Странник по звездам / The Star-Rover

Джек Лондон, 2020

Профессор Дэррел Стэндинг, осужденный за убийство, отбывает пожизненное заключение в тюрьме Сан-Квентин, где надзиратели пытают заключенных с помощью «смирительной рубашки». Чтобы выжить, Стэндинг находит способ усилием воли погружать себя в транс и покидать свое физическое тело. Каждое из подобных «путешествий» позволяет ему странствовать по самым отдаленным эпохам и странам. Книга содержит грамматический комментарий и словарь, облегчающие чтение. Предназначается для продолжающих изучать английский язык высшей ступени (уровень 4 – UpperIntermediate).

Chapter II

I am Darrell Standing. They are going to take me out and hang me soon. In the meantime I write in these pages of the other times and places.

After my sentence, I came to spend the rest of my life in the prison of San Quentin. They put me in the jute-mill^[11]. The criminality of wastefulness irritated me. The crime of waste was abhorrent. I rebelled. I tried to show the guards more efficient ways. But I was given the dungeon and the starvation of light and food. And I rebelled again. I was given the dungeon, plus the strait-jacket^[12]. I was beaten by the stupid guards.

Two years of this witless persecution I endured. It is terrible for a man to be tied down and gnawed by rats. The stupid guards were rats, and they gnawed my intelligence, gnawed all my nerves and my consciousness. And I, who in my past have been a fighter, in this present life was no fighter at all. I was a farmer, an agriculturist, a professor, a laboratory slave, interested only in the soil and the increase of the productiveness of the soil.

I was not a fighter, but I was a thinker. And I told Warden Atherton^[13]:

“It is so absurd, my dear Warden, to think that your guards can shake out of my brain the things that are clear and definite. The whole organization of this prison is stupid. You can’t weave jute. Your loom-rooms are fifty years behind the times.”

I showed him what a fool he was, and as a result he decided that I was a hopeless incorrigible.

Give a dog a bad name… — you know this proverb. Very well. Warden Atherton gave the final sanction to the badness of my name. Intelligent men are cruel. Stupid men are monstrously cruel. The guards were stupid monsters. Listen, and you will learn what they did to me. There was a poet in the prison, a convict, a degenerate poet. He was a forger. He was a coward. He was a snitcher. This poet-forger’s name was Cecil Winwood^[14]. I was the dog that had been given a bad name. Cecil Winwood needed the dogs with bad names, the desperate ones, the incorrigibles.

Примечания

11

jute-mill — ткацкая мастерская

12

strait-jacket — смирительная рубашка

13

Warden Atherton — начальник тюрьмы Азертон

14

Cecil Winwood — Сесил Уинвуд