30 лучших рассказов американских писателей. Коллектив авторов

appalling splash within two yards of him was followed by a loud, rushing sound, DIMINUENDO, which seemed to travel back through the air to the fort and died in an explosion which stirred the very river to its deeps! A rising sheet of water curved over him, fell down upon him, blinded him, strangled him! The cannon had taken an hand in the game. As he shook his head free from the commotion of the smitten water he heard the deflected shot humming through the air ahead, and in an instant it was cracking and smashing the branches in the forest beyond.

      ‘They will not do that again,’ he thought; ‘the next time they will use a charge of grape. I must keep my eye upon the gun; the smoke will apprise me – the report arrives too late; it lags behind the missile. That is a good gun.’

      Suddenly he felt himself whirled round and round – spinning like a top. The water, the banks, the forests, the now distant bridge, fort and men, all were commingled and blurred. Objects were represented by their colors only; circular horizontal streaks of color – that was all he saw. He had been caught in a vortex and was being whirled on with a velocity of advance and gyration that made him giddy and sick. In few moments he was flung upon the gravel at the foot of the left bank of the stream – the southern bank – and behind a projecting point which concealed him from his enemies. The sudden arrest of his motion, the abrasion of one of his hands on the gravel, restored him, and he wept with delight. He dug his fingers into the sand, threw it over himself in handfuls and audibly blessed it. It looked like diamonds, rubies, emeralds; he could think of nothing beautiful which it did not resemble. The trees upon the bank were giant garden plants; he noted a definite order in their arrangement, inhaled the fragrance of their blooms. A strange roseate light shone through the spaces among their trunks and the wind made in their branches the music of Aeolian harps[13]. He had no wish to perfect his escape – he was content to remain in that enchanting spot until retaken.

      A whiz and a rattle of grapeshot among the branches high above his head roused him from his dream. The baffled cannoneer had fired him a random farewell. He sprang to his feet, rushed up the sloping bank, and plunged into the forest.

      All that day he traveled, laying his course by the rounding sun. The forest seemed interminable; nowhere did he discover a break in it, not even a woodman’s road. He had not known that he lived in so wild a region. There was something uncanny in the revelation.

      By nightfall he was fatigued, footsore, famished. The thought of his wife and children urged him on. At last he found a road which led him in what he knew to be the right direction. It was as wide and straight as a city street, yet it seemed untraveled. No fields bordered it, no dwelling anywhere. Not so much as the barking of a dog suggested human habitation. The black bodies of the trees formed a straight wall on both sides, terminating on the horizon in a point, like a diagram in a lesson in perspective. Overhead, as he looked up through this rift in the wood, shone great golden stars looking unfamiliar and grouped in strange constellations. He was sure they were arranged in some order which had a secret and malign significance. The wood on either side was full of singular noises, among which – once, twice, and again – he distinctly heard whispers in an unknown tongue.

      His neck was in pain and lifting his hand to it found it horribly swollen. He knew that it had a circle of black where the rope had bruised it. His eyes felt congested; he could no longer close them. His tongue was swollen with thirst; he relieved its fever by thrusting it forward from between his teeth into the cold air. How softly the turf had carpeted the untraveled avenue – he could no longer feel the roadway beneath his feet!

      Doubtless, despite his suffering, he had fallen asleep while walking, for now he sees another scene – perhaps he has merely recovered from a delirium[14]. He stands at the gate of his own home. All is as he left it, and all bright and beautiful in the morning sunshine. He must have traveled the entire night. As he pushes open the gate and passes up the wide white walk, he sees a flutter of female garments; his wife, looking fresh and cool and sweet, steps down from the veranda to meet him. At the bottom of the steps she stands waiting, with a smile of ineffable joy, an attitude of matchless grace and dignity. Ah, how beautiful she is! He springs forwards with extended arms. As he is about to clasp her he feels a stunning blow upon the back of the neck; a blinding white light blazes all about him with a sound like the shock of a cannon – then all is darkness and silence!

      Peyton Farquhar was dead; his body, with a broken neck, swung gently from side to side beneath the timbers of the Owl Creek bridge.

