I had been again with my mother, but except Mrs. Meldrum and the gleam of France had not found at Folkestone my old resources and pastimes. Mrs. Meldrum, much edified1 by my report of the performances, as she called them, in my studio, had told me that to her knowledge Flora2 would soon be on the straw: she had cut from her capital such fine fat slices that there was almost nothing more left to swallow. Perched on her breezy cliff the good lady dazzled me as usual by her universal light: she knew so much more about everything and everybody than I could ever squeeze out of my colour-tubes. She knew that Flora was acting3 on system and absolutely declined to be interfered4 with: her precious reasoning was that her money would last as long as she should need it, that a magnificent marriage would crown her charms before she should be really pinched. She had a sum put by for a liberal outfit5; meanwhile the proper use of the rest was to decorate her for the approaches to the altar, keep her afloat in the society in which she would most naturally meet her match. Lord Iffield had been seen with her at Lucerne, at Cadenabbia; but it was Mrs. Meldrum’s conviction that nothing was to be expected of him but the most futile6 flirtation7. The girl had a certain hold of him, but with a great deal of swagger he hadn’t the spirit of a sheep: he was in fear of his father and would never commit himself in Lord Considine’s lifetime. The most Flora might achieve would be that he wouldn’t marry some one else. Geoffrey Dawling, to Mrs. Meldrum’s knowledge (I had told her of the young man’s visit) had attached himself on the way back from Italy to the Hammond Synge group. My informant was in a position to be definite about this dangler8; she knew about his people: she had heard of him before. Hadn’t he been, at Oxford9, a friend of one of her nephews? Hadn’t he spent the Christmas holidays precisely10 three years before at her brother-in-law’s in Yorkshire, taking that occasion to get himself refused with derision by wilful11 Betty, the second daughter of the house? Her sister, who liked the floundering youth, had written to her to complain of Betty, and that the young man should now turn up as an appendage12 of Flora’s was one of those oft-cited proofs that the world is small and that there are not enough people to go round. His father had been something or other in the Treasury13; his grandfather, on the mother’s side, had been something or other in the Church. He had come into the paternal14 estate, two or three thousand a year in Hampshire; but he had let the place advantageously and was generous to four ugly sisters who lived at Bournemouth and adored him. The family was hideous15 all round, but the salt of the earth. He was supposed to be unspeakably clever; he was fond of London, fond of books, of intellectual society and of the idea of a political career. That such a man should be at the same time fond of Flora Saunt attested16, as the phrase in the first volume of Gibbon has it, the variety of his inclinations17. I was soon to learn that he was fonder of her than of all the other things together. Betty, one of five and with views above her station, was at any rate felt at home to have dished herself by her perversity18. Of course no one had looked at her since and no one would ever look at her again. It would be eminently19 desirable that Flora should learn the lesson of Betty’s fate.
I was not struck, I confess, with all this in my mind, by any symptoms on our young lady’s part of that sort of meditation20. The only moral she saw in anything was that of her incomparable countenance21, which Mr. Dawling, smitten22 even like the railway porters and the cabmen by the doom-dealing gods, had followed from London to Venice and from Venice back to London again. I afterwards learned that her version of this episode was profusely23 inexact: his personal acquaintance with her had been determined24 by an accident remarkable25 enough, I admit, in connection with what had gone before — a coincidence at all events superficially striking. At Munich, returning from a tour in the Tyrol with two of his sisters, he had found himself at the table d’h?te of his inn opposite to the full presentment of that face of which the mere26 clumsy copy had made him dream and desire. He had been tossed by it to a height so vertiginous27 as to involve a retreat from the table; but the next day he had dropped with a resounding28 thud at the very feet of his apparition29. On the following, with an equal incoherence, a sacrifice even of his bewildered sisters, whom he left behind, he made an heroic effort to escape by flight from a fate of which he already felt the cold breath. That fate, in London, very little later, drove him straight before it — drove him one Sunday afternoon, in the rain, to the door of the Hammond Synges. He marched in other words close up to the cannon30 that was to blow him to pieces. But three weeks, when he reappeared to me, had elapsed since then, yet (to vary my metaphor) the burden he was to carry for the rest of his days was firmly lashed31 to his back. I don’t mean by this that Flora had been persuaded to contract her scope; I mean that he had been treated to the unconditional32 snub which, as the event was to show, couldn’t have been bettered as a means of securing him. She hadn’t calculated, but she had said “Never!” and that word had made a bed big enough for his long-legged patience. He became from this moment to my mind the interesting figure in the piece.
Now that he had acted without my aid I was free to show him this, and having on his own side something to show me he repeatedly knocked at my door. What he brought with him on these occasions was a simplicity33 so huge that, as I turn my ear to the past, I seem even now to hear it bumping up and down my stairs. That was really what I saw of him in the light of his behaviour. He had fallen in love as he might have broken his leg, and the fracture was of a sort that would make him permanently34 lame35. It was the whole man who limped and lurched, with nothing of him left in the same position as before. The tremendous cleverness, the literary society, the political ambition, the Bournemouth sisters all seemed to flop36 with his every movement a little nearer to the floor. I hadn’t had an Oxford training and I had never encountered the great man at whose feet poor Dawling had most submissively sat and who had addressed him his most destructive sniffs37; but I remember asking myself if such privileges had been an indispensable preparation to the career on which my friend appeared now to have embarked38. I remember too making up my mind about the cleverness, which had its uses and I suppose in impenetrable shades even its critics, but from which the friction39 of mere personal intercourse40 was not the sort of process to extract a revealing spark. He accepted without a question both his fever and his chill, and the only thing he showed any subtlety41 about was this convenience of my friendship. He doubtless told me his simple story, but the matter comes back to me in a kind of sense of my being rather the mouthpiece, of my having had to thresh it out for him. He took it from me without a groan42, and I gave it to him, as we used to say, pretty hot; he took it again and again, spending his odd half-hours with me as if for the very purpose of learning how idiotically he was in love. He told me I made him see things: to begin with, hadn’t I first made him see Flora Saunt? I wanted him to give her up and luminously43 informed him why; on which he never protested nor contradicted, never was even so alembicated as to declare just for the sake of the drama that he wouldn’t. He simply and undramatically didn’t, and when at the end of three months I asked him what was the use of talking with such a fellow his nearest approach to a justification44 was to say that what made him want to help her was just the deficiencies I dwelt on. I could only reply without pointing the moral: “Oh, if you’re as sorry for her as that!” I too was nearly as sorry for her as that, but it only led me to be sorrier still for other victims of this compassion45. With Dawling as with me the compassion was at first in excess of any visible motive46; so that when eventually the motive was supplied each could to a certain extent compliment the other on the fineness of his foresight47.
After he had begun to haunt my studio Miss Saunt quite gave it up, and I finally learned that she accused me of conspiring48 with him to put pressure on her to marry him. She didn’t know I would take it that way; else she wouldn’t have brought him to see me. It was in her view a part of the conspiracy49; that to show him a kindness I asked him at last to sit to me. I daresay moreover she was disgusted to hear that I had ended by attempting almost as many sketches50 of his beauty as I had attempted of hers. What was the value of tributes to beauty by a hand that luxuriated in ugliness? My relation to poor Dawling’s want of modelling was simple enough. I was really digging in that sandy desert for the buried treasure of his soul.
收听单词发音 |
1
edified
|
|
| v.开导，启发( edify的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
2
flora
|
|
| n.(某一地区的)植物群 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
3
acting
|
|
| n.演戏，行为，假装；adj.代理的，临时的，演出用的 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
4
interfered
|
|
| v.干预( interfere的过去式和过去分词 )；调停；妨碍；干涉 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
5
outfit
|
|
| n.（为特殊用途的）全套装备，全套服装 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
6
futile
|
|
| adj.无效的，无用的，无希望的 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
7
flirtation
|
|
| n.调情，调戏，挑逗 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
8
dangler
|
|
| 吊着晃来晃去之物，耳环，追逐女人的男人 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
|
9
Oxford
|
|
| n.牛津（英国城市） | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
10
precisely
|
|
| adv.恰好，正好，精确地，细致地 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
11
wilful
|
|
| adj.任性的，故意的 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
12
appendage
|
|
| n.附加物 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
13
treasury
|
|
| n.宝库；国库，金库；文库 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
14
paternal
|
|
| adj.父亲的，像父亲的，父系的，父方的 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
15
hideous
|
|
| adj.丑陋的，可憎的，可怕的，恐怖的 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
16
attested
|
|
| adj.经检验证明无病的，经检验证明无菌的v.证明( attest的过去式和过去分词 )；证实；声称…属实；使宣誓 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
17
inclinations
|
|
| 倾向( inclination的名词复数 )； 倾斜； 爱好； 斜坡 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
18
perversity
|
|
| n.任性；刚愎自用 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
19
eminently
|
|
| adv.突出地；显著地；不寻常地 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
20
meditation
|
|
| n.熟虑，（尤指宗教的）默想，沉思，（pl.）冥想录 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
21
countenance
|
|
| n.脸色，面容；面部表情；vt.支持，赞同 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
22
smitten
|
|
| 猛打，重击，打击( smite的过去分词 ) | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
23
profusely
|
|
| ad.abundantly | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
24
determined
|
|
| adj.坚定的；有决心的 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
25
remarkable
|
|
| adj.显著的，异常的，非凡的，值得注意的 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
26
mere
|
|
| adj.纯粹的；仅仅，只不过 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
27
vertiginous
|
|
| adj.回旋的；引起头晕的 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
28
resounding
|
|
| adj. 响亮的 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
29
apparition
|
|
| n.幽灵，神奇的现象 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
30
cannon
|
|
| n.大炮，火炮；飞机上的机关炮 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
31
lashed
|
|
| adj.具睫毛的v.鞭打( lash的过去式和过去分词 )；煽动；紧系；怒斥 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
32
unconditional
|
|
| adj.无条件的，无限制的，绝对的 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
33
simplicity
|
|
| n.简单，简易；朴素；直率，单纯 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
34
permanently
|
|
| adv.永恒地，永久地，固定不变地 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
35
lame
|
|
| adj.跛的，(辩解、论据等)无说服力的 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
36
flop
|
|
| n.失败(者)，扑通一声；vi.笨重地行动，沉重地落下 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
37
sniffs
|
|
| v.以鼻吸气，嗅，闻( sniff的第三人称单数 )；抽鼻子（尤指哭泣、患感冒等时出声地用鼻子吸气）；抱怨，不以为然地说 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
38
embarked
|
|
| 乘船( embark的过去式和过去分词 )； 装载； 从事 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
39
friction
|
|
| n.摩擦，摩擦力 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
40
intercourse
|
|
| n.性交；交流，交往，交际 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
41
subtlety
|
|
| n.微妙，敏锐，精巧；微妙之处，细微的区别 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
42
groan
|
|
| vi./n.呻吟，抱怨；(发出)呻吟般的声音 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
43
luminously
|
|
| 发光的； 明亮的； 清楚的； 辉赫 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
44
justification
|
|
| n.正当的理由；辩解的理由 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
45
compassion
|
|
| n.同情，怜悯 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
46
motive
|
|
| n.动机，目的；adv.发动的，运动的 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
47
foresight
|
|
| n.先见之明，深谋远虑 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
48
conspiring
|
|
| 密谋( conspire的现在分词 )； 搞阴谋； （事件等）巧合； 共同导致 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
49
conspiracy
|
|
| n.阴谋，密谋，共谋 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
50
sketches
|
|
| n.草图( sketch的名词复数 )；素描；速写；梗概 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
| 欢迎访问英文小说网 |