章节正文
I often think, you know, of that."
She looked as if she sometimes thought of that too, but rather in a
different way. "Where other people, you mean, are concerned?"
"Well, you're really so in with me, you know--as a sort of result
of my being so in with yourself. I mean of my having such an
immense regard for you, being so tremendously mindful of all you've
done for me. I sometimes ask myself if it's quite fair. Fair I
mean to have so involved and--since one may say it--interested you.
I almost feel as if you hadn't really had time to do anything
else."
"Anything else but be interested?" she asked. "Ah what else does
one ever want to be? If I've been 'watching' with you, as we long
ago agreed I was to do, watching's always in itself an absorption."
"Oh certainly," John Marcher said, "if you hadn't had your
curiosity -! Only doesn't it sometimes come to you as time goes on
that your curiosity isn't being particularly repaid?"
May Bartram had a pause. "Do you ask that, by any chance, because
you feel at all that yours isn't? I mean because you have to wait
so long."
Oh he understood what she meant! "For the thing to happen that
never does happen? For the Beast to jump out? No, I'm just where
I was about it. It isn't a matter as to which I can CHOOSE, I can
decide for a change. It isn't one as to which there CAN be a
change. It's in the lap of the gods. One's in the hands of one's
law--there one is. As to the form the law will take, the way it
will operate, that's its own affair."
"Yes," Miss Bartram replied; "of course one's fate's coming, of
course it HAS come in its own form and its own way, all the while.
Only, you know, the form and the way in your case were to have
been--well, something so exceptional and, as one may say, so
particularly YOUR own."
Something in this made him look at her with suspicion. "You say
'were to HAVE been,' as if in your heart you had begun to doubt."
"Oh!" she vaguely protested.
"As if you believed," he went on, "that nothing will now take
place."
She shook her head slowly but rather inscrutably. "You're far from
my thought."
He continued to look at her. "What then is the matter with you?"
"Well," she said after another wait, "the matter with me is simply
that I'm more sure than ever my curiosity, as you call it, will be
but too well repaid."
They were frankly grave now; he had got up from his seat, had
turned once more about the little drawing-room to which, year after
year, he brought his inevitable topic; in which he had, as he might
have said, tasted their intimatecommunity with every sauce, where
every object was as familiar to him as the things of his own house
and the very carpets were worn with his fitful walk very much as
the desks in old counting-houses are worn by the elbows of
generations of clerks. The generations of his nervous moods had
been at work there, and the place was the written history of his
whole middle life. Under the impression of what his friend had
just said he knew himself, for some reason, more aware of these
things; which made him, after a moment, stop again before her. "Is
it possibly that you've grown afraid?"
"Afraid?" He thought, as she repeated the word, that his question
had made her, a little, change colour; so that, lest he should have
touched on a truth, he explained very kindly: "You remember that
that was what you asked ME long ago--that first day at Weatherend."
"Oh yes, and you told me you didn't know--that I was to see for
myself. We've said little about it since, even in so long a time."
"Precisely," Marcher interposed--"quite as if it were too delicate
a matter for us to make free with. Quite as if we might find, on
pressure, that I AM afraid. For then," he said, "we shouldn't,
should we? quite know what to do."
She had for the time no answer to this question. "There have been
days when I thought you were. Only, of course," she added, "there
have been days when we have thought almost anything."
"Everything. Oh!" Marcher softly groaned, as with a gasp, half
spent, at the face, more uncovered just then than it had been for a
long while, of the imagination always with them. It had always had
it's incalculable moments of glaring out, quite as with the very
eyes of the very Beast, and, used as he was to them, they could
still draw from him the tribute of a sigh that rose from the depths
of his being. All they had thought, first and last, rolled over
him; the past seemed to have been reduced to mere barren
speculation. This in fact was what the place had just struck him
as so full of--the simplification of everything but the state of
suspense. That remained only by seeming to hang in the void
surrounding it. Even his original fear, if fear it as had been,
had lost itself in the desert. "I judge, however," he continued,
"that you see I'm not afraid now."
