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英語�T　英文-翻訳

GOODBYE, MY BROTHER

by John Cheever

ジョン・シーバー

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p.1

We are a family that has always been very close in spirit.
私たち家族は、いつも非常に心を閉ざしていました。

Our father was drowned in a sailing accident when we were young, and
our mother has always stressed the fact that our familial relationships
have a kind of permanence that we will never meet with again.

私たちの父は、若いときに船の事故に遭い、溺死しました。
そして、私たちの母は、いつもその事でストレスを抱えていた。
私たちの家族の絆は、永久の思いやりがあることだ。
私たちは再び、必ず会うだろう。

I don't think about the family much, but when I remember its members and the
coast where they lived and the sea salt that I think is in our blood, I am
happy to recall that I am a Pommeroy - that I have the nose, the
coloring, and the promise of longevity - and that while we are not a
distinguished family, we enjoy the illusion,when we are together, that
the Pommeroys are unique.

私はずっと家族のことを思っているわけではありません。
しかし、いつも私は、海岸とそれらの一員たちを忘れない。
海の塩そして、彼らがどこに住んでいようが、
私は私たちの血筋を思う。
私は、幸せを思い出す。
私は、ポメロリーです。
私は、鼻と肌色に長生きを約束する。
そして、私たちは際立った家族ではなかった。
私たちは、幻想を楽しむ。
いつも私たちは一緒です。
ポメロリーたちは、類まれです。


I don't say any of this because I'm
interested in family history or because this sense of uniqueness is deep
or important to me but in order to advance the point that we are loyal
to one another in spite of our differences, and that any rupture in this
loyalty is a source of confusion and pain.

私は何も言いません。
なぜなら、私は家族の歴史に興味を持っていたから。
また、なぜなら、この個性的な価値観は、私にとって重要でかつ、深いからです。
しかし、求められたアドバイスのポイントが、私たちは思わず他のことに違って
しまうほど高級です。
そして、いくつかの仲違いしてしまうこの献身的な愛情は、混乱と苦痛の原因です。


We are four children; there is my sister Diana and the three
men - Chaddy, Lawrence, and myself.

私たちは四人の子供です。
それらは、私の姉・ディアナと三人の兄弟・チャディ、ローレンス、そして
私自身です。

Like most families in which the
children are out of their twenties, we have been separated by business,
mariage, and war.

家族達はとても好きです。
子供達は、20人以上です。
私たちは、戦争と結婚と仕事によって、離れ離れです。

Helen and I live on Long Island now, with our four
children. I teach in a secondary school, and I am past the age where I
expect to be made headmaster - or principal,as we say - but I respect
the work.

ヘレンと私はいま、ロングアイスランドに住んでいます。
そして、私たちの四人の子供達と一緒です。
私は中学校で教えています。
そして、私は定年を迎えています。
私は校長先生になる予定です。
また、主要の。
私たちは言います。
しかし、私は仕事に敬意を評します。


Chaddy, who has done better than rest of us, lives in
Manhattan, with Odette and their children. Mother lives in Philadelphia,
and Diana, since her divorce, has been living in France, but she comes

キャディは私たちの休暇よりあって、マンハッタンに住んでいます。
オッデッティと彼らの子供と一緒です。
母は、フィラデルフィアに住んでいます。
そして、ディアナは、彼女が離婚してからずっと、フランスに住んでいます。
そして、彼女が来て・・・






------------------------------------------------------------------------
p.2

back to the States in the summer to spend a month at Laud's Head.
Laud's Head に夏の1ヶ月間を過ごすために戻って滞在した。

Laud's Head is a summer place on the shore of one of the Massachusetts
islands.
Laud's Headは、マサチューセッツ島の海岸で夏の場所です。

shore 岸、海岸、湖畔、河岸、陸

We used to have a cottage there, and in the Twenties our
father built the big house.

私たちの父が建てた大きな家が20あり、そして、
私たちはそこに持っているコテージ（小別荘）を使った。

It stands on a cliff above the sea and, excepting St.Tropez and
some of the Apennine villages, it is my favorite place in the world.

世界の中で私のお気に入りの場所は、
St.Tropezとアペニン山脈のいくつかの村　を除いては、海の上の崖に建っている。

cliff　絶壁、がけ、岩壁
excepting ・・・を除いて
Apennine アペニン山脈（イタリア半島を縦走する）
favorit お気に入りの、一番好きな


We each have an equity in the place and
we contribute some money to help keep it going.

私たちはそれを保持する支援のためにいくらかのお金を寄付している。そして、
私たちはお互いにその場所を公平に持っている。

equity　株価　公平、正当、公明正大、公正な行為、衡平法（こうへいほう）
contribute　寄付する、寄与する、貢献する

Our youngest brother, Lawrence, who is a lawyer, got a job with a
Cleveland firm after the war, and none of us saw him for four years.


私たちの一番下の弟であるローレンスは、
戦後、クレバーランドで安定した仕事をしている弁護士です。
そして、私たちは、彼に4年間、少しも会えなかった。

firm しっかりと安定した、手堅い、変動しない
none 少しも・・・ない

When he decided to leave Cleveland and go to work for a firm in
Albany, he wrote Mother that he would, between jobs, spend ten days
at Laud's Head, with his wife and their two children.

彼は、クレバーランドに住んでいることが明確で、オールバニーへ安定した仕事をするために行っている。
彼は母に書いた、仕事の間、彼の妻と二人の子供がLaud's Headに10日間滞在したことを・・・

decided　明確な、疑いのない、間違えようのない、確固たる、断固とした
Albany　オールバニー：米国New York州の州都.

This was when I
had planned to take my vacation - I had been teaching summer
school - and Helen and Chaddy and Odette and Diana were all going to
be there, so tha family would be together.

私のバケーション（休暇）計画だったのは、
私はサマースクール（夏期講習）で教えていて、
ヘレン、キャディ、オッディ、ディアナは、家族と一緒にそこへ全員行くつもりだった。

Lawrence is the member of
the family with whom the rest of us have least in common.

ローレンスは、家族の一員です。私たちは一般的に最小限、支え合っている。

rest 休息、休憩、休養
least　最も小さい、最も少ない、最も・・・でなく、最小、最少
common　普通の、ありふれた、よく起こる、一般的な、よく知られた、並みの、普通の、平凡な

　　 We have
never seen a great deal of him, and I suppose that's why we still call
him Tifty - a nickname he was given when he was a child, because
when he came down the hall toward the dining-room for breakfast, his
slippers made a noise that sounded like 'Tifty, tifty, tifty.' That's what
Father called him, and so did everyone else.

私たちは、彼にたくさん会う事ができない。
そして、私は、彼が子供だった時のニックネームのTiftを未だ呼んだことないと思う。
なぜなら、彼は朝食のためにダイニングルームがある大食堂へ向かって降りてきた。
彼のスリッパはTifty、Tifty、Tiftyのような音を立てて聞こえたからだ。
父は彼をそう呼んだし、他の人たちもそうした。

deal　量
Tifty ???
suppose ・・・だと思う、考える、・・・であると想像する、推測する
come down
hall ホール、集会所、多日rま、会館、大食堂
toward ・・・に向かって、・・・の方へ、・・・に対する、・・・に関する

　　　 When he grew older, Diana
sometimes used to call him Little Jesus, and Mother often called him
the Croaker.

彼は成人になった時、ディアナは彼の小さなイエスを呼ぶ時にしばしば使った。
そして、母はしばしば彼をガーガーと呼んだ。

Croaker　ガーガー鳴くもの（カエル・カラスなど）、悲観論者、不平家、（俗）医者

We had disliked Lawrence, but we looked forward to his
return with a mixture of apprehension and loyalty, and with some of
the joy and delight of reclaiming a brother.
私たちはローレンスが嫌いだった。
しかし、私たちは彼の誠実さと気遣いが入り混じったものを促進して返すのを見た。
そして、兄弟を再生することに歓喜し、いくつか楽しむ。

forward　前へ、前進
mixture 混合、混和、調合、入り混じったもの、交錯
apprehension 懸念、気遣い、心配
loyalty　忠誠、忠義、忠実、誠実さ
reclaiming 元の姿に戻す、再生する

Lawrence crossed over from the mainland on the four o'clock boat
one afternoon late in the summer, and Chaddy and I went down to


ローレンスは、夏の午後遅く16時にボートで本土を越えた。
そして、キャディと私は彼に会いに降りて行った。



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p.3


meet him.

　　　　　 The arrivals and departures of the summer ferry have all the
outward signs that suggest a voyage-whistles, bells, hand trucks,
reunions, and the smell of brine-but it is a voyage of no import, and
when I watched the boat come into the blue harbor that afternoon and
thought that it was completing a voyage of no import, I realized that I
had hit on exactly the kind of observation that Lawrence would have
made.

夏のフェリーの発着は、全て航海の間中、国外への兆候を暗示している。
ベル、手押し車、再結合、そして、海水の匂いがする
しかし、それは輸入しない航海です。
そして、私は青い港にボートが入ってきたのを見た。
そして、それは完全な輸入航海ではないと思った。
私は、ローレンスが作ったものをまさに親切に注意深く見て、はっきり理解した。


arrival 到着する
departure ・・・に向けて出発する、辞任、辞職
ferry 渡し船、フェリー
outward 表面上、見せかけの、外へ向かう、国外への、外へ、港外へ、国外へ
sign しるし、兆候、サイン
suggest をそれとなく示す、暗示する、連想させる、思い起こさせる、
voyage 船旅、航海、人生航路、旅路、航海する
whistles　しばらくの間、・・・の間中
hand truck 手押し車
reunion 再会の集い、同窓会、再結合
smell ・・・のにわいが分かる、・・・のにおいを嗅ぐ
brine 塩水、海水
complete まったくの、完全な、徹底した、全部の、完成した、完備した、完成させる、仕上げる
thought thinkの過去・過去分詞形
think ・・・と思う、信じる、理解する
harbor　港、入江、湾
realize をはっきり理解する、悟る、実現する、達成する
observation 観察力、観測、注意深く見る、

　　　We looked for his face behind the windshields as the cars drove
off the boat, and we had no trouble in recognizing him. And we ran
over and shook his hand and clumsily kissed his wife and the children.

私たちは、ボートで車から去っていく時にフロントガラス越しに彼の顔を見た。
そして、私たちは彼を認めることに問題はなかった。
そして、私たちは、彼の妻と子供たちにぎこちなくキスをした。そして、彼と握手を
繰り返した。

behind ・・・の後ろに、・・・の裏側に、・・・の向こう側に、・・・の後に続いて
windshield フロントガラス、風除け、風防
drive off を追い払う、を車に乗せて連れ去る、車を運転して去る
recognize に覚えがある、・・・を識別する、を認める、承認する

run over ・・・をひく、・・・からあふれる、・・・を繰り返す
shook shakeの過去形。
clumsily 不器用に、ぎこちなく


'Tifty!' Chaddy shouted. 'Tifty!' It is difficult to judge changes in the
appearance of a brother, but both Chaddy and I agreed, as we drove
back to Laud's Head, that Lawrence still looked very young. He got to
the house first, and we took the suitcases out of his car. When I came
in, he was standing in the living room, talking with Mother and Diana.

