The Oracles Read Online Free PDF Page B

they are meek and mannerly; they sit upon the floor and air no opinions. Outside it they make up for this by assuming a borrowed prestige. They boast of their distinguished friends, and offer to the rabble their own version of the current dogma.
    Martha Rawson had got three of them; Billy, Rhona and Nell. Billy was the most harmless, since he had a bad stammer and could repeat nothing that he heard. Rhona and Nell were both talkative and silly; they repeated, with considerable inaccuracy, everything that they heard. Rhona was a fat girl with a large nose; she lived near the harbour with a widowed mother, and worked in a folk-weaving centre which Martha had inaugurated. Nell had the misfortune to be the daughter of Sir Gregory Manders, the principal landowner of the district, a notoriously disagreeable man. He came of a quarrelsome line and was, moreover, obliged to live in an age which had divested him of nearly all the power enjoyed by his forebears. Unable to tyrannise, he still did his best to make himself a nuisance. Poor Nell had suffered all her life from his universal unpopularity and had been very short of friends until Martha took her up.
    Sir Gregory disapproved of the acquaintance but could do nothing to prevent it save deny the use of his car to Nell whenever she went to see Martha. She therefore had to foot it on the night of the Summersdown party, and got down the hill from Chale Park in a series of panic rushes, since she was terrified of thunder. Rhona, whom she met by appointment in the town, did not like it either. They would not have missed the party for anything, but the walk up to Summersdown daunted them. They staggered for a little way through the empty streets, clinging to one another, and came to a halt outside the Cellar Bar of the Metropole Hotel. Rhona suggested that a drink might pull them together, but neither of them had any money.
    ‘Let’s go in,’ she suggested. ‘Somebody might stand us a drink. I can’t go on without one.’
    ‘Supposing they didn’t,’ suggested Nell. ‘We should look so silly, just standing wistfully there.’
    Rhona, whose secret ambition it was to be thought a little devil, decided to face this risk. She pushed Nell down the steps into the bar, thrust her into the arms of the nearest man, and announced that her friend was fainting.
    ‘Could be,’ he agreed, surveying Nell’s white, chinless face. ‘You want a hearse?’
    Nell had closed her eyes. She opened them at this and shut them again hastily, for his ugliness was really terrifying. He had a face like a gargoyle, crimson, pug-nosed , with abnormally protuberant eyes. Nobody in the bar had ever seen him before, but his appearance had already provoked comment.
    ‘A glass of water …’ she murmured.
    ‘Water,’ he told her, ‘is dangerous in a thunderstorm. Siddown and I’ll get you what the doctor ordered.’
    The prawn’s eyes travelled round the room and spied two chairs behind a table in a secluded corner. Timmy Hughes, the son of the Congregational minister, sat in one of them; he always kept out of sight, as much as possible, in the Cellar Bar because his father had forbidden him to go there. The other chair was empty. Nell was brought over and put into it and Timmy was ejected, to make room for Rhona.
    ‘Excuse me, George! Fainting ladies,’ said the stranger blandly.
    ‘It’s worked,’ whispered Rhona, as their cavalier went off to get drinks.
    ‘But he’s such a horrid-looking man, and he’s got a cockney accent.’
    ‘Don’t be so drear. Nothing can happen to the two of us.’
    Rhona liked to bully Nell, whom she would have had to call Miss Manders in any other circle.
    Their friend returned with three double whiskies, sat himself on the table in front of them, and suggested that they were easily scared.
    ‘Actually,’ said Rhona, nettled, ‘thunder happens to be the only thing I am scared of.’
    This should have convinced him that she was a little devil, but he merely asked