Одержимый, или Сделка с призраком

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УДК 372.8
ББК 81.2 Англ-93
Д45

ISBN 978-5-9925-1142-0

Диккенс, Чарльз.
Д45 
Одержимый, или Сделка с призраком : книга для чтения на английском языке. — Санкт-Петербург : КАРО, 
2016. — 160 с. — (Classical Literature).

ISBN 978-5-9925-1142-0.

Предлагаем вниманию читателей рождественскую повесть классика английской и мировой литературы Ч. Диккенса 
«Одержимый, или сделка с призраком».
Главный герой повести, учитель химии Редлоу, довольно часто вспоминает об обидах и горестях прошлого, о промахах и досадах. Обо всем этом знает Призрак, зловещий двойник Редлоу, 
который его преследует…
В книге представлен текст повести с комментариями и 
словарем.
УДК 372.8
ББК 81.2 Англ-93

© КАРО, 2016

Chapter I

The Gift Bestowed

Everybody said so.
Far be it from me to assert1 that what everybody 
says must be true. Everybody is, oft en, as likely to be 
wrong as right. In the general experience, everybody 
has been wrong so oft en, and it has taken, in most 
instances, such a weary while to fi nd out how wrong, 
that the authority is proved to be fallible. Everybody 
may sometimes be right; “but THAT’s no rule,” as the 
ghost of Giles Scroggins says in the ballad.
Th e dread word, GHOST, recalls me.
Everybody said he looked like a haunted man. 
Th e extent of my present claim for everybody is, that 
they were so far right. He did.
Who could have seen his hollow cheek; his sunken 
brilliant eye; his black-attired fi gure, indefi nably grim, 
although well-knit and well-proportioned; his grizzled 
hair hanging, like tangled sea-weed, about his face, as if 
he had been, through his whole life, a lonely mark for the 

1 Far be it from me to assert — (уст.) Я вовсе не берусь 
утверждать

chafi ng and beating of the great deep of humanity, — 
but might have said he looked like a haunted man?
Who could have observed his manner, taciturn, 
thoughtful, gloomy, shadowed by habitual reserve, 
retiring always and jocund never, with a distraught air 
of reverting to a bygone place and time, or of listening 
to some old echoes in his mind, but might have said 
it was the manner of a haunted man?
Who could have heard his voice, slow-speaking, 
deep, and grave, with a natural fulness and melody in 
it which he seemed to set himself against and stop, but 
might have said it was the voice of a haunted man?
Who that had seen him in his inner chamber, part 
library and part laboratory, — for he was, as the world 
knew, far and wide, a learned man in chemistry, and a 
teacher on whose lips and hands a crowd of aspiring 
ears and eyes hung daily, — who that had seen him 
there, upon a winter night, alone, surrounded by 
his drugs and instruments and books; the shadow 
of his shaded lamp a monstrous beetle on the wall, 
motionless among a crowd of spectral shapes raised 
there by the fl ickering of the fi re upon the quaint 
objects around him; some of these phantoms (the 
refl ection of glass vessels that held liquids), trembling 
at heart like things that knew his power to uncombine 
them, and to give back their component parts to fi re 
and vapour; — who that had seen him then, his work 
done, and he pondering in his chair before the rusted 

grate and red fl ame, moving his thin mouth as if in 
speech, but silent as the dead, would not have said that 
the man seemed haunted and the chamber too?
Who might not, by a very easy fl ight of fancy, have 
believed that everything about him took this haunted 
tone, and that he lived on haunted ground?
His dwelling was so solitary and vault-like, — an 
old, retired part of an ancient endowment for students, 
once a brave edifi ce, planted in an open place, but now 
the obsolete whim of forgotten architects; smokeage-and-weather-darkened, squeezed on every side 
by the overgrowing of the great city, and choked, 
like an old well, with stones and bricks; its small 
quadrangles, lying down in very pits formed by the 
streets and buildings, which, in course of time, had 
been constructed above its heavy chimney stalks; 
its old trees, insulted by the neighbouring smoke, 
which deigned to droop so low when it was very 
feeble and the weather very moody; its grass-plots, 
struggling with the mildewed earth to be grass, or to 
win any show of compromise; its silent pavements, 
unaccustomed to the tread of feet, and even to the 
observation of eyes, except when a stray face looked 
down from the upper world, wondering what nook it 
was; its sun-dial in a little bricked-up corner, where 
no sun had straggled for a hundred years, but where, 
in compensation for the sun’s neglect, the snow would 
lie for weeks when it lay nowhere else, and the black 

east wind would spin like a huge humming-top, when 
in all other places it was silent and still.
His dwelling, at its heart and core — within 
doors — at his fi reside — was so lowering and old, 
so crazy, yet so strong, with its worn-eaten beams 
of wood in the ceiling, and its sturdy fl oor shelving 
downward to the great oak chimney-piece; so environed and hemmed in by the pressure of the town 
yet so remote in fashion, age, and custom; so quiet, 
yet so thundering with echoes when a distant voice 
was raised or a door was shut, — echoes, not confi ned 
to the many low passages and empty rooms, but 
rumbling and grumbling till they were stifl ed in the 
heavy air of the forgotten Crypt where the Norman 
arches were half-buried in the earth.
You should have seen him in his dwelling about 
twilight, in the dead winter time.
When the wind was blowing, shrill and shrewd, 
with the going down of the blurred sun. When it was 
just so dark, as that the forms of things were indistinct 
and big — but not wholly lost. When sitters by the fi re 
began to see wild faces and fi gures, mountains and 
abysses, ambuscades and armies, in the coals. When 
people in the streets bent down their heads and ran 
before the weather. When those who were obliged 
to meet it, were stopped at angry corners, stung by 
wandering snow-flakes alighting on the lashes of 
their eyes, — which fell too sparingly, and were blown 

