Of Human Bondage 人性的枷锁 Chapter 27

Weeks had two little rooms at the back of Frau Erlin's house, and one of them, arranged as a parlour, was comfortable enough for him to invite people to sit in. After supper, urged perhaps by the impish humour which was the despair of his friends in Cambridge, Mass., he often asked Philip and Hayward to come in for a chat. He received them with elaborate courtesy and insisted on their sitting in the only two comfortable chairs in the room. Though he did not drink himself, with a politeness of which Philip recognised the irony ¹, he put a couple of bottles of beer at Hayward's elbow, and he insisted on lighting ² matches whenever in the heat of argument Hayward's pipe went out. At the beginning of their acquaintance Hayward, as a member of so celebrated ³ a university, had adopted a patronising attitude towards Weeks, who was a graduate of Harvard; and when by chance the conversation turned upon the Greek tragedians, a subject upon which Hayward felt he spoke ⁴ with authority, he had assumed the air that it was his part to give information rather than to exchange ideas. Weeks had listened politely, with smiling modesty ⁵, till Hayward finished; then he asked one or two insidious ⁶ questions, so innocent in appearance that Hayward, not seeing into what a quandary ⁷ they led him, answered blandly ⁸; Weeks made a courteous ⁹ objection, then a correction of fact, after that a quotation ¹⁰ from some little known Latin commentator ¹¹, then a reference to a German authority; and the fact was disclosed that he was a scholar. With smiling ease, apologetically, Weeks tore to pieces all that Hayward had said; with elaborate civility he displayed the superficiality of his attainments ¹². He mocked him with gentle irony. Philip could not help seeing that Hayward looked a perfect fool, and Hayward had not the sense to hold his tongue; in his irritation ¹³, his self-assurance undaunted, he attempted to argue: he made wild statements and Weeks amicably ¹⁴ corrected them; he reasoned falsely and Weeks proved that he was absurd: Weeks confessed that he had taught Greek Literature at Harvard. Hayward gave a laugh of scorn., ,'I might have known it. Of course you read Greek like a schoolmaster,' he said. 'I read it like a poet.', ,'And do you find it more poetic ¹⁵ when you don't quite know what it means? I thought it was only in revealed religion that a mistranslation improved the sense.', , ,'Of course the man's a pedant ¹⁶. He has no real feeling for beauty. Accuracy is the virtue ¹⁷ of clerks. It's the spirit of the Greeks that we aim at. Weeks is like that fellow who went to hear Rubenstein and complained that he played false notes. False notes! What did they matter when he played divinely?', ,Philip, not knowing how many incompetent ¹⁸ people have found solace ¹⁹ in these false notes, was much impressed., ,In her voice we could sense a certain tinge of irony.从她的声音里我们可以感到某种讥讽的意味 。,The gas lamp gradually lost ground to electric lighting.煤气灯逐渐为电灯所代替
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