Dandelion Wine. Вино из одуванчиков. Книга для чтения на английском языке. Уровень В1

He was only ten years old. He knew little of death, fear, or dread. Death was the waxen figure in the coffin when he was six and Great-grandfather died, silent, withdrawn, no more to tell him how to be a good boy, no more to comment briefly on politics. Death was his little sister one morning when he awoke at the age of seven, looked into her crib, and saw her staring up at him with a blind, blue, fixed and frozen stare until the men came with a small wicker basket to take her away. Death was when he stood by her high chair four weeks later and suddenly understood that she’d never be in it again, laughing and crying and making him jealous of her because she was born. That was death. And Death was the Lonely One, unseen, walking and standing behind trees, coming from the country, once or twice a year, to this town, to these streets, to these many places where there was little light, to kill one, two, three women in the past three years. That was Death…

But this was more than Death. This dark, dark summer night was all things you would ever feel or see or hear in your life, drowning you all at once.

They walked along a weed-fringed path while the crickets’ chorus rose in a loud full drumming. He followed obediently behind brave, fine, tall Mother – defender of the universe. Together, they reached and paused at the very end of civilization.

The Ravine.

Here and now, down in that pit of black jungle were suddenly all the things he would never know or understand; all the things without names lived in the deep tree shadow, in the odor of decay.

He and his mother were alone.

Her hand trembled. He realized his mother was frightened. It was a shock for him. So, she, too, felt that nameless threat from that darkness, that malignancy down below. Was there, then, no strength in growing up? No consolation in being an adult? No worldly citadel strong enough to stand up to the dreadful attack of midnights? Doubts flooded him. He was suddenly cold as a wind out of December.

He realized that all men were like this; that each person was to himself one alone. A unit in a society, but always afraid. Like here, standing. If he should scream for help, would it matter?

Blackness could come and swallow quickly; in one freezing moment all would be finished. Long before dawn, long before police with flashlights might come, long before worried men could rustle down the pebbles to his help. Even if they were within five hundred yards of him now, and help certainly was, in three seconds a dark wave could rise to take all ten years from him and —

The shock of life’s loneliness crushed his beginning-to- tremble body. Mother was alone, too. She could not look to the sanctity of marriage, the protection of her family’s love, she could not look to the United States Constitution or the City Police, she could not look anywhere, in this very moment, except into her heart, and there she would only find uncontrollable disgust and fear. In this moment it was an individual problem looking for an individual solution. He must accept being alone and work on from there.

He clung to his mother. Oh, Lord, don’t let her die, please, he thought. Don’t do anything to us. Father will be coming home from his meeting in an hour and if the house is empty —

Mother went down the path into the primeval jungle. His voice trembled. “Mom, Doug’s all right. He’s all right!”

Mother’s voice was strained, high. “He always comes through here. I tell him not to, but those kids, they come through here anyway. Some night he’ll come through and never come out again —”

Never come out again. That could mean death!

Alone in the universe.

There were a million small towns like this all over the world, with no lights, but many shadows. Oh, the vast loneliness of them. The secret damp ravines of them. Life was a horror lived in them at night, when at all sides sanity, marriage, children, happiness, were threatened by an ogre called Death.

Mother raised her voice into the dark. “Doug! Douglas!”

Suddenly both of them felt something was wrong.

The crickets’ chorus had stopped. Silence was absolutely complete.

Why should the crickets stop? Why? What reason? They’d never stopped before. Not ever.

Something was going to happen.

The silence was growing, growing; the tenseness was growing, growing. Oh, it was so dark, so far away from everything!

And then, a way off across the ravine:

“Okay, Mom! Coming, Mother!”

And again: “Hi, Mom! Coming, Mom!”

And then the sound of tennis shoes running down through the pit of the ravine as three kids came racing, giggling. His brother Douglas, Chuck Woodman, and John Huff.

The crickets sang!

The darkness pulled back, frightened, shocked, furious. Pulled back, losing its appetite at being so rudely interrupted as it prepared to feed. As the dark retreated like a wave on the shore, three children ran out of it, laughing.

“Hi, Mom! Hi, Tom! Hey!”

“Young man, you’re going to get a thrashing,” declared Mother. She put away her fear instantly. Tom knew she would never tell anyone of it. It would be in her heart, though, for all time, as it was in his heart for all time.

They walked home to bed in the late summer night. He was glad Douglas was alive. Very glad.

“Only two things I know for sure, Doug,” Tom whispered, lying in bed beside Douglas.

“What?”

“Nighttime is awfully dark – is one.”

“What’s the other?”

“The ravine at night doesn’t belong in Mr. Auffmann’s Happiness Machine, if he ever builds it.”

Late at night on the front porch Leo Auffmann wrote a list of components for his Happiness Machine. His wife joined him and sat down next to him on the swing. Theirs was a very happy family.

“That machine,” she said, “…we don’t need it.”

“No,” he said, “but sometimes you have to build for others. I’ve been thinking what to put in. Motion pictures? Radios? Stereoscopic viewers? All those in one place so any man can run his hand over it and smile and say, ‘Yes, sir, that’s happiness’.”

