This Was Tomorrow Read Online Free

after all, and I wanted to know a little more about it than they seemed willing to tell me. More than they wanted me to know, maybe. So I read up on rheumatic fever. And now I know.”
    “Oh, Jeff, you’re not all right?”
    “Now, don’t, for God’s sake, look sorry for me! I might live to be a hundred, like Grandmother Tibby. But if I loved somebody enough to want to marry her, I’d want to be a lot surer than I am now that she wouldn’t have an invalid on her hands for the last seventy-five years of it!”
    “I don’t think you ought to feel that way, I—”
    “Darling, we’re slipping,” he said quietly. “I know how it is with you, because I’ve got it too. But it mustn’t be like that. If we’re going to make each other miserable about it, I mustn’t come here at all.”
    “Cousin Sue would be very disappointed if you didn’t,” she said unargumentatively. “And so would I.”
    All the cards were on the table now. So soon. But it would have to be like that, he thought, you couldn’t fool Sylvia anymore than you could fool yourself. And that was what she had become, against his will—his other self, the one you talked to in the dark when you couldn’t sleep, the one who never talked back, except to comfort and uphold. And there she sat, within his reach, waiting, willing, and not afraid. He had only to ask her, and he need never be so alone again. But that was against the rules. Looking at her helplessly from across the room, he perceived that he wasn’t the only one. Sylvia wanted the same thing he wanted. It was not just himself that he denied.
    “Aunt Sue knew very well that I couldn’t stay here,” he said gravely. “Not for long. Never anywhere for very long.”
    “How soon?” she asked quietly. “This war.”
    “There’s a sort of superstition about 1938. Writing on the pyramids, or something. Actually, it will come when Germany is ready to start it.”
    “But—if your heart still bothers you—”
    “Well, that’s another drawback to this job I’ve got.” He came and sat down on the other end of the sofa. “You see, comes this war, and little old Jeff sets out into his first air raid to do a big story for the paper, and what happened? I’ve got a right to be scared, anybody’s entitled to that, and the heart is beating fast, but that’s not all. The strain goes on a little too long, we’ll say, or I have to run for a doorway or throw myself flat in the gutter—and then something slips loose inside my chest and the thing is beating up behind my ears, I can’t breathe, I don’t see straight, I start to wobble, and the only way to stop it is to lie down flat on my back and breathe carefully till it slips back into the groove again. That’s going to be very useful in the middle of this air raid we’re talking about. In other words, I won’t last five minutes in a war. But Bracken doesn’t know this. And I can’t bring myself to tell him. Not yet. I just go on, waiting for it to happen.”
    “But isn’t there something you can take—”
    “I’ve taken lots of things. But last summer in Berlin I saw what it was going to be like. We were there during the Purge, you know, when they killed off a lot of people they didn’t want in the Party. There was some shooting in the streets—not atme—and wholesale executions, and it was all very nasty. We all reacted to it, of course. Bracken lost pounds in just a few days, and Dinah kept losing her dinner. Anything she ate—right away it came up, like being seasick. There’s no way to make anyone who wasn’t in Berlin then understand what it did to you. The air was thick with evil and terror, and you were helpless—like the dream where you try to run and try to scream and can’t move or make a sound. I’m only dwelling on it because I learned then what to expect.”
    “Did you have to lie down flat and breathe carefully?”
    “Luckily not when anyone was looking. It almost caught up with me once, but we had got