《【英文小说】没有围墙的花园.docx》由会员分享，可在线阅读，更多相关《【英文小说】没有围墙的花园.docx（348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、【英文小说】没有围墙的花园 The Garden Without WallsCHAPTER IMY MOTHERIt happened about six in the morning, in a large red room. A bar of sunlight streamed in at the window, in which dust-motes were dancing by the thousand. A man and woman were lying in bed; I was standing up in my cot, plucking at the woman with
2、 my podgy fingers. She stirred, turned, rubbed her eyes, smiled, stretched out her arms, and drew me under the bed-clothes beside her. The man slept on.This is my earliest recollection. If it be true that the soul is born not at the same time as the body, but at a later period with the first glimmer
3、ing of memory, then this was the morning on which my soul groped its way into the world.I have sometimes thought that I have never grown wiser than the knowledge contained in that first recollection. Nothing that I have to record in this book will carry me much further. The scene is symbolic: a litt
4、le child, inarticulate, early awakened in a sunlit room, vainly striving to make life answer questions. Do we ever get beyond that? The woman is Nature. The man is God. The room is the worldfor me it has always been filled with sunlight.My mother I remember as very tall and patient, vaguely beautifu
5、l and smiling. I can recall hardly anything she saidonly her atmosphere and the fragrance of violets which seemed always to cling about her. I know that she took me out beneath the stars one night; there was frost on the ground and church-bells were ringing. And I know that one summers day, on a hol
6、iday at Ransby, she led me through lanes far out into the country till my legs were very tired. We came to a large white house, standing in a parkland. There we hid behind a clump of trees for hours. A horseman came riding down the avenue. My mother ran out from behind the trees and tried to make hi
7、m speak with her. She held me up to show me to him, and grasped his rein to make him halt. He said something angrily, set spurs to his horse, and disappeared at a gallop. She began to cry, telling me that the man was her father. I was too tired to pay much attention. She had to carry me most of the
8、way home. It was dark when we entered Ransby.In London some months laterit must have been wintertime, for we were sitting by the fire-lightshe took me in her arms and asked me if I would like to have a sister. I refused stoutly. At dawn I was wakened by hurrying feet on the staircase. Next day I was
9、 given a new box of soldiers to keep me quiet. A lot of strange people stole in and out the house as if they owned it. I never saw my mother again.All I had known of her had been so shy and gentle that it was a good deal of a surprise to me to learn years later that, as a girl, she had been consider
10、ed rather dashing. She had been called “The gay Miss Fannie Evrard” and her marriage with my father had begun with an elopement. Her father was Sir Charles Evrard, brother-in-law to the Earl of Lovegrove; my fathers folk were ship-chandlers in Ransby, outfitting vessels for the Baltic trade.The ineq
11、uality of the match, as far as social position was concerned, made life in Ransby impossible. My father was only a reporter on the local paper at the time of his escapade; the Evrards lived at Woadley Hall and were reckoned among the big people in the county. It must have been to this house that my
12、mother took me on that dusty summers day.After his marriage my father settled down in London, gaining his living as a free-lance journalist. I believe he was very poor at the start. He did not re-visit Ransby until years later. Pride prevented. My mother returned as often as finances would allow, in
13、 the vain hope of a reconciliation with her family. On these occasions she would stay at the ship-chandlers, and was an object of curiosity and commiseration among the neighbors.Most of the facts which lie outside my own recollection were communicated to me by my grandmother. She never got over her
14、amazement at her sons audacity. It was without parallel in her experience until I attempted to repeat his performance with an entirely individual variation. She never tired of rehearsing the details; it was noticeable that she always referred to my mother as “Miss Fannie.”“Often and often,” she woul
15、d say, “have I seen Miss Fannie come a-prancin down the High Street with her groom a-followin. She was always mounted on a gray horse, with a touch of red about her. Sometimes it was a red feather in her hat and sometimes a scarlet cloak. When Sir Charles rode beside her you could see the pride in h
16、is eye. She was his only child.”After my small sister failed to arrive someone must have told me that my mother had gone to find her. I would sit for hours at the window, watching for her homecoming.CHAPTER IITHE MAGIC CARPETI was born in South London on a crowded street lying off the Old Kent Road.
