The Saint in Europe by Leslie Charteris

Author:Leslie Charteris [Charteris, Leslie]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781258195564
Publisher: Literary Licensing, LLC
Published: 2011-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

4

Days followed through which she moved in a kind of fog —days of physical exhaustion, dark rooms in inns, meals tastelessly yet ravenously devoured, washing of dishes and ruin of manicured hands, lumpy beds on the bare ground, scorching sun, dust, sweat, rain, and cold. Once, after a day of ceaseless drizzle, when she had to sleep in her sodden clothes on earth that squelched under the flimsy ground-sheet, she was certain she must catch pneumonia and die, and felt cruelly injured when the fresh air and healthy life refused even to let her catch a cold in the nose. She had those moods of self-pity when any added affliction would have been welcome, so that she could have looked up to Heaven like Job and protested that no one had ever suffered so much. Self-pity alternated with the hours when her mind was filled with nothing but murderous hatred of the man who was always beside her, calm and unchanging as a mountain, blithely unruffled in good weather and bad. She carried out the tasks he set her because she had no choice; but she swore she would die before he could say he had broken her spirit. At first she washed the frying-pan perfunctorily, and brought it back with scraps of earth still clinging to the stubborn traces of egg: he said nothing about it, but that night he scrambled only two eggs and gave them to her, grey and gritty with the remains of mud she had left.

"That's your ration," he said remorselessly. "If you don't like it, have the pan clean next time."

Next time she finished her scouring with the towel, and when she wanted to wash she tried to take his. He stopped her.

"Egg is grand for the complexion," he said. "But if you object to drying your face on a dishcloth, the usual remedy applies—plus washing the towel."

Sometimes she thought she would steal his knife while he slept and cut his throat: the impulse was there, but she knew she would have been lost without him. Even when the rain had poured all day and everything was drenched, he conjured dry wood out of empty air and had a fire going in no time; he introduced unexpected variety into their simple fare, and robbed orchards for apples with abandoned enthusiasm of a schoolboy. He was never bad-tempered or at a loss: he smoothed difficulties away without appearing to notice them. For thirty-six hours after her spanking she sulked furiously, but it made no mark on his tranquility. The tension of labored silence slipped perforce into a minimum of essential conversation—strained and hostile on her part, unfailingly natural and good-humored on his. Three days passed before she discovered that his eyes were soundlessly laughing at her.

Nothing is more difficult than for two people to be together every hour of the day and punctiliously ignore each other's existence. Nothing, she found out miserably, can grow more irksome than keeping alive a grudge against the someone who is utterly untroubled by rancor.

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