After Vance had finished reading, Halo Tarrant sat silent. The library was very still. Only one lamp was lit, on a low table near Vance’s armchair; the rest of the room hung remote and shadowy about them, except when a dart1 of flame from the hearth2 woke up a row of books here and there, or made the flanks of a bronze vase glitter like a wet rock.
Vance’s heart was beating hurriedly. His voice was hoarse3 with excitement; he could not have read any longer without breaking down. In his agitation4 he did not dare to lift his eyes to his listener’s, but sat fumbling5 mechanically among the pages on his knee. Since the first paragraph he had been more and more certain that her verdict would be unfavourable.
“Well —?” he questioned at length, with an uneasy laugh. He could hardly endure the interval6 that elapsed before she answered. His throat was parched7, and little prickles ran all over his skin. He felt as if she would never speak.
“I think you ought to take more time over it,” she said. “The canvas is much bigger than you’re used to — and the subject is so new. There are things in it that I like very much; but there are bits that seem incomplete, undigested. . . . I’m sure you can do the book; but you must give yourself time . . . lots of time. Can’t you put it away for a few months and turn to something else?”
Her verdict was exactly what he had expected, yet it filled him with unreasonable8 discouragement. She always lit instantly on the flaws of which he himself was half conscious, even in the heat of composition, the flaws he hoped she would overlook, but knew in advance that she would detect; and for this reason he lost his critical independence in her presence, and swung uneasily between elation9 and despondency.
“Yes, I know. It’s a failure,” he muttered.
“How can you tell, when only a few chapters are written? And in them there’s so much that’s good. That first impression of the heartless overwhelmingness of New York — it’s been done so often, but no one has seen it and felt it exactly as you have. . . . And the opening scene in the little western town — all that’s good too, except that perhaps — ” she paused, lifting her eyes doubtfully to his, “perhaps when you did that part you’d been reading The Corner Grocery a little too attentively,” she concluded with her hesitating smile.
He smiled too: it felt like a dry contraction10 of the muscles. “Too much of the sedulous11 ape, you mean?”
“Well, you seem to be struggling against crosscurrents of influence. But you’ll work out of them when you really get into your subject.”
“Trouble is it’s not my subject,” he broke in nervously12; but she continued: “Not yet, perhaps; but it will be if you’ll only give yourself more time.” He looked up and met her scrutinizing13 eyes. “You look terribly tired, Vance. Can’t you drop the book for a few months?”
She made the suggestion gently, appealingly, in her most tranquil14 and compassionate15 voice. Yes, he thought, stirred by sudden exasperation17: that was the way with people to whom material ease was as much a matter of course as the air they breathed. It was always an unwholesome business for the rich and poor to mix; the poor ought to keep to their own kind.
“Drop it?” he echoed with a laugh. “Well, that wouldn’t be exactly easy. Your husband has agreed to let me off my monthly article so that I can keep all my time for the novel; and now you advise me to drop the novel! What I’ve got to do is to finish it as quickly as I can, and let it take its chance. I’m doomed18 to write potboilers — if ever I can learn the trick!”
She paled a little. He saw that his words had hurt her, and he was glad they had. She continued to look at him earnestly, with her narrowed wistful gaze.
“You never WILL learn the trick; I’m not afraid for you.”
He laughed again — she was preposterous19! “Oh, well, I didn’t come here to talk business,” he said irritably20. “What I wanted was your opinion — now I’ve got it. And as it’s exactly the same as mine I’d throw the book into the fire if I could.”
She received this in silence, sitting quite still, as her way was when she was turning over anything in her mind. “Vance,” she said abruptly21, “when you brought me these last chapters you didn’t feel like that about them. You had faith in them an hour ago. You mustn’t let my chance suggestions influence you; no artist should care so much for what people say . . . .”
He jumped up, the pages on his knee scattering22 to the floor. “Care what people say? I don’t care a damn what people say. . . . It’s only what you say,” he broke out with sudden vehemence23.
A little flash of light ran over her face: her only way of blushing was this luminous24 glow on her pallor. “But that’s even more unreasonable . . .” she began.
“Oh, God, what’s reason got to do with it? You’ve been the breath of life to me all these months. If you cut off a fellow’s oxygen he collapses25. . . . Don’t talk to me about not caring what you say! There’d be nothing left to me then.”
The silence of the dusky room seemed to receive and reverberate26 his words as the shadows caught and intensified27 the wavering gleams of the fire. Vance leaned against the mantel and stared down with blind eyes at the scattered28 pages of his manuscript. For a while — a long while, it seemed to him — Mrs. Tarrant did not move or look up.
