"Jack London - Like Argus of the Ancient Times" - читать интересную книгу автора (London Jack)

STORY: LIKE ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES




IT was the summer of 1897, and there was trouble in the Tarwater
family. Grandfather Tarwater, after remaining properly subdued and
crushed for a quiet decade, had broken out again. This time it was
the Klondike fever. His first and one unvarying symptom of such
attacks was song. One chant only he raised, though he remembered
no more than the first stanza and but three lines of that. And the
family knew his feet were itching and his brain was tingling with
the old madness, when he lifted his hoarse-cracked voice, now
falsetto-cracked, in:


Like Argus of the ancient times,
We leave this modern Greece,
Tum-tum, tum-tum, tum, tum, tum-tum,
To shear the Golden Fleece.


Ten years earlier he had lifted the chant, sung to the air of the
"Doxology," when afflicted with the fever to go gold-mining in
Patagonia. The multitudinous family had sat upon him, but had had
a hard time doing it. When all else had failed to shake his
resolution, they had applied lawyers to him, with the threat of
getting out guardianship papers and of confining him in the state
asylum for the insane - which was reasonable for a man who had, a
quarter of a century before, speculated away all but ten meagre
acres of a California principality, and who had displayed no better
business acumen ever since.

The application of lawyers to John Tarwater was like the
application of a mustard plaster. For, in his judgment, they were
the gentry, more than any other, who had skinned him out of the
broad Tarwater acres. So, at the time of his Patagonian fever, the
very thought of so drastic a remedy was sufficient to cure him. He
quickly demonstrated he was not crazy by shaking the fever from him
and agreeing not to go to Patagonia.

Next, he demonstrated how crazy he really was, by deeding over to
his family, unsolicited, the ten acres on Tarwater Flat, the house,
barn, outbuildings, and water-rights. Also did he turn over the
eight hundred dollars in bank that was the long-saved salvage of
his wrecked fortune. But for this the family found no cause for
committal to the asylum, since such committal would necessarily
invalidate what he had done.

"Grandfather is sure peeved," said Mary, his oldest daughter,