对于富人和时尚人士来说,19世纪70年代的纽约社交界充斥着各种规矩:何时应该打黑领带,或者何时适宜进行下午拜访;可以邀请谁参加晚上的聚会,或者听歌剧时可以挨着谁坐;哪些人受欢迎,哪些人不受欢迎。 埃伦·奥兰斯卡伯爵夫人是一位波兰伯爵的妻子,曾在欧洲生活多年,现在孤身一人回到了她在纽约的家。她希望摆脱自己不幸婚姻带来的痛苦,但她不了解纽约社交界的各种规矩。而纽兰·阿彻则深谙于此;他的未婚妻——年轻的梅·韦兰——也按照这些规矩生活着,因为她无法想象还有其他的生活方式。 纽兰、梅和埃伦陷入了一场爱情、名誉和责任的战斗之中。在这场战斗中,礼貌的微笑背后隐藏着强烈的情感,一切尽在不言中,而那穿过拥挤房间的意味深长的一瞥,更是胜过千言万语。 For the rich and the fashionable, New York society in the 1870s was a world full of rules: rules about when to wear a black tie, or the correct time to pay an afternoon visit; rules about who you could invite to your evening parties or sit next to at the opera; rules about who was an acceptable person, and who was not. Countess Ellen Olenska, who has lived for many years in Europe as the wife of a Polish Count, returns alone to her family in New York. She hopes to leave the pain of her unhappy marriage behind her, but she does not understand the rules of New York society. Newland Archer, however, understands them only too well, and the girl he is engaged to marry, young May Welland, lives her life by the rules, because she cannot imagine any other way of living. Newland, May, and Ellen are caught in a battle between love, honour, and duty – a battle where strong feelings hide behind polite smiles, where much is left unsaid, and where a single expressive look across a crowded room can carry more meaning than a hundred words.
Of course we must dine with Mrs. Carfry, dearest," Archer said; and his wife looked at him with an anxious frown across the monumental Britannia ware of their lodging house breakfast-table.
In all the rainy desert of autumnal London there were only two people whom the Newland Archers knew; and these two they had sedulously avoided, in conformity with the old New York tradition that it was not "dignified" to force one’s self on the notice of one’s acquaintances in foreign countries.
Mrs. Archer and Janey, in the course of their visits to Europe, had so unflinchingly lived up to this principle, and met the friendly advances of their fellow-travellers with an air of such impenetrable reserve, that they had almost achieved the record of never having exchanged a word with a "foreigner" other than those employed in hotels and railway-stations. Their own compatriots-- save those previously known or properly accredited-- they treated with an even more pronounced disdain; so that, unless they ran across a Chivers, a Dagonet or a Mingott, their months abroad were spent in an unbroken tete-a-tete. But the utmost precautions are sometimes unavailing; and one night at Botzen one of the two English ladies in the room across the passage (whose names, dress and social situation were already intimately known to Janey) had knocked on the door and asked if Mrs. Archer had a bottle of liniment. The other lady--the intruder’s sister, Mrs. Carfry--had been seized with a sudden attack of bronchitis; and Mrs. Archer, who never travelled without a complete family pharmacy, was fortunately able to produce the required remedy.
Mrs. Carfry was very ill, and as she and her sister Miss Harle were travelling alone they were profoundly grateful to the Archer ladies, who supplied them with ingenious comforts and whose efficient maid helped to nurse the invalid back to health.
When the Archers left Botzen they had no idea of ever seeing Mrs. Carfry and Miss Harle again. Nothing, to Mrs. Archer’s mind, would have been more "undignified" than to force one’s self on the notice of a "foreigner" to whom one had happened to render an accidental service. But Mrs. Carfry and her sister, to whom this point of view was unknown, and who would have found it utterly incomprehensible, felt themselves linked by an eternal gratitude to the "delightful Americans" who had been so kind at Botzen. With touching fidelity they seized every chance of meeting Mrs. Archer and Janey in the course of their continental travels, and displayed a supernatural acuteness in finding out when they were to pass through London on their way to or from the States. The intimacy became indissoluble, and Mrs. Archer and Janey, whenever they alighted at Brown’s Hotel, found themselves awaited by two affectionate friends who, like themselves, cultivated ferns in Wardian cases, made macrame lace, read the memoirs of the Baroness Bunsen and had views about the occupants of the leading London pulpits. As Mrs. Archer said, it made "another thing of London" to know Mrs. Carfry and Miss Harle; and by the time that Newland became engaged the tie between the families was so firmly established that it was thought "only right" to send a wedding invitation to the two English ladies, who sent, in return, a pretty bouquet of pressed Alpine flowers under glass. And on the dock, when Newland and his wife sailed for England, Mrs. Archer’s last word had been: "You must take May to see Mrs. Carfry."
