章节正文
The Night-Born
by Jack London
CONTENTS:
THE NIGHT-BORN
THE MADNESS OF JOHN HARNED
WHEN THE WORLD WAS YOUNG
THE BENEFIT OF THE DOUBT
WINGED BLACKMAIL
BUNCHES OF KNUCKLES
WAR
UNDER THE DECK AWNINGS
TO KILL A MAN
THE MEXICAN
THE NIGHT-BORN
It was in the old Alta-Inyo Club--a warm night for San
Francisco--and through the open windows, hushed and far, came
the brawl of the streets. The talk had led on from the Graft
Prosecution and the latest signs that the town was to be run
wide open, down through all the grotesque sordidness and
rottenness of manhate and man-meanness, until the name of
O'Brien was mentioned--O'Brien, the promising young pugilist
who had been killed in the prize-ring the night before. At once
the air had seemed to freshen. O'Brien had been a clean-living
young man with ideals. He neither drank, smoked, nor swore, and
his had been the body of a beautiful young god. He had even
carried his prayer-book to the ringside. They found it in his
coat pocket in the dressing-room. . . afterward.
Here was Youth, clean and wholesome, unsullied--the thing of
glory and wonder for men to conjure with..... after it has been
lost to them and they have turned middle-aged. And so well did
we conjure, that Romance came and for an hour led us far from
the man-city and its snarling roar. Bardwell, in a way, started
it by quoting from Thoreau; but it was old Trefethan,
bald-headed and dewlapped, who took up the quotation and for
the hour to come was romance incarnate. At first we wondered
how many Scotches he had consumed since dinner, but very soon
all that was forgotten.
"It was in 1898--I was thirty-five then," he said. "Yes, I know
you are adding it up. You're right. I'm forty-seven now; look
ten years more; and the doctors say--damn the doctors anyway!"
He lifted the long glass to his lips and sipped it slowly to
soothe away his irritation.
"But I was young. . . once. I was young twelve years ago, and I
had hair on top of my head, and my stomach was lean as a
runner's, and the longest day was none too long for me. I was a
husky back there in '98. You remember me, Milner. You knew me
then. Wasn't I a pretty good bit of all right?"
Milner nodded and agreed. Like Trefethan, he was another mining
engineer who had cleaned up a fortune in the Klondike.
"You certainly were, old man," Milner said. "I'll never forget
when you cleaned out those lumberjacks in the M. & M. that
night that little newspaper man started the row. Slavin was in
the country at the time,"--this to us--"and his manager wanted
to get up a match with Trefethan."
"Well, look at me now," Trefethan commanded angrily. "That's
what the Goldstead did to me--God knows how many millions, but
nothing left in my soul..... nor in my veins. The good red
blood is gone. I am a jellyfish, a huge, gross mass of
oscillating protoplasm, a--a . . ."
But language failed him, and he drew solace from the long
glass.
"Women looked at me then; and turned their heads to look a
second time. Strange that I never married. But the girl. That's
what I started to tell you about. I met her a thousand miles
from anywhere, and then some. And she quoted to me those very
words of Thoreau that Bardwell quoted a moment ago--the ones
about the day-born gods and the night-born."
"It was after I had made my locations on Goldstead--and didn't
know what a treasure-pot that that trip creek was going to
prove--that I made that trip east over the Rockies, angling
across to the Great Up North there the Rockies are something
more than a back-bone. They are a boundary, a dividing line, a
wall impregnable and unscalable. There is no intercourse across
them, though, on occasion, from the early days, wandering
trappers have crossed them, though more were lost by the way
than ever came through. And that was precisely why I tackled
the job. It was a traverse any man would be proud to make. I am
prouder of it right now than anything else I have ever done.
"It is an unknown land. Great stretches of it have never been
explored. There are big valleys there where the white man has
never set foot, and Indian tribes as primitive as ten thousand
years ... almost, for they have had some contact with the
whites. Parties of them come out once in a while to trade, and
that is all. Even the Hudson Bay Company failed to find them
and farm them.
