# Любимые повести на английском / Best Short Novels

Вашингтон Ирвинг, Джон Голсуорси, Оскар Уайльд, Фрэнсис Фицджеральд

Чтение оригинальных произведений – простой и действенный способ погрузиться в языковую среду и совершенствоваться в иностранном языке. Серия «Бестселлер на все времена» – это возможность улучшить свой английский, читая лучшие произведения англоязычных авторов, любимые миллионами читателей. Для лучшего понимания текста в книгу включены краткий словарь и комментарии, поясняющие языковые и лингвострановедческие вопросы, исторические и культурные реалии описываемой эпохи. В этой книге собраны блистательные повести выдающихся мастеров англоязычной прозы – Оскара Уайльда, Фрэнсиса Скотта Фицджеральда, Вашингтона Ирвинга и Джона Голсуорси. Они не похожи одна на другую: это загадочная история о Сонной лощине и мистическое происшествие в Кентервильском имении, фантасмагорический сюжет с огромным алмазом и вдохновенный гимн жизни, любви и красоте. Но все они увлекут читателя оригинальным сюжетом и помогут улучшить свой английский. Книга предназначена для тех, кто изучает английский язык на продолжающем или продвинутом уровне и стремится к его совершенствованию.

©ООО «Издательство «Эксмо», 2017

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Читайте «Бестселлер на все времена» – погрузитесь в языковую среду с лучшими произведениями любимых авторов!

> «Языковая компетенция – вещь капризная. Это как балет, как умение играть на музыкальном инструменте, как гимнастика, как любое действие, которое требует навыка. Либо вы идете вперед, либо начинаете сползать назад.

> А самое главное – не прекращать изучение языка. Это может быть чтение оригинальной литературы. Любите читать про любовь – читайте про любовь, любите фантастику – читайте фантастику. Но читайте обязательно!»

> Н. А. Бонк, лингвист, педагог,

> автор наиболее популярных в России

> учебников английского языка

## Francis Scott Fitzgerald. The Diamond as Big as The Ritz

### I

John T. Unger came from a family that had been well known in Hades[1] – a small town on the Mississippi River[2] – for several generations.

John’s father had held the amateur golf championship through many a heated contest; Mrs. Unger was known ‘from hot-box to hot-bed,’ as the local phrase went, for her political addresses; and young John T. Unger, who had just turned sixteen, had danced all the latest dances from New York before he put on long trousers. And now, for a certain time, he was to be away from home. That respect for a New England[3] education which is the bane of all provincial places, which drains them yearly of their most promising young men, had seized upon his parents. Nothing would suit them but that he should go to St. Midas’[4] School near Boston[5] – Hades was too small to hold their darling and gifted son.

Now in Hades – as you know if you ever have been there – the names of the more fashionable preparatory schools and colleges mean very little. The inhabitants have been so long out of the world that, though they make a show of keeping up to date in dress and manners and literature, they depend to a great extent on hearsay, and a function that in Hades would be considered elaborate would doubtless be hailed by a Chicago[6] – beef-princess as ‘perhaps a little tacky.’

John T. Unger was on the eve of departure. Mrs. Unger, with maternal fatuity, packed his trunks full of linen suits and electric fans, and Mr. Unger presented his son with an asbestos pocket-book stuffed with money.

‘Remember, you are always welcome here,’ he said. ‘You can be sure, boy, that we’ll keep the home fires burning.’

‘I know,’ answered John huskily.

‘Don’t forget who you are and where you come from,’ continued his father proudly, ‘and you can do nothing to harm you. You are an Unger – from Hades.’

So the old man and the young shook hands and John walked away with tears streaming from his eyes. Ten minutes later he had passed outside the city limits, and he stopped to glance back for the last time. Over the gates the old-fashioned Victorian[7] motto seemed strangely attractive to him. His father had tried time and time again to have it changed to something with a little more push and verve about it, such as ‘Hades – Your Opportunity,’ or else a plain ‘Welcome’ sign set over a hearty handshake pricked out in electric lights. The old motto was a little depressing, Mr. Unger had thought – but now…

So John took his look and then set his face resolutely toward his destination. And, as he turned away, the lights of Hades against the sky seemed full of a warm and passionate beauty.

St. Midas’ School is half an hour from Boston in a Rolls-Pierce motorcar. The actual distance will never be known, for no one, except John T. Unger, had ever arrived there save in a Rolls-Pierce and probably no one ever will again. St. Midas’ is the most expensive and the most exclusive boys’ preparatory school[8] in the world.

John’s first two years there passed pleasantly. The fathers of all the boys were money-kings and John spent his summers visiting at fashionable resorts. While he was very fond of all the boys he visited, their fathers struck him as being much of a piece, and in his boyish way he often wondered at their exceeding sameness. When he told them where his home was they would ask jovially, ‘Pretty hot down there?’ and John would muster a faint smile and answer, ‘It certainly is.’ His response would have been heartier had they not all made this joke – at best varying it with, ‘Is it hot enough for you down there?’ which he hated just as much.

In the middle of his second year at school, a quiet, handsome boy named Percy Washington had been put in John’s form. The newcomer was pleasant in his manner and exceedingly well dressed even for St. Midas’, but for some reason he kept aloof from the other boys. The only person with whom he was intimate was John T. Unger, but even to John he was entirely uncommunicative concerning his home or his family. That he was wealthy went without saying, but beyond a few such deductions John knew little of his friend, so it promised rich confectionery for his curiosity when Percy invited him to spend the summer at his home ‘in the West.’ He accepted, without hesitation.

It was only when they were in the train that Percy became, for the first time, rather communicative. One day while they were eating lunch in the dining-car and discussing the imperfect characters of several of the boys at school, Percy suddenly changed his tone and made an abrupt remark.

‘My father,’ he said, ‘is by far the richest man in the world.’

‘Oh,’ said John, politely. He could think of no answer to make to this confidence. He considered ‘That’s very nice,’ but it sounded hollow and was on the point of saying, ‘Really?’ but refrained since it would seem to question Percy’s statement. And such an astounding statement could scarcely be questioned.

‘By far the richest,’ repeated Percy.

