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1、【国外英文文学】五尔夫短篇小说Title: Woolf Short StoriesAuthor: Virginia Woolf* A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook *eBook No.: 0200781.txtLanguage: EnglishDate first posted: October 2002Date most recently updated: October 2002This eBook was produced by: Col ChoatProduction notes: Italics in the book have been
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4、ay be viewed online at.au/licence.html-A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBookTitle: Woolf Short StoriesAuthor: Virginia WoolfCONTENTSThe Mark on the Wall (1917)Kew Gardens (1919)Solid Objects (1920)An Unwritten Novel (1920)A Haunted House (1921)Monday or Tuesday (1921)The String Quartet (1921)A Soci
5、ety (1921)Blue and Green (1921)In the Orchard (1923)Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street (1923)A Womans College from the Outside(1926)The New Dress (1927)Moments of Being. SLATERS PINS HAVE NO POINTS (1928)The Lady in the Looking-Glass (1929)The Shooting Party (1938)The Duchess and the Jeweller (1938)Lappin
6、and Lappinova (1939)The Man who Loved his Kind (1944)The Searchlight (1944)The Legacy (1944)Together and Apart (1944)A Summing Up (1944)THE MARK ON THE WALLPerhaps it was the middle of January in the present that I first lookedup and saw the mark on the wall. In order to fix a date it is necessaryto
7、 remember what one saw. So now I think of the fire; the steady film ofyellow light upon the page of my book; the three chrysanthemums in theround glass bowl on the mantelpiece. Yes, it must have been the wintertime, and we had just finished our tea, for I remember that I was smokinga cigarette when
8、I looked up and saw the mark on the wall for the firsttime. I looked up through the smoke of my cigarette and my eye lodged fora moment upon the burning coals, and that old fancy of the crimson flagflapping from the castle tower came into my mind, and I thought of thecavalcade of red knights riding
9、up the side of the black rock. Rather tomy relief the sight of the mark interrupted the fancy, for it is an oldfancy, an automatic fancy, made as a child perhaps. The mark was a smallround mark, black upon the white wall, about six or seven inches abovethe mantelpiece.How readily our thoughts swarm
10、upon a new object, lifting it a littleway, as ants carry a blade of straw so feverishly, and then leave it. . .If that mark was made by a nail, it cant have been for a picture, itmust have been for a miniature-the miniature of a lady with whitepowdered curls, powder-dusted cheeks, and lips like red
11、carnations. Afraud of course, for the people who had this house before us would havechosen pictures in that way-an old picture for an old room. That is thesort of people they were-very interesting people, and I think of them sooften, in such queer places, because one will never see them again, never
12、know what happened next. They wanted to leave this house because theywanted to change their style of furniture, so he said, and he was inprocess of saying that in his opinion art should have ideas behind itwhen we were torn asunder, as one is torn from the old lady about to pourout tea and the young
13、 man about to hit the tennis ball in the back gardenof the suburban villa as one rushes past in the train.But as for that mark, Im not sure about it; I dont believe it was madeby a nail after all; its too big, too round, for that. I might get up,but if I got up and looked at it, ten to one I shouldn
14、t be able to sayfor certain; because once a things done, no one ever knows how ithappened. Oh! dear me, the mystery of life; The inaccuracy of thought!The ignorance of humanity! To show how very little control of ourpossessions we have-what an accidental affair this living is after allour civilizati
15、on-let me just count over a few of the things lost in onelifetime, beginning, for that seems always the most mysterious oflosses-what cat would gnaw, what rat would nibble-three pale bluecanisters of book-binding tools? Then there were the bird cages, the ironhoops, the steel skates, the Queen Anne
16、coal-scuttle, the bagatelleboard, the hand organ-all gone, and jewels, too. Opals and emeralds,they lie about the roots of turnips. What a scraping paring affair it isto be sure! The wonder is that Ive any clothes on my back, that I sitsurrounded by solid furniture at this moment. Why, if one wants
17、tocompare life to anything, one must liken it to being blown through theTube at fifty miles an hour-landing at the other end without a singlehairpin in ones hair! Shot out at the feet of God entirely naked!Tumbling head over heels in the asphodel meadows like brown paper parcelspitched down a shoot
