Читать книгу On Everything онлайн

45 страница из 62

The Doctor said: “It’s all a pose, those sort of people.” But which sort he did not say, so the Daughter of the House said sharply: “Which sort of people?” For she loved to cross-examine struggling professional men, and the Doctor got quite red, and said; “Oh, all that sort of people!”

The young lawyer, who was quick to see a difficulty, helped him out by saying, “He means people like Bensington!”

The Doctor, who had never heard of Bensington, nodded eagerly, and the Head of the House, frowning a healthy frown, said, “What, not John Bensington, old William Bensington’s son?”

“Yes,” said the young lawyer. “That’s the kind of man he means,” and the Doctor nodded again.

His enemy was dropping farther and farther behind him with every stride, but she made a brilliant rally. “Do you mean John Bensington?” she said. The Doctor, in some alarm, and with his mouth full, nodded vigorously for the third time. The Head of the House, still frowning, broke into all this with a solid roar: “I don’t believe a word of it.” He sat leaning back again, not relaxing his frown and trying to connect the son of his old friend with a gang of treasonable robbers. He remembered Jock’s marriage—for it was a bad one—and a silly book of verses he had written, and how keen he had been against his father’s selling the bit of land along the coast, because it was bound to go up. He could fit Jock in with many unpleasant things, but he couldn’t fit him in with the very definite picture that rose in his mind whenever he heard the word “Socialist.” There was something adventurous and violent and lean about the word—something like a wolf. There was nothing of all that in Jock. So much thought matured at last into living words, and the Head of the House said, “Why, he’s on the County Council.”