Mrs. Sawbridge was the widow of a solicitor1 who had been killed in a railway collision while his affairs, as she put it, were unsettled; and she had brought up her two daughters in a villa2 at Penge upon very little money, in a state of genteel protest. Ellen was the younger. She had been a sturdy dark-eyed doll-dragging little thing and had then shot up very rapidly. She had gone to a boarding-school at Wimbledon because Mrs. Sawbridge thought the Penge day-school had made Georgina opiniated and unladylike, besides developing her muscular system to an unrefined degree. The Wimbledon school was on less progressive lines, and anyhow Ellen grew taller and more feminine than her sister and by seventeen was already womanly, dignified3 and intensely admired by a number of schoolmates and a large circle of their cousins and brothers. She was generally very good and only now and then broke out with a venturesome enterprise that hurt nobody. She got out of a skylight, for example, and perambulated the roof in the moonshine to see how it felt and did one or two other little things of a similar kind. Otherwise her conduct was admirable and her temper in those days was always contagiously4 good. That attractiveness which Mr. Brumley felt, was already very manifest, and a little hindered her in the attainment5 of other distinctions. Most of her lessons were done for her by willing slaves, and they were happy slaves because she abounded6 in rewarding kindnesses; but on the other hand the study of English literature and music was almost forced upon her by the zeal7 of the two visiting Professors of these subjects.
And at seventeen, which is the age when girls most despise the boyishness of young men, she met Sir Isaac and filled him with an invincible8 covetousness9....
2
The school at Wimbledon was a large, hushed, faded place presided over by a lady of hidden motives10 and great exterior11 calm named Miss Beeton Clavier. She was handsome without any improper12 attractiveness, an Associate in Arts of St. Andrew's University and a cousin of Mr. Blenker of the Old Country Gazette. She was assisted by several resident mistresses and two very carefully married visiting masters for music and Shakespear, and playground and shrubbery and tennis-lawn were all quite effectively hidden from the high-road. The curriculum included Latin Grammar—nobody ever got to the reading of books in that formidable tongue—French by an English lady who had been in France, Hanoverian German by an irascible native, the more seemly aspects of English history and literature, arithmetic, algebra13, political economy and drawing. There was no hockey played within the precincts, science was taught without the clumsy apparatus14 or objectionable diagrams that are now so common, and stress was laid upon the carriage of the young ladies and the iniquity15 of speaking in raised voices. Miss Beeton Clavier deprecated the modern "craze for examinations," and released from such pressure her staff did not so much give courses of lessons as circle in a thorough-looking and patient manner about their subjects. This turn-spit quality was reflected in the school idiom; one did not learn algebra or Latin or so-forth, one did algebra, one was put into Latin....
The girls went through this system of exercises and occupations, evasively and as it were sotto voce, making friends, making enemies, making love to one another, following instincts that urged them to find out something about life—in spite of the most earnest discouragement.... None of them believed for a moment that the school was preparing them for life. Most of them regarded it as a long inexplicable16 passage of blank, grey occupations through which they had to pass. Beyond was the sunshine.
Ellen gathered what came to her. She realized a certain beauty in music in spite of the biographies of great musicians, the technical enthusiasms and the general professionalism of her teacher; the literature master directed her attention to memoirs17 and through these she caught gleams of understanding when the characters of history did for brief intervals18 cease to be rigidly19 dignified and institutional like Miss Beeton Clavier and became human—like schoolfellows. And one little spectacled mistress, who wore art dresses and adorned20 her class-room with flowers, took a great fancy to her, talked to her with much vagueness and emotion of High Aims, and lent her with an impressive furtiveness21 the works of Emerson and Shelley and a pamphlet by Bernard Shaw. It was a little difficult to understand what these writers were driving at, they were so dreadfully clever, but it was clear they reflected criticism upon the silences of her mother and the rigidities of Miss Beeton Clavier.
In that suppressed and evasive life beneath the outer forms and procedures of school and home, there came glimmerings of something that seemed charged with the promise of holding everything together, the key, religion. She was attracted to religion, much more attracted than she would confess even to herself, but every circumstance in her training dissuaded22 her from a free approach. Her mother treated religion with a reverence23 that was almost indistinguishable from huffiness. She never named the deity24 and she did not like the mention of His name: she threw a spell of indelicacy over religious topics that Ellen never thoroughly25 cast off. She put God among objectionable topics—albeit a sublime26 one. Miss Beeton Clavier sustained this remarkable27 suggestion. When she read prayers in school she did so with the balanced impartiality28 of one who offers no comment. She seemed pained as she read and finished with a sigh. Whatever she intended to convey, she conveyed that even if the divinity was not all He should be, if, indeed, He was a person almost primitive29, having neither the restraint nor the self-obliteration of a refined gentlewoman, no word of it should ever pass her lips. And so Ellen as a girl never let her mind go quite easily into this reconciling core of life, and talked of it only very rarely and shyly with a few chosen coevals. It wasn't very profitable talk. They had a guilty feeling, they laughed a little uneasily, they displayed a fatal proclivity30 to stab the swelling31 gravity of their souls with some forced and silly jest and so tumble back to ground again before they rose too high....
