Английский с улыбкой. Охотничьи рассказы / Tales of the Long Bow - стр. 9
“Indeed you are mistaken,” said Crane earnestly. “As I say, I was surprised, but my surprise was not as rude as you think. It wasn’t that I thought there was anything wrong about… somehow it was rather the other way… as if things could fit better than one thought… as if – but anyhow, as little as I know about it, I really do congratulate you.”
“I’ll tell you all about it before long,” replied his friend. “It’s enough to say just now that it was all connected with my succeeding after all in doing – what I did. She was the inspiration, you know. I have done what is called an impossible thing; but believe me, she is really the impossible part of it.”
“Well, I must not keep you from such an impossible engagement,” said Crane smiling. “Really, I’m awfully glad to hear about all this. Well, good-bye for now.”
Colonel Crane stood watching the square shoulders and dark red hair of his old friend, when they disappeared down the road, in a rather indescribable state of mind. When he turned quickly back towards his garden and his other guest, he noticed something had changed. Things seemed different in some light-headed and illogical manner. He could not himself understand what had happened; indeed, he did not know whether it happened inside or outside. He was very far from being a fool; but his brains were of the sort that are directed outwards to things, the brains of the soldier or the scientific man, and he had no practice in analysing his own mind. He did not quite understand why the news about Owen Hood should give him that strange sense of a difference in things in general. Without a doubt, he was very fond of Owen Hood; but he had been fond of other people who had got married without especially disturbing the atmosphere of his own back-garden. He even thought that his feelings on their own might have worked the other way; that they might have made him worry about Hood, and wonder whether Hood was making a fool of himself, or even feel suspicious or jealous of Mrs. Hood – something else made him feel quite the other way. He could not quite understand it; there seemed to be an increasing number of things that he could not understand. This world in which he himself wore pieces of green cabbage and in which his old friend the lawyer got married suddenly like a man going mad – this world was a new world, at once fresh and frightening, in which he could hardly understand the figures that were walking about, even his own. The flowers in the flower-beds looked differently, at once bright and nameless; and even the line of vegetables beyond could not altogether depress him with the memories of his last escapade. Indeed he felt very much like someone in the morning of the world; but beyond that he could understand nothing.
Audrey Smith was standing not so very many yards away, because he had followed his elder guest for only a few steps towards the gate. Yet her figure had fallen back far enough to be surrounded by the green framework of the garden. Her dress looked almost blue with a shade of distance. And when she spoke to him, even from that little way off, her voice sounded to him like the voice of someone shouting familiarly and from afar, like you call to an old friend. It made him emotional in a disproportionate way, though all that she said was: