Among some startling beliefs entertained by Chicot was one that “Michié St. Pierre et Michié St. Paul” had created him. Of “Michié bon Dieu” he held his own private 200opinion, and not a too flattering one at that. This fantastic notion concerning the origin of his being he owed to the early teaching of his young master, a lax believer, and a great farceur in his day. Chicot had once been thrashed by a robust4 young Irish priest for expressing his religious views, and at another time knifed by a Sicilian. So he had come to hold his peace upon that subject.
Upon another theme he talked freely and harped5 continuously. For years he had tried to convince his associates that his master had left a progeny6, rich, cultured, powerful, and numerous beyond belief. This prosperous race of beings inhabited the most imposing7 mansions8 in the city of New Orleans. Men of note and position, whose names were familiar to the public, he swore were grandchildren, great-grandchildren, or, less frequently, distant relatives of his master, long deceased, Ladies who came to the market in carriages, or whose elegance10 of attire11 attracted the attention and admiration12 of the fishwomen, were all des ’tites cousines to his former master, Jean Boisduré. He never looked for recognition from any of these superior beings, but 201delighted to discourse13 by the hour upon their dignity and pride of birth and wealth.
Chicot always carried an old gunny-sack, and into this went his earnings14. He cleaned stalls at the market, scaled fish, and did many odd offices for the itinerant15 merchants, who usually paid in trade for his service. Occasionally he saw the color of silver and got his clutch upon a coin, but he accepted anything, and seldom made terms. He was glad to get a handkerchief from the Hebrew, and grateful if the Choctaws would trade him a bottle of filé it. The butcher flung him a soup bone, and the fishmonger a few crabs16 or a paper bag of shrimps17. It was the big mulatresse, vendeuse de café, who cared for his inner man.
Once Chicot was accused by a shoe-vender of attempting to steal a pair of ladies’ shoes. He declared he was only examining them. The clamor raised in the market was terrific. Young Dagoes assembled and squealed18 like rats; a couple of Gascon butchers bellowed19 like bulls. Matteo’s wife shook her fist in the accuser’s face and called him incomprehensible names. The Choctaw women, where they 202squatted, turned their slow eyes in the direction of the fray20, taking no further notice; while a policeman jerked Chicot around by the puffed sleeve and brandished22 a club. It was a narrow escape.
Nobody knew where Chicot lived. A man—even a nég créol—who lives among the reeds and willows23 of Bayou St. John, in a deserted24 chicken-coop constructed chiefly of tarred paper, is not going to boast of his habitation or to invite attention to his domestic appointments. When, after market hours, he vanished in the direction of St. Philip street, limping, seemingly bent25 under the weight of his gunny-bag, it was like the disappearance26 from the stage of some petty actor whom the audience does not follow in imagination beyond the wings, or think of till his return in another scene.
There was one to whom Chicot’s coming or going meant more than this. In la maison grise they called her La Chouette, for no earthly reason unless that she perched high under the roof of the old rookery and scolded in shrill27 sudden outbursts. Forty or fifty years before, when for a little while she acted minor28 203parts with a company of French players (an escapade that had brought her grandmother to the grave), she was known as Mademoiselle de Montallaine. Seventy-five years before she had been christened Aglaé Boisduré.
No matter at what hour the old negro appeared at her threshold, Mamzelle Aglaé always kept him waiting till she finished her prayers. She opened the door for him and silently motioned him to a seat, returning to prostrate29 herself upon her knees before a crucifix, and a shell filled with holy water that stood on a small table; it represented in her imagination an altar. Chicot knew that she did it to aggravate30 him; he was convinced that she timed her devotions to begin when she heard his footsteps on the stairs. He would sit with sullen31 eyes contemplating32 her long, spare, poorly clad figure as she knelt and read from her book or finished her prayers. Bitter was the religious warfare33 that had raged for years between them, and Mamzelle Aglaé had grown, on her side, as intolerant as Chicot. She had come to hold St. Peter and St. Paul in such utter detestation 204that she had cut their pictures out of her prayer-book.
Then Mamzelle Aglaé pretended not to care what Chicot had in his bag. He drew forth34 a small hunk of beef and laid it in her basket that stood on the bare floor. She looked from the corner of her eye, and went on dusting the table. He brought out a handful of potatoes, some pieces of sliced fish, a few herbs, a yard of calico, and a small pat of butter wrapped in lettuce35 leaves. He was proud of the butter, and wanted her to notice it. He held it out and asked her for something to put it on. She handed him a saucer, and looked indifferent and resigned, with lifted eyebrows37.
“Pas d’ sucre, Nég?”
Chicot shook his head and scratched it, and looked like a black picture of distress38 and mortification39. No sugar! But tomorrow he would get a pinch here and a pinch there, and would bring as much as a cupful.
