章节正文
'I don't think I can let you go away tonight,' she said. 'Would
you like to sleep with me?'
'Oh, yes, yes, dear grandmother,' said Irene, and would have
clapped her hands, forgetting that she could not.
'You won't be afraid, then, to go to bed with such an old woman?'
'No. You are so beautiful, grandmother.'
'But I am very old.'
'And I suppose I am very young. You won't mind sleeping with such
a very young woman, grandmother?'
'You sweet little pertness!' said the old lady, and drew her
towards her, and kissed her on the forehead and the cheek and the
mouth. Then she got a large silver basin, and having poured some
water into it made Irene sit on the chair, and washed her feet.
This done, she was ready for bed. And oh, what a delicious bed it
was into which her grandmother laid her! She hardly could have
told she was lying upon anything: she felt nothing but the
softness.
The old lady having undressed herself lay down beside her.
'Why don't you put out your moon?' asked the princess.
'That never goes out, night or day,' she answered. 'In the darkest
night, if any of my pigeons are out on a message, they always see
my moon and know where to fly to.'
'But if somebody besides the pigeons were to see it - somebody
about the house, I mean - they would come to look what it was and
find you.'
'The better for them, then,' said the old lady. 'But it does not
happen above five times in a hundred years that anyone does see it.
The greater part of those who do take it for a meteor, wink their
eyes, and forget it again. Besides, nobody could find the room
except I pleased. Besides, again - I will tell you a secret - if
that light were to go out you would fancy yourself lying in a bare
garret, on a heap of old straw, and would not see one of the
pleasant things round about you all the time.'
'I hope it will never go out,' said the princess.
'I hope not. But it is time we both went to sleep. Shall I take
you in my arms?'
The little princess nestled close up to the old lady, who took her
in both her arms and held her close to her bosom.
'Oh, dear! this is so nice!' said the princess. 'I didn't know
anything in the world could be so comfortable. I should like to
lie here for ever.'
'You may if you will,' said the old lady. 'But I must put you to
one trial-not a very hard one, I hope. This night week you must
come back to me. If you don't, I do not know when you may find me
again, and you Will soon want me very much.'
'Oh! please, don't let me forget.'
'You shall not forget. The only question is whether you will
believe I am anywhere - whether you will believe I am anything but
a dream. You may be sure I will do all I can to help you to come.
But it will rest with yourself, after all. On the night of next
Friday, you must come to me. Mind now.'
'I will try,' said the princess.
'Then good night,' said the old lady, and kissed the forehead which
lay in her bosom.
In a moment more the little princess was dreaming in the midst of
the loveliest dreams - of summer seas and moonlight and mossy
springs and great murmuring trees, and beds of wild flowers with
such odours as she had never smelled before. But, after all, no
dream could be more lovely than what she had left behind when she
fell asleep.
In the morning she found herself in her own bed. There was no
handkerchief or anything else on her hand, only a sweet odour
lingered about it. The swelling had all gone down; the prick of
the brooch had vanished - in fact, her hand was perfectly well.
CHAPTER 12
A Short Chapter About Curdie
Curdie spent many nights in the mine. His father and he had taken
Mrs. Peterson into the secret, for they knew mother could hold her
tongue, which was more than could be said of all the miners' wives.
But Curdie did not tell her that every night he spent in the mine,
part of it went in earning a new red petticoat for her.
Mrs. Peterson was such a nice good mother! All mothers are nice
and good more or less, but Mrs. Peterson was nice and good all more
and no less. She made and kept a little heaven in that poor
cottage on the high hillside for her husband and son to go home to
out of the low and rather dreary earth in which they worked. I
doubt if the princess was very much happier even in the arms of her
huge great-grandmother than Peter and Curdie were in the arms of
Mrs. Peterson. True, her hands were hard and chapped and large,
but it was with work for them; and therefore, in the sight of the
angels, her hands were so much the more beautiful. And if Curdie
worked hard to get her a petticoat, she worked hard every day to
get him comforts which he would have missed much more than she
would a new petticoat even in winter. Not that she and Curdie ever
thought of how much they worked for each other: that would have
spoiled everything.
