Chapter 4 third chapter

According to posters plastered in the hallway, "Arabella's Ordeal" took just one day from preview to first performance.However, it was not easy for the writer-director to find time to concentrate on his work.As in the previous afternoon, she was troubled by how to bring the actors together for the scene.That night, like any little boy haunted by homesickness, Jackson, the disapproving father who played Arabella, wet the sheets; The sheets and pajamas were sent to the laundry room downstairs, and they were washed by hand under Betty's supervision, and Betty also followed the master's instructions, putting on a cold and firm look.Although this was done to let him have a long memory, let him remember that making mistakes in the future will bring him trouble and labor; but he himself did not take all this as punishment.But he must have thought it a reproach when he stood in front of the chest-high stone sink, with soapy water running over his bare arms and soaking his rolled-up shirtsleeves, and having to pick up dead, wet sheets— —He felt that the catastrophe had paralyzed his will.During the intermission, Briony came down to see him a few times, but Betty wouldn't let her help.So, Jackson, who had never washed a thing in his life, took two pieces of clothing and kept washing, rinsing, and repeatedly wringing them with a tumble dryer; after finishing, he ate something with a glass of water at the kitchen table Bread and butter, shivering for fifteen minutes - that's how he consumed two hours of rehearsal.

When Hardman came in to drink his pint of ale in the morning heat, Betty complained to him that it was all right for her to prepare a special roast dinner on such a summer day, but she personally thought that adding to the male The punishment on the child is too severe; if it were her, she would rather scrape the child's butt loudly a few times, and then wash the sheets herself.If so, it would be exactly what Briony wanted, because the morning rehearsal time was slipping away.So when her mother came downstairs to check on the mission, everyone couldn't help but breathe a sigh of relief, and Mrs. Tullis felt a little guilty; so when Jackson timidly asked if he could go to the pool with his brother While swimming, his request was granted immediately.Meanwhile, Briony's protests were ignored, as if she were inflicting unpleasant torment on the poor helpless little one.That's it, they went for a swim, and then it was time for lunch.

The rehearsal continued in the absence of Jackson, but the worst thing was that the main part of the first act of Arabella's farewell could not be rehearsed well-it turned out that Pierrot had been secretly worried about the fate of his brother downstairs, so that Unable to commit himself to the role - a cowardly foreign earl.In his view, what happened to Jackson will happen to him sooner or later.So, he kept patronizing the bathroom at the end of the corridor. Once, when Briony returned from a visit in the laundry room, Pierrot asked her: "Has he been boarded?" "not yet."

Like his brother, Pierrot has a knack for making every line that comes out of his mouth mean nothing.He draws out his voice, reciting every word like roll call: "Do you—think—you—can—escape—from—my—palm—?" The words are quite clear and accurate. "It's a question," Briony interrupted him just in time, "don't you know? Questions should end with a rising intonation." "what?" "Here, that line you just said. Your tone should go from low to high. It's a question." He swallowed hard, took a deep breath and tried again.This time, each word in the roll call went up a half step one by one.

"End! You should have a rising intonation at the end!" So the roll call was carried out again, each word maintained a single tone, until the last syllable, the original range was suddenly interrupted, and a falsetto appeared in the boy's throat. Laura also came to the nursery in the morning.She has always regarded herself as an adult in her heart, and her clothes are inevitably mature: a pair of pleated flannel trousers, a short-sleeved cashmere sweater, and a string of light yellow pearl necklaces softly wrapped around her neck-although the pearls are small, they are beautiful. There was a jadeite hoop around the nape of the neck, and three silver bracelets dangled loosely on the freckled wrists.Plus, wherever she went, the air around her smelled of rosewater.Although she has tried her best not to look condescending, in fact this style is more popular.She calmly responded to Briony's suggestion, matching her lines with the most expressive expressions (strange, she seemed to memorize them all overnight), she gently encouraged her brother, but faced with The director didn't mean to overstep the mark at all.There was no shaggy, childish fanaticism about her—it was as if Cecilia, or their mother, was willing to spend time with the children, to play a part in a play, without showing an iota of boredom.The night before, Briony had shown her cousins ​​the show's ticket booth and donation box -- and the twins fought for a fancier role.But Laura just folded her arms and smiled politely at Briony in compliment; in fact the half smile was too obscure to see through the sarcasm behind it.

"How marvelous! How clever you are, Briony! Did you really come up with all this yourself?" Briony couldn't help wondering if there was something ulterior motive behind her cousin's perfect manners.Maybe Lola was counting on her twin brother to just innocently screw up the show, while she herself just had to stand at a distance and wait for the good show to unfold. All these unverifiable suspicions, combined with Jackson's lingering in the laundry room, Pierrot's dismal performance, and the scorching morning heat weighed heavily on Briony.So when she found Danny Hardman watching at the door, she was upset and sent him away.She could not see through Lola's detached indifference, nor could she coax Pierrot into cadenced tones.So, when she suddenly found herself alone in the nursery, she was greatly relieved.It turned out that at this point Lola thought it necessary to go back to the room and re-do her hair, and her brother wandered down the hall again, to the bathroom or something.

Briony sat on the floor with her back against a tall built-in toy cabinet, fanning her face with the script she was holding.The house was extremely quiet—there was no sound of people around, no noisy children playing football downstairs, no gurgling water in the water pipes, and the flies trapped between the two window panes gave up buzzing and struggling.Outside the window, the birdsong that was originally flowing like a stream also evaporated and disappeared as if it had been dried by the heat.Briony stretched out her knees so that her eyes were filled with the white tulle of her dress, and the familiar and lovely folds of her knees - she should have changed her dress in the morning - it occurred to her I am too childish, I should pay more attention to my appearance like Laura - but how much effort would it take.The silence began to hiss in her ears, and the vision blurred in front of her eyes—the hands on her lap looked huge and distant, as if they looked from far away.She raised one hand, flexed and stretched her fingers, wondering how this thing, this grasping tool, which looks like a meat spider growing on her arm, can be owned by her and obey her command. ? Or does it have a little life of its own? She curls her finger, then straightens it.The most amazing thing is the moment when it will not move, her will will take effect at that moment.It's like a surging ocean wave; it's not the first time she has thought about this problem, and she even feels that if she can find herself in the crest of the wave, then she will understand the mystery of herself and know the real truth in her body. power in power.So she raised her index finger in front of her face, stared at it hard, and ordered it to move.The index finger didn't move, because she was pretending, not taking it seriously; because wanting it to move, or preparing to let it move, was not the same as actually moving it.When she finally flexed her index finger, the movement seemed to be happening from inside the finger, rather than from some area of ​​her brain.But when did she know that she should move her index finger? When did she know that she should move her finger? This is not an easy problem to solve, but the answer can only be one of two.Her fingers looked so flawless, but she knew that behind the smooth and continuous fabric structure, there was her real self-was it her soul? final order.

These thoughts came to her so often that she was used to them, and they were just as satisfying as looking at her own beautifully formed laps.Her knees match symmetrically and can be retracted freely.Her whimsical thoughts are always emerging: Does everyone really exist as she does? For example, does her sister have such a sense of self-awareness, does she value herself as much as Briony? Do Cecilia Is the feeling of being as real and vivid as being Briony? Behind the turbulent waves, is her sister also hiding a real self? Also, has my sister spent time thinking about this issue, Have you held up a finger in front of your face? Have Papa, Betty, Hardman, and everyone else considered such a question? If the answer is yes, then this world, this world Society, how complicated it must be! Two billion people have two billion voices, and two billion thoughts. Everyone pursues life so passionately, thinking that they are the only existence in the world, but in fact no one is Unique.People get lost in not getting the point.But if the answer is no, isn't Briony living in a machine? Although these "machines" are so smart and pleasing on the outside, they lack her independent feeling inside.Isn't that world too sinister, too lonely, and too remote? Although this somewhat disrupted her sense of organization, Briony still thinks that everyone probably has their own thinking just like her.But she just knew it, and didn't have a vivid experience.

Of course, the morning rehearsal had also greatly disrupted Briony's sense of order and made her feel very uncomfortable.The world she worked so hard to create with such clear and perfect sentences is actually disturbed by a few chaotic minds and a bunch of trivial things; moreover, time seems to be at her disposal—writing on paper Sometimes, it is easy to divide the time into scenes and scenes; but now she can only watch the time go by irreparably.Maybe Jackson wouldn't be brought to the rehearsal until after lunch, but Leon and his friends were supposed to be back in the evening, maybe earlier; the show was supposed to start exactly at seven o'clock.But so far there hasn't been a decent rehearsal, the twins don't even talk about acting, they can't even speak the lines, Laura has stolen Briony's natural role again, in short, everything is messed up , even the weather is so hot, it's terribly hot.The girl writhed sullenly and stood up.The back of the skirt and hands were covered with dust from the corner boards.In a trance, she wiped her hands on her dress and walked towards the window.If she had known this, she might as well have written a story, handed it directly to Leon, and watched him read it.Cursive titles, illustrated covers, and neatly bound pages—she thought the word "binding" itself had the allure of neatness, simplicity, and manageability; Forget all that! The story is different, direct and simple, never putting any barrier between her and the reader--no ambitious or incompetent intermediary, no time Pressure, and no prop restrictions.In the story, you can really do whatever you want: just write down what you want, and the whole world belongs to you.But in a play, you're just getting by with the few props you have: no horses, no country lanes, no seaside resorts; not even a curtain! It's too late to realize that now, but the story is the telepathy way.She only needs to use ink to leave various characters on the paper, and then she can directly convey her thoughts and feelings to the readers.It's a wonderful process, but so commonplace that no one stops to study it.Reading and comprehension are the same thing, there is no obstacle in between, it is as direct as bending a finger.When people see those characters, they naturally separate the meanings.For example, when you read the word "castle", it really stands before your eyes: you see the castle far away hidden by midsummer trees, the blue sky is so soft, and the blue smoke curls from the blacksmith The shop rises, and there is a cobblestone path, which winds and disappears in the green shade...

This idea is also very emotional, because a few seconds ago she came to an open window in the nursery, looking at a medieval castle in the distance.A few miles beyond the Tallis family estate, the Surrey Hills could be seen: the dense towering oak forests on the hills were motionless, and the milky heat steamed and softened the patches of lawn.Nearby, the spacious grassy area looks desolate and dry today, as if scorching hot like the savannah in East Africa; the cruel midsummer has baked the long grass to haggard; The stubby shadows on the ground hang together.Nearby, in the railed courtyard, there are several rose gardens, and nearer, in the central fountain, stands the statue of Triton, the god of the sea.At this moment, Briony found her sister standing on the edge of the parapet of the pool, and Robbie Turner was standing in front of her, and the standing posture was still very formal-his feet were spread apart, and his head was thrown back. , A full proposal scene! Seeing this situation, Briony was not surprised at all.She herself wrote a story in which the humble woodcutter rescues the princess from the water and ends up befriending her.This scene in front of me is somewhat similar to that story.Robbie Turner had no father or other siblings; his mother was a humble cleaning lady.Briony's father has been sponsoring Robbie's studies from the beginning to the university; Robbie, who at first hoped to be a garden designer, has now changed his mind and developed an interest in medicine.It should come as no surprise that he had the audacity to woo Cecilia.There should be a lot of love that crosses family backgrounds like this every day.

However, the next scene made Briony very puzzled: Robbie raised a hand proudly, as if giving orders to Cecilia.The strange thing is that my sister couldn't resist him and started to take off her clothes quickly.Now her skirt was slipping to the floor, and he was watching impatiently as she stepped out of it with his hands on his hips.What magic was he casting on her? Blackmail? Blackmail? Briony put her face in her hands and stepped back from the window.Seeing her sister suffer such humiliation, she felt that she should close her eyes.This was impossible, however, because even stranger things happened.Cecilia—she was still in her underwear, thank goodness—was climbing the wall into the pool.Now she was standing waist-deep in the water, pinching her nose - then submerged and gone! All that was left was Robbie and his sister's pile of clothes on the gravel; in the distance, the silence of the park , The foothills are green. But this matter must have been reversed! The scenes of the sister falling into the water and the hero saving the beauty should have happened before the marriage proposal.Briony had to admit that she couldn't understand the matter in front of her at all, she could only watch from the sidelines.Fortunately, she was standing on the second floor, and the sunlight was so dazzling that people in the yard couldn't notice her existence at all—just like that, Briony quietly crossed the age gap, and entered the room where she still had nothing. Among the behaviors and ceremonies known only to adults-of course, this must be some kind of ceremony.But despite her conviction, Briony thanked God sincerely when her sister's head popped out of the water.For the first time, she vaguely felt that the scene in front of her was no longer a fairy tale about a princess and a castle, but the strangeness that happened here and now, between people—between ordinary people around her— Subtle, unspeakable things; it turns out that one person can have such power over another person, and it turns out that everything is completely reversed so easily and becomes beyond recognition.At this moment, Cecilia had crawled out of the pool, where she was wearing a skirt while pulling her blouse with difficulty to cover her wet body.Then, turning suddenly, she picked up a vase full of flowers (which Briony hadn't been able to notice) from the shadow of the side of the pool, and carrying it, she walked toward the house.She didn't say a word to Robbie, didn't even look at him.And he stared straight into the water for a while, then strode away, no doubt contented, and disappeared around the corner of the house.Just like that, the yard suddenly became empty. If it weren't for the water stain Cecilia left on the ground, Briony would have wondered if anything had really happened just now. Briony leaned back against the wall, staring blankly across the nursery.She really wanted to regard this scene just now as a play specially staged for her, mysterious and implying some kind of meaning-but she quickly dismissed this idea, because she knew very well that even if she was not watching , that scene will still be staged, it has nothing to do with her presence or not.She just happened to be at the window.What she sees is no longer a fairy tale, but a real world belonging to adults—in this world, frogs will not show courteousness to the princess, only humans will express their affection.She also really wanted to run to Cecilia's room now and ask her about the matter-but this idea was quickly dismissed.Because she wanted to experience the excitement of this solitary pursuit, just like she had just done at the window.The excitement was so elusive that she could only define it emotionally.In fact, as the years go by, this definition will gradually improve; and she will eventually admit that when she was thirteen years old, perhaps she had put too much effort on herself.And this unspeakable feeling may be nothing but the irrepressible desire to write again. And so, while she was waiting for her cousins ​​in the nursery, Briony realized she could use the situation at the fountain as a blueprint to write a scene—with a voyeur like herself.Thinking of this, she seemed to see herself hurrying back downstairs to her bedroom, toward her marbled Bakelite fountain pen and a stack of clean lined paper.She seemed to have seen the concise sentences and lines of symbols with telepathic magic power pouring out of her pen.She could write the scene three times from three different angles.What excites her most is the freedom this style of writing affords her—she no longer has to struggle between good and evil, no longer has to worry about portraying heroes or villains.Because none of the three is a bad guy, nor is there a purely good guy.In short, she no longer has to make any judgments, and she doesn't have to set any moral standards.All she had to do was show their separate minds—each as alive as her own, equally afflicted by the awareness of the other minds.It is not only evil and subterfuge that make people unhappy, but confusion and misunderstanding; above all, the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you are.Only in the story can you enter the inner world of these many different characters and show them their equal value.That is the only moral moral a story needs to have. Sixty years later, this girl will recall in her pen how she traveled through the entire literary history when she was thirteen years old—starting with folk tales that originated in Europe, and then writing simple morality plays, until the 1935 On a scorching morning, her discovery turns her toward unbiased psychological realism.Sixty years later, she too will realize how much fantasy she mixed with reality, and she will laugh at herself appropriately.Her novels have a reputation for being amoral, and like all writers, she is plagued by repeated doubts that compel her to add plot structure to her work—and as the plot develops, there is always a She will show her figure in it every moment.She knows that it is wrong to refer to her drama in plural form, she knows that her sarcasm violates the childish nature of honest thinking, and she knows that what she recalls in her novel is not that long morning, but her own subjective interpretation afterwards.Perhaps, ruminations about crooked fingers, the unbearable thought that there are other minds, and the realization that story is superior to drama—maybe these thoughts came to her in other days.She also knows that whatever actually happened that day, it was her published work that made it important, otherwise it would have been forgotten. Yet she could not quite betray herself; no doubt she had had some kind of revelation that morning.When she returned to the window and looked down, the puddle of water on the gravel had evaporated.In this way, nothing remains of the pantomime scene by the water—the only traces are the memories embedded in the minds of the three—memories that are both separate and overlapping.The line between truth and fiction has become rather blurred.Of course she can start now, write down the situation objectively as she sees it—this is no small challenge, because she has to try to restrain herself from condemning her sister, even though her sister is in broad daylight. Stripped herself half naked in front of a house where people were going in and out! She could then rewrite the whole thing through Cecilia's and Robbie's perspectives respectively.But now is not the time - Briony has a strong sense of responsibility and an innate sense of order: the rehearsal is about to start, Leon is coming soon, and the whole family is waiting to see the show at night - she You have to have a beginning and an end.Thinking of this, she decided to go to the laundry room downstairs to see if Jackson's suffering was over.As for writing, she can wait until she has free time.