URSULA AND GUDRUN Brangwen sat one morning in the window-bay of their father’s house in Beldover, working and talking. Ursula was stitching a piece of brightly-coloured embroidery, and Gudrun was drawing upon a board which she held on her knee. They were mostly silent, talking as their thoughts strayed through their minds.
读书笔记
是否公开
2
-
“厄秀拉,”戈珍说,“你真想结婚吗?”厄秀拉把刺绣摊在膝上抬起头来,神情平静、若有所思地说:
读书笔记
是否公开
2
-
`Ursula,’ said Gudrun, `don’t you really want to get married?’ Ursula laid her embroidery in her lap and looked up. Her face was calm and considerate.
读书笔记
是否公开
3
-
“我不知道,这要看怎么讲了。”
读书笔记
是否公开
3
-
`I don’t know,’ she replied. `It depends how you mean.’
读书笔记
是否公开
4
-
戈珍有点吃惊地看着姐姐,看了好一会儿。
读书笔记
是否公开
4
-
Gudrun was slightly taken aback. She watched her sister for some moments.
`Well,’ she said, ironically, `it usually means one thing! But don’t you think anyhow, you’d be --’ she darkened slightly -- `in a better position than you are in now.’
读书笔记
是否公开
6
-
厄秀拉脸上闪过一片阴影。
读书笔记
是否公开
6
-
A shadow came over Ursula’s face.
读书笔记
是否公开
7
-
“应该,”她说,“不过我没把握。”
读书笔记
是否公开
7
-
`I might,’ she said. `But I’m not sure.’
读书笔记
是否公开
8
-
戈珍又不说话了,有点不高兴了,她原本要得到一个确切的答复。
读书笔记
是否公开
8
-
Again Gudrun paused, slightly irritated. She wanted to be quite definite.
读书笔记
是否公开
9
-
“你不认为一个人需要结婚的经验吗?”她问。
读书笔记
是否公开
9
-
`You don’t think one needs the experience of having been married?’ she asked.
读书笔记
是否公开
10
-
“你认为结婚是一种经验吗?”厄秀拉反问。
读书笔记
是否公开
10
-
`Do you think it need be an experience?’ replied Ursula.
读书笔记
是否公开
11
-
“肯定是,不管怎样都是。”戈珍冷静地说,“可能这经验让人不愉快,但肯定是一种经验。”
读书笔记
是否公开
11
-
`Bound to be, in some way or other,’ said Gudrun, coolly. `Possibly undesirable, but bound to be an experience of some sort.’
读书笔记
是否公开
12
-
“那不见得,”厄秀拉说,“也许倒是经验的结束呢。”
读书笔记
是否公开
12
-
`Not really,’ said Ursula. `More likely to be the end of experience.’
`Of course,’ she said, `there’s that to consider.’ This brought the conversation to a close. Gudrun, almost angrily, took up her rubber and began to rub out part of her drawing. Ursula stitched absorbedly.
读书笔记
是否公开
15
-
“有象样的人求婚你不考虑接受吗?”戈珍问。
读书笔记
是否公开
15
-
`You wouldn’t consider a good offer?’ asked Gudrun.
读书笔记
是否公开
16
-
“我都回绝了好几个了。”厄秀拉说。
读书笔记
是否公开
16
-
`I think I’ve rejected several,’ said Ursula.
读书笔记
是否公开
17
-
“真的!?”戈珍绯红了脸问:“什么值得你这么干?你真有什么想法吗?”
读书笔记
是否公开
17
-
`Really!’ Gudrun flushed dark -- `But anything really worth while? Have you really?’
读书笔记
是否公开
18
-
“一年中有好多人求婚,我喜欢上了一个非常好的人,太喜欢他了。”厄秀拉说。
读书笔记
是否公开
18
-
`A thousand a year, and an awfully nice man. I liked him awfully,’ said Ursula.
`In the abstract but not in the concrete,’ said Ursula. `When it comes to the point, one isn’t even tempted -- oh, if I were tempted, I’d marry like a shot. I’m only tempted not to.’ The faces of both sisters suddenly lit up with amusement.
读书笔记
是否公开
21
-
“太棒了,”戈珍叫道,“这引诱力也太大了,不结婚!”她们两人相对大笑起来,但她们心里感到可怕。
读书笔记
是否公开
21
-
`Isn’t it an amazing thing,’ cried Gudrun, `how strong the temptation is, not to!’ They both laughed, looking at each other. In their hearts they were frightened.
There was a long pause, whilst Ursula stitched and Gudrun went on with her sketch. The sisters were women, Ursula twenty-six, and Gudrun twenty-five. But both had the remote, virgin look of modern girls, sisters of Artemis rather than of Hebe. Gudrun was very beautiful, passive, soft-skinned, soft-limbed. She wore a dress of dark-blue silky stuff, with ruches of blue and green linen lace in the neck and sleeves; and she had emerald-green stockings. Her look of confidence and diffidence contrasted with Ursula’s sensitive expectancy. The provincial people, intimidated by Gudrun’s perfect sang-froid and exclusive bareness of manner, said of her: `She is a smart woman.’ She had just come back from London, where she had spent several years, working at an art-school, as a student, and living a studio life.
