Читать книгу The Meadows of the Moon - James Hilton - Страница 14

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A few evenings later, as she was going up to her room, John stopped her. He said: “By the way, Fran, if you see Michael you might tell him that I’ve written to Oxford withdrawing him.”

She stared at him in stupefied astonishment.

“You have? You’ve done that? Already?”

He replied: “Yes. I told him I should, if he didn’t promise to keep within his allowance in future. He hasn’t given me his promise, so I’ve had to keep mine. I usually do.”

After a pause he added: “So now he must decide what he’s going to do for a living. I’ve a post vacant in my office which he can have if he applies for it within three days. After that I shall advertise.”

She told Michael later on that same evening. They were walking over the meadows amidst bright moonlight, and all around them the wind blew the grasses into rippling waves of silver. Rather to her surprise he was not angry. He merely said, when she had told him: “Oh, well, it can’t be helped. He can always beat me that way, because he has the power. And, of course, to work in his stuffy little office with his eye on me all the time—oh, it’s too absurd—I’d rather starve....”

“Yet you don’t seem angry about it?”

He suddenly flung himself down amongst the grasses. “I suppose I’m not, really,” he answered, in a puzzled voice. He cried suddenly: “Fran, lie down here and look up at the moon.... No, no, I’m not angry. It’s so certain that he can beat me in his own way that I’ve lost all interest in the fight. And it’s just as certain that he can’t beat me in my way.... Besides, this moonlight’s like a drug—it soaks into you—makes you live in a sort of dream.... Fran, I’m beginning to be perfectly happy. It seems queer, doesn’t it, when there’s all this trouble in the air? But it’s true, and I don’t understand it a little bit. Why should I be happy? What have I got to be happy about? And yet I am happy—happy—oh, God, I’m happy....”

He leaned forward and took hold of both her hands, pulling her down on to the slope beside him. “I think I might write verse for a living, or go on a farm, or be a travelling actor, or play the piano at a cinema, or run away to sea—anything rather than be John’s office-boy.”

The warmth of his body was kindling her, and beyond and deeper than the stillness of the night she thought she could hear a curious undercurrent of sound, as if the earth were murmuring under the white blaze of the moon. The sound rose till it throbbed in her temples like a dynamo; she put her hand on Michael’s arm as if seeking as well as giving sympathy. “I think you are going to have a very hard time, Micky,” she said.

His answer came like a voice from a different world. “I don’t care—I don’t care. Nothing could make me care, or make me less happy than I am....”