He had the place to himself at that closing hour, and the librarian was able to give an undivided attention to his tentative request for letters—collections of letters. The librarian suggested Walpole.
“I meant women—women’s letters.”
Glennard cursed his own inarticulateness. “I mean letters to—to some one person—a man; their husband—or—”
“Ah,” said the inspired librarian, “Eloise and Abailard.”
“Well—something a little nearer, perhaps,” said Glennard, with lightness. “Didn’t Merimee—”
“The lady’s letters, in that case, were not published.”
“There are George Sand’s letters to Flaubert.”
“Ah!” Glennard hesitated. “Was she—were they—?” He chafed3 at his own ignorance of the sentimental4 by-paths of literature.
“If you want love-letters, perhaps some of the French eighteenth century correspondences might suit you better—Mlle. Aisse or Madame de Sabran—”
But Glennard insisted. “I want something modern—English or American. I want to look something up,” he lamely5 concluded.
The librarian could only suggest George Eliot.
“Well, give me some of the French things, then—and I’ll have Merimee’s letters. It was the woman who published them, wasn’t it?”
He caught up his armful, transferring it, on the doorstep, to a cab which carried him to his rooms. He dined alone, hurriedly, at a small restaurant near by, and returned at once to his books.
Late that night, as he undressed, he wondered what contemptible6 impulse had forced from him his last words to Alexa Trent. It was bad enough to interfere7 with the girl’s chances by hanging about her to the obvious exclusion8 of other men, but it was worse to seem to justify9 his weakness by dressing10 up the future in delusive11 ambiguities12. He saw himself sinking from depth to depth of sentimental cowardice13 in his reluctance14 to renounce15 his hold on her; and it filled him with self-disgust to think that the highest feeling of which he supposed himself capable was blent with such base elements.
His awakening16 was hardly cheered by the sight of her writing. He tore her note open and took in the few lines—she seldom exceeded the first page—with the lucidity17 of apprehension18 that is the forerunner19 of evil.
“My aunt sails on Saturday and I must give her my answer the day after to-morrow. Please don’t come till then—I want to think the question over by myself. I know I ought to go. Won’t you help me to be reasonable?”
It was settled, then. Well, he would be reasonable; he wouldn’t stand in her way; he would let her go. For two years he had been living some other, luckier man’s life; the time had come when he must drop back into his own. He no longer tried to look ahead, to grope his way through the endless labyrinth20 of his material difficulties; a sense of dull resignation closed in on him like a fog.
“Hullo, Glennard!” a voice said, as an electric-car, late that afternoon, dropped him at an uptown corner.
He looked up and met the interrogative smile of Barton Flamel, who stood on the curbstone watching the retreating car with the eye of a man philosophic21 enough to remember that it will be followed by another.
Glennard felt his usual impulse of pleasure at meeting Flamel; but it was not in this case curtailed23 by the reaction of contempt that habitually24 succeeded it. Probably even the few men who had known Flamel since his youth could have given no good reason for the vague mistrust that he inspired. Some people are judged by their actions, others by their ideas; and perhaps the shortest way of defining Flamel is to say that his well-known leniency25 of view was vaguely26 divined to include himself. Simple minds may have resented the discovery that his opinions were based on his perceptions; but there was certainly no more definite charge against him than that implied in the doubt as to how he would behave in an emergency, and his company was looked upon as one of those mildly unwholesome dissipations to which the prudent27 may occasionally yield. It now offered itself to Glennard as an easy escape from the obsession28 of moral problems, which somehow could no more be worn in Flamel’s presence than a surplice in the street.
“Where are you going? To the club?” Flamel asked; adding, as the younger man assented29, “Why not come to my studio instead? You’ll see one bore instead of twenty.”
The apartment which Flamel described as his studio showed, as its one claim to the designation, a perennially30 empty easel; the rest of its space being filled with the evidences of a comprehensive dilettanteism. Against this background, which seemed the visible expression of its owner’s intellectual tolerance31, rows of fine books detached themselves with a prominence32, showing them to be Flamel’s chief care.
Glennard glanced with the eye of untrained curiosity at the lines of warm-toned morocco, while his host busied himself with the uncorking of Apollinaris.
“You’ve got a splendid lot of books,” he said.
“They’re fairly decent,” the other assented, in the curt22 tone of the collector who will not talk of his passion for fear of talking of nothing else; then, as Glennard, his hands in his pockets, began to stroll perfunctorily down the long line of bookcases—“Some men,” Flamel irresistibly33 added, “think of books merely as tools, others as tooling. I’m between the two; there are days when I use them as scenery, other days when I want them as society; so that, as you see, my library represents a makeshift compromise between looks and brains, and the collectors look down on me almost as much as the students.”
