Читать книгу Beyond the Great South Wall: The Secret of the Antarctic онлайн

2 страница из 57

Each time he paused, as he turned against the light, every wrinkle and line was silhouetted mercilessly. Wretchedness covered his face as with a mask. My heart began to go out to him, bursting through its own crust of dejection. Wretched we both were, but I was seven years his senior. I began to commune with myself, seeking comfort for him out of my own hard-won store of disappointment, and trying to forget that our sorrows sat upon an even base.

Suddenly he turned towards me and broke the silence that had lasted between us the greater part of the afternoon.

“Well,” he said harshly, “that’s the end of most things for me.”

“Possibly,” answered I, “but probably not. The future’s very spacious yet, my dear boy. I don’t say it in any patronizing spirit, but you’re only twenty-four. Try to forget the ‘might-have-been,’ and buck yourself up into imagining the ‘maybe.’ It’s not all over yet.”

He grunted contemptuously, tramping off again upon his beat. A waiter who chanced in with the evening papers coughed ostentatiously, and with obvious intention towards the cloud of dust that followed hard upon his track. Gerry stared him down, and as the door closed behind him, brought himself to anchor before me again.