Friends and Lovers

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Authors: Helen MacInnes
a peculiar pleasure in watching the swirling mists, for it was always pleasant to have your comfort and security emphasized. And if you had work to do the days of mist were welcome; for there was no temptation to go climbing or fishing or swimming, or to have a game of tennis, or to lie among the heather where the air was warm and sweet. Sweeter and cleaner, David thought, than anything he had ever felt around him, so that it became a conscious pleasure just to be alive, just to be able to breathe.
    To-day was a day of mist, but David found, to his great irritation, that he was thoroughly unsettled. Here he was standing at the window again, looking out at the half-formed shapes and ghostly outlines of a world which had disappeared and depended on human memory for its existence. This morning he had thought that the usual daily routine would occupy this mind of his, and that the attack of gloom which had descended on him, very much as the mist had descended on the loch, would clear.
    But to-day an attack of restlessness had spread through the Lodge.
    Tea was over, yet the boys were certainly not doing much work, judging by the racket they were making in the music-room. George had settled philosophically in the more comfortable chair by the lighted fire in the library, with a pile of magazines on the small table at his elbow, although he actually had had enough good intentions to have a copy of The Greek Commonwealth lying open on his knees And David had spent the last half-hour reading and rereading the same page in Aristotle’s Politics, and then had riser from his chair and started walking round the library shelves.
    He had picked out a book here and there, glanced at it, pul it back into its place in its row. Well-filled rows, too, nol only in number, but in choice.
    The library had been stockec by the yard, but adequately, thanks to the advice Lad; Fenton-Stevens had taken from the Times Book Club. Guests marooned by the rain would find plenty to read. David had been surprised and delighted when he had first arrived, and had blessed Lady Fenton-Stevens’s advisers. It wasn’t toe cruel to admit that she couldn’t have made this choice her self. She probably had not read ten books in the last ter years.
    She knew all about the books being published, oi course—enough to make an amusing phrase in conversation But to read them completely was a very different matter “One is so frightfully busy, you know,” she had munnurec vaguely to David last Christmas, just after she had returnee from Paris and was about to set out for St. Moritz.
    There they were, all in their neat rows: Faulkner, Mann Proust, Stendhal, Hemingway, Morgan, Remains … Practically virgin, too: David had read them with a paper-kniff beside him, scanning a favourite page in those he knew seizing upon those he had not been able to buy or borrow. Ii was comfortable, pleasant, to sit in the library beside the dying fire once George had trundled off to bed and the boy were also out of sight and hearing. It was more than pleasant all the tutoring and coaching and justification for his existence were over for the day. He could spend a couple of hours here in peace, and take his choice in Stendhal 01 Dorothy Sayers, in Tolstoy or Wodehouse, before going u{ through the sleeping house to his own room. He hadn’t beer reduced, like Dr. Johnson, to reading a History of Birmingham This afternoon, however, even the choice of books hadn’ helped him.
    Here he was, standing at this window, looking out at a wet, grey curtain. He must find something to read He left the window and went back to the bookshelves. Hi pulled out A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man an opened it at random.
    “Pride and hope and desire like crushec herbs in his heart sent up va pours of maddening inc ens before the eyes of his mind.” David grimaced and turned over to another page impatiently. It always was unfair, he reminded himself, to take a sentence out of context: the easy, the

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