老妇人的故事 英文版The Old Wives' Tale
阿诺德.本涅特 Arnold Bennett
IV
There was a tremendous opening of doors in the Hotel de Vezelay,and much whispering on thresholds, as the executioner and his bandentered solemnly. Sophia heard them tramp upstairs; they seemed tohesitate, and then apparently went into a room on the same landingas hers. A door banged. But Sophia could hear the regular sound ofnew voices talking, and then the rattling of glasses on a tray.The conversation which came to her from the windows of the hotelnow showed a great increase of excitement. She could not see thepeople at these neighbouring windows without showing her own head,and this she would not do. The boom of a heavy bell striking thehour vibrated over the roofs of the square; she supposed that itmight be the cathedral clock. In a corner of the square she sawGerald talking vivaciously alone with one of the two girls who hadbeen together. She wondered vaguely how such a girl had beenbrought up, and what her parents thought--or knew! And she wasconscious of an intense pride in herself, of a measureless haughtyfeeling of superiority.
Her eye caught the guillotine again, and was held by it. Guardedby gendarmes, that tall and simple object did most menacinglydominate the square with its crude red columns. Tools and a largeopen box lay on the ground beside it. The enfeebled horse in thewaggon had an air of dozing on his twisted legs. Then the firstrays of the sun shot lengthwise across the square at the level ofthe chimneys; and Sophia noticed that nearly all the lamps andcandles had been extinguished. Many people at the windows wereyawning; they laughed foolishly after they had yawned. Some wereeating and drinking. Some were shouting conversations from onehouse to another. The mounted gendarmes were still pressing backthe feverish crowds that growled at all the inlets to the square.She saw Chirac walking to and fro alone. But she could not findGerald. He could not have left the square. Perhaps he had returnedto the hotel and would come up to see if she was comfortable or ifshe needed anything. Guiltily she sprang back into bed. When lastshe had surveyed the room it had been dark; now it was bright andevery detail stood clear. Yet she had the sensation of having beenat the window only a few minutes.
would not do. The boom of a heavy bell striking thehour vibrated over the.
She waited. But Gerald did not come. She could hear chiefly thesteady hum of the voices of the executioner and his aids. Shereflected that the room in which they were must be at the back.The other sounds in the hotel grew less noticeable. Then, after anage, she heard a door open, and a low voice say somethingcommandingly in French, and then a 'Oui, monsieur,' and a generaldescent of the stairs. The executioner and his aids were leaving."You," cried a drunken English voice from an upper floor--it wasthe middle-aged Englishman translating what the executioner hadsaid--"you, you will take the head." Then a rough laugh, and therepeating voice of the Englishman's girl, still pursuing herstudies in English: "You will take ze 'ead. Yess, sair." Andanother laugh. At length quiet reigned in the hotel. Sophia saidto herself: "I won't stir from this bed till it's all over andGerald comes back!"
She dozed, under the sheet, and was awakened by a tremendousshrieking, growling, and yelling: a phenomenon of human bestialitythat far surpassed Sophia's narrow experiences. Shut up though shewas in a room, perfectly secure, the mad fury of that crowd,balked at the inlets to the square, thrilled and intimidated her.It sounded as if they would be capable of tearing the very horsesto pieces. "I must stay where I am," she murmured. And even whilesaying it she rose and went to the window again and peeped out.The torture involved was extreme, but she had not sufficient forcewithin her to resist the fascination. She stared greedily into thebright square. The first thing she saw was Gerald coming out of ahouse opposite, followed after a few seconds by the girl with whomhe had previously been talking. Gerald glanced hastily up at thefacade of the hotel, and then approached as near as he could tothe red columns, in front of which were now drawn a line ofgendarmes with naked swords. A second and larger waggon, with twohorses, waited by the side of the other one. The racket beyond thesquare continued and even grew louder. But the couple of hundredpersons within the cordons, and all the inhabitants of thewindows, drunk and sober, gazed in a fixed and sinisterenchantment at the region of the guillotine, as Sophia gazed. "Icannot stand this!" she told herself in horror, but she could notmove; she could not move even her eyes.
At intervals the crowd would burst out in a violent staccato--
"Le voila! Nicholas! Ah! Ah! Ah!"