`I was hoping now for a man to come along,’ Gudrun said, suddenly catching her underlip between her teeth, and making a strange grimace, half sly smiling, half anguish. Ursula was afraid.
读书笔记
是否公开
24
-
“你回家来,就是为了在这儿等他?”她笑道。
读书笔记
是否公开
24
-
`So you have come home, expecting him here?’ she laughed.
`Oh my dear,’ cried Gudrun, strident, `I wouldn’t go out of my way to look for him. But if there did happen to come along a highly attractive individual of sufficient means -- well --’ she tailed off ironically. Then she looked searchingly at Ursula, as if to probe her. `Don’t you find yourself getting bored?’ she asked of her sister. `Don’t you find, that things fail to materialise? Nothing materialises! Everything withers in the bud.’
读书笔记
是否公开
26
-
“什么没开花就凋谢了?”厄秀拉问。
读书笔记
是否公开
26
-
`What withers in the bud?’ asked Ursula.
读书笔记
是否公开
27
-
“嗨,什么都是这样,自己一般的事情都这样。”姐妹俩不说话了,都在朦朦胧胧地考虑着自己的命运。
读书笔记
是否公开
27
-
`Oh, everything -- oneself -- things in general.’ There was a pause, whilst each sister vaguely considered her fate.
读书笔记
是否公开
28
-
“这是够可怕的。”厄秀拉说,停了一会儿又说:“不过你想通过结婚达到什么目的吗?”
读书笔记
是否公开
28
-
`It does frighten one,’ said Ursula, and again there was a pause. `But do you hope to get anywhere by just marrying?’
`It seems to be the inevitable next step,’ said Gudrun. Ursula pondered this, with a little bitterness. She was a class mistress herself, in Willey Green Grammar School, as she had been for some years.
`I know,’ she said, `it seems like that when one thinks in the abstract. But really imagine it: imagine any man one knows, imagine him coming home to one every evening, and saying "Hello," and giving one a kiss --’
读书笔记
是否公开
31
-
谁都不说话了。
读书笔记
是否公开
31
-
There was a blank pause.
读书笔记
是否公开
32
-
“没错,”戈珍小声说,“这不可能。男人不可能这样。”
读书笔记
是否公开
32
-
`Yes,’ said Gudrun, in a narrowed voice. `It’s just impossible. The man makes it impossible.’
读书笔记
是否公开
33
-
“当然还有孩子——”厄秀拉迟疑地说。
读书笔记
是否公开
33
-
`Of course there’s children --’ said Ursula doubtfully.
读书笔记
是否公开
34
-
戈珍的表情严峻起来。
读书笔记
是否公开
34
-
Gudrun’s face hardened.
读书笔记
是否公开
35
-
“你真想要孩子吗,厄秀拉?”她冷冷地问。听她这一问,厄秀拉脸上露出了迷惑不解的表情。
读书笔记
是否公开
35
-
`Do you really want children, Ursula?’ she asked coldly. A dazzled, baffled look came on Ursula’s face.
读书笔记
是否公开
36
-
“我觉得这个问题离我还太远,”她说。
读书笔记
是否公开
36
-
`One feels it is still beyond one,’ she said.
读书笔记
是否公开
37
-
“你是这种感受吗?”戈珍问,“我从来没想过生孩子,没那感受。”
读书笔记
是否公开
37
-
`Do you feel like that?’ asked Gudrun. `I get no feeling whatever from the thought of bearing children.’
读书笔记
是否公开
38
-
戈珍毫无表情地看着厄秀拉。厄秀拉皱起了眉头。
读书笔记
是否公开
38
-
Gudrun looked at Ursula with a masklike, expressionless face. Ursula knitted her brows.
`Perhaps it isn’t genuine,’ she faltered. `Perhaps one doesn’t really want them, in one’s soul -- only superficially.’ A hardness came over Gudrun’s face. She did not want to be too definite.
读书笔记
是否公开
40
-
“可有时一个人会想到别人的孩子。”厄秀拉说。
读书笔记
是否公开
40
-
`When one thinks of other people’s children --’ said Ursula.
读书笔记
是否公开
41
-
戈珍又一次看看姐姐,目光中几乎有些敌意。
读书笔记
是否公开
41
-
Again Gudrun looked at her sister, almost hostile.
The two sisters worked on in silence, Ursula having always that strange brightness of an essential flame that is caught, meshed, contravened. She lived a good deal by herself, to herself, working, passing on from day to day, and always thinking, trying to lay hold on life, to grasp it in her own understanding. Her active living was suspended, but underneath, in the darkness, something was coming to pass. If only she could break through the last integuments! She seemed to try and put her hands out, like an infant in the womb, and she could not, not yet. Still she had a strange prescience, an intimation of something yet to come.
