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The Jolly Corner-Part3_HENRY JAMES(1843-1916)_English Literature(文学名著)-第2页

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night to night, laying on him finally a rigour to which nothing in

his life had been comparable. It had been the theory of many



superficially-judging persons, he knew, that he was wasting that

life in a surrender to sensations, but he had tasted of no pleasure



so fine as his actualtension, had been introduced to no sport that

demanded at once the patience and the nerve of this stalking of a



creature more subtle, yet at bay perhaps more formidable, than any

beast of the forest. The terms, the comparisons, the very



practices of the chase positively came again into play; there were

even moments when passages of his occasional experience as a



sportsman, stirred memories, from his younger time, of moor and

mountain and desert, revived for him - and to the increase of his



keenness - by the tremendous force of analogy. He found himself at

moments - once he had placed his single light on some mantel-shelf



or in some recess - stepping back into shelter or shade, effacing

himself behind a door or in an embrasure, as he had sought of old



the vantage of rock and tree; he found himself holding his breath

and living in the joy of the instant, the supremesuspense created



by big game alone.

He wasn't afraid (though putting himself the question as he



believed gentlemen on Bengal tiger-shoots or in close quarters with

the great bear of the Rockies had been known to confess to having



put it); and this indeed - since here at least he might be frank! -

because of the impression, so intimate and so strange, that he



himself produced as yet a dread, produced certainly a strain,

beyond the liveliest he was likely to feel. They fell for him into



categories, they fairly became familiar, the signs, for his own

perception, of the alarm his presence and his vigilance created;



though leaving him always to remark, portentously, on his probably

having formed a relation, his probably enjoying a consciousness,



unique in the experience of man. People enough, first and last,

had been in terror of apparitions, but who had ever before so



turned the tables and become himself, in the apparitional world, an

incalculable terror? He might have found this sublime had he quite



dared to think of it; but he didn't too much insist, truly, on that

side of his privilege. With habit and repetition he gained to an



extraordinary degree the power to penetrate the dusk of distances

and the darkness of corners, to resolve back into their innocence



the treacheries of uncertain light, the evil-looking forms taken in

the gloom by mere shadows, by accidents of the air, by shifting



effects of perspective; putting down his dim luminary he could

still wander on without it, pass into other rooms and, only knowing



it was there behind him in case of need, see his way about,

visually project for his purpose a comparativeclearness. It made



him feel, this acquired faculty, like some monstrous stealthy cat;

he wondered if he would have glared at these moments with large



shining yellow eyes, and what it mightn't verily be, for the poor

hard-pressed ALTER EGO, to be confronted with such a type.



He liked however the open shutters; he opened everywhere those Mrs.

Muldoon had closed, closing them as carefully afterwards, so that



she shouldn't notice: he liked - oh this he did like, and above

all in the upper rooms! - the sense of the hard silver of the



autumn stars through the window-panes, and scarcely less the flare

of the street-lamps below, the white electric lustre which it would



have taken curtains to keep out. This was human actual social;

this was of the world he had lived in, and he was more at his ease



certainly for the countenance, coldly general and impersonal, that

all the while and in spite of his detachment it seemed to give him.



He had support of course mostly in the rooms at the wide front and

the prolonged side; it failed him considerably in the central






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