Like a child who has no one to play with she loitered through the dark hall. She saw a light under an office door. She knocked. To the person who opened she murmured, “Do you happen to know where the Perrys are?” She realized that it was Guy Pollock.
“I’m awfully2 sorry, Mrs. Kennicott, but I don’t know. Won’t you come in and wait for them?”
“W-why ——” she observed, as she reflected that in Gopher Prairie it is not decent to call on a man; as she decided3 that no, really, she wouldn’t go in; and as she went in.
“I didn’t know your office was up here.”
“Yes, office, town-house, and chateau4 in Picardy. But you can’t see the chateau and town-house (next to the Duke of Sutherland’s). They’re beyond that inner door. They are a cot and a wash-stand and my other suit and the blue crepe tie you said you liked.”
“You remember my saying that?”
“Of course. I always shall. Please try this chair.”
She glanced about the rusty5 office — gaunt stove, shelves of tan law-books, desk-chair filled with newspapers so long sat upon that they were in holes and smudged to grayness. There were only two things which suggested Guy Pollock. On the green felt of the table-desk, between legal blanks and a clotted6 inkwell, was a cloissone vase. On a swing shelf was a row of books unfamiliar7 to Gopher Prairie: Mosher editions of the poets, black and red German novels, a Charles Lamb in crushed levant.
Guy did not sit down. He quartered the office, a grayhound on the scent8; a grayhound with glasses tilted9 forward on his thin nose, and a silky indecisive brown mustache. He had a golf jacket of jersey10, worn through at the creases11 in the sleeves. She noted12 that he did not apologize for it, as Kennicott would have done.
He made conversation: “I didn’t know you were a bosom13 friend of the Perrys. Champ is the salt of the earth but somehow I can’t imagine him joining you in symbolic14 dancing, or making improvements on the Diesel15 engine.”
“No. He’s a dear soul, bless him, but he belongs in the National Museum, along with General Grant’s sword, and I’m —— Oh, I suppose I’m seeking for a gospel that will evangelize Gopher Prairie.”
“Really? Evangelize it to what?”
“To anything that’s definite. Seriousness or frivolousness16 or both. I wouldn’t care whether it was a laboratory or a carnival17. But it’s merely safe. Tell me, Mr. Pollock, what is the matter with Gopher Prairie?”
“Is anything the matter with it? Isn’t there perhaps something the matter with you and me? (May I join you in the honor of having something the matter?)”
“(Yes, thanks.) No, I think it’s the town.”
“Because they enjoy skating more than biology?”
“But I’m not only more interested in biology than the Jolly Seventeen, but also in skating! I’ll skate with them, or slide, or throw snowballs, just as gladly as talk with you.”
(“Oh no!”)
(“Yes!) But they want to stay home and embroider18.”
“Perhaps. I’m not defending the town. It’s merely —— I’m a confirmed doubter of myself. (Probably I’m conceited19 about my lack of conceit20!) Anyway, Gopher Prairie isn’t particularly bad. It’s like all villages in all countries. Most places that have lost the smell of earth but not yet acquired the smell of patchouli — or of factory-smoke — are just as suspicious and righteous. I wonder if the small town isn’t, with some lovely exceptions, a social appendix? Some day these dull market-towns may be as obsolete21 as monasteries22. I can imagine the farmer and his local store-manager going by monorail, at the end of the day, into a city more charming than any William Morris Utopia — music, a university, clubs for loafers like me. (Lord, how I’d like to have a real club!)”
She asked impulsively23, “You, why do you stay here?”
“I have the Village Virus.”
“It sounds dangerous.”
“It is. More dangerous than the cancer that will certainly get me at fifty unless I stop this smoking. The Village Virus is the germ which — it’s extraordinarily24 like the hook-worm — it infects ambitious people who stay too long in the provinces. You’ll find it epidemic25 among lawyers and doctors and ministers and college-bred merchants — all these people who have had a glimpse of the world that thinks and laughs, but have returned to their swamp. I’m a perfect example. But I sha’n’t pester26 you with my dolors.”
