Chapter 9 Chapter nine

This Sunday, the pastor was going to take a nap in the living room (the pastor’s daily life is as orderly and orderly as a ceremony), and Mrs. Carey was also planning to go upstairs to rest, Philip suddenly asked: "I'm not allowed to play, so what do you ask me to do?" "Can't you sit still for a while?" "I can't sit still like this until tea time." Mr. Carey looked out of the window. It was cold and dreary, and Philip could not be sent into the garden. "I know you can do something. You can recite a short prayer that you have to say today."

As he spoke, he took down the prayer book from the organ, and turned to the page he was looking for. "It's not a long one. If you can recite it verbatim when I come in for tea, I'll reward you with the tip of my egg." Mrs. Carey dragged Philip's chair over to the table (they had provided Philip with a high chair especially) and put the prayer book in front of him. "The devil will send idlers to do bad things," said Mr. Carey. He added some coal to the fire, which would burn brightly when he came in for tea.Mr. Kayong walked into the living room, loosened his collar, straightened the cushions, and lay down comfortably on the sofa.Mrs. Carey, thinking that it was cold in the drawing room, got a traveling blanket from the hall and spread it over his legs and bound his feet tightly.At first she was about to draw down the blinds to save the glare from the sun, but seeing that he had closed them, she stomped out of the living room.The pastor felt at peace today, and fell asleep in less than ten minutes, snoring lightly.

That day was the sixth Sunday after Epiphany, and the prayer appointed for that day began with the words: "Lord, the Son has shown that he can break the devil's sorcery, and thus make us sons of God, Heirs of eternal life." Philip read the prayer in one breath, but could not understand it.He began to read aloud. There were many words he didn't recognize, and the sentence structure was so weird.Philip read and recited, but could remember at most two lines.He was always absent-minded: there were many fruit trees planted along the walls around the house, and a long slender branch flapped the window pane from time to time; the sheep were gnawing dully at the grass in the field beyond the garden.Philip's head seemed to be full of knots.Suddenly a burst of fear came to my heart: what if I can't recite it by tea time?He continued to babble again, very quickly, and instead of trying to understand the content, he forced the sentences into his head like a parrot.

That afternoon, Mrs. Carey tossed and turned and couldn't sleep. She didn't feel sleepy until about four o'clock, so she just got up and went downstairs.She wanted to hear Philip repeat the prayer first, so as not to make any mistake in repeating it to his uncle, so that his uncle would be satisfied that the boy had a good heart.But when Mrs. Carey came to the dining room door and was waiting to go in, she heard an unexpected sound, which made her stop abruptly.Her heart skipped a beat.She turned, tiptoed out the front door, walked around the house to the dining room window, and cautiously peered into the house.Philip was still sitting in the chair she had given him, but he was lying on his stomach on the table, with his little head buried in his arms, and was sobbing deeply with grief.Mrs. Carey also saw his shoulders jerk up and down.It frightened her.She had always had the impression in the past that the child seemed to be quite self-controlled and had never seen him cry.Mrs. Carey suddenly realized that the child's pretended calm turned out to be some kind of instinctive reaction, thinking that it would be shameful to show emotion in front of people: he often hides behind people's back and weeps secretly!

Mrs. Carey rushed into the parlour, disregarding her husband's distaste for being woken suddenly from his sleep. "William, William," she said, "that boy is crying so hard." Mr. Carey sat up and threw the blanket off his lap. "What are you crying about?" "I don't know . . . Oh, William, we can't let our children be wronged. Do you think it's our fault? We'd know what to do if we had children of our own." Mr. Carey looked at Mrs. Carey in bewilderment.He was particularly helpless when encountering such a thing. "It's not that he's crying because I told him to recite the prayers. It's not ten lines in all."

"Or let me get him some picture books, what do you say, William? We have some picture books about the Holy Land. There's nothing wrong with that." "Well, I'm fine with that." Mrs. Carey went into the study.Collecting books was Mr. Carey's only hobby. Every time he went to Canterbury, he would spend an hour or two in second-hand bookstores, and he would bring back four or five volumes of moldy old books.He never read them, for he had long since lost the habit of reading for the good, but he liked to look at them sometimes, and to look at the illustrations, if they had them.He also likes to mend the covers of old books.He longed for rain, for in such weather he could safely stay at home, mix egg whites in a glue pot, and spend an afternoon mending the Russian leather covers of old quarto volumes.He had a great collection of old volumes of travel journals, with inserts of plate engravings; and Mrs. Carey immediately found two books on the Holy Land of Palestine.She went to the dining-room door and coughed deliberately to give Philip time to collect himself.She thought that Philip would feel ashamed if he bumped into him while secretly crying.Then she rattled and turned the doorknob.When she came into the dining-room she saw Philip pretending to be absorbed in his prayer-book.He covered his eyes with his hands so that Mrs. Carey would not notice that he was crying.

"Have the prayers been recited?" she asked. He didn't answer right away; she could sense that the child was afraid that his voice would give away.She found the situation strangely awkward. "I can't recite it," he breathed heavily, and finally managed to say something. "Oh, never mind," she said. "You don't have to memorize it. I brought you some picture books. Come, sit on my lap, and let's read together." Philip jumped out of his chair and limped towards her.He looked down at the floor, trying not to let Mrs. Carey meet his eyes.She hugged him tightly.

