"Bram Stoker - Dracula" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stoker Bram)

or that it is a medium, a tangible help, in conveying memories of sympathy
and comfort? Some time, if it may be, I must examine this matter
and try to make up my mind about it. In the meantime I must find
out all I can about Count Dracula,as it may help me to understand.
Tonight he may talk of himself, if I turn the conversation that way.
I must be very careful, however, not to awake his suspicion.


Midnight.--I have had a long talk with the Count.
I asked him a few questions on Transylvania history,
and he warmed up to the subject wonderfully. In his speaking
of things and people, and especially of battles, he spoke
as if he had been present at them all. This he afterwards
explained by saying that to a Boyar the pride of his house
and name is his own pride, that their glory is his glory,
that their fate is his fate. Whenever he spoke of his
house he always said "we", and spoke almost in the plural,
like a king speaking. I wish I could put down all he said
exactly as he said it, for to me it was most fascinating.
It seemed to have in it a whole history of the country.
He grew excited as he spoke, and walked about the room pulling
his great white moustache and grasping anything on which he laid
his hands as though he would crush it by main strength.
One thing he said which I shall put down as nearly as I can,
for it tells in its way the story of his race.

"We Szekelys have a right to be proud, for in our veins flows the blood
of many brave races who fought as the lion fights, for lordship.
Here, in the whirlpool of European races, the Ugric tribe bore down
from Iceland the fighting spirit which Thor and Wodin game them,
which their Berserkers displayed to such fell intent on the seaboards
of Europe, aye, and of Asia and Africa too, till the peoples thought
that the werewolves themselves had come. Here, too, when they came,
they found the Huns, whose warlike fury had swept the earth like a
living flame, till the dying peoples held that in their veins ran
the blood of those old witches, who, expelled from Scythia had mated
with the devils in the desert. Fools, fools! What devil or what
witch was ever so great as Attila, whose blood is in these veins?"
He held up his arms. "Is it a wonder that we were a conquering race,
that we were proud, that when the Magyar, the Lombard, the Avar, the Bulgar,
or the Turk poured his thousands on our frontiers, we drove them back?
Is it strange that when Arpad and his legions swept through the Hungarian
fatherland he found us here when he reached the frontier, that the Honfoglalas
was completed there? And when the Hungarian flood swept eastward,
the Szekelys were claimed as kindred by the victorious Magyars, and to us
for centuries was trusted the guarding of the frontier of Turkeyland.
Aye, and more than that, endless duty of the frontier guard, for as
the Turks say, `water sleeps, and the enemy is sleepless.' Who more
gladly than we throughout the Four Nations received the `bloody sword,'
or at its warlike call flocked quicker to the standard of the King?