"Hope Mirrlees - Lud in the Mist" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mirrlees Hope)

comic baroque statues of dead citizens held levees attended by birds and lovers and insects and children.
It had, indeed, more than its share of pleasant things; for, as we have seen, it had two rivers.
Also, it was plentifully planted with trees.

One of the handsomest houses of Lud-in-the-Mist had belonged for generations to the family of
Chanticleer. It was of red brick, and the front, which looked on to a quiet lane leading into the High
Street, was covered with stucco, on which flowers and fruit and shells were delicately modelled, while
over the door was emblazoned a fine, stylized cock — the badge of the family. Behind, it had a spacious
garden, which stretched down to the river Dapple. Though it had no lack of flowers, they did not
immediately meet the eye, but were imprisoned in a walled kitchen-garden, where they were planted in
neat ribands, edging the plots of vegetables. Here, too, in spring was to be found the pleasantest of all
garden conjunctions — thick yew hedges and fruit trees in blossom. Outside this kitchen-garden there
was no need of flowers, for they had many substitutes. Let a thing be but a sort of punctual surprise, like
the first cache of violets in March, let it be delicate, painted and gratuitous, hinting that the Creator is
solely preoccupied with aesthetic considerations, and combines disparate objects simply because they
look so well together, and that thing will admirably fill the role of a flower.
In early summer it was the doves, with the bloom of plums on their breasts, waddling on their coral legs
over the wide expanse of lawn, to which their propinquity gave an almost startling greenness, that were
the flowers in the Chanticleers' garden. And the trunks of birches are as good, any day, as white
blossom, even if there had not been the acacias in flower. And there was a white peacock which, in spite
of its restlessness and harsh shrieks, had something about it, too, of a flower. And the Dapple itself,
stained like a palette, with great daubs of colour reflected from sky and earth, and carrying on its surface,
in autumn, red and yellow leaves which may have fallen on it from the trees of Fairyland, where it had its
source — even the Dapple might be considered as a flower growing in the garden of the Chanticleers.
There was also a pleached alley of hornbeams. To the imaginative, it is always something of an
adventure to walk down a pleached alley. You enter boldly enough, but soon you find yourself wishing
you had stayed outside — it is not air that you are breathing, but silence, the almost palpable silence of
trees. And is the only exit that small round hole in the distance? Why, you will never be able to squeeze
through that! You must turn back . . .too late! The spacious portal by which you entered has in its turn
shrunk to a small round hole.

Master Nathaniel Chanticleer, the actual head of the family, was a typical Dorimarite in appearance;
rotund, rubicund, red-haired, with hazel eyes in which the jokes, before he uttered them, twinkled like a
trout in a burn. Spiritually, too, he passed for a typical Dorimarite; though, indeed, it is never safe to
classify the souls of one's neighbors; one is apt, in the long run, to be proved a fool. You should regard
each meeting with a friend as a sitting he is unwittingly giving you for a portrait — a portrait that,
probably, when you or he die, will still be unfinished. And, though this is an absorbing pursuit,
nevertheless, the painters are apt to end pessimists. For however handsome and merry may be the face,
however rich may be the background, in the first rough sketch of each portrait, yet with every added
stroke of the brush, with every tiny readjustment of the "values," with every modification of the
chiaroscuro, the eyes looking out at you grow more disquieting. And, finally, it is your own face that you
are staring at in terror, as in a mirror by candle-light, when all the house is still.
All who knew Master Nathaniel would have been not only surprised, but incredulous, had they been
told he was not a happy man. Yet such was the case. His life was poisoned at its springs by a small,
nameless fear; a fear not always active, for during considerable periods it would lie almost dormant —
almost, but never entirely.
He knew the exact date of its genesis. One evening, many years ago, when he was still but a lad, he
and some friends decided as a frolic to dress up as the ghosts of their ancestors and frighten the servants.
There was no lack of properties; for the attics of the Chanticleers were filled with the lumber of the past:
grotesque wooden masks, old weapons and musical instruments, and old costumes — tragic,