Cruelty! Had he been cruel? It was the girl’s fault, not his. He had dreamed of her as a great artist, had given his love to her because he had thought her great. Then she had disappointed him. She

Dorian Gray’s Thoughts

Cruelty! Had he been cruel? It was the girl’s fault, not his. He had dreamed of her as a great artist, had given his love to her because he had thought her great. Then she had disappointed him. She had been shallow and unworthy. And, yet, a feeling of infinite regret came over him, as he thought of her lying at his feet sobbing like a little child. He remembered with what callousness he had watched her. Why had he been made like that? Why had such a soul been given to him? But he had suffered also. During the three terrible hours that the play had lasted, he had lived centuries of pain. His life was well worth hers. She had marred ¹ him for a moment, if he had wounded her for an age. Besides, women were better suited to bear sorrow than men. They lived on their emotions. They only thought of their emotions. When they took lovers, it was merely to have some one with whom they could have scenes. Lord Henry had told him that, and Lord Henry knew what women were. Why should he trouble about Sibyl Vane? She was nothing to him now.

But the picture? What was he to say of that? It held the secret of his life, and told his story. It had taught him to love his own beauty. Would it teach him to loathe his own soul? Would he ever look at it again?

No; it was merely an illusion wrought on the troubled senses. The horrible night that he had passed had left phantoms behind it. Suddenly there had fallen upon his brain that tiny scarlet speck² that makes men mad. The picture had not changed. It was folly to think so.

Yet it was watching him, with its beautiful marred face and its cruel smile. Its bright hair gleamed in the early sunlight. Its blue eyes met his own. A sense of infinite pity, not for himself, but for the painted image of himself, came over him. It had altered already, and would alter more. Its gold would wither into grey. Its red and white roses would die. For every sin that he committed a stain would fleck and wreck its fairness. But he would not sin. The picture, changed or unchanged, would be to him the visible emblem of conscience. He would resist temptation. He would not see Lord Henry any more – would not, at any rate, listen to those subtle poisonous theories that in Basil Hallward’s garden had first stirred within him the passion for impossible things. He would go back to Sibyl Vane, make her amends, marry her, try to love her again. Yes, it was his duty to do so. She must have suffered more than he had. Poor child! He had been selfish and cruel to her. The fascination that she had exercised over him would return. They would be happy together. His life with her would be beautiful and pure.

/ He got up from his chair, and drew a large screen right in front of the portrait, shuddering as he glanced at it. “How horrible!” he murmured to himself, and he walked across to the window and opened it. When he stepped out on the grass, he drew a deep breath. The fresh morning air seemed to drive away all his sombre passions. He thought only of Sibyl. A faint echo of his love came back to him. He repeated her name over and over again. The birds that were singing in the dew-drenched ³ garden seemed to be telling the flowers about her./

1. to mar – портить, испортить

2. speck – крапинка, пятнышко

3. dew-drenched – покрытый росой

Miss Vane’s Acting

When the second act was over there came a storm of hisses, and Lord Henry got up from his chair and put on his coat. “She is quite beautiful, Dorian,” he said, “but she can’t act. Let us go.”

“I am going to see the play through,” answered the lad, in a hard, bitter voice. “I am awfully sorry that I have made you waste an evening, Harry. I apologise to you both.”

“My dear Dorian, I should think Miss Vane was ill,” interrupted Hallward. “We will come some other night.”

“I wish she were ill,” he rejoined. “But she seems to me be simply callous and cold. She has entirely altered. Last night she was a great artist. This evening she is merely a commonplace, mediocre actress.”

“Don’t talk like that about anyone you love, Dorian. Love is a more wonderful thing than Art.”

“They are both simply forms of imitation,” remarked Lord Henry. “But do let us go. Dorian, you must not stay here any longer. It is not good for one’s morals to see bad acting. Besides, I don’t suppose you will want your wife to act. So what does it matter if she plays Juliet like a wooden doll? She is very lovely, and if she knows as little about life as she does about acting, she will be a delightful experience. There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating – people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing. Good heavens, my dear boy, don’t look so tragic! The secret of remaining young is never to have an emotion that is unbecoming. Come to the club with Basil and myself. We will smoke cigarettes and drink to the beauty of Sibyl Vane. She is beautiful. What more can you want?”

