既然我們的美國文學沒開成，裦伯老師大概也還來不及教我們福克納的〈一束玫瑰向睌天〉！不過這麼 morbid 的好作品偶而還是讀一讀好了，磨腦子。我學生 (《紅孩兒》的編劇)說：唉呦！大家都讀暢銷書，小心腦皮層會像腎臟一樣光滑。
這個 Emily 小姐用砒霜將「非志願情人」留下，同床共幄數十年.....
學生的詮釋很不一樣。有人覺得很浪漫：交了一個音樂盒來。滿花床的玫瑰，讓我不禁想唱：I beg your pardon! I never promised you a rose garden....
也有學生將愛情的怖悚表達成超寫實的玫瑰花語...
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原文來自:
http://www.ariyam.com/docs/lit/wf_rose.htmlA Rose for Emily
by William Faulkner
I
WHEN Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral:
the men through a sort of respectful affection for a fallen
monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her
house, which no one save an old man-servant--a combined gardener and
cook--had seen in at least ten years.
It was a big, squarish frame house that had once been white,
decorated with cupolas and spires and scrolled balconies in the
heavily lightsome style of the seventies, set on what had once been
our most select street. But garages and cotton gins had encroached
and obliterated even the august names of that neighborhood; only
Miss Emily’s house was left, lifting its stubborn and coquettish
decay above the cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps-an eyesore
among eyesores. And now Miss Emily had gone to join the
representatives of those august names where they lay in the cedar-
bemused cemetery among the ranked and anonymous graves of Union and
Confederate soldiers who fell at the battle of Jefferson.
Alive, Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort
of hereditary obligation upon the town, dating from that day in 1894
when Colonel Sartoris, the mayor--he who fathered the edict that no
Negro woman should appear on the streets without an apron-remitted
her taxes, the dispensation dating from the death of her father on
into perpetuity. Not that Miss Emily would have accepted charity.
Colonel Sartoris invented an involved tale to the effect that Miss
Emily’s father had loaned money to the town, which the town, as a
matter of business, preferred this way of repaying. Only a man of
Colonel Sartoris’ generation and thought could have invented it,
and only a woman could have believed it.
When the next generation, with its more modern ideas, became mayors
and aldermen, this arrangement created some little dissatisfaction.
On the first of the year they mailed her a tax notice. February came, and there was no reply. They wrote her a formal letter, asking
her to call at the sheriff’s office at her convenience. A week
later the mayor wrote her himself, offering to call or to send his
car for her, and received in reply a note on paper of an archaic
shape, in a thin, flowing calligraphy in faded ink, to the effect
that she no longer went out at all. The tax notice was also
enclosed, without comment.
They called a special meeting of the Board of Aldermen. A deputation
waited upon her, knocked at the door through which no visitor had
passed since she ceased giving china-painting lessons eight or ten
years earlier. They were admitted by the old Negro into a dim hall
from which a stairway mounted into still more shadow. It smelled of
dust and disuse--a close, dank smell. The Negro led them into the
parlor. It was furnished in heavy, leather-covered furniture. When
the Negro opened the blinds of one window, they could see that the
leather was cracked; and when they sat down, a faint dust rose
sluggishly about their thighs, spinning with slow motes in the
single sun-ray. On a tarnished gilt easel before the fireplace stood
a crayon portrait of Miss Emily’s father.
They rose when she entered--a small, fat woman in black, with a thin
gold chain descending to her waist and vanishing into her belt, leaning on an ebony cane with a tarnished gold head. Her skeleton
was small and spare; perhaps that was why what would have been merely plumpness in another was obesity in her. She looked bloated,
like a body long submerged in motionless water, and of that pallid
hue. Her eyes, lost in the fatty ridges of her face, looked like two
small pieces of coal pressed into a lump of dough as they moved from
one face to another while the visitors stated their errand.
She did not ask them to sit. She just stood in the door and listened
quietly until the spokesman came to a stumbling halt. Then they
could hear the invisible watch ticking at the end of the gold chain.
Her voice was dry and cold. ”I have no taxes in Jefferson. Colonel
Sartoris explained it to me. Perhaps one of you can gain access to
the city records and satisfy yourselves.”
”But we have. We are the city authorities, Miss Emily. Didn’t you
get a notice from the sheriff, signed by him?”
”I received a paper, yes,” Miss Emily said. ”Perhaps he considers
himself the sheriff . . . I have no taxes in Jefferson.”
”But there is nothing on the books to show that, you see We must go
by the--”
”See Colonel Sartoris. I have no taxes in Jefferson.”