Mamzelle Aglaé then sat down, and talked to Chicot uninterruptedly and confidentially40. She complained bitterly, and it was all about a pain that lodged41 in her leg; that crept and acted like a live, stinging serpent, twining 205about her waist and up her spine42, and coiling round the shoulder-blade. And then les rheumatismes in her fingers! He could see for himself how they were knotted. She could not bend them; she could hold nothing in her hands, and had let a saucer fall that morning and broken it in pieces. And if she were to tell him that she had slept a wink44 through the night, she would be a liar9, deserving of perdition. She had sat at the window la nuit blanche, hearing the hours strike and the market-wagons rumble45. Chicot nodded, and kept up a running fire of sympathetic comment and suggestive remedies for rheumatism43 and insomnia46: herbs, or tisanes, or grigris, or all three. As if he knew! There was Purgatory47 Mary, a perambulating soul whose office in life was to pray for the shades in purgatory,—she had brought Mamzelle Aglaé a bottle of eau de Lourdes, but so little of it! She might have kept her water of Lourdes, for all the good it did,—a drop! Not so much as would cure a fly or a mosquito! Mamzelle Aglaé was going to show Purgatory Mary the door when she came again, not only because of her avarice48 with the Lourdes water, but, beside 206that, she brought in on her feet dirt that could only be removed with a shovel49 after she left.
And Mamzelle Aglaé wanted to inform Chicot that there would be slaughter50 and bloodshed in la maison grise if the people below stairs did not mend their ways. She was convinced that they lived for no other purpose than to torture and molest51 her. The woman kept a bucket of dirty water constantly on the landing with the hope of Mamzelle Aglaé falling over it or into it. And she knew that the children were instructed to gather in the hall and on the stairway, and scream and make a noise and jump up and down like galloping52 horses, with the intention of driving her to suicide. Chicot should notify the policeman on the beat, and have them arrested, if possible, and thrust into the parish prison, where they belonged.
Chicot would have been extremely alarmed if he had ever chanced to find Mamzelle Aglaé in an uncomplaining mood. It never occurred to him that she might be otherwise. He felt that she had a right to quarrel with fate, if ever mortal had. Her poverty was a 207disgrace, and he hung his head before it and felt ashamed.
One day he found Mamzelle Aglaé stretched on the bed, with her head tied up in a handkerchief. Her sole complaint that day was, “Aïe—aïe—aïe! Aïe—aïe—aïe!” uttered with every breath. He had seen her so before, especially when the weather was damp.
“Vous pas bézouin tisane, Mamzelle Aglaé? Vous pas veux mo cri gagni docteur?”
She desired nothing. “Aïe—aïe—aïe!”
He emptied his bag very quietly, so as not to disturb her; and he wanted to stay there with her and lie down on the floor in case she needed him, but the woman from below had come up. She was an Irishwoman with rolled sleeves.
“It’s a shtout shtick I’m afther giving her, Nég, and she do but knock on the flure it’s me or Janie or wan36 of us that’ll be hearing her.”
“You too good, Brigitte. Aïe—aïe—aïe! Une goutte d’eau sucré, Nég! That Purg’tory Marie,—you see hair, ma bonne Brigitte, you tell hair go say li’le prayer là-bas au Cathédral. Aïe—aïe—aïe!”
208Nég could hear her lamentation53 as he descended54 the stairs. It followed him as he limped his way through the city streets, and seemed part of the city’s noise; he could hear it in the rumble of wheels and jangle of car-*bells, and in the voices of those passing by.
He stopped at Mimotte the Voudou’s shanty55 and bought a grigri—a cheap one for fifteen cents. Mimotte held her charms at all prices. This he intended to introduce next day into Mamzelle Anglaé’s room,—somewhere about the altar,—to the confusion and discomfort56 of “Michié bon Dieu,” who persistently57 declined to concern himself with the welfare of a Boisduré.
At night, among the reeds on the bayou, Chicot could still hear the woman’s wail58, mingled59 now with the croaking60 of the frogs. If he could have been convinced that giving up his life down there in the water would in any way have bettered her condition, he would not have hesitated to sacrifice the remnant of his existence that was wholly devoted61 to her. He lived but to serve her. He did not know it himself; but Chicot knew so little, and that little in such a distorted way! He could 209scarcely have been expected, even in his most lucid62 moments, to give himself over to self-analysis.
Chicot gathered an uncommon63 amount of dainties at market the following day. He had to work hard, and scheme and whine64 a little; but he got hold of an orange and a lump of ice and a chou-fleur. He did not drink his cup of café au lait, but asked Mimi Lambeau to put it in the little new tin pail that the Hebrew notion-vender had just given him in exchange for a mess of shrimps. This time, however, Chicot had his trouble for nothing. When he reached the upper room of la maison grise, it was to find that Mamzelle Aglaé had died during the night. He set his bag down in the middle of the floor, and stood shaking, and whined65 low like a dog in pain.
