“Condaford: August 10.
“MY VERY DEAR —
“I promised to give you a true and particular account of how Dinny went off. Look in The Lantern for their conception of ‘the bride and bridegroom leaving the church.’ Fortunately, the lens of that enquiring2 organ caught them just before they pushed off — except in movies the camera simply cannot record movement; it always gets the sole of one foot cocked towards the eye, flannelises the knee of the other leg, and upsets the set of the trousers. Dornford looked quite good value — in this style, fourteen-and-six; and Dinny — bless her! — without the ‘bride’s smile,’ almost as if she saw the joke. Ever since the engagement, I’ve wondered what she’s really feeling. Love such as she gave Desert it certainly is not, but I don’t believe there’s any physical reluctance4. When, yesterday, I said to her: ‘In good heart?’ her answer was: ‘No half heart, anyway.’ We both of us have reason to know that she can go all out in what she does for other people. But she’s really doing this for herself. She’ll be carrying on — she’ll have children — and she’ll count. That’s as it should be, and so I believe she feels. If she hasn’t what hopeful youth calls ‘a crush on’ Dornford, she admires and respects him, and I think quite rightly. Besides, he knows from me, if not from her, what she’s capable of, and won’t expect more until he gets it. The weather held up all right, and the church — wherein, by the way, your special correspondent was baptized — in the word of Verdant5 Green never looked ‘berrer.’ The congregation was perhaps a trifle Early English, though it seemed to me you could have got most of the faces at Woolworth’s.
“At the top of the nave6, in the more holy positions, came our own gang, County and would-be County. The more I looked at County the more I thought how merciful that the states of life into which it has pleased God to call us have prevented the Charwells of our generation from looking County. Even Con1 and Liz, who have to stick down here all the time, haven’t got quite the hang of it. Remarkable7, if you think, that there is such a thing as ‘County’ left; but I suppose it’ll last while there’s ‘huntin’ and shootin’. I remember, as a boy, out hunting (when I could screw a mount out of our stables or somebody else’s), I used to lurk8 out of reach of people for fear of having to talk to them, their words and music were so trying. Better to be human than County or even would-be County. I must say that Clare, after all her jollification in the courts, carried it off amazingly, and so far as I could see, nobody had the nerve to show any of the feelings which, as a fact, at this time of day, they probably hadn’t got. Then, a little less holy, came the village in force — Dinny’s a great favourite with them — quite a show of oldest inhabitants. Some real faces; an old chap called Downer, in a Bath chair, all ‘Whitechapel’ whiskers and beard, and shrewd remaining brown spaces. He perfectly9 remembered Hilary and me falling off a hay-cart we oughtn’t to have been on. And old Mrs. Tibwhite — a sweet old witch of a thing, who always let me eat her raspberries. The schoolchildren had a special holiday. Liz tells me not one in twenty of them has ever seen London, or indeed been ten miles out of the village, even now. But there’s a real difference in the young men and maidens10. The girls have most excellent legs and stockings and quite tasteful dresses; and the youths good flannel3 suits and collars and ties — all done by the motor bike and the film. Lots of flowers in the church, and a good deal of bell-ringing and blowy organ-playing. Hilary did the swearing-in with his usual rapidity, and the old rector, who held the sponge, looked blue at the pace he went and the things he left out. Well, you want, of course, to hear about those dresses. The general effect, as they stood in the aisle11, was what you might call delphinian. Dinny, even in white, has that look, and, consciously or not, the bridesmaids were togged up according; and what with Monica and Joan and two young Dornford nieces being slim and tall, they really looked like a planting of blue delphiniums, preceded by four blue tots, sweet, but none as pretty as Sheila. Really, that chickenpox was very perverse12; you and your two were terribly missed, and Ronald as a page would just have topped everything up. I walked back to the Grange with Lawrence and Em, an imposing13 steel-grey presence slightly marred14 where ‘tears had got mixed with her powder sometimes.’ In fact, I had to stop her under a stricken tree and do some good work with one of those silk handkerchiefs you gave me. Lawrence was in feather — thought the whole show the least gimcrack thing he had seen for a long time, and had now more hope of the pound going still lower. Em had been to see the house on Campden Hill; she predicted that Dinny would be in love with Dornford within a year, which started another tear, so I called her attention to the tree which had in fact been struck by lightning while she and I and Hilary were standing15 under it. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘you were squits — so providential; and the butler made a penholder out of the wood; it wouldn’t hold nibs16, so I gave it to Con for school, and he cursed me. Lawrence, I’m old.’ Whereon Lawrence took her hand, and they walked hand in hand the rest of the way.
