Of Human Bondage 人性的枷锁 Chapter 17

Philip passed the next two years with comfortable monotony. He was not bullied ¹ more than other boys of his size; and his deformity, withdrawing him from games, acquired for him an insignificance ² for which he was grateful. He was not popular, and he was very lonely. He spent a couple of terms with Winks ³ in the Upper Third. Winks, with his weary manner and his drooping ⁴ eyelids ⁵, looked infinitely ⁶ bored. He did his duty, but he did it with an abstracted mind. He was kind, gentle, and foolish. He had a great belief in the honour of boys; he felt that the first thing to make them truthful ⁷ was not to let it enter your head for a moment that it was possible for them to lie. 'Ask much,' he quoted, 'and much shall be given to you.' Life was easy in the Upper Third. You knew exactly what lines would come to your turn to construe ⁸, and with the crib that passed from hand to hand you could find out all you wanted in two minutes; you could hold a Latin Grammar open on your knees while questions were passing round; and Winks never noticed anything odd in the fact that the same incredible mistake was to be found in a dozen different exercises. He had no great faith in examinations, for he noticed that boys never did so well in them as in form: it was disappointing, but not significant. In due course they were moved up, having learned little but a cheerful effrontery ¹⁰ in the distortion of truth, which was possibly of greater service to them in after life than an ability to read Latin at sight., ,Then they fell into the hands of Tar ¹¹. His name was Turner; he was the most vivacious ¹² of the old masters, a short man with an immense belly ¹³, a black beard turning now to gray, and a swarthy skin. In his clerical dress there was indeed something in him to suggest the tar-barrel; and though on principle he gave five hundred lines to any boy on whose lips he overheard his nickname, at dinner-parties in the precincts he often made little jokes about it. He was the most worldly of the masters; he dined out more frequently than any of the others, and the society he kept was not so exclusively clerical. The boys looked upon him as rather a dog. He left off his clerical attire ¹⁴ during the holidays and had been seen in Switzerland in gay tweeds. He liked a bottle of wine and a good dinner, and having once been seen at the Cafe Royal with a lady who was very probably a near relation, was thenceforward supposed by generations of schoolboys to indulge in orgies the circumstantial details of which pointed ¹⁵ to an unbounded belief in human depravity., ,Mr. Turner reckoned that it took him a term to lick boys into shape after they had been in the Upper Third; and now and then he let fall a sly hint, which showed that he knew perfectly ¹⁶ what went on in his colleague's form. He took it good-humouredly. He looked upon boys as young ruffians who were more apt to be truthful if it was quite certain a lie would be found out, whose sense of honour was peculiar ¹⁷ to themselves and did not apply to dealings with masters, and who were least likely to be troublesome when they learned that it did not pay. He was proud of his form and as eager at fifty-five that it should do better in examinations than any of the others as he had been when he first came to the school. He had the choler of the obese ¹⁸, easily roused and as easily calmed, and his boys soon discovered that there was much kindliness ¹⁹ beneath the invective ²⁰ with which he constantly assailed ²¹ them. He had no patience with fools, but was willing to take much trouble with boys whom he suspected of concealing ²² intelligence behind their wilfulness ²³. He was fond of inviting ²⁴ them to tea; and, though vowing ²⁵ they never got a look in with him at the cakes and muffins, for it was the fashion to believe that his corpulence pointed to a voracious ²⁶ appetite, and his voracious appetite to tapeworms, they accepted his invitations with real pleasure., , ,Then he began to go to the classes which were held in the headmaster's study, immediately after tea, to prepare boys for confirmation ³⁶. Philip's piety ³⁷ had not stood the test of time, and he had long since given up his nightly reading of the Bible; but now, under the influence of Mr. Perkins, with this new condition of the body which made him so restless, his old feelings revived, and he reproached himself bitterly for his backsliding. The fires of Hell burned fiercely before his mind's eye. If he had died during that time when he was little better than an infidel he would have been lost; he believed implicitly ³⁸ in pain everlasting ³⁹, he believed in it much more than in eternal happiness; and he shuddered ⁴⁰ at the dangers he had run., ,Since the day on which Mr. Perkins had spoken kindly ⁴¹ to him, when he was smarting under the particular form of abuse which he could least bear, Philip had conceived for his headmaster a dog-like adoration ⁴². He racked his brains vainly for some way to please him. He treasured the smallest word of commendation which by chance fell from his lips. And when he came to the quiet little meetings in his house he was prepared to surrender himself entirely ⁴³. He kept his eyes fixed ⁴⁴ on Mr. Perkins' shining eyes, and sat with mouth half open, his head a little thrown forward so as to miss no word. The ordinariness of the surroundings made the matters they dealt with extraordinarily ⁴⁵ moving. And often the master, seized himself by the wonder of his subject, would push back the book in front of him, and with his hands clasped together over his heart, as though to still the beating, would talk of the mysteries of their religion. Sometimes Philip did not understand, but he did not want to understand, he felt vaguely that it was enough to feel. It seemed to him then that the headmaster, with his black, straggling hair and his pale face, was like those prophets of Israel who feared not to take kings to task; and when he thought of the Redeemer he saw Him only with the same dark eyes and those wan ⁹ cheeks., ,The boy bullied the small girl into giving him all her money. 那男孩威逼那个小女孩把所有的钱都给他。 来自《简明英汉词典》,Her insignificance in the presence of so much magnificence faintly affected her. "她想象着他所描绘的一切，心里不禁有些刺痛 。 来自英汉文学 - 嘉莉妹妹