followed immediately at his heels. In an instant he had reached the extremity of the niche, and finding his progress arrested by the rock, stood stupidly bewildered. A moment more and I had fettered him to the granite. In its surface were two iron staples, distant from each other about two feet, horizontally. From one of these depended a short chain, from the other a padlock . Throwing the links about his waist, it was but the work of a few seconds to secure it. He was too much
astounded to resist. Withdrawing the key I stepped back from the recess. \\implore you to return. No? Then I must positively leave you. But I will first render you all the little attentions in my power.\
\ \
As I said these words I busied myself among the pile of bones of which I have before spoken. Throwing them aside, I soon uncovered a quantity of building stone and mortar. With these materials and with the aid of my trowel, I began vigorously to wall up the entrance of the niche. 在墓穴的尽头,又出现了更狭窄的墓穴。四壁成排堆着尸骨,一直高高堆到拱顶,就跟巴黎那些大墓窖一个样。里头这个墓穴有三面墙,仍然这样堆着。还有一面的尸骨都给推倒了,乱七八糟的堆在地上,积成相当大的一个尸骨墩。在搬开尸骨的那堵墙间,只见里头还有一个墓穴,或者壁龛,深约四英尺,宽达三英尺,高六七英尺。看上去当初造了并没打算派什么特别用处,不过是墓窖顶下两根大柱间的空隙罢了,后面却靠着一堵坚固的花岗石垣墙。
福吐纳托举起昏暗的火把,尽力朝壁龛深处仔细探看,可就是白费劲,火光微弱,看不见底。
“往前走,”我说,“白葡萄酒就在这里头。卢克雷西——”
“他是个充内行,”我朋友一面摇摇晃晃的往前走,一面插嘴道,我紧跟在他屁股后走进去。一眨眼工夫,他走到壁龛的尽头了,一见给岩石挡住了道,就一筹莫展的发着楞。隔了片刻,我已经把他锁在花岗石墙上了。墙上装着两个铁环,横里相距两英尺左右。一个环上挂着根短铁链,另一个挂着把大锁。不消一刹那工夫,就把他拦腰拴上链子了。他惊慌失措,根本忘了反抗,我拔掉钥匙,就退出壁龛。
“伸出手去摸摸墙,”我说,“保你摸到硝。真是湿得很。让我再一次求求你回去吧。不回去?那我得离开你啦。可我还先得尽份心,照顾你一下。”
“白葡萄酒!”我朋友惊魂未定,不由失声喊道。 “不错,”我答,“白葡萄酒。”
说着我就在前文提过的尸骨堆间忙着。我把尸骨扔开,不久就掏出好些砌墙用的的石块和灰泥。我便用这些材料,再靠那把泥刀,一个劲地在壁龛入口处砌起一堵墙来。
Unit4
Yet there were intervals when the whole scene, in which she was the most conspicuous object, seemed to vanish from her eyes, or at least, glimmered indistinctly before them, like a mass of imperfectly shaped and spectral images. Her mind, and especially her memory, was preternaturally active, and kept bringing up other scenes than this roughly hewn street of a little town, on the edge of the Western wilderness ; other faces than were lowering upon her from beneath the brims of those steeple-crowned hats. Reminiscences, the most trifling and immaterial, passages of infancy
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and school-days, sports, childish quarrels, and the little domestic traits of her maiden years, came swarming back upon her, intermingled with recollections of whatever was gravest in her
subsequent life; one picture precisely as vivid as another; as if all were of similar importance, or all alike a play. Possibly, it was an instinctive device of her spirit, to relieve itself, by the exhibition of these phantasmagoric forms, from the cruel weight and hardness of the reality. Be that as it might, the scaffold of the pillory was a point of view that revealed to Hester Prynne the entire track along which she had been treading, since her happy infancy. Standing on that miserable eminence, she saw her native village, in old England, and her paternal home; a decayed house of gray stone, with a poverty-stricken aspect, but retaining a half-obliterated shield of arms over the portal, in token of antique gentility. She saw her father's face, with its bald brow, and reverend white beard, that flowed over the old-fashioned Elizabethan ruff; her mother's, too, with the look of heedful and anxious love which it always wore in her remembrance, and which, even since her death, had so often laid the impediment of a gentle remonstrance in her daughter's pathway. She saw her own face, glowing with girlish beauty, and illuminating all the interior of the dusky mirror in which she had been wont to gaze at it. There she beheld another countenance, of a man well stricken in years, a pale, thin, scholar-like visage, with eyes dim and bleared by the lamplight that had served them to pore over many ponderous books. Yet those same bleared optics had a strange, penetrating power, when it was their owner's purpose to read the human soul. This figure of the study and the cloister, as Hester Prynne's womanly fancy failed not to recall, was slightly deformed, with the left shoulder a trifle higher than the right. Next rose before her, in memory's picture — gallery, the intricate and narrow thoroughfares, the tall gray houses, the huge cathedrals, and the public edifices, ancient in date and quaint in architecture, of a Continental city; where a new life had awaited her, still in connection with the misshapen scholar; a new life, but feeding itself on time — worn materials, like a tuft of green moss on a crumbling wall. Lastly, in lieu of these shifting scenes, came back the rude market-place of the Puritan settlement, with all the townspeople assembled and leveling their stern regards at Hester Prynne — yes, at herself — who stood on the scaffold of the pillory, an infant on her arm, and the letter A, in scarlet, fantastically embroidered with gold thread, upon her bosom!