When left alone in the mine Curdie always worked on for an hour or
two at first, following the lode which, according to Glump, would
lead at last into the deserted habitation. After that, he would
set out on a reconnoitring expedition. In order to manage this, or
rather the return from it, better than the first time, he had
bought a huge ball of fine string, having learned the trick from
Hop-o'-my-Thumb, whose history his mother had often told him. Not
that Hop-o'-my-Thumb had ever used a ball of string - I should be
sorry to be supposed so far out in my classics - but the principle
was the same as that of the pebbles. The end of this string he
fastened to his pickaxe, which figured no bad anchor, and then,
with the ball in his hand, unrolling it as he went, set out in the
dark through the natural gangs of the goblins' territory. The
first night or two he came upon nothing worth remembering; saw only
a little of the home-life of the cobs in the various caves they
called houses; failed in coming upon anything to cast light upon
the foregoing design which kept the inundation for the present in
the background. But at length, I think on the third or fourth
night, he found, partly guided by the noise of their implements, a
company of evidently the best sappers and miners amongst them, hard
at work. What were they about? It could not well be the
inundation, seeing that had in the meantime been postponed to
something else. Then what was it? He lurked and watched, every
now and then in the greatest risk of being detected, but without
success. He had again and again to retreat in haste, a proceeding
rendered the more difficult that he had to gather up his string as
he returned upon its course. It was not that he was afraid of the
goblins, but that he was afraid of their finding out that they were
watched, which might have prevented the discovery at which he
aimed. Sometimes his haste had to be such that, when he reached
home towards morning, his string, for lack of time to wind it up as
he 'dodged the cobs', would be in what seemed most hopeless
entanglement; but after a good sleep, though a short one, he always
found his mother had got it right again. There it was, wound in a
most respectable ball, ready for use the moment he should want it!
'I can't think how you do it, mother,' he would say.
'I follow the thread,' she would answer - 'just as you do in the
mine.' She never had more to say about it; but the less clever she
was with her words, the more clever she was with her hands; and the
less his mother said, the more Curdie believed she had to say. But
still he had made no discovery as to what the goblin miners were
about.
CHAPTER 13
The Cobs' Creatures
About this time the gentlemen whom the king had left behind him to
watch over the princess had each occasion to doubt the testimony of
his own eyes, for more than strange were the objects to which they
would bear witness. They were of one sort - creatures - but so
grotesque and misshapen as to be more like a child's drawings upon
his slate than anything natural. They saw them only at night,
while on guard about the house. The testimony of the man who first
reported having seen one of them was that, as he was walking slowly
round the house, while yet in the shadow, he caught sight of a
creature standing on its hind legs in the moonlight, with its
forefeet upon a window-ledge, staring in at the window. Its body
might have been that of a dog or wolf, he thought, but he declared
on his honour that its head was twice the size it ought to have
been for the size of its body, and as round as a ball, while the
face, which it turned upon him as it fled, was more like one carved
by a boy upon the turnip inside which he is going to put a candle
than anything else he could think of. It rushed into the garden.
He sent an arrow after it, and thought he must have struck it; for
it gave an unearthly howl, and he could not find his arrow any more
than the beast, although he searched all about the place where it
vanished. They laughed at him until he was driven to hold his
tongue, and said he must have taken too long a pull at the ale-jug.
But before two nights were over he had one to side with him, for
he, too, had seen something strange, only quite different from that
reported by the other. The description the second man gave of the
creature he had seen was yet more grotesque and unlikely. They
were both laughed at by the rest; but night after night another
came over to their side, until at last there was only one left to
laugh at all his companions. Two nights more passed, and he saw
nothing; but on the third he came rushing from the garden to the
other two before the house, in such an agitation that they declared
- for it was their turn now - that the band of his helmet was
cracking under his chin with the rising of his hair inside it.
Running with him into that part of the garden which I have already
described, they saw a score of creatures, to not one of which they
could give a name, and not one of which was like another, hideous
and ludicrous at once, gambolling on the lawn in the moonlight.
