Love of Life and Other Stories. Jack London
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Название: Love of Life and Other Stories
Автор: Jack London
Издательство: Public Domain
Жанр: Зарубежная классика
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“He covered his tracks cunningly.” Haythorne cleared his throat. “There was rumor that they went to the South Seas-were lost on a trading schooner in a typhoon, or something like that.”
“I never heard that,” Messner said. “You remember the case, Mrs. Haythorne?”
“Perfectly,” she answered, in a voice the control of which was in amazing contrast to the anger that blazed in the face she turned aside so that Haythorne might not see.
The latter was again on the verge of asking his name, when Messner remarked:
“This Dr. Womble, I’ve heard he was very handsome, and-er-quite a success, so to say, with the ladies.”
“Well, if he was, he finished himself off by that affair,” Haythorne grumbled.
“And the woman was a termagant-at least so I’ve been told. It was generally accepted in Berkeley that she made life-er-not exactly paradise for her husband.”
“I never heard that,” Haythorne rejoined. “In San Francisco the talk was all the other way.”
“Woman sort of a martyr, eh?-crucified on the cross of matrimony?”
The doctor nodded. Messner’s gray eyes were mildly curious as he went on:
“That was to be expected-two sides to the shield. Living in Berkeley I only got the one side. She was a great deal in San Francisco, it seems.”
“Some coffee, please,” Haythorne said.
The woman refilled his mug, at the same time breaking into light laughter.
“You’re gossiping like a pair of beldames,” she chided them.
“It’s so interesting,” Messner smiled at her, then returned to the doctor. “The husband seems then to have had a not very savory reputation in San Francisco?”
“On the contrary, he was a moral prig,” Haythorne blurted out, with apparently undue warmth. “He was a little scholastic shrimp without a drop of red blood in his body.”
“Did you know him?”
“Never laid eyes on him. I never knocked about in university circles.”
“One side of the shield again,” Messner said, with an air of weighing the matter judicially. “While he did not amount to much, it is true-that is, physically-I’d hardly say he was as bad as all that. He did take an active interest in student athletics. And he had some talent. He once wrote a Nativity play that brought him quite a bit of local appreciation. I have heard, also, that he was slated for the head of the English department, only the affair happened and he resigned and went away. It quite broke his career, or so it seemed. At any rate, on our side the shield, it was considered a knock-out blow to him. It was thought he cared a great deal for his wife.”
Haythorne, finishing his mug of coffee, grunted uninterestedly and lighted his pipe.
“It was fortunate they had no children,” Messner continued.
But Haythorne, with a glance at the stove, pulled on his cap and mittens.
“I’m going out to get some wood,” he said. “Then I can take off my moccasins and he comfortable.”
The door slammed behind him. For a long minute there was silence. The man continued in the same position on the bed. The woman sat on the grub-box, facing him.
“What are you going to do?” she asked abruptly.
Messner looked at her with lazy indecision. “What do you think I ought to do? Nothing scenic, I hope. You see I am stiff and trail-sore, and this bunk is so restful.”
She gnawed her lower lip and fumed dumbly.
“But-” she began vehemently, then clenched her hands and stopped.
“I hope you don’t want me to kill Mr.-er-Haythorne,” he said gently, almost pleadingly. “It would be most distressing, and, I assure you, really it is unnecessary.”
“But you must do something,” she cried.
“On the contrary, it is quite conceivable that I do not have to do anything.”
“You would stay here?”
He nodded.
She glanced desperately around the cabin and at the bed unrolled on the other bunk. “Night is coming on. You can’t stop here. You can’t! I tell you, you simply can’t!”
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