"Eyes" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wharton Edith)

Etext of The Eyes
by Edith Wharton
Scribner's Magazine 47 (June 1910):

"The Eyes."

I

WE had been put in the mood for ghosts, that evening, after an
excellent dinner at our old friend Culwin's, by a tale of Fred
Murchard's -- the narrative of a strange personal visitation.

Seen through the haze of our cigars, and by the drowsy gleam of a
coal fire, Culwin's library, with its oak walls and dark old bindings,
made a good setting for such evocations; and ghostly experiences
at first hand being, after Murchard's brilliant opening, the only
kind acceptable to us, we proceeded to take stock of our group and
tax each member for a contribution. There were eight of us, and
seven contrived, in a manner more or less adequate, to fulfil the
condition imposed. It surprised us all to find that we could muster
such a show of supernatural impressions, for none of us, excepting
Murchard himself and young Phil Frenham -- whose story was the
slightest of the lot -- had the habit of sending our souls into the
invisible. So that, on the whole, we had every reason to be proud
of our seven "exhibits," and none of us would have dreamed of
expecting an eighth from our host.

Our old friend, Mr. Andrew Culwin, who had sat back in his
arm-chair, listening and blinking through the smoke circles with
the cheerful tolerance of a wise old idol, was not the kind of man
likely to be favoured with such contacts, though he had
imagination enough to enjoy, without envying, the superior
privileges of his guests. By age and by education he belonged to
the stout Positivist tradition, and his habit of thought had been
formed in the days of the epic struggle between physics and
metaphysics. But he had been, then and always, essentially a
spectator, a humorous detached observer of the immense muddled
variety show of life, slipping out of his seat now and then for a
brief dip into the convivialities at the back of the house, but never,
as far as one knew, showing the least desire to jump on the stage
and do a "turn."

Among his contemporaries there lingered a vague tradition of his
having, at a remote period, and in a romantic clime, been wounded
in a duel; but this legend no more tallied with what we younger
men knew of his character than my mother's assertion that he had
once been "a charming little man with nice eyes" corresponded to
any possible reconstitution of his dry thwarted physiognomy.

"He never can have looked like anything but a bundle of sticks,"