Read Evening in Byzantium for Free Online Page B

pages. Might as well get all the day’s reading done at one time before facing the day.
    He carried the pages out to the balcony and sat down on one of the chairs in the sun. Even if he gained nothing else from the expedition to Cannes, he would have a suntan.
    “Item,” he read, “he is a formal man, a keeper of distances. Dressed in a slightly old-fashioned dinner jacket at a party in the ballroom off the Winter Casino, given after the evening showing, he seemed ambassadorial, remote. In the hothouse atmosphere of this place, where effusive camaraderie is the rule of the game, where men embrace and women kiss people they barely know, his politeness can be chilling. He spoke to no one for more than five minutes at a time but moved constantly around the room, not restlessly but with cool detachment. There were many beautiful women present, and there were two at least with whom his name had been linked. The two ladies, magnificently gowned and coiffed, seemed, to this observer, at least, to be eager to keep him at their side, but he allotted them only his ceremonial five minutes and moved on.”
    Linked, he thought angrily. With whom his name has been linked. Someone has been feeding her information. Someone who knows me well and who is not my friend. He had seen Gail McKinnon at the party across the room and had nodded to her. But he had not noticed that she had followed him around.
    “It was not the economic condition of the Craig family that prevented Craig from going to college, as the family was comparatively well-off. Craig’s father, Philip, was the treasurer of several Broadway theatres until his death in 1946, and while he was undoubtedly under some financial strain during the Depression, he certainly could have afforded to send his only child to college when he reached the age to apply. But Craig chose instead to enlist in the army shortly after Pearl Harbor. Although he served for nearly five years and rose to the rank of technical sergeant, he won no decorations aside from theatre and campaign ribbons.”
    There was an asterisk after this, indicating a footnote.
    On the bottom of the page, under another asterisk, he read the footnote. “Dear Mr. C., this is all desperately dull stuff, but until you unbutton, all I can do is amass facts. When the time comes to put everything together, I shall mercilessly trim so as to keep the reader from dying of boredom.”
    He went back to the paragraph above the footnote. “He was lucky enough to come out of the war unscathed and even luckier to have in his duffel bag the script of a play by a young fellow enlisted man, Edward Brenner, which, a year after Craig’s discharge from the army, he presented under the title The Foot Soldier. The elder Craig’s theatrical connections undoubtedly aided considerably in allowing a very young and completely unknown beginner to manage so difficult a coup.
    “Brenner had two more plays on Broadway in later years, both disastrous flops. One of them was produced by Craig. Brenner has since completely dropped out of sight.”
    Maybe out of your sight, young lady, Craig thought, but not out of his or out of mine. If he ever reads this, I will hear from my young fellow enlisted man.
    “On the subject of his rarely working with creative people more than once, he is reputed to have said, not for quotation, ‘It is generally believed in literary circles that everybody has at least one novel in him. I doubt that. I have found a few men and women who do have one novel in them, but the greatest number of people I have met have perhaps a sentence in them or at the very most a short story.”
    Where the hell did she get it? he thought angrily. He remembered having said something like that once as an abrasive joke to brush off a bore, although he couldn’t remember where or when. And even if in a rough way he half-believed it, having it in print was not going to enhance his reputation as a lover of mankind.
    She’s goading me, he thought, the