Well, he was to know within the week, for though she kept him a while at bay, left him restless and wretched during a series of days on each of which he asked about her only again to have to turn away, she ended his trial by receiving him where she had always received him. Yet she had been brought out at some hazard into the presence of so many of the things that were, consciously, vainly, half their past, and there was scant9 service left in the gentleness of her mere10 desire, all too visible, to check his obsession11 and wind up his long trouble. That was clearly what she wanted; the one thing more for her own peace while she could still put out her hand. He was so affected12 by her state that, once seated by her chair, he was moved to let everything go; it was she herself therefore who brought him back, took up again, before she dismissed him, her last word of the other time. She showed how she wished to leave their business in order. “I’m not sure you understood. You’ve nothing to wait for more. It has come.”
Oh how he looked at her! “Really?”
“Really.”
“The thing that, as you said, was to?”
“The thing that we began in our youth to watch for.”
Face to face with her once more he believed her; it was a claim to which he had so abjectly13 little to oppose. “You mean that it has come as a positive definite occurrence, with a name and a date?”
“Positive. Definite. I don’t know about the ‘name,’ but, oh with a date!”
He found himself again too helplessly at sea. “But come in the night—come and passed me by?”
May Bartram had her strange faint smile. “Oh no, it hasn’t passed you by!”
“But if I haven’t been aware of it and it hasn’t touched me—?”
“Ah your not being aware of it”—and she seemed to hesitate an instant to deal with this—“your not being aware of it is the strangeness in the strangeness. It’s the wonder of the wonder.” She spoke14 as with the softness almost of a sick child, yet now at last, at the end of all, with the perfect straightness of a sibyl. She visibly knew that she knew, and the effect on him was of something co-ordinate, in its high character, with the law that had ruled him. It was the true voice of the law; so on her lips would the law itself have sounded. “It has touched you,” she went on. “It has done its office. It has made you all its own.”
“So utterly without your knowing it.” His hand, as he leaned to her, was on the arm of her chair, and, dimly smiling always now, she placed her own on it. “It’s enough if I know it.”
“Oh!” he confusedly breathed, as she herself of late so often had done.
“What I long ago said is true. You’ll never know now, and I think you ought to be content. You’ve had it,” said May Bartram.
“But had what?”
“Why what was to have marked you out. The proof of your law. It has acted. I’m too glad,” she then bravely added, “to have been able to see what it’s not.”
He continued to attach his eyes to her, and with the sense that it was all beyond him, and that she was too, he would still have sharply challenged her hadn’t he so felt it an abuse of her weakness to do more than take devoutly16 what she gave him, take it hushed as to a revelation. If he did speak, it was out of the foreknowledge of his loneliness to come. “If you’re glad of what it’s ‘not’ it might then have been worse?”
She turned her eyes away, she looked straight before her; with which after a moment: “Well, you know our fears.”
He wondered. “It’s something then we never feared?”
On this slowly she turned to him. “Did we ever dream, with all our dreams, that we should sit and talk of it thus?”
He tried for a little to make out that they had; but it was as if their dreams, numberless enough, were in solution in some thick cold mist through which thought lost itself. “It might have been that we couldn’t talk.”
“Well”—she did her best for him—“not from this side. This, you see,” she said, “is the other side.”
“I think,” poor Marcher returned, “that all sides are the same to me.” Then, however, as she gently shook her head in correction: “We mightn’t, as it were, have got across—?”
“To where we are—no. We’re here”—she made her weak emphasis.
“And much good does it do us!” was her friend’s frank comment.
“It does us the good it can. It does us the good that it isn’t here. It’s past. It’s behind,” said May Bartram. “Before—” but her voice dropped.
He had got up, not to tire her, but it was hard to combat his yearning17. She after all told him nothing but that his light had failed—which he knew well enough without her. “Before—?” he blankly echoed.
“Before you see, it was always to come. That kept it present.”
“Oh I don’t care what comes now! Besides,” Marcher added, “it seems to me I liked it better present, as you say, than I can like it absent with your absence.”
“Oh mine!”—and her pale hands made light of it.
