Of Illustrious Men

Начало книги

IN THE MIDDLE OF THE afternoon he had climbed up on the corrugated iron roof of the shed where the clothes are dried to saw off the branches of the plum tree that had become entangled in the telephone wires after a winter storm. This was a wise precaution. The next strong wind might well bring the whole thing down, temporarily cutting us off from the outside world. Not that Random was situated in an out-of-the-way valley far removed from civilization, but thanks to our telephone we belonged to a sort of caste, a sort of local aristocracy. The country people, who didn’t yet possess phones and were reluctant to let the operator know the name of the person they were calling, had gotten into the habit of coming and phoning from our house rather than from the post office, giving us some sort of explanation of the snatches of their conversations, which we didn’t even try to overhear but were certainly not going to pass on and distort. We took the greatest care to see that the office door was properly shut and to cover our ears so as not to be like the postmistress. The result was that we felt handicapped by the trust with which we were honored and didn’t like to ask people to pay for their calls. But we valued this privilege.

Читать дальше →