THE TOUCHSTONE(试金石)

VIP免费
2024-12-26 1 0 279.59KB 80 页 5.9玖币
侵权投诉
THE TOUCHSTONE
1
THE TOUCHSTONE
By Edith Wharton
THE TOUCHSTONE
2
I
Professor Joslin, who, as our readers are doubtless aware, is engaged
in writing the life of Mrs. Aubyn, asks us to state that he will be greatly
indebted to any of the famous novelist's friends who will furnish him with
information concerning the period previous to her coming to England.
Mrs. Aubyn had so few intimate friends, and consequently so few regular
correspondents, that letters will be of special value. Professor Joslin's
address is 10 Augusta Gardens, Kensington, and he begs us to say that he
will promptly return any documents entrusted to him."
Glennard dropped the Spectator and sat looking into the fire. The
club was filling up, but he still had to himself the small inner room, with
its darkening outlook down the rainstreaked prospect of Fifth Avenue. It
was all dull and dismal enough, yet a moment earlier his boredom had
been perversely tinged by a sense of resentment at the thought that, as
things were going, he might in time have to surrender even the despised
privilege of boring himself within those particular four walls. It was not
that he cared much for the club, but that the remote contingency of having
to give it up stood to him, just then, perhaps by very reason of its
insignificance and remoteness, for the symbol of his increasing
abnegations; of that perpetual paring-off that was gradually reducing
existence to the naked business of keeping himself alive. It was the
futility of his multiplied shifts and privations that made them seem
unworthy of a high attitude; the sense that, however rapidly he eliminated
the superfluous, his cleared horizon was likely to offer no nearer view of
the one prospect toward which he strained. To give up things in order to
marry the woman one loves is easier than to give them up without being
brought appreciably nearer to such a conclusion.
Through the open door he saw young Hollingsworth rise with a yawn
from the ineffectual solace of a brandy-and-soda and transport his
purposeless person to the window. Glennard measured his course with a
contemptuous eye. It was so like Hollingsworth to get up and look out of
the window just as it was growing too dark to see anything! There was a
man rich enough to do what he pleased--had he been capable of being
THE TOUCHSTONE
3
pleased--yet barred from all conceivable achievement by his own
impervious dulness; while, a few feet off, Glennard, who wanted only
enough to keep a decent coat on his back and a roof over the head of the
woman he loved, Glennard, who had sweated, toiled, denied himself for
the scant measure of opportunity that his zeal would have converted into a
kingdom--sat wretchedly calculating that, even when he had resigned from
the club, and knocked off his cigars, and given up his Sundays out of town,
he would still be no nearer attainment.
The Spectator had slipped to his feet and as he picked it up his eye fell
again on the paragraph addressed to the friends of Mrs. Aubyn. He had
read it for the first time with a scarcely perceptible quickening of attention:
her name had so long been public property that his eye passed it
unseeingly, as the crowd in the street hurries without a glance by some
familiar monument.
"Information concerning the period previous to her coming to
England. . . ." The words were an evocation. He saw her again as she
had looked at their first meeting, the poor woman of genius with her long
pale face and short-sighted eyes, softened a little by the grace of youth and
inexperience, but so incapable even then of any hold upon the pulses.
When she spoke, indeed, she was wonderful, more wonderful, perhaps,
than when later, to Glennard's fancy at least, the conscious of memorable
things uttered seemed to take from even her most intimate speech the
perfect bloom of privacy. It was in those earliest days, if ever, that he
had come near loving her; though even then his sentiment had lived only
in the intervals of its expression. Later, when to be loved by her had
been a state to touch any man's imagination, the physical reluctance had,
inexplicably, so overborne the intellectual attraction, that the last years had
been, to both of them, an agony of conflicting impulses. Even now, if, in
turning over old papers, his hand lit on her letters, the touch filled him
with inarticulate misery. . . .
"She had so few intimate friends . . . that letters will be of special
value." So few intimate friends! For years she had had but one; one
who in the last years had requited her wonderful pages, her tragic
outpourings of love, humility, and pardon, with the scant phrases by which
THE TOUCHSTONE
4
a man evades the vulgarest of sentimental importunities. He had been a
brute in spite of himself, and sometimes, now that the remembrance of her
face had faded, and only her voice and words remained with him, he
chafed at his own inadequacy, his stupid inability to rise to the height of
her passion. His egoism was not of a kind to mirror its complacency in
the adventure. To have been loved by the most brilliant woman of her
day, and to have been incapable of loving her, seemed to him, in looking
back, the most derisive evidence of his limitations; and his remorseful
tenderness for her memory was complicated with a sense of irritation
against her for having given him once for all the measure of his emotional
capacity. It was not often, however, that he thus probed the past. The
public, in taking possession of Mrs. Aubyn, had eased his shoulders of
their burden. There was something fatuous in an attitude of sentimental
apology toward a memory already classic: to reproach one's self for not
having loved Margaret Aubyn was a good deal like being disturbed by an
inability to admire the Venus of Milo. From her cold niche of fame she
looked down ironically enough on his self-flagellations. . . . It was only
when he came on something that belonged to her that he felt a sudden
renewal of the old feeling, the strange dual impulse that drew him to her
voice but drove him from her hand, so that even now, at sight of anything
she had touched, his heart contracted painfully. It happened seldom
nowadays. Her little presents, one by one, had disappeared from his
rooms, and her letters, kept from some unacknowledged puerile vanity in
the possession of such treasures, seldom came beneath his hand. . . .
"Her letters will be of special value--" Her letters! Why, he must
have hundreds of them--enough to fill a volume. Sometimes it used to
seem to him that they came with every post--he used to avoid looking in
his letter-box when he came home to his rooms-- but her writing seemed
to spring out at him as he put his key in the door--.
He stood up and strolled into the other room. Hollingsworth,
lounging away from the window, had joined himself to a languidly
convivial group of men to whom, in phrases as halting as though they
struggled to define an ultimate idea, he was expounding the cursed
nuisance of living in a hole with such a damned climate that one had to get
THE TOUCHSTONE
5
out of it by February, with the contingent difficulty of there being no place
to take one's yacht to in winter but that other played-out hole, the Riviera.
From the outskirts of this group Glennard wandered to another, where a
voice as different as possible from Hollingsworth's colorless organ
dominated another circle of languid listeners.
"Come and hear Dinslow talk about his patent: admission free," one of
the men sang out in a tone of mock resignation.
Dinslow turned to Glennard the confident pugnacity of his smile.
"Give it another six months and it'll be talking about itself," he declared.
"It's pretty nearly articulate now."
"Can it say papa?" someone else inquired.
Dinslow's smile broadened. "You'll be deuced glad to say papa to IT
a year from now," he retorted. "It'll be able to support even you in
affluence. Look here, now, just let me explain to you--"
Glennard moved away impatiently. The men at the club--all but
those who were "in it"--were proverbially "tired" of Dinslow's patent, and
none more so than Glennard, whose knowledge of its merits made it loom
large in the depressing catalogue of lost opportunities. The relations
between the two men had always been friendly, and Dinslow's urgent
offers to "take him in on the ground floor" had of late intensified
Glennard's sense of his own inability to meet good luck half way. Some
of the men who had paused to listen were already in evening clothes,
others on their way home to dress; and Glennard, with an accustomed
twinge of humiliation, said to himself that if he lingered among them it
was in the miserable hope that one of the number might ask him to dine.
Miss Trent had told him that she was to go to the opera that evening with
her rich aunt; and if he should have the luck to pick up a dinner-invitation
he might join her there without extra outlay.
He moved about the room, lingering here and there in a tentative
affectation of interest; but though the men greeted him pleasantly no one
asked him to dine. Doubtless they were all engaged, these men who
could afford to pay for their dinners, who did not have to hunt for
invitations as a beggar rummages for a crust in an ash- barrel! But no--as
Hollingsworth left the lessening circle about the table an admiring youth
THE TOUCHSTONE
6
called out--"Holly, stop and dine!"
Hollingsworth turned on him the crude countenance that looked like
the wrong side of a more finished face. "Sorry I can't. I'm in for a
beastly banquet."
Glennard threw himself into an arm-chair. Why go home in the rain
to dress? It was folly to take a cab to the opera, it was worse folly to go
there at all. His perpetual meetings with Alexa Trent were as unfair to
the girl as they were unnerving to himself. Since he couldn't marry her, it
was time to stand aside and give a better man the chance--and his thought
admitted the ironical implication that in the terms of expediency the
phrase might stand for Hollingsworth.
