75 лучших рассказов / 75 Best Short Stories

Clorinda was the first to come to her senses. ‘It’s all our fault,’ she said. ‘Every one of us knows how to read. But no one, save Poll, has ever taken the trouble to do it. I, for one, have taken it for granted that it was a woman’s duty to spend her youth in bearing children. I venerated my mother for bearing ten; still more my grandmother for bearing fifteen; it was, I confess, my own ambition to bear twenty. We have gone on all these ages supposing that men were equally industrious, and that their works were of equal merit. While we have borne the children, they, we supposed, have borne the books and the pictures. We have populated the world. They have civilized it. But now that we can read, what prevents us from judging the results? Before we bring another child into the world we must swear that we will find out what the world is like.’

So we made ourselves into a society for asking questions. One of us was to visit a man-of-war; another was to hide herself in a scholar’s study; another was to attend a meeting of business men; while all were to read books, look at pictures, go to concerts, keep our eyes open in the streets, and ask questions perpetually. We were very young. You can judge of our simplicity when I tell you that before parting that night we agreed that the objects of life were to produce good people and good books. Our questions were to be directed to finding out how far these objects were now attained by men. We vowed solemnly that we would not bear a single child until we were satisfied.

Off we went then, some to the British Museum; others to the King’s Navy [575] ; some to Oxford; others to Cambridge; we visited the Royal Academy [576] and the Tate [577] ; heard modern music in concert rooms, went to the Law Courts [578] , and saw new plays. No one dined out without asking her partner certain questions and carefully noting his replies. At intervals we met together and compared our observations. Oh, those were merry meetings! Never have I laughed so much as I did when Rose read her notes upon ‘Honour’ and described how she had dressed herself as an Æthiopian Prince and gone aboard one of His Majesty’s ships. Discovering the hoax, the Captain visited her (now disguised as a private gentleman) and demanded that honour should be satisfied. ‘But how?’ she asked. ‘How?’ he bellowed. ‘With the cane of course!’ Seeing that he was beside himself with rage and expecting that her last moment had come, she bent over and received, to her amazement, six light taps upon the behind. ‘The honour of the British Navy is avenged!’ he cried, and, raising herself, she saw him with the sweat pouring down his face holding out a trembling right hand. ‘Away!’ she exclaimed, striking an attitude and imitating the ferocity of his own expression, ‘My honour has still to be satisfied!’ ‘Spoken like a gentleman!’ he returned, and fell into profound thought. ‘If six strokes avenge the honour of the King’s Navy,’ he mused, ‘how many avenge the honour of a private gentleman?’ He said he would prefer to lay the case before his brother officers. She replied haughtily that she could not wait. He praised her sensibility. ‘Let me see,’ he cried suddenly, ‘did your father keep a carriage?’ ‘No,’ she said. ‘Or a riding horse!’ ‘We had a donkey,’ she bethought her, ‘which drew the mowing machine.’ At this his face lighted. ‘My mother’s name—’ she added. ‘For God’s sake, man, don’t mention your mother’s name!’ he shrieked, trembling like an aspen and flushing to the roots of his hair, and it was ten minutes at least before she could induce him to proceed. At length he decreed that if she gave him four strokes and a half in the small of the back at a spot indicated by himself (the half conceded, he said, in recognition of the fact that her great grandmother’s uncle was killed at Trafalgar) it was his opinion that her honour would be as good as new. This was done; they retired to a restaurant; drank two bottles of wine for which he insisted upon paying; and parted with protestations of eternal friendship.

Then we had Fanny’s account of her visit to the Law Courts. At her first visit she had come to the conclusion that the Judges were either made of wood or were impersonated by large animals resembling man who had been trained to move with extreme dignity, mumble and nod their heads. To test her theory she had liberated a handkerchief of bluebottles at the critical moment of a trial, but was unable to judge whether the creatures gave signs of humanity for the buzzing of the flies induced so sound a sleep that she only woke in time to see the prisoners led into the cells below. But from the evidence she brought we voted that it is unfair to suppose that the Judges are men.