The days passed heavily. Vance and Halo held no further communication with the Pension Britannique. Vance returned the cheque to Colonel Churley, with a note saying that the twenty pounds had been a gift to Chris, and that Chris was aware of it; and the following week a copy of Mr. Dorman’s parish bulletin was left at the pink villa1, with an underscored paragraph announcing that Colonel Churley, in memory of his son, had given twenty pounds to the Church library (Purchasing Committee: the Chaplain, Lady Dayes–Dawes, Miss Plummet2.) Vance was diverted at the thought of the works which would be acquired with this fund; he amused himself and Halo by drawing up a probable list, and they smiled over the brilliant additions that Chris would have made to it.
But Vance was still full of disquietude. Everything in his life seemed to have gone wrong, to have come to grief. He asked Halo, the day after Mrs. Dorman’s visit, if she would not like to leave Oubli; but she said with a smile that she didn’t see why they should alter their plans to suit the Pension Britannique. They had taken the villa for a year, and she wanted him to have a taste of the summer life, the boating and bathing, the long hot days on the sands. “There’ll be nobody to be scandalized then — the Pension Britannique closes in summer. If you suppose I mind what those poor women say,” she added carelessly; and he understood that nothing could be more distasteful to her than to seem aware that she was the subject of gossip and criticism.
Vance himself had no feelings of the sort. He resented furiously any slight to Halo, but saw no reason for appearing to ignore such slights. He supposed it was what he called the “Tarrant pride” in her; the attitude of all her clan3; the same which had helped Tarrant to stiffen4 himself against the moral torture of his talk with Vance, and affect indifference5 when every nerve was writhing6. It all seemed an obsolete7 superstition8, as dead as duelling; yet there were moments when Vance admired the stoicism. He could think of girls — straight, loyal, decent girls — who, if they loved a man, and lived with him, would have gloried in the fact, and laughed at social slights and strictures. But Halo suffered acutely from every slight and stricture, yet bore herself with the gayest indifference. “All those old institutions — I suppose there was something in them, a sort of scaffolding, an armour,” he thought. He felt how often his own undisciplined impulses needed the support of some principle that would not have to be thought out each time.
But if Halo did not want to leave Oubli, he did; and she was not long in divining it. There was no longer any question of his working; the manuscript lay untouched. If he were ever to finish “Colossus” he must get away — get away at once. When he had lectured Chris on the evils of idleness he had little imagined that within a few weeks he would be exemplifying them. “I told him he’d be able to work fast enough if he had to — such rot! Look at me now!” he said bitterly.
“But it’s just because of Chris that you can’t work. You’re still suffering too much.”
“A good many books have been made out of suffering.”
“Perhaps; but not out of tattered9 nerves. You’ve got to get away.” He was silent. “Why not go to London?” she suggested suddenly. “It’s time you saw your publishers about ‘Colossus’. Go now; it’s just what you need. You could stay with Tolby, who’s so often invited you.”
Vance felt a rush of life in his veins10. London — London! He remembered the look in Chris Churley’s eyes when he had heard the magic suggestion. “I wonder if my eyes look like that to Halo,” Vance thought with a twinge of compunction; but the twinge was fleeting11. London, Madrid, Constantinople — it hardly mattered which. Freedom was what they all meant — change and freedom! And how good to see old Tolby again, and drop back into the current of their endless talks. Everything connected with the idea of departure seemed suddenly easy and inviting12.
“You’d really rather stay here?” he faltered13.
“I’d rather,” she smiled.
In the train, on the boat, and now in Tolby’s snug14 smoky quarters, Vance felt the same glow of liberation. With his first step on English soil had come the sense of being at home and at ease. The feeling of sureness and authority underlying15 the careless confidence with which life was conducted, soothed16 his nerves, and put him quietly yet not unironically in his place — a strangely small one, he perceived, yet roomy and comfortable as one of Tolby’s armchairs.
