"Joe Haldeman - Guardian" - читать интересную книгу автора (Haldeman Joe)

woman, avoiding even the appearance of sin, and that was how I presented myself to the
old-fashioned man. He left with a perplexed expression, and a few minutes later I
realized he might have been talking to Daniel downstairs, who would have been faithful
to our cover story of widowhood.
Toward noon, two men in white set up a large folding table and covered it with a
starched white cloth. They brought up a large sliced ham and a dark brown smoked
turkey, and then platters of bread and cakes and bowls of fruit. Finally, a huge punch
bowl with a block of ice, into which they poured several pitchers of cider, some sliced-up
lemons and oranges, and two jugs of what smelled like pure alcohol. Meanwhile,
someone below rang a loud tinkling bell, like a triangle, and shouted "Come and get it!"
I guess the stairway had been closed off during the preparations, which was why
I'd had the hurricane deck to myself for an hour. Now a whole crowd surged up, laughing
and chattering. The two young boys struggled up behind them, lugging a washtub full of
iced-down bottled drinks. I was glad to see Daniel was helping them; not so glad to see
him take a beer from the tub when they set it down. He looked at me warily, and I said
one was all right, for the Fourth. Just don't go near that punch.
The pilot came up to carve the turkey and tell a few stories: progressively less
believable tall tales. The only other unescorted ladies, two German girls and a pinch-
faced old maid, sat down at my table. The old woman introduced herself as Miss Stroff,
and then began to knit with furious concentration. I speak no German, but the girls and I
were able to hold a simple conversation in French.
They had gone more than halfway around the world! Sisters, they had left Munich
with their father after their mother's death a few years before. He had gone to Kowloon,
China, working with a tea export concern, and then moved on to California after that
enterprise failed. They lived in a German enclave, Sutter's Mill, while their father worked
at a small gold mine. It was hard work and more dangerous than they knew; he
apparently died of progressive arsenic poisoning.
For most of a year they'd worked as domestics for a wealthy German family,
eking out their income with "gifts from gentlemen," until they had saved enough to return
to Germany. Prostitutes! They blushed and looked at the floor upon admitting this. I was
truly at a loss for words. (The old woman, who before had given no sign of being able to
speak French, gasped and left the table.)
They were headed for New York to take a steamer across, but the Pullman strike
stranded them. Then they found it would be less expensive to go down the Mississippi
and proceed directly from New Orleans to Europe. I was sure they were misinformed
about that, but kept my own counsel. They were committed to this course, and it was
obvious in their voices that they had to leave this horrible place, America, and seek a
normal life in Germany.
A gunshot frightened all of us, but it was followed immediately by laughter, and
then a fusillade. Some men in the bow, below, were shooting at a floating bottle. That
became the main entertainment for the afternoon. Someone brought out a fowling piece,
even louder than the revolvers, to shoot at bottles in midair. If anybody else was bothered
by increasingly pixilated men firing weapons every which way, they didn't show it. I
spent a lot of time in my cabin, reading what would be one of the most important books
of my life.
The German girls had read a lot of French literature, and I had read a bit. The
elder one had just finished a novel by Camille Flammarion, whom I knew not as a
novelist but as a science writer. Just a few months before, I had read his new Popular
Astronomy, from the Philadelphia library, in English translation.
She loaned me the novel, Lumen, which I took downstairs (tolerating the heat