"Lev Kassil. The black book and Schwambrania (англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автораlight-bishops. Then the king and queen each had two rookfuls of tea.
When at last the samovar-king cooled off and we became tired of our game, we decided to put the figures back in their case. Horrors! The black queen was missing! We bruised our knees crawling about, looking under the chairs, the tables and the bookcases. All our efforts were in vain. The wretched queen was gone. Vanished! We finally had to tell Mamma, who soon had everyone up in arms. No matter how hard we all looked, we could not find it. A terrible storm was about to break over our cropped heads. Then Papa came home. This was no measly storm. A blizzard, a hurricane, a cyclone, a simoom, a waterspout and a typhoon came crashing down upon us! Papa was furious. He called us vandals and barbarians. He said that one could even teach a wild bear to handle things carefully, and all we knew how to do was wreck everything we touched, and he would not stand for such destructiveness and vandalism. "Into the corner, both of you! And stay there!" he shouted. "Vandals!" We looked at each other and burst into tears. "If I'd have known I was going to have such a Papa, I'd never get borned!" Oska bawled. Mamma blinked hard. She was about to shed a tear, but that did not soften Papa's heart. We stumbled off to the "medicine chest". For some reason or other that was the name given to the dim storeroom near the bathroom and the kitchen. There were always dusty jars and bottles on the small window-sill, which is probably how the room originally got its name. There was a small low bench in one comer known as "the dock". Papa, who they were punished and so had us sit in the corner instead. There we were, banished to that shameful bench. The medicine chest was as dim as a dungeon. Oska said: "He meant the circus, didn't he? I mean, the part about bears being so careful. Didn't he?" "Yes." "Are vandals part of the circus, too?" "Vandals are robbers," I muttered. "That's what I thought." He sounded pleased. "They have chains tied on them." Annushka, our cook, stuck her head out of the kitchen and threw up her hands. "Goodness! The master's lost his toy and so the babies have to sit here in the dark. My poor little sinners! Do you want me to bring you the cat to play with?" "No!" I growled. The resentment which had gradually died down now welled up in me again. As the unhappy day drew to a close the dim room became darker still. The Earth was turning its back on the Sun. The world, too, turned its back on us. We looked out upon the unjust world from our place of shame. The world was very large, as I had learned in geography, but there was no place for children in it. Grown-ups were in charge of everything on all five continents. They changed the course of history, rode horses, hunted, sailed ships, smoked, made real things, went |
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