“Go away, Harry,” cried the lad. “I want to be alone. Basil, you must go. Ah! Can’t you see that my heart is breaking?” The hot tears came to his eyes. His lips trembled, and, rushing to the back of the box, he leaned up against the wall, hiding his face in his hands.

“Let us go, Basil,” said Lord Henry, with a strange tenderness in his voice; and the two young men passed out together.

A few moments afterwards the footlights flared up, and the curtain rose on the third act. Dorian Grey went back to his seat. He looked pale, and proud, and indifferent. The play dragged on, and seemed interminable. Half of the audience went out, tramping in heavy boots, and laughing. The whole thing was a fiasco. The last act was played to almost empty benches. The curtain went down on a titter, and some groans.

As soon as it was over, Dorian Gray rushed behind the scenes into the green-room. The girl was standing there alone, with a look of triumph on her face. Her eyes were lit with an exquisite fire. There was a radiance about her. Her parted lips were smiling over some secret of their own.

When he entered, she looked at him, and an expression of infinite joy came over her. “How badly I acted to-night, Dorian!” she cried.

/ “Horribly!” he answered, gazing at her in amazement – “horribly! It was dreadful. Are you ill? You have no idea what it was. You have no idea what I suffered.”

The girl smiled. “Dorian,” she answered, lingering over his name with long-drawn music in her voice, as though it were sweeter than honey to the red petals of her mouth – “Dorian, you should have understood. But you understand now, don’t you?”

“Understand what?” he asked, angrily.

“Why I was so bad to-night. Why I shall always be bad. Why I shall never act well again.” /

Meeting

When I came to the house on Madison Avenue it looked so big and brown and forbidding that I didn’t dare go in, so I walked around the block to get up my courage. But I needn’t have a bit afraid; your butler is such a nice, fatherly old man that he made me feel at home at once. He told me to wait in the drawing-room. I sat down on the edge of a big upholstered chair and kept saying to myself.

“I am going to see Daddy-Long-Legs! I’m going to see Daddy-Long-Legs!”

Then presently the man came back and asked me please to step up to the library. I was so excited that really and truly my feet would hardly take me up. Outside the door he turned and whispered, “He’s been very ill, Miss. This is the first day he’s been allowed to sit up. You’ll not stay long enough to excite him?” I knew from the way he said it that he loved you – and I think he’s an old dear!

Then he knocked and said, “Miss Abbott,” and I went in and the door closed behind me.

/ It was so dim coming in from the brightly lighted hall that for a moment I could scarcely make out anything; then I saw a big easy chair before the fire and a shining tea table with a smaller chair beside it. And I realized that a man was sitting in the big chair propped up by pillows with a rug over his knees. Before I could stop him he rose – sort of shakily – and steadied himself by the back of the chair and just looked at me without a word. And then – and then – I saw it was you! /

Then you laughed and held out your hand and said, “Dear little Judy, couldn’t you guess that I was Daddy-Long-Legs?”

In an instant it flashed over me. Oh, but I have been stupid! A hundred little things might have told me, if I had had any wits. I wouldn’t make a very good detective, would I, Daddy? – Jervie? What must I call you? Just plain Jervie sounds disrespectful and I can’t be disrespectful to you!

It was a very sweet half hour before your doctor came and sent me away. I was so dazed when I got to the station that I almost took a train for St. Louis. And you were pretty dazed, too. You forgot to give me any tea. But we’re both very, very happy, aren’t we? I drove back to Lock Willow in the dark – but oh, how the stars were shining! And this morning I’ve been out with Colin visiting all the places that you and I went together and remembering what you said and how you looked. I am missing you dreadfully, Jervie dear, but it’s a happy kind of missing: we’ll be together soon. We belong to each other now really and truly, no make-believe¹. Doesn’t it seem queer for me to belong to some one at last? It seems very, very sweet.

And I shall never let you be sorry for a single instant.

Yours, forever and ever,

Judy.

