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

“She never spoke of it?” Dyke asked.
Lessing shook his head. “It was all just beneath the surface. And if I tried to ask questions they . . . they -seemed to slide right off. She wasn’t consciously evading me. It was more as if she hadn’t quite understood—” He paused. “Arid then things went wrong,” he said slowly. “Something—”
It was hard to recapture this part. The bad memories were submerged perhaps a little - deeper than the good ones, shut off behind additional layers of mental scar tissue. What had happened? He knew Clarissa loved him; they talked of marriage plans. The pattern of happiness had surely been set out clearly for them to follow.
“The aunt,” he said doubtfully. “I think she must have interfered. I think . . . Clarissa seemed to slip out of my hands. She’d be busy when I phoned, or the aunt would say she was out. I was fairly sure she was lying, but what could Idor’ -
When she did see him, Clarissa had denied her neglect, reassuring him with shining glances and delicate, grave caresses. But she was so preoccupied. She did so little, really, and yet she seemed always absorbingly busy. -
“If she was only - watching a sparrow pick up crumbs,”
he told Dyke, “or two men arguing on the street, she gave all her attention to them and had none left over for me. So after awhile—I think about a week had gone by without my even seeing her—I decided to have it out with the aunt,”
- There were gaps—’ He remembered clearly only standing in the white hallway outside the apartment door and knocking. He remembered the door creaking softly open a -little way. Only a little way. The chain had been on it, and it hung open only that narrow width, the chain glinting slightly from light within. It had been dim inside, light reflecting from wall to wall in the many mirrors, but from no source he could see. He could see, though, that someone was moving about inside, a figure distorted by the mirrors, multiplied by them, flickering quietly as it went about its own enigmatic business within, paying no attention to his ring at the door.
“Hello,” he called. “Is that you, ‘Clarissa?”
No answer. Nothing but the silent motion inside, visible now and then in the reflecting walls. He had called the aunt by name, then.
“Is it you, Mrs.—” What name? He had no idea, now. But he had called her again and again, getting angrier as the motion flickered on heedlessly. “I can see you,” he remembered saying, his face against the jamb. “I know you can hear me. Why don’t you answer?”
Still nothing. The motion vanished inside for a moment or two, then wavered twice and was still again. He could not see what figure cast the reflection. Someone dark, moving silently over the thick dark carpets, paying no attention to the voice at the door. What a very odd sort of person the aunt must be.
Abruptly he was struck with the unreality of the situation; that dim, fitting shape in the next room, and the unsatisfactory figure he cut, hesitating there on the threshold calling through the door. Why the devil did the woman insist on this mystery? She was ~oo dominant,
Hot anger rose in him, a violent, sudden, unexpected
- reaction. “Clarissa!” he called. Then, as dim motion flickered in the mirrors again, he put his shoulder to the yielding panel, pushing hard. -
The safety latch must have been flimsy. It gave with a
crackling snap, and Lessing, off balance, staggered forward.
The room with its many dark mirrors whirled vertiginously. He did not see Clarissa’s aunt except as a swift, enigmatic
movement in the glass, but quite suddenly he faced the inexplicable.
Gravity had- shifted, both in direction and in force. His motion continued and he fell with nightmare slowness— Alice down the Rabbit Hole-in a spiraling, expanding orbit; it was like anaesthesia in its unlikeliness and the fact that it did not surprise him. The curious qtsality of the motion pushed everything else out of his mind for the moment. There was no one in the room with him; there were no mirrors; there was no room. Bodiless, an equation, a simplified ego, he fell toward— There was Clarissa. Then he saw a burst of golden light
flaming and faffing against the white dark. A golden shower that enveloped Clarissa and carried her away.
Distantly, with the underbeat of his mind, he knew he should be surprised. But it was like half-sleep. It was too easy to accept things as they came, and he was too lazy to make the effort of awakening. He saw Clarissa again, moving against backgrounds sometimes only a little unfamiliar, at other times—he thought—wildly impossible— Then an armored man was dropping down through warm
sunlit air to the terrace, and the background was a park, with mountains rising far away. A woman was shrinking from him, two men had moved in front of her. Clarissa was there too. He could understand the language, though he did not know how he understood it. The armored man had a weapon of some sort lifted, and was crying, “Get back, Highness! .1 can’t fire—too close-”
A young man in a long, belted robe of barbaric colors skipped backward, tugging at the coiled scarlet whip which was his belt. But neither of them seemed quite ready to make any aggressive moves, astonishment blanking their faces and staring eyes as they gaped at Leasing. Behind them the tall woman with the commanding, discontented face stood frozen by the same surprise. -Lessing glanced around in bewilderment, meeting the incredulous stares of the girls flocking behind her. Clarissa was among them, and beyond her—beyond her—someone he could not quite remember. A dark figure, enigmatic, a little stooped. . .
All of them stood transfixed. (All but Clarissa, perhaps. and perhaps the figure at her elbow—) The armored man’sweapon was poised half lifted, the young robed man’s whip unslung - but trailing. They wore fantastic garments of a style and period Leasing had never heard of, and all their
faces were strained and unhappy beneath the blankness of surprise, as if they had been living under some long-standing pressure of anxiety. He never knew what it was.