The supernatural or rather subnatural ugliness of their faces, the
length of legs and necks in some, the apparentabsence of both or
either in others, made the spectators, although in one consent as
to what they saw, yet doubtful, as I have said, of the evidence of
their own eyes - and ears as well; for the noises they made,
although not loud, were as uncouth and varied as their forms, and
could be described neither as grunts nor squeaks nor roars nor
howls nor barks nor yells nor screams nor croaks nor hisses nor
mews nor shrieks, but only as something like all of them mingled in
one horrible dissonance. Keeping in the shade, the watchers had a
few moments to recover themselves before the hideous assembly
suspected their presence; but all at once, as if by common consent,
they scampered off in the direction of a great rock, and vanished
before the men had come to themselves sufficiently to think of
following them.
My readers will suspect what these were; but I will now give them
full information concerning them. They were, of course, household
animals belonging to the goblins, whose ancestors had taken their
ancestors many centuries before from the upper regions of light
into the lower regions of darkness. The original stocks of these
horrible creatures were very much the same as the animals now seen
about farms and homes in the country, with the exception of a few
of them, which had been wild creatures, such as foxes, and indeed
wolves and small bears, which the goblins, from their proclivity
towards the animal creation, had caught when cubs and tamed. But
in the course of time all had undergone even greater changes than
had passed upon their owners. They had altered - that is, their
descendants had altered - into such creatures as I have not
attempted to describe except in the vaguest manner - the various
parts of their bodies assuming, in an apparently arbitrary and
self-willed manner, the most abnormal developments. Indeed, so
little did any distinct type predominate in some of the bewildering
results, that you could only have guessed at any known animal as
the original, and even then, what likeness remained would be more
you like to sleep with me?'
'Oh, yes, yes, dear grandmother,' said Irene, and would have
clapped her hands, forgetting that she could not.
'You won't be afraid, then, to go to bed with such an old woman?'
'No. You are so beautiful, grandmother.'
'But I am very old.'
'And I suppose I am very young. You won't mind sleeping with such
a very young woman, grandmother?'
'You sweet little pertness!' said the old lady, and drew her
towards her, and kissed her on the forehead and the cheek and the
mouth. Then she got a large silver basin, and having poured some
water into it made Irene sit on the chair, and washed her feet.
This done, she was ready for bed. And oh, what a delicious bed it
was into which her grandmother laid her! She hardly could have
told she was lying upon anything: she felt nothing but the
softness.
The old lady having undressed herself lay down beside her.
'Why don't you put out your moon?' asked the princess.
'That never goes out, night or day,' she answered. 'In the darkest
night, if any of my pigeons are out on a message, they always see
my moon and know where to fly to.'
'But if somebody besides the pigeons were to see it - somebody
about the house, I mean - they would come to look what it was and
find you.'
'The better for them, then,' said the old lady. 'But it does not
happen above five times in a hundred years that anyone does see it.
The greater part of those who do take it for a meteor, wink their
eyes, and forget it again. Besides, nobody could find the room
except I pleased. Besides, again - I will tell you a secret - if
that light were to go out you would fancy yourself lying in a bare
garret, on a heap of old straw, and would not see one of the
pleasant things round about you all the time.'
'I hope it will never go out,' said the princess.
'I hope not. But it is time we both went to sleep. Shall I take
you in my arms?'
The little princess nestled close up to the old lady, who took her
in both her arms and held her close to her bosom.
'Oh, dear! this is so nice!' said the princess. 'I didn't know
anything in the world could be so comfortable. I should like to
lie here for ever.'
'You may if you will,' said the old lady. 'But I must put you to
one trial-not a very hard one, I hope. This night week you must
come back to me. If you don't, I do not know when you may find me
again, and you Will soon want me very much.'
'Oh! please, don't let me forget.'
'You shall not forget. The only question is whether you will
believe I am anywhere - whether you will believe I am anything but
a dream. You may be sure I will do all I can to help you to come.
But it will rest with yourself, after all. On the night of next
Friday, you must come to me. Mind now.'
'I will try,' said the princess.
'Then good night,' said the old lady, and kissed the forehead which
lay in her bosom.