P.S. This is the first love letter I ever wrote. Isn’t it funny that I know how?

no make-believe – по-настоящему без притворства

The Prince Consort

I had known her for some considerable time before I came to know him. Most of their acquaintance were in the same case; for to know him was among the less noticeable and the less immediate results of knowing her. You might go to the house three or four times and not happen upon him. He was there always, but he did not attract attention. You joined Mrs. Clinton’s circle, or, if she were in a confidential mood, you sat with her on the sofa. Her daughter, Muriel, would talk to you about “Mamma’s books”, while Mrs. Clinton declared that, do what she would, she could not prevent the darling from reading them. Perhaps, when you had paid half-a-dozen visits, Mr. Clinton would cross your path. He was very polite, active for your comfort, ready to carry out his wife’s directions, determined to be useful. Mrs. Clinton recognized his virtues. She called him an “old dear”, with a fond pitying smile on her lips, and would tell you, with an arch glance and the slightest of shrugs, that “he wrote too”. If you asked what he wrote, she said it was “something musty ¹”, but that it kept him happy, and that he never minded being interrupted, or even having nowhere to write, because Muriel’s dancing lesson occupied the dining-room, “and I really couldn’t have him in my study. One must be alone to work, mustn’t one?” She could not be blamed for holding her work above his, there was nothing at all to show for his; whereas hers not only brought her a measure of fame, as fame is counted, but also doubled the moderate private income on which they had started housekeeping – and writing – thirteen of fourteen years before. Mr. Clinton accepted his inferiority with an acquiescence that was almost eagerness. He threw himself into the task of helping his wife, not of course in the writing, but by relieving her of family and social cares. He walked with Muriel, and was sent to parties when his wife was too busy to come.

I liked Clinton, and I do not mean by that that I disliked Mrs. Clinton. Indeed I admired her very much, and her husband’s position in the household seemed just as natural to me as it did to himself and to everybody else. Young Gregory Dulcet, who is a poet and a handsome impudent young dog, was felt by us all to have put the matter in a shape that was at once true in regard to our host, and pretty in regard to our hostess, when he referred apparently in a casual way, to Mr. Clinton as “the Prince Consort ²”. Mrs. Clinton laughed and blushed; Muriel; clapped her hands and run off to tell her father. She came back saying that he was very pleased with the name, and I believe that very possibly he really was. Anyhow, young Dulcet was immensely pleased with it; he repeated it, and it “caught on”. I heard Mrs. Clinton herself, with a half-daring, half-modest air, use it more than once. Thus Mrs. Clinton was led to believe herself great.

/ Thus Mr. Clinton passed the days of an obscure useful life, helping his wife, using the dining-room when dancing lessons did not interfere, and enjoying the luxury of the study in the small hours of the morning. And Mrs. Clinton grew more and more pitiful to him; and Muriel more and more patronizing; and the world more and more forgetful. And then, one fine morning, as I was going to my office, the Prince Consort overtook me. He was walking fast, and he carried a large, untidy, brown-paper parcel. I quickened my pace to keep up with his. /

musty – out of date

Consort – супруг царствующей королевы (не являющийся сам королём)

Winner

I was pretty panting at the end, but it was great fun, with the whole class waving balloons and cheering and yelling:

What’s the matter with Judy Abbott?

She’s all right.

Who’s all right.

Judy Ab-bott!

/ That, Daddy, is true fame. Then trotting back to the dressing tent and being rubbed down with alcohol and having a lemon to suck. You see we’re very professional. It’s a fine thing to win an event for your class, because the class that wins the most gets the athletic cup for the year. The Seniors won it this year, with seven events to their credit. The athletic association gave a dinner in the sport hall to all of the winners. We had fried soft-shell crabs, and chocolate ice-cream molded in the shape of basket balls. /

I sat up half of last night reading “Jane Eyre”. I can’t see how any girl could have written such a book, especially any girl who was brought up in a churchyard. There’s something about those Brontës that fascinates me. Their books, their lives, their spirit. Where did they get it? When I was reading about Jane’s troubles in the charity school, I got so angry that I had to go out and take a walk. I understood exactly haw she felt. Having known Mrs. Lippett, I could see Mr. Brocklehurst.

Don’t be outraged, Daddy, I’m not intimating that the John Grier Home was like the Lowood Institute. We had plenty to eat and plenty to wear, sufficient water to wash in, and a furnace in the cellar. But there was one deadly likeness. Our lives were absolutely monotonous and uneventful. Nothing nice ever happened, except ice-cream on Sundays, and even that was regular. In all the eighteen years I was there I only had one adventure – when the woodshed burned.

