评论
打印
Why tell the whole? The blows of the basement hammer every day grew more and more between; and each blow every day grew fainter than the last; the wife sat frozen at the window, with tearless eyes, glitteringly gazing into the weeping faces of her children; the bellows fell; the forge choked up with cinders; the house was sold; the mother dived down into the long church-yard grass; her children twice followed her thither; and the houseless, familyless old man staggered off a vagabond in crape; his every woe unreverenced; his grey head a scorn to flaxen curls!
还用再说下去吗？总之，地下室里的锤子一天紧似一天地敲下去，可是每一记都一天比一天轻；妻子冻僵了似地坐在窗边，无泪的眼睛，光闪闪地直瞪着几个小孩的哭泣的脸；风箱不动了，熔炉里塞满了炉灰，房子卖掉了，母亲钻进了教堂墓地里的长长的青草下面，两个孩子也都相继跟着她去了；于是这个无家无室的老头带着黑纱摇摇晃晃地离开了，做流浪汉去了；他的各种悲哀都是不值得同情的，他的白发成为少妇们的诅咒对象！
Death seems the only desirable sequel for a career like this; but Death is only a launching into the region of the strange Untried; it is but the first salutation to the possibilities of the immense Remote, the Wild, the Watery, the Unshored; therefore, to the death-longing eyes of such men, who still have left in them some interior compunctions against suicide, does the all-contributed and all-receptive ocean alluringly spread forth his whole plain of unimaginable, taking terrors, and wonderful, new-life adventures; and from the hearts of infinite Pacifics, the thousand mermaids sing to them — "Come hither, broken-hearted; here is another life without the guilt of intermediate death; here are wonders supernatural, without dying for them.
这样一种生涯，唯一值得想望的结果就是死；可是死只是走向那个"未经证实"的异域；它不过招呼你到那辽阔的"远方"，"蛮荒"，"水乡"，"无涘无际的"一切可能的地方的第一声。因此，那种求死而内心里还是不肯自杀的人，眼睛看到的是，那个慷慨豪爽与虚怀若谷的海洋已在诱人地展开它整个不可想象的景致，加上从那无垠的太平洋的中间，无数的人鱼都在对他们叫喊——"到这里来，伤心的人们呀；这里是不会有犯死罪的另一种生活；这里是超自然的奇迹，是永生的。
