Читать книгу The Inquisitor. A Novel онлайн

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However, he could not stand there for ever, so he said:

'What about sitting down, old girl, and waiting a bit? I've been travelling all day.'

'Yes, of course.'

'I only left the boat this morning.'

'The boat?'

'Yes. I've come from America. Come straight here to see how you were all getting along.'

It seemed that she had made up her mind, for again with that smile which came and went as though she herself had nothing to do with it, she moved down the hall. She moved with the concentrated certainty of the blind and, coming to a door on the left, opened it.

'You can make yourself comfortable here perhaps. Stephen won't be long, I'm sure.'

He moved in, taking his brown bag with him. He was at once struck with the icy coldness of the room.

'My God!' he thought. 'I shan't be able to stay here a week.'

He saw things that he recognized. The old clock on the mantelpiece with the grumpy face, faint yellow marks of discoloration that gave it a pouting mouth and a twisted nose. It was not going; the hands pointed to quarter-past eleven. Two large china ornaments, country girls in wide-brimmed hats carrying baskets of flowers; two arm-chairs of horsehair; a white wool rug with black lines on it; a glass-fronted cabinet containing some very mediocre china, a Swiss cow-bell, a carved wooden box. All these things he remembered from his childhood. On that same rug Stephen had, in one of those dry, bitter tempers of his, rubbed his knuckles in his brother's eyes until he screamed again. His mother had slapped him for opening the cabinet without permission. The clock made a noise, when it was going, like an old man in a wheezing hurry. He had been all the world over and had returned to these same things. He could fancy that they recognized him and he half expected the old clock to start off again on its wheezy way to show him that it remembered him. But no—everything here was frozen into silence.