【英文读物】THE MARK ON THE WALL.docx

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1、【英文读物】THE MARK ON THE WALLTHE MARK ON THE WALL Perhaps it was the middle of January in the present year that I first looked up and saw the mark on the wall. In order to fix a date it is necessary to remember what one saw. So now I think of the fire; the steady film of yellow light upon the page of m

2、y book; the three chrysanthemums in the round glass bowl on the mantelpiece. Yes, it must have been the winter time, and we had just finished our tea, for I remember that I was smoking a cigarette when I looked up and saw the mark on the wall for the first time. I looked up through the smoke of my c

3、igarette and my eye lodged for a moment upon the burning coals, and that old fancy of the crimson flag flapping from the castle tower came into my mind, and I thought of the cavalcade of red knights riding up the side of the black rock. Rather to my relief the sight of the mark interrupted the fancy

4、, for it is an old fancy, an automatic fancy, made as a child perhaps. The mark was a small round mark, black upon the white wall, about six or seven inches above the mantelpiece. How readily our thoughts swarm upon a new object, lifting it a little way, as ants carry a blade of straw so feverishly,

5、 and then leave it . . . . . . If that mark was made by a nail, it cant have been for a picture, it must have been for a miniaturethe miniature of a lady with white powdered curls, powder-dusted cheeks, and lips like red carnations. A fraud of course, for the people who had this house before us woul

6、d have chosen pictures in that wayan old picture for an old room. That is the sort of people they werevery interesting people, and I think of them so often, in such queer places, because one will never see them again, never know what happened next. She wore a flannel dog collar round her throat, and

7、 he drew posters for an oatmeal company, and they wanted to leave this house because they wanted to change their style of furniture, so he said, and he was in process of saying that in his opinion art should have ideas behind it when we were torn asunder, as one is torn from the old lady about to po

8、ur out tea and the young man about to hit the tennis ball in the back garden of the suburban villa as one rushes past in the train. But as for that mark, Im not sure about it; I dont believe it was made by a nail after all; its too big, too round for that. I might get up, but if I got up and looked

9、at it, ten to one I shouldnt be able to say for certain; because once a things done, no one ever knows how it happened. O dear me, the mystery of life! The inaccuracy of thought! The ignorance of humanity! To show how very little control of our possessions we havewhat an accidental affair this livin

10、g is after all our civilisationlet me just count over a few of the things lost in one lifetime, beginning, for that seems always the most mysterious of all loseswhat cat would gnaw, what rat would nibblethree pale blue canisters of book-binding tools? Then there were the bird cages, the iron hoops,

11、the steel skates, the Queen Anne coal-scuttle, the bagatelle board, the hand organall gone, and jewels too. Opals and emeralds, they lie about the root of turnips. What a scraping paring affair it is to be sure! The wonder is that Ive any clothes on my back, that I sit surrounded by solid furniture

12、at this moment. Why, if one wants to compare life to anything, one must liken it to being blown through the Tube at fifty miles an hourlanding at the other end without a single hair pin in ones hair! Shot out at the feet of God entirely naked! Tumbling head over heels in the asphodel meadows like br

13、own paper parcels pitched down a shoot in the post office! With ones hair flying back like the tail of a race horse. Yes, that seems to express the rapidity of life, the perpetual waste and repair; all so casual, all so haphazard. . . .But after life. The slow pulling down of thick green stalks so t

14、hat the cup of the flower as it turns over deluges one with purple and red light. Why, after all, should one not be born there as one is born here, helpless, speechless, unable to focus ones eyesight, groping at the roots of the grass, at the toes of the Giants? As for saying which are trees, and wh

15、ich are men and women, or whether there are such things, that one wont be in a condition to do for fifty years or so. There will be nothing but spaces of light and dark, intersected by thick stalks, and rather higher up perhaps, rose-shaped blots of an indistinct colourdim pinks and blueswhich will,

16、 as time goes on, become more definite, becomeI dont know what. But no. I refuse to be beaten. I will not move. I will not recognise her. See, she fades already. I am very nearly rid of her and her insinuations, which I can hear quite distinctly. Yet she has about her the pathos of all people who wi