Glennard, without answering, was mechanically taking one book after another from the shelves. His hands slipped curiously34 over the smooth covers and the noiseless subsidence of opening pages. Suddenly he came on a thin volume of faded manuscript.
“What’s this?” he asked, with a listless sense of wonder.
“Ah, you’re at my manuscript shelf. I’ve been going in for that sort of thing lately.” Flamel came up and looked over his shoulders. “That’s a bit of Stendhal—one of the Italian stories—and here are some letters of Balzac to Madame Commanville.”
Glennard took the book with sudden eagerness. “Who was Madame Commanville?”
“His sister.” He was conscious that Flamel was looking at him with the smile that was like an interrogation point. “I didn’t know you cared for this kind of thing.”
“I don’t—at least I’ve never had the chance. Have you many collections of letters?”
“Lord, no—very few. I’m just beginning, and most of the interesting ones are out of my reach. Here’s a queer little collection, though—the rarest thing I’ve got—half a dozen of Shelley’s letters to Harriet Westbrook. I had a devil of a time getting them—a lot of collectors were after them.”
Glennard, taking the volume from his hand, glanced with a kind of repugnance35 at the interleaving of yellow cris-crossed sheets. “She was the one who drowned herself, wasn’t she?”
Flamel nodded. “I suppose that little episode adds about fifty per cent. to their value,” he said, meditatively37.
Glennard laid the book down. He wondered why he had joined Flamel. He was in no humor to be amused by the older man’s talk, and a recrudescence of personal misery38 rose about him like an icy tide.
“I believe I must take myself off,” he said. “I’d forgotten an engagement.”
He turned to go; but almost at the same moment he was conscious of a duality of intention wherein his apparent wish to leave revealed itself as a last effort of the will against the overmastering desire to stay and unbosom himself to Flamel.
The older man, as though divining the conflict, laid a detaining pressure on his arm.
“Won’t the engagement keep? Sit down and try one of these cigars. I don’t often have the luck of seeing you here.”
“I’m rather driven just now,” said Glennard, vaguely. He found himself seated again, and Flamel had pushed to his side a low stand holding a bottle of Apollinaris and a decanter of cognac.
Flamel, thrown back in his capacious arm-chair, surveyed him through a cloud of smoke with the comfortable tolerance of the man to whom no inconsistencies need be explained. Connivance39 was implicit40 in the air. It was the kind of atmosphere in which the outrageous41 loses its edge. Glennard felt a gradual relaxing of his nerves.
“I suppose one has to pay a lot for letters like that?” he heard himself asking, with a glance in the direction of the volume he had laid aside.
“Oh, so-so—depends on circumstances.” Flamel viewed him thoughtfully. “Are you thinking of collecting?”
Glennard laughed. “Lord, no. The other way round.”
“Selling?”
“Oh, I hardly know. I was thinking of a poor chap—”
Flamel filled the pause with a nod of interest.
“A poor chap I used to know—who died—he died last year—and who left me a lot of letters, letters he thought a great deal of—he was fond of me and left ’em to me outright42, with the idea, I suppose, that they might benefit me somehow—I don’t know—I’m not much up on such things—” he reached his hand to the tall glass his host had filled.
“A collection of autograph letters, eh? Any big names?”
“Oh, only one name. They’re all letters written to him—by one person, you understand; a woman, in fact—”
“Oh, a woman,” said Flamel, negligently43.
Glennard was nettled44 by his obvious loss of interest. “I rather think they’d attract a good deal of notice if they were published.”
Flamel still looked uninterested. “Love-letters, I suppose?”
“Oh, just—the letters a woman would write to a man she knew well. They were tremendous friends, he and she.”
“And she wrote a clever letter?”
“Clever? It was Margaret Aubyn.”
A great silence filled the room. It seemed to Glennard that the words had burst from him as blood gushes45 from a wound.
“Great Scott!” said Flamel, sitting up. “A collection of Margaret Aubyn’s letters? Did you say you had them?”
“They were left me—by my friend.”
“I see. Was he—well, no matter. You’re to be congratulated, at any rate. What are you going to do with them?”
Glennard stood up with a sense of weariness in all his bones. “Oh, I don’t know. I haven’t thought much about it. I just happened to see that some fellow was writing her life—”
“Joslin; yes. You didn’t think of giving them to him?”
Glennard had lounged across the room and stood staring up at a bronze Bacchus who drooped46 his garlanded head above the pediment of an Italian cabinet. “What ought I to do? You’re just the fellow to advise me.” He felt the blood in his cheek as he spoke47.
Flamel sat with meditative36 eye. “What do you want to do with them?” he asked.
“I want to publish them,” said Glennard, swinging round with sudden energy—“If I can—”
“If you can? They’re yours, you say?”
