章节正文
pills to take. Said to go to bed and get a good sleep and I'd
be all hunky-dory in the morning. So I never mentioned my
hankerings to him, or any one any more.'
"The mountain home broke up--starved out, I imagine--and the
family came to Seattle to live. There she worked in a
factory--long hours, you know, and all the rest, deadly work.
And after a year of that she became waitress in a cheap
restaurant--hash-slinger, she called it. "She said to me once,
'Romance I guess was what I wanted. But there wan't no romance
floating around in dishpans and washtubs, or in factories and
hash-joints.'
"When she was eighteen she married--a man who was going up to
Juneau to start a restaurant. He had a few dollars saved, and
appeared prosperous. She didn't love him--she was emphatic
about that, but she was all tired out, and she wanted to get
away from the unending drudgery. Besides, Juneau was in Alaska,
and her yearning took the form of a desire to see that
wonderland. But little she saw of it. He started the
restaurant, a little cheap one, and she quickly learned what he
had married her for..... to save paying wages. She came pretty
close to running the joint and doing all the work from waiting
to dishwashing. She cooked most of the time as well. And she
had four years of it.
"Can't you picture her, this wild woods creature, quick with
every old primitiveinstinct, yearning for the free open, and
mowed up in a vile little hash-joint and toiling and moiling
for four mortal years?
"'There was no meaning in anything,' she said. 'What was it all
about! Why was I born! Was that all the meaning of life--just
to work and work and be always tired!--to go to bed tired and
to wake up tired, with every day like every other day unless it
was harder?' She had heard talk of immortal life from the
gospel sharps, she said, but she could not reckon that what she
was doin' was a likely preparation for her immortality.
"But she still had her dreams, though more rarely. She had read
a few books--what, it is pretty hard to imagine, Seaside
Library novels most likely; yet they had been food for fancy.
'Sometimes,' she said, 'when I was that dizzy from the heat of
the cooking that if I didn't take a breath of fresh air I'd
faint, I'd stick my head out of the kitchen window, and close
my eyes and see most wonderful things. All of a sudden I'd be
traveling down a country road, and everything clean and quiet,
no dust, no dirt; just streams ripplin' down sweet meadows, and
lambs playing, breezes blowing the breath of flowers, and soft
sunshine over everything; and lovely cows lazying knee-deep in
quiet pools, and young girls bathing in a curve of stream all
white and slim and natural--and I'd know I was in Arcady. I'd
read about that country once, in a book. And maybe knights, all
flashing in the sun, would come riding around a bend in the
road, or a lady on a milk-white mare, and in the distance I
could see the towers of a castle rising, or I just knew, on the
next turn, that I'd come upon some palace, all white and airy
and fairy-like, with fountains playing, and flowers all over
everything, and peacocks on the lawn..... and then I'd open my
eyes, and the heat of the cooking range would strike on me, and
I'd hear Jake sayin'--he was my husband--I'd hear Jake sayin',
"Why ain't you served them beans? Think I can wait here all
day!" Romance!--I reckon the nearest I ever come to it was when
a drunken Armenian cook got the snakes and tried to cut my
throat with a potato knife and I got my arm burned on the stove
before I could lay him out with the potato stomper.
"'I wanted easy ways, and lovely things, and Romance and all
that; but it just seemed I had no luck nohow and was only and
expressly born for cooking and dishwashing. There was a wild
crowd in Juneau them days, but I looked at the other women, and
their way of life didn't excite me. I reckon I wanted to be
clean. I don't know why; I just wanted to, I guess; and I
reckoned I might as well die dishwashing as die their way."
Trefethan halted in his tale for a moment, completing to
himself some thread of thought.
"And this is the woman I met up there in the Arctic, running a
tribe of wild Indians and a few thousand square miles of
hunting territory. And it happened, simply enough, though, for
that matter, she might have lived and died among the pots and
pans. But 'Came the whisper, came the vision.' That was all she
needed, and she got it.