Yet great possibilities of faith and devotion stirred already in the girl's heart. She thought little of God by day, but had a strange sense of Him in the starlight; never under the moonlight—that was in no sense divine—but in the stirring darkness of the stars. And it is remarkable that after a course of astronomical32 enlightenment by a visiting master and descriptions of masses and distances, incredible aching distances, then even more than ever she seemed to feel God among the stars....
A fatal accident to a schoolfellow turned her mind for a time to the dark stillnesses of death. The accident happened away in Wales during the summer holidays; she saw nothing of it, she only knew of its consequence. Hitherto she had assumed it was the function of girls to grow up and go out from the grey intermediate state of school work into freedoms and realities beyond. Death happened, she was aware, to young people, but not she had thought to the people one knew. This termination came with a shock. The girl was no great personal loss to Ellen, they had belonged to different sets and classes, but the conception of her as lying very very still for ever was a haunting one. Ellen felt she did not want to be still for evermore in a confined space, with life and sunshine going on all about her and above her, and it quickened her growing appetite for living to think that she might presently have to be like that. How stifled33 one would feel!
It couldn't be like that.
She began to speculate about that future life upon which religion insists so much and communicates so little. Was it perhaps in other planets, under those wonderful, many-mooned, silver-banded skies? She perceived more and more a kind of absurdity34 in the existence all about her. Was all this world a mere35 make-believe, and would Miss Beeton Clavier and every one about her presently cast aside a veil? Manifestly there was a veil. She had a very natural disposition36 to doubt whether the actual circumstances of her life were real. Her mother for instance was so lacking in blood and fire, so very like the stiff paper wrapping of something else. But if these things were not real, what was real? What might she not presently do? What might she not presently be? Perhaps death had something to do with that. Was death perhaps no more than the flinging off of grotesque37 outer garments by the newly arrived guests at the feast of living? She had that feeling that there might be a feast of living.
These preoccupations were a jealously guarded secret, but they gave her a quality of slight detachment that added a dreaming dignity to her dark tall charm.
There were moments of fine, deep excitement that somehow linked themselves in her mind with these thoughts as being set over against the things of every day. These too were moments quite different and separate in quality from delight, from the keen appreciation38 of flowers or sunshine or little vividly39 living things. Daylight seemed to blind her to them, as they blinded her to starshine. They too had a quality of reference to things large and remote, distances, unknown mysteries of light and matter, the thought of mountains, cool white wildernesses40 and driving snowstorms, or great periods of time. Such were the luminous41 transfigurations that would come to her at the evening service in church.
The school used to sit in the gallery over against the organist, and for a year and more Ellen had the place at the corner from which she could look down the hazy42 candle-lit vista43 of the nave44 and see the congregation as ranks and ranks of dim faces and vaguely45 apprehended46 clothes, ranks that rose with a peculiar47 deep and spacious48 rustle49 to sing, and sang with a massiveness of effect she knew in no other music. Certain hymns50 in particular seemed to bear her up and carry her into another larger, more wonderful world: "Heart's Abode52, Celestial53 Salem" for example, a world of luminous spiritualized sensuousness54. Of such a quality she thought the Heavenly City must surely be, away there and away. But this persuasion55 differed from those other mystical intimations in its detachment from any sense of the divinity. And remarkably56 mixed up with it and yet not belonging to it, antagonistic57 and kindred like a silver dagger58 stuck through a mystically illuminated59 parchment, was the angelic figure of a tall fair boy in a surplice who stood out amidst the choir60 below and sang, it seemed to her, alone.
She herself on these occasions of exaltation would be far too deeply moved to sing. She was inundated61 by a swimming sense of boundaries nearly transcended62, as though she was upon the threshold of a different life altogether, the real enduring life, and as though if she could only maintain herself long enough in this shimmering63 exaltation she would get right over; things would happen, things that would draw her into that music and magic and prevent her ever returning to everyday life again. There one would walk through music between great candles under eternal stars, hand-in-hand with a tall white figure. But nothing ever did happen to make her cross that boundary; the hymn51 ceased, the "Amen" died away, as if a curtain fell. The congregation subsided64. Reluctantly she would sink back into her seat....
But all through the sermon, to which she never gave the slightest attention, her mind would feel mute and stilled, and she used to come out of church silent and preoccupied65, returning unwillingly66 to the commonplaces of life....
