The Burden - Christie Agatha - Страница 24

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He muttered: "You're so pale, so thin… I've worn you out. I couldn't help it… I can't help it. I've always hated anything like illness or pain. In the war, I used to think I wouldn't mind being killed, but I could never understand how fellows could bear to be burnt or disfigured or-or maimed."

"I see. I understand…"

"I'm a selfish devil, I know. But I'll get better-better in mind, I mean-even if I never get better in body. We might be able to make a go of it-of everything-if you'll be patient. Just don't leave me."

"I'll never leave you, never."

"I do love you, Shirley… I do… I always have. There's never really been anyone but you-there never will be. All these months-you've been so good, so patient. I know I've been a devil. Say you forgive me."

"There's nothing to forgive. I love you."

"Even if one is a cripple-one might enjoy life."

"We will enjoy life."

"Can't see how!"

With a tremor in her voice, Shirley said:

"Well, there's always eating."

"And drinking," said Henry.

A faint ghost of his old smile showed.

"One might go in for higher mathematics."

"Crossword puzzles for me."

He said:

"I shall be a devil to-morrow, I expect."

"I expect you will. I shan't mind now."

"Where are my pills?"

"I'll give them to you."

He swallowed them obediently.

"Poor old Muriel," he said suddenly.

"What made you think of her?"

"Remembering taking you over there the first time. You had on a yellow stripy dress. I ought to have gone and seen old Muriel more often, but she had got to be such a bore. I hate bores. Now I'm a bore."

"No, you're not."

From the hall below, Laura called: "Shirley!"

She kissed him. She ran down the stairs, happiness surging up in her, happiness and a kind of triumph.

In the hall below, Laura said that nurse had started.

"Oh, am I late? I'll run."

She ran down the drive turning her head to call:

"I've given Henry his sleeping-pills."

But Laura had gone inside again, aud was closing the door.

Llewellyn Knox threw open the shutters of the hotel windows and let in the sweet-scented night air. Below him were the twinkling lights of the town, and beyond them the lights of the harbour.

For the first time for some weeks, Llewellyn felt relaxed and at peace. Here, perhaps, in the island, he could pause and take stock of himself and of the future. The pattern of the future was clear in outline, but blurred as to detail. He had passed through the agony, the emptiness, the weariness. Soon, very soon now, he should be able to begin life anew. A simpler, more undemanding life, the life of a man like any other man-with this disadvantage only: he would be beginning it at the age of forty.

He turned back into the room. It was austerely furnished but clean. He washed his face and hands, unpacked his few possessions, and then left his bedroom, and walked down two flights of stairs into the hotel lobby. A clerk was behind a desk there, writing. His eyes came up for a moment, viewed Llewellyn politely, but with no particular interest or curiosity, and dropped once more to his work.

Llewellyn pushed through the revolving doors and went out into the street. The air was warm with a soft, fragrant dampness.

It had none of the exotic languor of the tropics. Its warmth was just sufficient to relax tension. The accentuated tempo of civilisation was left behind here. It was as though in the island one went back to an earlier age, an age where the people went about their business slowly, with due thought, without hurry or stress, but where purpose was still purpose. There would be poverty here, and pain, and the various ills of the flesh, but not the jangled nerves, the feverish haste; the apprehensive thoughts of to-morrow, which are the constant goads of the higher civilisations of the world. The hard faces of the career women, the ruthless faces of mothers, ambitious for their young, the worn grey faces of business executives fighting incessantly so that they and theirs should not go down and perish, the anxious tired faces of multitudes fighting for a better existence to-morrow or even to retain the existence they had-all these were absent from the people who passed him by. Most of them glanced at him, a good-mannered glance that registered him as a foreigner, and then glanced away, resuming their own lives. They walked slowly, without haste. Perhaps they were just taking the air. Even if they were bent upon some particular course, there was no urgency. What was not done today could be done to-morrow; friends who awaited their arrival would always wait a little longer, without annoyance.

A grave, polite people, Llewellyn thought, who smiled seldom, not because they were sad, but because to smile one must be amused. The smile here was not used as a social weapon.

A woman with a baby in her arms came up to him and begged in a mechanical, lifeless whine. He did not understand what she said, but her outstretched hand, and the melancholy chant of her words conformed, he thought, to a very old pattern. He put a small coin in her palm and she thanked him in the same mechanical manner and turned away. The baby lay asleep against her shoulder. It was well nourished, and her own face, though worn, was not haggard or emaciated. Probably, he thought, she was not in want, it was simply that begging was her trade. She pursued it mechanically, courteously, and with sufficient success to provide food and shelter for herself and the child.

He turned a corner and walked down a steep street towards the harbour. Two girls, walking together, came up and passed him. They were talking and laughing, and, without turning their heads, it was apparent that they were very conscious of a group of four young men who walked a little distance behind them.

Llewellyn smiled to himself. This, he thought, was the courting pattern of the island. The girls were beautiful with a proud dark beauty that would probably not outlast youth. In ten years, perhaps less, they would look like this elderly woman who was waddling up the hill on her husband's arm, stout, good-humoured, and still dignified in spite of her shapelessness.

Llewellyn went on down the steep, narrow street. It came out on the harbour front. Here there were caf?s with broad terraces where people sat and drank little glasses of brightly-coloured drinks. Quite a throng of people were walking up and down in front of the caf?s. Here again their gaze registered Llewellyn as a foreigner, but without any overwhelming interest. They were used to foreigners. Ships put in, and foreigners came ashore, sometimes for a few hours, sometimes to stay-though not usually for long, since the hotels were mediocre and not much given to refinements of plumbing. Foreigners, so the glances seemed to say, were not really their concern. Foreigners were extraneous and had nothing to do with the life of the island.

Insensibly, the length of Llewellyn's stride shortened. He had been walking at his own brisk transatlantic pace, the pace of a man going to some definite place, and anxious to get there with as much speed as is consistent, with comfort.

But there was, now, no definite place to which he was going. That was as true spiritually as physically. He was merely a man amongst his fellow kind.

And with that thought there came over him that warm and happy consciousness of brotherhood which he had felt increasingly in the arid wastes of the last months. It was a thing almost impossible to describe-this sense of nearness to, of feeling with, his fellow-men. It had no purpose, no aim, it was as far removed from beneficence as anything could be. It was a consciousness of love and friendliness that gave nothing, and took nothing, that had no wish to confer a benefit or to receive one. One might describe it as a moment of love that embraced utter comprehension, that was endlessly satisfying, and that yet could not, by very reason of what it was, last.

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