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This passage describes the family of the rich, ignorant and rude landlord Sir Pitt Crawley in whose house Becky Sharp finds herself as a governess.
Sir Pitt Crawley was a philosopher with a taste for what is called low life. His first marriage with the daughter of the noble Binkie had been made under the auspices of his parents; and as he often told Lady Crawley in her life time she was such a confounded quarrelsome highbred jade that when she died he was hanged if he would eve take another of her sort, at her ladyship's demise he kept his promise, and selected for a second wife Miss Rose Dawson, daughter of Mr. John Thomas Dawson, ironmonger, of Mudbury. What a happy woman was Rose to be my Lady Crawley!
Let us set down the items of her happiness. In the first place, she gave up Peter Butt, a young man who kept company with her, and in consequence of his disappointment in love took to smuggling, poaching, and a thousand other bad courses. Then she quarrelled, as in duty bound with all the friends and intimates of her youth, who, of cause, could not be received by my Lady at Queen's Crawley — nor did she find in her new rank and abode any persons who were willing to welcome her. Who ever did? Sir Huddleston Fuddleston had three daughters who all hoped to be Lady Crawley. Sir Giles Wapshot's family were insulted that one of the Wapshot girls had not the preference in the marriage, and the remaining baronets of the county were indignant at their comrade's misalliance. Never mind the commoners, whom we will leave to grumble anonymously.
Sir Pitt did not care, as he said, a brass farden for any one of them. He had his pretty Rose, and what more need a man require than to please himself? So he used to get drunk every nignt; to beat his pretty Rose sometimes; to leave her in Hampshire when he Went to London for the parliamentary session, without a single friend in the wide world. Even Mrs. Bute Crawley, the rector's wife, refused to visit her, as she said she would never give the pas to a tradesman's daughter.
As the only endowments with which Nature had gifted Lady Crawley were those of pink cheeks and a white skin, and as she had no sort of character, nor talents, nor opinions, nor occupations, nor amusements, nor that vigor of soul and ferocity of temper which often falls to the lot of entirely foolish women, her hold upon Sir Pitt's affections was not very great. Her roses faded out of her cheeks, and the pretty freshness left her figure after the birth of a couple of children, and she became a mere machine in her husband's house of no more use than the late Lady Crawley's grand piano. Being a light-complexioned woman, she wore light clothes, as most blondes will, and appeared, in preference, in draggled sea green or slatternly sky-blue. She worked that worsted day and night, or other pieces like it. She had counterpanes in the course of a few years to all the beds in Crawley. She had a small flower-garden, for which she had rather an affection; but beyond this no other like or disliking. When her husband was rude to her she was apathetic; whenever he struck her she cried. She had not character enough to take to drinking, and moaned about, slipshod and in curl-papers all day. O Vanity Fair! Vanity Fair! This might have been, but for you, a 'cheery"! ass —Peter Butt and Rose a happy man and wife, in a snug farm, with a hearty family; and an honest portion of pleasures, cares, hopes, and struggles. But a title and a coach and four are toys more precious than happiness in Vanity Fair; and if Harry the Eighth or Bluebeard were alive now, and wanted a tenth wife, do you suppose he could not get the prettiest girl that shall be presented this season?
The languid dullness of their mamma did not, as it may be supposed, awaken much affection in her little daughters, but they were very happy in the servants' hall and in the stables; and the Scotch gardener having luckily a good wife and some good children, they got a little wholesome society and instruction in his lodge, which was the only education bestowed upon them until Miss Sharp came.
Vanity Fair! Vanity Fair! Here was a man, who could not spell, and did not care to read — who had the habits and the cunning of a boor; whose aim in life was pettifogging; who never had a taste, or emotion, or enjoyment, but what was sordid and foul; and yet he had rank, and honours, and power, somehow; and was a dignitary of the land, and a pillar of the state. He was high sheriff, and rode in a golden coach. Great ministers and statesmen courted him; and in Vanity Fair he had a higher place than the most brilliant genius of spotless virtue.
YOUNG GEORGE WILLARD got out of bed at four in the morning. It was April and the young tree leaves were just coming out of their buds. The trees along the residence streets in Winesburg are maple and the seeds are winged. When the wind blows they whirl crazily about, filling the air and making a car pet underfoot. George came downstairs into the hotel office car rying a brown leather bag. His trunk was packed for departure. Since two o'clock he had been awake thinking of the journey he was about to take and wondering what he would find at the end of his journey. The boy who slept in the hotel office lay on a cot by the door. His mouth was open and he snored lustily. George crept past the cot and went out into the silent deserted main street. The east was pink with the dawn and long streaks of light climbed into the sky where a few stars still shone.
Beyond the last house on Trunion Pike in Wines burg there is a great stretch of open fields. The fields are owned by farmers who live in town and drive homeward at evening along Trunion Pike in light creaking wagons. In the fields are planted berries and small fruits. In the late afternoon in the hot summers when the road and the fields are covered with dust, a smoky haze lies over the great flat basin of land. To look across it is like looking out across the sea. In the spring when the land is green the effect is somewhat different. The land becomes a wide green billiard table on which tiny human in sects toil up and down.
All through his boyhood and young manhood George Willard had been in the habit of walking on Trunion Pike. He had been in the midst of the great open place on winter nights when it was covered with snow and only the moon looked down at him; he had been there in the fall when bleak winds blew and on summer evenings when the air vibrated with the song of insects. On the April morning he wanted to go there again, to walk again in the silence. He did walk to where the road dipped down by a little stream two miles from town and then turned and walked silently back again. When he got to Main Street clerks were sweeping the sidewalks before the stores. "Hey, you George. How does it feel to be going away?" they asked.
The westbound train leaves Winesburg at seven forty-five in the morning. Tom Little is conductor. His train runs from Cleveland to where it connects with a great trunk line railroad with terminals in Chicago and New York. Tom has what in railroad circles is called an "easy run." Every evening he returns to his family. In the fall and spring he spends his Sundays fishing in Lake Erie. He has a round red face and small blue eyes. He knows the people in the towns along his railroad better than a city man knows the people who live in his apart ment building.
George came down the little incline from the New Willard House at seven o'clock. Tom Willard carried his bag. The son had become taller than the father.
On the station platform everyone shook the young man's hand. More than a dozen people waited about. Then they talked of their own affairs. Even Will Henderson, who was lazy and often slept until nine, had got out of bed. George was embarrassed. Gertrude Wilmot, a tall thin woman of fifty who worked in the Winesburg post office, came along the station platform. She had never before paid any attention to George. Now she stopped and put out her hand. In two words she voiced what everyone felt. "Good luck," she said sharply and then turning went on her way.
When the train came into the station George felt relieved. He scampered hurriedly aboard. Helen White came running along Main Street hoping to have a parting word with him, but he had found a seat and did not see her. When the train started Tom Little punched his ticket, grinned and, although he knew George well and knew on what adventure he was just setting out, made no comment. Tom had seen a thousand George Willards go out of their towns to the city. It was a commonplace enough incident with him. In the smoking car there was a man who had just invited Tom to go on a fishing trip to Sandusky Bay. He wanted to accept the invi tation and talk over details.
George glanced up and down the car to be sure no one was looking, then took out his pocketbook and counted his money. His mind was occupied with a desire not to appear green. Almost the last words his father had said to him concerned the matter of his behavior when he got to the city. "Be a sharp one," Tom Willard had said. "Keep your eyes on your money. Be awake. That's the ticket. Don't let anyone think you're a greenhorn."
After George counted his money he looked out of the window and was surprised to see that the train was still in Winesburg.
The young man, going out of his town to meet the adventure of life, began to think but he did not think of anything very big or dramatic. Things like his mother's death, his departure from Winesburg, the uncertainty of his future life in the city, the serious and larger aspects of his life did not come into his mind.
He thought of little things-Turk Smollet wheeling boards through the main street of his town in the morning, a tall woman, beautifully gowned, who had once stayed overnight at his father's hotel, Butch Wheeler the lamp lighter of Winesburg hur rying through the streets on a summer evening and holding a torch in his hand, Helen White standing by a window in the Winesburg post office and put ting a stamp on an envelope.
The young man's mind was carried away by his growing passion for dreams. One looking at him would not have thought him particularly sharp. With the recollection of little things occupying his mind he closed his eyes and leaned back in the car seat. He stayed that way for a long time and when he aroused himself and again looked out of the car window the town of Winesburg had disappeared and his life there had become but a background on which to paint the dreams of his manhood.
He woke in the morning so unrefreshed and strengthless that he sent for the doctor. After sounding him, the fellow pulled a face as long as your arm, and ordered him to stay in bed and give up smoking. That was no hardship; there was nothing to get up for, and when he felt ill, tobacco always lost its savour. He spent the morning languidly with the sun-blinds down, turning and re-turning The Times, not reading much, the dog Balthasar lying beside his bed. With his lunch they brought him a telegram, running thus: ‘Your letter received coming down this afternoon will be with you at four-thirty. Irene.’
Coming down! After all! Then she did exist—and he was not deserted. Coming down! A glow ran through his limbs; his cheeks and forehead felt hot. He drank his soup, and pushed the tray-table away, lying very quiet until they had removed lunch and left him alone; but every now and then his eyes twinkled. Coming down! His heart beat fast, and then did not seem to beat at all. At three o’clock he got up and dressed deliberately, noiselessly. Holly and Mam’zelle would be in the schoolroom, and the servants asleep after their dinner, he shouldn’t wonder. He opened his door cautiously, and went downstairs. In the hall the dog Balthasar lay solitary, and, followed by him, old Jolyon passed into his study and out into the burning afternoon. He meant to go down and meet her in the coppice, but felt at once he could not manage that in this heat. He sat down instead under the oak tree by the swing, and the dog Balthasar, who also felt the heat, lay down beside him. He sat there smiling. What a revel of bright minutes! What a hum of insects, and cooing of pigeons! It was the quintessence of a summer day. Lovely! And he was happy—happy as a sand-boy, whatever that might be. She was coming; she had not given him up! He had everything in life he wanted—except a little more breath, and less weight—just here! He would see her when she emerged from the fernery, come swaying just a little, a violet-grey figure passing over the daisies and dandelions and ‘soldiers’ on the lawn—the soldiers with their flowery crowns. He would not move, but she would come up to him and say: ‘Dear Uncle Jolyon, I am sorry!’ and sit in the swing and let him look at her and tell her that he had not been very well but was all right now; and that dog would lick her hand. That dog knew his master was fond of her; that dog was a good dog.
It was quite shady under the tree; the sun could not get at him, only make the rest of the world bright so that he could see the Grand Stand at Epsom away out there, very far, and the cows cropping the clover in the field and swishing at the flies with their tails. He smelled the scent of limes, and lavender. Ah! That was why there was such a racket of bees. They were excited—busy, as his heart was busy and excited. Drowsy, too, drowsy and drugged on honey and happiness; as his heart was drugged and drowsy. Summer — summer — they seemed saying; great bees and little bees, and the flies too!
The stable clock struck four; in half an hour she would be here. He would have just one tiny nap, because he had had so little sleep of late; and then he would be fresh for her, fresh for youth and beauty, coming towards him across the sunlit lawn—lady in grey! And settling back in his chair he closed his eyes. Some thistle-down came on what little air there was, and pitched on his moustache more white than itself. He did not know; but his breathing stirred it, caught there. A ray of sunlight struck through and lodged on his boot. A bumble-bee alighted and strolled on the crown of his Panama hat. And the delicious surge of slumber reached the brain beneath that hat, and the head swayed forward and rested on his breast. Summer — summer! So went the hum.
The stable clock struck the quarter past. The dog Balthasar stretched and looked up at his master. The thistledown no longer moved. The dog placed his chin over the sunlit foot. It did not stir. The dog withdrew his chin quickly, rose, and leaped on old Jolyon’s lap, looked in his face, whined; then, leaping down, sat on his haunches, gazing up. And suddenly he uttered a long, long howl.
But the thistledown was still as death, and the face of his old master.
Summer — summer — summer! The soundless footsteps on the grass!
I remember the cold night you brought in a pile of logs and a chipmunk jumped off as you lowered your arms. «What do you think you’re doing in here?” you said, as it ran through the living room. It went through the library and stopped at the front door as though it knew the house well. This would be difficult for anyone to believe, except perhaps as the subject of a poem. Our first week in the house was spent scraping, finding some of the house’s secrets, like wallpaper underneath wallpaper. In the kitchen, a pattern of white-gold trellises supported purple grapes as big and round as Ping-Pong balls. When we painted the walls yellow, I thought of the bits of grape that remained underneath and imagined the vine popping through, the way some plants can tenaciously push through anything. The day of the big snow, when you had to shovel the walk and couldn’t find your cap and asked me how to wind a towel so that it would stay on your head – you, in white towel turban, like a crazy king of snow. People liked the idea of our being together leaving the city for the country. So many people visited, and the fire place made all of them want to tell amazing stories: the child who happened to be standing on the right corner when the door of the ice-cream truck came open and hundreds of Popsicles crashed out; the man standing on the beach, sand sparkling in the sun, one bit glinting more than the rest, stooping to find a diamond ring. Did they talk about amazing things because they thought we’d run into one of them? Now I think they probably guessed it wouldn’t work it was as hopeless as giving a child a matched cup and saucer. Remember the night, out on the lawn, knee-deep in snow, chins pointed at the sky as the wind whirled down all that whiteness? It seemed that the world had been turned upside down, and we were looking into an enormous field of Queen Anne’s lace. Later, headlights off, our car was the first to ride through the newly fallen snow. The world outside the car looked solarised.
You remember it differently. You remember that the cold settled in stages, that a small curve of light was shaved from the moon night after night, until you were no longer surprised the sky was black, that the chipmunk ran to hide in the dark, not simply to a door that led to its escape. Our visitors told the same stories people always tell. One night, giving me lessons in storytelling, you said, “Any life will seem dramatic if you omit mention of most of it”
This, then, for drama: I drove back to that house not long ago. It was April, and Allen had died. In spite of all the visitors, Allen, next door, had been the good friend in bad times. I sat with his wife in their living room looking out the grass doors to the backyard, and there was Allen’s pool, still covered with black plastic that had been stretched across it for winter. It had rained, and as the rain fell, the cover collected more and more water until it finally spilled onto the concrete. When I left that day, I drove past what had been our house. Three or four crocuses were blooming in the front – just a few dots of white, no field of snow. I felt embarrassed for them. They couldn’t compete.