“There’d be your genius left to you,” she said, still motionless in her corner.
He laughed. “I sometimes think my genius is a phantasm we’ve manufactured between us. When I’m not with you I don’t believe in it — I don’t believe in anything when I’m not with you.”
“Oh, Vance, don’t — don’t blaspheme!”
“Blaspheme! The only blasphemy29 would be to say that you’re not the whole earth to me!”
Still she did not move; and her immobility held him spellbound on the hearth. “That’s too much to be to anyone,” he heard her murmur30, and immediately afterward31: “All I’ve wanted was to help you with your books . . . .”
“My books? My books?” He moved a step or two nearer to her, and then stood checked again by her immobility. “What do you suppose books are made of?” he cried. “Paper and ink, or the marrow32 of a man’s bones and the blood of his brain? But you’re in my books, you’re part of them, whether you want to be or not, whether you believe in them or despise them, whether you believe in me or despise me; and you’re in me, in my body and blood, just as you’re in my books, and just as fatally. It’s done now and you can’t get away from me, you can’t undo33 what you’ve done: you’re the thoughts I think, and the visions I see, and the air I breathe, and the food I eat — and everything, everything, in the earth and over it . . . .”
He broke off, startled by his own outburst. He who was in general so tongue-tied, to whom eloquence34 came only with the pen, what power had driven this rush of words from him? Some fiery35 fusion36 of his whole being, the heightening and merging37 of every faculty38, seemed to have unloosed his tongue. And it was all as he had said. He and his art and this woman were one, indissolubly one in a passionate16 mutual39 understanding. He and she understood each other — didn’t she know it? — with their intelligences and their emotions, with their eyes, their hands, their lips. Ah, her lips! All he could see now was the shape of her lips, that mouth haunted by all the smiles that had ever played over it, as if they were gathered up in her like shut flowerbuds.
“Didn’t you know — didn’t you know?” he stammered40.
She had risen and stood a little way off from him. “About you —?”
“About you and me. There’s no difference. IS there any difference?”
He moved closer and caught her hands in his. They lay there like birds with their wings folded; birds that are frightened, and then suddenly lie still, with little subsiding41 palpitations. He was trying to see her face, to trace it line by line. “One of your eyebrows42 is a little higher than the other — I never noticed it before!” he cried exultantly43, as if he had made an earthshaking discovery. She laughed a little and slipped her hands out of his.
“Oh, stop exploring me — you frighten me,” she murmured.
“Frighten you? I mean to. And you frighten me. It’s because we’re so close . . . leaning over into the gulfs of each other. . . . Don’t you like it, don’t you WANT it? Don’t you see there’s no difference anymore between you and me?”
She drew away from him. “My poor Vance — I see only what is. It’s my curse.”
His heart fell with a thump44. All of a sudden she seemed hopelessly far away, spectral45 and cold. Inexperienced as he was, he knew this was no clever feint, that she was not playing with him. There was a fearless directness in her voice.
“You mean to tell me,” he cried, “that you’re all right? That your life is full enough without me?” She made no answer, and he burst out: “I shouldn’t believe you if you did!”
The exclamation46 brought a faint smile to her lips. “I won’t then. What would be the use? And what difference would it make? I’m here — you’re THERE. It’s not our nearness to each other that frightens me; it’s the leagues and leagues between — that is, when you begin to talk like this . . . .”
“Haven’t you always known I was going to talk like this?” he interrupted her.
“I suppose I have . . . but I hoped it wouldn’t be for a long time . . . .”
“Well, it’s been a long time since I began to love you.” Again she was silent. “You remember Thundertop?”
“Oh, Vance — even then?”
“Even before, I guess. The first time I read poetry or looked at a sunset you must have been mixed up with it. I didn’t have to wait to see you.”
She had sunk back into her armchair and sat there with her hands over her eyes. He wanted to snatch them away, to kiss her on the lids and lips; but there hung between them the faint awe47 of her presence. She was the woman his arms longed for, but she was also the goddess, the miracle, the unattainable being who haunted the peaks of his imagination.
“She’s sorry for me, that’s all,” he thought bitterly.
Other fellows, he felt, would have known how to break through the barrier; he had no such arts, and probably no experience of life would instruct him. There was an absoluteness in his love which benumbed him, now that his exaltation had fallen. It had always seemed to him that on the pinnacles48 there was just room to kneel and be mute.
Halo Tarrant dropped her hands and looked up at him between narrowed lids. She was excessively pale; her face looked haggard, almost old. “Oh, Vance,” she murmured, “take care . . . .”
“Take care?”
“Not to spoil something perfect. This free friendship. It’s been so — exquisite49.”
