Читать онлайн «Decline and Fall. Vile Bodies. Put Out More Flags»
Автор Ивлин Во
Evelyn Waugh
PUT OUT MORE FLAGS
First published in 1942
Dedicatory Letter to
MAJOR RANDOLPH CHURCHILL,
4th Hussars, Member of Parliament
Dear Randolph, I am afraid that these pages may not be altogether acceptable to your ardent and sanguine nature. They deal, mostly, with a race of ghosts, the survivors of the world we both knew ten years ago, which you have outflown in the empyrean of strenuous politics, but where my imagination still fondly lingers. I find more food for thought in the follies of Basil Seal and Ambrose Silk than in the sagacity of the Higher Command These characters are no longer contemporary in sympathy; they were forgotten even before the war; but they lived on delightfully in holes and corners and, like everyone else, they have been disturbed in their habits by the rough intrusion of current history. Here they are in that odd, dead period before the Churchillian renaissance which people called at the time “the Great Bore War. ”
So please accept them with the sincere regards of
Your affectionate friend,
THE AUTHOR
“A man getting drunk at a farewell party should strike a musical tone, in order to strengthen his spirit…and a drunk military man should order gallons and put out more flags in order to increase his military splendour.
CHINESE SAGE, quoted and
translated by Lin Yutang in
THE IMPORTANCE OF LIVING.
“A little injustice in the heart can be drowned by wine; but a great injustice in the world can be drowned only by the sword. ”
EPIGRAMS OF CHANG CH’AO; quoted
and translated by Lin Yutang in
THE IMPORTANCE OF LIVING.
The military operation described in Chapter III is wholly imaginary.
No existing unit of His Majesty’s Forces is represented there, or anywhere, directly or indirectly.
No character is derived from any living man or woman.chapter 1 AUTUMN
In the week which preceded the outbreak of the Second World War days of surmise and apprehension which cannot, without irony, be called the last days of “peace” and on the Sunday morning when all doubts were finally resolved and misconceptions corrected, three rich women thought first and mainly of Basil Seal. They were his sister, his mother and his mistress.
Barbara Sothill was at Malfrey; in recent years she had thought of her brother as seldom as circumstances allowed her, but on that historic September morning, as she walked to the village, he predominated over a multitude of worries.
She and Freddy had just heard the Prime Minister’s speech, broadcast by wireless. “It is an evil thing we are fighting,” he had said and as Barbara turned her back on the house where, for the most part, the eight years of her marriage had been spent, she felt personally challenged and threatened, as though, already, the mild, autumnal sky were dark with circling enemies and their shadows were trespassing on the sunlit lawns.
There was something female and voluptuous in the beauty of Malfrey; other lovely houses maintained a virginal modesty or a manly defiance, but Malfrey had no secret from the heavens; it had been built more than two hundred years ago in days of victory and ostentation and lay, spread out, sumptuously at ease, splendid, defenceless and provocative a Cleopatra among houses; across the sea, Barbara felt, a small and envious mind, a meanly ascetic mind, a creature of the conifers, was plotting the destruction of her home. It was for Malfrey that she loved her prosaic and slightly absurd husband; for Malfrey, too, that she had abandoned Basil and with him the part of herself which, in the atrophy endemic to all fruitful marriages, she had let waste and die.
