He turned away from South Street with a curious sinking of the heart; his state of ignorance struck inward, as it were – had the force of a vague, disquieting12 portent13. He went to old Crookenden’s only when he had arrived at his last penny. This, however, was very promptly14 the case. He had disembarked at London Bridge with only seventeen pence in his pocket, and he had lived on that sum for three days. The old fiddler in Lomax Place was having a chop before he went to the theatre, and he invited Hyacinth to share his repast, sending out at the same time for another pot of beer. He took the youth with him to the play, where, as at that season there were very few spectators, he had no difficulty in finding him a place. He seemed to wish to keep hold of him, and looked at him strangely, over his spectacles (Mr Vetch wore the homely15 double glass in these latter years), when he learned that Hyacinth had taken a lodging not in their old familiar quarter but in the unexplored purlieus of Westminster. What had determined16 our young man was the fact that from this part of the town the journey was comparatively a short one to Camberwell; he had suffered so much, before Pinnie’s death, from being separated by such a distance from his best friends. There was a pang17 in his heart connected with the image of Paul Muniment, but none the less the prospect7 of an evening hour in Audley Court, from time to time, appeared one of his most definite sources of satisfaction in the future. He could have gone straight to Camberwell to live, but that would carry him too far from the scene of his profession; and in Westminster he was much nearer to old Crookenden’s than he had been in Lomax Place. He said to Mr Vetch that if it would give him pleasure he would abandon his lodging and take another in Pentonville. But the old man replied, after a moment, that he should be sorry to put that constraint18 upon him; if he were to make such an exaction19 Hyacinth would think he wanted to watch him.
“How do you mean, to watch me?”
Mr Vetch had begun to tune20 his fiddle6, and he scraped it a little before answering. “I mean it as I have always meant it. Surely you know that in Lomax Place I had my eyes on you. I watched you as a child on the edge of a pond watches the little boat he has constructed and set afloat.”
“You couldn’t discover much. You saw, after all, very little of me,” Hyacinth said.
“I made what I could of that little; it was better than nothing.”
Hyacinth laid his hand gently on the old man’s arm; he had never felt so kindly21 to him, not even when he accepted the thirty pounds, before going abroad, as at this moment. “Certainly I will come and see you.”
“I was much obliged to you for your letters,” Mr Vetch remarked, without heeding22 these words, and continuing to scrape. He had always, even into the shabbiness of his old age, kept that mark of English good-breeding (which is composed of some such odd elements), that there was a shyness, an aversion to possible phrase-making, in his manner of expressing gratitude23 for favours, and that in spite of this cursory24 tone his acknowledgment had ever the accent of sincerity25.
Hyacinth took but little interest in the play, which was an inanimate revival26; he had been at the Théatre Fran?ais and the tradition of that house was still sufficiently27 present to him to make any other style of interpretation28 appear of the clumsiest. He sat in one of the front stalls, close to the orchestra; and while the piece went forward – or backward, ever backward, as it seemed to him – his thoughts wandered far from the shabby scene and the dusty boards, revolving29 round a question which had come up immensely during the last few hours. The Princess was a capricciosa – that, at least, was Madame Grandoni’s account of her; and was that blank, expressionless house in South Street a sign that an end had come to the particular caprice in which he had happened to be involved? He had returned to London with an ache of eagerness to be with her again on the same terms as at Medley, a throbbing30 sense that unless she had been abominably31 dishonest he might count upon her. This state of mind was by no means complete security, but it was so sweet that it mattered little whether it were sound. Circumstances had favoured in an extraordinary degree his visit to her, and it was by no means clear that they would again be so accommodating or that what had been possible for a few days should be possible with continuity, in the midst of the ceremonies and complications of London. Hyacinth felt poorer than he had ever felt before, inasmuch as he had had money and spent it, whereas in previous times he had never had it to spend. He never for an instant regretted his squandered32 fortune, for he said to himself that he had made a good bargain and become master of a precious equivalent. The equivalent was a rich experience – an experience which would become richer still as he should talk it over, in a low chair, close to hers, with the all-comprehending, all-suggesting lady of his life. His poverty would be no obstacle to their intercourse so long as he should have a pair of legs to carry him to her door; for she liked him better shabby than when he was furbished up, and she had given him too many pledges, they had taken together too many appointments, worked out too many programmes, to be disconcerted (on either side) by obstacles that were merely a part of the general conventionality. He was to go with her into the slums, to introduce her to the worst that London contained (he should have, precisely33, to make acquaintance with it first), to show her the reality of the horrors of which she dreamed that the world might be purged34. He had ceased, himself, to care for the slums, and had reasons for not wishing to spend his remnant in the contemplation of foul35 things; but he would go through with his part of the engagement. He might be perfunctory, but any dreariness36 would have a gilding37 that should involve an association with her. What if she should have changed, have ceased to care? What if, from a kind of royal insolence38 which he suspected to lurk39 somewhere in the side-scenes of her nature, though he had really not once seen it peep out, she should toss back her perfect head with a movement signifying that he was too basely literal and that she knew him no more? Hyacinth’s imagination represented her this evening in places where a barrier of dazzling light shut her out from access, or even from any appeal. He saw her with other people, in splendid rooms, where ‘the dukes’ had possession of her, smiling, satisfied, surrounded, covered with jewels. When this vision grew intense he found a reassurance40 in reflecting that after all she would be unlikely to throw him personally over so long as she should remain mixed up with what was being planned in the dark, and that it would not be easy for her to liberate41 herself from that entanglement42. She had of course told him more, at Medley, of the manner in which she had already committed herself, and he remembered, with a strange perverse43 elation44, that she had gone very far indeed.
In the intervals45 of the foolish play Mr Vetch, who lingered in his place in the orchestra while his mates descended46 into the little hole under the stage, leaned over the rail and asked his young friend occasional questions, carrying his eyes at the same time up about the dingy47 house, at whose smoky ceiling and tarnished48 galleries he had been staring for so many a year. He came back to Hyacinth’s letters, and said, “Of course you know they were clever; they entertained me immensely. But as I read them I thought of poor Pinnie: I wished she could have listened to them; they would have made her so happy.”
“Yes, poor Pinnie,” Hyacinth murmured, while Mr Vetch went on –
“I was in Paris in 1840; I stayed at a small hotel in the Rue49 Mogador. I judge everything is changed, from your letters. Does the Rue Mogador still exist? Yes, everything is changed. I dare say it’s all much finer, but I liked it very much as it was then. At all events, I am right in supposing – am I not? – that it cheered you up considerably50, made you really happy.”
“Why should I have wanted any cheering? I was happy enough,” Hyacinth replied.
The fiddler turned his old white face upon him; it had the unhealthy smoothness which denotes a sedentary occupation, thirty years spent in a close crowd, amid the smoke of lamps and the odour of stage-paint. “I thought you were sad about Pinnie,” he remarked.
“When I jumped, with that avidity, at your proposal that I should take a tour? Poor old Pinnie!” Hyacinth added.
“Well, I hope you think a little better of the world. We mustn’t make up our mind too early in life.”
“Oh, I have made up mine: it’s an awfully51 jolly place.”
“Awfully jolly, no; but I like it as I like an old pair of shoes – I like so much less the idea of putting on the new ones.”
“Why should I complain?” Hyacinth asked. “What have I known but kindness? People have done such a lot for me.”
“Oh, well, of course, they have liked you. But that’s all right,” murmured Mr Vetch, beginning to scrape again. What remained in Hyacinth’s mind from this conversation was the fact that the old man, whom he regarded distinctly as cultivated, had thought his letters clever. He only wished that he had made them cleverer still; he had no doubt of his ability to have done so.