Tolby lived off the King’s Road, on top of a house divided into old~fashioned flats. Attached to his studio were two bedrooms, a kitchenette and a slit17 of a bathroom, with a geyser which had to be managed like a neurasthenic woman. “When you get to know her it’ll be all right; she’ll get tired of trying on her tricks. She’s always a bit nervous at first,” Tolby explained. No one else in the flat was nervous. From the kitchen, at stated intervals18, a broad calm woman (who removed a black bonnet19 with strings20 when she entered the flat), appeared with crisp bacon, kippered herring, cold beef and large placid21 puddings. To Vance the diet was ambrosial22. He delighted also in the tidiness of the studio, where everything was shabby and paintless, but neat and orderly, with a handful of spring flowers on the breakfast table, a pleasant fire in the grate, and a general seemliness that reminded him of Halo. “You must be glad to get back to this from Montparnasse,” he said with a sigh of satisfaction.
“Yes; when I’ve had enough talk.”
“Isn’t there any talk in London?”
“Yes; but it’s not a sport or a career. It’s done in corners — furtively23.”
“At any rate,” Vance thought, “I’m not likely to hear any of that drivel that poor Chris ran after.”
Little by little the social immensities of London began to dawn on him, its groups within groups, each, in spite of all the broad~casting and modern fluidity, so walled in by silence and indifference, and he became more and more sure that there was no risk of any communication between Tolby’s group and Sir Felix Oster’s. Among the young painters and writers who came to the studio he found himself already known, but not what Floss Delaney would have called celebrated24. These young people had read his books, and were interested in them but not overwhelmed. The discovery roused his slumbering25 energy, and he said to himself in a burst of creative enthusiasm: “They’re dead right about what I’ve done so far; but wait till they see ‘Colossus’ — I’ll show them!”
His first days were spent in wandering about the streets, alert yet dreaming, letting the panorama26 of churches, museums, galleries, stream through his attentive27 senses. Tolby, himself hard at work, seldom joined him till the evening, and then they either supped (since dining, in Tolby’s group, was out of fashion) with other pleasant busy people, chiefly writers or painters, or went to hear old music or to see new dancing. But by the end of the first week the desire to write had once more mastered Vance, and he shut himself up at his desk for long hours of the day.
On Saturdays he and his host went off on their bicycles to some quiet leafy place where there was an inn with a garden full of lilacs and tulips, or else they stayed with friends of Tolby’s in low-studded village cottages transformed into bungalows28, with black cross-beams and windows latticed with roses. But as Vance grew more absorbed in his work even such outings became disturbing, and he asked to be left behind when Tolby went away for the next week~end.
Tolby took this as a matter of course (the blessed way they had in England of taking things like that!), and the following Saturday Vance, after his friend’s departure, turned with a grin of joy to his work.
Toward evening the opening of the door broke in on a happy cadence29. The placid woman who purveyed30 the kippered herrings pronounced: “Mr. Fane”, and Vance’s memory added: “Of the ‘Amplifier’.” It was in fact Derek Fane, the young critic whom Vance had met at Savignac’s the previous autumn, and to whom he had given a verbal outline of “Colossus”. The book had undergone such changes that Vance was glad to see Fane again, and allowed the talk to be led to his work with more affability than he usually showed to interviewers. He knew his publishers were anxious that the “Amplifier” should make the most of his visit to London, and a talk with a critic like Derek Fane would be very different from the “third degree” applied31 by newspaper reporters. Fane was one of the quietest men Vance had ever met, even in England. Everything about him was muffled32 and pianissimo; he did his interviewing by listening. Vance could hardly recall his having put a question; but his silence was not only benevolent33 but acute. After Vance’s summing-up of the new “Colossus” he merely said: “It sounds as if you’d pulled it into shape”; but the remark carried such conviction that a glow of encouragement rushed through Vance.
The next morning the “Amplifier” had a brilliant survey of Vance’s past work, and a discerning account of his projected book, inserted into a picturesque34 impression of the King’s Road studio. Henceforth all literary and fashionable London, if it cared to know, would be aware of Vance’s presence.
The first result was a shower of invitations; one from Lady Pevensey headed the list. She besought35 Vance to climb to her little flat on the roof of a new West End sky-scraper for the most informal of after-theatre suppers. He would find just the people he liked, and must of course bring his friend Mr. Tolby, whose pictures everybody was beginning to talk about. Tolby urged Vance to accept. “It’s one of the penalties of your profession; you must go and film the animals in their native habitat. I can sit still and wait till they come to be painted — but it’s your job to snap them at their games.”
