Miriam combined earnestness of spirit with great practical incapacity. The house was never clean nor tidy, but always being frightfully disarranged for cleaning or tidying up, and she cooked because food had to be cooked and with a sound moralist’s entire disregard of the quality of the consequences. The food came from her hands done rather than improved, and looking as uncomfortable as savages1 clothed under duress2 by a missionary3 with a stock of out-sizes. Such food is too apt to behave resentfully, rebel and work Obi. She ceased to listen to her husband’s talk from the day she married him, and ceased to unwrinkle the kink in her brow at his presence, giving herself up to mental states that had a quality of secret preoccupation. And she developed an idea for which perhaps there was legitimate4 excuse, that he was lazy. He seemed to stand about in the shop a great deal, to read — an indolent habit — and presently to seek company for talking. He began to attend the bar parlour of the God’s Providence5 Inn with some frequency, and would have done so regularly in the evening if cards, which bored him to death, had not arrested conversation. But the perpetual foolish variation of the permutations and combinations of two and fifty cards taken five at a time, and the meagre surprises and excitements that ensue had no charms for Mr. Polly’s mind, which was at once too vivid in its impressions and too easily fatigued6.
It was soon manifest the shop paid only in the least exacting7 sense, and Miriam did not conceal8 her opinion that he ought to bestir himself and “do things,” though what he was to do was hard to say. You see, when you have once sunken your capital in a shop you do not very easily get it out again. If customers will not come to you cheerfully and freely the law sets limits upon the compulsion you may exercise. You cannot pursue people about the streets of a watering place, compelling them either by threats or importunity9 to buy flannel10 trousers. Additional sources of income for a tradesman are not always easy to find. Wintershed at the bicycle and gramaphone shop to the right, played the organ in the church, and Clamp of the toy shop was pew opener and so forth11, Gambell, the greengrocer, waited at table and his wife cooked, and Carter, the watchmaker, left things to his wife while he went about the world winding12 clocks, but Mr. Polly had none of these arts, and wouldn’t, in spite of Miriam’s quietly persistent13 protests, get any other. And on summer evenings he would ride his bicycle about the country, and if he discovered a sale where there were books he would as often as not waste half the next day in going again to acquire a job lot of them haphazard14, and bring them home tied about with a string, and hide them from Miriam under the counter in the shop. That is a heartbreaking thing for any wife with a serious investigatory turn of mind to discover. She was always thinking of burning these finds, but her natural turn for economy prevailed with her.
The books he read during those fifteen years! He read everything he got except theology, and as he read his little unsuccessful circumstances vanished and the wonder of life returned to him, the routine of reluctant getting up, opening shop, pretending to dust it with zest15, breakfasting with a shop egg underdone or overdone16 or a herring raw or charred17, and coffee made Miriam’s way and full of little particles, the return to the shop, the morning paper, the standing18, standing at the door saying “How do!” to passers-by, or getting a bit of gossip or watching unusual visitors, all these things vanished as the auditorium19 of a theatre vanishes when the stage is lit. He acquired hundreds of books at last, old dusty books, books with torn covers and broken covers, fat books whose backs were naked string and glue, an inimical litter to Miriam.
There was, for example, the voyages of La Perouse, with many careful, explicit20 woodcuts and the frankest revelations of the ways of the eighteenth century sailorman, homely21, adventurous22, drunken, incontinent and delightful23, until he floated, smooth and slow, with all sails set and mirrored in the glassy water, until his head was full of the thought of shining kindly24 brown-skinned women, who smiled at him and wreathed his head with unfamiliar25 flowers. He had, too, a piece of a book about the lost palaces of Yucatan, those vast terraces buried in primordial26 forest, of whose makers27 there is now no human memory. With La Perouse he linked “The Island Nights Entertainments,” and it never palled28 upon him that in the dusky stabbing of the “Island of Voices” something poured over the stabber’s hands “like warm tea.” Queer incommunicable joy it is, the joy of the vivid phrase that turns the statement of the horridest fact to beauty!
And another book which had no beginning for him was the second volume of the Travels of the Abbés Hue29 and Gabet. He followed those two sweet souls from their lessons in Thibetan under Sandura the Bearded (who called them donkeys to their infinite benefit and stole their store of butter) through a hundred misadventures to the very heart of Lhassa, and it was a thirst in him that was never quenched30 to find the other volume and whence they came, and who in fact they were. He read Fenimore Cooper and “Tom Cringle’s Log” side by side with Joseph Conrad, and dreamt of the many-hued humanity of the East and West Indies until his heart ached to see those sun-soaked lands before he died. Conrad’s prose had a pleasure for him that he was never able to define, a peculiar31 deep coloured effect. He found too one day among a pile of soiled sixpenny books at Port Burdock, to which place he sometimes rode on his ageing bicycle, Bart Kennedy’s “A Sailor Tramp,” all written in livid jerks, and had forever after a kindlier and more understanding eye for every burly rough who slouched through Fishbourne High Street. Sterne he read with a wavering appreciation32 and some perplexity, but except for the Pickwick Papers, for some reason that I do not understand he never took at all kindly to Dickens. Yet he liked Lever and Thackeray’s “Catherine,” and all Dumas until he got to the Vicomte de Bragelonne. I am puzzled by his insensibility to Dickens, and I record it as a good historian should, with an admission of my perplexity. It is much more understandable that he had no love for Scott. And I suppose it was because of his ignorance of the proper pronunciation of words that he infinitely33 preferred any prose to any metrical writing.
A book he browsed34 over with a recurrent pleasure was Waterton’s Wanderings in South America. He would even amuse himself by inventing descriptions of other birds in the Watertonian manner, new birds that he invented, birds with peculiarities35 that made him chuckle36 when they occurred to him. He tried to make Rusper, the ironmonger, share this joy with him. He read Bates, too, about the Amazon, but when he discovered that you could not see one bank from the other, he lost, through some mysterious action of the soul that again I cannot understand, at least a tithe37 of the pleasure he had taken in that river. But he read all sorts of things; a book of old Keltic stories collected by Joyce charmed him, and Mitford’s Tales of Old Japan, and a number of paper-covered volumes, Tales from Blackwood, he had acquired at Easewood, remained a stand-by. He developed a quite considerable acquaintance with the plays of William Shakespeare, and in his dreams he wore cinque cento or Elizabethan clothes, and walked about a stormy, ruffling38, taverning, teeming39 world. Great land of sublimated40 things, thou World of Books, happy asylum41, refreshment42 and refuge from the world of everyday! . . .
The essential thing of those fifteen long years of shopkeeping is Mr. Polly, well athwart the counter of his rather ill-lit shop, lost in a book, or rousing himself with a sigh to attend to business.
Meanwhile he got little exercise, indigestion grew with him until it ruled all his moods, he fattened43 and deteriorated44 physically45, moods of distress46 invaded and darkened his skies, little things irritated him more and more, and casual laughter ceased in him. His hair began to come off until he had a large bald space at the back of his head. Suddenly one day it came to him — forgetful of those books and all he had lived and seen through them — that he had been in his shop for exactly fifteen years, that he would soon be forty, and that his life during that time had not been worth living, that it had been in apathetic47 and feebly hostile and critical company, ugly in detail and mean in scope — and that it had brought him at last to an outlook utterly48 hopeless and grey.
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savages
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| 未开化的人，野蛮人( savage的名词复数 ) | |
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duress
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| n.胁迫 | |
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missionary
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| adj.教会的，传教(士)的；n.传教士 | |
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legitimate
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| adj.合法的，合理的，合乎逻辑的；v.使合法 | |
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providence
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| n.深谋远虑，天道，天意；远见；节约；上帝 | |
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fatigued
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| adj. 疲乏的 | |
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exacting
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| adj.苛求的，要求严格的 | |
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conceal
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| v.隐藏，隐瞒，隐蔽 | |
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importunity
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| n.硬要，强求 | |
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flannel
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| n.法兰绒；法兰绒衣服 | |
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forth
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| adv.向前；向外，往外 | |
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winding
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| n.绕，缠，绕组，线圈 | |
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persistent
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| adj.坚持不懈的，执意的；持续的 | |
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haphazard
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| adj.无计划的，随意的，杂乱无章的 | |
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zest
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| n.乐趣；滋味，风味；兴趣 | |
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overdone
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| v.做得过分( overdo的过去分词 )；太夸张；把…煮得太久；（工作等）过度 | |
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charred
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| v.把…烧成炭( char的过去式)；烧焦 | |
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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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auditorium
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| n.观众席，听众席；会堂，礼堂 | |
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explicit
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| adj.详述的，明确的；坦率的；显然的 | |
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homely
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| adj.家常的，简朴的；不漂亮的 | |
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adventurous
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| adj.爱冒险的；惊心动魄的，惊险的，刺激的 | |
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delightful
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| adj.令人高兴的，使人快乐的 | |
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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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unfamiliar
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| adj.陌生的，不熟悉的 | |
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primordial
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| adj.原始的；最初的 | |
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makers
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| n.制造者，制造商（maker的复数形式） | |
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palled
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| v.（因过多或过久而）生厌，感到乏味，厌烦( pall的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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hue
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| n.色度；色调；样子 | |
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quenched
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| 解（渴）( quench的过去式和过去分词 )； 终止（某事物）； （用水）扑灭（火焰等）； 将（热物体）放入水中急速冷却 | |
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peculiar
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| adj.古怪的，异常的；特殊的，特有的 | |
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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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infinitely
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| adv.无限地，无穷地 | |
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browsed
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| v.吃草( browse的过去式和过去分词 )；随意翻阅；（在商店里）随便看看；（在计算机上）浏览信息 | |
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peculiarities
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| n. 特质, 特性, 怪癖, 古怪 | |
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chuckle
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| vi.／n.轻声笑，咯咯笑 | |
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tithe
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| n.十分之一税；v.课什一税，缴什一税 | |
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ruffling
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| 弄皱( ruffle的现在分词 )； 弄乱； 激怒； 扰乱 | |
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teeming
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| adj.丰富的v.充满( teem的现在分词 )；到处都是；（指水、雨等）暴降；倾注 | |
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sublimated
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| v.（使某物质）升华( sublimate的过去式和过去分词 )；使净化；纯化 | |
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asylum
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| n.避难所，庇护所，避难 | |
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refreshment
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| n.恢复，精神爽快，提神之事物；（复数）refreshments:点心，茶点 | |
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fattened
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| v.喂肥( fatten的过去式和过去分词 )；养肥（牲畜）；使（钱）增多；使（公司）升值 | |
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deteriorated
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| 恶化，变坏( deteriorate的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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physically
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| adj.物质上，体格上，身体上，按自然规律 | |
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distress
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| n.苦恼，痛苦，不舒适；不幸；vt.使悲痛 | |
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apathetic
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| adj.冷漠的，无动于衷的 | |
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utterly
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| adv.完全地，绝对地 | |
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