Newland and his wife had had no idea of obeying this injunction; but Mrs. Carfry, with her usual acuteness, had run them down and sent them an invitation to dine; and it was over this invitation that May Archer was wrinkling her brows across the tea and muffins.
Newland leaned back in his chair and smiled at her. She looked handsomer and more Diana-like than ever. The moist English air seemed to have deepened the bloom of her cheeks and softened the slight hardness of her virginal features; or else it was simply the inner glow of happiness, shining through like a light under ice.
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“穿什么?亲爱的,我记得上星期从巴黎运来了一箱子衣服嘛。”
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"Wear, dearest? I thought a trunkful of things had come from Paris last week."
"Yes, of course. I meant to say that I shan’t know WHICH to wear." She pouted a little. "I’ve never dined out in London; and I don’t want to be ridiculous."
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11
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他竭力想为她分忧。“可是,英国的女士晚上不也和其他人穿得一样吗?”
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He tried to enter into her perplexity. "But don’t Englishwomen dress just like everybody else in the evening?"
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12
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“纽兰,你怎么会问这么可笑的问题?要知道,她们去看戏时是穿旧舞装,而且不戴帽子。”
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12
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"Newland! How can you ask such funny questions? When they go to the theatre in old ball-dresses and bare heads."
"Well, perhaps they wear new ball-dresses at home; but at any rate Mrs. Carfry and Miss Harle won’t. They’ll wear caps like my mother’s--and shawls; very soft shawls."
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14
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“不错,可别的女子会穿什么呢?”
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"Yes; but how will the other women be dressed?"
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“不会比你穿得更好,亲爱的,”他回答说,心里纳闷是什么原因使她对衣着产生了詹尼那种病态的兴趣。
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"Not as well as you, dear," he rejoined, wondering what had suddenly developed in her Janey’s morbid interest in clothes.
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她叹口气,向后推了推椅子,说:“你真好,纽兰。但这帮不了我多少忙。”
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She pushed back her chair with a sigh. "That’s dear of you, Newland; but it doesn’t help me much."
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他灵机一动。“干吗不穿结婚礼服?那决不会出错的,对吗?”
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He had an inspiration. "Why not wear your wedding- dress? That can’t be wrong, can it?"
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“唉,亲爱的!如果在这儿就好了!可我已把它送到巴黎去改了,预备明年冬天用。沃思还没送回来呢。”
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"Oh, dearest! If I only had it here! But it’s gone to Paris to be made over for next winter, and Worth hasn’t sent it back."
"Oh, well--" said Archer, getting up. "Look here-- the fog’s lifting. If we made a dash for the National Gallery we might manage to catch a glimpse of the pictures."
The Newland Archers were on their way home, after a three months’ wedding-tour which May, in writing to her girl friends, vaguely summarised as "blissful."
They had not gone to the Italian Lakes: on reflection, Archer had not been able to picture his wife in that particular setting. Her own inclination (after a month with the Paris dressmakers) was for mountaineering in July and swimming in August. This plan they punctually fulfilled, spending July at Interlaken and Grindelwald, and August at a little place called Etretat, on the Normandy coast, which some one had recommended as quaint and quiet. Once or twice, in the mountains, Archer had pointed southward and said: "There’s Italy"; and May, her feet in a gentian-bed, had smiled cheerfully, and replied: "It would be lovely to go there next winter, if only you didn’t have to be in New York."
But in reality travelling interested her even less than he had expected. She regarded it (once her clothes were ordered) as merely an enlarged opportunity for walking, riding, swimming, and trying her hand at the fascinating new game of lawn tennis; and when they finally got back to London (where they were to spend a fortnight while he ordered HIS clothes) she no longer concealed the eagerness with which she looked forward to sailing.
In London nothing interested her but the theatres and the shops; and she found the theatres less exciting than the Paris cafes chantants where, under the blossoming horse-chestnuts of the Champs Elysees, she had had the novel experience of looking down from the restaurant terrace on an audience of "cocottes," and having her husband interpret to her as much of the songs as he thought suitable for bridal ears.