18、in the post office! With ones hair flying back likethe tail of a race-horse. Yes, that seems to express the rapidity oflife, the perpetual waste and repair; all so casual, all so haphazard. . .But after life. The slow pulling down of thick green stalks so that thecup of the flower, as it turns over,
19、 deluges one with purple and redlight. Why, after all, should one not be born there as one is born here,helpless, speechless, unable to focus ones eyesight, groping at theroots of the grass, at the toes of the Giants? As for saying which aretrees, and which are men and women, or whether there are su
20、ch things,that one wont be in a condition to do for fifty years or so. There willbe nothing but spaces of light and dark, intersected by thick stalks, andrather higher up perhaps, rose-shaped blots of an indistinct colour-dimpinks and blues-which will, as time goes on, become more definite,become-I
21、dont know what. . .And yet that mark on the wall is not a hole at all. It may even be causedby some round black substance, such as a small rose leaf, left over fromthe summer, and I, not being a very vigilant housekeeper-look at thedust on the mantelpiece, for example, the dust which, so they say, b
22、uriedTroy three times over, only fragments of pots utterly refusingannihilation, as one can believe.The tree outside the window taps very gently on the pane. . . I want tothink quietly, calmly, spaciously, never to be interrupted, never to haveto rise from my chair, to slip easily from one thing to
23、another, withoutany sense of hostility, or obstacle. I want to sink deeper and deeper,away from the surface, with its hard separate facts. To steady myself,let me catch hold of the first idea that passes. . . Shakespeare. . .Well, he will do as well as another. A man who sat himself solidly in anarm
24、-chair, and looked into the fire, so-A shower of ideas fellperpetually from some very high Heaven down through his mind. He leanthis forehead on his hand, and people, looking in through the opendoor,-for this scene is supposed to take place on a summersevening-But how dull this is, this historical f
25、iction! It doesntinterest me at all. I wish I could hit upon a pleasant track of thought,a track indirectly reflecting credit upon myself, for those are thepleasantest thoughts, and very frequent even in the minds of modestmouse-coloured people, who believe genuinely that they dislike to heartheir o
26、wn praises. They are not thoughts directly praising oneself; thatis the beauty of them; they are thoughts like this:And then I came into the room. They were discussing botany. I said howId seen a flower growing on a dust heap on the site of an old house inKingsway. The seed, I said, must have been s
27、own in the reign of Charlesthe First. What flowers grew in the reign of Charles the First? Iasked-(but, I dont remember the answer). Tall flowers with purpletassels to them perhaps. And so it goes on. All the time Im dressing upthe figure of myself in my own mind, lovingly, stealthily, not openlyado
28、ring it, for if I did that, I should catch myself out, and stretch myhand at once for a book in self-protection. Indeed, it is curious howinstinctively one protects the image of oneself from idolatry or anyother handling that could make it ridiculous, or too unlike the originalto be believed in any
29、longer. Or is it not so very curious after all? Itis a matter of great importance. Suppose the looking glass smashes, theimage disappears, and the romantic figure with the green of forest depthsall about it is there no longer, but only that shell of a person which isseen by other people-what an airl
30、ess, shallow, bald, prominent world itbecomes! A world not to be lived in. As we face each other in omnibusesand underground railways we are looking into the mirror that accounts forthe vagueness, the gleam of glassiness, in our eyes. And the novelists infuture will realize more and more the importa
31、nce of these reflections,for of course there is not one reflection but an almost infinite number;those are the depths they will explore, those the phantoms they willpursue, leaving the description of reality more and more out of theirstories, taking a knowledge of it for granted, as the Greeks did a
32、ndShakespeare perhaps-but these generalizations are very worthless. Themilitary sound of the word is enough. It recalls leading articles,cabinet ministers-a whole class of things indeed which as a child onethought the thing itself, the standard thing, the real thing, from whichone could not depart s
