![]() Once outside I remained still for twenty seconds or so, ignoring the vagrant flurries of snow that even here, on the lee side, seemed bent on getting down my collar and up the trouser cuffs, then walked quickly foreword. Look your last on all things lovely every hour."' Your Shakespeares are all very well, but Walter de la Mare is my boy." He lifted his glass and squinted myopically at it against the light. We Gilberts have the indomitable spirit, the unconquerable soul. A tragic figure, a sad man, fated and laden with doom. ![]() ![]() Maybe she was watching me, maybe she was virtually guarding me, maybe she was giving someone the opportunity to visit my cabin while-I was suddenly very acutely aware that there were things in my cabin that I'd rather not be seen by others. Why my company? Why not that of, say, Charles Conrad who was a whole lot younger, nicer, and better looking than I was? Or even his other two fellow actors, Gunther Jungbeck and ion Heyter, both very personable characters indeed? Maybe she wanted to be with me for all the wrong reasons. She was scared, she said, she was lonely and so she naturally wanted company. Mary Stuart had visited it, but then she'd told me she had and the fact that she was here now confirmed the reason for her visit. On our stumbling descent of the companionway he said:īack in my corner I picked up the booklet again but instead of reading it got to wondering about my cabin and those who might visit it during my absence. Clearly, he had his emergency supplies cached in his cabin. But I have a sensitive nature and I don't want to be around when you find out that your assessment of Otto is a hundred percent wrong." Lonnie came without a single murmur of protest. "Neither am I being heavy-handed and moralistic. "I'm not trying to deprive you of the necessities of life," I explained. "Now that we have touched, inadvertently chanced upon, as one might say, this topic-spirit, the blushful hippocrene-I wonder if by any chance you would care to join me in a thimbleful of the elixir I have here-?' He broke off as I went round the back of the bar, replaced the bottles, locked the doors, placed the keys in his dressing-gown pocket and took his arm. And, of course, a little assistance." He drank half his malt in one gulp and intoned: Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day to the last syllable-" How, you will ask, can one forget the future? Well, for one thing, it takes practice. But some of us-very, very few and it would not be right of me to say that we're gifted with a prescience and understanding and intelligence far beyond the normal ken, so I'll just say we're different some of us, I say, drink to forget the future. All of it-the livelong day." He lifted his recharged glass. ![]() The only good thing you can say about a today is that at any given moment such and such a portion of it is already irrevocably past'-he paused to admire his speech control-"Irrevocably past, as I say, and, with the passing of every moment, so much less of it to come. I don't want to, mind you, for tomorrows, We found, are always distressingly similar to todays. The day after tomorrow? Well, yes, if I must, I'll face the day after tomorrow. "And that, my dear boy, is the whole point of the exercise, I don't want to get up tomorrow. Otto will have you drawn and quartered if he finds you here." Anyway, doctor's orders and do me a favour-get to hell out of here. I don't think he quite meant it in that way, Lonnie. This Hippocratic spirit-" He broke off only to resume almost at once. Hot-foot to the succour of suffering mankind? A new and dreadful epidemic, is it? Your old Uncle Lonnie is proud of you, boy, proud of you. "You think I'm headed for the next world with my gas pedal flat on the floor, don't you?" She looked at me gravely and said nothing. I picked up the rug, did my customary two-step across the heaving deck and draped the rug over her. Nothing brings out the worst in me more quickly than sweetly smiling suffering.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |