"Dunsany, Lord - collection - Tales of Three Hemispheres" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dunsany Lord)

farther afield than the village, farther afield than the last house in the
lane, right up to the big bare wold and the house where no one went, no one
that is but the three grim men that dwell there and the secretive wife of
one, and, once a year when the queer green letter came, Amuel Sleggins the
postman.
The green letter always came just as the leaves were turning, addressed to
the eldest of the three grim men, with a wonderful Chinese stamp and the
Otford post-mark, and Amuel Sleggins carried it up to the house.
He was not afraid to go, for he always took the letter, had done so for
seven years, yet whenever summer began to draw to a close, Amuel Sleggins
was ill at ease, and if there was a touch of autumn about shivered unduly so
that all folk wondered.
And then one day a wind would blow from the East, and the wild geese would
appear, having left the sea, flying high and crying strangely, and pass till
they were no more than a thin black line in the sky like a magical stick
flung up by a doer of magic, twisting and twirling away; and the leaves
would turn on the trees and the mists be white on the marshes and the sun
set large and red and autumn would step down quietly that night from the
wold; and the next day the strange green letter would come from China.
His fear of the three grim men and that secretive woman and their lonely,
secluded house, or else the cadaverous cold of the dying season, rather
braced Amuel when the time was come and he would step out bolder upon the
day that he feared than he had perhaps for weeks. He longed on that day for
a letter for the last house in the lane, there he would dally and talk
awhile and look on church-going faces before his last tramp over the lonely
wold to end at the dreaded door of the queer grey house called wold-hut.
When he came to the door of wold-hut he would give the postman's knock as
though he came on ordinary rounds to a house of every day, although no path
led up to it, although the skins of weasels hung thickly from upper windows.

And scarcely had his postman's knock rung through the dark of the house when
the eldest of the three grim men would always run to the door. O, what a
face had he. There was more slyness in it than ever his beard could hide. He
would put out a gristly hand; and into it Amuel Sleggins would put the
letter from China, and rejoice that his duty was done, and would turn and
stride away. And the fields lit up before him, but, ominous, eager and low
murmuring arose in the wold-hut.
For seven years this was so and no harm had come to Sleggins, seven times he
had gone to wold-hut and as often come safely away; and then he needs must
marry. Perhaps because she was young, perhaps because she was fair or
because she had shapely ankles as she came one day through the marshes among
the milkmaid flowers shoeless in spring. Less things than these have brought
men to their ends and been the nooses with which Fate snared them running.
With marriage curiosity entered his house, and one day as they walked with
evening through the meadows, one summer evening, she asked him of wold-hut
where he only went, and what the folks were like that no one else had seen.
All this he told her; and then she asked him of the green letter from China,
that came with autumn, and what the letter contained. He read to her all the
rules of the Inland Revenue, he told her he did not know, that it was not
right that he should know, he lectured her on the sin of inquisitiveness, he