"Garry Kilworth - We Are The Music Makers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kilworth Garry)

the phantom player, and finally the colonel gave in and tried to accept
the situation. His headaches continued, but he took medicine to relieve
them. At night he put wax in his ears, but the faint sound of music was
now in his head, trapped there it seemed, and plagued him even in his
dreams.
One day the colonel woke from a troubled sleep to the agony of a terrible
pain in his leg.
He went straight to his physician in Old Town Square.
After a long examination, the physician gave the colonel the bad news.
'You're losing your limb,' said the doctor. 'The arteries have constricted
and cut off the supply of blood. I've seen it happen in smokers, but you
don't smoke, do you? Perhaps it's this tension of which you keep
complaining?'
'I don't complain of the tension,' snapped the grieving colonel, 'I
complain of the music.'
'Well, whatever is causing your stress, that leg will have to be
amputated...'
'Never!' stormed the colonel, shocked to the very centre of his being.
'I'm a soldier. How can I fight a war with only one leg? Think of some
other treatment. Is there no cure? What about medicines? Pills? Give me
something.'
But the physician could recommend nothing, so the colonel changed his
doctor, just as he had changed his lodgings, and the answer was more or
less the same from each and every one of them, and finally he woke up to
the foul smell of gangrene wafting up from beneath the sheets, and
screamed for assistance.
They took off the right leg that very morning.
The colonel dived into misery as no man had ever done before him, feeling
that his life was completely at an end. Left to his own desperate desires,
he would have ended it all in the river, or taken to his bed and starved
himself to death, but his friends would not let him. They took pity on
him, bestowed upon him all their charity, made him live, made him feel
twice as wretched because their sympathy ate at his heart with worse
consequences to his pride than the rot which had eaten at his limb. He
hated them, but hated himself more, because he could not find it in
himself to shoot out his brains while they still fawned over what was left
of his body.
The music returned yet again, merciless in its outpourings, ruthlessly
penetrating his spirit. This time, when his arm developed the pain, he
knew what it meant. He walked straight down to the river and jumped from
the Charles Bridge. Unfortunately it was summer, the water was warm, and
he was fished out half-drowned by some boatmen. When he woke in hospital
his right arm had been removed. The surgeon explained how necessary the
operation had been, to save his life.
'What am I to do?' cried the colonel in despair. 'God help me!'
Even while he was lying in the hospital, the musician found him, and
tormented him with the crippling tune.
By the time he left the hospital he was a poor man, his money having been
eaten into by doctors' bills and care fees. Now that he was caught in the
hole of poverty, his friends abandoned him. The colonel was no longer the