老妇人的故事 英文版The Old Wives' Tale
阿诺德.本涅特 Arnold Bennett
II
One day Madame Foucault knocked at the door of Sophia's littleroom (this ceremony of knocking was one of the indications thatSophia, convalescent, had been reinstated in her rights as anindividual), and cried:
"Madame, one is going to leave you all alone for some time."
"Come in," said Sophia, who was sitting up in an armchair, andreading.
Madame Foucault opened the door. "One is going to leave you allalone for some time," she repeated in a low, confidential voice,sharply contrasting with her shriek behind the door.
Sophia nodded and smiled, and Madame Foucault also nodded andsmiled. But Madame Foucault's face quickly resumed its anxiousexpression.
"The servant's brother marries himself to-day, and she implored meto accord her two days--what would you? Madame Laurence is out.And I must go out. It is four o'clock. I shall re-enter at sixo'clock striking. Therefore ..."
"Perfectly," Sophia concurred.
She looked curiously at Madame Foucault, who was carefully made upand arranged for the street, in a dress of yellow tussore withblue ornaments, bright lemon-coloured gloves, a little bluebonnet, and a little white parasol not wider when opened than hershoulders. Cheeks, lips, and eyes were heavily charged with rouge,powder, or black. And that too abundant waist had been mostcunningly confined in a belt that descended beneath, instead ofrising above, the lower masses of the vast torso. The generaleffect was worthy of the effort that must have gone to it. MadameFoucault was not rejuvenated by her toilette, but it almostprocured her pardon for the crime of being over forty, fat,creased, and worn out. It was one of those defeats that are atriumph.
"You are very chic," said Sophia, uttering her admiration.
"Ah!" said Madame Foucault, shrugging the shoulders ofdisillusion. "Chic! What does that do?"
But she was pleased.
Foucault knocked at the door of Sophia's littleroom (this ceremony of knocking was one of the indications thatSophia, convalescent, had been reinstated in her !
The front-door banged. Sophia, by herself for the first time inthe flat into which she had been carried unconscious and which shehad never since left, had the disturbing sensation of beingsurrounded by mysterious rooms and mysterious things. She tried tocontinue reading, but the sentences conveyed nothing to her. Sherose--she could walk now a little--and looked out of the window,through the interstices of the pattern of the lace curtains. Thewindow gave on the courtyard, which was about sixteen feet belowher. A low wall divided the courtyard from that of the next house.And the windows of the two houses, only to be distinguished by thedifferent tints of their yellow paint, rose tier above tier inlevel floors, continuing beyond Sophia's field of vision. Shepressed her face against the glass, and remembered the St. Luke'sSquare of her childhood; and just as there from the showroomwindow she could not even by pressing her face against the glasssee the pavement, so here she could not see the roof; thecourtyard was like the bottom of a well. There was no end to thewindows; six storeys she could count, and the sills of a seventhwere the limit of her view. Every window was heavily curtained,like her own. Some of the upper ones had green sunblinds. Scarcelyany sound! Mysteries brooded without as well as within the flat ofMadame Foucault. Sophia saw a bodiless hand twitch at a curtainand vanish. She noticed a green bird in a tiny cage on a sill inthe next house. A woman whom she took to be the concierge appearedin the courtyard, deposited a small plant in the track of a ray ofsunshine that lighted a corner for a couple of hours in theafternoon, and disappeared again. Then she heard a piano--somewhere. That was all. The feeling that secret and strange liveswere being lived behind those baffling windows, that humanity waseverywhere intimately pulsing around her, oppressed her spirit yetnot quite unpleasantly. The environment softened her glance uponthe spectacle of existence, insomuch that sadness became avoluptuous pleasure. And the environment threw her back onherself, into a sensuous contemplation of the fundamental fact ofSophia Scales, formerly Sophia Baines.
strong and resolute character, did despise them aspoor things. The one point on which she envied them was theirformal.
She turned to the room, with the marks of the bath on the floor bythe bed, and the draped piano that was never opened, and her twotrunks filling up the corner opposite the door. She had the ideaof thoroughly examining those trunks, which Chirac or somebodyelse must have fetched from the hotel. At the top of one of themwas her purse, tied up with old ribbon and ostentatiously sealed!How comical these French people were when they deemed it necessaryto be serious! She emptied both trunks, scrutinizing minutely allher goods, and thinking of the varied occasions upon which she hadobtained them. Then she carefully restored them, her mind full ofsouvenirs newly awakened.