away too quickly, to leave a trace upon the frozen 
ground. When windows of private houses closed up 
tight and warm. When lighted gas began to burst 
forth in the busy and the quiet streets, fast blackening 
otherwise. When stray pedestrians, shivering along 
the latter, looked down at the glowing fi res in kitchens, and sharpened their sharp appetites by sniffi  ng 
up the fragrance of whole miles of dinners.
When travellers by land were bitter cold, and 
looked wearily on gloomy landscapes, rustling and 
shuddering in the blast. When mariners at sea, outlying upon icy yards, were tossed and swung above 
the howling ocean dreadfully. When lighthouses, on 
rocks and headlands, showed solitary and watchful; 
and benighted sea-birds breasted on against their 
ponderous lanterns, and fell dead. When little readers of story-books, by the fi relight, trembled to think 
of Cassim Baba cut into quarters, hanging in the 
Robbers’ Cave, or had some small misgivings that 
the fierce little old woman, with the crutch, who 
used to start out of the box in the merchant Abudah’s 
bedroom, might, one of these nights, be found upon 
the stairs, in the long, cold, dusky journey up to bed.
When, in rustic places, the last glimmering of 
daylight died away from the ends of avenues; and 
the trees, arching overhead, were sullen and black. 
When, in parks and woods, the high wet fern and 
sodden moss, and beds of fallen leaves, and trunks 

of trees, were lost to view, in masses of impenetrable 
shade. When mists arose from dyke, and fen, and 
river. When lights in old halls and in cottage windows, 
were a cheerful sight. When the mill stopped, the 
wheelwright and the blacksmith shut their workshops, the turnpike-gate closed, the plough and 
harrow were left  lonely in the fi elds, the labourer and 
team went home, and the striking of the church clock 
had a deeper sound than at noon, and the churchyard 
wicket would be swung no more that night.
When twilight everywhere released the shadows, 
prisoned up all day, that now closed in and gathered 
like mustering swarms of ghosts. When they stood 
lowering, in corners of rooms, and frowned out 
from behind half-opened doors. When they had 
full possession of unoccupied apartments. When 
they danced upon the fl oors, and walls, and ceilings 
of inhabited chambers, while the fi re was low, and 
withdrew like ebbing waters when it sprang into a 
blaze. When they fantastically mocked the shapes1 of 
household objects, making the nurse an ogress, the 
rocking-horse a monster, the wondering child, halfscared and half-amused, a stranger to itself, — the 
very tongs upon the hearth, a straddling giant with 
his arms a-kimbo2, evidently smelling the blood of 

1 mocked the shapes — (разг.) искажали очертания
2 with his arms a-kimbo — (уст.) подбоченившись; 
руки в боки

Englishmen, and wanting to grind people’s bones to 
make his bread.
When these shadows brought into the minds 
of older people, other thoughts, and showed them 
diff erent images. When they stole from their retreats, 
in the likenesses of forms and faces from the past, 
from the grave, from the deep, deep gulf, where the 
things that might have been, and never were, are 
always wandering.
When he sat, as already mentioned, gazing at the 
fi re. When, as it rose and fell, the shadows went and 
came. When he took no heed of them, with his bodily 
eyes; but, let them come or let them go, looked fi xedly 
at the fi re. You should have seen him, then.
When the sounds that had arisen with the shadows, 
and come out of their lurking-places at the twilight 
summons, seemed to make a deeper stillness all about 
him. When the wind was rumbling in the chimney, 
and sometimes crooning, sometimes howling, in the 
house. When the old trees outside were so shaken and 
beaten, that one querulous old rook, unable to sleep, 
protested now and then, in a feeble, dozy, high-up 
“Caw!” When, at intervals, the window trembled, the 
rusty vane upon the turret-top complained, the clock 
beneath it recorded that another quarter of an hour was 
gone, or the fi re collapsed and fell in with a rattle.
When a knock came at his door, in short, as he was 
sitting so, and roused him.

“Who’s that?” said he. “Come in!”
Surely there had been no fi gure leaning on the 
back of his chair; no face looking over it. It is certain 
that no gliding footstep touched the fl oor, as he lift ed 
up his head, with a start, and spoke. And yet there 
was no mirror in the room on whose surface his own 
form could have cast its shadow for a moment; and, 
Something had passed darkly and gone!
“I’m humbly fearful, sir,” said a fresh-coloured busy 
man, holding the door open with his foot for the 
admis sion of himself and a wooden tray he carried, and 
letting it go again by very gentle and careful degrees, 
when he and the tray had got in, lest it should close 
noisily, “that it’s a good bit past the time to-night. But 
Mrs. William has been taken off  her legs so oft en” —
“By the wind? Ay! I have heard it rising.”
“By the wind, sir — that it’s a mercy she got home at 
all. Oh dear, yes. Yes. It was by the wind, Mr. Redlaw. 
By the wind.”
He had, by this time, put down the tray for dinner, 
and was employed in lighting the lamp, and spreading 
a cloth on the table. From this employment he desisted 
in a hurry, to stir and feed the fi re, and then resumed 
it; the lamp he had lighted, and the blaze that rose 
under his hand, so quickly changing the appearance 
of the room, that it seemed as if the mere coming in 
of his fresh red face and active manner had made the 
pleasant alteration.