SUN AND MOON, sun and moon, time goes. In Mrs. Smith's acres, crocuses break the crust. Daffodils and narcissi unpack1 their trumpets2. The reviving grass harbors violets, and the lawn is suddenly coarse with dandelions and broad?leaved weeds. Invisible rivulets3 running brokenly make the low land of the estate sing. The flowerbeds, bordered with bricks buried diagonally, are pierced by dull red spikes4 that will be peonies, and the earth itself, scumbled, stone?flecked, horny, raggedly5 patched with damp and dry, looks like the oldest and smells like the newest thing under Heaven. The shaggy golden suds of blooming forsythia glow through the smoke that fogs the garden while Rabbit burns rakings of crumpled6 stalks, perished grass, oak leaves shed in the dark privacy of winter, and rosebush prunings that cling together in infuriating ankle?clawing clumps7. These brush piles, ignited soon after he arrives, crusty?eyed and tasting coffee, in the midst of the webs of dew, are still damply smoldering8 when he leaves, making ghosts in the night behind him as his footsteps crunch9 on the spalls of the Smith driveway. All the way back to Brewer10 in the bus he smells the warm ashes.
Funny, for these two months he never has to cut his fingernails. He lops, lifts, digs. He plants annuals, packets the old lady gives him ? nasturtiums, poppies, sweet peas, petunias11. He loves folding the hoed ridge12 of crumbs13 of soil over the seeds. Sealed, they cease to be his. The simplicity14. Getting rid of something by giving it to itself. God Himself folded into the tiny adamant15 structure, Self?destined16 to a succession of explosions, the great slow gathering17 out of water and air and silicon18: this is felt without words in the turn of the round hoe?handle in his palms.
Now, after the magnolias have lost their grip but before any but the leaves of the maple19 have the breadth to cast much shade, the cherry trees and crabapples and, in a remote corner of the grounds, a solitary20 plum tree ball with bloom, a whiteness the black limbs seem to gather from the blowing clouds and after a moment hurl21 away, so the reviving grass is bleached22 by an astonishing storm of confetti. Fragrant23 of gasoline, the power mower24 chews the petals25; the lawn digests them. The lilac bushes bloom by the fallen tennis?court fences. Birds come to the birdbath. Busy one morning with a crescent?shaped edger, Harry26 is caught in a tide of perfume, for behind him the breeze has turned and washes down through a thick sloping bank of acrid27 lily?of?the?valley leaves in which on that warm night a thousand bells have ripened29, the high ones on the stem still the faint sherbet green of cantaloupe rind. Apple trees and pear trees. Tulips. Those ugly purple tatters the iris30. And at last, prefaced by azaleas, the rhododendrons themselves, with a profusion31 increasing through the last week of May. Rabbit has waited all spring for this crowning. The bushes puzzled him, they were so big, almost trees, some twice his height, and there seemed so many. They were planted all along the edges of the towering droop32?limbed hemlocks33 that sheltered the place, and in the acres sheltered there were dozens of great rectangular clumps like loaves ofporous green bread. The bushes were evergreen34. With their zigzag35 branches and long oval leaves fingering in every direction they seemed to belong to a different climate, to a different land, whose gravity pulled softer than this one. When the first blooms came they were like the single big flower Oriental temptresses wear on the, sides of their heads on the covers of the paperback36 spy stories Ruth reads. But when the hemispheres of blossom appear in crowds they remind him of nothing so much as the hats worn by cheap girls to church on Easter. Harry has often wanted and never had a girl like that, a little Catholic from a shabby house, dressed in flashy bargain clothes. In the swarthy leaves under the pert soft cap of fivepetaled flowers he can fancy her face; he can almost smell her perfume. He draws within an inch of the massed petals. Odorless, but each individual flower wears on the roof of its mouth two fans of freckles37 where the anthers tap.
At this climax38 of her late husband's garden, Mrs. Smith comes out of the house and on Rabbit's arm walks deep into the rhododendron plantation39. A woman once of some height, she is bent40 small, and the lingering strands41 of black look dirty in her white hair. She carries a cane42, but in forgetfulness, perhaps, hangs it over her forearm and totters43 along with it dangling44 loose like an outlandish bracelet45. Her method of gripping her gardener is this: he crooks46 his right arm, pointing his elbow toward her shoulder, and she shakily brings her left forearm up within his and bears down heavily on his wrist with her lumpish and freckled47 fingers. Her hold is like that of a vine to a wall; one good pull will destroy it, but otherwise it will survive all weathers. He feels her body jolt48 with every step, and every word twitches49 her head. Not that the effort of speaking is so great; it is the need for emphasis that seizes her, wrinkling the arch of her nose fiercely, making her lips snarl50 above her snaggle?teeth with a comic over?expressiveness51 that is self?conscious, like the funny faces made by a thirteen?year?old girl in constant confession52 of the fact that she is not beautiful. She sharply tips her head to look up at Harry, and in tiny brown sockets53 afflicted54 by creases55 like so many drawstrings, her cracked blue eyes bulge56 frantically57 with captive life as she speaks: "Oh, I don't like Mrs. R. S. Holford; she always looks so washed?out and flossy to me. Horace loved those salmon58 colors so; I'd say to him, `If I want red, give me red; a fat red rose. And if I want white, give me white, a tall white lily; and don't bother me with all these inbetweens and would?be?pinks and almost?purples that don't know what their mind is. Rhody's a mealymouthed plant,' I'd say to Horace, `she does have a brain, so she gives you some of everything,' just to tease him. But in truth I meant it." The thought seems to strike her. She stops dead on the path of grass and her eyes, the irises59 a kind of broken?glass white within rings of persisting blue, roll nervously60, looking from one side of him to the other. "In truth I meant every word of it. I'm a farmer's daughter, Mr. Angstrom, and I would have rather seen this land gone under to alfalfa. I'd say to him, `Why don't you plant buckwheat if you must fuss in the ground? Now there's a real crop. You raise the wheat, I'll bake the bread.' I would have, too. `What do we want with all these corsages that after they're gone we have to look at their homely61 leaves all the year round?' I'd say to him, `What pretty girl are you growing these for?' He was younger than 1, that's why I took advantage of my right to tease him. I won't say by how much. What are we standing62 here for? Old body like mine, stand still in one place you'll stick fast." She jabs the cane into the grass, the signal for him to extend his arm. They move on down the alley28 of bloom. "Never thought I'd outlive him. That was his weakness. Come in out of the garden, he'd be forever sitting. A farmer's daughter never learns the meaning of sit."
Her unsteady touch on his wrist bobs like the swaying tops of the tall hemlocks. He associates these trees with forbidden estates; it gives him pleasure to be within their protection. "Ali. Now here is a plant." They stop at a corner and she lifts her dangling cane toward a small rhododendron clothed in a pink of penetrating63 purity. "Horace's Bianchi," Mrs. Smith says. "The only rhody except some of the whites, I forget their names, silly names anyway, that says what it means. It's the only true pink there is. When Horace first got it, he set it among the other so?called pinks and it showed them up as just so muddy he tore them right out and backed the Bianchi with all crimsons64. The crimsons are by, aren't they? Is today June?" Her wild eyes fix him crazily and her grip tightens65.
"Not quite. Memorial Day's next Saturday."
"Oh, I remember so well the day we got that silly plant. Hot! We drove to New York City to take it off the boat and put it in the back seat of the Packard like a favorite aunt or some such thing. It came in a big blue wooden tub of earth. There was only one nursery in England that carried the stock and it cost two hundred dollars to ship. A man came down to the hold to water it every day. Hot, and all that vile66 traffic through Jersey67 City and Trenton and this scrawny bush sitting in its blue tub in the back seat like a prince of the realm! There weren't any of these turnpikes then so it was a good six?hour trip to New York. The middle of the Depression and it looked like everybody in the world owned an automobile68. You came over the Delaware at Burlington. This was before the war. I don't suppose when I say `the war' you know which one I mean. You probably think of that Korean thing as the war."
