Тринадцать гостей / Thirteen Guests

”

“Well, if it’s not too much trouble—sooner the better.”

She made a sign to the chauffeur, then turned back to him.

“Grit on to yourself. It mayn’t be nice when they lift you. I know what it’s like—I hunt.”

He closed his eyes, and kept them closed for two very unpleasant minutes. Then he found himself gliding through a land of gentle undulations and russet October hues. Above him the sky was crisp and clear. The tang of autumn was in his nostrils. The sounds of autumn came to him, too.

Dogs bayed in the distance. He recognised the quality, and pictured red coats among them. From an opposite direction cracked the report of a gun. Now he pictured a pheasant flashing downwards from the blue dome, to end its short uneasy life in fulfilment of its destiny. Closer at hand were branches as gold as the pheasant’s breast. Closer still was a bronze curl.... His eyes, as they opened, focused on the bronze curl.

But pain intruded. Stags and pheasants were not suffering alone.

“How are you feeling?”

“Not too bad.”

“I expect I’d say the same.” Nadine’s voice was appreciative and sympathetic. “We’ll soon be at the doctor’s.”

It occurred to him that he ought to thank her, but when he began the bronze curl moved a little nearer to him and she placed her hand over his mouth. He rebelled against the pleasure of that momentary contact with her fingers. They were cool, while they warmed. He rebelled because he knew that she was conscious of his pleasure, that she had deliberately produced it.

But he did not know that she was conscious, also, of his rebellion. She took her hand away. She had the sporting instinct. She did not fight a man who was down.

“But stags and foxes, eh?” her husband had once taxed her, when she had been forced to point out this virtue to him.

“They’re different,” she had retorted.

“Of course they are,” he agreed. “They don’t start fifty-fifty—and they can never get up again and smack you.

”

The conversation had preceded one of their biggest rows.

The Rolls glided on. A small vine-covered house peeped over one of the brown hedges on their left. The sun, nearing the end of its shortened day, sent a low arrow of light into the vines and picked out a brilliant little plate-inscribed: “Dr. L. G. Pudrow, M.D.” The house was less pretentious than the plate, and therefore needed the plate to dignify it.