"Conrad, Joseph - Tomorrow" - читать интересную книгу автора (Conrad Joseph)

TO-MORROW

by Joseph Conrad

What was known of Captain Hagberd in the little
seaport of Colebrook was not exactly in his favour.
He did not belong to the place. He had come to
settle there under circumstances not at all myste-
rious--he used to be very communicative about
them at the time--but extremely morbid and un-
reasonable. He was possessed of some little money
evidently, because he bought a plot of ground, and
had a pair of ugly yellow brick cottages run up
very cheaply. He occupied one of them himself
and let the other to Josiah Carvil--blind Carvil,
the retired boat-builder--a man of evil repute as a
domestic tyrant.

These cottages had one wall in common, shared
in a line of iron railing dividing their front gar-
dens; a wooden fence separated their back gardens.
Miss Bessie Carvil was allowed, as it were of right,
to throw over it the tea-cloths, blue rags, or an
apron that wanted drying.

"It rots the wood, Bessie my girl," the captain
would remark mildly, from his side of the fence,
each time he saw her exercising that privilege.

She was a tall girl; the fence was low, and
she could spread her elbows on the top. Her hands
would be red with the bit of washing she had done,
but her forearms were white and shapely, and she
would look at her father's landlord in silence--in
an informed silence which had an air of knowledge,
expectation and desire.

"It rots the wood," repeated Captain Hagberd.
"It is the only unthrifty, careless habit I know in
you. Why don't you have a clothes line out in your
back yard?"

Miss Carvil would say nothing to this--she only
shook her head negatively. The tiny back yard
on her side had a few stone-bordered little beds of
black earth, in which the simple flowers she found
time to cultivate appeared somehow extravagantly
overgrown, as if belonging to an exotic clime; and
Captain Hagberd's upright, hale person, clad in
No. 1 sail-cloth from head to foot, would be emer-