【英文读物】The Way to Peace.docx

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1、【英文读物】The Way to PeaceChapter 1ATHALIA HALL stopped to get her breath and look back over the road climbing steeply up from the covered bridge. It was a little after five, and the delicate air of dawn was full of wood and pasture scentsthe sweetness of bay and the freshness of dew-drenched leaves. In

2、 the valley night still hung like gauze under the trees, but the top of the hill was glittering with sunshine.“Why, weve hardly come halfway!” she said.Her husband, plodding along behind her, nodded ruefully. “Hardly,” he said.In her slim prettiness Athalia Hall looked like a girl, but she was thirt

3、y-four. Part of the girlishness lay in the smoothness of her white forehead and in the sincere intensity of her gaze. She wore a blue linen dress, and there was a little, soft, blue scarf under her chin; her white hat, with pink roses and loops of gray-blue ribbon, shadowed eager, unhumorous eyes, t

4、he color of forget-me-nots. Her husband was her senior by several yearsa large, loose-limbed man, with a scholarly face and mild, calm eyeseyes that were full of a singular tenacity of purpose. Just now his face showed the fatigue of the long climb up-hill; and when his wife, stopping to look back o

5、ver the glistening tops of the birches, said, “I believe its half a mile to the top yet!” he agreed, breathlessly. “Hard work!” he said.“It will be worth it when I get to the top and can see the view!” she declared, and began to climb again.“All the same, this road will be mighty hot when the sun ge

6、ts full on it,” her husband said; and added, anxiously, “I wish I had made you rest in the station until train-time.” She flung out her hands with an exclamation: “Rest! I hate rest!”“Hold on, and Ill give you a stick,” he called to her; “its a help when youre climbing.” He pulled down a slender bir

7、ch, and, setting his foot on it, broke it off at the root. She stopped, with an impatient gesture, and waited while he tore off handfuls of leaves and whittled away the side-shoots.“Do hurry, Lewis!” she said.They had left their train at five oclock in the morning, and had been sitting in the frowsy

8、 station, sleepily awaiting the express, when Athalia had had this fancy for climbing the hill so that she might see the view.“It looks pretty steep,” her husband warned her.“It will be something to do, anyhow!” she said; and added, with a restless sigh, “but you dont understand that, I suppose.”“I

9、guess I doafter a fashion,” he said, smiling at her. It was only in loves fashion, for really he was incapable of quite understanding her. To the country lawyer of sober piety and granite sense of duty, the rich variety of her moods was a continual wonder and sometimes a painful bewilderment. But wh

10、ether he understood the impetuous inconsequence of her temperament “after a fashion,” or whether he failed entirely to follow the complexity of her thought, he met all her fancies with a sort of tender admiration. People said that Squire Hall was henpecked; they also said that he had married beneath

11、 him. His father had been a judge and his grandfather a minister; he himself was a graduate of a fresh-water college, which later, when he published his exegesis on the Prophet Daniel, had conferred its little degree upon him and felt that he was a “distinguished son.” With such a lineage he might h

12、ave done better, people said, than to marry that girl, who was the most fickle creature and no housekeeper, and whose peoplethis they told one another in reserved voiceswere PLAY-ACTORS! Athalias mother, who had been the “play-actor,” had left her children an example of dutydomestic as well as profe

13、ssional dutyfaithfully done. As she did not leave anything else, Athalia added nothing to the Hall fortune; but Lewiss law practice, which was hardly more than conveyancing now and then, was helped out by a sawmill which the Halls had owned for two generations. So, as things were, they were able to

14、live in humdrum prosperity which gave Lewis plenty of time to browse about among his grandfathers old theological books, and by-and-by to become a very sound Hebrew scholar, and spared Athalia much wholesome occupation which would have been steadying to her eager nature. She was one of those people

15、who express every passing emotion, as a flower expresses each wind that sways it upon its stalk. But with expression the emotion ended.“But she isnt fickle,” Lewis had defended her once to a privileged relation who had made the accusation, basing it on the fact that Athalia had sewed her fingers off

16、 for the Missionary Society one winter and done nothing the next“Athalia ISNT fickle,” Lewis explained; “fickle people are insincere. Athalia is perfectly sincere, but she is temporary; thats all. Anyway, she wants to do something else this winter, and Thalia must have her head.”“Your heads better t

17、han hers, young man,” the venturesome relative insisted.“But it must be her head and not mine, Aunty, when it comes to doing what she thinks is right, even if its wrong,” he said, smiling.“Well, tell her shes a little fool!” cried the old lady, viciously.“You cant do that with Thalia,” Lewis explain

18、ed, patiently, “because it would make her unhappy. She takes everything so dreadfully hard; she feels things more than other people do.”“Lewis,” said the little, old, wrinkled, privileged great-aunt, “think a little less of her feelings and a little more of your own, or youll make a mess of things.”

