骑马出走的女人D.H.劳伦斯
2021-01-28 16:34阅读：
THE WOMAN WHO RODE AWAY
翻译：王志镐
I
She had thought that this marriage, of all marriages, would be an
adventure. Not that the man himself was exactly magical to her. A
little, wiry, twisted fellow, twenty years older than herself, with
brown eyes and greying hair, who had come to America a scrap of a
wastrel, from Holland, years ago, as a tiny boy, and from the
gold-mines of the west had been kicked south into Mexico, and now
was more or less rich, owning silver-mines in the wilds of the
Sierra Madre: it was obvious that the adventure lay in his
circumstances, rather than his person. But he was still a little
dynamo of energy, in spite of accidents survived, and what he had
accomplished he had accomplished alone. One of those human oddments
there is no accounting for.
在所有婚姻中，她原以为这段婚姻会是一种冒险。那倒不是因为那男人本身对她真的有魅力。一个矮小、精壮身体扭曲的家伙，比她大二十岁，褐色的眼睛，花白的头发，多年前他从荷兰来美国时，还是一个小男孩，一块无用的废物。后来他从西部的金矿被撵到南方的墨西哥，如今多少发了点财，在马德雷山脉一带拥有几处银矿。显而易见，所谓冒险，与其说在他身上，不如说在他的境遇。不过他仍然是个精力充沛的人，尽管经历意外却死而复生，他所创造的业绩是
他自己一个人挣下的，他是人类中不可思议的怪物之一。
When she actually saw what he had accomplished, her heart quailed.
Great green-covered, unbroken mountain-hills, and in the midst of
the lifeless isolation, the sharp pinkish mounds of the dried mud
from the silver-works. Under the nakedness of the works, the
walled-in, one-storey adobe house, with its garden inside, and its
deep inner verandah with tropical climbers on the sides. And when
you looked up from this shut-in flowered patio, you saw the huge
pink cone of the silver-mud refuse, and the machinery of the
extracting plant against heaven above. No more.
To be sure, the great wooden doors were often open. And then she
could stand outside, in the vast open world. And see great, void,
tree-clad hills piling behind one another, from nowhere into
nowhere. They were green in autumn time. For the rest, pinkish,
stark dry, and abstract.
And in his battered Ford car her husband would take her into the
dead, thrice-dead little Spanish town forgotten among the
mountains. The great, sundried dead church, the dead portales, the
hopeless covered market-place, where, the first time she went, she
saw a dead dog lying between the meat stalls and the vegetable
array, stretched out as if for ever, nobody troubling to throw it
away. Deadness within deadness.
Everybody feebly talking silver, and showing bits of ore. But
silver was at a standstill. The great war came and went. Silver was
a dead market. Her husband's mines were closed down. But she and he
lived on in the adobe house under the works, among the flowers that
were never very flowery to her.
She had two children, a boy and a girl. And her eldest, the boy,
was nearly ten years old before she aroused from her stupor of
subjected amazement. She was now thirty-three, a large, blue-eyed,
dazed woman, beginning to grow stout. Her little, wiry, tough,
twisted, brown-eyed husband was fifty-three, a man as tough as
wire, tenacious as wire, still full of energy, but dimmed by the
lapse of silver from the market, and by some curious
inaccessibility on his wife's part.
He was a man of principles, and a good husband. In a way, he doted
on her. He never quite got over his dazzled admiration of her. But
essentially, he was still a bachelor. He had been thrown out on the
world, a little bachelor, at the age of ten. When he married he was
over forty, and had enough money to marry on. But his capital was
all a bachelor's. He was boss of his own works, and marriage was
the last and most intimate bit of his own works.
He admired his wife to extinction, he admired her body, all her
points. And she was to him always the rather dazzling Californian
girl from Berkeley, whom he had first known. Like any sheik, he
kept her guarded among those mountains of Chihuahua. He was jealous
of her as he was of his silver-mine: and that is saying a
lot.
At thirty-three she really was still the girl from Berkeley, in all
but physique. Her conscious development had stopped mysteriously
with her marriage, completely arrested. Her husband had never
become real to her, neither mentally nor physically. In spite of
his late sort of passion for her, he never meant anything to her,
physically. Only morally he swayed her, downed her, kept her in an
invincible slavery.
So the years went by, in the adobe house strung round the sunny
patio, with the silver-works overhead. Her husband was never still.
When the silver went dead, he ran a ranch lower down, some twenty
miles away, and raised pure-bred hogs, splendid creatures. At the
same time, he hated pigs. He was a squeamish waif of an idealist,
and really hated the physical side of life. He loved work, work,
work, and making things. His marriage, his children, were something
he was making, part of his business, but with a sentimental income
this time.
