Through the quiet corridors came the din3 of it, making hideous4 the peace of the morning. From each of the yawning windows of the little quadrangle the noise poured out on to the still, sunlit garden where the grass was grey yet with dew.
Little Miss Pym stirred, opened one doubtful grey eye, and reached blindly for her watch. There was no watch. She opened the other eye. There seemed to be no bedside table either. No, of course not; now she remembered. There was no bedside table; as she had found last night. Her watch had had of necessity to be put under her pillow. She fumbled5 for it. Good heavens, what a row that bell was making! Obscene. There seemed to be no watch under the pillow. But it must be there! She lifted the pillow bodily, revealing only one small sheer-linen handkerchief in a saucy6 pattern of blue-and-white. She dropped the pillow and peered down between the bed and the wall. Yes, there was something that looked like a watch. By lying flat on her front and inserting an arm she could just reach it. Carefully she brought it up, lightly caught between the tips of first and second fingers. If she dropped it now she would have to get out of bed and crawl under for it. She turned on her back with a sigh of relief, holding the watch triumphantly7 above her.
Half-past five, said the watch.
Half-past five!
Miss Pym stopped breathing and stared in unbelieving fascination8. No, really, did any college, however physical and hearty9, begin the day at half-past five! Anything was possible, of course, in a community which had use for neither bedside tables nor bedside lamps, but-half-past five! She put the watch to her small pink ear. It ticked faithfully. She squinted10 round her pillow at the garden which was visible from the window behind her bed. Yes, it certainly was early; the world had that unmoving just-an-apparition look of early morning. Well, well!
Henrietta had said last night, standing11 large and majestical in the doorway12: “Sleep well. The students enjoyed your lecture, my dear. I shall see you in the morning;” but had not seen fit to mention half-past-five bells.
Oh, well. It wasn’t her funeral, thank goodness. Once upon a time she too had lived a life regulated by bells, but that was long ago. Nearly twenty years ago. When a bell rang in Miss Pym’s life now it was because she had put a delicately varnished13 finger-tip on the bell-push. As the clamour died into a complaining whimper and then into silence, she turned over to face the wall, burrowing14 happily into her pillow. Not her funeral. Dew on the grass, and all that, was for youth: shining resplendent youth; and they could have it. She was having another two hours’ sleep.
Very childlike she looked with her round pink face, her neat little button of a nose, and her brown hair rolled in flat invisible-pinned curls all over her head. They had cost her a spiritual struggle last night, those curls. She had been very tired after the train journey, and meeting Henrietta again, and the lecture; and her weaker self had pointed15 out that she would in all probability be leaving after lunch on the morrow, that her permanent wave was only two months old, and that her hair might very well be left unpinned for one night. But, partly to spite her weaker self with whom she waged a constant and bitter war, partly so that she might do Henrietta justice, she had seen to it that fourteen pins were pressed to their nightly duty. She was remembering her strong-mindedness now (it helped to cancel out any twinge of conscience about her self-indulgence this morning) and marvelling16 at the survival of that desire to live up to Henrietta. At school, she, the little fourth-form rabbit, had admired the sixth-form Henrietta extravagantly17. Henrietta was the born Head Girl. Her talent lay exclusively in seeing that other people employed theirs. That was why, although she had left school to train in secretarial work, she was now Principal of a college of physical culture; a subject of which she knew nothing at all. She had forgotten all about Lucy Pym, just as Lucy had forgotten about her, until Miss Pym had written The Book.
That is how Lucy herself thought of it. The Book.
She was still a little surprised about The Book herself. Her mission in life had been to teach schoolgirls to speak French. But after four years of that her remaining parent had died, leaving her two hundred and fifty pounds a year, and Lucy had dried her eyes with one hand and given in her resignation with the other. The Headmistress had pointed out with envy and all uncharitableness that investments were variable things, and that two hundred and fifty didn’t leave much margin18 for a civilised and cultured existence such as people in Lucy’s position were expected to live. But Lucy had resigned all the same, and had taken a very civilised and cultured flat far enough from Camden Town to be nearly Regents Park. She provided the necessary margin by giving French lessons now and then when gas bills were imminent19, and spent all her spare time reading books on psychology20.
