And he had not been disappointed. The old town with its ancient palaces — the worn and age-grimed fa?ades of a forgotten power, a storeyed architecture — and the fair, green earth, the deep, familiar green of the intimate and yet enchanted5 hills, awoke in him all the old drowsy gold of legendry, the promise of a fair and enfabled domain6, fat with plenty.
He had been here three days now, flooded with living green and gold, a willing captive in the spell of time, drinking the noblest wine, eating some of the noblest cookery he had ever known. After the dull Swiss food, the food and wine of Burgundy were good beyond belief; and everything — old town, the fair, green country and the hills — made a music in him again which was like all the green-gold magic of his childhood’s dream of France.
Now he sat there at a table before a little café, already meditating7 with slow, lustful8 reverie his noonday meal at an ancient, famous inn where for eighteen francs one was served a stupendous meal — a succession of succulent native dishes such as he had dreamed about but had never thought that he would find outside of dreams or legends, in a town so small as this.
As he thought of this gourmet’s heaven with a feeling of wonder and disbelief, the memory of a hundred little towns and cities in America returned to him, with the hideous9 and dyspeptic memory of their foods — the greasy10, rancid, sodden11, stale, dead, and weary foods of the Greek restaurants, of the luncheon12 rooms, coffee shops and railway cafeterias — hastily bolted and washed down to the inevitable13 miseries14 of dyspepsia with gulping15 swallows of sour, weak coffee.
Yes, even the noble food and wine had made a magic in this ancient place, and suddenly he was pierced again by the old hunger that haunts and hurts Americans — the hunger for a better life — an end of rawness, newness, sourness, distressful16 and exacerbated17 misery18, the taking from the great plantation19 of the earth and of America our rich inheritance of splendour, ease, and abundance — good food, and sensual love, and noble cookery — the warmth of radiant colour and of wine — pulse of the blood — an end of misery, bitterness, hunger and unrest upon the breast of everlasting20 plenty — the inheritance of exultancy21 and joy for ever, which some foul22, corrosive23 poison in our lives — bitter enigma24 that it is! — has taken from us.
Now, as he thought these things, sitting before the café and looking across the quiet square of whitened cobbles, a bell struck and noon came. Slowly a great clock began to strike in the old town. In a cool, dark church, which he had seen the day before, a bell-rope, knotted at the ends, hung down before the altar-steps from an immense distance in the ceiling. The moment the town bell had finished its deep reverberation25, a sexton walked noisily across the old flagged church-floor and took the bell-cord in his hands. Slowly, with a gentle rhythm, he began to swing upon the rope, and one could hear at first an old and heavy creaking from the upper air, but as yet no bell.
Then the sexton’s body stiffened26 in its rhythm, he hung hard upon the knotted rope in punctual sway, and there began, far up in the church, the upper air of that old place, a sweet and ponderous27 beating of the bells. At first they beat in threes — ding-dong-dong; ding-dong-dong; then swiftly the man changed his rhythm, and the bells began to beat a faster double measure.
And now the youth remembered old, distant chimes upon a street at night; and the memory of his own bells came back into his heart. He remembered the great bell at college that rang the boys to classes, and how the knotted bell-rope came down into the room of the student who rang it; and how often he had rung the bell himself, and how at first there was the creaking noise in the upper air of the bell-tower, there as here; and how, as the great bell far above him swung into its rhythm, he would be carried off the floor by that weight of thronging28 bronze; and he remembered still the lift and power of the old college bell, as he swung at the knotted rope, and the feeling of joy and power that surged up in him as he was lifted on the mighty29 upward stroke, and heard above him in the tower the dark music of the grand old bell and the students running on the campus paths below the window, and then the loose rope, the bell tolling30 brokenly away to silence, the creaking sound again, and finally nothing but silence, the day’s green spell and golden magic of the drowsy campus in the month of May.
And now the memory of that old bell, with all its host of long-forgotten things, swarmed31 back with living and intolerable pungency32, as he sat there at noon in the old French town and heard the sexton swinging on the bell of the old church.
He thought of home.
And now, with the sound of that old bell, everything around him burst into instant life. Although the structure of that life was foreign to him, and different from anything he had known as a child, everything instantly became incredibly living, near, and familiar, like something he had always known.
The little café before which he was sitting was old and small, and had a warm, worn look of use and comfort. Inside, in the cool, dark depth of the place, were two old men sitting at a table playing cards — with a faded, green cloth upon the table; and two waiters. One of the old men had long, pointed4 moustaches, and a thin, distinguished33 face; the other was more ruddy and full-fleshed and had a beard. They played quietly, bending over the old, green cloth with studious deliberation, making each play slowly. Sometimes they spoke34 quietly to each other, only a few words at a time; sometimes the ruddy old man’s thick shoulders would heave and tremble, and his face would flush rosily35 with satisfaction; but the other one laughed thinly, quietly, in a more gentle, weary way.
The two waiters were polishing up the silverware and getting the tables set and put in order for the midday meal. One of the waiters was an old man with the sprouting36, energetic moustaches one sees so often in France, and with the weary, hawk-like, cynical37, yet not ill-natured face that one often sees on old waiters. The other — really just a bus-boy — was a young, clumsy, thick-fingered and thick-featured country lad, with the wine-dark, vital, sanguinary colouring some Frenchmen have.
The young fellow was full of exuberant38 good spirits; he was polishing up the knives and forks and spoons with enthusiastic gusto, humming the snatches of a song as he did so, and slamming each piece of silver down into a drawer with such vigour39, when he had finished, that it was obvious that he got great pleasure from the musical jingle40 thus created.
Meanwhile the old waiter moved quietly, softly, and yet wearily about, setting the tables. At length, however, at the end of a particularly violent and enthusiastic jingle of silverware from his polishing companion, he looked up, with a slight cynical arching of his eyebrows41, and then, without ill-nature but with perfect urbanity, he said ironically:
“Ah! On fait la musique!”
This was all, but one saw the young fellow’s face flush and redden with exuberant laughter; his thick shoulders rose and for a moment trembled convulsively, then he went on polishing, singing to himself, and hurling42 the noisy silverware into the drawer with more enthusiasm than ever.
And that brief, pleasant, and somehow poignantly43 unforgettable scene now seemed, like everything else, to be intolerably near and familiar to the youth, and something he had always known.
Before him the quiet, faded, strangely pleasant square was waking briefly44 to its moment of noonday life. Far off he could hear the little shrill45 fifing whistle of a French locomotive and the sound of slow trains; an ice-wagon, with a tin interior and large, delicately carved cakes of ice, clattered46 across the cobbles of the square; and he remembered how he had seen, the day before, some barge47 people eating on a barge beneath the trees. From where he sat he could see workmen, wearing shapeless caps and baggy48 corduroy trousers streaked49 with lime and cement, and talking in hoarse50, loud, disputatious voices as they leaned above their drinks on the zinc51 bar of a little bistro on the corner.
Some young, dull-looking women, wearing light-coloured stockings and light, grey-tannish overcoats, came by, with domesticity written in every movement that they made, looking, somehow, their wedded52 propriety53 and the stern dullness of provincial54 places everywhere.
And then the lost, the irrevocable, the lonely sounds which he had not heard for fifteen years awoke there in the square, and suddenly he was a child, and it was noon, and he was waiting in his father’s house to hear the slam of the iron gate, the great body stride up the high porch steps, knowing his father had come home again.
At first, before him, in that little whitened square, it was just the thring of the bicycle bells, the bounding of the light-wired wheels. And at first he could see some French army officers riding home upon their bicycles. They were proper and assured-looking men, with solid, wine-dark faces, and they rode solidly and well, driving the light-wired wheels beneath them with firm propulsions of their solid legs.
Then, with a thring of bells, an army sergeant55 came by, riding fast and smoothly56 on his way home to dinner. And then, with sudden rush, the thring of bells, the thrum of wheels increased: the clerks, the bank clerks, the bookkeepers — the little proper and respectable people of all sorts — were riding home across the quiet little square at noon.
On the other side of the square he could see two workmen who were still at work upon a piece of stone; one was holding an iron spike57 and one a sledge58, and they worked slowly, with frequent pauses.
A young buck59, with a noisy, sporty little car, sped over the square and vanished; and the youth wondered if he was one of the daring blades of Dijon, and what young women of the town’s best families he had taken out in the car, and if he boasted to other young town blades in cafés of his prowess at seduction, as did the bucks60 before Wood’s Pharmacy61 at home.
Then for a moment there was a brooding silence in the square again, and presently there began the most lonely, lost and unforgettable of all sounds on earth — the solid, liquid leather-shuffle62 of footsteps going home one way, as men had done when they came home to lunch at noon some twenty years ago, in the green-gold and summer magic of full June, before he had seen his father’s land, and when the kingdoms of this earth and the enchanted city still blazed there in the legendary63 magic of his boyhood’s vision.
They came with solid, lonely, liquid shuffle of their decent leather, going home, the merchants, workers, and good citizens of that old town of Dijon. They streamed across the cobbles of that little square; they passed, and vanished, and were gone for ever — leaving silence, the brooding hush64 and apathy65 of noon, a suddenly living and intolerable memory, instant and familiar as all this life around him, of a life that he had lost, and that could never die.
It was the life of twenty years ago in the quiet, leafy streets and little towns of lost America — of an America that had been lost beneath the savage66 roar of its machinery67, the brutal68 stupefaction of its days, the huge disease of its furious, ever-quickening and incurable69 unrest, its flood-tide horror of grey, driven faces, stolid70 eyes, starved, brutal nerves, and dull, dead flesh.
The memory of the lost America — the America of twenty years ago, of quiet streets, the time-enchanted spell and magic of full June, the solid, lonely, liquid shuffle of men in shirt-sleeves coming home, the leafy fragrance71 of the cooling turnip-greens, and screens that slammed, and sudden silence — had long since died, had been drowned beneath the brutal flood-tide, the edict stupefaction of that roaring surge and mechanical life which had succeeded it.
And now, all that lost magic had come to life again here in the little whitened square, here in this old French town, and he was closer to his childhood and his father’s life of power and magnificence than he could ever be again in savage new America; and as the knowledge of these strange, these lost yet familiar things returned to him, his heart was filled with all the mystery of time, dark time, the mystery of strange, million-visaged time that haunts us with the briefness of our days.
He thought of home.
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1
evoking
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| 产生，引起，唤起( evoke的现在分词 ) | |
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drowsy
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| adj.昏昏欲睡的，令人发困的 | |
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knightly
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| adj. 骑士般的 adv. 骑士般地 | |
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pointed
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| adj.尖的，直截了当的 | |
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enchanted
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| adj. 被施魔法的，陶醉的，入迷的 动词enchant的过去式和过去分词 | |
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domain
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| n.(活动等)领域，范围；领地，势力范围 | |
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meditating
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| a.沉思的，冥想的 | |
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lustful
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| a.贪婪的；渴望的 | |
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hideous
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| adj.丑陋的，可憎的，可怕的，恐怖的 | |
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greasy
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| adj. 多脂的，油脂的 | |
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sodden
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| adj.浑身湿透的；v.使浸透；使呆头呆脑 | |
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luncheon
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| n.午宴，午餐，便宴 | |
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13
inevitable
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| adj.不可避免的，必然发生的 | |
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14
miseries
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| n.痛苦( misery的名词复数 )；痛苦的事；穷困；常发牢骚的人 | |
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15
gulping
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| v.狼吞虎咽地吃，吞咽( gulp的现在分词 )；大口地吸（气）；哽住 | |
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16
distressful
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| adj.苦难重重的，不幸的，使苦恼的 | |
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17
exacerbated
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| v.使恶化，使加重( exacerbate的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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misery
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| n.痛苦，苦恼，苦难；悲惨的境遇，贫苦 | |
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plantation
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| n.种植园，大农场 | |
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everlasting
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| adj.永恒的，持久的，无止境的 | |
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21
exultancy
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| n.大喜，狂喜 | |
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22
foul
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| adj.污秽的；邪恶的；v.弄脏；妨害；犯规；n.犯规 | |
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23
corrosive
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| adj.腐蚀性的；有害的；恶毒的 | |
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enigma
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| n.谜，谜一样的人或事 | |
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25
reverberation
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| 反响； 回响； 反射； 反射物 | |
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26
stiffened
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| 加强的 | |
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27
ponderous
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| adj.沉重的，笨重的，(文章)冗长的 | |
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28
thronging
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| v.成群，挤满( throng的现在分词 ) | |
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29
mighty
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| adj.强有力的；巨大的 | |
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30
tolling
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| [财]来料加工 | |
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31
swarmed
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| 密集( swarm的过去式和过去分词 )； 云集； 成群地移动； 蜜蜂或其他飞行昆虫成群地飞来飞去 | |
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32
pungency
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| n.（气味等的）刺激性；辣；（言语等的）辛辣；尖刻 | |
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33
distinguished
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| adj.卓越的，杰出的，著名的 | |
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34
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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35
rosily
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| adv.带玫瑰色地，乐观地 | |
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36
sprouting
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| v.发芽( sprout的现在分词 )；抽芽；出现；（使）涌现出 | |
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37
cynical
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| adj.(对人性或动机)怀疑的，不信世道向善的 | |
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38
exuberant
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| adj.充满活力的；（植物）繁茂的 | |
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39
vigour
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| （=vigor）n.智力，体力，精力 | |
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40
jingle
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| n.叮当声，韵律简单的诗句；v.使叮当作响，叮当响，押韵 | |
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41
eyebrows
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| 眉毛( eyebrow的名词复数 ) | |
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42
hurling
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| n.爱尔兰式曲棍球v.猛投，用力掷( hurl的现在分词 )；大声叫骂 | |
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43
poignantly
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briefly
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| adv.简单地，简短地 | |
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45
shrill
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| adj.尖声的；刺耳的；v尖叫 | |
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46
clattered
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| 发出咔哒声（clatter的过去式与过去分词形式） | |
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barge
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| n.平底载货船，驳船 | |
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baggy
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| adj.膨胀如袋的，宽松下垂的 | |
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49
streaked
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| adj.有条斑纹的，不安的v.快速移动( streak的过去式和过去分词 )；使布满条纹 | |
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50
hoarse
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| adj.嘶哑的，沙哑的 | |
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51
zinc
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| n.锌；vt.在...上镀锌 | |
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52
wedded
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| adj.正式结婚的；渴望…的，执著于…的v.嫁，娶，（与…）结婚( wed的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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53
propriety
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| n.正当行为；正当；适当 | |
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54
provincial
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| adj.省的，地方的；n．外省人，乡下人 | |
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55
sergeant
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| n.警官，中士 | |
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56
smoothly
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| adv.平滑地，顺利地，流利地，流畅地 | |
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57
spike
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| n.长钉，钉鞋；v.以大钉钉牢，使...失效 | |
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58
sledge
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| n.雪橇，大锤；v.用雪橇搬运，坐雪橇往 | |
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59
buck
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| n.雄鹿，雄兔；v.马离地跳跃 | |
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60
bucks
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| n.雄鹿( buck的名词复数 )；钱；（英国十九世纪初的）花花公子；（用于某些表达方式）责任v.（马等）猛然弓背跃起( buck的第三人称单数 )；抵制；猛然震荡；马等尥起后蹄跳跃 | |
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61
pharmacy
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| n.药房，药剂学，制药业，配药业，一批备用药品 | |
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62
shuffle
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| n.拖著脚走，洗纸牌；v.拖曳，慢吞吞地走 | |
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63
legendary
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| adj.传奇（中）的，闻名遐迩的；n.传奇（文学） | |
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64
hush
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| int.嘘，别出声；n.沉默，静寂；v.使安静 | |
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65
apathy
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| n.漠不关心，无动于衷；冷淡 | |
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66
savage
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| adj.野蛮的；凶恶的，残暴的；n.未开化的人 | |
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67
machinery
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| n.(总称)机械，机器；机构 | |
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68
brutal
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| adj.残忍的，野蛮的，不讲理的 | |
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69
incurable
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| adj.不能医治的，不能矫正的，无救的；n.不治的病人，无救的人 | |
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70
stolid
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| adj.无动于衷的，感情麻木的 | |
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fragrance
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| n.芬芳，香味，香气 | |
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