"Look, this is the birthplace of Jesus Christ." What she pointed out to him was an oriental city, with flat-roofed and domed buildings interspersed with monastery spiers.In the foreground of the picture is a row of palm trees, under which two Arabs and a few camels are resting.Philip ran his hands across the screen, as if trying to feel the buildings and the loose clothes of the homeless. "Read what's written on it," he begged. In a calm voice Mrs. Carey read from the transcript on the other page.It was a romantic travel note written by an oriental traveler in the 1930s. The words may be too gorgeous, but the writing is beautiful and moving, full of emotion, and for the generation after Byron and Chateaubriand It is said that the Eastern world is displayed in front of them with this kind of emotional color.After a while Philip interrupted Mrs. Carey's reading.

"Show me another picture." Just then Mary Ann came in, and Mrs. Carey got up to help her spread the table-cloth, and Philip, holding the book in his hand, turned over the pages in a hurry.It was with some difficulty that his aunt coaxed him to put down his books for tea.He had forgotten the agony of reciting the prayers, and forgot that he had been weeping just now.The next day, when it started to rain, he asked to read the book again.Mrs. Carey handed it to him with great joy.Mrs. Carey had talked with her husband about the child's future, and found that they both hoped that the child would be a clergyman, and Philip now showed an extraordinary interest in this book describing the place of the Son's apparition. , this is undoubtedly a good sign yo.It seemed that the child's mind was naturally connected with sacred things.And after a day or two, he proposed to read other books.Mr. Carey led him into his study, showed him the shelves in which were some illustrated volumes in his collection, and selected for him a book on Rome.Philip generally couldn't wait to take it.The illustrations in the book introduced him to a new happy land.In order to make out what the pictures were, he tried to read the text on the pages preceding and following each engraving; and soon the toys ceased to interest him.

Afterwards, whenever he was alone, he took out his books and read to himself; perhaps because it was an Eastern city that first impressed him, he had a particular preference for books describing the countries and islands of the eastern Mediterranean.His heart beat with excitement when he saw pictures of mosques and splendid palaces; and in a book on Constantinople there was an illustration entitled "Hall of a Thousand Columns," Especially made his imagination run wild.The painting is about an artificial lake in Byzantium, which has been transformed into a magical, illusory, and boundless magic lake after man-made imaginative processing.Philip read the description of the illustration: at the entrance of this artificial lake, there is always a light boat moored to lure those who are rash and reckless, and no one who ventures into this mysterious abyss survives.Philip wondered whether the canoe had traveled forever in the colonnades, or had reached at last some strange mansion.

One day, Philip accidentally got lucky and found a copy of "Arabian Nights" translated by Ryan.As soon as he opened the book, he was attracted by the illustrations in the book, and then began to read it carefully.At the beginning, he read those few stories about witchcraft, and then read the other ones one after another; the few he liked, he couldn't put it down, and he read and read them again and again.He was so absorbed in these stories that he forgot everything around him.When eating, someone always had to call Shanshan two or three times before she came.Before he knew it Philip had acquired one of the greatest pleasures in the world--the habit of reading; and, without realizing it, he had thus found for himself a refuge from life's troubles. ; nor did he realize that he was creating for himself an unreal fantasy, which in turn made the everyday reality a source of painful disappointment.Before long, he started reading other books.His intellect had matured prematurely.The uncle and aunt saw that the child was neither worried nor noisy, and his whole body and mind were immersed in the sea of ​​books, so they stopped bothering him.Mr. Carey's collection of books is so large that even he can't figure it out; he has not read a few books seriously, and he has no idea about the scattered old books that he bought one after another because he was greedy for cheap.Among the prices of sermons, travelogues, biographies of saints and elders, religious histories, etc., there were also some old novels mixed in, and these old novels were finally discovered by Philip.He picked them out by their titles.The first book I read was The Witch of Summer, and then I read "The Admirable Crichton", and then I read many other novels one after another.Whenever he opened a book and saw the description of two lonely wanderers riding horses on the cliff, he always thought that he was safe and sound. Spring goes to summer.A gardener who was an old sailor made a hammock for Philip, and hung it on the branches of the weeping willows.For hours Philip lay in this hammock reading, devouring and devouring, and Philip was never to be seen by anyone who came to the parsonage.Time flies, and it is July in a blink of an eye, and then suddenly it is August.Every Sunday, the church is always full of strangers, and the donations collected during the service are often as much as two pounds.During this time, neither the pastor nor Mrs. Carey often stayed at home.They don't like to see those strange faces, and they are extremely disgusted with those tourists from London.A gentleman took a house opposite the vicarage for six weeks.This gentleman has two little boys.Once he sent specifically to ask Philip if he would like to come and play with the children, but Mrs. Carey politely declined.She was afraid that Philip would be spoiled by the children from London.Philip was going to be a clergyman when he grew up, so he must not be allowed to acquire bad habits.Mrs. Carey wished that Philip would grow up to be a Samuel.