章节正文
dream. The loveliest dreams of all are dreamed when you are hungry. She
thought she was walking in a beautiful place, holding her father's hand,
and they both had crowns on their heads, crowns of wild asparagus. The
people whom they passed smiled and kissed her; some gave her flowers, and
some gave her food, and the sunlight was everywhere. She dreamed the same
dream over and over, and it grew more and more beautiful; till, suddenly,
it seemed as though she were standing quite alone. She looked up: on one
side of her was the high precipice, on the other was the river, with the
willow trees, drooping their branches into the water; and the moonlight was
over all. Up, against the night sky the pointed leaves of the kippersol
trees were clearly marked, and the rocks and the willow trees cast dark
shadows.
In her sleep she shivered, and half awoke.
"Ah, I am not there, I am here," she said; and she crept closer to the
rock, and kissed it, and went to sleep again.
It must have been about three o'clock, for the moon had begun to sink
towards the western sky, when she woke, with a violent start. She sat up,
and pressed her hand against her heart.
"What can it be? A cony must surely have run across my feet and frightened
me!" she said, and she turned to lie down again; but soon she sat up.
Outside, there was the distinct sound of thorns crackling in a fire.
She crept to the door and made an opening in the branches with her fingers.
A large fire was blazing in the shadow, at the foot of the rocks. A little
Bushman sat over some burning coals that had been raked from it, cooking
meat. Stretched on the ground was an Englishman, dressed in a blouse, and
with a heavy, sullen face. On the stone beside him was Dirk, the
Hottentot, sharpening a bowie knife.
She held her breath. Not a cony in all the rocks was so still.
"They can never find me here," she said; and she knelt, and listened to
every word they said. She could hear it all.
"You may have all the money," said the Bushman; "but I want the cask of
brandy. I will set the roof alight in six places, for a Dutchman burnt my
mother once alive in a hut, with three children."
"You are sure there is no one else on the farm?" said the navvy.
"No, I have told you till I am tired," said Dirk; "The two Kaffirs have
gone with the son to town; and the maids have gone to a dance; there is
only the old man and the two women left."
"But suppose," said the navvy, "he should have the gun at his bedside, and
loaded!"
"He never has," said Dirk; "it hangs in the passage, and the cartridges
too. He never thought when he bought it what work it was for! I only wish
the little white girl was there still," said Dirk; "but she is drowned. We
traced her footmarks to the great pool that has no bottom."
She listened to every word, and they talked on.
Afterwards, the little Bushman, who crouched over the fire, sat up
suddenly, listening.
"Ha! what is that?" he said.
A Bushman is like a dog: his ear is so fine he knows a jackal's tread from
a wild dog's.
"I heard nothing," said the navvy.
"I heard," said the Hottentot; "but it was only a cony on the rocks."
"No cony, no cony," said the Bushman; "see, what is that there moving in
the shade round the point?"
"Nothing, you idiot!" said the navvy. "Finish your meat; we must start
now."
There were two roads to the homestead. One went along the open plain, and
was by far the shortest; but you might be seen half a mile off. The other
ran along the river bank, where there were rocks, and holes, and willow
trees to hide among. And all down the river bank ran a little figure.
The river was swollen by the storm full to its banks, and the willow trees
dipped their half-drowned branches into its water. Wherever there was a
gap between them, you could see it flow, red and muddy, with the stumps
upon it. But the little figure ran on and on; never looking, never
thinking; panting, panting! There, where the rocks were the thickest;
there, where on the open space the moonlight shone; there, where the
prickly pears were tangled, and the rocks cast shadows, on it ran; the
little hands clinched, the little heart beating, the eyes fixed always
ahead.
It was not far to run now. Only the narrow path between the high rocks and
the river.
At last she came to the end of it, and stood for an instant. Before her
lay the plain, and the red farmhouse, so near, that if persons had been
walking there you might have seen them in the moonlight. She clasped her
hands. "Yes, I will tell them, I will tell them!" she said; "I am almost
there!" She ran forward again, then hesitated. She shaded her eyes from
the moonlight, and looked. Between her and the farmhouse there were three
figures moving over the low bushes.