Could it be true? She clutched the child so fiercely to her breast, that it sent forth a cry; she turned her eyes downward at the scarlet letter, and even touched it with her finger, to assure herself that the infant and the shame were real. Yes! — these were her realities — all else had vanished!
然而,在她充当众目所瞩的目标的全部期间,她不时感到眼前茫茫一片,至少,人群象一大堆支离破碎、光怪陆离的幻象般地朦胧模糊。她的思绪,尤其是她的记忆,却不可思议地活跃,越出这蛮荒的大洋西岸边缘上的小镇的祖创的街道,不断带回来别的景色与场面;她想到的,不是那些尖顶高帽帽植下藐视她的面孔。她回忆起那些最琐碎零散、最无关紧要的事情;孩提时期和学校生活,儿时的游戏和争哆,以及婚前在娘家的种种琐事蜂拥回到她的脑海,其中还混杂着她后来生活中最重大的事件的种种片断,一切全都历历如在目前;似乎全都同等重要,或者全都象一出戏。可能,这是她心理上的一种本能反应:通过展现这些备色各样、变幻莫测的画面,把自己的精神从眼前这残酷现实的无情重压下解脱出来。
无论如何,这座示众刑台成了一个了望点,在海丝特·白兰面前展现山自从她幸福的童年以来的全都轨迹。她痛苦地高高站在那里,再次看见了她在老英格兰故乡的村落和她父母的家园:那是一座破败的灰色石屋,虽说外表是一派衰微的景象,但在门廊上方还残存着半明半暗的盾形家族纹章,标志着远祖的世系。她看到厂她父亲的面容:光秃秃的额头和飘洒
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在伊丽莎白时代老式环状皱领上的威风凛凛的白须;她也看到了她母亲的面容,那种无微不至和牵肠挂肚的爱的表情,时时在她脑海中索绕,即使在母亲去世之后,仍在女儿的人生道路上经常留下温馨忆念的告诫。她看到了自己少女时代的光彩动人的美貌,把她惯于映照的那面昏暗的镜子的整个镜心都照亮了。她还看到了另一副面孔,那是一个年老力衰的男人的面孔,苍白而瘦削,看上去一副学者模样,由于在灯光下研读一册册长篇巨著而老眼昏花。然而正是这同一双昏花的烂眼,在一心接窥测他人的灵魂时,又具有那么奇特的洞察力。尽管海丝特·白兰那女性的想象力竭力想摆脱他的形象,但那学者和隐士的身影还是出现了:他略带畸形,左肩比右肩稍高。在她回忆的画廊中接卜来升到她眼前的,是欧洲大陆一座城市里的纵横交错又显得狭窄的街道,以及年深日久、古色古香的公共建筑物,宏伟的天主教堂和高大的灰色住宅③;一种崭新的生活在那里等待着她,不过仍和那个陶形的学者密切相关;那种生活象是附在颓垣上的一簇青苔,只能靠腐败的营养滋补自己。最终,这些接踵而至的场景烟消云散,海丝特·白兰又回到这片清教徒殖民地的简陋的市场上,全镇的人都聚集在这里,一双双严厉的眼睛紧紧盯着她——是的,盯着她本人——她站在示众刑台上,怀中抱着婴儿,胸前钉着那个用金丝线绝妙地绣着花边的鲜红的字母A!
这一切会是真的吗?她把孩子往胸前猛地用力一抱,孩子昨地一声哭了;她垂下眼睛注视着那鲜红的字母,甚至还用指头触摸了一下,以便使自己确信婴儿和耻辱都是实实在在的。是啊——这些便是她的现实,其余的一切全都消失了!
Unit5
Nor was it his unwonted magnitude, nor his remarkable hue, nor yet his deformed lower jaw, that so much invested the whale with natural terror, as that unexampled, intelligent malignity which, according to specific accounts, he had over and over again evinced in his assaults. More than all, his treacherous retreats struck more of dismay than perhaps aught else. For, when swimming before his exulting pursuers, with every apparent symptom of alarm, he had several times been known to turn around suddenly, and, bearing down upon them, either stave their boats to splinters, or drive them back in consternation to their ship.
Already several fatalities had attended his chase. But though similar disasters, however little bruited ashore, were by no means unusual in the fishery; yet, in most instances, such seemed the White Whale's infernal aforethought of ferocity, that every dismembering or death that he caused, was not wholly regarded as having been inflicted by an unintelligent agent.
