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1、【英文文学】The Old Maid 老处女Chapter 1In the old New York of the fifties a few families ruled, in simplicity and affluence. Of these were the Ralstons.The sturdy English and the rubicund and heavier Dutch had mingled to produce a prosperous, prudent and yet lavish society. To “do things handsomely” had alw
2、ays been a fundamental principle in this cautious world, built up on the fortunes of bankers, India merchants, ship-builders and ship-chandlers. Those well-fed slow-moving people, who seemed irritable and dyspeptic to European eyes only because the caprices of the climate had stripped them of superf
3、luous flesh, and strung their nerves a little tighter, lived in a genteel monotony of which the surface was never stirred by the dumb dramas now and then enacted underground. Sensitive souls in those days were like muted key-boards, on which Fate played without a sound.In this compact society, built
4、 of solidly welded blocks, one of the largest areas was filled by the Ralstons and their ramifications. The Ralstons were of middle-class English stock. They had not come to the Colonies to die for a creed but to live for a bank-account. The result had been beyond their hopes, and their religion was
5、 tinged by their success. An edulcorated Church of England which, under the conciliatory name of the “Episcopal Church of the United States of America,” left out the coarser allusions in the Marriage Service, slid over the comminatory passages in the Athanasian Creed, and thought it more respectful
6、to say “Our Father who” than “which” in the Lords Prayer, was exactly suited to the spirit of compromise whereon the Ralstons had built themselves up. There was in all the tribe the same instinctive recoil from new religions as from unaccounted-for people. Institutional to the core, they represented
7、 the conservative element that holds new societies together as seaplants bind the seashore.Compared with the Ralstons, even such traditionalists as the Lovells, the Halseys or the Vandergraves appeared careless, indifferent to money, almost reckless in their impulses and indecisions. Old John Freder
8、ick Ralston, the stout founder of the race, had perceived the difference, and emphasized it to his son, Frederick John, in whom he had scented a faint leaning toward the untried and unprofitable.“You let the Lannings and the Dagonets and the Spenders take risks and fly kites. Its the county-family b
9、lood in em: weve nothing to do with that. Look how theyre petering out already the men, I mean. Let your boys marry their girls, if you like (theyre wholesome and handsome); though Id sooner see my grandsons take a Lovell or a Vandergrave, or any of our own kind. But dont let your sons go mooning ar
10、ound after their young fellows, horse-racing, and running down south to those d d Springs, and gambling at New Orleans, and all the rest of it. Thats how youll build up the family, and keep the weather out. The way weve always done it.”Frederick John listened, obeyed, married a Halsey, and passively
11、 followed in his fathers steps. He belonged to the cautious generation of New York gentleman who revered Hamilton and served Jefferson, who longed to lay out New York like Washington, and who laid it out instead like a gridiron, lest they should be thought “undemocratic” by people they secretly look
12、ed down upon. Shopkeepers to the marrow, they put in their windows the wares there was most demand for, keeping their private opinions for the back-shop, where through lack of use, they gradually lost substance and colour.The fourth generation of Ralstons had nothing left in the way of convictions s
13、ave an acute sense of honour in private and business matters; on the life of the community and the state they took their daily views from the newspapers, and the newspapers they already despised. The Ralstons had done little to shape the destiny of their country, except to finance the Cause when it
14、had become safe to do so. They were related to many of the great men who had built the Republic; but no Ralston had so far committed himself as to be great. As old John Frederick said, it was safer to be satisfied with three per cent: they regarded heroism as a form of gambling. Yet by merely being
15、so numerous and so similar they had come to have a weight in the community. People said: “The Ralstons” when they wished to invoke a precedent. This attribution of authority had gradually convinced the third generation of its collective importance, and the fourth, to which Delia Ralstons husband bel
16、onged, had the ease and simplicity of a ruling class.Within the limits of their universal caution, the Ralstons fulfilled their obligations as rich and respected citizens. They figured on the boards of all the old-established charities, gave handsomely to thriving institutions, had the best cooks in