”But, Miss Emily--”
”See Colonel Sartoris.” (Colonel Sartoris had been dead almost ten
years.) ”I have no taxes in Jefferson. Tobe!” The Negro
appeared. ”Show these gentlemen out.”
II
So SHE vanquished them, horse and foot, just as she had vanquished
their fathers thirty years before about the smell.
That was two years after her father’s death and a short time after
her sweetheart--the one we believed would marry her --had deserted
her. After her father’s death she went out very little; after her
sweetheart went away, people hardly saw her at all. A few of the
ladies had the temerity to call, but were not received, and the only
sign of life about the place was the Negro man--a young man then--
going in and out with a market basket.
”Just as if a man--any man--could keep a kitchen properly, ”the
ladies said; so they were not surprised when the smell developed. It
was another link between the gross, teeming world and the high and
mighty Griersons.
A neighbor, a woman, complained to the mayor, Judge Stevens, eighty
years old.
”But what will you have me do about it, madam?” he said.
”Why, send her word to stop it,” the woman said. ”Isn’t there a
law? ”
”I’m sure that won’t be necessary,” Judge Stevens said. ”It’s
probably just a snake or a rat that nigger of hers killed in the
yard. I’ll speak to him about it.”
The next day he received two more complaints, one from a man who
came in diffident deprecation. ”We really must do something about
it, Judge. I’d be the last one in the world to bother Miss Emily,
but we’ve got to do something.” That night the Board of Aldermen
met--three graybeards and one younger man, a member of the rising
generation.
”It’s simple enough,” he said. ”Send her word to have her place
cleaned up. Give her a certain time to do it in, and if she don’t. ..”
”Dammit, sir,” Judge Stevens said, ”will you accuse a lady to her
face of smelling bad?”
So the next night, after midnight, four men crossed Miss Emily’s
lawn and slunk about the house like burglars, sniffing along the
base of the brickwork and at the cellar openings while one of them
performed a regular sowing motion with his hand out of a sack slung
from his shoulder. They broke open the cellar door and sprinkled
lime there, and in all the outbuildings. As they recrossed the lawn,
a window that had been dark was lighted and Miss Emily sat in it,
the light behind her, and her upright torso motionless as that of an
idol. They crept quietly across the lawn and into the shadow of the
locusts that lined the street. After a week or two the smell went
away.
That was when people had begun to feel really sorry for her. People
in our town, remembering how old lady Wyatt, her great-aunt, had
gone completely crazy at last, believed that the Griersons held
themselves a little too high for what they really were. None of the
young men were quite good enough for Miss Emily and such. We had
long thought of them as a tableau, Miss Emily a slender figure in
white in the background, her father a spraddled silhouette in the
foreground, his back to her and clutching a horsewhip, the two of
them framed by the back-flung front door. So when she got to be
thirty and was still single, we were not pleased exactly, but
vindicated; even with insanity in the family she wouldn’t have
turned down all of her chances if they had really materialized.
When her father died, it got about that the house was all that was
left to her; and in a way, people were glad. At last they could pity
Miss Emily. Being left alone, and a pauper, she had become
humanized. Now she too would know the old thrill and the old despair
of a penny more or less.
The day after his death all the ladies prepared to call at the house
and offer condolence and aid, as is our custom Miss Emily met them
at the door, dressed as usual and with no trace of grief on her
face. She told them that her father was not dead. She did that for
three days, with the ministers calling on her, and the doctors, t
trying to persuade her to let them dispose of the body. Just as they
were about to resort to law and force, she broke down, and they
buried her father quickly.
We did not say she was crazy then. We believed she had to do that.
We remembered all the young men her father had driven away, and we
knew that with nothing left, she would have to cling to that which
had robbed her, as people will.
III
SHE WAS SICK for a long time. When we saw her again, her hair was
cut short, making her look like a girl, with a vague resemblance to
those angels in colored church windows--sort of tragic and serene.
The town had just let the contracts for paving the sidewalks, and in
the summer after her father’s death they began the work. The
construction company came with riggers and mules and machinery, and
a foreman named Homer Barron, a Yankee--a big, dark, ready man, with
a big voice and eyes lighter than his face. The little boys would
follow in groups to hear him cuss the riggers, and the riggers
singing in time to the rise and fall of picks. Pretty soon he knew
everybody in town. Whenever you heard a lot of laughing anywhere
about the square, Homer Barron would be in the center of the group.
