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1、【英文文学】The Puppet Show of MemoryCHAPTER I THE NURSERYWhen people sit down to write their recollections they exclaim with regret, “If only I had kept a diary, what a rich store of material I should now have at my disposal!” I remember one of the masters at Eton telling me, when I was a boy, that if I
2、wished to make a fortune when I was grown up, I had only to keep a detailed diary of every day of my life at Eton. He said the same thing to all the boys he knew, but I do not remember any boy of my generation taking his wise advice.On the other hand, for the writer who wishes to recall past memorie
3、s, the absence of diaries and notebooks has its compensations. Memory, as someone has said, is the greatest of artists. It eliminates the unessential, and chooses with careless skill the sights and the sounds and the episodes that are best worth remembering and recording. The first thing I can remem
4、ber is a Christmas tree which I think celebrated the Christmas of 1876. It was at Shoreham in Kent, at a house belonging to Mr. H. B. Mildmay, who married one of my mothers sisters. I was two years old, and I remember my Christmas present, a large bird with yellow and red plumage, which for a long t
5、ime afterwards lived at the top of the nursery wardrobe. It was neither a bird of Paradise nor a pheasant; possibly only a somewhat flamboyant hen; but I loved it dearly, and it irradiated the nursery to me for at least two years.The curtain then falls and rises again on the nursery of 37 Charles St
6、reet, Berkeley Square, London. The nursery2 epoch, which lasted till promotion to the schoolroom and lessons began, seems to children as long as a lifetime, just as houses and places seem to them infinitely large. The nursery was on the third floor of the house, and looked out on to the street. Ther
7、e was a small night-nursery next door to it, which had coloured pictures of St. Petersburg on the wall.I can remember the peculiar roar of London in those days; the four-wheelers and hansoms rattling on the macadam pavement through the fog, except when there was straw down in the street for some sic
8、k person; and the various denizens of the streets, the lamplighter and the muffin-man; often a barrel-organ, constantly in summer a band, and sometimes a Punch and Judy. During the war, when the streets began to be darkened, but before the final complete darkness set in in 1917, London looked at nig
9、ht very much as it was in my childhood. But the strange rumbling noise had gone for ever. Sometimes on one of the houses opposite there used to be an heraldic hatchment. The nursery was inhabited by my brother Hugo and myself, our nurse, Hilly, and two nurserymaids, Grace Hetherington, and Annie. Gr
10、ace was annexed by me; Annie by Hugo. Hilly had been nurse to my sisters and, I think, to my elder brothers too. She had the slightly weather-beaten but fresh agelessness of Nannies, and her most violent threat was: “Ill bring my old shoe to you,” and one of her most frequent exclamations: “Oh, you
11、naughty boy, you very naughty boy!” The nursery had Landseer pictures in gilt frames, and on the chest of drawers between the two windows a mechanical toy of an entrancing description. It was a square box, one side of which was made of glass, and behind this glass curtain, on a small platform, a lad
12、y sat dressed in light blue silk at an open spinet; a dancing master, in a red silk doublet with a powdered wig and yellow satin knee-breeches, on one side of it, conducted, and in the foreground a little girl in short skirts of purple gauze covered with spangles stood ready to dance. When you wound
13、 up the toy, the lady played, the man conducted elegantly with an open score in one hand and a baton in the other, and the little girl pirouetted. It only played one short, melancholy, tinkling, but extremely refined dance-tune.At one of the top windows of the house opposite, a little girl used to a
14、ppear sometimes. Hugo and I used to exchange3 signals with her, and we called her Miss Rose. Our mute acquaintance went on for a long time, but we never saw her except across the street and at her window. We did not wish to see more of her. Nearer acquaintance would have marred the perfect romance o
15、f the relation.There were two forms of light refreshment peculiar to the nursery, and probably to all nurseries: one was Albert biscuits, and the other toast-in-water. Children call for an Albert biscuit as men ask for a whisky-and-soda at a club, not from hunger, but as an adjunct to conversation a
16、nd a break in monotony. At night, after we had gone to bed, we used often to ask monotonously and insistently for a drink of water. “Hilly, I want a drink of water”; but this meant, not that one was thirsty, but that one was frightened and wanted to see a human being. All my brothers and sisters, I
