Лучшие рассказы О. Генри = The Best of O. Henry. О. Генри

Milly in the centre.

      This, I say, happened three years ago. And about that time a little luck descended upon us three, and we were enabled to buy costlier and less wholesome food than Cypher’s. Our paths separated, and I saw Kraft no more and Judkins seldom.

      But, as I said, I saw a painting the other day that was sold for $5,000. The title was “Boadicea[98],” and the figure seemed to fill all out-of-doors. But of all the picture’s admirers who stood before it, I believe I was the only one who longed for Boadicea to stalk from her frame, bringing me corned-beef hash with poached egg.

      I hurried away to see Kraft. His satanic eyes were the same, his hair was worse tangled, but his clothes had been made by a tailor.

      “I didn’t know,” I said to him.

      “We’ve bought a cottage in the Bronx[99] with the money,” said he. “Any evening at 7.”

      “Then,” said I, “when you led us against the lumberman – the – Klondiker – it wasn’t altogether on account of the Unerring Artistic Adjustment of Nature?”

      “Well, not altogether,” said Kraft, with a grin.

      Memoirs of a Yellow Dog

      I don’t suppose it will knock any of you people off your perch to read a contribution from an animal. Mr. Kipling[100] and a good many others have demonstrated the fact that animals can express themselves in remunerative English, and no magazine goes to press nowadays without an animal story in it, except the old-style monthlies that are still running pictures of Bryan[101] and the Mont Pelée[102] horror.

      But you needn’t look for any stuck-up literature in my piece, such as Bearoo[103], the bear, and Snakoo[104], the snake, and Tammanoo[105], the tiger, talk in the jungle books. A yellow dog that’s spent most of his life in a cheap New York flat, sleeping in a corner on an old sateen underskirt (the one she spilled port wine on at the Lady Longshoremen’s banquet), mustn’t be expected to perform any tricks with the art of speech.

      I was born a yellow pup; date, locality, pedigree and weight unknown. The first thing I can recollect, an old woman had me in a basket at Broadway and Twenty-third trying to sell me to a fat lady. Old Mother Hubbard was boosting me to beat the band as a genuine Pomeranian-Hambletonian-Red-Irish-Cochin-China-Stoke-Pogis fox terrier. The fat lady chased a V around among the samples of gross grain flannelette in her shopping bag till she cornered it, and gave up. From that moment I was a pet – a mamma’s own wootsey squidlums[106]. Say, gentle reader, did you ever have a 200-pound woman breathing a flavour of Camembert cheese and Peau d’Espagne[107] pick you up and wallop her nose all over you, remarking all the time in an Emma Eames tone of voice: “Oh, oo’s um oodlum, doodlum, woodlum, toodlum, bitsy-witsy skoodlums?”

      From a pedigreed yellow pup I grew up to be an anonymous yellow cur looking like a cross between an Angora cat and a box of lemons. But my mistress never tumbled. She thought that the two primeval pups that Noah chased into the ark were but a collateral branch of my ancestors. It took two policemen to keep her from entering me at the Madison Square Garden[108] for the Siberian bloodhound prize.

      I’ll tell you about that flat. The house was the ordinary thing in New York, paved with Parian marble in the entrance hall and cobblestones above the first floor. Our fiat was three – well, not flights – climbs up. My mistress rented it unfurnished, and put in the regular things – 1903 antique unholstered parlour set, oil chromo of geishas in a Harlem tea house, rubber plant and husband.

      By Sirius! there was a biped I felt sorry for. He was a little man with sandy hair and whiskers a good deal like mine. Henpecked? – well, toucans and flamingoes and pelicans all had their bills in him. He wiped the dishes and listened to my mistress tell about the cheap, ragged things the lady with the squirrel-skin coat on the second floor hung out on her line to dry. And every evening while she was getting supper she made him take me out on the end of a string for a walk.

      If men knew how women pass the time when they are alone they’d never marry. Laura Lean Jibbey, peanut brittle, a little almond cream on the neck muscles, dishes unwashed, half an hour’s talk with the iceman, reading a package of old letters, a couple of pickles and two bottles of malt extract, one hour peeking through a hole in the window shade into the flat across the air-shaft – that’s about all there is to it. Twenty minutes before time for him to come home from work she straightens up the house, fixes her rat so it won’t show, and gets out a lot of sewing for a ten-minute bluff.

      I led a dog’s life in that flat. ’Most all day I lay there in my corner watching that fat woman kill time. I slept sometimes and had pipe dreams about being out chasing cats into basements and growling at old ladies with black mittens, as a dog was intended to do. Then she would pounce upon me with a lot of that drivelling poodle palaver and kiss me on the nose – but what could I do? A dog can’t chew cloves.

      I began to feel sorry for Hubby, dog my cats if I didn’t. We looked so much alike that people noticed it when we went out; so we shook the streets that Morgan’s cab drives down, and took to climbing the piles of last December’s snow on the streets where cheap people live.

      One evening when we were thus promenading, and I was trying to look like a prize St. Bernard, and the old man was trying to look like he wouldn’t have murdered the first organ-grinder he heard play Mendelssohn’s[109] wedding-march, I looked up at him and said, in my way:

      “What are you looking so sour about, you oakum trimmed lobster? She don’t kiss you. You don’t have to sit on her lap and listen to talk that would make the book of a musical comedy sound like the maxims of Epictetus[110]. You ought to be thankful you’re not a dog. Brace up, Benedick, and bid the blues begone.”

      The matrimonial mishap looked down at me with almost canine intelligence in his face.

      “Why, doggie,” says he, “good doggie. You almost look like you could speak. What is it, doggie – Cats?”

      Cats! Could speak!

      But, of course, he couldn’t understand. Humans were denied the speech of animals. The only common ground of communication upon which dogs and men can get together is in fiction.

      In the flat across the hall from us lived a lady with a black-and-tan terrier. Her husband strung

98

Boadicea (1st century) – an ancient British queen who led the revolt against the Romans

99

the Bronx – the northern borough of the New York City

100

Mr. Kipling – Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936), an English writer and poet

101

Bryan – a city in east-central Texas, formally founded in 1855

102

Mont Pelée – an active volcano on one of the Caribbean islands

103

Bearoo – characters in Rudyard Kipling’s tales

104

Snakoo – characters in Rudyard Kipling’s tales

105

Tammanoo – characters in Rudyard Kipling’s tales

106

wootsey squidlums, etc. – pet names

107

Peau d’Espagne – a sort of soft cheese

108

Madison Square Garden – a sports arena in New York City, built in 1891

109

Mendelssohn – Felix Mendelssohn (1809–1847), a German composer, conductor and pianist of the Romantic period

110

Epictetus (55–135) – a Greek philosopher; his teaching was later recorded by Arrian, his pupil.