"'I woke up one day,' she said. 'Just happened on it in a scrap
of newspaper. I remember every word of it, and I can give it to
you.' And then she quoted Thoreau's Cry of the Human:
"'The young pines springing up, in the corn field from year to
year are to me a refreshing fact. We talk of civilizing the
Indian, but that is not the name for his improvement. By the
wary independence and aloofness of his dim forest life he
preserves his intercourse with his native gods and is admitted
from time to time to a rare and peculiar society with nature.
He has glances of starryrecognition, to which our saloons are
strangers. The steady illumination of his qenius, dim only
because distant, is like the faint but satisfying light of the
stars compared with the dazzling but ineffectual and
short-lived blaze of candles. The Society Islanders had their
day-born gods, but they were not supposed to be of equal
antiquity with the..... night-born gods.'
"That's what she did, repeated it word for word, and I forgot
the tang, for it was solemn, a declaration of religion--pagan,
if you will; and clothed in the living garmenture of herself.
"'And the rest of it was torn away,' she added, a great
emptiness in her voice. 'It was only a scrap of newspaper. But
that Thoreau was a wise man. I wish I knew more about him.' She
stopped a moment, and I swear her face was ineffably holy as
she said, 'I could have made him a good wife.'
"And then she went on. 'I knew right away, as soon as I read
that, what was the matter with me. I was a night-born. I, who
had lived all my life with the day-born, was a night-born. That
was why I had never been satisfied with cooking and
dishwashing; that was why I had hankered to run naked in the
moonlight. And I knew that this dirty little Juneau hash-joint
was no place for me. And right there and then I said, "I quit."
I packed up my few rags of clothes, and started. Jake saw me
and tried to stop me.
"'What you doing?" he says.
"'Divorcin' you and me,' I says. 'I'm headin' for tall timber
and where I belong.'"
"'No you don't," he says, reaching for me to stop me. "The
cooking has got on your head. You listen to me talk before you
up and do anything brash.'"
"'But I pulled a gun-a little Colt's forty-four--and says,
"This does my talkin' for me.'"
"'And I left.'"
Trefethan emptied his glass and called for another.
"Boys, do you know what that girl did? She was twenty-two. She
had spent her life over the dish-pan and she knew no more about
the world than I do of the fourth dimension, or the fifth. All
roads led to her desire. No; she didn't head for the
dance-halls. On the Alaskan Pan-handle it is preferable to
travel by water. She went down to the beach. An Indian canoe
was starting for Dyea--you know the kind, carved out of a
single tree, narrow and deep and sixty feet long. She gave them
a couple of dollars and got on board.
"'Romance?' she told me. 'It was Romance from the jump. There
were three families altogether in that canoe, and that crowded
there wasn't room to turn around, with dogs and Indian babies
sprawling over everything, and everybody dipping a paddle and
making that canoe go.' And all around the great solemn
mountains, and tangled drifts of clouds and sunshine. And oh,
the silence! the great wonderful silence! And, once, the smoke
of a hunter's camp, away off in the distance, trailing among
the trees. It was like a picnic, a grand picnic, and I could
see my dreams coming true, and I was ready for something to
happen 'most any time. And it did.
"'And that first camp, on the island! And the boys spearing
fish in the mouth of the creek, and the big deer one of the
bucks shot just around the point. And there were flowers
everywhere, and in back from the beach the grass was thick and
lush and neck-high. And some of the girls went through this
with me, and we climbed the hillside behind and picked berries
and roots that tasted sour and were good to eat. And we came
upon a big bear in the berries making his supper, and he said
"Oof!" and ran away as scared as we were. And then the camp,
and the camp smoke, and the smell of fresh venison cooking. It
was beautiful. I was with the night-born at last, and I knew
that was where I belonged. And for the first time in my life,
it seemed to me, I went to bed happy that night, looking out
under a corner of the canvas at the stars cut off black by a
big shoulder of mountain, and listening to the night-noises,
and knowing that the same thing would go on next day and
forever and ever, for I wasn't going back. And I never did go
back.'
"'Romance! I got it next day. We had to cross a big arm of the
ocean--twelve or fifteen miles, at least; and it came on to
blow when we were in the middle. That night I was along on
shore, with one wolf-dog, and I was the only one left alive.'