She sighed as she straightened her back. A clock struck in anotherroom. It seemed to invite her towards discoveries. She had been inno other room of the flat. She knew nothing of the rest of theflat save by sound. For neither of the other women had everdescribed it, nor had it occurred to them that Sophia might careto leave her room though she could not leave the house.
She opened her door, and glanced along the dim corridor, withwhich she was familiar. She knew that the kitchen lay next to herlittle room, and that next to the kitchen came the front-door. Onthe opposite side of the corridor were four double-doors. Shecrossed to the pair of doors facing her own little door, andquietly turned the handle, but the doors were locked; the samewith the next pair. The third pair yielded, and she was in a largebedroom, with three windows on the street. She saw that the secondpair of doors, which she had failed to unfasten, also opened intothis room. Between the two pairs of doors was a wide bed. In frontof the central window was a large dressing-table. To the left ofthe bed, half hiding the locked doors, was a large screen. On themarble mantelpiece, reflected in a huge mirror, that ascended tothe ornate cornice, was a gilt-and-basalt clock, with pendants tomatch. On the opposite side of the room from this was a long widecouch. The floor was of polished oak, with a skin on either sideof the bed. At the foot of the bed was a small writing-table, witha penny bottle of ink on it. A few coloured prints and engravings--representing, for example, Louis Philippe and his family, andpeople perishing on a raft--broke the tedium of the walls. Thefirst impression on Sophia's eye was one of sombre splendour.Everything had the air of being richly ornamented, draped, looped,carved, twisted, brocaded into gorgeousness. The dark crimson bed-hangings fell from massive rosettes in majestic folds. Thecounterpane was covered with lace. The window-curtains hadamplitude beyond the necessary, and they were suspended frombehind fringed and pleated valances. The green sofa and its sateencushions were stiff with applied embroidery. The chandelierhanging from the middle of the ceiling, modelled to representcupids holding festoons, was a glittering confusion of gilt andlustres; the lustres tinkled when Sophia stood on a certain partof the floor. The cane-seated chairs were completely gilded. Therewas an effect of spaciousness. And the situation of the bedbetween the two double-doors, with the three windows in front andother pairs of doors communicating with other rooms on eitherhand, produced in addition an admirable symmetry.
But Sophia, with the sharp gaze of a woman brought up in thetraditions of a modesty so proud that it scorns ostentation,quickly tested and condemned the details of this chamber thatimitated every luxury. Nothing in it, she found, was 'good.' Andin St. Luke's Square 'goodness' meant honest workmanship,permanence, the absence of pretence. All the stuffs were cheap andshowy and shabby; all the furniture was cracked, warped, orbroken. The clock showed five minutes past twelve at five o'clock.And further, dust was everywhere, except in those places whereeven the most perfunctory cleaning could not have left it. In theobscurer pleatings of draperies it lay thick. Sophia's lip curled,and instinctively she lifted her peignoir. One of her mother'sphrases came into her head: 'a lick and a promise.' And thenanother: "If you want to leave dirt, leave it where everybody cansee it, not in the corners."
She peeped behind the screen, and all the horrible welter of acabinet de toilette met her gaze: a repulsive medley of foulwaters, stained vessels and cloths, brushes, sponges, powders, andpastes. Clothes were hung up in disorder on rough nails; amongthem she recognized a dressing-gown of Madame Foucault's, and,behind affairs of later date, the dazzling scarlet cloak in whichshe had first seen Madame Foucault, dilapidated now. So this wasMadame Foucault's room! This was the bower from which thatelegance emerged, the filth from which had sprung the matureblossom!
