Clutch of Constables Read Online Free PDF Page B

set him apart, that made him physically speaking, an odd man out. Need I,” Alleyn asked, “remind you what this was—?”
    The intelligent-looking man seated in the second row made a slight gesture. “Exactly,” Alleyn said and enlarged upon it to the class.
    “I’m able,” he went on, “to give you a pretty full account of this apparently blameless little cruise because my wife wrote at some length about it. In her first letter she told me—”
     
    -1-
    “And there you are.” Troy wrote. “All done on the spur of the moment and I think I’m going to be glad I saw that notice in the Pleasure Craft Company’s office window.
    “It’s always been you that writes in cabins and on trains and in hotel bedrooms and me that sits at the receiving end and now here we are, both at it. The only thing I mind is not getting your letters for the next five days. I’ll post this at Ramsdyke Lock and with a bit of luck it should reach you in New York when I’m at Longminster on the turning point of my little journey. At that rate it’ll travel about two thousand times as fast as I do so whar’s your relativity, noo? I’m writing it on my knee from a deck chair. I can’t tell you how oddly time behaves on The River, how fantastically remote we are from the country that lies so close on either hand. There go the cars and lorries, streaking along main arteries and over bridges and there are the sound-breakers belching away overhead but they belong to another world. Truly.
    “Our world is watery: details of eddies and reeds and wet banks. Beyond it things move in a very rum and baffling kind of way. You know how hopeless I am about direction. Well, what goes on over there beyond our banks, completely flummuckses me. There’s a group of vast power-houses that has spent the greater part of the afternoon slowly moving from one half of our world to the other. They retire over our horizon on the port side and just as one thinks that’s the last of
them
: there they are moving in on the starboard. Sometimes we approach them and sometimes we retreat and at one dramatic phase we sailed close-by and there were Lilliputians half-way up one of them, being busy. Yes: O.K. darling, I know rivers wind.
    “Apart from the power-houses the country beyond The River is about as empty as anywhere in England: flat, flat, flat and according to the Skipper almost hammered so by the passage of history. Red roses and white. Cavaliers and Roundheads. Priests and barons. The Percies of the North. The Jockeys of Norfolk. The lot: all galumphing over the landscape through the centuries. Did you know that Constable stayed here one summer and painted? Church spires turn up with minimal villages and of course, the locks. Do you remember the lock in
Our Mutual Friend
: a great slippery drowning-box? I keep thinking of it although the weirs are more noisily alarming.
    “It seems we are going towards the sea in our devious fashion and so we sink in locks.
    “As for the company: I’ve tried to introduce them to you. We’re no more oddly-assorted, I suppose, than any other eight people that might take it into their heads to spend five days out of time on The River. Apart from Miss Rickerby-Carrick who sends me up the wall (you know how
beastly
I am about ostentatious colds-in-the-head) and Dr Natouche who is black, there’s nothing at all remarkable about us.
    “I’m not the only one who finds poor Miss R-C. difficult. Her sledge-hammer tact crashes over Dr N like a shower of brick-bats, so anxious is she to be unracial. I saw him flinch two minutes ago under a frontal assault. Mr Bard said just now that a peep into her subconscious would be enough to send him round more bends than the
Zodiac
negotiates in a summer season. If only she’d just pipe down every now and then. But no, she doesn’t know how to. She has a bosom friend in Birmingham called—incredibly I forget what—Mavis something—upon whom we get incessant bulletins. What Mavis