"Kuttner, Henry - The Children's Hour UC" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kuttner Henry)

“Tell me,” said Lieutenant Dyke.
“There was a girl,” Lessing began futilely. “I met her in a park—”
Clarissa on a glittering June morning, tall and dark and slim, with the waters of the Hudson pouring past beyond her in a smooth, blue, glassy current. Stabbed by a white wench’s black eyes. Yes, very black eyes, bright and starry with blackness, and set wide apart in a grave face that had the remoteness and thoughtfulness of a child’s. And from the moment he met that grave, bright glance they knew one another. He had been stabbed indeed—stabbbed awake after a lifetime of drowsiness. (Stabbed—like Romeo, who lost both ~ loves
“Hello,” said Clarissa.

“It didn’t last very long.. . I think,” he told Dyke, speaking distractedly. “Long enough to find out there was something very Itrange about Clarissa. . . very wonderful.. . but not long enough to find out what it was. . . I think.”
(And yet they had been days of glory, even after the shadows began to fall about them. For there were always
shadows, just at her elbow. And he thought they had centered about the aunt who lived with her, that grim nonentity whose face he could not remember.)
“She didn’t like me,” he explained, frowning with the effort of remembering. “Well, no, not quite that. But there was something in the. . . in the air when she was with us. In a minute I may remember— I wish I could think what she looked like.”
It probably didn’t matter. They had not seen her often.. They had met, Clarissa and he, in so many places in New York, and each place acquired a brilliance of its own once her presence made it clarissima for him. There was no sensible explanation for that glory about her, so that street noises clarified to music and dust turned golden while they were together. It was as if he saw the world through her eyes when they were together, and as if she saw it with vision clearer—or perhaps less clear—than human.
“I knew so little about her,” he said. (She might almost have sprung into existence in that first moment by the river. And so far as he would ever know, now, she had- vanished back into oblivion in that other moment in the dim apartment, when the aunt said—now what was it the aunt had said?)
This was the moment he had been avoiding ever since memory began to come back. But he must think of it now. Perhaps it was the most important moment in the whole strange sequence, the moment that had shut him off so sharply from Clarissa and her shining, unreal, better than normal world.
What had the woman said to him?
He sat very still, thinking. He shut his eyes and turned his mind inward and backward to that strangely clouded hour, groping among shadows that slid smoothly away at his touch.
“I can’t—” he said, scowling, his eyes still closed. “I can’t. They were. . . negative. . .words, I think, but— No, it’s no use.
“Try the aunt again,” suggested Dyke. “What did she look like?”
Lessing put his hands over his eyes and thought hard. Tall? Dark, like Clarissa? Gum, certainly-or had that only been the connotation of her words? He could not remember. He slumped down in his chair, grimacing with the effort. She had stood before the mirrors, hadn’t she, looking down? Had
she? What were her outlines against the light? She had no outlines. She had never existed. Her image seemed to slide behind furniture or slip deftly around corners whenever his persistent memory followed it through the apartment. Here, quite clearly, the memory block was complete.
“I don’t thinfr I ever can have seen her,” he said, looking up at Dyke with strained, incredulous eyes. “She just isn’t there.”
Yet it was her shadow between him and Clarissa in the last moment before . . . before . . . what was it that cut off all memory between that hour and this? What happened? Well, say before forgetfulness began, then. Before- Lethe.
This much he remembered—Clarissa’s face in the shadowed room, grief and despair upon it, her eyes almost unbearably bright with tears, her arms still extended, the fingers curved as they had slipped from his. He could remember the warmth and softness of them in that last handclasp. And then Lethe
had poured between them. -