THE TOUCHSTONE
7
II
He dined alone and walked home to his rooms in the rain. As he
turned into Fifth Avenue he caught the wet gleam of carriages on their way
to the opera, and he took the first side street, in a moment of irritation
against the petty restrictions that thwarted every impulse. It was
ridiculous to give up the opera, not because one might possibly be bored
there, but because one must pay for the experiment.
In his sitting-room, the tacit connivance of the inanimate had centred
the lamp-light on a photograph of Alexa Trent, placed, in the obligatory
silver frame, just where, as memory officiously reminded him, Margaret
Aubyn's picture had long throned in its stead. Miss Trent's features
cruelly justified the usurpation. She had the kind of beauty that comes of a
happy accord of face and spirit. It is not given to many to have the lips
and eyes of their rarest mood, and some women go through life behind a
mask expressing only their anxiety about the butcher's bill or their
inability to see a joke. With Miss Trent, face and mind had the same high
serious contour. She looked like a throned Justice by some grave
Florentine painter; and it seemed to Glennard that her most salient
attribute, or that at least to which her conduct gave most consistent
expression, was a kind of passionate justice--the intuitive feminine
justness that is so much rarer than a reasoned impartiality.
Circumstances had tragically combined to develop this instinct into a
conscious habit. She had seen more than most girls of the shabby side of
life, of the perpetual tendency of want to cramp the noblest attitude.
Poverty and misfortune had overhung her childhood and she had none of
the pretty delusions about life that are supposed to be the crowning grace
of girlhood. This very competence, which gave her a touching
reasonableness, made Glennard's situation more difficult than if he had
aspired to a princess bred in the purple. Between them they asked so
little-- they knew so well how to make that little do--but they understood
also, and she especially did not for a moment let him forget, that without
that little the future they dreamed of was impossible.
The sight of her photograph quickened Glennard's exasperation. He
THE TOUCHSTONE
8
was sick and ashamed of the part he was playing. He had loved her now
for two years, with the tranquil tenderness that gathers depth and volume
as it nears fulfilment; he knew that she would wait for him--but the
certitude was an added pang. There are times when the constancy of the
woman one cannot marry is almost as trying as that of the woman one
does not want to.
Glennard turned up his reading-lamp and stirred the fire. He had a
long evening before him and he wanted to crowd out thought with action.
He had brought some papers from his office and he spread them out on his
table and squared himself to the task. . . .
It must have been an hour later that he found himself automatically
fitting a key into a locked drawer. He had no more notion than a
somnambulist of the mental process that had led up to this action. He
was just dimly aware of having pushed aside the papers and the heavy calf
volumes that a moment before had bounded his horizon, and of laying in
their place, without a trace of conscious volition, the parcel he had taken
from the drawer.
The letters were tied in packets of thirty or forty. There were a great
many packets. On some of the envelopes the ink was fading; on others,
which bore the English post-mark, it was still fresh. She had been dead
hardly three years, and she had written, at lengthening intervals, to the
last. . . .
He undid one of the earlier packets--little notes written during their
first acquaintance at Hillbridge. Glennard, on leaving college, had begun
life in his uncle's law office in the old university town. It was there that,
at the house of her father, Professor Forth, he had first met the young lady
then chiefly distinguished for having, after two years of a conspicuously
unhappy marriage, returned to the protection of the paternal roof.
Mrs. Aubyn was at that time an eager and somewhat tragic young
woman, of complex mind and undeveloped manners, whom her crude
experience of matrimony had fitted out with a stock of generalizations that
exploded like bombs in the academic air of Hillbridge. In her choice of a
husband she had been fortunate enough, if the paradox be permitted, to
light on one so signally gifted with the faculty of putting himself in the
THE TOUCHSTONE
9
wrong that her leaving him had the dignity of a manifesto--made her, as it
were, the spokeswoman of outraged wifehood. In this light she was
cherished by that dominant portion of Hillbridge society which was least
indulgent to conjugal differences, and which found a proportionate
pleasure in being for once able to feast openly on a dish liberally seasoned
with the outrageous. So much did this endear Mrs. Aubyn to the
university ladies that they were disposed from the first to allow her more
latitude of speech and action than the ill-used wife was generally accorded
in Hillbridge, where misfortune was still regarded as a visitation designed
to put people in their proper place and make them feel the superiority of
their neighbors. The young woman so privileged combined with a kind
of personal shyness an intellectual audacity that was like a deflected
impulse of coquetry: one felt that if she had been prettier she would have
had emotions instead of ideas. She was in fact even then what she had
always remained: a genius capable of the acutest generalizations, but
curiously undiscerning where her personal susceptibilities were concerned.
