25 лучших рассказов / 25 Best Short Stories

Rosa was no mining-camp. It laid in the valley, and was as free of uproar and pestilence as one of them rural towns in the country. There was a three-mile trolley line champing its bit in the environs; and me and Idaho spent a week riding on one of the cars, dropping off at nights at the Sunset View Hotel. Being now well read as well as travelled, we was soon pro re nata[51 - Pro re nata (лат.) = ввиду обстоятельств.] with the best society in Rosa, and was invited out to the most dressed-up and high-toned entertainments. It was at a piano recital and quail-eating contest in the city hall, for the benefit of the fire company, that me and Idaho first met Mrs. De Ormond Sampson, the queen of Rosa society.

Mrs. Sampson was a widow, and owned the only two-story house in town. It was painted yellow, and whichever way you looked from you could see it as plain as egg on the chin of an O’Grady on a Friday. Twenty-two men in Rosa besides me and Idaho was trying to stake a claim on that yellow house.

There was a dance after the song books and quail bones had been raked out of the Hall. Twenty-three of the bunch galloped over to Mrs. Sampson and asked for a dance. I side-stepped the two-step, and asked permission to escort her home. That’s where I made a hit.

On the way home says she:

“Ain’t the stars lovely and bright to-night, Mr. Pratt?”

“For the chance they’ve got,” says I, “they’re humping themselves in a mighty creditable way. That big one you see is sixty-six million miles distant. It took thirty-six years for its light to reach us. With an eighteen-foot telescope you can see forty-three millions of ’em, including them of the thirteenth magnitude, which, if one was to go out now, you would keep on seeing it for twenty-seven hundred years.”

“My!” says Mrs. Sampson. “I never knew that before. How warm it is! I’m as damp as I can be from dancing so much.”

“That’s easy to account for,” says I, “when you happen to know that you’ve got two million sweat-glands working all at once. If every one of your perspiratory ducts, which are a quarter of an inch long, was placed end to end, they would reach a distance of seven miles.”

“Lawsy!” says Mrs. Sampson. “It sounds like an irrigation ditch you was describing, Mr. Pratt. How do you get all this knowledge of information?”

“From observation, Mrs. Sampson,” I tells her. “I keep my eyes open when I go about the world.”

“Mr. Pratt,” says she, “I always did admire a man of education. There are so few scholars among the sap-headed plug-uglies of this town that it is a real pleasure to converse with a gentleman of culture. I’d be gratified to have you call at my house whenever you feel so inclined.”

And that was the way I got the goodwill of the lady in the yellow house. Every Tuesday and Friday evening I used to go there and tell her about the wonders of the universe as discovered, tabulated, and compiled from nature by Herkimer. Idaho and the other gay Lutherans[52 - Lutherans – члены лютеранской церкви, одной из основных протестантских церквей мира, основанной Мартином Лютером (1483–1546), немецким проповедником и реформатором.] of the town got every minute of the rest of the week that they could.

I never imagined that Idaho was trying to work on Mrs. Sampson with old K. M.’s rules of courtship till one afternoon when I was on my way over to take her a basket of wild hog-plums. I met the lady coming down the lane that led to her house. Her eyes was snapping, and her hat made a dangerous dip over one eye.

“Mr. Pratt,” she opens up, “this Mr. Green is a friend of yours, I believe.”

“For nine years,” says I.

“Cut him out,” says she. “He’s no gentleman!”

“Why ma’am,” says I, “he’s a plain incumbent of the mountains, with asperities and the usual failings of a spendthrift and a liar, but I never on the most momentous occasion had the heart to deny that he was a gentleman. It may be that in haberdashery and the sense of arrogance and display Idaho offends the eye, but inside, ma’am, I’ve found him impervious to the lower grades of crime and obesity. After nine years of Idaho’s society, Mrs. Sampson,” I winds up, “I should hate to impute him, and I should hate to see him imputed.”

