"WalterDeLaMare-SeatonsAunt" - читать интересную книгу автора (De LaMare Walter)

Seaton's Aunt
Walter de la Mare


I had heard rumours of Seaton's Aunt long before I actually encountered her.
Seaton, in the hush of confidence, or at any little show of toleration on our
part, would remark, "My aunt," or "My old aunt, you know," as if his relative
might be a kind of cement to an entente cordiale.
He had an unusual quantity of pocket-money; or, at any rate, it was bestowed on
him in unusually large amounts; and he spent it freely, though none of us would
have described him as an "awfully generous chap." "Hullo, Seaton," we would say,
"the old Begum?" At the beginning of term, too, he used to bring back surprising
and exotic dainties in a box with a trick padlock that accompanied him from his
first appearance at Gummidge's in a billy-cock hat to the rather abrupt
conclusion of his schooldays.
From a boy's point of view he looked distastefully foreign, with his yellow
skin, and slow chocolate-coloured eyes, and lean weak figure. Merely for his
looks he was treated by most of us true-blue Englishmen with condescension,
hostility, or contempt. We used to call him "Pongo,"
but without any much better excuse for the nickname than his skin. He was, that
is, in one sense of the term what he assuredly was not in the other senseЧa
sport.
Seaton and I, as I may say, were never in any sense intimate at school; our
orbits only intersected in class. I kept deliberately aloof from him. I felt
vaguely he was a sneak, and remained quite unmollified by advances on his side,
which, in a boy's barbarous fashion, unless it suited me to be magnanimous, I
haughtily ignored.
We were both of us quick-footed, and at Prisoner's Base used occasionally to
hide together.
And so I best remember SeatonЧhis narrow watchful face in the dusk of a summer
evening; his peculiar crouch, and his inarticulate whisperings and mumblings.
Otherwise he played all games slackly and limply; used to stand and feed at his
locker with a crony or two until his "tuck" gave out; or waste his money on some
outlandish fancy or other. He bought, for instance, a silver bangle, which he
wore above his left elbow, until some of the fellows showed their masterly
contempt of the practice by dropping it nearly red-hot down his back.
It needed, therefore, a rather peculiar taste, a rather rare kind of schoolboy
courage and indifference to criticism, to be much associated with him. And I had
neither the taste nor, perhaps, the courage. None the less, he did make
advances, and on one memorable occasion went to the length of bestowing on me a
whole pot of some outlandish mulberry-coloured jelly that had been duplicated in
his term's supplies. In the exuberance of my gratitude I promised to spend the
next half-term holiday with him at his aunt's house.
I had clean forgotten my promise when, two or three days before the holiday, he
came up and triumphantly reminded me of it.
"Well, to tell you the honest truth, Seaton, old chapЧЧ" I began graciously; but
he cut me short.
"My aunt expects you," he said; "she is very glad you are coming. She's sure to
be quite decent to you, Withers."
I looked at him in sheer astonishment; the emphasis was so uncalled for. It