But on her forehead sits a fire:
She sets her forward countenance1
And leaps into the future chance,
Submitting all things to desire.
—Tennyson, In Memoriam (1850)
Exeter, a hundred years ago, was a great deal farther from the capital than it is today; and it therefore still provided for itself some of the wicked amenities2 all Britain now flocks to London to enjoy. It would be an exaggeration to say that the city had a red light quarter in 1867; for all that it had a distinctly louche area, rather away from the center of the town and the carbolic presence of the Cathedral. It occupied a part of the city that slopes down towards the river, once, in the days (already well past in 1867) when it was a consider-able port, the heart of Exeter life. It consisted of a warren of streets still with many Tudor houses, badly lit, malodorous, teeming3. There were brothels there, and dance halls and gin places; but rather more frequent were variously undone4 girls and women—unmarried mothers, mistresses, a whole popula-tion in retreat from the claustrophobic villages and small towns of Devon. It was notoriously a place to hide, in short; crammed5 with cheap lodging6 houses and inns like that one described by Sarah in Weymouth, safe sanctuaries7 from the stern moral tide that swept elsewhere through the life of the country. Exeter was, in all this, no exception—all the larger provincial8 towns of the time had to find room for this unfortunate army of female wounded in the battle for uni-versal masculine purity.
In a street on the fringe of this area there stood a row of Georgian terrace houses. No doubt they had when built enjoyed a pleasant prospect9 down towards the river. But warehouses10 had gone up and blocked that view; the houses had most visibly lost self-confidence in their natural elegance12. Their woodwork lacked paint, their roofs tiles, the door panels were split. One or two were still private residences; but a central block of five, made shabbily uniform by a blasphemous13 application of dull brown paint to the original brick, declared themselves in a long wooden sign over the central doorway14 of the five to be a hotel—Endicott’s Family Hotel, to be precise. It was owned, and administered (as the wooden sign also informed passers-by) by Mrs. Martha Endicott, whose chief characteristic may be said to have been a sublime15 lack of curiosity about her clientele. She was a thoroughly16 Devon woman; that is, she did not see intending guests, but only the money their stay would represent. She classified those who stood in her little office off the hall accordingly: ten-shillinger, twelve-shillinger, fifteener, and so on ... the prices referring to the charge per week. Those accustomed to being fifteen shillings down every time they touch a bell in a modern hotel must not think that her hotel was cheap; the normal rent for a cottage in those days was a shilling a week, two at most. Very nice little houses in Exeter could have been rented for six or seven shillings; and ten shillings a week for the cheapest room made Endicott’s Family, though without any obvious justification17 beyond the rapacity18 of the proprietress, on the choice side.
It is a gray evening turning into night. Already the two gaslamps on the pavement opposite have been pulled to brightness by the lamplighter’s long pole and illumine the raw brick of the warehouse11 walls. There are several lights on in the rooms of the hotel; brighter on the ground floor, softer above, since as in so many Victorian houses the gaspipes had been considered too expensive to be allowed upstairs, and there oil lamps are still in use. Through one ground-floor window, by the main door, Mrs. Endicott herself can be seen at a table by a small coal fire, poring over her Bible—that is, her accounts ledger19; and if we traverse diagonally up from that window to another in the endmost house to the right, a darkened top-floor window, whose murrey curtains are still not drawn20, we can just see a good example of a twelve-and-sixer—though here I mean the room, not the guest.
It is really two rooms, a small sitting room and an even smaller bedroom, both made out of one decent-sized Geor-gian room. The walls are papered in an indeterminate pattern of minute bistre flowers. There is a worn carpet, a round-topped tripod table covered by a dark green rep cloth, on the corners of which someone had once attempted—evidently the very first attempt—to teach herself embroidery21; two awkward armchairs, overcarved wood garnished22 by a tired puce velvet23, a dark-brown mahogany chest of drawers. On the wall, a foxed print of Charles Wesley, and a very bad watercolor of Exeter Cathedral—received in reluctant part payment, some years before, from a lady in reduced circum-stances.
