Lord Ivywood was in error, therefore, when he said that the fugitives11 could not possibly escape in modern England. You can do a great many things in modern England if you have noticed; some things, in fact, which others know by pictures or current speech; if you know, for instance, that most roadside hedges are taller and denser12 than they look, and that even the largest man lying just behind them, takes up far less room than you would suppose; if you know that many natural sounds are much more like each other than the enlightened ear can believe, as in the case of wind in leaves and of the sea; if you know that it is easier to walk in socks than in boots, if you know how to take hold of the ground; if you know that the proportion of dogs who will bite a man under any circumstances is rather less than the proportion of men who will murder you in a railway carriage; if you know that you need not be drowned even in a river, unless the tide is very strong, and unless you practise putting yourself into the special attitudes of a suicide; if you know that country stations have objectless, extra waiting rooms that nobody ever goes into; and if you know that county folk will forget you if you speak to them, but talk about you all day if you don’t.
By the exercise of these and other arts and sciences Humphrey Pump was able to guide his friend across country, mostly in the character of trespasser13 and occasionally in that of something like housebreaker, and eventually, with sign, keg, cheese and all to step out of a black pinewood onto a white road in a part of the county where they would not be sought for the present.
Opposite them was a cornfield and on their right, in the shades of the pine trees, a cottage, a very tumbledown cottage that seemed to have collapsed14 under its own thatch15. The red-haired Irishman’s face wore a curious smile. He stuck the inn-sign erect16 in the road and went and hammered on the door.
It was opened tremulously by an old man with a face so wrinkled that the wrinkles seemed more distinctly graven than the features themselves, which seemed lost in the labyrinth18 of them. He might have crawled out of the hole in a gnarled tree and he might have been a thousand years old.
He did not seem to notice the sign-board, which stood rather to the left of the door; and what life remained in his eyes seemed to awake in wonder at Dalroy’s stature19 and strange uniform and the sword at his side. “I beg your pardon,” said the Captain, courteously20. “I fear my uniform startles you. It is Lord Ivywood’s livery. All his servants are to dress like this. In fact, I understand the tenants22 also and even yourself, perhaps ... excuse my sword. Lord Ivywood is very particular that every man should have a sword. You know his beautiful, eloquent23 way of putting his views. ‘How can we profess24,’ he was saying to me yesterday, while I was brushing his trousers. ‘How can we profess that all men are brothers while we refuse to them the symbol of manhood; or with what assurance can we claim it as a movement of modern emancipation25 to deny the citizen that which has in all ages marked the difference between the free man and the slave. Nor need we anticipate any such barbaric abuses as my honourable26 friend who is cleaning the knives has prophesied27, for this gift is a sublime28 act of confidence in your universal passion for the severe splendours of Peace; and he that has the right to strike is he who has learnt to spare.’”
Talking all this nonsense with extreme rapidity and vast oratorical29 flourishes of the hand, Captain Dalroy proceeded to trundle both the big cheese and the cask of rum into the house of the astonished cottager: Mr. Pump following with a grim placidity30 and his gun under his arm.
“Lord Ivywood,” said Dalroy, setting the rum cask with a bump on the plain deal table, “wishes to take wine with you. Or, more strictly31 speaking, rum. Don’t you run away, my friend, with any of these stories about Lord Ivywood being opposed to drink. Three-bottle Ivywood, we call him in the kitchen. But it must be rum; nothing but rum for the Ivywoods. ‘Wine may be a mocker,’ he was saying the other day (and I particularly noted32 the phrasing, which seemed to be very happy even for his lordship; he was standing33 at the top of the steps, and I stopped cleaning them to make a note of it), ‘wine may be a mocker; strong drink may be raging, but nowhere in the sacred pages will you find one word of censure34 of the sweeter spirit sacred to them that go down to the sea in ships; no tongue of priest and prophet was ever lifted to break the sacred silence of Holy Writ35 about Rum.’ He then explained to me,” went on Dalroy, signing to Pump to tap the cask according to his own technical secret, “that the great tip for avoiding any bad results that a bottle or two of rum might have on young and inexperienced people was to eat cheese with it, particularly this kind of cheese that I have here. I’ve forgotten its name.”
“Cheddar,” said Pump, quite gravely.
“But mind you!” continued the Captain almost ferociously36, shaking his big finger in warning at the aged37 man. “Mind you ‘no bread with the cheese. All the devastating38 ruin wrought39 by cheese and the once happy homes of this country, has been due to the reckless and insane experiment of eating bread with it.’ You’ll get no bread from me, my friend. Indeed, Lord Ivywood has given directions that the allusion40 to this ignorant and depraved habit shall be eliminated from the Lord’s Prayer. Have a drink.”
He had already poured out a little of the spirit into two thick tumblers and a broken teacup, which he had induced the aged man to produce; and now solemnly pledged him.
“Thank ye kindly41, sir,” said the old man, using his cracked voice for the first time. Then he drank; and his old face changed as if it were an old horn lantern in which the flame began to rise.
“Ar,” he said. “My son he be a sailor.”
“I wish him a happy voyage,” said the Captain. “And I’ll sing you a song about the first sailor there ever was in the world; and who (as Lord Ivywood acutely observes) lived before the time of rum.”
He sat down on a wooden chair and lifted his loud voice once more, beating on the table with the broken tea-cup.
He ate his egg with a ladle in an egg-cup big as a pail,
And the soup he took was Elephant Soup and the fish he took was Whale;
But they all were small to the cellar he took when he set out to sail;
And Noah, he often said to his wife when he sat down to dine,
‘I don’t care where the water goes if it doesn’t get into the wine.’
As if it would wash the stars away as suds go down a sink,
The seven heavens came roaring down for the throats of hell to drink,
And Noah, he cocked his eye and said, ‘It looks like rain, I think,
The water has drowned the Matterhorn as deep as a Mendip mine,
But I don’t care where the water goes if it doesn’t get into the wine.’
“But Noah he sinned, and we have sinned; on tipsy feet we trod,
Till a great big black teetotaller was sent to us for a rod,
But I don’t care where the water goes if it doesn’t get into the wine.”
“Lord Ivywood’s favorite song,” concluded Mr. Patrick Dalroy, drinking. “Sing us a song yourself.”
Rather to the surprise of the two humourists, the old gentleman actually began in a quavering voice to chant,
“King George that lives in London Town,
I hope they will defend his crown,
And Bonyparte be quite put down
On Christmas Day in the morning.
All in his——”
It is perhaps fortunate for the rapidity of this narrative50 that the old gentleman’s favourite song, which consists of forty-seven verses, was interrupted by a curious incident. The door of the cottage opened and a sheepish-looking man in corduroys stood silently in the room for a few seconds and then said, without preface or further explanation,
“Four ale.”
“I beg your pardon?” inquired the polite Captain.
“Four ale,” said the man with solidity; then catching51 sight of Humphrey seemed to find a few more words in his vocabulary.
“Morning, Mr. Pump. Didn’t know as how you’d moved ‘The Old Ship.’”
“Mr. Marne’s seeing after it now, Mr. Gowl,” said Pump with the strict etiquette53 of the country side. “But he’s got nothing but this rum in stock as yet.”
“Better’nowt,” said the laconic54 Mr. Gowl; and put down some money in front of the aged Marne, who eyed it wonderingly. As he was turning with a farewell and wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, the door once more moved, letting in white sunlight and a man in a red neckerchief.
“Morning, Mr. Marne; Morning, Mr. Pump; Morning, Mr. Gowl,” said the man in the red neckerchief.
“Morning, Mr. Coote,” said the other three, one after another.
Mr. Coote also had a little rum; and also laid a little money under the rather vague gaze of the venerable cottager. Mr. Coote was just proceeding56 to explain that these were bad times, but if you saw a sign you were all right still; a lawyer up at Grunton Abbot had told him so; when the company was increased and greatly excited by the arrival of a boisterous57 and popular tinker, who ordered glasses all round and said he had his donkey and cart outside. A prolonged, rich and confused conversation about the donkey and cart then ensued, in which the most varied58 views were taken of their merits; and it gradually began to dawn on Dalroy that the tinker was trying to sell them.
An idea, suited to the romantic opportunism of his present absurd career, suddenly swept over his mind, and he rushed out to look at the cart and donkey. The next moment he was back again, asking the tinker what his price was, and almost in the same breath offering a much bigger price than the tinker would have dreamed of asking. This was considered, however, as a lunacy specially59 allowed to gentlemen; the tinker had some more rum on the strength of the payment, and then Dalroy, offering his excuses, sealed up the cask and took it and the cheese to be stowed in the bottom of the cart. The money, however, he still left lying in shining silver and copper60 before the silver beard of old Marne.
No one acquainted with the quaint61 and often wordless camaraderie62 of the English poor will require to be told that they all went out and stared at him as he loaded the cart and saw to the harness of the donkey—all except the old cottager, who sat as if hypnotised by the sight of the money. While they were standing there they saw coming down the white, hot road, where it curled over the hill, a figure that gave them no pleasure, even when it was a mere17 marching black spot in the distance. It was a Mr. Bullrose, the agent of Lord Ivywood’s estates.
Mr. Bullrose was a short, square man with a broad, square head with ridges63 of close, black curls on it, with a heavy, froglike face and starting, suspicious eyes; a man with a good silk hat but a square business jacket. Mr. Bullrose was not a nice man. The agent on that sort of estate hardly ever is a nice man. The landlord often is; and even Lord Ivywood had an arctic magnanimity of his own, which made most people want, if possible, to see him personally. But Mr. Bullrose was petty. Every really practical tyrant64 must be petty.
He evidently failed to understand the commotion65 in front of Mr. Marne’s partly collapsed cottage, but he felt there must be something wrong about it. He wanted to get rid of the cottage altogether, and had not, of course, the faintest intention of giving the cottager any compensation for it. He hoped the old man would die; but in any case he could easily clear him out if it became suddenly necessary, for he could not possibly pay the rent for this week. The rent was not very much; but it was immeasurably too much for the old man who had no conceivable way of borrowing or earning it. That is where the chivalry66 of our aristocratic land system comes in.
“Good-bye, my friends,” the enormous man in the fantastic uniform was saying, “all roads lead to rum, as Lord Ivywood said in one of his gayer moments, and we hope to be back soon, establishing a first class hotel here, of which prospectuses67 will soon be sent out.”
The heavy froglike face of Mr. Bullrose, the agent, grew uglier with astonishment68; and the eyes stood out more like a snail’s than a frog’s. The indefensible allusion to Lord Ivywood would in any case have caused a choleric69 intervention70, if it had not been swallowed up in the earthquake suggestion of an unlicensed hotel on the estate. This again would have effected the explosion, if that and everything else had not been struck still and rigid71 by the sight of a solid, wooden sign-post already erected72 outside old Marne’s miserable73 cottage.
“I’ve got him now,” muttered Mr. Bullrose. “He can’t possibly pay; and out he shall go.” And he walked swiftly towards the door of the cottage, almost at the same moment that Dalroy went to the donkey’s head, as if to lead it off along the road.
“Look here, my man,” burst out Bullrose, the instant he was inside the cottage. “You’ve cooked yourself this time. His lordship has been a great deal too indulgent with you; but this is going to be the end of it. The insolence74 of what you’ve done outside, especially when you know his lordship’s wishes in such things, has just put the lid on.” He stopped a moment and sneered75. “So unless you happen to have the exact rent down to a farthing or two about you, out you go. We’re sick of your sort.”
In a very awkward and fumbling76 manner, the old man pushed a heap of coins across the table. Mr. Bullrose sat down suddenly on the wooden chair with his silk hat on, and began counting them furiously. He counted them once; he counted them twice; and he counted them again. Then he stared at them more steadily77 than the cottager had done.
“Where did you get this money?” he asked in a thick, gross voice. “Did you steal it?”
