Tea was served in Louie’s suite1 on the lake front, with a fine view of the falling snow from the windows. The Professor was in a genial2 mood; he was glad to be in a big city again, in a luxurious3 hotel, and especially pleased to be able to sit in comfort and watch the storm over the water.
“How snug4 you are here, Louie! This is really very nice,” he said, turning back from the window when Rosamond called him.
Louie came and put both hands on St. Peter’s shoulders, exclaiming delightedly: “And do you like these rooms, sir? Well, I’m glad, for they’re yours! Rosie and I are farther down the corridor. Not a word! It’s all arranged. You are our guests for this engagement. We won’t have our great scholar staying off in some grimy place on the South side. We want him where we can keep an eye on him.”
Louie was so warm with his plan that the Professor could only express satisfaction. “And our luggage?”
“It’s on the way. I cancelled your reservations and did everything in order. Now have your tea, but not too much. You dine early; you have an engagement for to-night. You and Dearest are going to the opera — Oh, not with us! We have other fish to fry. You are going off alone.”
“Very well, Louie! And what are they giving to-night?”
“Mignon. It will remind you of your student days in Paris.”
“It will. I always had abonnement at the Opéra Comique, and Mignon came round frequently. It’s one of my favourites.”
“I thought so!” Louie kissed both the ladies, to express his satisfaction. The Professor had forgotten his scruples5 about accepting lavish6 hospitalities. He was really very glad to have windows on the lake, and not to have to go away to another hotel. After the Marselluses went to their own apartment, he remarked to his wife, while he unpacked7 his bag, that it was much more convenient to be on the same floor with Louie and Rosamond.
“Much better than cabbing across Chicago to meet them all the time, isn’t it?”
At eight o’clock he and his wife were in their places in the Auditorium8. The overture9 brought a smile to his lips and a gracious mood to his heart. The music seemed extraordinarily10 fresh and genuine still. It might grow old-fashioned, he told himself, but never old, surely, while there was any youth left in men. It was an expression of youth, — that, and no more; with the sweetness and foolishness, the lingering accent, the heavy stresses — the delicacy11, too — belonging to that time. After the entrance of the hero, Lillian leaned toward him and whispered: “Am I over-credulous? He looks to me exactly like the pictures of Goethe in his youth.”
“So he does to me. He is certainly as tall as Goethe. I didn’t know tenors12 were ever so tall. The Mignon seems young, too.”
She was slender, at any rate, and very fragile beside the courtly Wilhelm. When she began her immortal13 song, one felt that she was right for the part, the pure lyric14 soprano that suits it best, and in her voice there was something fresh and delicate, like deep wood flowers. “Connais-tu — le pays” — it stirred one like the odours of early spring, recalled the time of sweet, impersonal15 emotions.
When the curtain fell on the first act, St. Peter turned to his wife. “A fine cast, don’t you think? And the harps16 are very good. Except for the wood-winds, I should say it was as good as any performance I ever heard at the Comique.”
“How it does make one think of Paris, and of so many half-forgotten things!” his wife murmured. It had been long since he had seen her face so relaxed and reflective and undetermined.
Through the next act he often glanced at her. Curious, how a young mood could return and soften17 a face. More than once he saw a starry18 moisture shine in her eyes. If she only knew how much more lovely she was when she wasn’t doing her duty!
“My dear,” he sighed when the lights were turned on and they both looked older, “it’s been a mistake, our having a family and writing histories and getting middle-aged19. We should have been picturesquely21 shipwrecked together when we were young.”
“How often I’ve thought that!” she replied with a faint, melancholy23 smile.
“You? But you’re so occupied with the future, you adapt yourself so readily,” he murmured in astonishment24.
“One must go on living, Godfrey. But it wasn’t the children who came between us.” There was something lonely and forgiving in her voice, something that spoke25 of an old wound, healed and hardened and hopeless.
“You, you too?” he breathed in amazement26.
He took up one of her gloves and began drawing it out through his fingers. She said nothing, but he saw her lip quiver, and she turned away and began looking at the house through the glasses. He likewise began to examine the audience. He wished he knew just how it seemed to her. He had been mistaken, he felt. The heart of another is a dark forest, always, no matter how close it has been to one’s own. Presently the melting music of the tenor’s last aria27 brought their eyes together in a smile not altogether sad.
That night, after he was in bed, among unaccustomed surroundings and a little wakeful, St. Peter still played with his idea of a picturesque20 shipwreck22, and he cast about for the particular occasion he would have chosen for such a finale. Before he went to sleep he found the very day, but his wife was not in it. Indeed, nobody was in it but himself, and a weather-dried little sea captain from the Hautes–Pyrénées, half a dozen spry seamen28, and a line of gleaming snow peaks, agonizingly high and sharp, along the southern coast of Spain.