Apart from a small clatter24 of appliances beneath the tiny barred fire, now a sleeping ruby25, that was the inventory26 of the room. Only one small detail saved it: the white marble surround of the fireplace, which was Georgian, and showed above graceful27 nymphs with cornucopias28 of flowers. Perhaps they had always had a faint air of surprise about their classical faces; they certainly seemed to have it now, to see what awful changes a mere29 hundred years could work in a nation’s culture. They had been born into a pleasant pine-paneled room; now they found themselves in a dingy30 cell.
They must surely, if they had been capable, have breathed a sigh of relief when the door opened and the hitherto absent occupant stood silhouetted31 in the doorway. That strange-cut coat, that black bonnet32, that indigo33 dress with its small white collar ... but Sarah came briskly, almost eagerly in.
This was not her arrival at the Endicott Family. How she had come there—several days before—was simple. The name of the hotel had been a sort of joke at the academy where she studied as a girl in Exeter; the adjective was taken as a noun, and it was supposed that the Endicotts were so multi-plied that they required a whole hotel to themselves.
Sarah had found herself standing34 at the Ship, where the Dorchester omnibuses ended their run. Her box was waiting; had arrived the previous day. A porter asked her where she was to go. She had a moment of panic. No ready name came to her mind except that dim remembered joke. A something about the porter’s face when he heard her destination must have told her she had not chosen the most distinguished35 place to stay in Exeter. But he humped her box without argument and she followed him down through the town to the quarter I have already mentioned. She was not taken by the appear-ance of the place—in her memory (but she had only seen it once) it was homelier, more dignified36, more open ... howev-er, beggars cannot be choosers. It relieved her somewhat that her solitary37 situation evoked38 no comment. She paid over a week’s room money in advance, and that was evidently sufficient recommendation. She had intended to take the cheapest room, but when she found that only one room was offered for ten shillings but one and a half for the extra half-crown, she had changed her mind.
She came swiftly inside the room and shut the door. A match was struck and applied39 to the wick of the lamp, whose milk-glass diffuser, once the “chimney” was replaced, gently repelled40 the night. Then she tore off her bonnet and shook her hair loose in her characteristic way. She lifted the canvas bag she was carrying onto the table, evidently too anxious to unpack41 it to be bothered to take off her coat. Slowly and carefully she lifted out one after the other a row of wrapped objects and placed them on the green cloth. Then she put the basket on the floor, and started to unwrap her purchases.
She began with a Staffordshire teapot with a pretty colored transfer of a cottage by a stream and a pair of lovers (she looked closely at the lovers); and then a Toby jug42, not one of those garish-colored monstrosities of Victorian manufacture, but a delicate little thing in pale mauve and primrose-yellow, the jolly man’s features charmingly lacquered by a soft blue glaze43 (ceramic experts may recognize a Ralph Wood). Those two purchases had cost Sarah ninepence in an old china shop; the Toby was cracked, and was to be recracked in the course of time, as I can testify, having bought it myself a year or two ago for a good deal more than the three pennies Sarah was charged. But unlike her, I fell for the Ralph Wood part of it. She fell for the smile.
Sarah had, though we have never seen it exercised, an aesthetic44 sense; or perhaps it was an emotional sense—a reaction against the dreadful decor in which she found herself. She did not have the least idea of the age of her little Toby. But she had a dim feeling that it had been much used, had passed through many hands ... and was now hers. Was now hers—she set it on the mantelpiece and, still in her coat, stared at it with a childlike absorption, as if not to lose any atom of this first faint taste of ownership.
Her reverie was broken by footsteps in the passage out-side. She threw a brief but intense look at the door. The footsteps passed on. Now Sarah took off her coat and poked45 the fire into life; then set a blackened kettle on the hob. She turned again to her other purchases: a twisted paper of tea, another of sugar, a small metal can of milk she set beside the teapot. Then she took the remaining three parcels and went into the bedroom: a bed, a marble washstand, a small mir-ror, a sad scrap46 of carpet, and that was all.
