This Was Ivor Trent

Начало книги

A yellow fog brooded over the city like a curse.

It was about six o’clock of a Sunday evening in October, 1933. For over an hour Ivor Trent had stood by the undrawn curtains in his sitting-room, looking down on desolation. No one was visible: every sound was muffled. The church bells seemed to be summoning the ghosts of a forsaken city to worship.

Some minutes passed, but Ivor Trent remained motionless. Anyone entering the room would have been startled by this immobility, which was that of a waxwork. But moments of deep interior intensity have a physical reflection, and such a moment now possessed him—elevating him to an eminence from which the pattern of his life was clearly discernible.

And Ivor Trent saw that he had reached a final frontier: that he stood, not on a high-road, but at the end of a cul-de-sac. The future would hold only repetitions, not unique experiences. He would become the plagiarist of his own past.

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