty’s Civil Service would have given anything just that minute to say to him frankly, “Well, if you’re not an Englishman, and you’re not an American, and you’re not a Colonist, and you ARE an Alien, and yet you talk English like a native, and have always talked it, why, what in the name of goodness do you want us to take you for?” But he restrained himself with difficulty. There was something about the stranger that made him feel by instinct it would be more a breach of etiquette to question him closely than to question any one he had ever met with.
They walked on along the road for some minutes together, the stranger admiring all the way the golden tresses of the laburnum and the rich perfume of the lilac, and talking much as he went of the quaintness and prettiness of the suburban houses. Philip thought them pretty, too (or rather, important), but failed to see for his own part where the quaintness came in. Nay, he took the imputation as rather a slur on so respectable a neighbourhood: for to be quaint is to be picturesque, and to be picturesque is to be old-fashioned. But the stranger’s voice and manner were so pleasant, almost so ingratiating, that Philip did not care to differ from him on the abstract question of a qualifying epithet. After all, there’s nothing positively insulting in calling a house quaint, though Philip would certainly have preferred, himself, to hear the Eligible Family Residences of that Aristocratic Neighbourhood described in auctioneering phrase as “imposing,”