Stories by English Authors in France(旅法英国作家的故事)

VIP免费

2024-12-26 0 0 418.67KB 111 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

STORIES

by English Authors in France

STORIES

A LODGING FOR THE NIGHT

BY ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

It was late in November, 1456. The snow fell over Paris with rigorous,

relentless persistence; sometimes the wind made a sally and scattered it in

flying vortices; sometimes there was a lull, and flake after flake descended

out of the black night air, silent, circuitous, interminable. To poor people,

looking up under moist eyebrows, it seemed a wonder where it all came

from. Master Francis Villon had propounded an alternative that afternoon,

at a tavern window: was it only pagan Jupiter plucking geese upon

Olympus? or were the holy angels moulting? He was only a poor Master

of Arts, he went on; and as the question somewhat touched upon divinity,

he durst not venture to conclude. A silly old priest from Montargis, who

was among the company, treated the young rascal to a bottle of wine in

honour of the jest and grimaces with which it was accompanied, and

swore on his own white beard that he had been just such another irreverent

dog when he was Villon's age.

The air was raw and pointed, but not far below freezing; and the flakes

were large, damp, and adhesive. The whole city was sheeted up. An army

might have marched from end to end and not a footfall given the alarm. If

there were any belated birds in heaven, they saw the island like a large

white patch, and the bridges like slim white spars on the black ground of

the river. High up overhead the snow settled among the tracery of the

cathedral towers. Many a niche was drifted full; many a statue wore a long

white bonnet on its grotesque or sainted head. The gargoyles had been

transformed into great false noses, drooping toward the point. The

crockets were like upright pillows swollen on one side. In the intervals of

the wind there was a dull sound dripping about the precincts of the church.

The cemetery of St. John had taken its own share of the snow. All the

graves were decently covered; tall white housetops stood around in grave

array; worthy burghers were long ago in bed, be-nightcapped like their

domiciles; there was no light in all the neighbourhood but a little peep

from a lamp that hung swinging in the church choir, and tossed the

STORIES

shadows to and fro in time to its oscillations. The clock was hard on ten

when the patrol went by with halberds and a lantern, beating their hands;

and they saw nothing suspicious about the cemetery of St. John.

Yet there was a small house, backed up against the cemetery wall,

which was still awake, and awake to evil purpose, in that snoring district.

There was not much to betray it from without; only a stream of warm

vapour from the chimney-top, a patch where the snow melted on the roof,

and a few half-obliterated footprints at the door. But within, behind the

shuttered windows, Master Francis Villon, the poet, and some of the

thievish crew with whom he consorted, were keeping the night alive and

passing round the bottle.

A great pile of living embers diffused a strong and ruddy glow from

the arched chimney. Before this straddled Dom Nicolas, the Picardy monk,

with his skirts picked up and his fat legs bared to the comfortable warmth.

His dilated shadow cut the room in half; and the firelight only escaped on

either side of his broad person, and in a little pool between his outspread

feet. His face had the beery, bruised appearance of the continual drinker's;

it was covered with a network of congested veins, purple in ordinary

circumstances, but now pale violet, for even with his back to the fire the

cold pinched him on the other side. His cowl had half fallen back, and

made a strange excrescence on either side of his bull-neck. So he straddled,

grumbling, and cut the room in half with the shadow of his portly frame.

On the right, Villon and Guy Tabary were huddled together over a

scrap of parchment; Villon making a ballade which he was to call the

"Ballade of Roast Fish," and Tabary sputtering admiration at his shoulder.

The poet was a rag of a man, dark, little, and lean, with hollow cheeks and

thin black locks. He carried his four and twenty years with feverish

animation. Greed had made folds about his eyes, evil smiles had puckered

his mouth. The wolf and pig struggled together in his face. It was an

eloquent, sharp, ugly, earthly countenance. His hands were small and

prehensile, with fingers knotted like a cord; and they were continually

flickering in front of him in violent and expressive pantomime. As for

Tabary, a broad, complacent, admiring imbecility breathed from his squash

nose and slobbering lips; he had become a thief, just as he might have

STORIES

become the most decent of burgesses, by the imperious chance that rules

the lives of human geese and human donkeys.

At the monk's other hand, Montigny and Thevenin Pensete played a

game of chance. About the first there clung some flavour of good birth and

training, as about a fallen angel; something long, lithe, and courtly in the

person; something aquiline and darkling in the face. Thevenin, poor soul,

was in great feather; he had done a good stroke of knavery that afternoon

in the Faubourg St. Jacques, and all night he had been gaining from

Montigny. A flat smile illuminated his face; his bald head shone rosily in a

garland of red curls; his little protuberant stomach shook with silent

chucklings as he swept in his gains.