“With the absence of everything.” He had a dreadful sense of standing18 there before her for—so far as anything but this proved, this bottomless drop was concerned—the last time of their life. It rested on him with a weight he felt he could scarce bear, and this weight it apparently19 was that still pressed out what remained in him of speakable protest. “I believe you; but I can’t begin to pretend I understand. Nothing, for me, is past; nothing will pass till I pass myself, which I pray my stars may be as soon as possible. Say, however,” he added, “that I’ve eaten my cake, as you contend, to the last crumb—how can the thing I’ve never felt at all be the thing I was marked out to feel?”
She met him perhaps less directly, but she met him unperturbed. “You take your ‘feelings’ for granted. You were to suffer your fate. That was not necessarily to know it.”
“How in the world—when what is such knowledge but suffering?”
She looked up at him a while in silence. “No—you don’t understand.”
“I suffer,” said John Marcher.
“Don’t, don’t!”
“How can I help at least that?”
“Don’t!” May Bartram repeated.
She spoke it in a tone so special, in spite of her weakness, that he stared an instant—stared as if some light, hitherto hidden, had shimmered20 across his vision. Darkness again closed over it, but the gleam had already become for him an idea. “Because I haven’t the right—?”
“Don’t know—when you needn’t,” she mercifully urged. “You needn’t—for we shouldn’t.”
“Shouldn’t?” If he could but know what she meant!
“No— it’s too much.”
“Too much?” he still asked but with a mystification that was the next moment of a sudden to give way. Her words, if they meant something, affected him in this light—the light also of her wasted face—as meaning all, and the sense of what knowledge had been for herself came over him with a rush which broke through into a question. “Is it of that then you’re dying?”
She but watched him, gravely at first, as to see, with this, where he was, and she might have seen something or feared something that moved her sympathy. “I would live for you still—if I could.” Her eyes closed for a little, as if, withdrawn21 into herself, she were for a last time trying. “But I can’t!” she said as she raised them again to take leave of him.
She couldn’t indeed, as but too promptly22 and sharply appeared, and he had no vision of her after this that was anything but darkness and doom. They had parted for ever in that strange talk; access to her chamber23 of pain, rigidly24 guarded, was almost wholly forbidden him; he was feeling now moreover, in the face of doctors, nurses, the two or three relatives attracted doubtless by the presumption25 of what she had to “leave,” how few were the rights, as they were called in such cases, that he had to put forward, and how odd it might even seem that their intimacy26 shouldn’t have given him more of them. The stupidest fourth cousin had more, even though she had been nothing in such a person’s life. She had been a feature of features in his, for what else was it to have been so indispensable? Strange beyond saying were the ways of existence, baffling for him the anomaly of his lack, as he felt it to be, of producible claim. A woman might have been, as it were, everything to him, and it might yet present him, in no connexion that any one seemed held to recognise. If this was the case in these closing weeks it was the case more sharply on the occasion of the last offices rendered, in the great grey London cemetery27, to what had been mortal, to what had been precious, in his friend. The concourse at her grave was not numerous, but he saw himself treated as scarce more nearly concerned with it than if there had been a thousand others. He was in short from this moment face to face with the fact that he was to profit extraordinarily28 little by the interest May Bartram had taken in him. He couldn’t quite have said what he expected, but he hadn’t surely expected this approach to a double privation. Not only had her interest failed him, but he seemed to feel himself unattended—and for a reason he couldn’t seize—by the distinction, the dignity, the propriety29, if nothing else, of the man markedly bereaved30. It was as if, in the view of society he had not been markedly bereaved, as if there still failed some sign or proof of it, and as if none the less his character could never be affirmed nor the deficiency ever made up. There were moments as the weeks went by when he would have liked, by some almost aggressive act, to take his stand on the intimacy of his loss, in order that it might be questioned and his retort, to the relief of his spirit, so recorded; but the moments of an irritation31 more helpless followed fast on these, the moments during which, turning things over with a good conscience but with a bare horizon, he found himself wondering if he oughtn’t to have begun, so to speak, further back.