17、 New York, and when they travelled abroad ordered statuary of the American sculptors in Rome whose reputation was already established. The first Ralston who had brought home a statue had been regarded as a wild fellow; but when it became known that the sculptor had executed several orders for the Br
18、itish aristocracy it was felt in the family that this too was a three per cent investment.Two marriages with the Dutch Vandergraves had consolidated these qualities of thrift and handsome living, and the carefully built-up Ralston character was now so congenital that Delia Ralston sometimes asked he
19、rself whether, were she to turn her own little boy loose in a wilderness, he would not create a small New York there, and be on all its boards of directors.Delia Lovell had married James Ralston at twenty. The marriage, which had taken place in the month of September, 1840, had been solemnized, as w
20、as then the custom, in the drawing-room of the brides country home, at what is now the corner of Avenue A and Ninety-first Street, overlooking the Sound. Thence her husband had driven her (in Grandmamma Lovells canary-coloured coach with a fringed hammer-cloth) through spreading suburbs and untidy e
21、lm-shaded streets to one of the new houses in Gramercy Park, which the pioneers of the younger set were just beginning to affect; and there, at five-and-twenty, she was established, the mother of two children, the possessor of a generous allowance of pin-money, and, by common consent, one of the han
22、dsomest and most popular “young matrons” (as they were called) of her day.She was thinking placidly and gratefully of these things as she sat one afternoon in her handsome bedroom in Gramercy Park. She was too near to the primitive Ralstons to have as clear a view of them, as for instance, the son i
23、n question might one day command: she lived under them as unthinkingly as one lives under the laws of ones country. Yet that tremor of the muted key-board, that secret questioning which sometimes beat in her like wings, would now and then so divide her from them that for a fleeting moment she could
24、survey them in their relation to other things. The moment was always fleeting; she dropped back from it quickly, breathless and a little pale, to her children, her house-keeping, her new dresses and her kindly Jim.She thought of him today with a smile of tenderness, remembering how he had told her t
25、o spare no expense on her new bonnet. Though she was twenty-five, and twice a mother, her image was still surprisingly fresh. The plumpness then thought seemly in a young wife stretched the grey silk across her bosom, and caused her heavy gold watch-chain after it left the anchorage of the brooch of
26、 St. Peters in mosaic that fastened her low-cut Cluny collar to dangle perilously in the void above a tiny waist buckled into a velvet waist-band. But the shoulders above sloped youthfully under her Cashmere scarf, and every movement was as quick as a girls.Mrs. Jim Ralston approvingly examined the
27、rosy-cheeked oval set in the blonde ruffles of the bonnet on which, in compliance with her husbands instructions, she had spared no expense. It was a cabriolet of white velvet tied with wide satin ribbons and plumed with a crystal-spangled marabout a wedding bonnet ordered for the marriage of her co
28、usin, Charlotte Lovell, which was to take place that week at St. Marks-in-the-Bouwerie. Charlotte was making a match exactly like Delias own: marrying a Ralston, of the Waverly Place branch, than which nothing could be safer, sounder or more well, usual. Delia did not know why the word had occurred
29、to her, for it could hardly be postulated, even of the young women of her own narrow clan, that they “usually” married Ralstons; but the soundness, safeness, suitability of the arrangement, did make it typical of the kind of alliance which a nice girl in the nicest set would serenely and blushingly
30、forecast for herself.Yes and afterward?Well what? And what did this new question mean? Afterward: why, of course, there was the startled puzzled surrender to the incomprehensible exigencies of the young man to whom one had at most yielded a rosy cheek in return for an engagement ring; there was the
31、large double-bed; the terror of seeing him shaving calmly the next morning, in his shirt-sleeves, through the dressing-room door; the evasions, insinuations, resigned smiles and Bible texts of ones Mamma; the reminder of the phrase “to obey” in the glittering blur of the Marriage Service; a week or
32、a month of flushed distress, confusion, embarrassed pleasure; then the growth of habit, the insidious lulling of the matter-of-course, the dreamless double slumbers in the big white bed, the early morning discussions and consultations through that dressing-room door which had once seemed open into a
33、 fiery pit scorching the brow of innocence.And then, the babies; the babies who were supposed to “make up for everything,” and didnt though they were such darlings, and one had no definite notion as to what it was that one had missed, and that they were to make up for.Yes: Charlottes fate would be j