You know, Daddy, I think that the most necessary quality for any person to have is imagination. It makes people able to put themselves in other people’s places. It makes them kind and sympathetic and understanding. It ought to be cultivated in children. But the John Grier Home instantly stamped out the slightest flicker that appeared.

Wait until you see the orphan asylum that I’m going to be the head of! It’s my favourite play at night before I go to sleep. I plan it out to the littlest detail – the meals and clothes and study and amusements and punishments; for even my superior orphans are sometimes bad.

But anyway, they are going to be happy. I think that every one, no matter how many troubles he may have when he grows up, ought to have a happy childhood to look back upon. And if I ever have any children of my own, no matter how unhappy I may be, I am not going to let them have any cares until they grow up.

Patience is …

Patience is eighteen now. She has a round little face and almost black eyes; her lips are red and rather full. She is slender and all her motions are quick and soft. She loves bright colours. Patience is rather like a little cat. She is all impulse; yet she doesn’t like to show her feelings. She plays the violin.

/ The old man has a great tenderness for her and she is fond of him in her own way. She obeys him generally – but as if she couldn’t breathe while doing it. She has had a queer sort of education – history, geography, elementary mathematics and nothing else. She has never been to school; had a few lessons on the violin, but has taught herself most of what she knows. She loves birds, flowers and animals, and she is perfectly fearless in a boat. /

They put me up as their lodger as a favour to Dan Treffry. They are not rich; this is a large farm but it doesn’t bring them much.

We have family prayers at eight, then breakfast – after that freedom for writing or anything else till dinner and then evening prayers. On Sundays, two miles to church twice, or you get into John Ford’s black books.

Dan Treffry himself is staying at a hotel at Kings-beard, and red-brown cheeks. He is a little bald on the temples, and a little grey, but as hard as iron. He rides over to the farm nearly every day. John Ford and Dan Treffry are very good friends, and respect each other; Dan has a great admiration for the old man, but the attraction is Patience. He talks very little when she is in the room, but looks at her in a wistful sort of way. Patience’s conduct to him is rather cruel. Sometimes Dan goes off, but turns up again.

Last night we were sitting on the veranda and suddenly Dan asked Patience to play her violin.

“What!” she said, “before man? No, thank you!”

“Why not?”

“Because I hate them.”

“You forget yourself! Go to bed!” cried John Ford.

She looked at Dan with anger and went. We could hear her playing the violin in her bedroom; it sounded like a dance of spirits. John Ford asked our pardons and went into the house. The violin stopped and he came down again. Just as he was settling in his chair there was a soft sound and something dark fell through the window. The violin! Dan wanted to pick it up, but the old man stopped him. Later, from my bedroom window, I saw John Ford standing in the garden and looking at the violin. He raised his foot as if to stamp on it. Then he picked the violin up, wiped it carefully and took it in.

My room is next to Patience’s room. I heard her laugh and move in her room. I went to the window for a breath of fresh air. The night was warm and quiet but I had a feeling of fear. There is something disturbing here; a sort of suppressed struggle. I have never in my life seen such an irresponsible girl or such an uncompromising old man.

Four men stood …

Four men stood together on the garden path. They carried rolls of canvas, and they had big tool-bags on their backs. They looked impressive. Laura wished now that she had not to got the bread-and-butter but there were nowhere to put it, and she couldn’t throw it away. She blushed and tried to look very serious as she came to them.

“Good morning,” she said, copying her mother’s voice. But it sounded so artificial that she was ashamed and stammered like a little girl, “Oh-er-have you come – is it about the tent?”

“That’s right, miss,” said the tallest of the men, and he knocked back his hat and smiled her.

His smile was so easy, so friendly that Laura recovered. What nice eyes he had, small, but such dark blue! And now she looked at the others, they were smiling too. How very nice workmen were! And what a beautiful morning! She must not speak about the morning; she must be business-like. The tent.

“Well, what about that lawn?” And she pointed to the lawn with the hand that didn’t hold the bread-and-butter. They turned, they stared in the direction. A little fat man frowned.

“I don’t fancy it,” said he. “Not conspicuous enough.”