Tifty!　キャディは叫んだ。
Tifty!　それは見かけで兄弟と改めて判断するのは難しいです。
しかし、キャディも私も両方とも、Laud's Headへ戻ることで合意に達していた。
ローレンスは未だとても幼く見えた。
彼は、はじめて家に着いた、そして私たちは彼の車からスーツケースを取りだした。
私が来た時、彼はリビングルームで立ったまま、ディアナと母と一緒に話していた。

appearance 見かけ、体裁
both A and B AもBも両方とも、AだけでなくBも
agree 一致する、賛成する、合意に達する

They were in their best clothes and all their jewelry, and they were
welcoming him extravagantly, but even then, when everyone was
endeavoring to seem most affectionate and at a time when these
endeavors come easiest, I was aware of a faint tension in the room.

彼らは、全ての装飾品を一番よく着飾った。
そして、彼を贅沢に歓迎した。
しかし、それでもなお、誰もがその時、愛情を込めて会おうと努めた。
そして、その時、容易に努力して、私は部屋で気のないテンションを意識した。

clothe 着せる、付与する、・・・をすっかり覆う、・・・をそれらしく表現する
jewelry 装飾品、宝飾品、アクセサリー
welcoming 歓迎の気持ちを表す
extravagantly 贅沢に、法外に、派手に
even then それでもなお、そうなっても
endeavor ・・・しようと努める、努力、試み
affectionate 情感のある、優しい、愛情のこもった
easiest easilyの最上級　容易に、楽に、努力しないで、すぐに、
aware ・・・に気が付いている、・・・を知っている、・・・を意識した、配慮した
faint かすかな、ほのかな、ぼんやりした、おぼろな、わずかな、弱々しい、気が遠くなりそうな、気のない


Thinking about this as I carried Lawrence's heavy suitcases up the
stairs, I realized that our dislikes are as deeply ingrained as our better
passions, and I remembered that once, twenty-five years ago, when I
had hit Lawrence on the head with a rock, he had picked himself up
and gone directly to our father to complain.

私は、ローレンスの重いスーツケースを持って、階段を上がりながら思った。
私は、私たちの深々としみ込んだ情熱が私たちは嫌いであることに気付いた。
そして、私は25年前のことを忘れなかった。
私がローレンスの頭を押さえつけて叩いた時、彼は父にじかに苦情を言って、
彼自身を選んだ。

stair 階段
realize をはっきり理解する、悟る
dislike　が嫌いである
ingrained 深くしみ込んだ、根深い、こびりついた
passion 激しい感情、熱情、情熱、激情、熱中、愛着、夢中、愛情、情欲
directly 直接に、じかに、直ちに
complain について不満を言う、文句を言う、苦情を言う


I carried the suitcases up to the third floor, where Ruth, Lawrence's
wife, had begun to settle her family. She is a thin girl, and she seemed
very tired from the journey, but when I asked her if she didn't want
me to bring a drink upstairs to her, she said she didn't think she did.
When I got downstairs, Lawrence wasn't around, but the others were

私は三階へスーツケースを運んだ。
ローレンスの妻であるルースは、家族を落ち着かせ始めた。
彼女は、痩せた女性です。
そして、彼女は、旅のためにとても疲れているようだった。
しかし、私は彼女に尋ねた。
もし彼女が階上へ飲み物を持って行けなかったなら、
彼女は、しないとは思わなかったと言った。
私は階下へ行った。
ローレンスは、周りにいなかった。
しかし、他は

floor　階
settle 落ち着かせる、静める
thin ほっそりとした、痩せた
upstairs 階上へ
downstairs 階下へ
around 辺りに、周辺に、・・・の周囲に
------------------------------------------------------------------------
p.4

all ready for cocktails, and we decided to go ahead. Lawrence is the
only member of the family who has never enjoyed drinking. We took
our cocktails onto the terrace, so that we could see the bluffs and the
sea and the islands in the east, and the return of Lawrence and his
wife, their presence in the house, seemed to refresh our responses to
the familiar view; it was as if the pleasure they would take in the
sweep and the color of that coast, after such a long absence, had been
imparted to us. While we were there, Lawrence came up the path from
the beach.
カクテルの用意ができていた。
そして、私たちは将来に備えて、決心した。
ローレンスは、家族の中ではただ一人、お酒で楽しむことが決してなかった。
私たちはテラスの上でカクテルを頂いた。
だから私たちは、戻ってきたローレンスと彼の妻の家の面前で
東の島々と海と切り立った岬を見ることができた。
打ち解けた様子の反応は、新鮮な出会いだった。
その楽しみは、海岸の色鮮やかさと共にさっと運び去った。
とても長い不在の後、私たちへ知らせがあった。
ローレンスは、浜辺を通って上がって来た。

cocktail カクテル
decide ・・・しようと決心する、を決める
ahead 進んで、前に、将来に備えて
terrace 高台、坂町、テラス
bluff 断崖、絶壁、切り立った岬
presence 面前、出席、列席、同席
familiar 打ち解けた、気楽な、くだけた、親しい、心安い
response 反応
pleasure 喜び、楽しさ、愉快、満足
sweep を掃く、をさっと運び去る、さらう
coast 沿岸、海岸、沿岸地方
such そのような、そんな、とても・・・な、非常に・・・な
absence 不在、欠席、欠勤、居合わせないこと
impart　・・・を与える、添える、知らせる、伝える
come up 上がって来る、階上に来る、やって来る

'Isn't the beach fabulous, Tifty?' Mother asked. 'Isn't it fabulous to be
back? Will you have a Martini?'
'I don't care.' Lawrence said. 'Whiskey, gin-I don't care what I
drink. Give me a little rum.'

素晴らしい砂浜じゃなかった、Tifty？母は尋ねた。
元の所は素晴らしかった？あなたマティーニはどう？
私は構わないですよ。ローレンスは言った。
ウィスキー、ジン　私は飲んで構いませんよ。
私に少しラムを下さい。

fabulous 素晴らしい、ワクワクする、信じ難い、並外れた、驚くべき、架空の、伝説上の、想像上の


'We don't have any rum,' Mother said. It was the first note of
asperity. She had taught us never to be indecisive, never to reply as
Lawrence had. Beyond this, she is deeply concerned with the propriety
of her house, and anything irregular by her standards, like drinking
straight rum or bringing a beer can to the dinner table, excites in her a
conflict that she cannot, even with her capacious sense of humor,

私たちは、ラムは持っていませんよ。母は言った。
それは、初めて辛辣な調子の言葉だった。
彼女は、決してはっきりしない話だった。
ローレンスはの返事では決してなかった。
この他に、彼女は彼女の家の妥当さと共に深く関係した。
そして、彼女の基準は、イレギュラーなことです。
彼女はテーブルディナーへ連れて来ることもストレートラムを飲むようなことも、
激しく争うこともできない。
たぶん彼女がユーモアのセンスが大きいから乗り越えた。

note 覚書、メモ、語気、調子
asperity　荒々しさ、辛辣な言葉
indecisive 決断力のない、優柔不断な、漠然とした、決定的でない、勝ち負けのはっきりしない
reply 返事をする、答える、回答する、応じる、応える
beyond ・・・の向こうに、・・・を過ぎて、を越えて、・・・より以上に、・・・の他に
concern　に関することである、・・・のことを扱っている、に関係する、影響する
propriety 作法、礼儀正しさ、適当さ、妥当さ
irregular 不規則な、イレギュラー、異常な、変則的な、不定の
straight ストレート、まっすぐな
bringing bringの進行形　持ってくる
conflict 闘争、争い、論争
capacious 収容力の大きい、広々した、大きい
humor ユーモア


surmount. She sensed the asperity and worked to repair it. 'Would you
like some Irish, Tifty dear?' she said. 'Isn't Irish what you've always
liked? There's some Irish on the sideboard. Why don't you get yourself
some Irish?' Lawrence said that he didn't care.

彼女は、それを修復するために働いた、そして、感覚が荒れた。
「親愛なTifty、あなたはアイルランドが好きですか？」と彼女は言った。
「アイルランド人ではないあなたは、いつも好きだった？食器棚の上に
アイルランドがいくつかあります。なぜあなたはあなた自身でアイルランドを取らない
のですか？」ローレンスは構わずに言った。

surmount に打ち勝つ、・・・を克服する、・・・の上に置く、・・・に載せる、
　　　　・・・を覆う、に登る、・・・を登って越える、を乗り越える
asperity 荒々しさ、辛辣な言葉
repair を修理する、修繕する、を回復する、修復する、を補償する
Irish アイルランドの、アイルランド人
dear 親愛な
sideboard 食器棚、サイドボード
He Poured himself a
Martini, and then Ruth came down and we went in to dinner.
In spite of the fact that we had, through waiting for Lawrence, drunk
too much before dinner, we were all anxious to put our best foot
forward and to enjoy a peaceful time. Mother is a small womam whose
face is still a striking reminder of how pretty she must have been, and

彼はマーチンを彼自身で注いだ。そして、夕食に私たちは行った。
ルースも降りて来た。
現実は厳しく、意地悪だ。
夕食前の飲み過ぎをローレンスは、待ち通した。
私たちは、平和を時間を楽しむこと、そして、最善の進歩を進めること全てが
気がかりだった。
母は、小さな女性です。顔は未だに可愛い印象を思い起こさせる。

poured pourの過去形。
pour 注ぐ
spite 悪意、意地悪、に意地悪をする、・・・をわざと困らせる
fact　事実、現実
through ・・・を通り抜けて、・・・を貫いて
anxious　心配している、不安に思う、気がかりな
foot　足
forward　前へ
peaceful 平和な、穏やかな、安らかな
striking に印象を与える、の心に浮かぶ、の心を打つ
reminder 思い出させるもの、合図

------------------------------------------------------------------------

p.5
whose conversation is unusually light, but she talked that evening about
a soil-reclamation project that is goint on up-island. Diana is as pretty
as Mother must have been; she is an animated and lovely woman who
likes to talk about the dissolute friends that she has made in France,
but she talked that night about school in Switzerland where she
had left her two children. I could see that the dinner had been planned
to please Lawrence. It was not too rich, and there was nothing to make
him worry about extravagance.


そして、会話は非常に気さくです。
しかし、彼女は、島を良くするつもりで、一人で開墾する計画について、いつも話していた。
ディアナは、母が可愛かった。
彼女はフランスで作った放蕩な友達について話すことが好きで、
彼女は快活で愛らしい女性です。
しかし、彼女は２人の子供たちが行っているスイスの学校について、夜中に話した。
私はローレンスにお願いして、計画を夕食で見せることができた。
それは贅沢過ぎではなかったが、彼の行き過ぎた心配を取り除くことができた。

conversation 会話、対談、座談
unusually　異常に、珍しく、非常に
soil　soloの過去形 ソロ、独唱
reclamation　更生、教化、開墾、埋め立て、干拓、再生、返還要求
animated 活気に満ちた、快活な、生きているようなアニメの、動画の
dissolute　ふしだらな、放蕩な、堕落した
Switzerland　スイス
worry　心配する、気にする、悩む
extravagance　浪費、贅沢、行き過ぎ、無節制、突飛な言行、卓越した素晴らしさ


After supper, when we went back onto the terrace, the clouds held
that kind of light that looks like blood, and I was glad that Lawrence
had such a lurid sunset for his homecoming. When we had been out
there a few minutes, a man named Edward Chester came to get Diana.

