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

"She said Billy's teacher wasn't qualified to teach horses."
"And tell him what she said about Hector and Achilles!"
Laura sniffed. "She said it was a shame to make a cowboy-and-Indian melodrama
out of a classic like the Iliad and call it education."
The story came out gradually. Miss Jones apparently had gone on an intellectual
rampage from the moment Laura had turned her on in the morning to the moment
Laura had turned her off. According to Miss Jones, everything in the Danby
household was wrong, from the teleducation programs Billy watched on the little red
TV set in his room and the morning and afternoon programs Laura watched on the
big TV set in the living room, to the pattern of the wallpaper in the hallway (little red
Cadillettes rollicking along interlaced ribbons of highways), the windshield picture
window in the kitchen, and the dearth of books.
"Can you imagine?" Laura said. "She actually thinks books are still being
published!"
"All I want to know," Danby said, "is did she hit him?"
"I'm coming to that—"
About three o' clock, Miss Jones had been dusting in Billy's room. Billy was
watching his lessons dutifully, sitting at his little desk as nice and quiet as you please,
absorbed in the efforts of the cowboys to take the Indian village of Troy, when all of
a sudden Miss Jones swept across the room like a mad woman, uttered her
sacrilegious remark about the alteration of the Iliad, and turned off the set right in the
middle of the lesson. That was when Billy had begun to scream and when Laura had
burst into the room and found Miss Jones gripping his arm with one hand and raising
her other hand to deliver the blow.
"I got there in the nick of time," Laura said. "There's no telling what she might
have done. Why, she might have killed him!"
"I doubt it," Danby said. "What happened after that?"
"I grabbed Billy away from her and told her to go back to her case. Then I shut
her off and closed the cover. And believe me, George Danby, it's going to stay
closed! And like I said, tomorrow morning you're going to take her back—if you
want Billy and me to go on living in this house!"




***

Danby felt sick all evening. He picked at his supper, languished through part of the
Western Hour, glancing every now and then, when he was sure Laura wasn't looking,
at the case standing mutely by the door. The heroine of the Western Hour was a
dance hall girl—a 32-24-38 blonde named Antigone. Seemed that her two brothers
had killed each other in a gunfight, and the local sheriff—a character named
Creon—had permitted only one of them a decent burial on Boot Hill, illogically
insisting that the other be left out on the desert for the buzzards to pick at. Antigone
couldn't see it that way at all, and she told her sister Ismene that if one brother rated
a respectable grave, so did the other, and that she, Antigone, was going to see that
he got one, and would Ismene please lend her a hand? But Ismene was chicken, so
Antigone said, All right, she'd take care of the matter herself; then an old prospector
named Teiresias rode into town and—
Danby got up quietly, slipped into the kitchen, and let himself out the back door.