《【英文文学】In the Days of the Comet.docx》由会员分享，可在线阅读，更多相关《【英文文学】In the Days of the Comet.docx（133页珍藏版）》请在taowenge.com淘文阁网|工程机械CAD图纸|机械工程制图|CAD装配图下载|SolidWorks_CaTia_CAD_UG_PROE_设计图分享下载上搜索。
1、【英文文学】In the Days of the CometPrologueThe Man Who Wrote in the TowerI SAW a gray-haired man, a figure of hale age, sitting at a desk and writing:He seemed to be in a room in a tower, very high, so that through the tall window on his left one perceived only distances, a remote horizon of sea, a headl
2、and and that vague haze and glitter in the sunset that many miles away marks a city. All the appointments of this room were orderly and beautiful, and in some subtle quality, in this small difference and that, new to me and strange. They were in no fashion I could name, and the simple costume the ma
3、n wore suggested neither period nor country. It might, I thought, be the Happy Future, or Utopia, or the Land of Simple Dreams; an errant mote of memory, Henry Jamess phrase and story of “The Great Good Place,” twinkled across my mind, and passed and left no light.The man I saw wrote with a thing li
4、ke a fountain pen, a modern touch that prohibited any historical retrospection, and as he finished each sheet, writing in an easy flowing hand, he added it to a growing pile upon a graceful little table under the window. His last done sheets lay loose, partly covering others that were clipped togeth
5、er into fascicles.Clearly he was unaware of my presence, and I stood waiting until his pen should come to a pause. Old as he certainly was he wrote with a steady hand . . . .I discovered that a concave speculum hung slantingly high over his head; a movement in this caught my attention sharply, and I
6、 looked up to see, distorted and made fantastic but bright and beautifully colored, the magnified, reflected, evasive rendering of a palace, of a terrace, of the vista of a great roadway with many people, people exaggerated, impossible-looking because of the curvature of the mirror, going to and fro
7、. I turned my head quickly that I might see more clearly through the window behind me, but it was too high for me to survey this nearer scene directly, and after a momentary pause I came back to that distorting mirror again.But now the writer was leaning back in his chair. He put down his pen and si
8、ghed the half resentful sigh “ah! you, work, you! how you gratify and tire me!” of a man who has been writing to his satisfaction.“What is this place,” I asked, “and who are you?”He looked around with the quick movement of surprise.“What is this place?” I repeated, “and where am I?”He regarded me st
9、eadfastly for a moment under his wrinkled brows, and then his expression softened to a smile. He pointed to a chair beside the table. “I am writing,” he said.“About this?”“About the change.”I sat down. It was a very comfortable chair, and well placed under the light.“If you would like to read ” he s
10、aid.I indicated the manuscript. “This explains?” I asked.“That explains,” he answered.He drew a fresh sheet of paper toward him as he looked at me.I glanced from him about his apartment and back to the little table. A fascicle marked very distinctly “1” caught my attention, and I took it up. I smile
11、d in his friendly eyes. “Very well,” said I, suddenly at my ease, and he nodded and went on writing. And in a mood between confidence and curiosity, I began to read.This is the story that happy, active-looking old man in that pleasant place had written.Part 1 The Comet Chapter 1 Dust in the ShadowsS
12、ection 1I HAVE set myself to write the story of the Great Change, so far as it has affected my own life and the lives of one or two people closely connected with me, primarily to please myself.Long ago in my crude unhappy youth, I conceived the desire of writing a book. To scribble secretly and drea
13、m of authorship was one of my chief alleviations, and I read with a sympathetic envy every scrap I could get about the world of literature and the lives of literary people. It is something, even amidst this present happiness, to find leisure and opportunity to take up and partially realize these old
14、 and hopeless dreams. But that alone, in a world where so much of vivid and increasing interest presents itself to be done, even by an old man, would not, I think, suffice to set me at this desk. I find some such recapitulation of my past as this will involve, is becoming necessary to my own secure
15、mental continuity. The passage of years brings a man at last to retrospection; at seventy-two ones youth is far more important than it was at forty. And I am out of touch with my youth. The old life seems so cut off from the new, so alien and so unreasonable, that at times I find it bordering upon t
16、he incredible. The data have gone, the buildings and places. I stopped dead the other afternoon in my walk across the moor, where once the dismal outskirts of Swathinglea straggled toward Leet, and asked, “Was it here indeed that I crouched among the weeds and refuse and broken crockery and loaded m
17、y revolver ready for murder? Did ever such a thing happen in my life? Was such a mood and thought and intention ever possible to me? Rather, has not some queer nightmare spirit out of dreamland slipped a pseudo-memory into the records of my vanished life?” There must be many alive still who have the
18、 same perplexities. And I think too that those who are now growing up to take our places in the great enterprise of mankind, will need many such narratives as mine for even the most partial conception of the old world of shadows that came before our day. It chances too that my case is fairly typical
19、 of the Change; I was caught midway in a gust of passion; and a curious accident put me for a time in the very nucleus of the new order.My memory takes me back across the interval of fifty years to a little ill-lit room with a sash window open to a starry sky, and instantly there returns to me the c
20、haracteristic smell of that room, the penetrating odor of an ill-trimmed lamp, burning cheap paraffin. Lighting by electricity had then been perfected for fifteen years, but still the larger portion of the world used these lamps. All this first scene will go, in my mind at least, to that olfactory a
21、ccompaniment. That was the evening smell of the room. By day it had a more subtle aroma, a closeness, a peculiar sort of faint pungency that I associate I know not why with dust.Let me describe this room to you in detail. It was perhaps eight feet by seven in area and rather higher than either of th
22、ese dimensions; the ceiling was of plaster, cracked and bulging in places, gray with the soot of the lamp, and in one place discolored by a system of yellow and olive-green stains caused by the percolation of damp from above. The walls were covered with dun-colored paper, upon which had been printed
23、 in oblique reiteration a crimson shape, something of the nature of a curly ostrich feather, or an acanthus flower, that had in its less faded moments a sort of dingy gaiety. There were several big plaster-rimmed wounds in this, caused by Parloads ineffectual attempts to get nails into the wall, whe
24、reby there might hang pictures. One nail had hit between two bricks and got home, and from this depended, sustained a little insecurely by frayed and knotted blind-cord, Parloads hanging bookshelves, planks painted over with a treacly blue enamel and further decorated by a fringe of pinked American
25、cloth insecurely fixed by tacks. Below this was a little table that behaved with a mulish vindictiveness to any knee that was thrust beneath it suddenly; it was covered with a cloth whose pattern of red and black had been rendered less monotonous by the accidents of Parloads versatile ink bottle, an
26、d on it, leit motif of the whole, stood and stank the lamp. This lamp, you must understand, was of some whitish translucent substance that was neither china nor glass, it had a shade of the same substance, a shade that did not protect the eyes of a reader in any measure, and it seemed admirably adap
27、ted to bring into pitiless prominence the fact that, after the lamps trimming, dust and paraffin had been smeared over its exterior with a reckless generosity.The uneven floor boards of this apartment were covered with scratched enamel of chocolate hue, on which a small island of frayed carpet dimly
28、 blossomed in the dust and shadows.There was a very small grate, made of cast-iron in one piece and painted buff, and a still smaller misfit of a cast-iron fender that confessed the gray stone of the hearth. No fire was laid, only a few scraps of torn paper and the bowl of a broken corn-cob pipe wer
29、e visible behind the bars, and in the corner and rather thrust away was an angular japanned coal-box with a damaged hinge. It was the custom in those days to warm every room separately from a separate fireplace, more prolific of dirt than heat, and the rickety sash window, the small chimney, and the
30、 loose-fitting door were expected to organize the ventilation of the room among themselves without any further direction.Parloads truckle bed hid its gray sheets beneath an old patchwork counterpane on one side of the room, and veiled his boxes and suchlike oddments, and invading the two corners of
31、the window were an old whatnot and the washhandstand, on which were distributed the simple appliances of his toilet.This washhandstand had been made of deal by some one with an excess of turnery appliances in a hurry, who had tried to distract attention from the rough economies of his workmanship by
32、 an arresting ornamentation of blobs and bulbs upon the joints and legs. Apparently the piece had then been placed in the hands of some person of infinite leisure equipped with a pot of ocherous paint, varnish, and a set of flexible combs. This person had first painted the article, then, I fancy, sm
33、eared it with varnish, and then sat down to work with the combs to streak and comb the varnish into a weird imitation of the grain of some nightmare timber. The washhandstand so made had evidently had a prolonged career of violent use, had been chipped, kicked, splintered, punched, stained, scorched