夕食後、私たちはテラスへと戻った。
不安を一族らしい気兼ねのない親切さで晴らした。
そして、私は彼が帰宅した時、けばけばしい夕焼けでローレンスは、
喜んでいた。
私たちが外に何分かいた時、ディアナと帰ってきた男の名前は、エドワード・チェスターと言った。


supper 夕食、晩御飯
terrace テラス、高台
cloud 雲、憂鬱、憂慮、疑念、不安
held holdの過去・過去分詞形。
glad 嬉しく思う、感謝している、喜んでする、嬉しそうな、晴れやかな
lurid けばけばしい、ゾッとする、恐ろしい、扇情的な
sunset　日没、夕焼け、満了、満期
homecoming　帰宅、帰郷、帰国

She had met him in France, or on the boat home, and he was staying
for ten days at the inn in the vilage. He was introduced to Lawrence
and Ruth, and then he and Diana left.

彼女はフランスでしかも船上ハウスの上で彼と出会った。
そして、その村の小さな旅館で１０日間滞在した。
彼は、ローレンスとルース、そして、ディアナの左にいる彼を紹介した。

met　meetの過去・過去分詞形
inn 宿屋、小さな旅館、酒場、パブ
introduce 紹介する

'Is that the one she's sleeping with now?' Lawrence asked.
'What a horrid thing to say!' Helen said.
'You ought to apologize for that, Tifty,' Chaddy said.
'I don't know,' Mother said tiredly. 'I don't know, Tifty. Diana is in a
position to do whatever she wants, and I don't ask sordid questions.
She's my only daughter. I don't see her often.'
'Is she going back to France?'
'She's going back the week after next.'

「いま彼女は寝ていますか？」ローレンスが尋ねた。
「何でそんなひどい事を言うの！」ヘレンが言った。
「あなたはTiftyに謝るべきである」キャディは言った。
「私は知りませんよ」母はうんざりして言った。
「私は知りませんよ、Tifty。ディアナは、何かを欲しがっている様子だったので、
私は浅ましい質問を尋ねません。
彼女は、私のたった一人の娘です。私はしばらく彼女に会いませんよ」
「彼女はフランスへ戻っていますか？」
「彼女は来週戻ります。」

horrid 大変ひどい、ひどく不親切な
tiredly 疲れて、うんざりして
whatever 物はなんでも、・・・する何か、どんな事が、何であれ、何であろうとも
ought　・・・すべきである、・・・するのが当然である
apologize 詫びる、謝る、謝罪する
want ・・・が欲しい、・・・を望む
sordid 下劣な、卑しむべき、浅ましい、強欲な、利己的な、汚い、不潔な、
　　　むさ苦しい、みじめな、みすぼらしい
often しばしば、たびたび、たいてい、


Lawrence and Ruth were sitting at the edge of the terrace, not in
the chairs, not in the circle of chairs. With his mouth set, my brother
looked to me then like a Puritan cleric. Sometimes, when I try to
Understand his frame of mind, I think of the beginnings of our family in
this country, and his disapproval of Diana and her lover reminded me of

ローレンスとルースは、椅子にも、バルコニー席も使わずに、
テラスの端に座っていた。
彼のささやく様子から、私の兄弟は、ピューリタン仲間のように見えた。
時々、私は彼のものの考え方について、理解しようと試みる。
私は、今時の家族の基礎について思う。
彼のディアナへの不満は、彼女の愛を私に思い起こさせる。



frame フレーム
mind 意見、思考力、正気、を嫌だと思っている、気にする
beginning 始め、最初、初期、基礎の
disapproval 不可とすること、不承認、不賛成、不満、非難、反感
remind 気付かせる、思い起こさせる、念を押す



------------------------------------------------------------------------
p.6

this. The branch of the Pommeroys to which we belong was founded
by a minister who was eulogized by Cotton Mather for his untiring,
abjuration of the Devil. The Pommeroys were ministers until the middle
of the nineteenth century, and the harshness of their thought-man is
full of misery, and all earthly beauty is lustful and corrupt-has been
preserved in books and sermons.

私たちが所属するポメロイ家の分家は、聖職者によって見つかった。
彼の悪魔を放棄する不屈さは、コットンマザーによって、称賛された。
ポメロイ家は１９世紀中頃まで聖職者だった。
そして、彼らは厳しい考える人で、全てが惨めです。
そして、全てが素晴らしい低俗で、貪欲で堕落していたが、本と説教で
身を保っていた。

branch 分家
Pommeroy ポメロイ
belong 所属する、付属する、ふさわしい、あるべきである
found findの過去・過去分詞形。
find を見つける、発見する
minister 大臣、聖職者、牧師、公使、外交使節、仕える、世話をする
eulogize 褒め称える、賛辞を呈する
untiring 疲れを知らない、不屈の
abjuration （神に誓っての）放棄、破棄
until ・・・まで
middle 中間の、中流の
harshness 粗さ、厳しさ
misery 惨めさ、悲惨さ、不幸、窮乏、苦痛、苦悩、苦難
earthly 土の、土のような、
　　　　（特に性・身体についての）言葉・ユーモアなどが）明け透けな、
　　　　　粗野な、低俗な、洗練されていない
lustful 貪欲な、好色な、肉欲的な
corrupt 賄賂の利く、地位を悪用した、不正な、堕落した、頽廃した、腐敗させる
preserve 保つ、保存する、保護する
sermons 説教、小言


The temper of our family changed
somewhat and became more lighthearted, but when I was of school
age, I can remember a cousinage of old men and women who seemed
to hark back to the dark days of the ministry and to be animated by
perpetual guilt and the deification of the scourge.

私たちの家族は、陽気になれば、怒りっぽい気質を多少変えることができた。
しかし、私はその時、学生だった。
私は祟りを崇め、絶えることのない罪を快活な親族の老人、老女を忘れることが
できない。

temper �@癇癪を起した状態、怒りっぽい気質、腹立ち、
　　　 �A平静な気分、落ち着き、自制、
　　　 �B機嫌、気質、和らげる
somwhat 幾分、多少、やや
lighthearted 面白い、軽妙な、快活な、陽気な
cousinage ？？？
cousin いとこ
hark 耳を傾ける
ministry 内閣、閣僚、牧師の職務、牧師、聖職者
perpetual とぎれることのない、絶え間のない、永久の、永続する
guilt 罪、犯罪
deification 神を祭る、神を崇拝する、崇める、理想化する
scourge 鞭、苦しみを引き起こす人、天災、災難、祟り、を鞭打つ、を厳しく罰する

　　 If you are raised in
this atmosphere-and in a sense we were-I think it is a trial of the
spirit to reject its habits of guilt, self-denial, taciturnity, and penitence,
and it seemed to me to have been a trial of the spirit in which
Lawrence had succumbed.

もしあなたは雰囲気が盛り上がったなら、私は無愛想で、悔い改めて、罪ある癖を捨てるために
勇気を出して試みると思う。
そして、ローレンスは勇気を出して試みたら、負けた。


raise を上げる、持ち上げる、を揚げる、（料金など）上げる、（水量など）を増す、
　　　（倒れた人・物）を立てる、起こす、（碑・建物）を建てる
atmosphere 大気、雰囲気、周囲の状況、環境
trial 裁判、公判、審理、試み、試し、試験、試練、苦労、苦難
spirit 精神、魂、気迫、気力、勇気、情熱、特質、傾向
reject 投げる、拒絶する、断る、却下する
habit 習慣、癖、気質、性質、体質、習性
self 自己、自分自身、私利、私欲
denial 否定する、否認、否定の申し立て、拒絶、拒否、自制、克己
taciturnity taciturnの派生形。
taciturn　無口な、無愛想な、むっつりした
penitence 悔い改め、後悔、懺悔（ざんげ）
succumb　負ける、屈する、死ぬ、倒れる

'It that Cassiopeia?' Odette asked.
'No, dear,' Chaddy said. 'That isn't Cassiopeia.'
'Who was Cassiopeia?' Odette said.
'She was the wife of Cepheus and the mother of Andromeda,' I said.
'The cook is a Giants fan,' Chaddy said. 'She'll give you even money '
that they win the pennant.
「カシオペアは？」オッディが尋ねた。
「いいえ、違いますよ」キャディが言った。
「あれはカシオペアじゃないですよ」
「カシオペアとは、誰ですか？」オッディが言った。
「彼女は、アンドロメダの母でチェフィエスの妻でした」私は言った。
「コックはジャイアンツファンです」キャディは言った。
彼らが競争に勝利して、「彼女はあなたに十分お金を与えるだろう」


It had grown so dark that we could see the passage of light through
the sky from the lighthouse at Cape Heron. In the dark below the cliff,
the continual detonations of the surf sounded. And then, as she often
does when it is getting dark and she has drunk too much before
dinner, Mother began to talk about the improvements and additions
that would someday be made on the house, the wings and bathrooms
and gardens.
'This house will be in the sea in five years,' Lawrence said.

暗くても成長した。私たちはキャプ・ヘロンの灯台からスキーで通路を通り抜ける
ことができた。
暗闇の下の崖は、大陸の爆発で音が波打っている。
夕食の前に彼女は、飲み過ぎた。そして、崖へ行った。
母は進歩について話し始めた。そして、いつか庭とバスルームと両開き戸棚を持った
家を作りたいと話した。
「この家は、５年で海にできるだろう」ローレンスは言った。

passage 通路、廊下、一節、引用部分、抜粋、通行、経過、通過、可決
through 通り抜けて、貫いて
lighthouse 灯台
below ・・・より下に、・・・の下方に
continual　大陸の、ヨーロッパ大陸の、大陸の人
detonation 爆発、爆発音
surf 寄せる波、波乗りをする、サーフィンをする、ネットサーフィンをする、に乗る
improvement 改良する、改善、進歩、向上
addition 追加分、増加分、足し算、付加、加算
someday いつか、そのうち

------------------------------------------------------------------------
p.7
'Tifty the Croaker,' Chaddy said.
'Don't call me Tifty,' Lawrence said.
'Little Jesus,' Chaddy said.
'The sea wall is badly cracked,' Lawrence said. 'I looked at it this
afternoon. You had it repaired four years ago, and it cost eight
thousand dollars. You can't do that every four years.'
'Please, Tifty,' Mother said.

「Tiftyはカーカー鳴く小動物だ」キャディは言った。
「Tiftyと私を呼ばないでくれ」ローレンスは言った。
「海はとてもひどく裂けるだろう」ローレンスは言った。
「私は今日の午後に見た。あなたは４年前それを修理した。そして、それに
8,000ドルの費用がかかった。
あなたは4年ごとに行うことはできない。
「お願い、Tifty」母は言った。」

badly まずく、へたに、不当に、とてもひどく
crack　ヒビが入る、砕ける、裂ける、割れる、くじける、まいる
repaire　を修理する、修繕する



'Facts are facts,' Lawrence said, 'and it's a damned-fool idea to build
a house at the edge of the cliff on a sinking coastline. In my lifetime,
half the garden has washed away and there's four feet of water where
we used to have a bathhouse.'
'Let's have a very general conversation,' Mother said bitterly. 'Let's
talk about politics or the boat-club dance.'