"No, I think of the war as World War Two."
"So do I! So do I! Do you really remember it?"
"Sure. I mean I was pretty old. I flattened69 tin cans and bought War Stamps and we got awards at grade school."
"Our son was killed."
"Oh he was old, he was old. He was almost forty. They made him an officer right off."
"Still -"
"I know. You think of only young men being killed."
"Yeah, you do."
"It was a good war. It wasn't like the first. It was ours to win, and we won it. All wars are hateful things, but that one was satisfying to win." She gestures with her cane again at the pink plant. "The day we came over from the boat docks it of course wasn't in flower that late in the summer so it looked just like foolishness to me, to have it riding in the back seat like a" ?she realizes she is repeating herself, falters71, but goes on ? "like a prince of the realm." In her almost transparent72 blue eyes there is pinned this little sharpness watching his face to see if he smiles at her addlement. Seeing nothing, she snaps roughly, "It's the only one."
"The only Bianchi?"
"Yes! Right! There's not another in the United States. There's not another good pink from the Golden Gate to ? wherever. The Brooklyn Bridge, I suppose they say. All the truly good pink in the nation is right here under our eyes. A florist73 from Lancaster took some cuttings but they died. Probably smothered74 them in lime. Stupid man. A Greek."
She claws at his arm and moves on more heavily and rapidly. The sun is high and she probably feels a need for the house. Bees swim in the foliage75; hidden birds scold. The tide of leaf has overtaken the tide ofblossom, and a furtively76 bitter odor breathes from the fresh walls of green. Maples77, poplars, oaks, elms, and horsechestnut trees compose a thin forest that runs, at a varying depth, along the far property?line. In the damp shaded fringe between the lawn and this copse, the rhododendrons are still putting forth78, but the unsheltered clumps in the center of the lawn have already dropped petals, in pale neat lines, along the edge of the grass paths. "1° don't like it, I don't like it," Mrs. Smith says, hobbling with Rabbit down past the overblown blooms. "I appreciate the beauty but I'd rather see alfalfa. A woman ? I don't know why it should vex79 me so ? Horace used to encourage the neighbors to come in and see the place in blooming time, he was like a child in many ways. This woman, Mrs. Foster, from down the hill in a little brick shack80 with a metal cat climbing up the shutters81, used to invariably say, turn to me with lipstick82 halfway83 up to her nose and say" ? she mimics84 a too?sweet voice with a spirited spite that shakes her frame ? " `My, Mrs. Smith, this must be what Heaven is like!' One year I said to her, I couldn't hold my tongue any longer, I said, `Well if I'm driving six miles back and forth to St. John's Episcopal Church every Sunday just to get into another splash of rhodies, I might as well save the mileage85 because I don't want to go.' Now wasn't that a dreadful thing for an old sinner to say?"
"Oh, I don't know -"
"To this poor woman who was only trying to be civil? Hadn't a bean of a brain in her head, of course; painting her face like a young fool. She's passed on now, poor soul; Alma Foster passed on two or three winters back. Now she knows the truth and I don't."
"Well, maybe what looks like rhododendrons to her will look like alfalfa to you."
"Heh! Eh?HA! Exactly! Exactly! You know, Mr. Angstrom, it's such a pleasure =" She stops them in the walk and caresses86 his forearm awkwardly; in the sunshine the tiny tan landscape of her face tips up toward his, and in her gaze, beneath the fumbling87 girlish flirtatiousness and the watery88 wander, there glitters an old acuteness, so that Rabbit uneasily standing there feels a stab of the penetrating force that drove Mr. Smith out to the brainless flowers. "You and I, we think alike. Don't we? Now don't we?"
