章节正文
soon as I ventured out, inside three days, this was what
happened. And what became of the men that mined all that gold?
Often and often I wonder about it. They left their horses,
loaded and tied, and just disappeared off the face of the
earth, leaving neither hide nor hair behind them. I never heard
tell of them. Nobody knows anything about them. Well, being the
night-born, I reckon I was their rightful heir.'
Trefethan stopped to light a cigar.
"Do you know what that girl did? She cached the gold, saving
out thirty pounds, which she carried back to the coast. Then
she signaled a passing canoe, made her way to Pat Healy's
trading post at Dyea, outfitted, and went over Chilcoot Pass.
That was in '88--eight years before the Klondike strike, and
the Yukon was a howling wilderness. She was afraid of the
bucks, but she took two young squaws with her, crossed the
lakes, and went down the river and to all the early camps on
the Lower Yukon. She wandered several years over that country
and then on in to where I met her. Liked the looks of it, she
said, seeing, in her own words, 'a big bull caribou knee-deep
in purple iris on the valley-bottom.' She hooked up with the
Indians, doctored them, gained their confidence, and gradually
took them in charge. She had only left that country once, and
then, with a bunch of the young bucks, she went over Chilcoot,
cleaned up her gold-cache, and brought it back with her.
"'And here I be, stranger,' she concluded her yarn, 'and here's
the most precious thing I own.'
"She pulled out a little pouch of buckskin, worn on her neck
like a locket, and opened it. And inside, wrapped in oiled
silk, yellowed with age and worn and thumbed, was the original
scrap of newspaper containing the quotation from Thoreau.
"'And are you happy . . . satisfied?' I asked her. 'With a
quarter of a million you wouldn't have to work down in the
States. You must miss a lot.'
"'Not much,' she answered. 'I wouldn't swop places with any
woman down in the States. These are my people; this is where I
belong. But there are times--and in her eyes smoldered up that
hungry yearning I've mentioned--'there are times when I wish
most awful bad for that Thoreau man to happen along.'
"'Why?' I asked.
"'So as I could marry him. I do get mightylonesome at spells.
I'm just a woman--a real woman. I've heard tell of the other
kind of women that gallivanted off like me and did queer
things--the sort that become soldiers in armies, and sailors on
ships. But those women are queer themselves. They're more like
men than women; they look like men and they don't have ordinary
women's needs. They don't want love, nor little children in
their arms and around their knees. I'm not that sort. I leave
it to you, stranger. Do I look like a man?'
"She didn't. She was a woman, a beautiful, nut-brown woman,
with a sturdy, health-rounded woman's body and with wonderful
deep-blue woman's eyes.
"'Ain't I woman?' she demanded. 'I am. I'm 'most all woman, and
then some. And the funny thing is, though I'm night-born in
everything else, I'm not when it comes to mating. I reckon that
kind likes its own kind best. That's the way it is with me,
anyway, and has been all these years.'
"'You mean to tell me--' I began.
"'Never,' she said, and her eyes looked into mine with the
straightness of truth. 'I had one husband, only--him I call the
Ox; and I reckon he's still down in Juneau running the
hash-joint. Look him up, if you ever get back, and you'll find
he's rightly named.'
"And look him up I did, two years afterward. He was all she
said--solid and stolid, the Ox--shuffling around and waiting on
the tables.
"'You need a wife to help you,' I said.
"'I had one once,' was his answer.
"'Widower?'
"'Yep. She went loco. She always said the heat of the cooking
would get her, and it did. Pulled a gun on me one day and ran
away with some Siwashes in a canoe. Caught a blow up the coast
and all hands drowned.'"
Trefethan devoted himself to his glass and remained silent.
"But the girl?" Milner reminded him.
"You left your story just as it was getting interesting,
tender. Did it?"
"It did," Trefethan replied. "As she said herself, she was
savage in everything except mating, and then she wanted her own
kind. She was very nice about it, but she was straight to the
point. She wanted to marry me.
"'Stranger,' she said, 'I want you bad. You like this sort of
life or you wouldn't be here trying to cross the Rockies in
fall weather. It's a likely spot. You'll find few likelier. Why
not settle down! I'll make you a good wife.'
"And then it was up to me. And she waited. I don't mind
confessing that I was sorely tempted. I was half in love with
her as it was. You know I have never married. And I don't mind
adding, looking back over my life, that she is the only woman
that ever affected me that way. But it was too preposterous,
the whole thing, and I lied like a gentleman. I told her I was
already married.
"'Is your wife waiting for you?' she asked.
"I said yes.
"'And she loves you?'
"I said yes.
"And that was all. She never pressed her point. . . except
once, and then she showed a bit of fire.
