Читать книгу Wickford Point онлайн

42 страница из 119

Bella's voice grew sharp. I could see her intent white face turn toward me in a startled profile.

"What have you been doing with yourself?" she said. "What are you thinking about?"

"Thinking I won't be able to sleep," I said. But I did not tell her why. She would not have understood the preoccupation which comes of balancing this against that before you set it down on paper.

If you try to get back to the beginning of your existence, you find that all subsequent action has been built upon the shifting sands of unsupported fact. You start with a lot of erroneous impressions supplied by your own untrained observation or foisted upon you by your elders. Then years later you discover that you never knew those elders at all, no matter how long you were thrown with them during the formative years of childhood; and finally the day comes when it is too late even to try to know them, when the blank façade of the generations stands before you to demonstrate the tragic impossibility of passing on experience. All that is left for me at present is to guess about the shady forms I used to see at Wickford Point, whose portraits and daguerreotypes are now in the little parlor, and whose carpet bags and boots and parasols used to be up in the attic until my Cousin Sue in one of her spells of economy sold them to an itinerant antique dealer.