Chapter 9 chapter eight

In the evening, the high clouds formed a yellowish cloud in the western sky.As time went by, the color of the clouds became more and more intense, and finally became the orange sunset glow hanging over the huge canopy of the sparse trees in the grassland.The leaves were a nutty brown, the boughs looming through them were black and shiny with oil, and the dry grass was the color of the sky.A Fauvist who admired exotic colors might have imagined such a scene, especially when the sky and the ground were flushed red, and the swollen trunk of the old oak tree was dark and blue.Although the light was dimming as the sun went down, the temperature seemed to rise from the cessation of the relieved breeze that had been blowing all day, and the air was now thickening.

Robbie Turner could have seen the view, or a small part of it, if he had been willing to stand up from his bathtub and stare out of the closed skylight with his knees bent.His small bedroom, bathroom, and the little room in between that he called his den lived in the sun all day long under the roof of the bungalow's south side.For more than an hour after returning home from get off work, he lay in a warm bathtub, and his blood and his thoughts seemed to be warming the water in the bathtub.As he filtered out strange sensations and recalled certain memory fragments over and over again, the color of the sky in the skylight above his head slowly changed from yellow to orange in its limited spectrum .Everything is in high spirits.An inch below the surface, the muscles in his stomach tensed now and again involuntarily as he recalled another detail.A drop of water hangs from her upper arm.Soggy.A flower was embroidered in the center of her bra, a raw daisy.Her breasts are small and set apart.There was a mole on her back, half hidden by a suspender.As she came up from the pond, he caught a glimpse of the black triangle her shorts were supposed to hide.Soggy.He saw it, and he forced himself to take another look.Her pelvis pushed the cloth out of her skin, her waist was deeply curved, and her jade body was surprisingly white.When she reached out to grab the skirt, her foot, which had inadvertently lifted, exposed the soles of the soles covered with dirt.Her toes are so small and sweet.She also had a mole the size of a farthing coin on her thigh, and she also had something purplish on her calf - a strawberry-shaped red birthmark, a scar.They are not blemishes, but ornaments.

The two of them had known each other since childhood, but he had never laid eyes on her.When she was in Cambridge, once she and a New Zealand girl from the same school as her came to his residence with glasses, and a friend of his from Downing happened to be there.They chatted unnaturally for an hour, making jokes and passing cigarettes in circles.When they meet by chance in the street, they will look at each other and smile.As she wandered the streets, she would whisper to her friends, That's my cleaning lady's son.It always seemed awkward to her to do so.But he wanted people to know he didn't care—he told a friend once that the girl who walked past was my mother's employer's daughter.He has his own set of self-protection strategies and class theory based on science, and he has the self-confidence that is forced out.I am who I am.She is like a sister, almost invisible.That long narrow face, that small mouth—if he had thought of her even a little, he might have said she looked a little bit like a horse.But now he thinks it is a strange beauty-her face is sharp-edged and calm, especially near the slope of her cheekbones, her nostrils are straight and flared, and her small cherry mouth is plump and shiny.She had dark, brooding eyes.It was a statuesque face, but her movements were quick and hasty—it would have been a whole if she hadn't snatched the vase from his hand suddenly.She was restless, it was palpable.She was imprisoned at home and felt bored.Soon she will run away from home.

He soon had to talk to her.He finally stood up from the bathtub, trembling all over.There is no doubt that he is undergoing a great change.Naked, he walked through the study and into the bedroom.The messy bed, the messy clothes thrown around, a towel thrown on the floor, and the warmth of the room after being baked by the sun made him unable to arouse any sexual interest.He stretched out, fell on the bed, buried his face in the pillow, and moaned.She, his childhood friend, had been so lovely, so refined, and now she was so out of reach.Undressing like that—yes, she's always trying to be endearingly different, she's all flamboyant, daring, with an exaggerated, self-directed quality.Now she would feel so much pain from regret that it was impossible for her to understand what had been done to him.If she hadn't been mad at him for the vase that broke in his hands, everything would be all right, everything could be repaired.But he also liked her anger.He turned sideways, fixed his eyes, but turned a blind eye to things.He was immersed in a movie-like fantasy: she beat his lapel, then died, sobbing and fell into his safe arms, while he kissed her furiously.She didn't forgive him, she just gave up.The fantasy flashed through his mind several times before he came back to reality: but the reality was that she was still angry with him, and she would be even more angry when she learned that he would be one of the guests at the dinner party.Back then, when he was outside, under the harsh light, he couldn't think fast enough to refuse Leon's invitation.Without even thinking about it, he blurted out the word "good".Now, he will face her exasperation head on.Thinking of how she had undressed in front of him so nonchalantly, as if he were a baby, he groaned again, not caring about being heard downstairs.Of course, he understood very well now.This move was meant to humiliate him.The undeniable facts are there.That's humiliating.She wanted to humiliate him.She is more than cute.He must not be humbled by her.She is a kind of strength, she can drive him to nowhere, willing to surrender.