“You won’t. And do sit down, so I can see you.”
He dropped into the shrieking27 desk-chair. He looked squarely at her; she was conscious of the pupils of his eyes; of the fact that he was a man, and lonely. They were embarrassed. They elaborately glanced away, and were relieved as he went on:
“The diagnosis28 of my Village Virus is simple enough. I was born in an Ohio town about the same size as Gopher Prairie, and much less friendly. It’d had more generations in which to form an oligarchy29 of respectability. Here, a stranger is taken in if he is correct, if he likes hunting and motoring and God and our Senator. There, we didn’t take in even our own till we had contemptuously got used to them. It was a red- brick Ohio town, and the trees made it damp, and it smelled of rotten apples. The country wasn’t like our lakes and prairie. There were small stuffy30 corn-fields and brick-yards and greasy31 oil-wells.
“I went to a denominational college and learned that since dictating32 the Bible, and hiring a perfect race of ministers to explain it, God has never done much but creep around and try to catch us disobeying it. From college I went to New York, to the Columbia Law School. And for four years I lived. Oh, I won’t rhapsodize about New York. It was dirty and noisy and breathless and ghastly expensive. But compared with the moldy33 academy in which I had been smothered34 ——! I went to symphonies twice a week. I saw Irving and Terry and Duse and Bernhardt, from the top gallery. I walked in Gramercy Park. And I read, oh, everything.
“Through a cousin I learned that Julius Flickerbaugh was sick and needed a partner. I came here. Julius got well. He didn’t like my way of loafing five hours and then doing my work (really not so badly) in one. We parted.
“When I first came here I swore I’d ‘keep up my interests.’ Very lofty! I read Browning, and went to Minneapolis for the theaters. I thought I was ‘keeping up.’ But I guess the Village Virus had me already. I was reading four copies of cheap fiction-magazines to one poem. I’d put off the Minneapolis trips till I simply had to go there on a lot of legal matters.
“A few years ago I was talking to a patent lawyer from Chicago, and I realized that —— I’d always felt so superior to people like Julius Flickerbaugh, but I saw that I was as provincial35 and behind-the-times as Julius. (Worse! Julius plows36 through the Literary Digest and the Outlook faithfully, while I’m turning over pages of a book by Charles Flandrau that I already know by heart.)
“I decided to leave here. Stern resolution. Grasp the world. Then I found that the Village Virus had me, absolute: I didn’t want to face new streets and younger men — real competition. It was too easy to go on making out conveyances37 and arguing ditching cases. So —— That’s all of the biography of a living dead man, except the diverting last chapter, the lies about my having been ‘a tower of strength and legal wisdom’ which some day a preacher will spin over my lean dry body.”
He looked down at his table-desk, fingering the starry38 enameled39 vase.
She could not comment. She pictured herself running across the room to pat his hair. She saw that his lips were firm, under his soft faded mustache. She sat still and maundered, “I know. The Village Virus. Perhaps it will get me. Some day I’m going —— Oh, no matter. At least, I am making you talk! Usually you have to be polite to my garrulousness40, but now I’m sitting at your feet.”
“It would be rather nice to have you literally41 sitting at my feet, by a fire.”
“Would you have a fireplace for me?”
“Naturally! Please don’t snub me now! Let the old man rave42. How old are you, Carol?”
“Twenty-six, Guy.”
