Читать «Практический курс английского языка 3 курс (calibre 2.43.0)» онлайн - страница 186
Владимир Дмитриевич Аракин
показался мне очень осторожным и нерешительным человеком. 18. Мне кажется, он настоящий знаток живописи.
TEXT EIGHT THE APPLE-TREE
By John Galsworthy
(Extract)
John Galsworthy (1867—1933), a prominent English novelist, playwright and short-story writer, came from an upper middle-class family. He was edu-
cated at Harrow and Oxford and was called to the Bar. His first novel
won him fame. Among his numerous novels
bourgeois society at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centu ries.
On the first of May, after their last year together at.college, Frank Ashurst and his friend Robert Garton were on a tramp. They had
walked that day from Brent, intending to make Chagford 1 but Ashurst's football knee 2 had given out, and according to their map they
had still some seven miles to go. They were sitting on a bank beside the road, where a track crossed alongside a wood, resting the
knee and talking of the universe, as young men will. Both were over six feet, and thin as rails,3 Ashurst pale, idealistic, full of absence;
Garton queer, round-the-corner,4 knotted, curly, like some primeval beast. Both had a literary bent; neither wore a hat. Ashurst's hair
was smooth, pale, wavy; and had a way of rising on either side of his brow, as if always being flung back; Garton's was a kind of dark
un- fathomed mop. They had not met a soul for miles.
"My dear fellow," Garton was saying, "pity's only an effect of self-consciousness; it's a disease of the last five thousand years. The
world was happier without."
Ashurst did not answer; he had plucked a blue floweret, and was twiddling it against the sky. A cuckoo began calling from a thorn
tree. The sky, the flowers, the songs of birds! Robert was talking through his h a t . 5 And he said:
"Wel , let's go on, and find some farm where we can put up." In uttering those words he was conscious of a girl coming
down from the common just above them. She was outlined against the sky, carrying a basket, and you could see that sky
through the crook of her arm. And Ashurst, who saw beauty without wondering how it could advantage him, thought:
"How pretty!" The wind, blowing her dark frieze skirt against her legs, lifted her battered peacock tam-o'-shanter; her
greyish blouse was worn and old, her shoes were split, her little hands rough and red, her neck browned. Her dark hair waved untidy
across her broad forehead, her face was short, her upper lip short, showing a glint of teeth, her brows were straight and dark, her
lashes long and dark, her nose straight; but her grey eyes were the wonder — dewy as if opened for the first time that day. She looked
at Ashurst — perhaps he struck her as strange, limping along without a hat, with his large eyes on her, and his hair flung back. He