Gradually her nerves began to go wrong: she must get out. She must
get out. So he took her to El Paso for three months. And at least
it was the United States.
But he kept his spell over her. The three months ended: back she
was, just the same, in her adobe house among those eternal green or
pinky-brown hills, void as only the undiscovered is void. She
taught her children, she supervised the Mexican boys who were her
servants. And sometimes her husband brought visitors, Spaniards or
Mexicans or occasionally white men.
He really loved to have white men staying on the place. Yet he had
not a moment's peace when they were there. It was as if his wife
were some peculiar secret vein of ore in his mines, which no one
must be aware of except himself. And she was fascinated by the
young gentlemen, mining engineers, who were his guests at times.
He, too, was fascinated by a real gentleman. But he was an
old-timer miner with a wife, and if a gentleman looked at his wife,
he felt as if his mine were being looted, the secrets of it pryed
out.
It was one of these young gentlemen who put the idea into her mind.
They were all standing outside the great wooden doors of the patio,
looking at the outer world. The eternal, motionless hills were all
green, it was September, after the rains. There was no sign of
anything, save the deserted mine, the deserted works, and a bunch
of half-deserted miner's dwellings.
'I wonder,' said the young man, 'what there is behind those great
blank hills.'
'More hills,' said Lederman. 'If you go that way, Sonora and the
coast. This way is the desert--you came from there--And the other
way, hills and mountains.'
'Yes, but what lives in the hills and mountains? Surely there is
something wonderful? It looks so like nowhere on earth: like being
on the moon.'
'There's plenty of game, if you want to shoot. And Indians, if you
call them wonderful.'
'Wild ones?'
'Wild enough.'
'But friendly?'
'It depends. Some of them are quite wild, and they don't let
anybody near. They kill a missionary at sight. And where a
missionary can't get, nobody can.'
'But what does the government say?'
'They're so far from everywhere, the government leaves 'em alone.
And they're wily; if they think there'll be trouble, they send a
delegation to Chihuahua and make a formal submission. The
government is glad to leave it at that.'
'And do they live quite wild, with their own savage customs and
religion?'
'Oh, yes. They use nothing but bows and arrows. I've seen them in
town, in the Plaza, with funny sort of hats with flowers round
them, and a bow in one hand, quite naked except for a sort of
shirt, even in cold weather--striding round with their savage's
bare legs.'
'But don't you suppose it's wonderful, up there in their secret
villages?'
'No. What would there be wonderful about it? Savages are savages,
and all savages behave more or less alike: rather low-down and
dirty, unsanitary, with a few cunning tricks, and struggling to get
enough to eat.'
'But surely they have old, old religions and mysteries--it must be
wonderful, surely it must.'
'I don't know about mysteries--howling and heathen practices, more
or less indecent. No, I see nothing wonderful in that kind of
stuff. And I wonder that you should, when you have lived in London
or Paris or New York--'
'Ah, everybody lives in London or Paris or New York'--said the
young man, as if this were an argument.
And his peculiar vague enthusiasm for unknown Indians found a full
echo in the woman's heart. She was overcome by a foolish
romanticism more unreal than a girl's. She felt it was her destiny
to wander into the secret haunts of these timeless, mysterious,
marvellous Indians of the mountains.
She kept her secret. The young man was departing, her husband was
going with him down to Torreon, on business:--would be away for
some days. But before the departure, she made her husband talk
about the Indians: about the wandering tribes, resembling the
Navajo, who were still wandering free; and the Yaquis of Sonora:
and the different groups in the different valleys of Chihuahua
State.
There was supposed to be one tribe, the Chilchuis, living in a high
valley to the south, who were the sacred tribe of all the Indians.
The descendants of Montezuma and of the old Aztec or Totonac kings
still lived among them, and the old priests still kept up the
ancient religion, and offered human sacrifices--so it was said.
Some scientists had been to the Chilchui country, and had come back
gaunt and exhausted with hunger and bitter privation, bringing
various curious, barbaric objects of worship, but having seen
nothing extraordinary in the hungry, stark village of
savages.
Though Lederman talked in this off-hand way, it was obvious he felt
some of the vulgar excitement at the idea of ancient and mysterious
savages.
'How far away are they?' she asked.
'Oh--three days on horseback--past Cuchitee and a little lake there
is up there.'
Her husband and the young man departed. The woman made her crazy
plans. Of late, to break the monotony of her life, she had harassed
her husband into letting her go riding with him, occasionally, on
horseback. She was never allowed to go out alone. The country truly
was not safe, lawless and crude.
But she had her own horse, and she dreamed of being free as she had
been as a girl, among the hills of California.
Her daughter, nine years old, was now in a tiny convent in the
little half-deserted Spanish mining-town five miles away.
