"kidnapped" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kipling Rudyard)

Properly speaking, Government should establish a Matrimonial
Department, efficiently officered, with a Jury of Matrons, a Judge
of the Chief Court, a Senior Chaplain, and an Awful Warning, in the
shape of a love-match that has gone wrong, chained to the trees in the
courtyard. All marriages should be made through the Department,
which might be subordinate to the Educational Department, under the
same penalty as that attaching to the transfer of land without a
stamped document. But Government won't take suggestions. It pretends
that it is too busy. However, I will put my notion on record, and
explain the example that illustrates the theory.
{KIDNAPPED ^paragraph 10}
Once upon a time, there was a good young man- a first-class
officer in his own Department- a man with a career before him and,
possibly, a K. C. I. E. at the end of it. All his superiors spoke well
of him, because he knew how to hold his tongue and his pen at the
proper times. There are, to-day, only eleven men in India who
possess this secret; and they have all, with one exception, attained
great honour and enormous incomes.
This good young man was quiet and self-contained- too old for his
years by far. Which always carries its own punishment. Had a Subaltern
or a Tea-Planter's Assistant, or anybody who enjoys life and has no
care for to-morrow, done what he tried to do, not a soul would have
cared. But when Peythroppe- the estimable, virtuous, economical,
quiet, hard-working, young Peythroppe- fell, there was a flutter
through five Departments.
The manner of his fall was in this way. He met a Miss Castries-
d'Castries it was originally, but the family dropped the d' for
administrative reasons- and he fell in love with her even more
energetically than he worked. Understand clearly that there was not
a breath of a word to be said against Miss Castries- not a shadow of a
breath. She was good and very lovely- possessed what innocent people
at Home call a 'Spanish' complexion, with thick blue-black hair
growing low down on the forehead, into a 'widow's peak,' and big
violet eyes under eyebrows as black and as straight as the borders
of a "Gazette Extraordinary," when a big man dies. But- but- but-
Well, she was a оveryп * sweet girl and very pious, but for many
reasons she was 'impossible.' Quite so. All good Mammas know what
'impossible' means. It was obviously absurd that Peythroppe should
marry her. The little opal-tinted onyx at the base of her finger-nails
said this as plainly as print. Further, marriage with Miss Castries
meant marriage with several other Castries- Honorary Lieutenant
Castries her Papa, Mrs. Eulalie Castries her Mamma, and all the
ramifications of the Castries family, on incomes ranging from Rs.
175 to Rs. 470 a month, and оtheirп wives and connections again.
-
* In DOS versions italicized text is enclosed in оchevronsп.
{KIDNAPPED ^paragraph 15}
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It would have been cheaper for Peythroppe to have assaulted a
Commissioner with a dog-whip, or to have burned the records of a