Archer had reverted to all his old inherited ideas about marriage. It was less trouble to conform with the tradition and treat May exactly as all his friends treated their wives than to try to put into practice the theories with which his untrammelled bachelorhood had dallied. There was no use in trying to emancipate a wife who had not the dimmest notion that she was not free; and he had long since discovered that May’s only use of the liberty she supposed herself to possess would be to lay it on the altar of her wifelyadoration. Her innate dignity would always keep her from making the gift abjectly; and a day might even come (as it once had) when she would find strength to take it altogether back if she thought she were doing it for his own good. But with a conception of marriage so uncomplicated and incurious as hers such a crisis could be brought about only by something visibly outrageous in his own conduct; and the fineness of her feeling for him made that unthinkable. Whatever happened, he knew, she would always be loyal, gallant and unresentful; and that pledged him to the practice of the same virtues.
All this tended to draw him back into his old habits of mind. If her simplicity had been the simplicity of pettiness he would have chafed and rebelled; but since the lines of her character, though so few, were on the same fine mould as her face, she became the tutelarydivinity of all his old traditions and reverences.
Such qualities were scarcely of the kind to enliven foreign travel, though they made her so easy and pleasant a companion; but he saw at once how they would fall into place in their proper setting. He had no fear of being oppressed by them, for his artistic and intellectual life would go on, as it always had, outside the domestic circle; and within it there would be nothing small and stifling--coming back to his wife would never be like entering a stuffy room after a tramp in the open. And when they had children the vacant corners in both their lives would be filled.
All these things went through his mind during their long slow drive from Mayfair to South Kensington, where Mrs. Carfry and her sister lived. Archer too would have preferred to escape their friends’ hospitality: in conformity with the family tradition he had always travelled as a sight-seer and looker-on, affecting a haughtyunconsciousness of the presence of his fellow- beings. Once only, just after Harvard, he had spent a few gay weeks at Florence with a band of queer Europeanised Americans, dancing all night with titled ladies in palaces, and gambling half the day with the rakes and dandies of the fashionable club; but it had all seemed to him, though the greatest fun in the world, as unreal as a carnival. These queer cosmopolitan women, deep in complicated love-affairs which they appeared to feel the need of retailing to every one they met, and the magnificent young officers and elderly dyed wits who were the subjects or the recipients of their confidences, were too different from the people Archer had grown up among, too much like expensive and rather malodorous hot-house exotics, to detain his imagination long. To introduce his wife into such a society was out of the question; and in the course of his travels no other had shown any marked eagerness for his company.
Not long after their arrival in London he had run across the Duke of St. Austrey, and the Duke, instantly and cordially recognising him, had said: "Look me up, won’t you?"--but no proper-spirited American would have considered that a suggestion to be acted on, and the meeting was without a sequel. They had even managed to avoid May’s English aunt, the banker’s wife, who was still in Yorkshire; in fact, they had purposely postponed going to London till the autumn in order that their arrival during the season might not appear pushing and snobbish to these unknown relatives.
"Probably there’ll be nobody at Mrs. Carfry’s--London’s a desert at this season, and you’ve made yourself much too beautiful," Archer said to May, who sat at his side in the hansom so spotlessly splendid in her sky-blue cloak edged with swansdown that it seemed wicked to expose her to the London grime.
"I don’t want them to think that we dress like savages," she replied, with a scorn that Pocahontas might have resented; and he was struck again by the religious reverence of even the most unworldly American women for the social advantages of dress.
"It’s their armour," he thought, "their defence against the unknown, and their defiance of it." And he understood for the first time the earnestness with which May, who was incapable of tying a ribbon in her hair to charm him, had gone through the solemn rite of selecting and ordering her extensive wardrobe.
He had been right in expecting the party at Mrs. Carfry’s to be a small one. Besides their hostess and her sister, they found, in the long chillydrawing-room, only another shawled lady, a genialVicar who was her husband, a silent lad whom Mrs. Carfry named as her nephew, and a small dark gentleman with lively eyes whom she introduced as his tutor, pronouncing a French name as she did so.
Into this dimly-lit and dim-featured group May Archer floated like a swan with the sunset on her: she seemed larger, fairer, more voluminously rustling than her husband had ever seen her; and he perceived that the rosiness and rustlingness were the tokens of an extreme and infantile shyness.
