老妇人的故事 英文版The Old Wives' Tale
阿诺德.本涅特 Arnold Bennett
II
She languidly picked up a book, the moment Gerald had departed,and tried to prove to herself that she was sufficiently in commandof her nerves to read. For a long time reading had been her chiefsolace. But she could not read. She glanced round the inhospitablechamber, and thought of the hundreds of rooms--some splendid andsome vile, but all arid in their unwelcoming aspect--through whichshe had passed in her progress from mad exultation to calm andcold disgust. The ceaseless din of the street annoyed her jadedears. And a great wave of desire for peace, peace of no matterwhat kind, swept through her. And then her deep distrust of Geraldreawakened; in spite of his seriously desperate air, which had aquality of sincerity quite new in her experience of him, she couldnot be entirely sure that, in asserting utter penury, he was notafter all merely using a trick to get rid of her.
She sprang up, threw the book on the bed, and seized her gloves.She would follow him, if she could. She would do what she hadnever done before--she would spy on him. Fighting against herlassitude, she descended the long winding stairs, and peeped forthfrom the doorway into the street. The ground floor of the hotelwas a wine-shop; the stout landlord was lightly flicking one ofthe three little yellow tables that stood on the pavement. Hesmiled with his customary benevolence, and silently pointed in thedirection of the Rue Notre Dame de Lorette. She saw Gerald downthere in the distance. He was smoking a cigar.
He seemed to be a little man without a care. The smoke of thecigar came first round his left cheek and then round his right,sailing away into nothing. He walked with a gay spring, but notquickly, flourishing his cane as freely as the traffic of thepavement would permit, glancing into all the shop windows and intothe eyes of all the women under forty. This was not at all thesame man as had a moment ago been spitting angry menaces at her inthe bedroom of the hotel. It was a fellow of blithe charm, ripefor any adventurous joys that destiny had to offer.
Supposing he turned round and saw her?
If he turned round and saw her and asked her what she was doingthere in the street, she would tell him plainly: "I'm followingyou, to find out what you do."
But he did not turn. He went straight forward, deviating at thechurch, where the crowd became thicker, into the Rue du FaubourgMontmartre, and so to the boulevard, which he crossed. The wholecity seemed excited and vivacious. Cannons boomed in slowsuccession, and flags were flying. Sophia had no conception of thesignificance of those guns, for, though she read a great deal, shenever read a newspaper; the idea of opening a newspaper neveroccurred to her. But she was accustomed to the feverish atmosphereof Paris. She had lately seen regiments of cavalry flashing andprancing in the Luxembourg Gardens, and had much admired the finepicture. She accepted the booming as another expression of thehigh spirits that had to find vent somehow in this feverishempire. She so accepted it and forgot it, using all the panoramaof the capital as a dim background for her exacerbated egoism.
She was obliged to walk slowly, because Gerald walked slowly. Abeautiful woman, or any woman not positively hag-like orvenerable, who walks slowly in the streets of Paris becomes atonce the cause of inconvenient desires, as representing the mainobjective on earth, always transcending in importance politics andaffairs. Just as a true patriotic Englishman cannot be too busy torun after a fox, so a Frenchman is always ready to forsake all inorder to follow a woman whom he has never before set eyes on. Manymen thought twice about her, with her romantic Saxon mystery oftemperament, and her Parisian clothes; but all refrained fromaffronting her, not in the least out of respect for the gloom inher face, but from an expert conviction that those rapt eyes werefixed immovably on another male. She walked unscathed amid thefrothing hounds as though protected by a spell.