17、 It was here that my mother died. When I was about six, a false-dawn came in my fathers prospects, on the promise of which he moved northward to the suburb of Stoke Newington.At the time of which I write, Stoke Newington still retained a village atmosphere. The houses, for the most part, were old, b
18、ow-windowed, and quaint. Many of them were occupied by leisured peopleretired city-merchants, maiden-ladies, and widows, who came there because it was reasonable in price without being shabby. It was a backwater of the surging stream of London life where one found time to grow flowers, read books, a
19、nd be kindly. Its red, tree-shaded streets witnessed many an old-fashioned love-affair. The early morning was filled with country soundssinging of birds, creaking of wooden-gates, and cock-crowing.Our house was situated in Pope Lane, a blind alley overgrown with limes. It had posts set up at the ent
20、rance to prevent wheel-traffic. You could not see the houses from the lane, so steeply did the walls rise up on either side. It led nowhere and was a mere tunnel dotted with doors. Did the doors open by chance as you were passing, you caught glimpses of kitchen-gardens, shrubberies, and well-kept la
21、wns. We rarely saw our neighbors. Each door hid a mystery, on which a child could exercise his fancy.My father was too strenuously engaged in wringing an income out of reluctant editors to pay much attention to my upbringing. In moving to Pope Lane, he had made an increase in his expenditure which,
22、as events proved, his prospects did not warrant. The keeping up of appearances was a continuous and unrelenting fight. Early in the morning he was at his desk; the last thing in the evening, when I ventured into his study to bid him good-night, his pen was still toiling industriously across the page
23、. His morn-. ings were spent in hack-work, preparing special articles on contemporary economics for a group of daily papers. His evenings were given over to the writing of books which he hoped would bring him fame, many of which are still unpublished.He coveted fame and despised it. He wrote to plea
24、se himself and expected praise. He was an unpractical idealist, always planning huge undertakings for which there was no market. His most important work, which occupied twenty years of his life, was The History of Human Progress. It was really a history of human selfishness, written to prove that ev
25、ery act which has dug man out of the mire, however seemingly sacrificial and noble, had for its initial motive an enlightened self-interest. He never managed to get it before the public. It was disillusionizing. We all know that we are selfish, but we all hope that with luck we could be heroes.The t
26、rouble with my father was that he was an emotionalist ashamed of his emotions. He wanted to be scrupulously just, and feared that his sentiments would weaken his judgments. Temperamentally he was willing to believe everything. But he had read Herbert Spencer and admired the academic mind; consequent
27、ly he off-set his natural predisposition to faith by re-acting from everything accepted, and scrawled across the page of recorded altruism a gigantic note of interrogation. He gave to strangers and little boys the impression of being cynical and hard, whereas he had within him the smoldering enthusi
28、asms and compassion which go to the kindling of martyrs and saints. He was planned for a man of action, but had turned aside to grope after phantoms in the mazes of the mind. His career is typical of the nineteenth century and sedentary modes of life.Looking back I often wonder if he would not have
29、been happier as a ship-chandler, moving among jolly sea-captains, following his fathers trade. How many hours, mounting into years, he wasted on literary failureshours which might have been spent on people and friendships. As a child I rarely saw him save at meal-times, and then he was pre-occupied.
