Читать книгу The Dawn of Reckoning - James Hilton - Страница 9

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That was how Philip Monsell and his mother came to Buda- Pesth upon a golden August evening. They took a cab from the quayside to their hotel in the Andrassy-Ut, where Mrs. Monsell promptly examined the visitors' book to see if they were to have interest ing fellow-guests. A German baron and an Italian from Perugia looked the most promising, though Mrs. Monsell was clearly doubtful about them. "I guess if it isn't interesting enough here we can go some where else," she remarked. Interest for her was almost entirely a matter of interesting conversation.

Philip was different. Slower, less communicative, and inclined to be easily embarrassed, he was always a trifle bored at his mother's dinner-parties. He was interested in people, not merely in interesting people, and Buda-Pesth, with its curious meeting of East and West, was quick to exert a fascination over him. While his mother spent the mornings conversing animatedly in the hotel-lounge, he went out into the streets and by-ways, braving the smells and the dust-storms and the fierce heat of the sun. And sometimes he took the funicular up to Buda and sipped iced beer in the cafes on the hill. He enjoyed travelling, and his mother's annual pilgrimages on which he had accompanied her since his early years, had given him a fairly extensive knowledge of the world. Last year it had been Asia Minor and Egypt; this year Roumania and the Danubian provinces.

He was twenty years old, rather tall, quite good-looking, with blue eyes and brown hair and small, delicate features. An adolescent heart had taught him to be cautious in his movements; his speech, too, was somewhat slow and precise, but his brain was sound enough, though perhaps a shade too coldly intellectual. Already, in his freshman's year at Cambridge he had done moderately well, and most likely he would enter the diplomatic service on leaving the University. "For there," as his mother observed cynically, "your ignorance of life will be a positive asset to you."

During the lazy, drowsy hours of the afternoon, when all good Pesthians were asleep, he used to climb the pathway up the hill of Buda, on whose summit the cool Danubian breeze played softly beneath the glare of the sun. And it was there that, on the third day after his arrival, he met the Hungarian girl again.