“The reception was held on the terrace and lawn; everybody came, schoolchildren and all, a quaint17 mix-up, but jolly, it seemed to me. I didn’t know I was so fond of the old place. However much one may believe in levelling-up chances, there’s something about old places. They can’t be re-created if they’re once let slip, and they focus landscape in a queer kind of way. Some villages and landscapes seem to have no core — you can’t explain why, but they feel hollow, and shallow and flat. A real old place puts heart into a neighbourhood. If the people who live in it are not just selfish pigs, it means a lot in a quiet way to people who have no actual ownership in it. The Grange is a sort of anchor to this neighbourhood. I doubt if you’d find a single villager, however poor, who grudged18 its existence, or wouldn’t feel the worse for its ruination. Generations of love and trouble, and goodness knows not too much money, have been spent on it, and the result is something very hand-made and special. Everything’s changing, and has got to change, no doubt, and how to save the old that’s worth saving, whether in landscape, houses, manners, institutions, or human types, is one of our greatest problems, and the one that we bother least about. We save our works of art, our old furniture, we have our cult19 — and a strong one — of ‘antiques,’ and not even the most go-ahead modern thought objects to that. Why not the same throughout our social life? ‘The old order changeth’— yes, but we ought to be able to preserve beauty and dignity, and the sense of service, and manners — things that have come very slowly, and can be made to vanish very fast if we aren’t set on preserving them somehow. Human nature being what it is, nothing seems to me more futile21 than to level to the ground and start again. The old order had many excrescences, and was by no means ‘all werry capital,’ but, now that the housebreakers are in, one does see that you can smash in an hour what has taken centuries to produce; and that, unless you can see your way pretty clearly to replace what admittedly wasn’t perfect with something more perfect, you’re throwing human life back instead of advancing it. The thing is to pick on what’s worth preserving, though I don’t say there’s very much that is. Well, that’s all very portentous22! To come back to Dinny — they’re going to spend their honeymoon23 in Shropshire, round about where Dornford comes from. Then they come back here for a bit, then settle in on Campden Hill. I hope this weather will last for them. Honeymooning24 in wet weather, especially when one is keener on the other than the other is on the one, should be very trying. Dinny’s ‘going away’ frock, you may like to know, was blue, and suited her not quite down to the ground. We had a minute together. I gave her your love, and she sent you hers, and said: ‘Well, I’m very nearly over, Uncle dear. Wish me luck!’ I felt like piping my eye. Over what? Well, anyway, if wishes for luck will help, she goes wreathed with them; but all that kissing business is hard to get through. Con and Liz took theirs down at the car. I felt rather a brute25, looking at their faces when she’d gone. They went away in Dornford’s car, with himself driving. After that I confess that I slunk off. They’re all right, I know, but it didn’t feel like it. There’s such cursed finality about a wedding, however easy divorce is or may become; besides, Dinny is not the sort who would take someone who loved her and then let him down; it’s the old-fashioned ‘for better for worse’ there, but I think it’ll be ‘for better’— in the long run, anyway. I sneaked26 out of sight into the orchard27 and then up through the fields to the woods. I hope it was as gorgeous a day with you as it was here. These beech-woods on the slopes are more beautiful than the careful beech-clumps they plant on downs, though even those have a sort of temple-like effect, in spite of being meant as landmarks28 or to give shade to sheep. I can assure you that wood about half-past five was enchanted29. I went up the slope and sat down and just enjoyed it. Great shifting