She laid down her work and looked at her sister. She thought Gudrun so charming, so infinitely charming, in her softness and her fine, exquisite richness of texture and delicacy of line. There was a certain playfulness about her too, such a piquancy or ironic suggestion, such an untouched reserve. Ursula admired her with all her soul.
读书笔记
是否公开
45
-
“你为什么回家来?”
读书笔记
是否公开
45
-
`Why did you come home, Prune?’ she asked.
读书笔记
是否公开
46
-
戈珍知道厄秀拉羡慕她了。她直起腰来,线条优美的眼睫毛下目光凝视着厄秀拉。
读书笔记
是否公开
46
-
Gudrun knew she was being admired. She sat back from her drawing and looked at Ursula, from under her finely-curved lashes.
读书笔记
是否公开
47
-
“问我为什么回来吗,厄秀拉?”她重复道:“我自己已经问过自己一千次了。”
读书笔记
是否公开
47
-
`Why did I come back, Ursula?’ she repeated. `I have asked myself a thousand times.’
读书笔记
是否公开
48
-
“你知道了吗?”
读书笔记
是否公开
48
-
`And don’t you know?’
读书笔记
是否公开
49
-
“知道了,我想我明白了。我觉得我退一步是为了更好地前进。”
读书笔记
是否公开
49
-
`Yes, I think I do. I think my coming back home was just reculer pour mieux sauter.’
读书笔记
是否公开
50
-
说完她久久地盯着厄秀拉,目光寻问着她。
读书笔记
是否公开
50
-
And she looked with a long, slow look of knowledge at Ursula.
读书笔记
是否公开
51
-
“我知道!”厄秀拉叫道,那神情有些迷茫,象是在说谎,好象她不明白一样。“可你要跳到哪儿去呢?”
读书笔记
是否公开
51
-
`I know!’ cried Ursula, looking slightly dazzled and falsified, and as if she did not know. `But where can one jump to?’
读书笔记
是否公开
52
-
“哦,无所谓,”戈珍说,口气有点超然。“一个人如果跳过了篱笆,他总能落到一个什么地方的。”
读书笔记
是否公开
52
-
`Oh, it doesn’t matter,’ said Gudrun, somewhat superbly. `If one jumps over the edge, one is bound to land somewhere.’
读书笔记
是否公开
53
-
“可这不是在冒险吗?”厄秀拉说。
读书笔记
是否公开
53
-
`But isn’t it very risky?’ asked Ursula.
读书笔记
是否公开
54
-
戈珍脸上渐渐掠过一丝嘲讽的笑意。
读书笔记
是否公开
54
-
A slow mocking smile dawned on Gudrun’s face.
读书笔记
是否公开
55
-
“嗨!”她笑道:“我们尽吵些什么呀!”她又不说话了,可厄秀拉仍然郁闷地沉思着。
读书笔记
是否公开
55
-
`Ah!’ she said laughing. `What is it all but words!’ And so again she closed the conversation. But Ursula was still brooding.
读书笔记
是否公开
56
-
“你回来了,觉得家里怎么样?”她问。
读书笔记
是否公开
56
-
`And how do you find home, now you have come back to it?’ she asked.
读书笔记
是否公开
57
-
戈珍沉默了片刻,有点冷漠。然后冷冷地说:
读书笔记
是否公开
57
-
Gudrun paused for some moments, coldly, before answering. Then, in a cold truthful voice, she said:
读书笔记
是否公开
58
-
“我发现我完全不是这儿的人了。”
读书笔记
是否公开
58
-
`I find myself completely out of it.’
读书笔记
是否公开
59
-
“那爸爸呢?”
读书笔记
是否公开
59
-
`And father?’
读书笔记
是否公开
60
-
戈珍几乎有点反感地看看厄秀拉,有些被迫的样子,说:
读书笔记
是否公开
60
-
Gudrun looked at Ursula, almost with resentment, as if brought to bay.
读书笔记
是否公开
61
-
“我还没想到他呢,我不让自己去想。”她的话很冷漠。
读书笔记
是否公开
61
-
`I haven’t thought about him: I’ve refrained,’ she said coldly.
`Yes,’ wavered Ursula; and the conversation was really at an end. The sisters found themselves confronted by a void, a terrifying chasm, as if they had looked over the edge.
读书笔记
是否公开
63
-
她们又默默地做着自己的活儿。一会儿,戈珍的脸因为控制着情绪而通红起来。她不愿让脸红起来。
读书笔记
是否公开
63
-
They worked on in silence for some time, Gudrun’s cheek was flushed with repressed emotion. She resented its having been called into being.
读书笔记
是否公开
64
-
“我们出去看看人家的婚礼吧。”她终于说话了,口气很随便。
读书笔记
是否公开
64
-
`Shall we go out and look at that wedding?’ she asked at length, in a voice that was too casual.
