75 лучших рассказов / 75 Best Short Stories

But when the important course, the fish course, was being brought on, there was – how shall I put it? – A vivid shadow, a projection of his personality, which told that he was hovering near. The sacred fish course consisted (to the eyes of the vulgar) in a sort of monstrous pudding, about the size and shape of a wedding cake, in which some considerable number of interesting fishes had finally lost the shapes which God had given to them. The Twelve True Fishermen took up their celebrated fish knives and fish forks, and approached it as gravely as if every inch of the pudding cost as much as the silver fork it was eaten with.

�Nowhere,’ said Mr. Audley, in a deep bass voice, turning to the speaker and nodding his venerable head a number of times. �Nowhere, assuredly, except here.

Here he was interrupted and even agitated for a moment by the removal of his plate, but he recaptured the valuable thread of his thoughts. �It was represented to me that the same could be done at the Cafe Anglais. Nothing like it, sir,’ he said, shaking his head ruthlessly, like a hanging judge. �Nothing like it.’

�Overrated place,’ said a certain Colonel Pound, speaking (by the look of him) for the first time for some months.

�Oh, I don’t know,’ said the Duke of Chester, who was an optimist, �it’s jolly good for some things. You can’t beat it at—’

A waiter came swiftly along the room, and then stopped dead. His stoppage was as silent as his tread; but all those vague and kindly gentlemen were so used to the utter smoothness of the unseen machinery which surrounded and supported their lives, that a waiter doing anything unexpected was a start and a jar. They felt as you and I would feel if the inanimate world disobeyed – if a chair ran away from us.

The waiter stood staring a few seconds, while there deepened on every face at table a strange shame which is wholly the product of our time. It is the combination of modern humanitarianism with the horrible modern abyss between the souls of the rich and poor. A genuine historic aristocrat would have thrown things at the waiter, beginning with empty bottles, and very probably ending with money.