Louie arranged the birthday dinner in the public dining-room of the hotel, and three of the Professor’s colleagues dined with them on that occasion. Louie had gone out to the university to hear St. Peter lecture, had met some of the faculty29, and immediately invited them to dinner. They accepted — when was a professor known to refuse a good dinner? Rosamond was presented with her emeralds, and, as St. Peter afterward30 observed to his wife, practically all the guests in the dining-room were participants in the happy event. Lillian was doubtless right when she told him that, all the same, his fellow professors went away from the Blackstone that night respecting Godfrey St. Peter more than they had ever done before, and if they had marriageable daughters, they were certainly envying him his luck.
“That,” her husband replied, “is my chief objection to public magnificence; it seems to show everybody up in the worst possible light. I’m not finding fault with anyone but myself, understand. When I consented to occupy an apartment I couldn’t afford, I let myself in for whatever might follow.”
They got back to Hamilton in bitter weather. The lake winds were scourging31 the town, and Scott had laryngitis and was writing prose poems about the pleasures of tending your own furnace when the thermometer is twenty below.
“Godfrey,” said Mrs. St. Peter when he set off for his class-room on the morning after their return, “surely you’re not going to the old house this afternoon. It will be like a refrigerating-plant. There’s no way of heating your study except by that miserable32 little stove.”
“There never was, my dear. I got along a good many years.”
“It was very different when the house below was heated. That stove isn’t safe when you keep the window open. A gust33 of wind might blow it out at any moment, and if you were at work you’d never notice until you were half poisoned by gas. You’ll get a fine headache one of these days.”
“I’ve got headaches that way before, and survived them,” he said stubbornly.
“How can you be so perverse34? You know things are different now, and you ought to take more care of your health.”
“Why so? It’s not worth half so much as it was then.”
His wife disregarded this. “And don’t you think it’s foolish extravagance to go on paying the rent of an entire house, in order to spend a few hours a day in one very uncomfortable room of it?”
The Professor’s dark skin reddened, and the ends of his formidable eyebrows35 ascended36 toward his black hair. “It’s almost my only extravagance,” he muttered fiercely.
“How irritable37 and unreasonable38 he is becoming!” his wife reflected, as she heard him putting on his overshoes in the hall.
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1
suite
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| n.一套(家具)；套房；随从人员 | |
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genial
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| adj.亲切的，和蔼的，愉快的，脾气好的 | |
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luxurious
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| adj.精美而昂贵的；豪华的 | |
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snug
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| adj.温暖舒适的，合身的，安全的；v.使整洁干净，舒适地依靠，紧贴；n.（英）酒吧里的私房 | |
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5
scruples
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| n.良心上的不安( scruple的名词复数 )；顾虑，顾忌v.感到于心不安，有顾忌( scruple的第三人称单数 ) | |
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6
lavish
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| adj.无节制的；浪费的；vt.慷慨地给予，挥霍 | |
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7
unpacked
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| v.从（包裹等）中取出（所装的东西），打开行李取出( unpack的过去式和过去分词 )；拆包；解除…的负担；吐露（心事等） | |
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8
auditorium
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| n.观众席，听众席；会堂，礼堂 | |
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9
overture
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| n.前奏曲、序曲，提议，提案，初步交涉 | |
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extraordinarily
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| adv.格外地；极端地 | |
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delicacy
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| n.精致，细微，微妙，精良；美味，佳肴 | |
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12
tenors
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| n.男高音( tenor的名词复数 )；大意；男高音歌唱家；（文件的）抄本 | |
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13
immortal
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| adj.不朽的；永生的，不死的；神的 | |
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lyric
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| n.抒情诗，歌词；adj.抒情的 | |
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impersonal
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| adj.无个人感情的，与个人无关的，非人称的 | |
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harps
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| abbr.harpsichord 拨弦古钢琴n.竖琴( harp的名词复数 ) | |
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17
soften
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| v.(使)变柔软；(使)变柔和 | |
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starry
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| adj.星光照耀的, 闪亮的 | |
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middle-aged
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| adj.中年的 | |
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picturesque
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| adj.美丽如画的，（语言）生动的，绘声绘色的 | |
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picturesquely
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shipwreck
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| n.船舶失事，海难 | |
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melancholy
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| n.忧郁，愁思；adj.令人感伤（沮丧）的，忧郁的 | |
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astonishment
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| n.惊奇，惊异 | |
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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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amazement
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| n.惊奇，惊讶 | |
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aria
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| n.独唱曲，咏叹调 | |
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28
seamen
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| n.海员 | |
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faculty
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| n.才能；学院，系；(学院或系的)全体教学人员 | |
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afterward
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| adv.后来；以后 | |
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31
scourging
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| 鞭打( scourge的现在分词 )； 惩罚，压迫 | |
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32
miserable
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| adj.悲惨的，痛苦的；可怜的，糟糕的 | |
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gust
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| n.阵风，突然一阵（雨、烟等），（感情的）迸发 | |
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34
perverse
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| adj.刚愎的；坚持错误的，行为反常的 | |
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35
eyebrows
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| 眉毛( eyebrow的名词复数 ) | |
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36
ascended
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| v.上升，攀登( ascend的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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37
irritable
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| adj.急躁的；过敏的；易怒的 | |
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unreasonable
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| adj.不讲道理的，不合情理的，过度的 | |
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