“It’s right plausible of you, Mr. Pratt,” says Mrs. Sampson, “to take up the curmudgeons in your friend’s behalf; but it don’t alter the fact that he has made proposals to me sufficiently obnoxious to ruffle the ignominy of any lady.”

“Why, now, now, now!” says I. “Old Idaho do that! I could believe it of myself, sooner. I never knew but one thing to deride in him; and a blizzard was responsible for that. Once while we was snow-bound in the mountains he became a prey to a kind of spurious and uneven poetry, which may have corrupted his demeanour.”

“It has,” says Mrs. Sampson. “Ever since I knew him he has been reciting to me a lot of irreligious rhymes by some person he calls Ruby Ott[53 - Ruby Ott – зд. рубаи, знаменитые стихотворные четверостишия Омара Хайяма.], and who is no better than she should be, if you judge by her poetry.”

“Then Idaho has struck a new book,” says I, “for the one he had was by a man who writes under the nom de plume[54 - Nom de plume (фр.) = псевдоним.] of K. M.”

“He’d better have stuck to it,” says Mrs. Sampson, “whatever it was. And to-day he caps the vortex. I get a bunch of flowers from him, and on ’em is pinned a note. Now, Mr. Pratt, you know a lady when you see her; and you know how I stand in Rosa society. Do you think for a moment that I’d skip out to the woods with a man along with a jug of wine and a loaf of bread, and go singing and cavorting up and down under the trees with him? I take a little claret[55 - Claret – кларет, красное французское вино из района города Бордо.] with my meals, but I’m not in the habit of packing a jug of it into the brush and raising Cain[56 - Raise Cain – (идиома) разозлиться, устроить скандал.] in any such style as that. And of course he’d bring his book of verses along, too. He said so. Let him go on his scandalous picnics alone! Or let him take his Ruby Ott with him. I reckon she wouldn’t kick unless it was on account of there being too much bread along. And what do you think of your gentleman friend now, Mr. Pratt?”

“Well, ’m,” says I, “it may be that Idaho’s invitation was a kind of poetry, and meant no harm. May be it belonged to the class of rhymes they call figurative. They offend law and order, but they get sent through the mails on the grounds that they mean something that they don’t say. I’d be glad on Idaho’s account if you’d overlook it,” says I, “and let us extricate our minds from the low regions of poetry to the higher planes of fact and fancy. On a beautiful afternoon like this, Mrs. Sampson,” I goes on, “we should let our thoughts dwell accordingly. Though it is warm here, we should remember that at the equator the line of perpetual frost is at an altitude of fifteen thousand feet[57 - Feet – мн. ч. от foot; фут – единица длины, равная 30,48 см.]. Between the latitudes of forty degrees and forty-nine degrees it is from four thousand to nine thousand feet.”

“Oh, Mr. Pratt,” says Mrs. Sampson, “it’s such a comfort to hear you say them beautiful facts after getting such a jar from that minx of a Ruby’s poetry!”

“Let us sit on this log at the roadside,” says I, “and forget the inhumanity and ribaldry of the poets. It is in the glorious columns of ascertained facts and legalised measures that beauty is to be found. In this very log we sit upon, Mrs. Sampson,” says I, “is statistics more wonderful than any poem. The rings show it was sixty years old. At the depth of two thousand feet it would become coal in three thousand years. The deepest coal mine in the world is at Killingworth, near Newcastle[58 - Newcastle – шахтерский город, основанный в 1809 г. и названный в честь английского угольного порта Ньюкасл на реке Тайн.]. A box four feet long, three feet wide, and two feet eight inches deep will hold one ton of coal. If an artery is cut, compress it above the wound. A man’s leg contains thirty bones. The Tower of London was burned in 1841.”

“Go on, Mr. Pratt,” says Mrs. Sampson. “Them ideas is so original and soothing. I think statistics are just as lovely as they can be.”

But it wasn’t till two weeks later that I got all that was coming to me out of Herkimer.