17、found out afterwards, had done the same thing in the same way, and for the same reason, but the tradition had been handed down quite unconsciously. I cant remember how the nursery epoch came to an end; it merges in my memory without any line of division, into the schoolroom period; but the first vis
18、its in the country certainly belonged to the nursery epoch.We used to go in the summer to Coombe Cottage, near Malden, an ivy-covered, red-brick house, with a tower at one end, a cool oak hall and staircase, a drawing-room full of water-colours, a room next to it full of books, with a drawing-table
19、and painting materials ready, and a long dining-room, of which the narrow end was a sitting-room, and had a verandah looking out on to the garden. There was also a kitchen garden, lawns, a dairy, a gardener, Mr. Baker, who made nosegays, a deaf-and-dumb under-gardener who spoke on his fingers, a far
20、myard, and a duck-pond into which I remember falling.Coombe was an enchanted spot for us. My recollection of it is that of a place where it was always summer and where the smell of summer and the sounds of summer evening used to make the night-nursery a fairy place; and sometimes in the morning, red
21、-coated soldiers used to march past playing “The Girl I left behind me,” with a band of drums and fifes. The uniforms of the soldiers were as bright as the poppies in the field, and that particular tune made a lasting impression on me. I never forgot it. I can remember losing my first front tooth4 a
22、t Coombe by tying it on to a thread and slamming the door, and I can remember my sisters singing, “Where are you going to, my pretty Maid?” one of them acting the milkmaid, with a wastepaper basket under her arm for a pail. Best of all, I remember the garden, the roses, the fruit, trying to put salt
23、 on a birds tail for the first time, and the wonderful games in the hayfields.We are probably all of us privileged at least once or twice in our lives to experience the indescribable witchery of a perfect summer night, when time seems to stand still, the world becomes unsubstantial, and Nature is st
24、eeped in music and silver light, quivering shadows and mysterious sound, when such a pitch of beauty and glamour and mystery is achieved by the darkness, the landscape, the birds, the insects, the trees and the shadows, and perhaps the moon or even one star, that one would like to say to the fleetin
25、g moment what Faust challenged and defied the devil to compel him to cry out: “Verweile, Du bist sch?n.”It is the moment that the great poets have sometimes caught and made permanent for us by their prodigious conjury: Shakespeare, in the end of the Merchant of Venice, when Lorenzo and Jessica let t
26、he sounds of music creep into their ears, and wonder at patines of bright gold in the floor of heaven; Keats, when he wished to cease upon the midnight with no pain; Musset, in the “Nuit de Mai”; Victor Hugo, when, on their lovely brief and fatal bridal night, Hernani and Do?a Sol fancy in the moonl
27、ight that sleeping Nature is watching amorously over them; and the musicians speak this magic with an even greater certainty, without the need of words: Beethoven, in his Sonata; Chopin, again and again; Schumann, in his lyrics, especially “Frühlingsnacht”; Schubert, in his “Serenade.”I have kn
28、own many such nights: the dark nights of Central Russia before the harvest ends, when the watchmans rattle punctuates and intensifies the huge silence, and a far-off stamping dance rhythm and a bleating accordion outdo Shakespeare and Schubert in magic; June nights in Florence, when you couldnt see
29、the grass for fireflies, and the croaking of frogs made a divine orchestra; or in Venice, on the glassy lagoon, when streaks of red still hung in the west; May nights by the Neckar at Heidelberg, loud with the jubilee of nightingales and aromatic with lilac; a twilight in May at Arundel Park, when l
30、arge trees, dim lawns, and antlered shapes seemed to be5 part of a fairy revel; and nights in South Devon, when the full September moon made the garden and the ilex tree as unreal as Prosperos island.But I never in my whole life felt the spell so acutely as in the summer evenings in the night nurser
31、y at Coombe Cottage, when we went to bed by daylight and lay in our cots guessing at the pattern on the wall, to wake up later when it was dark, half conscious of the summer scents outside, and of a birds song in the darkness. The intense magic of that moment I have never quite recaptured, except wh
32、en reading Keats “Ode to the Nightingale” for the first time, when the door on to the past was opened wide once more and the old vision and the strange sense of awe, unreality, and enchantment returned.But to go back to nursery life. Our London life followed the ritual, I suppose, of most nurseries.