“Twenty-six! I was just leaving New York, at twenty-six. I heard Patti sing, at twenty-six. And now I’m forty-seven. I feel like a child, yet I’m old enough to be your father. So it’s decently paternal43 to imagine you curled at my feet . . . . Of course I hope it isn’t, but we’ll reflect the morals of Gopher Prairie by officially announcing that it is! . . . These standards that you and I live up to! There’s one thing that’s the matter with Gopher Prairie, at least with the ruling-class (there is a ruling-class, despite all our professions of democ- racy). And the penalty we tribal44 rulers pay is that our subjects watch us every minute. We can’t get wholesomely45 drunk and relax. We have to be so correct about sex morals, and inconspicuous clothes, and doing our commercial trickery only in the traditional ways, that none of us can live up to it, and we become horribly hypocritical. Unavoidably. The widow-robbing deacon of fiction can’t help being hypocritical. The widows themselves demand it! They admire his unctuousness46. And look at me. Suppose I did dare to make love to — some exquisite47 married woman. I wouldn’t admit it to myself. I giggle48 with the most revolting salaciousness over La Vie Parisienne, when I get hold of one in Chicago, yet I shouldn’t even try to hold your hand. I’m broken. It’s the historical Anglo- Saxon way of making life miserable49. . . . Oh, my dear, I haven’t talked to anybody about myself and all our selves for years.”
“Guy! Can’t we do something with the town? Really?”
“No, we can’t!” He disposed of it like a judge ruling out an improper50 objection; returned to matters less uncomfortably energetic: “Curious. Most troubles are unnecessary. We have Nature beaten; we can make her grow wheat; we can keep warm when she sends blizzards51. So we raise the devil just for pleasure — wars, politics, race-hatreds, labor-disputes. Here in Gopher Prairie we’ve cleared the fields, and become soft, so we make ourselves unhappy artificially, at great expense and exertion53: Methodists disliking Episcopalians, the man with the Hudson laughing at the man with the flivver. The worst is the commercial hatred52 — the grocer feeling that any man who doesn’t deal with him is robbing him. What hurts me is that it applies to lawyers and doctors (and decidedly to their wives!) as much as to grocers. The doctors — you know about that — how your husband and Westlake and Gould dislike one another.”
“No! I won’t admit it!”
He grinned.
“Oh, maybe once or twice, when Will has positively54 known of a case where Doctor — where one of the others has continued to call on patients longer than necessary, he has laughed about it, but ——”
He still grinned.
“No, REALLY! And when you say the wives of the doctors share these jealousies55 —— Mrs. McGanum and I haven’t any particular crush on each other; she’s so stolid56. But her mother, Mrs. Westlake — nobody could be sweeter.”
“Yes, I’m sure she’s very bland57. But I wouldn’t tell her my heart’s secrets if I were you, my dear. I insist that there’s only one professional-man’s wife in this town who doesn’t plot, and that is you, you blessed, credulous58 outsider!”
“I won’t be cajoled! I won’t believe that medicine, the priesthood of healing, can be turned into a penny-picking business.”
“See here: Hasn’t Kennicott ever hinted to you that you’d better be nice to some old woman because she tells her friends which doctor to call in? But I oughtn’t to ——”
She remembered certain remarks which Kennicott had offered regarding the Widow Bogart. She flinched59, looked at Guy beseechingly60.
He sprang up, strode to her with a nervous step, smoothed her hand. She wondered if she ought to be offended by his caress61. Then she wondered if he liked her hat, the new Oriental turban of rose and silver brocade.
He dropped her hand. His elbow brushed her shoulder. He flitted over to the desk-chair, his thin back stooped. He picked up the cloisonne vase. Across it he peered at her with such loneliness that she was startled. But his eyes faded into impersonality62 as he talked of the jealousies of Gopher Prairie. He stopped himself with a sharp, “Good Lord, Carol, you’re not a jury. You are within your legal rights in refusing to be subjected to this summing-up. I’m a tedious old fool analyzing63 the obvious, while you’re the spirit of rebellion. Tell me your side. What is Gopher Prairie to you?”
“A bore!”
“Can I help?”
“How could you?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps by listening. I haven’t done that tonight. But normally —— Can’t I be the confidant of the old French plays, the tiring-maid with the mirror and the loyal ears?”
“Oh, what is there to confide64? The people are savorless and proud of it. And even if I liked you tremendously, I couldn’t talk to you without twenty old hexes watching, whispering.”
“But you will come talk to me, once in a while?”
