Читать книгу Lark Ascending - Mazo de la Roche - Страница 9

THE four people, of such diverse temperaments, who sailed in the New Year for France, now saw the Atlantic in an entirely different aspect from the one to which they were accustomed. They had been born and had lived all their lives within sight, sound and smell of it. The prosperity of Saltport depended on it. It was like a great dancing bear secured by the iron chain of the shore. It might rage and roar all the winter, but in summer it danced for the Summer Colony and Saltport passed the hat. But it was a new experience to see it in mid-ocean from the heaving deck of a liner. If it was, in truth, a dancing bear, they were now no more than the fleas on its shaggy back.

Their new situation affected them according to their individual characters. Fay Palmas, the oldest of the quartette, responded in a spirit the most temerarious and childlike. Even as she lay seasick in her berth, wondering if the ship would ever right herself after the last roll, she felt a wild joy in her escape from what she looked back on as years of hateful bondage. She had ceased to love her husband from the time of Diego’s birth. She had always been conscious that he had been criticising her, and she abhorred criticism. Now she thrust the remembrance of his aproned figure, his floury arms, his ascetic face, out of her mind forever. She stretched her arms towards the Old World with the rapturous hope that spurred early explorers on toward the New.