Everything had been done. The Irishwoman had gone for the doctor, and Purgatory Mary had summoned a priest. Furthermore, the woman had arranged Mamzelle Aglaé decently. She had covered the table with a white cloth, and had placed it at the head of the bed, with the crucifix and two lighted candles in silver candlesticks upon it; the little 210bit of ornamentation brightened and embellished66 the poor room. Purgatory Mary, dressed in shabby black, fat and breathing hard, sat reading half audibly from a prayer-book. She was watching the dead and the silver candlesticks, which she had borrowed from a benevolent67 society, and for which she held herself responsible. A young man was just leaving,—a reporter snuffing the air for items, who had scented68 one up there in the top room of la maison grise.
All the morning Janie had been escorting a procession of street Arabs up and down the stairs to view the remains69. One of them—a little girl, who had had her face washed and had made a species of toilet for the occasion—refused to be dragged away. She stayed seated as if at an entertainment, fascinated alternately by the long, still figure of Mamzelle Aglaé, the mumbling71 lips of Purgatory Mary, and the silver candlesticks.
“Will ye get down on yer knees, man, and say a prayer for the dead!” commanded the woman.
But Chicot only shook his head, and refused to obey. He approached the bed, and 211laid a little black paw for a moment on the stiffened72 body of Mamzelle Aglaé. There was nothing for him to do here. He picked up his old ragged70 hat and his bag and went away.
“The black h’athen!” the woman muttered. “Shut the dure, child.”
The little girl slid down from her chair, and went on tiptoe to shut the door which Chicot had left open. Having resumed her seat, she fastened her eyes upon Purgatory Mary’s heaving chest.
“You, Chicot!” cried Matteo’s wife the next morning. “My man, he read in paper ’bout woman name’ Boisduré, use’ b’long to big-a famny. She die roun’ on St. Philip—po’, same-a like church rat. It’s any them Boisdurés you alla talk ’bout?”
Chicot shook his head in slow but emphatic73 denial. No, indeed, the woman was not of kin21 to his Boisdurés. He surely had told Matteo’s wife often enough—how many times did he have to repeat it!—of their wealth, their social standing74. It was doubtless some Boisduré of les Attakapas; it was none of his.
212The next day there was a small funeral procession passing a little distance away,—a hearse and a carriage or two. There was the priest who had attended Mamzelle Aglaé, and a benevolent Creole gentleman whose father had known the Boisdurés in his youth. There was a couple of player-folk, who, having got wind of the story, had thrust their hands into their pockets.
“Look, Chicot!” cried Matteo’s wife. “Yonda go the fune’al. Mus-a be that-a Boisduré woman we talken ’bout yesaday.”
But Chicot paid no heed75. What was to him the funeral of a woman who had died in St. Philip street? He did not even turn his head in the direction of the moving procession. He went on scaling his red-snapper.
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收听单词发音
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1
lame
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| adj.跛的，(辩解、论据等)无说服力的 | |
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bestow
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| v.把…赠与，把…授予；花费 | |
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puffed
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| adj.疏松的v.使喷出( puff的过去式和过去分词 )；喷着汽（或烟）移动；吹嘘；吹捧 | |
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robust
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| adj.强壮的，强健的，粗野的，需要体力的，浓的 | |
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5
harped
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| vi.弹竖琴（harp的过去式与过去分词形式） | |
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progeny
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| n.后代，子孙；结果 | |
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imposing
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| adj.使人难忘的，壮丽的，堂皇的，雄伟的 | |
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mansions
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| n.宅第，公馆，大厦( mansion的名词复数 ) | |
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liar
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| n.说谎的人 | |
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elegance
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| n.优雅；优美，雅致；精致，巧妙 | |
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attire
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| v.穿衣，装扮[同]array；n.衣着；盛装 | |
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12
admiration
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| n.钦佩，赞美，羡慕 | |
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13
discourse
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| n.论文，演说；谈话；话语；vi.讲述，著述 | |
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14
earnings
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| n.工资收人；利润，利益，所得 | |
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itinerant
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| adj.巡回的；流动的 | |
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16
crabs
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| n.蟹( crab的名词复数 )；阴虱寄生病；蟹肉v.捕蟹( crab的第三人称单数 ) | |
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shrimps
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| n.虾，小虾( shrimp的名词复数 )；矮小的人 | |
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squealed
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| v.长声尖叫，用长而尖锐的声音说( squeal的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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19
bellowed
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| v.发出吼叫声，咆哮（尤指因痛苦）( bellow的过去式和过去分词 )；（愤怒地）说出（某事），大叫 | |
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fray
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| v.争吵；打斗；磨损，磨破；n.吵架；打斗 | |
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21
kin
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| n.家族，亲属，血缘关系；adj.亲属关系的，同类的 | |
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22
brandished
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| v.挥舞( brandish的过去式和过去分词 )；炫耀 | |
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willows
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| n.柳树( willow的名词复数 )；柳木 | |
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deserted
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| adj.荒芜的，荒废的，无人的，被遗弃的 | |
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25
bent
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| n.爱好，癖好；adj.弯的；决心的，一心的 | |
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26
disappearance
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| n.消失，消散，失踪 | |
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shrill
