The Secret Vanguard Read Online Free PDF

and it was curious that one so clearly knew. Sheila closed her book – shutting up romantic adventure with a snap – and turned to observe the social comedy. She took another look at the two men.
    She was going to call the reserved person Pennyfeather; nothing else would quite do. A professional man, but from one of those corners of the professional world in which money is the main concern. Money was his job, and his job had thinned those lips and given just that set to the chin. He was tolerably high up in money – and would not get higher. For he had an uncertain streak; it emerged in a faintly hunted look. Something had happened in his nursery; the effect of that something had asserted itself at adolescence – and Pennyfeather had been obscurely pursued ever since. It was because of this that he was distinguishably a ‘cultivated’ person; he had compensated for a haunting inner uncertainty by getting up a little art and what not. And it was because of this, too, that he was so severely aloof. Behind the severe and ready frown of Pennyfeather was a person easily scared.
    This modish analysis had taken Sheila some time. She had barely christened the expansive person Burge – it was not quite right, but it would serve – when Pennyfeather spoke.
    ‘I seldom read verse,’ said Pennyfeather, ‘but I read good verse when I do.’
    Blunt and to the point, thought Sheila. But glancing diagonally across the compartment she could see that Pennyfeather was trembling slightly. The uncertain streak coming out. As for Burge, his eye was taking on a glazed quality which was decidedly in the picture. The eye, Sheila told herself, of a stupid and obstinate man who gets into a quarrel in a pub.
    ‘Did you ever hear of Swinburne?’ Pennyfeather asked.
    This was a smashing stroke – rather like suggesting to the man in the pub that he was little better than a bleeding Aristotle. Burge made an inarticulate noise: he knew better than to know about Swinburne, it seemed to say.
    ‘Listen.’ And Pennyfeather, leaning back in his corner and closing his eyes, began to recite:
     
    In a coign of the cliff between lowland and highland,
    At the sea-down’s edge between windward and lee,
    Walled round with rocks as an inland island
    The ghost of a garden fronts the sea…
     
    Pennyfeather paused, opened his eyes, and surveyed Burge with severe displeasure. ‘That, now,’ he said, ‘ is poetry.’ And he repeated the lines over again.
    It was eminently absurd. Burge – who after all had started off on poetry – was looking embarrassed as well as angry. He was like a man who, having initiated a slightly improper conversation, is now being told the wrong sort of indecent story. Sheila had scarcely done admiring a comparison somewhat outside her own experience when Pennyfeather was off again:
     
    A girdle of brushwood and thorn incloses
    The steep square slope of the blossomless bed…
     
    He was evidently set to deliver himself of the whole poem. A beautiful and drowsy poem. It was odd, thought Sheila, making a rambling incursion in literary criticism, that verse so wildly exciting in its day should be decidedly hypnoidal now. Or better perhaps pleasantly lulling – its effect not dissimilar to that of the book-wormy prose about the young man at the Queensferry… On Burge’s eye the glaze was thickening. The sandy-haired man, who had shown an unobtrusive interest when Pennyfeather started to declaim, had relapsed into inattention. And Pennyfeather himself droned on; his enunciation was not unpleasant, but exaggerated perhaps the already obvious rhythm of the piece. Ti-ti- tum , ti-ti- tum … Sheila became aware of the rapid beat of the wheels on the rails beneath her, and found herself trying to fit this to the beat of the verse:
     
    Where the westerly spur of the furthermost mountain
    Hovers falcon-like over the heart of the bay,
    Past seven sad leagues and a last lonely fountain,
    A mile towards tomorrow the dead garden