a. v. laider(A.V.雷德)

VIP免费

2024-12-26 0 0 80.23KB 22 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

A. V. Laider

By MAX BEERBOHM

A. V. Laider

I UNPACKED my things and went down to await luncheon.

It was good to be here again in this little old sleepy hostel by the sea.

Hostel I say, though it spelt itself without an "s" and even placed a

circumflex above the "o." It made no other pretension. It was very cozy

indeed.

I had been here just a year before, in mid-February, after an attack of

influenza. And now I had returned, after an attack of influenza. Nothing

was changed. It had been raining when I left, and the waiter-- there was

but a single, a very old waiter--had told me it was only a shower. That

waiter was still here, not a day older. And the shower had not ceased.

Steadfastly it fell on to the sands, steadfastly into the iron-gray sea. I

stood looking out at it from the windows of the hall, admiring it very

much. There seemed to be little else to do. What little there was I did. I

mastered the contents of a blue hand-bill which, pinned to the wall just

beneath the framed engraving of Queen Victoria's Coronation, gave token

of a concert that was to be held--or, rather, was to have been held some

weeks ago--in the town hall for the benefit of the Life-Boat Fund. I looked

at the barometer, tapped it, was not the wiser. I wandered to the letter-

board.

These letter-boards always fascinate me. Usually some two or three of

the envelops stuck into the cross-garterings have a certain newness and

freshness. They seem sure they will yet be claimed. Why not? Why

SHOULDN'T John Doe, Esq., or Mrs. Richard Roe turn up at any moment?

I do not know. I can only say that nothing in the world seems to me more

unlikely. Thus it is that these young bright envelops touch my heart even

more than do their dusty and sallowed seniors. Sour resignation is less

touching than impatience for what will not be, than the eagerness that has

to wane and wither. Soured beyond measure these old envelops are. They

are not nearly so nice as they should be to the young ones. They lose no

chance of sneering and discouraging. Such dialogues as this are only too

frequent:

A Very Young Envelop: Something in me whispers that he will come

A. V. Laider

to-day!

A Very Old Envelop: He? Well, that's good! Ha, ha, ha! Why didn't he

come last week, when YOU came? What reason have you for supposing

he'll ever come now? It isn't as if he were a frequenter of the place. He's

never been here. His name is utterly unknown here. You don't suppose he's

coming on the chance of finding YOU?

A. V. Y. E.: It may seem silly, but--something in me whispers--

A. V. O. E.: Something in YOU? One has only to look at you to see

there's nothing in you but a note scribbled to him by a cousin. Look at ME!

There are three sheets, closely written, in ME. The lady to whom I am

addressed--

A. V. Y. E.: Yes, sir, yes; you told me all about her yesterday.

A. V. O. E.: And I shall do so to-day and to-morrow and every day and

all day long. That young lady was a widow. She stayed here many times.

She was delicate, and the air suited her. She was poor, and the tariff was

just within her means. She was lonely, and had need of love. I have in me

for her a passionate avowal and strictly honorable proposal, written to her,

after many rough copies, by a gentleman who had made her acquaintance

under this very roof. He was rich, he was charming, he was in the prime of

life. He had asked if he might write to her. She had flutteringly granted his

request. He posted me to her the day after his return to London. I looked

forward to being torn open by her. I was very sure she would wear me and

my contents next to her bosom. She was gone. She had left no address.

She never returned. This I tell you, and shall continue to tell you, not

because I want any of your callow sympathy,--no, THANK you!--but that

you may judge how much less than slight are the probabilities that you

yourself--

But my reader has overheard these dialogues as often as I. He wants to

know what was odd about this particular letter-board before which I was

standing. At first glance I saw nothing odd about it. But presently I

distinguished a handwriting that was vaguely familiar. It was mine. I

stared, I wondered. There is always a slight shock in seeing an envelop of

one's own after it has gone through the post. It looks as if it had gone

through so much. But this was the first time I had ever seen an envelop of

A. V. Laider

mine eating its heart out in bondage on a letter-board. This was outrageous.

This was hardly to be believed. Sheer kindness had impelled me to write

to "A. V. Laider, Esq.," and this was the result! I hadn't minded receiving

no answer. Only now, indeed, did I remember that I hadn't received one. In

multitudinous London the memory of A. V. Laider and his trouble had

soon passed from my mind. But--well, what a lesson not to go out of one's

way to write to casual acquaintances!

