"Mervyn Peake - Ghormenghast 01 - Titus Groan" - читать интересную книгу автора (Peake Mervyn)

their replenishment before retiring at nine o'clock in the evening. There was a stock of white
candles in the small dark ante-room beyond the door of the hail, where also were kept ready for
use Rottcodd's overall, a huge visitors' book, white with dust, and a stepladder. There were no
chairs or tables, nor indecd any furniture save the hammock at the window end where Mr. Rottcodd
slept. The boarded floor was white with dust which, so assiduously kept from the carvings, had no
alternative resting place and had collected deep and ash-like, accumulating especially in the four
corners of the hall.
Having flicked at the first carving on his right, Rottcodd would move mechanically down
the long phalanx of colour standing a moment before each carving, his eyes running up and down it
and all over it, and his head wobbling knowingly on his neck before he introduced his feather
duster. Rottcodd was unmarried. An aloofness and even a nervousness was apparent on first
acquaintance and the ladies held a peculiar horror for him. His, then, was an ideal existence,
living alone day and night in a long loft. Yet occasionally, for one reason or another, a servant
or a member of the household would make an unexpected appearance and startle him with some
question appertaining to ritual, and then the dust would settle once more in the hall and on the
soul of Mr. Rottcodd.
What were his reveries as he lay in his hammock with his dark bullet head tucked in the
crook of his arm? What would he be dreaming of, hour after hour, year after year? It is not easy
to feel that any great thoughts haunted his mind nor -- in spite of the sculpture whose bright
files surged over the dust in narrowing perspective like the highway for an emperor -- that
Rottcodd made any attempt to avail himself of his isolation, but rather that he was enjoying the
solitude for its Own Sake, with, at the back of his mind, the dread of an intruder.
One humid afternoon a visitor _did_ arrive to disturb Rottcodd as he lay deeply hammocked,
for his siesta was broken sharply by a rattling of the door handle which was apparently performed
in lieu of the more popular practice of knocking at the panels. The sound echoed down the long
room and then settled into the fine dust on the boarded floor. The sunlight squeezed itself
between the thin cracks of the window blind. Even on a hot, stifling, unhealthy afternoon such as
this, the blinds were down and the candlelight filled the room with an incongruous radiance. At
the sound of the door handle being rattled Rottcodd sat up suddenly. The thin bands of moted light
edging their way through the shutters barred his dark head with the brilliance of the outer world.
As he lowered himself over the hammock, it wobbled on his shoulders, and his eyes darted up and
down the door returning again and again after their rapid and precipitous journeys to the
agitations of the door handle. Gripping his feather duster in his right hand, Rottcodd began to
advance down the bright avenue, his feet giving rise at each step to little clouds of dust. When
he had at last reached the door the handle had ceased to vibrate. Lowering himself suddenly to his
knees he placed his right eye at the keyhole, and controlling the oscillation of his head and the
vagaries of his left eye (which was for ever trying to dash up and down the vertical surface of
the door), he was able by dint of concentration to observe, within three inches of his keyholed
eye, an eye which was not his, being not only of a different colour to his own iron marble but


file:///C|/2590%20Sci-Fi%20and%20Fantasy%20...20Ghormenghast%2001%20-%20Titus%20Groan.txt (3 of 222) [12/29/2004 1:02:59 AM]
 file:///C|/2590%20Sci-Fi%20and%20Fantasy%20E-books/Mervyn%20Peake%20-%20Ghormenghast%2001%20-%20Titus%20Groan.txt

being, which is more convincing, on the other side of the door. This third eye which was going
through the same performance as the one belonging to Rottcodd, belonged to Flay, the taciturn
servant of Sepuichrave, Earl of Gormenghast. For Flay to be four rooms horizontally or one floor
vertically away from his lordship was a rare enough thing in the castle. For him to be absent at
all from his master's side was abnormal, yet here apparently on this stifling summer afternoon was
the eye of Mr. Flay at the outer keyhole of the Hall of the Bright Carvings, and presumably the