"Deland, Margaret - Many Waters" - читать интересную книгу автора (Deland Margaret)

occasional faint clangor of cars far down in the streets, the room, high up in
the big office building, was quiet; but its quiet was the muffled, inarticulate,
never-ending roar of living, rising from below. Fleming sighed, and, turning his
back to his lawyer, stared absently out of the window. Before him, in the
afternoon dusk, lay the struggling, panting city. Far off to the south he could
see the water, and ferryboats crawling like beetles back and forth. Below, the
deep canyons of the streets were blurred with creeping yellow fog; but higher
up, above the crowding roofs and chimneys and occasional spires, the air was
clearer; it was full of tumultuous movement--sudden jets of white steam
ballooning from hundreds of escape pipes; shuffling, shifting coils of black
smoke; here and there the straining quiver of flags, whipping out from their
masts. Fleming, his hands in his pockets, stood staring and listening--with
unseeing eyes, unhearing ears. The lawyer behind him, at the office door,
hesitated.
"Fleming, really, it isn't going to amount to anything. Of course, I know how
you feel about Mrs. Fleming, but--"
The man at the window turned round. "Rather than have her disturbed, I'd
compromise on it. I'd pay him. I'd--"
The lawyer raised his eyebrows. "This time, I think, Hammond is honest. I guess
he really believes he has a case; but Ellis & Grew are sharks, and you'd be
encouraging blackmail to compromise. Anyway, you couldn't do it. Grew
volunteered the information that their man couldn't be bought off'; he meant to
put it through, Grew said. I told him they'd got the wrong pig by the ear. I
told him that Thomas Fleming wasn't the kind of man who purchases peace at the
cost of principle. They're shysters, and I gave 'em plain talk. Now, don't let
Mrs. Fleming take it to heart. Tell her I say it will be a triumph!"
He went off, laughing; and a minute later Fleming heard his step in the
corridor, and then the clang of the elevator door. He took up his black cloth
bag and poked about in it among some papers; then unlocked his desk and found
what he had been looking for--a box of candy for his wife. He slipped it into
his bag, and a minute or two later he was down in the muddy dusk of the street.
As he moved along with the steady surge of the homeward-bound crowd, he looked
doubtfully into the flower stores; he wished he had bought violets for Amy
instead of candy; he had taken her candy last Saturday. He debated whether he
had not better get the violets too, but decided against them, because Amy was
stern with him when he was extravagant for her sake. She never saw extravagance
in any purchase he made on his own account! He smiled to himself at the thought
of her sweet severity.
"Amy keeps me in order," he used to say, whimsically; "she insists that I shall
be her best; it appears that my own best isn't good enough for her!" This she
would always deny, indignantly, and indeed justly; for Thomas Fleming stood on
his own legs, morally, in his community. But in the ten years of their married
life no doubt her ideals, in small matters, had created his. With his indolent
good-nature, he had found it easier to agree with Amy's delicate austerities of
thought than to dispute them. Her hair-splitting in matters of conscience always
amused him, and sometimes touched him, but he accepted her standards of duty
with real tenderness-- which, for all practical purposes, was as good as
conviction. Gradually, too, she pushed him, gently, before he knew it, into
civic affairs; not in any very large way; perhaps hardly more than in a
readiness to do his part as a citizen; but such readiness was sincere, and had