Bealby; A Holiday. Герберт Уэллс

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       CHAPTER VI BEALBY AND THE TRAMP

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       CHAPTER VII THE BATTLE OF CRAYMINSTER

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       CHAPTER VIII HOW BEALBY EXPLAINED

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      BEALBY

CHAPTER I

       YOUNG BEALBY GOES TO SHONTS

       Table of Contents

§ 1

       Table of Contents

      The cat is the offspring of a cat and the dog of a dog, but butlers and lady’s maids do not reproduce their kind. They have other duties.

      So their successors have to be sought among the prolific, and particularly among the prolific on great estates. Such are gardeners, but not under-gardeners, gamekeepers, and coachmen—but not lodge people, because their years are too great and their lodges too small. And among those to whom this opportunity of entering service came was young Bealby, who was the stepson of Mr. Darling, the gardener of Shonts.

      Everyone knows the glories of Shonts. Its façade. Its two towers. The great marble pond. The terraces where the peacocks walk and the lower lake with the black and white swans. The great park and the avenue. The view of the river winding away across the blue country. And of the Shonts Velasquez—but that is now in America. And the Shonts Rubens, which is in the National Gallery. And the Shonts porcelain. And the Shonts past history; it was a refuge for the old faith; it had priest’s holes and secret passages. And how at last the Marquis had to let Shonts to the Laxtons—the Peptonized Milk and Baby Soother people—for a long term of years. It was a splendid chance for any boy to begin his knowledge of service in so great an establishment, and only the natural perversity of human nature can explain the violent objection young Bealby took to anything of the sort. He did. He said he did not want to be a servant, and that he would not go and be a good boy and try his very best in that state of life to which it had pleased God to call him at Shonts. On the contrary.

      He communicated СКАЧАТЬ