It may be imagined whether the first hours he spent at old Crookenden’s, after he took up work again, were altogether to his taste, and what was the nature of the reception given him by his former comrades, whom he found exactly in the same attitudes and the same clothes (he knew and hated every article they wore), and with the same primitive52 pleasantries on their lips. Our young man’s feelings were mingled54; the place and the people appeared to him loathsome55, but there was something delightful56 in handling his tools. He gave a little private groan57 of relief when he discovered that he still liked his work and that the pleasant swarm58 of his ideas (in the matter of sides and backs) returned to him. They came in still brighter, more suggestive form, and he had the satisfaction of feeling that his taste had improved, that it had been purified by experience, and that the covers of a book might be made to express an astonishing number of high conceptions. Strange enough it was, and a proof surely, of our little hero’s being a genuine artist, that the impressions he had accumulated during the last few months appeared to mingle53 and confound themselves with the very sources of his craft and to be susceptible59 of technical representation. He had quite determined, by this time, to carry on his life as if nothing were hanging over him, and he had no intention of remaining a little bookbinder to the end of his days; for that medium, after all, would translate only some of his conceptions. Yet his trade was a resource, an undiminished resource, for the present, and he had a particular as well as a general motive61 in attempting new flights – the prevision of the exquisite62 work which he was to do during the coming year for the Princess and which it was very definite to him he owed her. When that debt should have been paid and his other arrears63 made up he proposed to himself to write something. He was far from having decided as yet what it should be; the only point settled was that it should be very remarkable64 and should not, at least on the face of it, have anything to do with a fresh deal of the social pack. That was to be his transition – into literature; to bind60 the book, charming as the process might be, was after all much less fundamental than to write it. It had occurred to Hyacinth more than once that it would be a fine thing to produce a brilliant death-song.
It is not surprising that among such reveries as this he should have been conscious of a narrow range in the tone of his old workfellows. They had only one idea: that he had come into a thousand pounds and had gone to spend them in France with a regular high one. He was aware, in advance, of the diffusion65 of this legend, and did his best to allow for it, taking the simplest course, which was not to contradict it but to catch the ball as it came and toss it still further, enlarging and embroidering66 humorously until Grugan and Roker and Hotchkin and all the rest, who struck him as not having washed since he left them, seemed really to begin to understand how it was he could have spent such a rare sum in so short a time. The impressiveness of this achievement helped him greatly to slip into his place; he could see that, though the treatment it received was superficially irreverent, the sense that he was very sharp and that the springs of his sharpness were somehow secret gained a good deal of strength from it. Hyacinth was not incapable67 of being rather pleased that it should be supposed, even by Grugan, Roker and Hotchkin, that he could get rid of a thousand pounds in less than five months, especially as to his own conscience the fact had altogether yet to be proved. He got off, on the whole, easily enough to feel a little ashamed, and he reflected that the men at Crookenden’s, at any rate, showed no symptoms of the social jealousy68 lying at the bottom of the desire for a fresh deal. This was doubtless an accident, and not inherent in the fact that they were highly skilled workmen (old Crookenden had no others), and therefore sure of constant employment; for it was impossible to be more skilled, in one’s own line, than Paul Muniment was, and yet he (though not out of jealousy, of course) went in for the great restitution69. What struck him most, after he had got used again to the sense of his apron70 and bent71 his back a while over his battered72 table, was the simple, synthetic73 patience of the others, who had bent their backs and felt the rub of that dirty drapery all the while he was lounging in the halls of Medley, dawdling74 through boulevards and museums, and admiring the purity of the Venetian girl-face. With Poupin, to be sure, his relations were special; but the explanations that he owed the sensitive Frenchman were not such as could make him very unhappy, once he had determined to resist as much as possible the friction75 of his remaining days. There was moreover more sorrow than anger in Poupin’s face when he learned that his young friend and pupil had failed to cultivate, in Paris, the rich opportunities he had offered him. “You are cooling off, my child; there is something about you! Have you the weakness to flatter yourself that anything has been done, or that humanity suffers a particle less? Enfin, it’s between you and your conscience.”
“Do you think I want to get out of it?” Hyacinth asked, smiling; Eustache Poupin’s phrases about humanity, which used to thrill him so, having grown of late strangely hollow and rococo76.