‘I was reading in the ‘World Almanac,’’ began John, ‘that there was one man in America with an income of over five million a year and four men with incomes of over three million a year, and – ’

‘Oh, they’re nothing.’ Percy’s mouth was a half-moon of scorn. ‘Catchpenny capitalists, financial small-fry, petty merchants and money-lenders. My father could buy them out and not know he’d done it.’

‘But how does he – ’

‘Why haven’t they put downhisincome tax? Because he doesn’t pay any. At least he pays a little one – but he doesn’t pay any on his realincome.’

‘He must be very rich,’ said John simply. ‘I’m glad. I like very rich people.

‘The richer a fella is, the better I like him.’ There was a look of passionate frankness upon his dark face. ‘I visited the Schnlitzer-Murphys last Easter. Vivian Schnlitzer-Murphy had rubies as big as hen’s eggs, and sapphires that were like globes with lights inside them – ’

‘I love jewels,’ agreed Percy enthusiastically. ‘Of course I wouldn’t want any one at school to know about it, but I’ve got quite a collection myself. I used to collect them instead of stamps.’

‘And diamonds,’ continued John eagerly. ‘The Schnlit-zer-Murphys had diamonds as big as walnuts – ’

‘That’s nothing.’ Percy had leaned forward and dropped his voice to a low whisper. ‘That’s nothing at all. My father has a diamond bigger than the Ritz-Carlton Hotel.[9]’

### II

The Montana[10] sunset lay between two mountains like a gigantic bruise from which dark arteries spread themselves over a poisoned sky. An immense distance under the sky crouched the village of Fish, minute, dismal, and forgotten. There were twelve men, so it was said, in the village of Fish, twelve somber and inexplicable souls who sucked a lean milk from the almost literally bare rock upon which a mysterious populatory force had begotten them. They had become a race apart, these twelve men of Fish, like some species developed by an early whim of nature, which on second thought had abandoned them to struggle and extermination.

Out of the blue-black bruise in the distance crept a long line of moving lights upon the desolation of the land, and the twelve men of Fish gathered like ghosts at the shanty depot to watch the passing of the seven o’clock train, the Transcontinental Express from Chicago. Six times or so a year the Transcontinental Express, through some inconceivable jurisdiction, stopped at the village of Fish, and when this occurred a figure or so would disembark, mount into a buggy that always appeared from out of the dusk, and drive off toward the bruised sunset. The observation of this pointless and preposterous phenomenon had become a sort of cult among the men of Fish. To observe, that was all; there remained in them none of the vital quality of illusion which would make them wonder or speculate, else a religion might have grown up around these mysterious visitations. But the men of Fish were beyond all religion – the barest and most savage tenets of even Christianity could gain no foothold on that barren rock – so there was no altar, no priest, no sacrifice; only each night at seven the silent concourse by the shanty depot, a congregation who lifted up a prayer of dim, anaemic wonder.

On this June night, the Great Brakeman,[11] whom, had they deified any one, they might well have chosen as their celestial protagonist,[12] had ordained that the seven o’clock train should leave its human (or inhuman) deposit at Fish. At two minutes after seven Percy Washington and John T. Unger disembarked, hurried past the spellbound, the agape, the fearsome eyes of the twelve men of Fish, mounted into a buggy which had obviously appeared from nowhere, and drove away.

After half an hour, when the twilight had coagulated into dark, the silent negro who was driving the buggy hailed an opaque body somewhere ahead of them in the gloom. In response to his cry, it turned upon them a luminous disk which regarded them like a malignant eye out of the unfathomable night. As they came closer, John saw that it was the tail-light of an immense automobile, larger and more magnificent than any he had ever seen. Its body was of gleaming metal richer than nickel and lighter than silver, and the hubs of the wheels were studded with iridescent geometric figures of green and yellow – John did not dare to guess whether they were glass or jewel.

Two negroes, dressed in glittering livery such as one sees in pictures of royal processions in London, were standing at attention beside the car and as the two young men dismounted from the buggy they were greeted in some language which the guest could not understand, but which seemed to be an extreme form of the Southern negro’s dialect.

‘Get in,’ said Percy to his friend, as their trunks were tossed to the ebony roof of the limousine. ‘Sorry we had to bring you this far in that buggy, but of course it wouldn’t do for the people on the train or those Godforsaken fellas in Fish to see this automobile.’

‘Gosh! What a car!’ This ejaculation was provoked by its interior. John saw that the upholstery consisted of a thousand minute and exquisite tapestries of silk, woven with jewels and embroideries, and set upon a background of cloth of gold. The two armchair seats in which the boys luxuriated were covered with stuff that resembled duvetyn, but seemed woven in numberless colors of the ends of ostrich feathers.

‘What a car!’ cried John again in amazement.

‘This thing?’ Percy laughed. ‘Why, it’s just an old junk we use for a station wagon.’

By this time they were gliding along through the darkness toward the break between the two mountains.

‘We’ll be there in an hour and a half,’ said Percy, looking at the clock. ‘I may as well tell you it’s not going to be like anything you ever saw before.’

If the car was any indication of what John would see, he was prepared to be astonished indeed. The simple piety prevalent in Hades has the earnest worship of and respect for riches as the first article of its creed – had John felt otherwise than radiantly humble before them, his parents would have turned away in horror at the blasphemy.

They had now reached and were entering the break between the two mountains and almost immediately the way became much rougher.

‘If the moon shone down here, you’d see that we’re in a big gulch,’ said Percy, trying to peer out of the window. He spoke a few words into the mouthpiece and immediately the footman turned on a search-light and swept the hillsides with an immense beam.

‘Rocky, you see. An ordinary car would be knocked to pieces in half an hour. In fact, it’d take a tank to navigate it unless you knew the way. You notice we’re going uphill now. ‘

They were obviously ascending, and within a few minutes the car was crossing a high rise, where they caught a glimpse of a pale moon newly risen in the distance. The car stopped suddenly and several figures took shape out of the dark beside it – these were negroes also. Again the two young men were saluted in the same dimly recognizable dialect; then the negroes set to work and four immense cables dangling from overhead were attached with hooks to the hubs of the great jeweled wheels. At a resounding ‘Hey-yah!’ John felt the car being lifted slowly from the ground – up and up – clear of the tallest rocks on both sides – then higher, until he could see a wavy, moonlit valley stretched out before him in sharp contrast to the quagmire of rocks that they had just left. Only on one side was there still rock – and then suddenly there was no rock beside them or anywhere around.

It was apparent that they had surmounted some immense knife-blade of stone, projecting perpendicularly into the air. In a moment they were going down again, and finally with a soft bump they were landed upon the smooth earth.

‘The worst is over,’ said Percy, squinting out the window. ‘It’s only five miles from here, and our own road – tapestry brick – all the way. This belongs to us. This is where the United States ends, father says.’

‘Are we in Canada?’

‘We are not. We’re in the middle of the Montana Rockies.[13] But you are now on the only five square miles of land in the country that’s never been surveyed.’

‘Why hasn’t it? Did they forget it?’

‘No,’ said Percy, grinning, ‘they tried to do it three times. The first time my grandfather corrupted a whole department of the State survey; the second time he had the official maps of the United States tinkered with – that held them for fifteen years. The last time was harder. My father fixed it so that their compasses were in the strongest magnetic field ever artificially set up. He had a whole set of surveying instruments made with a slight defection that would allow for this territory not to appear, and he substituted them for the ones that were to be used. Then he had a river deflected and he had what looked like a village built up on its banks – so that they’d see it, and think it was a town ten miles farther up the valley. There’s only one thing my father’s afraid of,’ he concluded, ‘only one thing in the world that could be used to find us out.’

‘What’s that?’

Percy sank his voice to a whisper.

‘Aeroplanes,’ he breathed. ‘We’ve got half a dozen anti-aircraft guns and we’ve arranged it so far – but there’ve been a few deaths and a great many prisoners. Not that we mindthat, you know, father and I, but it upsets mother and the girls, and there’s always the chance that some time we won’t be able to arrange it.’

Shreds and tatters of chinchilla, courtesy clouds in the green moon’s heaven, were passing the green moon like precious Eastern stuffs paraded for the inspection of some Tartar Khan. It seemed to John that it was day, and that he was looking at some lads sailing above him in the air, showering down tracts and patent medicine circulars, with their messages of hope for despairing, rockbound hamlets. It seemed to him that he could see them look down out of the clouds and stare – and stare at whatever there was to stare at in this place whither he was bound – What then? Were they induced to land by some insidious device there to be immured far from patent medicines and from tracts until the judgment day – or, should they fail to fall into the trap, did a quick puff of smoke and the sharp round of a splitting shell bring them drooping to earth – and ‘upset’ Percy’s mother and sisters. John shook his head and the wraith of a hollow laugh issued silently from his parted lips. What desperate transaction lay hidden here? What a moral expedient of a bizarre Croesus?[14] What terrible and golden mystery?…

The chinchilla clouds had drifted past now and outside the Montana night was bright as day. The tapestry brick of the road was smooth to the tread of the great tires as they rounded a still, moonlit lake; they passed into darkness for a moment, a pine grove, pungent and cool, then they came out into a broad avenue of lawn and John’s exclamation of pleasure was simultaneous with Percy’s taciturn ‘We’re home.’

Full in the light of the stars, an exquisite château[15] rose from the borders of the lake, climbed in marble radiance half the height of an adjoining mountain, then melted in grace, in perfect symmetry, in translucent feminine languor, into the massed darkness of a forest of pine. The many towers, the slender tracery of the sloping parapets, the chiselled wonder of a thousand yellow windows with their oblongs and hectagons and triangles of golden light, the shattered softness of the intersecting planes of star-shine and blue shade, all trembled on John’s spirit like a chord of music. On one of the towers, the tallest, the blackest at its base, an arrangement of exterior lights at the top made a sort of floating fairyland – and as John gazed up in warm enchantment the faint acciaccare[16] sound of violins drifted down in a rococo[17] harmony that was like nothing he had ever heard before. Then in a moment the car stopped before wide, high marble steps around which the night air was fragrant with a host of flowers. At the top of the steps two great doors swung silently open and amber light flooded out upon the darkness, silhouetting the figure of an exquisite lady with black, high-piled hair, who held out her arms toward them.

‘Mother,’ Percy was saying, ‘this is my friend, John Unger, from Hades.’

Afterward John remembered that first night as a daze of many colors, of quick sensory impressions, of music soft as a voice in love, and of the beauty of things, lights and shadows, and motions and faces. There was a white-haired man who stood drinking a many-hued cordial from a crystal thimble set on a golden stem. There was a girl with a flowery face, dressed like Titania[18] with braided sapphires in her hair. There was a room where the solid, soft gold of the walls yielded to the pressure of his hand, and a room that was like a platonic[19] conception of the ultimate prism – ceiling, floor, and all, it was lined with an unbroken mass of diamonds, diamonds of every size and shape, until, lit with tall violet lamps in the corners, it dazzled the eyes with a whiteness that could be compared only with itself, beyond human wish or dream.

Through a maze of these rooms the two boys wandered. Sometimes the floor under their feet would flame in brilliant patterns from lighting below, patterns of barbaric clashing colors, of pastel delicacy, of sheer whiteness, or of subtle and intricate mosaic, surely from some mosque on the Adriatic Sea.[20] Sometimes beneath layers of thick crystal he would see blue or green water swirling, inhabited by vivid fish and growths of rainbow foliage. Then they would be treading on furs of every texture and color or along corridors of palest ivory, unbroken as though carved complete from the gigantic tusks of dinosaurs extinct before the age of man…

Then a hazily remembered transition, and they were at dinner – where each plate was of two almost imperceptible layers of solid diamond between which was curiously worked a filigree of emerald design, a shaving sliced from green air. Music, plangent and unobtrusive, drifted down through far corridors – his chair, feathered and curved insidiously to his back, seemed to engulf and overpower him as he drank his first glass of port. He tried drowsily to answer a question that had been asked him, but the honeyed luxury that clasped his body added to the illusion of sleep – jewels, fabrics, wines, and metals blurred before his eyes into a sweet mist…

‘Yes,’ he replied with a polite effort, ‘it certainly is hot enough for me down there.’

He managed to add a ghostly laugh; then, without movement, without resistance, he seemed to float off and away, leaving an iced dessert that was pink as a dream… He fell asleep.

When he awoke he knew that several hours had passed. He was in a great quiet room with ebony walls and a dull illumination that was too faint, too subtle, to be called a light. His young host was standing over him.

‘You fell asleep at dinner,’ Percy was saying. ‘I nearly did, too – it was such a treat to be comfortable again after this year of school. Servants undressed and bathed you while you were sleeping.’

‘Is this a bed or a cloud?’ sighed John. ‘Percy, Percy – before you go, I want to apologize.’

‘For what?’

‘For doubting you when you said you had a diamond as big as the Ritz-Carlton Hotel.’

Percy smiled.

‘I thought you didn’t believe me. It’s that mountain, you know.’

‘What mountain?’

‘The mountain the château rests on. It’s not very big, for a mountain. But except about fifty feet of sod and gravel on top it’s solid diamond.Onediamond, one cubic mile without a flaw. Aren’t you listening? Say – ’

But John T. Unger had again fallen asleep.

### III

Morning. As he awoke he perceived drowsily that the room had at the same moment become dense with sunlight. The ebony panels of one wall had slid aside on a sort of track, leaving his chamber half open to the day. A large negro in a white uniform stood beside his bed.

‘Good evening,’ muttered John, summoning his brains from the wild places.

‘Good morning, sir. Are you ready for your bath, sir? Oh, don’t get up – I’ll put you in, if you’ll just unbutton your pajamas – there. Thank you, sir.’

John lay quietly as his pajamas were removed – he was amused and delighted; he expected to be lifted like a child by this black Gargantua who was tending him, but nothing of the sort happened; instead he felt the bed tilt up slowly on its side – he began to roll, startled at first, in the direction of the wall, but when he reached the wall its drapery gave way, and sliding two yards farther down a fleecy incline he plumped gently into water the same temperature as his body.

He looked about him. The runway or rollway on which he had arrived had folded gently back into place. He had been projected into another chamber and was sitting in a sunken bath with his head just above the level of the floor. All about him, lining the walls of the room and the sides and bottom of the bath itself, was a blue aquarium, and gazing through the crystal surface on which he sat, he could see fish swimming among amber lights and even gliding without curiosity past his outstretched toes, which were separated from them only by the thickness of the crystal. From overhead, sunlight came down through sea-green glass.

‘I suppose, sir, that you’d like hot rosewater and soapsuds this morning, sir – and perhaps cold salt water to finish.’

The negro was standing beside him.

‘Yes,’ agreed John, smiling inanely, ‘as you please.’ Any idea of ordering this bath according to his own meager standards of living would have been priggish and not a little wicked.

The negro pressed a button and a warm rain began to fall, apparently from overhead, but really, so John discovered after a moment, from a fountain arrangement near by. The water turned to a pale rose color and jets of liquid soap spurted into it from four miniature walrus heads at the corners of the bath. In a moment a dozen little paddle-wheels, fixed to the sides, had churned the mixture into a radiant rainbow of pink foam which enveloped him softly with its delicious lightness, and burst in shining, rosy bubbles here and there about him.

‘Shall I turn on the moving-picture machine, sir?’ suggested the negro deferentially. ‘There’s a good one-reel comedy in this machine to-day, or can put in a serious piece in a moment, if you prefer it.’

‘No, thanks,’ answered John, politely but firmly. He was enjoying his bath too much to desire any distraction. But distraction came. In a moment he was listening intently to the sound of flutes from just outside, flutes ripping a melody that was like a waterfall, cool and green as the room itself, accompanying a frothy piccolo,[21] in play more fragile than the lace of suds that covered and charmed him.

After a cold salt-water bracer and a cold fresh finish, he stepped out and into a fleecy robe, and upon a couch covered with the same material he was rubbed with oil, alcohol, and spice. Later he sat in a voluptuous chair while he was shaved and his hair was trimmed.

‘Mr. Percy is waiting in your sitting-room,’ said the negro, when these operations were finished. ‘My name is Gygsum, Mr. Unger, sir. I am to see to Mr. Unger every morning.’

John walked out into the brisk sunshine of his living-room, where he found breakfast waiting for him and Percy, gorgeous in white kid knickerbockers, smoking in an easy chair.

### IV

This is a story of the Washington family as Percy sketched it for John during breakfast.

The father of the present Mr. Washington had been a Virginian,[22] a direct descendant of George Washington,[23] and Lord Baltimore.[24] At the close of the Civil War[25] he was a twenty-five-year-old Colonel with a played-out plantation and about a thousand dollars in gold.

Fitz-Norman Culpepper Washington, for that was the young Colonel’s name, decided to present the Virginia estate to his younger brother and go West. He selected two dozen of the most faithful blacks, who, of course, worshipped him, and bought twenty-five tickets to the West, where he intended to take out land in their names and start a sheep and cattle ranch.

When he had been in Montana for less than a month and things were going very poorly indeed, he stumbled on his great discovery. He had lost his way when riding in the hills, and after a day without food he began to grow hungry. As he was without his rifle, he was forced to pursue a squirrel, and in the course of the pursuit he noticed that it was carrying something shiny in its mouth. Just before it vanished into its hole – for Providence did not intend that this squirrel should alleviate his hunger – it dropped its burden. Sitting down to consider the situation Fitz-Norman’s eye was caught by a gleam in the grass beside him. In ten seconds he had completely lost his appetite and gained one hundred thousand dollars. The squirrel, which had refused with annoying persistence to become food, had made him a present of a large and perfect diamond.