“I’m not sure that I shall. I’m trying to develop my own large capacity for dullness and contentment. I’ve failed at every positive thing I’ve tried. I’d better ‘settle down,’ as they call it, and be satisfied to be — nothing.”
“Don’t be cynical65. It hurts me, in you. It’s like blood on the wing of a humming-bird.”
“I’m not a humming-bird. I’m a hawk66; a tiny leashed hawk, pecked to death by these large, white, flabby, wormy hens. But I am grateful to you for confirming me in the faith. And I’m going home!”
“Please stay and have some coffee with me.”
“I’d like to. But they’ve succeeded in terrorizing me. I’m afraid of what people might say.”
“I’m not afraid of that. I’m only afraid of what you might say!” He stalked to her; took her unresponsive hand. “Carol! You have been happy here tonight? (Yes. I’m begging!)”
She squeezed his hand quickly, then snatched hers away. She had but little of the curiosity of the flirt67, and none of the intrigante’s joy in furtiveness68. If she was the naive69 girl, Guy Pollock was the clumsy boy. He raced about the office; he rammed70 his fists into his pockets. He stammered71, “I— I— I—— Oh, the devil! Why do I awaken72 from smooth dustiness to this jagged rawness? I’ll make I’m going to trot73 down the hall and bring in the Dillons, and we’ll all have coffee or something.”
“The Dillons?”
“Yes. Really quite a decent young pair — Harvey Dillon and his wife. He’s a dentist, just come to town. They live in a room behind his office, same as I do here. They don’t know much of anybody ——”
“I’ve heard of them. And I’ve never thought to call. I’m horribly ashamed. Do bring them ——”
She stopped, for no very clear reason, but his expression said, her faltering74 admitted, that they wished they had never mentioned the Dillons. With spurious enthusiasm he said, “Splendid! I will.” From the door he glanced at her, curled in the peeled leather chair. He slipped out, came back with Dr. and Mrs. Dillon.
The four of them drank rather bad coffee which Pollock made on a kerosene75 burner. They laughed, and spoke76 of Minneapolis, and were tremendously tactful; and Carol started for home, through the November wind.
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1
loyalty
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| n.忠诚，忠心 | |
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awfully
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| adv.可怕地，非常地，极端地 | |
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decided
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| adj.决定了的，坚决的；明显的，明确的 | |
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chateau
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| n.城堡，别墅 | |
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rusty
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| adj.生锈的；锈色的；荒废了的 | |
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clotted
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| adj.凝结的v.凝固( clot的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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unfamiliar
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| adj.陌生的，不熟悉的 | |
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scent
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| n.气味，香味，香水，线索，嗅觉；v.嗅，发觉 | |
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tilted
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| v. 倾斜的 | |
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jersey
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| n.运动衫 | |
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creases
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| （使…）起折痕，弄皱( crease的第三人称单数 )； （皮肤）皱起，使起皱纹 | |
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noted
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| adj.著名的，知名的 | |
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bosom
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| n.胸，胸部；胸怀；内心；adj.亲密的 | |
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symbolic
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| adj.象征性的，符号的，象征主义的 | |
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diesel
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| n.柴油发动机，内燃机 | |
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frivolousness
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| n.不重要，不必要 | |
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carnival
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| n.嘉年华会，狂欢，狂欢节，巡回表演 | |
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embroider
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| v.刺绣于(布)上；给…添枝加叶，润饰 | |
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conceited
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| adj.自负的，骄傲自满的 | |
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conceit
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| n.自负，自高自大 | |
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obsolete
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| adj.已废弃的，过时的 | |
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monasteries
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| 修道院( monastery的名词复数 ) | |
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impulsively
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| adv.冲动地 | |
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extraordinarily
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| adv.格外地；极端地 | |
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epidemic
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| n.流行病；盛行；adj.流行性的，流传极广的 | |
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pester
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| v.纠缠，强求 | |
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shrieking
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| v.尖叫( shriek的现在分词 ) | |
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diagnosis
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| n.诊断，诊断结果，调查分析，判断 | |
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oligarchy
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| n.寡头政治 | |
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stuffy
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| adj.不透气的，闷热的 | |
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greasy
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| adj. 多脂的，油脂的 | |
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dictating
