If one wanted to show a foreigner England, perhaps the wisest course would be to take him to the final section of the Purbeck Hills, and stand him on their summit, a few miles to the east of Corfe. Then system after system of our island would roll together under his feet. Beneath him is the valley of the Frome, and all the wild lands that come tossing down from Dorchester, black and gold, to mirror their gorse in the expanses of Poole. The valley of the Stour is beyond, unaccountable stream, dirty at Blandford, pure at Wimborne--the Stour, sliding out of fat fields, to marry the Avon beneath the tower of Christchurch. The valley of the Avon--invisible, but far to the north the trained eye may see Clearbury Ring that guards it, and the imagination may leap beyond that on to Salisbury Plain itself, and beyond the Plain to all the glorious downs of Central England. Nor is Suburbia absent. Bournemouth's ignoble1 coast cowers2 to the right, heralding3 the pine-trees that mean, for all their beauty, red houses, and the Stock Exchange, and extend to the gates of London itself. So tremendous is the City's trail! But the cliffs of Freshwater it shall never touch, and the island will guard the Island's purity till the end of time. Seen from the west, the Wight is beautiful beyond all laws of beauty. It is as if a fragment of England floated forward to greet the foreigner--chalk of our chalk, turf of our turf, epitome4 of what will follow. And behind the fragment lies Southampton, hostess to the nations, and Portsmouth, a latent fire, and all around it, with double and treble collision of tides, swirls5 the sea. How many villages appear in this view! How many castles! How many churches, vanished or triumphant6! How many ships, railways, and roads! What incredible variety of men working beneath that lucent sky to what final end! The reason fails, like a wave on the Swanage beach; the imagination swells7, spreads, and deepens, until it becomes geographic8 and encircles England.
So Frieda Mosebach, now Frau Architect Liesecke, and mother to her husband's baby, was brought up to these heights to be impressed, and, after a prolonged gaze, she said that the hills were more swelling9 here than in Pomerania, which was true, but did not seem to Mrs. Munt apposite. Poole Harbour was dry, which led her to praise the absence of muddy foreshore at Friedrich Wilhelms Bad, Rugen, where beech-trees hang over the tideless Baltic, and cows may contemplate10 the brine. Rather unhealthy Mrs. Munt thought this would be, water being safer when it moved about.
"And your English lakes--Vindermere, Grasmere--are they, then, unhealthy?"
"No, Frau Liesecke; but that is because they are fresh water, and different. Salt water ought to have tides, and go up and down a great deal, or else it smells. Look, for instance, at an aquarium12."
"An aquarium! Oh, MEESIS Munt, you mean to tell me that fresh aquariums13 stink14 less than salt? Why, when Victor, my brother-in-law, collected many tadpoles15--"
"You are not to say 'stink,'" interrupted Helen; "at least, you may say it, but you must pretend you are being funny while you say it."
"Then 'smell.' And the mud of your Pool down there--does it not smell, or may I say 'stink, ha, ha'?"
"There always has been mud in Poole Harbour," said Mrs. Munt, with a slight frown. "The rivers bring it down, and a most valuable oyster-fishery depends upon it."
"Yes, that is so," conceded Frieda; and another international incident was closed.
"'Bournemouth is,'" resumed their hostess, quoting a local rhyme to which she was much attached--" 'Bournemouth is, Poole was, and Swanage is to be the most important town of all and biggest of the three.' Now, Frau Liesecke, I have shown you Bournemouth, and I have shown you Poole, so let us walk backward a little, and look down again at Swanage."
"Aunt Juley, wouldn't that be Meg's train?"
A tiny puff16 of smoke had been circling the harbour, and now was bearing southwards towards them over the black and the gold.
"Oh, dearest Margaret, I do hope she won't be overtired."
"Oh, I do wonder--I do wonder whether she's taken the house."
"I hope she hasn't been hasty."
"So do I--oh, so do I."
"Will it be as beautiful as Wickham Place?" Frieda asked.
"I should think it would. Trust Mr. Wilcox for doing himself proud. All those Ducie Street houses are beautiful in their modern way, and I can't think why he doesn't keep on with it. But it's really for Evie that he went there, and now that Evie's going to be married--"
"Ah!"
"You've never seen Miss Wilcox, Frieda. How absurdly matrimonial you are!"
"But sister to that Paul?"
"Yes."
"And to that Charles," said Mrs. Munt with feeling. "Oh, Helen, Helen, what a time that was!"
Helen laughed. "Meg and I haven't got such tender hearts. If there's a chance of a cheap house, we go for it."
"Now look, Frau Liesecke, at my niece's train. You see, it is coming towards us--coming, coming; and, when it gets to Corfe, it will actually go THROUGH the downs, on which we are standing17, so that, if we walk over, as I suggested, and look down on Swanage, we shall see it coming on the other side. Shall we?"