This is a story, told the way you say stories should be told: Somebody grew up, fell in love, and spent a winter with her lover in the country. This, of course, is the barest outline, and futile to discuss. It as pointless as throwing birdseed on the ground while snow still falls fast. Who expects small things to survive when even the largest get lost? People forget years and remember moments. Seconds and symbols are left to sum things up: the black shroud over the pool. Love, in its shortest form, becomes a word. What I remember about all that time is one winter. The snow. Even now, saying “snow”, my lips move so that they kiss the air.
No mention has been made of the snowplow that seemed always to be there, scraping snow off our narrow road – an artery cleared, though neither of us could have said where the heart was.
Knowing that Mrs. Mallard was afflicted with a heart trouble, great care was taken to break to her as gently as possible the news of her husband's death. It was her sister Josephine who told her, in broken sentences; veiled hints that revealed in half concealing. Her husband's friend Richards was there, too, near her. It was he who had been in the newspaper office when intelligence of the railroad disaster was received, with Brently Mallard's name leading the list of "killed." He had only taken the time to assure himself of its truth by a second telegram, and had hastened to forestall any less careful, less tender friend in bearing the sad message.
She did not hear the story as many women have heard the same, with a paralyzed inability to accept its significance. She wept at once, with sudden, wild abandonment, in her sister's arms. When the storm of grief had spent itself she went away to her room alone. She would have no one follow her.
There stood, facing the open window, a comfortable, roomy armchair. Into this she sank, pressed down by a physical exhaustion that haunted her body and seemed to reach into her soul.
She could see in the open square before her house the tops of trees that were all aquiver with the new spring life. The delicious breath of rain was in the air. In the street below a peddler was crying his wares. The notes of a distant song which some one was singing reached her faintly, and countless sparrows were twittering in the eaves.
There were patches of blue sky showing here and there through the clouds that had met and piled one above the other in the west facing her window.
She sat with her head thrown back upon the cushion of the chair, quite motionless, except when a sob came up into her throat and shook her, as a child who has cried itself to sleep continues to sob in its dreams.
She was young, with a fair, calm face, whose lines bespoke repression and even a certain strength. But now there was a dull stare in her eyes, whose gaze was fixed away off yonder on one of those patches of blue sky. It was not a glance of reflection, but rather indicated a suspension of intelligent thought.
There was something coming to her and she was waiting for it, fearfully. What was it? She did not know; it was too subtle and elusive to name. But she felt it, creeping out of the sky, reaching toward her through the sounds, the scents, the color that filled the air.
Now her bosom rose and fell tumultuously. She was beginning to recognize this thing that was approaching to possess her, and she was striving to beat it back with her will--as powerless as her two white slender hands would have been. When she abandoned herself a little whispered word escaped her slightly parted lips. She said it over and over under hte breath: "free, free, free!" The vacant stare and the look of terror that had followed it went from her eyes. They stayed keen and bright. Her pulses beat fast, and the coursing blood warmed and relaxed every inch of her body.
She did not stop to ask if it were or were not a monstrous joy that held her. A clear and exalted perception enabled her to dismiss the suggestion as trivial. She knew that she would weep again when she saw the kind, tender hands folded in death; the face that had never looked save with love upon her, fixed and gray and dead. But she saw beyond that bitter moment a long procession of years to come that owuld belong to her absolutely. And she opened and spread her arms out to them in welcome.
There would be no one to live for during those coming years; she would live for herself. There would be no powerful will bending hers in that blind persistence with which men and women believe they ahve a right to impose a private will upon a fellow-creature. A kind intention or a cruel intention made the act seem no less a crime as she looked upon it in that brief moment of illumination.
And yet she had loved him--sometimes. Often she had not. What did it matter! What could love, the unsolved mystery, count for in the face of this possession of self-assertion which she suddenly recognized as the strongest impulse of her being!
"Free! Body and soul free!" she kept whispering.
Josephine was kneeling before the closed door with her lips to the keyhold, imploring for admission. "Louise, open the door! I beg; open the door--you will make yourself ill. What are you doing, Louise? For heaven's sake open the door."
"Go away. I am not making myself ill." No; she was drinking in a very elixir of life through that open window.
Her fancy was running riot along those days ahead of her. Spring days, and summer days, and all sorts of days that would be her own. She breathed a quick prayer that life might be long. It was only yesterday she had thought with a shudder that life might be long.
She arose at length and opened the door to her sister's importunities. There was a feverish triumph in her eyes, and she carried herself unwittingly like a goddess of Victory. She clasped her sister's waist, and together they descended the stairs. Richards stood waiting for them at the bottom.
Some one was opening the front door with a latchkey. It was Brently Mallard who entered, a little travel-stained, composedly carrying his grip-sack and umbrella. He had been far from the scene of the accident, and did not even know there had been one. He stood amazed at Josephine's piercing cry; at Richards' quick motion to screen him from the view of his wife.
When the doctors came they said she had died of heart disease--of the joy that kills.
One hot evening in Padua they carried him up onto the roof and he could look out over the top of the town. There were chimney swifts in the sky. After a while it got dark and the searchlights came out. The others went down and took the bottles with them. He and Luz could hear them below on the balcony. Luz sat on the bed. She was cool and fresh in the hot night.
Luz stayed on night duty for three months. They were glad to let her. When they operated on him she prepared him for the operating table; and they had a joke about friend or enema. He went under the anesthetic holding tight on to himself so he would not blab about anything during the silly, talky time. After he got on crutches he used to take the temperatures so Luz would not have to get up from the bed. There were only a few patients, and they all knew about it. They all liked Luz. As he walked back along the halls he thought of Luz in his bed.
Before he went back to the front they went into the Duomo and prayed. It was dim and quiet, and there were other people praying. They wanted to get married, but there was not enough time for the banns, and neither of them had birth certificates. They felt as though they were married, but they wanted every one to know about it, and to make it so they could not lose it.
Luz wrote him many letters that he never got until after the armistice. Fifteen came in a bunch to the front and he sorted them by the dates and read them all straight through. They were all about the hospital, and how much she loved him and how it was impossible to get along without him and how terrible it was missing him at night.
After the armistice they agreed he should go home to get a job so they might be married. Luz would not come home until he had a good job and could come to New York to meet her. It was understood he would not drink, and he did not want to see his friends or any one in the States. Only to get a job and be married. On the train from Padua to Milan they quarrelled about her not being willing to come home at once. When they had to say good-bye, in the station at Milan, they kissed good-bye, but were not finished with the quarrel. He felt sick about saying good-bye like that.
He went to America on a boat from Genoa. Luz went back to Pordonone to open a hospital. It was lonely and rainy there, and there was a battalion of arditi quartered in the town. Living in the muddy, rainy town in the winter, the major of the battalion made love to Luz, and she had never known Italians before, and finally wrote to the States that theirs had been only a boy and girl affair. She was sorry, and she knew he would probably not be able to understand, but might someday forgive her, and be grateful to her, and she expected, absolutely unexpectedly, to be married in the spring. She loved him as always, but she realized now it was only a boy and girl love. She hoped he would have a great career, and believed in him absolutely. She knew it was for the best.
The major did not marry her in the spring, or any other time. Luz never got an answer to the letter to Chicago about it. A short time after he contracted gonorrhea from a sales girl in a loop department store while riding in a taxicab through Lincoln Park.
We got out at Sonning, and went for a walk round the village. It is the most fairy-like little nook on the whole river. It is more like a stage village than one built of bricks and mortar. Every house is smothered in roses, and now, in early June, they were bursting forth in clouds of dainty splendour. If you stop at Sonning, put up at the "Bull," behind the church. It is a veritable picture of an old country inn, with green, square courtyard in front, where, on seats beneath the trees, the old men group of an evening to drink their ale and gossip over village politics; with low, quaint rooms and latticed windows, and awkward stairs and winding passages.
We roamed about sweet Sonning for an hour or so, and then, it being too late to push on past Reading, we decided to go back to one of the Shiplake islands, and put up there for the night. It was still early when we got settled, and George said that, as we had plenty of time, it would be a splendid opportunity to try a good, slap-up supper. He said he would show us what could be done up the river in the way of cooking, and suggested that, with the vegetables and the remains of the cold beef and general odds and ends, we should make an Irish stew.
It seemed a fascinating idea. George gathered wood and made a fire, and Harris and I started to peel the potatoes I should never have thought that peeling potatoes was such an undertaking. The job turned out to be the biggest thing of its kind that I had ever been in. We began cheerfully, one might almost say skittishly, but our light-heartedness was gone by the time the first potato was finished. The more we peeled, the more peel there seemed to be left on; by the time we had got all the peel off and all the eyes out, there was no potato left, at least none worth speaking of. George came and had a look at it, it was about the size of a pea-nut.
He said:
"Oh, that won't do! You're wasting them. You must scrape them."
So we scraped them, and that was harder work than peeling. They are such an extraordinary shape, potatoes, all bumps and warts and hollows. We worked steadily for five-and-twenty minutes, and did four potatoes. Then we struck. We said we should require the rest of the evening for scraping ourselves.
I never saw such a thing as potato-scraping for making a fellow in a mess. It seemed difficult to believe that the potato-scrapings in which Harris and I stood, half smothered, could have come off four potatoes. It shows you what can be done with economy and care.
George said it was absurd to have only four potatoes in an Irish stew, so we washed half-a-dozen or so more, and put them in without peeling. We also put in a cabbage and about half a peck of peas. George stirred it all up, and then he said that there seemed to be a lot of room to spare, so we overhauled both the hampers, and picked out all the odds and ends and the remnants, and added them to the stew. There were half a pork pie and a bit of cold boiled bacon left, and we put them in. Then George found half a tin of potted salmon, and he emptied that into the pot.
He said that was the advantage of Irish stew: you got rid of such a lot of things. I fished out a couple of eggs that had got cracked, and put those in. George said they would thicken the gravy.
I forget the other ingredients, but I know nothing was wasted; and I remember that, towards the end, Montmorency, who had evinced great interest in the proceedings throughout, strolled away with an earnest and thoughtful air, reappearing, a few minutes afterwards, with a dead water rat in his mouth, which he evidently wished to present as his contribution to the dinner; whether in a sarcastic spirit, or with a genuine desire to assist, I cannot say.
We had a discussion as to whether the rat should go in or not. Harris said that he thought it would be all right, mixed up with the other things, and that every little helped; but George stood up for precedent. He said he had never heard of water-rats in Irish stew, and he would rather be on the safe side, and not try experiments.
Harris said:
"If you never try a new thing, how can you tell what it's like? It's men such as you that hamper the world's progress. Think of the man who first tried German sausage!"
It was a great success, that Irish stew. I don't think I ever enjoyed a meal more. There was something so fresh and piquant about it. One's palate gets so tired of the old hackneyed things: here was a dish with a new flavour, with a taste like nothing else on earth.
And it was nourishing, too. As George said, there was good stuff in it. The peas and potatoes might have been a bit softer, but we all had good teeth, so that did not matter much: and as for the gravy, it was a poem, a little too rich, perhaps, for a weak stomach, but nutritious.
Years after her death a mother is remembered by her child.
One day I was listening to the AM radio. I heard a song: “Oh, I Long to See My Mother in the Doorway”. By God! I said, I understand that song. I have often longed to see my mother in the doorway. As a matter of fact, she did stand frequently in various doorways looking at me. She stood one day, just so, at the front door, the darkness of the hallway behind her. It was New Year’s Day. She said sadly, If you come home at 4 A.M. when you’re seventeen, what time will you come home when you’re twenty? She asked this question without humor and meanness. She had begun her worried preparations for death. She wouldn’t be present, she thought, when I was twenty. So she wondered.
Another time she stood in the doorway of my room. I had just issued a political manifesto attacking the family’s position on the Soviet Union. She said, Go to sleep for godsakes, you damn fool, you and your Communist ideas. We saw them already, Papa and me, in 1905. We guessed it all.
At the door of the kitchen she said, You never finish your lunch. You run around senselessly. What will become of you?
Then she died.
Naturally for the rest of my life I longed to see her, not only in doorways, in a great number of places – in the dining room with my aunts, at the window looking up and down the block, in the country garden among zinnias and marigolds, in the living room with my father.
They sat in comfortable leather chairs. They were listening to Mozart. They looked at one another amazed. It seemed to them that they’d just come over on the boat. They‘d just learned the first English words. It seemed to them that he had just proudly handed in a 100 percent correct exam to the American anatomy professor. It seemed as though she’d just quit the shop for the kitchen.
I wish I could see her in the doorway of the living room.
She stood there a minute. Then she sat beside him. They owned an expensive record player. They were listening to Bach. She said to him, Talk to me a little. We don’t talk so much anymore.
I’m tired, he said. Can’t you see? I saw maybe thirty people today. All sick, all talk talk talk. Listen to the music, he said. I believe you once had perfect pitch. I’m tired he said.
Then he died.
I have always believed that if a woman made up her mind to marry a man nothing could save him. I have only once known a man who in such circumstances managed to save himself. His name was Roger Charing. He was no longer young when he fell in love with Ruth Barlow and he had had enough experience to make him careful; but Ruth Barlow had a gift that makes most men defenceless. This was the gift of pathos. Mrs. Barlow was twice a widow. She had splendid dark eyes and they were the most moving I ever saw. They seemed to be always on the point of filling with tears and you felt that her sufferings had been impossible to bear. If you were a strong fellow with plenty of money, like Roger Charing, you should say to yourself: I must stand between the troubles of life and this helpless little thing. Mrs. Barlow was one of those unfortunate persons with whom nothing goes right. If she married the husband beat her; if she employed a broker he cheated her; if she took a cook she drank.