Vance hardly needed urging. It was not so much the novelty of the scene that attracted him as its atmosphere. Being in England felt like coming back to something known in a happier state, and, as the hymn36 said, “lost awhile”. There was nothing like it in his conscious experience, yet it seemed nearer to him than his actual life. He discovered that the sense of security and solidarity37 emanating38 from the group of dowdy39 exiles at Oubli was the very air of England. Wherever he went it looked out of calm eyes and sounded in calm voices. Ah, those calm voices, their rich organ~tones, their still depths of sound! Vance never tired of them. Halo’s way of speaking, and that of her group, was a thin reminder40 of those rich notes; but how staccato and metallic41 compared with the brooding English intonations42! “It’s the way your voices handle the words,” Vance explained, struggling for a definition. “The way a collector touches gems43 or ivories, not fussily44 or mincingly45, but surely and softly. Or the way a girl in a poultry-yard picks up downy chickens.” Tolby laughed and said he liked the last analogy best.
The next day a voice with a different cadence broke in on his toil46. “I’m Margot Crash,” it shrilled47, and Vance found himself confronting a slender young lady with a face adorned48 by movie-star teeth and eyelashes. Miss Crash’s job, though brilliant, was probably less lucrative50 than if she had used her gifts on the screen: she represented in London the literary page of the Des Moines “Daily Ubiquity”. Vance started up to protest at the intrusion; but the teeth and eyelashes mollified him, and in another moment their owner, snugly51 ensconced in Tolby’s deepest armchair, was confessing that she was a beginner, and desperately52 in earnest about her job. “If I can get a good write-up off of you I’m made forever,” she declared; “but I’m so scared I guess you’ll have to do it for me. I’m too crazy about your novels to know how to talk about them to their author.”
“Oh, well,” said Vance, “the ones I’ve already written are still measurable by human instruments.”
She lifted her long lashes49 with a vague laugh. “Well, what I want is to find out all about them — how you write them, I mean, and how you began writing anyhow. What made you think of it? Did you take a course?”
“A course —?”
“Why, I mean at college. Or did the idea just come to you? Did you educate yourself to be a writer? Did you begin by studying your contemporaries? That’s the way they make you do in some courses.”
“No; I believe I began with Mother Goose.”
Her lovely stare widened; allusiveness53 was evidently as unintelligible54 to her as irony55. “Oh, do you mean you started by writing children’s books?” She drew out a little note-book in which Vance could almost see her inscribing56: “Began by writing for children.” “Like the Pollyannas, for instance?” she helped him out enthusiastically.
“Well — something.”
She clapped it down. “But what I want to know is — how did you learn to write for adults? Did you pick one of your contemporaries and work out your style on his, or did you take one of the longer courses — the ones that go way back to the classics?”
“It depends on what you call the classics.”
That puzzled her again, and provoked a lovely frown. “Well — Galsworthy, I suppose,” she triumphed.
“Oh, no; not as far back as that.” Her face fell, but she wrote on ardently57 till he signified to her, as humanely58 as possible, that there was really no more to tell, and that he must get back to his work.
“Oh — your WORK!” she breathed, in awed59 acquiescence60; and then, putting out her hand: “You see, I’m trying to write novels myself, and it just means everything to me to find out from somebody up at the top what you have to do to get there. But I don’t believe I’ll ever have time to go way back to those old classics,” she sighed.
The next day the London edition of the Des Moines “Daily Ubiquity” brought out a heavily head-lined article on the celebrated young American novelist who was visiting London for the first time, and who had acquired mastery in his art by writing children’s stories and taking a college course in adult fiction. Well, why not?
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villa
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| n.别墅，城郊小屋 | |
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plummet
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| vi.(价格、水平等)骤然下跌；n.铅坠；重压物 | |
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clan
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| n.氏族，部落，宗族，家族，宗派 | |
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stiffen
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| v.(使)硬，(使)变挺，(使)变僵硬 | |
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indifference
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| n.不感兴趣，不关心，冷淡，不在乎 | |
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writhing
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| （因极度痛苦而）扭动或翻滚( writhe的现在分词 ) | |
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obsolete
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| adj.已废弃的，过时的 | |
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superstition
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| n.迷信，迷信行为 | |
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tattered
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| adj.破旧的，衣衫破的 | |
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veins
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| n.纹理；矿脉( vein的名词复数 )；静脉；叶脉；纹理 | |
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fleeting
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| adj.短暂的，飞逝的 | |
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inviting
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| adj.诱人的，引人注目的 | |
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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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snug
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| adj.温暖舒适的，合身的，安全的；v.使整洁干净，舒适地依靠，紧贴；n.（英）酒吧里的私房 | |
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underlying
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| adj.在下面的，含蓄的，潜在的 | |
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soothed
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| v.安慰( soothe的过去式和过去分词 )；抚慰；使舒服；减轻痛苦 | |
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slit
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| n.狭长的切口；裂缝；vt.切开，撕裂 | |
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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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bonnet
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| n.无边女帽；童帽 | |
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strings
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| n.弦 | |
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placid
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| adj.安静的，平和的 | |
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ambrosial
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| adj.美味的 | |
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furtively
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| adv. 偷偷地, 暗中地 | |
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celebrated
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| adj.有名的，声誉卓著的 | |
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slumbering
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| 微睡，睡眠（slumber的现在分词形式） | |
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panorama
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| n.全景，全景画，全景摄影，全景照片[装置] | |
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attentive
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| adj.注意的，专心的；关心(别人)的，殷勤的 | |
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bungalows
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| n.平房( bungalow的名词复数 )；单层小屋，多于一层的小屋 | |
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cadence
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| n.（说话声调的）抑扬顿挫 | |
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purveyed
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| v.提供，供应( purvey的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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applied
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| adj.应用的；v.应用，适用 | |
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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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benevolent
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| adj.仁慈的，乐善好施的 | |
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picturesque
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| adj.美丽如画的，（语言）生动的，绘声绘色的 | |
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besought
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| v.恳求，乞求（某事物）( beseech的过去式和过去分词 )；(beseech的过去式与过去分词) | |
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hymn
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| n.赞美诗，圣歌，颂歌 | |
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solidarity
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| n.团结；休戚相关 | |
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emanating
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| v.从…处传出，传出( emanate的现在分词 )；产生，表现，显示 | |
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dowdy
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| adj.不整洁的；过旧的 | |
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reminder
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| n.提醒物，纪念品；暗示，提示 | |
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metallic
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| adj.金属的；金属制的；含金属的；产金属的；像金属的 | |
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intonations
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| n.语调，说话的抑扬顿挫( intonation的名词复数 )；（演奏或唱歌中的）音准 | |
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gems
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| growth； economy； management； and customer satisfaction 增长 | |
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fussily
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| adv.无事空扰地，大惊小怪地，小题大做地 | |
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mincingly
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toil
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| vi.辛劳工作，艰难地行动；n.苦工，难事 | |
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shrilled
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| （声音）尖锐的，刺耳的，高频率的( shrill的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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adorned
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| [计]被修饰的 | |
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lashes
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| n.鞭挞( lash的名词复数 )；鞭子；突然猛烈的一击；急速挥动v.鞭打( lash的第三人称单数 )；煽动；紧系；怒斥 | |
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lucrative
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| adj.赚钱的，可获利的 | |
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snugly
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| adv.紧贴地；贴身地；暖和舒适地；安适地 | |
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desperately
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| adv.极度渴望地，绝望地，孤注一掷地 | |
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allusiveness
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unintelligible
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| adj.无法了解的，难解的，莫明其妙的 | |
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irony
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| n.反语，冷嘲；具有讽刺意味的事，嘲弄 | |
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inscribing
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| v.写，刻( inscribe的现在分词 ) | |
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ardently
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| adv.热心地，热烈地 | |
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humanely
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| adv.仁慈地；人道地；富人情地；慈悲地 | |
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awed
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| adj.充满敬畏的，表示敬畏的v.使敬畏，使惊惧( awe的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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acquiescence
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| n.默许；顺从 | |
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