Читать книгу The Ball of Fire онлайн

62 страница из 101

“Address, please?” asked the clerk, pencil poised over delivery slip.

“I’ll take it with me,” and Allison helped them secure the clumsy thing in the seat beside him. Then he streaked up the Avenue to the small and severely furnished house where four ebony servants protected him from the world.

“Out of town except to this list,” he directed his kinky-haired old butler, and going into the heavy oak library, he closed the door. On the wall, depending from the roller case, was a huge map of the boroughs of New York, which had hung there since he had first begun to group transportation systems together. It was streaked and smudged with the marks of various coloured pencils, some faded and some fresh, and around one rectangle, lettered Vedder Court, was a heavy green mark. He picked up a pencil from the stand, but laid it down again with a smile. There was no need for that new red line; nor need, either, any longer, for the map itself; and he snapped it up into its case, on roller-springs stiff with disuse. In its place he drew down another one, a broad familiar domain between two oceans, and he smiled as his eye fell upon that tiny territory near the Atlantic, which, up to now, he had called a world, because he had mastered it.