But she had eyes only for her parcels. The first contained a nightgown. She did not try it against herself, but laid it on the bed; and then unwrapped her next parcel. It was a dark-green shawl, merino fringed with emerald-green silk. This she held in a strange sort of trance—no doubt at its sheer expense, for it cost a good deal more than all her other purchases put together. At last she pensively47 raised and touched its fine soft material against her cheek, staring down at the nightgown; and then in the first truly feminine gesture I have permitted her, moved a tress of her brown-auburn hair forward to lie on the green cloth; a moment later she shook the scarf out—it was wide, more than a yard across, and twisted it round her shoulders. More staring, this time into the mirror; and then she returned to the bed and arranged the scarf round the shoulders of the laid-out night-gown.
She unwrapped the third and smallest parcel; but this was merely a roll of bandage, which, stopping a moment to stare back at the green-and-white arrangement on the bed, she carried back into the other room and put in a drawer of the mahogany chest, just as the kettle lid began to rattle48.
Charles’s purse had contained ten sovereigns, and this alone—never mind what else may have been involved—was enough to transform Sarah’s approach to the external world. Each night since she had first counted those ten golden coins, she had counted them again. Not like a miser49, but as one who goes to see some film again and again—out of an irresistible50 pleasure in the story, in certain images ...
For days, when she first arrived in Exeter, she spent nothing, only the barest amounts, and then from her own pitiful savings51, on sustenance52; but stared at shops: at dresses, at chairs, tables, groceries, wines, a hundred things that had come to seem hostile to her, taunters, mockers, so many two-faced citizens of Lyme, avoiding her eyes when she passed before them and grinning when she had passed be-hind. This was why she had taken so long to buy a teapot. You can make do with a kettle; and her poverty had inured53 her to not having, had so profoundly removed from her the appetite to buy that, like some sailor who has subsisted54 for weeks on half a biscuit a day, she could not eat all the food that was now hers for the asking. Which does not mean she was unhappy; very far from it. She was simply enjoying the first holiday of her adult life.
She made the tea. Small golden flames, reflected, gleamed back from the pot in the hearth55. She seemed waiting in the quiet light and crackle, the firethrown shadows. Perhaps you think she must, to be so changed, so apparently56 equanimous57 and contented58 with her lot, have heard from or of Charles. But not a word. And I no more intend to find out what was going on in her mind as she firegazed than I did on that other occasion when her eyes welled tears in the silent night of Marlborough House. After a while she roused herself and went to the chest of drawers and took from a top compartment59 a teaspoon60 and a cup without a saucer. Having poured her tea at the table, she unwrapped the last of her parcels. It was a small meat pie. Then she began to eat, and without any delicacy61 whatsoever62.
