The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber and other stories

Előszó

THE SHORT HAPPY LIFE OF FRANCIS MACOMBER
It was now lunch time and they were all sitting under the double green fly of the dining tent pretending that nothing had happened.
'Will you have lime juice or lemon squash?' Macomber asked.
'I'll have a gimlet,' Robert Wilson told him.
'I'll have a gimlet too. I need something,' Macomber's wife said.
'I suppose it's the thing to do,' Macomber agreed. 'Tell him to make three gimlets.'
The mess boy had started them already, lifting the bottles out of the canvas cooling bags that sweated wet in the wind that blew through the trees that shaded the tents.
'What had I ought to give them?' Macomber asked.
'A quid would be plenty,' Wilson told him. 'You don't want to spoil them.'
'Will the headman distribute it?'
'Absolutely.'
Francis Macomber had, half an hour before, been carried to his tent from the edge of the camp in triumph on the arms and shoulders of the cook, the personal boys, the skinner and the porters. The gun-bearers had taken no part in the demonstration. When the native boys put him down at the door of his tent, he had shaken all their hands, received their congratulations, and then gone into the tent and sat on the bed until his wife came in. She did not speak to him when she came in and he left the tent at once to wash his face and hands in the portable wash basin outside and go over to the dining tent to sit in a comfortable canvas chair in the breeze and the shade.
7 Vissza