Frieda assented18, and in a few minutes they had crossed the ridge19 and exchanged the greater view for the lesser20. Rather a dull valley lay below, backed by the slope of the coastward downs. They were looking across the Isle21 of Purbeck and on to Swanage, soon to be the most important town of all, and ugliest of the three. Margaret's train reappeared as promised, and was greeted with approval by her aunt. It came to a standstill in the middle distance, and there it had been planned that Tibby should meet her, and drive her, and a tea-basket, up to join them.
"You see," continued Helen to her cousin, "the Wilcoxes collect houses as your Victor collects tadpoles. They have, one, Ducie Street; two, Howards End, where my great rumpus was; three, a country seat in Shropshire; four, Charles has a house in Hilton; and five, another near Epsom; and six, Evie will have a house when she marries, and probably a pied-a-terre in the country--which makes seven. Oh yes, and Paul a hut in Africa makes eight. I wish we could get Howards End. That was something like a dear little house! Didn't you think so, Aunt Juley?"
" I had too much to do, dear, to look at it," said Mrs. Munt, with a gracious dignity. "I had everything to settle and explain, and Charles Wilcox to keep in his place besides. It isn't likely I should remember much. I just remember having lunch in your bedroom."
"Yes so do I. But, oh dear, dear, how dead it all seems! And in the autumn there began this anti-Pauline movement--you, and Frieda, and Meg, and Mrs. Wilcox, all obsessed22 with the idea that I might yet marry Paul."
"You yet may," said Frieda despondently23.
Helen shook her head. "The Great Wilcox Peril24 will never return. If I'm certain of anything it's of that."
"One is certain of nothing but the truth of one's own emotions."
The remark fell damply on the conversation. But Helen slipped her arm round her cousin, somehow liking25 her the better for making it. It was not an original remark, nor had Frieda appropriated it passionately26, for she had a patriotic27 rather than a philosophic28 mind. Yet it betrayed that interest in the universal which the average Teuton possesses and the average Englishman does not. It was, however illogically, the good, the beautiful, the true, as opposed to the respectable, the pretty, the adequate. It was a landscape of Bocklin's beside a landscape of Leader's, strident and ill-considered, but quivering into supernatural life. It sharpened idealism, stirred the soul. It may have been a bad preparation for what followed.
"Look!" cried Aunt Juley, hurrying away from generalities over the narrow summit of the down. "Stand where I stand, and you will see the pony29-cart coming. I see the pony-cart coming."
They stood and saw the pony-cart coming. Margaret and Tibby were presently seen coming in it. Leaving the outskirts30 of Swanage, it drove for a little through the budding lanes, and then began the ascent31.
"Have you got the house?" they shouted, long before she could possibly hear.
Helen ran down to meet her. The highroad passed over a saddle, and a track went thence at right angles along the ridge of the down.
"Have you got the house?"
Margaret shook her head.
"Oh, what a nuisance! So we're as we were?"
"Not exactly."
She got out, looking tired.
"Some mystery," said Tibby. "We are to be enlightened presently."
Margaret came close up to her and whispered that she had had a proposal of marriage from Mr. Wilcox.
Helen was amused. She opened the gate on to the downs so that her brother might lead the pony through. "It's just like a widower," she remarked. "They've cheek enough for anything, and invariably select one of their first wife's friends."
Margaret's face flashed despair.
"That type--" She broke off with a cry. "Meg, not anything wrong with you?"
"Wait one minute," said Margaret, whispering always.
"But you've never conceivably--you've never--" She pulled herself together. "Tibby, hurry up through; I can't hold this gate indefinitely. Aunt Juley! I say, Aunt Juley, make the tea, will you, and Frieda; we've got to talk houses, and I'll come on afterwards." And then, turning her face to her sister's, she burst into tears.
Margaret was stupefied. She heard herself saying, "Oh, really--" She felt herself touched with a hand that trembled.
"Don't," sobbed32 Helen, "don't, don't, Meg, don't!" She seemed incapable33 of saying any other word. Margaret, trembling herself, led her forward up the road, till they strayed through another gate on to the down.
"Don't, don't do such a thing! I tell you not to--don't! I know--don't!"
"What do you know?"
"Panic and emptiness," sobbed Helen. "Don't!"
Then Margaret thought, "Helen is a little selfish. I have never behaved like this when there has seemed a chance of her marrying. She said: "But we would still see each other very often, and--"
"It's not a thing like that," sobbed Helen. And she broke right away and wandered distractedly upwards34, stretching her hands towards the view and crying.
"What's happened to you?" called Margaret, following through the wind that gathers at sundown on the northern slopes of hills. "But it's stupid!" And suddenly stupidity seized her, and the immense landscape was blurred35. But Helen turned back.
