"James, Henry - The Altar of the Dead" - читать интересную книгу автора (James Henry)

little that they got, poor things, even less, and died again, died every day, of
the hard usage of life. They had no organized service, no reserved place, no
honor, no shelter, no safety. Even ungenerous people provided for the living,
but even those who were called most generous did nothing for the others. So, on
George Stransom's part, there grew up with the years a determination that he at
least would do something to it, that is, for his own--and perform the great
charity without reproach. Every man had his own, and every man had, to meet this
charity, the ample resources of the soul.
It was doubtless the voice of Mary Antrim that spoke for them best; at any rate,
as the years went on, he found himself in regular communion with these
alternative associates, with those whom indeed he always called in his thoughts
the Others. He spared them the moments, he organized the charity. How it grew up
he probably never could have told you, but what came to pass was that an altar,
such as was, after all, within everybody's compass, lighted with perpetual
candles and dedicated to these secret rites, reared itself in his spiritual
spaces. He had wondered of old, in some embarrassment, whether he had a
religion; being very sure, and not a little content, that he had not at all
events the religion some of the people he had known wanted him to have.
Gradually this question was straightened out for him; it became clear to him
that the religion instilled by his earliest consciousness had been simply the
religion of the Dead. It suited his inclination, it satisfied his spirit, it
gave employment to his piety. It answered his love of great offices, of a solemn
and splendid ritual; for no shrine could be more bedecked and no ceremonial more
stately than those to which his worship was attached. He had no imagination
about these things save that they were accessible to everyone who should ever
feel the need of them. The poorest could build such temples of the spirit--could
make them blaze with candles and smoke with incense, make them flush with
pictures and flowers. The cost, in common phrase, of keeping them up fell
entirely on the liberal heart.
II
He had this year, on the eve of his anniversary, as it happened, an emotion not
unconnected with that range of feeling. Walking home at the close of a busy day,
he was arrested in the London street by the particular effect of a shopfront
which lighted the dull brown air with its mercenary grin, and before which
several persons were gathered. It was the window of a jeweler whose diamonds and
sapphires seemed to laugh, in flashes like high notes of sound, with the mere
joy of knowing how much more they were "worth" than most of the dingy
pedestrians staring at them from the other side of the pane. Stransom lingered
long enough to suspend, in a vision, a string of pearls about the white neck of
Mary Antrim, and then was kept an instant longer by the sound of a voice he
knew. Next to him was a mumbling old woman, and beyond the old woman a gentleman
with a lady on his arm. It was from him, from Paul Creston, the voice had
proceeded; he was talking with the lady of some precious object in the window.
Stransom had no sooner recognized him than the old woman turned away; but
simultaneously with this increase of opportunity he became aware of a
strangeness which stayed him in the very act of laying his hand on his friend's
arm. It lasted only a few seconds, but a few seconds were long enough for the
flash of a wild question. Was not Mrs. Creston dead?--the ambiguity met him
there in the short drop of her husband's voice, the drop conjugal, if it ever
was, and in the way the two figures leaned to each other. Creston, making a step