Her psychology failed her just where it serves most women and one felt
that her brains would never be a guide to her heart. Of all this, however,
Glennard thought little in the first year of their acquaintance. He was at an
age when all the gifts and graces are but so much undiscriminated food to
the ravening egoism of youth. In seeking Mrs. Aubyn's company he was
prompted by an intuitive taste for the best as a pledge of his own
superiority. The sympathy of the cleverest woman in Hillbridge was
balm to his craving for distinction: it was public confirmation of his secret
sense that he was cut out for a bigger place. It must not be understood
that Glennard was vain. Vanity contents itself with the coarsest diet;
there is no palate so fastidious as that of self-distrust. To a youth of
Glennard's aspirations the encouragement of a clever woman stood for the
symbol of all success. Later, when he had begun to feel his way, to gain
a foothold, he would not need such support; but it served to carry him
lightly and easily over what is often a period of insecurity and
discouragement.
It would be unjust, however, to represent his interest in Mrs. Aubyn as
a matter of calculation. It was as instinctive as love, and it missed being
THE TOUCHSTONE
10
love by just such a hair-breadth deflection from the line of beauty as had
determined the curve of Mrs. Aubyn's lips. When they met she had just
published her first novel, and Glennard, who afterward had an ambitious
man's impatience of distinguished women, was young enough to be
dazzled by the semi-publicity it gave her. It was the kind of book that
makes elderly ladies lower their voices and call each other "my dear"
when they furtively discuss it; and Glennard exulted in the superior
knowledge of the world that enabled him to take as a matter of course
sentiments over which the university shook its head. Still more
delightful was it to hear Mrs. Aubyn waken the echoes of academic
drawing-rooms with audacities surpassing those of her printed page. Her
intellectual independence gave a touch of comradeship to their intimacy,
prolonging the illusion of college friendships based on a joyous
interchange of heresies. Mrs. Aubyn and Glennard represented to each
other the augur's wink behind the Hillbridge idol: they walked together in
that light of young omniscience from which fate so curiously excludes
one's elders.
Husbands who are notoriously inopportune, may even die
inopportunely, and this was the revenge that Mr. Aubyn, some two years
after her return to Hillbridge, took upon his injured wife. He died precisely
at the moment when Glennard was beginning to criticise her. It was not
that she bored him; she did what was infinitely worse--she made him feel
his inferiority. The sense of mental equality had been gratifying to his
raw ambition; but as his self-knowledge defined itself, his understanding
of her also increased; and if man is at times indirectly flattered by the
moral superiority of woman, her mental ascendency is extenuated by no
such oblique tribute to his powers. The attitude of looking up is a strain
on the muscles; and it was becoming more and more Glennard's opinion
that brains, in a woman, should be merely the obverse of beauty. To
beauty Mrs. Aubyn could lay no claim; and while she had enough
prettiness to exasperate him by her incapacity to make use of it, she
seemed invincibly ignorant of any of the little artifices whereby women
contrive to palliate their defects and even to turn them into graces. Her
dress never seemed a part of her; all her clothes had an impersonal air, as
摘要:

THETOUCHSTONE1THETOUCHSTONEByEdithWhartonTHETOUCHSTONE2IProfessorJoslin,who,asourreadersaredoubtlessaware,isengagedinwritingthelifeofMrs.Aubyn,asksustostatethathewillbegreatlyindebtedtoanyofthefamousnovelist'sfriendswhowillfurnishhimwithinformationconcerningtheperiodprevioustohercomingtoEngland.Mrs....

收起<<
THE TOUCHSTONE(试金石).pdf

共80页,预览16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!
分类:外语学习 价格:5.9玖币 属性:80 页 大小:279.59KB 格式:PDF 时间:2024-12-26

开通VIP享超值会员特权

  • 多端同步记录
  • 高速下载文档
  • 免费文档工具
  • 分享文档赚钱
  • 每日登录抽奖
  • 优质衍生服务
/ 80
客服
关注