The blood rushed back to his heart, and his eyes were blurred50 with happy tears. They choked in his throat, and he stood looking at her with a kind of desperate joy.
“I’ve never once called you by your name, even,” he stammered out.
“Well, call me by it now,” she answered, still smiling. She stood up and moved toward him. “Friends do that, don’t they? But we can’t go beyond friendship — ”
“This has got nothing to do with friendship.”
“Oh, what a mistake, Vance! It includes friendship — ” She spoke51 very low, as if what she had to say were difficult; but her eyes did not leave him. “It includes everything,” she said.
“Well, then — if it does?”
“Only, what we’ve got to do is to choose — take what we may, and leave the rest.”
“Never, never! I can’t leave it.” He was looking at her almost sternly. “Can you?” he challenged her.
“Yes,” she said, facing him resolutely52.
“Ah — then you don’t care!”
“Call it that, then. At least I’ve cared for our friendship . . . .”
“Friendship! Friendship! If that means seeing you for a few minutes every now and then, and talking to you this way, with half the room between us, when what I want is nothing else than all of you — all your time, all your thoughts, all yourself — then I don’t give a curse for your friendship.”
She said nothing, and his words were flung back at him from the dead wall of her silence. He didn’t give a curse for her friendship! He had said that! When her friendship had been all of life to him, the breath of his nostrils53, the sight of his eyes — well, and it was true nevertheless that he wanted no more of it, or rather that it had ceased to exist for him, and that henceforth she must be the world’s length away from him, or else in his arms.
“You don’t understand — I want to kiss you,” he stammered, looking at her with desperate eyes.
“That’s why I say — we can’t go on.”
“Can’t — why?”
She hesitated, and he saw that the hand resting on the back of her chair trembled a little.
“Because you don’t want to?” he burst out.
“Because I won’t take a lover while I have a husband — or while my lover has a wife,” she said precipitately54.
Vance stood motionless. A moment before his thoughts had enveloped55 her in a million caressing56 touches, soul had seemed to clasp soul as body would presently embrace body, the distance between them had vanished in the hallucinating fusion of sight and touch. There had been no other world than that which the quiet room built in about them, no human beings in it but themselves. And now, abruptly thrust across the plane on which they stood, the other crowded grimacing57 world had pushed itself in, and between them stood Laura Lou and the sordid58 boarding house room, the moneylenders and the unfinished book, Mrs. Hubbard and the washing bills, and the account that Laura Lou was always running up at the druggist’s . . .
“And because I can’t leave my husband — any more than you can leave your wife . . . .”
He was not sure if it was Halo who had completed the sentence, or if it was the echo of his own thought.
Leave Laura Lou? No, of course he couldn’t. What nonsense! There was nobody else to look after her. He had chosen to have it so — and it was so. His world had closed in on him again, he was handcuffed and chained to it. He felt like a man in a railway smash who has come suddenly back to consciousness and finds himself pinned down under a dead weight. The sluggish59 current of reality was forcing itself once more into his veins60, and he was faint with agony.
From a long way off he seemed to hear her saying: This mustn’t be the end, Vance. Someday . . .?
(Oh, yes — someday!)
“I HAVE been able to help you, haven’t I? . . . and I want, I do so want to go on . . .”
(What were women made of? He wondered.)
“You’ll promise me, won’t you?”
(Oh, he’d promise anything, if only a rescue party would come along and hoist61 up this dead weight off his chest. Couldn’t she SEE what he was suffering . . .?)
“Yes, I’LL promise.”
(You had to be everlastingly62 promising63 things to women . . . even with your life blood running out of you, they’d make you promise . . . .)
“Well, good-bye.”
“Good-bye, Vance.”
He turned to go, and heard a little exclamation behind him. He looked back from the doorway64 and saw that she had stooped down and was gathering65 up the sheets of manuscript he had left scattered about the floor.
He came back, stammering66: “Here . . . don’t you trouble . . . I’ll do it . . .” and knelt down on the floor beside her. The pages seemed innumerable; they had fluttered away on all sides, he had to reach out right and left to recover them. One had even flown over the brass67 fender onto the hearth. Yet in a second they were all gathered up again: there were no normal time measures in this world of fever.
She held out the pages she had put together; his hand touched hers as he took them. Then he turned away and the door shut on him. That was over.
