"Джон Пассос. One Man's Initiation: 1917 (англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

light from the west.


The rain beat hard on the window-panes of the little room and hissed
down the chimney into the smouldering fire that sent up thick green smoke.
At a plain oak table before the fireplace sat Martin Howe and Tom Randolph,
Tom Randolph with his sunburned hands with their dirty nails spread flat and
his head resting on the table between them, so that Martin could see the
stiff black hair on top of his head and the dark nape of his neck going into
shadow under the collar of the flannel shirt.
"Oh, God, it's too damned absurd! An arrangement for mutual suicide and
no damned other thing," said Randolph, raising his head.
"A certain jolly asinine grotesqueness, though. I mean, if you were God
and could look at it like that . . . Oh, Randy, why do they enjoy hatred
so?"
"A question of taste . . . as the lady said when she kissed the cow."
"But it isn't. It isn't natural for people to hate that way, it can't
be. It even disgusts the perfectly stupid damn-fool people, like Higgins,
who believes that the Bible was written in God's own handwriting and that
the newspapers tell the truth."
"It makes me sick at ma stomach, Howe, to talk to one of those
Hun-hatin' women, if they're male or female."
"It is a stupid affair, la vie, as the doctor at P.I. said yesterday.
.
. ."
"Hell, yes. . ."
They sat silent, watching the rain beat on the window, and run down in
sparkling finger-like streams.
"What I can't get over is these Frenchwomen." Randolph threw back his
head and laughed. "They're so bloody frank. Did I tell you about what
happened to me at that last village on the Verdun road?"
"I was lyin' down for a nap under a plumtree, a wonderfully nice place
near a li'l brook an' all, an' suddenly that crazy Jane. . . . You know the
one that used to throw stones at us out of that broken-down house at the
corner of the road. . . . Anyway, she comes up to me with a funny look in
her eyes an' starts makin' love to me. I had a regular wrastlin' match
gettin' away from her."
"Funny position for you to be in, getting away from a woman."
"But doesn't that strike you funny? Why, down where I come from a
drunken mulatto woman wouldn't act like that. They all keep up a fake of not
wantin' your attentions." His black eyes sparkled, and he laughed his deep
ringing laugh, that made the withered woman smile as she set an omelette
before them.
"Voilа, messieurs," she said with a grand air, as if it were a boar's
head that she was serving.
Three French infantrymen came into the cafй, shaking the rain off their
shoulders.
"Nothing to drink but champagne at four francs fifty," shouted Howe.
"Dirty night out, isn't it?"
"We'll drink that, then!"