"DF Lewis - The Horn Of Europe" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lewis D F)

The Horn of Europe
a short story by DF Lewis

The girl faced straight out of the old photograph - as if she knew Charles
would be looking at it all these years in the future.
About six years old, with white hood and white cardigan and white
thigh-length dress and a single white knickerbocker leg showing its
droops. All these things are white because it is a black and white
photograph and all the other shades are degrees of black and grey. Or
were. It is difficult to order verb tenses in these circumstances.
She holds her two hands together as if she is an older person who is
embarrassed about their whereabouts. The face is wondering, pensive,
unsmiling. She stands at the stony edge of a river, with a cantilever
bridge in the distance and a head of shaggy grey trees over-spilling the
wall to a probable garden on the other side of the river.
Charles has concentrated simply on the girl, since she is central to this
old photograph and looking at him querulously. Her pensiveness has almost
turned to vacancy. Merely his imagination. Not hers. At least, the present
was truly present then. Today, Charles often feels the present is
something other than reality.
On her right (Charles' left) is a black-suited lad of about eleven,
fishing-rod angled downwards like a wooden stream of urine - evidently
after sticklebacks or something equally fishy, an empty jam-jar in front
of his carefully positioned feet. His mind is not on the job. Or wasn't.
His collar is Persil white.
The other boy, only slightly older than the girl has a white boater on his
head, brim a trifle upraised, face intensively down-turned towards a model
yacht, the angle of its sails, both in reality and in the river's
reflections, imitating that of the boy's knobbly-kneed legs, wide apart in
the inch-high water of the riverside. There appear to be sandals on his
feet; his grey shorts rolled to his thigh-tops; both his white
shirt-sleeves gathered to the elbows in circular sausages of cloth. One of
the arms is concealed behind the left side of the boy's body.
That more or less completes it. Why Charles has taken the time and trouble
to examine the old photograph so closely and, indeed, to have noted down
his impressions is a mystery. It would be easy to imagine all kinds of
connection - like the girl being someone with whom Charles is acquainted
in the present, without realising it. But the photograph seems too old for
that. Turn of the century, it seems, when Europe had a different face than
the one it sports today. Charles plumps for 1899. No reason. Simply
instinct. It might be something derived from the sound Charles hears of an
elfin horn beyond the garden wall. Charles laughs at his own conjurations.

But where is the photograph taken? Well, that does not concern him unduly.
Anywhere will suffice. And it probably was.
As Charles continues to dwell on the various images, he convinces himself
that it must be in England. Not even Scotland or Wales. But England. The
heart of England. Its Englishness screams out at him.
The three children are frozen into silent studied poses which the ensuing
years have stylised. At the time the photograph was taken, however, they