"Doubles or quits?" said Thevenin.

Montigny nodded grimly.

"Some may prefer to dine in state," wrote Villon, "on bread and cheese

on silver plate. Or, or--help me out, Guido!"

Tabary giggled.

"Or parsley on a golden dish," scribbled the poet.

The wind was freshening without; it drove the snow before it, and

sometimes raised its voice in a victorious whoop, and made sepulchral

grumblings in the chimney. The cold was growing sharper as the night

went on. Villon, protruding his lips, imitated the gust with something

between a whistle and a groan. It was an eerie, uncomfortable talent of the

poet's, much detested by the Picardy monk.

"Can't you hear it rattle in the gibbet?" said Villon. "They are all

dancing the devil's jig on nothing, up there. You may dance, my gallants;

you'll be none the warmer. Whew, what a gust! Down went somebody just

now! A medlar the fewer on the three-legged medlar-tree! I say, Dom

Nicolas, it'll be cold to-night on the St. Denis Road?" he asked.

Dom Nicholas winked both his big eyes, and seemed to choke upon

his Adam's apple. Montfaucon, the great, grisly Paris gibbet, stood hard by

the St. Denis Road, and the pleasantry touched him on the raw. As for

Tabary, he laughed immoderately over the medlars; he had never heard

anything more light-hearted; and he held his sides and crowed. Villon

fetched him a fillip on the nose, which turned his mirth into an attack of

STORIES

coughing.

"Oh, stop that row," said Villon, "and think of rhymes to 'fish'!"

"Doubles or quits? Said Montigny, doggedly.

"With all my heart," quoth Thevenin.

"Is there any more in that bottle?" asked the monk.

"Open another," said Villon. "How do you ever hope to fill that big

hogshead, your body, with little things like bottles? And how do you

expect to get to heaven? How many angels, do you fancy, can be spared to

carry up a single monk from Picardy? Or do you think yourself another

Elias--and they'll send the coach for you?"

"/Hominibus/ impossible," replied the monk, as he filled his glass.

Tabary was in ecstasies.

Villon filliped his nose again.

"Laugh at my jokes, if you like," he said.

Villon made a face at him. "Think of rhymes to 'fish,' " he said. "What

have you to do with Latin? You'll wish you knew none of it at the great

assizes, when the devil calls for Guido Tabary, /clericus/--the devil with

the humpback and red-hot fingernails. Talking of the devil," he added, in a

whisper, "look at Montigny!"

All three peered covertly at the gamester. He did not seem to be

enjoying his luck. His mouth was a little to a side; one nostril nearly shut,

and the other much inflated. The black dog was on his back, as people say,

in terrifying nursery metaphor; and he breathed hard under the gruesome

burden.

"He looks as if he could knife him," whispered Tabary, with round

eyes.

The monk shuddered, and turned his face and spread his open hands to

the red embers. It was the cold that thus affected Dom Nicolas, and not

any excess of moral sensibility.

"Come now," said Villon--"about this ballade. How does it run so far?"

And beating time with his hand, he read it aloud to Tabary.

They were interrupted at the fourth rhyme by a brief and fatal

movement among the gamesters. The round was completed, and Thevenin

was just opening his mouth to claim another victory, when Montigny

STORIES

leaped up, swift as an adder, and stabbed him to the heart. The blow took

effect before he had time to utter a cry, before he had time to move. A

tremor or two convulsed his frame; his hands opened and shut, his heels

rattled on the floor; then his head rolled backward over one shoulder, with

eyes wide open; and Thevenin Pensete's spirit had returned to Him who

made it.

Every one sprang to his feet; but the business was over in two twos.

The four living fellows looked at each other in rather a ghastly fashion, the

dead man contemplating a corner of the roof with a singular and ugly leer.

"My God!" said Tabary, and he began to pray in Latin.

Villon broke out into hysterical laughter. He came a step forward and

ducked a ridiculous bow at Thevenin, and laughed still louder. Then he sat

down suddenly, all of a heap, upon a stool, and continued laughing bitterly,

as though he would shake himself to pieces.

Montigny recovered his composure first.

"Let's see what he has about him," he remarked; and he picked the

dead man's pockets with a practised hand, and divided the money into four

equal portions on the table. "There's for you," he said.

The monk received his share with a deep sigh, and a single stealthy

glance at the dead Thevenin, who was beginning to sink into himself and

topple sideways off the chair.

"We're all in for it," cried Villon, swallowing his mirth. "It's a hanging

job for every man Jack of us that's here--not to speak of those who aren't."