" Meg--"
"I don't know what's happened to either of us," said Margaret, wiping her eyes. "We must both have gone mad." Then Helen wiped hers, and they even laughed a little.
"Look here, sit down."
"All right; I'll sit down if you'll sit down."
"There. (One kiss.) Now, whatever, whatever is the matter?"
"I do mean what I said. Don't; it wouldn't do."
"Oh, Helen, stop saying 'don't'! It's ignorant. It's as if your head wasn't out of the slime. 'Don't' is probably what Mrs. Bast says all the day to Mr. Bast."
Helen was silent.
"Well?"
"Tell me about it first, and meanwhile perhaps I'll have got my head out of the slime."
"That's better. Well, where shall I begin? When I arrived at Waterloo--no, I'll go back before that, because I'm anxious you should know everything from the first. The 'first' was about ten days ago. It was the day Mr. Bast came to tea and lost his temper. I was defending him, and Mr. Wilcox became jealous about me, however slightly. I thought it was the involuntary thing, which men can't help any more than we can. You know--at least, I know in my own case--when a man has said to me, 'So-and-so's a pretty girl,' I am seized with a momentary36 sourness against So-and-so, and long to tweak her ear. It's a tiresome37 feeling, but not an important one, and one easily manages it. But it wasn't only this in Mr. Wilcox's case, I gather now."
"Then you love him?"
Margaret considered. "It is wonderful knowing that a real man cares for you," she said. "The mere11 fact of that grows more tremendous. Remember, I've known and liked him steadily38 for nearly three years.
"But loved him?"
Margaret peered into her past. It is pleasant to analyze39 feelings while they are still only feelings, and unembodied in the social fabric40. With her arm round Helen, and her eyes shifting over the view, as if this county or that could reveal the secret of her own heart, she meditated41 honestly, and said, "No."
"But you will?"
"Yes," said Margaret, "of that I'm pretty sure. Indeed, I began the moment he spoke42 to me."
"And have settled to marry him?"
"I had, but am wanting a long talk about it now. What is it against him, Helen? You must try and say."
Helen, in her turn, looked outwards43. "It is ever since Paul," she said finally.
"But what has Mr. Wilcox to do with Paul?"
"But he was there, they were all there that morning when I came down to breakfast, and saw that Paul was frightened--the man who loved me frightened and all his paraphernalia44 fallen, so that I knew it was impossible, because personal relations are the important thing for ever and ever, and not this outer life of telegrams and anger."
She poured the sentence forth45 in one breath, but her sister understood it, because it touched on thoughts that were familiar between them.
"That's foolish. In the first place, I disagree about the outer life. Well, we've often argued that. The real point is that there is the widest gulf46 between my love-making and yours. Yours--was romance; mine will be prose. I'm not running it down--a very good kind of prose, but well considered, well thought out. For instance, I know all Mr. Wilcox's faults. He's afraid of emotion. He cares too much about success, too little about the past. His sympathy lacks poetry, and so isn't sympathy really. I'd even say"--she looked at the shining lagoons--"that, spiritually, he's not as honest as I am. Doesn't that satisfy you?"
"No, it doesn't," said Helen. "It makes me feel worse and worse. You must be mad."
Margaret made a movement of irritation47.
"I don't intend him, or any man or any woman, to be all my life--good heavens, no! There are heaps of things in me that he doesn't, and shall never, understand."
Thus she spoke before the wedding ceremony and the physical union, before the astonishing glass shade had fallen that interposes between married couples and the world. She was to keep her independence more than do most women as yet. Marriage was to alter her fortunes rather than her character, and she was not far wrong in boasting that she understood her future husband. Yet he did alter her character--a little. There was an unforeseen surprise, a cessation of the winds and odours of life, a social pressure that would have her think conjugally48.
"So with him," she continued. "There are heaps of things in him--more especially things that he does--that will always be hidden from me. He has all those public qualities which you so despise and enable all this--" She waved her hand at the landscape, which confirmed anything. "If Wilcoxes hadn't worked and died in England for thousands of years, you and I couldn't sit here without having our throats cut. There would be no trains, no ships to carry us literary people about in, no fields even. Just savagery49. No--perhaps not even that. Without their spirit life might never have moved out of protoplasm. More and more do I refuse to draw my income and sneer50 at those who guarantee it. There are times when it seems to me--"
"And to me, and to all women. So one kissed Paul."
"That's brutal," said Margaret. "Mine is an absolutely different case. I've thought things out."
"It makes no difference thinking things out. They come to the same."
" Rubbish!"
