Jacob's Room eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 206 pages of information about Jacob's Room.

Jacob's Room eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 206 pages of information about Jacob's Room.

Her tumbler of pinkish sweet stuff was set down by the waiter; and she sucked, through a straw, her eyes on the looking-glass, on the door, now soothed by the sweet taste.  When Nick Bramham came in it was plain, even to the young Swiss waiter, that there was a bargain between them.  Nick hitched his clothes together clumsily; ran his fingers through his hair; sat down, to an ordeal, nervously.  She looked at him; and set off laughing; laughed—­laughed—­laughed.  The young Swiss waiter, standing with crossed legs by the pillar, laughed too.

The door opened; in came the roar of Regent Street, the roar of traffic, impersonal, unpitying; and sunshine grained with dirt.  The Swiss waiter must see to the newcomers.  Bramham lifted his glass.

“He’s like Jacob,” said Florinda, looking at the newcomer.

“The way he stares.”  She stopped laughing.

Jacob, leaning forward, drew a plan of the Parthenon in the dust in Hyde Park, a network of strokes at least, which may have been the Parthenon, or again a mathematical diagram.  And why was the pebble so emphatically ground in at the corner?  It was not to count his notes that he took out a wad of papers and read a long flowing letter which Sandra had written two days ago at Milton Dower House with his book before her and in her mind the memory of something said or attempted, some moment in the dark on the road to the Acropolis which (such was her creed) mattered for ever.

“He is,” she mused, “like that man in Moliere.”

She meant Alceste.  She meant that he was severe.  She meant that she could deceive him.

“Or could I not?” she thought, putting the poems of Donne back in the bookcase.  “Jacob,” she went on, going to the window and looking over the spotted flower-beds across the grass where the piebald cows grazed under beech trees, “Jacob would be shocked.”

The perambulator was going through the little gate in the railing.  She kissed her hand; directed by the nurse, Jimmy waved his.

He’s a small boy,” she said, thinking of Jacob.

And yet—­Alceste?

“What a nuisance you are!” Jacob grumbled, stretching out first one leg and then the other and feeling in each trouser-pocket for his chair ticket.

“I expect the sheep have eaten it,” he said.  “Why do you keep sheep?”

“Sorry to disturb you, sir,” said the ticket-collector, his hand deep in the enormous pouch of pence.

“Well, I hope they pay you for it,” said Jacob.  “There you are.  No.  You can stick to it.  Go and get drunk.”

He had parted with half-a-crown, tolerantly, compassionately, with considerable contempt for his species.

Even now poor Fanny Elmer was dealing, as she walked along the Strand, in her incompetent way with this very careless, indifferent, sublime manner he had of talking to railway guards or porters; or Mrs. Whitehorn, when she consulted him about her little boy who was beaten by the schoolmaster.

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Project Gutenberg
Jacob's Room from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.