He made a shocking gesture in the air with his raised right hand, and put

out his tongue and threw his head on one side, so as to counterfeit the

appearance of one who has been hanged. Then he pocketed his share of

the spoil, and executed a shuffle with his feet as if to restore the

circulation.

Tabary was the last to help himself; he made a dash at the money, and

retired to the other end of the apartment.

Montigny stuck Thevenin upright in the chair, and drew out the dagger,

which was followed by a jet of blood.

"You fellows had better be moving," he said, as he wiped the blade on

his victim's doublet.

STORIES

"I think we had," returned Villon, with a gulp. "Damn his fat head!" he

broke out. "It sticks in my throat like phlegm. What right has a man to

have red hair when he is dead?" And he fell all of a heap again upon the

stool, and fairly covered his face with his hands.

Montigny and Dom Nicolas laughed aloud, even Tabary feebly

chiming in.

"Cry-baby!" said the monk.

"I always said he was a woman," added Montigny, with a sneer. "Sit

up, can't you?" he went on, giving another shake to the murdered body.

"Tread out that fire, Nick!"

But Nick was better employed; he was quietly taking Villon's purse, as

the poet sat, limp and trembling, on the stool where he had been making a

ballade not three minutes before. Montigny and Tabary dumbly demanded

a share of the booty, which the monk silently promised as he passed the

little bag into the bosom of his gown. In many ways an artistic nature

unfits a man for practical existence.

No sooner had the theft been accomplished than Villon shook himself,

jumped to his feet, and began helping to scatter and extinguish the embers.

Meanwhile Montigny opened the door and cautiously peered into the

street. The coast was clear; there was no meddlesome patrol in sight. Still

it was judged wiser to slip out severally; and as Villon was himself in a

hurry to escape from the neighbourhood of the dead Thevenin, and the rest

were in a still greater hurry to get rid of him before he should discover the

loss of his money, he was the first by general consent to issue forth into

the street.

The wind had triumphed and swept all the clouds from heaven. Only a

few vapours, as thin as moonlight, fleeted rapidly across the stars. It was

bitter cold; and, by a common optical effect, things seemed almost more

definite than in the broadest daylight. The sleeping city was absolutely still;

a company of white hoods, a field full of little alps, below the twinkling

stars. Villon cursed his fortune. Would it were still snowing! Now,

wherever he went, he left an indelible trail behind him on the glittering

streets; wherever he went, he was still tethered to the house by the

cemetery of St. John; wherever he went, he must weave, with his own

STORIES

plodding feet, the rope that bound him to the crime and would bind him to

the gallows. The leer of the dead man came back to him with new

significance. He snapped his fingers as if to pluck up his own spirits, and,

choosing a street at random, stepped boldly forward in the snow.

Two things preoccupied him as he went: the aspect of the gallows at

Montfaucon in this bright, windy phase of the night's existence, for one;

and for another, the look of the dead man with his bald head and garland

of red curls. Both struck cold upon his heart, and he kept quickening his

pace as if he could escape from unpleasant thoughts by mere fleetness of

foot. Sometimes he looked back over his shoulder with a sudden nervous

jerk; but he was the only moving thing in the white streets, except when

the wind swooped round a corner and threw up the snow, which was

beginning to freeze, in spouts of glittering dust.

Suddenly he saw, a long way before him, a black clump and a couple

of lanterns. The clump was in motion, and the lanterns swung as though

carried by men walking. It was a patrol. And though it was merely

crossing his line of march he judged it wiser to get out of eyeshot as

speedily as he could. He was not in the humour to be challenged, and he

was conscious of making a very conspicuous mark upon the snow. Just on

his left hand there stood a great hotel, with some turrets and a large porch

before the door; it was half ruinous, he remembered, and had long stood

empty; and so he made three steps of it, and jumped into the shelter of the

porch. It was pretty dark inside, after the glimmer of the snowy streets,

and he was groping forward with outspread hands, when he stumbled over

some substance which offered an indescribable mixture of resistances,

hard and soft, firm and loose. His heart gave a leap, and he sprang two

steps back and stared dreadfully at the obstacle. Then he gave a little laugh

of relief. It was only a woman, and she dead. He knelt beside her to make

sure upon this latter point. She was freezing cold, and rigid like a stick. A

little ragged finery fluttered in the wind about her hair, and her cheeks had

been heavily rouged that same afternoon. Her pockets were quite empty;

but in her stocking, underneath the garter, Villon found two of the small

coins that went by the name of whites. It was little enough, but it was

always something; and the poet was moved with a deep sense of pathos

STORIES

that she should have died before she had spent her money. That seemed to

him a dark and pitiable mystery; and he looked from the coins in his hand

to the dead woman, and back again to the coins, shaking his head over the

riddle of man's life. Henry V. of England, dying at Vincennes just after he

had conquered France, and this poor jade cut off by a cold draught in a

great man's doorway before she had time to spend her couple of whites--it

seemed a cruel way to carry on the world. Two whites would have taken

such a little while to squander; and yet it would have been one more good

taste in the mouth, one more smack of the lips, before the devil got the

soul, and the body was left to birds and vermin. He would like to use all

his tallow before the light was blown out and the lantern broken.

