"A. E. Merritt - Creep, Shadow!" - читать интересную книгу автора (Merritt A. E)

They were the closest friends I had, and the queer current of hostility between them had often amused
me. They thoroughly liked, yet as thoroughly disapproved of, each other. I had the idea that away down
under they were closer each to the other than to me; that they might have been Damon and Pythias if
each hadn't so disliked the other's attitude toward life; and maybe were Damon and Pythias despite it.

Old Aesop formulated their discordance centuries ago in his fable of the Ant and the Cricket. Bill Bennett
was the Ant. The serious-minded, hard-working son of Dr. Lionel Bennett, until recently one of the
modern, civilized world's five outstanding experts upon brain pathology. I make the distinction of modern
and civilized because I have had proof that what we are pleased to call the uncivilized world has many
more such experts, and I have good reason to believe that the ancient world had others much further
advanced than those of the modern world, civilized or uncivilized.

Bennett, the elder, had been one of the few specialists whose mind turned upon his work rather than his
bank account. Distinguished but poor. Bennett, the younger, was about thirty-five, my own age. I knew
that his father had rested heavily upon him. I suspected that along some lines, and especially in the realm
of the subconscious, the son had outstripped the sire; his mind more flexible, more open. Bill had written
me a year ago that his father had died, and that he had associated himself with Dr. Austin Lowell, taking
the place of Dr. David Braile who had been killed by a falling chandelier in Dr. Lowell's private hospital.
(See Burn, Witch, Burn.)

Dick Ralston was the Cricket. He was heir to a fortune so solid that even the teeth of the depression
could only scratch it. Very much the traditional rich man's son of the better sort, but seeing no honor, use,
nor any joy or other virtue in labor. Happy-go-lucky, clever, generous--but decidedly a first-class idler.

I was the compromise--the bridge on which they could meet. I had my medical degree, but also I had
enough money to save me from the grind of practice. Enough to allow me to do as I pleased--which was
drifting around the world on ethnological research. Especially in those fields which my medical and allied
scientific brethren call superstition--native sorceries, witchcraft, voodoo, and the like. In that research I
was as earnest as Bill in his. And he knew it.

Dick, on the other hand, attributed my wanderings to an itching foot inherited from one of my old Breton
forebears, a pirate who had sailed out of St. Malo and carved himself a gory reputation in the New
World. And ultimately was hanged for it. The peculiar bent of my mind he likewise attributed to the fact
that two of my ancestors had been burned as witches in Brittany.

I was perfectly understandable to him.

Bill's industry was not so understandable.

I reflected, morosely, that even if I had been away for three years it was too short a time to be forgotten.
And then I managed to shake off my gloom and to laugh at myself. After all, they might not have gotten
my letters; or they might have had engagements they couldn't break; and each might have thought the
other would be on hand.

There was an afternoon newspaper on the bed. I noticed that it was of the day before. My eye fell upon
some headlines. I stopped laughing. The headlines ran:

$5,000,000 COPPER HEIR KILLS HIMSELF

RICHARD J. RALSTON, JR. PUTS BULLET THROUGH HEAD