"Picture it yourself," Trefethan broke off to say. "The canoe
was wrecked and lost, and everybody pounded to death on the
rocks except her. She went ashorehanging on to a dog's tail,
escaping the rocks and washing up on a tiny beach, the only one
in miles.
"'Lucky for me it was the mainland,' she said. 'So I headed
right away back, through the woods and over the mountains and
straight on anywhere. Seemed I was looking for something and
knew I'd find it. I wasn't afraid. I was night-born, and the
big timber couldn't kill me. And on the second day I found it.
I came upon a small clearing and a tumbledown cabin. Nobody had
been there for years and years. The roof had fallen in. Rotted
blankets lay in the bunks, and pots and pans were on the stove.
But that was not the most curious thing. Outside, along the
edge of the trees, you can't guess what I found. The skeletons
of eight horses, each tied to a tree. They had starved to
death, I reckon, and left only little piles of bones scattered
some here and there. And each horse had had a load on its back.
There the loads lay, in among the bones--painted canvas sacks,
and inside moosehide sacks, and inside the moosehide
sacks--what do you think?'"
She stopped, reached under a comer of the bed among the spruce
boughs, and pulled out a leather sack. She untied the mouth and
ran out into my hand as pretty a stream of gold as I have ever
seen--coarse gold, placer gold, some large dust, but mostly
nuggets, and it was so fresh and rough that it scarcely showed
signs of water-wash.
"'You say you're a mining engineer,' she said, 'and you know
this country. Can you name a pay-creek that has the color of
that gold!'
"I couldn't! There wasn't a trace of silver. It was almost
pure, and I told her so.
"'You bet,' she said. 'I sell that for nineteen dollars an
ounce. You can't get over seventeen for Eldorado gold, and
Minook gold don't fetch quite eighteen. Well, that was what I
found among the bones--eight horse-loads of it, one hundred and
fifty pounds to the load.'
"'A quarter of a million dollars!' I cried out.
"'That's what I reckoned it roughly,' she answered. 'Talk about
Romance! And me a slaving the way I had all the years, when as
be all hunky-dory in the morning. So I never mentioned my
hankerings to him, or any one any more.'
"The mountain home broke up--starved out, I imagine--and the
family came to Seattle to live. There she worked in a
factory--long hours, you know, and all the rest, deadly work.
And after a year of that she became waitress in a cheap
restaurant--hash-slinger, she called it. "She said to me once,
'Romance I guess was what I wanted. But there wan't no romance
floating around in dishpans and washtubs, or in factories and
hash-joints.'
"When she was eighteen she married--a man who was going up to
Juneau to start a restaurant. He had a few dollars saved, and
appeared prosperous. She didn't love him--she was emphatic
about that, but she was all tired out, and she wanted to get
away from the unending drudgery. Besides, Juneau was in Alaska,
and her yearning took the form of a desire to see that
wonderland. But little she saw of it. He started the
restaurant, a little cheap one, and she quickly learned what he
had married her for..... to save paying wages. She came pretty
close to running the joint and doing all the work from waiting
to dishwashing. She cooked most of the time as well. And she
had four years of it.
"Can't you picture her, this wild woods creature, quick with
every old primitiveinstinct, yearning for the free open, and
mowed up in a vile little hash-joint and toiling and moiling
for four mortal years?
"'There was no meaning in anything,' she said. 'What was it all
about! Why was I born! Was that all the meaning of life--just
to work and work and be always tired!--to go to bed tired and
to wake up tired, with every day like every other day unless it
was harder?' She had heard talk of immortal life from the
gospel sharps, she said, but she could not reckon that what she
was doin' was a likely preparation for her immortality.
"But she still had her dreams, though more rarely. She had read
a few books--what, it is pretty hard to imagine, Seaside
Library novels most likely; yet they had been food for fancy.
