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Beasts and Superbeasts-Part35_H.H.Munro(Saki)(1870-1916)_English Literature(文学名著)-第2页

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of Hindostan, amid deserted bungalows, seething bazaars,

and riotous barrack squares, listening to the throbbing



of tom-toms and the distant rattle of musketry.

Jocantha went back to her house in Chelsea, which



struck her for the first time as looking dull and over-

furnished. She had a resentful conviction that Gregory



would be uninteresting at dinner, and that the play would

be stupid after dinner. On the whole her frame of mind



showed a marked divergence from the purring complacency

of Attab, who was again curled up in his corner of the



divan with a great peace radiating from every curve of

his body.



But then he had killed his sparrow.

ON APPROVAL



OF all the genuine Bohemians who strayed from time

to time into the would-be Bohemian circle of the



Restaurant Nuremberg, Owl Street, Soho, none was more

interesting and more elusive than Gebhard Knopfschrank.



He had no friends, and though he treated all the

restaurant frequenters as acquaintances he never seemed



to wish to carry the acquaintanceship beyond the door

that led into Owl Street and the outer world. He dealt



with them all rather as a market woman might deal with

chance passers-by, exhibiting her wares and chattering



about the weather and the slackness of business,

occasionally about rheumatism, but never showing a desire



to penetrate into their daily lives or to dissect their

ambitions.



He was understood to belong to a family of peasant

farmers, somewhere in Pomerania; some two years ago,



according to all that was known of him, he had abandoned

the labours and responsibilities of swine tending and



goose rearing to try his fortune as an artist in London.

"Why London and not Paris or Munich?" he had been



asked by the curious.

Well, there was a ship that left Stolpmunde for



London twice a month, that carried few passengers, but

carried them cheaply; the railway fares to Munich or



Paris were not cheap. Thus it was that he came to select

London as the scene of his great adventure.



The question that had long and seriously agitated

the frequenters of the Nuremberg was whether this goose-



boy migrant was really a soul-driven genius, spreading

his wings to the light, or merely an enterprising young



man who fancied he could paint and was pardonably anxious

to escape from the monotony of rye bread diet and the



sandy, swine-bestrewn plains of Pomerania. There was

reasonable ground for doubt and caution; the artistic



groups that foregathered at the little restaurant

contained so many young women with short hair and so many



young men with long hair, who supposed themselves to be

abnormally gifted in the domain of music, poetry,



painting, or stagecraft, with little or nothing to

support the supposition, that a self-announced genius of



any sort in their midst was inevitablysuspect. On the

other hand, there was the ever-imminent danger of



entertaining, and snubbing, an angel unawares. There had

been the lamentable case of Sledonti, the dramatic poet,



who had been belittled and cold-shouldered in the Owl

Street hall of judgment, and had been afterwards hailed



as a master singer by the Grand Duke Constantine

Constantinovitch - "the most educated of the Romanoffs,"



according to Sylvia Strubble, who spoke rather as one who

knew every individual member of the Russian imperial



family; as a matter of fact, she knew a newspaper

correspondent, a young man who ate BORTSCH with the air



of having invented it. Sledonti's "Poems of Death and

Passion" were now being sold by the thousand in seven



European languages, and were about to be translated into

Syrian, a circumstance which made the discerning critics



of the Nuremberg rather shy of maturing their future

judgments too rapidly and too irrevocably.



As regards Knopfschrank's work, they did not lack

opportunity for inspecting and appraising it. However






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