As he laid the flowers on the damp, raw earth, suddenly it struck him as strange that he should be doing it. He was not a sentimental4 person, and for a moment it puzzled him that he should be making this gesture. He hadn’t planned to do it. He had simply seen the florist’s window as they drove along and, without thinking, had stopped and got the flowers, and now there they were.
Then he realised why he had done it — and why he had wanted to come back to the cemetery at all. This visit to Libya Hill, which he had dreamed about so many times as his home-coming, and which had not turned out in any way as he had thought it would be, was really his leave-taking, his farewell. The last tie that had bound him to his native earth was severed5, and he was going out from here to make a life for himself as each man must — alone.
And now, once again, the dusk was falling in this place, and in the valley below the lights were beginning to come on in the town. With Margaret at his side, he stood there and looked down upon it, and she seemed to understand his feelings, for she was quiet and said nothing. Then, in a low voice, George began to speak to her. He needed to tell someone all that he had thought and felt during his week at borne. Randy was not available, and Margaret was the only one left to whom he could talk. She listened without interruption as he spoke6 about his book and his hopes for it, telling her as well as he could what kind of book it was, and how much he feared that the town would not like it. She pressed his arm reassuringly7, and the gesture was more eloquent8 than any words could be.
He did not say anything about Randy and Merrit. There was no need to alarm her unduly9, no sense in robbing her of that security which is so fundamental to a woman’s peace and happiness. Sufficient unto the day . . .
But he spoke at length about the town itself, telling her all that he had seen of its speculative10 madness, and how it had impressed him. What did the future hold for that place and its people? They were always talking of the better life that lay ahead of them and of the greater city they would build, but to George it seemed that in all such talk there was evidence of a strange and savage11 hunger that drove them on, and that there was a desperate quality in it, as though what they really hungered for was ruin and death. It seemed to him that they were ruined, and that even when they laughed and shouted and smote12 each other on the back, the knowledge of their ruin was in them.
They had squandered13 fabulous14 sums in meaningless streets and bridges. They had torn down ancient buildings and erected15 new ones large enough to take care of a city of half a million people. They had levelled hills and bored through mountains, making magnificent tunnels paved with double roadways and glittering with shining tiles — tunnels which leaped out on the other side into Arcadian wilderness16. They had flung away the earnings17 of a lifetime, and mortgaged those of a generation to come. They had ruined their city, and in doing so had ruined themselves, their children, and their children’s children.
Already the town had passed from their possession. They no longer owned it. It was mortgaged under a debt of fifty million dollars, owned by bonding companies in the North. The very streets they walked on had been sold beneath their feet. They signed their names to papers calling for the payment of fabulous sums, and resold their land the next day to other madmen who signed away their lives with the same careless magnificence. On paper, their profits were enormous, but their “boom” was already over and they would not see it. They were staggering beneath obligations to pay which none of them could meet — and still they bought.
And when they had exhausted18 all their possibilities of ruin and extravagance that the town could offer, they had rushed out into the wilderness, into the lyrical immensities of wild earth where there was land enough for all men living, and they had staked off little plots and wedges in the hills as one might try to stake a picket19 fence out in the middle of the ocean. They had given fancy names to all these foolish enterprises —“Wild Boulders”—“Shady Acres”—“Eagle’s Crest”. They had set prices on these sites of forest, field, and tangled20 undergrowth that might have bought a mountain, and made charts and drawings showing populous21 communities of shops, houses, streets, roads, and clubs in regions where there was no road, no street, no house, and which could not be reached in any way save by a band of resolute22 pioneers armed with axes. These places were to be transformed into idyllic23 colonies for artists and writers and critics; and there were colonies as well for preachers, doctors, actors, dancers, golf players, and retired24 locomotive engineers. There were colonies for everyone, and, what is more, they sold the lots — to one another!
But under all this flash and play of great endeavour, the paucity25 of their designs and the starved meagreness of their lives were already apparent. The better life which they talked about resolved itself into a few sterile26 and baffled gestures. All they really did for themselves was to build uglier and more expensive homes, and buy new cars, and join a country club. And they did all this with a frenzied27 haste, because — it seemed to George — they were looking for food to feed their hunger and had not found it.
As he stood upon the hill and looked out on the scene that spread below him in the gathering28 darkness, with its pattern of lights to mark the streets and the creeping pin-pricks of the thronging29 traffic, he remembered the barren night-time streets of the town he had known so well in his boyhood. Their dreary30 and unpeopled desolation had burned its acid print upon his memory. Bare and deserted31 by ten o’clock at night, those streets had been an aching monotony, a weariness of hard lights and empty pavements, a frozen torpor32 broken only occasionally by the footfalls of some prowler — some desperate, famished33, lonely man who hoped past hope and past belief for some haven34 of comfort, warmth, and love there in the wilderness, for the sudden opening of a magic door into some secret, rich, and more abundant life. There had been many such, but they had never found what they were searching for. They had been dying in the darkness — without a goal, a certain purpose, or a door.