"And now the girl. I was coming up a stream--you'd call it a
river in California--uncharted--and unnamed. It was a noble
valley, now shut in by high canyon walls, and again opening out
into beautiful stretches, wide and long, with pasture
shoulder-high in the bottoms, meadows dotted with flowers, and
with clumps of timberspruce--virgin and magnificent. The dogs
were packing on their backs, and were sore-footed and played
out; while I was looking for any bunch of Indians to get sleds
and drivers from and go on with the first snow. It was late
fall, but the way those flowers persisted surprised me. I was
supposed to be in sub-arctic America, and high up among the
buttresses of the Rockies, and yet there was that everlasting
spread of flowers. Some day the white settlers will be in there
and growing wheat down all that valley.
"And then I lifted a smoke, and heard the barking of the
dogs--Indian dogs--and came into camp. There must have been
five hundred of them, proper Indians at that, and I could see
by the jerking-frames that the fall hunting had been good. And
then I met her--Lucy. That was her name. Sign language--that
was all we could talk with, till they led me to a big fly--you
know, half a tent, open on the one side where a campfire
burned. It was all of moose-skins, this fly--moose-skins,
smoke-cured, hand-rubbed, and golden-brown. Under it everything
was neat and orderly as no Indian camp ever was. The bed was
laid on fresh spruce boughs. There were furs galore, and on top
of all was a robe of swanskins--white swan-skins--I have never
seen anything like that robe. And on top of it, sitting
cross-legged, was Lucy. She was nut-brown. I have called her a
girl. But she was not. She was a woman, a nut-brown woman, an
Amazon, a full-blooded, full-bodied woman, and royal ripe. And
her eyes were blue.
"That's what took me off my feet--her eyes--blue, not China
blue, but deep blue, like the sea and sky all melted into one,
and very wise. More than that, they had laughter in them--warm
laughter, sun-warm and human, very human, and . . . shall I say
feminine? They were. They were a woman's eyes, a proper woman's
eyes. You know what that means. Can I say more? Also, in those
blue eyes were, at the same time, a wild unrest, a wistful
yearning, and a repose, an absoluterepose, a sort of all-wise
and philosophical calm."
Trefethan broke off abruptly.
"You fellows think I am screwed. I'm not. This is only my fifth
since dinner. I am dead sober. I am solemn. I sit here now side
by side with my sacred youth. It is not I--'old'
Trefethan--that talks; it is my youth, and it is my youth that
says those were the most wonderful eyes I have ever seen--so
very calm, so very restless; so very wise, so very curious; so
very old, so very young; so satisfied and yet yearning so
wistfully. Boys, I can't describe them. When I have told you
about her, you may know better for yourselves."
"She did not stand up. But she put out her hand."
"'Stranger,' she said, 'I'm real glad to see you.'
"I leave it to you--that sharp, frontier, Western tang of
speech. Picture my sensations. It was a woman, a white woman,
but that tang! It was amazing that it should be a white woman,
here, beyond the last boundary of the world--but the tang. I
tell you, it hurt. It was like the stab of a flatted note. And
yet, let me tell you, that woman was a poet. You shall see."
"She dismissed the Indians. And, by Jove, they went. They took
her orders and followed her blind. She was hi-yu skookam chief.
She told the bucks to make a camp for me and to take care of my
dogs. And they did, too. And they knew enough not to get away
with as much as a moccasin-lace of my outfit. She was a regular
She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed, and I want to tell you it chilled me to
the marrow, sent those little thrills Marathoning up and down
my spinalcolumn, meeting a white woman out there at the head
of a tribe of savages a thousand miles the other side of No
Man's Land.
"'Stranger," she said, 'I reckon you're sure the first white
that ever set foot in this valley. Set down an' talk a spell,
and then we'll have a bite to eat. Which way might you be
comin'?'
"There it was, that tang again. But from now to the end of the
yarn I want you to forget it. I tell you I forgot it, sitting
there on the edge of that swan-skin robe and listening and
looking at the most wonderful woman that ever stepped out of
the pages of Thoreau or of any other man's book.
"I stayed on there a week. It was on her invitation. She
promised to fit me out with dogs and sleds and with Indians
that would put me across the best pass of the Rockies in five
hundred miles. Her fly was pitched apart from the others, on
the high bank by the river, and a couple of Indian girls did
her cooking for her and the camp work. And so we talked and
talked, while the first snow fell and continued to fall and
make a surface for my sleds. And this was her story.
"She was frontier-born, of poor settlers, and you know what
that means--work, work, always work, work in plenty and without
end.
"'I never seen the glory of the world,' she said. 'I had no
time. I knew it was right out there, anywhere, all around the
cabin, but there was always the bread to set, the scrubbin' and
the washin' and the work that was never done. I used to be
plumb sick at times, jes' to get out into it all, especially in
the spring when the songs of the birds drove me most clean
crazy. I wanted to run out through the long pasture grass,
wetting my legs with the dew of it, and to climb the rail
fence, and keep on through the timber and up and up over the
divide so as to get a look around. Oh, I had all kinds of
hankerings--to follow up the canyon beds and slosh around from
pool to pool, making friends with the water-dogs and the
speckly trout; to peep on the sly and watch the squirrels and
rabbits and small furry things and see what they was doing and
learn the secrets of their ways. Seemed to me, if I had time, I
could crawl among the flowers, and, if I was good and quiet,
catch them whispering with themselves, telling all kinds of
wise things that mere humans never know.'"
Trefethan paused to see that his glass had been refilled.
"Another time she said: 'I wanted to run nights like a wild
thing, just to run through the moonshine and under the stars,
to run white and naked in the darkness that I knew must feel
like cool velvet, and to run and run and keep on running. One
evening, plumb tuckered out--it had been a dreadful hard hot
day, and the bread wouldn't raise and the churning had gone
wrong, and I was all irritated and jerky--well, that evening I
made mention to dad of this wanting to run of mine. He looked
at me curious-some and a bit scared. And then he gave me two
by Jack London
CONTENTS:
THE NIGHT-BORN
THE MADNESS OF JOHN HARNED
WHEN THE WORLD WAS YOUNG
THE BENEFIT OF THE DOUBT
WINGED BLACKMAIL
BUNCHES OF KNUCKLES
WAR
UNDER THE DECK AWNINGS
TO KILL A MAN
THE MEXICAN
THE NIGHT-BORN
It was in the old Alta-Inyo Club--a warm night for San
Francisco--and through the open windows, hushed and far, came
the brawl of the streets. The talk had led on from the Graft
Prosecution and the latest signs that the town was to be run
wide open, down through all the grotesque sordidness and
rottenness of manhate and man-meanness, until the name of
O'Brien was mentioned--O'Brien, the promising young pugilist
who had been killed in the prize-ring the night before. At once
the air had seemed to freshen. O'Brien had been a clean-living
young man with ideals. He neither drank, smoked, nor swore, and
his had been the body of a beautiful young god. He had even
carried his prayer-book to the ringside. They found it in his
coat pocket in the dressing-room. . . afterward.
Here was Youth, clean and wholesome, unsullied--the thing of
glory and wonder for men to conjure with..... after it has been
lost to them and they have turned middle-aged. And so well did
we conjure, that Romance came and for an hour led us far from
the man-city and its snarling roar. Bardwell, in a way, started
it by quoting from Thoreau; but it was old Trefethan,
bald-headed and dewlapped, who took up the quotation and for
the hour to come was romance incarnate. At first we wondered
how many Scotches he had consumed since dinner, but very soon
all that was forgotten.
"It was in 1898--I was thirty-five then," he said. "Yes, I know
you are adding it up. You're right. I'm forty-seven now; look
ten years more; and the doctors say--damn the doctors anyway!"
He lifted the long glass to his lips and sipped it slowly to
soothe away his irritation.
"But I was young. . . once. I was young twelve years ago, and I
had hair on top of my head, and my stomach was lean as a
runner's, and the longest day was none too long for me. I was a
husky back there in '98. You remember me, Milner. You knew me
then. Wasn't I a pretty good bit of all right?"
Milner nodded and agreed. Like Trefethan, he was another mining
engineer who had cleaned up a fortune in the Klondike.