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1
solicitor
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| n.初级律师，事务律师 | |
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villa
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| n.别墅，城郊小屋 | |
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dignified
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| a.可敬的，高贵的 | |
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contagiously
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| 传染性地，蔓延地 | |
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attainment
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| n.达到，到达；［常pl.］成就，造诣 | |
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abounded
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| v.大量存在，充满，富于( abound的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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7
zeal
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| n.热心，热情，热忱 | |
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8
invincible
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| adj.不可征服的，难以制服的 | |
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9
covetousness
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10
motives
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| n.动机，目的( motive的名词复数 ) | |
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11
exterior
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| adj.外部的，外在的；表面的 | |
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improper
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| adj.不适当的，不合适的，不正确的，不合礼仪的 | |
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algebra
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| n.代数学 | |
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14
apparatus
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| n.装置，器械；器具，设备 | |
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15
iniquity
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| n.邪恶；不公正 | |
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inexplicable
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| adj.无法解释的，难理解的 | |
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17
memoirs
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| n.回忆录；回忆录传( mem,自oir的名词复数) | |
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18
intervals
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| n.[军事]间隔( interval的名词复数 )；间隔时间；[数学]区间；（戏剧、电影或音乐会的）幕间休息 | |
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rigidly
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| adv.刻板地，僵化地 | |
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adorned
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| [计]被修饰的 | |
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furtiveness
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| 偷偷摸摸，鬼鬼祟祟 | |
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dissuaded
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| 劝（某人）勿做某事，劝阻( dissuade的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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23
reverence
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| n.敬畏，尊敬，尊严；Reverence:对某些基督教神职人员的尊称；v.尊敬，敬畏，崇敬 | |
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24
deity
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| n.神，神性；被奉若神明的人(或物) | |
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thoroughly
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| adv.完全地，彻底地，十足地 | |
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26
sublime
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| adj.崇高的，伟大的；极度的，不顾后果的 | |
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remarkable
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| adj.显著的，异常的，非凡的，值得注意的 | |
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impartiality
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| n. 公平, 无私, 不偏 | |
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29
primitive
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| adj.原始的；简单的；n.原(始)人，原始事物 | |
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proclivity
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| n.倾向，癖性 | |
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swelling
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| n.肿胀 | |
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32
astronomical
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| adj.天文学的，（数字）极大的 | |
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33
stifled
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| （使）窒息， （使）窒闷( stifle的过去式和过去分词 )； 镇压，遏制； 堵 | |
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34
absurdity
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| n.荒谬，愚蠢；谬论 | |
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35
mere
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| adj.纯粹的；仅仅，只不过 | |
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disposition
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| n.性情，性格；意向，倾向；排列，部署 | |
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grotesque
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| adj.怪诞的，丑陋的；n.怪诞的图案，怪人（物） | |
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appreciation
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| n.评价；欣赏；感谢；领会，理解；价格上涨 | |
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39
vividly
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| adv.清楚地，鲜明地，生动地 | |
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40
wildernesses
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| 荒野( wilderness的名词复数 )； 沙漠； （政治家）在野； 不再当政（或掌权） | |
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41
luminous
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| adj.发光的，发亮的；光明的；明白易懂的；有启发的 | |
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42
hazy
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| adj.有薄雾的，朦胧的；不肯定的，模糊的 | |
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43
vista
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| n.远景，深景，展望，回想 | |
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44
nave
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| n.教堂的中部；本堂 | |
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45
vaguely
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| adv.含糊地，暖昧地 | |
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46
apprehended
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| 逮捕，拘押( apprehend的过去式和过去分词 )； 理解 | |
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47
peculiar
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| adj.古怪的，异常的；特殊的，特有的 | |
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48
spacious
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| adj.广阔的，宽敞的 | |
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49
rustle
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| v.沙沙作响；偷盗(牛、马等)；n.沙沙声声 | |
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50
hymns
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| n.赞美诗，圣歌，颂歌( hymn的名词复数 ) | |
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51
hymn
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| n.赞美诗，圣歌，颂歌 | |
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52
abode
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| n.住处，住所 | |
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53
celestial
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| adj.天体的；天上的 | |
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54
sensuousness
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| n.知觉 | |
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55
persuasion
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| n.劝说；说服；持有某种信仰的宗派 | |
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56
remarkably
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| ad.不同寻常地，相当地 | |
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antagonistic
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| adj.敌对的 | |
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58
dagger
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| n.匕首，短剑，剑号 | |
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illuminated
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| adj.被照明的；受启迪的 | |
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60
choir
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| n.唱诗班，唱诗班的席位，合唱团，舞蹈团；v.合唱 | |
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61
inundated
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| v.淹没( inundate的过去式和过去分词 )；（洪水般地）涌来；充满；给予或交予（太多事物）使难以应付 | |
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62
transcended
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| 超出或超越（经验、信念、描写能力等）的范围( transcend的过去式和过去分词 )； 优于或胜过… | |
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63
shimmering
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| v.闪闪发光，发微光( shimmer的现在分词 ) | |
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64
subsided
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| v.（土地）下陷（因在地下采矿）( subside的过去式和过去分词 )；减弱；下降至较低或正常水平；一下子坐在椅子等上 | |
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65
preoccupied
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| adj.全神贯注的，入神的；被抢先占有的；心事重重的v.占据（某人）思想，使对…全神贯注，使专心于( preoccupy的过去式) | |
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66
unwillingly
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| adv.不情愿地 | |
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