‘I’VE brought you some stamps,’ Scobie said. ‘I’ve been collecting them for a week - from everybody. Even Mrs Carter has contributed a magnificent parrakeet - look at it - from somewhere in South America. And here’s a complete set of Liberians surcharged for the American occupation. I got those from the Naval1 Observer.’
They were completely at ease: it seemed to both of them for that very reason they were safe.
‘Why do you collect stamps?’ he asked. ‘It’s an odd thing to do - after sixteen.’
‘I don’t know,’ Helen Rolt said. ‘I don’t really collect. I carry them round. I suppose it’s habit.’ She opened the album and said, ‘No, it’s not just habit. I do love the things. Do you see this green George V halfpenny stamp? It’s the first I ever collected. I was eight. I steamed it off an envelope and stuck it in a notebook. That’s why my father gave me an album. My mother had died, so he gave me a stamp-album.’
She tried to explain more exactly. ‘They are like snapshots. They are so portable. People who collect china - they can’t carry it around with them. Or books. But you don’t have to tear the pages out like you do with snapshots.
‘You’ve never told me about your husband,’ Scobie said.
‘No.’
‘It’s not really much good tearing out a page because you can see the place where it’s been torn?’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s easier to get over a thing,’ Scobie said, ‘if you talk about it.’
‘That’s not the trouble,’ she said. ‘The trouble is - it’s so terribly easy to get over.’ She took him by surprise; he hadn’t believed she was old enough to have reached that stage in her lessons, that particular turn of the screw. She said, ‘He’s been dead - how long - is it eight weeks yet? and he’s so dead, so completely dead. What a little bitch I must be.’
Scobie said, ‘You needn’t feel that. It’s the same with everybody, I think. When we say to someone, ‘I can’t live without you,’ what we really mean is, ‘I can’t live feeling you may be in pain, unhappy, in want.’ That’s all it is. When they are dead our responsibility ends. There’s nothing more we can do about it. We can rest in peace.’
‘I didn’t know I was so tough,’ Helen said. ‘Horribly tough.’
‘I had a child,’ Scobie said, ‘who died. I was out here. My wife sent me two cables from Bexhill, one at five in the evening and one at six, but they mixed up the order. You see she meant to break the thing gently. I got one cable just after breakfast. It was eight o’clock in the morning - a dead time of day for any news.’ He had never mentioned this before to anyone, not even to Louise. Now he brought out the exact words of each cable, carefully. ‘The cable said, Catherine died this afternoon no pain God bless you. The second cable came at lunch-time. It said, Catherine seriously ill. Doctor has hope my diving. That was the one sent off at five. ‘Diving’ was a mutilation - I suppose for ‘darling’. You see there was nothing more hopeless she could have put to break the news than “doctor has hope”.’
‘How terrible for you,’ Helen said.
‘No, the terrible thing was that when I got the second telegram, I was so muddled2 in my head, I thought, there’s been a mistake. She must be still alive. For a moment until I realized what had happened, I was - disappointed. That was the terrible thing. I thought ‘now the anxiety begins, and the pain’, but when I realized what had happened, then it was all right, she was dead, I could begin to forget her.’
‘Have you forgotten her?’
‘I don’t remember her often. You see, I escaped seeing her die. My wife had that.’
It was astonishing to him how easily and quickly they had become friends. They came together over two deaths without reserve. She said, ‘I don’t know what I’d have done without you.’
‘Everybody would have looked after you.’
‘I think they are scared of me, she said.
He laughed.
‘They are. Flight-Lieutenant Bagster took me to the beach this afternoon but he was scared. Because I’m not happy and because of my husband. Everybody on the beach was pretending to be happy about something and I sat there grinning and it didn’t work. Do you remember when you went to your first party and coming up the stairs you heard all the voices and you didn’t know how to talk to people? That’s how I felt so I sat and grinned in Mrs Carter’s bathing-dress and Bagster stroked my leg and I wanted to go home.’
‘You’ll be going home soon.’
‘I don’t mean that home. I mean here where I can shut the door and not answer when they knock. I don’t want to go away yet.’
‘But surely you aren’t happy here?’
‘I’m so afraid of the sea,’ she said.
‘Do you dream about it?’