34、ust like hers. Joe Ralston was so like his second cousin Jim (Delias James), that Delia could see no reason why life in the squat brick house in Waverly Place should not exactly resemble life in the tall brown-stone house in Gramercy Park. Only Charlottes bedroom would certainly not be as pretty as
35、hers.She glanced complacently at the French wall-paper that reproduced a watered silk, with a “valanced” border, and tassels between the loops. The mahogany bedstead, covered with a white embroidered counterpane, was symmetrically reflected in the mirror of a wardrobe which matched it. Coloured lith
36、ographs of the “Four Seasons” by Leopold Robert surmounted groups of family daguerreotypes in deeply-recessed gilt frames. The ormolu clock represented a shepherdess sitting on a fallen trunk, a basket of flowers at her feet. A shepherd, stealing up, surprised her with a kiss, while her little dog b
37、arked at him from a clump of roses. One knew the profession of the lovers by their crooks and the shape of their hats. This frivolous time-piece had been a wedding-gift from Delias aunt, Mrs. Manson Mingott, a dashing widow who lived in Paris and was received at the Tuileries. It had been entrusted
38、by Mrs. Mingott to young Clement Spender, who had come back from Italy for a short holiday just after Delias marriage; the marriage which might never have been, if Clem Spender could have supported a wife, or if he had consented to give up painting and Rome for New York and the law. The young man (w
39、ho looked, already, so odd and foreign and sarcastic) had laughingly assured the bride that her aunts gift was “the newest thing in the Palais Royal”; and the family, who admired Mrs. Manson Mingotts taste though they had disapproved of her “foreignness,” had criticized Delias putting the clock in h
40、er bedroom instead of displaying it on the drawing-room mantel. But she liked, when she woke in the morning, to see the bold shepherd stealing his kiss.Charlotte would certainly not have such a pretty clock in her bedroom; but then she had not been used to pretty things. Her father, who had died at
41、thirty of lung-fever, was one of the “poor Lovells.” His widow, burdened with a young family, and living all year round “up the River,” could not do much for her eldest girl; and Charlotte had entered society in her mothers turned garments, and shod with satin sandals handed down from a defunct aunt
42、 who had “opened a ball” with General Washington. The old-fashioned Ralston furniture, which Delia already saw herself banishing, would seem sumptuous to Chatty; very likely she would think Delias gay French timepiece somewhat frivolous, or even not “quite nice.” Poor Charlotte had become so serious
43、, so prudish almost, since she had given up balls and taken to visiting the poor! Delia remembered, with ever-recurring wonder, the abrupt change in her: the precise moment at which it had been privately agreed in the family that, after all, Charlotte Lovell was going to be an old maid.They had not
44、thought so when she came out. Though her mother could not afford to give her more than one new tarlatan dress, and though nearly everything in her appearance was regrettable, from the too bright red of her hair to the too pale brown of her eyes not to mention the rounds of brick-rose on her cheek-bo
45、nes, which almost (preposterous thought!) made her look as if she painted yet these defects were redeemed by a slim waist, a light foot and a gay laugh; and when her hair was well oiled and brushed for an evening party, so that it looked almost brown, and lay smoothly along her delicate cheeks under
46、 a wreath of red and white camellias, several eligible young men (Joe Ralston among them) were known to have called her pretty.Then came her illness. She caught cold on a moonlight sleighing-party, the brick-rose circles deepened, and she began to cough. There was a report that she was “going like h
47、er father,” and she was hurried off to a remote village in Georgia, where she lived alone for a year with an old family governess. When she came back everyone felt at once that there was a change in her. She was pale, and thinner than ever, but with an exquisitely transparent cheek, darker eyes and
48、redder hair; and the oddness of her appearance was increased by plain dresses of Quakerish cut. She had left off trinkets and watch chains, always wore the same grey cloak and small close bonnet, and displayed a sudden zeal for visiting the indigent. The family explained that during her year in the
49、south she had been shocked by the hopeless degradation of the “poor whites” and their children, and that this revelation of misery had made it impossible for her to return to the light-hearted life of her young friends. Everyone agreed, with significant glances that this unnatural state of mind would “pass off in time”; and meanwhile old Mrs. Lovell, Chattys grandmother, who understood her perhaps better than the others, gave her a little money f