Читать книгу The Dawn of Reckoning - James Hilton - Страница 22

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The week that intervened between the announcement of the result and Philip's party was an anti climax. There seemed to be nothing at all to do. Each outgoing train left Cambridge emptier, and in a few days the place had all the forlorn air of a ball room from which all but the last revellers have departed. It was all right for Ward; he had his plans cut and dried for the future—two years at a London hospital, and then, perhaps, a year or so of specialisation, and finally a house-surgeonship or else the ordinary unexciting life of the general practitioner.

But Philip's plans were vague in the extreme. He was twenty-five years old—rather older, that is, than most undergraduates attaining their degrees; he had had by no means a distinguished career, though he could regard that as chiefly a result of bad luck, The Civil Service did not attract him, despite the high position that his father had held in it; nor did journalism or the law, even supposing he could have obtained an entry into either of those professions. Sufficient money to do as he liked, without the necessity of earning a living, rather accentuated than eased the difficulty of the problem.

One sphere of life had always lured him, and that was politics. He had the half didactic, half administrative mind, the mind that delights in schemes and paper formulations of all kinds. In another age he would have found a patron and been nominated for a "rotten" borough. As it was, the way to success seemed barred by the utter unthinkability of his ever winning an election. He was too nervous, too slow in speech, too unready for any combative emergency. "My dear boy," said his mother, "why on earth should you choose a profession in which you will be even more a failure than in any other? Take my advice and be either a diplomat or a stockbroker. And if you can't make up your mind which, have another year at Cambridge to think about it...Or travel...Or write books...Or marry...Or do anything you like."

"Marry?—And whom should I marry?"

"I should have thought, Philip," she answered severely, "that there were some things which even you would have felt capable of deciding for yourself."

But with all her mordant cleverness she totally failed to understand him. She did not realise that beneath his slowness and willingness to listen to advice, he hail a quiet and definite will of his own, in subservience to which he would spend himself wholly and absolutely, and with all the greater fierceness in that he would count and mark down every atom of the coast. In short, he was an idealist, and Mrs. Monsell did not understand the breed.