“That was it,” said Lessing in a bewildered voice. He looked up. “Those were the highlights. None of them mean anything.”
Dyke drew on his cigarette, his eyes narrow above its glow. “Somewhere we’ve missed the point,” he said. “The real truth’s still hidden, even deeper than all this was. Hard to know yet, just where to begin probing. Clarissa, do you think?”
Lessing shook his head. “I don’t think she knew.” (She bad walked through all. those enchanted days, gravely and aloofly, a perfectly normal girl except for— What had happened? He could not quite remember yet, but that which did happen had not been normal. Something shocking, something terrible, buried deep down under the commonplaces. Something glorious, glimmering far beneath the surface.)
“Try the aunt again,” - said Dyke.
Leasing shut his eyes. That faceless, bodiless, voiceless woman who maneuvered through his memories so deftly that he began to despair of ever catching her full-face. . .
“Go back, then,” Dyke told him. “Back to the very beginning. When did you first realize that something out of the
- ordinary was happening?”
Leasing’s mind fumbled backward through those unnaturally empty spaces of the past.
He had not even been aware, at the outset, of the one
strangeness he could remember now—that wond~ful clarif ying of the world in Clarissa’s presence~ It had to come slowly, through many meetings, as if by a sort of induced magnetism he became sensitized to her and aware as she was aware. He had known only that it was delightful simply to breathe the same air as she, and walk the same streets.
The same streets? Yes, something curious had happened on a street somewhere. Street noises, loud voices shouting— An accident. The coffision just outside the Central Park entrance at Seventy-second Street. It was coming back clearly now, and with a swelling awareness of terror. They had been strolling up by the winding walk under the trellises toward the street. And as they neared it, the scieam of brakes and the hollow, reverberant crash of metal against metal, and then voices rising.
Lessing had been holding Clarissa’s hand. At the sudden noise he felt a tremor quiver along her arm, and then very softly, and with a curiously shocking deftness, her hand slipped out of his. Their fingers had been interlocked, and his did not relax, but somehow her hand was smoothly withdrawn.
He turned to look.
His mind shrank from the memory. But he knew it had happened. He knew he had seen the circle of shaken air ring her luminously about, like a circle in water from a dropped stone. It was very like the spreading rings in water, except that these rings did not expand, but contracted. And as they contracted, Clarissa moved farther away. She was drawn down a rapidly diminishing tunnel of shining circles, with the park distorted in focus beyond them. And she was not looking at Lessing or at anything around him. Her eyes were downcast and that look of thoughtful quiet on her face shut out the world.
He stood perfectly still, too stunned even for surprise.
The luminous, concentric rings drew together in a dazzle, and when he looked again she was not there. People were running up the slope toward the street now, and the voices beyond the wall had risen to a babble. No one had been near enough to see—or perhaps only Lessing himself could have seen an aberration of his own mind. Perhaps he was suddenly mad. Panic was rising wildly in him, but it had not broken the surface yet. There hadn’t been time.
And before the full, stunning realization could burst over him, he saw Clarissa again. She was coming leisurely up the hill around a clump of bushes. She was not looking at him.
He stood quite still in the middle of the path, his heart thudding so hard that the whole park shook around him.
Not until she reached his side did she look up, smiling, and take his hand again.
And that was the first thing that happened.
“I couldn’t talk to her about it,” Lessing told Dyke miserably. “I knew I couldn’t from the first look at her face I got. Because she didn’t know’ To her it hadn’t happened. And then I thought I’d imagined it, of course-but I knew I couldn’t have imagined such a thing unless there was something too wrong with me to talk about. Later, I began to figure out a theory.” He laughed nervously. “Anything, you kww, to keep from admitting that I might have. . . well, had hallucinations.”
“Go on.” Dyke said again. He was leaning forward across the desk, his eyes piercing upon Leasing’s. “Then what? It happened again?”
“Not that, no.”
Not that? How did he know? He could not quite remember yet. The memories came in flashes, each complete even to its ititerloeking foreshadow of events to come, but the events themselves still lay hidden.
Had those shining rings been sheer hallucination? He would have believed so, he was sure, if nothing further had happened. As the impossible recedes into distance we convince ourselves, because we must, that it never really could have been. But L~ssing was not allowed to forget. .
The memories were unraveling now, tumbling one after another through his mind. He had caught the thread. He relaxed in his chair, his face smoothing out from its scowl of deep concentration. Deep beneath the surface that discovery lay whose astonishing gleam shone up through the murk of forgetfulness, tantalizing, still eluding him, but there to be grasped when he reached it. If he wanted to grasp it. If he dared. He hurried on, not ready yet to think of that.
What had the next thing been?