She passed from that room direct to another, of which the shutterswere closed, leaving it in twilight. This room too was a bedroom,rather smaller than the middle one, and having only one window,but furnished with the same dubious opulence. Dust covered iteverywhere, and small footmarks were visible in the dust on thefloor. At the back was a small door, papered to match the wall,and within this door was a cabinet de toilette, with no light andno air; neither in the room nor in the closet was there any signof individual habitation. She traversed the main bedroom again andfound another bedroom to balance the second one, but open to thefull light of day, and in a state of extreme disorder; the double-pillowed bed had not even been made: clothes and towels draped allthe furniture: shoes were about the floor, and on a piece ofstring tied across the windows hung a single white stocking, wet.At the back was a cabinet de toilette, as dark as the other one, avile malodorous mess of appliances whose familiar forms loomedvague and extraordinarily sinister in the dense obscurity. Sophiaturned away with the righteous disgust of one whose preparationsfor the gaze of the world are as candid and simple as those of achild. Concealed dirt shocked her as much as it would have shockedher mother; and as for the trickeries of the toilet table, shecontemned them as harshly as a young saint who has never beentempted contemns moral weakness. She thought of the strangeflaccid daily life of those two women, whose hours seemed to slipunprofitably away without any result of achievement. She hadactually witnessed nothing; but since the beginning of herconvalescence her ears had heard, and she could piece theevidences together. There was never any sound in the flat, outsidethe kitchen, until noon. Then vague noises and smells wouldcommence. And about one o'clock Madame Foucault, disarrayed, wouldcome to inquire if the servant had attended to the needs of theinvalid. Then the odours of cookery would accentuate themselves;bells rang; fragments of conversations escaped through doors ajar;occasionally a man's voice or a heavy step; then the fragrance ofcoffee; sometimes the sound of a kiss, the banging of the frontdoor, the noise of brushing, or of the shaking of a carpet, alittle scream as at some trifling domestic contretemps. Laurence,still in a dressing-gown, would lounge into Sophia's room, dirty,haggard, but polite with a curious stiff ceremony, and would drinkher coffee there. This wandering in peignoirs would continue tillthree o'clock, and then Laurence might say, as if nerving herselfto an unusual and immense effort: "I must be dressed by fiveo'clock. I have not a moment." Often Madame Foucault did not dressat all; on such days she would go to bed immediately after dinner,with the remark that she didn't know what was the matter with her,but she was exhausted. And then the servant would retire to herseventh floor, and there would be silence until, now and then,faint creepings were heard at midnight or after. Once or twice,through the chinks of her door, Sophia had seen a light at twoo'clock in the morning, just before the dawn.
Yet these were the women who had saved her life, who between themhad put her into a cold bath every three hours night and day forweeks! Surely it was impossible after that to despise them forshiftlessness and talkative idling in peignoirs; impossible todespise them for anything whatever! But Sophia, conscious of herinheritance of strong and resolute character, did despise them aspoor things. The one point on which she envied them was theirformal manners to her, which seemed to become more dignified andgraciously distant as her health improved. It was always 'Madame,''Madame,' to her, with an intonation of increasing deference. Theymight have been apologizing to her for themselves.
She prowled into all the corners of the flat; but she discoveredno more rooms, nothing but a large cupboard crammed with MadameFoucault's dresses. Then she went back to the large bedroom, andenjoyed the busy movement and rattle of the sloping street, andhad long, vague yearnings for strength and for freedom in wide,sane places. She decided that on the morrow she would dressherself 'properly,' and never again wear a peignoir; the peignoirand all that it represented, disgusted her. And while looking atthe street she ceased to see it and saw Cook's office and Chirachelping her into the carriage. Where was he? Why had he broughther to this impossible abode? What did he mean by such conduct?But could he have acted otherwise? He had done the one thing thathe could do. ... Chance! ... Chance! And why an impossible abode?Was one place more impossible than another? All this came ofrunning away from home with Gerald. It was remarkable that sheseldom thought of Gerald. He had vanished from her life as he hadcome into it--madly, preposterously. She wondered what the nextstage in her career would be. She certainly could not forecast it.Perhaps Gerald was starving, or in prison ... Bah! Thatexclamation expressed her appalling disdain of Gerald and of theSophia who had once deemed him the paragon of men. Bah!
A carriage stopping in front of the house awakened her from hermeditation. Madame Foucault and a man very much younger thanMadame Foucault got out of it. Sophia fled. After all, this pryinginto other people's rooms was quite inexcusable. She dropped on toher own bed and picked up a book, in case Madame Foucault shouldcome in.