While these thoughts were passing through his mind, he was feeling,

half mechanically, for his purse. Suddenly his heart stopped beating; a

feeling of cold scales passed up the back of his legs, and a cold blow

seemed to fall upon his scalp. He stood petrified for a moment; then he felt

again with one feverish movement; then his loss burst upon him, and he

was covered at once with perspiration. To spendthrifts money is so living

and actual--it is such a thin veil between them and their pleasures! There is

only one limit to their fortune--that of time; and a spendthrift with only a

few crowns is the Emperor of Rome until they are spent. For such a person

to lose his money is to suffer the most shocking reverse, and fall from

heaven to hell, from all to nothing, in a breath. And all the more if he has

put his head in the halter for it; if he may be hanged to-morrow for that

same purse, so dearly earned, so foolishly departed! Villon stood and

cursed; he threw the two whites into the street; he shook his fist at heaven;

he stamped, and was not horrified to find himself trampling the poor

corpse. Then he began rapidly to retrace his steps toward the house beside

the cemetery. He had forgotten all fear of the patrol, which was long gone

by at any rate, and had no idea but that of his lost purse. It was in vain that

he looked right and left upon the snow; nothing was to be seen. He had not

dropped it in the streets. Had it fallen in the house? He would have liked

dearly to go in and see; but the idea of the grisly occupant unmanned him.

And he saw besides, as he drew near, that their efforts to put out the fire

had been unsuccessful; on the contrary, it had broken into a blaze, and a

STORIES

changeful light played in the chinks of door and window, and revived his

terror for the authorities and Paris gibbet.

He returned to the hotel with the porch, and groped about upon the

snow for the money he had thrown away in his childish passion. But he

could only find one white; the other had probably struck sideways and

sunk deeply in. With a single white in his pocket, all his projects for a

rousing night in some wild tavern vanished utterly away. And it was not

only pleasure that fled laughing from his grasp; positive discomfort,

positive pain, attacked him as he stood ruefully before the porch. His

perspiration had dried upon him; and although the wind had now fallen, a

binding frost was setting in stronger with every hour, and he felt

benumbed and sick at heart. What was to be done? Late as was the hour,

improbable as was his success, he would try the house of his adopted

father, the chaplain of St. Benoit.

He ran all the way, and knocked timidly. There was no answer. He

knocked again and again, taking heart with every stroke; and at last steps

were heard approaching from within. A barred wicket fell open in the iron-

studded door, and emitted a gush of yellow light.

"Hold up your face to the wicket," said the chaplain from within.

"It's only me," whimpered Villon.

"Oh, it's only you, is it?" returned the chaplain; and he cursed him with

foul, unpriestly oaths for disturbing him at such an hour, and bade him be

off to hell, where he came from.

"My hands are blue to the wrist," pleaded Villon; "my feet are dead

and full of twinges; my nose aches with the sharp air; the cold lies at my

heart. I may be dead before morning. Only this once, father, and, before

God, I will never ask again!"

"You should have come earlier," said the ecclesiastic, coolly. "Young

men require a lesson now and then." He shut the wicket and retired

deliberately into the interior of the house.

Villon was beside himself; he beat upon the door with his hands and

feet, and shouted hoarsely after the chaplain.

"Wormy old fox!" he cried. "If I had my hand under your twist, I

would send you flying headlong into the bottomless pit."

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

STORIES1STORIESbyEnglishAuthorsinFranceSTORIES2ALODGINGFORTHENIGHTBYROBERTLOUISSTEVENSONItwaslateinNovember,1456.ThesnowfelloverPariswithrigorous,relentlesspersistence;sometimesthewindmadeasallyandscattereditinflyingvortices;sometimestherewasalull,andflakeafterflakedescendedoutoftheblacknightair,sil...

展开>> 收起<<

Stories by English Authors in France(旅法英国作家的故事).pdf

共111页,预览23页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Stories by English Authors in France(旅法英国作家的故事)

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: