50+ Space Action Adventure Classics. Жюль Верн

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СКАЧАТЬ shed hot tears of tenderness in her arms. And she would sometimes even speak tentatively in those narrow, old-world phrases that her lips could rob of all their bitter narrowness, of Nettie.

      “She wasn’t worthy of you, dear,” she would say abruptly, leaving me to guess the person she intended.

      “No man is worthy of a woman’s love,” I answered. “No woman is worthy of a man’s. I love her, dear mother, and that you cannot alter.”

      “There’s others,” she would muse.

      “Not for me,” I said. “No! I didn’t fire a shot that time; I burnt my magazine. I can’t begin again, mother, not from the beginning.”

      She sighed and said no more then.

      At another time she said — I think her words were: “You’ll be lonely when I’m gone dear.”

      “You’ll not think of going, then,” I said.

      “Eh, dear! but man and maid should come together.”

      I said nothing to that.

      “You brood overmuch on Nettie, dear. If I could see you married to some sweet girl of a woman, some good, KIND girl — — — “

      “Dear mother, I’m married enough. Perhaps some day — — — Who knows?

       I can wait.”

      “But to have nothing to do with women!”

      “I have my friends. Don’t you trouble, mother. There’s plentiful work for a man in this world though the heart of love is cast out from him. Nettie was life and beauty for me — is — will be. Don’t think I’ve lost too much, mother.”

      (Because in my heart I told myself the end had still to come.)

      And once she sprang a question on me suddenly that surprised me.

      “Where are they now?” she asked.

      “Who?”

      “Nettie and — him.”

      She had pierced to the marrow of my thoughts. “I don’t know,” I said shortly.

      Her shriveled hand just fluttered into touch of mine.

      “It’s better so,” she said, as if pleading. “Indeed … it is better so.”

      There was something in her quivering old voice that for a moment took me back across an epoch, to the protests of the former time, to those counsels of submission, those appeals not to offend It, that had always stirred an angry spirit of rebellion within me.

      “That is the thing I doubt,” I said, and abruptly I felt I could talk no more to her of Nettie. I got up and walked away from her, and came back after a while, to speak of other things, with a bunch of daffodils for her in my hand.

      But I did not always spend my afternoons with her. There were days when my crushed hunger for Nettie rose again, and then I had to be alone; I walked, or bicycled, and presently I found a new interest and relief in learning to ride. For the horse was already very swiftly reaping the benefit to the Change. Hardly anywhere was the inhumanity of horse traction to be found after the first year of the new epoch, everywhere lugging and dragging and straining was done by machines, and the horse had become a beautiful instrument for the pleasure and carriage of youth. I rode both in the saddle and, what is finer, naked and barebacked. I found violent exercises were good for the states of enormous melancholy that came upon me, and when at last horse riding palled, I went and joined the aviators who practised soaring upon aeroplanes beyond Horsemarden Hill… . But at least every alternate day I spent with my mother, and altogether I think I gave her two-thirds of my afternoons.

      Section 4

      When presently that illness, that fading weakness that made an euthanasia for so many of the older people in the beginning of the new time, took hold upon my mother, there came Anna Reeves to daughter her — after our new custom. She chose to come. She was already known to us a little from chance meetings and chance services she had done my mother in the garden; she sought to give her help. She seemed then just one of those plainly good girls the world at its worst has never failed to produce, who were indeed in the dark old times the hidden antiseptic of all our hustling, hating, faithless lives. They made their secret voiceless worship, they did their steadfast, uninspired, unthanked, unselfish work as helpful daughters, as nurses, as faithful servants, as the humble providences of homes. She was almost exactly three years older than I. At first I found no beauty in her, she was short but rather sturdy and ruddy, with red-tinged hair, and fair hairy brows and red-brown eyes. But her freckled hands I found, were full of apt help, her voice carried good cheer… .

      At first she was no more than a blue-clad, white-aproned benevolence, that moved in the shadows behind the bed on which my old mother lay and sank restfully to death. She would come forward to anticipate some little need, to proffer some simple comfort, and always then my mother smiled on her. In a little while I discovered the beauty of that helpful poise of her woman’s body, I discovered the grace of untiring goodness, the sweetness of a tender pity, and the great riches of her voice, of her few reassuring words and phrases. I noted and remembered very clearly how once my mother’s lean old hand patted the firm gold-flecked strength of hers, as it went by upon its duties with the coverlet.

      “She is a good girl to me,” said my mother one day. “A good girl.

       Like a daughter should be… . I never had a daughter — really.”

       She mused peacefully for a space. “Your little sister died,” she

       said.

      I had never heard of that little sister.

      “November the tenth,” said my mother. “Twenty-nine months and three days… . I cried. I cried. That was before you came, dear. So long ago — and I can see it now. I was a young wife then, and your father was very kind. But I can see its hands, its dear little quiet hands… . Dear, they say that now — now they will not let the little children die.”

      “No, dear mother,” I said. “We shall do better now.”

      “The club doctor could not come. Your father went twice. There was some one else, some one who paid. So your father went on into Swathinglea, and that man wouldn’t come unless he had his fee. And your father had changed his clothes to look more respectful and he hadn’t any money, not even his tram fare home. It seemed cruel to be waiting there with my baby thing in pain… . And I can’t help thinking perhaps we might have saved her… . But it was like that with the poor always in the bad old times — always. When the doctor came at last he was angry. ‘Why wasn’t I called before?’ he said, and he took no pains. He was angry because some one hadn’t explained. I begged him — but it was too late.”

      She said these things very quietly with drooping eyelids, like one who describes a dream. “We are going to manage all these things better now,” I said, feeling a strange resentment at this pitiful little story her faded, matter-of-fact voice was telling me.

      “She talked,” my mother went on. “She talked for her age wonderfully.

       … Hippopotamus.”

      “Eh?” СКАЧАТЬ