"Diana Wynne Jones - Howl's Moving Castle" - читать интересную книгу автора (Jones Diana Wynne)

she still felt.
She did wonder if she should say goodbye to Martha. But she did not like the idea of Martha not
knowing her. It was best just to go. Sophie decided she would write to both her sisters when she got
wherever she was going, and shuffled on, though the field where the Fair had been, over the bridge, and
on into the country lanes beyond. It was a warm spring day. Sophie discovered that being a crone did
not stop her from enjoying the sight and smell of may in the hedgerows, though her sight was a little
blurred. Her back began to ache. She hobbled sturdily enough, but she needed a stick. She searched the
hedges as she went for a loose stake of some kind.
Evidently, her eyes were not as good as they had been. She thought she saw a stick, a mile or so on, but
when she hauled on it, it proved to be the bottom end of an old scarecrow someone had thrown into the
hedge. Sophie heaved the thing upright. It had a withered turnip for a face. Sophie found she had some
fellow feeling for it. Instead of pulling it to pieces and taking the stick, she stuck it between two
branches of the hedge, so that it stood looming rakishly above the may, with the tattered sleeves on its
stick arms fluttering over the hedge.
"There," she said, and her crackled old voice surprised her into giving a cracked old cackle
of laughter. "Neither of us are up to much, are we, my friend? Maybe you'll get back to your field if I
leave you where people can see you." She set off up the lane again, but a thought struck her and she
turned back. "Now if I wasn't doomed to failure because of my position in the family," she told the
scarecrow, "you could come to life and offer me help in making my fortune. But I wish you luck
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Jones, Diana Wynne - Howl's Moving Castle.txt
anyway."
She cackled again as she walked on. Perhaps she was a little mad, but old women often were.
She found a stick an hour or so later when she sat down on the bank to rest and eat her bread and
cheese. There were noises in the hedge behind her: little strangled squeakings, followed by heavings
that shook may petals off the hedge. Sophie crawled on her bony knees to peer past leaves and flowers
and thorns into the inside of the hedge, and discovered a thin gray dog in there. It was hopelessly
trapped by a stout stick which had somehow got twisted into a rope that was tied around its neck. The
stick had wedged itself between two branches on the hedge so that the dog could barely move. It rolled
its eyes wildly at Sophie's peering face.
As a girl, Sophie was scared of all dogs. Even as an old woman, she was quite alarmed by the two rows
of white fangs in the creature's open jaws. But she said to herself, "The way I am now, it's scarcely
worth worrying about," and felt in her sewing pocket for her scissors. She reached into the hedge with
the scissors and sawed away at the rope around the dog's neck.
The dog was very wild. It flinched away from her and growled. But Sophie sawed bravely on. "You'll
starve or throttle to death, my friend," she told the dog in her cracked old voice, "unless you let me cut
you loose. In fact, I think someone has tried to throttle you already. Maybe that accounts for your
wildness." The rope had been tied quite tightly around the dog's neck and the stick had been twisted
viciously into it. It took a lot of sawing before the rope parted and the dog was able to drag itself out
from under the stick.
"Would you like some bread and cheese?" Sophie asked it then. But the dog growled at her,
forced its way out through the opposite side of the hedge, and slunk away. "There's gratitude for you!"
Sophie said, rubbing her prickled arms. "But you left me a gift in spite of yourself." She pulled the stick
that had trapped the dog out of the hedge and found it was a proper walking stick, well trimmed and
tipped with iron. Sophie finished her bread and cheese and set off walking again. The lane became
steeper and steeper and she found the stick a great help. It was also something to talk to. Sophie
thumped along with a will, chatting to her stick. After all, old people often talk to themselves.
"There's two encounters," she said, "and not a scrap of magical gratitude from either. Still,
you're a good stick. I' m not grumbling. But I'm surely due to have a third encounter, magical or not. In
fact, I insist on one. I wonder what it will be."