Читать книгу Wickford Point онлайн

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"I'll answer it," she said.

I myself could feel the stimulating effect of that ugly tinkling bell. It was not ringing with the mechanical pulse beats of a city telephone but with the long vicious rings translated by the frustrated finger of some girl at the local switchboard. It was a summons from the saner, outer world that was too busy to permit the overdevelopment of personal eccentricity. Over the lines the world was calling Wickford Point—the world which had exploited me in the journalistic trade, the world which had pushed me into France and had blown me out of the front-line trenches and had rubbed my nose in London, Paris and Berlin, and in Beirut and Peking. The same world was calling which had nearly cleaned me out in the crash of '29 and which was now taxing my earnings to give me a more abundant life. Everything you learned in it turned out to be wrong. It was as baffling and as fascinating as when I had seen it first.

Bella, skipping to the telephone, was arranging her exterior to meet it. She was now the intellectual, epigrammatic Bella Brill, the granddaughter of old John Brill, the homespun sage and poet of transcendentalist New England. I myself was changing, because the call might be for me. I was casting aside the minutiae of Wickford Point; I was becoming Jim Calder, who knew his way around.... It was an out-of-town call, judging from the insistence of the bell. It might be my agent in New York to converse about that story. It might be someone else asking me somewhere.