Appleby's End Read Online Free Page B

whereas the girl’s nose was definitely attractive, the melancholy man’s nose at least congruous with his features as a whole, and Mr Raven’s nose indisputably utilitarian in that it afforded a number of alternative resting-places for his gold-rimmed glasses, the newcomer’s nose was entirely disconcerting. For the eyes, which were small and feral, were deep-set beneath beetling brows after the manner of the higher anthropoids; the forehead was low and receding; the mouth, which was large and thick-lipped, hung open in a species of rictus or fixed grimace; the figure was massive, stooped and lurching. It thus came about that the stranger’s long nose achieved a sort of perpetually surprising tour de force in asserting a decisively human influence over what would otherwise have been an uncompromisingly simian whole.
    The train had started again and was gaining speed; indeed, it was going at least twice as fast as it had ever gone before. The new arrival sat in the middle of the compartment with his knees apart and his hands hanging over them in the manner of a pugilist waiting in his corner. He was breathing stertorously as if he had already fought a gruelling ten rounds. And – what was mildly disconcerting – he was glaring at Appleby with what had every appearance of being the most unbridled ferocity.
    The girl was looking at Appleby too. She seemed rather taken with him. But in the most peculiar way. There was a sort of latent or smouldering passion in her glance. At the same time it was extremely impersonal. Appleby had an obscure feeling that she would not be nearly so interested in him if he were not sitting precisely as he was under the rays of a gas mantle invented in 1851. There was something unflattering about this. Appleby had a look at the cypress-suited man in the corner.
    The cypress-suited man too was still staring. Not exactly through Appleby this time, but rather as if he were something phenomenal and essentially trivial with which the speculative mind must nevertheless of necessity concern itself in the effort to penetrate to a more substantial significance beyond. From under the penthouse of his large black hat the cypress-suited man was looking at Appleby like this. Appleby felt that, on the whole, he preferred the girl. It was somehow less uncomfortable to be of immediate interest in terms of optical science than to serve as a mere starting-point for some voyage into a metaphysical inane. And, of course, altogether preferable to either was being regarded mildly by Mr Raven, who perceived one to be a student with a keen power of inference.
    Appleby buried his chin deeper in the collar of his coat and upbraided himself for these self-conscious musings. The sight of the truculent young Appleby in the bowler hat standing outside Gaffer Odgers’ cindery hovel had begun it. After some years of being photographed in the society or close vicinity of charred bodies, driven women, blunt instruments, love nests, park benches, furtive amorists and packets of weed-killer one ought to be decidedly hardened to scrutiny. Appleby, on the contrary, was coming to feel rather morbid about it. Sometimes he wondered if it would help to grow a beard.
    Rattling and clanking, buffeted by a great wind, bucketing and unbearably jolting, perpetually howling into the night, the train was now rushing dementedly down a gradient that led presumably to the abyss of Boxer’s Bottom. The holiday-makers joggled on their beach, Chirico’s hotel rocked as if to an earthquake, the faintly hissing light from the gas mantle flickered and flared. Conversation would scarcely have been possible, nor did any of the passengers seem inclined to communication other than by speaking looks and – in the case of the simian man – continued threatening breathings. Mr Raven had tucked away his glasses and was swathing himself in several yards of grey woollen scarf – so carefully as to make Appleby feel a