The Angels Weep - Smith Wilbur - Страница 178
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"No!" he said, quickly. "It's not that. It's just that I don't really know what it is-" He couldn't call it a book, and it would be pretentious to call it a novel. "It's just something I have been fiddling with." Janine riffled the edges of the sheets. The pile was over twelve inches deep. "It doesn't look like fiddling," she said, "To me it looks like deadly earnest!" "It's a story I have been trying to write down." may I read it?" she asked, and he felt panic rising in him. "Oh, it wouldn't interest you." "How do you know?" She lugged the huge typescript to the table. "May I read it?" He shrugged helplessly, "I don't think you will get far, but if you would like to try-" She sat down and read the first page.
"It's still very rough, you must make allowances, "he said.
"Craig, you still don't know when to shut up, do you?" she said, without looking up. She turned the page.
He took the plates and glasses through to the galley and washed them, then he made coffee and brought the pot to the saloon table.
Janine did not look up. He poured her a mug, and she did not look up from the page.
After a while he left her and slid through to his cabin. He stretched out on the bunk, and picked up the book he was reading from the bedside table. It was Crawford's Mariners" Celestial No6gation, and he began to wrestle distractedly with zenith distances and azimuth angles. He woke with Janine's hand on his cheek. She jerked her fingers away as he sat up hurriedly.
"What time is it?"he asked groggily.
"It's morning, I have to go. I didn't sleep all night. I don't know how I will get through work today." "Will you come back? "he demanded, coming full awake.
"I have to, I have to finish reading. I would take it with me, but I'd need a camel to carry it, it's so big." She stood over the bunk looking down at him, with a strange speculation in those slanted dark blue eyes.
"It's difficult to believe that was written by somebody I thought that I knew," she mused softly. "I realize that I really knew very little about you at all." She glanced at her watch. "Oh, my gosh! I have to fly!" She parked the VW under the mango trees beside the yacht a little after five o'clock that evening.
"I have brought the steaks," she called, "and the wine." She came up the ladder and ducked down into the saloon. Her voice floated up to him in the cockpit, "But you'll have to cook them. I can't spare the time, I'm afraid." By the time he got down into the saloon, she was already seated and completely engrossed in the massive typescript.
It was long past midnight when she turned the last page. When she had finished it, she sat quietly with her hands clasped in her lap, staring at the pile of paper silently.
Then when she looked up at him at last, her eyes were bright and wet with tears.
"It's magnificent," she said quietly. "It will take me a little time before I can get over it enough to talk about it rationally, and then I will want to read it again." The following evening, she brought a fat Cornish chicken. "It's range-fed," she told him. "One more steak and you would start growing horns." She made a coq all yin and while they ate, she demanded an explanation of the characters in his typescript.
"Was Mr. Rhodes really a homosexual?" "There doesn't seem to be any other explanation," he defended himself. "So many great men are hounded to greatness by their own imperfections." "What about Lobengula? Was his first love really a captured white girl? Did he commit suicide? And Robyn Ballantyne tell me more about her, did she impersonate a man to enrol in medical school? How much of that is true?" "Does it matter?" Craig laughed at her. "It's just a story, the way it might have been. I was just trying to portray an age, and the mood of that age." "Oh, yes, it does matter," she said seriously. "It matters very much to me. You have made it matter. It is as though I am a part of it you have made me a part of it all." That night when it grew late, Craig said simply, "I made up the bunk in the forward cabin, it seems silly for you to drive all that way home." She stayed, and the following evening she brought a valise which she unpacked into the stowage of the forward cabin, and they settled slowly into a routine. She had first use of the shower and heads in the morning while he made the breakfast. He did the cleaning and made up the bunks while she did the shopping and any other errands for him during her lunch break When she arrived back at the yacht in the evenings, she would change into a tee-shirt and jeans, then help him with the work on the yacht. She was particularly good at sanding and varnishing, she had more patience and dexterity than Craig did.
At the end of the first week, Craig suggested, "It would save you a bundle if you gave up that flat of yours." "I'll pay you rent," she agreed, and when he protested, "Okay, then, I get the food and liquor agreed?" That night just after she had doused the gaslight in her cabin, she called through the dark saloon to his stern cabin.
"Craig, do you know, this is the first time that I feel safe since-" She did not finish.
"I know how you feel," he assured her. "Goodnight, Skipper." Yet it was only a few nights later that he came awake to her screams. They were so anguished, so tormented and heartrending, that for seconds he could not move, then he tumbled from his bunk and sprawled on the deck in his haste to get to her. He fumbled and found the switch to the fluorescent tube in the saloon, and then clawed himself down the companionway.
In the reflected light from the saloon, he saw her crouched in one corner of the cabin. Her bedclothes were hanging in untidy festoons from the bunk, her nightdress was tucked up around her naked thighs and her fingers formed a cage across her terrified contorted face.
He reached for her. "Jan, it's all right. I'm here!" He wrapped both arms around her, to try and still those dreadful cries of terror.
Immediately she turned into a maddened animal, and she flew at him.
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