In a moment more the little princess was dreaming in the midst of
the loveliest dreams - of summer seas and moonlight and mossy
springs and great murmuring trees, and beds of wild flowers with
such odours as she had never smelled before. But, after all, no
dream could be more lovely than what she had left behind when she
fell asleep.
In the morning she found herself in her own bed. There was no
handkerchief or anything else on her hand, only a sweet odour
lingered about it. The swelling had all gone down; the prick of
the brooch had vanished - in fact, her hand was perfectly well.
CHAPTER 12
A Short Chapter About Curdie
Curdie spent many nights in the mine. His father and he had taken
Mrs. Peterson into the secret, for they knew mother could hold her
tongue, which was more than could be said of all the miners' wives.
But Curdie did not tell her that every night he spent in the mine,
part of it went in earning a new red petticoat for her.
Mrs. Peterson was such a nice good mother! All mothers are nice
and good more or less, but Mrs. Peterson was nice and good all more
and no less. She made and kept a little heaven in that poor
cottage on the high hillside for her husband and son to go home to
out of the low and rather dreary earth in which they worked. I
doubt if the princess was very much happier even in the arms of her
huge great-grandmother than Peter and Curdie were in the arms of
Mrs. Peterson. True, her hands were hard and chapped and large,
but it was with work for them; and therefore, in the sight of the
angels, her hands were so much the more beautiful. And if Curdie
worked hard to get her a petticoat, she worked hard every day to
get him comforts which he would have missed much more than she
would a new petticoat even in winter. Not that she and Curdie ever
thought of how much they worked for each other: that would have
spoiled everything.
When left alone in the mine Curdie always worked on for an hour or
two at first, following the lode which, according to Glump, would
lead at last into the deserted habitation. After that, he would
set out on a reconnoitring expedition. In order to manage this, or
rather the return from it, better than the first time, he had
bought a huge ball of fine string, having learned the trick from
Hop-o'-my-Thumb, whose history his mother had often told him. Not
that Hop-o'-my-Thumb had ever used a ball of string - I should be
sorry to be supposed so far out in my classics - but the principle
was the same as that of the pebbles. The end of this string he
fastened to his pickaxe, which figured no bad anchor, and then,
with the ball in his hand, unrolling it as he went, set out in the
dark through the natural gangs of the goblins' territory. The
first night or two he came upon nothing worth remembering; saw only
a little of the home-life of the cobs in the various caves they
called houses; failed in coming upon anything to cast light upon
the foregoing design which kept the inundation for the present in
the background. But at length, I think on the third or fourth
night, he found, partly guided by the noise of their implements, a
company of evidently the best sappers and miners amongst them, hard
at work. What were they about? It could not well be the
inundation, seeing that had in the meantime been postponed to
something else. Then what was it? He lurked and watched, every
now and then in the greatest risk of being detected, but without
success. He had again and again to retreat in haste, a proceeding
rendered the more difficult that he had to gather up his string as
he returned upon its course. It was not that he was afraid of the
goblins, but that he was afraid of their finding out that they were
watched, which might have prevented the discovery at which he
aimed. Sometimes his haste had to be such that, when he reached
home towards morning, his string, for lack of time to wind it up as
he 'dodged the cobs', would be in what seemed most hopeless
entanglement; but after a good sleep, though a short one, he always
found his mother had got it right again. There it was, wound in a
most respectable ball, ready for use the moment he should want it!
'I can't think how you do it, mother,' he would say.
'I follow the thread,' she would answer - 'just as you do in the
mine.' She never had more to say about it; but the less clever she
was with her words, the more clever she was with her hands; and the
less his mother said, the more Curdie believed she had to say. But
still he had made no discovery as to what the goblin miners were
about.
