"Charles L. Harness - The Rose" - читать интересную книгу автора (Harness Charles L)

He cocked his head slightly and seemed to listen. "You haven't, I gather."

"You flatter her. She was never more than a pawn in our little game of Science versus Art. Now that
she's off the board, and I've announced checkmate against you, I can't see that she matters."

"So Science announces checkmate? Isn't that a bit premature? Suppose Anna shows up again, with or
without the conclusion of her ballet score? Suppose we find another prima? What's to keep us from
holding The Nightingale and the Rose tonight, as scheduled?"

"Nothing," replied Martha Jacques coolly. "Nothing at all, except that Anna van Tuyl has probably joined
your former prima at the South Pole by this time, and anyway, a new ballerina couldn't learn the score in
the space of two hours, even if you found one. If this wishful thinking comforts you, why, pile it on!"

Very slowly Jacques put his wine glass on the nearby table. He washed his mind clear with a shake of his
satyrish head, and strained every sense into receptivity. Something was being etched against that slurred
background of laughter and clinking glassware. Then he sensedтАФor heardтАФsomething that brought tiny
beads of sweat to his forehead and made him tremble.

"What's the matter with you?" demanded the woman.

As quickly as it had come, the chill was gone.

Without replying, he strode quickly into the center of the studio.

"Fellow revellers!" he cried. "Let us prepare to double, nay, re-double our merriment!" With sardonic
satisfaction he watched the troubled silence spread away from him, faster and faster, like ripples around a
plague spot.

When the stillness was complete, he lowered his head, stretched out his hand as if in horrible warning,
and spoke in the tense spectral whisper of Poe's Roderick Usher:

"Madmen! I tell you that she now stands without the door!"

Heads turned; eyes bulged toward the entrance.

There, the door knob was turning slowly.

The door swung in, and left a cloaked figure framed in the doorway.

The artist started. He had been certain that this must be Anna.

It must be Anna, yet it could not be. The once frail, cruelly bent body now stood superbly erect beneath
the shelter of the cloak. There was no hint of spinal deformity in this woman, and there were no marring
lines of pain about her faintly smiling mouth and eyes, which were fixed on his. In one graceful motion her
hands reached up beneath the cloak and set it back on her shoulders. Then after an almost instantaneous
demi-plie, she floated twice, like some fragile flower dancing in a summer breeze, and stood before him
sur les pointes, with her cape billowing and fluttering behind her in mute encore.

Jacques looked down into eyes that were dark fires. But her continued silence was beginning to disturb