shafts30 of sunlight coming in below and splashing the trunks; and ever-so-green cool spaces between — only one word for it, holy. The trees, many of them, go up branchless for a long way, and some of the trunks looked almost white. Not much undergrowth and very little ‘life’ except jays and a brown squirrel. When you’re in a wood as lovely as that, and think of death duties and timber, your heart turns over and over as if you’d supped entirely31 off Spanish onions. Two hundred years in His sight may be as yesterday, but in mine I confess they’re like eternity32. These woods are no longer ‘shot,’ and anybody can come into them. I suppose the young folk do — what a place to wander about in, lovering! I lay down in a patch of sunlight and thought of you; and two small grey wood-doves perched about fifty yards off and talked cosily33 to each other, so that I could have done with my field-glasses. Willow-herb and tansy were out where trees have come down and been cleared away — foxgloves don’t seem to flourish round here. It was very restful, except that one ached a bit because it was green and beautiful. Queer, that ‘beauty’ ache! Lurking34 consciousness of mortality, perhaps knowledge that all things must slip away from one in time, and the greater their beauty the greater the loss in store! Mistake in our make-up, that. We ought to feel: The greater the earth’s beauty, the more marvellous the screen of light and wind and foliage35, the lovelier nature, in fact — the deeper and sweeter our rest in her will be. All very puzzling! I know the sight of a dead rabbit out in a wood like that affects me more than it does in a poulterer’s shop. I passed one as I was going back — killed by a weasel; its soft limpness seemed saying: ‘Pity I’m dead!’ Death may be a good thing, but life’s a better. A dead shape that’s still a shape moves one horribly. Shape IS life, and when life’s gone one can’t see why shape should remain even for the little time it does. I’d have liked to stay and see the moon come up and peer about in there, and slowly fill it all up with ghostly glistening36; then I might have caught the feeling that shape lives on in rarefied form, and all of us, even the dead rabbits and birds and moths37, still move and have their being — which may be the truth, for all I know or ever shall. But dinner was at eight, so I had to come away with the light still green and golden — there flows alliteration38 again like a twopenny brook39! Outside, on the terrace, I met Dinny’s spaniel, Foch. Knowing his history, it was like meeting a banshee — not that he was howling; but it reminded me sharply of what Dinny has been through. He was sitting on his haunches and looking down at nothing, as dogs — especially spaniels — will when things are beyond them, and the one and only scent40 is no more, for the time being. He’ll go with them, of course, to Campden Hill when they come back. I went up and had a bath, and dressed, and stood at my window, listening to the drone of a tractor still cutting corn, and getting a little drunk on whiffs from the honeysuckle that climbs and flowers round my window. I see now what Dinny meant by: ‘Over.’ Over the river that she used to dream she couldn’t cross. Well, all life is crossing rivers, or getting drowned on the way. I hope — I believe — she’s touching41 shore. Dinner was just like dinner always is — we didn’t talk of her, or mention our feelings in any way. I played Clare a game of billiards42 — she struck me as softer and more attractive than I’ve ever seen her. And then I sat up till past midnight with Con, in order, apparently43, that we might say nothing. They’ll miss her a lot, I’m afraid.
“The silence in my room, when I got up here at last, was stunning44, and the moonlight almost yellow. The moon’s hiding, now, behind one of the elms, and the evening star shining above a dead branch. A few other stars are out, but very dim. It’s a night far from our time, far even from our world. Not an owl20 hooting45, but the honeysuckle still sweet. And so, my most dear, here endeth the tale! Good night!
“Your ever loving
“ADRIAN.”
