Mr American. George Fraser MacDonald
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Название: Mr American

Автор: George Fraser MacDonald

Издательство: HarperCollins

Жанр: Историческая литература

Серия:

isbn: 9780007458431

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СКАЧАТЬ off by heart, the spidery writing in faded ink: “To Luke Franklin, in the earnest hope that he may find profit, pleasure, and peace of mind in its pages, from his affectionate father”. The signature was “Jno. Franklin, 1858”. His grandfather’s gift to his own father; he could hear the old man’s voice reading from it – Luke Franklin had loved best of all to recite Falstaff’s part, chuckling over the grosser jests, rolling Shakespeare’s rich periods over his tongue … “when I was of thy years I was not an eagle’s talon in the waist; I could have crept me into any alderman’s thumb ring.” He had wondered what an alderman was, and Luke Franklin had told him, on a soft and starry summer night when they camped on the road to El Paso; he had been just a boy then, lying staring into the fire, listening while his father explained that it was a corruption of “eolderman”, an old English word – “it’s the same as elder, an elder man, an alderman, who is a kind of city councilman back in England. They still have them there.” His father had resumed his reading aloud, and the boy had gone to sleep, to awake in the pearly dawn, beside a dead fire, with his father still croaking away through the Battle of Shrewsbury, oblivious of time and place, lost in the magic of the play.

      Mr Franklin sighed. Shakespeare and he had travelled some long roads since then, into some strange places. There had been the time in the silver camp when he had read Othello to a group of amusement-starved miners, and old Davis, his partner, had burst out: “Why, that damnfool nigger! Couldn’t he have asked around? Couldn’t he see they were makin’ a jackass out of him?” Or the night in Hole-in-the-Wall when he had lent the book to Cassidy, the last man on earth who might have been expected to appreciate the Swan of Avon, but he had studied away at it, the broad, beefy face frowning as he spelled out the words, and Franklin had caught the whispered mutter: “Before these eyes take themselves to slumber, I’ll do good service, or lie in the ground for it, aye, or go to death. But I’ll pay it as valorously as I may. That will I surely do.” Yes, Cassidy might never have heard of Harfleur or the Salic Law, but he could understand that kind of talk, all right. Wonder where he was now? Where were any of them, for that matter?

      Well, he was here, in Liverpool, Lancashire County, England, quarter of the way round the world from Hole-in-the-Wall, or El Paso, or the Tonopah diggings, or the Nebraska farm that he could barely remember. Already it seemed far away, that other world, in mind as well as distance. Only the instinct of the wanderer, whose home and effects travelled with him, whose whole being could be contained in one old trunk, had prompted him to hold on to all these relics – not the books, but the trail gear. Why hadn’t he abandoned it? Habit? Sentiment, perhaps? Insurance? Mr Franklin had to admit that he did not know.

      He replaced the books, paused, and then reached under the saddle and drew out the belt with its scabbards and the two. 44 Remingtons; he unsheathed them and weighed them in his hand, one after the other, the light catching the long slim silver barrels. Like the Shakespeare, they had belonged to his father; like the Shakespeare, they were rather old and out of date; but again, he told himself, like the Shakespeare they would probably outlast most modern innovations. He rolled the cylinders, listening to the soft oily clicks of the mechanism; then he frowned, broke open the chambers, and carefully shook the little brass shells out into his palm. Loaded pistols in Liverpool were as incongruous as … as Shakespeare in Hole-in-the-Wall.

      Dropping the cartridges into an old cloth, he knotted it and stowed it under the saddle with the empty pistols. Then he closed the trunk, buckled its straps securely, looked round the room again, rolled into bed, and turned out the light.

