The Dark Labyrinth Read Online Free

Smiling”, with a care that seemed a little over-scrupulous to the more sober members of the crew who watched them from the rail. Graecen had made some remark to Baird and they had both laughed. It was obvious that Miss Dombey was not enjoying their company. She kept her gaze steadily averted and wondered how these disgusting people had managed to travel first-class. As the boat came in to the Europa’s side she had caught Truman’s eye and, to her horror, after a second’s patient, indulgent, and glassy scrutiny, he had winked at her. “That man,” she hissed to Baird as she came up the gangway. “He’s drunk.”
    The purser had liked the Truman couple. He was short and thickset, with a good deal of grey hair and a clipped moustache. His manner was extremely good-natured and he appeared to suffer from no sense of social inferiority whatsoever in travelling first-class: “Money,” he said whenever he had to produce any at the bar. “It means nothing to me. I never had any use for it. Here, take the lot.” He was reputed to have won a fortune on the football pools. Miss Dombey found him infuriating because she could not condescend to him; he was alert, civil, and very faintly mocking.
    Mrs. Truman was a good-looking woman but a trifle sluttish of dress. Her rouge was nearly always unevenly put on, her deck-shoes rather grubby. Between her husband and herself there existed a sensible bond of ordinary humour; they were accomplices in the criticism of the world around them; a world which threw up people so irresistibly funny as Miss Dombey or as pleasant as Graecen. They were particularly pleased at any speculations as to how they had managed to acquire their wealth; as a matter of fact they had just fifteen pounds of their savings in hand. Truman had won a competition in a weekly paper which had offered him a choice between a pound a week for life or a holiday cruise. The choice was characteristic of them. “Mother,” he said with a calm good-humour, “the pound a week I can make myself, but a holiday cruise we shall never afford if we don’t go now.”
    They were obviously very much in love, and Miss Dombey could not forgive them for their private jokes, the way they whispered into each other’s ears, and walked hand in hand about the wet decks like schoolchildren. The stewardess’s, in qualification of her liking of them with the suggestion that they were perhaps a little eccentric was due to a conversation she overheard one night when they were undressing in their cabin. The door had been left ajar while Truman cleaned his teeth—which he always did with a gusto and uproar quite out of proportion to so elementary an operation. You would have thought that a horse was being curried in its stall. He added to the noise by trying to hum snatches of song as he brushed. One night as the stewardess passed the door she heard this customary performance broken off abruptly and the sound of weeping, subdued and rather unearthly in the corridor which was silent now save for the furry noise of the fans. “There, Elsie,” Truman was saying, “I know things would have been different if it hadn’t died.” After some further conversation she heard Mrs. Truman’s melodious voice, recovering its steadiness, say: “I know it’s silly, but I can’t help feeling I killed it, John.”
    Later that evening she heard Truman cursing the narrowness of the cabin: “Making love in these bunks is like making love in a matchbox,” he said with his comical north-country accent, with its flattened vowels.
    But perhaps the seal was set upon their eccentricity when one day the stewardess found them sitting naked, side by side on the bunk, playing noughts and crosses. “Come in, dear,” Mrs. Truman had said with pleasant unconcern, and then, seeing her consternation, “John, out of sight with you.” She heard Truman