"Cather, Willa - Alexander's Bridge" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cather Willa Sibert)

without smartness or mawkishness. Of course,
Hilda is Irish,--the Burgoynes have been
stage people for generations,--and she has the
Irish voice. It's delightful to hear it in a
London theatre. That laugh, now, when she
doubles over at the hips--who ever heard it
out of Galway? She saves her hand, too.
She's at her best in the second act. She's
really MacConnell's poetic motif, you see;
makes the whole thing a fairy tale."

The second act opened before Philly
Doyle's underground still, with Peggy and
her battered donkey come in to smuggle a
load of potheen across the bog, and to bring
Philly word of what was doing in the world
without, and of what was happening along
the roadsides and ditches with the first gleam
of fine weather. Alexander, annoyed by
Mainhall's sighs and exclamations, watched
her with keen, half-skeptical interest. As
Mainhall had said, she was the second act;
the plot and feeling alike depended upon her
lightness of foot, her lightness of touch, upon
the shrewdness and deft fancifulness that
played alternately, and sometimes together,
in her mirthful brown eyes. When she began
to dance, by way of showing the gossoons what
she had seen in the fairy rings at night,
the house broke into a prolonged uproar.
After her dance she withdrew from the dialogue
and retreated to the ditch wall back of Philly's
burrow, where she sat singing "The Rising of the Moon"
and making a wreath of primroses for her donkey.

When the act was over Alexander and Mainhall
strolled out into the corridor. They met
a good many acquaintances; Mainhall, indeed,
knew almost every one, and he babbled on incontinently,
screwing his small head about over his high collar.
Presently he hailed a tall, bearded man, grim-browed
and rather battered-looking, who had his opera cloak
on his arm and his hat in his hand, and who seemed
to be on the point of leaving the theatre.

"MacConnell, let me introduce Mr. Bartley
Alexander. I say! It's going famously
to-night, Mac. And what an audience!
You'll never do anything like this again, mark me.
A man writes to the top of his bent only once."