Presently we began to see him and Miss Emily on Sunday afternoons
driving in the yellow-wheeled buggy and the matched team of bays
from the livery stable.
At first we were glad that Miss Emily would have an interest,
because the ladies all said, ”Of course a Grierson would not think
seriously of a Northerner, a day laborer.” But there were still
others, older people, who said that even grief could not cause a
real lady to forget noblesse oblige- -
without calling it noblesse oblige. They just said, ”Poor Emily.
Her kinsfolk should come to her.” She had some kin in Alabama; but
years ago her father had fallen out with them over the estate of old
lady Wyatt, the crazy woman, and there was no communication between
the two families. They had not even been represented at the funeral.
And as soon as the old people said, ”Poor Emily,” the whispering
began. ”Do you suppose it’s really so?” they said to one
another. ”Of course it is. What else could . . .” This behind
their hands; rustling of craned silk and satin behind jalousies
closed upon the sun of Sunday afternoon as the thin, swift clop-clop-
clop of the matched team passed: ”Poor Emily.”
She carried her head high enough--even when we believed that she was
fallen. It was as if she demanded more than ever the recognition of
her dignity as the last Grierson; as if it had wanted that touch of
earthiness to reaffirm her imperviousness. Like when she bought the
rat poison, the arsenic. That was over a year after they had begun
to say ”Poor Emily,” and while the two female cousins were
visiting her.
”I want some poison,” she said to the druggist. She was over
thirty then, still a slight woman, though thinner than usual, with
cold, haughty black eyes in a face the flesh of which was strained
across the temples and about the eyesockets as you imagine a
lighthouse-keeper’s face ought to look. ”I want some poison,” she
said.
”Yes, Miss Emily. What kind? For rats and such? I’d recom--”
”I want the best you have. I don’t care what kind.”
The druggist named several. ”They’ll kill anything up to an
elephant. But what you want is--”
”Arsenic,” Miss Emily said. ”Is that a good one?”
”Is . . . arsenic? Yes, ma’am. But what you want--”
”I want arsenic.”
The druggist looked down at her. She looked back at him, erect, her
face like a strained flag. ”Why, of course,” the druggist said. ”
If that’s what you want. But the law requires you to tell what you are going to use it for.”
Miss Emily just stared at him, her head tilted back in order to look
him eye for eye, until he looked away and went and got the arsenic
and wrapped it up. The Negro delivery boy brought her the package;
the druggist didn’t come back. When she opened the package at home
there was written on the box, under the skull and bones: ”For
rats.”
IV
So THE NEXT day we all said, ”She will kill herself”; and we said
it would be the best thing. When she had first begun to be seen with
Homer Barron, we had said, ”She will marry him.” Then we said, ”
She will persuade him yet,” because Homer himself had remarked--he
liked men, and it was known that he drank with the younger men in the Elks’ Club--that he was not a marrying man. Later we said, ”
Poor Emily” behind the jalousies as they passed on Sunday afternoon
in the glittering buggy, Miss Emily with her head high and Homer
Barron with his hat cocked and a cigar in his teeth, reins and whip in a yellow glove.
Then some of the ladies began to say that it was a disgrace to the
town and a bad example to the young people. The men did not want to
interfere, but at last the ladies forced the Baptist minister--Miss
Emily’s people were Episcopal-- to call upon her. He would never
divulge what happened during that interview, but he refused to go
back again. The next Sunday they again drove about the streets, and
the following day the minister’s wife wrote to Miss Emily’s
relations in Alabama.
So she had blood-kin under her roof again and we sat back to watch
developments. At first nothing happened. Then we were sure that they
were to be married. We learned that Miss Emily had been to the jeweler’s and ordered a man’s toilet set in silver, with the
letters H. B. on each piece. Two days later we learned that she had
bought a complete outfit of men’s clothing, including a nightshirt,
and we said, ”They are married.” We were really glad. We were glad
because the two female cousins were even more Grierson than Miss Emily had ever been.
So we were not surprised when Homer Barron--the streets had been
finished some time since--was gone. We were a little disappointed
that there was not a public blowing-off, but we believed that he had
gone on to prepare for Miss Emily’s coming, or to give her a chance
to get rid of the cousins. (By that time it was a cabal, and we were
all Miss Emily’s allies to help circumvent the cousins.) Sure
enough, after another week they departed. And, as we had expected
all along, within three days Homer Barron was back in town. A
neighbor saw the Negro man admit him at the kitchen door at dusk one
evening.
