"Hope Mirrlees - Lud in the Mist" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mirrlees Hope)

hierophantic robes that looked little suited to the uses of daily life. There were whole chests, too, filled
with pieces of silk, embroidered or painted with curious scenes. Who has not wondered in what
mysterious forests our ancestors discovered the models for the beasts and birds upon their tapestries;
and on what planet were enacted the scenes they have portrayed? It is in vain that the dead fingers have
stitched beneath them тАФ and we can picture the mocking smile with which these crafty cozeners of
posterity accompanied the action тАФ the words "February," or "Hawking," or "Harvest," having us believe
that they are but illustrations of the activities proper to the different months. We know better. These are
not the normal activities of mortal men. What kind of beings peopled the earth four or five centuries ago,
what strange lore they had acquired, and what were their sinister doings, we shall never know. Our
ancestors keep their secret well.
Among the Chanticleers' lumber there was also no lack of those delicate, sophisticated toys тАФ fans,
porcelain cups, engraved seals тАФ that, when the civilisation that played with them is dead, become
pathetic and appealing, just as tunes once gay inevitably become plaintive when the generation that first
sang them has turned to dust. But those particular toys, one felt, could never have been really frivolous тАФ
there was a curious gravity about their colouring and lines. Besides, the moral of the ephemeral things
with which they were decorated was often pointed in an aphorism or riddle. For instance, on a fan
painted with wind-flowers and violets were illuminated these words: "Why is Melancholy like Honey?
Because it is very sweet, and it is culled from Flowers."
These trifles clearly belonged to a later period than the masks and costumes. Nevertheless, they, too,
seemed very remote from the daily life of the modern Dorimarites.
Well, when they had whitened their faces with flour and decked themselves out to look as fantastic as
possible, Master Nathaniel seized one of the old instruments, a sort of lute ending in the carving of a
cock's head, its strings rotted by damp and antiquity, and, crying out, "Let's see if this old fellow has a
croak left in him!" plucked roughly at its strings. They gave out one note, so plangent, blood-freezing and
alluring, that for a few seconds the company stood as if petrified.
Then one of the girls saved the situation with a humourous squawk, and, putting her hands to her ears,
cried, "Thank you, Nat, for your cat's concert! It was worse than a squeaking slate." And one of the
young men cried laughingly, "It must be the ghost of one of your ancestors, who wants to be let out and
given a glass of his own claret." And the incident faded from their memories тАФ but not from the memory
of Master Nathaniel.
He was never again the same man. For years that note was the apex of his nightly dreams; the point
towards which, by their circuitous and seemingly senseless windings, they had all the time been
converging. It was as if the note were a living substance, and subject to the law of chemical changes тАФ
that is to say, as that law works in dreams. For instance, he might dream that his old nurse was baking an
apple on the fire in her own cosy room, and as he watched it simmer and sizzle she would look at him
with a strange smile, a smile such as he had never seen on her face in his waking hours, and say, "But, of
course, you know it isn't really the apple. It's the Note."
The influence that this experience had had upon his attitude to daily life was a curious one. Before he
had heard the note he had caused his father some uneasiness by his impatience of routine and his
hankering after travel and adventure. He had, indeed, been heard to vow that he would rather be the
captain of one of his father's ships than the sedentary owner of the whole fleet.
But after he had heard the Note a more stay-at-home and steady young man could not have been
found in Lud-in-the-Mist. For it had generated in him what one can only call a wistful yearning after the
prosaic things he already possessed. It was as if he thought he had already lost what he was actually
holding in his hands.
From this there sprang an ever-present sense of insecurity together with a distrust of the homely things
he cherished. With what familiar object тАФ quill, pipe, pack of cards тАФ would he be occupied, in which
regular recurrent action тАФ the pulling on or off of his nightcap, the weekly auditing of his accounts тАФ
would he be engaged when IT, the hidden menace, sprang out at him? And he would gaze in terror at his
furniture, his walls, his pictures тАФ what strange scene might they one day witness, what awful experience