章节正文
Mrs. Conant slowly dropped the paper, and sat on a
chair, clasping her hands tightly.
"Let me think -- O God! -- let me think," she whis-
pered. "I took the bottle with me . . . I threw it
out of the window of the train . . . I -- . . .
there was another bottle in the cabinet . . . there
were two, side by side -- the aconite -- and the valerian
that I took when I could not sleep . . . If they
found the aconite bottle full, why -- but, he is alive, of
course -- I gave him only a harmless dose of valerian
. . . I am not a murderess in fact . . . Ralph, I
-- 0 God, don't let this be a dream!"
She went into the part of the house that she rented from
the old Peruvian man and his wife, shut the door, and
walked up and down her room swiftly and feverishly
for half an hour. Merriam's photograph stood in a frame
on a table. She picked it up, looked at it with a smile
of exquisitetenderness, and -- dropped four tears on it.
And Merriam only twenty rods away! Then she stood
still for ten minutes, looking into space. She looked into
space through a slowly opening door. On her side of the
door was the building material for a castle of Romance --
love, an Arcady of waving palms, a lullaby of waves on
the shore of a haven of rest, respite, peace, a lotus land
of dreamy ease and security -- a life of poetry and heart's
ease and refuge. Romanticist, will you tell me what
Mrs. Conant saw on the other side of the door? You
cannot? -- that is, you will not? Very well; then listen.
She saw herself go into a department store and buy five
spools of silk thread and three yards of gingham to make
an apron for the cook. "Shall I charge it, ma'am?"
asked the clerk. As she walked out a lady whom she met
greeted her cordially. "Oh, where did you get the pattern for
those sleeves, dear Mrs. Conant?" she said. At the corner
a policeman helped her across the street and touched his
helmet. "Any callers?" she asked the maid when she
reached home. "Mrs. Waldron," answered the maid,
and the tqvo Misses Jenkinson." "Very well," she said.
You may bring me a cup of tea, Maggie."
Mrs. Conant went to the door and called Angela, the old
Peruvian woman. "If Mateo is there send him to me."
Mateo, a half-breed, shuffling and old but efficient, came.
"Is there a steamer or a vessel of any kind leaving
this coast to-night or to-morrow that I can get passage
on?" she asked.
Mateo considered.
"At Punta Reina, thirty miles down the coast, se锟給ra,"
he answered, "there is a small steamer loading with
cinchona and dyewoods. She sails for San Francisco
to-morrow at sunrise. So says my brother, who arrived
in his sloop to-day, passing by Punta Reina."
"You must take me in that sloop to that steamer
to-night. Will you do that?"
"Perhaps -- " Mateo shrugged a suggestive shoul-
der. Mrs. Conant took a handful of money from a
drawer and gave it to him.
"Get the sloop ready behind the little point of land below
the town," she ordered. "Get sailors, and be ready
to sail at six o'clock. In half an hour bring a cart partly
filled with straw into the patio here, and take my trunk
to the sloop. There is more money yet. Now, hurry."
For one time Mateo walked away without shuffling
his feet.
"Angela," cried Mrs. Conant, almost fiercely, "come
and help me pack. I am going away. Out with this
trunk. My clothes first. Stir yourself. Those dark
dresses first. Hurry."
From the first she did not waver from her decision.
Her view was clear and final. Her door had opened
and let the world in. Her love for Merriam was not
lessened; but it now appeared a hopeless and unrealizable
thing. The visions of their future that had seemed so
blissful and complete had vanished. She tried to assure
herself that her renunciation was rather for his sake than
for her own. Now that she was cleared of her burden --
at least, technically -- would not his own weigh too heavily
upon him? If she should cling to him, would not the
difference forever silently mar and corrode their happiness?
Thus she reasoned; but there were a thousand little voices
calling to her that she could feel rather than hear, like the
hum of distant, powerful machinery -- the little voices
of the world, that, when raised in unison, can send their
insistent call through the thickest door.
Once while packing, a brief shadow of the lotus dream
came back to her. She held Merriam's picture to her heart
with one hand, while she threw a pair of shoes into the
trunk with her other.
