Array Коллектив авторов - 33 лучших юмористических рассказа на английском / 33 Best Humorous Short Stories

‘Yes.’

‘And she became what you called your wife?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘And you worked for her?’ asked the Man in Asbestos in astonishment.

‘Yes.’

‘And she did not work?’

‘No,’ I answered, ‘of course not.’

‘And half of what you had was hers?’

‘Yes.’

‘And she had the right to live in your house and use your things?’

‘Of course,’ I answered.

‘How dreadful!’ said the Man in Asbestos. ‘I hadn’t realised the horrors of your age till now.’

He sat shivering slightly, with the same timid look in his face as before.

Then it suddenly struck me that of the figures on the street, all had looked alike.

‘Tell me,’ I said, ‘are there no women now? Are they gone too?’

‘Oh, no,’ answered the Man in Asbestos, ‘they’re here just the same. Some of those are women. Only, you see, everything has been changed now. It all came as part of their great revolt, their desire to be like the men. Had that begun in your time?’

‘Only a little.’ I answered; ‘they were beginning to ask for votes and equality.’

‘That’s it,’ said my acquaintance, ‘I couldn’t think of the word. Your women, I believe, were something awful, were they not? Covered with feathers and skins and dazzling colours made of dead things all over them? And they laughed, did they not, and had foolish teeth, and at any moment they could inveigle you into one of those contracts! Ugh!’

He shuddered.

‘Asbestos,’ I said (I knew no other name to call him), as I turned on him in wrath, ‘Asbestos, do you think that those jelly-bag Equalities out on the street there, with their ash-barrel suits, can be compared for one moment with our unredeemed, unreformed, heaven-created, hobble-skirted women of the twentieth century?’

Then, suddenly, another thought flashed into my mind —

‘The children,’ I said, ‘where are the children? Are there any?’

‘Children,’ he said, ‘no! I have never heard of there being any such things for at least a century. Horrible little hobgoblins they must have been! Great big faces, and cried constantly! And grew , did they not? Like funguses! I believe they were longer each year than they had been the last, and —’

I rose.

‘Asbestos!’ I said, ‘this, then, is your coming Civilisation, your millennium. This dull, dead thing, with the work and the burden gone out of life, and with them all the joy and sweetness of it. For the old struggle—mere stagnation, and in place of danger and death, the dull monotony of security and the horror of an unending decay! Give me back,’ I cried, and I flung wide my arms to the dull air, ‘the old life of danger and stress, with its hard toil and its bitter chances, and its heartbreaks. I see its value! I know its worth! Give me no rest,’ I cried aloud —

‘Yes, but give a rest to the rest of the corridor!’ cried an angered voice that broke in upon my exultation.

Suddenly my sleep had gone.

I was back again in the room of my hotel, with the hum of the wicked, busy old world all about me, and loud in my ears the voice of the indignant man across the corridor.

‘Quit your blatting, you infernal blatherskite,’ he was calling. ‘Come down to earth.’

I came.

This is a plain account of a fishing party. It is not a story. There is no plot. Nothing happens in it and nobody is hurt. The only point of this narrative is its peculiar truth. It not only tells what happened to us – the five people concerned in it – but what has happened and is happening to all the other fishing parties that at the season of the year, from Halifax to Idaho, go gliding out on the unruffled surface of our Canadian and American lakes in the still cool of early summer morning.

We decided to go in the early morning because there is a popular belief that the early morning is the right time for bass fishing. The bass is said to bite in the early morning. Perhaps it does. In fact the thing is almost capable of scientific proof. The bass does NOT bite between eight and twelve. It does NOT bite between twelve and six in the afternoon. Nor does it bite between six o’clock and midnight. All these things are known facts. The inference is that the bass bites furiously at about daybreak.

At any rate our party were unanimous about starting early.

‘Better make an early start,’ said the Colonel, when the idea of the party was suggested. ‘Oh, yes,’ said George Popley, the bank manager, ‘we want to get right out on the shoal while the fish are biting.’

When he said this all our eyes glistened. Everybody’s do. There’s a thrill in the words. To ‘get right out on the shoal at daybreak when the fish are biting,’ is an idea that goes to any man’s brain.

If you listen to the men talking in a Pullman car, or an hotel corridor, or, better still, at the little tables in a first-class bar, you will not listen long before you hear one say: ‘Well, we got out early, just after sunrise, right on the shoal.’ And presently, even if you can’t hear him, you will see him reach out his two hands and hold them about two feet apart for the other man to admire. He is measuring the fish. No, not the fish they caught; this was the big one that they lost. But they had him right up to the top of the water. Oh, yes, he was up to the top of the water all right. The number of huge fish that have been heaved up to the top of the water in our lakes is almost incredible. Or at least it used to be when we still had bar rooms and little tables for serving that vile stuff Scotch whisky and such foul things as gin Rickeys and John Collinses. It makes one sick to think of it, doesn’t it? But there was good fishing in the bars, all the winter.

But, as I say, we decided to go early in the morning. Charlie Jones, the railroad man, said that he remembered how when he was a boy, up in Wisconsin, they used to get out at five in the morning – not get up at five but be on the shoal at five. It appears that there is a shoal somewhere in Wisconsin where the bass lie in thousands. Kernin, the lawyer, said that when he was a boy – this was on Lake Rosseau – they used to get out at four. It seems there is a shoal in Lake Rosseau where you can haul up the bass as fast as you can drop your line. The shoal is hard to find – very hard. Kernin can find it, but it is doubtful – so I gather – if any other living man can. The Wisconsin shoal, too, is very difficult to find. Once you find it, you are all right; but it’s hard to find. Charlie Jones can find it. If you were in Wisconsin right now he’d take you straight to it, but probably no other person now alive could reach that shoal. In the same way Colonel Morse knows of a shoal in Lake Simcoe where he used to fish years and years ago and which, I understand, he can still find.

I have mentioned that Kernin is a lawyer, and Jones a railroad man and Popley a banker. But I needn’t have. Any reader would take it for granted. In any fishing party there is always a lawyer. You can tell him at sight. He is the one of the party that has a landing net and a steel rod in sections with a wheel that is used to wind the fish to the top of the water.

And there is always a banker. You can tell him by his good clothes. Popley, in the bank, wears his banking suit. When he goes fishing he wears his fishing suit. It is much the better of the two, because his banking suit has ink marks on it, and his fishing suit has no fish marks on it.

As for the railroad man – quite so, the reader knows it as well as I do – you can tell him because he carries a pole that he cut in the bush himself, with a ten-cent line wrapped round the end of it. Jones says he can catch as many fish with this kind of line as Kernin can with his patent rod and wheel. So he can too. Just the same number.