17、sh to compromise. And why should I resent the fact that she has a few books in her house, a picture or two? But what I really resent is that she resents melife being an affair of attack and defence after all. Another time I will have it out with her, not now. She must go now. The tree outside the wi

18、ndow taps very gently on the pane. I want to think quietly, calmly, spaciously, never to be interrupted, never to have to rise from my chair, to slip easily from one thing to another, without any sense of hostility, or obstacle. I want to sink deeper and deeper, away from the surface, with its hard

19、separate facts. To steady myself, let me catch hold of the first idea that passes. Shakespeare. Well, he will do as well as another. A man who sat himself solidly in an arm-chair, and looked into the fire, soA shower of ideas fell perpetually from some very high Heaven down through his mind. He lean

20、t his forehead on his hand, and people looking in through the open door, for this scene is supposed to take place on a summers evening,But how dull this is, this historical fiction! It doesnt interest me at all. I wish I could hit upon a pleasant track of thought, a track indirectly reflecting credi

21、t upon myself, for those are the pleasantest thoughts, and very frequent even in the minds of modest mouse-coloured people, who believe genuinely that they dislike to hear their own praises. They are not thoughts directly praising oneself; that is the beauty of them; they are thoughts like this. And

22、 then I came into the room. They were discussing botany. I said how Id seen a flower growing on a dust heap on the site of an old house in Kingsway. The seed, I said, must have been sown in the reign of Charles the First. What flowers grew in the reign of Charles the First? I asked(but I dont rememb

23、er the answer). Tall flowers with purple tassels to them perhaps. And so it goes on. All the time Im dressing up the figure of myself in my own mind lovingly, stealthily, not openly adoring it, for if I did that, I should catch myself out, and stretch my hand at once for a book in self protection. I

24、ndeed, it is curious how instinctively one protects the image of oneself from idolatry or any other handling that could make it ridiculous, or too unlike the original to be believed in any longer. Or is it not so very curious after all? It is a matter of great importance. Suppose the looking glass s

25、mashes, the image disappears, and the romantic figure with the green of forest depths all about it is there no longer, but only that shell of a person which is seen by other peoplewhat an airless shallow, bald, prominent world it becomes! A world not to be lived in. As we face each other in omnibuse

26、s and underground railways we are looking into the mirror; that accounts for the expression in our vague and almost glassy eyes. And the novelists in future will realise more and more the importance of these reflections, for of course there is not one reflection but an almost infinite number; those

27、are the depths they will explore, those the phantoms they will pursue, leaving the description of reality more and more out of their stories, taking a knowledge of it for granted, as the Greeks did and Shakespeare perhaps; but these generalisations are very worthless. The military sound of the word

28、is enough. It recalls leading articles, cabinet ministersa whole class of things indeed which as a child one thought the thing itself, the standard thing, the real thing, from which one could not depart save at the risk of nameless damnation. Generalisations bring back somehow Sunday in London, Sund

29、ay afternoon walks, Sunday luncheons, and also ways of speaking of the dead, clothes and habitslike the habit of sitting all together in one room until a certain hour, although nobody liked it. There was a rule for everything. The rule for tablecloths at that particular period was that they should b

30、e made of tapestry with little yellow compartments marked upon them, such as you may see in photographs of the carpets in the corridors of the royal palaces. Tablecloths of a different kind were not real tablecloths. How shocking and yet how wonderful it was to discover that these real things, Sunda

31、y luncheons, Sunday walks, country houses, and tablecloths were not entirely real, were indeed half phantoms, and the damnation which visited the disbeliever in them was only a sense of illegitimate freedom. What now takes the place of those things, I wonder, those real standard things? Men perhaps,

32、 should you be a woman; the masculine point of view which governs our lives, which sets the standard, which establishes Whitakers Table of Precedency, which has become, I suppose, since the war half a phantom to many men and women, which soon one may hope will be laughed into the dustbin where the p

33、hantoms go, the mahogany sideboards and Landseer prints, Gods and Devils, Hell and so forth, leaving us all with an intoxicating sense of illegitimate freedomif freedom exists. In certain lights, that mark on the wall seems actually to project from the wall. Nor is it entirely circular. I cannot be