"What I see, as I make it out, is that you've achieved something
almost unprecedented in the way of getting used to danger. Living
with it so long and so closely you've lost your sense of it; you
know it's there, but you're indifferent, and you cease even, as of
old, to have to whistle in the dark. Considering what the danger
is," May Bartram wound up, "I'm bound to say I don't think your
attitude could well be surpassed."
John Marcher faintly smiled. "It's heroic?"
"Certainly--call it that."
It was what he would have liked indeed to call it. "I AM then a
man of courage?"
"That's what you were to show me."
He still, however, wondered. "But doesn't the man of courage know
what he's afraid of--or not afraid of? I don't know THAT, you see.
I don't focus it. I can't name it. I only know I'm exposed."
"Yes, but exposed--how shall I say?--so directly. So intimately.
That's surely enough."
"Enough to make you feel then--as what we may call the end and the
upshot of our watch--that I'm not afraid?"
"You're not afraid. But it isn't," she said, "the end of our
watch. That is it isn't the end of yours. You've everything still
to see."
"Then why haven't you?" he asked. He had had, all along, to-day,
the sense of her keeping something back, and he still had it. As
this was his first impression of that it quite made a date. The
case was the more marked as she didn't at first answer; which in
turn made him go on. "You know something I don't." Then his
voice, for that of a man of courage, trembled a little. "You know
what's to happen." Her silence, with the face she showed, was
almost a confession--it made him sure. "You know, and you're
afraid to tell me. It's so bad that you're afraid I'll find out."
All this might be true, for she did look as if, unexpectedly to
her, he had crossed some mystic line that she had secretly drawn
round her. Yet she might, after all, not have worried; and the
real climax was that he himself, at all events, needn't. "You'll
never find out."
CHAPTER III
It was all to have made, none the less, as I have said, a date;
which came out in the fact that again and again, even after long
intervals, other things that passed between them were in relation
to this hour but the character of recalls and results. Its
immediate effect had been indeed rather to lighten insistence--
almost to provoke a reaction; as if their topic had dropped by its
own weight and as if moreover, for that matter, Marcher had been
visited by one of his occasional warnings against egotism. He had
kept up, he felt, and very decently on the whole, his consciousness
of the importance of not being selfish, and it was true that he had
never sinned in that direction without promptly enough trying to
press the scales the other way. He often repaired his fault, the
season permitting, by inviting his friend to accompany him to the
opera; and it not infrequently thus happened that, to show he
didn't wish her to have but one sort of food for her mind, he was
the cause of her appearing there with him a dozen nights in the
month. It even happened that, seeing her home at such times, he
occasionally went in with her to finish, as he called it, the
evening, and, the better to make his point, sat down to the frugal
but always careful little supper that awaited his pleasure. His
point was made, he thought, by his not eternally insisting with her
on himself; made for instance, at such hours, when it befell that,
her piano at hand and each of them familiar with it, they went over
passages of the opera together. It chanced to be on one of these
occasions, however, that he reminded her of her not having answered
a certain question he had put to her during the talk that had taken
place between them on her last birthday. "What is it that saves
YOU?"--saved her, he meant, from that appearance of variation from
the usual human type. If he had practically escaped remark, as she
pretended, by doing, in the most important particular, what most
men do--find the answer to life in patching up an alliance of a
sort with a woman no better than himself--how had she escaped it,
and how could the alliance, such as it was, since they must suppose
it had been more or less noticed, have failed to make her rather
positively talked about?
"I never said," May Bartram replied, "that it hadn't made me a good
deal talked about."
"Ah well then you're not 'saved.'"
"It hasn't been a question for me. If you've had your woman I've
had," she said, "my man."
"And you mean that makes you all right?"
Oh it was always as if there were so much to say!
"I don't know why it shouldn't make me--humanly, which is what
we're speaking of--as right as it makes you."
"I see," Marcher returned. "'Humanly,' no doubt, as showing that
you're living for something. Not, that is, just for me and my
secret."
May Bartram smiled. "I don't pretend it exactly shows that I'm not
living for you. It's my intimacy with you that's in question."
He laughed as he saw what she meant. "Yes, but since, as you say,
I'm only, so far as people make out, ordinary, you're--aren't you?
no more than ordinary either. You help me to pass for a man like
another. So if I AM, as I understand you, you're not compromised.
Is that it?"
She had another of her waits, but she spoke clearly enough.
"That's it. It's all that concerns me--to help you to pass for a
man like another."
He was careful to acknowledge the remark handsomely. "How kind,
how beautiful, you are to me! How shall I ever repay you?"
She had her last grave pause, as if there might be a choice of
ways. But she chose. "By going on as you are."
It was into this going on as he was that they relapsed, and really
for so long a time that the day inevitably came for a further
sounding of their depths. These depths, constantly bridged over by
a structure firm enough in spite of its lightness and of its
occasional oscillation in the somewhat vertiginous air, invited on
occasion, in the interest of their nerves, a dropping of the
plummet and a measurement of the abyss. A difference had been made
moreover, once for all, by the fact that she had all the while not
appeared to feel the need of rebutting his charge of an idea within
her that she didn't dare to express--a charge uttered just before
one of the fullest of their later discussions ended. It had come
up for him then that she "knew" something and that what she knew
was bad--too bad to tell him. When he had spoken of it as visibly
so bad that she was afraid he might find it out, her reply had left
the matter too equivocal to be let alone and yet, for Marcher's
special sensibility, almost too formidable again to touch. He
circled about it at a distance that alternately narrowed and
widened and that still wasn't much affected by the consciousness in
him that there was nothing she could "know," after all, any better
than he did. She had no source of knowledge he hadn't equally--
except of course that she might have finer nerves. That was what
She looked as if she sometimes thought of that too, but rather in a
different way. "Where other people, you mean, are concerned?"
"Well, you're really so in with me, you know--as a sort of result
of my being so in with yourself. I mean of my having such an
immense regard for you, being so tremendously mindful of all you've
done for me. I sometimes ask myself if it's quite fair. Fair I
mean to have so involved and--since one may say it--interested you.
I almost feel as if you hadn't really had time to do anything
else."
"Anything else but be interested?" she asked. "Ah what else does
one ever want to be? If I've been 'watching' with you, as we long
ago agreed I was to do, watching's always in itself an absorption."
"Oh certainly," John Marcher said, "if you hadn't had your
curiosity -! Only doesn't it sometimes come to you as time goes on
that your curiosity isn't being particularly repaid?"
May Bartram had a pause. "Do you ask that, by any chance, because
you feel at all that yours isn't? I mean because you have to wait
so long."
Oh he understood what she meant! "For the thing to happen that
never does happen? For the Beast to jump out? No, I'm just where
I was about it. It isn't a matter as to which I can CHOOSE, I can
decide for a change. It isn't one as to which there CAN be a
change. It's in the lap of the gods. One's in the hands of one's
law--there one is. As to the form the law will take, the way it
will operate, that's its own affair."
"Yes," Miss Bartram replied; "of course one's fate's coming, of
course it HAS come in its own form and its own way, all the while.
Only, you know, the form and the way in your case were to have
been--well, something so exceptional and, as one may say, so
particularly YOUR own."
Something in this made him look at her with suspicion. "You say
'were to HAVE been,' as if in your heart you had begun to doubt."
"Oh!" she vaguely protested.
"As if you believed," he went on, "that nothing will now take
place."
She shook her head slowly but rather inscrutably. "You're far from
my thought."
He continued to look at her. "What then is the matter with you?"
"Well," she said after another wait, "the matter with me is simply
that I'm more sure than ever my curiosity, as you call it, will be
but too well repaid."
They were frankly grave now; he had got up from his seat, had
turned once more about the little drawing-room to which, year after
year, he brought his inevitable topic; in which he had, as he might
have said, tasted their intimatecommunity with every sauce, where
every object was as familiar to him as the things of his own house
and the very carpets were worn with his fitful walk very much as
the desks in old counting-houses are worn by the elbows of
generations of clerks. The generations of his nervous moods had
been at work there, and the place was the written history of his
whole middle life. Under the impression of what his friend had
just said he knew himself, for some reason, more aware of these
things; which made him, after a moment, stop again before her. "Is
it possibly that you've grown afraid?"
"Afraid?" He thought, as she repeated the word, that his question
had made her, a little, change colour; so that, lest he should have
touched on a truth, he explained very kindly: "You remember that
that was what you asked ME long ago--that first day at Weatherend."
"Oh yes, and you told me you didn't know--that I was to see for
myself. We've said little about it since, even in so long a time."
"Precisely," Marcher interposed--"quite as if it were too delicate
a matter for us to make free with. Quite as if we might find, on
pressure, that I AM afraid. For then," he said, "we shouldn't,
should we? quite know what to do."
She had for the time no answer to this question. "There have been
days when I thought you were. Only, of course," she added, "there
have been days when we have thought almost anything."
"Everything. Oh!" Marcher softly groaned, as with a gasp, half
spent, at the face, more uncovered just then than it had been for a
long while, of the imagination always with them. It had always had
it's incalculable moments of glaring out, quite as with the very
eyes of the very Beast, and, used as he was to them, they could
still draw from him the tribute of a sigh that rose from the depths
of his being. All they had thought, first and last, rolled over
him; the past seemed to have been reduced to mere barren
speculation. This in fact was what the place had just struck him
as so full of--the simplification of everything but the state of
suspense. That remained only by seeming to hang in the void
surrounding it. Even his original fear, if fear it as had been,
had lost itself in the desert. "I judge, however," he continued,
"that you see I'm not afraid now."
"What I see, as I make it out, is that you've achieved something
almost unprecedented in the way of getting used to danger. Living
with it so long and so closely you've lost your sense of it; you
know it's there, but you're indifferent, and you cease even, as of
old, to have to whistle in the dark. Considering what the danger
is," May Bartram wound up, "I'm bound to say I don't think your
attitude could well be surpassed."
John Marcher faintly smiled. "It's heroic?"
"Certainly--call it that."
It was what he would have liked indeed to call it. "I AM then a
man of courage?"
"That's what you were to show me."
He still, however, wondered. "But doesn't the man of courage know
what he's afraid of--or not afraid of? I don't know THAT, you see.
I don't focus it. I can't name it. I only know I'm exposed."
"Yes, but exposed--how shall I say?--so directly. So intimately.
That's surely enough."
"Enough to make you feel then--as what we may call the end and the
upshot of our watch--that I'm not afraid?"
"You're not afraid. But it isn't," she said, "the end of our
watch. That is it isn't the end of yours. You've everything still
to see."
"Then why haven't you?" he asked. He had had, all along, to-day,
the sense of her keeping something back, and he still had it. As
this was his first impression of that it quite made a date. The
case was the more marked as she didn't at first answer; which in
turn made him go on. "You know something I don't." Then his
voice, for that of a man of courage, trembled a little. "You know
what's to happen." Her silence, with the face she showed, was
almost a confession--it made him sure. "You know, and you're
afraid to tell me. It's so bad that you're afraid I'll find out."
All this might be true, for she did look as if, unexpectedly to
her, he had crossed some mystic line that she had secretly drawn
round her. Yet she might, after all, not have worried; and the
real climax was that he himself, at all events, needn't. "You'll
never find out."
CHAPTER III
It was all to have made, none the less, as I have said, a date;
which came out in the fact that again and again, even after long
intervals, other things that passed between them were in relation
to this hour but the character of recalls and results. Its
immediate effect had been indeed rather to lighten insistence--
almost to provoke a reaction; as if their topic had dropped by its
own weight and as if moreover, for that matter, Marcher had been
visited by one of his occasional warnings against egotism. He had
kept up, he felt, and very decently on the whole, his consciousness
of the importance of not being selfish, and it was true that he had
never sinned in that direction without promptly enough trying to
press the scales the other way. He often repaired his fault, the
season permitting, by inviting his friend to accompany him to the
opera; and it not infrequently thus happened that, to show he
didn't wish her to have but one sort of food for her mind, he was
the cause of her appearing there with him a dozen nights in the
month. It even happened that, seeing her home at such times, he
occasionally went in with her to finish, as he called it, the
evening, and, the better to make his point, sat down to the frugal
but always careful little supper that awaited his pleasure. His
point was made, he thought, by his not eternally insisting with her
on himself; made for instance, at such hours, when it befell that,
her piano at hand and each of them familiar with it, they went over
passages of the opera together. It chanced to be on one of these
occasions, however, that he reminded her of her not having answered
a certain question he had put to her during the talk that had taken
place between them on her last birthday. "What is it that saves
YOU?"--saved her, he meant, from that appearance of variation from
the usual human type. If he had practically escaped remark, as she
pretended, by doing, in the most important particular, what most
men do--find the answer to life in patching up an alliance of a
sort with a woman no better than himself--how had she escaped it,
and how could the alliance, such as it was, since they must suppose
it had been more or less noticed, have failed to make her rather
positively talked about?
"I never said," May Bartram replied, "that it hadn't made me a good
deal talked about."
"Ah well then you're not 'saved.'"
"It hasn't been a question for me. If you've had your woman I've
had," she said, "my man."
"And you mean that makes you all right?"
Oh it was always as if there were so much to say!
"I don't know why it shouldn't make me--humanly, which is what
we're speaking of--as right as it makes you."
"I see," Marcher returned. "'Humanly,' no doubt, as showing that
you're living for something. Not, that is, just for me and my
secret."
May Bartram smiled. "I don't pretend it exactly shows that I'm not
living for you. It's my intimacy with you that's in question."
He laughed as he saw what she meant. "Yes, but since, as you say,
I'm only, so far as people make out, ordinary, you're--aren't you?
no more than ordinary either. You help me to pass for a man like
another. So if I AM, as I understand you, you're not compromised.
Is that it?"
She had another of her waits, but she spoke clearly enough.
"That's it. It's all that concerns me--to help you to pass for a
man like another."
He was careful to acknowledge the remark handsomely. "How kind,
how beautiful, you are to me! How shall I ever repay you?"
She had her last grave pause, as if there might be a choice of
ways. But she chose. "By going on as you are."
It was into this going on as he was that they relapsed, and really
for so long a time that the day inevitably came for a further
sounding of their depths. These depths, constantly bridged over by
a structure firm enough in spite of its lightness and of its
occasional oscillation in the somewhat vertiginous air, invited on
occasion, in the interest of their nerves, a dropping of the
plummet and a measurement of the abyss. A difference had been made
moreover, once for all, by the fact that she had all the while not
appeared to feel the need of rebutting his charge of an idea within
her that she didn't dare to express--a charge uttered just before
one of the fullest of their later discussions ended. It had come
up for him then that she "knew" something and that what she knew
was bad--too bad to tell him. When he had spoken of it as visibly
so bad that she was afraid he might find it out, her reply had left
the matter too equivocal to be let alone and yet, for Marcher's
special sensibility, almost too formidable again to touch. He
circled about it at a distance that alternately narrowed and
widened and that still wasn't much affected by the consciousness in
him that there was nothing she could "know," after all, any better
than he did. She had no source of knowledge he hadn't equally--
except of course that she might have finer nerves. That was what
- curiosity [,kjuəri´ɔsiti]
n.好奇；奇事；珍品 (初中英语单词) - operate [´ɔpəreit] v.(使)运转；操作；经营 (初中英语单词)
- suspicion [sə´spiʃən] n.怀(猜)疑；嫌疑 (初中英语单词)
- frankly [´fræŋkli] ad.直率地；慷慨地 (初中英语单词)
- intimate [´intimit] a.亲密的 n.知己 (初中英语单词)
- nervous [´nə:vəs] a.神经的；神经过敏的 (初中英语单词)
- impression [im´preʃən] n.印刷；印象；效果 (初中英语单词)
- softly [´sɔftli] ad.软化地；柔和地 (初中英语单词)
- imagination [i,mædʒi´neiʃən] n.想象(力) (初中英语单词)
- tribute [´tribju:t] n.贡物；献礼；颂词 (初中英语单词)
- whistle [´wisəl] v.吹哨 n.口哨；汽笛 (初中英语单词)
- character [´kæriktə] n.特性；性质；人物；字 (初中英语单词)
- reaction [ri´ækʃən] n.反应(力) (初中英语单词)
- moreover [mɔ:´rəuvə] ad.再者，此外，而且 (初中英语单词)
- occasional [ə´keiʒənəl] a.偶然的；临时的 (初中英语单词)
- selfish [´selfiʃ] a.自私的，利己的 (初中英语单词)
- promptly [´prɔmptli] ad.敏捷地；即时地 (初中英语单词)
- instance [´instəns] n.例子，实例，例证 (初中英语单词)
- alliance [ə´laiəns] n.联盟；同盟 (初中英语单词)
- pretend [pri´tend] v.假装；借口；妄求 (初中英语单词)
- acknowledge [ək´nɔlidʒ] vt.(公开)承认；感谢 (初中英语单词)
- constantly [´kɔnstəntli] ad.经常地；不断地 (初中英语单词)
- structure [´strʌktʃə] n.结构，构造；组织 (初中英语单词)
- measurement [´meʒəmənt] n.测量；尺寸；宽度 (初中英语单词)
- charge [tʃɑ:dʒ] v.收费；冲锋 n.费用 (初中英语单词)
- spoken [´spəukən] speak的过去分词 (初中英语单词)
- inevitable [i´nevitəbəl] a.不可避免的 (高中英语单词)
- community [kə´mju:niti] n.团体；社区；公众 (高中英语单词)
- repeated [ri´pi:tid] a.反复的；重复的 (高中英语单词)
- indifferent [in´difrənt] a.不关心的；中立的 (高中英语单词)
- faintly [´feintli] ad.微弱地，软弱无力的 (高中英语单词)
- secretly [´si:kritli] ad.秘密地；隐蔽地 (高中英语单词)
- climax [´klaimæks] n.顶点；高潮 (高中英语单词)
- lighten [´laitn] v.减轻；点亮；启发 (高中英语单词)
- provoke [prə´vəuk] vt.挑拨；煽动；引起 (高中英语单词)
- seeing [si:iŋ] see的现在分词 n.视觉 (高中英语单词)
- variation [,veəri´eiʃən] n.变化；变动 (高中英语单词)
- formidable [´fɔ:midəbəl] a.可怕的；艰难的 (高中英语单词)
- consciousness [´kɔnʃəsnis] n.意识；觉悟；知觉 (高中英语单词)
- tremendously [tri´mendəsli] ad.可怕地；极大地 (英语四级单词)
- exceptional [ik´sepʃənəl] a.异常的，特别的 (英语四级单词)
- vaguely [´veigli] ad.含糊地，暖昧地 (英语四级单词)
- seeming [´si:miŋ] a.表面上的 n.外观 (英语四级单词)
- considering [kən´sidəriŋ] prep.就...而论 (英语四级单词)
- unexpectedly [´ʌniks´pektidli] ad.意外地；突然地 (英语四级单词)
- trying [´traiiŋ] a.难堪的；费劲的 (英语四级单词)
- befell [bi´fel] befall的过去式 (英语四级单词)
- intimacy [´intiməsi] n.亲密；熟悉；秘密 (英语四级单词)
- inevitably [in´evitəbli] ad.不可避免地；必然地 (英语四级单词)
- alternately [ɔ:l´tə:nitli] ad.交替地，轮流地 (英语四级单词)
- unprecedented [ʌn´presidentid] a.空前的 (英语六级单词)
- mystic [´mistik] a.神秘的；难以理解的 (英语六级单词)
- inviting [in´vaitiŋ] a.动人的 (英语六级单词)
- eternally [i:´tə:nli] ad.永久地；不朽地 (英语六级单词)
- speaking [´spi:kiŋ] n.说话 a.发言的 (英语六级单词)
- affected [ə´fektid] a.做作的；假装的 (英语六级单词)
文章标签:名著
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