10 short stories O. Henry. Книга для чтения на английском языке. Неадаптированный текст

One Street crosses itself a time or two |Одна улица можем пересекать себя раз или два|. An artist once discovered a valuable possibility in this street. Suppose a collector with a bill for paints |сборщик счетов за краски|, paper and canvas should, in traversing this route |по прохождении этого пути|, suddenly meet himself |встречает себя же| coming back, without a cent having been paid on account |безцента, оплаченногопосчету|!

So, to quaint |странный| old Greenwich Village the art people soon came prowling |блуждая|, hunting for north windows and eighteenth-century gables |мезонины| and Dutch attics and low rents.

Then they imported some pewter mugs and a chafing dish |оловянные кружки и жаровню| or two from Sixth Avenue, and became a “colony.”

At the top of a squatty, three-story brick |трехэтажного кирпичного дома| Sue and Johnsy had their studio. “Johnsy” was familiar for |уменьшительное от| Joanna. One was from Maine; the other from California. They had met at the table d’h?te |ресторанчика| of an Eighth Street “Delmonico’s,” and found their tastes in art, chicory salad and bishop sleeves so congenial |схожими| that the joint studio resulted.

That was in May. In November a cold, unseen stranger, whom the doctors called Pneumonia, stalked about |ходил вокруг да около| the colony, touching one here and there with his icy fingers. Over on the east side this ravager strode boldly |этот душегуб шагал смело|, smiting |поражая| his victims by scores |кучами|, but his feet trod slowly |его ноги медленно плелись| through the maze of the narrow and moss-grown |в лабиринте узких и поросших мхом…| “places.

”

Mr. Pneumonia was not what you would call a chivalric |галантным| old gentleman. A mite |миниатюрная| of a little woman with blood thinned by California zephyrs |зефиры – южные ветры| was hardly fair game for the red-fisted, short-breathed old duffer |едва ли была достойным соперником для дюжего старого тупицы с красными кулаками и одышкой|.

But Johnsy he smote |свалил|; and she lay, scarcely |едва| moving, on her painted iron bedstead |крашеной железной кровати|, looking through the small Dutch window-panes at the blank side of the next brick house.

One morning the busy doctor invited Sue into the hallway with a shaggy, grey eyebrow |движением седых косматых бровей|.

«She has one chance in – let us say, ten,” he said, as he shook down the mercury |ртуть| in his clinical thermometer.