In the sheeny moonlight you could see how they moved on, slowly and
furtively; the short one, and the one in light clothes, and the one in
dark.
"I cannot help them now!" she cried, and sank down on the ground, with her
little hands clasped before her.
...
"Awake, awake!" said the farmer's wife; "I hear a strange noise; something
calling, calling, calling!"
The man rose, and went to the window.
"I hear it also," he said; "surely some jackal's at the sheep. I will load
my gun and go and see."
"It sounds to me like the cry of no jackal," said the woman; and when he
was gone she woke her daughter.
"Come, let us go and make a fire, I can sleep no more," she said; "I have
heard a strange thing tonight. Your father said it was a jackal's cry, but
no jackal cries so. It was a child's voice, and it cried, 'Master, master,
wake!'"
The women looked at each other; then they went to the kitchen, and made a
great fire; and they sang psalms all the while.
At last the man came back; and they asked him, "What have you seen?"
"Nothing," he said, "but the sheep asleep in their kraals, and the
moonlight on the walls. And yet, it did seem to me," he added, "that far
away near the krantz by the river, I saw three figures moving. And
afterwards--it might have been fancy--I thought I heard the cry again; but
since that, all has been still there."
...
Next day a navvy had returned to the railway works.
"Where have you been so long?" his comrades asked.
"He keeps looking over his shoulder," said one, "as though he thought he
should see something there."
"When he drank his grog today," said another, "he let it fall, and looked
round."
Next day, a small old Bushman, and a Hottentot, in ragged yellow trousers,
were at a wayside canteen. When the Bushman had had brandy, he began to
tell how something (he did not say whether it was man, woman, or child) had
lifted up its hands and cried for mercy; had kissed a white man's hands,
and cried to him to help it. Then the Hottentot took the Bushman by the
throat, and dragged him out.
Next night, the moon rose up, and mounted the quiet sky. She was full now,
and looked in at the little home; at the purple flowers stuck about the
room, and the kippersol on the shelf. Her light fell on the willow trees,
and on the high rocks, and on a little new-made heap of earth and round
stones. Three men knew what was under it; and no one else ever will.
Lily Kloof,
South Africa.
II. THE WOMAN'S ROSE.
I have an old, brown carved box; the lid is broken and tied with a string.
In it I keep little squares of paper, with hair inside, and a little
picture which hung over my brother's bed when we were children, and other
things as small. I have in it a rose. Other women also have such boxes
where they keep such trifles, but no one has my rose.
When my eye is dim, and my heart grows faint, and my faith in woman
flickers, and her present is an agony to me, and her future a despair, the
scent of that dead rose, withered for twelve years, comes back to me. I
know there will be spring; as surely as the birds know it when they see
above the snow two tiny, quivering green leaves. Spring cannot fail us.
There were other flowers in the box once; a bunch of white acacia flowers,
gathered by the strong hand of a man, as we passed down a village street on
a sultry afternoon, when it had rained, and the drops fell on us from the
leaves of the acacia trees. The flowers were damp; they made mildew marks
on the paper I folded them in. After many years I threw them away. There
is nothing of them left in the box now, but a faint, strong smell of dried
acacia, that recalls that sultry summer afternoon; but the rose is in the
box still.
It is many years ago now; I was a girl of fifteen, and I went to visit in a
small up-country town. It was young in those days, and two days' journey
from the nearest village; the population consisted mainly of men. A few
were married, and had their wives and children, but most were single.
There was only one young girl there when I came. She was about seventeen,
fair, and rather fully-fleshed; she had large dreamy blue eyes, and wavy
light hair; full, rather heavy lips, until she smiled; then her face broke
into dimples, and all her white teeth shone. The hotel-keeper may have had
a daughter, and the farmer in the outskirts had two, but we never saw them.
She reigned alone. All the men worshipped her. She was the only woman
they had to think of. They talked of her on the stoep, at the market, at
the hotel; they watched for her at street corners; they hated the man she
bowed to or walked with down the street. They brought flowers to the front
door; they offered her their horses; they begged her to marry them when
they dared. Partly, there was something noble and heroic in this devotion
of men to the best woman they knew; partly there was something natural in
it, that these men, shut off from the world, should pour at the feet of one
woman the worship that otherwise would have been given to twenty; and
partly there was something mean in their envy of one another. If she had
raised her little finger, I suppose, she might have married any one out of
twenty of them.
