‘I thought you’d come, Jim. I heard you were at Mrs. Steavens’s last night. I’ve been looking for you all day.’
She was thinner than I had ever seen her, and looked as Mrs. Steavens said, ‘worked down,’ but there was a new kind of strength in the gravity of her face, and her colour still gave her that look of deep-seated health and ardour. Still? Why, it flashed across me that though so much had happened in her life and in mine, she was barely twenty-four years old.
Antonia stuck her fork in the ground, and instinctively1 we walked toward that unploughed patch at the crossing of the roads as the fittest place to talk to each other. We sat down outside the sagging2 wire fence that shut Mr. Shimerda’s plot off from the rest of the world. The tall red grass had never been cut there. It had died down in winter and come up again in the spring until it was as thick and shrubby3 as some tropical garden-grass. I found myself telling her everything: why I had decided4 to study law and to go into the law office of one of my mother’s relatives in New York City; about Gaston Cleric’s death from pneumonia5 last winter, and the difference it had made in my life. She wanted to know about my friends, and my way of living, and my dearest hopes.
‘Of course it means you are going away from us for good,’ she said with a sigh. ‘But that don’t mean I’ll lose you. Look at my papa here; he’s been dead all these years, and yet he is more real to me than almost anybody else. He never goes out of my life. I talk to him and consult him all the time. The older I grow, the better I know him and the more I understand him.’
She asked me whether I had learned to like big cities. ‘I’d always be miserable6 in a city. I’d die of lonesomeness. I like to be where I know every stack and tree, and where all the ground is friendly. I want to live and die here. Father Kelly says everybody’s put into this world for something, and I know what I’ve got to do. I’m going to see that my little girl has a better chance than ever I had. I’m going to take care of that girl, Jim.’
I told her I knew she would. ‘Do you know, Antonia, since I’ve been away, I think of you more often than of anyone else in this part of the world. I’d have liked to have you for a sweetheart, or a wife, or my mother or my sister—anything that a woman can be to a man. The idea of you is a part of my mind; you influence my likes and dislikes, all my tastes, hundreds of times when I don’t realize it. You really are a part of me.’
She turned her bright, believing eyes to me, and the tears came up in them slowly, ‘How can it be like that, when you know so many people, and when I’ve disappointed you so? Ain’t it wonderful, Jim, how much people can mean to each other? I’m so glad we had each other when we were little. I can’t wait till my little girl’s old enough to tell her about all the things we used to do. You’ll always remember me when you think about old times, won’t you? And I guess everybody thinks about old times, even the happiest people.’
As we walked homeward across the fields, the sun dropped and lay like a great golden globe in the low west. While it hung there, the moon rose in the east, as big as a cart-wheel, pale silver and streaked8 with rose colour, thin as a bubble or a ghost-moon. For five, perhaps ten minutes, the two luminaries9 confronted each other across the level land, resting on opposite edges of the world.
In that singular light every little tree and shock of wheat, every sunflower stalk and clump10 of snow-on-the-mountain, drew itself up high and pointed7; the very clods and furrows11 in the fields seemed to stand up sharply. I felt the old pull of the earth, the solemn magic that comes out of those fields at nightfall. I wished I could be a little boy again, and that my way could end there.
We reached the edge of the field, where our ways parted. I took her hands and held them against my breast, feeling once more how strong and warm and good they were, those brown hands, and remembering how many kind things they had done for me. I held them now a long while, over my heart. About us it was growing darker and darker, and I had to look hard to see her face, which I meant always to carry with me; the closest, realest face, under all the shadows of women’s faces, at the very bottom of my memory.
‘Perhaps you will’—I felt rather than saw her smile. ‘But even if you don’t, you’re here, like my father. So I won’t be lonesome.’
As I went back alone over that familiar road, I could almost believe that a boy and girl ran along beside me, as our shadows used to do, laughing and whispering to each other in the grass.
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1
instinctively
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| adv.本能地 | |
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2
sagging
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| 下垂[沉，陷]，松垂，垂度 | |
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3
shrubby
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| adj.灌木的，灌木一般的，灌木繁茂著的 | |
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4
decided
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| adj.决定了的，坚决的；明显的，明确的 | |
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5
pneumonia
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| n.肺炎 | |
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6
miserable
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| adj.悲惨的，痛苦的；可怜的，糟糕的 | |
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7
pointed
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| adj.尖的，直截了当的 | |
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8
streaked
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| adj.有条斑纹的，不安的v.快速移动( streak的过去式和过去分词 )；使布满条纹 | |
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9
luminaries
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| n.杰出人物，名人（luminary的复数形式） | |
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10
clump
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| n.树丛，草丛；vi.用沉重的脚步行走 | |
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11
furrows
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| n.犁沟( furrow的名词复数 )；（脸上的）皱纹v.犁田，开沟( furrow的第三人称单数 ) | |
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12
intrusive
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| adj.打搅的；侵扰的 | |
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