I do lie about,” she said, “from time to time. The trouble is I go off everyone so quickly. I soon get bored.” “Bored with the things they say? Or with the things they do?” “With the things they do. I never listen to the things they say.
Though Thomas liked to think he had his own way over things, it was generally Janet who had the last say in the matter. She would fling a word at her husband and no more, and he would go off to his work with an uneasy feeling at the back of his mind that she had won. He called it “giving in to Janie,” but it was more than that, it was unconscious subservience to a quieter but stronger personality than his own.
They’ve been drinking too,” said Pappy, examining the tooth-glass. “Cognac, judging by the smell. I never knew my daughter drank.” “She doesn’t,” said Celia, smoothing Pappy’s bed. “She always has orangeade. Unless it’s a first night, when she has champagne.” “Then it must be Niall,” said Pappy. “Someone – and who can it be but Niall? – has been pouring cognac into my tooth-glass. I shall attack Freada. Freada is responsible.” He filled the tooth-glass with cognac for himself.
I thought at first somebody was dead, but after a while I saw it was just England.
He was like a schoolmaster after all. It was just as she had feared. He was now going to make a fuss about her drawings, and write to Pappy, and worry Pappy, and say that time must be set aside for her to work, and everything would become a performance, and a ritual, and be difficult. Drawing would become a burden instead of an escape.
The happy thing about success was that it meant he could provide for his children and his grandchildren, and they would none of them know want and dire poverty as he had done. He would take care that there would be enough for all of them when he died – enough for distant cousins and little grand-nephews and the straggling remnants of the Busson clan.
I would forget my own beating heart, my own trembling body, my own sense of inexpiable degradation. I got up and started to throw off my things. Then the door opened and Jake came into the cabin. I did not want to look at him at first. I turned my back and fumbled with the tap of the basin. He did not say anything either. I whistled a tune under my breath. I wished he had been drunk, or laughing, or cursing, or in some way dragging himself down to my level.
A wave of perfume came from these fine folk, a strange exotic scent like flowers no longer fresh, whose petals curl, and this stale richness somehow mingled with the drab dirt of those beside us, pressing forward even as we did, in a dumb desire to see the Queen.
She put back the receiver and lifted it again. She asked for the number of Niall’s room at the theater. She went on ringing. And surely, she thought with sudden hopelessness and a new kind of dead despair, they can’t both be out and away, now at this minute in my life, when I need both of them so much? Surely one of them will come, surely one of them will help me? Because I don’t want to go home alone. I don’t want to be in the house alone, without Pappy.
So they pass out of memory and out of these pages, the figures of fifty, of a hundred years ago. Some of them were comic, and some a little tragic, and all of them had faults, but once they were living, breathing men and women like the rest of us, possessing the world that we possess to-day.
Whoever has loved much, felt deeply, trodden a certain path in happiness or pain, leaves an imprint of himself for evermore.
A master glass-maker must accustom himself to moving on. In old days they had always been wanderers, going from one forest to another, settling for a few years only.
Mary Rose that did it. Mary Rose was a country girl. Always hiding up apple trees, and then disappearing on the island. She was a ghost, and Charles fell in love with the ghost.” “What did you fall in love with?” asked Niall. “As I was being Mary Rose, I fell in love with Simon,” said Maria. “And Charles was my idea of Simon. Quiet, dependable, devoted. Besides, at that particular time there was no one much around. And all those flowers.
The spaniel came up to me, sniffing at my legs, and I bent down and stroked his ears. “Well, Micky,” I said, “you surely remember me? Poor old Micky, good old Micky.” “Micky has got very fat,” said my mother. “Yes,” I said. “Micky is fond of his food,” said Grey. There was another pause and I went on stroking the spaniel’s ears.
If the flower of my generation had not been blown to bits in the war they would have brought it back again. Now it’s too late. So few of us are left.” The bride at St. George’s.
Sir,’ or whatever one does say to God, ‘here I am, Maria, and I am the lowest form of life,’ that would be honest. And honesty counts for something, doesn’t it?” “One doesn’t know,” said Niall. “That’s the frightful thing. One just does not know what goes down well with God. He may think honesty is a form of bragging.” “In that case I’m sunk,” said Maria. “I think you’re sunk, anyway,” said Niall.
Ellen turned away from them impatiently, and went to the rail once again. Her mother’s friends were all the same – affected and insincere, their conversation a continual mockery of people and things. The poor family on the lower deck had no claim upon their sympathy.
Grey put me up for his club. I dine there most evenings. Fellows there have been extraordinarily kind. I go out often, I know many people. Sometimes I remember what Jake said about me being successful one day. I suppose it will come true. It’s all very different, of course, from what I dreamed. But then dreams are apart from the business of living; they are things we shed from us gently as we grow older.
This astonished us as children, for we grew up beside the charcoal burners, called them by their Christian names, watched them at work, visited them in their log huts when they were ill; but to my mother, the bailiff’s daughter from St. Christophe, gently nurtured, educated and well spoken, the rude shouts of these wild men of the woods at midnight must have sounded like devils in hell.
No.” Monsieur Ledru mused, as though he had but half heard. Then with a start: “Oh, but most certainly not. No, it is rather a heaviness upon the mind – a weight as of lead upon brain and thoughts, while my legs are like paper under me.” Lifting his hat he passed a thin hand over his forehead. “It is such as when one cannot recall a name and goes under a burden until memory releases it.