One night I was waked up by folks hollering “Fire!” all around. I jumped up and dressed and went out of the hotel to enjoy the scene. When I see it was Mrs. Sampson’s house, I gave forth a kind of yell, and I was there in two minutes.

The whole lower story of the yellow house was in flames, and every masculine, feminine, and canine in Rosa was there, screeching and barking and getting in the way of the firemen. I saw Idaho trying to get away from six firemen who were holding him. They was telling him the whole place was on fire down-stairs, and no man could go in it and come out alive.

“Where’s Mrs. Sampson?” I asks.

“She hasn’t been seen,” says one of the firemen. “She sleeps up-stairs. We’ve tried to get in, but we can’t, and our company hasn’t got any ladders yet.”

I runs around to the light of the big blaze, and pulls the Handbook out of my inside pocket. I kind of laughed when I felt it in my hands – I reckon I was some daffy with the sensation of excitement.

“Herky, old boy,” I says to it, as I flipped over the pages, “you ain’t ever lied to me yet, and you ain’t ever throwed me down at a scratch yet. Tell me what, old boy, tell me what!” says I.

I turned to “What to do in Case of Accidents,” on page 117. I run my finger down the page, and struck it. Good old Herkimer, he never overlooked anything! It said:

Suffocation from Inhaling Smoke or Gas. – There is nothing better than flaxseed. Place a few seed in the outer corner of the eye.

I shoved the Handbook back in my pocket, and grabbed a boy that was running by.

“Here,” says I, giving him some money, “run to the drug store and bring a dollar’s worth of flaxseed. Hurry, and you’ll get another one for yourself. Now,” I sings out to the crowd, “we’ll have Mrs. Sampson!” And I throws away my coat and hat.

Four of the firemen and citizens grabs hold of me. It’s sure death, they say, to go in the house, for the floors was beginning to fall through.

“How in blazes,” I sings out, kind of laughing yet, but not feeling like it, “do you expect me to put flaxseed in a eye without the eye?”

I jabbed each elbow in a fireman’s face, kicked the bark off of one citizen’s shin, and tripped the other one with a side hold. And then I busted into the house. If I die first I’ll write you a letter and tell you if it’s any worse down there than the inside of that yellow house was; but don’t believe it yet. I was a heap more cooked than the hurry-up orders of broiled chicken that you get in restaurants. The fire and smoke had me down on the floor twice, and was about to shame Herkimer, but the firemen helped me with their little stream of water, and I got to Mrs. Sampson’s room. She’d lost conscientiousness from the smoke, so I wrapped her in the bed clothes and got her on my shoulder. Well, the floors wasn’t as bad as they said, or I never could have done it – not by no means.

I carried her out fifty yards from the house and laid her on the grass. Then, of course, every one of them other twenty-two plaintiff’s to the lady’s hand crowded around with tin dippers of water ready to save her. And up runs the boy with the flaxseed.

I unwrapped the covers from Mrs. Sampson’s head. She opened her eyes and says:

“Is that you, Mr. Pratt?”

“S-s-sh,” says I. “Don’t talk till you’ve had the remedy.”

I runs my arm around her neck and raises her head, gentle, and breaks the bag of flaxseed with the other hand; and as easy as I could I bends over and slips three or four of the seeds in the outer corner of her eye.

Up gallops the village doc by this time, and snorts around, and grabs at Mrs. Sampson’s pulse, and wants to know what I mean by any such sandblasted nonsense.

“Well, old Jalap and Jerusalem oakseed,” says I, “I’m no regular practitioner, but I’ll show you my authority, anyway.”

They fetched my coat, and I gets out the Handbook.

“Look on page 117,” says I, “at the remedy for suffocation by smoke or gas. Flaxseed in the outer corner of the eye, it says. I don’t know whether it works as a smoke consumer or whether it hikes the compound gastro-hippopotamus nerve into action, but Herkimer says it, and he was called to the case first. If you want to make it a consultation, there’s no objection.”