34、sure, but it seems to cast a perceptible shadow, suggesting that if I ran my finger down that strip of the wall it would at a certain point mount and descend a small tumulus, a smooth tumulus like those barrows on the South Downs which are, they say, either tombs or camps. Of the two I should prefer

35、 them to be tombs, desiring melancholy like most English people and finding it natural at the end of a walk to think of the bones stretched beneath the turf. There must be some book about it. Some antiquary must have dug up those bones and given them a name. What sort of man is an antiquary, I wonde

36、r? Retired colonels for the most part, I daresay, leading parties of aged labourers to the top here, examining clods of earth and stone, and getting into correspondence with the neighbouring clergy, which being opened at breakfast time gives them a feeling of importance, and the comparison of arrowh

37、eads necessitates cross country journeys to the county towns, an agreeable necessity both to them and to their elderly wives, who wish to make plum jam, or to clean out the study, and have every reason for keeping that great question of the camp or the tomb in perpetual suspension, while the Colonel

38、 himself feels agreeably philosophic in accumulating evidence on both sides of the question. It is true that he does finally incline to believe in the camp; and, being opposed, casts all his arrowheads into one scale, and being still further opposed, indites a pamphlet which he is about to read at t

39、he quarterly meeting of the local society when a stroke lays him low, and his last conscious thoughts are not of wire or child, but of the camp and that arrow-head there which is now in the case at the local museum, together with the hand of a Chinese murderess, a handful of Elizabethan nails, a gre

40、at many Tudor clay pipes a piece of Roman pottery, and the wine-glass that Nelson drank out ofproving I really dont know what. No, no, nothing is proved, nothing is known. And if I were to get up at this very moment and ascertain that the mark on the wall is reallywhat shall we say?the head of a gig

41、antic old nail, driven in two hundred years ago which has now, owing to the patient attrition of many generations of housemaids, revealed its head above the coat of paint, and is taking its first view of modern life in the sight of a white-walled fire-lit room, what should I gain? Knowledge? Matter

42、for further speculation? I can think sitting still as well as standing up. And what is knowledge? What are our learned men save the descendants of witches and hermits who crouched in caves and in woods brewing herbs, interrogating shrew-mice, and writing down the language of the stars? And the less

43、we honour them as our superstitions dwindle and our respect for beauty and health of mind increases. . . . . Yes, one could imagine a very pleasant world. A quiet spacious world, with the flowers so red and blue in the open fields. A world without professors or specialists or house-keepers with the

44、profiles of policemen, a world which one could slice with ones thought as a fish slices the water with his fin, grazing the stems of the water-lilies, and hanging suspended over nests of white sea eggs. . . . . . How peaceful it is down here, rooted into the centre of the world and gazing up through

45、 the gray waters, with their sudden gleams of light, and their reflectionsIf it were not for Whitakers Almanackif it were not for the Table of Precedency! I must jump up and see for myself what that mark on the wall really isa nail, a rose-leaf, a crack in the wood? Here is Nature once more at her o

46、ld game of self-preservation. This train of thought, she perceives, is threatening mere waste of energy, even some collision with reality, for who will ever be able to lift a finger against Whitakers Table of Precedency? The Archbishop of Canterbury is followed by the Lord High Chancellor; the Lord

47、High Chancellor is followed by the Archbishop of York. Everybody follows somebody, such is the philosophy of Whitaker; and the great thing is to know who follows whom. Whitaker knows, and let that, so Nature counsels, comfort you, instead of enraging you; and if you cant be comforted, if you must sh

48、atter this hour of peace, think of the mark on the wall. I understand Natures gameher prompting to take action as a way of ending any thought that threatens to excite or to pain. Hence, I suppose, comes our slight contempt for men of action, men, we assume, who dont think. Still, theres no harm in p

49、utting a full stop to ones disagreeable thoughts by looking at a mark on the wall. Indeed, now that I have fixed my eyes upon it, I feel I have grasped a plank in the sea; I feel a satisfying sense of reality which at once turns the two Archbishops and the Lord High Chancellor to the shadows of shades. Here is something definite, something real. Thus, waking from a midnight dream of horror one hastily turns on the light and lies quiescent, worshipping the chest of drawers, worshipping soli