       2

      Mr Franklin travelled down to London on the Monday afternoon; noting that the railway company hedged its bets by giving the journey time as “from four to five and a half hours” he armed himself with every paper and periodical that the head porter could find and walked the short distance to Lime Street with his luggage borne behind him on the hotel barrow. Here he resisted the offer of a five-guinea book of rail tickets for 1000 miles-worth of first-class travel, buying only a single, and found himself an empty carriage, rather dusty and redolent of stale cigar smoke and Victorian grandeur.

      For the first few miles there was nothing to see except the smoke-grimed roofs of Liverpool under heavy rain; Mr Franklin wondered why so much downpour didn’t have the effect of cleaning the city, and concluded that the rain was probably as dirty as the buildings. He turned at last to his newspapers, and settled himself comfortably to discover what England, the great mother of Empire, was concerning herself with that week-end; it seemed to him essential, if he was to accustom himself to his new surroundings.

      The news was mixed and, to him, confusing. Mr Cody had crashed his aeroplane at Doncaster on Saturday and had emerged from the wreckage congratulating himself on his amazing good luck; further evidence of the flying mania was contained in a report of a race at Clapton Ladies Swimming Club, in which the fair competitors had taken the water equipped with model flying machines. There were columns about the Budget which had been introduced months before, but was still exciting heated debate, although it was all Greek to Mr Franklin – he noted a prominent advertisement on a facing page strongly recommending him to write to an insurance company for advice on how to provide against Mr Lloyd George’s new death duties. Jack Johnson, the highly unpopular black boxing champion, who had recently delighted the sporting public by his failure to defeat a rising young British heavyweight named Victor McLaglen, had somewhat restored his laurels by knocking out the formidable Stanley Ketchell in nine rounds; a French scientist, M. Flammarion, was proposing to harness the internal heat of the earth as a source of energy, Mr Bernard Shaw had made a witty speech on photography as an art form, and a Plymouth Rock hen had had its broken leg set at the London Hospital.

      On the lighter side, questions had been asked in the House of Commons about the forcible feeding of suffragettes; the German army were reported to be buying flying torpedoes from Sweden, and El Roghi, a pretender to the Moroccan throne, had been exhibited in an iron cage at Fez and subsequently executed. Spain was at war with the Riffians.

      Having brought himself abreast of current events, Mr Franklin studied the advertising pages. Here he was invited to subscribe to Cuban Telephones, Val d’Or Rubber, and Brazilian Railways; his custom was also solicited for Mexican Hair Renewer, Poudre d’Amour, Dr Deimel’s celebrated porous undergarments, and the new chocolate “massolettes” costing a penny-farthing each and containing “ten million beneficent microbes” guaranteed to kill all pernicious germs and ensure perfect health if taken twice daily.

      For his intellectual nourishment he was offered H. G. Wells” latest novel, Anna Veronica, E. Phillips Oppenheim’s Mr Marx’s Secret and a sensational new work entitled All At Sea: a novel of Life and Love on a Liner, by none other than Lily Langtry, whose outstanding attractions, displayed in an accompanying photograph, suggested to Mr Franklin that she was liable to outsell Mr Wells and Mr Oppenheim on appearance alone, whatever her prose was like. Her most serious competitor was obviously the Countess of Cardigan, whose Recollections promised a feast of scandal and included (according to the reviewer) “at least two stories which should not have been printed”.

      Mr Franklin betrayed his sad literary taste by laying the reviews aside unfinished, and taking up a recent back number of The Strand which the porter had particularly recommended, since it contained a new story by Conan Doyle which he judged would be to Mr Franklin’s taste. And it might have been, for it was a spirited piece about a young prize-fighter hired by a vengeful beauty to beat up her brute of a husband, the Lord of Falconbridge, but the train had now left the grubby environs of Liverpool, and Mr Franklin was more interested in his first view of the English countryside. A glance at Baedeker informed him that he was passing through that fertile country famous for Cheshire cheese, and that the Welsh hills might be seen to the right, and like any dutiful tourist he sat looking out on the green fields and neat hedgerows, thinking how small and tidy and well-ordered they looked, СКАЧАТЬ