"Robert F. Young - The First Sweet Sleep of Night" - читать интересную книгу автора (Young Robert F)

abetted by the right symbolical interpretation of his milieu, it could be more than enough. All primitive
races were in some measure influenced by the topography of their native habitat.
In some cases they were inordinately influenced. From the perspective of an observer the present
land mass was merely unusual. But from the perspective of the natives who lived and died on it, in whose
eyes it constituted the entire universe, it equalled life and death and was symbolically interpreted
according to those terms.
The beaches and the coves of the north coast represented life, since all sustenance for life came from
the sea and from the sands bordering the sea. The hills, possibly because of their superficial resemblance
to virginal breasts, were the fertility symbol, the place where all life was reproduced. And the cliffsтАФ
The cliffs symbolized death.
The topographical interpretation of existence, therefore, was life, reproduction, and death, death for
the men immediately following the reproductive act because of the association of the hills with the cliffs,
and the parallel association of the idea of marriage with the idea of social death.
Taken separately, neither association would have been strong, enough to evoke the suicide response.
But taken together, they made the death-wish inevitable ...
The last of the natives had passed. Dr. Hanley was a barely discernible figure moving up the starlit
slope of the next hill.
"Dr. Hanley," Millicent shouted. "Dr. Hanley!"
He did not pause. He surmounted the star-kissed crest of the hill and started down the opposite
slope. Torches danced like boated fireflies in the distance.
She started to, run after him. Then she paused.
She looked down at her baggy jacket, at her uncompromising mannish slacks. She reached up and
touched her short hair. She remembered the gossamer garments of the native women and the way their
long hair had drifted in the wind. She remembered their beautiful faces.
She touched her own face, her cheeks, her mouth. She pressed her fingers against her lips, trying to
soften, their hard line, but the hardness would not go away.
She couldn't change the expression of her face or the shortness of her hair. Nothing but, time could
do that. But there was something that she could do. She walked on numb feet to her tent and she opened
her foot locker with numb hands. The dress was at the bottom where she had placed itтАФhow long ago?
Before that it had been at the bottom of a bureau drawer in a dormitory, and before that it had been
at the bottom of another bureau drawer in another dormitory, and before that it .had been at the bottom
of a bureau drawer in her room where she had placed it on her seventeenth birthday.
When she uncovered it the first thing she saw was the crumpled corsage of plastic violets, and that
was when she began to cry.

IT WAS her seventeenth birthday and she was descending the staircase to the improvised ballroom.
The polished floor was already aswirl with youthful dancers and the little orchestra in the corner was
bravely playing "Roses from the South."
It was her seventeenth birthday and she had been reading "Lines to an Indian Air" in her room,
glancing shyly, now and then, at her oval face in the mirror, listening to the pounding of her heart; touching
the gossamer shoulder straps of her new white dress to reassure herself that they were real, that she was
real, that the lovely night in June was real, and that she was really seventeen.
It was her seventeenth birthday and it was her first dress, and it was the first time that she had ever
dared to leave the enchanted universe of her books and come out and inform the world that she too,
beneath her shapeless sweaters and her schoolgirl skirts, had been a woman all the time, and a beautiful
woman too.
Bruce was standing at the base of the stairs when she came down, his eyes absorbing her springtime
lovelinessтАФher soft child's face, the whiteness of her shoulders, the burgeoning swell of her breasts. The
plastic violets above her heart had bloomed a springtime blue.
He stepped forward, without a word, and took her in his arms, and together they floated away on the