However, he rolled over on his back—maybe he shouldn't have thought she was insulting him.Isn't that too contrived? Presumably even when she was angry, she must have meant better than that.Even when she was angry, she wanted him to see how beautiful she really was, and wanted him to be attached to her.How could he believe such an interpretation that came out of his own hopes and desires and served his own interests? He had to believe it.He crossed his legs and folded his hands behind his head, feeling the coolness of his skin as it dried.What might Freud have said? Would he have said it?—behind the outburst she hid her unconscious desire to reveal herself to him.What a poor hope! It was an unmanly sentence, and this—the torture he was feeling now—was his punishment for breaking her ridiculous vase.He should never see her again.But tonight he had to see her.In any case, he didn't have a choice - he had to go.If he goes, she will look down on him.He should have declined Leon's invitation, but at the time he was impulsive and blurted out his consent.He will be in the same room with her tonight, and the jade body, the mole, the fair skin, the strawberry-shaped red birthmark he has seen will be hidden in her clothes.Only he knew it, and of course Emily knew it too.But only he thinks about them.And Cecilia neither spoke to him nor looked at him.Even then, it's better than lying here moaning.no, I can not.It would be worse than that, but he wanted it anyway.He has to.He wanted to break the jar and smash it.

At last he sat up in bed, half dressed, and went into his study, where he sat by his typewriter and thought about what kind of letter he should write her.Like the bedroom and bathroom, the study was squeezed under the roof of the bungalow, not much larger than the passage connecting it, just six feet long by five feet wide.As with the bedroom and bathroom, there is a skylight framed in rough pine.His hiking gear—boots, trekking poles, leather backpack—was stacked in one corner.A knife-scarred kitchen table takes up most of the space.He tilted his chair back and looked at the desk carefully, as if he was looking at life.At one end of the desk, stacked up to the sloping ceiling, were the notebooks and workbooks he had used in recent months to study for final exams.He no longer needed those notebooks, but they contained too much homework, too much success, and he couldn't bear to throw them away.They were half-stacked, and spread out on the table were maps of his excursions, maps of North Wales, Hampshire, Surrey, and the abandoned plan for an excursion to Istanbul.Also on the table was a compass with a cracked graduated mirror, by which he had walked as far as Lulworth Cove without a map.

In front of the compass stood Auden's Poems and Housman's Shropshire Boys.On the other side of the table are various history books, theoretical anthologies and practical manuals on landscape architecture.The ten typewritten poems lay under the rejection notice from the "Standard" magazine, signed Mr. Eliot's own initials on the notice.Closest to where Robbie sat was his new favorite book. Gray's Anatomy was open, next to the folio pad in which he had drawn his own diagrams.He set himself the task of drawing the bones of the hand and memorizing them one by one.At this point, he tried to divert his attention by going over some components of the hand bones.He whispers their names: the skull, the hamate, the triquetrum, the lunate . Sectional view of the esophagus and trachea.All his pencils and pens were contained in a pewter tankard with the handle missing.The typewriter was a new Olympia that Jack Tallis had given him at his twenty-first birthday luncheon in the library.Both Leon and his father spoke, and of course Cecilia was there.But Robbie couldn't recall a single thing they might have talked about.Is she mad at him that he ignored her for years? Another poor hope.