「事実は事実」とローレンスは言った。
「そして、海岸線の崩れた崖っぷちに家を建てた考えは、酷く馬鹿です。
私の生涯の中で、4フィートの水が庭半分を押し流したので、私たちは脱衣所を使った。」
「ごくごく普通の会話をしましょう！」と母は苦々しく言った。
「ボートクラブのダンスや政治について話しましょう！」

fact 事実、現実、実際、申立て、犯行
damned　ひどい、くそいまいましい、まったく
sink 沈む、沈没する、没する、（建物などが）落ち込む、沈下する、傾く、
　　　（人・体が）崩れ落ちる、倒れる、（体力・気力などが）衰える、弱まる
coastline　（主に海から見た）海岸線
lifetime　一生、生涯、終生、（物の）寿命、存続期間
half　半分
bathhouse　（海水浴場の）脱衣所、（公衆のプール付き温泉浴場）
general　一般的な、世間一般の、普通の、全体的な、大雑把な、漠然とした
conversation　会話、対談、座談、（外交上の）非公式会談[交渉]、[遠回しに]談判
bitterly　激しく、痛烈に、苦々しく、敵意に満ちて、辛辣に、とても、大変
politics　政治、政治活動、政治的手段、政治学、政見、政綱、政策、政争、対立、
　　　　　駆け引き、力関係


'As a matter of fact,' Lawrence said, 'the house is probably in some
danger now. If you had an unusually high sea, a hurricane sea, the wall
would crumble and the house would go. We could all be drowned.'
'I can't bear it,' Mother said. She went into the pantry and came
back with a full glass of gin.

「実際の問題だと」とローレンスは言った。
「その家は、たぶんいまいくつかの危険です。異常に海が満潮だったり、海が荒らしだったりしたら、
家に行ったら壁はボロボロでしょう。私たちはみんな溺死していたことだろう」
「私はそれを運ぶことができない」と母は言った。
「彼女は食器室へ行って、グラスいっぱいにジンを入れて戻ってきた。

matter 事実、事柄、問題、事態、事情、情勢
probably　たぶん、おそらく
unusually　異常に、珍しく、非常に
crumble　ボロボロにする、粉々にする、細かくちぎる、砕ける、崩れ落ちる、水泡に帰す、徐々に落ちる
drown　溺れ死ぬ、溺死する、
bear　運ぶ、持って行く、支える、負担する、を持つ、を身につける、携帯する
pantry　食料品室、食器室

I have grown too old now to think that I can judge the sentiments of
others, but I was conscious of the tension between Lawrence and
been more than sixteen years old when he decided that Mother was
frivolous, mischievous, destructive, and overly strong. When he had
determined this, he decided to separate himself from her. He was at
boarding school then, and I remember that he did not come home for
Christmas. He spent Christmas with a friend. He came home very
seldom after he had made his unfavorable judgment on Mother, and
when he did come home, he always tried, in his conversation, to remind

私はいま思うに年を取り過ぎていた。
私は他から感情的に影響を受けていると判断できる。
しかし、私は16歳の時からローレンスとの間の緊張をくだらないものだと意識していた。
彼は母があまりにも強く壊滅的な害やいたずらのような軽い害を与えることが明確であった。
彼は学校に囲われた。そして、私は彼がクリスマスに家に帰らなかったことを覚えている。
彼は友達と一緒にクリスマスを過ごした。
彼は滅多に家に帰らなかった。
彼はいつも試みて家に帰ったが、彼と彼女の会話を思い起こすと彼の母への評価は好ましくなかった。



conscious 意識している、自覚している、気付いている、正気の、意識的な、故意の、気にする、気にかける、
　　　　　自覚した、意識の強い
decided 明確な、疑いのない、間違えようのない、確固たる、断固とした
frivolous 軽薄な、不真面目な、くだらない、取るに足らない
mischievous いたずら好きな、いたずらっぽい、害を与える、有害な
destructive 破壊的な、否定的な、有害な、破壊する
overly あまりにも、過度に、とても
determine を発見する、明らかにする、を決定する、と結論を下す、判断する、判定する、決心する、決意する、
　　　　　しようと思う
determined 決然とした、断固とした、決定した、確定した、限定した
separate 置く、準備する
boarding 板張り、板囲い、[集合的に]板、乗船、乗車、搭乗、賄い、寄宿、ペットを預けること
spent spendの過去・過去分詞形
　　　使い尽くされた、役に立たない、疲れ切った、力の尽きた、金を使いはたしている
spend ・・・を過ごす
seldom めったに・・・ない、・・・の場合はほとんどない
unfavorable 好ましくない、不都合な、不利な、好意的でない、否定的な
remind を気付かせる、思い起こさせる、念を押す

------------------------------------------------------------------------
p.8
her of his estrangement.

When he married Ruth, he did not tell
Mother. He did not tell her when his children were born. But in spite
of these principled and lengthy exertions he seemed, unlike the rest of
us, never to have enjoyed any separation, and when they are together,
you feel at once a tension, an unclearness.

彼はルースと結婚した時、彼は母と話さなかった。
彼は彼の子供が生まれた時も彼女と話さなかった。
しかし、信念を持った恨みと長時間にわたる骨折って彼は会った。
私たちは平安を嫌う。彼らは一緒です。あなたが不明確な緊迫した感じで
離れることを決して楽しまなかった。


spite 悪意、意地悪、恨み、遺恨、に意地悪をする、・・・をわざと困らせる
principled 真理[信念]に基づいた、主義を持った、節操のある
principle 道義、正道、高潔、節操、原理、原則、公理、法則、主義、信念、信条
lengthy 長時間の、長時間にわたる、冗長な、長くて詳しい
exertion 努力、尽力、骨折り、行使、発揮
rest　休息、休憩、平静、平安
separation　分離、離脱、独立、分類、選別、離れること、別居、隔たり、距離、分岐点
unclearness 不明、曖昧、不明確
unclear はっきりしない、明らかでない、曖昧な、十分理解していない


And it was unfortunate, in a way, that Mother should have picked
that night to get drunk. It's her privilege, and she dosen't get drunk
often, and fortunately she wasn't bellicose, but we were all conscious of
what was happening. As she quietly drank her gin, she seemed sadly to
be parting from us; she seemed to be in the throes of travel.

不運にも、たいてい母は夜に酒を飲むために選んでいることだろう。
それは彼女の特権です。彼女はしばしばお酒を飲まない。
幸運にも彼女は、敵意に満ちていなかった。
しかし、私たちは起きたことは全て意識している。
彼女は静かに陣を飲んでいた。彼女は不幸にも私たちパーティに会った。
彼女は苦悩の旅をしているらしかった。

unfortunate 不幸にも、不運にも、あいにく
privilege 特権ｌ、特典、恩恵、名誉、利益
fortunately 幸運にも、運よく、ありがたいことには
bellicose 好戦的な、敵意に満ちた
quietly 静かに、そっと、地味に、控え目に、目立たぬように、平穏に、事を荒立てずに、
　　　　落ち着いて、ひそかに、心の中で
sadly 悲しそうに、悲し気に、悲しんで、残念なことに、不幸にも、ひどく、とても
throe ひどい苦しみ、激痛、断末魔の苦しみ、苦悩
Then her
mood changed from travel to injury, and the few remarks she made
were petulant and irrelevant. When her glass was nearly empty, she
stared angrily at the dark air in front of her nose, moving her head a
little, like a fighter. I knew that there was not room in her mind then
for all the injuries that were crowding into it. Her children were stupid,
her husband was drowned, her servants were thieves, and the chair she
sat in was uncomfortable. Suddenly she put down her empty glass and
interrupted Chaddy, who was talking about baseball. 'I know one
thing,' she said hoarsely. 'I know that if there is an afterlife, I'm going
to have a very different kind of family. I'm going to have nothing but
fabulously rich, witty, and enchanting children.' She got up and, starting
for the door, nearly fell. Chaddy caught her and helped her up the
stairs. I could hear their tender good-nights, and then Chaddy came
back. I thought that Lawrence by now would be tired from his journey
and his return, but he remained on the terrace, as if he were waiting to
see the final malfeasance, and the rest of us left him there and went
swimming in the dark.

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p.9
When I woke the next morning, or half woke, I could hear the sound
of someone rolling the tennis court. It is a fainter and a deeper sound
than the iron buoy bells off the point-an unrhythmic iron chiming-
that belongs in my mind to the beginnings of a summer day, a good
portent. When I went downstairs, Lawrence's two kids were in the
living room, dressed in ornate cowboy suits. They are frightened and
skinny children. They told me their father was rolling the tennis court
but that they did not want to go out because they had seen a snake
under the doorstep. I explained to them that their cousins-all the other
children-ate breakfast in the kitchen and that they'd better run along
in there. At this announcement, the boy began to cry. Then his sister
Joined him. They cried as if to go in the kitchen and eat would destroy
their most precious rights. I told them to sit down with me. Lawrence
came in, and I asked him if he wanted to play some tennis. He said
no, thanks, although he thought he might play some singles with
Chaddy. He was in the right here, because both he and Chaddy play
better tennis than I, and he did play some singles with Chaddy after
breakfast, but later on, when the others came down to play family
doubles, Lawrence disappeared. This made me cross-unreasonably so,
I suppose-but we play darned interesting family doubles and he could
have played in a set for the sake of courtesy.
Late in the morning, when I came up from the court alone, I saw
Tifty on the terrace, prying up a shingle from the wall with his
jackknife. 'What's the matter, Lawrence?' I said. 'Termites?' There are
termites in the wood and they've given us a lot of trouble.
He pointed out to me, at the base of each row of shingles, a faint
blue line of carpenter's chalk. 'This house is about twenty-two years
old,' he said. 'These shingles are about two hundred years old. Dad

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p.10
must have bought shingles from all the farms around here when he
built the place, to make it look venerable. You can still see the
carpenter's chalk put down where these antiques were nailed into
place.'
It was true about the shingles, although I had forgotten it. When the
house was built, our father, or his architect, had ordered it covered with
lichened and weather-beaten shingles. I didn't follow Lawrence's reason
for thinking that this was scandalous.
'And look at these doors,' Lawrence said. 'Look at these doors and
window frames.' I followed him over to a big Dutch door that opens
onto the terrace and looked at it. It was a relatively new door, but
someone had worked hard to conceal its newness. The surface had
been deeply scored with some metal implement, and white paint had
been rubbed into the incisions to imitate brine, lichen, and weather rot.
'Imagine spending thousands of dollars to make a sound house look like
a wreck,' Lawrence said. 'Imagine the frame of mind this implies.
Imagine wanting to live so much in the past that you'll pay men
carpenters' wages to disfigure your front door.' Then I remenbered
Lawrence's sensitivity to time and this sentiments and opinions about
our freiends and our part of the nation, finding ourselves unable to cope
with the problems of the present, had, like a wretched adult, turned
back to what we supposed was a happier and a simpler time, and that
our taste for reconstruction and candlelight was a measure of this
irremediable failure. The faint blue line of chalk had reminded him of
these ideas, the scarified door had reinforced them, and now clue after
clue presented itself to him-the stern light at the door, the bulk of the
chimney, the width of the floorboards and the pieces set into them to

