Читать книгу Babes in the Darkling Woods - H.G. Wells - Страница 8

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One side of the deep lane changed its character and became highly respectable as a tall, well-trimmed hedge of yew. Presently that hedge had a lapse, where something had devoured or destroyed it and left only a stretch of oak palings to carry on in its place.

Our young people cast off the cares of the world abruptly and became gaminesque. Simultaneously they had one and the same idea. "Let's peek at old Kalikov's lump," she said. "Just once more. That lovely lump."

"Marble it is," he said.

"Alabaster, I tell you. I know."

"Marble. You never get alabaster in 'normous lumps like that. Alabaster's semi-precious or something of that sort. Just little bits."

"Who ever saw marble all bloodshot?"

"Obstinate. Alabaster is marble."

"Ignorance. It's gypsum."

"That G is hard. It's Greek."

"Even there you are wrong. It's English and soft. Naturalised ages ago."

She put out her tongue at him. That was that.... In the most perfect accord they crept up to the gap in the hedge and looked over. There, amidst thick grass and tall wild hemlock was a big piece of Derbyshire alabaster, twelve feet high at least.

"See that sort of dirty pink vein," she began.... He laid a hand on her arm. "Sh," he said very softly. "He's there.... There!"

They became as still and observant as startled fawns. Kalikov, a great lump of a man, with a frizzy, non-Aryan coiffure and ears that you would have thought any sensitive sculptor would have cut off or improved upon years ago, was sitting on a garden seat in the shade of a mulberry tree, brooding over his huge, clumsy block of material. There was a flavour almost of blood-relationship between him and it. He was still as death and intensely wide awake. When at last he stirred it was as eventful as if the block had stirred. He put out his hand. He moved it slowly in a curving path. Then it came to rest, extended.

He shook his head disapprovingly. He repeated his gesture. This time it passed muster. He drew it back along an invisible lower path, carefully, mystically. It was as if he caressed the invisible. It was as if he was trying to hypnotise the inanimate. Then his hand went back into his pocket and he became still again, scheming, dreaming.

The two young people looked at one another and then dropped back noiselessly into the lane.

"Like that," she whispered.

"Then one day he will get his chisels and hammers and things and begin to hew it out," she expanded.

"No clay model?" he queried.

"Not for him." She was sure. Some paces further he spoke with a note of intense surprise.

"But that's exactly how we have to do it. Exactly. Exactly what has been trying to get into my mind for weeks."

She made an interrogative noise.

"That," he said, with a backward toss of the head. "That behind there. It's just exactly how I feel about things."

"Meaning?"

"Something completely hidden. Which is there?

"Yeah?"

"Clumsy block of a world, monstrous, crushing the grass, bloodshot, and yet in it there is a world to be found, a real world, a great world."

"Which he may find?"

"Which we may find-our sort of people—in this block of a world to-day."

She stood regarding him with her legs wide apart, her arms akimbo and her head a little on one side.

"Gemini, you're saying something. You talk like an evangelist tract but you're saying something considerable. It's a new sort of approach?

"I've said something that's been in my mind in a state of helpless solution for ever so long. That, somehow, has crystallised it. The proper religion, the proper way of life, it isn't all this everlasting squabbling of anti-this and anti-that. Newspapers, politics, churches; the whole bloody jumble. Everybody wrong and nobody right. Our sort of people and more of us and more, have been astray, getting into disputes that don't matter a damn, blundering away at negations. That isn't the job for us. Our job is to realise the shape in the block, to get the vision of it clearer and clearer in our heads and then to set about carving it out. Am I saying something at last?"

"Sounds to me something quite considerable?"

She reflected.

"I'll have a thousand criticisms presently," she said, "but you are saying something, Gemini. Something we can talk about for days."

"Leave it now then for a bit," said he, "for I'm hungry. Down here, what with the air and this love-making, I seem to be always hungry. Come on. Get to your kitchen, woman, for old mother Greedle is more of a talking heart than a head. See to things."

And he waved his bunch of bananas towards the cottage ahead of them, and went limping in front of her.

"It's such a consolidating idea," she said to his back.

"It is a consolidating idea. It's the consolidating idea. The unrevealed statue. The unrevealed new world. The right world.... I wonder if we shall find the unquenchable Balch on the doorstep.... So soon as he scents a meal afoot.... I'll try this notion out on him."