收听单词发音 |
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dart
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| v.猛冲，投掷；n.飞镖，猛冲 | |
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hearth
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| n.壁炉炉床，壁炉地面 | |
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hoarse
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| adj.嘶哑的，沙哑的 | |
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agitation
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| n.搅动；搅拌；鼓动，煽动 | |
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fumbling
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| n. 摸索,漏接 v. 摸索,摸弄,笨拙的处理 | |
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interval
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| n.间隔，间距；幕间休息，中场休息 | |
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parched
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| adj.焦干的；极渴的；v.（使）焦干 | |
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unreasonable
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| adj.不讲道理的，不合情理的，过度的 | |
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elation
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| n.兴高采烈，洋洋得意 | |
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contraction
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| n.缩略词，缩写式，害病 | |
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sedulous
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| adj.勤勉的，努力的 | |
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nervously
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| adv.神情激动地，不安地 | |
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scrutinizing
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| v.仔细检查，详审( scrutinize的现在分词 ) | |
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tranquil
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| adj. 安静的, 宁静的, 稳定的, 不变的 | |
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compassionate
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| adj.有同情心的，表示同情的 | |
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passionate
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| adj.热情的，热烈的，激昂的，易动情的，易怒的，性情暴躁的 | |
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exasperation
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| n.愤慨 | |
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doomed
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| 命定的 | |
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preposterous
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| adj.荒谬的，可笑的 | |
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irritably
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| ad.易生气地 | |
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abruptly
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| adv.突然地，出其不意地 | |
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scattering
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| n.[物]散射；散乱，分散；在媒介质中的散播adj.散乱的；分散在不同范围的；广泛扩散的；（选票）数量分散的v.散射(scatter的ing形式)；散布；驱散 | |
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vehemence
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| n.热切；激烈；愤怒 | |
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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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collapses
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| 折叠( collapse的第三人称单数 )； 倒塌； 崩溃； （尤指工作劳累后）坐下 | |
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reverberate
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| v.使回响，使反响 | |
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intensified
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| v.（使）增强， （使）加剧( intensify的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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scattered
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| adj.分散的，稀疏的；散步的；疏疏落落的 | |
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blasphemy
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| n.亵渎，渎神 | |
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murmur
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| n.低语，低声的怨言；v.低语，低声而言 | |
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afterward
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| adv.后来；以后 | |
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marrow
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| n.骨髓；精华；活力 | |
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undo
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| vt.解开，松开；取消，撤销 | |
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eloquence
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| n.雄辩；口才，修辞 | |
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fiery
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| adj.燃烧着的，火红的；暴躁的；激烈的 | |
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fusion
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| n.溶化；熔解；熔化状态，熔和；熔接 | |
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merging
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| 合并（分类） | |
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faculty
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| n.才能；学院，系；(学院或系的)全体教学人员 | |
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mutual
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| adj.相互的，彼此的；共同的，共有的 | |
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stammered
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| v.结巴地说出( stammer的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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subsiding
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| v.（土地）下陷（因在地下采矿）( subside的现在分词 )；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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eyebrows
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| 眉毛( eyebrow的名词复数 ) | |
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exultantly
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| adv.狂欢地，欢欣鼓舞地 | |
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thump
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| v.重击，砰然地响；n.重击，重击声 | |
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spectral
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| adj.幽灵的，鬼魂的 | |
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exclamation
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| n.感叹号，惊呼，惊叹词 | |
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awe
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| n.敬畏，惊惧；vt.使敬畏，使惊惧 | |
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pinnacles
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| 顶峰( pinnacle的名词复数 )； 顶点； 尖顶； 小尖塔 | |
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exquisite
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| adj.精美的；敏锐的；剧烈的，感觉强烈的 | |
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50
blurred
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| v.（使）变模糊( blur的过去式和过去分词 )；（使）难以区分；模模糊糊；迷离 | |
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51
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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52
resolutely
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| adj.坚决地，果断地 | |
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53
nostrils
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| 鼻孔( nostril的名词复数 ) | |
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54
precipitately
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| adv.猛进地 | |
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enveloped
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| v.包围，笼罩，包住( envelop的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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caressing
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| 爱抚的，表现爱情的，亲切的 | |
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57
grimacing
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| v.扮鬼相，做鬼脸( grimace的现在分词 ) | |
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sordid
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| adj.肮脏的，不干净的，卑鄙的，暗淡的 | |
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sluggish
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| adj.懒惰的，迟钝的，无精打采的 | |
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60
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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61
hoist
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| n.升高，起重机，推动；v.升起，升高，举起 | |
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everlastingly
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| 永久地，持久地 | |
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promising
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| adj.有希望的，有前途的 | |
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64
doorway
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| n.门口，(喻)入门；门路，途径 | |
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65
gathering
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| n.集会，聚会，聚集 | |
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66
stammering
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| v.结巴地说出( stammer的现在分词 ) | |
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67
brass
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| n.黄铜；黄铜器，铜管乐器 | |
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