Faraway

Előszó

CHAPTER I
uncle baldwin comes and goes I
it was Tuesday evening and so William's friend, Green-law, from the Buntingham Grammar School, was there. When William dropped the stub of his cigarette into his coffee cup and said, "Well, what about a game?" Green-law nodded and then replied solemnly: "Let us play at the pieces."
Greenlaw nearly always said this. Probably four Tuesday nights out of five found hím at William's house, Ivy Lodge, saying, "Let us play at the pieces." Perhaps he said such things, with a kind of solemn facetiousness, because, after teaching mathematics all day, he found it a relief in the evening to be rather idiotic in his talk. He was capable of repeating faded jokes and dreary mis-quotations by the hour. Yet there was nothing idiotic about Greenlaw himself; he was a solid sensible school-master of fifty or so, one of those spectacled, bushy, smoky men who seem destined to teach mathematics and to remain bachelors; and he and William were very good friends.
"There's a fire in the study," said William, getting up. "We'll go in there."
"Lead on, Macduff," said Greenlaw.
The study was cosy higgledy-piggledy. It was a small high room, a muddle of oldish books, albums, letter files, and skewerd receipts, cases of moths and butterflies, geological specimens, and other vaguely scientific odds and ends that proved that John Dursley, William's father, had once been a member of the Natural History Society of Suffolk. Vissza