Читать книгу Dr. Wainwright's Patient. A Novel онлайн

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"Oh, dam!" Sun and sea and sky, purple clouds, foam-crested breakwaters, tan sails sunset-gilded, yohoing boatmen, nest-seeking curlews, hoary cliff. "Oh, dam!" But that was not all. Lazily lying at full length, lazily picking blades of grass, lazily nibbling them, and lazily spitting them from his mouth, he said in a quaintly querulous tone:

"Beastly place! How I hate it! Beastly sea, and all that kind of thing; and those fellows going away in their beastly boats, smelling of fish and oil and grease, and beastliness, and wearing greasy woollen nightcaps, and smoking beastly strong tobacco in their foul pipes; and then people draw them, and write about them, and call them romantic, and all such cussed twaddle! Why the deuce ain't they clean and neat, and why don't they dance about, and sing like those fellows in Masaniello? And--Oh Lord! Masaniello! I didn't think I should even have remembered the name of anything decent in this infernal place! What's the time now?" looking at his watch. "Nearly eight. Gad! fancy having had a little dinner at the Windham, or, better still, at the Coventry, where they say that fellow--what's his name?--Francatelli, is so good, and then dropping down to the Opera to hear Cruvelli and Lablache, or the new house which Poyntz wrote me about--Covent Garden--where Grisi and Mario and the lot have gone! Fancy my never having seen the new house! Dammy! I shall become a regular fogey if I stop in this infernal hole much longer. And not as if I were stopping for myself either! If I'd been shaking a loose leg, and had outrun the constable, or anything of that sort, I can understand a fellow being compelled to pull up and live quiet for a bit; though there's Boulogne, which is much handier to town, and much jollier with the établissement, and plenty of écarté, and all that sort of thing, to go on with. But this! Pooh! that's the dam folly of a man's marrying what they call a superior woman! I suppose Gertrude's all right; I suppose it will come off all straight; but I don't see the particular pull for me when it does come off. Here am I wastin' the best years of my life--and just at a time when I haven't got too many of 'em to waste, by Jove!--just that another fellow may stand in for a good thing. To be sure, he's my son, and there's fatherly feelings, and all that sort of thing; but he's never done anything for me, and I think it's rather hard he don't come and take a little of this infernal dreariness on his own shoulders. I shall have to cut away--I know I shall; I can't stand it much longer. I shall have to tell Gertrude--and I never can do that, and I haven't got the pluck to cut away without telling her, and I know she won't even let me go to old Dingo's for the shooting in the autumn. What an ass I was ever to let myself be swindled into coming into this beastly place! and how confoundedly I hate it! Oh, dam! Oh, dam!"