CHAPTER 13
The Cobs' Creatures
About this time the gentlemen whom the king had left behind him to
watch over the princess had each occasion to doubt the testimony of
his own eyes, for more than strange were the objects to which they
would bear witness. They were of one sort - creatures - but so
grotesque and misshapen as to be more like a child's drawings upon
his slate than anything natural. They saw them only at night,
while on guard about the house. The testimony of the man who first
reported having seen one of them was that, as he was walking slowly
round the house, while yet in the shadow, he caught sight of a
creature standing on its hind legs in the moonlight, with its
forefeet upon a window-ledge, staring in at the window. Its body
might have been that of a dog or wolf, he thought, but he declared
on his honour that its head was twice the size it ought to have
been for the size of its body, and as round as a ball, while the
face, which it turned upon him as it fled, was more like one carved
by a boy upon the turnip inside which he is going to put a candle
than anything else he could think of. It rushed into the garden.
He sent an arrow after it, and thought he must have struck it; for
it gave an unearthly howl, and he could not find his arrow any more
than the beast, although he searched all about the place where it
vanished. They laughed at him until he was driven to hold his
tongue, and said he must have taken too long a pull at the ale-jug.
But before two nights were over he had one to side with him, for
he, too, had seen something strange, only quite different from that
reported by the other. The description the second man gave of the
creature he had seen was yet more grotesque and unlikely. They
were both laughed at by the rest; but night after night another
came over to their side, until at last there was only one left to
laugh at all his companions. Two nights more passed, and he saw
nothing; but on the third he came rushing from the garden to the
other two before the house, in such an agitation that they declared
- for it was their turn now - that the band of his helmet was
cracking under his chin with the rising of his hair inside it.
Running with him into that part of the garden which I have already
described, they saw a score of creatures, to not one of which they
could give a name, and not one of which was like another, hideous
and ludicrous at once, gambolling on the lawn in the moonlight.
The supernatural or rather subnatural ugliness of their faces, the
length of legs and necks in some, the apparentabsence of both or
either in others, made the spectators, although in one consent as
to what they saw, yet doubtful, as I have said, of the evidence of
their own eyes - and ears as well; for the noises they made,
although not loud, were as uncouth and varied as their forms, and
could be described neither as grunts nor squeaks nor roars nor
howls nor barks nor yells nor screams nor croaks nor hisses nor
mews nor shrieks, but only as something like all of them mingled in
one horrible dissonance. Keeping in the shade, the watchers had a
few moments to recover themselves before the hideous assembly
suspected their presence; but all at once, as if by common consent,
they scampered off in the direction of a great rock, and vanished
before the men had come to themselves sufficiently to think of
following them.
My readers will suspect what these were; but I will now give them
full information concerning them. They were, of course, household
animals belonging to the goblins, whose ancestors had taken their
