Нижегородский государственный лингвистический
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Текст 5 (Hal Porter First Love) My paternal grandfather was English, military and long-nosed. He married twice, and had seven sons and four daughters. My maternal grandfather, Swiss, agricultural and long-nosed, married once but had six sons and six daughters. As a child, therefore, I was well-provided not only with ancestral aunts and uncles but also with the uncle-husbands and wife-aunts they had married. Since each of these couples were abundantly productive, long-nosed cousins of all ages, from braggart striplings and chatterbox young women to india-rubber babies like tempestuous Queen Victorias with bonnets awry congested my boyhood. It seems to me now that what my grandparents imported to Australia along with fecundity and long noses was largely noise. Noise, in their case, can be enlarged to cover vivacity bordering on uproar, devil-may-care wildness, a febrile intensity about issues of great unimportance. From the most feckless uncle to the most social aunt, from bread-line-treading aunts to rich uncles, all were afflicted by this rowdy insouciance. My mother, essentially provincial, was nevertheless giddy as a porpoise, and lived like a windmill rotating to alternate gusts of temper and charm. In this uproarious tribal whirlpool I was odd boy out. A throwback inheritance of some less mettlesome blood braked me. I had the same passion for decorous behaviour as they had for fits-and-starts behaviour, for conversations at full pitch, for gambling and gipsying about. This perversity of self-restraint caused me to lag behind, to be a some-time observer rather than a full-time participant. Yet, oddly enough, I also had maximum esprit de corps. Nor was I niminy-piminy and stand-offish. Japan-shaped scabs blotched my fruit-stealer’s country boy knees; my bare soles were as ring-like as fire-walkers’. I could swim like a toad, swear like a cow-cocky and smoke like a debutante. These abilities and simulated ferocities were, however, strictly conventional. In their execution I went just so far. I drew a line. Other members of the family always went farther and further. I would not, for example, kill snakes as Uncle Foster and cousins and brothers did by cracking them like whips. Sticks did me. As well as affecting protective discretions such as this, and making withdrawals from hereditary bravura, I often broke the wrong rules. My brothers and country cousins each had a dog, usually a bossy fox-terrier or a smart-alec mong with lots of heeler in it. I had a cat. I found its relative muteness and disdainful independence preferable to the ostentatious servility and noisily neurasthenic demands of dogs. Need I say that I wore spectacles and spoke in polysyllables? Not only did I violate the clan code by visible nonconformity but I was mentally and invisibly rebellious… I became the tree for believers not to stand by when lightning flashed… As the one child in this riotous shuffling to and fro who was family-obsessed and a born archivist, I was a magpie of a different colour. I wanted facts, dates, the how and why and where, all possible information about the past of the living gods and goddesses I paid homage to. I begged postcards of all sorts … and spring-cleaning aunts sent me packets of photographs; uncles put aside for me dim, henna-coloured snapshots or postcards of magenta-nosed drunks with crayfish semaphoring from their hip-pockets which they had dug out of drawers holding the treasures of a lifetime ... sovereign-cases, insurance policies, opal tie-pins, wives’ first love-letters, and the halves of pairs of cuff-links. On my behalf, archaeology into their own racy and cluttered pasts became an accepted pastime of my aunts and uncles. Alas! At the height of ray miniature fame, at the unornamental age of ten, a bee-keeper stung by his own bee, I fell in love with a photograph, I fell deeply, unfalteringly and hauntedly in love. The photograph came in a packet of postcards from Aunt Meta. Had I not been alone in the house, with nobody peering over my shoulder, I could have been saved a long ecstasy and a savage destruction. Alone I was, however, when the postman came; alone I unwrapped my gift and, among postcards of Gaiety Girls, and snapshots of bowler-hatted uncles in jinkers, and ant-waisted aunts leaning on or being leaned on by bicycles, alone I came upon my fate. Nothing can undo what was done that instant, that day. I saw the photograph. The door of the one addled world I had known closed softly behind me. I was in the anteroom to Paradise. Its bejewelled throne was mine. I perceived that all loves experienced in the back room past were imaginary, were delusions, were nothing. I had been wastefully librating above shadows – however spirited; visions – however cock-a-hoop; hollow beings; deceptive shapes; creatures