`Yes!’ cried Ursula, too eagerly, throwing aside her sewing and leaping up, as if to escape something, thus betraying the tension of the situation and causing a friction of dislike to go over Gudrun’s nerves.
As she went upstairs, Ursula was aware of the house, of her home round about her. And she loathed it, the sordid, too-familiar place! She was afraid at the depth of her feeling against the home, the milieu, the whole atmosphere and condition of this obsolete life. Her feeling frightened her.
The two girls were soon walking swiftly down the main road of Beldover, a wide street, part shops, part dwelling-houses, utterly formless and sordid, without poverty. Gudrun, new from her life in Chelsea and Sussex, shrank cruelly from this amorphous ugliness of a small colliery town in the Midlands. Yet forward she went, through the whole sordid gamut of pettiness, the long amorphous, gritty street. She was exposed to every stare, she passed on through a stretch of torment. It was strange that she should have chosen to come back and test the full effect of this shapeless, barren ugliness upon herself. Why had she wanted to submit herself to it, did she still want to submit herself to it, the insufferable torture of these ugly, meaningless people, this defaced countryside? She felt like a beetle toiling in the dust. She was filled with repulsion.
They turned off the main road, past a black patch of common-garden, where sooty cabbage stumps stood shameless. No one thought to be ashamed. No one was ashamed of it all.
`It is like a country in an underworld,’ said Gudrun. `The colliers bring it aboveground with them, shovel it up. Ursula, it’s marvellous, it’s really marvellous -- it’s really wonderful, another world. The people are all ghouls, and everything is ghostly. Everything is a ghoulishreplica of the real world, a replica, a ghoul, all soiled, everything sordid. It’s like being mad, Ursula.’
The sisters were crossing a black path through a dark, soiled field. On the left was a large landscape, a valley with collieries, and opposite hills with cornfields and woods, all blackened with distance, as if seen through a veil of crape. White and black smoke rose up in steady columns, magic within the dark air. Near at hand came the long rows of dwellings, approaching curved up the hill-slope, in straight lines along the brow of the hill. They were of darkened red brick, brittle, with dark slate roofs.
The path on which the sisters walked was black, trodden-in by the feet of the recurrent colliers, and bounded from the field by iron fences; the stile that led again into the road was rubbed shiny by the moleskins of the passing miners. Now the two girls were going between some rows of dwellings, of the poorer sort. Women, their arms folded over their coarse aprons, standing gossiping at the end of their block, stared after the Brangwen sisters with that long, unwearying stare of aborigines; children called out names.
Gudrun went on her way half dazed. If this were human life, if these were human beings, living in a complete world, then what was her own world, outside? She was aware of her grass-green stockings, her large grass-green velour hat, her full soft coat, of a strong blue colour. And she felt as if she were treading in the air, quite unstable, her heart was contracted, as if at any minute she might be precipitated to the ground. She was afraid.
She clung to Ursula, who, through long usage was inured to this violation of a dark, uncreated, hostile world. But all the time her heart was crying, as if in the midst of some ordeal: `I want to go back, I want to go away, I want not to know it, not to know that this exists.’ Yet she must go forward.
They drew away from the colliery region, over the curve of the hill, into the purer country of the other side, towards Willey Green. Still the faint glamour of blackness persisted over the fields and the wooded hills, and seemed darkly to gleam in the air. It was a spring day, chill, with snatches of sunshine. Yellow celandines showed out from the hedge-bottoms, and in the cottage gardens of Willey Green, currant-bushes were breaking into leaf, and little flowers were coming white on the grey alyssum that hung over the stone walls.
Turning, they passed down the high-road, that went between high banks towards the church. There, in the lowest bend of the road, low under the trees, stood a little group of expectant people, waiting to see the wedding. The daughter of the chief mine-owner of the district, Thomas Crich, was getting married to a naval officer.
读书笔记
是否公开
81
-
“咱们回去吧,”戈珍转过身说着,“全是些这种人。”
读书笔记
是否公开
81
-
`Let us go back,’ said Gudrun, swerving away. `There are all those people.’
读书笔记
是否公开
82
-
她在路上犹豫着。
读书笔记
是否公开
82
-
And she hung wavering in the road.
读书笔记
是否公开
83
-
“别管他们,”厄秀拉说,“他们都不错,都认识我,没事儿。”
读书笔记
是否公开
83
-
`Never mind them,’ said Ursula, `they’re all right. They all know me, they don’t matter.’
`They’re quite all right, really,’ said Ursula, going forward. And together the two sisters approached the group of uneasy, watchful common people. They were chiefly women, colliers’ wives of the more shiftless sort. They had watchful, underworld faces.
The two sisters held themselves tense, and went straight towards the gate. The women made way for them, but barely sufficient, as if grudging to yield ground. The sisters passed in silence through the stone gateway and up the steps, on the red carpet, a policeman estimating their progress.
`What price the stockings!’ said a voice at the back of Gudrun. A sudden fierce anger swept over the girl, violent and murderous. She would have liked them all annihilated, cleared away, so that the world was left clear for her. How she hated walking up the churchyard path, along the red carpet, continuing in motion, in their sight.
`I won’t go into the church,’ she said suddenly, with such final decision that Ursula immediately halted, turned round, and branched off up a small side path which led to the little private gate of the Grammar School, whose grounds adjoined those of the church.
Just inside the gate of the school shrubbery, outside the churchyard, Ursula sat down for a moment on the low stone wall under the laurel bushes, to rest. Behind her, the large red building of the school rose up peacefully, the windows all open for the holiday. Over the shrubs, before her, were the pale roofs and tower of the old church. The sisters were hidden by the foliage.
Gudrun sat down in silence. Her mouth was shut close, her face averted. She was regretting bitterly that she had ever come back. Ursula looked at her, and thought how amazingly beautiful she was, flushed with discomfiture. But she caused a constraint over Ursula’s nature, a certain weariness. Ursula wished to be alone, freed from the tightness, the enclosure of Gudrun’s presence.
`I was only resting a minute,’ said Ursula, getting up as if rebuked. `We will stand in the corner by the fives-court, we shall see everything from there.’
For the moment, the sunshine fell brightly into the churchyard, there was a vague scent of sap and of spring, perhaps of violets from off the graves. Some white daisies were out, bright as angels. In the air, the unfolding leaves of a copperbeech were blood-red.
Punctually at eleven o’clock, the carriages began to arrive. There was a stir in the crowd at the gate, a concentration as a carriage drove up, wedding guests were mounting up the steps and passing along the red carpet to the church. They were all gay and excited because the sun was shining.
Gudrun watched them closely, with objective curiosity. She saw each one as a complete figure, like a character in a book, or a subject in a picture, or a marionette in a theatre, a finished creation. She loved to recognise their various characteristics, to place them in their true light, give them their own surroundings, settle them for ever as they passed before her along the path to the church. She knew them, they were finished, sealed and stamped and finished with, for her. There was none that had anything unknown, unresolved, until the Criches themselves began to appear. Then her interest was piqued. Here was something not quite so preconcluded.
There came the mother, Mrs Crich, with her eldest son Gerald. She was a queer unkempt figure, in spite of the attempts that had obviously been made to bring her into line for the day. Her face was pale, yellowish, with a clear, transparent skin, she leaned forward rather, her features were strongly marked, handsome, with a tense, unseeing, predative look. Her colourless hair was untidy, wisps floating down on to her sac coat of dark blue silk, from under her blue silk hat. She looked like a woman with a monomania, furtive almost, but heavily proud.
Her son was of a fair, sun-tanned type, rather above middle height, well-made, and almost exaggeratedly well-dressed. But about him also was the strange, guarded look, the unconscious glisten, as if he did not belong to the same creation as the people about him. Gudrun lighted on him at once. There was something northern about him that magnetised her. In his clear northern flesh and his fair hair was a glisten like sunshine refracted through crystals of ice. And he looked so new, unbroached, pure as an arctic thing. Perhaps he was thirty years old, perhaps more.
His gleaming beauty, maleness, like a young, good-humoured, smiling wolf, did not blind her to the significant, sinister stillness in his bearing, the lurking danger of his unsubdued temper. `His totem is the wolf,’ she repeated to herself. `His mother is an old, unbroken wolf.’ And then she experienced a keen paroxyism, a transport, as if she had made some incredible discovery, known to nobody else on earth. A strange transport took possession of her, all her veins were in a paroxysm of violent sensation. `Good God!’ she exclaimed to herself, `what is this?’ And then, a moment after, she was saying assuredly, `I shall know more of that man.’
She was tortured with desire to see him again, a nostalgia, a necessity to see him again, to make sure it was not all a mistake, that she was not deluding herself, that she really felt this strange and overwhelming sensation on his account, this knowledge of him in her essence, this powerful apprehension of him. `Am I really singled out for him in some way, is there really some pale gold, arctic light that envelopes only us two?’ she asked herself. And she could not believe it, she remained in a muse, scarcely conscious of what was going on around.
The bridesmaids were here, and yet the bridegroom had not come. Ursula wondered if something was amiss, and if the wedding would yet all go wrong. She felt troubled, as if it rested upon her. The chief bridesmaids had arrived. Ursula watched them come up the steps. One of them she knew, a tall, slow, reluctant woman with a weight of fair hair and a pale, long face. This was Hermione Roddice, a friend of the Criches. Now she came along, with her head held up, balancing an enormous flat hat of pale yellow velvet, on which were streaks of ostrich feathers, natural and grey. She drifted forward as if scarcely conscious, her long blanched face lifted up, not to see the world.
She was rich. She wore a dress of silky, frail velvet, of pale yellow colour, and she carried a lot of small rosecoloured cyclamens. Her shoes and stockings were of brownish grey, like the feathers on her hat, her hair was heavy, she drifted along with a peculiar fixity of the hips, a strange unwilling motion. She was impressive, in her lovely paleyellow and brownish-rose, yet macabre, something repulsive. People were silent when she passed, impressed, roused, wanting to jeer, yet for some reason silenced. Her long, pale face, that she carried lifted up, somewhat in the Rossetti fashion, seemed almost drugged, as if a strange mass of thoughts coiled in the darkness within her, and she was never allowed to escape.
Ursula watched her with fascination. She knew her a little. She was the most remarkable woman in the Midlands. Her father was a Derbyshire Baronet of the old school, she was a woman of the new school, full of intellectuality, and heavy, nerve-worn with consciousness. She was passionately interested in reform, her soul was given up to the public cause. But she was a man’s woman, it was the manly world that held her.
She had various intimacies of mind and soul with various men of capacity. Ursula knew, among these men, only Rupert Birkin, who was one of the schoolinspectors of the county. But Gudrun had met others, in London. Moving with her artist friends in different kinds of society, Gudrun had already come to know a good many people of repute and standing. She had met Hermione twice, but they did not take to each other. It would be queer to meet again down here in the Midlands, where their social standing was so diverse, after they had known each other on terms of equality in the houses of sundry acquaintances in town. For Gudrun had been a social success, and had her friends among the slack aristocracy that keeps touch with the arts.
Hermione knew herself to be well-dressed; she knew herself to be the social equal, if not far the superior, of anyone she was likely to meet in Willey Green. She knew she was accepted in the world of culture and of intellect. She was a Kulturtrager, a medium for the culture of ideas. With all that was highest, whether in society or in thought or in public action, or even in art, she was at one, she moved among the foremost, at home with them. No one could put her down, no one could make mock of her, because she stood among the first, and those that were against her were below her, either in rank, or in wealth, or in high association of thought and progress and understanding. So, she was invulnerable. All her life, she had sought to make herself invulnerable, unassailable, beyond reach of the world’s judgment.
And yet her soul was tortured, exposed. Even walking up the path to the church, confident as she was that in every respect she stood beyond all vulgar judgment, knowing perfectly that her appearance was complete and perfect, according to the first standards, yet she suffered a torture, under her confidence and her pride, feeling herself exposed to wounds and to mockery and to despite. She always felt vulnerable, vulnerable, there was always a secret chink in her armour. She did not know herself what it was. It was a lack of robust self, she had no natural sufficiency, there was a terrible void, a lack, a deficiency of being within her.
And she wanted someone to close up this deficiency, to close it up for ever. She craved for Rupert Birkin. When he was there, she felt complete, she was sufficient, whole. For the rest of time she was established on the sand, built over a chasm, and, in spite of all her vanity and securities, any common maid-servant of positive, robust temper could fling her down this bottomless pit of insufficiency, by the slightest movement of jeering or contempt. And all the while the pensive, tortured woman piled up her own defences of aesthetic knowledge, and culture, and worldvisions, and disinterestedness. Yet she could never stop up the terrible gap of insufficiency.
If only Birkin would form a close and abiding connection with her, she would be safe during this fretful voyage of life. He could make her sound and triumphant, triumphant over the very angels of heaven. If only he would do it! But she was tortured with fear, with misgiving. She made herself beautiful, she strove so hard to come to that degree of beauty and advantage, when he should be convinced. But always there was a deficiency.
He was perverse too. He fought her off, he always fought her off. The more she strove to bring him to her, the more he battled her back. And they had been lovers now, for years. Oh, it was so wearying, so aching; she was so tired. But still she believed in herself. She knew he was trying to leave her. She knew he was trying to break away from her finally, to be free. But still she believed in her strength to keep him, she believed in her own higher knowledge. His own knowledge was high, she was the central touchstone of truth. She only needed his conjunction with her.
And this, this conjunction with her, which was his highest fulfilment also, with the perverseness of a wilful child he wanted to deny. With the wilfulness of an obstinate child, he wanted to break the holy connection that was between them.
He would be at this wedding; he was to be groom’s man. He would be in the church, waiting. He would know when she came. She shuddered with nervous apprehension and desire as she went through the church-door. He would be there, surely he would see how beautiful her dress was, surely he would see how she had made herself beautiful for him. He would understand, he would be able to see how she was made for him, the first, how she was, for him, the highest. Surely at last he would be able to accept his highest fate, he would not deny her.
In a little convulsion of too-tired yearning, she entered the church and looked slowly along her cheeks for him, her slender body convulsed with agitation. As best man, he would be standing beside the altar. She looked slowly, deferring in her certainty.
And then, he was not there. A terrible storm came over her, as if she were drowning. She was possessed by a devastating hopelessness. And she approached mechanically to the altar. Never had she known such a pang of utter and final hopelessness. It was beyond death, so utterly null, desert.
