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Our hostess’s coffee! Will she tell us her secret?

The baby! The usual baby – we have seen it. To be honest, we do not like babies a lot. But this baby! It is just the kind we wanted for ourselves.

Little Janet’s recitation: “A Visit to the Dentist”! This is genius, surely. She must train for the stage. Her mother does not like the stage. But the theatre will lose such talent.

Every bride is beautiful. Every bride looks charming in a simple dress of – for further particulars see local papers. Every marriage is a cause for universal rejoicing. With our wine-glass in our hand we picture the best life for them. How can it be otherwise? She, the daughter of her mother. (Cheers.) He – well, we all know him. (More cheers.)

We carry our make-believe even into our religion. We sit in church, and say to the God, that we are miserable worms – that there is no good in us. It does us no harm, we must do it anyway.

We make-believe that every woman is good, that every man is honest – until they show us, against our will, that they are not. Then we become very angry with them, and explain to them that they are such sinners, and are not to mix with us perfect people.

Everybody goes to a better world when they have got all they can here. We stand around the open grave and tell each other so. The clergyman is so assured of it that, to save time, they have written out the formula for him and had it printed in a little book.

When I was a child, I was very surprised that everybody went to heaven. I was thinking about all the people that had died, there were too many people there. Almost I felt sorry for the Devil, forgotten and abandoned. I saw him in imagination, a lonely old gentleman, sitting at his gate day after day, doing nothing. An old nurse whom I told my ideas was sure that he would get me anyhow. Maybe I was an evil-hearted boy. But the thought of how he will welcome me, the only human being that he had seen for years, made me almost happy.

At every public meeting the chief speaker is always “a good fellow.” The man from Mars, reading our newspapers, will be convinced that every Member of Parliament was a jovial, kindly, high-hearted, generous-souled saint. We have always listened with pleasure to the brilliant speech of our friend who has just sat down.

The higher one ascends in the social scale, the wider becomes the make-believe. When anything sad happens to a very important person, the lesser people round about him hardly can live. So one wonders sometimes how it is the world continues to exist.

Once upon a time a certain good and great man became ill. I read in the newspaper that the whole nation was in grief. People dining in restaurants dropped their heads upon the table and sobbed. Strangers, meeting in the street, cried like little children. I was abroad at the time, but began to return home. I almost felt ashamed to go. I looked at myself in the mirror, and was shocked at my own appearance: there was a man who had not been in trouble for weeks. Surely, I had a shallow nature. I had had luck with a play in America, and I just could not look grief-stricken. There were moments when I found myself whistling!