The End
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1
con
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| n.反对的观点，反对者，反对票，肺病；vt.精读，学习，默记；adv.反对地，从反面；adj.欺诈的 | |
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2
enquiring
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| a.爱打听的，显得好奇的 | |
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3
flannel
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| n.法兰绒；法兰绒衣服 | |
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4
reluctance
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| n.厌恶，讨厌，勉强，不情愿 | |
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5
verdant
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| adj.翠绿的，青翠的，生疏的，不老练的 | |
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6
nave
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| n.教堂的中部；本堂 | |
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7
remarkable
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| adj.显著的，异常的，非凡的，值得注意的 | |
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8
lurk
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| n.潜伏，潜行；v.潜藏，潜伏，埋伏 | |
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9
perfectly
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| adv.完美地，无可非议地，彻底地 | |
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10
maidens
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| 处女( maiden的名词复数 )； 少女； 未婚女子； （板球运动）未得分的一轮投球 | |
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11
aisle
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| n.（教堂、教室、戏院等里的）过道，通道 | |
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12
perverse
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| adj.刚愎的；坚持错误的，行为反常的 | |
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13
imposing
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| adj.使人难忘的，壮丽的，堂皇的，雄伟的 | |
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14
marred
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| adj. 被损毁, 污损的 | |
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15
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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16
nibs
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| 上司，大人物； 钢笔尖，鹅毛管笔笔尖( nib的名词复数 )； 可可豆的碎粒； 小瑕疵 | |
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17
quaint
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| adj.古雅的，离奇有趣的，奇怪的 | |
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18
grudged
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| 怀恨（grudge的过去式与过去分词形式） | |
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cult
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| n.异教，邪教；时尚，狂热的崇拜 | |
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20
owl
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| n.猫头鹰，枭 | |
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21
futile
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| adj.无效的，无用的，无希望的 | |
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22
portentous
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| adj.不祥的，可怕的，装腔作势的 | |
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23
honeymoon
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| n.蜜月（假期）；vi.度蜜月 | |
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24
honeymooning
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| 度蜜月（honeymoon的现在分词形式） | |
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25
brute
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| n.野兽，兽性 | |
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26
sneaked
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| v.潜行( sneak的过去式和过去分词 )；偷偷溜走；（儿童向成人）打小报告；告状 | |
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27
orchard
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| n.果园，果园里的全部果树，(美俚)棒球场 | |
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28
landmarks
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| n.陆标( landmark的名词复数 )；目标；（标志重要阶段的）里程碑 ~ (in sth)；有历史意义的建筑物（或遗址） | |
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29
enchanted
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| adj. 被施魔法的，陶醉的，入迷的 动词enchant的过去式和过去分词 | |
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30
shafts
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| n.轴( shaft的名词复数 )；（箭、高尔夫球棒等的）杆；通风井；一阵（疼痛、害怕等） | |
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31
entirely
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| ad.全部地，完整地；完全地，彻底地 | |
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32
eternity
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| n.不朽，来世；永恒，无穷 | |
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33
cosily
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| adv.舒适地，惬意地 | |
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34
lurking
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| 潜在 | |
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35
foliage
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| n.叶子，树叶，簇叶 | |
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36
glistening
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| adj.闪耀的，反光的v.湿物闪耀，闪亮( glisten的现在分词 ) | |
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37
moths
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| n.蛾( moth的名词复数 ) | |
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38
alliteration
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| n.（诗歌的）头韵 | |
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39
brook
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| n.小河，溪；v.忍受，容让 | |
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40
scent
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| n.气味，香味，香水，线索，嗅觉；v.嗅，发觉 | |
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41
touching
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| adj.动人的，使人感伤的 | |
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42
billiards
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| n.台球 | |
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43
apparently
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| adv.显然地；表面上，似乎 | |
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44
stunning
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| adj.极好的；使人晕倒的 | |
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45
hooting
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| （使）作汽笛声响，作汽车喇叭声( hoot的现在分词 )； 倒好儿； 倒彩 | |
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