【英文读物】Cheerful--By Request.docx
《【英文读物】Cheerful--By Request.docx》由会员分享,可在线阅读,更多相关《【英文读物】Cheerful--By Request.docx(186页珍藏版)》请在得力文库 - 分享文档赚钱的网站上搜索。
1、【英文读物】Cheerful-By RequestI CHEERFULBY REQUESTThe editor paid for the lunch (as editors do). He lighted his seventh cigarette and leaned back. The conversation, which had zigzagged from the war to Zuloaga, and from Rasputin the Monk to the number of miles a Darrow would go on a gallon, narrowed down
2、to the thin, straight line of business.Now dont misunderstand. Please! Were not presuming to dictate. Dear me, no! We have always felt that the writer should be free to express that which is in hisahheart. But in the last year weve been swamped with these drab, realistic stories. Strong, relentless
3、things, you know, about dishwashers, with a lot of fine detail about the fuzz of grease on the rim of the pan. And then those drear and hopeless ones about fallen sisters who end it all in the East River. The East River must be choked up with em. Now, I know that life is real, life is earnest, and I
4、m not demanding a happy ending, exactly. But if you couldthat iswould youdo you see your way at all clear to giving us a fairly cheerful story? Not necessarily Glad, but not so darned Russian, if you get me. Not pink, but not all grey either. Saymauve. .That was Josie Fifers existence. Mostly grey,
5、with a dash of pink. Which makes mauve.Unless you are connected (which you probably are not) with the great firm of Hahn & Lohman, theatrical producers, you never will have heard of Josie Fifer.There are things about the theatre that the public does not know. A statement, at first blush, to be dispu
6、ted. The press agent, the special writer, the critic, the magazines, the Sunday supplement, the divorce courtswhat have they left untold? We know the make of car Miss Billboard drives; who her husbands are and were; how much the movies have offered her; what she wears, reads, says, thinks, and eats
7、for breakfast. Snapshots of author writing play at place on Hudson; pictures of the play in rehearsal; of the director directing it; of the stage hands rewriting itlong before the opening night we know more about the piece than does the playwright himself, and are ten times less eager to see it.Josi
8、e Fifers knowledge surpassed even this. For she was keeper of the ghosts of the firm of Hahn & Lohman. Not only was she present at the birth of a play; she officiated at its funeral. She carried the keys to the closets that housed the skeletons of the firm. When a play died of inanition, old age, or
9、as was sometimes the casebefore it was born, it was Josie Fifer who laid out its remains and followed it to the grave.Her notification of its demise would come thus:Hello, Fifer! This is McCabe (the property man of H. & L. at the phone).Well?A little waspish this morning, arent you, Josephine?Ive go
10、t twenty-five bathing suits for the No. 2 Ataboy company to mend and clean and press before five this afternoon. If you think Im going to stand here wasting myAll right, all right! I just wanted to tell you that My Mistake closes Saturday. The stuffll be up Monday morning early.A sardonic laugh from
11、 Josie. And yet they say Whats in a name!The unfortunate play had been all that its title implies. Its purpose was to star an actress who hadnt a glint. Her second-act costume alone had cost $700, but even Russian sable bands cant carry a bad play. The critics had pounced on it with the savagery of
12、their kind and hacked it, limb from limb, leaving its carcass to rot under the pitiless white glare of Broadway. The dress with the Russian sable bands went the way of all Hahn & Lohman tragedies. Josie Fifer received it, if not reverently, still appreciatively.I should think Sid Hahn would know by
13、this time, she observed sniffily, as her expert fingers shook out the silken folds and smoothed the fabulous fur, that auburn hair and a gurgle and a Lucille dress dont make a play. Besides, Fritzi Kirke wears the biggest shoe of any actress I ever saw. A woman with feet like thatshe picked up a sat
14、in slipper, size 7? Chasnt any business on the stage. She ought to travel with a circus. Here, Etta. Hang this away in D, next to the amethyst blue velvet, and be sure and lock the door.McCabe had been right. A waspish wit was Josies.The question is whether to reveal to you now where it was that Jos
15、ie Fifer reigned thus, queen of the cast-offs; or to take you back to the days that led up to her being therethe days when she was Jos Fyfer on the programme.Her domain was the storage warehouse of Hahn & Lohman, as you may have guessed. If your business lay Forty-third Street way, you might have pa
16、ssed the building a hundred times without once giving it a seeing glance. It was not Forty-third Street of the small shops, the smart crowds, and the glittering motors. It was the Forty-third lying east of the Grand Central sluice gates; east of fashion; east, in a word, of Fifth Avenuea great squar
17、e brick building smoke-grimed, cobwebbed, and having the look of a cold-storage plant or a car barn fallen into disuse; dusty, neglected, almost eerie. Yet within it lurks Romance, and her sombre sister Tragedy, and their antic brother Comedy, the cut-up.A worn flight of wooden steps leads up from t
18、he sidewalk to the dim hallway; a musty-smelling passage wherein you are met by a genial sign which reads:No admittance. Keep out. This means you.To confirm this, the eye, penetrating the gloom, is confronted by a great blank metal door that sheathes the elevator. To ride in that elevator is to know
19、 adventure, so painfully, so protestingly, with such creaks and jerks and lurchings does it pull itself from floor to floor, like an octogenarian who, grunting and groaning, hoists himself from his easy-chair by slow stages that wring a protest from ankle, knee, hip, back and shoulder. The corkscrew
20、 stairway, broken and footworn though it is, seems infinitely less perilous.First floorsecondthirdfourth. Whew! And there you are in Josie Fifers kingdoma great front room, unexpectedly bright and even cosy with its whir of sewing machines: tables, and tables, and tables, piled with orderly stacks o
21、f every sort of clothing, from shoes to hats, from gloves to parasols; and in the room beyond this, and beyond that, and again beyond that, row after row of high wooden cabinets stretching the width of the room, and forming innumerable aisles. All of Bluebeards wives could have been tucked away in o
22、ne corner of the remotest and least of these, and no one the wiser. All grimly shut and locked, they are, with the key in Josies pocket. But when, at the behest of McCabe, or sometimes even Sid Hahn himself, she unlocked and opened one of these doors, what treasures hung revealed! What shimmer and s
23、parkle and perfumeand moth balls! The long-tailed electric light bulb held high in one hand, Josie would stand at the door like a priestess before her altar.There they swung, the ghosts and the skeletons, side by side. You remember that slinking black satin snakelike sheath that Gita Morini wore in
24、Little Eyolf? There it dangles, limp, invertebrate, yet how eloquent! No other woman in the world could have worn that gown, with its unbroken line from throat to hem, its smooth, high, black satin collar, its writhing tail that went slip-slip-slipping after her. In it she had looked like a sleek an
- 配套讲稿:
如PPT文件的首页显示word图标,表示该PPT已包含配套word讲稿。双击word图标可打开word文档。
- 特殊限制:
部分文档作品中含有的国旗、国徽等图片,仅作为作品整体效果示例展示,禁止商用。设计者仅对作品中独创性部分享有著作权。
- 关 键 词:
- 英文读物 【英文读物】Cheerful-By Request 英文 读物 Cheerful By
限制150内