And the final 'Ah' was devilish.
Then a gigantic passionate roar, the culmination of the mob'sfierce savagery, crashed against the skies. The line of maddenedhorses swerved and reared, and seemed to fall on the furiousmultitude while the statue-like gendarmes rocked over them. It wasa last effort to break the cordon, and it failed.
From the little street at the rear of the guillotine appeared apriest, walking backwards, and holding a crucifix high in hisright hand, and behind him came the handsome hero, his body allcrossed with cords, between two warders, who pressed against himand supported him on either side. He was certainly very young. Helifted his chin gallantly, but his face was incredibly white.Sophia discerned that the priest was trying to hide the sight ofthe guillotine from the prisoner with his body, just as in thestory which she had heard at dinner.
Except the voice of the priest, indistinctly rising and falling inthe prayer for the dying, there was no sound in the square or itsenvirons. The windows were now occupied by groups turned to stonewith distended eyes fixed on the little procession. Sophia had atightening of the throat, and the hand trembled by which she heldthe curtain. The central figure did not seem to her to be alive;but rather a doll, a marionette wound up to imitate the action ofa tragedy. She saw the priest offer the crucifix to the mouth ofthe marionette, which with a clumsy unhuman shoving of its cordedshoulders butted the thing away. And as the procession turned andstopped she could plainly see that the marionette's nape andshoulders were bare, his shirt having been slit. It was horrible."Why do I stay here?" she asked herself hysterically. But she didnot stir. The victim had disappeared now in the midst of a groupof men. Then she perceived him prone under the red column, betweenthe grooves. The silence was now broken only by the tinkling ofthe horses' bits in the corners of the square. The line ofgendarmes in front of the scaffold held their swords tightly andlooked over their noses, ignoring the privileged groups thatpeered almost between their shoulders.
And Sophia waited, horror-struck. She saw nothing but the gleamingtriangle of metal that was suspended high above the prone,attendant victim. She felt like a lost soul, torn too soon fromshelter, and exposed for ever to the worst hazards of destiny. Whywas she in this strange, incomprehensible town, foreign andinimical to her, watching with agonized glance this cruel, obscenespectacle? Her sensibilities were all a bleeding mass of wounds.Why? Only yesterday, and she had been, an innocent, timid creaturein Bursley, in Axe, a foolish creature who deemed the concealmentof letters a supreme excitement. Either that day or this day wasnot real. Why was she imprisoned alone in that odious,indescribably odious hotel, with no one to soothe and comfort her,and carry her away?
The distant bell boomed once. Then a monosyllabic voice sounded,sharp, low, nervous; she recognized the voice of the executioner,whose name she had heard but could not remember. There was aclicking noise.
She shrank down to the floor in terror and loathing, and hid herface, and shuddered. Shriek after shriek, from various windows,rang on her ears in a fusillade; and then the mad yell of thepenned crowd, which, like herself, had not seen but had heard,extinguished all other noise. Justice was done. The great ambitionof Gerald's life was at last satisfied.
Later, amid the stir of the hotel, there came a knock at her door,impatient and nervous. Forgetting, in her tribulation, that shewas without her bodice, she got up from the floor in a kind ofmiserable dream, and opened. Chirac stood on the landing, and hehad Gerald by the arm. Chirac looked worn out, curiously fragileand pathetic; but Gerald was the very image of death. Theattainment of ambition had utterly destroyed his equilibrium; hiscuriosity had proved itself stronger than his stomach. Sophiawould have pitied him had she in that moment been capable of pity.Gerald staggered past her into the room, and sank with a groan onto the bed. Not long since he had been proudly conversing withimpudent women. Now, in swift collapse, he was as flaccid as asick hound and as disgusting as an aged drunkard.
"He is some little souffrant," said Chirac, weakly.
Sophia perceived in Chirac's tone the assumption that of courseher present duty was to devote herself to the task of restoringher shamed husband to his manly pride.
"And what about me?" she thought bitterly.
The fat woman ascended the stairs like a tottering blancmange, andbegan to gabble to Sophia, who understood nothing whatever.
"She wants sixty francs," Chirac said, and in answer to Sophia'sstartled question, he explained that Gerald had agreed to pay ahundred francs for the room, which was the landlady's own--fiftyfrancs in advance and the fifty after the execution. The other tenwas for the dinner. The landlady, distrusting the whole of herclientele, was collecting her accounts instantly on the completionof the spectacle.
Sophia made no remark as to Gerald's lie to her. Indeed, Chirachad heard it. She knew Gerald for a glib liar to others, but shewas naively surprised when he practised upon herself.
"Gerald! Do you hear?" she said coldly.
The amateur of severed heads only groaned.
had proved itself stronger than his stomach. Sophiawould have pitied!
With a movement of irritation she went to him and felt in hispockets for his purse; he acquiesced, still groaning. Chirachelped her to choose and count the coins.
The fat woman, appeased, pursued her way.
"Good-bye, madame!" said Chirac, with his customary courtliness,transforming the landing of the hideous hotel into some imperialantechamber.
"Are you going away?" she asked, in surprise. Her distress was soobvious that it tremendously flattered him. He would have stayedif he could. But he had to return to Paris to write and deliverhis article.
"To-morrow, I hope!" he murmured sympathetically, kissing herhand. The gesture atoned somewhat for the sordidness of hersituation, and even corrected the faults of her attire. Alwaysafterwards it seemed to her that Chirac was an old and intimatefriend; he had successfully passed through the ordeal of seeing'the wrong side' of the stuff of her life.
She shut the door on him with a lingering glance, and reconciledherself to her predicament.
Gerald slept. Just as he was, he slept heavily.
This was what he had brought her to, then! The horrors of thenight, of the dawn, and of the morning! Ineffable suffering andhumiliation; anguish and torture that could never be forgotten!And after a fatuous vigil of unguessed license, he had totteredback, an offensive beast, to sleep the day away in that filthychamber! He did not possess even enough spirit to play the role ofroysterer to the end. And she was bound to him; far, far from anyother human aid; cut off irrevocably by her pride from those whoperhaps would have protected her from his dangerous folly. Thedeep conviction henceforward formed a permanent part of hergeneral consciousness that he was simply an irresponsible andthoughtless fool! He was without sense. Such was her brilliant andgodlike husband, the man who had given her the right to callherself a married woman! He was a fool. With all her ignorance ofthe world she could see that nobody but an arrant imbecile couldhave brought her to the present pass. Her native sagacityrevolted. Gusts of feeling came over her in which she could havethrashed him into the realization of his responsibilities.
Sticking out of the breast-pocket of his soiled coat was thepacket which he had received on the previous day. If he had notalready lost it, he could only thank his luck. She took it. Therewere English bank-notes in it for two hundred pounds, a letterfrom a banker, and other papers. With precautions against noiseshe tore the envelope and the letter and papers into small pieces,and then looked about for a place to hide them. A cupboardsuggested itself. She got on a chair, and pushed the fragments outof sight on the topmost shelf, where they may well be to this day.She finished dressing, and then sewed the notes into the lining ofher skirt. She had no silly, delicate notions about stealing. Sheobscurely felt that, in the care of a man like Gerald, she mightfind herself in the most monstrous, the most impossible dilemmas.Those notes, safe and secret in her skirt, gave her confidence,reassured her against the perils of the future, and endowed herwith independence. The act was characteristic of her enterpriseand of her fundamental prudence. It approached the heroic. And herconscience hotly defended its righteousness.
She decided that when he discovered his loss, she would merelydeny all knowledge of the envelope, for he had not spoken a wordto her about it. He never mentioned the details of money; he had afortune. However, the necessity for this untruth did not occur. Hemade no reference whatever to his loss. The fact was, he thoughthe had been careless enough to let the envelope be filched fromhim during the excesses of the night.
All day till evening Sophia sat on a dirty chair, without food,while Gerald slept. She kept repeating to herself, in amazedresentment: "A hundred francs for this room! A hundred francs! Andhe hadn't the pluck to tell me!" She could not have expressed hercontempt.
Long before sheer ennui forced her to look out of the windowagain, every sign of justice had been removed from the square.Nothing whatever remained in the heavy August sunshine savegathered heaps of filth where the horses had reared and caracoled.