She read her first book on psychology out of curiosity, because it seemed to her an interesting sort of thing; and she read all the rest to see if they were just as silly. By the time she had read thirty-seven books on the subject, she had evolved ideas of her own on psychology; at variance21, of course, with all thirty-seven volumes read to date. In fact, the thirty-seven volumes seemed to her so idiotic22 and made her so angry that she sat down there and then and wrote reams of refutal. Since one cannot talk about psychology in anything but jargon23, there being no English for most of it, the reams of refutal read very learnedly indeed. Not that that would have impressed anyone if Miss Pym had not used the back of a discarded sheet (her typing was not very professional) on which to write:
Dear Mr Stallard,
I should be so grateful if you would not use your wireless24 after eleven at night. I find it so distracting.
Yours sincerely
Lucy Pym.
Mr Stallard, whom she did not know (his name was on the card outside his door on the floor below) arrived in person that evening. He was holding her letter open in his hand, which seemed to Lucy very grim indeed, and she swallowed several times before she could make any coherent sound at all. But Mr Stallard wasn’t angry about the wireless. He was a publishers’ reader, it seemed, and was interested in what she had unconsciously sent him on the back of the paper.
Now in normal times a publisher would have rung for brandy at the mere25 suggestion of publishing a book on psychology. But the previous year the British public had shaken the publishing world by tiring suddenly of fiction, and developing an interest in abstruse26 subjects, such as the distance of Sirius from the earth, and the inward meaning of primitive27 dances in Bechuanaland. Publishers were falling over themselves, therefore, in their effort to supply this strange new thirst for knowledge, and Miss Pym found herself welcomed with open arms. That is to say, she was taken to lunch by the senior partner, and given an agreement to sign. This alone was a piece of luck, but Providence28 so ordained29 it that not only had the British public tired of fiction, but the intellectuals had tired of Freud and Company. They were longing30 for Some New Thing. And Lucy proved to be it. So Lucy woke one morning to find herself not only famous, but a best-seller. She was so shocked that she went out and had three cups of black coffee and sat in the Park looking straight in front of her for the rest of the morning.
She had been a best-seller for several months, and had become quite used to lecturing on “her subject” to learned societies, when Henrietta’s letter had come; reminding her of their schooldays together and asking her to come and stay for a while and address the students. Lucy was a little wearied of addressing people, and the image of Henrietta had grown dim with the years. She was about to write a polite refusal, when she remembered the day on which the fourth form had discovered her christened name to be Laetitia; a shame that Lucy had spent her life concealing31. The fourth form had excelled themselves, and Lucy had been wondering whether her mother would mind very much about her suicide, and deciding that anyhow she had brought it on herself by giving her daughter such a high-falutin name. And then Henrietta had waded32 into the humourists, literally33 and metaphorically34. Her blistering35 comment had withered36 humour at the root, so that the word Laetitia had never been heard again, and Lucy had gone home and enjoyed jam roly-poly instead of throwing herself in the river. Lucy sat in her civilised and cultured living-room, and felt the old passionate37 gratitude38 to Henrietta run over her in waves. She wrote and said that she would be delighted to stay a night with Henrietta (her native caution was not entirely39 obliterated40 by her gratitude) and would with pleasure talk on psychology to her students.
The pleasure had been considerable, she thought, pushing up a hump of sheet to shut out the full brilliance41 of the daylight. Quite the nicest audience she had ever had. Rows of shining heads, making the bare lecture-room look like a garden. And good hearty applause. After weeks of the polite pattering of learned societies it was pleasant to hear the percussion42 of hollowed palm on hollowed palm. And their questions had been quite intelligent. Somehow, although psychology was a subject on their timetable, as shown in the common-room, she had not expected intellectual appreciation43 from young women who presumably spent their days doing things with their muscles. Only a few, of course, had asked questions; so there was still a chance that the rest were morons44.
Oh well, tonight she would sleep in her own charming bed, and all this would seem like a dream. Henrietta had pressed her to stay for some days, and for a little she had toyed with the idea. But supper had shaken her. Beans and milk pudding seemed an uninspired sort of meal for a summer evening. Very sustaining and nourishing and all that, she didn’t doubt. But not a meal one wanted to repeat. The staff table, Henrietta had said, always had the same food that the students had; and Lucy had hoped that that remark didn’t mean that she had looked doubtfully upon the beans. She had tried to look very bright and pleased about the beans; but perhaps it hadn’t been a success.
“Tommy! Tom-mee! Oh, Tommy, darling, waken up. I’m desperate!”