Then I came. I do not think I was prettier; I do not think I was so pretty
as she was. I was certainly not as handsome. But I was vital, and I was
new, and she was old--they all forsook her and followed me. They
worshipped me. It was to my door that the flowers came; it was I had
twenty horses offered me when I could only ride one; it was for me they
waited at street corners; it was what I said and did that they talked of.
Partly I liked it. I had lived alone all my life; no one ever had told me
I was beautiful and a woman. I believed them. I did not know it was
simply a fashion, which one man had set and the rest followed
unreasoningly. I liked them to ask me to marry them, and to say, No. I
despised them. The mother heart had not swelled in me yet; I did not know
all men were my children, as the large woman knows when her heart is grown.
I was too small to be tender. I liked my power. I was like a child with a
new whip, which it goes about cracking everywhere, not caring against what.
I could not wind it up and put it away. Men were curious creatures, who
liked me, I could never tell why. Only one thing took from my pleasure; I
could not bear that they had deserted her for me. I liked her great dreamy
blue eyes, I liked her slow walk and drawl; when I saw her sitting among
men, she seemed to me much too good to be among them; I would have given
all their compliments if she would once have smiled at me as she smiled at
them, with all her face breaking into radiance, with her dimples and
flashing teeth. But I knew it never could be; I felt sure she hated me;
that she wished I was dead; that she wished I had never come to the
village. She did not know, when we went out riding, and a man who had
always ridden beside her came to ride beside me, that I sent him away; that
once when a man thought to win my favour by ridiculing her slow drawl
before me I turned on him so fiercely that he never dared come before me
again. I knew she knew that at the hotel men had made a bet as to which
was the prettier, she or I, and had asked each man who came in, and that
the one who had staked on me won. I hated them for it, but I would not let
her see that I cared about what she felt towards me.
She and I never spoke to each other.
If we met in the village street we bowed and passed on; when we shook hands
we did so silently, and did not look at each other. But I thought she felt
my presence in a room just as I felt hers.
At last the time for my going came. I was to leave the next day. Some one
I knew gave a party in my honour, to which all the village was invited.
It was midwinter. There was nothing in the gardens but a few dahlias and
chrysanthemums, and I suppose that for two hundred miles round there was
thought she was walking in a beautiful place, holding her father's hand,
and they both had crowns on their heads, crowns of wild asparagus. The
people whom they passed smiled and kissed her; some gave her flowers, and
some gave her food, and the sunlight was everywhere. She dreamed the same
dream over and over, and it grew more and more beautiful; till, suddenly,
it seemed as though she were standing quite alone. She looked up: on one
side of her was the high precipice, on the other was the river, with the
willow trees, drooping their branches into the water; and the moonlight was
over all. Up, against the night sky the pointed leaves of the kippersol
trees were clearly marked, and the rocks and the willow trees cast dark
shadows.
In her sleep she shivered, and half awoke.
"Ah, I am not there, I am here," she said; and she crept closer to the
rock, and kissed it, and went to sleep again.
It must have been about three o'clock, for the moon had begun to sink
towards the western sky, when she woke, with a violent start. She sat up,
and pressed her hand against her heart.
"What can it be? A cony must surely have run across my feet and frightened
me!" she said, and she turned to lie down again; but soon she sat up.
Outside, there was the distinct sound of thorns crackling in a fire.
She crept to the door and made an opening in the branches with her fingers.
A large fire was blazing in the shadow, at the foot of the rocks. A little
Bushman sat over some burning coals that had been raked from it, cooking
meat. Stretched on the ground was an Englishman, dressed in a blouse, and
with a heavy, sullen face. On the stone beside him was Dirk, the
Hottentot, sharpening a bowie knife.
She held her breath. Not a cony in all the rocks was so still.
"They can never find me here," she said; and she knelt, and listened to
every word they said. She could hear it all.
"You may have all the money," said the Bushman; "but I want the cask of
brandy. I will set the roof alight in six places, for a Dutchman burnt my
mother once alive in a hut, with three children."
"You are sure there is no one else on the farm?" said the navvy.
"No, I have told you till I am tired," said Dirk; "The two Kaffirs have
gone with the son to town; and the maids have gone to a dance; there is
only the old man and the two women left."
"But suppose," said the navvy, "he should have the gun at his bedside, and
loaded!"
"He never has," said Dirk; "it hangs in the passage, and the cartridges
too. He never thought when he bought it what work it was for! I only wish
the little white girl was there still," said Dirk; "but she is drowned. We
traced her footmarks to the great pool that has no bottom."
She listened to every word, and they talked on.
Afterwards, the little Bushman, who crouched over the fire, sat up
suddenly, listening.
"Ha! what is that?" he said.
A Bushman is like a dog: his ear is so fine he knows a jackal's tread from
a wild dog's.
"I heard nothing," said the navvy.
"I heard," said the Hottentot; "but it was only a cony on the rocks."
"No cony, no cony," said the Bushman; "see, what is that there moving in
the shade round the point?"
"Nothing, you idiot!" said the navvy. "Finish your meat; we must start
now."
There were two roads to the homestead. One went along the open plain, and
was by far the shortest; but you might be seen half a mile off. The other
ran along the river bank, where there were rocks, and holes, and willow
trees to hide among. And all down the river bank ran a little figure.
The river was swollen by the storm full to its banks, and the willow trees
dipped their half-drowned branches into its water. Wherever there was a
gap between them, you could see it flow, red and muddy, with the stumps
upon it. But the little figure ran on and on; never looking, never
thinking; panting, panting! There, where the rocks were the thickest;
there, where on the open space the moonlight shone; there, where the
prickly pears were tangled, and the rocks cast shadows, on it ran; the
little hands clinched, the little heart beating, the eyes fixed always
ahead.
It was not far to run now. Only the narrow path between the high rocks and
the river.
At last she came to the end of it, and stood for an instant. Before her
lay the plain, and the red farmhouse, so near, that if persons had been
walking there you might have seen them in the moonlight. She clasped her
hands. "Yes, I will tell them, I will tell them!" she said; "I am almost
there!" She ran forward again, then hesitated. She shaded her eyes from
the moonlight, and looked. Between her and the farmhouse there were three
figures moving over the low bushes.
In the sheeny moonlight you could see how they moved on, slowly and
furtively; the short one, and the one in light clothes, and the one in
dark.
"I cannot help them now!" she cried, and sank down on the ground, with her
little hands clasped before her.
...
"Awake, awake!" said the farmer's wife; "I hear a strange noise; something
calling, calling, calling!"
The man rose, and went to the window.
"I hear it also," he said; "surely some jackal's at the sheep. I will load
my gun and go and see."
"It sounds to me like the cry of no jackal," said the woman; and when he
was gone she woke her daughter.
"Come, let us go and make a fire, I can sleep no more," she said; "I have
heard a strange thing tonight. Your father said it was a jackal's cry, but
no jackal cries so. It was a child's voice, and it cried, 'Master, master,
wake!'"
The women looked at each other; then they went to the kitchen, and made a
great fire; and they sang psalms all the while.
At last the man came back; and they asked him, "What have you seen?"
"Nothing," he said, "but the sheep asleep in their kraals, and the
moonlight on the walls. And yet, it did seem to me," he added, "that far
away near the krantz by the river, I saw three figures moving. And
afterwards--it might have been fancy--I thought I heard the cry again; but
since that, all has been still there."
...
Next day a navvy had returned to the railway works.
"Where have you been so long?" his comrades asked.
"He keeps looking over his shoulder," said one, "as though he thought he
should see something there."
"When he drank his grog today," said another, "he let it fall, and looked
round."
Next day, a small old Bushman, and a Hottentot, in ragged yellow trousers,
were at a wayside canteen. When the Bushman had had brandy, he began to
tell how something (he did not say whether it was man, woman, or child) had
lifted up its hands and cried for mercy; had kissed a white man's hands,
and cried to him to help it. Then the Hottentot took the Bushman by the
throat, and dragged him out.
Next night, the moon rose up, and mounted the quiet sky. She was full now,
and looked in at the little home; at the purple flowers stuck about the
room, and the kippersol on the shelf. Her light fell on the willow trees,
and on the high rocks, and on a little new-made heap of earth and round
stones. Three men knew what was under it; and no one else ever will.
Lily Kloof,
South Africa.
II. THE WOMAN'S ROSE.
I have an old, brown carved box; the lid is broken and tied with a string.
In it I keep little squares of paper, with hair inside, and a little
picture which hung over my brother's bed when we were children, and other
things as small. I have in it a rose. Other women also have such boxes
where they keep such trifles, but no one has my rose.
When my eye is dim, and my heart grows faint, and my faith in woman
flickers, and her present is an agony to me, and her future a despair, the
scent of that dead rose, withered for twelve years, comes back to me. I
know there will be spring; as surely as the birds know it when they see
above the snow two tiny, quivering green leaves. Spring cannot fail us.
There were other flowers in the box once; a bunch of white acacia flowers,
gathered by the strong hand of a man, as we passed down a village street on
a sultry afternoon, when it had rained, and the drops fell on us from the
leaves of the acacia trees. The flowers were damp; they made mildew marks
on the paper I folded them in. After many years I threw them away. There
is nothing of them left in the box now, but a faint, strong smell of dried
acacia, that recalls that sultry summer afternoon; but the rose is in the
box still.
It is many years ago now; I was a girl of fifteen, and I went to visit in a
small up-country town. It was young in those days, and two days' journey
from the nearest village; the population consisted mainly of men. A few
were married, and had their wives and children, but most were single.
There was only one young girl there when I came. She was about seventeen,
fair, and rather fully-fleshed; she had large dreamy blue eyes, and wavy
light hair; full, rather heavy lips, until she smiled; then her face broke
into dimples, and all her white teeth shone. The hotel-keeper may have had
a daughter, and the farmer in the outskirts had two, but we never saw them.
She reigned alone. All the men worshipped her. She was the only woman
they had to think of. They talked of her on the stoep, at the market, at
the hotel; they watched for her at street corners; they hated the man she
bowed to or walked with down the street. They brought flowers to the front
door; they offered her their horses; they begged her to marry them when
they dared. Partly, there was something noble and heroic in this devotion
of men to the best woman they knew; partly there was something natural in
it, that these men, shut off from the world, should pour at the feet of one
woman the worship that otherwise would have been given to twenty; and
partly there was something mean in their envy of one another. If she had
raised her little finger, I suppose, she might have married any one out of
twenty of them.
Then I came. I do not think I was prettier; I do not think I was so pretty
as she was. I was certainly not as handsome. But I was vital, and I was
new, and she was old--they all forsook her and followed me. They
worshipped me. It was to my door that the flowers came; it was I had
twenty horses offered me when I could only ride one; it was for me they
waited at street corners; it was what I said and did that they talked of.
Partly I liked it. I had lived alone all my life; no one ever had told me
I was beautiful and a woman. I believed them. I did not know it was
simply a fashion, which one man had set and the rest followed
unreasoningly. I liked them to ask me to marry them, and to say, No. I
despised them. The mother heart had not swelled in me yet; I did not know
all men were my children, as the large woman knows when her heart is grown.
I was too small to be tender. I liked my power. I was like a child with a
new whip, which it goes about cracking everywhere, not caring against what.
I could not wind it up and put it away. Men were curious creatures, who
liked me, I could never tell why. Only one thing took from my pleasure; I
could not bear that they had deserted her for me. I liked her great dreamy
blue eyes, I liked her slow walk and drawl; when I saw her sitting among
men, she seemed to me much too good to be among them; I would have given
all their compliments if she would once have smiled at me as she smiled at
them, with all her face breaking into radiance, with her dimples and
flashing teeth. But I knew it never could be; I felt sure she hated me;
that she wished I was dead; that she wished I had never come to the
village. She did not know, when we went out riding, and a man who had
always ridden beside her came to ride beside me, that I sent him away; that
once when a man thought to win my favour by ridiculing her slow drawl
before me I turned on him so fiercely that he never dared come before me
again. I knew she knew that at the hotel men had made a bet as to which
was the prettier, she or I, and had asked each man who came in, and that
the one who had staked on me won. I hated them for it, but I would not let
her see that I cared about what she felt towards me.
She and I never spoke to each other.
If we met in the village street we bowed and passed on; when we shook hands
we did so silently, and did not look at each other. But I thought she felt
my presence in a room just as I felt hers.
At last the time for my going came. I was to leave the next day. Some one
I knew gave a party in my honour, to which all the village was invited.
It was midwinter. There was nothing in the gardens but a few dahlias and
chrysanthemums, and I suppose that for two hundred miles round there was
- sunlight [´sʌnlait]
n.日光 (初中英语单词) - standing [´stændiŋ] n.持续 a.直立的 (初中英语单词)
- moonlight [´mu:nlait] n.&a.月光(的) (初中英语单词)
- pointed [´pɔintid] a.尖(锐)的；中肯的 (初中英语单词)
- willow [´wiləu] n.柳树 (初中英语单词)
- western [´westən] a.西的；西方的 (初中英语单词)
- violent [´vaiələnt] a.强暴的；猛烈的 (初中英语单词)
- distinct [di´stiŋkt] a.清楚的；独特的 (初中英语单词)
- opening [´əupəniŋ] n.开放；开端 a.开始的 (初中英语单词)
- breath [breθ] n.呼吸；气息 (初中英语单词)
- alight [ə´lait] a.燃着的 vi.下；降落 (初中英语单词)
- wherever [weər´evə] conj.无论在哪里 (初中英语单词)
- instant [´instənt] a.立即的 n.紧迫；瞬间 (初中英语单词)
- purple [´pə:pl] n.紫色 a.紫(红)的 (初中英语单词)
- despair [di´speə] vi.&n.绝望 (初中英语单词)
- mainly [´meinli] ad.主要地；大体上 (初中英语单词)
- partly [´pɑ:tli] ad.部分地；不完全地 (初中英语单词)
- worship [´wə:ʃip] n.&v.崇拜；敬仰 (初中英语单词)
- otherwise [´ʌðəwaiz] ad.另外 conj.否则 (初中英语单词)
- fiercely [´fiəsli] ad.凶猛地，残忍地 (初中英语单词)
- silently [´sailəntli] ad.寂静地；沉默地 (初中英语单词)
- sullen [´sʌlən] a.不高兴的 (高中英语单词)
- farmhouse [´fɑ:mhaus] n.农场住房，农舍 (高中英语单词)
- ragged [´rægid] a.衣服破烂的 (高中英语单词)
- heroic [hi´rəuik] a.英雄的，英勇的 (高中英语单词)
- asparagus [ə´spærəgəs] n.文竹；天门冬；龙须菜 (英语四级单词)
- precipice [´presipis] n.悬崖；危急的处境 (英语四级单词)
- blouse [blauz] n.女衬衫；短上衣 (英语四级单词)
- bedside [´bedsaid] n.床边 a.护理的 (英语四级单词)
- homestead [´həumsted] n.家宅，宅基 (英语四级单词)
- swollen [´swəulən] swell的过去分词 (英语四级单词)
- brandy [´brændi] n.白兰地酒 (英语四级单词)
- radiance [´reidjəns] n.发光；光彩；辐射 (英语四级单词)
- ridden [´ridn] ride 的过去分词 (英语四级单词)
- holding [´həuldiŋ] n.保持，固定，存储 (英语六级单词)
- dutchman [´dʌtʃmən] n.荷兰人 (英语六级单词)
- beating [´bi:tiŋ] n.敲；搅打；失败 (英语六级单词)
- calling [´kɔ:liŋ] n.点名；职业；欲望 (英语六级单词)
- wayside [´weisaid] n.&a.路边(的) (英语六级单词)
- sultry [´sʌltri] a.狂(闷)热的；风骚的 (英语六级单词)
- dreamy [´dri:mi] a.心不在焉的；朦胧的 (英语六级单词)
- outskirts [´autskə:ts] n.外边；郊区 (英语六级单词)
- forsook [fə´suk] forsake的过去式 (英语六级单词)
文章标签:名著
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