“You owe me no explanations; the conscience of the individual is absolute, except, of course, in those classes in which, from the very nature of the infamies77 on which they are founded, no conscience can exist. Speak to me, however, of my Paris; she is always divine,” Poupin went on; but he showed signs of irritation78 when Hyacinth began to praise to him the magnificent creations of the arch-fiend of December. In the presence of this picture he was in a terrible dilemma79: he was gratified as a Parisian and a patriot80 but he was disconcerted as a lover of liberty; it cost him a pang to admit that anything in the sacred city was defective81, yet he saw still less his way to concede that it could owe any charm to the perjured82 monster of the second Empire, or even to the hypocritical, mendacious83 republicanism of the régime before which the sacred Commune had gone down in blood and fire. “Ah, yes, it’s very fine, no doubt,” he remarked at last, “but it will be finer still when it’s ours!” – a speech which caused Hyacinth to turn back to his work with a slight feeling of sickness. Everywhere, everywhere, he saw the ulcer84 of envy – the passion of a party which hung together for the purpose of despoiling85 another to its advantage. In old Eustache, one of the ‘pure’, this was particularly sad.
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1
lodging
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| n.寄宿，住所；(大学生的)校外宿舍 | |
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livelihood
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| n.生计，谋生之道 | |
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brink
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| n.(悬崖、河流等的)边缘，边沿 | |
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4
plunged
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| v.颠簸( plunge的过去式和过去分词 )；暴跌；骤降；突降 | |
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interval
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| n.间隔，间距；幕间休息，中场休息 | |
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fiddle
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| n.小提琴；vi.拉提琴；不停拨弄，乱动 | |
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7
prospect
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| n.前景，前途；景色，视野 | |
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intercourse
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| n.性交；交流，交往，交际 | |
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apprehension
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| n.理解，领悟；逮捕，拘捕；忧虑 | |
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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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medley
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| n.混合 | |
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disquieting
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| adj.令人不安的，令人不平静的v.使不安，使忧虑，使烦恼( disquiet的现在分词 ) | |
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13
portent
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| n.预兆；恶兆；怪事 | |
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promptly
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| adv.及时地，敏捷地 | |
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homely
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| adj.家常的，简朴的；不漂亮的 | |
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determined
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| adj.坚定的；有决心的 | |
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pang
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| n.剧痛，悲痛，苦闷 | |
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constraint
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| n.(on)约束，限制；限制(或约束)性的事物 | |
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exaction
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| n.强求，强征；杂税 | |
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tune
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| n.调子；和谐，协调；v.调音，调节，调整 | |
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21
kindly
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| adj.和蔼的，温和的，爽快的；adv.温和地，亲切地 | |
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heeding
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| v.听某人的劝告，听从( heed的现在分词 ) | |
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gratitude
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| adj.感激，感谢 | |
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cursory
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| adj.粗略的；草率的；匆促的 | |
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sincerity
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| n.真诚，诚意；真实 | |
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revival
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| n.复兴，复苏，（精力、活力等的）重振 | |
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sufficiently
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| adv.足够地，充分地 | |
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interpretation
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| n.解释，说明，描述；艺术处理 | |
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revolving
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| adj.旋转的，轮转式的；循环的v.（使）旋转( revolve的现在分词 )；细想 | |
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throbbing
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| a. 跳动的,悸动的 | |
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abominably
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| adv. 可恶地，可恨地，恶劣地 | |
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squandered
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| v.（指钱，财产等）浪费，乱花( squander的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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precisely
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| adv.恰好，正好，精确地，细致地 | |
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purged
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| 清除（政敌等）( purge的过去式和过去分词 )； 涤除（罪恶等）； 净化（心灵、风气等）； 消除（错事等）的不良影响 | |
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foul
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| adj.污秽的；邪恶的；v.弄脏；妨害；犯规；n.犯规 | |
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dreariness
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| 沉寂，可怕，凄凉 | |
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gilding
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| n.贴金箔，镀金 | |
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insolence
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| n.傲慢；无礼；厚颜；傲慢的态度 | |
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lurk
