"Dunsany, Lord - Fifty-one Tales" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dunsany Lord)

Then the small orange that had the laughter in its heart
rolled slowly off the plate on to the floor. And the dark
young men both sought for it at once, and they met suddenly
beneath the table, and soon they were speaking swift words
to one another, and a horror and an impotence came over the
Reason of each as she sat helpless at the back of the mind,
and the heart of the orange laughed and the woman went on
smiling; and Death, who was sitting at another table,
tete-a-tete with an old man, rose and came over to listen to
the quarrel.












The Prayer of the Flowers




It was the voice of the flowers on the West wind, the
lovable, the old, the lazy West wind, blowing ceaselessly,
blowing sleepily, going Greecewards.
"The woods have gone away, they have fallen and left us;
men love us no longer, we are lonely by moonlight. Great
engines rush over the beautiful fields, their ways lie hard
and terrible up and down the land.
"The cancrous cities spread over the grass, they clatter
in their lairs continually, they glitter about us blemishing
the night.
"The woods are gone, O Pan, the woods, the woods. And
thou art far, O Pan, and far away."
I was standing by night between two railway embankments
on the edge of a Midland city. On one of them I saw the
trains go by, once in every two minutes, and on the other,
the trains went by twice in every five.
Quite close were the glaring factories, and the sky above
them wore the fearful look that it wears in dreams of fever.
The flowers were right in the stride of that advancing
city, and thence I heard them sending up their cry. And
then I heard, beating musically up wind, the voice of Pan
reproving them from Arcady -- "Be patient a little, these
things are not for long."