纯真年代(The Age of Innocence)第25-26章_英文原著_外语学习资料

发布时间：2024-11-21

伊迪丝.华顿的代表作。作者把19世纪70年代末80年代初的纽约上流社会比作一个小小的又尖的又滑的金字塔。处在塔顶的三户人家是上流社会的最高阶层,但已处于衰败阶段;中坚力量是名门望族,他们的祖辈都是来自英国或荷兰的富商,早年在殖民地发迹成为有身份地位的人物;塔底的是富有却不显贵的人们。他们多数是内战之后崛起的新富,凭借雄厚的财力通过联姻而跻身上流社会。本书于1921年获得普利策文学奖,是该奖的第一位女性得主。

纯真年代

Edith Wharton

中国出版集团公司

中国对外翻译出版有限公司

图书在版编目(CIP)数据

纯真年代：英文/(美)华顿(Wharton, E.)著. —北京：中国对外翻译出版有限公司，2012.3

(中译经典文库·世界文学名著：英语原著版)Ⅰ .①纯… Ⅱ.①华… Ⅲ.①英语-语言读物②长篇小说－美国－现代 Ⅳ.①H319.4: I

中国版本图书馆CIP数据核字(2012)第022546号

出版发行 / 中国对外翻译出版有限公司

地址 / 北京市西城区车公庄大街甲4号(物华大厦六层)

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封面设计 / 奇文堂·潘峰

排版 / 竹页图文

印刷 / 保定市中画美凯印刷有限公司

经销 / 新华书店北京发行所

规

印

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印格／787×1092毫米 1/32张／8.125次／2012年3月第一版次／2012年3月第一次

ISBN 978-7-5001-3360-5 定价：17.00元

中国对外翻译出版有限公司

出版前言

协エ金』金。〒协

゛ォゝ〒ゴ

。。中ゝ ·

PREFACE

A history of literature is a phylogeny of human beings growing from childhood to adulthood, a spiritual history of masters in litera-ture portraying human spirit with great touch, as well as a thinking history reflecting human conscience and emotional introspection. Reading these immortal classics is like browsing through our history, while communicating across time and space with great writers into thinking and feelings. It bestows spiritual nutrition as well as aesthetic relish upon readers from generation to generation.

China Translation and Publishing Corporation (CTPC), with a publishing mission oriented toward readings of Chinese and foreign languages learning as well as cultural exchange, has been dedicated to providing spiritual feasts which not only optimize language aptitude but also nourish heart and soul. Along with the development of Internet and digital publication, readers have easier access to reading classic works. Nevertheless, well-designed printed books remain favorite readings for most readers.

“After perusing three hundred Tang poems, a learner can at least utter some verses, if cannot proficiently write a poem.” That is true for learning Chinese, more so for learning a foreign language. To master a language, we must read comprehensively, not only for taking in lingual competence, but also for catching the unique cultural essence implied in the language. “World Literary Classics (English originals)” can surely serve as a series of readings with everlasting edifying significance.

作家与作品

· ココ。《。《《 · 《名ヅ〒祭コ金。 · 名名

· 。コ』ゑエコ · ゐポギ介ゑ

iii

〒コギコ〒 · ) · ㎎ゑ · · ㏎』 · 祭。。コ。ゑコギ。』ゑ』 · ッ

· ギ。コ。ッコ。。ヂ〓㎝や孳。コ。ォ啟〒 ·

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18 161117212834394554626978838997Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Chapter 21 Chapter 22 Chapter 23 Chapter 24 Chapter 25 Chapter 26 Chapter 27 Chapter 28 Chapter 29 Chapter 30 Chapter 31 Chapter 32 Chapter 33 Chapter 34

v 122 130 139 150 156 164 168 175 184 190 195 201 208 218 225 237 104 112

Chapter 25

once more on the boat, and in the presence of others, Archer felt a tranquillity of spirit that surprised as much as it sustained him. The day, according to any current valuation, had been a rather ridiculous failure; he had not so much as touched Madame Olenska’s hand with his lips, or extracted one word from her that gave promise of further opportunities. Nevertheless, for a man sick with unsatis ed love, and parting for an inde nite period from the object of his passion, he felt himself almost humiliatingly calm and comforted. It was the perfect balance she had held between their loyalty to others and their honesty to themselves that had so stirred and yet tranquillised him; a balance not artfully calculated, as her tears and her falterings showed, but resulting naturally from her unabashed sincerity. It lled him with a tender awe, now the danger was over, and made him thank the fates that no personal vanity, no sense of playing a part before sophisticated witnesses, had tempted him to tempt her. Even after they had clasped hands for goodbye at the Fall River station, and he had

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turned away alone, the conviction remained with him of having saved out of their meeting much more than he had sacri ced.He wandered back to the club, and went and sat alone in the deserted library, turning and turning over in his thoughts every separate second of their hours together. It was dear to him, and it grew more clear under closer scrutiny, that if she should nally decide on returning to Europe — returning to her husband — it would not be because her old life tempted her, even on the new terms offered. No: she would go only if she felt herself becoming a temptation to Archer, a temptation to fall away from the standard they had both set up. Her choice would be to stay near him as long as he did not ask her to come nearer; and it depended on himself to keep her just there, safe but secluded. In the train these thoughts were still with him. They enclosed him in a kind of golden haze, through which the faces about him looked remote and indistinct: he had a feeling that if he spoke to his fellow-travellers they would not understand what he was saying. In this state of abstraction he found himself, the following morning, waking to the reality of a sti ing September day in New York. The heat-withered faces in the long train streamed past him, and he continued to stare at them through the same golden blur; but suddenly, as he left the station, one of the faces detached itself, came closer and forced itself upon his consciousness. It was, as he instantly recalled, the face of the young man he had seen, the day before, passing out of the Parker House, and had noted as not conforming to type, as not having an American hotel face. The same thing struck him now; and again he became aware of a dim stir of former associations. The young man stood looking about him with the dazed air of the foreigner ung upon the harsh mercies of American travel; then he advanced toward Archer, lifted his hat, and said in English: ‘Surely, Monsieur, we met in London?’‘Ah, to be sure: in London!’ Archer grasped his hand with curiosity and sympathy. ‘So you did get here, after all?’ he exclaimed, casting a wondering eye on the astute and haggard little countenance of young Carfry’s French tutor.‘Oh, I got here — yes,’ M. Rivière smiled with drawn lips. ‘But not for long; I return the day after tomorrow.’ He stood grasping his light valise in one neatly gloved hand, and gazing anxiously, perplexedly, almost appealingly, into Archer’s face.

170‘I wonder, Monsieur, since I’ve had the good luck to run across you, if I might — ’‘I was just going to suggest it: come to luncheon, won’t you? Down town, I mean: if you’ll look me up in my of ce I’ll take you to a very decent restaurant in that quarter.’M. Rivière was visibly touched and surprised. ‘You’re too kind. But I was only going to ask if you would tell me how to reach some sort of conveyance. There are no porters, and no one here seems to listen — ’‘I know: our American stations must surprise you. When you ask for a porter they give you chewing-gum. But if you’ll come along I’ll extricate you; and you must really lunch with me, you know.’The young man, after a just perceptible hesitation, replied, with profuse thanks, and in a tone that did not carry complete conviction, that he was already engaged; but when they had reached the comparative reassurance of the street he asked if he might call that afternoon.Archer, at ease in the midsummer leisure of the of ce, xed an hour and scribbled his address, which the Frenchman pocketed with reiterated thanks and a wide ourish of his hat. A horse-car received him, and Archer walked away.Punctually at the hour M. Rivière appeared, shaved, smoothed out, but still unmistakably drawn and serious. Archer was alone in his of ce, and the young man, before accepting the seat he proffered, began abruptly: ‘I believe I saw you, sir, yesterday in Boston.’The statement was insigni cant enough, and Archer was about to frame an assent when his words were checked by something mysterious yet illuminating in his visitor’s insistent gaze.‘It is extraordinary, very extraordinary,’ M. Rivière continued, ‘that we should have met in the circumstances in which I nd myself.’‘What circumstances?’ Archer asked, wondering a little crudely if he needed money.M. Rivière continued to study him with tentative eyes. ‘I have come, not to look for employment, as I spoke of doing when we last met, but on a special mission — ’‘A — !’ Archer exclaimed. In a ash the two meetings had connected themselves in his mind. He paused to take in the situation thus suddenly lighted up for him, and M. Rivière also remained silent, as if aware that what he had said was enough.

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‘A special mission,’ Archer at length repeated.The young Frenchman, opening his palms, raised them slightly, and the two men continued to look at each other across the of ce-desk till Archer roused himself to say: ‘Do sit down’; whereupon M. Rivière bowed, took a distant chair, and again waited.‘It was about this mission that you wanted to consult me?’ Archer nally asked.M. Rivière bent his head. ‘Not in my own behalf: on that score I — I have fully dealt with myself. I should like — if I may — to speak to you about the Countess Olenska.’Archer had known for the last few minutes that the words were coming; but when they came they sent the blood rushing to his temples as if he had been caught by a bent-back branch in a thicket. ‘And on whose behalf,’ he said, ‘do you wish to do this?’ M. Rivière met the question sturdily. ‘Well — I might say hers, if it did not sound like a liberty. Shall I say instead: on behalf of abstract justice?’Archer considered him ironically. ‘In other words: you are Count Olenski’s messenger?’He saw his blush more darkly re ected in M. Riviere’s sallow countenance. ‘Not to you, Monsieur. If I come to you, it is on quite other grounds.’‘What right have you, in the circumstances, to be on any other ground?’ Archer retorted. ‘If you’re an emissary you’re an emissary.’ The young man considered. ‘My mission is over: as far as the Countess Olenska goes, it has failed.’‘I can’t help that,’ Archer rejoined on the same note of irony. ‘No: but you can help — ’ M. Rivière paused, turned his hat about in his still carefully gloved hands, looked into its lining and then back at Archer’s face. ‘You can help, Monsieur, I am convinced, to make it equally a failure with her family.’Archer pushed back his chair and stood up. ‘Well — and by God I will!’ he exclaimed. He stood with his hands in his pockets, staring down wrathfully at the little Frenchman, whose face, though he too had risen, was still an inch or two below the line of Archer’s eyes. M. Rivière paled to his normal hue: paler than that his complexion could hardly turn.‘Why the devil,’ Archer explosively continued, ‘should you have

172thought — since I suppose you’re appealing to me on the ground of my relationship to Madame Olenska — that I should take a view contrary to the rest of her family?’The change of expression in M. Rivière’s face was for a time his only answer. His look passed from timidity to absolute distress: for a young man of his usually resourceful mien it would have been dif cult to appear more disarmed and defenceless. ‘Oh, Monsieur — ’‘I can’t imagine,’ Archer continued, ‘why you should have come to me when there are others so much nearer to the Countess; still less why you thought I should be more accessible to the arguments I suppose you were sent over with.’M. Rivière took this onslaught with a disconcerting humility. ‘The arguments I want to present to you, Monsieur, are my own and not those I was sent over with.’‘Then I see still less reason for listening to them.’M. Rivière again looked into his hat, as if considering whether these last words were not a suf ciently broad hint to put it on and be gone. Then he spoke with sudden decision. ‘Monsieur — will you tell me one thing? Is it my ght to be here that you question? Or do you perhaps believe the whole matter to be already closed?’His quiet insistence made Archer feel the clumsiness of his own bluster. M. Rivière had succeeded in imposing himself: Archer, reddening slightly, dropped into his chair again, and signed to the young man to be seated.‘I beg your pardon: but why isn’t the matter closed?’M. Rivière gazed back at him with anguish. ‘You do, then, agree with the rest of the family that, in face of the new proposals I have brought, it is hardly possible for Madame Olenska not to return to her husband?’‘Good God!’ Archer exclaimed; and his visitor gave out a low murmur of con rmation.‘Before seeing her, I saw — at Count Olenski’s request — Mr Lovell Mingott, with whom I had several talks before going to Boston. I understand that he represents his mother’s view; and that Mrs Manson Mingott’s in uence is great throughout her family.’Archer sat silent, with the sense of clinging to the edge of a sliding precipice. The discovery that he had been excluded from a share in these negotiations, and even from the knowledge that they were on foot, caused him a surprise hardly dulled by the acuter wonder of what he was learning.

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He saw in a ash that if the family had ceased to consult him it was because some deep tribal instinct warned them that he was no longer on their side; and he recalled, with a start of comprehension, a remark of May’s during their drive home from Mrs Manson Mingott’s on the day of the Archery Meeting: ‘Perhaps, after all, Ellen would be happier with her husband.’Even in the tumult of new discoveries Archer remembered his indignant exclamation, and the fact that since then his wife had never named Madame Olenska to him. Her careless allusion had no doubt been the straw held up to see which way the wind blew; the result had been reported to the family, and thereafter Archer had been tacitly omitted from their counsels. He admired the tribal discipline which made May bow to this decision. She would not have done so, he knew, had her conscience protested; but she probably shared the family view that Madame Olenska would be better off as an unhappy wife than as a separated one, and that there was no use in discussing the case with Newland, who had an awkward way of suddenly not seeming to take the most fundamental things for granted.Archer looked up and met his visitor’s anxious gaze. ‘Don’t you know, Monsieur — is it possible you don’t know — that the family begin to doubt if they have the right to advise the Countess to refuse her husband’s last proposals?’‘The proposals you brought?’‘The proposals I brought.’It was on Archer’s lips to exclaim that whatever he knew or did not know was no concern of M. Rivière’s; but something in the humble and yet courageous tenacity of M. Rivière’s gaze made him reject this conclusion, and he met the young man’s question with another. ‘What is your object in speaking to me of this?’He had not to wait a moment for the answer. ‘To beg you, Monsieur — to beg you with all the force I’m capable of — not to let her go back. — Oh, don’t let her!’ M. Rivière exclaimed. Archer looked at him with increasing astonishment. There was no mistaking the sincerity of his distress or the strength of his determination: he had evidently resolved to let everything go by the board but the supreme need of thus putting himself on record. Archer considered.‘May I ask,’ he said at length, ‘if this is the line you took with the Countess Olenska?’M. Rivière reddened, but his eyes did not falter. ‘No, Monsieur: I

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accepted my mission in good faith. I really believed — for reasons I need not trouble you with — that it would be better for Madame Olenska to recover her situation, her fortune, the social consideration that her husband’s standing gives her.’‘So I supposed: you could hardly have accepted such a mission otherwise.’‘I should not have accepted it.’‘Well, then — ?’ Archer paused again, and their eyes met in another protracted scrutiny.‘Ah, Monsieur, after I had seen her, after I had listened to her, I knew she was better off here.’‘You knew?’‘Monsieur, I discharged my mission faithfully: I put the Count’s arguments, I stated his offers, without adding any comment of my own. The Countess was good enough to listen patiently; she carried her goodness so far as to see me twice; she considered impartially all I had come to say. And it was in the course of these two talks that I changed my mind, that I came to see things differently.’‘May I ask what led to this change?’‘Simply seeing the change in her,’ M. Rivière replied. ‘The change in her? Then you knew her before?’The young man’s colour again rose. ‘I used to see her in her husband’s house. I have known Count Olenski for many years. You can imagine that he would not have sent a stranger on such a mission.’Archer’s gaze, wandering away to the blank walls of the of ce, rested on a hanging calendar surmounted by the rugged features of the President of the United States. That such a conversation should be going on anywhere within the millions of square miles subject to his rule seemed as strange as anything that the imagination could invent. ‘The change — what sort of change?’‘Ah, Monsieur, if I could tell you!’ M. Rivière paused. ‘Tenez — the discovery, I suppose, of what I’d never thought of before: that she’s an American. And that if you’re an American of her kind — of your kind — things that are accepted in certain other societies, or at least put up with as part of a general convenient give-and-take — become unthinkable, simply unthinkable. If Madame Olenska’s relations understood what these things were, their opposition to her returning would no doubt be as unconditional

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as her own; but they seem to regard her husband’s wish to have her back as proof of an irresistible longing for domestic life.’ M. Rivière paused, and then added: ‘Whereas it’s far from being as simple as that.’Archer looked back to the President of the United States, and then down at his desk and at the papers scattered on it. For a second or two he could not trust himself to speak. During this interval he heard M. Rivière’s chair pushed back, and was aware that the young man had risen. When he glanced up again he saw that his visitor was as moved as himself.‘Thank you,’ Archer said simply.‘There’s nothing to thank me for, Monsieur; it is I, rather — ’ M. Rivière broke off, as if speech for him too were dif cult. ‘I should like, though,’ he continued in a rmer voice, ‘to add one thing. You asked me if I was in Count Olenski’s employ. I am at this moment: I returned to him, a few months ago, for reasons of private necessity such as may happen to any one who has persons, ill and older persons, dependent on him. But from the moment that I have taken the step of coming here to say these things to you I consider myself discharged, and I shall tell him so on my return, and give him the reasons. That’s all, Monsieur.’M. Rivière bowed and drew back a step.‘Thank you,’ Archer said again, as their hands met.

Chapter 26

every year on the fteenth of October Fifth Avenue opened its shutters, unrolled its carpets and hung up its triple layer of window-curtains.By the rst of November this household ritual was over, and society had begun to look about and take stock of itself. By the fteenth the season was in full blast, Opera and theatres were putting forth their new attractions, dinner-engagements were accumulating, and dates for dances being xed. And punctually at about this time Mrs Archer always said that New York was very much changed.Observing it from the lofty stand, point of a non-participant, she was

176able, with the help of Mr Sillerton Jackson and Miss Sophy, to trace each new crack in its surface, and all the strange weeds pushing up between the ordered rows of social vegetables. It had been one of the amusements of Archer’s youth to wait for this annual pronouncement of his mother’s, and to hear her enumerate the minute signs of disintegration that his careless gaze had overlooked. For New York, to Mrs Archer’s mind, never changed without changing for the worse; and in this view Miss Sophy Jackson heartily concurred.Mr Sillerton Jackson, as became a man of the world, suspended his judgment and listened with an amused impartiality to the lamentations of the ladies. But even he never denied that New York had changed; and Newland Archer, in the winter of the second year of his marriage, was himself obliged to admit that if it had not actually changed it was certainly changing.These points had been raised, as usual, at Mrs Archer’s Thanksgiving dinner. At the date when she was of cially enjoined to give thanks for the blessings of the year it was her habit to take a mournful though not embittered stock of her world, and wonder what there was to be thankful for. At any rate, not the state of society; society, if it could be said to exist, was rather a spectacle on which to call down Biblical imprecations — and in fact, every one knew what the Reverend Dr Ashmore meant when he chose a text from Jeremiah (chap. II, verse 25) for his Thanksgiving sermon. Dr Ashmore, the new Rector of St Matthew’s, had been chosen because he was very ‘advanced’; his sermons were considered bold in thought and novel in language. When he fulminated against fashionable society he always spoke of its ‘trend’; and to Mrs Archer it was terrifying and yet fascinating to feel herself part of a community that was trending.‘There’s no doubt that Dr Ashmore is right: there is a marked trend,’ she said, as if it were something visible and measurable, like a crack in a house.‘It was odd, though, to preach about it on Thanksgiving,’ Miss Jackson opened; and her hostess drily rejoined: ‘Oh, he means us to give thanks for what’s left.’Archer had been wont to smile at these annual vaticinations of his mother’s; but this year even he was obliged to acknowledge, as he listened to an enumeration of the changes, that the ‘trend’ was visible.‘The extravagance in dress — ’ Miss Jackson began. ‘Sillerton took me to the rst night of the Opera, and I can only tell you that Jane Merry’s

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