Джек Лондон - The Little Lady of the Big House / Маленькая хозяйка большого дома. Книга для чтения на английском языке

“Supposin’ I don’t show up?” Tim asked.

“I’ll be on my way just the same.” Young Dick turned as if to depart, paused casually, and said over his shoulder, “Better come along.”

Tim shook up the beer as he answered with equal casualness, “Aw right. I’ll be there.”

After parting from Tim Hagan Young Dick spent a busy hour or so looking up one, Marcovich, a Slavonian schoolmate whose father ran a chop-house in which was reputed to be served the finest twenty-cent meal in the city. Young Marcovich owed Young Dick two dollars, and Young Dick accepted the payment of a dollar and forty cents as full quittance of the debt.

Also, with shyness and perturbation, Young Dick wandered down Montgomery Street and vacillated among the many pawnshops that graced that thoroughfare. At last, diving desperately into one, he managed to exchange for eight dollars and a ticket his gold watch that he knew was worth fifty at the very least [82] at the very least – ( разг. ) по меньшей мере .

Dinner in the Nob Hill palace was served at six-thirty. He arrived at six-forty-five and encountered Mrs. Summer-stone. She was a stout, elderly, decayed gentlewoman, a daughter of the great Porter-Rickington family that had shaken the entire Pacific Coast with its financial crash in the middle seventies. Despite her stoutness, she suffered from what she called shattered nerves.

“This will never, never do, Richard,” she censured. “Here is dinner waiting fifteen minutes already, and you have not yet washed your face and hands.”

“I am sorry, Mrs. Summerstone,” Young Dick apologized. “I won’t keep you waiting ever again. And I won’t bother you much ever.”

At dinner, in state [83] in state – ( разг. ) как и полагалось , the two of them alone in the great dining-room, Young Dick strove to make things easy for the lady, whom, despite his knowledge that she was on his pay-roll, he felt toward as a host must feel toward a guest.

“You’ll be very comfortable here,” he promised, “once you are settled down. It’s a good old house, and most of the servants have been here for years.”

“But, Richard,” she smiled seriously to him; “it is not the servants who will determine my happiness here. It is you.”

“I’ll do my best,” he said graciously. “Better than that. I’m sorry I came in late for dinner. In years and years you’ll never see me late again. I won’t bother you at all. You’ll see. It will be just as though I wasn’t in the house.”

When he bade her good night, on his way to bed, he added, as a last thought:

“I’ll warn you of one thing: Ah Sing. He’s the cook. He’s been in our house for years and years – oh, I don’t know, maybe twenty-five or thirty years he’s cooked for father, from long before this house was built or I was born. He’s privileged. He’s so used to having his own way that you’ll have to handle him with gloves [84] you’ll have to handle him with gloves – ( разг. ) вам придется обращаться с ним осторожно . But once he likes you he’ll work his fool head off to please you. He likes me that way. You get him to like you, and you’ll have the time of your life here [85] you’ll have the time of your life here – ( разг. ) здесь вам будет очень хорошо . And, honest, I won’t give you any trouble at all. It’ll be a regular snap, just as if I wasn’t here at all.”

At nine in the evening, sharp to the second, clad in his oldest clothes, Young Dick met Tim Hagan at the Ferry Building.

“No use headin’ north,” said Tim. “Winter’ll come on up that way and make the sleepin’ crimpy. D’ye want to go East – that means Nevada and the deserts.”

“Any other way?” queried Young Dick. “What’s the matter with south? We can head for Los Angeles, an’ Arizona, an’ New Mexico – oh, an’ Texas.”

“How much money you got?” Tim demanded.

“What for?” Young Dick countered.

“We gotta get out quick, an’ payin’ our way at the start is quickest. Me – I’m all hunkydory [86] I’m all hunky-dory – ( сленг ) мне плевать ; but you ain’t. The folks that’s lookin’ after you’ll raise a roar. They’ll have more detectives out than you can shake at stick at. We gotta dodge ’em, that’s what.”

“Then we will dodge,” said Young Dick. “We’ll make short jumps this way and that for a couple of days, layin’ low most of the time, paying our way, until we can get to Tracy. Then we’ll quit payin’ an’ beat her south.”

All of which program was carefully carried out. They eventually went through Tracy as pay passengers, six hours after the local deputy sheriff had given up his task of searching the trains. With an excess of precaution Young Dick paid beyond Tracy and as far as Modesto. After that, under the teaching of Tim, he traveled without paying, riding blind baggage [87] riding blind baggage – ( разг. ) ехали «зайцами» в багажных вагонах , box cars, and cow-catchers. Young Dick bought the newspapers, and frightened Tim by reading to him the lurid accounts of the kidnapping of the young heir to the Forrest millions.

Back in San Francisco the Board of Guardians offered rewards that totaled thirty thousand dollars for the recovery of their ward. And Tim Hagan, reading the same while they lay in the grass by some water-tank, branded forever the mind of Young Dick with the fact that honor beyond price was a matter of neither place nor caste and might outcrop in the palace on the height of land or in the dwelling over a grocery down on the flat.

“Gee!” Tim said to the general landscape. “The old man wouldn’t raise a roar if I snitched on you for that thirty thousand. It makes me scared to think of it.”

And from the fact that Tim thus openly mentioned the matter, Young Dick concluded that there was no possibility of the policeman’s son betraying him.

Not until six weeks afterward, in Arizona, did Young Dick bring up the subject.

“You see, Tim,” he said, “I’ve got slathers of money [88] slathers of money – ( разг. ) куча денег . It’s growing all the time, and I ain’t spending a cent of it, not so as you can notice… though that Mrs. Summerstone is getting a cold eighteen hundred a year out of me, with board and carriages thrown in, while you an’ I are glad to get the leavings of firemen’s pails in the round-houses. Just the same, my money’s growing. What’s ten per cent, on twenty dollars?”

Tim Hagan stared at the shimmering heat-waves of the desert and tried to solve the problem.

“What’s one-tenth of twenty million?” Young Dick demanded irritably.

“Huh! – two million, of course.”

“Well, five per cent’s half of ten per cent. What does twenty million earn at five per cent, for one year?”

Tim hesitated.

“Half of it, half of two million!” Young Dick cried. “At that rate I’m a million richer every year. Get that, and hang on to it, and listen to me. When I’m good and willing to go back – but not for years an’ years – we’ll fix it up, you and I. When I say the word, you’ll write to your father. He’ll jump out to where we are waiting, pick me up, and cart me back. Then he’ll collect the thirty thousand reward from my guardians, quit the police force, and most likely start a saloon.”

“Thirty thousand’s a hell of a lot of money,” was Tim’s nonchalant way of expressing his gratitude.

“Not to me,” Young Dick minimized his generosity. “Thirty thousand goes into a million thirty-three times, and a million’s only a year’s turnover of my money.”