Late that night he found his way to camp and twelve hours later all the males among his darkies were back by the squirrel hole digging furiously at the side of the mountain. He told them he had discovered a rhinestone mine, and, as only one or two of them had ever seen even a small diamond before, they believed him, without question. When the magnitude of his discovery became apparent to him, he found himself in a quandary. The mountain wasadiamond – it was literally nothing else but solid diamond. He filled four saddle bags full of glittering samples and started on horseback for St. Paul.[26] There he managed to dispose of half a dozen small stones – when he tried a larger one a storekeeper fainted and Fitz-Norman was arrested as a public disturber. He escaped from jail and caught the train for New York, where he sold a few medium-sized diamonds and received in exchange about two hundred thousand dollars in gold. But he did not dare to produce any exceptional gems – in fact, he left New York just in time. Tremendous excitement had been created in jewelry circles, not so much by the size of his diamonds as by their appearance in the city from mysterious sources. Wild rumors became current that a diamond mine had been discovered in the Catskills,[27] on the Jersey[28] coast, on Long Island,[29] beneath Washington Square. Excursion trains, packed with men carrying picks and shovels, began to leave New York hourly, bound for various neighboring El Dorados. But by that time young Fitz-Norman was on his way back to Montana.

By the end of a fortnight he had estimated that the diamond in the mountain was approximately equal in quantity to all the rest of the diamonds known to exist in the world. There was no valuing it by any regular computation, however, for it wasone solid diamond– and if it were offered for sale not only would the bottom fall out of the market, but also, if the value should vary with its size in the usual arithmetical progression, there would not be enough gold in the world to buy a tenth part of it. And what could any one do with a diamond that size?

It was an amazing predicament. He was, in one sense, the richest man that ever lived – and yet was he worth anything at all? If his secret should transpire there was no telling to what measures the Government might resort in order to prevent a panic, in gold as well as in jewels. They might take over the claim immediately and institute a monopoly.

There was no alternative – he must market his mountain in secret. He sent South for his younger brother and put him in charge of his colored following – darkies who had never realized that slavery was abolished. To make sure of this, he read them a proclamation[30] that he had composed, which announced that General Forrest had reorganized the shattered Southern armies and defeated the North in one pitched battle. The negroes believed him implicitly. They passed a vote declaring it a good thing and held revival services immediately.

Fitz-Norman himself set out for foreign parts with one hundred thousand dollars and two trunks filled with rough diamonds of all sizes. He sailed for Russia in a Chinese junk and six months after his departure from Montana he was in St. Petersburg. He took obscure lodgings and called immediately upon the court jeweller, announcing that he had a diamond for the Czar. He remained in St. Petersburg for two weeks, in constant danger of being murdered, living from lodging to lodging, and afraid to visit his trunks more than three or four times during the whole fortnight.

On his promise to return in a year with larger and finer stones, he was allowed to leave for India. Before he left, however, the Court Treasurers had deposited to his credit, in American banks, the sum of fifteen million dollars – under four different aliases.[31]

He returned to America in 1868, having been gone a little over two years. He had visited the capitals of twenty-two countries and talked with five emperors, eleven kings, three princes, a shah, a khan, and a sultan. At that time Fitz-Norman estimated his own wealth at one billion dollars. One fact worked consistently against the disclosure of his secret. No one of his larger diamonds remained in the public eye for a week before being invested with a history of enough fatalities, amours, revolutions, and wars to have occupied it from the days of the first Babylonian Empire.[32]

From 1870 until his death in 1900, the history of Fitz-Norman Washington was a long epic in gold. There were side issues, of course – he evaded the surveys, he married a Virginia lady, by whom he had a single son, and he was compelled, due to a series of unfortunate complications, to murder his brother, whose unfortunate habit of drinking himself into an indiscreet stupor had several times endangered their safety. But very few other murders stained these happy years of progress and expansion.

Just before he died he changed his policy, and with all but a few million dollars of his outside wealth bought up rare minerals in bulk, which he deposited in the safety vaults of banks all over the world, marked as bric-à-brac.[33] His son, Braddock Tarleton Washington, followed this policy on an even more tensive scale. The minerals were converted into the rarest of all elements – radium – so that the equivalent of a billion dollars in gold could be placed in a receptacle no bigger than a cigar box.

When Fitz-Norman had been dead three years his son, Braddock, decided that the business had gone far enough. The amount of wealth that he and his father had taken out of the mountain was beyond all exact computation. He kept a note-book in cipher in which he set down the approximate quantity of radium in each of the thousand banks he patronized, and recorded the alias under which it was held. Then he did a very simple thing – he sealed up the mine.

He sealed up the mine. What had been taken out of it would support all the Washingtons yet to be born in unparalleled luxury for generations. His one care must be the protection of his secret, lest in the possible panic attendant on its discovery he should be reduced with all the property-holders in the world to utter poverty.

This was the family among whom John T. Unger was staying. This was the story he heard in his silver-walled living-room the morning after his arrival.

### V

After breakfast, John found his way out the great marble entrance and looked curiously at the scene before him. The whole valley, from the diamond mountain to the steep granite cliff five miles away, still gave off a breath of golden haze which hovered idly above the fine sweep of lawns and lakes and gardens. Here and there clusters of elms made delicate groves of shade, contrasting strangely with the tough masses of pine forest that held the hills in a grip of dark-blue green. Even as John looked he saw three fawns in single file patter out from one clump about a half mile away and disappear with awkward gayety into the black-ribbed half-light of another. John would not have been surprised to see a goat-foot piping his way among the trees or to catch a glimpse of pink nymph[34] -skin and flying yellow hair between the greenest of the green leaves.

In some such cool hope he descended the marble steps, disturbing faintly the sleep of two silky Russian wolfhounds at the bottom, and set off along a walk of white and blue brick that seemed to lead in no particular direction.

He was enjoying himself as much as he was able. It is youth’s felicity as well as its insufficiency that it can never live in the present, but must always be measuring up the day against its own radiantly imagined future – flowers and gold, girls and stars, they are only prefigurations and prophecies of that incomparable, unattainable young dream.

John rounded a soft corner where the massed rose-bushes filled the air with heavy scent, and struck off across a park toward a patch of moss under some trees. He had never lain upon moss, and he wanted to see whether it was really soft enough to justify the use of its name as an adjective. Then he saw a girl coming toward him over the grass. She was the most beautiful person he had ever seen.