On the south side of the boulevard, Gerald proceeded down the RueMontmartre, and then turned suddenly into the Rue Croissant.Sophia stopped and asked the price of some combs which wereexposed outside a little shop. Then she went on, boldly passingthe end of the Rue Croissant. No shadow of Gerald! She saw thesigns of newspapers all along the street, Le Bien Public, LaPresse Libre, La Patrie. There was a creamery at the corner. Sheentered it, asked for a cup of chocolate and sat down. She wantedto drink coffee, but every doctor had forbidden coffee to her, onaccount of her attacks of dizziness. Then, having orderedchocolate, she felt that, on this occasion, when she had need ofstrength in her great fatigue, only coffee could suffice her, andshe changed the order. She was close to the door, and Gerald couldnot escape her vigilance if he emerged at that end of the street.She drank the coffee with greedy satisfaction, and waited in thecreamery till she began to feel conspicuous there. And then Geraldwent by the door, within six feet of her. He turned the corner andcontinued his descent of the Rue Montmartre. She paid for hercoffee and followed the chase. Her blood seemed to be up. Her lipswere tightened, and her thought was: "Wherever he goes, I'll go,and I don't care what happens." She despised him. She felt herselfabove him. She felt that somehow, since quitting the hotel, he hadbeen gradually growing more and more vile and meet to beexterminated. She imagined infamies as to the Rue Croissant. Therewas no obvious ground for this intensifying of her attitudetowards him; it was merely the result of the chase. All that couldbe definitely charged against him was the smoking of a cigar.
He stepped into a tobacco-shop, and came out with a longer cigarthan the first one, a more expensive article, stripped off itscollar and lighted it as a millionaire might have lighted it. Thiswas the man who swore that he did not possess five francs.
She tracked him as far as the Rue de Rivoli, and then lost him.There were vast surging crowds in the Rue de Rivoli, and muchbunting, and soldiers and gesticulatory policemen. The generaleffect of the street was that all things were brightly waving inthe breeze. She was caught in the crowd as in the current of astream, and when she tried to sidle out of it into a square, a rowof smiling policemen barred her passage; she was a part of thetraffic that they had to regulate. She drifted till the Louvrecame into view. After all, Gerald had only strolled forth to seethe sight of the day, whatever it might be! She knew not what itwas. She had no curiosity about it. In the middle of all thatthickening mass of humanity, staring with one accord at the vastmonument of royal and imperial vanities, she thought, with hercharacteristic grimness, of the sacrifice of her whole career as aschool-teacher for the chance of seeing Gerald once a quarter inthe shop. She gloated over that, as a sick appetite will gloatover tainted food. And she saw the shop, and the curve of thestairs up to the showroom, and the pier-glass in the showroom.
ripefor any adventurous joys that destiny had to offer.fiacre, her fatiguedbody?
Then the guns began to boom again, and splendid carriages sweptone after another from under a majestic archway and glitteredwestward down a lane of spotless splendid uniforms. The carriageswere laden with still more splendid uniforms, and with enchantingtoilets. Sophia, in her modestly stylish black, mechanicallynoticed how much easier it was for attired women to sit in acarriage now that crinolines had gone. That was the soleimpression made upon her by this glimpse of the last fete of theNapoleonic Empire. She knew not that the supreme pillars ofimperialism were exhibiting themselves before her; and that theeyes of those uniforms and those toilettes were full of thelegendary beauty of Eugenie, and their ears echoing to the longphrases of Napoleon the Third about his gratitude to his peoplefor their confidence in him as shown by the plebiscite, and aboutthe ratification of constitutional reforms guaranteeing order, andabout the empire having been strengthened at its base, and aboutshowing force by moderation and envisaging the future withoutfear, and about the bosom of peace and liberty, and the eternalcontinuance of his dynasty.
She just wondered vaguely what was afoot.
When the last carriage had rolled away, and the guns andacclamations had ceased, the crowd at length began to scatter. Shewas carried by it into the Place du Palais Royal, and in a fewmoments she managed to withdraw into the Rue des Bons Enfants andwas free.
The coins in her purse amounted to three sous, and therefore,though she felt exhausted to the point of illness, she had toreturn to the hotel on foot. Very slowly she crawled upwards inthe direction of the Boulevard, through the expiring gaiety of thecity. Near the Bourse a fiacre overtook her, and in the fiacrewere Gerald and a woman. Gerald had not seen her; he was talkingeagerly to his ornate companion. All his body was alive. Thefiacre was out of sight in a moment, but Sophia judged instantlythe grade of the woman, who was evidently of the discreet classthat frequented the big shops of an afternoon with something oftheir own to sell.
Sophia's grimness increased. The pace of the fiacre, her fatiguedbody, Gerald's delightful, careless vivacity, the attractivestreaming veil of the nice, modest courtesan--everything conspiredto increase it.