On the outer edge of the table are various photographs: stills from a play on the University Lawn.He starred in Malvolio, wearing the Cross.How fitting.There is another group photo.It was of himself and the thirty French children he taught at a boarding school near Lille.In a patinaed metal frame from Baylor's time is a photo of his parents, Ernest and Grace.It was taken three days after their wedding.In the photo, there is the front side of a car behind them - it is certainly not their car.A little farther, loomed behind a brick wall, was a drying room.Grace always said the two weeks of hop picking with her husband's family and the overnight stay in a gypsy caravan parked in the farm yard — the honeymoon was amazing.Robbie's father wore a collarless shirt.The scarf and rope wrapped around his trousers reveal the gypsy's light-hearted humor.His head and face are round, but this does not give the photo a real jovial effect, as he is not grinning happily or holding the hand of his young bride, but with his arms folded.In contrast, she was leaning on him, her head resting on his shoulder, her hands clumsily grasping the elbows of his shirt.Grace has a gentle disposition and is always more than willing to cooperate.In the photo, she is in charge of putting on a smile, so her husband doesn't have to worry about it.But being helpful and being kind isn't enough.Ernest's thoughts seemed to be elsewhere, drifting to that night seven years later.That night he wanted to give up his job as a gardener at the Tallis's and leave the bungalow without any luggage or even a farewell note on the kitchen table to say goodbye to his wife and their six-year-old son. Son, let them pursue his whereabouts for the rest of their lives.

Elsewhere on the table, scattered among revision notes and stacks of garden and anatomy books, are letters and greeting cards: unpaid student bills for room and board, congratulatory letters from tutors and friends congratulating him on his victory.Every time he rereads these congratulatory letters, he still finds pleasure in them.There were other letters inquiring about his next steps.The latest letter to arrive was from Jack Tallis, in brown ink on Whitehall departmental stationery.He promised to help him pay for medical school.There are also 20-page admission application forms from Edinburgh Medical School and London Medical School, and thickly printed admissions brochures.The tightly worded prose of the two colleges seemed to signal a new kind of academic rigor.Today, however, what they signify is not adventure, not a new beginning, but exile.He foresaw lifeless sloping streets away from here, a small room with printed paper on the walls, an old wardrobe on the floor, a tufted sheet on the bed, a group of new best friends, most of them younger than himself, filled with formaldehyde. The vats of solution, the echoing classrooms—all these lacked her breath.

From the pile of landscape books he drew a volume of Versailles, which he had borrowed from the Tallis library.On the day he borrowed the book, he noticed his embarrassment in front of her for the first time.Kneeling by the front door to take off his work shoes, he realized how worn his socks were—holes at the toe and heel, and they stink.On impulse, he took off his socks too.Then he found himself, like an idiot, following her silently, barefoot, across the hall into the library.At that time, there was only one thought in his mind, which was to get out of there as soon as possible.He escaped through the kitchen and had to let Danny Hardman go around to the front door to retrieve his socks and shoes.

Cecilia was probably not going to read much of this collection of treatises on the hydraulics at Versailles, written by an eighteenth-century Dane.The Dane praised the Virgin Mary's extraordinary talents in Latin.With the help of a dictionary, Robbie read five pages in one morning, then gave up reading the text and turned only the illustrations.It wasn't for her, indeed for anyone, but she handed it to him from the library steps, leaving her fingerprints somewhere on the leather cover.Although he didn't want to do it, he couldn't help holding the book up to his nostrils and smelling it.He smelled dust and old paper and soap from his hands, but not her.When did he unknowingly enter the advanced stage of fetishism-worshiping love objects? Freud must have a great opinion on this in "Three Essays on Sexuality".Also, Keats and Shakespeare and Petrarch and others must have written about it, and it's in The Romance of the Rose.He had spent three years dryly studying symptoms that seemed to be mere literary clichés, and now, all alone, he was like some ruffled and feathered sycophant at the edge of the forest Gaze at a discarded keepsake.When he languishes in his lover's taunts, he adores her vestiges—not a handkerchief, but fingerprints! Nevertheless, when he loaded a sheet of paper into the typewriter, he did not forget to load the carbon paper.He typed the date and salutation, and then cut to the chase with a clichéd apology for his "clumsy and inconsiderate behaviour".Then he paused.He wondered if he should write something expressive; if so, to what extent? "If that's an excuse, I've only recently noticed that I've been acting rather stupid in front of you. I mean, I've never walked into someone's house with bare feet before. It must be because of the heat!" How feeble was this self-protective jest! He was like a terminal tuberculosis patient pretending to have a cold.He returned to the car twice and wrote again: "I know this is hardly an excuse, but I seem to be acting very stupid when I'm around you lately. Walking into your house with bare feet, what am I doing? Besides ,Have I broken off the top of an antique vase before?" His hand stopped on the keyboard, and at this moment he wanted to type her name again. "Sey, I don't think I can blame the heat!" The antics give way to mediocrity or pain.There is a hint of unease in the rhetorical question; the exclamation point is the go-to method for those who yell and want to be heard better.He only used the punctuation mark in letters to his mother, where a row of five consecutive exclamation points marks a hilariously good joke.He spun the drum and hit an "x". "Cecilia, I don't think I can blame the heat." Now the sense of humor was gone, and a tinge of self-pity set in.That exclamation point should have been used again.Obviously, volume isn't its only role. He spent another fifteen minutes revising the draft, then loaded several new sheets of paper and typed the revision.The key lines of the letter now read: "You think I'm crazy - wandering into your home with bare feet, or breaking your antique vase - and I don't blame you. Actually, Si, in front of you I feel very stupid. I don't think I can blame the heat! Will you forgive me, Robbie." Then, after a moment of fantasy, Robbie leans back in his chair and thinks of his Anatomy "The page that I often turn to.He sat forward and, in a fit of impulse, typed on the paper "In my dream I kissed your pussy, your sweet wet pussy. In my mind, I made love to you all day long." It's over, it's over—this draft is void.He pulled the manuscript out of the typewriter, put it aside, and began to write in cursive.He was sure that the personal letter would be appropriate for the occasion.He looked at his watch and remembered that he should polish his shoes before setting off.He rose carefully from the desk so as not to bang his head on the rafters. He's very social - and in the eyes of many, that's not true.Once, at dinner in Cambridge, in the sudden silence at the table, someone who hated Robbie asked loudly about his parents.Robbie looked the man in the eye and replied readily that his father had run away from home a long time ago and that his mother was a maid who occasionally supplemented her income by telling fortunes.His tone was easygoing and he showed tolerance for the ignorance and rudeness of the questioner.Robbie narrated his life in detail, and then politely asked about the situation of the other party's parents.It was said that naivety or ignorance of the world protected Robbie from it, and that he was a wise fool who could walk through a coal-hot living room without getting hurt.As far as Cecilia knew, the truth was simpler than that.As a child, he moved freely between the bungalow and the main building.Jack Tallis was his patron, and Leon and Cecilia were good friends, at least until grammar school.In college, Robbie found that he was smarter than many people he knew, and his mind was completely liberated.Even his arrogance need not show off. Grace Turner was more than happy to do his laundry, because how else would she show her motherly love when her only son turned twenty-three, other than cooking him hot meals? But Robbie liked to shine his own shoes.He was wearing a white undershirt, trousers, and stockings on his feet. Holding a pair of brogue black leather shoes, he walked down the stairs on short straight steps.Next to the living room door there was a short narrow passage that ended in the frosted glass door at the main entrance.Through the frosted glass doors, a diffused orange light casts fiery red honeycomb patterns on the beige and olive wallpaper.Surprised by this change, he froze for a moment, put one hand on the doorknob, opened the door and walked in.The air in the room was warm and humid, slightly salty.A meeting must have just ended.His mother was lying on the sofa with her feet crossed, with soft wool