Гилберт Честертон - Английский с улыбкой. Охотничьи рассказы / Tales of the Long Bow

She stopped in front of him and her pale, flying eyelids lifted from her blue-grey eyes.

“Why,” she said, “you are the boy that jumped in the river!”

“I’m no longer a boy,” answered Hood, “but I’m ready to jump in the river again.”

“Well, don’t jump on the railway-line,” she said, when he turned quickly in that direction.

“To tell you the truth,” he said, “I was thinking of jumping into a railway-train. Do you mind if I jump into your train?”

“Well, I’m going to Birkstead,” she said with some doubt in her voice.

Mr. Owen Hood did not care one bit where she was going, because he had decided to go there, but he actually remembered a little station on that line that lay very near to where he was going, so he tumbled into the carriage. The landscapes shot by them while they sat looking in a dazed and almost foolish manner at each other. At last the girl felt how absurd it all was and smiled.

“I heard about you from a friend of yours,” she said; “he came to call on us soon after it happened. At least that was when he first came. You know Dr. Hunter, don’t you?”

“Yes,” replied Owen, a shadow coming over his shining hour. “Do you… Do you know him well?”

“I know him pretty well now,” said Miss Elizabeth Seymour.

The shadow on his spirit became darker; he suspected something quite suddenly, and the idea made him furious. Hunter, in Crane’s old phrase, was not a man who would let the grass grow under his feet. It was so like him to use the incident as an introduction to the Seymours. Things were always stepping-stones for Hunter, and the little rock in the river had been a stepping-stone to the country-house. But was the country-house a stepping-stone to something else? Suddenly Hood realized that all his anger had been very abstract anger. He had never hated a man before. At that moment the train stopped at the station of Cowford.

“I wish you’d get out here with me,” he said quickly, “only for a little – and it might be the last time. I want you to do something.”

She looked at him with a curious expression and said in a rather low voice, “What do you want me to do?”

“I want you to come and pick bluebells,” he said.

She stepped out of the train, and they went up a country road without a word.

“I remember!” she said suddenly. “When you get to the top of this hill you see the wood where the bluebells were, and your little island beyond.”

“Come on and see it,” said Owen.

They stepped on the top of the hill and stood. Below them the black factory threw its yellowish smoke into the air; and where the wood had been there were now rows of little houses like boxes, built of dirty yellow brick.

Hood spoke. “And when you see the abomination of desolation sitting in the Holy of Holies [21]– isn’t that when the world is supposed to end? I want the world to end now – with you and me standing on a hill.”

She was staring at the place with parted lips and she was paler than usual; he knew she understood something monstrous and symbolic in the scene; yet her first remark was short and trivial. On the nearest of the yellow brick boxes she could see the cheap colours of different advertisements; and larger than the rest a blue poster proclaiming “Vote for Hunter.” With a final touch of hatred, Hood remembered that it was the last and most important day of the election. But the girl had already found her voice.

“Is that Dr. Hunter?” she asked with very usual curiosity; “is he standing for parliament?”

A load that lay on Hood’s mind like a rock suddenly rose like an eagle; and he felt as if the hill he stood on were higher than Everest. He understood well enough that SHE would have known well enough whether Hunter was standing, if —

if there had been anything like what he supposed. Suddenly, the weight wasn’t there anymore, and he lost his balance and said something quite indefensible.

“I thought you would know. I thought you and he were probably… well, the truth is I thought you were engaged, though I really don’t know why.”

“I can’t imagine why,” said Elizabeth Seymour. “I heard he was engaged to Sir Samuel’s daughter. They’ve got our old place now, you know.”

There was a silence and then Hood spoke suddenly in a loud and cheerful voice.

“Well, I say, ‘Vote for Hunter,’” he said cheerfully. “After all, why not vote for Hunter? Good old Hunter! I hope he’ll be a member of Parliament. I hope he’ll be Prime Minister. I hope he’ll be President of the World State. By George [22], he deserves to be Emperor of the Solar System.”

“But why,” she protested, “why should he deserve all that?”

“For not being engaged to you, of course,” he replied.

“Oh!” she said, and something of a secret shiver in her voice went through him like a silver bell.

Abruptly, all of a sudden, the rage of raillery seemed to have left his voice and his face, so that his Napoleonic profile looked earnest and eager and much younger, like the profile of the young Napoleon. His wide shoulders lost the slight stoop that books had given them, and his rather wild red hair fell away from his lifted head.

“There is one thing I must tell you about him,” he said, “and one thing you must hear about me. My friends tell me I am a drifter and a dreamer; that I let the grass grow under my feet; I must tell you at least how and why I once let it grow. Three days after that day near the river, I talked to Hunter; he was my doctor and he talked about it and you. Of course he knew nothing about either. But he is a practical man; a very practical man; he does not dream or drift. From the way he talked I knew he was thinking even then how this accident could be used; used for his purposes and perhaps for mine too (because he is good-natured; yes, he is quite good-natured). I think that if I had taken his hint and formed a sort of social partnership, I might have known you six years sooner, not as a memory, but – an acquaintance. And I could not do it. Judge me how you will, I could not bring myself to do it.

That is what is meant by being born with a bee in the bonnet [23], with an impediment in the speech, with a stumbling-block in the path. I could not bear to approach you by that door, with that gross and grinning lackey holding it open.

I could not bear that terrible snob to take so much space in my story or know so much of my secret. A revulsion I could never describe made me feel that the vision should remain my own even by remaining unfulfilled. It should not be vulgarized. That is what people mean when they say you are a failure in life. And when my best friend made a prophecy about me, and said there was something I should never do, I thought he was right.”

“Why, what do you mean?” she asked rather faintly, “what was it you would never do?”

“Never mind that now,” he said, with the shadow of a returning smile. “Rather strange things are moving in me just now, and who knows, maybe I will try something yet? But before all else, I must make clear for once what I am and for what I lived. There are men like me in the world; I am far from thinking they are the best or the most valuable; but they exist, to the irritation and surprise of all the clever people and the realists. There has been and there is only one thing for me; something that in the normal sense I never even knew. I walked about the world blind, with my eyes turned inside me, looking at you. For days after a night when I had dreamed of you, I was broken. I was like a man who had seen a ghost. I read over and over the solemn lines of the old poets, because only they were worthy of you. And when I saw you again by chance, I thought the world had already ended. It is like meeting you beyond the grave. It is too good to be true.”