There was a long silence, during which the tide returned into Poole Harbour. "One would lose something," murmured Helen, apparently51 to herself. The water crept over the mud-flats towards the gorse and the blackened heather. Branksea Island lost its immense foreshores, and became a sombre episode of trees. Frome was forced inward towards Dorchester, Stour against Wimborne, Avon towards Salisbury, and over the immense displacement52 the sun presided, leading it to triumph ere he sank to rest. England was alive, throbbing53 through all her estuaries54, crying for joy through the mouths of all her gulls55, and the north wind, with contrary motion, blew stronger against her rising seas. What did it mean? For what end are her fair complexities56, her changes of soil, her sinuous57 coast? Does she belong to those who have moulded her and made her feared by other lands, or to those who have added nothing to her power, but have somehow seen her, seen the whole island at once, lying as a jewel in a silver sea, sailing as a ship of souls, with all the brave world's fleet accompanying her towards eternity58?
收听单词发音 |
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ignoble
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| adj.不光彩的，卑鄙的；可耻的 | |
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cowers
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| v.畏缩，抖缩( cower的第三人称单数 ) | |
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heralding
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| v.预示( herald的现在分词 )；宣布（好或重要） | |
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epitome
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| n.典型，梗概 | |
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swirls
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| n.旋转( swirl的名词复数 )；卷状物；漩涡；尘旋v.旋转，打旋( swirl的第三人称单数 ) | |
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triumphant
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| adj.胜利的，成功的；狂欢的，喜悦的 | |
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swells
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| 增强( swell的第三人称单数 )； 肿胀； （使）凸出； 充满（激情） | |
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geographic
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| adj.地理学的，地理的 | |
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swelling
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| n.肿胀 | |
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contemplate
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| vt.盘算，计议；周密考虑；注视，凝视 | |
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mere
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| adj.纯粹的；仅仅，只不过 | |
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12
aquarium
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| n.水族馆，养鱼池，玻璃缸 | |
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aquariums
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| n.养鱼缸，水族馆( aquarium的名词复数 ) | |
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stink
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| vi.发出恶臭；糟透，招人厌恶；n.恶臭 | |
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tadpoles
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| n.蝌蚪( tadpole的名词复数 ) | |
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puff
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| n.一口(气)；一阵(风)；v.喷气，喘气 | |
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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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assented
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| 同意，赞成( assent的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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ridge
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| n.山脊；鼻梁；分水岭 | |
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lesser
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| adj.次要的，较小的；adv.较小地，较少地 | |
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isle
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| n.小岛，岛 | |
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obsessed
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| adj.心神不宁的,鬼迷心窍的,沉迷的 | |
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despondently
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| adv.沮丧地，意志消沉地 | |
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peril
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| n.(严重的)危险；危险的事物 | |
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liking
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| n.爱好；嗜好；喜欢 | |
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passionately
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| ad.热烈地，激烈地 | |
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patriotic
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| adj.爱国的，有爱国心的 | |
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philosophic
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| adj.哲学的，贤明的 | |
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pony
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| adj.小型的；n.小马 | |
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outskirts
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| n.郊外，郊区 | |
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ascent
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| n.(声望或地位)提高；上升，升高；登高 | |
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sobbed
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| 哭泣，啜泣( sob的过去式和过去分词 )； 哭诉，呜咽地说 | |
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incapable
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| adj.无能力的，不能做某事的 | |
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upwards
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| adv.向上，在更高处...以上 | |
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blurred
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| v.（使）变模糊( blur的过去式和过去分词 )；（使）难以区分；模模糊糊；迷离 | |
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momentary
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| adj.片刻的，瞬息的；短暂的 | |
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tiresome
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| adj.令人疲劳的，令人厌倦的 | |
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steadily
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| adv.稳定地；不变地；持续地 | |
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analyze
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| vt.分析，解析 (=analyse) | |
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fabric
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| n.织物，织品，布；构造，结构，组织 | |
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meditated
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| 深思，沉思，冥想( meditate的过去式和过去分词 )； 内心策划，考虑 | |
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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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outwards
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| adj.外面的，公开的，向外的；adv.向外；n.外形 | |
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paraphernalia
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| n.装备；随身用品 | |
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forth
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| adv.向前；向外，往外 | |
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gulf
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| n.海湾；深渊，鸿沟；分歧，隔阂 | |
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irritation
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| n.激怒，恼怒，生气 | |
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conjugally
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savagery
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| n.野性 | |
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sneer
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| v.轻蔑；嘲笑；n.嘲笑，讥讽的言语 | |
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apparently
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| adv.显然地；表面上，似乎 | |
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displacement
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| n.移置，取代，位移，排水量 | |
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throbbing
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| a. 跳动的,悸动的 | |
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estuaries
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| （江河入海的）河口，河口湾( estuary的名词复数 ) | |
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gulls
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| n.鸥( gull的名词复数 )v.欺骗某人( gull的第三人称单数 ) | |
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complexities
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| 复杂性(complexity的名词复数)； 复杂的事物 | |
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sinuous
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| adj.蜿蜒的，迂回的 | |
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eternity
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| n.不朽，来世；永恒，无穷 | |
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