Yes, he thought, to make a mechanism that in spite of wet feet, various troubles, rumpled beds, and those three-in-the-morning hours when monsters ate your soul, would manufacture happiness, like that magic salt mill that, thrown in the ocean, made salt forever and turned the sea to brine. Who wouldn’t put all his soul into inventing a machine like that? he asked the world, he asked the town, he asked his wife!

In the porch swing beside him, Lena’s uneasy silence was an opinion.

Silent now, too, head back, he listened to the elm leaves above rustling in the wind.

Don’t forget, he told himself, that sound, too, must be in the machine.

Grandfather smiled in his sleep.

He awoke and lay quietly listening, and the smile was explained: he heard a sound which was far more important than birds, or the rustle of new leaves. This sound meant that summer had officially begun. A cool soft fountain of sweet summer grass leaped up from the chattering mower. Grandfather imagined it tickling his legs, spraying his warm face, filling his nostrils with the timeless scent of a new season begun, with the promise that, yes, we’ll all live another twelve months.

God bless the lawn-mower, he thought. What fool made January first New Year’s Day? No, they should set a man to watch the grasses across a million Illinois, Ohio, and Iowa lawns, and on that morning when it was long enough for cutting, instead of rockets and hymns and yelling, there should be a great symphony of lawn-mowers reaping fresh grass upon the prairie lands. Instead of confetti and serpentine, people should throw grass spray at each other on the one day each year that really represents Beginning!

He went to the window and looked out into the sunshine, and sure enough, there was a boarder, a young newspaperman named Forrester, just finishing a row.

“Morning, Mr. Spaulding!”

“Give ’em hell, Bill!” cried Grandpa heartily, and went downstairs to eat Grandma’s breakfast, with the window open so the buzz of the lawn-mower accompanied his eating.

“It gives you confidence,” Grandpa said. “That lawnmower. Listen to it!”

“Won’t be using the lawn-mower much longer,” Grandma said. “Bill Forrester’s putting in a new kind of grass that never needs cutting.”

Grandpa stared at the woman. “You’re finding a poor way to joke with me.”

“Go look for yourself,” said Grandma, “it was Bill Forrester’s idea. The new grass is waiting in little trays by the side of the house. You just dig small holes here and there and put the new grass in spots. By the end of the year the new grass kills off the old, and you sell your lawn-mower.”

Grandpa was up from his chair, through the hall, and out the front door in ten seconds.

“That’s right,” Bill Forrester said. “Bought the grass yesterday. Thought, while I’m on vacation I’d just plant it for you.”

“Why wasn’t I consulted about this? It’s my lawn!” cried Grandfather.

“Thought you’d appreciate it, Mr. Spaulding.”

“Well, I don’t think I do appreciate it.”

Grandpa looked at the new grass suspiciously. “Looks like plain old grass to me. You sure some horse trader didn’t catch you early in the morning when you weren’t fully awake?”

“I’ve seen the stuff growing in California. Only so high and no higher. If it survives our climate, next year we won’t have to cut it once a week.”

“That’s the trouble with your generation,” said Grandpa. “Bill, I’m ashamed ofyou, you a newspaperman. All the things in life that were put here to savor, you eliminate. Save time, save work, you say.” He nudged the grass trays disrespectfully. “Bill, when you’re my age, you’ll find out it’s the little savors and little things that count more than big ones. A walk on a spring morning is better than an eighty-mile ride in a car, you know why? Because it’s full of flavors, full of a lot of things growing. You’ve time to seek and find. I know – you’re after the bigjobs now, and I suppose that’s fit and proper. But for a young man working on a newspaper, you got to look for grapes as well as watermelons. If you had your way you’d pass a law to abolish all the little jobs, the little things. But then you’d leave yourselves nothing to do between the big jobs and you’d have a devil of a time thinking up things to do so you wouldn’t go crazy. Instead of that, why not let nature show you a few things? Cutting grass and pulling weeds can be a way of life, son.”

Bill Forrester was smiling quietly at him.

“I know,” said Grandpa, “I talk too much.”

“There’s no one I’d rather hear.”

“Lecture continued, then. Lilacs on a bush are better than orchids. And dandelions are better! Why? Because they bend you over and turn you away from all the people and the town for a little while and get you down where you remember you got a nose again. And when you’re all to yourself that way, you’re really yourself for a little while; you get to thinking things through, alone. Gardening is a very helpful excuse for being a philosopher. Nobody guesses, nobody accuses, nobody knows, but there you are, Plato in the peonies, Socrates force-growing his own hemlock. A man carrying a sack of manure across his lawn is kin to Atlas letting the world spin easy on his shoulder. As Samuel Spaulding, Esquire, once said, ‘Dig in the earth, look into the soul.’ Spin those mower blades, Bill, and walk in the spray of the Fountain of Youth. End of lecture.”

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Notes

1

Byzantium – the ancient Greek city on the Bosporus, which was founded about 660 BC, was rebuilt by Constantine I in AD 330 and called Constantinople. It is now Istanbul.

2

W. B. Yeats – the English-Irish poet, who in his poem “Sailing to Byzantium” describes the metaphorical journey of a man pursuing his own vision of eternal life and his conception of paradise.