'Manuel,' said the woman to her house-servant, 'I'm going to ride
to the convent to see Margarita, and take her a few things. Perhaps
I shall stay the night in the convent. You look after Freddy and
see everything is all right till I come back.'
'Shall I ride with you on the master's horse, or shall Juan?' asked
the servant.
'Neither of you. I shall go alone.'
The young man looked her in the eyes, in protest. Absolutely
impossible that the woman should ride alone!
'I shall go alone,' repeated the large, placid-seeming,
fair-complexioned woman, with peculiar overbearing emphasis. And
the man silently, unhappily yielded.
'Why are you going alone, mother?' asked her son, as she made up
parcels of food.
'Am I never to be let alone? Not one moment of my life?' she cried,
with sudden explosion of energy. And the child, like the servant,
shrank into silence.
She set off without a qualm, riding astride on her strong roan
horse, and wearing a riding suit of coarse linen, a riding skirt
over her linen breeches, a scarlet neck-tie over her white blouse,
and a black felt hat on her head. She had food in her saddle-bags,
an army canteen with water, and a large, native blanket tied on
behind the saddle. Peering into the distance, she set off from her
home. Manuel and the little boy stood in the gateway to watch her
go. She did not even turn to wave them farewell.
But when she had ridden about a mile, she left the wild road and
took a small trail to the right, that led into another valley, over
steep places and past great trees, and through another deserted
mining-settlement. It was September, the water was running freely
in the little stream that had fed the now-abandoned mine. She got
down to drink, and let the horse drink too.
She saw natives coming through the trees, away up the slope. They
had seen her, and were watching her closely. She watched in turn.
The three people, two women and a youth, were making a wide detour,
so as not to come too close to her. She did not care. Mounting, she
trotted ahead up the silent valley, beyond the silver-works, beyond
any trace of mining. There was still a rough trail, that led over
rocks and loose stones into the valley beyond. This trail she had
already ridden, with her husband. Beyond that she knew she must go
south.
Curiously she was not afraid, although it was a frightening
country, the silent, fatal-seeming mountain-slopes, the occasional
distant, suspicious, elusive natives among the trees, the great
carrion birds occasionally hovering, like great flies, in the
distance, over some carrion or some ranch house or some group of
huts.
As she climbed, the trees shrank and the trail ran through a thorny
scrub, that was trailed over with blue convolvulus and an
occasional pink creeper. Then these flowers lapsed. She was nearing
the pine-trees.
She was over the crest, and before her another silent, void,
green-clad valley. It was past midday. Her horse turned to a little
runlet of water, so she got down to eat her midday meal. She sat in
silence looking at the motionless unliving valley, and at the
sharp-peaked hills, rising higher to rock and pine-trees,
southwards. She rested two hours in the heat of the day, while the
horse cropped around her.
Curious that she was neither afraid nor lonely. Indeed, the
loneliness was like a drink of cold water to one who is very
thirsty. And a strange elation sustained her from within.
She travelled on, and camped at night in a valley beside a stream,
deep among the bushes. She had seen cattle and had crossed several
trails. There must be a ranch not far off. She heard the strange
wailing shriek of a mountain-lion, and the answer of dogs. But she
sat by her small camp fire in a secret hollow place and was not
really afraid. She was buoyed up always by the curious, bubbling
elation within her.
It was very cold before dawn. She lay wrapped in her blanket
looking at the stars, listening to her horse shivering, and feeling
like a woman who has died and passed beyond. She was not sure that
she had not heard, during the night, a great crash at the centre of
herself, which was the crash of her own death. Or else it was a
crash at the centre of the earth, and meant something big and
mysterious.
With the first peep of light she got up, numb with cold, and made a
fire. She ate hastily, gave her horse some pieces of oil-seed cake,
and set off again. She avoided any meeting--and since she met
nobody, it was evident that she in turn was avoided. She came at
last in sight of the village of Cuchitee, with its black houses
with their reddish roofs, a sombre, dreary little cluster below
another silent, long-abandoned mine. And beyond, a long, great
mountain-side, rising up green and light to the darker, shaggier
green of pine trees. And beyond the pine trees stretches of naked
rock against the sky, rock slashed already and brindled with white
stripes of snow. High up, the new snow had already begun to
fall.
And now, as she neared, more or less, her destination, she began to
go vague and disheartened. She had passed the little lake among
yellowing aspen trees whose white trunks were round and suave like
the white round arms of some woman. What a lovely place! In
California she would have raved about it. But here she looked and
saw that it was lovely, but she didn't care. She was weary and
spent with her two nights in the open, and afraid of the coming
night. She didn't know where she was going, or what she was going
for. Her horse plodded dejectedly on, towards that immense and
forbidding mountain-slope, following a stony little trail. And if
she had had any will of her own left, she would have turned back,
to the village, to be protected and sent home to her husband.
