Читать книгу The Meadows of the Moon - James Hilton - Страница 8

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The two were inseparables. They went about together everywhere, did everything together; John and Nan were curious outsiders in their world. Especially Nan. “She seems almost frightened of us,” Fran said once, and Michael replied: “She seems frightened of everything and everybody. She’s frightened of John—and even of Manning and the servants. In fact, I believe she’s frightened to be alive.”

John left Wellborough at the age of eighteen and, disdaining the university, came home to work at the Bermondsey tannery. He worked very hard and steadily, and all the time Michael was “idling.” But the “idling” was feverishly active; it consisted in a never-ceasing procession of occupations. At any time the outside observer might have decided that it was Michael who was working hard, and John who was pursuing an easy humdrum existence.

There was hardly anything that Michael did not do, or try to do, to some extent, or at some time or another. (The qualifications are all very necessary.) He wrote verses (which were occasionally accepted, and still more occasionally paid for, by magazines and periodicals); he wrote short stories (which were always too weird and breathless to have any commercial value); he began (but never had the patience to finish) innumerable novels and plays. He painted a little, played the piano with brilliant inaccuracy, tried to play the violin and the ’cello; was a good singer and a tolerably good amateur actor; dabbled in heraldry and astrology and physical culture and spiritualism and telepathy and “eurhythmics”; and had extraordinary theories about almost every conceivable thing, from the correct way of making coffee to the authorship of Wuthering Heights. And also, constantly, and violently, he fell in love.