And that, it seemed to George, was the way the thing had come. That was the way it had happened. Yes, it was there — on many a night long past and wearily accomplished35, in ten thousand little towns and in ten million barren streets where all the passion, hope, and hunger of the famished men beat like a great pulse through the fields of darkness — it was there and nowhere else that all this madness had been brewed36.
As he remembered the bleak37, deserted streets of night which he had known here fifteen years before, he thought again of Judge Rumford Bland38, whose solitary39 figure ranging restlessly through the sleeping town had been so familiar to him and had struck such terror in his heart. Perhaps he was the key to this whole tragedy. Perhaps Rumford Bland had sought his life in darkness not because of something evil in him — though certainly there was evil there — but because of something good that had not died. Something in the man had always fought against the dullness of provincial40 life, against is predudice, its caution, its smugness, its sterility41, and its lack of joy. He had looked for something better in the night, for a place of warmth and fellowship, a moment of dark mystery, the thrill of imminent42 and unknown adventure, the excitement of the hunt, pursuit, perhaps the capture, and then the fulfilment of desire. Was it possible that in the blind man whose whole life had become such a miracle of open shamelessness, there had once been a warmth and an energy that had sought for an enhancement of the town’s cold values, and for a joy and a beauty that were not there, but that lived in himself alone? Could that be what had wrecked43 him? Was he one of the lost men — lost, really, only because the town itself was lost, because his gifts had been rejected, his energies unused, the shoulder of his strength finding no work to bend to — because what he had had to give of hope, intelligence, curiosity, and warmth had found no place there, and so were lost?
Yes, the same thing that explained the plight44 the town had come to might also explain Judge Rumford Bland. What was it he had said on the train: “Do you think you can ‘go home again?” And: “Don’t forget I tried to warn you.” Was this, then, what he had meant? If so, George understood him now.
Around them in the cemetery as George thought these things and spoke of them, the air brooded with a lazy, drowsy45 warmth. There was the last evening cry of robins46, and the thrumming bullet noises in undergrowth and leaf, and broken sounds from far away — a voice in the wind, a boy’s shout, the barking of a dog, the tinkle47 of a cowbell. There was the fragrance48 of intoxicating49 odours — the resinous50 smell of pine, and the smells of grass and warm sweet clover. All this was just as it had always been. But the town of his childhood, with its quiet streets and the old houses which had been almost obscured below the leafy spread of trees, was changed past recognition, scarred now with hard patches of bright concrete and raw dumps of new construction. It looked like a battlefield, cratered51 and shell torn with savage explosions of brick, cement, and harsh new stucco-And in the interspaces only the embowered remnants of the old and pleasant town remained — timid, retreating, overwhelmed — to remind one of the liquid leather shuffle52 in the quiet streets at noon when the men came home to lunch, and of laughter and low voices in the leafy rustle53 of the night. For this was lost!
An old and tragic54 light was shining faintly on the time-enchanted hills. George thought of Mrs. Delia Flood, and what she had said of Aunt Maw’s hope that some day he’d come home again to stay.. And as he stood there with Margaret quietly by his side the old and tragic light of fading day shone faintly on their faces, and all at once it seemed to him that they were fixed55 there like a prophecy with the hills and river all round them, and that there was something lost, intolerable, foretold56 and come to pass, something like old time and destiny — some magic that he could not say.
Down by the river’s edge, in darkness now, he heard the bell, the whistle, and the pounding wheel of the night express coming into town, there to pause for half an hour and then resume its northward57 journey. It swept away from them, leaving the lonely thunder of its echoes in the hills and the flame-flare of its open firebox for a moment, and then just heavy wheels and rumbling58 cars as the great train pounded on the rails across the river — and, finally, nothing but the silence it had left behind. Then, farther off and almost lost in the traffic of the town, he heard again and for the last time its wailing59 cry, and it brought to him once more, as it had done for ever in his childhood, its wild and secret exultation60, its pain of going, and its triumphant61 promise of morning, new lands, and a shining city. And something in his heart was saying, like a demon’s whisper that spoke of flight and darkness: “Soon! Soon! Soon!”
Then they got in the car and drove rapidly away from the great hill of the dead, the woman towards the certitude of lights, the people, and the town; the man towards the train, the city, and the unknown future.
点击收听单词发音
1 cemetery | |
n.坟墓,墓地,坟场 | |
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2 chrysanthemums | |
n.菊花( chrysanthemum的名词复数 ) | |
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3 mound | |
n.土墩,堤,小山;v.筑堤,用土堆防卫 | |
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4 sentimental | |
adj.多愁善感的,感伤的 | |
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5 severed | |
v.切断,断绝( sever的过去式和过去分词 );断,裂 | |
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6 spoke | |
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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7 reassuringly | |
ad.安心,可靠 | |
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8 eloquent | |
adj.雄辩的,口才流利的;明白显示出的 | |
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9 unduly | |
adv.过度地,不适当地 | |
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10 speculative | |
adj.思索性的,暝想性的,推理的 | |
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11 savage | |
adj.野蛮的;凶恶的,残暴的;n.未开化的人 | |
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12 smote | |
v.猛打,重击,打击( smite的过去式 ) | |
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13 squandered | |
v.(指钱,财产等)浪费,乱花( squander的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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14 fabulous | |
adj.极好的;极为巨大的;寓言中的,传说中的 | |
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15 ERECTED | |
adj. 直立的,竖立的,笔直的 vt. 使 ... 直立,建立 | |
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16 wilderness | |
n.杳无人烟的一片陆地、水等,荒漠 | |
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17 earnings | |
n.工资收人;利润,利益,所得 | |
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18 exhausted | |
adj.极其疲惫的,精疲力尽的 | |
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19 picket | |
n.纠察队;警戒哨;v.设置纠察线;布置警卫 | |
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20 tangled | |
adj. 纠缠的,紊乱的 动词tangle的过去式和过去分词 | |
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21 populous | |
adj.人口稠密的,人口众多的 | |
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22 resolute | |
adj.坚决的,果敢的 | |
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23 idyllic | |
adj.质朴宜人的,田园风光的 | |
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24 retired | |
adj.隐退的,退休的,退役的 | |
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25 paucity | |
n.小量,缺乏 | |
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26 sterile | |
adj.不毛的,不孕的,无菌的,枯燥的,贫瘠的 | |
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27 frenzied | |
a.激怒的;疯狂的 | |
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28 gathering | |
n.集会,聚会,聚集 | |
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29 thronging | |
v.成群,挤满( throng的现在分词 ) | |
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30 dreary | |
adj.令人沮丧的,沉闷的,单调乏味的 | |
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31 deserted | |
adj.荒芜的,荒废的,无人的,被遗弃的 | |
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32 torpor | |
n.迟钝;麻木;(动物的)冬眠 | |
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33 famished | |
adj.饥饿的 | |
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34 haven | |
n.安全的地方,避难所,庇护所 | |
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35 accomplished | |
adj.有才艺的;有造诣的;达到了的 | |
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36 brewed | |
调制( brew的过去式和过去分词 ); 酝酿; 沏(茶); 煮(咖啡) | |
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37 bleak | |
adj.(天气)阴冷的;凄凉的;暗淡的 | |
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38 bland | |
adj.淡而无味的,温和的,无刺激性的 | |
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39 solitary | |
adj.孤独的,独立的,荒凉的;n.隐士 | |
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40 provincial | |
adj.省的,地方的;n.外省人,乡下人 | |
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41 sterility | |
n.不生育,不结果,贫瘠,消毒,无菌 | |
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42 imminent | |
adj.即将发生的,临近的,逼近的 | |
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43 wrecked | |
adj.失事的,遇难的 | |
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44 plight | |
n.困境,境况,誓约,艰难;vt.宣誓,保证,约定 | |
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45 drowsy | |
adj.昏昏欲睡的,令人发困的 | |
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46 robins | |
n.知更鸟,鸫( robin的名词复数 );(签名者不分先后,以避免受责的)圆形签名抗议书(或请愿书) | |
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47 tinkle | |
vi.叮当作响;n.叮当声 | |
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48 fragrance | |
n.芬芳,香味,香气 | |
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49 intoxicating | |
a. 醉人的,使人兴奋的 | |
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50 resinous | |
adj.树脂的,树脂质的,树脂制的 | |
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51 cratered | |
adj.有坑洞的,多坑的v.火山口( crater的过去分词 );弹坑等 | |
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52 shuffle | |
n.拖著脚走,洗纸牌;v.拖曳,慢吞吞地走 | |
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53 rustle | |
v.沙沙作响;偷盗(牛、马等);n.沙沙声声 | |
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54 tragic | |
adj.悲剧的,悲剧性的,悲惨的 | |
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55 fixed | |
adj.固定的,不变的,准备好的;(计算机)固定的 | |
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56 foretold | |
v.预言,预示( foretell的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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57 northward | |
adv.向北;n.北方的地区 | |
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58 rumbling | |
n. 隆隆声, 辘辘声 adj. 隆隆响的 动词rumble的现在分词 | |
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59 wailing | |
v.哭叫,哀号( wail的现在分词 );沱 | |
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60 exultation | |
n.狂喜,得意 | |
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61 triumphant | |
adj.胜利的,成功的;狂欢的,喜悦的 | |
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