Читать книгу The Man on the White Horse - Warwick Deeping - Страница 12

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Moonlight, black water, the island with its tower and smother of fruit-blossom afloat in the profound stillness of the night. Restlessness possessed Geraint. He stood by the wooden stage and looked at the water. The moonlight made it mysterious, as mutable as life, a mirror and a masked face, a dial for the stars. Here it was black—there lambent silver. He was aware of reflections.

He had escaped from the candlelight and his wife's chatter. She had begun to talk to him of her religion like a woman shelling peas and throwing them into a basin.

Her religion—this thing that was both new and old, this new superstition that had sprung up when the old superstitions were dying?

And Geraint thought: "Am I a child? To whom do I pray or sacrifice, if I do either? Not to Jove or Mithras, or Serapis or Jesus, but to the Unknown God. Are we children to whom old women tell stories? Placida and her miracles, loaves and fishes, a man walking on the water, the dead rising. I have seen death, but never have I seen the dead come to life. I have seen no god walking, nor heard his voice. Ghosts? Illusions. The sun rises and sets, the seasons come and go. I have seen no hand thrust out to stay the wheel. A man should be true to what he sees and does not see, but men are like frightened children in the dark, crying: 'Mother—mother.'"

The black barge lay at his feet. He stepped into it, cast off the chain, and, taking the pole, thrust off for the island. Two faint ripples ran from the boat's bow and, diverging, died away behind it. Water dripped from the pole. Charon's ferry-boat? There was sudden strange laughter in him. Where did the dead go? Were the live any less blind? He looked at the tower as the barge drifted into its shadow, that strong, straight tower holding the moon like a shield. He eased the boat against the grass bank among the water-flags and, thrusting the pole into the mud to pin it there, climbed out.

Apple-blossom, the smell of the night, a strange listening silence. He was wearing sandals, and he felt the grass wet with dew brushing his feet. It was as though a great net had been thrown over the trees, and its pattern lay upon the grass. Was the Unknown God a fowler? Did he catch men in nets? Geraint came to the tower. It rose up straight and stark and white, and to Geraint its starkness had a beauty. Man should stand like a tower.

Somewhere he heard a bird singing, a night bird, and he stood still and listened.

And the voice of the bird sang: "Guinevra—Guinevra."