Miss Pym shot into wakefulness. The despairing cries seemed to be in her room. Then she realised that the second window of her room gave on to the courtyard; that the courtyard was small, and conversation from room to room through the gaping45 windows a natural method of communication. She lay trying to quiet her thumping46 heart, peering down over the folds of sheet to where, beyond the hump of her toes, the foreshortened oblong of the window framed a small piece of distant wall. But her bed lay in the angle of the room, one window to her right in the wall behind her, and the courtyard window to her left beyond the foot of her bed, and all that was visible from her pillow through the tall thin strip of brightness was half of an open window far down the courtyard.
“Tom-mee! Tom-mee!”
A dark head appeared in the window Miss Pym could see.
“For God’s sake, someone,” said the head, “throw something at Thomas and stop Dakers’ row.”
“Oh, Greengage, darling, you are an unsympathetic beast. I’ve bust47 my garter, and I don’t know what to do. And Tommy took my only safety-pin yesterday to pick the winkles with at Tuppence-ha’penny’s party. She simply must let me have it back before —Tommy! Oh, Tommy!”
“Hey, shut up, will you,” said a new voice, in a lowered tone, and there was a pause. A pause, Lucy felt, full of sign language.
“And what does all that semaphoring mean?” asked the dark head.
“Shut up, I tell you. She’s there!” This in desperate sotto voce.
“Who is?”
“The Pym woman.”
“What rubbish, darling,”— it was the Dakers voice again, high and unsubdued; the happy voice of a world’s darling —“she’s sleeping in the front of the house with the rest of the mighty48. Do you think she would have a spare safety-pin if I was to ask her?”
“She looks zipp-fastener to me,” a new voice said.
“Oh, will you be quiet! I tell you, she’s in Bentley’s room!”
There was a real silence this time. Lucy saw the dark head turn sharply towards her window.
“How do you know?” someone asked.
“Jolly told me last night when she was giving me late supper.” Miss Joliffe was the housekeeper49, Lucy remembered, and appreciated the nickname for so grim a piece of humanity.
“Gawd’s truth!” said the “zipp-fastener” voice, with feeling.
Into the silence came a bell. The same urgent clamour that had wakened them. The dark head disappeared at the first sound of it, and Dakers’ voice above the row could be heard wailing50 her desperation like a lost thing. Social gaffes51 were relegated52 to their proper unimportance, as the business of the day overwhelmed them. A great wave of sound rose up to meet the sound of the bell. Doors were banged, feet drummed in the corridor, voices called, someone remembered that Thomas was still asleep, and a tattoo53 was beaten on her locked door when objects flung at her from surrounding windows had failed to waken her, and then there was the sound of running feet on the gravel54 path that crossed the courtyard grass. And gradually there were more feet on the gravel and fewer on the stairs, and the babble55 of voices swelled56 to a climax57 and faded. When the noises had grown faint with distance or died into lecture-room silence, a single pair of feet pattered in flight across the gravel, a voice saying: “Damn, damn, damn, damn, damn —” at each footfall. The Thomas who slept, apparently58.
Miss Pym felt sympathetic to the unknown Thomas. Bed was a charming place at any time, but if one was so sleepy that neither riotous59 bell-ringing nor the wails60 of a colleague made any impression, then getting up must be torture. Welsh, too, probably. All Thomases were Welsh. Celts hated getting up. Poor Thomas. Poor, poor Thomas. She would like to find poor Thomas a job where she would never have to get up before afternoon.
Sleep ran over her in waves, drawing her deeper and deeper under. She wondered if “looking zipp-fastener” was a compliment. Being a safety-pin person couldn’t be thought exactly admirable, so perhaps —
She fell asleep.
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1
brazen
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| adj.厚脸皮的，无耻的，坚硬的 | |
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insistent
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| adj.迫切的，坚持的 | |
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din
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| n.喧闹声，嘈杂声 | |
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hideous
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| adj.丑陋的，可憎的，可怕的，恐怖的 | |
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fumbled
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| （笨拙地）摸索或处理（某事物）( fumble的过去式和过去分词 )； 乱摸，笨拙地弄； 使落下 | |
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saucy
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| adj.无礼的；俊俏的；活泼的 | |
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triumphantly
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| ad.得意洋洋地；得胜地；成功地 | |
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fascination
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| n.令人着迷的事物，魅力，迷恋 | |
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hearty
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| adj.热情友好的；衷心的；尽情的，纵情的 | |
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10
squinted
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| 斜视( squint的过去式和过去分词 )； 眯着眼睛； 瞟； 从小孔或缝隙里看 | |
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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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doorway
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| n.门口，(喻)入门；门路，途径 | |
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varnished
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| 浸渍过的，涂漆的 | |
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burrowing
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| v.挖掘（洞穴），挖洞( burrow的现在分词 )；翻寻 | |
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15
pointed
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| adj.尖的，直截了当的 | |
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16
marvelling
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| v.惊奇，对…感到惊奇( marvel的现在分词 ) | |
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extravagantly
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| adv.挥霍无度地 | |
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margin
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| n.页边空白；差额；余地，余裕；边，边缘 | |
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imminent
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| adj.即将发生的，临近的，逼近的 | |
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psychology
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| n.心理，心理学，心理状态 | |
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variance
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| n.矛盾，不同 | |
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idiotic
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| adj.白痴的 | |
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jargon
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| n.术语，行话 | |
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wireless
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| adj.无线的；n.无线电 | |
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25
mere
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| adj.纯粹的；仅仅，只不过 | |
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abstruse
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| adj.深奥的，难解的 | |
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primitive
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| adj.原始的；简单的；n.原(始)人，原始事物 | |
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28
providence
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| n.深谋远虑，天道，天意；远见；节约；上帝 | |
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29
ordained
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| v.任命（某人）为牧师( ordain的过去式和过去分词 )；授予（某人）圣职；（上帝、法律等）命令；判定 | |
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longing
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| n.（for）渴望 | |
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concealing
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| v.隐藏，隐瞒，遮住( conceal的现在分词 ) | |
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32
waded
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| （从水、泥等）蹚，走过，跋( wade的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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literally
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| adv.照字面意义，逐字地；确实 | |
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metaphorically
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| adv. 用比喻地 | |
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blistering
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| adj.酷热的；猛烈的；使起疱的；可恶的v.起水疱；起气泡；使受暴晒n.[涂料] 起泡 | |
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36
withered
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| adj. 枯萎的，干瘪的，（人身体的部分器官）因病萎缩的或未发育良好的 动词wither的过去式和过去分词形式 | |
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passionate
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| adj.热情的，热烈的，激昂的，易动情的，易怒的，性情暴躁的 | |
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gratitude
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| adj.感激，感谢 | |
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entirely
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| ad.全部地，完整地；完全地，彻底地 | |
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obliterated
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| v.除去( obliterate的过去式和过去分词 )；涂去；擦掉；彻底破坏或毁灭 | |
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brilliance
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| n.光辉，辉煌，壮丽，（卓越的）才华，才智 | |
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percussion
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| n.打击乐器；冲突，撞击；震动，音响 | |
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appreciation
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| n.评价；欣赏；感谢；领会，理解；价格上涨 | |
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44
morons
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| 傻子( moron的名词复数 )； 痴愚者（指心理年龄在8至12岁的成年人） | |
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45
gaping
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| adj.口的；张口的；敞口的；多洞穴的v.目瞪口呆地凝视( gape的现在分词 )；张开，张大 | |
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46
thumping
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| adj.重大的，巨大的；重击的；尺码大的；极好的adv.极端地；非常地v.重击(thump的现在分词)；狠打；怦怦地跳；全力支持 | |
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47
bust
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| vt.打破；vi.爆裂；n.半身像；胸部 | |
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48
mighty
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| adj.强有力的；巨大的 | |
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housekeeper
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| n.管理家务的主妇，女管家 | |
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50
wailing
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| v.哭叫，哀号( wail的现在分词 )；沱 | |
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51
gaffes
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| n.失礼，出丑( gaffe的名词复数 ) | |
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relegated
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| v.使降级( relegate的过去式和过去分词 )；使降职；转移；把…归类 | |
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tattoo
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| n.纹身，(皮肤上的)刺花纹；vt.刺花纹于 | |
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gravel
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| n.砂跞；砂砾层；结石 | |
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babble
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| v.含糊不清地说，胡言乱语地说，儿语 | |
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56
swelled
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| 增强( swell的过去式和过去分词 )； 肿胀； （使）凸出； 充满（激情） | |
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57
climax
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| n.顶点；高潮；v.(使)达到顶点 | |
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apparently
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| adv.显然地；表面上，似乎 | |
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riotous
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| adj.骚乱的；狂欢的 | |
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wails
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| 痛哭，哭声( wail的名词复数 ) | |
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