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| v.大声讲或读( dictate的现在分词 )；口授；支配；摆布 | |
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moldy
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| adj.发霉的 | |
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smothered
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| （使）窒息， （使）透不过气( smother的过去式和过去分词 )； 覆盖； 忍住； 抑制 | |
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provincial
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| adj.省的，地方的；n．外省人，乡下人 | |
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plows
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| n.犁( plow的名词复数 )；犁型铲雪机v.耕( plow的第三人称单数 )；犁耕；费力穿过 | |
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conveyances
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| n.传送( conveyance的名词复数 )；运送；表达；运输工具 | |
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starry
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| adj.星光照耀的, 闪亮的 | |
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enameled
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| 涂瓷釉于，给…上瓷漆，给…上彩饰( enamel的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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garrulousness
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literally
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| adv.照字面意义，逐字地；确实 | |
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rave
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| vi.胡言乱语；热衷谈论；n.热情赞扬 | |
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paternal
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| adj.父亲的，像父亲的，父系的，父方的 | |
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tribal
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| adj.部族的，种族的 | |
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wholesomely
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| 卫生地，有益健康地 | |
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unctuousness
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| 油性 | |
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exquisite
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| adj.精美的；敏锐的；剧烈的，感觉强烈的 | |
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giggle
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| n.痴笑，咯咯地笑；v.咯咯地笑着说 | |
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miserable
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| adj.悲惨的，痛苦的；可怜的，糟糕的 | |
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improper
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| adj.不适当的，不合适的，不正确的，不合礼仪的 | |
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blizzards
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| 暴风雪( blizzard的名词复数 )； 暴风雪似的一阵，大量（或大批） | |
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hatred
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| n.憎恶，憎恨，仇恨 | |
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exertion
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| n.尽力，努力 | |
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positively
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| adv.明确地，断然，坚决地；实在，确实 | |
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jealousies
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| n.妒忌( jealousy的名词复数 )；妒羡 | |
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stolid
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| adj.无动于衷的，感情麻木的 | |
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bland
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| adj.淡而无味的，温和的，无刺激性的 | |
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credulous
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| adj.轻信的，易信的 | |
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flinched
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| v.（因危险和痛苦）退缩，畏惧( flinch的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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beseechingly
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| adv. 恳求地 | |
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caress
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| vt./n.爱抚，抚摸 | |
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impersonality
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| n.无人情味 | |
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63
analyzing
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| v.分析；分析( analyze的现在分词 )；分解；解释；对…进行心理分析n.分析 | |
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64
confide
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| v.向某人吐露秘密 | |
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cynical
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| adj.(对人性或动机)怀疑的，不信世道向善的 | |
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hawk
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| n.鹰，骗子；鹰派成员 | |
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flirt
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| v.调情，挑逗，调戏；n.调情者，卖俏者 | |
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furtiveness
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| 偷偷摸摸，鬼鬼祟祟 | |
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naive
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| adj.幼稚的，轻信的；天真的 | |
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70
rammed
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| v.夯实（土等）( ram的过去式和过去分词 )；猛撞；猛压；反复灌输 | |
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71
stammered
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| v.结巴地说出( stammer的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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72
awaken
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| vi.醒，觉醒；vt.唤醒，使觉醒，唤起，激起 | |
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73
trot
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| n.疾走，慢跑；n.老太婆；现成译本；(复数）trots:腹泻（与the 连用）；v.小跑，快步走，赶紧 | |
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74
faltering
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| 犹豫的，支吾的，蹒跚的 | |
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75
kerosene
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| n.(kerosine)煤油，火油 | |
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76
spoke
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| n.（车轮的）辐条；轮辐；破坏某人的计划；阻挠某人的行动 v.讲，谈（speak的过去式）；说；演说；从某种观点来说 | |
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