When Roger told me that he was going to marry her, I wished him joy. As for me I thought she was stupid and as hard as nails.Roger introduced her to his friends. He gave her lovely jewels. He took her everywhere. Their marriage was announced for the nearest future. Roger was very pleased with himself, he was committing a good action. Then suddenly he fell out of love. I don't know why. Perhaps that pathetic look of hers ceased to touch his heart-strings. He realized that Ruth Barlow had made up her mind to marry him and he swore that nothing would make him marry her. Roger knew it wouldn't be easy.Roger didn't show that his feelings to Ruth Barlol had changed. He remained attentive to all her wishes, he took her to dine at restaurants, he sent her flowers, he was charming.
They were to get married as soon as they found a house that suited them; and they started looking for residences. The agents sent Roger orders to view and he took Ruth to see some houses. It was very difficult to find anything satisfactory. They visited house after house. Sometimes they were too large and sometimes they were too small; sometimes they were too far from the centre and sometimes they were too close; sometimes they were too expensive and sometimes they wanted too many repairs; sometimes they were too stuffy and sometimes they were too airy. Roger always found a fault that made the house unsuitable. He couldn't let his dear Ruth to live in a bad house.Ruth began to grow peevish. Roger asked her to have patience. They looked at hundreds of houses; they climbed thousands of stairs. Ruth was exhausted and often lost her temper. For two years they looked for houses. Ruth grew silent, her eyes no longer looked beautiful and pathetic. There are limits to human patience.
"Do you want to marry me or do you not?" she asked him one day.
"Of course I do. We'll be married the very moment we find a house.
"I don't feel well enough to look at any more houses."
Ruth Barlow took to her bed. Roger remained gallant as ever. Every day he wrote her and told her that he had heard of another house for them to look at. A week later he received the following letter:
'Roger —
I do not think you really love me. I've found someone who really wants to take care of me and I am going to be married to him today.
Ruth.'
He sent back his reply: 'Ruth -
I'll never get over this blow. But your happiness must be my first concern. I send you seven addresses. I am sure you'll find among them a house that will exactly suit you. Roger.'
A husband arranges a secret meeting with a woman and is surprised by the outcome.
“I’m going to go for a drive”, he said to his wife. “I’ll be back in an hour or two.”
He didn’t often leave the house for more than the few minutes it took him to go to the post office or to a store, but he spent his time hanging around, doing odd jobs – Mr. Fix-it, his wife called him – and also, though not nearly enough of it, painting – which he made his living from.
“All right”, his wife said brightly, as though he were doing her a favour. As a matter of fact, she didn’t really like him to leave; she felt safer with him at home, and he helped look after the children, especially the baby.
“You’re glad to get rid of me, aren’t you? He said.
“Uh-huh”, she said with a smile that suddenly made her look very pretty – someone to be missed.
She didn’t ask him where he was going for his drive. She wasn’t the least bit inquisitive, though jealous she was in silent, subtle ways.
As he put his coat on, he watched her. She was in the living room with their elder daughter. «Do the can-can, mother», the child said, at which she held up her skirt and did the can-can, kicking her legs up high in his direction.
He wasn’t simply going for a drive, as he had said, but going to cafe, to meet Sarah, whom his wife knew but did not suspect, and with her go to a house on a lake his wife knew nothing about – a summer cottage to which he had the key.
“Well, goodbye”, he said.
“Bye”, she called back, still dancing.
This wasn’t the way a husband expected his wife – whom he was about to leave home to go to another woman – to behave at all, he thought. He expected her to be sewing or washing, not doing the can-can, for God’s sake. Yes, doing something uninteresting and unattractive, like darning children’s clothes. She had no stockings on, no shoes and her legs looked very white and smooth, secret, as though he had never touched them or come near them. Her feet, swinging up and down high in the air, seemed to be nodding to him. She held her skirt bunched up, attractively. Why was she doing that of all times now? He lingered. Her eyes had mockery in them, and she laughed. The child laughed with her as she danced. She was still dancing as he left the house.
He thought of the difficulties he had had arranging this rendezvous – going out to a call box; phoning Sarah at her office (she was married, too); her being out; his calling her again; the busy signal; the coin falling out of sight, his opening the door of the phone box in order to retrieve it; at last getting her on the line; her asking him to call again next week, finally setting a date.
Waiting for her at the cafe, he surprised himself hoping that she wouldn’t come. The appointment was at three. It was now ten past. Well, she was often late. He looked at the clock, and at the picture window for her car. A car like hers, and yet not hers – no luggage rack on it. The smooth hardtop gave him a peculiar pleasure. Why? It was 3:15 now. Perhaps she wouldn’t come. No, if she was going to come at all, this was the most likely time for her to arrive. Twenty past. Ah, now there was some hope. Hope? How strange he should be hoping for her absence. Why had he made the appointment if he was hoping she would miss it? He didn’t know why, but simpler, simpler if she didn’t come. Because all he wanted now was to smoke cigarette, drink that cup of coffee for the sake of them, and not to give himself something to do. And he wished he could go for a drive, free and easy, as he had said he would. But he waited, and at 3:30 she arrived. “I had almost given up hope”, he said.
They drove to the house on the lake. As he held her in his arms he couldn’t think of her; for the life of him he couldn’t.
“What are you thinking about?” she said afterwards, sensing his detachment.
For a moment he didn’t answer, then he said, “You really want to know what I was thinking of?”
“Yes”, she said, a little anxiously.
He suppressed a laugh, as though what he was going to tell her was too absurd or silly. “I was thinking of someone doing the can-can”.
“Oh”, she said, reassured. “For a moment I was afraid you were thinking of your wife.”
“The Grass Harp” by Truman Capote. Chapter two
No one in our town ever had themselves so much talked about as Riley Henderson. Older people spoke of him with sighing voices, and those nearer his own age, like myself, were glad to call him mean and hard: that was because he would only let us envy him, would not let us love him, be his friend.
Anyone could have told you the facts.
He was born in China, where his father, a missionary, had been killed in an uprising. His mother was from this town, and her name was Rose; though I never saw her myself, people say she was a beautiful woman until she started wearing glasses; she was rich too, having received a large inheritance from her grandfather. When she came back from China she brought Riley, then five, and two younger children, both girls; they lived with her unmarried brother, Justice of the Peace Horace Holton, a meaty spinsterish man with skin yellow as quince. In the following years Rose Henderson grew strange in her ways: she threatened to sue Verena for selling her a dress that shrank in the wash; to punish Riley, she made him hop on one leg around the yard reciting the multiplication table; otherwise, she let him run wild, and when the Presbyterian minister spoke to her about it she told him she hated her children and wished they were dead. And she must have meant it, for one Christmas morning she locked the bathroom door and tried to drown her two little girls in the tub: it was said that Riley broke the door down with a hatchet, which seems a tall order for a boy of nine or ten, whatever he was. Afterwards, Rose was sent off to a place on the Gulf Coast, an institution, and she may still be living there, at least I’ve never heard that she died. Now Riley and his uncle Horace Holton couldn’t get on. One night he stole Horace’s Oldsmobile and drove out to the Dance-N-Dine with Mamie Curtiss: she was fast as lightning, and maybe five years older than Riley, who was not more than fifteen at the time. Well, Horace heard they were at the Dance-N-Dine and got the Sheriff to drive him out there: he said he was going to teach Riley a lesson and have him arrested. But Riley said Sheriff, you’re after the wrong party. Right there in front of a crowd he accused his uncle of stealing money that belonged to Rose and that was meant for him and his sisters. He offered to fight it out on the spot; and when Horace held back, he just walked over and socked him in the eye. The Sheriff put Riley in jail. But Judge Cool, an old friend of Rose’s began to investigate, and sure enough it turned out Horace had been draining Rose’s money into his own account. So Horace simply packed his things and took the train to New Orleans where, a few months later, we heard that, billed as the Minister of Romance, he had a job marrying couples on an excursion steamer that made moonlight cruises up the Mississippi. From then on, Riley was his own boss. With money borrowed against the inheritance he was coming into, he bought a red racy car and went skidding round the countryside with every floozy in town; the only nice girls you ever saw in that car were his sisters – he took them for a drive Sunday afternoons, a slow respectable circling of the square. They were pretty girls, his sisters, but they didn’t have much fun, for he kept a strict watch, and boys were afraid to come near them. A reliable colored woman did their housework, otherwise they lived alone. One of his sisters, Elizabeth, was in my class at school, and she got the best grades, straight A’s. Riley himself had quit school; but he was not one of the pool-hall loafs, nor did he mix with them; he fished in the daytime, or went hunting; around the old Holton house he made many improvements, as he was a good carpenter; and a good mechanic, too: for instance, he built a special car horn, it wailed like a train-whistle, and in the evening you could hear it howling as he roared down the road on his way to a dance in another town. How I longed for him to be my friend! And it seemed possible, he was just two years older. But I could remember the only time he ever spoke to me. Spruce in a pair of white flannels, he was off to a dance at the clubhouse, and he came into Verena’s drugstore, where I sometimes helped out on Saturday nights. What he wanted was a package of Shadows, but I wasn’t sure what Shadows were, so he had to come behind the counter and get them out of the drawer himself; and he laughed, not unkindly, though it was worse than if it had been: now he knew I was a fool, we would never be friends.
NOTES: meaty – зд. толстый. Dance-N-Dine – ресторан с танцами.
fast as lightning – зд. распутная.
billed as the Minister of Romance, he had a job marrying couples on an excursion steamer – в рекламных плакатах его называли Священнослужителем романтики, и в его обязанности входило венчать парочки на экскурсионном пароходе.
straight A’s – сплошные отличные оценки.
pool-hall loafs – бездельники, околачивающиеся около биллиардной.
clubhouse – в помещении клуба есть ресторан и зал для танцев.
Shadows – фирменное название презервативов.
“Breakfast At Tiffany’s” by Truman Capote.
Outside, the rain had stopped, there was only a mist of it in the air, so I turned the corner and walked along the street where the brownstone stands. It is a street with trees that in the summer makes cool patterns on the pavement; but now the leaves were yellowed and mostly down, and the rain had made them slippery, they skidded underfoot. The brownstone is midway in the block, next to a church where a blue tower-clock tolls the hours. It has been sleeked up since my day; a smart black door has replaced the old frosted glass, and gray elegant shutters frame the windows. No one I remember still lives there except Madame Sapphia Spanella, a husky coloratura who every afternoon went roll-skating in Central Park. I know she’s still there because I went up the steps and looked at the mailboxes. It was one of these mailboxes that had first made me aware of Holly Golightly.
I’d been living in the house about a week when I noticed that the mailbox belonging to Apt. 2 had a name-slot fitted with a curious card. Printed, rather Cartier-formal, it read: Miss Holiday Golightly; and, underneath, in the corner, Traveling. It nagged me like a tune: Miss Holiday Golightly, Traveling.
One night, it was long past twelve, I woke up at the sound of Mr. Yunoshi calling down the stairs. Since he lived on the top floor, his voice fell through the whole house, exasperated and stern. “Miss Golightly! I must protest!”
The voice that came back, welling up from the bottom of the stairs, was silly-young and self-amused. “Oh, darling, I am sorry. I lost the goddamn key.”
“You cannot go on ringing my bell. You must please, please have yourself a key made.”
“But I lose them all.”
“I work, I have to sleep,” Mr. Younoshi shouted. “But always you are ringing my bell…”
“Oh, don’t be angry, you dear little man: I won’t do it again. And if you promise not to be angry” – her voice was coming nearer, she was climbing the stairs – “I might let you take those pictures we mentioned.”
By now I’d left my bed and opened the door an inch. I could hear Mr. Yunoshi’s silence: hear, because it was accompanied by an audible change of breath.
“When?” he said.
The girl laughed. “Sometime,” she answered, slurring the word.
“Any time,” he said, and closed his door.
I went out into the hall and leaned over the banister, just enough to see without being seen. She was still on the stairs, now she reached the landing, and the ragbag colors of her boy’s hair, tawny streaks, strands of albino-blond and yellow, caught the hall light. It was a warm evening, nearly summer, and she wore a slim cool black dress, black sandals, a pearl choker. For all her chic thinness, she had an almost breakfast-cereal air of health, a soap and lemon cleanness, a rough pink darkening in the cheek. Her mouth was large, her nose upturned. A pair of dark glasses blotted out her eyes. It was a face beyond childhood, yet this side of belonging to a woman. I thought her anywhere between sixteen and thirty; as it turned out, she was shy two months of her nineteenth birthday.
She was not alone. There was a man following behind her. The way his plum hand clutched at her hip seemed somehow improper; not morally, aesthetically. He was short and vast, sun-lamped and pomaded, a man in a buttressed pin-stripe suit with a red carnation withering in the lapel. When they reached her door she rummaged her purse in search of a key, and took no notice of the fact that his thick lips were nuzzling the nape of her neck. At last, though, finding the key and opening her door, she turned to him cordially: “Bless you, darling – you were sweet to see me home.”
“Hey, baby!” he said, for the door was closing in his face.
“Yes, Harry?”
“Harry was the other guy. I’m Sid. Sid Arbuck. You like me.”
“I worship you, Mr. Arbuck. But good night, Mr. Arbuck.”
Mr. Arbuck stared with disbelief as the door shut firmly.
“Hey, baby, let me in, baby. You like me, baby. I’m a liked guy. Didn’t I pick up the check, five people, your friends, I never seen them before? Don’t that give me the right you should like me? You like me, baby.”
He tapped on the door gently, then louder; finally he took several steps back, his body hunched and lowering, as though he meant to charge it, crash it down. Instead, he plunged down the stairs, slamming a fist against the wall. Just as he reached the bottom, the door of the girl’s apartment opened and she poked out her head.
“Oh, Mr. Arbuck…”
He turned back, a smile of relief oiling his face: she’d only been teasing.
“The next time a girl wants a little powder-room change,” she called, not teasing at all, “take my advice, darling: don’t give her twenty-cents!”
NOTES:
Cartier-formal – красивым строгим шрифтом.
ragbag colors of her boy’s hair – пестрота ее волос в мальчишеской стрижке.
pearl choker – жемчужное ожерелье под самую шею.
she had an almost breakfast-cereal air of health – от нее веяло здоровьем, она выглядела как на плакате, рекламирующем полуфабрикат каши на завтрак.
she was shy two months of her nineteenth birthday – ей не хватало двух месяцев до девятнадцати лет.
sun-lamped – загорелый от света кварцевой лампы.
buttressed pin-stripe suit – костюм в полосочку с подложенными плечами, грудью и т.п.
powder-room change – мелочь, чтобы расплатиться в туалете.