At six o'clock Mateo returned and reported the sloop
ready. He and his brother lifted the trunk into the cart,
covered it with straw and conveyed it to the point of
embarkation. From there they transferred it on board
in the sloop's dory. Then Mateo returned for additional
orders.
Mrs. Conant was ready. She had settled all business
matters with Angela, and was impatientlywaiting. She
wore a long, loose black-silk duster that she often walked
about in when the evenino's were chilly. On her head
was a small round hat, and over it the apricot-coloured
lace mantilla.
Dusk had quickly followed the short twilight. Mateo
led her by dark and grass-grown streets toward the point
behind which the sloop was anchored. On turning a
corner they beheld the Hotel Orilla del Mar three streets
away, nebulously aglow with its array of kerosene lamps.
Mrs. Conant paused, with streamin eyes. "I must,
I must see him once before I go," she murmured in
anguish. But even then she did not falter in her decision.
Quickly she invented a plan by which she might speak to
him, and yet make her departure without his knowing.
She would walk past the hotel, ask some one to call him
out and talk a few moments on some trivial excuse,
leaving him expecting to see her at her home at seven.
She unpinned her hat and gave it to Mateo. "Keep
this, and wait here till I come," she ordered. Then she
draped the mantilla over her head as she usually did when
walking after sunset, and went straight to the Orilla del
Mar.
She was glad to see the bulky, white-clad figure of
Tio Pancho standing alone on the gallery.
"Tio Pancho," she said, with a charming smile, "may
I trouble you to ask Mr. Merriam to come out for just a
few moments that I may speak with him?"
Tio Pancho bowed as an elephant bows.
"Buenas tardes, Se锟給ra Conant," he said, as a cavalier
talks. And then he went on, less at his ease:
"But does not the se锟給ra know that Se锟給r Merriam
sailed on the Pajaro for Panama at three o'clock of this
afternoon?"
THE THEORY AND THE HOUND
NOT many days ago my old friend from the tropics,
J. P. Bridger, United States consul on the island of Ratona,
was in the city. We had wassail and jubilee and saw
the Flatiron building, and missed seeing the Bronxless
menagerie by about a couple of nights. And then, at the
ebb tide, we were walking up a street that parallels and
parodies Broadway.
A woman with a comely and mundane countenance
passed us, holding in leash a wheezing, vicious, waddling,
brute of a yellow pug. The dog entangled himself with
Bridger's legs and mumbled his ankles in a snarling,
peevish, sulky bite. Bridger, with a happy smile, kicked
the breath out of the brute; the woman showered us
with a quick rain of well-conceived adjectives that left
us in no doubt as to our place in her opinion, and we
passed on. Ten yards farther an old woman with dis-
ordered white hair and her bankbook tucked well hidden
beneath her tattered shawl begged. Bridger stopped
and disinterred for her a quarter from his holiday waist-
coat.
On the next corner a quarter of a ton of well-clothed
man with a rice-powdered, fat, white jowl, stood holding
the chain of a devil-born bulldog whose forelegs were
strangers by the length of a dachshund. A little woman
in a last-season's hat confronted him and wept, which
was plainly all she could do, while he cursed her in low
sweet, practised tones.
Bridger smiled again -- strictly to himself -- and this
time he took out a little memorandum book and made
a note of it. This he had no right to do without due
explanation, and I said so.
"It's a new theory," said Bridger, "that I picked up
down in Ratona. I've been gathering support for it as I
knock about. The world isn't ripe for it yet, but -- well
I'll tell you; and then you run your mind back along the
people you've known and see what you make of it."
And so I cornered Bridger in a place where they have
artificial palms and wine; and he told me the story which
is here in my words and on his responsibility.
One afternoon at three o'clock, on the island of Ratona,
a boy raced alongthe beach screaming, "Pajaro, ahoy!"
Thus he made known the keenness of his hearing and
the justice of his discrimination in pitch.
He who first heard and made oral proclamation con-
cerning the toot of an approaching steamer's whistle, and
correctly named the steamer, was a small hero in Ratona
-until the' next steamer came. Wherefore, there was
rivalry among the barefoot youth of Ratona, and many
fell victims to the softly blown conch shells of sloops which,
as they enter harbour, sound surprisingly like a distant
steamer's signal. And some could name you the vessel
when its call, in your duller ears, sounded no louder than
the sigh of the wind through the branches of the cocoa-
nut palms.
But to-day he who proclaimed the Pajaro gained his
honours. Ratona bent its ear to listen; and soon the
deep-tongued blast grew louder and nearer, and at length
Ratona saw above the line of palms on the low "joint"
the two black funnels of the fruiter slowly creeping toward
the mouth of the harbour.
You must know that Ratona is an island twenty miles
off the south of a South American republic. It is a port
of that republic; and it sleeps sweetly in a smiling sea,
toiling not nor spinning; fed by the abundant tropics
where all things "ripen, cease and fall toward the grave."
Eight hundred people dream life away in a green-
embowered village that follows the horseshoe curve of
its bijou harbour. They are mostly Spanish and Indian
mestizos, with a shading of San Domingo Negroes, a
lightening of pure-blood Spanish officials and a slight
leavening of the froth of three or four pioneering white
races. No steamers touch at Ratona save the fruit steamers
chair, clasping her hands tightly.
"Let me think -- O God! -- let me think," she whis-
pered. "I took the bottle with me . . . I threw it
out of the window of the train . . . I -- . . .
there was another bottle in the cabinet . . . there
were two, side by side -- the aconite -- and the valerian
that I took when I could not sleep . . . If they
found the aconite bottle full, why -- but, he is alive, of
course -- I gave him only a harmless dose of valerian
. . . I am not a murderess in fact . . . Ralph, I
-- 0 God, don't let this be a dream!"
She went into the part of the house that she rented from
the old Peruvian man and his wife, shut the door, and
walked up and down her room swiftly and feverishly
for half an hour. Merriam's photograph stood in a frame
on a table. She picked it up, looked at it with a smile
of exquisitetenderness, and -- dropped four tears on it.
And Merriam only twenty rods away! Then she stood
still for ten minutes, looking into space. She looked into
space through a slowly opening door. On her side of the
door was the building material for a castle of Romance --
love, an Arcady of waving palms, a lullaby of waves on
the shore of a haven of rest, respite, peace, a lotus land
of dreamy ease and security -- a life of poetry and heart's
ease and refuge. Romanticist, will you tell me what
Mrs. Conant saw on the other side of the door? You
cannot? -- that is, you will not? Very well; then listen.
She saw herself go into a department store and buy five
spools of silk thread and three yards of gingham to make
an apron for the cook. "Shall I charge it, ma'am?"
asked the clerk. As she walked out a lady whom she met
greeted her cordially. "Oh, where did you get the pattern for
those sleeves, dear Mrs. Conant?" she said. At the corner
a policeman helped her across the street and touched his
helmet. "Any callers?" she asked the maid when she
reached home. "Mrs. Waldron," answered the maid,
and the tqvo Misses Jenkinson." "Very well," she said.
You may bring me a cup of tea, Maggie."
Mrs. Conant went to the door and called Angela, the old
Peruvian woman. "If Mateo is there send him to me."
Mateo, a half-breed, shuffling and old but efficient, came.
"Is there a steamer or a vessel of any kind leaving
this coast to-night or to-morrow that I can get passage
on?" she asked.
Mateo considered.
"At Punta Reina, thirty miles down the coast, se锟給ra,"
he answered, "there is a small steamer loading with
cinchona and dyewoods. She sails for San Francisco
to-morrow at sunrise. So says my brother, who arrived
in his sloop to-day, passing by Punta Reina."
"You must take me in that sloop to that steamer
to-night. Will you do that?"
"Perhaps -- " Mateo shrugged a suggestive shoul-
der. Mrs. Conant took a handful of money from a
drawer and gave it to him.
"Get the sloop ready behind the little point of land below
the town," she ordered. "Get sailors, and be ready
to sail at six o'clock. In half an hour bring a cart partly
filled with straw into the patio here, and take my trunk
to the sloop. There is more money yet. Now, hurry."
For one time Mateo walked away without shuffling
his feet.
"Angela," cried Mrs. Conant, almost fiercely, "come
and help me pack. I am going away. Out with this
trunk. My clothes first. Stir yourself. Those dark
dresses first. Hurry."
From the first she did not waver from her decision.
Her view was clear and final. Her door had opened
and let the world in. Her love for Merriam was not
lessened; but it now appeared a hopeless and unrealizable
thing. The visions of their future that had seemed so
blissful and complete had vanished. She tried to assure
herself that her renunciation was rather for his sake than
for her own. Now that she was cleared of her burden --
at least, technically -- would not his own weigh too heavily
upon him? If she should cling to him, would not the
difference forever silently mar and corrode their happiness?
Thus she reasoned; but there were a thousand little voices
calling to her that she could feel rather than hear, like the
hum of distant, powerful machinery -- the little voices
of the world, that, when raised in unison, can send their
insistent call through the thickest door.
Once while packing, a brief shadow of the lotus dream
came back to her. She held Merriam's picture to her heart
with one hand, while she threw a pair of shoes into the
trunk with her other.
At six o'clock Mateo returned and reported the sloop
ready. He and his brother lifted the trunk into the cart,
covered it with straw and conveyed it to the point of
embarkation. From there they transferred it on board
in the sloop's dory. Then Mateo returned for additional
orders.
Mrs. Conant was ready. She had settled all business
matters with Angela, and was impatientlywaiting. She
wore a long, loose black-silk duster that she often walked
about in when the evenino's were chilly. On her head
was a small round hat, and over it the apricot-coloured
lace mantilla.
Dusk had quickly followed the short twilight. Mateo
led her by dark and grass-grown streets toward the point
behind which the sloop was anchored. On turning a
corner they beheld the Hotel Orilla del Mar three streets
away, nebulously aglow with its array of kerosene lamps.
Mrs. Conant paused, with streamin eyes. "I must,
I must see him once before I go," she murmured in
anguish. But even then she did not falter in her decision.
Quickly she invented a plan by which she might speak to
him, and yet make her departure without his knowing.
She would walk past the hotel, ask some one to call him
out and talk a few moments on some trivial excuse,
leaving him expecting to see her at her home at seven.
She unpinned her hat and gave it to Mateo. "Keep
this, and wait here till I come," she ordered. Then she
draped the mantilla over her head as she usually did when
walking after sunset, and went straight to the Orilla del
Mar.
She was glad to see the bulky, white-clad figure of
Tio Pancho standing alone on the gallery.
"Tio Pancho," she said, with a charming smile, "may
I trouble you to ask Mr. Merriam to come out for just a
few moments that I may speak with him?"
Tio Pancho bowed as an elephant bows.
"Buenas tardes, Se锟給ra Conant," he said, as a cavalier
talks. And then he went on, less at his ease:
"But does not the se锟給ra know that Se锟給r Merriam
sailed on the Pajaro for Panama at three o'clock of this
afternoon?"
THE THEORY AND THE HOUND
NOT many days ago my old friend from the tropics,
J. P. Bridger, United States consul on the island of Ratona,
was in the city. We had wassail and jubilee and saw
the Flatiron building, and missed seeing the Bronxless
menagerie by about a couple of nights. And then, at the
ebb tide, we were walking up a street that parallels and
parodies Broadway.
A woman with a comely and mundane countenance
passed us, holding in leash a wheezing, vicious, waddling,
brute of a yellow pug. The dog entangled himself with
Bridger's legs and mumbled his ankles in a snarling,
peevish, sulky bite. Bridger, with a happy smile, kicked
the breath out of the brute; the woman showered us
with a quick rain of well-conceived adjectives that left
us in no doubt as to our place in her opinion, and we
passed on. Ten yards farther an old woman with dis-
ordered white hair and her bankbook tucked well hidden
beneath her tattered shawl begged. Bridger stopped
and disinterred for her a quarter from his holiday waist-
coat.
On the next corner a quarter of a ton of well-clothed
man with a rice-powdered, fat, white jowl, stood holding
the chain of a devil-born bulldog whose forelegs were
strangers by the length of a dachshund. A little woman
in a last-season's hat confronted him and wept, which
was plainly all she could do, while he cursed her in low
sweet, practised tones.
Bridger smiled again -- strictly to himself -- and this
time he took out a little memorandum book and made
a note of it. This he had no right to do without due
explanation, and I said so.
"It's a new theory," said Bridger, "that I picked up
down in Ratona. I've been gathering support for it as I
knock about. The world isn't ripe for it yet, but -- well
I'll tell you; and then you run your mind back along the
people you've known and see what you make of it."
And so I cornered Bridger in a place where they have
artificial palms and wine; and he told me the story which
is here in my words and on his responsibility.
One afternoon at three o'clock, on the island of Ratona,
a boy raced alongthe beach screaming, "Pajaro, ahoy!"
Thus he made known the keenness of his hearing and
the justice of his discrimination in pitch.
He who first heard and made oral proclamation con-
cerning the toot of an approaching steamer's whistle, and
correctly named the steamer, was a small hero in Ratona
-until the' next steamer came. Wherefore, there was
rivalry among the barefoot youth of Ratona, and many
fell victims to the softly blown conch shells of sloops which,
as they enter harbour, sound surprisingly like a distant
steamer's signal. And some could name you the vessel
when its call, in your duller ears, sounded no louder than
the sigh of the wind through the branches of the cocoa-
nut palms.
But to-day he who proclaimed the Pajaro gained his
honours. Ratona bent its ear to listen; and soon the
deep-tongued blast grew louder and nearer, and at length
Ratona saw above the line of palms on the low "joint"
the two black funnels of the fruiter slowly creeping toward
the mouth of the harbour.
You must know that Ratona is an island twenty miles
off the south of a South American republic. It is a port
of that republic; and it sleeps sweetly in a smiling sea,
toiling not nor spinning; fed by the abundant tropics
where all things "ripen, cease and fall toward the grave."
Eight hundred people dream life away in a green-
embowered village that follows the horseshoe curve of
its bijou harbour. They are mostly Spanish and Indian
mestizos, with a shading of San Domingo Negroes, a
lightening of pure-blood Spanish officials and a slight
leavening of the froth of three or four pioneering white
races. No steamers touch at Ratona save the fruit steamers
- cabinet [´kæbinit]
n.橱，柜；内阁 (初中英语单词) - swiftly [´swiftli] ad.迅速地，敏捷地 (初中英语单词)