“They’re mine fast enough. There’s no one to prevent—I mean there are no restrictions—” he was arrested by the sense that these accumulated proofs of impunity48 might precisely49 stand as the strongest check on his action.
“And Mrs. Aubyn had no family, I believe?”
“No.”
“Then I don’t see who’s to interfere,” said Flamel, studying his cigar-tip.
Glennard had turned his unseeing stare on an ecstatic Saint Catherine framed in tarnished50 gilding51.
“It’s just this way,” he began again, with an effort. “When letters are as personal as—as these of my friend’s.... Well, I don’t mind telling you that the cash would make a heap of difference to me; such a lot that it rather obscures my judgment—the fact is if I could lay my hand on a few thousands now I could get into a big thing, and without appreciable52 risk; and I’d like to know whether you think I’d be justified53—under the circumstances....” He paused, with a dry throat. It seemed to him at the moment that it would be impossible for him ever to sink lower in his own estimation. He was in truth less ashamed of weighing the temptation than of submitting his scruples54 to a man like Flamel, and affecting to appeal to sentiments of delicacy55 on the absence of which he had consciously reckoned. But he had reached a point where each word seemed to compel another, as each wave in a stream is forced forward by the pressure behind it; and before Flamel could speak he had faltered56 out—“You don’t think people could say... could criticise57 the man....”
“But the man’s dead, isn’t he?”
“He’s dead—yes; but can I assume the responsibility without—”
Flamel hesitated; and almost immediately Glennard’s scruples gave way to irritation58. If at this hour Flamel were to affect an inopportune reluctance—!
The older man’s answer reassured59 him. “Why need you assume any responsibility? Your name won’t appear, of course; and as to your friend’s, I don’t see why his should, either. He wasn’t a celebrity60 himself, I suppose?”
“No, no.”
“Then the letters can be addressed to Mr. Blank. Doesn’t that make it all right?”
Glennard’s hesitation61 revived. “For the public, yes. But I don’t see that it alters the case for me. The question is, ought I to publish them at all?”
“Of course you ought to.” Flamel spoke with invigorating emphasis. “I doubt if you’d be justified in keeping them back. Anything of Margaret Aubyn’s is more or less public property by this time. She’s too great for any one of us. I was only wondering how you could use them to the best advantage—to yourself, I mean. How many are there?”
“Oh, a lot; perhaps a hundred—I haven’t counted. There may be more....”
“Gad! What a haul! When were they written?”
“I don’t know—that is—they corresponded for years. What’s the odds62?” He moved toward his hat with a vague impulse of flight.
“It all counts,” said Flamel, imperturbably63. “A long correspondence—one, I mean, that covers a great deal of time—is obviously worth more than if the same number of letters had been written within a year. At any rate, you won’t give them to Joslin? They’d fill a book, wouldn’t they?”
“I suppose so. I don’t know how much it takes to fill a book.”
“Not love-letters, you say?”
“Why?” flashed from Glennard.
“Oh, nothing—only the big public is sentimental, and if they were—why, you could get any money for Margaret Aubyn’s love-letters.”
Glennard was silent.
“Are the letters interesting in themselves? I mean apart from the association with her name?”
“I’m no judge.” Glennard took up his hat and thrust himself into his overcoat. “I dare say I sha’n’t do anything about it. And, Flamel—you won’t mention this to anyone?”
“Lord, no. Well, I congratulate you. You’ve got a big thing.” Flamel was smiling at him from the hearth64.
Glennard, on the threshold, forced a response to the smile, while he questioned with loitering indifference—“Financially, eh?”
“Rather; I should say so.”
Glennard’s hand lingered on the knob. “How much—should you say? You know about such things.”
“Oh, I should have to see the letters; but I should say—well, if you’ve got enough to fill a book and they’re fairly readable, and the book is brought out at the right time—say ten thousand down from the publisher, and possibly one or two more in royalties65. If you got the publishers bidding against each other you might do even better; but of course I’m talking in the dark.”
“Of course,” said Glennard, with sudden dizziness. His hand had slipped from the knob and he stood staring down at the exotic spirals of the Persian rug beneath his feet.
“I’d have to see the letters,” Flamel repeated.
“Of course—you’d have to see them....” Glennard stammered66; and, without turning, he flung over his shoulder an inarticulate “Good-by....”
