Лучшие рассказы О. Генри = The Best of O. Henry. О. Генри

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СКАЧАТЬ trying to look like he wouldn’t have murdered the first organ-grinder he heard play Mendelssohn’s[109] wedding-march, I looked up at him and said, in my way:

      “What are you looking so sour about, you oakum trimmed lobster? She don’t kiss you. You don’t have to sit on her lap and listen to talk that would make the book of a musical comedy sound like the maxims of Epictetus[110]. You ought to be thankful you’re not a dog. Brace up, Benedick, and bid the blues begone.”

      The matrimonial mishap looked down at me with almost canine intelligence in his face.

      “Why, doggie,” says he, “good doggie. You almost look like you could speak. What is it, doggie – Cats?”

      Cats! Could speak!

      But, of course, he couldn’t understand. Humans were denied the speech of animals. The only common ground of communication upon which dogs and men can get together is in fiction.

      In the flat across the hall from us lived a lady with a black-and-tan terrier. Her husband strung it and took it out every evening, but he always came home cheerful and whistling. One day I touched noses with the black-and-tan in the hall, and I struck him for an elucidation.

      “See, here, Wiggle-and-Skip,” I says, “you know that it ain’t the nature of a real man to play dry nurse to a dog in public. I never saw one leashed to a bow-wow yet that didn’t look like he’d like to lick every other man that looked at him. But your boss comes in every day as perky and set up as an amateur prestidigitator[111] doing the egg trick. How does he do it? Don’t tell me he likes it.”

      “Him?” says the black-and-tan. “Why, he uses Nature’s Own Remedy. He gets spifflicated. At first when we go out he’s as shy as the man on the steamer who would rather play pedro when they make ’em all jackpots. By the time we’ve been in eight saloons he don’t care whether the thing on the end of his line is a dog or a catfish. I’ve lost two inches of my tail trying to sidestep those swinging doors.”

      The pointer I got from that terrier – vaudeville please copy – set me to thinking.

      One evening about 6 o’clock my mistress ordered him to get busy and do the ozone act for Lovey. I have concealed it until now, but that is what she called me. The black-and-tan was called “Tweetness.” I consider that I have the bulge on him as far as you could chase a rabbit. Still “Lovey” is something of a nomenclatural tin can on the tail of one’s self respect.

      At a quiet place on a safe street I tightened the line of my custodian in front of an attractive, refined saloon. I made a dead-ahead scramble for the doors, whining like a dog in the press dispatches that lets the family know that little Alice is bogged while gathering lilies in the brook.

      “Why, darn my eyes,” says the old man, with a grin; “darn my eyes if the saffron-coloured son of a seltzer lemonade ain’t asking me in to take a drink. Lemme see – how long’s it been since I saved shoe leather by keeping one foot on the foot-rest? I believe I’ll —”

      I knew I had him. Hot Scotches he took, sitting at a table. For an hour he kept the Campbells[112] coming. I sat by his side rapping for the waiter with my tail, and eating free lunch such as mamma in her flat never equalled with her homemade truck bought at a delicatessen store eight minutes before papa comes home.

      When the products of Scotland were all exhausted except the rye bread the old man unwound me from the table leg and played me outside like a fisherman plays a salmon. Out there he took off my collar and threw it into the street.

      “Poor doggie,” says he; “good doggie. She shan’t kiss you anymore. ’S a darned shame. Good doggie, go away and get run over by a street car and be happy.”

      I refused to leave. I leaped and frisked around the old man’s legs happy as a pug on a rug.

      “You old flea-headed woodchuck-chaser,” I said to him – “you moon-baying, rabbit-pointing, egg-stealing old beagle, can’t you see that I don’t want to leave you? Can’t you see that we’re both Pups in the Wood and the missis is the cruel uncle after you with the dish towel and me with the flea liniment and a pink bow to tie on my tail. Why not cut that all out and be pards forever more?”

      Maybe you’ll say he didn’t understand – maybe he didn’t. But he kind of got a grip on the Hot Scotches, and stood still for a minute, thinking.

      “Doggie,” says he, finally, “we don’t live more than a dozen lives on this earth, and very few of us live to be more than 300. If I ever see that flat any more I’m a flat, and if you do you’re flatter; and that’s no flattery. I’m offering 60 to 1 that Westward Ho wins out by the length of a dachshund.”

      There was no string, but I frolicked along with my master to the Twenty-third street ferry. And the cats on the route saw reason to give thanks that prehensile claws had been given them.

      On the Jersey side my master said to a stranger who stood eating a currant bun:

      “Me and my doggie, we are bound for the Rocky Mountains.”

      But what pleased me most was when my old man pulled both of my ears until I howled, and said: “You common, monkey-headed, rat-tailed, sulphur-coloured[113] son of a door mat, do you know what I’m going to call you?”

      I thought of “Lovey,” and I whined dolefully.

      “I’m going to call you ‘Pete,’” says my master; and if I’d had five tails I couldn’t have done enough wagging to do justice to the occasion.

      The Love-philtre of Ikey Schoenstein

      The Blue Light Drug Store is downtown, between the Bowery and First Avenue, where the distance between the two streets is the shortest. The Blue Light does not consider that pharmacy is a thing of bric-a-brac, scent and ice-cream soda. If you ask it for pain-killer it will not give you a bonbon[114].

      The Blue Light scorns the labour-saving arts of modern pharmacy. It macerates its opium and percolates its own laudanum[115] and paregoric[116]. To this day pills are made behind its tall prescription desk – pills rolled out on its own pill-tile, divided with a spatula, rolled with the finger and thumb, dusted with calcined magnesia and delivered in little round pasteboard pill-boxes. The store is on a corner about which coveys of ragged-plumed, hilarious children play and become candidates for the cough drops and soothing syrups that wait for them inside.

      Ikey Schoenstein was СКАЧАТЬ