Читать книгу The Lost Weekend онлайн

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Suddenly, sickeningly, the whole thing was so much eyewash. How could he have been seduced, fooled, into dreaming up such a ridiculous piece; in perpetrating, even in his imagination, anything so pat, so contrived, so cheap, so phoney, so adolescent, so (crowning offense) sentimental? Euphoria! Faithless muse! What crimes are committed in thy-- There was a line he might use; and oh, another: the ending!--the ending sprang to his mind clear and true as if he had seen it in print. The hero, after the long procession of motley scenes from his past life (would the line stretch out to th' crack of doom?)--the hero decides to walk out of the bar and somewhere, somehow, that very day--not for himself, of course: for Helen--commit suicide. The tag: "It would give her a lifelong romance." Perfect; but now--oh more perfect still--was the line that came next, the new ending: the little simple line set in a paragraph all by itself beneath the other, on the last page:

"But he knew he wouldn't."

How much it said, that line; how much it told about himself. How it disarmed the reader about the hero and still more the author--as if the author had stepped in between the page and the reader and said, "You see? I didn't die, after all. I went home and wrote down what you have just been reading. And Helen--what of her? Did we marry, you ask?" Shrug. "Who can tell?..."