Лучшие рассказы О. Генри = The Best of O. Henry

He was a little man with sandy hair and whiskers a good deal like mine. Henpecked? – well, toucans and flamingoes and pelicans all had their bills in him. He wiped the dishes and listened to my mistress tell about the cheap, ragged things the lady with the squirrel-skin coat on the second floor hung out on her line to dry. And every evening while she was getting supper she made him take me out on the end of a string for a walk.

If men knew how women pass the time when they are alone they’d never marry. Laura Lean Jibbey, peanut brittle, a little almond cream on the neck muscles, dishes unwashed, half an hour’s talk with the iceman, reading a package of old letters, a couple of pickles and two bottles of malt extract, one hour peeking through a hole in the window shade into the flat across the air-shaft – that’s about all there is to it.

Twenty minutes before time for him to come home from work she straightens up the house, fixes her rat so it won’t show, and gets out a lot of sewing for a ten-minute bluff.

I led a dog’s life in that flat. ’Most all day I lay there in my corner watching that fat woman kill time. I slept sometimes and had pipe dreams about being out chasing cats into basements and growling at old ladies with black mittens, as a dog was intended to do. Then she would pounce upon me with a lot of that drivelling poodle palaver and kiss me on the nose – but what could I do? A dog can’t chew cloves.

I began to feel sorry for Hubby, dog my cats if I didn’t.

We looked so much alike that people noticed it when we went out; so we shook the streets that Morgan’s cab drives down, and took to climbing the piles of last December’s snow on the streets where cheap people live.

One evening when we were thus promenading, and I was trying to look like a prize St. Bernard, and the old man was trying to look like he wouldn’t have murdered the first organ-grinder he heard play Mendelssohn’s[109 - Mendelssohn – Felix Mendelssohn (1809–1847), a German composer, conductor and pianist of the Romantic period] wedding-march, I looked up at him and said, in my way:

“What are you looking so sour about, you oakum trimmed lobster? She don’t kiss you.

You don’t have to sit on her lap and listen to talk that would make the book of a musical comedy sound like the maxims of Epictetus[110 - Epictetus (55–135) – a Greek philosopher; his teaching was later recorded by Arrian, his pupil.].