'Sometimes,' she said, 'when I was that dizzy from the heat of
the cooking that if I didn't take a breath of fresh air I'd
faint, I'd stick my head out of the kitchen window, and close
my eyes and see most wonderful things. All of a sudden I'd be
traveling down a country road, and everything clean and quiet,
no dust, no dirt; just streams ripplin' down sweet meadows, and
lambs playing, breezes blowing the breath of flowers, and soft
sunshine over everything; and lovely cows lazying knee-deep in
quiet pools, and young girls bathing in a curve of stream all
white and slim and natural--and I'd know I was in Arcady. I'd
read about that country once, in a book. And maybe knights, all
flashing in the sun, would come riding around a bend in the
road, or a lady on a milk-white mare, and in the distance I
could see the towers of a castle rising, or I just knew, on the
next turn, that I'd come upon some palace, all white and airy
and fairy-like, with fountains playing, and flowers all over
everything, and peacocks on the lawn..... and then I'd open my
eyes, and the heat of the cooking range would strike on me, and
I'd hear Jake sayin'--he was my husband--I'd hear Jake sayin',
"Why ain't you served them beans? Think I can wait here all
day!" Romance!--I reckon the nearest I ever come to it was when
a drunken Armenian cook got the snakes and tried to cut my
throat with a potato knife and I got my arm burned on the stove
before I could lay him out with the potato stomper.
"'I wanted easy ways, and lovely things, and Romance and all
that; but it just seemed I had no luck nohow and was only and
expressly born for cooking and dishwashing. There was a wild
crowd in Juneau them days, but I looked at the other women, and
their way of life didn't excite me. I reckon I wanted to be
clean. I don't know why; I just wanted to, I guess; and I
reckoned I might as well die dishwashing as die their way."
Trefethan halted in his tale for a moment, completing to
himself some thread of thought.
"And this is the woman I met up there in the Arctic, running a
tribe of wild Indians and a few thousand square miles of
hunting territory. And it happened, simply enough, though, for
that matter, she might have lived and died among the pots and
pans. But 'Came the whisper, came the vision.' That was all she
needed, and she got it.
"'I woke up one day,' she said. 'Just happened on it in a scrap
of newspaper. I remember every word of it, and I can give it to
you.' And then she quoted Thoreau's Cry of the Human:
"'The young pines springing up, in the corn field from year to
year are to me a refreshing fact. We talk of civilizing the
Indian, but that is not the name for his improvement. By the
wary independence and aloofness of his dim forest life he
preserves his intercourse with his native gods and is admitted
from time to time to a rare and peculiar society with nature.
He has glances of starryrecognition, to which our saloons are
strangers. The steady illumination of his qenius, dim only
because distant, is like the faint but satisfying light of the
stars compared with the dazzling but ineffectual and
short-lived blaze of candles. The Society Islanders had their
day-born gods, but they were not supposed to be of equal
antiquity with the..... night-born gods.'
"That's what she did, repeated it word for word, and I forgot
the tang, for it was solemn, a declaration of religion--pagan,
if you will; and clothed in the living garmenture of herself.
"'And the rest of it was torn away,' she added, a great
emptiness in her voice. 'It was only a scrap of newspaper. But
that Thoreau was a wise man. I wish I knew more about him.' She
stopped a moment, and I swear her face was ineffably holy as
she said, 'I could have made him a good wife.'
"And then she went on. 'I knew right away, as soon as I read
that, what was the matter with me. I was a night-born. I, who
had lived all my life with the day-born, was a night-born. That
was why I had never been satisfied with cooking and
dishwashing; that was why I had hankered to run naked in the
moonlight. And I knew that this dirty little Juneau hash-joint
was no place for me. And right there and then I said, "I quit."
I packed up my few rags of clothes, and started. Jake saw me
and tried to stop me.
"'What you doing?" he says.
"'Divorcin' you and me,' I says. 'I'm headin' for tall timber
and where I belong.'"
"'No you don't," he says, reaching for me to stop me. "The
cooking has got on your head. You listen to me talk before you
up and do anything brash.'"
"'But I pulled a gun-a little Colt's forty-four--and says,
"This does my talkin' for me.'"
"'And I left.'"
Trefethan emptied his glass and called for another.
