"Patricia A. McKillip - The Gorgon in the Cupboard" - читать интересную книгу автора (McKillip Patricia A)

"I'll send word," Harry repeated.
"Don't forget your dinner there, sir."
"You have it. I'm not hungry."
He dropped the charcoal into his pocket, tucked the canvas under one arm and the folded easel under the other, and
walked home dejectedly, scarcely seeing the city around him. He was a fair-haired, sweet-faced young man, nicely
built despite his awkward ways, with a habitually patient expression and a heart full of ravaging longings and
ambitions. He was not talented enough for them, this morning's work told him. He would never be good enough. The
girl was right.
His paintings, if chosen at all to be hung for important exhibits, always ended up too high, or too close to the floor,
or in obscure, badly lit corners. He thought of McAlister's magnificent Diana, with the dogs and the deer in it looking
so well-behaved they might have been stuffed. And Haversham's Watchful Shepherd: the sheep as fat as dandelions
and as docile asтАФas, well, sheep. Why not scapesheep? he wondered despondently, rather than scapegoats? No goat
would stand still long enough for mankind to heap their crimes on its head.
Then he saw that which drove every other thought out of his head.
Her.
She was walking with her husband on the other side of the street. He was speaking fervidly, gesturing, as was his
wont, probably about something that had seized his imagination. It might have been anything, Harry knew: a poem, the
style of an arch, a pattern of embroidery on a woman's sleeve. She listened, her quiet face angled slightly toward him,
her eyes downturned, intent, it seemed, on the man's brilliance. He swept fingers through his dark, shaggy hair, his
thick mustaches dancing, spit flying now and then in his exuberance. Neither of them saw Harry. Who had stopped
midstream in the busy street, willing her to look, terrified that she might raise her dark, brooding eyes and see what
was in his face. She only raised her long white fingers, gently clasped her husband's flying arm and tucked it down
between them.
Thus they passed, the great Alex McAlister and his wife Aurora, oblivious to the man turned to stone by the sight
of her.
He moved at last, jostled by a pair of boys pursued through the crowd, and then by the irate man at their heels.
Harry barely noticed them. Her face hung in his mind, gazing out of canvas at him: McAlister's Diana, McAlister's
Cleopatra, McAlister's Venus. That hair, rippling like black fire from skin as white as alabaster, those deep, heavy-
lidded eyes that seemed to perceive invisible worlds. That strong, slender column of neck. Those long fingers,
impossibly mobile and expressive. That mouth like a bite of sweet fruit. Those full, sultry lipsтАж
I would give my soul to paint you, he told her silently. But even if in some marvelous synchronicity of events that
were possible, it would still be impossible. With her gazing at him, he could not have painted a stroke. Again and
again, she turned him into stone.
Not Aurora, he thought with hopeless longing, but Medusa.
He had tried to speak to her any number of times when he had visited Alex's studio or their enchanting cottage in
the country. All he managed, under that still, inhuman gaze, were insipid commonplaces. The weather. The wild-
flowers blooming in the garden. The stunning success of McAlister's latest painting. He coughed on crumbs, spilled
tea on his cuff. Her voice was very low; he bent to hear it and stepped on her hem with his muddy boot sole, so that
whatever she had begun to say was overwhelmed by his apologies. Invariably, routed by his own gracelessness, he
would turn abruptly away to study a vase that McAlister had glazed himself, or a frame he was making. McAlister
never seemed to notice his hopeless passion, the longing of the most insignificant moth for fire. He would clap Harry's
shoulder vigorously, spilling his tea again, and then fix him in an enthusiastic torrent of words, trying to elicit Harry's
opinion of some project or profundity, while the only thought in Harry's head was of the woman sitting so silently
beyond them she might have been in another world entirely.
He walked down a quiet side street shaded by stately elms, opened the gate in front of the comfortable house he
had inherited from his parents. Looking despondently upon his nicely blooming hollyhocks, he wondered what to do
next.
If only I could create a masterwork, he thought. An idea no one has thought of yet, that would attract the attention
of the city, bring me acclaim. Make me one of the circle of the greatтАж Now I'm only a novice, a squire, something
more than apprentice yet less than master. Harry Waterman, dabbler at the mystery of art. If only I could pass through