“Then a corner of the tennis-court,” she suggested. “But the band will be in one corner.”

“H’m, are you going to have a band?” said another of the workmen. He was pale with dark eyes. What was he thinking?

“Only a very small band,” said Laura softly. Perhaps, he wouldn’t mind so much if the band was quite small. But the tall fellow interrupted.

“Look here, miss, that’s the place. Against those trees, there.”

/ Against those flowering trees, then they would be hidden, and they were so lovely. Must they be hidden by the tent? They must. Already the men with the rolls of canvas were going to the place. Only the tall man was behind. He bent down, picked a flower, put it to his nose and smell it. When Laura saw that she forgot about the tent. She wondered at him – he cared for the smell of a flower. Oh, how wonderfully nice workmen were, she thought. Why couldn’t she have workmen for friends rather than the silly boys with whom she danced? It is all the fault of these absurd class distinctions./

And now there came the sounds of hammers. Some one whistled, some one said, “Are you right there, matey?” “Matey,” how friendly.

“Laura, Laura, where are you? Telephone, Laura!” a voice cried from the house.

“Coming!” Away she ran, over the lawn, up the path, up the steps, across the veranda. In the hall her father and her brother Laurie were brushing their hats ready to go to the office.

“I say, Laura,” said her brother, “my coat wants pressing, will you do it for me?”

“I will,” said she and ran to the telephone.

“Yes, yes; oh yes, Kitty? Good morning, dear. Come to lunch? Yes, isn’t it a perfect morning. One moment, hold the line. Mother is calling.” And Laura sat back. “What, mother? Can’t hear.”

Mrs Sheridan’s voice said, “Tell her to put on that nice hat she had on last Sunday.”

Lord Badgery …

Lord Badgery presented everyone in the room to the old painter, who bowed, shook hands, made little noise in his throat, but still could not speak.

Dinner was served; the guests took their places. Lord Badgery sat at the head of the table, with Mr Tillotson on his right hand. Mr Tillotson ate and drank a good deal. He had an appetite of one who has lived on potatoes for ten years among the beetles. After the second glass of wine he began to talk.

“In Asia Minor,” he began, “it is the custom, when one goes to dinner, to hiccough as a sign of fullness.”

Spode sat next to Mrs Cayman; she was an impossible woman, of course, but rich and useful.

“In a basement?” Mrs Cayman was saying. “With beetles? Oh, how dreadful! Poor old man. And he is ninety-seven, didn’t you say?”

The moment foe speeches arrived. Lord Badgery rose to his feet, said what was expected of him and asked Sir Herbert to propose the toast of the evening. Sir Herbert coughed, smiled, and began. In the course of his speech that lasted twenty minutes he told several anecdotes, he quoted Shakespeare, he was playful, he was eloquent… At last he finished and handed to Mr Tillotson a silk purse containing fifty-eight pounds ten shillings, the total amount of the subscription.

Then the old painter’s health was drunk.

Mr Tillotson rose with difficulty to his feet.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he began in a choking voice, and then broke down completely. It was a very painful spectacle. He stood there weeping and stammering and the guests did not know where to look with the feelings of discomfort. Lord Badgery offered the old man a glass of wine, Mr Tillotson began to recover. He murmured a few disconnected words.

“This great honour… your kindness… the banquet…”

Mr Tillotson paused, took some more wine, and then began with a new energy.

/ “The life of the artist is a hard one. His work is unlike other men’s work, which may be done mechanically. It demands from him a constant expense of spirit. He gives continually of his best life, and in return he receives much joy, it is true – much fame, it may be – but of material blessings, very few. It is eighty years since I devoted my life to the service of art; eighty years, and almost every one of those years has brought me fresh and painful proof of that; the artist’s life is a hard one.” /

This speech increased the general feeling of discomfort. It became necessary to take the old man seriously, to regard him as a human being. Up till then he had been no more than an object of curiosity, a mummy in an absurd dress-suit. The guests could not help wishing they had subscribed a little more. Fifty-eight pounds – it wasn’t much.

But happily for the peace of mind of the company, Mr Tillotson paused again, drank some more wine, and began talking absurdly.

The Garden – Party

And after all the weather was ideal. They could not have had a more perfect day for a garden-party if they had ordered it. Windless, warm, the sky without a cloud. Only the blue was veiled with a haze of light gold, as it is sometimes in early summer. The gardener had been up since dawn, mowing the lawns and sweeping them, until the grass and the dark flat rosettes ¹ where the daisy plants had been seemed to shine. As for the roses, you could not help feeling they understood that roses are the only flowers that impress people at the garden-parties; the only flowers that everybody is certain of knowing. Hundreds, yes, literally hundreds, had come out in a single night; the green bushes bowed down as though they had been visited by archangels.

Breakfast was not yet over before the men came to put up the marquee².

“Where do you want the marquee put, Mother?”

“My dear child, it’s no use asking me. I’m determined to leave everything to you children this year. Forget I am your mother. Treat me as an honoured guest.”

But Meg could not possibly go and supervise the men. She had washed her hair before breakfast, and she sat drinking her coffee in a green turban, with a dark wet curl stamped on each cheek. Jose, the butterfly, always came down in a silk petticoat and a kimono jacket.

“You’ll have to go, Laura; you’re the artistic one.”

Away Laura flew, still holding her piece of bread and butter. It’s so delicious to have an excuse for eating out of doors and, besides, she loved having to arrange things; she always felt she could do it so much better than anybody else.

Four men in shirt-sleeves stood grouped together on the garden path. They carried staves ³ covered with rolls of canvas and they had big tool-bags slung on their backs. They looked impressive. Laura wished now that she was not holding that piece of bread and butter, but there was nowhere to put it and she couldn’t possibly throw it away. She blushed and tried to look severe and even a little bit short-sighted as she came up to them.

“Good morning,” she said, copying her mother’s voice. But that sounded so fearfully affected that she was ashamed, and stammered like a little girl, “Oh-er-have you come – is it about the marquee?”

/ “That’s right, miss,” said the tallest of the men, a lanky, freckled fellow, and he shifted his tool-bag, knocked back his straw hat and smiled down at her. “That’s about it.”

His smile was so easy, so friendly, that Laura recovered. What nice eyes he had, small, but such a dark blue! And now she looked at the others, they were smiling too. “Cheer up, we won’t bite,” their smile seemed to say. How very nice workmen were! And what a beautiful morning! She mustn’t mention the morning; she must be business-like. The marquee. /

“Well, what about the lily-lawn? Would that do?”

And she pointed to the lily-lawn with the hand that didn’t hold the bread and butter. They turned, they stared in the direction.

“I don’t fancy it,” said a little fat chap.

“You see, with a thing like a marquee” – and he turned to Laura in his easy way – “you want to put it somewhere where it’ll give you a bang slap in the eye, if you follow me.”

Laura’s upbringing made her wonder for a moment whether it was quite respectful of a workman to talk to her of bangs slap in the eye. But she did quite follow him.

“A corner of the tennis-court,” she suggested. “But the band’s going to be in one corner.”

rosettes – a flower-bed

the marquee – a large tent

a stave – a ladder

Alan Campbell

He was an extremely clever young man, though he had no real appreciation of the visible arts, and whatever little sense of the beauty of poetry he possessed he had gained entirely from Dorian. His dominant intellectual passion was for science. At Cambridge he had spent a great deal of his time working in the Laboratory, and had taken a good class in the Natural Science Tripos ¹ of his year. Indeed, he was still devoted to the study of chemistry, and had a laboratory of his own, in which he used to shut himself up all day long, greatly to the annoyance of his mother, who had set her heart on his standing for Parliament, and had a vague idea that a chemist was a person who made up prescriptions. He was an excellent musician, however as well, and played both the violin and the piano better than most amateurs. In fact, it was music that had first brought him and Dorian Gray together – music and that indefinable attraction that Dorian seemed to be able to exercise whenever he wished, and indeed exercised often without being conscious of it. They had met at Lady Berkshire’s the night that Rubinstein played there, and after that used to be always seen together at the Opera, and wherever good music was going on. For eighteen months their intimacy lasted. Campbell was always either at Selby Royal or in Grosvenor Square. / To him, as to many others, Dorian Gray was the type of everything that is wonderful and fascinating in life. Whether or not a quarrel had taken place between them no one ever knew. But suddenly people remarked that they scarcely spoke when they met, and that Campbell seemed always to go away early from any party at which Dorian Gray was present. He had changed, too – was strangely melancholy at times, appeared almost to dislike hearing music, and would never himself play, giving as his excuse, when he was called upon, that he was so absorbed in science that he had no time left in which to practise. / And this was certainly true. Every day he seemed to become more interested in biology, and his name appeared once or twice in some of scientific reviews, in connection with certain curious experiments.