Judge, then, to what pitches of inflamed, distracted fury the minds of his more desperate hunters were impelled, when amid the chips of chewed boats, and the sinking limbs of torn comrades, they swam out of the white curds of the whale's direful wrath into the serene, exasperating sunlight, that smiled on, as if at a birth or a bridal.
His three boats stove around him, and oars and men both whirling in the eddies; one captain, seizing the line-knife from his broken prow, had dashed at the whale, as an Arkansas duellist at his foe, blindly seeking with a six inch blade to reach the fathom-deep life of the whale. That captain was Ahab. And then it was, that suddenly sweeping his sickle-shaped lower jaw beneath him, Moby Dick had reaped away Ahab's leg, as a mower a blade of grass in the field. No turbaned Turk, no hired Venetian or Malay, could have smote him with more seeming malice. Small reason was there to doubt, then, that ever since that almost fatal encounter, Ahab had cherished a wild vindictiveness against the whale, all the more fell for that in his frantic morbidness he at last came
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to identify with him, not only all his bodily woes, but all his intellectual and spiritual
exasperations. The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies, which some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung. That intangible malignity which has been from the beginning; to whose dominion even the modern Christians ascribe one-half of the worlds; which the ancient Ophites of the east reverenced in their statue devil; — Ahab did not fall down and worship it like them; but deliriously transferring its idea to the abhorred white whale, he pitted himself, all mutilated, against it. All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it.
这种鲸之所以天生使人畏惧,与其说是由于它那罕有的硕大,突出的色泽,畸形的下颚,倒不如说是(按照它那特有的情形说来)由于它在突击的时候,一再表现出来的那种无以伦比的充满机智的阴险.尤其是它那种可说是比之任何事情都更使人丧胆的奸诈的退却.因为,它在它那些兴高采烈的追击者面前一路游去的时候,就显得非常警觉,还故意突然转了几次身,可是,一下子就扑上他们,不是把他们的小艇撞得粉碎,就是把他们吓得手足无措,赶紧逃回大船.
为了追击它,已经发生了好几次惨案.虽则这些类似的不幸事件,在岸上是不大传布的,但在捕鱼业中,也决不是什么了不起的;而且,在多数场合上,似乎还有人并不完全把白鲸每次使得人们断肢失体或者丧命的凶残的预谋,看成是遭到无理性的神力的打击.
那么,看一看那些身处险境的猎手的内心给迫得多么激动.气得发昏的情况吧.当时,他们的四周尽是些被嚼得细碎的小艇残片,同伴们被折断了的.行将下沉的肢体,他们总算从大鲸那可怕的怒火所发出来的白色浆液中游了出来,游到那仿佛在对着新生婴孩或者新娘含笑相迎的.恬静而强烈的阳光里来.
那个船长的四周是三只被冲破了的小艇,船桨和水手都在涡流里旋来旋去;他从那破烂的艇头抓到一把小刀,朝大鲸猛地掷去,象个阿肯色州人在跟他的宿敌决斗,胡乱地找到一把六英寸的刀,想结束那条大鲸的深不可测的生命.那个船长就是亚哈.而且正在这时,莫比-迪克突然从他下边挥起它那镰刀似的下颚,如同一架刈草机在地里刈草一样,把亚哈的腿给刈掉了.这是裹着头巾的土耳其人,被雇佣的威尼斯人或者马来人,都也不会对他使出如此毒辣的手段的(参阅莎士比亚的《奥瑟罗》第五幕第二场中奥瑟罗的对话:\在阿勒普地方,曾经有个裹着头巾的满怀敌意的土耳其人殴打一个威尼斯人,诽谛我们的国家.\于是,无可置疑地,经过这番简直是致命的遭遇后,亚哈就对这只大鲸怀了一种狂热的报仇心,而在他的狂乱的病态中,他尤更被这股念头迷住了,终于把它看成不但是他肉体上的宿敌,也是他的理智上.精神上的愤激的宿敌.他把浮游在他面前的白鲸,看成是种种属于心怀恶念的神力的偏热症的化身,这种神力把那些意志强烈的人都腐蚀得只剩半颗心和半只肺在苟延残喘着.那种一开始就是无从捉摸的恶行,甚至现代的基督教徒也认为有半个宇宙是归它支配的,也是古代东方的拜蛇教(拜蛇教第二世纪时的教派,以蛇为神智之象征,加以崇拜.)对他们的魔王铸像顶礼膜拜的东西亚哈可不象他们那样向它屈膝膜拜,而是神志昏乱地把它的概念都移植到这条令人憎恶的白鲸身上,他不惜以遍体鳞伤之躯跟这种恶行敌对到底.举凡一切最使人狂怒和痛苦的事情,一切足以搅起事物的残渣的东西,一切附有恶念的真理,一切使人焦头烂额的东西,一切有关生命思想的神秘而不可思议的鬼神邪说;一切的邪恶等等,在疯狂的亚哈看来,都是莫比-迪克
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