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收听单词发音
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1
proffered
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| v.提供，贡献，提出( proffer的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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vexed
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| adj.争论不休的；（指问题等）棘手的；争论不休的问题；烦恼的v.使烦恼( vex的过去式和过去分词 )；使苦恼；使生气；详细讨论 | |
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chafed
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| v.擦热（尤指皮肤）( chafe的过去式 )；擦痛；发怒；惹怒 | |
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sentimental
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| adj.多愁善感的，感伤的 | |
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lamely
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| 一瘸一拐地，不完全地 | |
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contemptible
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| adj.可鄙的，可轻视的，卑劣的 | |
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interfere
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| v.(in)干涉，干预；(with)妨碍，打扰 | |
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exclusion
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| n.拒绝，排除，排斥，远足，远途旅行 | |
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9
justify
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| vt.证明…正当(或有理)，为…辩护 | |
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dressing
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| n.(食物)调料；包扎伤口的用品，敷料 | |
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delusive
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| adj.欺骗的，妄想的 | |
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ambiguities
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| n.歧义( ambiguity的名词复数 )；意义不明确；模棱两可的意思；模棱两可的话 | |
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cowardice
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| n.胆小，怯懦 | |
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reluctance
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| n.厌恶，讨厌，勉强，不情愿 | |
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15
renounce
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| v.放弃；拒绝承认，宣布与…断绝关系 | |
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awakening
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| n.觉醒，醒悟 adj.觉醒中的；唤醒的 | |
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17
lucidity
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| n.明朗，清晰，透明 | |
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apprehension
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| n.理解，领悟；逮捕，拘捕；忧虑 | |
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forerunner
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| n.前身，先驱（者），预兆，祖先 | |
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labyrinth
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| n.迷宫；难解的事物；迷路 | |
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philosophic
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| adj.哲学的，贤明的 | |
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curt
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| adj.简短的，草率的 | |
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23
curtailed
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| v.截断，缩短( curtail的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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habitually
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| ad.习惯地，通常地 | |
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leniency
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| n.宽大（不严厉） | |
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vaguely
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| adv.含糊地，暖昧地 | |
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prudent
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| adj.谨慎的，有远见的，精打细算的 | |
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obsession
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| n.困扰，无法摆脱的思想(或情感) | |
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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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perennially
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| adv.经常出现地；长期地；持久地；永久地 | |
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tolerance
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| n.宽容；容忍，忍受；耐药力；公差 | |
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prominence
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| n.突出；显著；杰出；重要 | |
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irresistibly
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| adv.无法抵抗地，不能自持地；极为诱惑人地 | |
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34
curiously
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| adv.有求知欲地；好问地；奇特地 | |
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repugnance
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| n.嫌恶 | |
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meditative
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| adj.沉思的，冥想的 | |
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meditatively
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| adv.冥想地 | |
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misery
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| n.痛苦，苦恼，苦难；悲惨的境遇，贫苦 | |
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connivance
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| n.纵容；默许 | |
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implicit
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| a.暗示的，含蓄的，不明晰的，绝对的 | |
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41
outrageous
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| adj.无理的，令人不能容忍的 | |
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42
outright
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| adv.坦率地；彻底地；立即；adj.无疑的；彻底的 | |
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43
negligently
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44
nettled
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| v.拿荨麻打，拿荨麻刺（nettle的过去式与过去分词形式） | |
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45
gushes
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| n.涌出，迸发( gush的名词复数 )v.喷，涌( gush的第三人称单数 )；滔滔不绝地说话 | |
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46
drooped
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| 弯曲或下垂，发蔫( droop的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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47
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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48
impunity
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| n.(惩罚、损失、伤害等的)免除 | |
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49
precisely
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| adv.恰好，正好，精确地，细致地 | |
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50
tarnished
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| （通常指金属）（使）失去光泽，（使）变灰暗( tarnish的过去式和过去分词 )； 玷污，败坏 | |
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51
gilding
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| n.贴金箔，镀金 | |
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52
appreciable
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| adj.明显的，可见的，可估量的，可觉察的 | |
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53
justified
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| a.正当的，有理的 | |
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54
scruples
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| n.良心上的不安( scruple的名词复数 )；顾虑，顾忌v.感到于心不安，有顾忌( scruple的第三人称单数 ) | |
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55
delicacy
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| n.精致，细微，微妙，精良；美味，佳肴 | |
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56
faltered
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| （嗓音）颤抖( falter的过去式和过去分词 )； 支吾其词； 蹒跚； 摇晃 | |
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57
criticise
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| v.批评，评论；非难 | |
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58
irritation
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| n.激怒，恼怒，生气 | |
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59
reassured
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| adj.使消除疑虑的；使放心的v.再保证，恢复信心( reassure的过去式和过去分词) | |
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60
celebrity
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| n.名人，名流；著名，名声，名望 | |
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61
hesitation
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| n.犹豫，踌躇 | |
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62
odds
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| n.让步，机率，可能性，比率；胜败优劣之别 | |
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63
imperturbably
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| adv.泰然地，镇静地，平静地 | |
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64
hearth
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| n.壁炉炉床，壁炉地面 | |
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65
royalties
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| 特许权使用费 | |
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stammered
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| v.结巴地说出( stammer的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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