ВУЗ:
Составители:
splendour, the heroism, the youth, the magnificence of life and of death, and, amid vast roarings
of a superhuman joy, he led his Fifth Symphony to the conclusion. But the goblins were there.
They could return. He had said so bravely, and that is why one can trust Beethoven when he says
other things.
John Galsworthy (1867 - 1933)
THE MAN OF PROPERTY (1906)
Chapter V. A Forsyte Menage
The happy pair were seated, not opposite each other, but rectangularly, at the handsome
rosewood table; they dined without a cloth - a distinguishing elegance - and so far had not
spoken a word. Soames liked to talk during dinner about business, or what he had been buying,
and so long as he talked Irene's silence did not distress him. This evening he had found it
impossible to talk. The decision to build had been weighing on his mind all the week, and he had
made up his mind to tell her. His nervousness about this disclosure irritated him profoundly; she
had no business to make him feel like that - a wife and a husband being one person. She had not
looked at him once since they sat down; and he wondered what on earth she had been thinking
about all the time. It was hard, when a man worked as he did, making money for heryes, and
with an ache in his heart - that she should sit there, looking - looking as if she saw the walls of
the room closing in. It was enough to make a man get up and leave the table. The light from the
rose-shaded lamp fell on her neck and arms - Soames liked her to dine in a low dress, it gave him
an inexpressible feeling of superiority to the majority of his acquaintance, whose wives were
contented with their best high frocks or with tea-gowns, when they dined at home. Under that
rosy light her amber-coloured hair and fair skin made a strange contrast with her dark brown
eyes. Could a man own anything prettier than this dining-table with its deep tints, the starry, soft-
petalled roses, the ruby-coloured glass, and quaint silver furnishing; could a man own anything
prettier than the woman who sat at it? Gratitude was no virtue among Forsytes, who, competitive
and full of common sense, had no occasion for it; and Soames only experienced a sense of
exasperation amounting to pain, that he did not own her as it was his right to own her, that he
could not, as by stretching out his hand to that rose, pluck her and sniff the very secrets of her
heart.
Out of his property, out of all the things he had collected, his silver, his pictures, his houses, his
investments, he got a secret and intimate feeling; out of her he got none. In this house of his there
was writing on every wall. His business-like temperament protested against a mysterious
warning that she was not made for him. He had married this woman, conquered her, made her
his own, and it seemed to him contrary to the most fundamental of all laws, the law of
possession, that he could do no more than own her body - if indeed he could do that, which he
was beginning to doubt. If anyone had asked him if he wanted to own her soul, the question
would have seemed to him both ridiculous and sentimental. But he did so want, and the writing
said he never would. She was ever silent, passive, gracefully averse; as though terrified lest by
word, motion, or sign she might lead him to believe that she was fond of him; and he asked
himself: Must I always go on like this? Like most novel readers of his generation (and Soames
was a great novel reader), literature coloured his view of life; and he had imbibed the belief that
it was only a question of time. In the end the husband always gained the affection of his wife.
Even in those cases a class of book he was not very fond of - which ended in tragedy, the wife
always died with poignant regrets on her lips, or if it were the husband who died - unpleasant
thought - threw herself on his body in an agony of remorse.
Страницы
- « первая
- ‹ предыдущая
- …
- 18
- 19
- 20
- 21
- 22
- …
- следующая ›
- последняя »