This was the man Dorian Gray was waiting for. Every second he kept glancing at the clock. As the minutes went by he became horribly agitated. At last he got up, and began to pace up and down the room, looking like a beautiful caged thing. He took long stealthy strides. His hands were curiously cold.

The suspense became unbearable. Time seemed to him to be crawling with feet of lead, while he by monstrous winds was being swept towards the jagged edge of some black cleft of precipice ². He knew what was waiting for him there; saw it indeed, and, shuddering, crushed with dank hands his burning lids as though he would have robbed the very brain of sight, and driven the eyeballs balls back into their cave. It was useless. The brain had its own food on which it battened, and the imagination, made grotesque by terror, twisted and distorted as a living thing by pain, danced like some foul puppet on a stand, and grinned through moving masks. Then, suddenly, Time stopped for him. Yes: that blind, slow-breathing thing crawled no more, and horrible thoughts, Time being dead, raced nimbly on in front, and dragged a hideous future from its grave, and showed it to him. He stared at it. Its very horror made him stone.

the Natural Science Tripos - специальный экзамен в области естественных наук

precipice - пропасть, обрыв

The Case of the Distressed Lady

“Good. I want to tell you a little story, Mrs. St. John. It concerns a young lady. A fair-haired young lady, I think. She is not married. Her name is not St. John. Her Christian name is not Daphne. On the contrary, her name is Ernestine Richards, and until recently she was secretary to Lady Dortheimer.

/ “Well, one day the setting of Lady Dortheimer’s diamond ring became loose and Miss Richards brought it up to town to have it fixed. Quite like your story here, is it not? The same idea occurred to Miss Richards that occurred to you. She had the ring copied. But she was a far-sighted young lady. She saw a day coming when Lady Dortheimer would discover the substitution. When that happened, she would remember who had taken the ring to town and Miss Richards would be instantly suspected. /

“So what happened? She called on me. She showed me the ring, allowed me to satisfy myself that it was genuine, thereby disarming suspicion on my part. That done and a plan of substitution arranged, the young lady took the ring to the jeweller, who in due course returned it to Lady Dortheimer.

“Yesterday evening the other ring, the false ring, was hurriedly handed over at the last minute at Waterloo Station. Quite rightly, Miss Richards did not consider that Mr. Luttrell was likely to be an authority on diamonds. But just to satisfy myself that everything was above-board I arranged for a friend of mine, a diamond merchant, to be on the train. He looked at the ring and pronounced at once, “This is not a real diamond; it is an excellent paste replica.”

“You see the point, of course, Mrs. St. John? When Lady Dortheimer discovered her loss, what would she remember? The charming young dancer who slipped the ring off her finger when the lights went out! She would make inquiries and find that the dancers originally engaged were bribed not to come. If matters were traced back to my office, my story of a Mrs. St. John would seem feeble in the extreme. Lady Dortheimer never knew a Mrs. St. John. The story would sound a flimsy fabrication.

“Now you see, don’t you, that I could not allow that? And so my friend Claude replaced on Lady Dortheimer’s finger the same ring that he took off.

“You see why I could not take a fee? I guarantee to give happiness. Clearly I have not made you happy. I will say just one thing more. You are young; possibly this is your first attempt at anything of the kind. Now I, on the contrary, am comparatively advanced in years, and I have had a long experience in the compilation of statistics. From that experience I can assure you that in eighty-seven percent of cases dishonesty does not pay. Eighty-seven percent. Think of it!”

With a brusque movement the pseudo Mrs. St. John rose. “You oily old brute!” she said. “Leading me on! Making me pay expenses! And all the time – “She choked, and rushed toward the door.

“Your ring,” said Mr. Parker Pyne, holding it out to her.

She snatched it from him, looked at it, and flung it out of the open window.

A door banged and she was gone.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-04