Читать книгу The Interpreter - Philip Gibbs - Страница 4

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The wound had been deep, cutting him to the soul, and for a time destroying the very foundations of his life upon which his faith and courage—he had had courage—were built.

As an American journalist in London, doing a nightly broadcast as well to the United States, John Barton had had but little time for the enjoyment of married life with a girl he had once called ironically “the flower of English beauty.” That was before his inferiority complex had been cut out, and when he was still hostile to the English accent and the English manner, in which he had suspected arrogance and condescension. Anne had been a little arrogant and very elusive, giving no easy wooing to an American reporter who had fallen in love with her after their first challenge and counterchallenge on board ship crossing the Atlantic. He had been a persistent lover, though once he had nearly lost her—in Germany, among the Nazis. He had quarrelled with her, and she had laughed at him. She had been as cold as ice sometimes, and the fire of his love had not melted her. She had been Lady Anne Ede. He had been audacious—a cub reporter, or at least a special correspondent with his rough edges hardly worn off after a year in Europe—in marrying a girl who belonged to the English aristocracy, poverty-stricken but still proud, though they made no fuss about it. It was only he, really, who became a bit fussed—absurdly embarrassed—because his wife, according to English custom, was Lady Anne Barton instead of Mrs. John Barton, as he would have preferred her to be. She had jeered at him for that. She had turned the tables on him, calling him an “American snob,” because he worried about a title which the English didn’t bother about unduly.

“All you Americans are snobs,” she told him once; “though you pose as being strictly democratic. Anybody with a title—what does it matter?—gets you all excited, John.”

“It’s the romance of it,” he assured her. “We’re all incurably romantic, and the old titles in Europe belong to our fairy tale of life.”

“Oh, you can’t get away with that!” she answered with a challenging laugh. “No, John, your inferiority complex is a national malady.”

She had slapped his hand when, after their marriage, he had called her chaffingly “Lady Anne,” or “Lady Anne of the Moated Grange,” and, at times, “La Belle Dame sans Merci.”

After his marriage—he had been amazed to find himself married to her one night in Washington where she had been living with her brother David of the British Embassy. She had nearly died of the heat in the furnace of a Washington summer. Perhaps, as he dared to tell her, half jeeringly, that had weakened her resistance to him. The war was threatening in Europe—the war which he had foreseen as an American correspondent in Berlin and other capitals where she had been a lady passing by. War was declared, and the English people whom he had learned to like stared up at the sky and asked: “When are they coming?” or “Will they come tonight?” Anne had refused to stay in Washington, though he had pleaded with her.

She had refused to stay, living in luxury, putting on “silly frocks,” while London might be bombed and all her friends might lie dead in the ruins. So she said. She wanted to be in England, sharing the peril of her own people. She had even questioned his courage. “Do you want to stay here in safety?” He had felt hurt at that. She had often hurt him.

They had married in a hurry. Only her brother David and a girl named Diana Faversham had been present. Their honeymoon was aboard ship driving across the great gray sea to a world at war. A strange honeymoon for a young married couple! At Journey’s End they would be in the war zone with its furnace fires, its unimaginable horrors. Now and again he funked it for Anne’s sake, and even for his own. He had no proof that he was anything of a hero. He was doubtful of his own courage, never having stood the test.

They had talked under the stars gravely and without any lightness of newly married love.

“I wonder what God thinks of it all?” Anne had asked him once. He remembered that afterwards, as he remembered all her words, and the touch of her hand, and many little things of delight and wonderment on that voyage from a world at peace to a world at war. He remembered his own answer, not meant to be flippant.

“I guess it makes Him vexed.”

He still suffered from an inferiority complex regarding Anne, even when she was his wife. She was so fine and delicate, and he so rough and clumsy, he thought. He was worshipful of her mind and body. He was absorbed by this exquisite thing which had come to him. He felt unworthy of her tenderness, her caresses—she was not so cold as ice—her high standard of style, as he called it. It was more than style. It was tradition—the tradition of a code which demanded courage, and good manners, and fastidious taste. “Isn’t that bad form, John?” she asked him when he had been a little careless, or a little clumsy. Bad form was a departure from the code which belonged to her family and her blood. He studied her watchfully in those early married days. He thanked God he could make her laugh a good deal, even though the shadow of the war was dark upon their minds. He was thankful that her code of good form did not make his kisses loathsome to her, or hold her back from the little tender things of love. He worshipped her. Sometimes he quarrelled with her, and then he hated himself. It was because he loved her so much. It made him angry when she took great risks, because he was afraid of what might happen to her.