The Longer Bodies Read Online Free PDF

fair-haired, stocky, determined-looking fellow, clean-shaven, blue-eyed, handsome in a clean, hard, Scandinavian fashion, and clad in flannel trousers and a heavy woollen sweater. He looked warm and angry, and was for the fifth day in succession engaged in initiating Clive Brown-Jenkins into the mysteries of the pole vault.
    â€˜And it’s no use, perhaps, to be timid, Mr Brown,’ he said contemptuously. ‘I can’t instruct cowards. No.’
    Clive Brown-Jenkins dropped the pole on the ground, pulled his sweater over his head, dropped the garment beside the pole, and walked deliberately up to the trainer. His jaw was set hard, and his grey eyes gleamed.
    â€˜You can’t instruct what?’ he said, with a quiet but ugly pugnacity. Kost stared back at him.
    â€˜Fools, perhaps,’ he said, with a grin. ‘What’s the matter with your temper, perhaps?’
    Clive turned on his heel and picked up the pole again.
    Great-aunt Puddequet nodded approvingly. The trainer was earning his pay. She gave the word, and her equipage rolled along the cinder track to the long-jump pitch.
    â€˜You want to jump higher,’ said Hilary Yeomond to his brother Francis as old Mrs Puddequet came up behind them.
    â€˜Nonsense, Grandnephew!’ she squealed. ‘He wants to jump a long way along, not a long way up!’
    â€˜Pardon me, Madam,’ said the voice of the trainer behind her, ‘but Mr Yeomond there is quite right, perhaps.’
    He stepped in front of the bathchair, and quickly and neatly stretched a piece of white worsted across the long-jump pit between two four-feet high sticks which had apparently been placed there previously for the purpose.
    â€˜Now, Mr Yeomond two,’ he said, stepping back a pace, ‘right over without breaking the thread, perhaps.’
    Francis paced the required distance, and commenced his run.
    â€˜Faster, faster! Lazy you are! Lazy!’ yelled Kost, dancing in agony on the verdant pasture as Francis burst the flimsy wool and fell forward on to his face.
    Francis picked himself up and smiled slightly.
    â€˜You must better go back and teach yourself to walk holding the seats of the chairs,’ said Kost unpleasantly. Francis’s smile deepened. Unruffled, he paced out the number of strides again.
    â€˜What a difference,’ murmured the angular Miss Caddick to her employer, ‘from the attitude adopted by Mr Brown-Jenkins.’
    â€˜What?’ said Great-aunt Puddequet, clicking her tongue, as, for the third time in succession, Richard Cowes lost control of the shot in making a spasmodic leap across the seven-foot putting-circle, and dropped the heavy weight with a dull thud almost on to his own foot. The eagle eye of the trainer chanced to fall on him.
    â€˜You are the animated clockwork grasshopper, perhaps!’ he roared. ‘Sure, you have contracted the housemaid’s knee, isn’t it!’ He left the docile Francis to his own devices and dashed across to Richard, who had retrieved the twelve-pound shot and seemed undecided whether to hurl it at the trainer or to burst into tears.
    â€˜Most noticeable,’ continued Miss Caddick brightly.
    â€˜Don’t be a fool, Companion Caddick!’ screamed the old lady.
    â€˜Oh, but I’m not, dear Mrs Puddequet,’ said Miss Caddick, blinking her pale eyes earnestly. ‘It
is
most noticeable! The beautiful, the
gentlemanly
behaviour of Mr Malpas, and Mr Francis, and Mr Hilary when they are taken to task by our dear trainer! And the morose, the boorish, the almost
resentful
way in which Mr Richard and Mr Clive receive his well-intentioned comments.’
    At this moment the wheel of the bathchair jolted uncomfortably over something on the grass, for Joseph, in response to a snapping of his employer’s fingers, had pushed onwards towards the centre of the ground. Here, looking, even in his shorts and singlet, more like a fifth-century Greek than the