"T. H. White - The Once and Future King" - читать интересную книгу автора (White T.H)

from Edgar Allan Poe. You hardly liked to look at him. They were red eyes, homicidal, terrific, seeming
actually to give out light. They were like rubies filled with flame. He was called the Grand Duke.
"I don't smell anything," said Agravaine. He sniffed suspiciously, frying to smell. But his palate was
gone, both for smell and taste, and he had a headache.
"It stinks of Sport," said Mordred in inverted commas, "and the Done Thing and the Best People. Let's
go to the garden."
Agravaine returned tenaciously to the subject which they had been discussing.
"It is no good making a fuss about it," he said. "We know the rights and wrongs, but nobody else knows.
Nobody would listen."
"But they must listen," Small flecks in the iris of Mordred's eyes burned with a turquoise light, as bright
as the owl's. Instead of being a foppish man with a crooked shoulder, dressed in extravagant clothes, he
became a Cause. He became, on this matter, everything which Arthur was notтАФ the irreconcilable
opposite of the Englishman. He became the invincible Gael, the scion of desperate races more ancient
than Arthur's, and more subtle. Now, when he was on fire with his Cause, Arthur's justice seemed
bourgeois and obtuse beside him. It seemed merely to be dull complacency, beside the savagery and
feral wit of the Pict. His maternal ancestors crowded into his face when he was spurning at ArthurтАФ
ancestors whose civilization, like Mordred's, had been matriarchal: who had ridden bare-back, charged
in chariots, fought by stratagem, and ornamented their grisly strongholds with the heads of enemies.
They had marched, long-haired and ferocious, an ancient writer tells us, "sword in hand, against rivers in
flood or against the storm-tossed ocean." They were the race, now represented by the Irish Republican
Army rather than by the Scots Nationalists, who had always murdered landlords and blamed them for
being murderedтАФthe race which could make a national hero of a man like Lynchahaun, because he bit
off a woman's nose and she a GallтАФthe race which had been expelled by the volcano of history into the
far quarters of the globe, where, with a venomous sense of grievance and inferiority, they even
nowadays proclaim their ancient megalomania. They were the Catholics who could fly directly in the
face of any pope or saintтАФAdrian, Alexander or St. JeromeтАФif the saint's policies did not suit their own
convenience: the hysterically touchy, sorrowful, flayed defenders of a broken heritage. They were the
race whose barbarous, cunning, valiant defiance had been enslaved, long centuries before, by the foreign
people whom Arthur represented. This was one of the barriers between the father and his son.
Agravaine said: "Mordred, I want to talk. There doesn't seem to be anywhere to sit. Sit on that thing, and
I will sit here. Nobody can hear us."
"I don't mind if they do hear. That is what we want. It should be said out loud, not whispered in

file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Incipit%20Liber%20Quartus.html (2 of 114)14-10-2007 15:44:46
 file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Incipit%20Liber%20Quartus.html


cloisters."
"The whispers will get there in the end."
"No, they won't. That is what they won't do. He doesn't want to hear, and, so long as we whisper, he can
always pretend that he can't. You are not the King of England for all these years, without knowing how
to use hypocrisy."
Agravaine was uncomfortable. His hatred for the King was not a reality like Mordred'sтАФindeed, he had
little personal feeling against anybody except Lancelot. His attitude was more of malice at random.
"I don't think it is any good complaining about what happened in the past," he said gloomily. "We can't
expect other people to side with us when everything is complicated, and happened so long ago."
"It may have happened long ago, but that doesn't alter the fact that Arthur is my father, and that he
turned me adrift in a boat as a baby."