She was dressed in a white little gown that came just below her knees, and a wreath of mignonettes clasped with blue slices of sapphire bound up her hair. Her pink bare feet scattered the dew before them as she came. She was younger than John – not more than sixteen.

‘Hello,’ she cried softly, ‘I’m Kismine.’

She was much more than that to John already. He advanced toward her, scarcely moving as he drew near lest he should tread on her bare toes.

‘You haven’t met me,’ said her soft voice. Her blue eyes added, ‘Oh, but you’ve missed a great deal!’… ‘You met my sister, Jasmine, last night. I was sick with lettuce poisoning,’ went on her soft voice, and her eyes continued, ‘and when I’m sick I’m sweet – and when I’m well.’

‘You have made an enormous impression on me,’ said John’s eyes, ‘and I’m not so slow myself’ – ‘How do you do?’ said his voice. ‘I hope you’re better this morning.’ – ‘You darling,’ added his eyes tremulously.

John observed that they had been walking along the path. On her suggestion they sat down together upon the moss, the softness of which he failed to determine.

He was critical about women. A single defect – a thick ankle, a hoarse voice, a glass eye – was enough to make him utterly indifferent. And here for the first time in his life he was beside a girl who seemed to him the incarnation of physical perfection.

‘Are you from the East?’ asked Kismine with charming interest.

‘No,’ answered John simply. ‘I’m from Hades.’

Either she had never heard of Hades, or she could think of no pleasant comment to make upon it, for she did not discuss it further.

‘I’m going East to school this fall,’ she said. ‘D’you think I’ll like it? I’m going to New York to Miss Bulge’s. It’s very strict, but you see over the weekends I’m going to live at home with the family in our New York house, because father heard that the girls had to go walking two by two.’

‘Your father wants you to be proud,’ observed John.

‘We are,’ she answered, her eyes shining with dignity. ‘None of us has ever been punished. Father said we never should be. Once when my sister Jasmine was a little girl she pushed him downstairs and he just got up and limped away.

‘Mother was – well, a little startled,’ continued Kismine, ‘when she heard that you were from – from where you are from, you know. She said that when she was a young girl – but then, you see, she’s a Spaniard and old-fashioned.’

‘Do you spend much time out here?’ asked John, to conceal the fact that he was somewhat hurt by this remark. It seemed an unkind allusion to his provincialism.

‘Percy and Jasmine and I are here every summer, but next summer Jasmine is going to Newport.[35] She’s coming out in London a year from this fall. She’ll be presented at court.’

‘Do you know,’ began John hesitantly, ‘you’re much more sophisticated than I thought you were when I first saw you?’

‘Oh, no, I’m not,’ she exclaimed hurriedly. ‘Oh, I wouldn’t think of being. I think that sophisticated young people areterriblycommon, don’t you? I’m not at all, really. If you say I am, I’m going to cry.’

She was so distressed that her lip was trembling. John was impelled to protest:

‘I didn’t mean that; I only said it to tease you.’

‘Because I wouldn’t mind if Iwere,’ she persisted. ‘but I’m not. I’m very innocent and girlish. I never smoke, or drink, or read anything except poetry. I know scarcely any mathematics or chemistry. I dress verysimply – in fact, I scarcely dress at all. I think sophisticated is the last thing you can say about me. I believe that girls ought to enjoy their youths in a wholesome way.’

‘I do, too,’ said John, heartily.

Kismine was cheerful again. She smiled at him, and a still-born tear dripped from the corner of one blue eye.

‘I like you,’ she whispered, intimately. ‘Are you going to spend all your time with Percy while you’re here, or will you be nice to me? Just think – I’m absolutely fresh ground. I’ve never had a boy in love with me in all my life. I’ve never been allowed even toseeboys alone – except Percy. I came all the way out here into this grove hoping to run into you, where the family wouldn’t be around.’

Deeply flattered, John bowed from the hips as he had been taught at dancing school in Hades.

‘We’d better go now,’ said Kismine sweetly. ‘I have to be with mother at eleven. You haven’t asked me to kiss you once. I thought boys always did that nowadays.’

John drew himself up proudly.

‘Some of them do,’ he answered, ‘but not me. Girls don’t do that sort of thing – in Hades.’

Side by side they walked back toward the house.

### VI

John stood facing Mr. Braddock Washington in the full sunlight. The elder man was about forty with a proud, vacuous face, intelligent eyes, and a robust figure. In the mornings he smelt of horses – the best horses. He carried a plain walking-stick of gray birch with a single large opal for a grip. He and Percy were showing John around.

‘The slaves’ quarters are there.’ His walking-stick indicated a cloister of marble on their left that ran in graceful Gothic along the side of the mountain. ‘In my youth I was distracted for a while from the business of life by a period of absurd idealism. During that time they lived in luxury. For instance, I equipped every one of their rooms with a tile bath.’

‘I suppose,’ ventured John, with an ingratiating laugh, ‘that they used the bathtubs to keep coal in. Mr. Schnlitzer-Murphy told me that once he – ’

‘The opinions of Mr. Schnlitzer-Murphy are of little importance, I should imagine,’ interrupted Braddock Washington, coldly. ‘My slaves did not keep coal in their bathtubs. They had orders to bathe every day, and they did. If they hadn’t I might have ordered a sulphuric acid shampoo. I discontinued the baths for quite another reason. Several of them caught cold and died. Water is not good for certain races – except as a beverage.’

John laughed, and then decided to nod his head in sober agreement. Braddock Washington made him uncomfortable.

‘All these negroes are descendants of the ones my father brought North with him. There are about two hundred and fifty now. You notice that they’ve lived so long apart from the world that their original dialect has become an almost indistinguishable patois. We bring a few of them up to speak English – my secretary and two or three of the house servants.

‘This is the golf course,’ he continued, as they strolled along the velvet winter grass. ‘It’s all a green, you see – no fairway, no rough, no hazards.’

He smiled pleasantly at John.

‘Many men in the cage, father?’ asked Percy suddenly.

Braddock Washington stumbled, and let forth an involuntary curse.

‘One less than there should be,’ he ejaculated darkly – and then added after a moment, ‘We’ve had difficulties.’

‘Mother was telling me,’ exclaimed Percy, ‘that Italian teacher – ’

‘A ghastly error,’ said Braddock Washington angrily. ‘But of course there’s a good chance that we may have got him. Perhaps he fell somewhere in the woods or stumbled over a cliff. And then there’s always the probability that if he did get away his story wouldn’t be believed. Nevertheless, I’ve had two dozen men looking for him in different towns around here.’

‘And no luck?’

‘Some. Fourteen of them reported to my agent that they’d each killed a man answering to that description, but of course it was probably only the reward they were after – ’

He broke off. They had come to a large cavity in the earth about the circumference of a merry-go-round and covered by a strong iron grating. Braddock Washington beckoned to John, and pointed his cane down through the grating. John stepped to the edge and gazed. Immediately his ears were assailed by a wild clamor from below.

‘Come on down to Hell!’

‘Hello, kiddo, how’s the air up there?’

‘Hey! Throw us a rope!’

‘Got an old doughnut, Buddy, or a couple of second-hand sandwiches?’

‘Say, fella, if you’ll push down that guy you’re with, we’ll show you a quick disappearance scene.’

‘Paste him one for me, will you?’

It was too dark to see clearly into the pit below, but John could tell from the coarse optimism and rugged vitality of the remarks and voices that they proceeded from middle-class Americans of the more spirited type. Then Mr. Washington put out his cane and touched a button in the grass, and the scene below sprang into light.

‘These are some adventurous mariners who had the misfortune to discover El Dorado,’ he remarked.

Below them there had appeared a large hollow in the earth shaped like the interior of a bowl. The sides were steep and apparently of polished glass, and on its slightly concave surface stood about two dozen men clad in the half costume, half uniform, of aviators. Their upturned faces, lit with wrath with malice, with despair, with cynical humor, were covered by long growths of beard, but with the exception of a few who had pined perceptibly away, they seemed to be a well-fed, healthy lot.

Braddock Washington drew a garden chair to the edge of the pit and sat down.

‘Well, how are you, boys?’ he inquired genially.

A chorus of execration in which all joined except a few too dispirited to cry out, rose up into the sunny air, but Braddock Washington heard it with unruffled composure. When its last echo had died away he spoke again.

‘Have you thought up a way out of your difficulty?’

From here and there among them a remark floated up.

‘We decided to stay here for love!’

‘Bring us up there and we’ll find us a way!’

Braddock Washington waited until they were again quiet. Then he said:

‘I’ve told you the situation. I don’t want you here. I wish to heaven I’d never seen you. Your own curiosity got you here, and any time that you can think of a way out which protects me and my interests I’ll be glad to consider it. But so long as you confine your efforts to digging tunnels – yes, I know about the new one you’ve started – you won’t get very far. This isn’t as hard on you as you make it out, with all your howling for the loved ones at home. If you were the type who worried much about the loved ones at home, you’d never have taken up aviation.’

A tall man moved apart from the others, and held up his hand to call his captor’s attention to what he was about to say.

‘Let me ask you a few questions!’ he cried. ‘You pretend to be a fair-minded man.’

‘How absurd. How could a man ofmyposition be fair-minded toward you? You might as well speak of a Spaniard being fair-minded toward a piece of steak.’

At this harsh observation the faces of the two dozen steaks fell, but the tall man continued:

‘All right!’ he cried. ‘We’ve argued this out before. You’re not a humanitarian and you’re not fair-minded, but you’re human – at least you say you are – and you ought to be able to put yourself in our place for long enough to think how – how – how – ’

‘How what?’ demanded Washington, coldly.

‘ – how unnecessary – ’

‘Not to me.’

‘Well, – how cruel – ’

‘We’ve covered that. Cruelty doesn’t exist where self-preservation is involved. You’ve been soldiers; you know that. Try another.’

‘Well, then, how stupid.’

‘There,’ admitted Washington, ‘I grant you that. But try to think of an alternative. I’ve offered to have all or any of you painlessly executed if you wish. I’ve offered to have your wives, sweethearts, children, and mothers kidnapped and brought out here. I’ll enlarge your place down there and feed and clothe you the rest of your lives. If there was some method of producing permanent amnesia[36] I’d have all of you operated on and released immediately, somewhere outside of my preserves. But that’s as far as my ideas go.’

‘How about trusting us not to peach on you?’ cried some one.

‘You don’t proffer that suggestion seriously,’ said Washington, with an expression of scorn. ‘I did take out one man to teach my daughter Italian. Last week he got away.’

A wild yell of jubilation went up suddenly from two dozen throats and a pandemonium of joy ensued. The prisoners clog-danced and cheered and yodled and wrestled with one another in a sudden uprush of animal spirits. They even ran up the glass sides of the bowl as far as they could, and slid back to the bottom upon the natural cushions of their bodies. The tall man started a song in which they all joined —

‘oh, we’ll hang the Kaiser
on a sour apple tree – ’

Braddock Washington sat in inscrutable silence until the song was over. ‘You see,’ he remarked, when he could gain a modicum of attention. ‘I bear you no ill-will. I like to see you enjoying yourselves. That’s why I didn’t tell you the whole story at once. The man – what was his name? Critchtichiello? – was shot by some of my agents in fourteen different places.’

Not guessing that the places referred to were cities, the tumult of rejoicing subsided immediately.

‘Nevertheless,’ cried Washington with a touch of anger, ‘he tried to run away. Do you expect me to take chances with any of you after an experience like that?’

Again a series of ejaculations went up.

‘Sure!’

‘Would your daughter like to learn Chinese?’

‘Hey, I can speak Italian! My mother was a wop.[37]’

‘Maybe she’d like t’learna speak N’Yawk!’

‘If she’s the little one with the big blue eyes I can teach her a lot of things better than Italian.’

‘I know some Irish songs – and I could hammer brass once’t.’

Mr. Washington reached forward suddenly with his cane and pushed the button in the grass so that the picture below went out instantly, and there remained only that great dark mouth covered dismally with the black teeth of the grating.

‘Hey!’ called a single voice from below, ‘you ain’t goin’ away without givin’ us your blessing?’

But Mr. Washington, followed by the two boys, was already strolling on toward the ninth hole of the golf course, as though the pit and its contents were no more than a hazard over which his facile iron had triumphed with ease.

### VII

July under the lee of the diamond mountain was a month of blanket nights and of warm, glowing days. John and Kismine were in love. He did not know that the little gold football(inscribed with the legend Pro deo et patria et St. Midas[38])which he had given her rested on a platinum chain next to her bosom. But it did. And she for her part was not aware that a large sapphire which had dropped one day from her simple coiffure was stowed away tenderly in John’s jewel box.

Late one afternoon when the ruby and ermine music room was quiet, they spent an hour there together. He held her hand and she gave him such a look that he whispered her name aloud. She bent toward him – then hesitated.

‘Did you say “Kismine”?’ she asked softly, ‘or – ’

She had wanted to be sure. She thought she might have misunderstood.

Neither of them had ever kissed before, but in the course of an hour it seemed to make little difference.

The afternoon drifted away. That night when a last breath of music drifted down from the highest tower, they each lay awake, happily dreaming over the separate minutes of the day. They had decided to be married as soon as possible.

### VIII

Every day Mr. Washington and the two young men went hunting or fishing in the deep forests or played golf around the somnolent course – games which John diplomatically allowed his host to win – or swam in the mountain coolness of the lake. John found Mr. Washington a somewhat exacting personality – utterly uninterested in any ideas or opinions except his own. Mrs. Washington was aloof and reserved at all times. She was apparently indifferent to her two daughters, and entirely absorbed in her son Percy, with whom she held interminable conversations in rapid Spanish at dinner.

# Примечания

1

Hades – Аид, в древнегреческой мифологии – подземное царство мертвых.

2

The Mississippi River – крупнейшая река в Северной Америке; Миссисипи вместе с притоком Миссури является самой длинной рекой в мире.

3

New England – Новая Англия, регион на северо-востоке США, включающий в себя шесть штатов; назван так капитаном Смитом в 1614 г.

4

Midas – Мидас, в греко-римской мифологии – царь Фригии, известный своей глупостью и жадностью.

5

Boston – Бостон, город в США на северо-восточном побережье Атлантики в заливе Массачусетс.

6

Chicago – Чикаго, крупный город на северо-западе штата Иллинойс.

7

Victorian – викторианский, относящийся к стилю в искусстве, архитектуре, литературе времен королевы Виктории (1837–1901).

8

Preparatory school – в США – частная школа, в которой учеников готовят к поступлению в колледж.

9

The Ritz Carlton Hotel – роскошный отель «Ритц-Карлтон». Сезар Ритц (1850–1918) создал сеть отелей, включая отель «Ритц» в Париже (1898) и «Ритц-Карлтон» в Лондоне (1906).

10

Montana – штат в США на границе с Канадой.

11

Brakeman – в США – тормозной кондуктор на железной дороге.

12

Protagonist – главное действующее лицо в пьесе, литературном произведении или реальном жизненном событии.

13

The Montana Rockies – Скалистые горы на западе штата Монтана, район высоких горных вершин и глубоких ущелий.

14

Croesus – Крез (VI век до н. э.), последний царь Лидии, древнего государства в Малой Азии; Крез славился своим несметным богатством, и позднее его имя стало символом богатства.

15

Château – дворец или замок, расположенный в сельской местности.

16

Acciaccare – музыкальный термин, обозначающий короткий, сжатый, форсированный звук.

17

Rococo – изысканный стиль в искусстве и архитектуре XVIII в.

18

Titania – Титания, персонаж комедии У. Шекспира «Сон в летнюю ночь»; напоминает Геру, верховную богиню в греческой мифологии.

19

Platonic – имеющий отношение к Платону (428 до н. э.–348 до н. э.), одному из величайших древнегреческих философов, или к его учению.

20

The Adriatic Sea – Адриатическое море, часть Средиземного моря между Италией и Балканским полуостровом.

21

Piccolo – маленькая флейта, издающая нежный звук.

22

Virginian – имеющий отношение к Вирджинии, штату на Атлантическом побережье США, к югу от Вашингтона; штат назван в честь Елизаветы I Английской, королевы-девы (1533–1603).

23

George Washington – Джордж Вашингтон (1732–1799), главнокомандующий Американской революционной армией во время Гражданской войны в США в 1775–1783 гг. и первый президент Соединенных Штатов (1789–1797).

24

Lord Baltimore – Джордж Калверт, основатель первой Британской колонии в Мэриленде, к северу от Вирджинии; его сын Леонард Калверт (1606–1647) был первым губернатором колонии Мэриленд.

25

The Civil War – четырехлетняя Гражданская война (1861–1865) между федеральным правительством и штатами Юга, которые хотели выйти из Союза.

26

St. Paul – Сент-Пол, город на реке Миссисипи в штате Миннесота.

27

the Catskills – Катскилл, горы в США, часть горного массива Аппалачи к северо-западу от Нью-Йорка, штат Нью-Йорк.

28

Jersey – Нью-Джерси, один из тринадцати первых штатов на Атлантическом побережье США.

29

Long Island – Лонг-Айленд, остров в Атлантическом океане вблизи устья реки Гудзон на юге штата Нью-Йорк.

30

Proclamation – декларация, воззвание, официальное или публичное заявление.

31

Alias – вымышленное имя, которое человек использует в определенных случаях или для каких-либо целей.

32

The Babylonian Empire – Вавилон, древняя империя и очаг культуры в Месопотамии, территории между реками Тигр и Евфрат.

33

Bric-à-brac – безделушки, не имеющие особой ценности.

34

Nymph – нимфа, в греко-римской мифологии – божество, живущее в реках, лесах и т. д.; красивая молодая женщина (перен.).

35

Newport – Ньюпорт, город на юго-западе Род-Айленда, основанный в 1639 г.

36

Amnesia – амнезия, потеря памяти.

37

Wop – американское жаргонное уничижительное прозвище итальянцев.

38

Pro deo et patria et St. Midas – За Бога, отечество и Св. Мидаса (лат.; девиз).