He had decided¹ to sit up all night, as a kind of penance². The telegram had simply said: “Ophelia’s condition critical.” He felt, under the circumstances, that to go to bed in the wagon-lit would be frivolous³. So he sat wearily in the first-class compartment⁴ as night fell over France.

He ought, of course, to be sitting by Ophelia’s bedside. But Ophelia didn’t want him. So he sat up in the train.

Deep inside him was a black and ponderous⁵ weight: like some tumour⁶ filled with sheer gloom, weighing down his vitals. He had always taken life seriously. Seriousness now overwhelmed him. His dark, handsome, clean-shaven face would have done for Christ on the Cross, with the thick black eyebrows⁷ tilted⁸ in the dazed agony.

The night in the train was like an inferno⁹: nothing was real. Two elderly Englishwomen opposite him had died long ago, perhaps even before he had. Because, of course, he was dead himself.

Slow, grey dawn came in the mountains of the frontier, and he watched it with unseeing eyes. But his mind repeated:

“And when the dawn came, dim and sad

And chill with early showers,

Her quiet eyelids¹⁰ closed: she had

Another morn than ours.”

And his monk’s changeless, tormented¹¹ face showed no trace of the contempt he felt, even self-contempt, for this bathos, as his critical mind judged it.

分享到：