He found himself wondering indeed at many things, and this last speculation32 had others to keep it company. What could he have done, after all, in her lifetime, without giving them both, as it were, away? He couldn’t have made known she was watching him, for that would have published the superstition33 of the Beast. This was what closed his mouth now—now that the Jungle had been thrashed to vacancy34 and that the Beast had stolen away. It sounded too foolish and too flat; the difference for him in this particular, the extinction35 in his life of the element of suspense, was such as in fact to surprise him. He could scarce have said what the effect resembled; the abrupt36 cessation, the positive prohibition37, of music perhaps, more than anything else, in some place all adjusted and all accustomed to sonority38 and to attention. If he could at any rate have conceived lifting the veil from his image at some moment of the past (what had he done, after all, if not lift it to her?) so to do this to-day, to talk to people at large of the Jungle cleared and confide39 to them that he now felt it as safe, would have been not only to see them listen as to a goodwife’s tale, but really to hear himself tell one. What it presently came to in truth was that poor Marcher waded40 through his beaten grass, where no life stirred, where no breath sounded, where no evil eye seemed to gleam from a possible lair41, very much as if vaguely42 looking for the Beast, and still more as if acutely missing it. He walked about in an existence that had grown strangely more spacious43, and, stopping fitfully in places where the undergrowth of life struck him as closer, asked himself yearningly44, wondered secretly and sorely, if it would have lurked45 here or there. It would have at all events sprung; what was at least complete was his belief in the truth itself of the assurance given him. The change from his old sense to his new was absolute and final: what was to happen had so absolutely and finally happened that he was as little able to know a fear for his future as to know a hope; so absent in short was any question of anything still to come. He was to live entirely46 with the other question, that of his unidentified past, that of his having to see his fortune impenetrably muffled47 and masked.
The torment of this vision became then his occupation; he couldn’t perhaps have consented to live but for the possibility of guessing. She had told him, his friend, not to guess; she had forbidden him, so far as he might, to know, and she had even in a sort denied the power in him to learn: which were so many things, precisely48, to deprive him of rest. It wasn’t that he wanted, he argued for fairness, that anything past and done should repeat itself; it was only that he shouldn’t, as an anticlimax49, have been taken sleeping so sound as not to be able to win back by an effort of thought the lost stuff of consciousness. He declared to himself at moments that he would either win it back or have done with consciousness for ever; he made this idea his one motive50 in fine, made it so much his passion that none other, to compare with it, seemed ever to have touched him. The lost stuff of consciousness became thus for him as a strayed or stolen child to an unappeasable father; he hunted it up and down very much as if he were knocking at doors and enquiring51 of the police. This was the spirit in which, inevitably52, he set himself to travel; he started on a journey that was to be as long as he could make it; it danced before him that, as the other side of the globe couldn’t possibly have less to say to him, it might, by a possibility of suggestion, have more. Before he quitted London, however, he made a pilgrimage to May Bartram’s grave, took his way to it through the endless avenues of the grim suburban53 necropolis, sought it out in the wilderness54 of tombs, and, though he had come but for the renewal55 of the act of farewell, found himself, when he had at last stood by it, beguiled56 into long intensities57. He stood for an hour, powerless to turn away and yet powerless to penetrate58 the darkness of death; fixing with his eyes her inscribed59 name and date, beating his forehead against the fact of the secret they kept, drawing his breath, while he waited, as if some sense would in pity of him rise from the stones. He kneeled on the stones, however, in vain; they kept what they concealed60; and if the face of the tomb did become a face for him it was because her two names became a pair of eyes that didn’t know him. He gave them a last long look, but no palest light broke.
