Simak, Cliffard D - Final Gentleman - Notisblokk

VIP免费

2024-11-23 0 0 66.73KB 28 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

Simak, Cliffard D - Final Gentleman

Title : Final Gentleman

Author : Clifford D. Simak

Original copyright year: 1959

Genre : science fiction

======================================================================

Final Gentleman

Clifford D. Simak

After thirty years and several million words there finally came a day when

he couldn't write a line.

There was nothing more to say. He had said it all.

The book, the last of many of them, had been finished weeks ago and would be

published soon and there was an emptiness inside of him, a sense of having been

completely drained away.

He sat now at the study window, waiting for the man from the news magazine

to come, looking out across the wilderness of lawn, with its evergreens and

birches and the gayness of the tulips. And he wondered why he cared that he

would write no more, for certainly he had said a great deal more than most men

in his trade and most of it more to the point than was usual, and cloaked though

it was in fictional garb, he'd said it with sincerity and, he hoped,

convincingly.

His place in literature was secure and solid. And, perhaps, he thought, this

was the way it should be - to stop now at the floodtide of his art rather than

to go into his declining years with the sharp tooth of senility nibbling away

the bright valor of his work.

And yet there remained the urge to write, an inborn feeling that to fail to

write was treachery, although to whom it might be traitorous he had no idea. And

there was more to it than that: An injured pride, perhaps, and a sense of panic

such as the newly blind must feel.

Although that was foolishness, he told himself. In his thirty years of

writing, he had done a lifetime's work. And he'd made a _good_ life of it. Not

frivolous or exciting, but surely satisfying.

He glanced around the study and thought how a room must bear the imprint of

the man who lives within it - the rows of calf-bound books, the decorous

neatness of the massive oaken desk, the mellow carpet on the floor, the old

chairs full of comfort, the sense of everything firmly and properly in place.

A knock came. 'Come in.' said Harrington.

The door opened and old Adams stood there, bent shoulders, snow white hair -

the perfect picture of the old retainer.

'It's the gentleman from _Situation_, sir.'

'Fine,' said Harrington. 'Will you show him in?'

It wasn't fine - he didn't want to see this man from the magazine. But the

arrangements had been made many weeks before and there was nothing now but to go

through with it.

The man from the magazine looked more like a businessman than a writer, and

Harrington caught himself wondering how such a man could write the curt,

penetrating journalistic prose which had made _Situation_ famous.

'John Leonard, sir,' said the man, shaking hands with Harrington.

Side 1

Simak, Cliffard D - Final Gentleman

'I'm glad to have you here,' said Harrington, falling into his pat pattern

of hospitality. 'Won't you take this chair? I feel I know you people down there.

I've read your magazine for years. I always read the Harvey column immediately

it arrives.'

Leonard laughed a little. 'Harvey,' he said, 'seems to be our best known

columnist and greatest attraction. All the visitors want to have a look at him.'

He sat down in the chair Harrington had pointed out.

'Mr. White,' he said, 'sends you his best wishes.'

'That is considerate of him,' said Harrington. 'You must thank him for me.

It's been years since I have seen him.'

And thinking back upon it, he recalled that he'd met Preston White only

once, all of twenty years ago. The man, he remembered, had made a great

impression upon him at the time - a forceful, driving, opinionated man, an exact

reflection of the magazine he published.

'A few weeks ago,' said Leonard. 'I talked with another friend of yours.

Senator Johnson Enright.'

Harrington nodded. 'I've known the senator for years and have admired him

greatly. I suppose you could call it a dissimilar association. The senator and I

are not too much alike.'

'He has a deep respect and affection for you.'

'And I for him.' said Harrington. 'But this secretary of state business. I

am concerned...'

'Yes?'

'Oh, he's the man for it, all right.' said Harrington. 'or I would suppose

he is. He is intellectually honest and he has a strange, hard streak of

stubbornness and a rugged constitution, which is what we need. But there are

considerations...'

Leonard showed surprise. 'Surely you do not...'

Harrington waved a weary hand. 'No, Mr. Leonard, I am looking at it solely

from the viewpoint of a man who has given most of his life to the public

service. I know that Johnson must look upon this possibility with something

close to dread. There have been times in the recent past when he's been ready to

retire, when only his sense of duty has kept him at his post.'

'A man,' said Leonard positively, 'does not turn down a chance to head the

state department. Besides, Harvey said last week he would accept the post.'

'Yes, I know,' said Harrington. 'I read it in his column.'

Leonard got down to business. 'I won't impose too much upon your time,' he

said. 'I've already done the basic research on you.'

'It's quite all right,' said Harrington. 'Take all the time you want. I

haven't a single thing to do until this evening, when I have dinner with my

mother.'

Leonard's eyebrows raised a bit. 'Your mother is still living?'

'Very spry.' said Harrington, 'for all she's eighty-three. A sort of

Whistler's mother. Serene and beautiful.'

'You're lucky. My mother died when I was still quite young.'

'I'm sorry to hear of it,' said Harrington. 'My mother is a gentlewoman to

Side 2

Simak, Cliffard D - Final Gentleman

her fingertips. You don't find many like her now. I am positive I owe a great

deal of what I am to her. Perhaps the thing I'm proudest of is what your book

editor, Cedric Madison, wrote about me quite some years ago. I sent a note to

thank him at the time and I fully meant to look him up someday, although I never

did. I'd like to meet the man.'

'What was it that he said?'

'He said, if I recall correctly, that I was the last surviving gentleman.'

'That's a good line.' Leonard said. 'I'll have to look it up. I think you

might like Cedric. He may seem slightly strange at times, but he's a devoted

man, like you. He lives in his office, almost day and night.'

Leonard reached into his briefcase and brought out a sheaf of notes,

rustling through them until he found the page he wanted.

'We'll do a full-length profile on you,' he told Harrington. 'A cover and an

inside spread with pictures. I know a great deal about you, but there still are

some questions, a few inconsistencies.'

'I'm not sure I follow you.'

'You know how we operate,' said Leonard. 'We do exhaustive checking to be

sure we have the background facts, then we go out and get the human facts. We

talk with our subject's boyhood chums, his teachers, all the people who might

have something to contribute to a better understanding of the man himself. We

visit the places he has lived, pick up the human story, the little anecdotes.

It's a demanding job, but we pride ourselves on the way we do it.'

'And rightly so, young man.'

'I went to Wyalusing in Wisconsin,' said the man from the magazine. 'That's

where the data said that you were born.'

'A charming place as I remember it,' said Harrington. 'A little town,

sandwiched between the river and the hills.'

'Mr. Harrington.'

'Yes?'

'You weren't born there.'

'I beg your pardon?'

'There's no birth record at the county seat. No one remembers you.'

'Some mistake,' said Harrington. 'Or perhaps you're joking.'

'You went to Harvard, Mr. Harrington. Class of 27.'

'That is right. I did.'

'You never married, sir.'

'There was a girl. She died.'

'Her name,' said Leonard, 'was Cornelia Storm.'

'That was her name. The fact's not widely known.'

'We are thorough, Mr. Harrington, in our background work.'

'I don't mind,' said Harrington. 'It's not a thing to hide. It's just not a

fact to flaunt.'

'Mr. Harrington.'

Side 3

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

Simak, Cliffard D - Final Gentleman - Notisblokk.pdf

共28页,预览3页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Simak, Cliffard D - Final Gentleman - Notisblokk

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: