Отрывок из книги
Michael Arlen
Published by Good Press, 2021
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"A second or a century later, at the end of a long, long silence, for me an infinity of happiness, she moved her head away from me and asked me to light her a cigarette. I gave it to her, and waited. I knew so well, you see, what was coming. I had been watching her, I had made a feast of all the movements of that amazing face. It was a sad face, wonderfully alive, but sad; and its sadness became fixed, her eyes were large and held no curiosity at all. I noticed the lack of curiosity in them, because one is so used to meeting it in women—they want to find out! But she, perhaps, in her splendid conceit, had found out, she knew, and she was sad—had she not said downstairs that she knew? I didn't care then whether she knew or not, for then life was before me, the present and the future were in exquisite certainty; but now, as I waited and watched her draw her cigarette, I looked back on that future, and was really terrified of the present. There are moments of ice-clear sanity in all of us—you must know those moments?—when you realise with helpless vividness what you can and what you cannot do, what you simply cannot alter. And so with this moment and this woman; she was inexorable, I could not alter her, I could do nothing but wait—for the epilogue to that prelude played long ago downstairs, when she had put her hands on my shoulders and told me that she was warning me....
"'But perhaps you will think me very vain?' she asked at last, very quietly.
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