“Fatherless Sons” by Dyson Carter. Part one, chapter one
***
“Well, mother,” said young James, in 1914, a day after his nineteenth birthday. He stood proudly in the doorway wearing the Kin’s uniform.
James was the handsome one. A huge boy, yet graceful as a buck. Three of his sweethearts wept unashamedly at the station when he left.
His sister-in-law Anna, Jules’ wife, pleaded and prayed with him to the last moment. She openly begged him to desert.
“It’s right for me to go,” Jim said. “Let Jules stay in the mine. He has a family. But if the Boche* wins, we’ll all be German slaves!”
Merrily the bands played for young Jimmy.
Three years later, in 1917, there was a band to send off Jules. But by that time, the players were old men and young boys. Ypres, St. Julien, Festhubert, Arras, Vimy Ridge*… a whole Canadian generation had perished there. The weeping at Deep Rock station sounded louder than the marching songs.
Anna and her two sons, George and David, went home in a stupor of fear. Soon Grandma Madeleine moved in to live with them. It was gossiped at her church that the elder Mrs. Nelson had repeated visions of Jules’ death.
“Now the Americans have declared war, they’ll end it!” Anna assured her. “Jules won’t be sent to the front at all!”
In the little movie theater of Deep Rock, the Nelsons saw American soldiers parading. How Canada sighed with admiration for those beautiful uniforms, the guns by the millions, the alluring Hollywood actresses selling Victory Bonds!
Still, it was the British and French, the Russians and Canadians, the Anzacs* and the Sikhs*, who went on dying…
Jules Nelson was only one of the 16,000 Canadians who fell in the bloody slime of Cambrai*, breaking the back of the Kaiser’s army there. While the graves were cooling, President Wilson made speeches promising to “bring our boys home before Christmas.”
Jules had not risen from the ranks. He had only his father’s skill with pick and shovel. When his rifle jammed at Cambrai he had picked up a shovel. And that was how the gravediggers had found him. There was no medal.
So the young orphan Dave used to say to visitors, “My father was killed one month and two days before Armistice!” Somehow that was a comforting boast.
George was seven, and Dave was just five, when they first sat quietly holding hands in the big kitchen of their mother’s boarding-house, to hear the answers to their question: “What was he like, mother?”
They never dared put the question to Uncle Jim, their father’s brother. He did not return till a year after the war ended. At the station, only his mother recognized him, and she fainted.
Not that his handsome features were much changed, or that he had lost a limb. But it seemed as though he had broken trail through a blizzard of supernatural force. His face was frozen, utterly immobile. And seeing the way others shrank from his strange visage, he would look away to the horizon, neither smiling nor frowning.
”He’s stark, staring mad,” a miner told his mates.
“No, not him,” the wives said. “Jim won’t look at a person long for some sin he has in his soul. He killed prisoners, they say.”
The young women secretly whispered to each other that Jim Nelson had suffered an unmentionable wound. That was why he went off to live in the bush*, and never looked at a girl.
Before she died, his mother made one last effort to probe Jim’s secret. Both he and his dead brother had abandoned the church in their youth. Madeleine played on what fears this might have left in Jim’s memory.
“Go back just once!” she said, despairingly. “Oh my James… only once! Go to confession! Promise me, I’ll rest easier.”
In the face of death Jim Nelson seemed only to freeze more rigidly than ever. But he was efficient at his mother’s funeral, and made a good impression on the big crowd of miners and their wives at the cemetery. Afterwards, a barely perceptible change developed in him. Uncle Jim became a more frequent caller at Anna’s boarding-house. He took the youngsters< George and Dave, out to his camp. He taught them to fish, shoot and trap, to sing the old ballads of the bush-rangers and lumber workers.
No one had ever heard an angry word from him, or any sign of passion, until 1941. He came to his married nephew’s house one August night carrying a loaded rifle, and quite drunk. Standing with his big legs wide spread in the stony back yard, hefting the heavy rifle with one hand like a pistol, he roared like a bull moose. He vowed that he would kill George then and there, unless he deserted the army and fled to the north country.
“I’ll kill you myself before I let them get you!” he bellowed, cursing the government. Half a dozen men finally packed him into a car and drove him out of town.
NOTES:
Boche – сленг, презр. бош, немец
Ypres, St. Julien, Festhubert, Arras, Vimy Ridge – бельгийские и французские города, в районе которых происходили крупные бои во время первой мировой войны.
Victory Bonds – облигации военного займа.
Cambrai – Камбре, город на севере Франции, где в сентябре-октябре 1918 г. союзные войска нанесли немецкой армии серьезной поражение.
Anzac – австралийский или новозеландский солдат.
Sikh – житель Пенджаба.
bush – большие пространства некультивированной земли. В Канаде это слово в переносном значении применяется, как по отношению к тайге, так и сельской местности в противоположность городу
“The House of the Peacock” by Gilbert Keith Chesterton
… He had a curious innocence which often appeared as impudence. Like other human beings, he was quite capable of doing wrong knowingly and being ashamed of it. But so long as he meant no wrong, it never even occurred to him that there could be anything to be ashamed of. For him burglary meant stealing; and he might have strolled, so to speak, down the chimney into a king’s bedchamber, so long as he had no intent to steal. The invitation of the leaning ladder and the open window was something almost too obvious even to be called an adventure. He began to mount the ladder as if he were going up the front steps of an hotel. But when he came up to the upper rungs he seemed to stop a moment, frowned at something; and, accelerating his ascent, slipped quickly over the window-sill into the room.
The twilight of the room seemed like darkness after the golden glare of the evening sunlight, and it was a second or two before the glimmer of light reflected from a round mirror opposite enabled him to make out the main features of the interior. The room itself seemed dusty and even defaced; the dark blue-green hangings, of a peacock pattern, as if carrying out the same scheme as the living decoration of the garden, were themselves, nevertheless, a background of dead colours; and, peering into the dusty mirror, he saw it was cracked. Nevertheless, the neglected room was evidently partly redecorated for a new festivity, for a long table was elaborately laid out for a dinner-party. By every plate, was a group of quaint and varied glasses for the wines of every course; and the blue vases on the table and the mantelpiece were filled with the same red and white blooms from the garden which he had seen on the window-sill. Nevertheless, there were odd things about the dinner-table, and his first thought was that it had already been the scene of some struggle or stampede, in which the salt-cellar had been knocked over and, for all he knew, the looking-glass broken. Then he looked at the knives on the table, and a light was beginning to dawn on his eyes, when the door opened and a sturdy, grey-haired man came rapidly into the room.
And at that he came back to common sense like a man flung from a flying ship into the cold shock of the sea. He remembered suddenly where he was and how he had got there. It was characteristic of him that, though he saw a practical point belatedly – and, perhaps, too late – when he did see it he saw it lucidly in all its logical ramifications. Nobody would believe in any legitimate reason for entering a strange house by the window instead of knocking at the door. Also, as it happened, he had no legitimate reason – or none that he could explain without a lecture on poetry and philosophy. He even realized the ugly detail that he was at that very moment fidgeting with the knives on the table, and that a large number of them were silver. After an instant of hesitation, he put down the knife and politely removed his hat.
“Well,” he said at last, with inconsequent irony, “I shouldn’t shoot if I were you; but I suppose you’ll send for the police.”
The new-comer, who was apparently the householder, was also fixed for the moment in a somewhat baffling attitude. When first he opened the door he had given a convulsive start, had opened his mouth as if to shout, and shut it again grimly, as if he was not even going to speak. He was a man with a strong, shrewd face, spoilt by painfully prominent eyes which gave him a look of perpetual protest. But by some accident it was not at these accusing eyes that the sleepy blue eyes of the poetical burglar were directed. The trick by which his rambling eye was so often riveted by some trivial object led him to look no higher at the moment than the stud in the old gentleman’s shirt-front, which was an unusually large and luminous opal. Having uttered his highly perverse and even suicidal remark, the poet smiled as if in relief, and waited for the other to speak.
“Are you a burglar?” asked the owner of the house at last.
“To make a clean breast of it, I’m not,” answered Gale. “But if you ask me what else I am, I really don’t know.”
The other man came rapidly round the table towards him, and made a motion as if offering his hand, or even both his hands.
“Of course you’re a burglar,” he said; “but it doesn’t matter. Won’t you stay to dinner?”
Then, after a sort of agitated pause, he repeated:
‘come, you really must stay to dinner; there’s place laid for you.”
“Hatter’s Castle” by Archibald Joseph Cronin
Book one
I
It was a singular dwelling. In size it was small, of such dimensions that it could not have contained more than seven rooms, in its construction solid, with the hard stability of new grey stone, in its architecture unique.
The base of the house had the shape of a narrow rectangle with the wider aspect directed towards the street, with walls which arose, not directly from the earth, but from a stone foundation a foot longer and wider than themselves, and upon which the whole structure seemed to sustain itself like an animal upon its deep dug paws. The frontage arising from this supporting pedestal, reared itself with a cold severity to terminate in one half of its extent in a steeply pithched gable and in the other in a low parapet which ran horizontally to join another gable, , similarly shaped to that in front, which formed the coping of the side wall of the house. These gables were peculiar, each converging in a series of steep right angled steps to a chamfered apex which bore with pompous dignity a large round ball of polished grey granite and, each in turn, merging into and become continuous with the parapet which ridged and serrated regularly and deeply after the fashion of a battlement fettered them together, forming thus a heavy stonelinked chain which embraced the body of the house like a manacle.
At the angle of the side gable and the front wall, and shackled, likewise, by this encircling, fillet of battlement, was a short round tower, ornamented in its middle by a deep-cut diamond shaped recess, carved beneath into rounded, diminishing courses which fixed it to the angle of the wall, and rising upwards to crown itself in a turret which carried a thin, reedy flagstaff. The heaviness of its upper dimensions, made the tower squat, deformed, gave to it the appearance of a broad frowning forehead, disfigured by a deep grooved stigma, while the two small embrasured windows which pierced it brooded from beneath the brow like secret, close-set eyes.
Immediately below this tower stood the narrow doorway of the house, the lesser proportion of its width giving it a meager, inhospitable look, like a thin repellent mouth its sides ascending above the horizontal lintel in a steep ogee curve encompassing a shaped and gloomy filling of darkly-stained glass and ending in a sharp lancet point. The windows of the dwelling, like the doorway, were narrow and unbevelled, having the significance merely of apertures stabbed through the sickness of the walls, grudgingly admitting light, yet sealing the interior from observation.
The whole aspect of the house was veiled, forbidding, sinister, its purpose, likewise hidden and obscure. From its very size it failed pitifully to achieve the boldness and magnificence of a baronial dwelling, if this, indeed, were the object of its pinnacle, its ramparts and the repetition of its sharp-pitched angles. And yet, in its coldness, hardness and strength, it could not be dismissed as seeking merely the smug attainment of pompous ostentation. Its battlements were formal but not ridiculous, its design extravagant, but never ludicrous, its grandiose architecture some quality which restrained merriment, some deeper, lurking, more perverse motive, sensed upon intensive scrutiny, which lay about the house like a deformity, and stood within its very structure like a violation of truth in stone.
The people of Levenford never laughed at this house, at least never openly. Something, some intangible potency pervading the atmosphere around it, forbade them even to smile.
“The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Chapter II
About half way between West Egg and New York the motor road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of ashes – a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of ash-grey men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of gray cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-gray men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight.
But above the gray land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg. The eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic – their retinas are one yard high. They look out of no face, but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a non-existent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness, or forgot them and moved away. But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days under sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground.
The valley of ashes is bounded on one side by a small foul river, and, when the drawbridge is up to let barges through, the passengers on waiting trains can stare at the dismal scene for as long as half an hour. There is always a halt there of at least a minute, and it was because of this that I first met Tom Buchanan’s mistress.
The fact that he had one was insisted upon wherever he was known. His acquaintances resented the fact that he turned up in popular restaurants with her and, leaving her at a table, sauntered about, chatting with whomsoever he knew. Though I was curious to see her, I had no desire to meet her – but I did. I went up to New York with Tom on the train one afternoon, and we stopped by the ashheaps he jumped to his feet and, taking hold of my elbow, literally forced me from the car.
“We’re getting off,” he insisted. “I want you to meet my girl.”
I think he’d tanked up a good deal at luncheon, and his determination to have my company bordered on violence. The supercilious assumption was that on Sunday afternoon I had nothing better to do.
I followed him over a low whitewashed railroad fence, and we walked back a hundred yards along the road under Doctor T.J. Eckleburg’s persistent stare. The only building in sight was a small block of yellow brick sitting on the edge of the waste land, a sort of compact Main Street ministering to it, and contiguous to absolutely nothing. One of the three shops it contained was for rent and another was an all-night restaurant, approached by a trail of ashes; the third was a garage – Repairs. George B. Wilson. Cars bought and sold. – and I followed Tom inside.
The interior was unprosperous and bare; the only car visible was the dust-covered wreck of a Ford, which crouched in a dim corner. It had occurred to me that this shadow of a garage must be a blind, and that sumptuous and romantic apartments were concealed overhead, when the proprietor himself appeared in the door of an office, wiping his hands on a piece of waste. He was a blond, spiritless man, anaemic, and faintly handsome. When he saw us a damp gleam of hope sprang into his light blue eyes.
“Hello, Wilson, old man,” said Tom, slapping him jovially on the shoulder. “How’s business?”
“I can’t complain,” answered Wilson unconvincingly. “When are you going to sell me this car?”
“Next week; I’ve got my man working on it now.”
“Works pretty slow, don’t he?”
“No, he doesn’t,” said Tom coldly. “And if you feel that way about it, maybe I’d better sell it somewhere else after all.”
