قراءة كتاب Guy and Pauline
تنويه: تعرض هنا نبذة من اول ١٠ صفحات فقط من الكتاب الالكتروني، لقراءة الكتاب كاملا اضغط على الزر “اشتر الآن"
absurdly in excess of anything he had done, that he began to speak of a possibility if after all the smallest case might not be squeezed ... but Mr. Godbold flicked the pony, and the trap rattled up the station road at a pace quite out of accord with the warmth of the afternoon. Presently he turned to his fare:
"Mrs. Godbold said to me only this morning, she said, 'You ought to have had a luggage-flap behind and that I shall always say.' And she was right. Women is often right, what's more," the husband postulated.
Guy nodded absently: he was thinking about the books.
"Very often right," Mr. Godbold murmured.
Still Guy paid no attention.
"Very often," he repeated, but as Guy would neither contradict nor agree with him, Mr. Godbold relapsed into meditation upon the justice of his observation. The pony had settled down to his wonted pace and jogged on through the golden haze of fine September weather. Soon the village of Shipcot was left behind, and before them lay the long road winding upward over the wold to Wychford. Guy thought of the friend who had left him that afternoon and wished that Michael Fane were still with him to enjoy this illimitable sweep of country. He had been the very person to share in the excitement of arranging a new house. Guy could not remember that he had ever made a suggestion for which he had not been asked; nor could he call to mind a single occasion when his appreciation had failed. And now to-night, when for the first time he was going to sleep in his own house, his friend was gone. There had been no hint of departure during the six weeks of preparation they had spent together at the Stag Inn, and it was really perverse of Michael to rush back to London now. Guy jumped down from the trap, which was climbing the hill very slowly, and stretched his long legs. He was rather bored by his loneliness, but as soon as he had stated so much to himself, he was shocked at the disloyalty to his ambition. After all, he reassured himself, he was not going back to a dull inn-parlour: to-night he was going to sleep in an hermitage for the right to enjoy the seclusion of which he had been compelled to fight very hard. It was weak to imagine he was lonely already, and to fortify himself against this mood, he pulled out of his pocket his father's last letter and read it again while he walked up the hill behind the trap.
FOX HALL, GALTON, HANTS.
September 10.
Dear Guy,
I agree with some of what you say, but I disagree with a good deal more, and I am entirely opposed to your method of procedure, which is to put it very mildly rather casual. Your degree was not so good as it ought to have been, but I did not reproach you, because in the Consular Service you had chosen a career which did not call specially for a first. At the same time you could, if you had worked, have got a first quite easily. Your six months with the Macedonian Relief people seems to have knocked all your consular ambitions on the head rather too easily, I confess, to make me feel very happy about your future. And now without consulting me you take a house in the country for the purpose of writing poetry! You imply in answer to my remonstrances that I am unable to appreciate the 'necessity' for your step. That may be, but I cannot help asking where you would be now if I at your age, instead of helping my father with his school, had gone off to Oxfordshire to write poetry. Perhaps I had ambitions to make a name for myself with the pen. If I had, I quenched them in order to devote myself to what I considered my duty. I do not reproach you for refusing to carry on the school at Fox Hall. Your dear mother's last request was that I should not urge you to be a schoolmaster, unless you were drawn to the vocation. Her wishes I have respected, and I repeat that I am not hurt at your refusal. At the same time I cannot encourage what can only be described as this whim of yours to bury yourself in a remote village where, having saddled yourself with the responsibilities of a house, you announce your intention of living by poetry! I am the last person to underestimate the value of poetry, but as a livelihood it seems to me as little to be relied upon as the weather. However, you are of age. You have £150 a year of your own. You are with the exercise of the strictest economy independent. And this brings me to the point of your last letter in which you ask me to supplement your own income with an allowance £150 a year from me. This inclination to depend upon your father is not what I conceive to be the artist's spirit of independence. This over-drawing upon your achievement fills me with dismay for the future. However, since I do not wish you to begin hampered by debt and as you assure me that you have spent all your own money on this idiotic house, I will give you £150, to be paid in quarterly instalments of £37 10s. as from the 21st of this month for one year. Furthermore, at the end of next year if you find that poetry is less profitable than even you expect, I will offer you a place at Fox Hall, thereby securing for you the certainty of a life moderately free from financial worries. After all, even a schoolmaster has some spare time, and I daresay our greatest poets did much of their best work in their spare time. The idea of writing poetry all day and every day appeals to me as enervating and ostentatious.
Your affectionate father,
John Hazlewood.
Guy stood still when he had finished the letter, and execrated mutely the damnable dependence that compelled him to accept gratefully and humbly this gift of £150. Yet with no money of his own coming in till December, with actually a housekeeper on her way from Cardiff and his house already furnished, he must accept the offer. In a year's time he would have proved the reasonableness of his request; and he began to compose a scene between them, in which his father would almost on bended knees beg him to accept an allowance of £300 a year in consideration of the magnificent proof he had afforded to the world of being in the direct line of English poets.
"And I mustn't forget to send him a sonnet on his birthday," said Guy to himself.
This notion restored his dignity, and he hurried on to overtake the trap which was waiting on the brow of the hill.
"You were saying something about women being right," he reminded Mr. Godbold, as he sat down again beside him. "Has it ever struck you that fathers are nearly always wrong?"
"That wouldn't do for me at all," said Mr. Godbold, shaking his head. "You see I'm the father of nine, and if I wasn't always right, sir, I shouldn't be no better than a bull in a china-shop where I live. I've got to be right, Mr. Hazlewood."
"I suppose that's what the Pope felt," Guy murmured.
"Now do you reckon this here Pope they speak of really exists in a manner of speaking?" Mr. Godbold asked, as the trap bowled along the level stretch of upland road. "You know there's some of these narrow-minded mortals at Wychford as will have it that Mr. Grey, our parson, is in with the Pope, and I said to one or two of them the other night while we was arguing in the post-office, I said, 'Have any of you wise men of Gotham ever seen this Pope as you're so knowing about?'"
"And had they?" asked Guy encouragingly.
"Not one of them," said Mr. Godbold. "And I thought to myself as I was walking up home, I thought now what if there wasn't no such thing as a Pope any more than there's women with fish-tails and all this rubbish you read of in books. If you ask my opinion of books, Mr. Hazlewood, I tell you that I think books is as bad for some people as wireworms is for carnations. They seem to regular eat into them."
Guy laughed. Misgivings about the wisdom of his choice vanished, and he was being conscious of a very intimate pleasure