收听单词发音 |
1
unpack
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| vt.打开包裹（或行李），卸货 | |
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2
trumpets
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| 喇叭( trumpet的名词复数 )； 小号； 喇叭形物； （尤指）绽开的水仙花 | |
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rivulets
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| n.小河，小溪( rivulet的名词复数 ) | |
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spikes
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| n.穗( spike的名词复数 )；跑鞋；（防滑）鞋钉；尖状物v.加烈酒于( spike的第三人称单数 )；偷偷地给某人的饮料加入（更多）酒精（ 或药物）；把尖状物钉入；打乱某人的计划 | |
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raggedly
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| 破烂地，粗糙地 | |
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crumpled
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| adj. 弯扭的, 变皱的 动词crumple的过去式和过去分词形式 | |
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clumps
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| n.（树、灌木、植物等的）丛、簇( clump的名词复数 )；（土、泥等）团；块；笨重的脚步声v.（树、灌木、植物等的）丛、簇( clump的第三人称单数 )；（土、泥等）团；块；笨重的脚步声 | |
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smoldering
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| v.用文火焖烧，熏烧，慢燃( smolder的现在分词 ) | |
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crunch
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| n.关键时刻；艰难局面；v.发出碎裂声 | |
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brewer
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| n. 啤酒制造者 | |
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petunias
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| n.矮牵牛（花）( petunia的名词复数 ) | |
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ridge
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| n.山脊；鼻梁；分水岭 | |
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crumbs
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| int. (表示惊讶)哎呀 n. 碎屑 名词crumb的复数形式 | |
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simplicity
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| n.简单，简易；朴素；直率，单纯 | |
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adamant
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| adj.坚硬的，固执的 | |
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destined
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| adj.命中注定的；(for)以…为目的地的 | |
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gathering
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| n.集会，聚会，聚集 | |
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silicon
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| n.硅(旧名矽) | |
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maple
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| n.槭树，枫树，槭木 | |
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solitary
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| adj.孤独的，独立的，荒凉的；n.隐士 | |
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21
hurl
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| vt.猛投，力掷，声叫骂 | |
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bleached
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| 漂白的，晒白的，颜色变浅的 | |
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23
fragrant
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| adj.芬香的，馥郁的，愉快的 | |
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24
mower
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| n.割草机 | |
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petals
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| n.花瓣( petal的名词复数 ) | |
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26
harry
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| vt.掠夺，蹂躏，使苦恼 | |
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acrid
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| adj.辛辣的，尖刻的，刻薄的 | |
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alley
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| n.小巷，胡同；小径，小路 | |
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ripened
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| v.成熟，使熟( ripen的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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iris
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| n.虹膜，彩虹 | |
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profusion
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| n.挥霍；丰富 | |
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32
droop
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| v.低垂，下垂；凋萎，萎靡 | |
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33
hemlocks
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| 由毒芹提取的毒药( hemlock的名词复数 ) | |
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evergreen
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| n.常青树；adj.四季常青的 | |
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zigzag
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| n.曲折，之字形；adj.曲折的，锯齿形的；adv.曲折地，成锯齿形地；vt.使曲折；vi.曲折前行 | |
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paperback
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| n.平装本，简装本 | |
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freckles
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| n.雀斑，斑点( freckle的名词复数 ) | |
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climax
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| n.顶点；高潮；v.(使)达到顶点 | |
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plantation
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| n.种植园，大农场 | |
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bent
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| n.爱好，癖好；adj.弯的；决心的，一心的 | |
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strands
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| n.（线、绳、金属线、毛发等的）股( strand的名词复数 )；缕；海洋、湖或河的)岸；（观点、计划、故事等的）部份v.使滞留，使搁浅( strand的第三人称单数 ) | |
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42
cane
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| n.手杖，细长的茎，藤条；v.以杖击，以藤编制的 | |
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43
totters
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| v.走得或动得不稳( totter的第三人称单数 )；踉跄；蹒跚；摇摇欲坠 | |
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44
dangling
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| 悬吊着( dangle的现在分词 )； 摆动不定； 用某事物诱惑…； 吊胃口 | |
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45
bracelet
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| n.手镯，臂镯 | |