‘No. I dream of John sometimes - that’s worse. Because I’ve always had bad dreams of him and I still have bad dreams of him. I mean we were always quarrelling in the dreams and we still go on quarrelling.’
‘Did you quarrel?’
‘No. He was sweet to me. We were only married a month you know. It would be easy being sweet as long as that wouldn’t it? When this happened I hadn’t really had time to know my way around.’ It seemed to Scobie that she had never known her way around - at least not since she had left her net-ball team; was it a year ago? Sometimes he saw her lying back in the boat on that oily featureless sea day after day with the other child near death and the sailor going mad and Miss Malcott, and the chief engineer who felt his responsibility to the owners, and sometimes he saw her carried past him on a stretcher grasping her stamp-album, and now he saw her in the borrowed unbecoming bathing-dress grinning at Bagster as he stroked her legs, listening to the laughter and the splashes, not knowing the adult etiquette4 ... Sadly like an evening tide he felt responsibility bearing him up the shore. ‘You’ve written to your father?’
‘Oh yes, of course. He cabled that he’s pulling strings5 about the passage. I don’t know what strings he can pull from Bury, poor dear. He doesn’t know anybody at all. He cabled too about John, of course.’ She lifted a cushion off the chair and pulled the cable out. ‘Read it. He’s very sweet, but of course he doesn’t know a thing about me.’
Scobie read. Terribly grieved for you, dear child, but remember his happiness, Your loving father. The date stamp with the Bury mark made him aware of the enormous distance between father and child. He said, ‘How do you mean, he doesn’t know a thing?’
‘You see, he believes in God and heaven, all that sort of thing.’
‘You don’t?’
‘I gave up all that when I left school. John used to pull his leg about it, quite gently you know. Father didn’t mind. But he never knew I felt the way John did. If you are a clergyman’s daughter there are a lot of things you have to pretend about. He would have hated knowing that John and I went together, oh, a fortnight before we married.’
Again he had that vision of someone who didn’t know her way around: no wonder Bagster was scared of her. Bagster was not a man to accept responsibility, and how could anyone lay the responsibility for any action, he thought, on this stupid bewildered child? He turned over the little pile of stamps he had accumulated for her and said, ‘I wonder what you’ll do when you get home?’
‘I suppose,’ she said, ‘they’ll conscript me.’
He thought: If my child had lived, she too would have been conscriptable, flung into some grim dormitory, to find her own way. After the Atlantic, the A.T.S. or the W.A.A.F., the blustering6 sergeant8 with the big bust9, the cook-house and the potato peelings, the Lesbian officer with the thin lips and the tidy gold hair, and the men waiting on the Common outside the camp, among the gorse bushes ... compared to that surely even the Atlantic was more a home. He said, ‘Haven’t you got any shorthand? any languages?’ Only the clever and the astute10 and the influential11 escaped in war.
‘No,’ she said, ‘I’m not really any good at anything.’
It was impossible to think of her being saved from the sea and then Sung back like a fish that wasn’t worth catching12.
He said, ‘Can you type?’
‘I can get along quite fast with one finger.’
‘You could get a job here, I think. We are very short of secretaries. All the wives, you know, are working in the secretariat, and we still haven’t enough. But it’s a bad climate for a woman.’
‘I’d like to stay. Let’s have a drink on it.’ She called, ‘Boy, boy.’
‘You are learning,’ Scobie said. ‘A week ago you were so frightened of him...’ The boy came in with a tray set out with glasses, limes, water, a new gin bottle.
‘This isn’t the boy I talked to,’ Scobie said.
‘No, that one went. You talked to him too fiercely.’
‘And this one came?’
‘Yes.’
‘What’s your name, boy?’
‘Vande, sah.’
‘I’ve seen you before, haven’t I?’
‘No, sah.’
‘Who am I?’
‘You big policeman, sah.’
‘Don’t frighten this one away,’ Helen said.
‘Who were you with?’
‘I was with D.C. Pemberton up bush, sah. I was small boy.’
‘Is that where I saw you?’ Scobie said. ‘I suppose I did. You look after this missus well now, and when she goes home, I get you big job. Remember that.’
‘You haven’t looked at the stamps,’ Scobie said.
‘No, I haven’t, have I?’ A spot of gin fell upon one of the stamps and stained it. He watched her pick it out of the pile, taking in the straight hair falling in rats’ tails over the nape as though the Atlantic had taken the strength out of it for ever, the hollowed face. It seemed to him that he had not felt so much at ease with another human being for years - not since Louise was young. But this case was different, he told himself: they were safe with each other. He was more than thirty years the older; his body in this climate had lost the sense of lust7; he watched her with sadness and affection and enormous pity because a time would come when he couldn’t show her around in a world where she was at sea. When she turned and the light fell on her face she looked ugly, with the temporary ugliness of a child. The ugliness was like handcuffs on his wrists.
He said, ‘That stamp’s spoilt. I’ll get you another.’
‘Oh no,’ she said, ‘it goes in as it is. I’m not a real collector.’
He had no sense of responsibility towards the beautiful and the graceful13 and the intelligent. They could find their own way. It was the face for which nobody would go out of his way, the face that would never catch the covert14 look, the face which would soon be used to rebuffs and indifference15 that demanded his allegiance. The word ‘pity’ is used as loosely as the word ‘love’: the terrible promiscuous16 passion which so few experience.
She said, ‘You see, whenever I see that stain I’ll see this room...’
‘Then it’s like a snapshot.’
‘You can pull a stamp out,’ she said with a terrible youthful clarity, ‘and you don’t know that it’s ever been there.’ She turned suddenly to him and said, ‘It’s so good to talk to you. I can say anything I like. I’m not afraid of hurting you. You don’t want anything out of me. I’m safe.’
‘We’re both safe.’ The rain surrounded them, falling regularly on the iron roof.
She said, ‘I have a feeling that you’d never let me down.’ The words came to him like a command he would have to obey however difficult. Her hands were full of the absurd scraps17 of paper he had brought her. She said, ‘I’ll keep these always. I’ll never have to pull these out.’
Somebody knocked on the door and a voice said, ‘Freddie Bagster. It’s only me. Freddie Bagster,’ cheerily.
‘Don’t answer,’ she whispered, ‘don’t answer.’ She put her arm in his and watched the door with her mouth a little open as though she were out of breath. He had the sense of an animal which had been chased to its hole.
‘Let Freddie in,’ the voice wheedled18. ‘Be a sport, Helen. Only Freddie Bagster.’ The man was a little drunk.
She stood pressed against him with her hand on his side.
When the sound of Bagster’s feet receded19, she raised her mouth and they kissed. What they had both thought was safety proved to have been the camouflage20 of an enemy who works in terms of friendship, trust and pity.
2
The rain poured steadily21 down, turning the little patch of reclaimed22 ground on which his house stood back into swamp again. The window of the room blew to and fro. At some time during the night the catch had been broken by a squall of wind. Now the rain had blown in, his dressing-table was soaking wet, and there was a pool of water on the floor. His alarm clock pointed3 to 4.25. He felt as though he had returned to a house that had been abandoned years ago. It would not have surprised him to find cobwebs over the mirror, the mosquito-net hanging in shreds23 and the dirt of mice upon the floor.
He sat down on a chair and the water drained off his trousers and made a second pool around his mosquito-boots. He had left his umbrella behind, setting out on his walk home with an odd jubilation24, as though he had rediscovered something he had lost, something which belonged to his youth. In the wet and noisy darkness he had even lifted his voice and tried out a line from Fraser’s song, but his voice was tuneless. Now somewhere between the Nissen hut and home he had mislaid his joy.
At four in the morning he had woken. Her head lay in his side and he could feel her hair against his breast. Putting his hand outside the net he found the light She lay in the odd cramped25 attitude of someone who has been shot in escaping. It seemed to him for a moment even then, before his tenderness and pleasure awoke, that he was looking at a bundle of cannon26 fodder27. The first words she said when the light had roused her were, ‘Bagster can go to hell.’
‘Were you dreaming?’
She said, ‘I dreamed I was lost in a marsh28 and Bagster found me.’
He said, ‘I’ve got to go. If we sleep now, we shan’t wake again till it’s light.’ He began to think for both of them, carefully. Like a criminal he began to fashion in his own mind the undetectable crime: he planned the moves ahead: he embarked29 for the first time in his life on the long legalistic arguments of deceit. If so-and-so ... then that follows. He said, ‘What time does your boy turn up?’
‘About six I think. I don’t know. He calls me at seven.’
‘Ali starts boiling my water about a quarter to six. I’d better go.’ He looked carefully everywhere for signs of his presence: he straightened a that and hesitated over an ash-tray. Then at the end of it all he had left his umbrella standing30 against the wall. It seemed to him the typical action of a criminal. When the rain reminded him of it, it was too late to go back. He would have to hammer on her door, and already in one hut a light had gone on. Standing in his own room with a mosquito-boot in his hand, he thought wearily and drearily31, In future I must do better than that.
In the future - that was where the sadness lay. Was it the butterfly that died in the act of love? But human beings were condemned32 to consequences. The responsibility as well as the guilt33 was his - he was not a Bagster: he knew what he was about. He had sworn to preserve Louise’s happiness, and now he had accepted another and contradictory34 responsibility. He felt tired by all the lies he would some time have to tell; he felt the wounds of those victims who had not yet bled. Lying back on the pillow he stared sleeplessly35 out towards the grey early morning tide. Somewhere on the face of those obscure waters moved the sense of yet another wrong and another victim, not Louise, nor Helen.
收听单词发音 |
1
naval
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| adj.海军的，军舰的，船的 | |
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muddled
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| adj.混乱的；糊涂的；头脑昏昏然的v.弄乱，弄糟( muddle的过去式)；使糊涂；对付，混日子 | |
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pointed
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| adj.尖的，直截了当的 | |
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etiquette
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| n.礼仪，礼节；规矩 | |
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strings
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| n.弦 | |
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blustering
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| adj.狂风大作的，狂暴的v.外强中干的威吓( bluster的现在分词 )；咆哮；（风）呼啸；狂吹 | |
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lust
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| n.性(淫)欲；渴(欲)望；vi.对…有强烈的欲望 | |
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sergeant
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| n.警官，中士 | |
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bust
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| vt.打破；vi.爆裂；n.半身像；胸部 | |
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astute
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| adj.机敏的，精明的 | |
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influential
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| adj.有影响的，有权势的 | |
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12
catching
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| adj.易传染的，有魅力的，迷人的，接住 | |
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graceful
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| adj.优美的，优雅的；得体的 | |
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covert
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| adj.隐藏的；暗地里的 | |
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indifference
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| n.不感兴趣，不关心，冷淡，不在乎 | |
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promiscuous
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| adj.杂乱的，随便的 | |
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scraps
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| 油渣 | |
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wheedled
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| v.骗取（某物），哄骗（某人干某事）( wheedle的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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receded
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| v.逐渐远离( recede的过去式和过去分词 )；向后倾斜；自原处后退或避开别人的注视；尤指问题 | |
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camouflage
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| n./v.掩饰，伪装 | |
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steadily
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| adv.稳定地；不变地；持续地 | |
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reclaimed
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| adj.再生的；翻造的；收复的；回收的v.开拓( reclaim的过去式和过去分词 )；要求收回；从废料中回收（有用的材料）；挽救 | |
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shreds
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| v.撕碎，切碎( shred的第三人称单数 )；用撕毁机撕毁（文件） | |
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jubilation
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| n.欢庆，喜悦 | |
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cramped
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| a.狭窄的 | |
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cannon
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| n.大炮，火炮；飞机上的机关炮 | |
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fodder
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| n.草料；炮灰 | |
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marsh
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| n.沼泽，湿地 | |
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embarked
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| 乘船( embark的过去式和过去分词 )； 装载； 从事 | |
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standing
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| n.持续，地位；adj.永久的，不动的，直立的，不流动的 | |
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31
drearily
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| 沉寂地，厌倦地，可怕地 | |
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32
condemned
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| adj. 被责难的, 被宣告有罪的 动词condemn的过去式和过去分词 | |
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guilt
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| n.犯罪；内疚；过失，罪责 | |
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contradictory
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| adj.反驳的，反对的，抗辩的；n.正反对，矛盾对立 | |
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sleeplessly
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| adv.失眠地 | |
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