"You certainly were, old man," Milner said. "I'll never forget
when you cleaned out those lumberjacks in the M. & M. that
night that little newspaper man started the row. Slavin was in
the country at the time,"--this to us--"and his manager wanted
to get up a match with Trefethan."
"Well, look at me now," Trefethan commanded angrily. "That's
what the Goldstead did to me--God knows how many millions, but
nothing left in my soul..... nor in my veins. The good red
blood is gone. I am a jellyfish, a huge, gross mass of
oscillating protoplasm, a--a . . ."
But language failed him, and he drew solace from the long
glass.
"Women looked at me then; and turned their heads to look a
second time. Strange that I never married. But the girl. That's
what I started to tell you about. I met her a thousand miles
from anywhere, and then some. And she quoted to me those very
words of Thoreau that Bardwell quoted a moment ago--the ones
about the day-born gods and the night-born."
"It was after I had made my locations on Goldstead--and didn't
know what a treasure-pot that that trip creek was going to
prove--that I made that trip east over the Rockies, angling
across to the Great Up North there the Rockies are something
more than a back-bone. They are a boundary, a dividing line, a
wall impregnable and unscalable. There is no intercourse across
them, though, on occasion, from the early days, wandering
trappers have crossed them, though more were lost by the way
than ever came through. And that was precisely why I tackled
the job. It was a traverse any man would be proud to make. I am
prouder of it right now than anything else I have ever done.
"It is an unknown land. Great stretches of it have never been
explored. There are big valleys there where the white man has
never set foot, and Indian tribes as primitive as ten thousand
years ... almost, for they have had some contact with the
whites. Parties of them come out once in a while to trade, and
that is all. Even the Hudson Bay Company failed to find them
and farm them.
"And now the girl. I was coming up a stream--you'd call it a
river in California--uncharted--and unnamed. It was a noble
valley, now shut in by high canyon walls, and again opening out
into beautiful stretches, wide and long, with pasture
shoulder-high in the bottoms, meadows dotted with flowers, and
with clumps of timberspruce--virgin and magnificent. The dogs
were packing on their backs, and were sore-footed and played
out; while I was looking for any bunch of Indians to get sleds
and drivers from and go on with the first snow. It was late
fall, but the way those flowers persisted surprised me. I was
supposed to be in sub-arctic America, and high up among the
buttresses of the Rockies, and yet there was that everlasting
spread of flowers. Some day the white settlers will be in there
and growing wheat down all that valley.
"And then I lifted a smoke, and heard the barking of the
dogs--Indian dogs--and came into camp. There must have been
five hundred of them, proper Indians at that, and I could see
by the jerking-frames that the fall hunting had been good. And
then I met her--Lucy. That was her name. Sign language--that
was all we could talk with, till they led me to a big fly--you
know, half a tent, open on the one side where a campfire
burned. It was all of moose-skins, this fly--moose-skins,
smoke-cured, hand-rubbed, and golden-brown. Under it everything
was neat and orderly as no Indian camp ever was. The bed was
laid on fresh spruce boughs. There were furs galore, and on top
of all was a robe of swanskins--white swan-skins--I have never
seen anything like that robe. And on top of it, sitting
cross-legged, was Lucy. She was nut-brown. I have called her a
girl. But she was not. She was a woman, a nut-brown woman, an
Amazon, a full-blooded, full-bodied woman, and royal ripe. And
her eyes were blue.
"That's what took me off my feet--her eyes--blue, not China
blue, but deep blue, like the sea and sky all melted into one,
and very wise. More than that, they had laughter in them--warm
laughter, sun-warm and human, very human, and . . . shall I say
feminine? They were. They were a woman's eyes, a proper woman's
eyes. You know what that means. Can I say more? Also, in those
blue eyes were, at the same time, a wild unrest, a wistful
yearning, and a repose, an absoluterepose, a sort of all-wise
and philosophical calm."
Trefethan broke off abruptly.