My envelop seemed not to recognize me as its writer. Its gaze was the

more piteous for being blank. Even so had I once been gazed at by a dog

that I had lost and, after many days, found in the Battersea Home. "I don't

know who you are, but, whoever you are, claim me, take me out of this!"

That was my dog's appeal. This was the appeal of my envelop.

I raised my hand to the letter-board, meaning to effect a swift and

lawless rescue, but paused at sound of a footstep behind me. The old

waiter had come to tell me that my luncheon was ready. I followed him

out of the hall, not, however, without a bright glance across my shoulder

to reassure the little captive that I should come back.

I had the sharp appetite of the convalescent, and this the sea air had

whetted already to a finer edge. In touch with a dozen oysters, and with

stout, I soon shed away the unreasoning anger I had felt against A. V.

Laider. I became merely sorry for him that he had not received a letter

which might perhaps have comforted him. In touch with cutlets, I felt how

sorely he had needed comfort. And anon, by the big bright fireside of that

small dark smoking-room where, a year ago, on the last evening of my

stay here, he and I had at length spoken to each other, I reviewed in detail

the tragic experience he had told me; and I simply reveled in reminiscent

sympathy with him.

A. V. LAIDER--I had looked him up in the visitors'-book on the night

of his arrival. I myself had arrived the day before, and had been rather

sorry there was no one else staying here. A convalescent by the sea likes to

have some one to observe, to wonder about, at meal-time. I was glad when,

on my second evening, I found seated at the table opposite to mine another

guest. I was the gladder because he was just the right kind of guest. He

was enigmatic. By this I mean that he did not look soldierly or financial or

A. V. Laider

artistic or anything definite at all. He offered a clean slate for speculation.

And, thank heaven! he evidently wasn't going to spoil the fun by engaging

me in conversation later on. A decently unsociable man, anxious to be left

alone.

The heartiness of his appetite, in contrast with his extreme fragility of

aspect and limpness of demeanor, assured me that he, too, had just had

influenza. I liked him for that. Now and again our eyes met and were

instantly parted. We managed, as a rule, to observe each other indirectly. I

was sure it was not merely because he had been ill that he looked

interesting. Nor did it seem to me that a spiritual melancholy, though I

imagined him sad at the best of times, was his sole asset. I conjectured that

he was clever. I thought he might also be imaginative. At first glance I had

mistrusted him. A shock of white hair, combined with a young face and

dark eyebrows, does somehow make a man look like a charlatan. But it is

foolish to be guided by an accident of color. I had soon rejected my first

impression of my fellow-diner. I found him very sympathetic.

Anywhere but in England it would be impossible for two solitary men,

howsoever much reduced by influenza, to spend five or six days in the

same hostel and not exchange a single word. That is one of the charms of

England. Had Laider and I been born and bred in any other land than Eng

we should have become acquainted before the end of our first evening in

the small smoking-room, and have found ourselves irrevocably committed

to go on talking to each other throughout the rest of our visit. We might, it

is true, have happened to like each other more than any one we had ever

met. This off chance may have occurred to us both. But it counted for

nothing against the certain surrender of quietude and liberty. We slightly

bowed to each other as we entered or left the dining-room or smoking-

room, and as we met on the wide-spread sands or in the shop that had a

small and faded circulating library. That was all. Our mutual aloofness was

a positive bond between us.

Had he been much older than I, the responsibility for our silence

would of course have been his alone. But he was not, I judged, more than

five or six years ahead of me, and thus I might without impropriety have

taken it on myself to perform that hard and perilous feat which English

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：

A.V.Laider1A.V.LaiderByMAXBEERBOHMA.V.Laider2IUNPACKEDmythingsandwentdowntoawaitluncheon.Itwasgoodtobehereagaininthislittleoldsleepyhostelbythesea.HostelIsay,thoughitspeltitselfwithoutan"s"andevenplacedacircumflexabovethe"o."Itmadenootherpretension.Itwasverycozyindeed.Ihadbeenherejustayearbefore,inm...

展开>> 收起<<

a. v. laider(A.V.雷德).pdf

共22页,预览5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！

a. v. laider(A.V.雷德)

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: