We wander under the trees by the main road, watching the dim passers-by as though they were the phantoms4 of a dream. We say little to one another. We turn aside into a little pathway and come to a bridge over the turbulent Reuss, hurrying down towards the Devil’s Bridge in the gorge6 below. Far away over the Furka ridge5 a pallid7 glow preludes8 the rising of the moon.
Two lovers pass us whispering, and we follow them with our eyes. This Utopia has certainly preserved the fundamental freedom, to love. And then a sweet-voiced bell from somewhere high up towards Oberalp chimes two-and-twenty times.
I break the silence. “That might mean ten o’clock,” I say.
My companion leans upon the bridge and looks down into the dim river below. I become aware of the keen edge of the moon like a needle of incandescent9 silver creeping over the crest10, and suddenly the river is alive with flashes.
He speaks, and astonishes me with the hidden course his thoughts have taken.
“We two were boy and girl lovers like that,” he says, and jerks a head at the receding11 Utopians. “I loved her first, and I do not think I have ever thought of loving anyone but her.”
It is a curiously12 human thing, and, upon my honour, not one I had designed, that when at last I stand in the twilight13 in the midst of a Utopian township, when my whole being should be taken up with speculative14 wonder, this man should be standing15 by my side, and lugging16 my attention persistently17 towards himself, towards his limited futile18 self. This thing perpetually happens to me, this intrusion of something small and irrelevant19 and alive, upon my great impressions. The time I first saw the Matterhorn, that Queen among the Alpine20 summits, I was distracted beyond appreciation21 by the tale of a man who could not eat sardines22 — always sardines did this with him and that; and my first wanderings along the brown streets of Pompeii, an experience I had anticipated with a strange intensity23, was shot with the most stupidly intelligent discourse24 on vehicular tariffs25 in the chief capitals of Europe that it is possible to imagine. And now this man, on my first night in Utopia, talks and talks and talks of his poor little love affair.
It shapes itself as the most trite26 and feeble of tragedies, one of those stories of effortless submission27 to chance and custom in which Mr. Hardy28 or George Gissing might have found a theme. I do but half listen at first — watching the black figures in the moonlit roadway pacing to and fro. Yet — I cannot trace how he conveys the subtle conviction to my mind — the woman he loves is beautiful.
They were boy and girl together, and afterwards they met again as fellow students in a world of comfortable discretions. He seems to have taken the decorums of life with a confiding29 good faith, to have been shy and innocent in a suppressed sort of way, and of a mental type not made for worldly successes; but he must have dreamt about her and loved her well enough. How she felt for him I could never gather; it seemed to be all of that fleshless friendliness30 into which we train our girls. Then abruptly31 happened stresses. The man who became her husband appeared, with a very evident passion. He was a year or so older than either of them, and he had the habit and quality of achieving his ends; he was already successful, and with the promise of wealth, and I, at least, perceived, from my botanist32’s phrasing, that his desire was for her beauty.
As my botanist talked I seemed to see the whole little drama, rather clearer than his words gave it me, the actors all absurdly in Hampstead middle-class raiment, meetings of a Sunday after church (the men in silk hats, frock coats, and tightly-rolled umbrellas), rare excursions into evening dress, the decorously vulgar fiction read in their homes, its ambling33 sentimentalities of thought, the amiably34 worldly mothers, the respectable fathers, the aunts, the “people”— his “people” and her “people”— the piano music and the song, and in this setting our friend, “quite clever” at botany and “going in” for it “as a profession,” and the girl, gratuitously35 beautiful; so I figured the arranged and orderly environment into which this claw of an elemental force had thrust itself to grip.
The stranger who had come in got what he wanted; the girl considered that she thought she had never loved the botanist, had had only friendship for him — though little she knew of the meaning of those fine words — they parted a little incoherently and in tears, and it had not occurred to the young man to imagine she was not going off to conventional life in some other of the endless Frognals he imagined as the cellular36 tissue of the world.
But she wasn’t.
He had kept her photograph and her memory sweet, and if ever he had strayed from the severest constancy, it seemed only in the end to strengthen with the stuff of experience, to enhance by comparative disappointment his imagination of what she might have meant to him. . . . Then eight years afterwards they met again.
By the time he gets to this part of his story we have, at my initiative, left the bridge and are walking towards the Utopian guest house. The Utopian guest house! His voice rises and falls, and sometimes he holds my arm. My attention comes and goes. “Good-night,” two sweet-voiced Utopians cry to us in their universal tongue, and I answer them “Good-night.”
“You see,” he persists, “I saw her only a week ago. It was in Lucerne, while I was waiting for you to come on from England. I talked to her three or four times altogether. And her face — the change in her! I can’t get it out of my head — night or day. The miserable37 waste of her. . . . ”
Before us, through the tall pine stems, shine the lights of our Utopian inn.
He talks vaguely38 of ill-usage. “The husband is vain, boastful, dishonest to the very confines of the law, and a drunkard. There are scenes and insults ——”
“She told you?”
“Not much, but someone else did. He brings other women almost into her presence to spite her.”
“And it’s going on?” I interrupt.
“Yes. Now.”
“Need it go on?”
“What do you mean?”
“Lady in trouble,” I say. “Knight at hand. Why not stop this dismal39 grizzling and carry her off?” (You figure the heroic sweep of the arm that belongs to the Voice.) I positively40 forget for the moment that we are in Utopia at all.
“You mean?”
“Take her away from him! What’s all this emotion of yours worth if it isn’t equal to that!”
Positively he seems aghast at me.
“Do you mean elope with her?”
“It seems a most suitable case.”
For a space he is silent, and we go on through the trees. A Utopian tram-car passes and I see his face, poor bitted wretch41! looking pinched and scared in its trailing glow of light.
“That’s all very well in a novel,” he says. “But how could I go back to my laboratory, mixed classes with young ladies, you know, after a thing like that? How could we live and where could we live? We might have a house in London, but who would call upon us? . . . Besides, you don’t know her. She is not the sort of woman. . . . Don’t think I’m timid or conventional. Don’t think I don’t feel. . . . Feel! You don’t know what it is to feel in a case of this sort. . . . ”
He halts and then flies out viciously: “Ugh! There are times when I could strangle him with my hands.”
Which is nonsense.
He flings out his lean botanising hands in an impotent gesture.
“My dear Man!” I say, and say no more.
For a moment I forget we are in Utopia altogether.
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收听单词发音
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1
watchful
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| adj.注意的，警惕的 | |
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migratory
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| n.候鸟，迁移 | |
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constellations
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| n.星座( constellation的名词复数 )；一群杰出人物；一系列（相关的想法、事物）；一群（相关的人） | |
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phantoms
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| n.鬼怪，幽灵( phantom的名词复数 ) | |
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ridge
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| n.山脊；鼻梁；分水岭 | |
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gorge
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| n.咽喉，胃，暴食，山峡；v.塞饱，狼吞虎咽地吃 | |
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pallid
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| adj.苍白的，呆板的 | |
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preludes
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| n.开端( prelude的名词复数 )；序幕；序曲；短篇作品 | |
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incandescent
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| adj.遇热发光的， 白炽的，感情强烈的 | |
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crest
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| n.顶点；饰章；羽冠；vt.达到顶点；vi.形成浪尖 | |
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receding
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| v.逐渐远离( recede的现在分词 )；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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curiously
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| adv.有求知欲地；好问地；奇特地 | |
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13
twilight
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| n.暮光，黄昏；暮年，晚期，衰落时期 | |
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speculative
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| adj.思索性的，暝想性的，推理的 | |
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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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lugging
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| 超载运转能力 | |
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persistently
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| ad.坚持地；固执地 | |
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futile
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| adj.无效的，无用的，无希望的 | |
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irrelevant
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| adj.不恰当的，无关系的，不相干的 | |
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alpine
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| adj.高山的；n.高山植物 | |
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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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sardines
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| n. 沙丁鱼 | |
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intensity
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| n.强烈，剧烈；强度；烈度 | |
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discourse
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| n.论文，演说；谈话；话语；vi.讲述，著述 | |
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tariffs
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| 关税制度； 关税( tariff的名词复数 )； 关税表； （旅馆或饭店等的）收费表； 量刑标准 | |
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trite
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| adj.陈腐的 | |
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submission
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| n.服从，投降；温顺，谦虚；提出 | |
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hardy
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| adj.勇敢的，果断的，吃苦的；耐寒的 | |
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confiding
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| adj.相信人的，易于相信的v.吐露（秘密，心事等）( confide的现在分词 )；（向某人）吐露（隐私、秘密等） | |
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30
friendliness
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| n.友谊，亲切，亲密 | |
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abruptly
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| adv.突然地，出其不意地 | |
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botanist
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| n.植物学家 | |
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ambling
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| v.（马）缓行( amble的现在分词 )；从容地走，漫步 | |
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amiably
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| adv.和蔼可亲地，亲切地 | |
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gratuitously
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| 平白 | |
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cellular
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| adj.移动的；细胞的，由细胞组成的 | |
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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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vaguely
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| adv.含糊地，暖昧地 | |
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dismal
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| adj.阴沉的，凄凉的，令人忧郁的，差劲的 | |
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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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wretch
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| n.可怜的人，不幸的人；卑鄙的人 | |
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