Читать книгу Wintersmoon онлайн

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He perceived another thing. On Sunday mornings they sat—his father, his mother, Aunt Alice, any guests—in the deep family pew in the old sixteenth-century church just outside the Wintersmoon gates. That had become a ritual so common as to inhibit consciousness. His second personality on these mornings would gladly swing itself free and he would be away far over England, far over Europe, lost in a beauty and a wonder that he had never had self-discipline enough to analyse.

But on this morning he was watching this new father of his. It was his first morning in church for months, the first bold step of his convalescence. Old Beatty, the white-bearded rector, was reading the First Lesson, and it was a Cursing Lesson—"I, the Lord thy God"—and the wretched Jews were cowering down on to their desert sand while the plague devastated them, fiery serpents assaulted them....

On his father's face was written disgust, and at the "Here endeth" he moved his thick stocky shoulders as though he would shake some evil spell from off them.