"Boys, do you know what that girl did? She was twenty-two. She
had spent her life over the dish-pan and she knew no more about
the world than I do of the fourth dimension, or the fifth. All
roads led to her desire. No; she didn't head for the
dance-halls. On the Alaskan Pan-handle it is preferable to
travel by water. She went down to the beach. An Indian canoe
was starting for Dyea--you know the kind, carved out of a
single tree, narrow and deep and sixty feet long. She gave them
a couple of dollars and got on board.
"'Romance?' she told me. 'It was Romance from the jump. There
were three families altogether in that canoe, and that crowded
there wasn't room to turn around, with dogs and Indian babies
sprawling over everything, and everybody dipping a paddle and
making that canoe go.' And all around the great solemn
mountains, and tangled drifts of clouds and sunshine. And oh,
the silence! the great wonderful silence! And, once, the smoke
of a hunter's camp, away off in the distance, trailing among
the trees. It was like a picnic, a grand picnic, and I could
see my dreams coming true, and I was ready for something to
happen 'most any time. And it did.
"'And that first camp, on the island! And the boys spearing
fish in the mouth of the creek, and the big deer one of the
bucks shot just around the point. And there were flowers
everywhere, and in back from the beach the grass was thick and
lush and neck-high. And some of the girls went through this
with me, and we climbed the hillside behind and picked berries
and roots that tasted sour and were good to eat. And we came
upon a big bear in the berries making his supper, and he said
"Oof!" and ran away as scared as we were. And then the camp,
and the camp smoke, and the smell of fresh venison cooking. It
was beautiful. I was with the night-born at last, and I knew
that was where I belonged. And for the first time in my life,
it seemed to me, I went to bed happy that night, looking out
under a corner of the canvas at the stars cut off black by a
big shoulder of mountain, and listening to the night-noises,
and knowing that the same thing would go on next day and
forever and ever, for I wasn't going back. And I never did go
back.'
"'Romance! I got it next day. We had to cross a big arm of the
ocean--twelve or fifteen miles, at least; and it came on to
blow when we were in the middle. That night I was along on
shore, with one wolf-dog, and I was the only one left alive.'
"Picture it yourself," Trefethan broke off to say. "The canoe
was wrecked and lost, and everybody pounded to death on the
rocks except her. She went ashorehanging on to a dog's tail,
escaping the rocks and washing up on a tiny beach, the only one
in miles.
"'Lucky for me it was the mainland,' she said. 'So I headed
right away back, through the woods and over the mountains and
straight on anywhere. Seemed I was looking for something and
knew I'd find it. I wasn't afraid. I was night-born, and the
big timber couldn't kill me. And on the second day I found it.
I came upon a small clearing and a tumbledown cabin. Nobody had
been there for years and years. The roof had fallen in. Rotted
blankets lay in the bunks, and pots and pans were on the stove.
But that was not the most curious thing. Outside, along the
edge of the trees, you can't guess what I found. The skeletons
of eight horses, each tied to a tree. They had starved to
death, I reckon, and left only little piles of bones scattered
some here and there. And each horse had had a load on its back.
There the loads lay, in among the bones--painted canvas sacks,
and inside moosehide sacks, and inside the moosehide
sacks--what do you think?'"
She stopped, reached under a comer of the bed among the spruce
boughs, and pulled out a leather sack. She untied the mouth and
ran out into my hand as pretty a stream of gold as I have ever
seen--coarse gold, placer gold, some large dust, but mostly
nuggets, and it was so fresh and rough that it scarcely showed
signs of water-wash.
"'You say you're a mining engineer,' she said, 'and you know
this country. Can you name a pay-creek that has the color of
that gold!'
"I couldn't! There wasn't a trace of silver. It was almost
pure, and I told her so.
"'You bet,' she said. 'I sell that for nineteen dollars an
ounce. You can't get over seventeen for Eldorado gold, and
Minook gold don't fetch quite eighteen. Well, that was what I
found among the bones--eight horse-loads of it, one hundred and
fifty pounds to the load.'
"'A quarter of a million dollars!' I cried out.
"'That's what I reckoned it roughly,' she answered. 'Talk about
Romance! And me a slaving the way I had all the years, when as
- deadly [´dedli]
a.致命的 ad.死一般地 (初中英语单词) - restaurant [´restərɔnt] n.饭店，菜馆 (初中英语单词)
- prosperous [´prɔspərəs] a.繁荣的；顺利的 (初中英语单词)
- running [´rʌniŋ] a.奔跑的；流动的 (初中英语单词)
- primitive [´primitiv] a.原始的 n.原始人 (初中英语单词)
- instinct [´instiŋkt] n.本能；直觉；天资 (初中英语单词)
- immortal [i´mɔ:təl] a.不死的n.不朽的人物 (初中英语单词)
- reckon [´rekən] v.计算；认为；估计 (初中英语单词)
- preparation [,prepə´reiʃən] n.准备；预习(时间) (初中英语单词)
- rarely [´reəli] ad.难得；非凡地 (初中英语单词)
- breath [breθ] n.呼吸；气息 (初中英语单词)
- stream [stri:m] n.河 vi.流出；飘扬 (初中英语单词)
- drunken [´drʌŋkən] a.喝醉的；常醉的 (初中英语单词)
- romance [rəu´mæns] n.中世纪骑士小说 (初中英语单词)
- excite [ik´sait] vt.激动；引起，招惹 (初中英语单词)
- whisper [´wispə] v.耳语 n.低语；沙沙声 (初中英语单词)
- improvement [im´pru:vmənt] n.改进，改善，进步 (初中英语单词)
- independence [,indi´pendəns] n.独立，自主，自立 (初中英语单词)
- peculiar [pi´kju:liə] a.特有的；奇异的 (初中英语单词)
- recognition [,rekəg´niʃən] n.认出；认识；承认 (初中英语单词)
- supposed [sə´pəuzd] a.想象的；假定的 (初中英语单词)
- solemn [´sɔləm] a.严肃的；隆重的 (初中英语单词)
- indian [´indiən] a.印度的 n.印度人 (初中英语单词)
- altogether [,ɔ:ltə´geðə] ad.完全；总而言之 (初中英语单词)
- sunshine [´sʌnʃain] n.日光，阳光 (初中英语单词)
- hillside [´hilsaid] n.山腰 (初中英语单词)
- canvas [´kænvəs] n.帆布；油画(布) (初中英语单词)
- knowing [´nəuiŋ] a.会意的，心照不宣的 (初中英语单词)
- ashore [ə´ʃɔ:] ad.向岸上 (初中英语单词)
- anywhere [´eniweə] ad.无论何处；任何地方 (初中英语单词)
- timber [´timbə] n.木材；木料；横梁 (初中英语单词)
- learned [´lə:nid] a.有学问的，博学的 (高中英语单词)
- mortal [´mɔ:tl] a.致命的 n.凡人 (高中英语单词)
- arctic [´ɑ:ktik] a.北极的 (高中英语单词)
- repeated [ri´pi:tid] a.反复的；重复的 (高中英语单词)
- declaration [,deklə´reiʃən] n.宣布；宣言；申报 (高中英语单词)
- dimension [di´menʃən] n.尺寸；面积；体积 (高中英语单词)
- paddle [´pædl] n.踏板 v.用浆划；划船 (高中英语单词)
- picnic [´piknik] n.郊游 vi.(去)野餐 (高中英语单词)
- hanging [´hæŋiŋ] n.绞刑 a.悬挂着的 (高中英语单词)
- mining [´mainiŋ] n.采矿；矿业 (高中英语单词)
- intercourse [´intəkɔ:s] n.交际；往来；交流 (英语四级单词)
- starry [´stɑ:ri] a.星光照耀的，闪亮的 (英语四级单词)
- clearing [´kliəriŋ] n.(森林中的)空旷地 (英语四级单词)
- drudgery [´drʌdʒəri] n.苦工；苦役 (英语六级单词)
- refreshing [ri´freʃiŋ] a.使心神爽快的 (英语六级单词)
- illumination [i,lju:mi´neiʃən] n.照明；阐明 (英语六级单词)
- venison [´venisən] n.鹿肉；野味 (英语六级单词)
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