“I don’t mean that,” explained Wilson quickly. “I just meant—“
His voice faded off and Tom glanced impatiently around the garage. Then I heard footsteps on a stairs, and in a moment the thickish figure of a woman blocked out the light from the office door. She was in the middle thirties, and faintly stout, but she carried her surplus flesh sensuously as some women can. Her face, above a spotted dress of dark blue crêpe-de-chine, contained no facet or gleam of beauty, but there was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smouldering. She smiled slowly and, walking through her husband as if he were a ghost shook hands with Tom, looking him flush in the eye. Then she wet her lips, and without turning around spoke to her husband in a soft, coarse voice…
“Tender is the Night” by F. Scott Fitzgerald / Chapter XIII
They came out of the neat restored trench, and faced a memorial to the Newfoundland dead. Reading the inscription Rosemary burst into sudden tears. Like most women she liked to be told how she should feel, and she liked Dick’s telling her which things were ludicrous and which things were sad. But most of all she wanted him to know how she loved him, now that the fact was upsetting everything, now that she was walking over the battle-field in a thrilling dream.
After that they got into their car and started back to toward Amiens. A thin warm rain was falling on the new scrubby woods and underbrush and they passed great funeral pyres of sorted duds, shells, bombs, grenades, and equipment, helmets, bayonets, gun stocks and rotten leather, abandoned six years in the ground. And suddenly around a bend the white caps of a great sea of graves. Dick asked the chauffer to stop.
“There’s that girl – and still with her wreath.”
They watched as he got out and went over to the girl, who stood uncertainly by the gate with a wreath in her hand. Her taxi waited. She was a red-haired girl from Tennessee whom they had met on the train this morning, come from Knoxville to lay a memorial on her brother’s grave. There were tears of vexation on her face.
“The War Department must have given me the wrong number,” she whimpered. “It had another name on it. I been lookin’ for it since two o’clock, and there’s so many graves.”
“Then if I were you I’d lay it on any grave without looking at the name,” Dick advised her.
“You reckon that’s what I ought to do?”
“I think that’s what he’d have wanted you to do.”
It was growing dark and the rain was coming down harder. She left the wreath on the first grave inside the gate, and accepted Dick’s suggestion that she dismiss her taxi-cab and ride back to Amiens with them.
Rosemary shed tears again when she heard of the mishap – altogether it had been a watery day, but she felt that she had learned something, though exactly what it was she did not know. Later she remembered all the hours of the afternoon as happy – one of those uneventful times that seem at the moment only a link between past and future pleasure but turn out to have been the pleasure itself.
Amiens was an echoing purple town, still sad with the war, as some railroad stations were: - the Gare du Nord and Waterloo station in London. In the daytime one is deflated by such towns, with their little trolley cars of twenty years ago crossing the street gray cobble-stoned squares in front of the cathedral, and the very weather seems to have a quality of the past, faded weather like that of old photographs. But after dark all that is most satisfactory in French life swims back into the picture – the sprightly tarts, the men arguing with a hundred Voilàs in the cafés, the couples drifting, head to head, toward the satisfactory inexpensiveness of nowhere. Waiting for the train they sat in a big arcade, tall enough to release the smoke and chatter and music upward and obligingly the orchestra launched into “Yes, We Have No Bananas,” – they clapped, because the leader looked so pleased with himself. The Tennessee girl forgot her sorrow and enjoyed herself, even began flirtations of tropical eye-rollings and pawings, with Dick and Abe. They teased her gently.
Then, leaving infinitesimal sections of Wurtemburgers, Prussian Guards, Chausseurd Alpins, Manchester mill hands and old Etonians to pursue their eternal dissolution under the warm rain, they took the train for Paris. They ate sandwiches of mortadel sausage and bel paese cheese made up in the station restaurant, and drank Beaujolais. Nicole was abstracted, biting her lip restlessly and reading over the guide-books to the battle-field that Dick had brought along – indeed, he had made a quick study of the whole affair, simplifying it always until it bore a faint resemblance to one of his own parties.
NOTES:
Newfoundland dead – павшие ньюфаундлендцы (жители канадского острова Ньюфаунленд).
Knoxville – Ноксвил, город в американском штате Теннеси.
Amiens – Амьен, город на севере Франции на реке Сомме; в 1918 г. в районе Амьена союзники провели операцию, положившую начало общему наступлению союзных войск в последней кампании первой мировой войны.
the Gare du Nord and Waterloo station – Северный железнодорожный вокзал в Париже; вокзал Ватерлоо в Лондоне.
arguing with a hundred Voilàs – пересыпающие свою речь бессчетными Voilà (фр. – «вот, так»).
Chasseurs Alpins – альпийские стрелки («фр.»)
Etonians – воспитанники Итона, одной из старейших привилегированных мужских школ в Англии. mortadel sausage – болонская колбаса.
bel paese cheese – сорт итальянского сыра «Бель паезе».
Beaujolais – «Божолэ», сорт сухого красного бургундского вина, производящегося во Франции.
Book 1
THE WHITE MONKEY
Chapter IX
Confusion
[…] Michael had clung to the top of the stairway, in no mood for talk and skirmish; and, leanin against the balustrade, wasp-thin in his long white waistcoat, with hands deep thrust into his trousers’ pockets, he watched the turns and twists of Fleur’s white neck, and listened to the Balkan songs, with a sort of blankness in his brain. The word “Mont!” startled him. Wilfrid was standing just below. Mont? He had not been that to Wilfrid for two years!
“Come down here.’
On that half-landing was a bust of Lionel Charwell, K.C., by Boris Strumolovski, in the genre he had cynically adopted when June Forsyte gave up supporting his authentic but unrewarded genius. It had been almost indistinguishable from any of the other busts in that year’s Academy, and was used by the young Charwells to chalk moustaches on.
Beside this object Desert leaned against the wall with his eyes closed. His face was a study to Michael.
“What’s wrong, Wilfrid?”
Desert did not move, “You’ve got to know – I’m in love with Fleur.”
“What!”
“I’m not going to play the snake. You’re up against me. Sorry, but there it is! You can let fly!” His face was death-pale, and its muscles twitched. In Michael, it was the mind, the heart that twitched. What a very horrible, strange, “too beastly” moment! His best friend – his best man! Instinctively he dived for his cigarette case – instinctively handed it to Desert. Instinctively they both took cigarettes, and lighted each other’s. Then Michael said:
“Fleur – knows?”
Desert nodded: “She doesn’t know I’m telling you – wouldn’t have let me. You’ve nothing against her – yet.” And, still with closed eyes, he added: “I could’t help it.”
It was Michael’s subconscious thought! Natural! Natural! Fool not to see how natural! Then something shut-to within him, and he said: “Decent of you to tell me; but aren’t you going to clear out?”
Desert’s shoulders writhed against the wall.
“I thought so; but it seems not.”
“Seems? I don’t understand.”
“If I knew for certain I’d no chance – but I don’t,” and he suddenly looked at Michael: “Look here, it’s no good keeping gloves on. I’m desperate, and I’ll take her from you if I can.”
“Good God!” said Michael. “It’s the limit!”
Yes! Rub it in! But, I tell you, when I think of you going home with her, and of myself,” he gave a dreadful little laugh, “I advise you not to rub it in.”
“Well,” said Michael, “as this isn’t a Dostoievsky novel, I suppose there’s no more to be said.”
Desert moved from the wall and laid his hand on the bust of Lionel Charwell…
“You realise, at least, that I’ve gone out of my way – perhaps dished myself – by telling you. I’ve not bombed without declaring war.”
“No,” said Michael dully.
“You can chuck my books over to some other publisher.”
Michael shrugged.
“Good-night, then,” said Desert. “Sorry for being so primitive.”
Michael looked straight into his “best man’s” face. There was no mistaking its expression of bitter despair. He made a half-movement with his hand, uttered half the word “Wilfrid”, and, as Desert went down, he went upstairs. […]
“Barren Ground” by Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
Part second
PINE
IV
She remembered his words the next day while she sat in the concert hall waiting for the music to begin. At first she had tried to make out the names on the program, desisting presently because they were all so confusing. Beethoven. Bach. Chopin. She went over the others again, stumbling because she could make nothing of the syllables. A-p-p-a-s-s-i-o-n-a-t-a. What did it mean? P-a-t-h-é-tique – that she could dimly grasp. Sonata? Nocturne? What did the strange words mean? How could she be expected to know when she had never heard them before?
Suddenly, while she struggled over the letters, the music floated toward her from the cool twilight of the distance. This was not music, she thought in surprise, but the sound of the storm coming up through the pines at Old Farm. She had heard this singing melody a thousand times, on autumn afternoons, in the woods. Then, as it drew nearer, the harmony changed from sound into sensation; and from pure sensation, rippling in wave after wave like a river, it was merged and lost in her consciousness.
In the beginning, while she sat there, rapt in startled apprehension, she thought of innumerable things she had forgotten; detached incidents, impressions which glittered sharply, edged with light, against the mosaic of her recollections. Mellow sunshine, sparkling like new cider, streamed over her. Music, which she had imagined to be sound only, was changing into colour. She saw it first in delicate green and amber; then in violent clashes of red and purple; but she saw it always as vividly as if it reached her brain through her eyes. She thought first of the evening sky over the bulrushes; of the grass after rain in the pasture; of the pear trees breaking with the dawn from palest green into white. Then the colours changed, and she remembered sunsets over the broomsedge. The glow cast upward from the earth as if the tall grass were burning. The bough of a black-gum tree emblazoned in scarlet on the blue sky. The purple mist of autumn twilight, like the bloom on a grape. The road home through the abandoned fields. The solitary star in a sky which was stained the colour of ripe fruit. The white farm-house. The shingled roof like a hood. Swallows flying. Swallows everywhere, a world of swallows spinning like curved blades against the afterglow.
With a crash the orchestra thundered over her, while sound and colour were transformed into waves of feeling. Pure sensation held and tortured her. She felt the music playing on her nerves as the wind plays on a harp; she felt it shatter her nerves like broken strings, and sweep on crashing, ploughing through the labyrinth of her soul. Down there, in the deep below the depths of her being, she felt it tearing her vitals. Down there, in the buried jungle, where her thoughts had never penetrated, she felt it destroying the hidden roots of her life. In this darkness there was no colour; there was no glimmer of twilight; there was only the maze of inarticulate agony. …
Now it was dying away. Now it was returning. Something that she had thought dead was coming to life again. Something that she had buried out of sight under the earth, was pushing upward in anguish. Something that she had defeated was marching as a conqueror over her life. Suddenly she was pierced by a thousand splinters of crystal sound. Little quivers of light ran over her. Beads of pain broke out on her forehead and her lips. She clenched her hands together, and forced her body back into her chair. “I’ve got to stand it. No matter what it does to me, I’ve got to stand it.”
“Barren Ground” by Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
PART THIRD
LIFE-EVERLASTING
IX
Withdrawn from the road, behind the fallen planks which had once made a fence, the poor house sprawled there in the midst of the life-everlasting, like the sun-bleached skeleton of an animal which buzzards had picked clean of flesh. The walls and roof were covered with whitewash; there was whitewash on the smooth, round stones that bordered the path to the door; and the few starved cedar trees in the yard were whitewashed to the thin foliage at their tops. At one side a few coarse garments were fluttering from clotheslines, and several decrepit paupers were spreading wet things on the bushes that grew by the back porch.
Like other relics of an abruptly changing era, the county poorhouse possessed both the advantages and the disadvantages of desuetude. The seven aged paupers and the one indigent young mother who now accepted its charity were neglected, it is true, but they were neglected in freedom. Where there was no system there was less room for interference. If the coarse clothes were thin, they were as varied as the tempers or inclinations of the paupers. Though the fare was mean, the complaints over it were bountiful. It is hard to be a pauper; it is particularly hard to be an aged pauper; but if these nine inmates (including the week-old infant) could have chosen between liberty and fraternity, they would probably have preferred the scant food and the rough clothes to the neat livery of dependence. Dorinda, however, perceived none of the varied blessings attendant upon orderless destitution. All she saw was the ramshackle building and the whitewashed cedars, which reminded her vaguely of missionary stories of the fences of dry bones surrounding the huts of Ethiopian kings. “It looks as bare as the palm of my hand,” she said aloud.
The doctor’s Ford car was standing in front of the door, with one wheel in a mudhole and one in a pile of trash; and when they stopped , an old woman, who was hanging the wash to dry on the bushes, put down the wet clothes and came over to meet them. She was so old that her skin was like bark; her mouth was closed as tight as nutcracker over her toothless gums; and her small red eyes flickered between eyelids which looked as if they had worn away. As she mumbled at them, she wiped her steaming wet hands on her skirt.
“You ain’t got any sweet stuff, is you, honey?” she whined, until the doctor appeared at the door and beckoned them round the corner of the house where the sunshine was falling. As usual he looked brisk, kindly, incurably optimistic.
“There is no longer any question. These county poorhouses must go,” he said, as they followed the beaten track which wound by the side of the building. “It costs the county not a cent under two thousand dollars a year to keep this place open for these eight inmates. It would be cheaper in the end to board them at the City Home where there is some system about the way things are managed.” Then he lowered his voice, which had been high and peremptory as if he wished to be overheard. “We brought Doctor Greylock here because he couldn’t be left alone and none of the negroes would go near him. There’s a scare about him, though he’s perfectly harmless. A little out of his head now and then, but too weak to hurt anybody even if he tried.”
“Is he delirious now?”
“No, he’s in his senses this morning, and quiet – you’ll find him as quiet as you could wish. Is there anybody to look after him at Five Oaks?”
“We’re not taking him to Five Oaks. There’s no place for him there. But I’ve got a nurse for him. Aunt Mirandy Moody. She knows how to take care of the sick, and I believe she can manage him.”
“Oh, anybody can manage him now,” Doctor Stout said reassuringly.
A tremor of weakness passed over Dorinda. She felt that her knees and elbows were shaking, and there was a meaningless noise in her ears. Was it Jason of whom they were speaking? No, it was not Jason, for it seemed to her that Jason had died long ago, so long ago that she couldn’t remember him. She was standing by the wall of the poorhouse, and an obscure pauper, somebody who could be “easily managed”, was dying within. She dropped her eyelids to shut out the brown cloud, as thick as the smoke of burning leaves, which rolled up from the meadows. When she opened her eyes again the sunshine of the whitewashed wall dazzled her. If only she had known! If only she could have looked ahead to this moment! Those summer evenings thirty years ago, and this autumn day beside the wall of the poorhouse! The whitewashed cedars, the sunken road, the flat fields, the ridged earth where labourers moved slowly, and over all the glittering dust of the ever-lasting.