19、Lewis Hall was too respectful to tell the old lady what he thought of such selfish advice; he merely did not act upon it. Instead, he went on giving a great deal of thought to Athalias “feelings.” That was why he and she were climbing the hill in the dewy silence of this August morning. Athalia had

20、“felt” that she wanted to see the viewthough it would have been better for her to have rested in the station, Lewis thought;(“I ought to have coaxed her out of it,” he reproached himself.) It certainly was a hard walk, considering that it followed a broken night in the sleeping-car. They had left th

21、e train at five oclock in the morning, and were sitting in the station awaiting the express when Athalia had had this impulse to climb the hill. “It looks pretty steep,” Lewis objected; and she flung out her hands with an impatient gesture.“I love to climb!” she said. So here they were, almost at th

22、e top, panting and toiling, Athalias skirts wet with dew, and Lewiss face drawn with fatigue.“Look!” she said; “its all open! We can sit down and see all over the world!” She left the road, springing lightly through the fringing bay and briers toward an open space on the hillside. “There is a gate i

23、n the wall!” she called out; “it seems to be some sort of enclosure. Lewis, help me to open the gate! Hurry! What a queer place! What do you suppose it is?”The gate opened into a little field bounded by a stone wall; the grass had been lately mowed, and the stubble, glistening with dew, showed the c

24、urving swaths of the scythe; across it, in even lines from wall to wall, were rows of small stakes painted black. Here and there were faint depressions, low, green cradles in the grass; each depression was marked at the head and foot by these iron stakes, hardly higher than the stubble itself.“Shake

25、rs graveyard, I guess,” Lewis said; “Ive heard that they dont use gravestones. Peaceful place, isnt it?”Her vivid face was instantly grave. “Very peaceful! Oh,” she added, as they sat down in the shadow of a pine, “dont you sometimes want to lie down and sleepdeep down in the grass and flowers?”“Wel

26、l,” he confessed, “I dont believe it would be as interesting as walking round on top of them.”She looked at him in despair.“Come, now,” he defended himself, “you dont take much to peace yourself at home.”“You dont understand!” she said, passionately.“There, there, little Tay,” he said, smiling, and

27、putting a soothing hand on hers; “I guess I doafter a fashion.”It was very still; below them the valley had suddenly brimmed with sunshine that flickered and twinkled on the birch leaves or shimmered on sombre stretches of pine and spruce. Close at hand, pennyroyal grew thick in the shadow of the wa

28、ll; and just beyond, mullen candles cast slender bars of shade across the grass. The sunken graves and the lines of iron markers lay before them.“How quiet it is!” she said, in a whisper.“I guess Ill smoke,” Lewis said, and scratched a match on his trousers.“How can you!” she protested; “it is profa

29、ne!”He gave her an amused look, but lighted his cigar and smoked dreamily for a minute; then he drew a long breath. “I was pretty tired,” he said, and turned to glance back at the road. A horse and cart were coming in at the open gate; the elderly driver, singing to himself, drew up abruptly at the

30、sight of the two under the pine-tree, then drove toward them, the wheels of the cart jolting cheerfully over the cradling graves. He had a sickle in his hand, and as he clambered down from the seat, he said, with friendly curiosity:“You folks are out early, for the worlds people.”“Is this a graveyar

31、d?” Athalia demanded, impetuously.“Yee,” he said, smiling; “its our burial-place; were Shakers.”“But why are there just the stakeswithout names?”“Why should there be names?” he said, whimsically; “they have new names now.”“Where is your community? Can we go and visit it?”“Yee; but were not much to s

32、ee,” he said; “just men and women, like you. Only were happy. I guess thats all the difference.”“But what a difference!” she exclaimed; and Lewis smiled.“Ive come up for pennyroyal,” the Shaker explained, sociably; “it grows thick round here.”“Tell me about the Shakers,” Athalia pleaded. “What do yo

33、u believe?”“Well,” he said, a simple shrewdness glimmering in his brown eyes, “if you go to the Trustees House, down there in the valley, Eldress Hannahll tell you all about us. And the sisters have baskets and pretty truck to sellthings the worlds people like. Go and ask the Eldress what we believe

34、, and shell show you the baskets.”She turned eagerly to her husband. “Never mind the ten-oclock train, Lewis. Let us go!”“We could take a later train, all right,” he admitted, “but”“Oh, PLEASE!” she entreated, joyously. “Well help you pick pennyroyal,” she added to the Shaker.But this he would not a

35、llow. “I doubt youd be careful enough,” he said, mildly; “Sister Lydia was the only female I ever knew who could pick herbs.”“Do you get paid for the work you do?” Athalia asked, practically. Lewis flushed at the boldness of such a question, but the old man chuckled.“Should I pay myself?” he asked.“

36、You own everything in common, dont you?” Lewis said.“Yee,” said the Shaker; “were all brothers and sisters. Nobody tries to get ahead of anybody else.”“And you dont believe in marriage?” Athalia asserted.“We are as the angels of God,” he said, simply.He left them and began to sickle his herbs, with

37、the cheerfully obvious purpose of escaping further interruption.Athalia instantly bubbled over with questions, but Lewis could tell her hardly more of the Shakers than she knew already.“No, it isnt free love,” he said; “theyre decent enough. They believe in general love, not particular, I suppose. T

38、halia, do you think its worth while to wait over a train just to see the settlement?”“Of course it is! He said they were happy; I would like to see what kind of life makes people happy.”He looked at the lighted end of his cigar and smiled, but he said nothing. Afterward, as they followed the cart ac

39、ross the field and out into the road, Athalia asked the old herb-gatherer many questions about the happiness of the community life, which he answered patiently enough. Once or twice he tried to draw into their talk the silent husband who walked at her side, but Lewis had nothing to say. Only when so

40、me reference was made to one of the Prophecies did he look up in sudden interest. “You take that to mean the Judgment, do you?” he said. And for the rest of the walk to the settlement the two men discussed the point, the Shaker walking with one hand on the heavy shaft, for the support it gave him, a

41、nd Lewis keeping step with him.At the foot of the hill the road widened into a grassy street, on both sides of which, under the elms and maples, were the community houses, big and substantial, but gauntly plain; their yellow paint, flaking and peeling here and there, shone clean and fresh in the spa

42、rkle of morning. Except for a black cat whose fur glistened like jet, dozing on a white doorstep, the settlement, steeped in sunshine, showed no sign of life. There was a strange remoteness from time about the place; a sort of emptiness, and a silence that silenced even Athalia.“Where IS everybody?”

43、 she said, in a lowered voice; as she spoke, a child in a blue apron came from an open doorway and tugged a basket across the street.“Are there children here?” Lewis asked, surprised; and their guide said, sadly:“Not as many as there ought to be. The new school laws have made a great difference. Wev

44、e only got two. Folks used to send em to us to bring up; oftentimes they stayed on after they were of age. Sister Lydia came that way. Well, well, she tired of us, Lydy did, poor girl! She went back into the world twenty years ago, now. And Sister Jane, she was a bound-out child, too,” he rambled on

45、; “she came here when she was six; shes seventy now.”“What!” Lewis exclaimed; “has she never known anything butthis?”His shocked tone did not disturb the old man. “Want to see my herb-house?” he said. “Guess youll find some of the sisters in the sorting-room. Im Nathan Dale,” he added, courteously.T

46、hey had come to the open door of a great, weather-beaten building, from whose open windows an aromatic breath wandered out into the summer air. As they crossed the worn threshold, Athalia stopped and caught her breath in the overpowering scent of drying herbs; then they followed Brother Nathan up a

47、shaky flight of steps to the loft. Here some elderly women, sitting on low benches, were sorting over great piles of herbs in silencethe silence, apparently, of peace and meditation. Two of them were dressed like worlds people, but the others wore small gray shoulder-capes buttoned to their chins, a

48、nd little caps of white net stretched smoothly over wire frames; the narrow shirrings inside the frames fitted so close to their peaceful, wrinkled foreheads that no hair could be seen.“I wish I could sit and sort herbs!” Athalia said, under her breath.Brother Nathan chuckled. “For how long?” he asked; and then introduced her to the three workers, who greeted her calmly and went on sorting their herbs. The loft was dark and cool; the window-frames, in which there were no sashes, opened wide on the still August fields and woods;