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46
crooks
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| n.骗子( crook的名词复数 )；罪犯；弯曲部分；（牧羊人或主教用的）弯拐杖v.弯成钩形( crook的第三人称单数 ) | |
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47
freckled
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| adj.雀斑；斑点；晒斑；（使）生雀斑v.雀斑，斑点( freckle的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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48
jolt
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| v.（使）摇动，（使）震动，（使）颠簸 | |
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49
twitches
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| n.（使）抽动， （使）颤动， （使）抽搐( twitch的名词复数 ) | |
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50
snarl
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| v.吼叫，怒骂，纠缠，混乱；n.混乱，缠结，咆哮 | |
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51
expressiveness
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| n.富有表现力 | |
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52
confession
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| n.自白，供认，承认 | |
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53
sockets
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| n.套接字，使应用程序能够读写与收发通讯协定(protocol)与资料的程序( Socket的名词复数 )；孔( socket的名词复数 )；（电器上的）插口；托座；凹穴 | |
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54
afflicted
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| 使受痛苦，折磨( afflict的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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creases
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| （使…）起折痕，弄皱( crease的第三人称单数 )； （皮肤）皱起，使起皱纹 | |
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56
bulge
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| n.突出，膨胀，激增；vt.突出，膨胀 | |
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57
frantically
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| ad.发狂地, 发疯地 | |
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58
salmon
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| n.鲑，大马哈鱼，橙红色的 | |
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59
irises
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| n.虹( iris的名词复数 )；虹膜；虹彩；鸢尾（花） | |
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60
nervously
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| adv.神情激动地，不安地 | |
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61
homely
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| adj.家常的，简朴的；不漂亮的 | |
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62
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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63
penetrating
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| adj.（声音）响亮的，尖锐的adj.（气味）刺激的adj.（思想）敏锐的，有洞察力的 | |
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64
crimsons
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| 变为深红色（crimson的第三人称单数形式） | |
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65
tightens
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| 收紧( tighten的第三人称单数 )； （使）变紧； （使）绷紧； 加紧 | |
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66
vile
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| adj.卑鄙的，可耻的，邪恶的；坏透的 | |
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67
jersey
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| n.运动衫 | |
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68
automobile
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| n.汽车，机动车 | |
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69
flattened
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| [医]（水）平扁的，弄平的 | |
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70
gee
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| n.马；int.向右！前进！，惊讶时所发声音；v.向右转 | |
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71
falters
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| （嗓音）颤抖( falter的第三人称单数 )； 支吾其词； 蹒跚； 摇晃 | |
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72
transparent
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| adj.明显的，无疑的；透明的 | |
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73
florist
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| n.花商；种花者 | |
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74
smothered
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| （使）窒息， （使）透不过气( smother的过去式和过去分词 )； 覆盖； 忍住； 抑制 | |
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75
foliage
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| n.叶子，树叶，簇叶 | |
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76
furtively
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| adv. 偷偷地, 暗中地 | |
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77
maples
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| 槭树，枫树( maple的名词复数 )； 槭木 | |
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78
forth
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| adv.向前；向外，往外 | |
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79
vex
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| vt.使烦恼，使苦恼 | |
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80
shack
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| adj.简陋的小屋，窝棚 | |
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81
shutters
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| 百叶窗( shutter的名词复数 )； （照相机的）快门 | |
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82
lipstick
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| n.口红，唇膏 | |
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83
halfway
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| adj.中途的，不彻底的，部分的；adv.半路地，在中途，在半途 | |
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84
mimics
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| n.模仿名人言行的娱乐演员，滑稽剧演员( mimic的名词复数 )；善于模仿的人或物v.（尤指为了逗乐而）模仿( mimic的第三人称单数 )；酷似 | |
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85
mileage
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| n.里程，英里数；好处，利润 | |
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86
caresses
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| 爱抚，抚摸( caress的名词复数 ) | |
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87
fumbling
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| n. 摸索,漏接 v. 摸索,摸弄,笨拙的处理 | |
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88
watery
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| adj.有水的，水汪汪的；湿的，湿润的 | |
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