Читать книгу Wickford Point онлайн

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"Now don't say that," said Allen, "please. You have no idea the number of times I've wanted to get you in here. But it's like old times, isn't it?"

"Yes," I said, "just like old times."

"How about some beer?" Allen asked.

"Have you any whisky?" I said.

He said that he had, and left the bottle near me on the table.

"Thanks," I said. "You give me an inferiority complex. That's why I said what I did, in case you don't know it."

"That's plain rot," said Allen kindly, "just plain rot, or else you're laughing at me."

I took a swallow of my whisky. I wished I knew whether I was laughing at him or not. It is so hard to judge whether a man one has known for a long while is really first-rate or not. It is so hard to get away from personal pique and from one's own peculiar disappointments. I certainly had never made the reputation which Allen Southby had, and certainly I never would, although I had been industrious and did possess a broader background of experience.

Allen lighted a straight-grain pipe and exhaled the sweet smooth smoke of an expensive mixture. He began talking charmingly about his meeting with Joyce in Paris. He had always maintained that Ulysses was the one great work of an era. Portions of it had to be chanted, he said, for Joyce drew his inspiration directly from the medieval choirs. When one heard Joyce himself read, from Work in Progress, the dialogue of the old washerwomen, thumping wearily at their soiled Gaelic linen, then one understood his mystic word-music. Everything that Allen said made sense; everything he said awakened an intellectual curiosity. He was speaking of a world of ideas, of that lonely, rather grotesque world where anyone who writes must live. Yet I still wondered if something inside me were not laughing in a polite sardonic undertone.