Chapter 37

2018-12-07 20:14:0006:36 261
所属专辑:了不起的盖茨比
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Previous story: Gatsby回忆着Daisy结婚后,他独自重游故地的怅惋。Nick也和Jordan发生了争执。而刚刚失去了妻子的Wilson精神一直不太正常,Michaelis一直陪在Wilson身边,并扯着其他的话题试图分散Wilson的注意力。Wilson坚信是那辆黄色轿车里的男人就是杀害他妻子的凶手,那么他接下来会怎么做呢?


Michaelis had seen this too but it hadn't occurred to him that there was any special significance in it.

He believed that Mrs. Wilson had been running away from her husband, rather than trying to stop any particular car.

"How could she of been like that?"

"She's a deep one," said Wilson, as if that answered the question. "Ah-h-h-m."

He began to rock again and Michaelis stood twisting the leash in his hand.

"Maybe you got some friend that I could telephone for, George?"

This was a forlorn hope — he was almost sure that Wilson had no friend: there was not enough of him for his wife.

He was glad a little later when he noticed a change in the room, a blue quickening by the window, and realized that dawn wasn't far off. About five o'clock it was blue enough outside to snap off the light.

Wilson's glazed eyes turned out to the ashheaps, where small grey clouds took on fantastic shape and scurried here and there in the faint dawn wind.

"I spoke to her," he muttered, after a long silence. "I told her she might fool me but she couldn't fool God. I took her to the window—"

With an effort he got up and walked to the rear window and leaned with his face pressed against it, "—and I said 'God knows what you've been doing, everything you've been doing. You may fool me but you can't fool God!' "

Standing behind him Michaelis saw with a shock that he was looking at the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg which had just emerged pale and enormous from the dissolving night.

"God sees everything," repeated Wilson.

"That's an advertisement," Michaelis assured him. Something made him turn away from the window and look back into the room.

But Wilson stood there a long time, his face close to the window pane, nodding into the twilight.

By six o'clock Michaelis was worn out and grateful for the sound of a car stopping outside. It was one of the watchers of the night before who had promised to come back so he cooked breakfast for three which he and the other man ate together.

Wilson was quieter now and Michaelis went home to sleep; when he awoke four hours later and hurried back to the garage Wilson was gone.

His movements — he was on foot all the time — were afterward traced to Port Roosevelt and then to Gad's Hill where he bought a sandwich that he didn't eat and a cup of coffee.

He must have been tired and walking slowly for he didn't reach Gad's Hill until noon.

Thus far there was no difficulty in accounting for his time—there were boys who had seen a man "acting sort of crazy" and motorists at whom he stared oddly from the side of the road.

Then for three hours he disappeared from view. The police, on the strength of what he said to Michaelis, that he "had a way of finding out," supposed that he spent that time going from garage to garage thereabouts inquiring for a yellow car.

On the other hand no garage man who had seen him ever came forward — and perhaps he had an easier, surer way of finding out what he wanted to know.

By half past two he was in West Egg where he asked someone the way to Gatsby's house. So by that time he knew Gatsby's name.

At two o'clock Gatsby put on his bathing suit and left word with the butler that if any one phoned word was to be brought to him at the pool.

He stopped at the garage for a pneumatic(充气式的)mattress that had amused his guests during the summer, and the chauffeur helped him pump it up.

Then he gave instructions that the open car wasn't to be taken out under any circumstances — and this was strange because the front right fender needed repair.

Gatsby shouldered the mattress and started for the pool. Once he stopped and shifted it a little, and the chauffeur asked him if he needed help, but he shook his head and in a moment disappeared among the yellowing trees.

No telephone message arrived but the butler went without his sleep and waited for it until four o'clock — until long after there was any one to give it to if it came.

I have an idea that Gatsby himself didn't believe it would come and perhaps he no longer cared.

If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream.

He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass.

A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about … like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees.

The chauffeur — he was one of Wolfshiem's protégés(手下)— heard the shots — afterward he could only say that he hadn't thought anything much about them.

I drove from the station directly to Gatsby's house and my rushing anxiously up the front steps was the first thing that alarmed any one.

But they knew then, I firmly believe. With scarcely a word said, four of us, the chauffeur, butler, gardener and I, hurried down to the pool.

There was a faint, barely perceptible movement of the water as the fresh flow from one end urged its way toward the drain at the other.

With little ripples that were hardly the shadows of waves, the laden mattress moved irregularly down the pool.

A small gust of wind that scarcely corrugated the surface was enough to disturb its accidental course with its accidental burden.

The touch of a cluster of leaves revolved it slowly, tracing, like the leg of transit, a thin red circle in the water.

It was after we started with Gatsby toward the house that the gardener saw Wilson's body a little way off in the grass, and the holocaust was complete.

(1035 words)

今日短语

1. take on呈现,显得

2. be worn out精疲力尽

3. pump sth. up给...充气

4. glide toward悄悄地走近

5. a cluster of一堆

6. way off 隔着一段距离

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