“I ain’t very spry for stealin’,” said the old man in quavering comedy.
Bullrose looked at him and then at the money; and remembered with fury that Ivywood was a just though cold magistrate78 on the bench.
“Well, anyhow,” he cried, in a hot, heady way, “we’ve got enough against you to turn you out of this. Haven’t you broken the law, my man, to say nothing of the regulations for tenants, in sticking up that fancy sign of yours outside the cottage? Eh?”
“Eh?” reiterated79 the agent.
“Ar,” replied the tenant.
“Have you or have you not a sign-board outside this house?” shouted Bullrose, hammering the table.
The tenant looked at him for a long time with a patient and venerable face, and then said: “Mubbe, yes. Mubbe, no.”
“I’ll mubbe you,” cried Mr. Bullrose, springing up and sticking his silk hat on the back of his head. “I don’t know whether you people are too drunk to see anything, but I saw the thing with my own eyes out in the road. Come out, and deny it if you dare!”
He tottered81 after the agent, who flung open the door with a businesslike fury and stood outside on the threshold. He stood there quite a long time, and he did not speak. Deep in the hardened mud of his materialistic82 mind there had stirred two things that were its ancient enemies; the old fairy tale in which every thing can be believed; the new scepticism in which nothing can be believed—not even one’s own eyes. There was no sign, nor sign of a sign, in the landscape.
On the withered83 face of the old man Marne there was a faint renewal84 of that laughter that has slept since the Middle Ages.
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1
perfectly
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| adv.完美地，无可非议地，彻底地 | |
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unaware
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| a.不知道的，未意识到的 | |
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beeches
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| n.山毛榉( beech的名词复数 )；山毛榉木材 | |
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ashen
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| adj.灰的 | |
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tints
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| 色彩( tint的名词复数 )； 带白的颜色； （淡色）染发剂； 痕迹 | |
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sylvan
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| adj.森林的 | |
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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
dispensing
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| v.分配( dispense的现在分词 )；施与；配（药） | |
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9
physically
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| adj.物质上，体格上，身体上，按自然规律 | |
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elude
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| v.躲避，困惑 | |
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fugitives
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| n.亡命者，逃命者( fugitive的名词复数 ) | |
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12
denser
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| adj. 不易看透的, 密集的, 浓厚的, 愚钝的 | |
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13
trespasser
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| n.侵犯者；违反者 | |
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14
collapsed
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| adj.倒塌的 | |
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thatch
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| vt.用茅草覆盖…的顶部；n.茅草(屋) | |
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16
erect
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| n./v.树立，建立，使竖立；adj.直立的，垂直的 | |
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17
mere
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| adj.纯粹的；仅仅，只不过 | |
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18
labyrinth
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| n.迷宫；难解的事物；迷路 | |
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19
stature
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| n.（高度）水平，（高度）境界，身高，身材 | |
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20
courteously
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| adv.有礼貌地，亲切地 | |
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21
tenant
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| n.承租人；房客；佃户；v.租借，租用 | |
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tenants
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| n.房客( tenant的名词复数 )；佃户；占用者；占有者 | |
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23
eloquent
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| adj.雄辩的，口才流利的；明白显示出的 | |
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24
profess
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| v.声称，冒称，以...为业，正式接受入教，表明信仰 | |
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25
emancipation
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| n.（从束缚、支配下）解放 | |
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26
honourable
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| adj.可敬的；荣誉的，光荣的 | |
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27
prophesied
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| v.预告，预言( prophesy的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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28
sublime
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| adj.崇高的，伟大的；极度的，不顾后果的 | |
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29
oratorical
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| adj.演说的，雄辩的 | |
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30
placidity
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| n.平静，安静，温和 | |
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31
strictly
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| adv.严厉地，严格地；严密地 | |
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32
noted
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| adj.著名的，知名的 | |
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33
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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34
censure
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| v./n.责备；非难；责难 | |
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35
writ
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| n.命令状，书面命令 | |
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36
ferociously
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| 野蛮地，残忍地 | |
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37
aged
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| adj.年老的，陈年的 | |
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38
devastating
