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

SURROUNDED BY HIS SONS AND GRANDSONS.

How willingly would he have changed places with that old baker! And then the disquieting thought
would come to him that perhaps after all epitaphs are not altogether to be trusted.



Chapter II

The Duke Who Laughed Himself Off a Throne and Other Traditions of Dorimare
 Before we start on our story, it will be necessary, for its proper understanding, to give a short sketch of
the history of Dorimare and the beliefs and customs of its inhabitants.
Lud-in-the-Mist was scattered about the banks of two rivers, the Dapple and the Dawl, which met on
its outskirts at an acute angle, the apex of which was the harbour. Then there were more houses up the
side of a hill, on the top of which stood the Fields of Grammary.
The Dawl was the biggest river of Dorimare, and it became so broad at Lud-in-the-Mist as to give that
town, twenty miles inland though it was, all the advantages of a port; while the actual seaport town itself
was little more than a fishing village. The Dapple, however, which had its source in Fairyland (from a salt
inland sea, the geographers held) and flowed subterraneously under the Debatable Hills, was a humble
little stream, and played no part in the commercial life of the town. But an old maxim of Dorimare bade
one never forget that `The Dapple flows into the Dawl.' It had come to be employed when one wanted to
show the inadvisability of despising the services of humble agents; but, possibly, it had originally another
application.
The wealth and importance of the country was mainly due to the Dawl. It was thanks to the Dawl that
girls in remote villages of Dorimare wore brooches made out of walrus tusks, and applied bits of
unicorns' horns to their toothache, that the chimney-piece in the parlour of almost every farm-house was
adorned with an ostrich egg, and that when the ladies of Lud-in-the-Mist went out shopping or to play
cards with their friends, their market-basket or ivory markers were carried by little indigo pages in
crimson turbans from the Cinnamon Isles, and that pigmy peddlers from the far North hawked amber
through the streets. For the Dawl had turned Lud-in-the-Mist into a town of merchants, and all the power
and nearly all the wealth of the country was in their hands.
But this had not always been the case. In the old days Dorimare had been a duchy, and the population
had consisted of nobles and peasants. But gradually there had arisen a middle-class. And this class had
discovered тАФ as it always does тАФ that trade was seriously hampered by a ruler unchecked by a
constitution, and by a ruthless, privileged class. Figuratively, these things were damming the Dawl.
Indeed, with each generation the Dukes had been growing more capricious and more selfish, till finally
these failings had culminated in Duke Aubrey, a hunchback with a face of angelic beauty, who seemed to
be possessed by a laughing demon of destructiveness. He had been known, out of sheer wantonness, to
gallop with his hunt straight through a field of standing corn, and to set fire to a fine ship for the mere
pleasure of watching it burn. And he dealt with the virtue of his subjects' wives and daughters in the same
high-handed way.
As a rule, his pranks were seasoned by a slightly sinister humour. For instance, when on the eve of
marriage a maid, according to immemorial custom, was ritually offering her virginity to the spirit of the
farm, symbolised by the most ancient tree on the freehold, Duke Aubrey would leap out from behind it,
and, pretending to be the spirit, take her at her word. And tradition said that he and one of his boon
companions wagered that they would succeed in making the court jester commit suicide of his own free
will. So they began to work on his imagination with plaintive songs, the burden of which was the frailty of
all lovely things, and with grim fables comparing man to a shepherd, doomed to stand by impotent, while
his sheep are torn, one by one, by a ravenous wolf.
They won their wager; for coming into the jester's room one morning they found him hanging from the