"Robert F. Young - One Love Have I" - читать интересную книгу автора (Young Robert F)

ONE LOVE HAVE I
Robert F. Young

It had been one of those rural suppers, which were being revived at the time. Philip had just arrived in
the little academic village that evening and he had just finished unpacking his clothes and his books. There
had been nothing more for him to do till morning when he was due to report at the university, and feeling
restless, and feeling a little lonely too (as he'd admitted to Miranda later), he had left the boarding house
with the intention of wandering about the village till he was tired enough to sleep. He had hardly gone two
blocks, however, before he had come to the brightly-lit community hall where the supper was in
progress, and strangely intrigued, perhaps motivated by the stirring of some pleasant racial memory, he
had paused before the entrance.
Through the wide-flung doors he had seen the long table in the middle of the floor, and the
food-laden tables, each with a girl in blue behind it, lining the walls. He had seen the men and women
passing the food tables, carrying trays, and he had heard the clatter of dishes and the reassuring sound of
homely voices. He had noticed the sign above the entrance then, and the simplicity of it bad touched him:
77c COMMUNITY SUPPERтАФSQUARE DANCE TO FOLLOW. It had touched him and filled him
with a yearning he hadn't experienced since he was a boy, and he had climbed the wide steps that led to
the open doors and stepped into the hall. It was a warm night in September and the curtains at the big
windows were breathing in a gentle wind.
He saw her instantly. She was behind the ham sandwich table on the opposite side of the room, tall,
dark-haired, her face a lovely flower above the blue petals of her collar. The moment he stepped through
the doorway she became the cynosure of the scene, and everything elseтАФtables, diners, walls,
floorтАФbecame vague extraneous details which an artist adds to a picture to accentuate its central
subject.
He was only dimly aware of the other people as he walked across the room. He was halfway to her
table before she looked up and saw him. Their eyes touched then, her blue ones and his gray; touched
and blended, achieved a moment apart from time. And he had fallen in love with her, and she with him,
and it didn't matter what the Freudian psychologists said about that kind of love because the Freudian
psychologists simply didn't know about that kind of love, about the way it was to walk into a room and
see a girl and know instantly, without understanding how you knewтАФor caring evenтАФthat she, and she
alone, was the girl for you, the girl you wanted and had always wanted, would want forever . . .

Forever and a day ...
His hands were shaking again and he made them place a cigarette between his lips and then he made
them light it. But when they had finished the task and the first pale exhalation of smoke was hovering in
the little compartment, they were still shaking, and he held them tightly together on his lap and forced his
eyes to look out the window of the monorail car at the passing countryside.
The land was a tired green, a September green. There was goldenrod on hillsides, and the tips of
sumac leaves were just beginning to redden. The car swayed as the overhead rail curved around a hill
and spanned a valley. It was a lovely valley but it wasn't a familiar one. However, Philip wasn't
perturbed; the car was still too far from Cedarville for him to be seeing familiar places. He'd never been
much for traveling and it would be some time yet before he could start looking for remembered hills and
forests, valleys, roads, housesтАФhouses sometimes stood for a hundred years. Not very often, maybe,
but once in a while. It wasn't too much to ask.
He lay his head back on the pneumatic headrest and tried to relax. That was what the Deep Freeze
Rehabilitation Director had instructed him to do. "Relax. Keep your mind empty. Let things enter into
your awareness gradually, and above all don't think of the past" Relax, Philip thought. Don't think of the
past. The past is past, past, past . . .
The car swayed again and his head turned slightly. The monorail bordered a spaceport at this point,
but he had never seen a spaceport before and for a moment he thought that the car was passing through