"You fellows think I am screwed. I'm not. This is only my fifth
since dinner. I am dead sober. I am solemn. I sit here now side
by side with my sacred youth. It is not I--'old'
Trefethan--that talks; it is my youth, and it is my youth that
says those were the most wonderful eyes I have ever seen--so
very calm, so very restless; so very wise, so very curious; so
very old, so very young; so satisfied and yet yearning so
wistfully. Boys, I can't describe them. When I have told you
about her, you may know better for yourselves."
"She did not stand up. But she put out her hand."
"'Stranger,' she said, 'I'm real glad to see you.'
"I leave it to you--that sharp, frontier, Western tang of
speech. Picture my sensations. It was a woman, a white woman,
but that tang! It was amazing that it should be a white woman,
here, beyond the last boundary of the world--but the tang. I
tell you, it hurt. It was like the stab of a flatted note. And
yet, let me tell you, that woman was a poet. You shall see."
"She dismissed the Indians. And, by Jove, they went. They took
her orders and followed her blind. She was hi-yu skookam chief.
She told the bucks to make a camp for me and to take care of my
dogs. And they did, too. And they knew enough not to get away
with as much as a moccasin-lace of my outfit. She was a regular
She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed, and I want to tell you it chilled me to
the marrow, sent those little thrills Marathoning up and down
my spinalcolumn, meeting a white woman out there at the head
of a tribe of savages a thousand miles the other side of No
Man's Land.
"'Stranger," she said, 'I reckon you're sure the first white
that ever set foot in this valley. Set down an' talk a spell,
and then we'll have a bite to eat. Which way might you be
comin'?'
"There it was, that tang again. But from now to the end of the
yarn I want you to forget it. I tell you I forgot it, sitting
there on the edge of that swan-skin robe and listening and
looking at the most wonderful woman that ever stepped out of
the pages of Thoreau or of any other man's book.
"I stayed on there a week. It was on her invitation. She
promised to fit me out with dogs and sleds and with Indians
that would put me across the best pass of the Rockies in five
hundred miles. Her fly was pitched apart from the others, on
the high bank by the river, and a couple of Indian girls did
her cooking for her and the camp work. And so we talked and
talked, while the first snow fell and continued to fall and
make a surface for my sleds. And this was her story.
"She was frontier-born, of poor settlers, and you know what
that means--work, work, always work, work in plenty and without
end.
"'I never seen the glory of the world,' she said. 'I had no
time. I knew it was right out there, anywhere, all around the
cabin, but there was always the bread to set, the scrubbin' and
the washin' and the work that was never done. I used to be
plumb sick at times, jes' to get out into it all, especially in
the spring when the songs of the birds drove me most clean
crazy. I wanted to run out through the long pasture grass,
wetting my legs with the dew of it, and to climb the rail
fence, and keep on through the timber and up and up over the
divide so as to get a look around. Oh, I had all kinds of
hankerings--to follow up the canyon beds and slosh around from
pool to pool, making friends with the water-dogs and the
speckly trout; to peep on the sly and watch the squirrels and
rabbits and small furry things and see what they was doing and
learn the secrets of their ways. Seemed to me, if I had time, I
could crawl among the flowers, and, if I was good and quiet,
catch them whispering with themselves, telling all kinds of
wise things that mere humans never know.'"
Trefethan paused to see that his glass had been refilled.