34、, hammered, dessicated, damped, and defiled, had met indeed with almost every possible adventure except a conflagration or a scrubbing, until at last it had come to this high refuge of Parloads attic to sustain the simple requirements of Parloads personal cleanliness. There were, in chief, a basin a
35、nd a jug of water and a slop-pail of tin, and, further, a piece of yellow soap in a tray, a tooth-brush, a rat-tailed shaving brush, one huckaback towel, and one or two other minor articles. In those days only very prosperous people had more than such an equipage, and it is to be remarked that every
36、 drop of water Parload used had to be carried by an unfortunate servant girl, the “slavey,” Parload called her up from the basement to the top of the house and subsequently down again. Already we begin to forget how modern an invention is personal cleanliness. It is a fact that Parload had never str
37、ipped for a swim in his life; never had a simultaneous bath all over his body since his childhood. Not one in fifty of us did in the days of which I am telling you.A chest, also singularly grained and streaked, of two large and two small drawers, held Parloads reserve of garments, and pegs on the do
38、or carried his two hats and completed this inventory of a “bed-sitting-room” as I knew it before the Change. But I had forgotten there was also a chair with a “squab” that apologized inadequately for the defects of its cane seat. I forgot that for the moment because I was sitting on the chair on the
39、 occasion that best begins this story.I have described Parloads room with such particularity because it will help you to understand the key in which my earlier chapters are written, but you must not imagine that this singular equipment or the smell of the lamp engaged my attention at that time to th
40、e slightest degree. I took all this grimy unpleasantness as if it were the most natural and proper setting for existence imaginable. It was the world as I knew it. My mind was entirely occupied then by graver and intenser matters, and it is only now in the distant retrospect that I see these details
41、 of environment as being remarkable, as significant, as indeed obviously the outward visible manifestations of the old world disorder in our hearts.Section 2Parload stood at the open window, opera-glass in hand, and sought and found and was uncertain about and lost again, the new comet.I thought the
42、 comet no more than a nuisance then because I wanted to talk of other matters. But Parload was full of it. My head was hot, I was feverish with interlacing annoyances and bitterness, I wanted to open my heart to him at least I wanted to relieve my heart by some romantic rendering of my troubles and
43、I gave but little heed to the things he told me. It was the first time I had heard of this new speck among the countless specks of heaven, and I did not care if I never heard of the thing again.We were two youths much of an age together, Parload was two and twenty, and eight months older than I. He
44、was I think his proper definition was “engrossing clerk” to a little solicitor in Overcastle, while I was third in the office staff of Rawdons pot-bank in Clayton. We had met first in the “Parliament” of the Young Mens Christian Association of Swathinglea; we had found we attended simultaneous class
45、es in Overcastle, he in science and I in shorthand, and had started a practice of walking home together, and so our friendship came into being. (Swathinglea, Clayton, and Overcastle were contiguous towns, I should mention, in the great industrial area of the Midlands.) We had shared each others secr
46、et of religious doubt, we had confided to one another a common interest in Socialism, he had come twice to supper at my mothers on a Sunday night, and I was free of his apartment. He was then a tall, flaxen-haired, gawky youth, with a disproportionate development of neck and wrist, and capable of va
47、st enthusiasm; he gave two evenings a week to the evening classes of the organized science school in Overcastle, physiography was his favorite “subject,” and through this insidious opening of his mind the wonder of outer space had come to take possession of his soul. He had commandeered an old opera
48、-glass from his uncle who farmed at Leet over the moors, he had bought a cheap paper planisphere and Whitakers Almanac, and for a time day and moonlight were mere blank interruptions to the one satisfactory reality in his life star-gazing. It was the deeps that had seized him, the immensities, and t
49、he mysterious possibilities that might float unlit in that unplumbed abyss. With infinite labor and the help of a very precise article in The Heavens, a little monthly magazine that catered for those who were under this obsession, he had at last got his opera-glass upon the new visitor to our system from outer space. He gazed in a sort of rapture upon that quivering little smudge of light among the shining pin-points and gazed. My troubles had to wait for him.“Wonderful,” h