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| adj.尖声的；刺耳的；v尖叫 | |
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minor
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| adj.较小(少)的，较次要的；n.辅修学科；vi.辅修 | |
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prostrate
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| v.拜倒，平卧，衰竭；adj.拜倒的，平卧的，衰竭的 | |
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aggravate
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| vt.加重(剧)，使恶化；激怒，使恼火 | |
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sullen
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| adj.愠怒的，闷闷不乐的，(天气等)阴沉的 | |
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contemplating
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| 深思，细想，仔细考虑( contemplate的现在分词 )； 注视，凝视； 考虑接受（发生某事的可能性）； 深思熟虑，沉思，苦思冥想 | |
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warfare
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| n.战争(状态)；斗争；冲突 | |
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forth
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| adv.向前；向外，往外 | |
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lettuce
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| n.莴苣；生菜 | |
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wan
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| (wide area network)广域网 | |
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eyebrows
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| 眉毛( eyebrow的名词复数 ) | |
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distress
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| n.苦恼，痛苦，不舒适；不幸；vt.使悲痛 | |
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mortification
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| n.耻辱，屈辱 | |
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confidentially
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| ad.秘密地，悄悄地 | |
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41
lodged
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| v.存放( lodge的过去式和过去分词 )；暂住；埋入；（权利、权威等）归属 | |
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spine
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| n.脊柱，脊椎；(动植物的)刺；书脊 | |
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43
rheumatism
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| n.风湿病 | |
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44
wink
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| n.眨眼，使眼色，瞬间；v.眨眼，使眼色，闪烁 | |
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45
rumble
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| n.隆隆声；吵嚷；v.隆隆响；低沉地说 | |
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46
insomnia
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| n.失眠，失眠症 | |
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47
purgatory
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| n.炼狱；苦难；adj.净化的，清洗的 | |
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48
avarice
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| n.贪婪；贪心 | |
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49
shovel
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| n.铁锨，铲子，一铲之量；v.铲，铲出 | |
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50
slaughter
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| n.屠杀，屠宰；vt.屠杀，宰杀 | |
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51
molest
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| vt.骚扰，干扰，调戏 | |
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52
galloping
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| adj. 飞驰的, 急性的 动词gallop的现在分词形式 | |
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53
lamentation
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| n.悲叹，哀悼 | |
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54
descended
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| a.为...后裔的，出身于...的 | |
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55
shanty
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| n.小屋，棚屋；船工号子 | |
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56
discomfort
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| n.不舒服，不安，难过，困难，不方便 | |
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57
persistently
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| ad.坚持地；固执地 | |
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58
wail
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| vt./vi.大声哀号，恸哭；呼啸，尖啸 | |
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mingled
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| 混合，混入( mingle的过去式和过去分词 )； 混进，与…交往[联系] | |
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60
croaking
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| v.呱呱地叫( croak的现在分词 )；用粗的声音说 | |
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devoted
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| adj.忠诚的，忠实的，热心的，献身于...的 | |
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lucid
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| adj.明白易懂的，清晰的，头脑清楚的 | |
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uncommon
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| adj.罕见的，非凡的，不平常的 | |
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64
whine
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| v.哀号，号哭；n.哀鸣 | |
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65
whined
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| v.哀号( whine的过去式和过去分词 )；哀诉，诉怨 | |
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66
embellished
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| v.美化( embellish的过去式和过去分词 )；装饰；修饰；润色 | |
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67
benevolent
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| adj.仁慈的，乐善好施的 | |
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68
scented
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| adj.有香味的；洒香水的；有气味的v.嗅到(scent的过去分词) | |
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69
remains
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| n.剩余物，残留物；遗体，遗迹 | |
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70
ragged
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| adj.衣衫褴褛的，粗糙的，刺耳的 | |
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71
mumbling
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| 含糊地说某事，叽咕，咕哝( mumble的现在分词 ) | |
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72
stiffened
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| 加强的 | |
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73
emphatic
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| adj.强调的，着重的；无可置疑的，明显的 | |
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74
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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75
heed
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| v.注意，留意；n.注意，留心 | |
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