slippers dangling from her toes. She said, "Molly has been here. I'm happy to tell you that she's going to be fine." She straightened up to talk. Robbie fetched a shoe polish box from the kitchen, sat down in the armchair closest to his mother, and spread a three-day-old Illustrated Daily on the rug. "You're doing well," he said, "I heard you talking about something, and then I went upstairs to take a shower." He knew he should leave quickly, that he should shine his shoes, but instead of doing that, he sat back in his chair, stretched, stretched, and yawned. "To hell with it! What am I doing with my youth?" There was more humor than distress in his tone.He folded his arms and stared at the ceiling while massaging the instep of the other foot with the big toe of one foot. His mother gazed into the space above his head and said, "Go ahead. What happened? What happened to you? Don't tell me 'it's okay.'" Grace Turner joined the Tallis family as a cleaner a week after Ernest ran away.Jack Tallis couldn't bear to reject a young woman and her child.In the village, he found a replacement gardener and handyman who didn't need a deeded house.There was speculation that Grace would move out or remarry elsewhere after living in the bungalow for a year or two.Her good-nature and knack for polishing—her work on surfaces was the butt of jokes in the Tallis family—won everyone's hearts, but it was six-year-old Cecilia and her eight-year-old Her brother Leon's love for her saved her and made Robbie.Grace is allowed to bring her six-year-old son to work during the school holidays.Robbie grew up in the yard and in the nursery and other areas of the house where the children were allowed to go.Leon, his tree-climbing playmate, and Cecilia, his little sister who trustingly holds his hand, make him feel wise.A few years later, when Robbie won a scholarship to the local grammar school, Jack Tallis began his ongoing sponsorship of his studies.He paid for Robbie's school uniform and textbooks.This year, Briony was born.The dystocia made Emily sick and bedridden for a long time.Grace has done a great favor to the Tallis family, thereby cementing her own: Christmas 1922—Leon in top hat and breeches The letter was delivered to the bungalow.In the letter, the lawyer informed her that regardless of her status in the Tallis family, ownership of the bungalow now belonged to her.But even when the children grew up, she continued to do the housework and shouldered the special responsibility of polishing utensils. She thought that Ernest used another name, enlisted in the army and went to the front, never to return.Otherwise, it would be too inhuman for him to ignore his own children.On her way from the bungalow to the big house every day, in the few minutes that belonged to her, she often thought about the changes in her life that didn't lead to bad results.She was always a little scared of Ernest.If they lived together, perhaps they would not be as happy as she was alone with her gifted darling in the cabin that belonged to her.If Mr. Tallis had been a different kind of man... some women who had hoped for the future were abandoned by their husbands, and more often their husbands were killed at the front.They lived a life of hardship, and it was almost her fate. "Nothing," he answered, "nothing happened to me at all." Taking up a brush and a black shoe polish, he said, "Then Molly's future is bright." "She's going to remarry in five years. She'll be happy. Someone from the North fits the bill." "She deserves happiness." They sit comfortably and quietly.She watched him polish his brogues with a yellow brush.The muscles in his handsome cheeks vibrated with the movement of the shoe, while the muscles in his forearm fanned out and changed position in complex ways under the skin.There must have been some merit in Ernest that he had such a boy with her. "So you're going out?" "I met Leon just arrived when I was leaving get off work. He brought his friend, you know, the chocolate giant. They insisted that I come with them to dinner tonight." "Oh, I've been cleaning the silver and tidying up his room all afternoon." He picked up his shoes and stood up. "When I look at my reflection in the spoon, I shall only see you." "Come on, your shirt is hanging in the kitchen." He packed up the shoe-shining kit, took it out, and selected a beige linen shirt from the three shirts on the clothes rack.He came back and was about to go out across the room, but his mother wanted to keep him a little longer. "And the Quincy boys, too. The boy wet the bed, got everything wet. Poor little lamb." He stopped at the door and shrugged.He had just looked in and saw them shouting and laughing around the pool in the midday heat.If he hadn't walked there, they would have pushed his cart into the deep pool.Danny Hardman was there too, squinting at their sister.He should have been working. "They'll be all right," he said. In a hurry to get out, he jumped up the stairs three steps at a time.Back in his bedroom, he dressed hastily, whistling out of tune as he bent over the mirror in his closet to comb and oil his hair.He has no musical cells at all, unable to distinguish between high and low tones.Now all he thought about was the night.He felt both thrilled and strangely free.The situation couldn't be any worse than the fait accompli.He is deeply satisfied with his efficiency, as if preparing for a dangerous journey or military operation.He methodically went through the familiar chores—feeling out the keys, finding a ten-shilling note in his purse, brushing his teeth, smelling himself in cupped hands, grabbing He picked up the written letter, folded it and put it in the envelope, filled the cigarette case with cigarettes and tried the lighter.Finally, he pulled himself together in front of the mirror, took a look at his gums, then turned his head to look at his profile in the mirror.At last he patted his pockets lightly, descended the stairs three steps at a time, said good-by to his mother, and took the narrow brick path between the flower beds and the picket fence gate. In later years, he would often think of this time: he walked along the shortcut path that cut through the corner of the oak forest.After the path merges with the main road, it turns to the lake and the mansion.While he still has time, he finds it impossible to slow himself down.Many immediate and other not so immediate pleasures were mingled in those ample minutes: the red dusk was receding, the warm, still air was scented with hay and sun-baked earth, his Limbs relaxed after a long day in the garden, his skin smooth from the bath, he touched his shirt and his only suit.He's looking forward to seeing her, yet dreading seeing her, and it's a sensual pleasure, a pleasure wrapped in a layer of elation like being hugged—it might hurt him, it's very inconvenient, it might It won't do him any favors, but he's thrilled that he's found the true meaning of being in love for himself.Various other events added to his joy; he also basked in the joy of being told that he had won first place in his class for the first time.Moreover, now Jack Tallis has confirmed that he will continue to support him.He suddenly understood that what awaited him was a new adventure, not exile at all.He should study medicine, that's all right, and very well.He can't explain his optimism—because he's happy, he's bound to succeed. All his feelings can be summed up in one word, that is - freedom, which also explains why he always thinks of this moment afterwards.His life, his limbs are free and unrestrained.Long ago, before he had ever heard the word grammar school, he had taken an examination which got him through the gates of a grammar school.Although he liked Cambridge University very much, the prestigious school was chosen for him by the ambitious headmaster of his secondary school.Even his subjects were chosen for him by a charismatic teacher.Now he is finally starting an adult life on his own terms.He is weaving a story in which he is the protagonist, and his friends are already impressed by the beginning of the story.Gardening was nothing more than a bohemian fantasy, a small ambition--with the help of Freud, who analyzed it in this way--to replace or surpass his departed father.Being a primary and secondary school teacher—fifteen years later, Mr. Robbie Turner, MA, Head of English, Cambridge—was not part of the story, nor was teaching at a university.In retrospect, despite his first place, learning English literature seems like a fascinating parlor game, and reading and discussing morals seems like a desirable appendage to civilized life.But whatever Dr. Leavis said in the lecture hall, this is not the core, nor the necessary path to the priesthood, nor the paramount pursuit of the curious mind, nor the first or last defense against barbaric nomadic tribes, Not to study painting or music, history or science.During his senior year, in various classes, Robbie heard a psychoanalyst, a Communist trade union official, and a physicist argue, as passionately and convincingly as Leavis did. Their own field waved the flag and shouted.Some people may preach medicine like this, but for Robbie, the reasons for choosing medicine are simpler and more personal: his natural love of practice, his ambition to devote himself to science has been thwarted, all these need to be vented, and he wants to achieve more than in the past. A far finer art is acquired in practical criticism.Most importantly, he can make his own decisions.He will settle down in a strange town and start a new life. He had come out of the woods and came to the intersection of the lane and the road.The darkening sky accentuated the vagueness of the emptiness around the garden.Across the lake, the soft yellow light from the windows made the mansion almost grand and beautiful.She's inside, maybe in her bedroom, getting ready for the dinner party - not visible from here, on the second floor at the back of the house.He faces the fountain.He put aside these vivid sunny reveries about her, because he didn't want to feel unhinged upon arrival.His stiff soles struck like a great clock on the hard pavement, and it made him think of time, of his huge savings, of a sumptuous fortune unspent.Never before had he been so conscious of his youth, or felt such an appetite, so impatient for the story to begin.There was no shortage of quick-witted teachers at Cambridge who were twenty years his senior, but who also played decent tennis and paddled boats.In his story, it took at least twenty years to roughly reach this state of material affluence—nearly as many as the number of years he had already lived.Twenty years would take him into the future in 1955.At that time, will he know how promising he is? Now it seems a blur.Will he be able to live another thirty years at a more thoughtful pace by then? He envisioned himself in 1962 at the age of fifty.At that time, he will be old, but not too old to be useless; at that time, as a experienced and knowledgeable doctor, he will have unknown stories and experience many joys and sorrows.He'll also have thousands of books, for he'll have a huge dark study, a treasury of memorabilia and thoughts from his life's travels—rare rainforest herbs, poisoned arrows, failures. electrical inventions, soapstone figurines, shrunken skulls and Aboriginal art.On the shelves, of course, were medical references and meditations, and all sorts of other books—an anthology of eighteenth-century poetry (which almost made him think he should be a gardener), Three editions of Jane Austen, Eliot, Lawrence, Wilfred Owen, the complete works of Conrad, Crabbe's rare 1783 edition of The Village, autographed copies by Hausman, Orton "Dance of Death"—these books are all stacked on a small shelf in the attic of the bungalow.Of course, one thing is clear: reading literature makes him a better doctor.Through in-depth reading, he can improve his sensitivity, understand human suffering, and gain insight into why self-destructive folly or sheer bad luck makes people sick! Life and death, how cowardly human beings are between life and death! The ups and downs of life—— This is the foundation of medicine and the way of writing.He thought of nineteenth-century novels.Large-hearted and wide-sighted, quiet heart and cool judgment; he is a doctor who sees the grotesque tricks of fate, and realizes the futile and comical denials of the inevitable; he touches The feeble pulse of the sick, hear their dying gasps, feel their feverish hands begin to cool, and reflect on the weakness and nobility of human beings in a literary and religious didactic way... He quickened his pace through the quiet midsummer night to the joyful rhythm of his thoughts.About a hundred yards ahead of him was the bridge.He thought there was a white shadow standing on the bridge, which formed a sharp contrast with the dark road.At first, the white shadow appeared to be part of the pale stone balustrade of the bridge.He stared straight at it before he recognized its outline, and it was only after a few steps away that he saw that it was a vague figure.From this distance, he couldn't tell whether the man was facing him or his back.The man was motionless, and he guessed that the man was looking at him.一两秒钟时间里,他突发奇想,认为那是个鬼,可是他并不迷信,他甚至不相信凌驾于村庄里的诺曼教堂之上的至高无上的慈善神灵。现在他终于认出那人是个孩子。她必定是布里奥妮,白天早些时候他就看见她一袭素装。现在他能清楚地看见她了。他向她挥了挥手,喊了她的名字,然后说:“是我,罗比。”但她还是一动不动。 他朝她走过去时突然想到,也许在他进屋以前由她先把信送进去会更好。否则他就得在众人面前把信交给塞西莉娅,这会被她的母亲看见。自从他毕业以来,她母亲就一直对他很冷淡。要不然他也许根本就无法把信交给塞西莉娅了,因为她会极力避着他。如果由布里奥妮把信交给她,她就会有时间看信,并且私下里细细思量。早几分钟把信交给她也许就会使她的心软下来。 “不知你愿不愿意帮我个忙,”他边走近她边说。 她点了点头,等他的下文。 “你能先跑去把这个便条交给西吗?” 他说着就把信封放到她的手里。她一言不发地接过信封。 “我过几分钟后再进屋,”他说道,但她已经转过身跑过桥去了。他背靠着桥的扶手,掏出一支香烟,看着她蹦跳着的身影渐渐远去,消失在暮色里。这个年龄的姑娘还不成熟,他满意地想着。十二岁,或许是十三岁?有一两秒钟他看不见她的身影,然后瞥见她穿过小岛,在颜色更深的树林的映照下显得分外醒目。然后她又消失在他的视野外了。正当她再一次在第二座桥的那一头出现,并且从车道上下去,抄小路穿过草地时,罗比突然站直了身子。一阵恐惧猛地袭上心头。他不由自主地无言地一喊。他沿着车道慌乱地跑了几步,踉跄了一下,又继续跑,然后又停了下来。他知道去追她毫无意义。当他把手围成喇叭状,放在口边大喊布里奥妮的名字时,他已经看不到她了。这样做也毫无意义。他站在那儿,瞪大双眼看她——就好像那样能有所帮助似的——同时他也在脑海里尽力地回想。他多么希望自己记错了。但他没有记错。他手写的信放在了那本翻开的《格雷解剖学》内脏学阴道那一章,第1546页。他拿起来折好放到信封里去的是用打字机打的、放在打字机旁的那一页。不再需要弗洛伊德的自作聪明——这个解释是简单而机械的——这封无伤大雅的信就横放在第1236号画着清晰伸展而放荡的阴毛冠图例上,而他那下流的草稿则放在桌子上,伸手可取。他又大喊了一次布里奥妮的名字,尽管他知道她现在一定已经到了正门口。一点没错,几秒钟之后,远处一个斜方形的赭色亮光变宽,映出了她的轮廓,停顿了一下,然后变窄消失——她进了房子,关上了身后的房门。