“For Whom The Bell Tolls” by Ernest Miller Hemingway
Chapter Fifteen
This was how they were talking in the sawmill while Anselmo waited in the snow watching the road and the light in the sawmill window.
I hope I am not for the killing, Anselmo was thinking. I think that after the war there will have to be great penance done for the killing. If we no longer have religion after the war then I think there must be some form of civic penance organized that all may be cleansed from the killing or else we will never have a true and human basis for living. The killing is necessary, I know, but still the doing of it is very bad for a man and I think that, after all this is over and we have won the war, there must be a penance of some kind for the cleansing of us all.
Anselmo was a very good man and whenever he was alone for long, and he was alone for much of the time, this problem of the killing returned to him.
I wonder about the Inglés, he thought. He told me that he did not mind it. Yet he seems to be both sensitive and kind. It may be that in the younger people it does not have an importance. It may be that in foreigners, or in those who have not had our religion, there is not the same attitude. But I think any one doing it will be brutalized in time and I think that even though necessary, it is a great sin and that afterwards we must do something very strong to atone for it.
It was dark now and he looked at the light across the road and shook his arms against his chest to warm them. Now, he thought, he would certainly leave for the camp; but something kept him there beside the tree above the road. It was snowing harder and Anselmo thought: if only we could blow the bridge tonight. On a night like this it would be nothing to take the posts and blow the bridge and it would all be over and done with. On a night like this you could do anything.
Then he stood there against the tree stamping his feet softly and he did not think any more about the bridge. The coming of the dark always made him feel lonely and tonight he felt so lonely that there was a hollowness in him as of hunger. In the old days he could help this loneliness by the saying of prayers and often coming home from hunting he would repeat a great number of the same prayer and it made him feel better. But he had not prayed once since the movement. He missed the prayers but he thought it would be unfair and hypocritical to say them and he did not wish to ask any favors or for any different treatment than all the men were receiving.
No, he thought, I am lonely. But so are all the soldiers and the wives of all the soldiers and all those who have lost families or parents. I have no wife, but I am glad that she died before the movement. She would not have understood it. I have no children and I never will have any children. I am lonely in the day when I am not working but when the dark comes it is a time of great loneliness. But one thing I have that no man, nor any God can take from me and that is that I have worked well for the Republic. I have worked hard for the good that we will all share later.
I have worked my best from the first of the movement and I have done nothing that I am ashamed of.
All that I am sorry for is the killing. But surely there will be an opportunity to atone for that because for a sin of that sort that so many bear, certainly some just relief will be devised. I would like to talk with the Inglés about it but, being young, it is possible that he might not understand. He mentioned the killing before. Or was it I that mentioned it? He must have killed much, but he shows no signs of liking it. In those who like it there is always a rottenness.
It must really be a great sin, he thought. Because certainly it is the one thing we have no right to do even though, as I know, it is necessary. But in Spain it is done too lightly and often without true necessity and there is much quick injustice which, afterward, can never be repaired. I wish I did not think about it so much, he thought. I wish there were a penance for I that one could commence now because it is the only thing that I have done in all my life that makes me feel badly when I am alone. All the other things are forgiven or one had a chance to atone for them by kindness or in some decent way. But I think this of the killing must be a very great sin and I would like to fix it up. Later on there may be certain days that one can work for the state or something that one can do that will remove it. It will probably be something that one pays as in the days of the Church, he thought, and smiled. The Church was well organized for sin. That pleased him and he was smiling in the dark when Robert Jordan came up to him. He came silently and the old man did not see him until he was there.
“Excursion in Reality” by Evelyn Waugh
For three weeks Simon and Miss Grits (he always thought of her by this name in spite of all subsequent intimacies) worked together in complete harmony. His life was redirected and transfigured. No longer did he lie in bed, glumly preparing himself for the coming day; no longer did he say every morning ‘I must get down to the country and finish that book’ and every evening find himself slinking back to the same urban flat; no longer did he sit over supper tables with Sylvia, idly bickering; no more listless explanations over the telephone. Instead he pursued a routine of incalculable variety, summoned by telephone at all hours to conferences which rarely assembled; sometimes to Hampstead, sometimes to the studios, once to Brighton. He spent long periods of work pacing up and down his sitting-room, with Miss Grits passing backwards and forwards along the other wall and Miss Dawkins obediently perched between them, as the two dictated, corrected and redrafted their scenario. There were meals at improbable times and vivid, unsentimental passages of love with Miss Grits. He ate irregular and improbable meals, bowling through the suburbs in Sir James’ car, pacing the carpet dictating to Miss Dawkins, perched in deserted lots upon scenery which seemed made to survive the collapse of civilization. He lapsed, like Miss Grits, into brief spells of death-like unconsciousness, often awakening, startled, to find that a street or desert or factory had come into being about him while he slept.
***
The film meanwhile grew rapidly, daily putting out new shoots and changing under their eyes in a hundred unexpected ways. Each conference produced some radical change in the story. Miss Grits in her precise, invariable voice would read out the fruits of their work. Sir James would sit with his head in his hand, rocking slightly from side to side and giving vent to occasional low moans and whimpers; round him sat the experts – production, direction, casting, continuity, cutting and costing managers, bright eyes, eager to attract the great man’s attention with some apt intrusion.
‘Well,’ Sir James would say, ‘I think we can O.K. that. Any suggestions, gentlemen?’
There would be a pause, until one by one the experts began to deliver their contributions… ‘I’ve been thinking, sir, that it won’t do to have the scene laid in Denmark. The public won’t stand for travel stuff. How about setting it Scotland – then we could have some kilts and clan gathering scenes?’
‘Yes, that’s a very sensible suggestion. Make a note of that, Lent…’
‘I was thinking we’d better drop this character of the Queen. She’d much better be dead before the action starts. She hangs up the action. The public won’t stand for him abusing his mother.’
‘Yes, make a note of that, Lent.’
‘How would it be, sir, to make the ghost the Queen instead of the King…’
‘Yes, make a note of that, Lent…’
‘Don’t you think, sir, it would be better if Ophelia were Horatio’s sister. More poignant, if you see what I mean.’
“Yes, make a note of that…’
‘I think we are losing sight of the essence of the story in the last sequence. After all, it is first and foremost a Ghost Story, isn’t it. …’
And so from simple beginnings the story spread majestically. It was in the second week that Sir James, after, it must be admitted, considerable debate, adopted the idea of incorporating with it the story of Macbeth. Simon was opposed to the proposition at first, but the appeal of the three witches proved too strong. The title was then changed to The White Lady of Dunsinane, and he and Miss Grits settled down to a prodigious week’s work in rewriting their entire scenarios.
The end came as suddenly as everything else in this remarkable episode. The third conference was being held at an hotel in the New Forest where Sir James happened to be staying; the experts had assembled by train, car and motor-bicycle at a moment’s notice and were tired and unresponsive. Miss Grits read the latest scenario; it took some time, for it had now reached the stage when it could be taken as ‘white script’ ready for shooting. Sir James sat sunk in reflection longer than usual. When he raised his head, it was to utter the single word:
‘No.’
‘No?’
‘No, it won’t do. We must scrap the whole thing. We’ve got much too far from the original story. I can’t think why you need introduce Julius Caesar and King Arthur at all.’
‘But, sir, they were your own suggestions at the last conference.’
‘Were they? Well, I can’t help it. I must have been tired and not paying full attention… Besides’ I don’t like the dialogue. It misses all the poetry of the original. What the public wants is Shakespeare, the whole of Shakespeare and nothing but Shakespeare. Now this scenario you’ve written is all very well it its way – but it’s not Shakespeare. I’ll tell you what we’ll do. We’ll use the play exactly as he wrote it and record from that. Make a note of it, Miss Grit.’
‘Then you’ll hardly require my services any more?’ said Simon.
‘No, I don’t think I shall. Still, nice of you to have come.’
Next morning Simon woke bright and cheerful as usual and was about to leap from his bed when he suddenly remembered the events of the last night. There was nothing for him to do. An empty day lay before him. No Miss Grits, no Miss Dawkins, no scampering off to conferences or dictating of dialogue. He rang up Miss Grits and asked her to lunch with him.
“No, quite impossible, I’m afraid. I have to do the continuity for a scenario of St. John’s Gospel before the end of the week. Pretty tough job. We’re setting in Algeria so as to get atmosphere. Off to Hollywood next month. Don’t suppose I shall see you again. Good-bye.’
Simon lay in bed with all his energy slowly slipping away. Nothing to do. Well, he supposed, now was the time to go away to the country and get on with his novel. Or should he go abroad? Some quiet café-restaurant in the sun where he could work out those intractable last chapters. That was what he would do… sometime… the end of the week perhaps.
Meanwhile he leaned over on his elbow, lifted the telephone and, asking for Sylvia’s number, prepared himself for twenty-five minutes’ acrimonious reconciliation.
NOTES:
the appeal of the three witches proved too strong – имеется в виду сцена, которой открывается трагедия Шекспира «Макбет»: три ведьмы предсказывают Макбету его судьбу
The White Lady of Dunsinane – «Белая дама Дунсинана», название образовано по аналогии с The White Lady of Avenel - Белая дама Эвенелов – мистический персонаж, женщина-призрак в романе В. Скотта «Монастырь» (1820). В Дунсинане был замок Макбета.
the New Forest – живописная лесная местность на юге Англии, традиционное, со времен Вильгельма завоевателя, место королевской охоты
“All The King’s Men” by Robert Penn Warren
Chapter Five
So I stood, later, in the embrasure of a big bay window and looked out as the last light ceased to gleam from the metallic leaves of magnolias and the creamy wash of the sea beyond dulled in the thickening dusk. Behind me was a room not very different from that other long white room giving on the sea – where now, at this moment perhaps, my mother would be lifting to the taffy-haired Young Executive that face which was still like a damned expensive present and which he had damned better admire. But in the room behind me, scarcely lighted by the stub of a candle on the mounted shelf, the furniture was shrouded in white cloth, and the grandfather’s clock in the corner was as severely mute as grandfather. But I knew that when I turned around there would also be, in the midst of the sepulchral sheetings and the out-of-time silence, a woman kneeling before the cold blackness of the wide fireplace to put pine cones and bits of light-wood beneath the logs there. She had said, “No, let me do it. It’s my house, you know, and I ought to light the fire when I come back like this. You know, a ritual. I want to. Adam always lets me do it. When we come back.”
For the woman was Anne Stanton, and this was the house of Governor Stanton, whose face, marmoreal and unperturbed and high, above black square beard and black frock coat, gazed down in the candlelight from the massy gold frame above the fire place, where his daughter crouched, as though at his feet, rasping a match to light a fire there. Well, I had been in this room when the Governor had not been the marmoreal brow in the massy gold frame but a tall man sitting with his feet on the hearthrug with a little girl, a child, on a hassock at his feet, leaning her head against his knee and gazing into the fire while his large man hand toyed deliciously with the loose, silken hair. But I was here now because Anne Stanton, no longer a little girl, had said, “Come on out to the Landing, we’re just going back for Saturday night and Sunday; just to build a fire and eat something out of a can and sleep under the roof again. It’s all the time Adam can spare. And he can’t spare that much often now.” So I had come, carrying my question.
I heard the match rasp, and turned from the sea, which was dark now. The flame had caught the fat of the light-wood and was leaping up and spewing little stars like Christmas sparklers, and the light danced warmly on Anne Stanton’s leaning face and then on her throat and cheek as, still crouching she looked up at me when I approached the hearth. Her eyes were glittering like the eyes of a child when you give a nice surprise, and she laughed in a sudden throaty, tingling way. It is the way a woman laughs for happiness. They never laugh that way just when they are being polite or at a joke. A woman only laughs that way a few times in her life. A woman only laughs that way when something has touched her way down in the very quick of her being and the happiness just wells out as natural as breath and the first jonquils and mountain brooks. When a woman laughs that way it always does something to you. You hear that laugh and feel that you have grasped a clean and beautiful truth. You feel that way because that laugh is a revelation. It is a great impersonal sincerity. It is a spray of dewy blossom from the great central stalk of All Being, and the woman’s name and address hasn’t got a damn thing to do with it. Therefore, that laugh cannot be faked. If a woman could learn to fake it she would make Nell Gwynn and Pompadour look like a couple of Campfire Girls wearing bifocals and ground- gripper shoes and with bands on their teeth. She could set all society by the ears. For all any man really wants is to hear a woman laugh like that.
So Anne looked up at me with the glittering eyes and laughed that way while the firelight glowed on her cheek. Then I laughed, too, looking down at her. She reached up her hand to me, and I took it and helped her as she rose easy and supple – God, how I hate a woman who scrambles up off things – and I still held her hand as she swayed at the instant of reaching her full height. She was very close to me, with the laughter still on her face – and echoing somehow deep inside me – and I was holding her hand, as I had held it a long time back, fifteen years back, twenty years back, to help her up to stand swaying for an instant in front of me before I could put my arm around her and feel her waist surrender supplely to the cup of my hand. It had been that way. So now I must have leaned toward her and for an instant the trace of the laughter was still on her face, and her head dropped a little back the way a girl’s head does when she expects you to pit your arm around her and doesn’t care if you do.
But all at once the laughter was gone. It was as though someone had pulled a shade down in front of her face. I felt as you do when you pass down a dark street and look up to see a lighted window and in the bright room people talking and singing and laughing with the firelight splashing and undulating over them, and the sound of the music drifts out to the street while you watch; and then a hand, you will never know whose hand, pulls down the shade. And there you are, outside.
And there I was, outside.
Notes:
taffy-haired – с каштановыми волосами
sparklers – бенгальские огни
Nell Gwynn – Нелл Гвин (1650-1687), одна из первых знаменитых английских актрис, фаворитка Карла II начала свой путь ко двору с рыночной площади, где торговала апельсинами
Pompadour – маркиза Жанна Антуанетта де Помпадур (1721-1764), фаворитка Людовика ХV, оказывавшая существенное влияние на государственную политику
Campfire Girls – «Костер», организация девочек США; основана в 1910 г.
ground-gripper shoes – ботинки с рифленой подошвой
bands on the teeth – специальные шины, которые надеваются для исправления кривизны зубов
“The Grapes of Wrath” by John Steinbeck / Chapter one
When June was half gone, the big clouds moved up out, of Texas and the Gulf, high heavy clouds, rain-heads. The men in the fields looked up at the clouds and sniffed at them and held wet fingers up to sense the wind. And the horses were nervous while the clouds were up. The rain-heads dropped a little spattering and hurried on to some other country. Behind them the sky was pale again and the sun flared. In the dust there were drop craters where the rain had fallen, and there were clean splashes on the corn, and that was all.