30、 For some years after my mothers death he was afraid to love anyone too dearly.He solved the problem of my immediate existence by locking the door into the lane, and giving me the freedom of the garden. I can recall it in every phase. Other and more recent memories have passed away, but, when I clos
31、e my eyes and think back, I am there again. Moss-grown walks spread before me. Peaches on the wall ripen. I catch the fragrance of box, basking in sunshine. I see my fathers study-window and the ivy blown across the pane. He is seated at his desk, writing, writing. His face is turned away. His head
32、is supported on his hand as though weary. I am wondering why it is that grown people never play, and why it is that they shut smaller people up always within walls.I saw nothing of the outside world except on Sundays. My father used to lead me as far as the parish church, and call for me when servic
33、e was ended. He never came inside. His intellectual integrity forbade it. He was an agnostic. My mother, knowing this, had made him promise to take me. He kept his word exactly.Few friends called on us. My companions were cooks and housemaids. I borrowed my impressions of life, as most children do,
34、from the lower orders of society. A servant is a prisoner; so is a child. Both are subject to tyranny, and both are dependent for their happiness on omnipotent persons moods and fortunes. A maidservant is always dreaming of a day when she will marry a lord, and drive up in a glittering carriage to p
35、atronize her old employer. A child, sensitive to misunderstanding, has similar visions of a far-off triumph which will consist in heaping coals of fire. He will heap them kindly and for his parents good, but unmistakably.It was in Pope Lane that I first began to dream of a garden without walls. As I
36、 grew older I became curious, and fretted at the narrowness of my restraint. What happened over there in the great beyond? Rumors came to me; sometimes it was the roar of London to the southward; sometimes it was the sing-song of a mower traversing a neighbors lawn. I dreamt of an unwalled garden, t
37、hrough which a child might wander on foreveran Eden, where each step revealed a new beauty and a fresh surprise, where flowers grew always and there were no doors to lock.It was a book which gave the first impulse to this thought; in a sense it was responsible for the entire trend of my character an
38、d life. In recent years I have tried to procure a copy. All traces of it seem to have vanished. If I ever knew the name of the author I have forgotten it. I am even uncertain of the exact title. I believe it was called The Magic Carpet.Mine was a big red copy. The color came off when your hands got
39、sticky. It had to be supported on the knees when read, or the arms got tired. It was a story of children, ordered about by day, who by night went forth invisible to wander the world, riding on the nursery carpet. Absurd! Yes, but this carpet happened to be magic. All you had to do was to seat yourse
40、lf upon it, hold on tight, and wish where you wanted to be carried. In a trice you were beyond the reach of adults, flying over roofs and spires, post-haste to the land of your desire. In that book little boys ate as much as they liked and never had stomach-ache. They defeated whole armies of cannib
41、als without a scratch. They rescued fair ladies, as old as housemaids, but ten times more beautiful, who wanted to marry them. No one seemed to know that they were little. No one condescended or told them to run away and wash their faces. Nobody went to school. Everybody was polite.The pictures whic
42、h illustrated the adventures still seem in remembrance the finest in the world. They typify the spirit of romance, the soul of youth, the revolt against limitations. They appealed to the lawless element within me, which still yearns to straddle the stallion of the world and go plunging bare-back thr
43、ough space.I tried every carpet in the house, but none of ours were magic. I lay awake imagining the lands, I would visit if I had it. I would go to my mother first, and try to bring her back. I remembered vaguely how care-free my father had been when we had had her with us. Perhaps, if she returned
44、, he would be happy. Then an inspiration came; there was one carpet which I had not testedit lay before the fire-place in my fathers study. But how should I get at it? Only in the hours of darkness was it different from any other carpet, and in the evenings my father was always there. I never doubte
45、d but that this was the carpet; its difficulty of access proved it.One night I lay awake, pinching myself to stave off sleep. It was winter. Outside I could hear the trees cracking beneath the weight of snow upon their boughs. The servants came to bed. I saw them pass my door, casting long shadows,
46、screening their candles with their hands lest the light should strike across my eyes and rouse me. I waited to hear the study-door open and close. In waiting I began to drowse. I came to myself with a shudder. What hour it was I could not guess. I got out of bed. Stealing to the top of the stairs I
47、looked down; all was blackness. Listening, I could hear the heavy breathing of sleepers. Bare-footed, I crept down into the hall, clinging to the banisters. The air was bitter. I was frightened. Each step I took seemed to cause the house to groan and tremble. The door of the study stood open. By the
48、 light of the fire, dying in the grate, I could just make out the carpet. Darting across the threshold, I knelt upon it. “Take me to Mama,” I whispered. The minutes ticked by; it did not stir. I spoke again; nothing happened.I heard a sound in the doorwaya sudden catching of the breath. I turned. My
49、 father was standing, watching me. I did not scream or cry out. He came toward me through the darkness. What with fear of consequences and disappointment, I fell to sobbing.I think he must have seen and overheard everything, for, with a tenderness which had something hungry and awful about it, he gathered me in his arms. Without a word of question or explanation, he carried me up to bed. Before he left, he