The bridegroom and the groom’s man had not yet come. There was a growing consternation outside. Ursula felt almost responsible. She could not bear it that the bride should arrive, and no groom. The wedding must not be a fiasco, it must not.
But here was the bride’s carriage, adorned with ribbons and cockades. Gaily the grey horses curvetted to their destination at the church-gate, a laughter in the whole movement. Here was the quick of all laughter and pleasure. The door of the carriage was thrown open, to let out the very blossom of the day. The people on the roadway murmured faintly with the discontented murmuring of a crowd.
The father stepped out first into the air of the morning, like a shadow. He was a tall, thin, careworn man, with a thin black beard that was touched with grey. He waited at the door of the carriage patiently, self-obliterated.
In the opening of the doorway was a shower of fine foliage and flowers, a whiteness of satin and lace, and a sound of a gay voice saying:`How do I get out?’
A ripple of satisfaction ran through the expectant people. They pressed near to receive her, looking with zest at the stooping blond head with its flower buds, and at the delicate, white, tentative foot that was reaching down to the step of the carriage. There was a sudden foaming rush, and the bride like a sudden surf-rush, floating all white beside her father in the morning shadow of trees, her veil flowing with laughter.
She put her hand on the arm of her care-worn, sallow father, and frothing her light draperies, proceeded over the eternal red carpet. Her father, mute and yellowish, his black beard making him look more careworn, mounted the steps stiffly, as if his spirit were absent; but the laughing mist of the bride went along with him undiminished.
And no bridegroom had arrived! It was intolerable for her. Ursula, her heart strained with anxiety, was watching the hill beyond; the white, descending road, that should give sight of him. There was a carriage. It was running. It had just come into sight. Yes, it was he. Ursula turned towards the bride and the people, and, from her place of vantage, gave an inarticulate cry. She wanted to warn them that he was coming. But her cry was inarticulate and inaudible, and she flushed deeply, between her desire and her wincing confusion.
The carriage rattled down the hill, and drew near. There was a shout from the people. The bride, who had just reached the top of the steps, turned round gaily to see what was the commotion. She saw a confusion among the people, a cab pulling up, and her lover dropping out of the carriage, and dodging among the horses and into the crowd.
`Tibs! Tibs!’ she cried in her sudden, mocking excitement, standing high on the path in the sunlight and waving her bouquet. He, dodging with his hat in his hand, had not heard.
He glanced up, unaware, and saw the bride and her father standing on the path above him. A queer, startled look went over his face. He hesitated for a moment. Then he gathered himself together for a leap, to overtake her.
`Ah-h-h!’ came her strange, intaken cry, as, on the reflex, she started, turned and fled, scudding with an unthinkable swift beating of her white feet and fraying of her white garments, towards the church. Like a hound the young man was after her, leaping the steps and swinging past her father, his supple haunches working like those of a hound that bears down on the quarry.
读书笔记
是否公开
126
-
“嘿,追上她!”下面那些粗俗的女人突然凑过来逗乐儿,大喊大叫着。
读书笔记
是否公开
126
-
`Ay, after her!’ cried the vulgar women below, carried suddenly into the sport.
She, her flowers shaken from her like froth, was steadying herself to turn the angle of the church. She glanced behind, and with a wild cry of laughter and challenge, veered, poised, and was gone beyond the grey stone buttress. In another instant the bridegroom, bent forward as he ran, had caught the angle of the silent stone with his hand, and had swung himself out of sight, his supple, strong loins vanishing in pursuit.
Instantly cries and exclamations of excitement burst from the crowd at the gate. And then Ursula noticed again the dark, rather stooping figure of Mr Crich, waiting suspended on the path, watching with expressionless face the flight to the church. It was over, and he turned round to look behind him, at the figure of Rupert Birkin, who at once came forward and joined him.`We’ll bring up the rear,’ said Birkin, a faint smile on his face.
读书笔记
是否公开
129
-
“好的!”父亲简短地回答。说完两人就转身上去了。
读书笔记
是否公开
129
-
`Ay!’ replied the father laconically. And the two men turned together up the path.
Birkin was as thin as Mr Crich, pale and ill-looking. His figure was narrow but nicely made. He went with a slight trail of one foot, which came only from selfconsciousness. Although he was dressed correctly for his part, yet there was an innateincongruity which caused a slight ridiculousness in his appearance. His nature was clever and separate, he did not fit at all in the conventional occasion. Yet he subordinated himself to the common idea, travestied himself.
He affected to be quite ordinary, perfectly and marvellouslycommonplace. And he did it so well, taking the tone of his surroundings, adjusting himself quickly to his interlocutor and his circumstance, that he achieved a verisimilitude of ordinary commonplaceness that usually propitiated his onlookers for the moment, disarmed them from attacking his singleness.
Now he spoke quite easily and pleasantly to Mr Crich, as they walked along the path; he played with situations like a man on a tight-rope: but always on a tightrope, pretending nothing but ease.