ancestors many centuries before from the upper regions of light
into the lower regions of darkness. The original stocks of these
horrible creatures were very much the same as the animals now seen
about farms and homes in the country, with the exception of a few
of them, which had been wild creatures, such as foxes, and indeed
wolves and small bears, which the goblins, from their proclivity
towards the animal creation, had caught when cubs and tamed. But
in the course of time all had undergone even greater changes than
had passed upon their owners. They had altered - that is, their
descendants had altered - into such creatures as I have not
attempted to describe except in the vaguest manner - the various
parts of their bodies assuming, in an apparently arbitrary and
self-willed manner, the most abnormal developments. Indeed, so
little did any distinct type predominate in some of the bewildering
results, that you could only have guessed at any known animal as
the original, and even then, what likeness remained would be more
- sleeping [´sli:piŋ]
n.&a.睡着(的) (初中英语单词) - forehead [´fɔrid] n.额，前部 (初中英语单词)
- delicious [di´liʃəs] a.美味的，可口的 (初中英语单词)
- grandmother [´græn,mʌðə] n.(外)祖母 (初中英语单词)
- princess [,prin´ses] n.公主；王妃；亲王夫人 (初中英语单词)
- anywhere [´eniweə] ad.无论何处；任何地方 (初中英语单词)
- moonlight [´mu:nlait] n.&a.月光(的) (初中英语单词)
- hillside [´hilsaid] n.山腰 (初中英语单词)
- therefore [´ðeəfɔ:] ad.&conj.因此；所以 (初中英语单词)
- expedition [,ekspi´diʃən] n.远征；探险；迅速 (初中英语单词)
- supposed [sə´pəuzd] a.想象的；假定的 (初中英语单词)
- anchor [´æŋkə] n.锚 v.抛锚 (初中英语单词)
- background [´bækgraund] n.背景；经历；幕后 (初中英语单词)
- partly [´pɑ:tli] ad.部分地；不完全地 (初中英语单词)
- evidently [´evidəntli] ad.明显地 (初中英语单词)
- meantime [´mi:ntaim] n.&ad.其间；同时 (初中英语单词)
- retreat [ri´tri:t] v.&n.退却；撤退；放弃 (初中英语单词)
- witness [´witnis] n.见证人 vt.目击 (初中英语单词)
- standing [´stændiŋ] n.持续 a.直立的 (初中英语单词)
- driven [´driv(ə)n] drive 的过去分词 (初中英语单词)
- description [di´skripʃən] n.描写 (初中英语单词)
- helmet [´helmit] n.钢盔 (初中英语单词)
- apparent [ə´pærənt] a.显然的；表面上的 (初中英语单词)
- absence [´æbsəns] n.不在，缺席；缺乏 (初中英语单词)
- horrible [´hɔrəbəl] a.可怕的；恐怖的 (初中英语单词)
- sufficiently [sə´fiʃəntli] ad.充分地，足够地 (初中英语单词)
- suspect [´sʌspekt, sə´spekt] v.怀疑；觉得 n.嫌疑犯 (初中英语单词)
- exception [ik´sepʃən] n.例外；反对，异议 (初中英语单词)
- creation [kri´eiʃən] n.创作；作品；创造 (初中英语单词)
- abnormal [æb´nɔ:məl] a.变态的，反常的 (初中英语单词)
- distinct [di´stiŋkt] a.清楚的；独特的 (初中英语单词)
- meteor [´mi:tiə] n.大气现象；流星 (高中英语单词)
- perfectly [´pə:fiktli] ad.理想地；完美地 (高中英语单词)
- dreary [´driəri] a.阴郁的；枯燥无味的 (高中英语单词)
- learned [´lə:nid] a.有学问的，博学的 (高中英语单词)
- amongst [ə´mʌŋst] prep.其中之一 =among (高中英语单词)
- seeing [si:iŋ] see的现在分词 n.视觉 (高中英语单词)
- finding [´faindiŋ] n.发现物；判断；结果 (高中英语单词)
- respectable [ri´spektəbəl] a.可敬的；有身价的 (高中英语单词)
- goblin [´gɔblin] n.恶鬼，小妖精 (高中英语单词)
- testimony [´testiməni] n.证明；证据；表明 (高中英语单词)
- turnip [´tə:nip] n.萝卜，芜菁 (高中英语单词)
- agitation [,ædʒi´teiʃən] n.鼓动；摇动；焦虑 (高中英语单词)
- doubtful [´dautful] a.怀疑的，可疑的 (高中英语单词)
- hideous [´hidiəs] a.丑陋的，可怕的 (高中英语单词)
- concerning [kən´sə:niŋ] prep.关于 (高中英语单词)
- apparently [ə´pærəntli] ad.显然，表面上地 (高中英语单词)
- likeness [´laiknis] n.相似；肖像；外表 (高中英语单词)
- petticoat [´petikəut] n.裙子 a.女性的 (英语四级单词)
- habitation [,hæbi´teiʃən] n.居住；住所 (英语四级单词)
- grotesque [grəu´tesk] a.奇异的，想象中的 (英语四级单词)
- varied [´veərid] a.各种各样的 (英语四级单词)
- arbitrary [´ɑ:bitrəri] a.任意的；专断的 (英语四级单词)
- brooch [brəutʃ] n.胸针 (英语六级单词)
- foregoing [´fɔ:gəuiŋ] a.在前的，上述的 (英语六级单词)
- unlikely [ʌn´laikli] a.不像的；未必可能的 (英语六级单词)
- uncouth [ʌn´ku:θ] a.粗野的；笨拙的 (英语六级单词)
- undergone [,ʌndə´gɔn] undergo的过去分词 (英语六级单词)
文章标签:名著
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