Lesson Six

Text: "A Canary for One" by E. Hemingway¹

Grammar: The Gerund

A Canary For One

The train passed very quickly a long, red-stone house with a garden and four thick palm trees with tables under them in the shade. On the other side was the sea, which was seen only occasionally and far below against the rocks.

"I bought him in Palermo,²" the American lady said. "We only had an hour and it was Sunday morning. The man wanted to be paid in dollars and I gave him a dollar and a half. He really sings very beau­tifully."

It was very hot in the train and it was very hot in the compartment. No breeze came through the open window. The American lady pulled the window-blind down and there was no more sea, even occasionally. On the other side there was glass, then the corridor, then trees and flat fields of grapes, with grey-stone hills behind them.

Coming into Marseilles³ the train slowed down and followed one track through many others into the station. The train stayed twenty-five minutes in the station at Marseilles and the American lady bought a copy of the Daily Mail⁴. She walked a little way along the sta­tion platform, but she stayed near the steps of the car because at Can­nes,⁵ where it stopped for twelve minutes, the train had left with no signal of departure and she had only gotten⁶ on just in time. The Ameri­can lady was a little deaf and she was afraid that perhaps signals of departure were given and that she did not hear them.

After it was dark the train was in Avignon.⁷ People got on and off. At the news-stand Frenchmen, returning to Paris, bought that day's French papers.

Inside the compartment the porter had pulled down the three beds from inside the wall and prepared them for sleeping. In the night the American lady lay without sleeping because the train was a rapide⁸ and went very fast and she was afraid of the speed in the night. The

American lady's bed was the one next to the window. The canary from Palermo, a cloth spread over his cage, was cut of the draught in the corridor that went into the compartment washroom. There was a blue light outside the compartment, and all night the train went fast and the American lady lay awake and waited for a wreck.

In the morning the train was near Paris, and after the American lady had come out of the washroom, looking very wholesome and mid­dle-aged and American in spite of not having slept, and had taken the cloth off the bird cage and hung the cage in the sun, she went to the restaurant car lor breakfast. When she came back to the compartment again, the beds had been pushed back into the wall and made into seats, the canary was shaking his feathers in the sunlight that came through the open window, and the train was much nearer Paris.

"He loves the sun," the American lady said. "He'll sing now in a little while. I've always loved birds. I'm taking him home to my lit­tle girl. There — he's singing now."

The train crossed a river and passed through a very beautifully tend­ed forest. The train passed through many outside of Paris towns. There were tram-cars in the towns and big advertisements en the walls toward the train. For several minutes I had not listened to the Ameri­can lady, who was talking to my wife.

"Is your husband American too?" asked the lady.

"Yes," said my wife. "We're both Americans."

"I thought you were English."

"Oh, no."

"I'm so glad you're Americans. American men make the best hus­bands," the American lady was saying. "That was why we left the Con­tinent,⁹ you know. My daughter fell in love with a man in Vevey.¹⁰" She stopped. "They were simply madly in love." She stopped again. "I took her away, of course."

"Did she get over it?" asked my wife.

"I don't think so," said the American lady. "She wouldn't eat any­thing and she doesn't seem to take an interest in anything. She doesn't care about things. I couldn't have her marrying a foreigner."" She paused. "Someone, a very good friend, told me once, "No foreigner can make an American girl a good husband."

"No," said my wife, "I suppose not."

The train was now coming into Paris. There were many cars stand­ing on tracks — brown wooden restaurant cars and brown wooden sleeping cars that would go to Italy at five o'clock that night; the cars were marked Paris—Rome, and cars, with seats on the roofs, that went back and forth to the suburbs with, at certain hours, people in all the seats and on the roofs.

"Americans make the best husbands," the American lady said to my wife. I was getting down the bags. "American men are the only men in the world to marry."

"How long ago did you leave Vevey?" asked my wife.

"Two years ago this fall.¹² It's her,'you know, that I'm taking the canary to."

"Was the man your daughter was in love with a Swiss?"¹³

"Yes," said the American lady. "He was from a very good family in Vevey. He was going to be an engineer. They met there in Vevey. They used to go for long walks together."

"I know Vevey," said my wife. "We were there on our honey-moon."

"Were you really? That must have been lovely. I had no idea, of course that she'd fall in love with him."

"It was a. very lovely place," said my wife.

"Yes," said the American lady. "Isn't it lovely? Were you there in the fall?"

"Yes," said my wife.

We were passing three cars that had been in a wreck.

"Look," I said. "There's been a wreck."

The American lady looked and saw the last car. "I was afraid of just that all night," she said. "I'll never travel on a rapide again at night. There must be other comfortable trains that don't go so fast."

The train was in the dark of the Gare de Lyons,¹⁴ and then stopped and porters came up to the windows. I handed the bags through the windows, and we were out on the platform, and the American lady put herself in charge of one of three men from Cook's¹⁵ who said: "Just a moment, madam, and I'll look for your name."

The porter brought a truck and piled on the luggage, and my wife said good-bye and I said good-bye to the American lady.

We followed the porter with the truck down the long cement plat­form beside the train. At the end was a gate and a man took the tickets.

We were returning to Paris to set up separate residences.¹⁶

NOTES

1. Ernest Hemingway, American writer, born in 1899 in Oak Park near Chicago. He first went to Europe during World War I, where his experiences gave him material for such of his works as "Men Without Women" (1928) and "A Farewell to Arms" (1929). In the twenties he attended the Genoa and the Lausanne conferences as correspondent. He was also correspondent in Spain during the 1936— 37 Civil War where he wrote "The Fifth Column". In 1939 he settled down in Cuba where he wrote "For Whom the Bell Tolls" about the Spanish Civil War. In 1944 he was sent as war correspondent to London.

In 1952 he won Pulitzer Prize for "The Old Man and the Sea" and in 1954 he got the Nobel Prize for literature. Hemingway died in 1961.

2. Palermo: the largest city and port of Sicily

3. Marseilles: a seaport in southeastern France on the Mediterranean

4. the Daily Mail: an English conservative newspaper

5. Cannes: a resort in the Riviera, southeastern France, famous also for the Film Festivals held there every year

6. gotten (Am. Е.): got

7. Avignon: a city in southern France, on the Rhone

8. rapide (Fr.): a fast train

9. the Continent: all of Europe except the British Isles.

10. Vevey: a town in Switzerland on the Lake of Geneva

11. the construction can't (couldn't, shan't, won't) have smb do/do­ing smth in a negative context has the meaning of разрешать, допус­кать, терпеть

e.g. I won't have you say (saying) things like that.

12. fall (Am. E.): autumn

13. Swiss: a native of Switzerland; швейцарец

14. Gare de Lyons: the Paris terminus (ж.д. ко­нечная станция) of the Paris-Lyons Mediterranean railway line

15. Cook's: Thomas Cook (1808—1892) English tourist agent, found­er of the Thomas Cook and Son, a travelling agency that helps tourists to make tours of Europe and the American continent (since 1864) and provides them with hotel accommodations

16. to set up separate residences: to set up different homes; (here) to arrange a divorce ... чтобы начать дело о разводе