Читать книгу The Saint of the Speedway онлайн

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The man’s whole manner was so gentle as to be irresistible. For all the thing that lay between them there had never been a moment when he had made so great an appeal to the girl. His normal roughness she knew to be but an unfortunate garment in which he clothed himself. Now, as times before, she was listening to the real man so surely hidden from the world that looked on. She was not without a shadow of regret that she could not see in him the man of her desire. Without a word of protest she permitted him to lead the way down from the bald crest of the headland.

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IVOR McLAGAN eased his great body in the groaning wicker chair, and his eyes snapped with something like irritation. The long, lean cigar it was his habit to smoke he removed from between his lips, and indicated the main thoroughfare beyond the window behind him.

“Don’t tell me you’ve a hunch for this muck-hole, Victor,” he said sharply. “Take a pull at yourself, man. Get a cold douche, if you can find a thing so wholesome in Beacon Glory, and wake yourself right up. Take a look out there. Take a peek around you, and if you aren’t as blind as a dead mule, and a sure candidate for the foolish place, you’ll see this darnation monument to human vanity as it is. I tell you there’s no sort of limit to human vanity when it gets a-riot fixing cities. Beacon Glory? Did you ever call a hogpen by any other fancy name? Sure you didn’t. You aren’t plumb crazed yet for all you’re talking this burg as though winter had no right hiding it up for six months of the year. Get a look at the garbage lying around even the business avenue. Avenue! Sounds fine, doesn’t it? And then think of the hell of flies and skitters you got to live through next summer. Look at the shanties lying scattered around desecrating a swell picture of Nature’s painting. They’re enough to insult a half-breed settlement that don’t know better. But that’s no circumstance to the folks who’re to blame for despoiling God Almighty’s decent earth with a pestilential collection of man’s assorted junk. The moral atmosphere of Beacon Glory would leave the hottest oven in hell hollering. There’s more dirt an’ dishonesty to the square inch in Beacon Glory than you’d ever find in any mediæval Turkish penitentiary, kept especially for housing the folks they don’t like the faces of. And they call this quagmire of corruption ‘Beacon Glory’! They laid it out in Avenues! They filled it up with garbage an’ human junk, an’ folk like you sit around with your hat in one hand and the other on your left chest and breathe the word ‘city’ in the sort of tone you’d hand out over a deathbed. That’s you, who don’t belong to it. You, who aren’t any sort of part of it, except you’re here to collect any stray gold lying around, and pass it back to your home city. You, a banker! My, it’s queer how folks can fall for their surroundings!”