"What on earth will they expect me to talk about?" her helpless eyes implored him, at the very moment that her dazzling apparition was calling forth the same anxiety in their own bosoms. But beauty, even when distrustful of itself, awakens confidence in the manly heart; and the Vicar and the French-named tutor were soon manifesting to May their desire to put her at her ease.
In spite of their best efforts, however, the dinner was a languishing affair. Archer noticed that his wife’s way of showing herself at her ease with foreigners was to become more uncompromisingly local in her references, so that, though her loveliness was an encouragement to admiration, her conversation was a chill to repartee. The Vicar soon abandoned the struggle; but the tutor, who spoke the most fluent and accomplished English, gallantly continued to pour it out to her until the ladies, to the manifest relief of all concerned, went up to the drawing-room.
The Vicar, after a glass of port, was obliged to hurry away to a meeting, and the shy nephew, who appeared to be an invalid, was packed off to bed. But Archer and the tutor continued to sit over their wine, and suddenly Archer found himself talking as he had not done since his last symposium with Ned Winsett. The Carfry nephew, it turned out, had been threatened with consumption, and had had to leave Harrow for Switzerland, where he had spent two years in the milder air of Lake Leman. Being a bookish youth, he had been entrusted to M. Riviere, who had brought him back to England, and was to remain with him till he went up to Oxford the following spring; and M. Riviere added with simplicity that he should then have to look out for another job.
It seemed impossible, Archer thought, that he should be long without one, so varied were his interests and so many his gifts. He was a man of about thirty, with a thin ugly face (May would certainly have called him common-looking) to which the play of his ideas gave an intense expressiveness; but there was nothing frivolous or cheap in his animation.
His father, who had died young, had filled a small diplomatic post, and it had been intended that the son should follow the same career; but an insatiable taste for letters had thrown the young man into journalism, then into authorship (apparently unsuccessful), and at length--after other experiments and vicissitudes which he spared his listener--into tutoring English youths in Switzerland. Before that, however, he had lived much in Paris, frequented the Goncourt grenier, been advised by Maupassant not to attempt to write (even that seemed to Archer a dazzling honour!), and had often talked with Merimee in his mother’s house. He had obviously always been desperately poor and anxious (having a mother and an unmarried sister to provide for), and it was apparent that his literary ambitions had failed. His situation, in fact, seemed, materially speaking, no more brilliant than Ned Winsett’s; but he had lived in a world in which, as he said, no one who loved ideas need hunger mentally. As it was precisely of that love that poor Winsett was starving to death, Archer looked with a sort of vicarious envy at this eager impecunious young man who had fared so richly in his poverty.
"You see, Monsieur, it’s worth everything, isn’t it, to keep one’s intellectual liberty, not to enslave one’s powers of appreciation, one’s critical independence? It was because of that that I abandoned journalism, and took to so much duller work: tutoring and private secretaryship. There is a good deal of drudgery, of course; but one preserves one’s moral freedom, what we call in French one’s quant a soi. And when one hears good talk one can join in it without compromising any opinions but one’s own; or one can listen, and answer it inwardly. Ah, good conversation--there’s nothing like it, is there? The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing. And so I have never regretted giving up either diplomacy or journalism--two different forms of the same self-abdication." He fixed his vivid eyes on Archer as he lit another cigarette. "Voyez-vous, Monsieur, to be able to look life in the face: that’s worth living in a garret for, isn’t it? But, after all, one must earn enough to pay for the garret; and I confess that to grow old as a private tutor--or a `private’ anything--is almost as chilling to the imagination as a second secretaryship at Bucharest. Sometimes I feel I must make a plunge: an immense plunge. Do you suppose, for instance, there would be any opening for me in America-- in New York?"
Archer looked at him with startled eyes. New York, for a young man who had frequented the Goncourts and Flaubert, and who thought the life of ideas the only one worth living! He continued to stare at M. Riviere perplexedly, wondering how to tell him that his very superiorities and advantages would be the surest hindrance to success.
"That young tutor is an interesting fellow: we had some awfully good talk after dinner about books and things," he threw out tentatively in the hansom.
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45
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梅从梦境般的沉默中苏醒过来。6个月前他面对这种沉默会浮想联翩,但婚后这段生活使他掌握了它的秘诀。
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45
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May roused herself from one of the dreamy silences into which he had read so many meanings before six months of marriage had given him the key to them.