"Robert F. Young - Thirty Days Had September" - читать интересную книгу автора (Young Robert F)

I don't want to miss a minute of it."
Billy relented. "Oh, all right!" he said. But he gave Miss Jones a wide berth as he
walked into the kitchen and took his place at the table.




***

Romeo Montague twisted a cigarette with deft fingers, put it between
sombrero-shadowed lips and lit it with a kitchen match. Then he guided his sleek
palomino down the moonlit hillside to the Capulet ranch house.
"Guess I better be a mite keerful," he soliloquized. "These hyar Capulets, being
sheepherders an' hereditary enemies o' my fambly, who are noble cattlemen, would
gun me down afore I knowed what happened if'n they got the chance. But this gal I
met at the wrassle tonight is worth a mite o' danger."
Danby frowned. He had nothing against rewriting the classics, but it seemed to
him that the rewrite men were overdoing the cattlemen-sheepmen deal. Laura and
Billy didn't seem to mind, however. They were hunched forward in their viewchairs,
gazing raptly at the 120" screen. So maybe the rewrite men knew what they were
doing at that.
Even Miss Jones seemed interested … but that was impossible, Danby quickly
reminded himself. She couldn't be interested. No matter how intelligently her blue
eyes might be focused on the screen, all she was doing, really, was sitting there
wasting her batteries. He should have taken Laura's advice and turned her off—
But somehow he just hadn't had the heart. There was an element of cruelty in
depriving her of life, even temporarily.
Now there was a ridiculous notion, if ever a man had one. Danby shifted irritably
in his viewchair, and his irritation intensified when he realized that he'd lost the thread
of the play. By the time he regained it, Romeo had scaled the wall of the Capulet
rancho, had crept through the orchard, and was standing in a gaudy garden beneath
a low balcony.
Juliet Capulet stepped onto the balcony via a pair of anachronistic french doors.
She was wearing a white cowgirl—or sheepgirl—suit with a thigh-length skirt, and a
wide-brimmed sombrero crowned her bleached blond tresses. She leaned over the
balcony railing, peered down into the garden. "Where y'all at, Rome?" she drawled.
"Why, this is ridiculous!" Miss Jones said abruptly. "The words, the costumes,
the action, the place— Everything's wrong!"
Danby stared at her. He remembered suddenly what the proprietor of the
secondhand store had said about her responding to scenes and situations as well as
words. He'd assumed, of course, that the old man had meant scenes and situations
directly connected with her duties as a teacher, not all scenes and situations.
An annoying little premonition skipped through Danby's mind. Both Laura and
Billy, he noticed, had turned from their visual repast and were regarding Miss Jones
with disbelieving eyes. The moment was a critical one.
He cleared his throat. "The play isn't really 'wrong,' Miss Jones," he said. "It's just
been rewritten. You see, nobody would watch it in the original, and if no one
watched it, what would be the sense of anyone sponsoring it?"
"But did they have to make it a Western?"
Danby glanced apprehensively at his wife. The disbelief in her eyes had been