A gentle wind followed the rain clouds, driving them on northward, a wind that softly clashed the drying corn. A day went by and the wind increased, steady, unbroken by gusts. The dust from the road fluffed up and spread out and fell on the weeds beside the fields, and fell into the fields a little way. Now the wind grew strong and hard and it worked at the rain crust in the corn fields. Little by little the sky was darkened by the mixing dust, and the wind felt over the earth, loosened the dust, and carried it away. The wind grew stronger. The rain crust broke and the dust lifted up out of the fields and drove gray plumes into the air like sluggish smoke. The corn threshed the wind and made a dry, rushing sound. The finest dust did not settle back to earth now, but disappeared into the darkening sky.
The wind grew stronger, whisked under the stones, carried up straws and old leaves, and even little clods, marking its course as it sailed across the fields. The air and the sky darkened and through them the sun shone redly, and there was a raw sting in the air. During a night the wind raced faster over the land, dug cunningly among the rootlets of the corn, and the corn fought the wind with its weakened leaves until the roots were freed by the prying wind and then each stalk settled wearily sideways toward the earth and pointed the direction of the wind.
The dawn came, but no day. In the gray sky a red sun appeared, a dim red circle that gave a little light, like dusk; and as that day advanced, the dusk slipped back toward darkness, and the wind cried and whimpered over the fallen corn.
Men and women huddled in their houses, and they tied handkerchiefs over their noses when they went out, and wore goggles to protect their eyes.
When the night came again it was black night, for the stars could not pierce the dust to get down, and the window lights could not even spread beyond their own yards. Now the dust was evenly mixed with the air, an amulsion of dust and air. Houses were shut tight, and cloth wedged around doors and windows, but the dust came in so thinly that it could not be seen in the air, and it settled like pollen on the chairs and tables, on the dishes. The people brushed it from their shoulders. Little lines of dust lay at the door sills.
In the middle of the night the wind passed on and left the land quiet. The dust-filled air muffled sound more completely than fog does. The people, lying in their beds, heard the wind stop. They awakened when the rushing wind was gone. They lay quietly and listened deep into the stillness. Then the roosters crowed, and their voices were muffled, and the people stirred restlessly in their beds and wanted the morning. They knew it would take a long time for the dust to settle out of the air. In the morning the dust hung like fog, and the sun was as red as ripe new blood. All day the dust sifted down from the sky, and the next day it sifted down. An even blanket covered the earth. It settled on the corn, piled up on the tops of the fence posts, piled up on the wires; it settled on roofs, blanketed the weeds and trees.
The people came out of their houses and smelled the hot stinging air and covered their noses from it. And the children came out of the houses, but they did not run or shout as they would have done after a rain. Men stood by their fences and looked at the ruined corn, drying fast now, only a little green showing through the film of dust. The men were silent and they did not move often. And the women came out of the houses to stand beside their men – to feel whether this time the men would break. The women studied the men’s faces secretly, for the corn could go, as long as something else remained. The children stood near by, drawing figures in the dust with bare toes, and the children sent exploring senses out to see whether men and women would break. The children peeked at the faces of the men and women, and then drew careful lines in the dust with their toes. Horses came to the watering troughs and nuzzled the water to clear the surface dust. After a while the faces of the watching men lost their bemused perplexity and became hard and angry and resistant. Then the women knew that they were safe and that there was no break. Then they asked, What’ll we do? And the men replied, I don’t know. But it was all right. The women knew it was all right, and the watching children knew it was all right. Women and children knew deep in themselves that no misfortune was too great to bear if their men were whole. The women went into the houses to their work, and the children began to play, but cautiously at first. As the day went forward the sun became less red. It flared down on the dust-blanketed land. The men sat in the doorways of their houses; their hands were busy with sticks and little rocks. The men sat still – thinking – figuring.
“Angel Pavement” by Priestley, John Boyton / Chapter IV
Then, the very next day, on Monday of all days, it happened. It happened in the afternoon. Somebody came in, and as Stanley was out, Turgis dashed to the other side of the frosted glass partition to see who it was. There, like a being from another world, stood a girl all in bright green, a girl with large brown eyes, the most impudent little nose, and a smiling scarlet mouth, the prettiest girl he had ever seen.
“Good afternoon. Is my father here, please?” She had a queer, fascinating voice.
“Your father?”
“Yes, Mr. Golspie. This is the place, isn’t it? He told me to call for him here.”
“Oh, yes, he is, Miss – Miss Golspie,” cried Turgis eagerly, his eyes devouring her all the time. “He’s in that room there. But I think there’s somebody with him. Shall I tell him you’re here?”
“You needn’t yet if he’s busy with somebody,” said the glorious creature, smiling at him. “I can wait.”
“I can tell him now, if you like.” He was trembling with eagerness to help, to serve.
“No, it doesn’t matter. I know he hates being interrupted. I’ll wait for him. I don’t suppose he’ll be long, will he?”
“I’m sure he won’t,” he told her fervently. “Will you wait here or in the office? It’s warmer in the office.”
“This will do,” and she made a movement towards the chair.
“Excuse me, Miss Golspie.” He brought it out somehow, and at the same time he dusted the seat of the chair with his handkerchief. “It – it – might be dirty, y’know.”
She looked him full in the eyes, deliciously, drowning him in sweetness, and then smiled. “Thank you. I’d hate to spoil my new coat. Everything looks a bit grimy here, doesn’t it? It’s such a frightfully dark place, too, isn’t it?”
He supposed it was, and tried to imagine her walking up Angel Pavement outside. He still lingered. “Is there anything else,” he began vaguely, hovering, adoring her.
“Quite happy, thanks.”
There was no excuse possible to stay a moment longer. Reluctantly he returned to his desk, with his heart swelling with excitement. The others looked at him inquiringly, but he pretended to be busy with something. He did not even want to explain about a girl like that. He wanted to keep the very thought of her being there to himself. Meanwhile, he was determined to listen hard. The moment that he heard Mr. Golspie’s visitor going, he would rush out, tell Mr. Golspie she was there, and thus see her again.
But he was not able to manage it. Mr. Golspie must have shown his visitor out, for immediately after the door was opened, Turgis heard Mr. Golspie’s voice booming behind the partition. ‘Hello, Lena girl!” he heard him say. “Forgotten about you coming. Won’t keep you a minute.”
Mr. Golspie then came into the office. “I’ve got to go out,” he told Mr. Smeeth, “and I shan’t be coming back to-day. Be in about eleven in the morning though, if anybody wants him. And I say, what’s your name – Turgis –“
“Yes, sir,” replied Turgis smartly.
“Get hold of the Anglo-Baltic – Mr. Borstein, nobody else, mind, Mr. Borstein – and tell him from me that if we’ve any more delays like that with the stuff, there’s going to be heap big trouble. They said they wouldn’t let us down, and they’re letting us down like hell. And you can tell him that from me.”
“Yes, sir, I will. Did you say Mr. Borstein?” And Turgis stared at Miss Lena Golspie’s father, at his massive bald front, at his great moustache, at his big square shoulders. Mr. Golspie had never seemed an ordinary man, but now he had for Turgis the power and fascination of a demi-god. Already his very name spelt sweetness and wonder.
“That’s the chap,” Mr. Golspie grunted. “Afternoon, everybody.” And he departed.
“That was Mr. Golspie’s daughter then who came to the door, was it?” said Mr. Smeeth.
“His daughter, eh?” Miss Matfield raised her eyebrows, the looked at Turgis, and said casually: “What was she like? Pretty?”
“Yes,” Turgis mumbled, “she was.” And he would say no more. He was not going to talk about her. Lena Golspie.
Then, with something like amorous urgency, he went to the telephone, rang up the Anglo-Baltic, and sternly demanded Mr. Borstein. He would tell Mr. Borstein something! He would show him whether he could let them down like hell! Lena Golspie. Lena Golspie. Lena, Lena, Lena. “Hello, is that Mr. Borstein? This is Twigg and Dersingham. Yes, Twigg and Dersingham. Mr. Golspie asked me to ring you up – Mr. Gol-spie…” Lena’s father. Lena, Lena, Lena.
“Babbit” by Sinclair Lewis / Chapter II
There was nothing of the giant in the aspect of the man who was beginning to awaken on the sleeping-porch of a Dutch Colonial house in that residential district of Zenith known as Floral Heights.
His name was George F. Babbitt. He was forty-six years old now, in April, 1920 and he made nothing in particular, neither butter nor shoes nor poetry, but he was nimble in the calling of selling houses for more than people could afford to pay.
His large head was pink, his brown hair thin and dry. His face was babyish in slumber, despite his wrinkles and the red spectacle-dents on the slopes of his nose. He was not fat but he was exceedingly well fed; his cheeks were pads, and the unroughened hand which lay helpless upon the khaki-colored blanket was slightly puffy. He seemed prosperous, extremely married and unromantic; and altogether unromantic appeared the sleeping-porch, which looked on one sizable elm, two respectable grass-plots, a cement driveway, and a corrugated iron garage. Yet Babbitt was again dreaming of the fairy child, a dream more romantic than scarlet pagodas by a silver sea.
For years the fairy child had come to him. Where others saw but Georgie Babbitt, she discerned gallant youth. She waited for him, in the darkness beyond mysterious groves. When at last he could slip away from the crowded house he darted to her. His wife, his clamoring friends, sought to follow, but he escaped, the girl fleet beside him, and they crouched together on a shadowy hill-side. She was so slim, so white, so eager! She cried that he was gay and valiant, that she would wait for him, that they could sail –
Rumble and bang of the milk-truck.
Babbitt moaned, turned over, struggled back toward his dream. He could see only her face now, beyond misty waters. The furnace- man slammed the basement door. A dog barked in the next yard. As Babbitt sank blissfully into a dim warm tide, the paper-carrier went by whistling, and the rolled up Advocate thumped the front door. Babbitt roused, his stomach constricted with alarm. As he relaxed, he was pierced by the familiar and irritating rattle of some one cranking a Ford: snap-ah-ah, snap-ah-ah, snap-ah-ah. Himself a pious motorist, Babbitt cranked with the unseen driver, with him waited through taut hours for the roar of the starting engine, with him agonized as the roar ceased and again began the infernal patient snap-ah-ah – a round, flat sound, a shivering cold-morning sound, a sound infuriating and inescapable. Not till the rising voice of the motor told him that the Ford was moving was he released from the panting tension. He glanced once at his favorite tree, elm twigs against the golden patina of sky, and fumbled for a drug. He who had been a boy very credulous of life was no longer greatly interested in the possible and improbable adventures of each new day.
“Fear” by James B. Henderson
The dirty sweat poured from his face and dripped from his nose. It stood out like small black grapes on the bent bare back and along his ribs. There was a squelching in his boots where the coal dust mixed with the perspiration.
The powerful arms and knee drove the shovel deep into the heap and the biceps bulged as he tossed the coal into the skip.
On the opposite side his mate kept pace with him, shovel for shovel, both lights bobbing up and down alternately, up and down, like parts of a machine.
As each head rose with the lift of the shovel the slender beam of light from the lamp shot into the haze of dust hanging over the skip, become diffused and lost.
Outside the narrow shafts of light was the impenetrable darkness.
The light dropped low, the shovel scraped along the floor, the light rose and the coal fell into the skip.
There was a rhythmic beat linking mate to mate.
The sounds of the shovel and the falling of coal were hemmed in by the deep darkness. It stood close up to them, like resilient folds of black velvet. The blackness retreated at each puny advance of the lamp, but flowed back immediately to bandage the thrust mark made by the rapier of light.
It was a thousand times darker than the darkest night; not merely the absence of light but a seeping something that penetrated everywhere and covered everything. Something tangible.
And Eric was afraid. Afraid for the first time in the twelve months he had worked “on the coal” as a contract miner.
The sweat that gushed from every pour was not only the measure of the weight of the shovel and the inadequate air flow, but, more than that, it was the outpouring of the fear that had been gnawing at his brain and knotting in his plexus for a long month past.
Eric and George were pinpoints of light on a blackened stage; performers without an audience.
A thousand feet above, the blazing sun wilted the leaves of the stunted box trees where the pee-wees lay cooling in the mud at the horse trough. The skip filled, George stood erect.
“She’ll do,” and cocked his ear to listen to the roof. Eric straightened slowly, listening as he did so, listening not with ears alone but with his whole body. Listening with his finger tips.
A Low sound like a gentle protesting sigh grew to a moan and built up and up and up till it thundered out, the groans of a monster in agony.
The knot in Eric’s stomach tightened and his throat contracted as he crouched instinctively. He wanted to run, to run screaming, to get miles away from it, to get into the light of day. Wondrous, beautiful sun.
The awful groaning and the shroud of darkness were pressing in on him, squeezing him, making it hard to breathe.
But the bravery of cowardice held him silent and hobbled his feet as it had done for four fearsome weeks.
George looked intently at the roof.
“While she’s talking to us, we know what she’s doing,” he said in a loud whisper. “No danger yet awhile. When she’s silent you never know, you never know.” His calm broke. “To hell with stripping pillars anyway, to hell with it! Gnawing away support that’s protecting you!”
As the groaning died away to a low grinding, a new terror gripped the younger man.
He didn’t want it to stop “talking”, talking to George who could understand it.
It didn’t talk to him, it terrified him and yet the silence terrified him even more.
He bent his back and pushed the full skip along the rails into the darkness.
Two specks now shone in the darkness, one moving rapidly away from the groan that was turning to silence. A vivid shrieking silence! The near rumble of the skip blotted out all other noises so that he couldn’t tell if the roof still talked or not.
