zloyzebr: переводы

→“I see; end of story; sic transit and all that. But didn’t it all trouble you afterwards?”

→“Pretty dreadful. I wanted to shout, ‘You’ve been tricked: this man you’re burying is just a common English seaman. The real one is alive in Tierra del Fuego living with an ex-soubrette and as mad as a hatter!’ But somehow I couldn’t bring myself to do it; not now that I was Baron Zaleski with two broad rings of shiny new gold braid on my cuffs and the Order of Leopold on my chest. And especially not when the Old Gentleman came up to me afterwards and took me by the arm and said, ‘Zaleski, we are truly grateful to you. This was a dreadful business, but now you have set our heart at rest.’ I mean, how could I say anything after that?”

→“How did you feel about it all?”

→“Yes, Prohaska, and there was that business with the Lost Archduke, do you remember all that?”

→We sat until the small hours in that dining-room, long after the wait-ers had cleared the other tables and gone to bed. We talked of old times, and the world that was gone, and reminisced about our voyage around the globe aboard that decrepit old wooden sailing ship in the sunlit opening years of the century. The early-morning light was gleaming on the little grey pretend-waves of the Baltic before Zaleski fell silent for a while, puffing reflectively at a cigar and gazing out to sea. I sensed that a certain matter would soon be broached. He spoke at last.

→We had sometimes passed in corridors and nodded to one another in those years—the k.u.k. Kriegsmarine was a small force and everyone knew everyone else—but somehow our service paths had never crossed sufficiently long for us to be able to sit together and talk. This meeting over dinner was our first encounter in nearly twenty years.

→“Parley with the nigger chieftains? No white man sits down to talk with a lot of bare-arsed black savages if he wants to keep a shred of self-respect. Just shoot our way through, that’s the thing: twenty rounds rapid fire and burn their huts down afterwards. That’d soon show them: start as we mean to go on.”

→For those born in that part of the world it must all seem perfectly natural, but for me after a while it was all intensely melancholic. Used to a crowded, communal life aboard a warship always sailing from one place to another, the sudden transition to the life of an anchorite on an island stuck firmly in the same place was bound to be rather disturbing—as was the sudden realisation that I was now entirely responsible for myself, thrown absolutely on my own resources after a life ordered to the second by the ship’s bell, the bugle and the watch-bill.

→Mr Musgrove’s visit to us that evening did nothing to ease the al-ready tense and peevish atmosphere aboard the Windischgrätz . As it hap-pened he was the sole guest at the reception, Mr Tribe having already (we assumed) turned down the invitation and Father Adametz having been called away to minister to a sick parishioner.

→Ours was a society that ran on deference and reverence for age. No one below the age of thirty was regarded as having anything remotely worthwhile to say, and men of forty would commonly try their best to look sixty. A seventeen-year-old cadet who dared to question a university professor was simply asking for trouble.

→One party of sixty men would accompany Dr Pürkler about twenty kilometres inland to climb the Tetuba Berg and carry out a geological survey—as well as trying to parley with the local chieftains about a possible sale of mining rights. The other party of thirty men would accompany Professor Skowronek and Herr Lenart on a specimen-collecting trip towards Mount Trumpington.

→“Excuse me, Herr Professor, but I had always thought that the task of science was to explain, not to create . . .”

→You’re the Jew-boy, aren’t you? There, cadets, you have before you a per-fect example of the carping, criticising, know-it-all attitude of the Eternal Jew: the product of a brain formation perfectly adapted to denigrating the work of others, but essentially sterile and incapable of creating anything of its own . . .”

→“Nothing, Herr Professor, except a little common sense.” Skowronek smiled maliciously. “Ah, of course, I remember now.

→“Your sheer impertinence amazes me, young man. What qualifica-tions do you possess, a mere naval cadet, that allow you to offer such insolence to one of Europe’s most respected men of science?”

→“With respect, Herr Professor, what you have just explained to us is no more science than palm-reading. What you have here on the blackboard is a set of assertions—some of them very dubious as mathematics, by the way—based on premises that are every bit as open to question as those which you are trying to prove.”

→“How dare you question science . . . !”

→He suddenly looked thoughtful—and fell on his knees once more in prayer. This time it went on for a good half-hour, myself shuffling awk-wardly from one foot to the other as he groaned and mumbled softly to himself. A fly buzzed around the room and settled on his nose. I wondered whether I should brush it off, but it seemed not to bother him so I left it where it was. At last he got up.

→“Am I to understand then, Mr Musgrove, that you will be unable to attend?”

→“No drop of alcoholic beverage shall pass my lips, neither shall I fre-quent music halls nor listen to profane merriment: those were the vows I took when I was admitted to the congregation of the Lord’s Elect in Penge.”