J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography. Humphrey Carpenter

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СКАЧАТЬ serenely happy, for it was the first time that we had ever been able to go calmly side by side to church’. But they also had to spend some time searching for a house for Edith and Jennie, and when a suitable one was found there were innumerable arrangements to be made. Ronald found the hours that passed in domestic concerns to be rather irritating. Indeed he and Edith were not always happy when they were together. They no longer knew each other very well, for they had spent the three years of their separation in two totally different societies: the one all-male, boisterous, and academic; the other mixed, genteel, and domestic. They had grown up, but they had grown apart. From now on each would have to make concessions to the other if they were to come to a real understanding. Ronald would have to tolerate Edith’s absorption in the daily details of life, trivial as they might seem to him. She would have to make an effort to understand his preoccupation with his books and his languages, selfish as it might appear to her. Neither of them entirely succeeded. Their letters were full of affection but also sometimes of mutual irritation. Ronald might address Edith as ‘little one’ (his favourite name for her), and talk lovingly of her ‘little house’, but she was far from little in personality, and when they were together their tempers would often flare. Part of the trouble lay in Ronald’s self-chosen role of sentimental lover, which was quite unlike the face he showed to his male friends. There was real love and understanding between him and Edith, but he often wrapped it up in amatory cliché; while if he had shown her more of his ‘bookish’ face and had taken her into the company of his male friends, she might not have minded so much when these elements loomed large in their marriage. But he kept the two sides of his life firmly apart.

      After his visit to Warwick Ronald set out for Paris with two Mexican boys to whom he was to act as tutor and escort. In Paris they met a third boy and two aunts, who spoke virtually no English. Ronald was ashamed that his own Spanish was only rudimentary, and he found that even his French deserted him when he was faced with the necessity of speaking it. He loved much of Paris and enjoyed exploring the city on his own, but he disliked the Frenchmen he saw in the streets, and wrote to Edith about ‘the vulgarity and the jabber and spitting and the indecency’. Long before this expedition he had conceived a dislike of France and the French, and what he now saw did not cure him of his Gallophobia. Certainly he had some justification for hating France after what happened next. The aunts and the boys decided to visit Brittany, and the prospect appealed to him, for the true Breton people are of Celtic stock and speak a language that is in many respects similar to Welsh. But in the event their destination proved to be Dinard, a seaside resort like any other place. ‘Brittany!’ Ronald wrote to Edith. ‘And to see nothing but trippers and dirty papers and bathing machines.’ There was worse to come. A few days after their arrival he was walking in the street with one of the boys and the older aunt. A car mounted the pavement and struck the aunt, running her over and causing acute internal injury. Ronald helped to take her back to the hotel but she died a few hours later. The holiday ended in distraught arrangements for the body to be shipped back to Mexico. Ronald brought the boys back to England, telling Edith: ‘Never again except I am in the direst poverty will I take any such job.’

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