Collected Short Stories. Patrick O’Brian

Чтение книги онлайн.

      LOOKING UP he saw the sea at the end of the tunnel, the line of the horizon sharp, dividing the round mouth. On the sea, brilliant light, and a boat with a man in it, doing something with a net over the edge. Outside the tunnel the world was blazing with a white glare, but inside he could hardly see: there was a dull, sweating concrete path, and the walls curved, arching overhead.

      What the devil was the sea doing at the end of that tunnel? The sea? From that he asked himself What tunnel? and he paused, walked slower, coming up from the abstraction into which he had sunk. The tunnel must have been familiar, or he would not have wondered about the sea. Did he usually walk along it the other way?

      He recalled getting off the train, with a crowd of other people, their noise as they hurried through the tunnel with their feet echoing and flapping. They had hurried intently past him, although at first he had gone fast, imitating them. Now they had all gone and alone he went slowly: lagging still in his ear was the sound of the last people, their resonant feet before they left the tunnel to him.

      It was like waking up from a strong dream, one so strong that for minutes you lie on the borders of the dream and reality and wonder which is which. But it did not clear: there at the end of the tunnel was the sea, stretched tight, the flood of sunlit air, and all enclosed by the mouth of the tube, a round patch of another world, infinitely remote, and unreal – not so much distance (though the tunnel was still long before him) as on another plane.

      Slowly he went now, very slowly, his feet going of themselves. His mind was still heavy, turning slowly. It had been warm in the train: and everybody had got out.

      There were books under his arm; it was cramped with carrying them. He had been reading a book in the train, wedged in the blind corner by the corridor: people were standing all the way; he had not been able to see out. He must have been reading a long time before he went off into this meditation. The book had been about a man – he moved his hand to look at the book’s title, but it was much too dark in the tunnel. It had been about a man who had loved a woman and had married her, and they had lived very happily, part of one another for years and years, and she had died. She had been killed in the war: or had she died? Was he confusing it again?