Любимые повести на английском / Best Short Novels. Оскар Уайльд

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СКАЧАТЬ at least you say you are – and you ought to be able to put yourself in our place for long enough to think how – how – how – ’

      ‘How what?’ demanded Washington, coldly.

      ‘ – how unnecessary – ’

      ‘Not to me.’

      ‘Well, – how cruel – ’

      ‘We’ve covered that. Cruelty doesn’t exist where self-preservation is involved. You’ve been soldiers; you know that. Try another.’

      ‘Well, then, how stupid.’

      ‘There,’ admitted Washington, ‘I grant you that. But try to think of an alternative. I’ve offered to have all or any of you painlessly executed if you wish. I’ve offered to have your wives, sweethearts, children, and mothers kidnapped and brought out here. I’ll enlarge your place down there and feed and clothe you the rest of your lives. If there was some method of producing permanent amnesia[36] I’d have all of you operated on and released immediately, somewhere outside of my preserves. But that’s as far as my ideas go.’

      ‘How about trusting us not to peach on you?’ cried some one.

      ‘You don’t proffer that suggestion seriously,’ said Washington, with an expression of scorn. ‘I did take out one man to teach my daughter Italian. Last week he got away.’

      A wild yell of jubilation went up suddenly from two dozen throats and a pandemonium of joy ensued. The prisoners clog-danced and cheered and yodled and wrestled with one another in a sudden uprush of animal spirits. They even ran up the glass sides of the bowl as far as they could, and slid back to the bottom upon the natural cushions of their bodies. The tall man started a song in which they all joined —

      ‘oh, we’ll hang the Kaiser

      on a sour apple tree – ’

      Braddock Washington sat in inscrutable silence until the song was over. ‘You see,’ he remarked, when he could gain a modicum of attention. ‘I bear you no ill-will. I like to see you enjoying yourselves. That’s why I didn’t tell you the whole story at once. The man – what was his name? Critchtichiello? – was shot by some of my agents in fourteen different places.’

      Not guessing that the places referred to were cities, the tumult of rejoicing subsided immediately.

      ‘Nevertheless,’ cried Washington with a touch of anger, ‘he tried to run away. Do you expect me to take chances with any of you after an experience like that?’

      Again a series of ejaculations went up.

      ‘Sure!’

      ‘Would your daughter like to learn Chinese?’

      ‘Hey, I can speak Italian! My mother was a wop.[37]’

      ‘Maybe she’d like t’learna speak N’Yawk!’

      ‘If she’s the little one with the big blue eyes I can teach her a lot of things better than Italian.’

      ‘I know some Irish songs – and I could hammer brass once’t.’

      Mr. Washington reached forward suddenly with his cane and pushed the button in the grass so that the picture below went out instantly, and there remained only that great dark mouth covered dismally with the black teeth of the grating.

      ‘Hey!’ called a single voice from below, ‘you ain’t goin’ away without givin’ us your blessing?’

      But Mr. Washington, followed by the two boys, was already strolling on toward the ninth hole of the golf course, as though the pit and its contents were no more than a hazard over which his facile iron had triumphed with ease.

      VII

      July under the lee of the diamond mountain was a month of blanket nights and of warm, glowing days. John and Kismine were in love. He did not know that the little gold football (inscribed with the legend Pro deo et patria et St. Midas[38]) which he had given her rested on a platinum chain next to her bosom. But it did. And she for her part was not aware that a large sapphire which had dropped one day from her simple coiffure was stowed away tenderly in John’s jewel box.

      Late one afternoon when the ruby and ermine music room was quiet, they spent an hour there together. He held her hand and she gave him such a look that he whispered her name aloud. She bent toward him – then hesitated.

      ‘Did you say “Kismine”?’ she asked softly, ‘or – ’

      She had wanted to be sure. She thought she might have misunderstood.

      Neither of them had ever kissed before, but in the course of an hour it seemed to make little difference.

      The afternoon drifted away. That night when a last breath of music drifted down from the highest tower, they each lay awake, happily dreaming over the separate minutes of the day. They had decided to be married as soon as possible.

      VIII

      Every day Mr. Washington and the two young men went hunting or fishing in the deep forests or played golf around the somnolent course – games which John diplomatically allowed his host to win – or swam in the mountain coolness of the lake. John found Mr. Washington a somewhat exacting personality – utterly uninterested in any ideas or opinions except his own. Mrs. Washington was aloof and reserved at all times. She was apparently indifferent to her two daughters, and entirely absorbed in her son Percy, with whom she held interminable conversations in rapid Spanish at dinner.

      Jasmine, the elder daughter, resembled Kismine in appearance – except that she was somewhat bow-legged, and terminated in large hands and feet – but was utterly unlike her in temperament. Her favorite books had to do with poor girls who kept house for widowed fathers. John learned from Kismine that Jasmine had never recovered from the shock and disappointment caused her by the termination of the World War, just as she was about to start for Europe as a canteen expert. She had even pined away for a time, and Braddock Washington had taken steps to promote a new war in the Balkans[39] – but she had seen a photograph of some wounded Serbian[40] soldiers and lost interest in the whole proceedings. But Percy and Kismine seemed to have inherited the arrogant attitude in all its harsh magnificence from their father. A chaste and consistent selfishness ran like a pattern through their every idea.

      John was enchanted by the wonders of the château and the valley. Braddock Washington, so Percy told him, had caused to be kidnapped a landscape gardener, an architect, a designer of state settings, and a French decadent poet left over from the last century. He had put his entire force of negroes at their disposal, guaranteed to supply them with any materials that the world could offer, and left them to work out some ideas of their own. But one by one they had shown their uselessness. The decadent poet had at once begun bewailing his separation from the boulevards in spring – he made some vague remarks about spices, apes, and ivories, but said nothing that was of any practical value. The stage designer on his part wanted to make the whole valley a series of tricks and sensational effects – a state of things that the Washingtons would soon have grown tired of. And as for the architect and the landscape gardener, they thought only in terms of convention. They must make this like this and that СКАЧАТЬ