of gauze; dresses empty of women; names without men to them. I had had merely a bowing acquaintance with love. The photograph was of a girl about my own age. She was dressed in Dolly Vardenish costume. Since she held a shepherd’s crook feminized by a large bow I gathered she was being Bo Peep for a fancy dress party. Or was she Bo Peep herself? There was nothing on the photograph to tell. The tilted oval of the hat with its rosebuds and ribbons, the black hatching of the elbow-length mittens, the criss-cross-laced bodice, all excited me romantically. What flooded into my being, however, to reveal inner depths and expanses never revealed before, was the illumination from the smile and the eyes. It did not occur to me that what really confronted the smile and the eyes were a camera like half-a-concertina on a tripod which was concealed with a nameless human under a black cloth. No! That faintly scented smile was for me. Those eyes, bottomless, and yet of dark sharpness, were looking into me. A gale of voices whirled through the galleries of my consciousness, aromatizing them, purging them of all former presences, and calling out deliciously “Thou!” “Thou!” I was eavesdropping on eternity. Eternity is time’s victim. Eternity had scarcely begun when I heard my mother at the front door. With the unflurried movements of a master criminal I put the photograph in an inside pocket. I was aware that the pocket was on the left, and the divine face deliberately turned inwards. The eyes looked directly into my heart which I imagined crimson as a playing-card heart, plump as an artichoke, and composed of a material with the texture of magnolia petals. I extinguished the lights in my face, swept up the other photographs with a gambler’s gesture and, as my mother entered, cried out ... oh, perfect imitation of a frank and guileless boy ... “Look what Aunt Meta sent!” Not a word about the divinity staring into my heart, not a word. Текст 6 (John Galsworthy The Apple Tree) He awoke feeling as if he had eaten heavily overnight instead of having eaten nothing. And far off, unreal, seemed yesterday’s romance! Yet it was a golden morning. Full spring had burst at last — in one night the ‘goldie-cups,’ as the little boys called them, seemed to have made the field their own, and from his window he could see apple blossoms covering the orchard as with a rose and white quilt. He went down almost dreading to see Megan: and yet, when not she but Mrs. Narracombe brought in his breakfast, he felt vexed and disappointed. The woman’s quick eye and snaky neck seemed to have a new alacrity this morning. Has she noticed? ‘So you an’ the moon went walkin’ last night, Mr. Ashurst! Did ye have your supper anywheres?’ Ashurst shook his head. ‘We kept it for you, but I suppose you was too busy in your brain to think o’ such a thing as that?’ Was she mocking him, in that voice of hers, which still kept some Welsh crispness against the invading burr of the West Country? If she knew! And at that moment he thought: ‘No, no; I’ll clear out. I won’t put myself in such a beastly false position.’ But, after breakfast, the longing to see Megan began and increased with every minute, together with fear lest something should have been said to her which had spoiled everything. Sinister that she had not appeared, not given him even a glimpse of her! And the love poem, whose manufacture had been so important and absorbing yesterday afternoon under the apple trees, now seemed so paltry that he tore it up and rolled it into pipe spills. What had he known of love, till she seized his hand and kissed it! And now – what did he not know? But to write of it seemed mere insipidity! He went up to his bedroom to get a book, and his heart began to beat violently, for she was in there making the bed. He stood in the doorway watching; and suddenly, with turbulent joy, he saw her stoop and kiss his pillow, just at the hollow made by his head last night. How let her know he had seen that pretty act of devotion? And yet, if she heard him stealing away, it would be even worse. She took the pillow up, holding it as if reluctant to shake out the impress of his cheek, dropped it, and turned round. ‘Megan!’ She put her hands up to her cheeks, but her eyes seemed to look right into him. He had never before realised the depth and purity and touching faithfulness in those dew-bright, and he stammered: ‘It was sweet of you to wait up for me last night.’ She still said nothing, and he stammered on: ‘I was wandering about on the moor; it was such a jolly night. I – I’ve just come up for a book.’ Then, the kiss he had seen her give the pillow afflicted him with sudden headiness, and he went up to her. Touching her eyes with his lips, he thought with queer excitemeat: ‘I’ve done it! Yesterday all was sudden – anyhow; but now – I’ve done it!’ The girl let her forehead rest against his lips, which moved downwards till they reached hers. That first real lover’s kiss – strange, wonderful, still almost innocent – in which heart did it make the most disturbance? ‘Come to the big apple tree to-night, after they've gone to bed. Megan – promise!’ She whispered back: ‘I promise.’ Then, scared at her white face, scared at everything, he let her go, and went downstairs again. Yes! he had done it now! Accepted her love, declared his own. He went out to the green chair as devoid of a book as ever; and there he sat staring vacantly before him, triumphant and remorseful, while under his nose and behind his back the work of the farm went on. How long he had been sitting in that curious state of vacancy he had no notion when he saw Joe standing a little behind him to the right. The youth had evidently come from hard work in the fields, and stood shifting his feet, breathing loudly, his face coloured like a setting sun, and his arms, below the rolled-up sleeves of his blue shirt, showing the hue and furry sheen of ripe peaches. His red lips were open, his blue eyes with their flaxen lashes stared fixedly at Ashurst, who said ironically: ‘Well, Joe, anything I can do for you?’ ‘Yeas.’ ‘What, then?’ ‘Yu can goo away from yere. Us don’ want yu.’ Ashurst’s face, never too humble, assumed its most lordly look. ‘Very good of you, but, do you know, I prefer the others should speak for themselves.’ The youth moved a pace or two nearer, and the scent of his honest heat afflicted Ashurst’s nostrils. ‘What d’yu stay yere for?’ ‘Because it pleases me.’ ‘ ‘Twon’t please yu when I’ve bashed yure head in!’ ‘Indeed! When would you like to begin that?’ Joe answered only with the loudness of his breathing, but his eyes looked like those of a young and angry bull. Then a sort of spasm seemed to convulse his face. ‘Megan don’ want yu.’ A rush of jealousy, of contempt, and anger with this thick, loud-breathing rustic got the better of Ashurst’s self-possession; he jumped up, and pushed back his chair. ‘You can go to the devil!’ And as he said those simple words, he saw Megan in the doorway with a tiny brown spaniel puppy in her arms. She came up to him quickly: ‘Its eyes are blue!’ she said. Joe turned away; the back of his neck was literally crimson. Ashurst put his finger to the mouth of the little brown bull-frog of a creature in her arms. How cosy it looked against her! ‘It’s fond of you already. Ah! Megan, everything is fond of you.’ Текст 7 (John Galsworthy The Apple Tree) ‘She’s sensitive, that’s why.’ ‘What’s that?’ ‘I mean, she feels everything.’ ‘Ah! She’m very lovin'-'earted.’ Ashurst, who felt colour coming into his cheeks, held out his tobacco pouch. ‘Have a fill, Jim?’ ‘'Thank ‘ее, sir. She’m one in an ‘underd, I think.’ ‘I expect so,’ said Ashurst shortly, and folding up his pouch, walked on. ‘Lovin'-hearted!’ Yes! And what was he doing! What were his intentions – as they say – towards this loving-hearted girl? The thought dogged him, wandering through fields bright with buttercups, where the little red calves were feeding, and the swallows flying high. Yes, the oaks were before the ashes, brown-gold already every tree in different stage and hue. The cuckoos and a thousand birds were singing; the little streams were very bright. The ancients believed in a golden age, in the garden of the Hesperides!... Ashurst crossed out unchallenged to the hillside above the stream. From that slope a tor mounted to its crown of rocks. The ground there was covered with a mist of blue-bells, and nearly a score of crab-apple trees were in full bloom. He threw himself down on the grass. The change from the buttercup glory and oak-goldarned glamour of the fields to this entereal beauty under the grey tor filled him with a sort of wonder; nothing the same, save the sound of running water and the songs of the cuckoos. He lay there a long time, watching the sunlight wheel till the crab-trees threw shadows over the bluebells, his only companions a few wild bees. He was not quite sane, thinking of that morning’s kiss, and of tonight under the apple tree. In such a spot as this, fauns and dryads surely lived: nymphs, white as the crab-apple blossom, retired within those trees: fauns, brown as the dead bracken, with pointed ears, lay in wait for them. The cuckoos were still calling when he woke… ‘Tonight!’ he thought. Just as from the earth everything was pushing up, unfolding under the soft insistent fingers of an unseen hand, so were his heart and senses being pushed, unfolded. He got up and broke off a spray from a crab-apple tree. The buds were like Megan – shell-like, rose-pink, wild, and fresh: and so, too, the opening flowers, white, and wild, and touching. He put the spray into his coat. And all the rush of the spring within him escaped in a triumphant sigh. It was nearly eleven that night when Ashurst put down the pocket ‘Odyssey’ which for half an hour he had held in his hands without reading, and slipped through the yard down to the orchard. The moon had just risen, very golden, over the hill, and like a bright, powerful, watching spirit peered through the bars of an ash tree’s half-naked boughs. In among the apple trees it was still dark, and he stood making sure of his direction, feeling the rough grass with his feet. A black mass close behind him stirred with a heavy grunting sound, and three large pigs settled down again close to each other, under the wall. He listened. There was no wind, but the stream’s burbling whispering chuckle had gained twice its day-time strength. One bird, he could not tell what, cried ‘Pip – pip,’ ‘Pip – pip,’ with perfect monotony: he could hear a night-jar spinning very far off: an owl hooting. Ashurst moved a step or two, and again halted, aware of a dim living whiteness all round his head. On the dark unstirring trees innumerable flowers and buds all soft and blurred were being bewitched to life by the creeping moonlight. He had the oddest feeling of actual companionship, as if a million white moths or spirits had floated in and settled between dark sky and darker ground, and were opening and shutting their wings on a level with his eyes. In the bewildering, still, scentless beauty of that moment he almost lost memory of why he had come to the orchard. The flying glamour which had clothed the earth all day had not gone now that night had fallen, but only changed into this new form. He moved on through the thicket of stems and boughs covered with that live powdering whiteness, till he reached the big apple tree. No mistaking that, even in the dark, nearly twice the height and size of any other, and leaning out towards the open meadows and the stream. Under the thick branches he stood still again, to listen. The same sounds exactly, and a faint grunting from the sleepy pigs. He put his hands on the dry, almost warm tree trunk, whose rough mossy surface gave forth a peaty scent at his touch. Would she come – would she! And among these quivering, haunted, moon-witched trees he was seized with doubts of everything! All was unearthly here, fit for no earthly lovers: fit only for god and goddess, faun and nymph – not be almost a relief if she did not come. But all the time he was listening. And still that unknown bird went ‘Pip – pip,’ ‘Pip – pip,’ and there rose the busy chatter of the little trout stream, whereon the moon was flinging glances through the bars of her treeprison. The blossom on a level with his eyes seemed to grow more living every moment, seemed with its mysterious white beauty more a part of his suspense. He plucked a fragment and held it close – three blossoms. Sacrilege to pluck fruit-tree blossom – soft, sacred, young blossom – and throw it away! Then suddenly he heard the gate close, the pigs stirring again grunting; and leaning against the trunk, he pressed his hands to its mossy sides behind him, and held his breath. She might have been a spirit threading the trees, for all the noise she made! Then he saw her quite close – her dark form part of a little tree, for her white face part of its blossom: so still, and peering towards him. He whispered: ‘Megan!’ and held out his hands. She ran forward, straight to his breast. When he felt her heart beating against him, Ashurst knew to the full the sensations of chivalry and passion. Because she was not of his world, because she was so simple and young and headlong, adoring and defenceless, how could he be other than her protector in the dark! Because she was all simple Nature and beauty, as much a part of this spring night as was the living blossom, how should he not take all that she would give him — how not fulfil the spring in her heart and his! And torn between these tow emotions he clasped her close, and kissed her hair. How long they stood there without speaking he knew not. The stream went on chattering, the owls hooting, the moon kept stealing up and growing whiter; the blossom all round them and above brightened in suspense of living beauty. Their lips had sought each other’s, and they did not speak. The moment speech began all would be unreal! Spring has no speech, nothing but rustling and whispering. Spring has so much more than speech in its unfolding flowers and leaves, and the coursing of its streams, and in its sweet restless seeking! And sometimes spring will come alive, and, like a mysterious Presence stand, encircling lovers with its arms, laying on them the fingers of enchantment, so that, standing lips to lips, they forget everything but just a kiss. While her heart beat against him, and her lips quivered on his, Ashurst felt nothing but simple rapture – Destiny meant her for his arms, Love could not be flouted! But when their lips parted for breath, division began again at once. |
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