Only Clarissa looked as serene as always. And only she showed no surprise. Her black eyes under a strange, elaborate coiffure met his with the familiar twinlding of many lights, and she smiled without saying anything.
A buzzing of excitement rose among the girls. The armored man said uncertainly, “Who are you? Where did you come from? Stand back or I’ll—”
“—Out of thin air!” the robed young man gasped, and gave the crimson whip a flick that made it writhe along the grass.
Leasing opened his mouth to say—well, something. The whip looked dangerous. But Clarissa shook her head, still smiling.
“Never mind,” she said. “Don’t bother explaining. They’ll forget, you know.”
If he had meant to say anything, that robbed him of all coherent thought again. It was too fantastically like .
like. . . something familiar. Alice, that was it. Alice again, in Looking Glass Land, at the Duchess’ garden party. The bright, strange costumes, the bright green grass, the same air of latent menace. In a moment someone would scream, “Off with his head!” -
The robed man stepped back and braced his feet against the- weight of the whip as he swung its long coil up. Lessing watched the scarlet tongue arch against the sky. (“Serpents! Serpents! There’s no pleasing them!” he thought wildly.) And then the whole world was spinning with the spin of the whip. The garden was a top, whirling faster and faster under that crimson lash. He lost his footing on the moving grass and centrifugal force flung him off into unconsciousness.
His head ached.
He got up off the hail floor slowly, pushing against the wall to steady’ himself. The walls were still spinning, but th~ey slowed to a stop as he stood there swaying and feeling the bump on his forehead. His mind took a little longer to stop spinning, but once it came under control again he could see quite clearly what ‘had happened. That chain had never broken at all. He had not fallen into the dark, mirrored room within, where the shadow of the aunt flitted quietly to and fro. The door, actually, had never been opened at all. At least, it was not open now. And the position of the doormat
and the long, dark scrape on the floor made it obvious that he had fried to force -the door and had slipped. His head must have cracked hard against ‘the knob.
He wondered if such a blow could send hallucinations f orward as well as backward through time from the moment of collision. Because he knew he had dreamed—he must have dreamed—that the door was open and the silent shadow moving inside.
When he called Clarissa that night he was fully determined to talk to her this time if he had to threaten the guardian aunt with violence or arrest or whatever seemed, on the spur of the moment, most effective. He knew how humiliatingly futile such threats would sound, but he could think of no other alternative. And the need to see Clarissa was desperate now, after that curious Wonderland dream. He meant to tell her about it, and he thought the story would have some effect. Almost, 1n his bewilderment, he expected her to remember the part she herself had played, though he knew how idiotic the expectation was.
It was a little disconcerting, after his fiery resolution, to hear not the aunt’s voice but Clarissa’s on the telephone.
“I’m coming over,” he said flatly, frustrated defiance making the statement a challenge.
“Why, of course,” Clarissa sounded as if they had parted only a few hours ago.
His eagerness made the trip across town seem very long. He was rehearsing the story he would tell her as - soon as they were alone. The dream had been so real and vivid, though it must have passed in the flash of a second between the time his head struck the doorknob an4 the time his knees struck the floor. What would she say about it? He did not know why at all, but he thought she could give him an answer to his questions, if he told her. -
He rang the doorbell impatiently. As before, there was no sound from within. He rang again. No answer. Feeling eerily as if he had stepped back in time, to relive that curious dream all over again, he tried the knob, and was surprised to find the door opening to his push. No chain fastened it this time. He was looking into familiar, many-mirrored dimness as the door swung wide. While he hesitated on the threshold, not sure whether to call out or try the bell again, he saw something moving far back in the apartment, visible only in the mirrors.
For a moment -the conviction that he was reliving the past
made his head swim. Then he saw that it was Clarissa this time. Clarissa standing quite still and looking up with a glow of shining anticipation upon her face. It was that Christmas morning look he had caught glimpses of before, but never so dearly as now. What she looked at he could not see, but the expression was unmistakable. Something glorious was about to happen, the lovely look implied. Something very glorious, very near, very soon— About her the air shimmered. Lessing blinked. The air
turned golden and began to shower down around her in sparkling rain. This was the dream, then, he thought wildly. He had seen it all before. Clarissa standing quietly beneath the golden shower, her face lifted, letting that shining waterfall pour over her slowly. But if it were the dream again, nothing further was to happen. He waited for the floor to spin underfoot— No, it was real. He was watching another miracle take
place, silently and gloriously, in the quiet apartment.
He had seen it in a dream; now it happened before his eyes. Clarissa in a shower of . . . of stars? Standing like Danae in a shower of gold— Like Danae in her brazen tower, shut away from the world.
Her likeness to Danae struck him with sudden violence. And that impossible rain of gold, and her look of rapt delight. What was it that poured down the shining torrent upon her? What was responsible for setting Clarissa so definitely apart from the rest of humanity, sheltering her at the cost of outraging natural laws, keeping the smooth machinery that protected her humming along its inaudible, omnipotent course? Omnipotent—yes, omnipotent as Zeus once was, who descended upon his chosen in that fabulous rain of gold.