"'All I've got to do,' she said, 'is to give the word, and you
don't get away from here. If I give the word, you stay on. . .
But I ain't going to give it. I wouldn't want you if you didn't
want to be wanted. . . and if you didn't want me.'
"She went ahead and outfitted me and started me on my way.
"'It's a darned shame, stranger," she said, at parting. 'I like
your looks, and I like you. If you ever change your mind, come
back.'
"Now there was one thing I wanted to do, and that was to kiss
her good-bye, but I didn't know how to go about it nor how she
would take it.--I tell you I was half in love with her. But she
settled it herself.
"'Kiss me,' she said. 'Just something to go on and remember.'
"And we kissed, there in the snow, in that valley by the
Rockies, and I left her standing by the trail and went on after
my dogs. I was six weeks in crossing over the pass and coming
down to the first post on Great Slave Lake."
The brawl of the streets came up to us like a distant surf. A
steward, moving noiselessly, brought fresh siphons. And in the
silence Trefethan's voice fell like a funeral bell:
"It would have been better had I stayed. Look at me."
We saw his grizzled mustache, the bald spot on his head, the
puff-sacks under his eyes, the sagging cheeks, the heavy
dewlap, the general tiredness and staleness and fatness, all
the collapse and ruin of a man who had once been strong but who
had lived too easily and too well.
"It's not too late, old man," Bardwell said, almost in a
whisper.
"By God! I wish I weren't a coward!" was Trefethan's answering
cry. "I could go back to her. She's there, now. I could shape
up and live many a long year. . . with her. . . up there. To
remain here is to commitsuicide. But I am an old
man--forty-seven--look at me. The trouble is," he lifted his
glass and glanced at it, "the trouble is that suicide of this
sort is so easy. I am soft and tender. The thought of the long
day's travel with the dogs appalls me; the thought of the keen
frost in the morning and of the frozen sled-lashings frightens
me--"
Automatically the glass was creeping toward his lips. With a
swift surge of anger he made as if to crash it down upon the
floor. Next came hesitancy and second thought. The glass moved
upward to his lips and paused. He laughed harshly and bitterly,
but his words were solemn:
"Well, here's to the Night-Born. She WAS a wonder."
THE MADNESS OF JOHN HARNED
I TELL this for a fact. It happened in the bull-ring at Quito.
I sat in the box with John Harned, and with Maria Valenzuela,
and with Luis Cervallos. I saw it happen. I saw it all from
first to last. I was on the steamer Ecuadore from Panama to
Guayaquil. Maria Valenzuela is my cousin. I have known her
always. She is very beautiful. I am a Spaniard--an Ecuadoriano,
true, but I am descended from Pedro Patino, who was one of
Pizarro's captains. They were brave men. They were heroes. Did
not Pizarro lead three hundred and fifty Spanish cavaliers and
four thousand Indians into the far Cordilleras in search of
treasure? And did not all the four thousand Indians and three
hundred of the brave cavaliers die on that vain quest? But
Pedro Patino did not die. He it was that lived to found the
family of the Patino. I am Ecuadoriano, true, but I am Spanish.
I am Manuel de Jesus Patino. I own many haciendas, and ten
thousand Indians are my slaves, though the law says they are
free men who work by freedom of contract. The law is a funny
thing. We Ecuadorianos laugh at it. It is our law. We make it
for ourselves. I am Manuel de Jesus Patino. Remember that name.
It will be written some day in history. There are revolutions
in Ecuador. We call them elections. It is a good joke is it
not?--what you call a pun?
John Harned was an American. I met him first at the Tivoli
hotel in Panama. He had much money--this I have heard. He was
going to Lima, but he met Maria Valenzuela in the Tivoli hotel.
Maria Valenzuela is my cousin, and she is beautiful. It is
true, she is the most beautiful woman in Ecuador. But also is
she most beautiful in every country--in Paris, in Madrid, in
New York, in Vienna. Always do all men look at her, and John
Harned looked long at her at Panama. He loved her, that I know
for a fact. She was Ecuadoriano, true--but she was of all
countries; she was of all the world. She spoke many languages.
She sang--ah! like an artiste. Her smile--wonderful, divine.
Her eyes--ah! have I not seen men look in her eyes? They were
what you English call amazing. They were promises of paradise.
Men drowned themselves in her eyes.
Maria Valenzuela was rich--richer than I, who am accounted very
rich in Ecuador. But John Harned did not care for her money. He
had a heart--a funny heart. He was a fool. He did not go to
Lima. He left the steamer at Guayaquil and followed her to
Quito. She was coming home from Europe and other places. I do
not see what she found in him, but she liked him. This I know
for a fact, else he would not have followed her to Quito. She
asked him to come. Well do I remember the occasion. She said:
"Come to Quito and I will show you the bullfight--brave,
clever, magnificent!"
But he said: "I go to Lima, not Quito. Such is my passage
engaged on the steamer."
"You travel for pleasure--no?" said Maria Valenzuela; and she
looked at him as only Maria Valenzuela could look, her eyes
warm with the promise.
And he came. No; he did not come for the bull-fight. He came
because of what he had seen in her eyes. Women like Maria
Valenzuela are born once in a hundred years. They are of no
country and no time. They are what you call goddesses. Men fall
down at their feet. They play with men and run them through
their pretty fingers like sand. Cleopatra was such a woman they
say; and so was Circe. She turned men into swine. Ha! ha! It is
true--no?
happened. And what became of the men that mined all that gold?
Often and often I wonder about it. They left their horses,
loaded and tied, and just disappeared off the face of the
earth, leaving neither hide nor hair behind them. I never heard
tell of them. Nobody knows anything about them. Well, being the
night-born, I reckon I was their rightful heir.'
Trefethan stopped to light a cigar.
"Do you know what that girl did? She cached the gold, saving
out thirty pounds, which she carried back to the coast. Then
she signaled a passing canoe, made her way to Pat Healy's
trading post at Dyea, outfitted, and went over Chilcoot Pass.
That was in '88--eight years before the Klondike strike, and
the Yukon was a howling wilderness. She was afraid of the
bucks, but she took two young squaws with her, crossed the
lakes, and went down the river and to all the early camps on
the Lower Yukon. She wandered several years over that country
and then on in to where I met her. Liked the looks of it, she
said, seeing, in her own words, 'a big bull caribou knee-deep
in purple iris on the valley-bottom.' She hooked up with the
Indians, doctored them, gained their confidence, and gradually
took them in charge. She had only left that country once, and
then, with a bunch of the young bucks, she went over Chilcoot,
cleaned up her gold-cache, and brought it back with her.
"'And here I be, stranger,' she concluded her yarn, 'and here's
the most precious thing I own.'
"She pulled out a little pouch of buckskin, worn on her neck
like a locket, and opened it. And inside, wrapped in oiled
silk, yellowed with age and worn and thumbed, was the original
scrap of newspaper containing the quotation from Thoreau.
"'And are you happy . . . satisfied?' I asked her. 'With a
quarter of a million you wouldn't have to work down in the
States. You must miss a lot.'
"'Not much,' she answered. 'I wouldn't swop places with any
woman down in the States. These are my people; this is where I
belong. But there are times--and in her eyes smoldered up that
hungry yearning I've mentioned--'there are times when I wish
most awful bad for that Thoreau man to happen along.'
"'Why?' I asked.
"'So as I could marry him. I do get mightylonesome at spells.
I'm just a woman--a real woman. I've heard tell of the other
kind of women that gallivanted off like me and did queer
things--the sort that become soldiers in armies, and sailors on
ships. But those women are queer themselves. They're more like
men than women; they look like men and they don't have ordinary
women's needs. They don't want love, nor little children in
their arms and around their knees. I'm not that sort. I leave
it to you, stranger. Do I look like a man?'
"She didn't. She was a woman, a beautiful, nut-brown woman,
with a sturdy, health-rounded woman's body and with wonderful
deep-blue woman's eyes.
"'Ain't I woman?' she demanded. 'I am. I'm 'most all woman, and
then some. And the funny thing is, though I'm night-born in
everything else, I'm not when it comes to mating. I reckon that
kind likes its own kind best. That's the way it is with me,
anyway, and has been all these years.'
"'You mean to tell me--' I began.
"'Never,' she said, and her eyes looked into mine with the
straightness of truth. 'I had one husband, only--him I call the
Ox; and I reckon he's still down in Juneau running the
hash-joint. Look him up, if you ever get back, and you'll find
he's rightly named.'
"And look him up I did, two years afterward. He was all she
said--solid and stolid, the Ox--shuffling around and waiting on
the tables.
"'You need a wife to help you,' I said.
"'I had one once,' was his answer.
"'Widower?'
"'Yep. She went loco. She always said the heat of the cooking
would get her, and it did. Pulled a gun on me one day and ran
away with some Siwashes in a canoe. Caught a blow up the coast
and all hands drowned.'"
Trefethan devoted himself to his glass and remained silent.
"But the girl?" Milner reminded him.
"You left your story just as it was getting interesting,
tender. Did it?"
"It did," Trefethan replied. "As she said herself, she was
savage in everything except mating, and then she wanted her own
kind. She was very nice about it, but she was straight to the
point. She wanted to marry me.
"'Stranger,' she said, 'I want you bad. You like this sort of
life or you wouldn't be here trying to cross the Rockies in
fall weather. It's a likely spot. You'll find few likelier. Why
not settle down! I'll make you a good wife.'
"And then it was up to me. And she waited. I don't mind
confessing that I was sorely tempted. I was half in love with
her as it was. You know I have never married. And I don't mind
adding, looking back over my life, that she is the only woman
that ever affected me that way. But it was too preposterous,
the whole thing, and I lied like a gentleman. I told her I was
already married.
"'Is your wife waiting for you?' she asked.
"I said yes.
"'And she loves you?'
"I said yes.
"And that was all. She never pressed her point. . . except
once, and then she showed a bit of fire.
"'All I've got to do,' she said, 'is to give the word, and you
don't get away from here. If I give the word, you stay on. . .
But I ain't going to give it. I wouldn't want you if you didn't
want to be wanted. . . and if you didn't want me.'
"She went ahead and outfitted me and started me on my way.
"'It's a darned shame, stranger," she said, at parting. 'I like
your looks, and I like you. If you ever change your mind, come
back.'
"Now there was one thing I wanted to do, and that was to kiss
her good-bye, but I didn't know how to go about it nor how she
would take it.--I tell you I was half in love with her. But she
settled it herself.
"'Kiss me,' she said. 'Just something to go on and remember.'
"And we kissed, there in the snow, in that valley by the
Rockies, and I left her standing by the trail and went on after
my dogs. I was six weeks in crossing over the pass and coming
down to the first post on Great Slave Lake."
The brawl of the streets came up to us like a distant surf. A
steward, moving noiselessly, brought fresh siphons. And in the
silence Trefethan's voice fell like a funeral bell:
"It would have been better had I stayed. Look at me."
We saw his grizzled mustache, the bald spot on his head, the
puff-sacks under his eyes, the sagging cheeks, the heavy
dewlap, the general tiredness and staleness and fatness, all
the collapse and ruin of a man who had once been strong but who
had lived too easily and too well.
"It's not too late, old man," Bardwell said, almost in a
whisper.
"By God! I wish I weren't a coward!" was Trefethan's answering
cry. "I could go back to her. She's there, now. I could shape
up and live many a long year. . . with her. . . up there. To
remain here is to commitsuicide. But I am an old
man--forty-seven--look at me. The trouble is," he lifted his
glass and glanced at it, "the trouble is that suicide of this
sort is so easy. I am soft and tender. The thought of the long
day's travel with the dogs appalls me; the thought of the keen
frost in the morning and of the frozen sled-lashings frightens
me--"
Automatically the glass was creeping toward his lips. With a
swift surge of anger he made as if to crash it down upon the
floor. Next came hesitancy and second thought. The glass moved
upward to his lips and paused. He laughed harshly and bitterly,
but his words were solemn:
"Well, here's to the Night-Born. She WAS a wonder."
THE MADNESS OF JOHN HARNED
I TELL this for a fact. It happened in the bull-ring at Quito.
I sat in the box with John Harned, and with Maria Valenzuela,
and with Luis Cervallos. I saw it happen. I saw it all from
first to last. I was on the steamer Ecuadore from Panama to
Guayaquil. Maria Valenzuela is my cousin. I have known her
always. She is very beautiful. I am a Spaniard--an Ecuadoriano,
true, but I am descended from Pedro Patino, who was one of
Pizarro's captains. They were brave men. They were heroes. Did
not Pizarro lead three hundred and fifty Spanish cavaliers and
four thousand Indians into the far Cordilleras in search of
treasure? And did not all the four thousand Indians and three
hundred of the brave cavaliers die on that vain quest? But
Pedro Patino did not die. He it was that lived to found the
family of the Patino. I am Ecuadoriano, true, but I am Spanish.
I am Manuel de Jesus Patino. I own many haciendas, and ten
thousand Indians are my slaves, though the law says they are
free men who work by freedom of contract. The law is a funny
thing. We Ecuadorianos laugh at it. It is our law. We make it
for ourselves. I am Manuel de Jesus Patino. Remember that name.
It will be written some day in history. There are revolutions
in Ecuador. We call them elections. It is a good joke is it
not?--what you call a pun?
John Harned was an American. I met him first at the Tivoli
hotel in Panama. He had much money--this I have heard. He was
going to Lima, but he met Maria Valenzuela in the Tivoli hotel.
Maria Valenzuela is my cousin, and she is beautiful. It is
true, she is the most beautiful woman in Ecuador. But also is
she most beautiful in every country--in Paris, in Madrid, in
New York, in Vienna. Always do all men look at her, and John
Harned looked long at her at Panama. He loved her, that I know
for a fact. She was Ecuadoriano, true--but she was of all
countries; she was of all the world. She spoke many languages.
She sang--ah! like an artiste. Her smile--wonderful, divine.
Her eyes--ah! have I not seen men look in her eyes? They were
what you English call amazing. They were promises of paradise.
Men drowned themselves in her eyes.
Maria Valenzuela was rich--richer than I, who am accounted very
rich in Ecuador. But John Harned did not care for her money. He
had a heart--a funny heart. He was a fool. He did not go to
Lima. He left the steamer at Guayaquil and followed her to
Quito. She was coming home from Europe and other places. I do
not see what she found in him, but she liked him. This I know
for a fact, else he would not have followed her to Quito. She
asked him to come. Well do I remember the occasion. She said:
"Come to Quito and I will show you the bullfight--brave,
clever, magnificent!"
But he said: "I go to Lima, not Quito. Such is my passage
engaged on the steamer."
"You travel for pleasure--no?" said Maria Valenzuela; and she
looked at him as only Maria Valenzuela could look, her eyes
warm with the promise.
And he came. No; he did not come for the bull-fight. He came
because of what he had seen in her eyes. Women like Maria
Valenzuela are born once in a hundred years. They are of no
country and no time. They are what you call goddesses. Men fall
down at their feet. They play with men and run them through
their pretty fingers like sand. Cleopatra was such a woman they
say; and so was Circe. She turned men into swine. Ha! ha! It is
true--no?
- reckon [´rekən]
v.计算；认为；估计 (初中英语单词) - wilderness [´wildənis] n.荒地，荒野 (初中英语单词)
- purple [´pə:pl] n.紫色 a.紫(红)的 (初中英语单词)
- hooked [hukt] a.钩状的；上瘾的 (初中英语单词)
- charge [tʃɑ:dʒ] v.收费；冲锋 n.费用 (初中英语单词)
- running [´rʌniŋ] a.奔跑的；流动的 (初中英语单词)
- waiting [´weitiŋ] n.等候；伺候 (初中英语单词)
- valley [´væli] n.谷；河谷；流域 (初中英语单词)
- standing [´stændiŋ] n.持续 a.直立的 (初中英语单词)
- funeral [´fju:nərəl] n.葬礼，丧葬；困难 (初中英语单词)
- commit [kə´mit] vt.犯(罪)；把...判处 (初中英语单词)
- frozen [´frəuzn] freeze 的过去分词 (初中英语单词)
- steamer [´sti:mə] n.汽船；轮船；蒸笼 (初中英语单词)
- amazing [ə´meiziŋ] a.惊人的；惊奇的 (初中英语单词)
- seeing [si:iŋ] see的现在分词 n.视觉 (高中英语单词)
- quotation [kwəu´teiʃən] n.引用；引文；语录 (高中英语单词)
- mighty [´maiti] a.强有力的 ad.很 (高中英语单词)
- lonesome [´ləunsəm] a.孤独的；冷清清的 (高中英语单词)
- sturdy [´stə:di] a.坚强的；坚定的 (高中英语单词)
- collapse [kə´læps] vi.&n.崩溃；病倒；衰败 (高中英语单词)
- suicide [´su:isaid, ´sju:-] n.&a.自杀(者)(的) (高中英语单词)
- madness [´mædnis] n.疯狂；狂热 (高中英语单词)
- panama [,pænə´mɑ:] n.巴拿马；巴拿马运河 (高中英语单词)
- rightly [´raitli] ad.正义地；正确地 (英语四级单词)
- devoted [di´vəutid] a.献身...的，忠实的 (英语四级单词)
- trying [´traiiŋ] a.难堪的；费劲的 (英语四级单词)
- parting [´pɑ:tiŋ] a.&n.分离(的) (英语四级单词)
- noiselessly [´nɔizlisli] ad.静静地，轻轻地 (英语四级单词)
- mustache [mə´stɑ:ʃ] n.髭，小胡子 (英语四级单词)
- vienna [vi´enə] n.维也纳 (英语四级单词)
- rightful [´raitfəl] a.正义的；合法的 (英语六级单词)
- sorely [´sɔ:li] ad.痛苦地；剧烈地 (英语六级单词)
- affected [ə´fektid] a.做作的；假装的 (英语六级单词)
- harshly [´hɑ:ʃli] ad.粗糙地，冷酷地 (英语六级单词)
- madrid [mə´drid] n.马德里(西班牙首都) (英语六级单词)
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