silent! – annoyancely Elizar interrupted. – Experiences are necessary! experiences! There will pass, maybe, one thousand years, not only the plane will be invented, and all life will change, heaven and earth will be moved… all work will be executed by the car, and the person will have only one – the highest work – a thought!. you remember, look back back what the mankind reached? Whether long ago steamships and engines went? And to efty only in the fairy tale Ivan the Fool on pike command went by an oven!. All laughed at Englishman Fulton who adapted a boiler, nobody trusted, nobody supported, with hunger the genius died!. And left on its!. And of course – instead of the flying carpet – the steam-engine will depart! Will depart! In efty there is no doubt!. And by self-skating rinks will go very much even to fast time… but will sometime open also the perpetual motion machine!
– Can be! not at us only!
– And how nobility? The science is more wonderful than any miracles!. The thought works not only for you yes at me!. to a mozha, thousands of the heads, not to us a couple, fight… and I trust: people will achieve! inevitably!
In a back of the cart wooden gear castors – one lay more, another – is less, a wooden box, and from the cart two long popular prints similar to sails with the wire fastened to them overhung. Children wanted to touch and turn gear castors, to take wire rods. Vukol stretched was a hand, but the father strictly shook finger at him and continued an unclear conversation.
The cart slid through the Spiked glade to the very tall black poplars going to the sky the tops hooting under warm wind. They a ridge stood on the very brink of high clay break, and through their branches silver of the wide river flashed. The brisk horse ran on the soft road cheerfully and quickly, wind blew sideways, blowing off her tail and a mane on the party.
The miller stopped the cart, drove under a shadow of black poplars. They were so enormous that a horse with the cart and people on it seemed toy, tops of trees as if went to clouds: on the foozle of the cut black poplar the cart could go in. Noise of widely raskinuty silvery branches merged in solemnly floating string rumble. Several enormous trees which are washed away by a high water under the roots fell down tops down and lay as prostrate giants, with naked roots, with even green branches. In the bottom of break the raging, bubbling sleeve of Volga, almost same wide, as well as it – Proran, a bend separated from Volga from which it was separated by the narrow oblong island densely overgrown with a young talnik rushed. Behind the island Proran, bending around it, again connected to radical Volga, forming as if a beach width in several kilometers.
– Vzmor! – told Laurels enthusiastically, showing on the island.
Far on the horizon the mountain coast of Volga slightly became blue and similar rose humpbacked, to a cloud, the gloomy mountain the Barge hauler. Lower mountains on the Volga Current it was hardly possible to distinguish the small town with several churches and the familiar tower reminding the sugar head.
The horse of a vypryagla was also tied to the cart put close to a tree trunk in several grasps. Thick boughs stretched over break. Deeply below Proran roared, the screw its terrible rapid turned, shaking up yellowish foam. Water had a fishing tent, and several fishermen sat with the long rods strengthened on pegs ashore. On a trick three-four boats shook.
With curiosity, having raised the heads, fishermen watched how Chelyak and Elizar pottered about about the cart, knocking hammers.
From the Spiked glade the audience – guys, maids, children approached – the crowd was formed. Chelyak angrily cried on them that departed far away.
Masters assembled the small mechanism with a gear wheel and a spring, with a wooden crossbeam in a bottom of the open basten wings reminding wings of a huge eagle.
Chelyak from the cart got on a direct and long bough, walked all on it.
Elizar lifted and stretched him the aircraft. Slowly and carefully involved the mechanism on a tree branch. Chelyak long pottered, measured something, leveled the wings raised over his head and began to get a spring.
– My God, bless! I fly!
Elizar got into the boat and across floated through Proran.
Cracked, began to patter in branches, and all saw an extraordinary show: the unusual bird soared up over Proran, rising above and above, like a kite. The beard of the miller and a leg in boots flashed. It seemed that the dragon flies and carries the person in the claws: under open wings the lump of the small human figure sitting on a crossbeam was seen.
The plane described an arch over Proran and began to decrease in Vzmor’s talnik. Decreased slowly and – as it seemed to the stood crowd – very long. From a distance resembled already the kite who caught production.
The winged being fell to tops of a dense talnik, potrepykhatsya and disappeared in him. Elizar stuck to a sandy shallow, jumped out of the boat and ran to the scene.
The crowd rustled.
– Flew? and? fathers!
– It was killed?
– Do not know!
Rushed from a steep slope to the coast. Put palms to eyes, looked. Some jumped in boats.
But here on the bank of Vzmor there was Elizar, bearing on shoulders basten wings. Behind it, limping, Chelyak hobbled.
– It is live! Sly fellow!
– And god, perhaps, will not praise for it? Took in head to fly supposedly?
When the boat moored, on hands pulled out it on the clay coast. Chelyak was pale, the sleeve of his jacket came off at all, on a cheek blood flowed. It wiped it a red scarf.
Elizar stood ahead of all. His beard shivered, in eyes there were tears. He wanted to tell something and could not. On sand fragments of wings lay.
The crowd started talking at once:
– See, darling, saw death!
– Death to be afraid – not to live on light!
– Without courage there is no home brew also!
– It, so put: or a breast in crosses, or the head in bushes! Was able, means! without ability and a bast shoe you will not weave!
– Here those and car! – told, sighing, Chelyak – into smithereens! Invented everything, everything looked for what-s!
– That will also find – who looks for! Nothing, the brother, fell you, and towered! – Elizar told.
The inventor looked on died a child and repeated, sighing, a favourite saying:
– Prepared – a reel on a prozvanye фир – at it many holes!
* * *
Before evening, as always for a Pentecost, maids in festive bright attires stood in the row the middle of the street and with lingering songs went to Dubrova to look for cuckoo slezk. It was the ancient cheerful custom.
The village since lordly times was divided into two ends by a hillock on which there was a column with an inscription: on the one hand: “the 1st society” and with another – “the 2nd society”, but in a spoken language the second society was called in the old manner “Children’s corvee”: since serfdom when a half of the village was bequeathed by the landowner in favor of children.
“Children’s corvee” had the village fence at the very end of the village, and Dubrova was seen behind a village fence: it was the reserved small wood, dense, curly, almost all the birch, going-down on the abrupt coast Postepka who in this place was deeper and wider, than about Zaymishcha, and all was covered with floating burdocks with white water colors. In ancient times there was an extensive landowner park, but now he ran wild long ago, grew with a dense thicket and turned into a beautiful virgin oak grove. Through the wood there was badly nayezzhenny sandy road, and in the depth