"Christopher, John - The White Mountains" - читать интересную книгу автора (Christopher John)

It was not until after his Capping that I understood how much I had depended on Jack for companionship in the past. Our alliance had isolated me from other boys of roughly my age in and around the village. I suppose it would have been possible to overcome this-Joe Beith, the carpenter's son, made overtures of friendship, for one-but in the mood I was in I preferred to be alone. I used to go down to the den and sit there for hours, thinking about it all. Henry came once and made some jeering remarks, and we fought. My anger was so great that I beat him decisively, and he kept out of my way after that.
From time to time I met Jack, and we exchanged words that meant nothing. His manner to me was amiable and distant: it carried the hint of a friendship suspended, a suggestion that he was waiting on the tar side of a gulf which in due course I would cross, and that then everything would be as it had been before. This did not comfort me, though, for the person I missed was the old Jack, and he was gone forever. As I would be? The thought frightened me, and I tried to dismiss it, but it continually returned.
Somehow, in this doubt and fear and brooding, I found myself becoming interested in the Vagrants. I remembered Jack's remark and wondered what he would have been like if the Capping had not worked. By now he would probably have left the village. I looked at the Vagrants who were staying with us and thought of them as once being like Jack and myself, in their own villages, sane and happy and with plans for their future. I was my father's only son and would be expected to take over the mill from him one day. But if the Capping were not a success...
There were now three of them, two recently arrived and a third who had been with us several weeks. He was a man of my father's age, but his beard was unkempt, his hair gray and sparse, with the lines of the Cap showing through it. He spent his time collecting stones from the fields near the village, and with them he was building a cairn outside the Vagrant House. He collected perhaps twenty stones a day, each about the size of a half brick. It was impossible to understand why he chose one stone rather than another, or what the purpose of the cairn was. He spoke very little, using words as a child learning to talk does.
The other two were much younger, one of them probably no more than a year from his Capping. He talked a lot, and what he said seemed almost to make sense, but never quite did. The third, a few years older, could talk in a way that one understood, but did not often do so. He seemed sunk in a great sadness and would lie in the road beside the House all day, staring up at the sky.
He remained when the others moved on, tin [SIC] young one in the morning and the cairn builder in the afternoon of the same day. The pile of stones stayed there, unfinished and without meaning. I looked at them that evening and wondered what I would be doing twenty-five years from now. Grinding corn at the mill? Perhaps. Or perhaps wandering the countryside, living on charity and doing useless things. Somehow the alternatives were not so black and white as I would have expected. I did not know why, but I thought I had a glimmer of understanding of what Jack had meant that morning in the den.
The new Vagrant arrived the next day, and being on my way to the den, I saw him come, along the road from the west. He was in his thirties, I judged, a powerfully built man, with red hair and a beard. He carried an ash stick and the usual small pack on his back, and he was singing a song, quite tunefully, as he strode along. He saw me, and stopped singing.
"Boy," he said, "what is the name of this place?"
"It's called Wherton," I told him.
"Wherton," he repeated. "Ah, loveliest village of the plain; here is no anguish, here no pain. Do you know me, boy?"
I shook my head. "No."
"I am the king of this land. My wife was the queen of a rainy country, but I left her weeping. My name is Ozymandias. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair."
He talked nonsense, but at least he talked, and the words themselves could be understood. They sounded a bit like poetry, and I remembered the name Ozymandias from a poem which I had found in a book, one of the dozen or so on the shelf in the parlor.
As he went on toward the village, I followed him. Glancing back. he said, "Dost follow me, boy? Wouldst be my page? Alas, alas. The fox has his hole, and the bird shelters in the great leafy oak, but the son of man has not where to lay his head. Have you no business of your own, then?"
"Nothing important."
"Nothing is important, true, but how does a man find Nothing? Where shall he seek for it? I tell you, could I find Nothing, I would be not king but emperor. Who dwells in the House, this day and hour?"
I assumed he was talking about the Vagrant House.
"Only one," I said. "I don't know his name."
"His name shall be Star. And yours?"
"Will Parker."
"Will is a good name. What trade does your father follow, Will, for you wear too fine a cloth to be a laborer's son?"
"He keeps the mill."
"And this the burden of his song forever seems to be: I care for nobody, no, not I, and nobody cares for me. Have you many friends. Will?"
"No. Not many."
"A good answer. For he that proclaims many friends declares that he has none."
I said, on an impulse which surprised me when I reflected on it, "In fact, I don't have any. I had one, but he was Capped a month ago."
He stopped in the road, and I did so too. We were on the outskirts of the village, opposite the Widow Ingold's cottage. The Vagrant looked at me keenly.
"No business, of importance anyway, and no friend. One who talks and walks with Vagrants. How old are you. Will?"
"Thirteen."
"You are small for it. So you will take the Cap next summer?"
"Yes."
Widow Ingold, I saw, was watching us through the curtains. The Vagrant also flicked a glance in that direction, and suddenly started dancing a weird little jig in the road. He sang, in a cracked voice:
Under the greenwood tree
Who loves to lie with me,
And tune his merry note
Unto the sweet bird's throat?
All the rest of the way to the Vagrant House he talked nonsense, and I was glad to part from him there.
My preoccupation with the Vagrants had been noticed, and that evening my father took me to task for it. He was sometimes stern but more often kindly-just according to his lights, but he saw the world in simple shades of black and white, and found it hard to be patient with things that struck him as foolishness. There was no sense that he could see in a boy hanging about the Vagrant House: one was sorry for them and it was a human duty to give them food and shelter, but there it should end. I had been seen that day with the most recent arrival, who appeared to be even madder than most. It was silly, and it gave tongues cause to wag. He hoped he would hear no more such reports, and I was not to go into the Vagrant House on any pretext. Did I understand?
I indicated that I did. There was more to it, I realized, than concern over people talking about me. He might be willing to listen, at a remove, to news from other villages and from the city, but for gossip and ill-natured talk he truly had nothing but contempt.
I wondered if his tear was of something quite different, and much worse. As a boy he had had an elder brother who had turned Vagrant; this had never been spoken of in our house, but Jack had told me of it long ago. There were some who said that this kind of weakness ran in families, and he might think that my interest in Vagrants was a bad omen for the Capping next year. This was not logical, but I knew that a man impatient of foolishness in others may yet have fallibilities of his own.
What with this, and my own embarrassment at the way in which the new Vagrant had behaved in the presence of others, I made a land [SIC] of resolve to do as I had been bid, and for a couple of days kept well clear of the Vagrants. Twice I saw the man who had called himself Ozymandias clowning and talking to himself in the street, and shied off. But on the third day I went to school not by the back way, the path along the river bank, but out of our front door, past the church. And past the Vagrant House. There was no sign of anyone, but when I came back in the middle of the day, I saw Ozymandias coming from the opposite direction. I quickened my step, and we met at the crossroads.
He said, "Welcome, Will! I have not seen thee, these many days. Hast aught ailed thee, boy? A murrain? Or haply the common cold?"
There had been something about him that had interested, even fascinated me, and it was that which had brought me here in the hope of encountering him again. I admitted that but, in the moment of admission, was once more conscious of the things that had kept me away. There was no one in our immediate vicinity, but other children, coming from school, were not far behind me, and there were people who knew me on the far side of the crossroads.
I said, "I've been busy with things," and prepared to move on.
He put a hand on my arm. "Wilt tarry, Will? He that has no friend can travel at his own pace, and pause, when he chooses, for a few minutes' converse."
"I've got to get back," I said. "My dinner will be waiting."
I had looked away from him. After only a slight pause, he dropped his hand.