`I’m sorry we are so late,’ he was saying. `We couldn’t find a button-hook, so it took us a long time to button our boots. But you were to the moment.’
读书笔记
是否公开
134
-
“我们总是遵守时间的,”克里奇先生说。
读书笔记
是否公开
134
-
`We are usually to time,’ said Mr Crich.
读书笔记
是否公开
135
-
“可我却常迟到,”伯金说,“不过今天我的确是想准点到那儿的,却出于偶然没能准点到这儿,太抱歉了。”
读书笔记
是否公开
135
-
`And I’m always late,’ said Birkin. `But today I was really punctual, only accidentally not so. I’m sorry.’
读书笔记
是否公开
136
-
这两个人也走远了,一时间没什么可看的了。厄秀拉在思量着伯金,他引起了她的注意,令她着迷也令她心乱。
读书笔记
是否公开
136
-
The two men were gone, there was nothing more to see, for the time. Ursula was left thinking about Birkin. He piqued her, attracted her, and annoyed her.
She wanted to know him more. She had spoken with him once or twice, but only in his official capacity as inspector. She thought he seemed to acknowledge some kinship between her and him, a natural, tacit understanding, a using of the same language. But there had been no time for the understanding to develop. And something kept her from him, as well as attracted her to him. There was a certain hostility, a hidden ultimate reserve in him, cold and inaccessible.
读书笔记
是否公开
138
-
可她还是要了解他。
读书笔记
是否公开
138
-
Yet she wanted to know him.
读书笔记
是否公开
139
-
“你觉得卢伯特-伯金这人怎么样?”她有点勉强地问戈珍。其实她并不想议论他。
读书笔记
是否公开
139
-
`What do you think of Rupert Birkin?’ she asked, a little reluctantly, of Gudrun. She did not want to discuss him.
`What do I think of Rupert Birkin?’ repeated Gudrun. `I think he’s attractive -decidedly attractive. What I can’t stand about him is his way with other people -his way of treating any little fool as if she were his greatest consideration. One feels so awfully sold, oneself.’
`Because he has no real critical faculty -- of people, at all events,’ said Gudrun. `I tell you, he treats any little fool as he treats me or you -- and it’s such an insult.’
读书笔记
是否公开
143
-
“哦,是这样,”厄秀拉说,“一个人必须要有判断力。”
读书笔记
是否公开
143
-
`Oh, it is,’ said Ursula. `One must discriminate.’
The sisters sat silent, waiting for the wedding party to come out. Gudrun was impatient of talk. She wanted to think about Gerald Crich. She wanted to see if the strong feeling she had got from him was real. She wanted to have herself ready.
Inside the church, the wedding was going on. Hermione Roddice was thinking only of Birkin. He stood near her. She seemed to gravitate physically towards him. She wanted to stand touching him. She could hardly be sure he was near her, if she did not touch him. Yet she stood subjected through the wedding service.
She had suffered so bitterly when he did not come, that still she was dazed. Still she was gnawed as by a neuralgia, tormented by his potential absence from her. She had awaited him in a faint delirium of nervous torture. As she stood bearing herself pensively, the rapt look on her face, that seemed spiritual, like the angels, but which came from torture, gave her a certain poignancy that tore his heart with pity. He saw her bowed head, her rapt face, the face of an almost demoniacalecstatic.
Feeling him looking, she lifted her face and sought his eyes, her own beautiful grey eyes flaring him a great signal. But he avoided her look, she sank her head in torment and shame, the gnawing at her heart going on. And he too was tortured with shame, and ultimate dislike, and with acute pity for her, because he did not want to meet her eyes, he did not want to receive her flare of recognition.
The bride and bridegroom were married, the party went into the vestry. Hermione crowded involuntarily up against Birkin, to touch him. And he endured it.
Outside, Gudrun and Ursula listened for their father’s playing on the organ. He would enjoy playing a wedding march. Now the married pair were coming! The bells were ringing, making the air shake. Ursula wondered if the trees and the flowers could feel the vibration, and what they thought of it, this strange motion in the air. The bride was quite demure on the arm of the bridegroom, who stared up into the sky before him, shutting and opening his eyes unconsciously, as if he were neither here nor there. He looked rather comical, blinking and trying to be in the scene, when emotionally he was violated by his exposure to a crowd. He looked a typical naval officer, manly, and up to his duty.
Birkin came with Hermione. She had a rapt, triumphant look, like the fallen angels restored, yet still subtly demoniacal, now she held Birkin by the arm. And he was expressionless, neutralised, possessed by her as if it were his fate, without question.
Gerald Crich came, fair, good-looking, healthy, with a great reserve of energy. He was erect and complete, there was a strange stealth glistening through his amiable, almost happy appearance. Gudrun rose sharply and went away. She could not bear it. She wanted to be alone, to know this strange, sharp inoculation that had changed the whole temper of her blood.