33、 In the morning after our breakfast we went down, washed and scrubbed and starched, into the dining-room, where breakfast was at nine, and kissed our father before he drove to the city in a phaeton, and played at the end of the dining-room round a pedestalled bust of one of the Popes. Then a walk in
34、 the Park, and sometimes as a treat a walk in the streets, and possibly a visit to Cremers, the toy-shop in Bond Street. Hugo and I detested the Park, and the only moment of real excitement I remember was when one day Hilly told me not to go near the flower-beds, and I climbed over the little railin
35、g and picked a towering hyacinth. Police intervention was immediately threatened, and I think a policeman actually did remonstrate; but although I felt for some hours a pariah and an outcast, there was none the less an aftertaste of triumph in the tears; attrition, perhaps, but no contrition.When we
36、 got to be a little older older than what? I dont know but there came our moment when we joined our sisters every morning to say our prayers in my mothers bedroom, every day before breakfast. They were short and simple prayersthe “Our Father” and one other short prayer. Nevertheless, for years the “
37、Our Father” was to me a mysterious and unintelligible formula, all the more so, as I said it entirely by the sound, and not at all by the sense, thinking that “Whichartinheaven” was one word and “Thykingdomcome” another. I never asked what it meant. I think in some dim way I felt that, could I under
38、stand it, something of its value6 as an invocation would be lost or diminished. I also remember learning at a very early age the hymn, “There is a green hill far away,” and finding it puzzling. I took it for granted that most green hills had city walls round them, though this particular one hadnt. B
39、esides going to Coombe we went at the end of the summer to Devonshire, to Membland, near the villages of Noss Mayo, and Newton, and not far from the river Yealm, an arm of the sea. It was when getting ready for the first of these journeys that I remember, while I was being dressed in the nursery, my
40、 fathers servant, Mr. Deacon, came up to the nursery and asked me whether I would like a ticket. He then gave me a beautiful green ticket with a round hole in it. I asked him what one could do with it, and he said, “In return for that ticket you can get Bath buns, Banbury cakes, jam-rolls, crackers,
41、 and pork sausages.” In the bustle of departure I lost it. Paddington Station resounded with the desperate cries of the bereaved ticket-holder. In vain I was given half a white first-class ticket. In vain Mr. Bullock, the guard, offered every other kind of ticket. It was not the same thing. That tic
42、ket, with the round hole, had conjured up visions of wonderful possibilities and fantastic exchanges. Sausages and Banbury cakes and Bath buns (all of them magic things), I knew, would be forthcoming to no other ticket. The loss was irreparable. I remember thinking the grown-up people so utterly wan
43、ting in understanding when they said: “A ticket? Of course, he can have a ticket. Heres a ticket for the dear little boy.” As if that white ticket was anything like the unique passport to gifts new and unheard of, anything like that real green ticket with the round hole in it. At the end of one of t
44、hese journeys, at Kingsbridge Road, the train ran off the line. We were in a saloon carriage, and I remember the accident being attributed to that fact by my mothers maid, who said saloon carriages were always unsafe. It turned out to be an enjoyable accident, and we all got out and I was given an o
45、range.Mr. Bullock, the guard, was a great friend of all of us children; and our chief pleasure was to ask him a riddle: “Why is it dangerous to go out in the spring?” I will leave it to the reader to guess the answer, with merely this as a guide, that the first part of the answer to the riddle is “B
46、ecause the hedges are shooting,” and the second part of the answer is peculiarly7 appropriate to Mr. Bullock. I am afraid Mr. Bullock never saw why, although no doubt he enjoyed the riddle.I have already said that I cannot fix any line of division between the nursery and the schoolroom epochs, but b
47、efore I get on to the subject of the schoolroom I will record a few things which must have belonged to the pre-schoolroom period.One incident which stands out clearly in my mind is that of the fifty-shilling train. There were at that time in London two toy-shops called Cremer. One was in New Bond St
48、reet, No. 27, I think, near Tessiers, the jeweller; another in Regent Street, somewhere between Libertys and Piccadilly Circus.In the window of the Regent Street shop there was a long train with people in it, and it was labelled fifty shillings. In the year 1921 it is only a small mechanical train t
49、hat can be bought for fifty shillings. I cant remember whether I had reached the schoolroom when this happened, but I know I still wore a frock and had not yet reached the dignity of trousers. I used constantly to ask to go and look at this shop window and gaze at the fifty-shilling train, which seemed first to be miraculous for its size, and, secondly, for its price. Who in the world could have fifty shillings all at once?I never went so far as thinking it was possible to poss