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| adj.毁灭性的，令人震惊的，强有力的 | |
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39
wrought
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| v.引起；以…原料制作；运转；adj.制造的 | |
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40
allusion
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| n.暗示，间接提示 | |
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41
kindly
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| adj.和蔼的，温和的，爽快的；adv.温和地，亲切地 | |
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42
ostrich
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| n.鸵鸟 | |
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43
fowls
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| 鸟( fowl的名词复数 )； 禽肉； 既不是这； 非驴非马 | |
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44
cataract
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| n.大瀑布，奔流，洪水，白内障 | |
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45
brink
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| n.(悬崖、河流等的)边缘，边沿 | |
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46
chapel
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| n.小教堂，殡仪馆 | |
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47
wrath
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| n.愤怒，愤慨，暴怒 | |
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48
shrine
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| n.圣地，神龛，庙；v.将...置于神龛内，把...奉为神圣 | |
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49
squire
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| n.护卫, 侍从, 乡绅 | |
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50
narrative
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| n.叙述，故事；adj.叙事的，故事体的 | |
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51
catching
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| adj.易传染的，有魅力的，迷人的，接住 | |
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52
pointed
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| adj.尖的，直截了当的 | |
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53
etiquette
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| n.礼仪，礼节；规矩 | |
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54
laconic
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| adj.简洁的；精练的 | |
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55
genially
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| adv.亲切地，和蔼地；快活地 | |
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56
proceeding
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| n.行动，进行，(pl.)会议录，学报 | |
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57
boisterous
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| adj.喧闹的，欢闹的 | |
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58
varied
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| adj.多样的，多变化的 | |
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59
specially
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| adv.特定地；特殊地；明确地 | |
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60
copper
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| n.铜；铜币；铜器；adj.铜(制)的；(紫)铜色的 | |
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61
quaint
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| adj.古雅的，离奇有趣的，奇怪的 | |
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62
camaraderie
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| n.同志之爱，友情 | |
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63
ridges
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| n.脊( ridge的名词复数 )；山脊；脊状突起；大气层的)高压脊 | |
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64
tyrant
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| n.暴君，专制的君主，残暴的人 | |
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65
commotion
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| n.骚动，动乱 | |
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66
chivalry
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| n.骑士气概，侠义；（男人）对女人彬彬有礼，献殷勤 | |
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67
prospectuses
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| n.章程，简章，简介( prospectus的名词复数 ) | |
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68
astonishment
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| n.惊奇，惊异 | |
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69
choleric
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| adj.易怒的，性情暴躁的 | |
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70
intervention
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| n.介入，干涉，干预 | |
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71
rigid
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| adj.严格的，死板的；刚硬的，僵硬的 | |
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72
ERECTED
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| adj. 直立的，竖立的，笔直的 vt. 使 ... 直立，建立 | |
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73
miserable
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| adj.悲惨的，痛苦的；可怜的，糟糕的 | |
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74
insolence
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| n.傲慢；无礼；厚颜；傲慢的态度 | |
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75
sneered
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| 讥笑，冷笑( sneer的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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76
fumbling
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| n. 摸索,漏接 v. 摸索,摸弄,笨拙的处理 | |
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77
steadily
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| adv.稳定地；不变地；持续地 | |
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78
magistrate
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| n.地方行政官，地方法官，治安官 | |
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79
reiterated
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| 反复地说，重申( reiterate的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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80
dubiously
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| adv.可疑地，怀疑地 | |
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81
tottered
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| v.走得或动得不稳( totter的过去式和过去分词 )；踉跄；蹒跚；摇摇欲坠 | |
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82
materialistic
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| a.唯物主义的，物质享乐主义的 | |
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83
withered
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| adj. 枯萎的，干瘪的，（人身体的部分器官）因病萎缩的或未发育良好的 动词wither的过去式和过去分词形式 | |
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84
renewal
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| adj.(契约)延期，续订，更新，复活，重来 | |
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