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

St. Louis, 1865

‘Uncle Mark, if you was here, I could tell you about Moses in the bulrushersagain, I know it better now. Mr. Sowerby has got his leg broke off a horse. He was riding it on Sunday. Margaret, that’s the maid, Margaret has took all the spittoons, and slop-buckets, and old jugs out of your room, because she says she don’t think you’re ever coming back any more, you been gone so long. Sissy MsElroy’s mother has got another little baby. She has them all the time. It has got little blue eyes, like Mr. Swimley that boards there, and looks just like him. I have got a new doll, but Johnny Anderson pulled one of its legs out. Miss Doosenberry was here to-day; I give her your picture, but she said she didn’t want it. My cat has got more kittens – oh! You can’t think! – twice as many as Lottie Belden’s. And there’s one, such a sweet little buff one with a short tail, and I named it for you. All of them’s got names now – General Grant, and Halleck, and Moses, and Margaret, and Deuteronorny,and Captain Semmes, and Exodus, and Leviticus, and Horace Greely – all named but one, and I am saving it, because the one that I named for you’s been sick all the time since, and I reckon it’ll die. [It appears to have been mighty rough on the short-tailed kitten, naming it for me – I wonder how the reserved victim will stand it.] Uncle Mark, I do believe Hattie Coldwell liked you, and I know she thinks you are pretty, because I heard her say nothing couldn’t hurt your good looks – nothing at all – she said, even if you was to have the small-pox ever so bad, you would be just as good-looking as you was before. An my ma says she’s ever so smart. [Very.] So no more this time, because General Grant and Moses is fighting

‘Annie’

This child treads on my toes, in every other sentence, with perfect looseness, but in the simplicity of her time of life she doesn’t know it.

I consider that a model letter – an eminently readable and entertaining letter, and, as I said before, it contains more matter of interest and more real information than any letter I ever received from the East. I had rather hear about the cats at home and their truly remarkable names, than listen to a lot of stuff about people I am not acquainted with, or read ‘The Evil Effects of the Intoxicating Bowl,’ illustrated in the back with a picture of a ragged scalliwag pelting away right and left, in the midst of his family circle, with a junk bottle.

[As related to the author of this book by Mr. McWilliams, a pleasant New York gentleman whom the said author met by chance on a journey.]

Well, to go back to where I was before I digressed to explain to you how that frightful and incurable disease, membranous croup,[Diphtheria D.W.] was ravaging the town and driving all mothers mad with terror, I called Mrs. McWilliams’s attention to little Penelope, and said:

‘Darling, I wouldn’t let that child be chewing that pine stick if I were you.’

‘Precious, where is the harm in it?’ said she, but at the same time preparing to take away the stick for women cannot receive even the most palpably judicious suggestion without arguing it, that is married women.

I replied:

‘Love, it is notorious that pine is the least nutritious wood that a child can eat.’

My wife’s hand paused, in the act of taking the stick, and returned itself to her lap. She bridled perceptibly, and said:

‘Hubby, you know better than that. You know you do. Doctors all say that the turpentine in pine wood is good for weak back and the kidneys.’

‘Ah – I was under a misapprehension. I did not know that the child’s kidneys and spine were affected, and that the family physician had recommended – ’

‘Who said the child’s spine and kidneys were affected?’

‘My love, you intimated it.’

‘The idea! I never intimated anything of the kind.’

‘Why, my dear, it hasn’t been two minutes since you said – ’

‘Bother what I said! I don’t care what I did say. There isn’t any harm in the child’s chewing a bit of pine stick if she wants to, and you know it perfectly well. And she shall chew it, too. So there, now!’

‘Say no more, my dear. I now see the force of your reasoning, and I will go and order two or three cords of the best pine wood to-day. No child of mine shall want while I – ’

‘Oh, please go along to your office and let me have some peace. A body can never make the simplest remark but you must take it up and go to arguing and arguing and arguing till you don’t know what you are talking about, and you never do.’

‘Very well, it shall be as you say. But there is a want of logic in your last remark which – ’

However, she was gone with a flourish before I could finish, and had taken the child with her. That night at dinner she confronted me with a face a white as a sheet:

‘Oh, Mortimer, there’s another! Little Georgi Gordon is taken.’

‘Membranous croup?’

‘Membranous croup.’

‘Is there any hope for him?’

‘None in the wide world. Oh, what is to be come of us!’

By and by a nurse brought in our Penelope to say good night and offer the customary prayer at the mother’s knee. In the midst of ‘Now I lay me down to sleep,’ she gave a slight cough! My wife fell back like one stricken with death. But the next moment she was up and brimming with the activities which terror inspires.

She commanded that the child’s crib be removed from the nursery to our bedroom; and she went along to see the order executed. She took me with her, of course. We got matters arranged with speed. A cot-bed was put up in my wife’s dressing room for the nurse. But now Mrs. McWilliams said we were too far away from the other baby, and what if he were to have the symptoms in the night – and she blanched again, poor thing.

We then restored the crib and the nurse to the nursery and put up a bed for ourselves in a room adjoining.

Presently, however, Mrs. McWilliams said suppose the baby should catch it from Penelope? This thought struck a new panic to her heart, and the tribe of us could not get the crib out of the nursery again fast enough to satisfy my wife, though she assisted in her own person and well-nigh pulled the crib to pieces in her frantic hurry.

We moved down-stairs; but there was no place there to stow the nurse, and Mrs. McWilliams said the nurse’s experience would be an inestimable help. So we returned, bag and baggage, to our own bedroom once more, and felt a great gladness, like storm-buffeted birds that have found their nest again.

Mrs. McWilliams sped to the nursery to see how things were going on there. She was back in a moment with a new dread. She said:

‘What can make Baby sleep so?’

I said:

‘Why, my darling, Baby always sleeps like a graven image.’

‘I know. I know; but there’s something peculiar about his sleep now. He seems to – to – he seems to breathe so regularly. Oh, this is dreadful.’

‘But, my dear, he always breathes regularly.’

‘Oh, I know it, but there’s something frightful about it now. His nurse is too young and inexperienced. Maria shall stay there with her, and be on hand if anything happens.’

‘That is a good idea, but who will help you?’

‘You can help me all I want. I wouldn’t allow anybody to do anything but myself, anyhow, at such a time as this.’

I said I would feel mean to lie abed and sleep, and leave her to watch and toil over our little patient all the weary night. But she reconciled me to it. So old Maria departed and took up her ancient quarters in the nursery.

Penelope coughed twice in her sleep.