      Eliza Calvert Hall

      Aunt Jane’s Album

      They were a bizarre mass of color on the sweet spring landscape, those patchwork quilts, swaying in a long line under the elms and maples. The old orchard made a blossoming background for them, and farther off on the horizon rose the beauty of fresh verdure and purple mist on those low hills, or ‘knobs’, that are to the heart of the Kentuckian[15] as the Alps to the Swiss or the sea to the sailor.

      I opened the gate softly and paused for a moment between the blossoming lilacs that grew on each side of the path. The fragrance of the white and the purple blooms was like a resurrection-call over the graves of many a dead spring; and as I stood, shaken with thoughts as the flowers are with the winds, Aunt Jane came around from the back of the house, her black silk cape fluttering from her shoulders, and a calico sunbonnet hiding her features in its cavernous depth. She walked briskly to the clothes-line and began patting and smoothing the quilts where the breeze had disarranged them.

      ‘Aunt Jane,’ I called out, ‘are you having a fair all by yourself?’

      She turned quickly, pushing back the sunbonnet from her eyes.

      ‘Why, child,’ she said, with a happy laugh, ‘you come pretty nigh skeerin’ me. No, I ain’t havin’ any fair; I’m jest givin’ my quilts their spring airin’. Twice a year I put ’em out in the sun and wind; and this mornin’ the air smelt so sweet, I thought it was a good chance to freshen ’em up for the summer. It’s about time to take ’em in now.’

      She began to fold the quilts and lay them over her arm, and I did the same. Back and forth we went from the clothes-line to the house, and from the house to the clothes-line, until the quilts were safely housed from the coming dewfall and piled on every available chair in the front room. I looked at them in sheer amazement. There seemed to be every pattern that the ingenuity of woman could devise and the industry of woman put together, – ‘four-patches,’ ‘nine-patches,’ ‘log-cabins,’ ‘wild-goose chases,’ ‘rising suns,’ hexagons, diamonds, and only Aunt Jane knows what else. As for color, a Sandwich Islander[16] would have danced with joy at the sight of those reds, purples, yellows, and greens.

      ‘Did you really make all these quilts, Aunt Jane?’ I asked wonderingly.

      Aunt Jane’s eyes sparkled with pride.

      ‘Every stitch of ’em, child,’ she said, ‘except the quiltin’. The neighbors used to come in and help some with that. I’ve heard folks say that piecin’ quilts was nothin’ but a waste o’ time, but that ain’t always so. They used to say that Sarah Jane Mitchell would set down right after breakfast and piece till it was time to git dinner, and then set and piece till she had to git supper, and then piece by candle-light till she fell asleep in her cheer.

      ‘I ricollect goin’ over there one day, and Sarah Jane was gittin’ dinner in a big hurry, for Sam had to go to town with some cattle, and there was a big basket o’ quilt pieces in the middle o’ the kitchen floor, and the house lookin’ like a pigpen, and the children runnin’ around half naked. And Sam he laughed, and says he, “Aunt Jane, if we could wear quilts and eat quilts we’d be the richest people in the country.” Sam was the best-natured man that ever was, or he couldn’t ’a’ put up with Sarah Jane’s shiftless ways. Hannah Crawford said she sent Sarah Jane a bundle o’ caliker once by Sam, and Sam always declared he lost it. But Uncle Jim Matthews said he was ridin’ along the road jest behind Sam, and he saw Sam throw it into the creek jest as he got on the bridge. I never blamed Sam

13

Aeolian harps – Aeolian harp is a musical instrument in which sound is produced by the movement of the wind over the strings; in Greek mythology, Aeolus is the god of the winds.

14

delirium – mental state marked by confused thinking, hallucinations, etc. as a result of the intoxication of the brain caused by fever or some other physical disorder.

15

Kentuckian – a resident of Kentucky, the US state in the south (102 694 sq. km).

16

a Sandwich Islander – a resident of the Sandwich Islands, the second name of the Hawaiian Islands, a group of the volcanic islands in the Pacific Ocean; the first European who visited the islands in 1778 was Captain James Cook (1728–1779).