Sunday, December 2, 2012

We were both weary

We were both weary; lack of sleep, the incessant din, and the strain every movement required, wore us down. We spent that afternoon apart in our cabins,fake uggs for sale. I slept and when I awoke the sea was as high as ever, inky clouds swept over us, and the glass streamed still with water, but I had grown used to the storm In my sleep, had made its rhythm mine, had become part of it, so that I arose strongly and confidently and found Julia already up and in the same temper.
‘What d’you think?’ she said. ‘That man’s giving a little “get together party” tonight in the smoking-room for all the good sailors. He asked me to bring my husband.’ ‘Are we going?’
‘Of course...I wonder if I ought to feel like the lady our friend met on the way to Barcelona. I don’t, Charles not a bit.’
There were eighteen people at the ‘get-together party’; we had nothing in common except immunity from seasickness. We drank champagne,Moncler outlet online store, and presently our host said:
‘Tell you what, I’ve got a roulette wheel. Trouble is we can’t go to my cabin on account of the wife, and we aren’t allowed to play in public.’
So the party adjourned to my sitting-room and we played for low stakes until late into the night, when Julia left and our host had drunk too much wine to be surprised that she and I were not in the same quarters. When all but he had gone, he fell asleep in his chair, and I left him there. It was the last I saw of him, for later - so the steward told me when he came from returning the roulette things to the man’s cabin - he broke his thigh, falling in the corridor, and was taken to the ship’s hospital. All next day Julia and I spent together without interruption; talking, scarcely moving, held in our chairs by the swell of the sea. After luncheon the last hardy passengers went to rest and we were alone as though the place had been cleared for us, as though tact on a titanic scale had sent everyone tip-toeing out to leave us to one another. The bronze doors of the lounge had been fixed, but not before two seamen had been badly injured. They had tried various devices, lashing with ropes and, later, when these failed, with steel hawsers, but there was nothing to which they could be made fast; finally, they drove wooden wedges under them, catching them in the brief moment of repose when they were full open, and these held firm.
When, before dinner, she went to her cabin to get ready (no one dressed that night) and I came with her, uninvited, unopposed, expected, and behind closed doors took her in my arms and first kissed her, there was no alteration from the mood of the afternoon. Later,fake montblanc pens, turning it over in my mind, as I turned in my bed with the rise and fall of the ship,replica montblanc pens, through the long, lonely, drowsy night, I recalled the courtships of the past, dead, ten years; how, knotting my tie before setting out, putting the gardenia in my buttonhole, I would plan my evening and think at such and such a time, at such and such an opportunity, I shall cross the start-line and open my attack for better or worse; ‘this phase of the battle has gone on long enough’, I would think; ‘a decision must be reached.’ With Julia there were no phases, no start-line, no tactics at all. But later that night when she went to bed and I followed her to her door, she stopped me.

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