"Another time she said: 'I wanted to run nights like a wild
thing, just to run through the moonshine and under the stars,
to run white and naked in the darkness that I knew must feel
like cool velvet, and to run and run and keep on running. One
evening, plumb tuckered out--it had been a dreadful hard hot
day, and the bread wouldn't raise and the churning had gone
wrong, and I was all irritated and jerky--well, that evening I
made mention to dad of this wanting to run of mine. He looked
at me curious-some and a bit scared. And then he gave me two
- promising [´prɔmisiŋ]
a.有希望的；有为的 (初中英语单词) - romance [rəu´mæns] n.中世纪骑士小说 (初中英语单词)
- stomach [´stʌmək] n.胃；胃口，食欲 (初中英语单词)
- manager [´mænidʒə] n.经理；管理人；干事 (初中英语单词)
- anywhere [´eniweə] ad.无论何处；任何地方 (初中英语单词)
- boundary [´baundəri] n.界线，边界 (初中英语单词)
- indian [´indiən] a.印度的 n.印度人 (初中英语单词)
- primitive [´primitiv] a.原始的 n.原始人 (初中英语单词)
- contact [´kɔntækt] n.接触；联系 v.联络 (初中英语单词)
- hudson [´hʌdsn] n.哈得孙河 (初中英语单词)
- opening [´əupəniŋ] n.开放；开端 a.开始的 (初中英语单词)
- magnificent [mæg´nifisənt] a.壮丽的；豪华的 (初中英语单词)
- orderly [´ɔ:dəli] a.整洁的 n.勤务兵 (初中英语单词)
- laughter [´lɑ:ftə] n.笑，笑声 (初中英语单词)
- absolute [´æbsəlu:t] a.绝对的 n.绝对 (初中英语单词)
- solemn [´sɔləm] a.严肃的；隆重的 (初中英语单词)
- sacred [´seikrid] a.神圣的；庄严的 (初中英语单词)
- restless [´restləs] a.没有休息的 (初中英语单词)
- frontier [´frʌntiə] n.国境；边疆；边界 (初中英语单词)
- western [´westən] a.西的；西方的 (初中英语单词)
- amazing [ə´meiziŋ] a.惊人的；惊奇的 (初中英语单词)
- column [´kɔləm] n.柱；柱状物；纵队 (初中英语单词)
- reckon [´rekən] v.计算；认为；估计 (初中英语单词)
- valley [´væli] n.谷；河谷；流域 (初中英语单词)
- invitation [,invi´teiʃən] n.邀请；请帖；吸引 (初中英语单词)
- pasture [´pɑ:stʃə] n.牧场；放牧 v.吃(草) (初中英语单词)
- timber [´timbə] n.木材；木料；横梁 (初中英语单词)
- velvet [´velvit] n.&a.天鹅绒(般的) (初中英语单词)
- running [´rʌniŋ] a.奔跑的；流动的 (初中英语单词)
- dreadful [´dredful] a.可怕的；讨厌的 (初中英语单词)
- madness [´mædnis] n.疯狂；狂热 (高中英语单词)
- wholesome [´həulsəm] a.有益于健康的 (高中英语单词)
- quotation [kwəu´teiʃən] n.引用；引文；语录 (高中英语单词)
- angrily [´æŋgrili] ad.生气地；愤怒地 (高中英语单词)
- precisely [pri´saisli] ad.精确地；刻板地 (高中英语单词)
- traverse [´trævə:s] vt.横越，穿过 (高中英语单词)
- spruce [spru:s] n.云杉木 a.&v.整洁 (高中英语单词)
- repose [ri´pəuz] v.&n.(使)休息；安息 (高中英语单词)
- outfit [´aut,fit] n.装备 vt.供给；装备 (高中英语单词)
- grotesque [grəu´tesk] a.奇异的，想象中的 (英语四级单词)
- conjure [´kʌndʒə] v.祈求；召(鬼)；变魔术 (英语四级单词)
- intercourse [´intəkɔ:s] n.交际；往来；交流 (英语四级单词)
- canyon [´kænjən] n.峡谷 (英语四级单词)
- unrest [ʌn´rest] n.不安；不稳；动乱 (英语四级单词)
- middle-aged [´midl´eidʒid] a.中年的 (英语六级单词)
- protoplasm [´prəutəplæzəm] n.原生质；原浆 (英语六级单词)
- solace [´sɔləs] n.&vt.安慰(物)；缓和 (英语六级单词)
- hunting [´hʌntiŋ] n.打猎 (英语六级单词)
- philosophical [,filə´sɔfikəl] a.哲学(上)的；冷静的 (英语六级单词)
- marrow [´mærəu] n.(骨)髓；精华；活力 (英语六级单词)
- spinal [´spainl] a.脊椎骨，脊骨的 (英语六级单词)
- wanting [´wɔntiŋ, wɑ:n-] a.短缺的；不足的 (英语六级单词)
文章标签:名著
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