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1
literally
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| adv.照字面意义，逐字地；确实 | |
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miserable
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| adj.悲惨的，痛苦的；可怜的，糟糕的 | |
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torment
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| n.折磨；令人痛苦的东西(人)；vt.折磨；纠缠 | |
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monstrous
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| adj.巨大的；恐怖的；可耻的，丢脸的 | |
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distinguished
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| adj.卓越的，杰出的，著名的 | |
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doom
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| n.厄运，劫数；v.注定，命定 | |
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twilight
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| n.暮光，黄昏；暮年，晚期，衰落时期 | |
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8
suspense
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| n.（对可能发生的事）紧张感，担心，挂虑 | |
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9
scant
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| adj.不充分的，不足的；v.减缩，限制，忽略 | |
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mere
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| adj.纯粹的；仅仅，只不过 | |
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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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affected
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| adj.不自然的，假装的 | |
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abjectly
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| 凄惨地； 绝望地； 糟透地； 悲惨地 | |
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spoke
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| n.（车轮的）辐条；轮辐；破坏某人的计划；阻挠某人的行动 v.讲，谈（speak的过去式）；说；演说；从某种观点来说 | |
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utterly
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| adv.完全地，绝对地 | |
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devoutly
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| adv.虔诚地，虔敬地，衷心地 | |
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yearning
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| a.渴望的；向往的；怀念的 | |
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18
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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apparently
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| adv.显然地；表面上，似乎 | |
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shimmered
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| v.闪闪发光，发微光( shimmer的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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21
withdrawn
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| vt.收回；使退出；vi.撤退，退出 | |
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promptly
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| adv.及时地，敏捷地 | |
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chamber
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| n.房间，寝室；会议厅；议院；会所 | |
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rigidly
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| adv.刻板地，僵化地 | |
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presumption
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| n.推测，可能性，冒昧，放肆，[法律]推定 | |
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intimacy
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| n.熟悉，亲密，密切关系，亲昵的言行 | |
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cemetery
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| n.坟墓，墓地，坟场 | |
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extraordinarily
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| adv.格外地；极端地 | |
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propriety
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| n.正当行为；正当；适当 | |
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bereaved
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| adj.刚刚丧失亲人的v.使失去（希望、生命等）( bereave的过去式和过去分词)；（尤指死亡）使丧失（亲人、朋友等）；使孤寂；抢走（财物） | |
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31
irritation
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| n.激怒，恼怒，生气 | |
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speculation
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| n.思索，沉思；猜测；投机 | |
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superstition
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| n.迷信，迷信行为 | |
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34
vacancy
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| n.（旅馆的）空位，空房，（职务的）空缺 | |
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extinction
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| n.熄灭，消亡，消灭，灭绝，绝种 | |
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abrupt
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| adj.突然的，意外的；唐突的，鲁莽的 | |
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prohibition
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| n.禁止；禁令，禁律 | |
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sonority
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| n.响亮，宏亮 | |
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confide
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| v.向某人吐露秘密 | |
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40
waded
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| （从水、泥等）蹚，走过，跋( wade的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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lair
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| n.野兽的巢穴；躲藏处 | |
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vaguely
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| adv.含糊地，暖昧地 | |
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spacious
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| adj.广阔的，宽敞的 | |
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yearningly
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| 怀念地，思慕地，同情地； 渴 | |
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45
lurked
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| vi.潜伏，埋伏（lurk的过去式与过去分词形式） | |
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46
entirely
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| ad.全部地，完整地；完全地，彻底地 | |
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47
muffled
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| adj.（声音）被隔的；听不太清的；（衣服）裹严的；蒙住的v.压抑，捂住( muffle的过去式和过去分词 )；用厚厚的衣帽包着（自己） | |
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48
precisely
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| adv.恰好，正好，精确地，细致地 | |
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49
anticlimax
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| n.令人扫兴的结局；突降法 | |
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50
motive
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| n.动机，目的；adv.发动的，运动的 | |
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51
enquiring
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| a.爱打听的，显得好奇的 | |
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52
inevitably
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| adv.不可避免地；必然发生地 | |
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53
suburban
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| adj.城郊的，在郊区的 | |
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54
wilderness
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| n.杳无人烟的一片陆地、水等，荒漠 | |
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55
renewal
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| adj.(契约)延期，续订，更新，复活，重来 | |
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56
beguiled
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| v.欺骗( beguile的过去式和过去分词 )；使陶醉；使高兴；消磨（时间等） | |
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57
intensities
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| n.强烈( intensity的名词复数 )；（感情的）强烈程度；强度；烈度 | |
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58
penetrate
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| v.透(渗)入；刺入，刺穿；洞察，了解 | |
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59
inscribed
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| v.写，刻( inscribe的过去式和过去分词 )；内接 | |
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concealed
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| a.隐藏的，隐蔽的 | |
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