Читать книгу Old Wine and New - Warwick Deeping - Страница 27

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But, in a little while, his outlook became personal. His vision of a whirling, predestined crowd narrowed to the contemplating of his intimate inward self and its hopes and fears, its moods and expectations.

What was he in the pattern? What did he desire? Was it security, the same old slippers before the same old fire, the same old thoughts and habits? For, if the colours of the gyroscope were changing, should he too not change? How live, how die? And in living was he to be his old, deliberate, docile self, a scribbler, Taggart’s understudy, a reviewer of other men’s books? What had he done with life? What had he done that could be compared with the sex swagger of those Australian soldiers? Had he not been a creature of ink instead of a man of blood?

Old Thames running down to The Nore! And ships! And speed! And the laughing eyes of a girl, and the wind in the June grasses! And he was going to squat in a stuffy little room next door to a man who was going bald and had dirty finger-nails, and who was savagely dyspeptic.

Was it possible? Or was he to feel the whip of the new world’s restlessness?

How those white clouds sailed!