To Love and Be Wise by Josephine Tey Read Free Book Online

successes, not so much because his earnest readers in Peoria and Paduca loved steaming manure but because Silas Weekley looked the part so perfectly. He was cadaverous, and dark, and tall, and his voice was slow and sibilant and hopeless, and all the good ladies of Peoria and Paduca longed to take him home and feed him up and give him a brighter outlook on life. In which they were a great deal more generous than his English colleagues; who considered him an unmitigated bore and a bit of an ass. Lavinia always referred to him as 'that tiresome man who always tells you that he was at a board school', and held that he was just a little mad. (He, on his part, referred to her as 'the woman Fitch', as one speaking of a criminal.)
    Weekley had come over to them because he could not keep away from the hateful beauty of Leslie Searle, and Walter caught himself wondering if Searle knew it. For Searle, who had been all gentle indifference with the eager Toby, was now engaged in throwing a rope over the antagonistic Silas. Walter, watching the almost feminine dexterity of it, was willing to bet that in about fifteen minutes Searle would have Silas roped and hog-tied. He glanced at the big bland clock behind the bar and decided to time him.
    Searle did it with five minutes to spare. In ten minutes he had Weekley, resentful and struggling, a prisoner in his toils. And the bewilderment in Weekley's sunken eyes was greater than ever the bewilderment in Toby's fish-scale ones had been. Walter nearly laughed aloud.
    And then Searle put the final touch of comedy to the act. At a moment when both Silas and Toby were doing their rival best to be entertaining, Searle said in his quiet drawl: 'Do forgive me, won't you, but I see a friend of mine,' and got up without haste and walked away to join the friend at the bar. The friend was Bill Maddox, the garage keeper.
    Walter buried his face in his beer mug and enjoyed the faces of his friends.
    It was only afterwards, rolling it over in his mind to savour it, that a vague discomfort pricked him. The fun had been so bland, so lightly handled, that its essential quality, its ruthlessness, had not been apparent.
    At the moment he was merely amused by the typical reactions of Searle's two victims. Silas Weekley gulped down what was left of his beer, pushed the mug away from him with a gesture of self-disgust, and went out of the pub without a word. He was like a man fleeing from the memory of some frowsy back-room embrace; a man sickened by his own succumbing. Walter wondered for a moment if Lavinia could possibly be right, and Weekley was after all a little mad.
    Toby Tullis, on the other hand, had never known either retreat or self-disgust. Toby was merely deploying his forces for further campaigning.
    'A little farouche, your young friend,' he remarked, his eye on Searle as he talked to Bill Maddox at the bar.
    Farouche was the last word that Walter would have used of Leslie Searle but he understood that Toby must justify his temporary overthrow.
    'You must bring him to see Hoo House.'
    Hoo House was the beautiful stone building that stood so unexpectedly in Salcott's row of pink and cream and yellow gables. It had once been an inn; and before that, it was said, its stones had been part of an abbey farther down the valley. Now it was a show-piece of a quality so rare that Toby, who normally changed his dwelling-place (one could hardly say his home) every second year, had refused all offers for it for several years now.
    'Is he staying long with you?'
    Walter said that he and Searle planned to do a book together. They had not yet decided on the form of it.
    'Gipsying Through Orfordshire?'
    'Something like that. I do the spiel and Searle does the illustrations. We haven't thought of a good central theme yet.'
    'A little early in the year to go gipsying.'
    'Good for photography, though. Before the county becomes clotted with greenery.'
    'Perhaps your young friend would like to photograph Hoo House,' Toby