Любимые рассказы на английском / Best Short Stories

He was beginning to feel grateful to her for that something final in her tone which had eased the strain.

�Why not tell me a tale?’

�A tale!’ He was really amazed.

�Yes. Why not?’

These words came with a slight petulance, the hint of a loved woman’s capricious will, which is capricious only because it feels itself to be a law, embarrassing sometimes and always difficult to elude.

�Why not?’ he repeated, with a slightly mocking accent, as though he had been asked to give her the moon.

But now he was feeling a little angry with her for that feminine mobility that slips out of an emotion as easily as out of a splendid gown.

He heard her say, a little unsteadily with a sort of fluttering intonation which made him think suddenly of a butterfly’s flight:

�You used to tell – your – your simple and – and professional – tales very well at one time. Or well enough to interest me. You had a – a sort of art – in the days – the days before the war.’

�Really?’ he said, with involuntary gloom.

�But now, you see, the war is going on,’ he continued in such a dead, equable tone that she felt a slight chill fall over her shoulders. And yet she persisted. For there’s nothing more unswerving in the world than a woman’s caprice.

�It could be a tale not of this world,’ she explained.

�You want a tale of the other, the better world?’ he asked, with a matter-of-fact surprise. �You must evoke for that task those who have already gone there.

’

�No. I don’t mean that. I mean another – some other – world. In the universe – not in heaven.’

�I am relieved. But you forget that I have only five days’ leave.’

�Yes. And I’ve also taken a five days’ leave from – from my duties.’

�I like that word.’

�What word?’

�Duty.’

�It is horrible – sometimes.’

�Oh, that’s because you think it’s narrow. But it isn’t. It contains infinities, and – and so – ’

�What is this jargon?’

He disregarded the interjected scorn.

�An infinity of absolution, for instance,’ he continued. �But as to this another world – who’s going to look for it and for the tale that is in it?’

�You,’ she said, with a strange, almost rough, sweetness of assertion.

He made a shadowy movement of assent in his chair, the irony of which not even the gathered darkness could render mysterious.

�As you will.