And that was the last we saw of Homer Barron. And of Miss Emily for
some time. The Negro man went in and out with the market basket, but the front door remained closed. Now and then we would see her at a
window for a moment, as the men did that night when they sprinkled
the lime, but for almost six months she did not appear on the streets. Then we knew that this was to be expected too; as if that
quality of her father which had thwarted her woman’s life so many times had been too virulent and too furious to die.
When we next saw Miss Emily, she had grown fat and her hair was
turning gray. During the next few years it grew grayer and grayer
until it attained an even pepper-and-salt iron-gray, when it ceased
turning. Up to the day of her death at seventy-four it was still
that vigorous iron-gray, like the hair of an active man.
From that time on her front door remained closed, save for a period
of six or seven years, when she was about forty, during which she
gave lessons in china-painting. She fitted up a studio in one of the
downstairs rooms, where the daughters and granddaughters of Colonel
Sartoris’ contemporaries were sent to her with the same regularity and in the same spirit that they were sent to church on Sundays with
a twenty-five-cent piece for the collection plate. Meanwhile her
taxes had been remitted.
Then the newer generation became the backbone and the spirit of the
town, and the painting pupils grew up and fell away and did not send
their children to her with boxes of color and tedious brushes and
pictures cut from the ladies’ magazines. The front door closed upon
the last one and remained closed for good. When the town got free
postal delivery, Miss Emily alone refused to let them fasten the
metal numbers above her door and attach a mailbox to it. She would
not listen to them.
Daily, monthly, yearly we watched the Negro grow grayer and more
stooped, going in and out with the market basket. Each December we
sent her a tax notice, which would be returned by the post office a
week later, unclaimed. Now and then we would see her in one of the
downstairs windows--she had evidently shut up the top floor of the
house--like the carven torso of an idol in a niche, looking or not
looking at us, we could never tell which. Thus she passed from
generation to generation--dear, inescapable, impervious, tranquil,
and perverse.
And so she died. Fell ill in the house filled with dust and shadows,
with only a doddering Negro man to wait on her. We did not even know
she was sick; we had long since given up trying to get any information from the Negro
He talked to no one, probably not even to her, for his voice had
grown harsh and rusty, as if from disuse.
She died in one of the downstairs rooms, in a heavy walnut bed with a curtain, her gray head propped on a pillow yellow and moldy with
age and lack of sunlight.
V
THE NEGRO met the first of the ladies at the front door and let them
in, with their hushed, sibilant voices and their quick, curious
glances, and then he disappeared. He walked right through the house
and out the back and was not seen again.
The two female cousins came at once. They held the funeral on the
second day, with the town coming to look at Miss Emily beneath a
mass of bought flowers, with the crayon face of her father musing profoundly above the bier and the ladies sibilant and macabre; and
the very old men --some in their brushed Confederate uniforms--on
the porch and the lawn, talking of Miss Emily as if she had been a
contemporary of theirs, believing that they had danced with her and
courted her perhaps, confusing time with its mathematical
progression, as the old do, to whom all the past is not a
diminishing road but, instead, a huge meadow which no winter ever
quite touches, divided from them now by the narrow bottle-neck of the most recent decade of years.
Already we knew that there was one room in that region above stairs
which no one had seen in forty years, and which would have to be
forced. They waited until Miss Emily was decently in the ground
before they opened it.
The violence of breaking down the door seemed to fill this room with
pervading dust. A thin, acrid pall as of the tomb seemed to lie
everywhere upon this room decked and furnished as for a bridal: upon
the valance curtains of faded rose color, upon the rose-shaded
lights, upon the dressing table, upon the delicate array of crystal
and the man’s toilet things backed with tarnished silver, silver so
tarnished that the monogram was obscured. Among them lay a collar
and tie, as if they had just been removed, which, lifted, left upon
the surface a pale crescent in the dust. Upon a chair hung the suit,
carefully folded; beneath it the two mute shoes and the discarded
socks.
The man himself lay in the bed.
For a long while we just stood there, looking down at the profound
and fleshless grin. The body had apparently once lain in the
attitude of an embrace, but now the long sleep that outlasts love,
that conquers even the grimace of love, had cuckolded him. What was
left of him, rotted beneath what was left of the nightshirt, had
become inextricable from the bed in which he lay; and upon him and
upon the pillow beside him lay that even coating of the patient and
biding dust.
Then we noticed that in the second pillow was the indentation of a
head. One of us lifted something from it, and leaning forward, that
faint and invisible dust dry and acrid in the nostrils, we saw a
long strand of iron-gray hair.
-END-
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