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| n.潜伏，潜行；v.潜藏，潜伏，埋伏 | |
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40
reassurance
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| n.使放心，使消除疑虑 | |
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liberate
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| v.解放，使获得自由，释出，放出；vt.解放，使获自由 | |
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entanglement
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| n.纠缠，牵累 | |
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perverse
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| adj.刚愎的；坚持错误的，行为反常的 | |
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elation
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| n.兴高采烈，洋洋得意 | |
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45
intervals
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| n.[军事]间隔( interval的名词复数 )；间隔时间；[数学]区间；（戏剧、电影或音乐会的）幕间休息 | |
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46
descended
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| a.为...后裔的，出身于...的 | |
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dingy
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| adj.昏暗的，肮脏的 | |
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48
tarnished
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| （通常指金属）（使）失去光泽，（使）变灰暗( tarnish的过去式和过去分词 )； 玷污，败坏 | |
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rue
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| n.懊悔，芸香，后悔；v.后悔，悲伤，懊悔 | |
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50
considerably
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| adv.极大地；相当大地；在很大程度上 | |
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51
awfully
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| adv.可怕地，非常地，极端地 | |
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52
primitive
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| adj.原始的；简单的；n.原(始)人，原始事物 | |
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53
mingle
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| vt.使混合，使相混；vi.混合起来；相交往 | |
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54
mingled
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| 混合，混入( mingle的过去式和过去分词 )； 混进，与…交往[联系] | |
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55
loathsome
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| adj.讨厌的，令人厌恶的 | |
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56
delightful
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| adj.令人高兴的，使人快乐的 | |
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57
groan
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| vi./n.呻吟，抱怨；(发出)呻吟般的声音 | |
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58
swarm
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| n.(昆虫)等一大群；vi.成群飞舞；蜂拥而入 | |
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59
susceptible
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| adj.过敏的，敏感的；易动感情的，易受感动的 | |
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60
bind
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| vt.捆，包扎；装订；约束；使凝固；vi.变硬 | |
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61
motive
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| n.动机，目的；adv.发动的，运动的 | |
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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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63
arrears
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| n.到期未付之债，拖欠的款项；待做的工作 | |
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64
remarkable
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| adj.显著的，异常的，非凡的，值得注意的 | |
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65
diffusion
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| n.流布；普及；散漫 | |
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66
embroidering
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| v.（在织物上）绣花( embroider的现在分词 )；刺绣；对…加以渲染（或修饰）；给…添枝加叶 | |
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67
incapable
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| adj.无能力的，不能做某事的 | |
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68
jealousy
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| n.妒忌，嫉妒，猜忌 | |
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restitution
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| n.赔偿；恢复原状 | |
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70
apron
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| n.围裙；工作裙 | |
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71
bent
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| n.爱好，癖好；adj.弯的；决心的，一心的 | |
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72
battered
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| adj.磨损的；v.连续猛击；磨损 | |
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synthetic
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| adj.合成的，人工的；综合的；n.人工制品 | |
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74
dawdling
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| adj.闲逛的，懒散的v.混（时间）( dawdle的现在分词 ) | |
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friction
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| n.摩擦，摩擦力 | |
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rococo
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| n.洛可可；adj.过分修饰的 | |
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77
infamies
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| n.声名狼藉( infamy的名词复数 )；臭名；丑恶；恶行 | |
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78
irritation
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| n.激怒，恼怒，生气 | |
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79
dilemma
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| n.困境，进退两难的局面 | |
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patriot
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| n.爱国者，爱国主义者 | |
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81
defective
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| adj.有毛病的，有问题的，有瑕疵的 | |
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82
perjured
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| adj.伪证的，犯伪证罪的v.发假誓，作伪证( perjure的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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83
mendacious
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| adj.不真的，撒谎的 | |
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84
ulcer
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| n.溃疡，腐坏物 | |
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85
despoiling
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| v.掠夺，抢劫( despoil的现在分词 ) | |
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