"William Tenn - The Human Angle" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tenn William)

more paintings.
"I don't understand it, " Mr. Glescu said, staring at the floor, which was strewn
with canvases tacked to their wooden stretchers. "This was obviously before you
dis-covered yourself and your true technique. But I'm look-ing for a sign, a hint, of
the genius that is to come. And I findтАФ " He shook his head dazedly.
"How about this one? " Morniel asked, breathing hard.
Mr. Glescu shoved at it with both hands. "Please take it away!" He looked at his
forefinger again. I noticed the black dot was expanding and contracting much more
slowly. "I'll have to leave soon, " he said. "And I don't understand at all. Let me show
you something, gentlemen. "
He walked into the purple box and came out with a book. He beckoned to us.
Morniel and I moved around behind him and stared over his shoulder. The pages
tinkled peculiarly as they were turned; one thing I knew for sureтАФthey weren't made
out of paper. And the title-page...
The Complete Paintings of Morniel Mathaway, 1928-1996.
"Were you born in 1928?" I demanded.
 Morniel nodded. "May 23, 1928." And he was silent. I knew what he was thinking
about and did a little quick figuring. Sixty-eight years. It 's not given to many men to
know exactly how much time they have. Sixty-eight yearsтАФthat wasn't so bad.
Mr. Glescu turned to the first of the paintings.
Even now, when I remember my initial sight of it, my knees get weak and bend
inward. It was an abstrac-tion in full color, but such an abstraction as I'd never
imagined before. As if all the work of all the abstrac-tionists up to this point had
been an apprenticeship on the kindergarten level.
You had to like itтАФso long as you had eyesтАФwhether or not your appreciation
had been limited to representa-tional painting until now; even if, in fact, you 'd never
particularly cared about painting of any school.
I don 't want to sound maudlin, but I actually felt tears in my eyes. Anyone who
was at all sensitive to beauty would have reacted the same way.
Not Morniel, though. "Oh, that kind of stuff," he said as if a great light had
broken on him. "Why didn 't you tell me you wanted that kind of stuff? "
Mr. Glescu clutched at Morniel's dirty tee-shirt. "Do you mean you have paintings
like this, too? "
"Not paintings-painting. Just one. I did it last week as a sort of experiment, but I
wasn 't satisfied with the way it turned out, so I gave it to the girl downstairs. Care to
take a look at it?"
"
Oh, yes! Very, very much! "
Morniel reached for the book and tossed it casually on the bed. "Okay," he said.
"Come on. It won't take more than a minute or two."
As we trooped downstairs, I found myself boiling with perplexity. One thing I was
sure ofтАФas sure as of the fact that Geoffrey Chaucer had lived before Algernon
SwinburneтАФnothing that Morniel had ever done or had the capacity of ever doing
could come within a million esthetic miles of the reproduction in that book. And for
all of his boasting, for all of his seemingly inexhaustible conceit, I was certain that he
also knew it.
He stopped before a door two floors below and rapped on it. There was no
answer. He waited a few seconds and knocked again. Still no answer.
"Damn," he said. "She isn't home. And I did want you to see that one."
"I want to see it," Mr. Glescu told him earnestly. "I want to see anything that