33、ave at the risk of nameless damnation.Generalizations bring back somehow Sunday in London, Sunday afternoonwalks, Sunday luncheons, and also ways of speaking of the dead, clothes,and habits-like the habit of sitting all together in one room until acertain hour, although nobody liked it. There was a
34、rule for everything.The rule for tablecloths at that particular period was that they shouldbe made of tapestry with little yellow compartments marked upon them,such as you may see in photographs of the carpets in the corridors of theroyal palaces. Tablecloths of a different kind were not real tablec
35、loths.How shocking, and yet how wonderful it was to discover that these realthings, Sunday luncheons, Sunday walks, country houses, and tableclothswere not entirely real, were indeed half phantoms, and the damnationwhich visited the disbeliever in them was only a sense of illegitimatefreedom. What n
36、ow takes the place of those things I wonder, those realstandard things? Men perhaps, should you be a woman; the masculine pointof view which governs our lives, which sets the standard, whichestablishes Whitakers Table of Precedency, which has become, I suppose,since the war half a phantom to many me
37、n and women, which soon-one mayhope, will be laughed into the dustbin where the phantoms go, themahogany sideboards and the Landseer prints, Gods and Devils, Hell and soforth, leaving us all with an intoxicating sense of illegitimatefreedom-if freedom exists. . .In certain lights that mark on the wa
38、ll seems actually to project fromthe wall. Nor is it entirely circular. I cannot be sure, but it seems tocast a perceptible shadow, suggesting that if I ran my finger down thatstrip of the wall it would, at a certain point, mount and descend a smalltumulus, a smooth tumulus like those barrows on the
39、 South Downs whichare, they say, either tombs or camps. Of the two I should prefer them tobe tombs, desiring melancholy like most English people, and finding itnatural at the end of a walk to think of the bones stretched beneath theturf. . . There must be some book about it. Some antiquary must have
40、 dugup those bones and given them a name. . . What sort of a man is anantiquary, I wonder? Retired Colonels for the most part, I daresay,leading parties of aged labourers to the top here, examining clods ofearth and stone, and getting into correspondence with the neighbouringclergy, which, being ope
41、ned at breakfast time, gives them a feeling ofimportance, and the comparison of arrow-heads necessitates cross-countryjourneys to the county towns, an agreeable necessity both to them and totheir elderly wives, who wish to make plum jam or to clean out the study,and have every reason for keeping tha
42、t great question of the camp or thetomb in perpetual suspension, while the Colonel himself feels agreeablyphilosophic in accumulating evidence on both sides of the question. It istrue that he does finally incline to believe in the camp; and, beingopposed, indites a pamphlet which he is about to read
43、 at the quarterlymeeting of the local society when a stroke lays him low, and his lastconscious thoughts are not of wife or child, but of the camp and thatarrowhead there, which is now in the case at the local museum, togetherwith the foot of a Chinese murderess, a handful of Elizabethan nails, agre
44、at many Tudor clay pipes, a piece of Roman pottery, and the wine-glassthat Nelson drank out of-proving I really dont know what.No, no, nothing is proved, nothing is known. And if I were to get up atthis very moment and ascertain that the mark on the wall is really-whatshall we say?-the head of a gig
45、antic old nail, driven in two hundredyears ago, which has now, owing to the patient attrition of manygenerations of housemaids, revealed its head above the coat of paint, andis taking its first view of modern life in the sight of a white-walledfire-lit room, what should I gain?-Knowledge? Matter for
46、 furtherspeculation? I can think sitting still as well as standing up. And whatis knowledge? What are our learned men save the descendants of witchesand hermits who crouched in caves and in woods brewing herbs,interrogating shrew-mice and writing down the language of the stars? Andthe less we honour
47、 them as our superstitions dwindle and our respect forbeauty and health of mind increases. . . Yes, one could imagine a verypleasant world. A quiet, spacious world, with the flowers so red and bluein the open fields. A world without professors or specialists orhouse-keepers with the profiles of policemen, a world which one couldslice with ones thought as a fish slices the water with his fin, grazingthe stems of the water-lilies, hanging suspended over nests of white seaeggs