He wanted to stop, to stop and listen. But outside lay safety, the horsedriver and rope runner to talk with, and the friendly electric light of the winch in the distance. …
“Parson’s Pleasure” by Roald Dahl
Mr. Boggis was driving the car slowly, leaning back comfortably in the seat with one elbow resting on the sill of the open window. How beautiful the countryside, he thought; how pleasant to see a sign or two of summer once again. The primroses especially. And the hawthorn. The hawthorn was exploding white and pink and red along the hedges and the primroses were growing underneath in little clumps, and it was beautiful.
He took one hand off the wheel and lit himself a cigarette. The best thing now, he told himself, would be to make for the top of Brill Hill. He could see it about half a mile ahead. And that must be the village of Brill, that cluster of cottages among the trees right on the very summit. Excellent. Not many of his Sunday sections had a nice elevation like that to work from.
He drove up the hill and stopped the car just short of the summit on the outskirts of the village. Then he got out and looked around. Down below, the countryside was spread out before him like a huge green carpet. He could see for miles. It was perfect. He took a pad and pencil from his pocket, leaned against the back of the car, and allowed his practiced eye to travel slowly over the landscape.
He could see one medium farmhouse over on the right, back in the fields, with a track leading to it from the road. There was another larger one beyond it. There was a house surrounded by tall elms that looked as though it might be a Queen Anne, and there were two likely farms away over on the left. Five places in all. That was about the lot in this direction.
Mr. Boggis drew a rough sketch on his pad showing the position of each so that he’d be able to find them easily when he was down below, then he got back into the car and drove up through the village to the other side of the hill. From there he spotted six more possibles – five farms and one big white Georgian house. He studied the Georgian house through his binoculars. It had a clean prosperous look, and the garden was well ordered. That was a pity. He ruled it out immediately. There was no point in calling on the prosperous.
In this square then, in this section, there were ten possibles in all. Ten was a nice number, Mr. Boggis told himself. Just the right amount for a leisurely afternoon work. What time was it now? Twelve o’clock/ He would have liked a pint of beer in the pub before he started, but on Sundays they didn’t open until one. Very well, he could have it later. He glanced at the notes on his pad. He decided to take the Queen Anne first, the house with the elms. It had looked nicely dilapidated through the binoculars. The people there could probably do with some money. He was always lucky with Queen Annes, anyway. Mr. Boggis climbed back into the car, released the handbrake, and began cruising slowly down the hill without the engine.
Apart from the fact that he was at this moment disguised in the uniform of a clergyman, there was nothing very sinister about Mr. Cyril Boggis. By trade he was a dealer in antique furniture, with his own shop and showroom in the King’s Road, Chelsea. His premises were not large, and generally he didn’t do a great deal of business, but because he always bought cheap, very very cheap, and sold very very dear, he managed to make quite a tidy little income every year. He was a talented salesman, and when buying or selling a piece he could slide smoothly into whichever mood suited the client best. He could become grave and charming for the aged, obsequious for the rich, sober for the godly, masterful for the weak, mischievous for the widow, arch and saucy for the spinster. He was well aware of this gift, using it shamelessly on every possible occasion; and often, at the end of an unusually good performance, it was as much as he could do to prevent himself from turning aside and taking a bow or two as the thundering applause of the audience went rolling through the theatre. […]
During the past few years, Mr. Boggis had achieved considerable fame among his friends in the trade by his ability to produce unusual and often quite rare items with astonishing regularity. Apparently the man had a source of supply that was almost inexhaustible, a sort of private warehouse, and it seemed that all he had to do was to drive out to it once a week and help himself. Whenever they asked him where he got the stuff, he would smile knowingly and wink and murmur something about a little secret.
NOTES:
a Queen Anne – дом в стиле английской архитектуры начала 18 в. (постройка из красного кирпича с классическим орнаментом); Анна, королева Англии (1702-1714)
Georgian house – дом в георгианском архитектурном стиле, относящийся к периоду правления трех английских королей Георгов (сложился к середине 18 в. и существовал до 30-х годов 19 в.). Характеризуется четкостью и симметричностью форм, пропорциональностью и внешней простотой постройки, что не исключает богатой отделки интерьеров.
King’s Road, Chelsea – главная магистраль в Челси, пригороде Лондона, где живут в основном актеры, художники, музыканты и писатели
“Nobody Knows” by Sherwood Anderson
Looking cautiously about, George Willard arose from his desk in the office of the Winesburg Eagle and went hurriedly out at the back door. The night was warm and cloudy and although it was not yet eight o’clock, the alleyway back of the Eagle office was pitch dark. A team of horses tied to a post somewhere in the darkness stamped on the hard-baked ground. A cat sprang from under George Willard’s feet and ran away into the night. The young man was nervous. All day he had gone about his work like one dazed by a blow. In the alleyway he trembled as though with fright.
In the darkness George Willard walked along the alleyway, going carefully and cautiously. The back doors of the Winesburg stores were open and he could see men sitting about under the store lamps. […]
George Willard crouched and then jumped through the path of light that came out at the door. He began to run forward in the darkness. […]
George Willard had set forth upon an adventure. All day he had been trying to make up his mind to go through with the adventure and now he was acting. In the office of the Winesburg Eagle he had been sitting since six o’clock trying to think.
There had been no decision. He had just jumped to his feet, hurried past Will Henderson who was reading proof in the printshop and started to run along the alleyway.
Through street after street went George Willard, avoiding the people who passed. He crossed and recrossed the road. When he passed a street lamp he pulled his hat down over his face. He did not dare think. In his mind there was a fear but it was a new kind of fear. He was afraid the adventure on which he had set out would be spoiled, that he would lose courage and turn back.
George Willard found Louise Trunnion in the kitchen of her father’s house. She was washing dishes by the light of a kerosene lamp. There she stood behind the screen door in the little shedlike kitchen at the back of the house. George Willard stopped by a picket fence and tried to control the shaking of his body. Only a narrow potato patch separated him from the adventure. Five minutes passed before he felt sure enough of himself to call her. “Louise! Oh, Louise!” he called. The cry stuck in his throat. His voice became a hoarse whisper.
Louise Trunnion came out across the potato patch holding the dish cloth in her hand. “How do you know I want to go out with you,” she said sulkily. “What makes you so sure?”
George Willard did not answer. In silence the two stood in the darkness with the fence between them. “You go on along,” she said. “Pa’s in there. I’ll come along. You wait by Williams’ barn.
The young newspaper reporter had received a letter from Louise Trunnion. It had come that morning […]. The letter was brief. “I’m yours if you want me.” It said. He thought it annoying that in the darkness by the fence she had pretended there was nothing between them. “She has a nerve! […]” he muttered as he went along the street and passed a row of vacant lots where corn grew. […]
When Louise Trunnion came out of the front door of her house she still wore the gingham dress in which she had been washing dishes. There was no hat on her head. […]
In the shadows by Williams’ barn George and Louise stood, not daring to talk. She was not particularly comely and there was a black smudge on the side of her nose. George thought she must have rubbed her nose with her finger after she had been handling some of the kitchen pots.
The young man began to laugh nervously. “It’s warm,” he said. He wanted to touch her with his hand. “I’m not very bold,” he thought. Just to touch the folds of the soiled gingham dress would, he decided, be an exquisite pleasure. She began to quibble. “You think you’re better than I am. Don’t tell me, I guess I know,” she said drawing closer to him.
A flood of words burst from George Willard. He remembered the look that had lurked in the girl’s eyes when they had met on the streets and thought of the note she had written. Doubt left him. The whispered tales concerning her that had gone about town gave him confidence. He became wholly the male, bold and aggressive. In his heart there was no sympathy for her. “Ah, come on, it’ll be all right. There won’t be anyone know anything. How can they know?” he urged.
They began to walk along a narrow brick sidewalk between the cracks of which tall weeds grew. Some of the bricks were missing and the sidewalk was rough and irregular. He took hold of her hand that was also rough and thought it delightfully small. “I can’t go far,” she said and her voice was quiet, unperturbed.
They crossed a bridge that ran over a tiny stream and passed another vacant lot in which corn grew. The street ended. In the path at the side of the road they were compelled to walk one behind the other. Will Overton’s berry field lay beside the road and there was a pile of boards. “Will is going to build a shed to store berry crates here,” said George and they sat down upon the boards.
* * *
When George Willard got back into Main Street it was past ten o’clock and had begun to rain. Three times he walked up and down the length of Main Street. Sylvester West’s Drug Store was still open and he went in and bought a cigar. When Shorty Crandall the clerk came out at the door with him he was pleased. For five minutes the two stood in the shelter of the store awning and talked. George Willard felt satisfied. He had wanted more than anything else to talk to some man. Around a corner toward the New Willard House he went whistling softly.
On the sidewalk at the side of Winney’s Dry Goods Store where there was a high board fence covered with circus pictures, he stopped whistling and stood perfectly still in the darkness, attentive, listening as though for a voice calling his name. Then again he laughed nervously. “She hasn’t got anything on me. Nobody knows,” he muttered doggedly and went on his way.
“The Cabala” by Thornton Wilder
Book One
During the first week Blair helped me find and fit out an apartment. It consisted of five rooms in an old palace across the river and within stone’s-throw of the basilica of Santa Maria in Trastevere. The rooms were high and damp and bad eighteenth century. The ceiling of the salon was modestly coffered, and there were bits of crumbling stucco in the hall, still tinted with faint blues and pinks and guilt; every morning’s sweeping carried off a bit more of some cupid’s curls or chips of scroll and garland. In the kitchen there was a fresco of Jacob wrestling with the angel, but the stove concealed it. We passed two days in choosing chairs and tables, in loading them upon carts and personally conducting them to our mean street, in haggling over great lengths of grey- blue brocade before a dozen shops, always with a view toward variety in stains and unravellings and creases; in selecting from among the brisk imitations of ancient candelabra those which most successfully simulated age and pure line.
The acquisition of Ottima was Blair’s triumph. There was a trattoria at the corner, a lazy casual talkative wine-shop, run by three sisters. Blair studied them for a time, and finally proposed to the intelligent, middle-aged, humorous one that she come and be my cook “for a few weeks.” Italians have a horror of making long-term contracts, and it was this last clause that won Ottima. We offered to take on any man she recommended to help her with the heavier work, but she clouded at that and replied that she could very well do the heavier work too. The removal to my rooms must have arrived as a providential solution to some problem in Ottima’s life, for she attached herself passionately to her work, to me, and to her companions in the kitchen, Kurt the police dog and Messalina the cat. We each winked at the other’s failings and we created a home.
The day following our arrival, then, we called upon the latest dictator of Rome and found a rather boyish spinster with an interesting and ailing face, fretful bird-like motions, and exhibiting a perpetual alternation of kindness and irritability. It was nearly six when he walked into the drawing-room in the Palazzo Barberini and found four ladies and a gentleman seated a little stiffly about a table conversing in French. Madame Agoropoulos gave a cry of joy at seeing Blair, the absent-minded scholar to whom she was so attached; Miss Grier echoed it. A thin Mrs. Roy waited until something had been dropped into the conversation about our family connections before she could relax and smile. The Spanish Ambassador and his wife wondered how on earth American could get on without a system of titles whereby one could unerringly recognize one’s own people, and the Marquesa shuddered slightly at the intrusion of two coarse young redskins and began composing mentally the faulty French sentence with which she would presently excuse herself. For a time the conversation blew fitfully about, touched with the formal charm of all conversation conducted in a language that is native to no one in the group.
Suddenly my attention was caught by a tension in the room. I sensed the tentatives of an intrigue without being able to gather the remotest notion of the objectives. Miss Grier was pretending to babble, but was in reality quite earnest, and Mrs. Roy was taking notes, mentally. The episode resolved itself into a typical, though not very complicated, example of the Roman social bargain, with its characteristic set of ramifications into religious, political and domestic life. In the light of information received much later, I call your attention to what Mrs. Roy wanted Miss Grier to do for her; and what Miss Grier asked in return for her services.
Mrs. Roy had narrow eyes and a mouth that had just tasted quinine; while she spoke her earpendants rattled against her lean clavicles. She was a Roman Catholic, and in her political activity a Black of the Blacks. During her residence in Rome she had occupied herself with the task of bringing the needs of certain American charitable organizations to the attention of the Supreme Pontiff. Slander attributed a diversity of motives to her good works, the least damaging of which was the hope of being named a Countess of the Papal States. The fact is that Mrs. Roy was pressing audiences in the Vatican with the hope of inducing his Holiness to commit a miracle, namely, to grant her a divorce under the Pauline Privilege. This consummation, not without precedent, depended upon a number of conditions. Before taking any such step the Vatican would ascertain very carefully how great the surprise would be in Roman Catholic circles, American cardinals would be asked in confidence for a report on the matron’s character, and the faithful in Rome and Baltimore, without their being aware of it, would be consulted. This done it would be well to gauge the degree of cynicism or approval the measure would arouse in Protestants. Mrs. Roy’s reputation happened to be above reproach, and her right to a divorce indisputable (her husband had offended under every category: he had been unfaithful, he had lapsed from a still greater faith; and he had become an animæ periculum, that is, he had tried to draw her into an irreverent argument over the liquefaction of the blood of St. Januarius), but the Protestant imprimatur was needed. Whose opinion would be more valuable for this purpose than that of the austere directress of the American Colony? Miss Grier would be approached – and both women knew it – through channels exquisite in their delicacy and resonance, and if an uncertain note were sounded from the Palazzo Barberini, the familiar verdict Inexpedient would be returned to the petitioner, and the question never reopened.
Mrs. Roy having so much to ask from Miss Grier, wanted to know if there were any service she could render in return.
There was.
NOTES:
Trastevere – Трастевере, район в Риме
coffered – зд. отделаны кессонами, т.е. углублениями в форме квадратов или многоугольников на потолке или на внутренней поверхности арки или свода.
Jacob (библ.) - Иаков, патриарх, отец двенадцати основателей родов древних израильтян.
a trattoria (ит.) – траттория, небольшой ресторанчик.
Marquesa (исп.) - маркиза
the Papal States – с 1870 г. доминион, подчинявшийся папской епархии.
animæ periculum (лат.) – опасность души.
St. Januarius – Св. Януарий, древнехристианский мученик.
imprimatur – разрешение цензуры печатать, одобрение.
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