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1
countenance
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| n.脸色，面容；面部表情；vt.支持，赞同 | |
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amenities
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| n.令人愉快的事物；礼仪；礼节；便利设施；礼仪( amenity的名词复数 )；便利设施；（环境等的）舒适；（性情等的）愉快 | |
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teeming
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| adj.丰富的v.充满( teem的现在分词 )；到处都是；（指水、雨等）暴降；倾注 | |
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undone
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| a.未做完的，未完成的 | |
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crammed
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| adj.塞满的，挤满的；大口地吃；快速贪婪地吃v.把…塞满；填入；临时抱佛脚( cram的过去式) | |
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lodging
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| n.寄宿，住所；(大学生的)校外宿舍 | |
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sanctuaries
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| n.避难所( sanctuary的名词复数 )；庇护；圣所；庇护所 | |
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8
provincial
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| adj.省的，地方的；n．外省人，乡下人 | |
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prospect
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| n.前景，前途；景色，视野 | |
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10
warehouses
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| 仓库，货栈( warehouse的名词复数 ) | |
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warehouse
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| n.仓库；vt.存入仓库 | |
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12
elegance
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| n.优雅；优美，雅致；精致，巧妙 | |
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blasphemous
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| adj.亵渎神明的，不敬神的 | |
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doorway
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| n.门口，(喻)入门；门路，途径 | |
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sublime
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| adj.崇高的，伟大的；极度的，不顾后果的 | |
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16
thoroughly
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| adv.完全地，彻底地，十足地 | |
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17
justification
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| n.正当的理由；辩解的理由 | |
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18
rapacity
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| n.贪婪，贪心，劫掠的欲望 | |
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ledger
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| n.总帐，分类帐；帐簿 | |
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drawn
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| v.拖，拉，拔出；adj.憔悴的，紧张的 | |
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21
embroidery
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| n.绣花，刺绣；绣制品 | |
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garnished
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| v.给（上餐桌的食物）加装饰( garnish的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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velvet
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| n.丝绒，天鹅绒；adj.丝绒制的，柔软的 | |
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clatter
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| v./n.(使)发出连续而清脆的撞击声 | |
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25
ruby
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| n.红宝石，红宝石色 | |
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26
inventory
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| n.详细目录，存货清单 | |
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graceful
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| adj.优美的，优雅的；得体的 | |
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28
cornucopias
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| n.丰饶角（象征丰饶的羊角，角内呈现满溢的鲜花、水果等）( cornucopia的名词复数 ) | |
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29
mere
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| adj.纯粹的；仅仅，只不过 | |
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dingy
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| adj.昏暗的，肮脏的 | |
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31
silhouetted
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| 显出轮廓的，显示影像的 | |
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32
bonnet
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| n.无边女帽；童帽 | |
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indigo
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| n.靛青，靛蓝 | |
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34
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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35
distinguished
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| adj.卓越的，杰出的，著名的 | |
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dignified
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| a.可敬的，高贵的 | |
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37
solitary
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| adj.孤独的，独立的，荒凉的；n.隐士 | |
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38
evoked
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| [医]诱发的 | |
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applied
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| adj.应用的；v.应用，适用 | |
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repelled
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| v.击退( repel的过去式和过去分词 )；使厌恶；排斥；推开 | |
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41
unpack
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| vt.打开包裹（或行李），卸货 | |
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42
jug
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| n.(有柄，小口，可盛水等的)大壶，罐，盂 | |
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glaze
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| v.因疲倦、疲劳等指眼睛变得呆滞，毫无表情 | |
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aesthetic
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| adj.美学的，审美的，有美感 | |
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45
poked
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| v.伸出( poke的过去式和过去分词 )；戳出；拨弄；与（某人）性交 | |
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scrap
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| n.碎片；废料；v.废弃，报废 | |
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pensively
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| adv.沉思地，焦虑地 | |
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48
rattle
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| v.飞奔，碰响；激怒；n.碰撞声；拨浪鼓 | |
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miser
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| n.守财奴，吝啬鬼 (adj.miserly) | |
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irresistible
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| adj.非常诱人的，无法拒绝的，无法抗拒的 | |
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51
savings
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| n.存款，储蓄 | |
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52
sustenance
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| n.食物，粮食；生活资料；生计 | |
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inured
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| adj.坚强的，习惯的 | |
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54
subsisted
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| v.（靠很少的钱或食物）维持生活，生存下去( subsist的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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hearth
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| n.壁炉炉床，壁炉地面 | |
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56
apparently
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| adv.显然地；表面上，似乎 | |
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equanimous
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| adj.安静的，镇定的 | |
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contented
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| adj.满意的，安心的，知足的 | |
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compartment
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| n.卧车包房，隔间；分隔的空间 | |
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teaspoon
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| n.茶匙 | |
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61
delicacy
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| n.精致，细微，微妙，精良；美味，佳肴 | |
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whatsoever
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| adv.（用于否定句中以加强语气）任何；pron.无论什么 | |
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