Читать книгу Wickford Point онлайн

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I could see the mark where I had spilled acid on the claw-and-ball foot mahogany table. I could see the broken knobs of the empire bureau, and the rack where I kept my shotgun, and the hole in the Oriental carpet which my Irish water spaniel puppy had chewed twenty years before. I could see my perfunctory and undistinguished Harvard diploma, and a photograph, which was growing yellow, of the officers and men of Battery C of the Three Hundred and Something Artillery, Bay State Division, taken at Camp de Souge in France. There had been a time when I could name everyone of those hundred-odd men from left to right without hesitation. Once it would have seemed impossible that I could ever forget those faces, but now I was not sure which figure among the officers was my own. I could see the hole in the wall made by a revolver bullet from a boyhood weapon which I had not known was loaded—the putty still there, put in by Mr. Morrissey, who was the hired man then, so that Cousin Sue might not find out about it. I had been pretending that I was a cowboy or Daniel Boone or someone, and it was lucky that I had not shot off a finger. I had pretended that I was a lot of things in that room—a soldier, a fireman, a philosopher, a trapper, a poet and a great lover. No doubt I was still pretending.