Читать книгу A Lady's Shoe - James Matthew Barrie - Страница 5

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I interrupted my friend at this point, saying, "It is the little dressmaker I am interested in; not the shoes. Tell me more of her."

"She vanished out of my knowledge at that point in her history," he answered; "I don't know what became of her."

"A story-teller," I complained, "has no right to close his tale so abruptly. It is his duty to leave nothing to the public's imagination."

"Mine," he said, "is not a story, it is only something that happened, and I warned you that I did not know the end. In real life you never get the end of a story, but you can guess it if you will."

"Then," I said, "I guess that the little dressmaker——"

"Had more severe disappointments in after life than the loss of a pair of shoes," he said.

"But had a happy future," I broke in, almost entreating him to say the words. "When her brother became a man he gave her a pretty house in the suburbs to be mistress of, and she was as happy as——"

"As Ruth Pinch," he suggested; "no, I think Will married, and left the little dressmaker alone in the shabby room."

"Until she married, you mean?"

"Or until," said my friend, very sadly, "she was damned to all eternity that a gentleman might have his pleasure."

"Don't say that," I implored.

"The little dressmaker is dead," he answered, "and the worms have eaten her long ago, so it does not matter much." Then he looked at me sharply: "If I cannot give the story an end," he said, "I can at least give it a moral. When I was in your house yesterday I found a pale little governess teaching your children, and I thought (forgive me) that you were somewhat brusque to her. She was the little dressmaker over again. Ah, sir, that is what I mean when I say that the stories in real life have no ending! The brave little dressmaker is still in London; you brush against her in every street, you meet her in scores of houses. Remember that little bit of her history, and you will help to make her next scene brighter. And now I must tell you of her who bought the shoes and took them to Gretna Green, and of how they entirely altered her future because they were a size too small. This time the story has an ending, or what passes for such in a world of make-believe. It is about a grandfather of mine, too, whose marriage, as you shall hear, was entirely arranged by this shoe."