|
Читайте также: |
"Oh, you don't know how I've missed you."
"I was an awful flop in America," he said. "I didn't tell you in my letters, because I thought it would only worry you. They thought me rotten."
"Michael," she cried, as though she could not believe him.
"The fact is, I suppose, I'm too English. They don't want me another year. I didn't think they did, but just as a matter of form I asked them if they were going to exercise their option and they said no, not at any price."
Julia was silent. She looked deeply concerned, but her heart was beating with exultation.
"I honestly don't care, you know. I didn't like America. It's a smack in the eye of course, it's no good denying that, but the only thing is to grin and bear it. If you only knew the people one has to deal with! Why, compared with some of them, Jimmie Langton's a great gentleman. Even if they had wanted me to stay I should have refused."
Though he put a brave face on it, Julia felt that he was deeply mortified. He must have had to put up with a good deal of unpleasantness. She hated him to have been made unhappy, but, oh, she was so relieved.
"What are you going to do now?" she asked quietly.
"Well, I shall go home for a bit and think things over. Then I shall go to London and see if I can't get a part."
She knew that it was no good suggesting that he should come back to Middlepool. Jimmie Langton would not have him.
"You wouldn't like to come with me, I suppose?"
Julia could hardly believe her ears.
"Me? Darling, you know I'd go anywhere in the world with you."
"Your contract's up at the end of this season, and if you want to get anywhere you've got to make a stab at London soon. I saved every bob* I could in America, they all called me a tight-wad but I just let them talk, I've brought back between twelve and fifteen hundred pounds."
"Michael, how on earth can you have done that?"
"I didn't give much away, you know," he smiled happily. "Of course it's not enough to start management on, but it's enough to get married on, I mean we'd have something to fall back on if we didn't get parts right away or happened to be out of a job for a few months."
It took Julia a second or two to understand what he meant.
"D'you mean to say, get married now?"
"Of course it's a risk, without anything in prospect, but one has to take a risk sometimes."
Julia took his head in both her hands and pressed his iips with hers. Then she gave a sigh.
"Darling, you're wonderful and you're as beautiful as a Greek god, but you're the biggest damned fool I've ever known in my life."
They went to a theatre that night and at supper drank champagne to celebrate their reunion and toast their future. When Michael accompanied her to her room she held up her face to his.
"D'you want me to say good night to you in the passage? I'll just come in for a minute."
"Better not, darling," she said with quiet dignity.
She felt like a high-born damsel, with all the traditions of a great and ancient family to keep up; her purity was a pearl of great price; she also felt that she was making a wonderfully good impression: of course he was a great gentleman, and "damn it all" it behoved her to be a great lady. She was so pleased with her performance that when she had got into her room and somewhat noisily locked the door, she paraded up and down bowing right and left graciously to her obsequious retainers. She stretched out her lily white hand for the trembling old steward to kiss (as a baby he had often dandled her on his knee), and when he pressed it with his pallid lips she felt something fall upon it. A tear.
THE first year of their marriage would have been stormy except for Michael's placidity. It needed the excitement of getting a part or a first night, the gaiety of a party where he had drunk several glasses of champagne, to turn his practical mind to thoughts of love. No flattery, no allurements, could tempt him when he had an engagement next day for which he had to keep his brain clear or a round of golf for which he needed a steady eye. Julia made him frantic scenes. She was jealous of his friends at the Green Room Club, jealous of the games that took him away from her, and jealous of the men's luncheons he went to under the pretext that he must cultivate people who might be useful to them. It infuriated her that when she worked herself up into a passion of tears he should sit there quite calmly, with his hands crossed and a good-humoured smile on his handsome face, as though she were merely making herself ridiculous.
"You don't think I'm running after any other woman, do you?" he asked.
"How do I know? It's quite obvious that you don't care two straws* for me."
"You know you're the only woman in the world for me."
"My God!"
"I don't know what you want."
"I want love. I thought I'd married the handsomest man in England and I've married a tailor's dummy."
"Don't be so silly. I'm just the ordinary normal Englishman. I'm not an Italian organ-grinder."*
Дата добавления: 2015-09-11; просмотров: 98 | Поможем написать вашу работу | Нарушение авторских прав |