評論
打印
I begged Stroeve to behave more wisely. His want of spirit was exasperating.
我勸說施特略夫放聰明一些。他這樣沒有骨氣叫旁觀的人都氣得要命。
You're doing no good at all by going on like this, I said. "I think you'd have been wiser if you'd hit her over the head with a stick. She wouldn't have despised you as she does now."
“你這樣下去一點也沒有好處，”我說，“依我看，你更應該做的倒是劈頭蓋臉地揍她一頓，她就不會照現在這樣看不起你了。”
I suggested that he should go home for a while. He had often spoken to me of the silent town, somewhere up in the north of Holland, where his parents still lived. They were poor people. His father was a carpenter, and they dwelt in a little old red-brick house, neat and clean, by the side of a sluggish canal. The streets were wide and empty; for two hundred years the place had been dying, but the houses had the homely stateliness of their time. Rich merchants, sending their wares to the distant Indies, had lived in them calm and prosperous lives, and in their decent decay they kept still an aroma of their splendid past. You could wander along the canal till you came to broad green fields, with windmills here and there, in which cattle, black and white, grazed lazily. I thought that among those surroundings, with their recollections of his boyhood, Dirk Stroeve would forget his unhappiness. But he would not go.
我建議叫他回老家去住些天。他常常同我提到他的老家，荷蘭北部某個地方的一個寂靜的城鎮，他的父母至今仍然住在那里。他們都是窮苦人，他父親是個木匠。他家住在一幢古老的小紅磚房里，干凈、整齊，房子旁是一條水流徐緩的運河。那里的街道非常寬闊，寂靜無人。兩百年來，這個地方日漸荒涼、冷落，但是城鎮里房屋卻仍然保持著當年的樸實而雄偉的氣象。富有的商人把貨物發往遙遠的東印度群島去，在這些房子里安靜地過著優裕的生活；如今這些人家雖已衰敗，但仍然閃爍著往日繁華的余輝。你可以沿著運河徜徉，直到走上一片片寬廣的綠色原野，黑白斑駁的牛只懶洋洋地在上面吃草。我想在這樣一個充滿童年回憶的環境里，戴爾克·施特略夫是可以忘掉他這次的不幸的。但是他卻不要回去。
I must be here when she needs me, he repeated. "It would be dreadful if something terrible happened and I were not at hand."
“我一定得留在這兒，她什么時候需要我就可以找到我，”他又重復他已經對我講過的話。“如果發生了什么不好的事，我又不在她身邊，那就太可怕了。”
