25 лучших рассказов / 25 Best Short Stories. О. Генри

the Pink, or Pinky the Brute, I forget which,” was James Williams’s answer. “But you can bet I’m a burglar; don’t leave that out. And you might add that it took five of ’em to pluck the Pink. I’d especially like to have that in the records.”

      In an hour came Mrs. James Williams, with Uncle Thomas, of Madison Avenue, in a respect-compelling motor car and proofs of the hero’s innocence – for all the world like the third act of a drama backed by an automobile mfg. co.[39]

      After the police had sternly reprimanded James Williams for imitating a copyrighted burglar and given him as honourable a discharge as the department was capable of, Mrs. Williams rearrested him and swept him into an angle of the station-house. James Williams regarded her with one eye. He always said that Donovan closed the other while somebody was holding his good right hand. Never before had he given her a word of reproach or of reproof.

      “If you can explain,” he began rather stiffly, “why you – ”

      “Dear,” she interrupted, “listen. It was an hour’s pain and trial to you. I did it for her – I mean the girl who spoke to me on the coach. I was so happy, Jim – so happy with you that I didn’t dare to refuse that happiness to another. Jim, they were married only this morning – those two; and I wanted him to get away. While they were struggling with you I saw him slip from behind his tree and hurry across the park. That’s all of it, dear – I had to do it.”

      Thus does one sister of the plain gold band know another who stands in the enchanted light that shines but once and briefly for each one. By rice and satin bows does mere man become aware of weddings. But bride knoweth bride at the glance of an eye. And between them swiftly passes comfort and meaning in a language that man and widows wot[40] not of.

      The Handbook of Hymen

      ’Tis the opinion of myself, Sanderson Pratt, who sets this down, that the educational system of the United States should be in the hands of the weather bureau. I can give you good reasons for it; and you can’t tell me why our college professors shouldn’t be transferred to the meteorological department. They have been learned to read; and they could very easily glance at the morning papers and then wire in to the main office what kind of weather to expect. But there’s the other side of the proposition. I am going on to tell you how the weather furnished me and Idaho Green with an elegant education.

      We was up in the Bitter Root Mountains over the Montana line[41] prospecting for gold. A chin-whiskered man in Walla-Walla, carrying a line of hope as excess baggage, had grubstaked us; and there we was in the foothills pecking away, with enough grub on hand to last an army through a peace conference.

      Along one day comes a mail-rider over the mountains from Carlos, and stops to eat three cans of greengages, and leave us a newspaper of modern date. This paper prints a system of premonitions of the weather, and the card it dealt Bitter Root Mountains from the bottom of the deck was “warmer and fair, with light westerly breezes.”

      That evening it began to snow, with the wind strong in the east. Me and Idaho moved camp into an old empty cabin higher up the mountain, thinking it was only a November flurry. But after falling three foot on a level it went to work in earnest; and we knew we was snowed in. We got in plenty of firewood before it got deep, and we had grub enough for two months, so we let the elements rage and cut up all they thought proper.

      If you want to instigate the art of manslaughter just shut two men up in a eighteen by twenty-foot cabin for a month. Human nature won’t stand it.

      When the first snowflakes fell me and Idaho Green laughed at each other’s jokes and praised the stuff we turned out of a skillet[42] and called bread. At the end of three weeks Idaho makes this kind of a edict to me. Says he:

      “I never exactly heard sour milk dropping out of a balloon on the bottom of a tin pan, but I have an idea it would be music of the spears compared to this attenuated stream of asphyxiated thought that emanates out of your organs of conversation. The kind of half-masticated noises that you emit every day puts me in mind of a cow’s cud, only she’s lady enough to keep hers to herself, and you ain’t.”

      “Mr. Green,” says I, “you having been a friend of mine once, I have some hesitations in confessing to you that if I had my choice for society between you and a common yellow, three-legged cur pup, one of the inmates of this here cabin would be wagging a tail just at present.”

      This way we goes on for two or three days, and then we quits speaking to one another. We divides up the cooking implements, and Idaho cooks his grub on one side of the fireplace, and me on the other. The snow is up to the windows, and we have to keep a fire all day.

      You see me and Idaho never had any education beyond reading and doing “if John had three apples and James five” on a slate. We never felt any special need for a university degree, though we had acquired a species of intrinsic intelligence in knocking around the world that we could use in emergencies. But, snowbound in that cabin in the Bitter Roots, we felt for the first time that if we had studied Homer[43] or Greek and fractions and the higher branches of information, we’d have had some resources in the line of meditation and private thought. I’ve seen them Eastern college fellows working in camps all through the West, and I never noticed but what education was less of a drawback to ’em than you would think. Why, once over on Snake River, when Andrew McWilliams’ saddle horse got the botts, he sent a buckboard ten miles for one of these strangers that claimed to be a botanist. But that horse died.

      One morning Idaho was poking around with a stick on top of a little shelf that was too high to reach. Two books fell down to the floor. I started toward ‘em, but caught Idaho’s eye. He speaks for the first time in a week.

      “Don’t burn your fingers,” says he. “In spite of the fact that you’re only fit to be the companion of a sleeping mud-turtle, I’ll give you a square deal. And that’s more than your parents did when they turned you loose in the world with the sociability of a rattle-snake and the bedside manner of a frozen turnip. I’ll play you a game of seven-up, the winner to pick up his choice of the book, the loser to take the other.”

      We played; and Idaho won. He picked up his book; and I took mine. Then each of us got on his side of the house and went to reading.

      I never was as glad to see a ten-ounce[44] nugget as I was that book. And Idaho took at his like a kid looks at a stick of candy.

      Mine was a little book about five by six inches called “Herkimer’s Handbook of Indispensable Information.” I may be wrong, but I think that was the greatest book that ever was written. I’ve got it to-day; and I can stump you or any man fifty times in five minutes with the information in it. Talk about Solomon or the New York Tribune[45]! Herkimer had cases on both of ’em. That man must have put in fifty years and travelled a million miles to find out all that stuff. There was the population of all cities in it, and the way to tell a girl’s age, and the number of teeth a camel has. It told you the longest tunnel in the world, the number of the stars, how long it takes for chicken pox to break out, what a lady’s neck ought to measure, the veto[46] powers of Governors, the dates of the Roman aqueducts[47], how many pounds of rice going without three beers a day would buy, the average annual temperature of Augusta, Maine, the quantity of seed required to plant an acre of carrots in drills, antidotes for poisons, the number of hairs on a blond lady’s head, how to preserve eggs, the height of all the mountains in the world, and the dates of all wars and battles, and how to restore drowned persons, and sunstroke, and the number of tacks in a pound, and how to make dynamite and flowers and beds, and what to do before the doctor comes – and a hundred times as many things besides. If there was anything Herkimer didn’t know I didn’t miss it out of the book.

      I sat and read that book for four hours. All the wonders of education

39

(automobile) mfg. co = manufacturing company (компания, производящая автомобили).

40

Wot = знать (устаревшее).

41

The Montana line – горный хребет в Скалистых горах в штате Монтана.

42

Skillet (амер.) – сковородка.

43

Homer (IX–VIII в. до н.э.) – древнегреческий поэт, автор двух великих эпических поэм – «Илиады и Одиссеи».

44

Ounce – унция, единица веса, равная 28,35 грамма.

45

The New York Tribune – американская ежедневная газета, основанная в XIX в., позднее объединившаяся с газетой Herald и ставшая New York Herald Tribune.

46

Veto – конституционное право власти на запрет или отказ.

47

Aqueduct – акведук, рукотворная система труб, каналов, канав и поддерживающих их конструкций для водоснабжения; впервые построена ассирийцами в 691 г. до н.э.