"C. L. Moore - No Woman Born" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moore C. L)

No Woman Born
C. L. Moore



She had been the loveliest creature whose image ever moved along the airways. John Harris, who was
once her manager, remembered dog.gedly how beautiful she had been as he rose in the silent elevator
to-ward the room where Deirdre sat waiting for him.

Since the theater fire that had destroyed her a year ago, he had never been quite able to let himself
remember her beauty clearly, ex-cept when some old poster, half in tatters, flaunted her face at him, or a
maudlin memorial program flashed her image unexpectedly across the television screen. But now he had
to remember.

The elevator came to a sighing stop and the door slid open. John Harris hesitated. He knew in his mind
that he had to go on, but his reluctant muscles almost refused him. He was thinking helplessly, as he had
not allowed himself to think until this moment, of the fabu-lous grace that had poured through her
wonderfuldaticerтАЩs body, remembering her soft and husky voice with the little burr in it that had
fascinated the audiences of the whole world.

There had never been anyone so beautiful.

In times before her, other actresses had been lovely and adulated, but never before DeirdreтАЩs day had
the entire world been able to take one woman so wholly to its heart.So few outside the capitals had ever
seen Bernhardt or the fabulous Jersey Lily. And the beauties of the movie screen had had to limit their
audiences to those who could reach the theaters. But DeirdreтАЩs image had once moved glowingly across
the television screens of every home in the civilized world.And in many outside the bounds of civilization.
Her soft, husky songs had sounded in the depths ofjungles, her lovely, languorous body had woven its
patterns of rhythm in desert tents and polar huts. The whole worldknew every smooth motion of her
body and every cadence of her voice, and the way a subtle radiance had seemed to go on behind her
features when she smiled.

And the whole world had mourned her when she died in the the-ater fire.

Harris could not quite think of her as other than dead, though he knew what sat waiting him in the room
ahead. He kept remembering the old words James Stephens wrote long ago for another Deirdre, also
lovely and beloved and unforgotten after two thousand years.




The time comes when our hearts sink utterly,

When we remember Deirdre and her tale,

And that her lips are dust.-

There has been again no woman born

Who was so beautiful; not one so beautiful