- opening [´əupəniŋ] n.开放；开端 a.开始的 (初中英语单词)
- romance [rəu´mæns] n.中世纪骑士小说 (初中英语单词)
- security [si´kjuəriti] n.安全；证券；抵押品 (初中英语单词)
- poetry [´pəuitri] n.诗；诗意 (初中英语单词)
- refuge [´refju:dʒ] v.&n.避难(所)；庇护 (初中英语单词)
- charge [tʃɑ:dʒ] v.收费；冲锋 n.费用 (初中英语单词)
- policeman [pə´li:smən] n.警察 (初中英语单词)
- steamer [´sti:mə] n.汽船；轮船；蒸笼 (初中英语单词)
- vessel [´vesəl] n.容器；船；脉管 (初中英语单词)
- fiercely [´fiəsli] ad.凶猛地，残忍地 (初中英语单词)
- silently [´sailəntli] ad.寂静地；沉默地 (初中英语单词)
- waiting [´weitiŋ] n.等候；伺候 (初中英语单词)
- chilly [´tʃili] a.凉飕飕的 (初中英语单词)
- twilight [´twailait] n.黎明；黄昏 (初中英语单词)
- beheld [bi´held] behold的过去式(分词) (初中英语单词)
- departure [di´pɑ:tʃə] n.离开，出发 (初中英语单词)
- sunset [´sʌnset] n.日落；晚霞 (初中英语单词)
- standing [´stændiŋ] n.持续 a.直立的 (初中英语单词)
- charming [´tʃɑ:miŋ] a.可爱的；极好的 (初中英语单词)
- elephant [´elifənt] n.象 (初中英语单词)
- breath [breθ] n.呼吸；气息 (初中英语单词)
- holiday [´hɔlidi] n.假日，假期，节日 (初中英语单词)
- plainly [´pleinli] ad.平坦地；简单地 (初中英语单词)
- whistle [´wisəl] v.吹哨 n.口哨；汽笛 (初中英语单词)
- softly [´sɔftli] ad.软化地；柔和地 (初中英语单词)
- republic [ri´pʌblik] n.共和国；共和政体 (初中英语单词)
- abundant [ə´bʌndənt] a.丰富的；充分的 (初中英语单词)
- mostly [´məustli] ad.主要地；多半；通常 (初中英语单词)
- harmless [´hɑ:mləs] a.无害的，无恶意的 (高中英语单词)
- exquisite [ik´skwizit] a.精巧的；敏锐的 (高中英语单词)
- tenderness [´tendənis] n.娇嫩；柔软；温柔 (高中英语单词)
- efficient [i´fiʃənt] a.有效的，有能力的 (高中英语单词)
- sunrise [´sʌnraiz] n.日出，黎明 (高中英语单词)
- handful [hændful] n.一把，少数，一小撮 (高中英语单词)
- hopeless [´həupləs] a.无望的，无可救药的 (高中英语单词)
- falter [´fɔ:ltə] vi.蹒跚；犹豫；疲软 (高中英语单词)
- panama [,pænə´mɑ:] n.巴拿马；巴拿马运河 (高中英语单词)
- consul [´kɔnsəl] n.领事；执政官 (高中英语单词)
- seeing [si:iŋ] see的现在分词 n.视觉 (高中英语单词)
- strictly [´striktli] ad.严格地 (高中英语单词)
- hearing [´hiəriŋ] n.听力；听证会；审讯 (高中英语单词)
- sweetly [´swi:tli] ad.甜蜜地；美妙地 (高中英语单词)
- spinning [´spiniŋ] n.纺织 a.纺织品的 (高中英语单词)
- cordially [´kɔ:djəli] ad.热诚地；亲切地 (英语四级单词)
- impatiently [im´peiʃəntli] ad.不耐烦地，急躁地 (英语四级单词)
- kerosene [´kerəsi:n] n.煤油，火油 (英语四级单词)
- trivial [´triviəl] a.琐碎的；不重要的 (英语四级单词)
- comely [´kʌmli] a.秀丽的；文雅的 (英语四级单词)
- vicious [´viʃəs] a.不道德的；刻毒的 (英语四级单词)
- tattered [´tætəd] a.(衣服等)破烂的 (英语四级单词)
- gathering [´gæðəriŋ] n.集会，聚集 (英语四级单词)
- proclamation [,prɔklə´meiʃən] n.宣布；公告；声明 (英语四级单词)
- wherefore [´weəfɔ:] ad.为什么；因此 (英语四级单词)
- lullaby [´lʌləbai] n.催眠曲，摇篮曲 (英语六级单词)
- respite [´respait] n.暂缓 vt.缓期执行 (英语六级单词)
- dreamy [´dri:mi] a.心不在焉的；朦胧的 (英语六级单词)
- gingham [´giŋəm] n.方格花布，条格平布 (英语六级单词)
- suggestive [sə´dʒestiv] a.暗示的；启发的 (英语六级单词)
- unison [´ju:nisən] n.协调，一致；齐唱 (英语六级单词)
- jubilee [´dʒu:bili:] n.欢乐的节日 (英语六级单词)
- holding [´həuldiŋ] n.保持，固定，存储 (英语六级单词)
- memorandum [,memə´rændəm] n.备忘录；记录 (英语六级单词)
- discrimination [di,skrimi´neiʃən] n.区别，歧视 (英语六级单词)
- barefoot [´beəfut] ad.&a.=barefooted (英语六级单词)
- surprisingly [sə´praiziŋli] ad.惊人地；意外地 (英语六级单词)
- horseshoe [´hɔ:s,ʃu] n.马蹄铁；马蹄铁形 (英语六级单词)
文章标签:名著
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