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p.11

resemble pegs. While Lawrence was lecturing me on these frailties, the
others came up from the court. As soon as Moter saw Lawrence, she
responded, and I saw that there was little hope of any rapport between
the matriarch and the changeling. She took Chaddy's arm. 'Let's go
swimming and have Martinis on the beach,' she said. 'Let's have a
fabulous morning.'
The sea that morning was a solid color, like verd stone. Everyone
went to the beach but Tifty and Ruth. 'I don't mind him,' Mother said.
She was excited, and she tipped her glass and spilled some gin into the
sand. 'I don't mind him. It doesn't matter to me how rude and horrid
and gloomy he is, but what I can't bear are the faces of his wretched
little children, those fabulously unhappy little children.' With the height
of the cliff between us, everyone taoked wrathfully about Lawrence;
about how he had grown worse instead of better, how unlike the rest
of us he was, how he endeavored to spoil every pleasure. We drank our
gin; the abuse seemed to reach a crescendo, and then, one by one, we
went swimming in the solid greeen water. But when we came out no
one mentioned Lawrence unkindly; the line of abusive conversation had
been cut, as if swimming had the cleansing force claimed for baptism.
We dried our hands and lighited cigarettes, and if Lawrence was
mentioned, it was only to suggest, kindly, something that might please
him. Wouldn't he like to sail to Barin's cove, or go fishing?
And now I remember that while Lawrence was visiting us, we went
swimming oftener than we usually do, and I think there was a reason
for this. When the irritability that accumulated as a result of his
company began to lessen our patience, not only with Lawrence but with
one another, we would all go swimming and shed our animus in the
cold water. I can see the family now, smarting from Lawrence's

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p.12

rebukes as they sat on the sand, and I can see them wading and diving
and surface-diving and hear in their voices the restoration of patience
and the rediscovery of inexhaustible good will. If Lawrence noticed this
change-this illusion of purification-I suppose that he would have
found in the vocabulary of psychiatry, or the mythology of the Atlantic,
some circumspect name for it, but I don't think he noticed the change.
He neglected to name the curative powers of the open sea, but it was
one of the few chances for diminution htat he missed.
The cook we had that year was a Polish woman named Anna
Ostrovick, a summer cook. She was first-rate -- a big, fat, hearty,
industrious woman who took her work seriously. She liked to cook and
to have the food she cooked appreciated and eaten, and whenever we
saw her, she always urged us to eat. She cooked hot bread-crescents
and bioches-for breakfast two or three times a week, and she would
bring these into the dining-room herself and say, 'Eat, eat, eat!' When
the maid took the serving dishes back into the pantry, we could
sometimes hear Anna, who was standing there, say, 'Good! They eat.'
She fed the garbage man, the milkman, and the gardener. 'Eat!' she
told them. 'Eat, eat!' On Thursday afternoons, she went to the movies
with the maid, but she didn't enjoy the movies, because the actors
were all so thin. She would sit in the dark theatre for an hour and a
half watching the screen anxiously for the appearance of someone who
had enjoyed his food. Bette Davis merely left with Anna the impression
of a woman who has not eaten well. 'They are all so skinny,' she would
say when she left the movies. In the evenings, after she had gorged all
of us, and washed the pots and pans, she would collect the table scraps
and go out to feed the creation. We had a few chickens that year, and
although they would have roosted by then, she would dump food into

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their troughs and urge the sleeping fowl to eat. She fed the songbirds
in the orchard and the chipmunks in the yard. Her appearance at the
edge of the garden and her urgent voice-we could hear her calling
'Eat, eat, eat'-had become, like the sunset gun at the boat club and
the passage of light from Cape Heron, attached to that hour. 'Eat, eat,
eat,' we could hear Anna say. 'Eat, eat...' Then it would be dark.
When Lawrence had been there three days, Anna called me into the
kitchen. 'You tell your mother,' she said, 'that he doesn't come into my
kitchen. If he comes into my kitchen all the time, I go. He is always
coming into my kitchen to tell me what a sad woman I am. He is
always telling me that I work too hard and that I don't get paid enough
and that I should belong to a union with vacations. Ha! He is so skinny
but he is always coming into my kitchen when I am busy to pity me,
but I am as good as him, I am as good as anybody, and I do not have
to have people like that getting into my way all the time and feeling
sorry for me. I am a famous and a wonderful cook and I have jobs
everywhere and the only reason I come here to work this summer is
because I was never before on an island, but I can have other jobs
everywhere and the only reason I come here to work this summer is
because I was never before on an island, but I can have other jobs
tomorrow, and if he is always coming into my kitchen to pity me, you
tell your mother I am going. I am as good as anybody and I do not
have to have that skinny all the time telling how poor I am.'
I was pleased to find that the cook was on our side, but I felt that
the situation was delicate. If Mother asked Lawrence to stay out of the
kitchen, he would make a grievance out of the request. He could make
a grievance out of anything, and it sometimes seemed that as he sat
darkly at the dinner table, every word of disparagement, whreever it
was aimed, came home to him. I didn't mention the cook's complaint to
anyone, but somehow there wasn't any more trouble from that quarter.


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The next cause for contention that I had from Lawrence came over
our backgammon games.
When we are at Laud's Head, we play a lot of backgammon. At
eight o'clock, after we have drunk our coffee, we usually get out the
board. In a way, it is one of our pleasantest hours. The lamps in the
room are still unlighted, Anna can be seen in the dark garden, and in
the sky above her head there are continents of shadow and fire.
Mother turns on the light and rattles the dice as a signal. We usually
play three games apiece, each with the others. We play for money, and
you can win or lose a hundred dollars on a game, but the stakes are
usually much lower. I think that Lawrence used to play-I can't
remember-but he doesn't play any more. He doesn't gamble. This is
not because he is poor or because he has any principles about gambling
but because he thinks the game is foolish and a waste of time. He was
ready enough, however, to waste his time watching the rest of us play.
Night after night, when the game began, he pulled a chair up beside
the board, and watched the checkers and the dice. His expression was
scornful, and yet he watched carefully. I wondered why he watched us
night after night, and, through watching his face, I think that I may
have found out.
Lawrence doesn't gamble, so he can't understand the excitement of
winning and losing money. He has forgotten how to play the game, I
think, so that its complex odds can't interest him. His observations
were bound to inclued the facts that backgammon is an idle game and
a game of chance, and that the board, marked with points, was a
symbol of our worthlessness. And since he doesn't understand gambling
or the odds of the game, I thought that wat interested him must be
the members of his family. One night when I was playing with Odette


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-I had won thirty-seven dollars from Mother and Chaddy-I think I
saw what was goin on in his mind.
Odette has black hair and black eyes. She is careful never to expose
her white skin to for long, so the striking contrast of blackness
and pallor is not changed in the summer. She needs and deserves
admiration-it is the element that contents her-and she will flirt,
unseriously, with any man. Her shoulders were bare that night, her
dress was cut to show the division of her breasts and to show her
breasts when leaned over the board to play. She kept losing and
flirting and making her losses seem like a part of the flirtation. Chaddy
was in the other room. She lost three games, and when the third game
ended, she fell back on the sofa and, looking at me squarely, said
something about going out on the dunes to settle the score. Lawrence
heard her. I looked at Lawrence. He seemed shocked and gratified at
the same time, as if he had suspected all along that we were not
playing for anything so insubstantial as money. I may be wrong, of
course, but I think that Lawrence felt that in watching our backgam-
mon he was observing the progress of a mordant tragedy in which the
money we won and lost served as a symbol for more vital forfeits. It is
like Lawrence to try to read significance and finality into every gesture
that we make, and it is certain of Lawrence that when he finds the
inner logic to our conduct, it will be sordid.
Chaddy came in to play with me. Chaddy and I have never liked to
lose to each other. When we were younger, we used to be forbidden to
play games together, because they always ended in a fight. We think
we know each other's mettle intimately. I think he is prudent; he thinks
I am foolish. There is always bad blood when we play anything-tennis
or backgammon or softball or bridge-and it does seem at times as if


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we were playing for the possession of each other's liberties. When I lose
to Chaddy, I can't sleep. All this is only half the truth of our
competitive relationship, but it was the half-truth that would be
discernible to Lawrence, and his presence at the table made me so
self-conscious that I lost two games. I tried not to seem angry when I
got up from the board. Lawrence was watching me. I went out onto
the terrace to suffer there in the dark the anger I always feel when I
lose to Chaddy.
When I came back into the room, Chaddy and Mother were playing.
Lawrence was still watching. By his lights, Odette had lost her virtue
to me, I had lost my self-esteem to Chaddy, and now I wondered what
he saw in the present match. He watched raptly, as if the opaque
checkers and the marked board served for an exchange of critical
power. How dramatic the board, in its ring of light, and the quiet
players and the crach of the sea outside must have seemed to him!
Here was spiritual cannibalism made visible; here, under his nose, were
the symbols of the rapacious use human bigins make of one another.
Mother plays a shrewd, an ardent, and an interfering game. She
always has her hands in her opponent's board. When she plays with
Chaddy, who is her favorite, she plays intently. Lawrence would have
noticed this. Mother is a sentimental woman. Her heart is good and
easily moved by tears and frailty, a characteristic that, like her
handsome nose, has not been changed at all by age. Grief in another
provokes her deeply, and she seems at times to be trying to divine in
Chaddy some grief, some loss, that she can succor and redress, and so
re-establish the relationship that she enjoyed with him when he was
sickly and young. She loves deending the weak and the childlike, and
now that we are old, she misses it. The world of debts and business,


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men and war, hunting and fishing has on her an exacerbating effect.
(When Father drowned, she threw away his fly rods and his guns.) She
has lectured us all endlessly on self-reliance, but when we come back
to her for comfort and for help-particularly Chaddy-she seems to feel
most like herself. I suppose Lawrence thought that the old womam and
her son were playing for each other's soul.
She lost. 'Oh dear,' she said. She looked stricken and bereaved, as
she always does when she loses. 'Get me my glasses, get me my
check-book, get me something to drink.' Lawrence got up at last and
stretched his legs. He looked at us all bleakly. The wind and the sea
had risen, and I thought that if he heard the waves, he must hear them
only as a dark answer to all his dark questions; that he would think
that the tide had expunged the embers of our picnic fires. The
company of a lie is unbearable, and he seemed like the embodiment of
a lie. I couldn't explain to him the simple and intense pleasures of
playing for money, and it seemed to me hideously wrong that he should
have sat at the edge of the board and concluded that we were playing
for one another's soul. He walked restlessly around the room two or
three times and then, as usual, gave us a parting shot. 'I should think
you'd go crazy,' he said, 'cooped up with one another like this, night
after night. Come on, Ruth. I'm going to bed.'
That night, I dreamed about Lawrence. I saw his plain face magnified
into ugliness, and when I woke in the morning, I felt sick, as if I had
suffered a great spiritual loss while I slept, like the loss of courage and
heart. It was foolish to let myself be troubled by my brother. I needed a
vacation. I needed to relax. At school, we live in one of the dormito-
ries, we eat at the house table, and we never get away. I not only



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teach English winter and summer but I work in the principal's office
and fire the pistol at track meets. I needed to get away from this and
from every other form of anxiety, and I decided to avoid my brother.
Early that day, I took Helen and the children sailing, and we stayed out
until suppertime. The next day, we went on a picnic. Then I had to go
to New York form a day, and when I got back, there was the costume
dance at the boat club. Lawrence wasn't going to this, and it's a party
where I always have a wonderful time.
The invitations that year said to come as you wish you were. After
several conversations, Helen and I had decided what to wear. The thing
she most wanted to be again, she said, was a bride, and so she decided
to wear her wedding dress. I thought this was a good choice-sincere,
lighthearted, and inexpensive. Her choice influenced mine, and I decided
to wear an old football uniform. Mother decided to go as Jenny Lind,
because there was an old Jenny Lind costume in the attic. The others
decided to rent costumes, and when I went to New York, I got the
clothes. Lawrence and Ruth didn't enter into any of this.
Helen was on the dance committee, and she spent most of Friday
decorating the club. Diana and Chaddy and I went sailing. Most of the
sailing that I do these days is in Manhasset, and I am used to setting a
homeward course by the gasoline barge and the tin roofs of the boat
shed, and it was a pleasure that afternoon, as we returned, to keep the
bow on a white church spire in the village and to find even the inshore
water green and clear. At the end of our sail, we stopped at the club
to get Helen. The committee had been trying to give a submarine
appearance to the ballroom, and the fact that they had nearly
succeeded in accomplishing this illusion made Helen very happy. We
drove back to Laud's Head. It had been a brilliant afternoon, but on the


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way home we could smell the east wind-the dark wind, as Lawrence
would have said-coming in from the sea.
My wife, Helen, is thirty-eight, and her hair would be gray, I guess,
if it were not dyed, but it is dyed an unobtrusive yellow-a faded
color-and I think it becomes her. I mixed cocktaiks that night while
she was dressing, and when I took a glass upstairs to her, I saw her
for the first time since our marriage in her wedding dress. There would
be no point in saying that she looked to me more beautiful than she did
on our wedding day, but because I have grown older and have, I think,
a greater depth of feeling, and because I could see in her face that
night both youth and age, both her devotion to the young woman that
she had been and the positions that she had yielded graciously to time,
I think I have never been so deeply moved. I had already put on the
football uniform, and the weight of it, the heaviness of the pants and
the shoulder guards, had worked a change in me, as if in putting on
these old clothes I had put off the reasonable anxieties and troubles of
my life. It felt as if we had both returned to the years before our
marriage, the years before the war.
The Collards had a big dinner party before the dance, and our
family-excepting Lawrence and Ruth-went to this. We drove over to
the club, through the fog, at about half-past nine. The orchestra was
playing a waltz. While I was checking my raincoat, someone hit me on
the back. It was Chucky Ewing, and the funny thing was that Chucky
had on a football uniform. This seemed comical as hell to both of us.
We were laughing when we went down the hall to the dance floor. I
stopped at the door to look at the party, and it was beautiful. The
committee had hung fish nets around the sides and over the high
ceiling. The nets on the ceiling were filled with colored balloons. The

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light was soft and uneven, and the people-our friends and neighbors
-dancing in the soft light to 'Three O'Clock in the Morning' made a
pretty picture. Then I noticed the number of women dressed in white,
and I realized that they, like Helen, were wearing wedding dresses.
Patsy Hewitt and Mrs. Gear and the Lackland girl waltzed by, dressed
as brides. Then Pep Talcott came over to where Chucky and I were
standing. He was dressed to be Henry VIII, but he told us that the
Auerbach twins and Henry Barrett and Dwight MacGregor were all
wearing football uniforms, and that by the last count there were ten
brides on the floor.
This coincidence, this funny coincidence, kept everybody laughing,
and made this one of the most lighthearted parties we've ever had at
the club. At first I thought that the women had planned with one
another to wear wedding dresses, but the ones that I danced with said
it was a coincidence and I'm sure that Helen had made her decision
alone. Everything went smoothly for me until a little before midnight. I
saw Ruth standing at the edge of the floor. She was wearing a long red
dress. It was all wrong. It wasn't the spirit of the party at all. I danced
with her, but no one cut in, and I was darned if I'd spend the rest of
the night dancing with her and I asked her where Lawrence was. She
said he was out on the dock, and I took her over to the bar and left
her and went out to get Lawrence.
The east fog was thick and wet, and he was alone on the dock. He
was not in costume. He had not even bothered to get himself up as a
fisherman or a sailor. He looked particularly saturnine. The fog blew
around us like a cold smoke. I wished that it had been a clear night,
because the easterly fog seemed to play into my misanthropic brother's
hands. And I knew that the buoys-the groaners and bells that we


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could hear then-would sound to him like half-human. half-drowned
cries, although every sailor knows that buoys are necessary and reliable
fixtures, and I knew that the foghorn at the lighthouse would mean
wanderings and losses to him and that he could misconstrue the
vivacity of the dance music. 'Come on in, Tifty.' I said, 'and dance with
your wife or get her some partners.'
'Why should I?' he said. 'Why should I?' And he walked to the
window and looked in at the party. 'Look at it,' he said. 'Look at that
...'
Chucky Ewing had got hold of a balloon and was trying to organize a
scrimmage line in the middle of the floor. The others were dancing a
samba. And I knew that Lawrence was looking bleakly at the party as
he had looked at the weather-beaten shingles on our house, as if he saw
here an abuse and a distortion of time; as if in wanting to be brides
and football players we exposed the fact that, the lights of youth
having been put out in us, we had been unable to find other lights to
go by and, destitute of faith and principle, had become foolish and sad.
And that he was thinking this about so many kind and happy and
generous people made me angry, made me feel for him such an
unnatural abhorrence that I was ashamed, for he is my brother and a
Pommeroy. I put my arm around his shoulders and tried to force him to
come in, but he would't.
I got back in time for the Grand March, and after the prizes had
been given out for the best costumes, they let the balloons down. The
room was hot, and someone opened the big doors onto the dock, and
the easterly wind circled the room and went out, carrying across the
dock and out onto the water most of the balloons. Chucky Ewing went
running out after the balloons, and when he saw them pass the dock




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and settle on the water, he took off his football uniform and dove in.
Then Eric Auerback dove in and Lew Phillips dove in and I dove in,
and you know how it is at a party after midnight when people start
jumping into the water. We recovered most of the balloons and dried
off and went on dancing, and we didn't get home until morning.

The next day was the day of the flower show. Mother and Helen and
Odette all had entries. We had a pickup lunch, and Chaddy drove the
women and children over to the show. I took a nap, and in the middle
of the afternoon I got some trunks and a towel and, on leaving the
housse, passed Ruth in the laundry. She was washing clothes. I don't
know why she should seem to have so much more work to do than
anyone else, but she is always washing or ironing or mending clothes.
She may have been taught, when she was young, to spend her time
like this, or she may be at the mercy of an expiatory passion. She
seems to scrub and iron with a penitential fervor, although I can't
imagine waht it is that she thinks she's done wrong. Her children were
with her in the laundry. I offered to take them to the beach, but they
didn't want to go.
It was late in August, and the wild grapes that grow profusely all
over the island made the land wind smell of wine. There is a little
grove of holly at the end of the path, and then you climb the dunes,
where nothing grows but that coarse grass. I could hear the sea, and I
remember thinking how Chaddy and I used to talk mystically about the
sea. When we were young, we had decided that we could never live in
the West because we would miss the sea. 'It is very nice here,' we
used to say politely when we visited people in the mountains, 'but we
miss the Atlantic.' We used to look down our noses at people from


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Iowa and Colorado who had been denied this revelation, and we scorned
the Pacific. Now I could hear the waves, whose heaviness sounded like
a reverberation, like a tumult, and it pleased me as it had pleased me
when I was young, and it seemed to have a purgative force, as if it had
cleared my memory of, among other things, the penitential image of
Ruth in the laundry.
But Lawrence was on the beach. There he sat. I went in without
speaking. The water was cold, and when I cameout, I put on a shirt. I
told him that I was going to walk up to Tanners Point, and he said
that he would come with me. I tried to walk beside him. His legs are
no longer than mine, but he always likes to stay a little ahead of his
companion. Walking along behind him, looking at his bent head and his
shoulders, I wondered what he could make of that landscape.
There were the dunes and cliffs, and then, where they declined, there
were some fields taht had begun to turn from green to brown and
yellow. The fields were used for pasturing sheep, and I guess Lawrence
would have noticed that the soil was eroded and that the sheep would
accelerate this decay. Beyond the fields there are a few coastal farms,
with square and pleasant buildings, but Lawrence could have pointed
out the hard lot of an island farmer. The sea, at our other side, was the
open sea. We always tell guests that there, to the east, lies the coast of
Portugal, and for Lawrence it would be an easy step from the coast of
Portugal to the tyranny in Sapin. The waves broke with a noise like a
'hurrah, hurrah, hurrah,' but to Lawrence they would say 'Vale vale.' I
suppose it would have occurred to his baleful and incisive mind that
the coast was terminal moraine, the edge of the prehistoric world, and
it must have occurred to him that we walked along the edge of the
known world in spirit as much as in fact. If he should otherwise have

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p.24
overlooked this, there were some Navy planes bombing an uninhabited
island to remind him.
That beach is a vast and preternaturally clean and simple landscape.
It is like a piece of the moon. The surf had pounded the floor solid, so
it was easy walking, and everything left on the sand had been twice
changed by the waves. There was the spine of a shell, a broomstick,
part of a bottle and part of a brick, both of them milled and broken
until they were nearly unrecognizable, and I suppose Lawrence's sad
frame of mind-for he kept his head down-went from one broken
thing to another. The company of his pessimism began to infuriate me,
and I caught up with him and put a hand on this shoulder. 'It's onle a
summer day, Tifty,' I said. 'It's only a summer day. What's the matter?
Don't you like it here?'
'I don't like it here,' he said blandly, without raising his eyes. 'I'm
going to sell my equity in the house to Chaddy. I didn't expect to have
a good time. The only reason I came back was to say goodbye.'
I let him get ahead again and I walked behind him, looking at his
shoulders and thinking of all the goodbyes he had made. When Father
drowned, he went to church and said goodbye to Father. It was only
three years later that he concluded that Mother was frivolous and said
goodbye to her. In his freshman year at college, he had been very good
friends with his roommate, but the man drank too much, and at the
beginning of the spring term Lawrence changed roommates and said
goodbye to his friend. When he had been in college for two years, he
goodbye to Yale. He enrolled at Columbia and got his law degree there,
but he found his first employer dishonest, and at the end of six months
he said goodbye to a good job. He married Ruth in City Hall and said


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p.25
goodbye to the Protestant Episcopal Church; they went to live on a
back street in Tuckahoe and said goodbye to the middle class. In 1938,
he went to Washington to work as a government lawyer, saying
goodbye to private enterprise, but after eight months in Washington he
concluded that the Roosevelt administration was sentimental and he
said goodbye to it. They left Washington for a suburb of Chicago,
where he said goodbye to his neighbors, one by one, on counts of
drunkenness, boorishness, and stupidity. He said goodbye to Chicago and
went to Kansas; he said goodbye to Kansas and went to Cleveland. Now
he had said goodbye to Cleveland and come East again, stooping at
Laud's Head long enough to say goodbye to the sea.
It was elegiac and it was bigoted and narrow, it mistook circum-
spection for character, and I wanted to help him. 'Come out of it,' I
said. 'Come out of it, Tifty.'
'Come out of what?'
'Come out of this gloominess. Come out of it. It's only a summer
day. You're spoiling your own good time and you're spoiling everyone
else's. We need a vacation, Tifty. I need one. I need to rest. We all do.
And you've made everything tense and unpleasant. I only have two
weeks in the year. Two weeks. I need to have a good time and so do
all the others. We need to rest. You think that your pessimism is an
advantage, but it's nothing but an unwillingness to grasp realities.'
'What are the realities?' he said. 'Diana is a foolish and a promiscuous
woman. So is Odette. Mother is an alcoholic. If she doesn't discipline
herself, she'll be in a hospital in a year or two. Chaddy is dishonest. He
always has been. The house is going to fall into the sea.' He looked at
me and added, as an afterthought, 'You're a fool.'
'You're a gloomy son of a bitch,' I said. 'You're a gloomy son of a


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p.26
bitch.'
'Get your fat face out of mine.' he said. He walked along.
Then I picked up a root and, coming at his back-although I have
never hit a man from the back before-I swung the root, heavy with
sea water, behind me, and the momentum sped my arm and I gave
him, my brother, a blow on the head that forced him to his knees on
the sand, and I saw the blood come out and begin to darken his hair.
Then I wishied that he was dead, dead and about to be buried, not
buried but about to be buried, because I did not want to be denied
ceremony and decorum in putting him away, in putting him out of my
consciousness, and I saw the rest of us-Chaddy and Mother and Diana
and Helen-in mourning in the house on Belvedere Street that was torn
down twenty years ago, greeting our guests and our relatives at the
door and answering their mannerly condolences with mannerly grief.
Nothing decorous was lacking so that even if he had been murdered on
a beach, one would feel before the tiresome ceremony ended that he
had come into the winter of his life and that it was a law of nature,
and a beautiful one, that Tifty should be buried in the cold, cold
ground.
He was still on his knees. I looked up and down. No one had seen
us. The naked beach, like a piece of the moon, reached to invisibility.
The spill of a wave, in a glancing run, shot up to where he knelt. I
would still have liked to end him, but now I had begun to act like two
dmen, the murderer and the Samaritan. With a swift roar, like
hollowness made sound, a white wave reched him and encircled him,
boiling over his shoulders, and I held him against the undertow. Then I
led him to a higher place. The blood had spread all through his hair, so
that it looked black. I took off my shift and tore it to bind up his head.


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p.27
He was conscious, and I didn't think he was badly hurt. He didn't
speak. Neither did I. Then I left him there.
I walked a little way down the beach and truned to watch him, and
I was thinking of my own skin then. He had got to his feet and he
seemed steady. The daylight was still clear, but on the sea wind fumes
of brine were blowing in like a light fog, and when I had walked a little
way from him, I could hardly see his dark figure in this obscurity. All
down the beach I could see the heavy salt air blowing in. Then I turned
my back on him and as I got near to the house, I went swimming
again, as I seem to have done after every encounter with Lawrence
that summer.
When I got back to the house, I lay down on the terrace. The others
came back. I could hear Mother defaming the flower arrangements that
had won prizes. None of ours had won anything. Then the house
quieted, as it always does at that hour. The children went into the
kitchen to get supper and the others went upstairs to bathe. Then I
head Chaddy making cocktails, and the conversation about the
flower-show judges was resumed. Then Mother cried, 'Tifty! Tifty! Oh,
Tifty!'
He stood in the door, looking half dead. He had taken off the bloody
bandage and held it in his hand. 'My brother did this,' he said. 'My
brother did it. He hit me with a stone-something-on the beach.' His
voice broke with self-pity. I thought he was going to cry. No one else
spoke. 'Where's Ruth?' he cried. 'Where's Ruth? Where in hell is Ruth?
I want her to start packing. I don't have any more time to waste here.
I have important things to do. I have important things to do.' And he
went up the stairs.

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p.28
They left for the mainland the next morning, taking the six o'clock
boat. Mother got up to say goodbye, but she was the only one, and it is
a harsh and an easy scene to imagine-the matriarch and the
changeling, looking at each other with a dismay that would seem like
the powers of love reversed. I heard the children's voices and the car
go down the drive, and I got up and went to the window, and what a
morning that was! Jesus, what a morning! The wind was northerly. The
air was clear. In the early heat, the roses in the garden smelled like
strawberry jam. While I was dressing, I heard the boat whistle, first the
warning signal and then the double blast, and I could see the good
people on the top deck drinking coffee out of fragile paper cups, and
Lawrence at the bow, saying to the sea, 'Thalassa, thalassa,' while his
timid and unhappy children watched the creation from the encirclement
of their mother's arms. The buoys would toll mournfully for Lawrence,
and while the grace of the light would make it an exertion not to throw
out your arms and swear exultantly, Lawrence's eyes would trace the
black sea as it fell astern; he would think of the bottom, dark and
strange, where full fathom five our father lies.
Oh, what can you do with a man like that? What can you do? How
can you dissuade his eye in a crowd from seeking out the cheek with
acne, the infirm hand; how can you teach him to respond to the
inestimable greatness of the race, the harsh surface beauty of life; how
can you put his finger for him on the obdurate truths before which fear
and horror are powerless? The sea that morning was iridescent and
dark. My wife and my sister were swimming-Diana and Helen-and I
saw their uncovered heads, black and gold in the dark water. I saw
them come out and I saw that they were naked, unshy, beautiful, and
full of grace, and I watched the naked women walk out of the sea.


------------------------------------------------------------------------

p.29
THE LITTLE WILLOW
by Frances Towers

The first evening, Simon Byrne was brought to the house by a friend
of Charlotte's, one of those with whom she would have to settle an
account after the war-unless, of course, he didn't come back. The
stranger stood on the threshold and took in the room, and a look of
such extraordinary delight came over his face that the youngest Miss
Avery's heart gave a little leap, almost as if, independently of her mind
and will, it greeted of its own accord another of its kind.
It was, of course, a peculiarly gracious room, with its high ceiling and
Adam chimney-piece. The shiny white walls were painted with light
and dim reflections of colours, and a thick black hearthrug smudged
with curly pink roses-an incongruous Balkan peasant rug in that
chaste room-somehow struck a note of innocence and gaiety, like the
scherzo in a symphony. That rug, and the photographs on the lid of the
grand piano; the untidy stack of books on a table; and a smoky pseudo
old master over the fireplace, with the lily of the Annunciation as a
highlight, a pale question mark in the gloom, gave the room an oddly
dramatic quality. Lisby had often thought-'It is like a room on the
stage, in which the story of three sisters is about to unfold.'
The passing reflections of Charlotte in red, Brenda in green made a
faint shimmer on the walls as they drifted about, as if a herbaceous
border were reflected momentarily in water.
'Charlotte dear, I've brought a friend. He was at Tobruk. Comes from
South Africa, and doesn't know a soul over here,' said Stephen Elyot.


------------------------------------------------------------------------

p.30
'He's just out of hospital.'
'I am so glad!' said Charlotte glowingly, giving him both her hands.
'You must came as often as you like.'
His eyes dwelt on her dark, lovely face, and he said, 'You don't know
what it feels like to be in a drawing-room again.'
'I can very well imagine. It must feel like the peace of God,' said
Brenda, in that soft, plangent voice of hers, which was so perfect an
instrument for the inspired remarks that seemed to fall effortlessly from
her lips.
She could say the most divinely right things without a throb of real
sympathy, and would spend pounds on roses rather than write a litter
of condolence. As for her 'cello playing, it was strange how deeply she
could move one, while she herself remained quite aloof. It was because
she knew what the music was meant to say and was thinking about
the music all the time, and not of how she played or how she felt. It
was a great charm in her.
Lisby said nothing. She had no poetic conception of herself to impose
on the minds of others. However, she had her uses. She cut the
sandwiches and made the coffee and threw herself into the breach
when some unassuming guest seemed in danger of being neglected.
And unassuming guests often were. Charlotte and Brenda had such
brilliant friends-musicians and artists and writers. The truest thing
about those girls was that they were charmers. Every other fact sank
into insignificance beside that one supreme quality. Though each had
her own strongly marked individuality, they had this in common: that
by lamplight they acquired, in their trailing dresses, a timeless look, as
if they might have stood for types of the seductive woman in any age.
Not a modern girl; but the delicate creature who through the ages has

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p.31
been man's rose of beauty, or his cup of homlock.
Always, destroying friendship, there was this allure- the glow, the
fragrance, the waht-you-will, which, sooner or later, ensnared every
young man and made him the captive of one or the other of the two
elder Misses Avery.
'Charlotte dear,' said Stephen Elyot, wandering about the room with
his coffee cup in his hand, 'I wonder, with your exquisite taste, you let
that picture hang there! It's all wrong, my dear, as I've told you before.
A Watteau, now, or a Fragonard, for this eighteenth-century room. And
yet your decors for the stage are so perfect! You are quite my favourite
designer.'
'Lisby would die if we banished the picture. It's been in the family
for generations,' said Charlotte.
'It has been loved by people who are dead, for its ... holiness, not
for aesthetic reasons; and that makes it spiritually precious,' said Simon
Byrne in a low voie to Lisby, by whom he chanced to be sitting.
She gave a little start. The thick white paint of the lily, and its
golden tongue, had fascinated her as a child, making all lilies seem not
quite earthly flowers. How did he know so quickly that the dark picture
in the white room brought spiritual values into it, brought her mother
saying, 'Yes, darling; perhaps the angel has a queer face-perhaps he
is a little bit like Miss Nettleton. How interesting that someone we
know should have a face that an old master chose for the Angel
Gabriel! I shall always think of Miss Nettleton as a very special kind of
person.'
'It almost seems as if he might be my kind of person,' she thought.
Perhaps one would have thought his face unremarkable if one had not
caught that look on it. 'He has known horro and violence, and is
'

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p.32
terribly vulnerable to beauty,' she had said to herself, with one of her
flashes of insight.
Brenda played that evening, and Simon Byrne never took his eyes off
her. In her long green dress, with her gold hair like an inverted sheaf
of corn, she held him spellbound. Or perhaps it was the music.
When she went to bed that night, Lisby caught herself hoping quite
desperately that it was, after all, the music; and for such a foolish
reason. Because as he was leaving he took her little willow tree in his
long thin hands.
'So cool,' he said, 'and watery. Willows and water-I used to dream
of them.'
'In the desert?' she asked.
'When I was lost,' he said, 'and parched with thirst, and terribly
frightened.'
'It's the loveliest thing I have,' she said.
It was made of jade and crystal and it stood on the lacquer cabinet
in the hall. She had fallen in love with it in an antique shop and had
expended on it, with wild extravagance, her first term's salary as a
teacher. Charlotte and Brenda had thought her too utterly fackless-al-
most wicked. The sun by day and the moon by night made it throw a
lovely shadow on the wall. She couldn't explain that what she loved
was the idea of a willow that had been in the mind of the Chinese
artist-the glitter and coolness and bewitchment. But he would know.
He came several times. 'Naturally,' thought Lisby, 'one would like the
house, wouldn't one? Its oldness and peace.' And Charlotte arranged the
flowers so beautifully and there were music and conversation: Brenda
and her friends practising their quartets for concerts and Charlotte's
friends talking of art. Anyone could come to the Court House as a


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p.33
place in which to forget the war. There was the strangeness of its
being so near London and yet completely hidden in a wood, an oasis in
the desert of ribbon development that had spread around it in the past
few years. Many young men on leave found it a place of refuge.
He was a person one could talk to. The things that made Lisby laugh
made him laugh too. Sometimes he would catch her eye and they
would go off into a silent fit of laughter at some absurd thing that no
one else had remarked. She knew, once or twice, the strange feeling of
strings being plucked in her mind by a chance word or gesture of his,
and he had a way of humming some tune that had been haunting her,
even something she had not heard for a long time: a phrase from a
symphony, perhaps, that had suddenly come back to her quite distinctly
between sleeping and waking, as if a record had been put on in her
mind.
And then, one day, Brenda, in her delicate way, appropriated his
friendship. A person versed in Brenda-ish modes of behaviour could
guess what she thought. When she said charming things a little
frostily, as if offering an ice-chilled gardenia, when she smiled with
dazzling sweetness one moment and raised her eyebrows rather coldly
the next, one knew what was in her mind. She was dealing with a
situation that required delicacy and tact. Love was sacred, even
unwanted love. The little flame must not be allowed to go out. So one
blew on it prettily one moment, and damped it down the next. For a
conflagration meant the end of everything, it meant stamping on the
heart in which it burned. And how, in wartime, could one bear to do
that?

She said, 'You know, Simon is rather an intriguing person. He can



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p.34
say rather divine things-when one is alone with him. Still waters, my
dear, run deep.'
Yes. He wouldn't wear his heart on his sleeve. But to be the person
to whom he said 'rather divine things' must be to feel oneself
unimaginably exquisite.
There was that night they all went out into the garden when the all
clear sounded. the scent of the tobacco plants was so sweet it was like
a presence, like a naked nymph following one about, and the moon was
so bright that the red roses kept their colour, and the white were
luminous like the moths. Standing apart, Lisby was fascinated by his
shadow lying clearcut on the lawn. She stared at it, and then, looking
up, saw it printed, gigantic, across the sky. It gave her a queer cold
feeling, seeming to confirm an idea she had had of him lately: that
everything he was concerned in here and now was the beginning of
something that would go on happening outside this sphere. It would
always be there, behind her eyelids.
After that, she couldn't go on trying to make up to him for the times
that Brenda was too much occupied with someone else to bother about
him. It would be a kind of mockery. The only thing was to keep out of
his way.
But the last evening of his embarkation liave, when he cae to say
good-bye, it was she who had to febrile gaiety, because the favoured lover
of the moment was home on forty-eight hours' leave, and she had no
eyes for anyone but him; and Charlotte was deeply involved with
Richard Harkness. When they said good-bye, they would doubtless be
driven into each other's arms. One could see it in their eyes when they
looked at each other.


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p.35
Lisby's eyes fell on the little willow. She seized it and put it into his
outstretched hand. 'Please take it-for luck,' she said.
'But you can't give this away, Miss Avery. It's-it's ... much too
lovely,' he stammered.
'Please, please-it's more yours than mine.'
'It's terribly kind of you. Your sisters-you've been so kind letting me
come. I shall dream of this house.'
'But you'll come again,' said Lisby, speaking as lightly as she could.
'I'd try to ... in the spirit, if not in the flesh,' he said, with his
crooked smile. Why must he say a thing so devastating?
'Look at Orion-like some secret heavenly diagram,' said Lisby, at the
open door, because she had no word of comfort for him (Oh, dear! He'll
think I'm trying to be appealing, trying to be a poetial little puss,
trying to get at him, she thought despairingly.) If only Brenda would
come out for a moment and be very sweet in that way she had of
being responsive to another's mood! She could have given him
something to take away with him, some cryptic remark, that he could
dwell upon and cherish, as if it were a tiny key she had put into his
hand to unlock a door in the future. But she was caught away into a
private heaven, and so he had to go without any hope.
He looked up at the heartbreaking glitter of Orion, so serene, so
triumphant above the tortured wourld. 'A lover might use it as a code,'
he said almost under his breath. 'Abelard signing his letters to
Heloise.'
He looked down at her, hesitating a moment, as if there were
something he wanted to say. And then, with a sigh, he turned away.
As he looked back at the gate to salute her, the little tree in his hand
caught the starlight and shone with a faint blue fire.


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p.36
He never wrote. Lisby, sorting out the post, sometimes looked
wonderingly at a letter addressed to Brenda in a hand-writing she
didn't know, but the name on the flap of the envelope was never his.
When the war was over at last, Richard Harkness, liberated from a
prison camp in Germany, came back to claim Charlotte. Their wedding
was fixed for the autumn.
'By the way, Brenda,' Charlotte said casually one day, looking up from
a letter she was writing, 'I forgot to tel you. Richard says that Simon
Byrne was a prisoner in the same Offlag. He died last year.'
'Oh, poor darling!' said Brenda, in the sweet, hollow voice she used
when the conventions demanded an assumption of sorrow. One's heart
had been wrung so often that there had come a time when it recorded
merely a mechanical spasm. She went on arranging the flowers with a
set expression.
Lisby said nothing. She sat very still in the recesses of the armchair
and clasped her knees to still their trembling. 'So much death, one
cannot bear it,' she said at last, and got herself out of the room
somehow. She always took things to heart-as if she suffered in her
own body the agony of unknown millions.
'It's all very well for Lisby,' said Brenda with a shrug. 'But, after all,
she hasn't had any personal loss in this war. Not like you and me. I
mean, when someone's killed who's been in love with one, it makes it
all so terribly poignant. I sometimes think I've felt so much, I can't feel
any more. Those poor lambs!' She sighedand dipped her face into the
roses, as if she would leave with them the expression of grief she could
now decently abandon. It was almost as though she were leaving them
on his grave to symbolize her thoughts of him, that would fade more
quickly than they. 'He was sweet, but rather dumb,' she said.


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p.37
'Did he ever--' asked Charlotte, looking over her tortoise-shell
glasses.
'Not in so many words. You all took it for granted it was me. But
perhaps, after all, you were the attraction, Charlotte.' But the hint of
doubt found no expression in the tones of her voice.
'Or Lisby. It really is rather awful the way we leave her out of
account.'
Charlotte sealed her letter and took off her glasses. She had a face
like La Belle Ferroniere, on which the glasses had the air of an amusing
affectation. But Brenda had the flowerlike delicacy of a Piero della
Francesca. Lisby had seen the resemblances and had made her sisters a
present of them. But no one had noticed that she herself was like a
watching girl who holds a basket on her head in the background of El
Greco's Christ in the Temple.
'Of course,' said Charlotte, affixing a stamp, 'it wasn't I. That's a
thing I never make a mistake about. A woman always knows.'
'Well, I am not so cocksure about love as you seem to be. I mean, I'm
inclined to say to myself, "If he does so and so, if he remembers what
hat I wore the day before yesterday, if he bothers to look up the
address I'm staying at in the telephone book, then I shall know for
certain." But I don't remember applying any such tests to Simon.
Somehow we never got that far. Though I had my suspicions, of
course.'

Brenda carried the roses across the room and put them on the piano,
in the midst of the numerous photographs, of young men in uniform.
Surreptitiously she changed the place of one. He had been shot down
over Hamburg, and his place was among the dead. Perhaps no one but



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p.38
herself, who was responsible for it, was aware of this arrangement of
the photographs. She had a feeling about the matter of which she
would not have spoken for the world. It did not exactly amount to a
superstition. Perhaps it meant no more than did the meticulous dividing
up of her books into their respective categories. It irritated her to find a
novel thrust in between two volumes of poetry. Death, perhaps, was
poetry, and life, prose. Or was it the other way round?
In the midst of preparations for the wedding, no one, it seemed, gave
another thought to Simon Byrne.
'Lisby seems rather odd these days--soft of strung-up,' said Charlotte
one day. 'Do you think, Brenda, that subconsciously she minds my
getting married and your being engaged? I mean, it can't be much fun,
poor child, seeing happiness through other people's eyes, as Shakespeare
has already remarked.' She snapped off a thread and took the pins out
of a seam.
Brenda looked down with a preoccupied expression at the ring on her
long pale hand, where it lay on a fold of crepe de Chine she had been
sewing. 'How incredibly lucky we are that our two have come through
alive!' she said. 'Gerald doesn't know how lucky he is; because it
might have been John. I don't know, but I think it might have been. I
was devastated when he was killed. I dare say you are right about
Lisby. But what can we do ... ?'
'That cyclamen colour you've chosen for the bridesmaids--of ourse,
you'll look divine in it, but it's trying for Lisby. Heaven knows, she's
sallow enough.'
'But, my dear, what was I to do? We had the stuff and we've got no
coupons. If only Gerald were back, we could have had a double
wedding and both got out of Lisby's way. I feel we rather swamp her,


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p.39
you know-like two arc lamps putting out the moonlight. Now, isn't
that a tribute to our Lis??'

Charlotte was married on a golden day. While they waited for her in
the porch, Lisby thought that Brenda looked more like an Italian
primitive than ever, pale and bright as an angel.(But we are all wrong
for the blue horizon and the golden leaves-too shrill, too springlike, she
thought.) Their reflections stained with pink the dewdrops in a spider's
web slung between two tombstones.
A cab drove up to the lich-gate, and Charlotte came down the path
on the arm of an uncle, her dark eyes shining through her veil. She
was so majestic, so withdrawn that they did not venture to speak to
her, but spread out her train, whispering nervously together.
Richard Harkness stood at the altar steps. To Lisby he had rather a
vulpine look. It argued a certain spirituality in Charlotte, not to be
deceived by outward appearances, but to swoop unerringly on the
qualities she wanted. But he hadn't been Simon's sort. He had never
mentioned Simon's name in Lisby's presence. She was grateful to him
for that, but she couldn't forgive him.
She stole a glance apprehensively at the best man. He had been in
the camp too-a doctor, they said. He had a dark, ascetic face,
sensitive and melancholy. One must keep out of his way.
The wedding reception was like any other: the strained hilarity, the
desperate frivolity, lit with a perilous brightness as of unshed tears.
Corks popped, the cake was cut, the toasts proposed. Charlotte came
out of her trance, and Richard made a speech so charming that all her
friends began to think they knew, after all, what she saw in him.
There was Brenda by the window, trying desperately to make

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comversation with Captain Oliver. When her voice was high and strained
like that, one knew she was wilting; and there were those faint mauve
shadows under her eyes. The man was difficult. He appeared to have
no capacity for small talk.
'By the way, did you come across someone who was a friend of
mine-Simon Byrne? He was in the tanks,' she said.
Brenda...don't...Don't! Lisby cried out soundlessly, with a pain
like cramp about her heart. His name seemed to sound through the
room like a clash of cymbals. She felt that it must pierce every
breastbone. It made a stranger of Brenda. It was incomprehensible that
she could use it to make comversation, that to her it could be a name
like any other.
Lisby saw the start that Captain Oliver gave. He turned quickly and
looked at Brenda-a long, searching look.
'Yes, I knew Byrne,' he said.
'He was such a dear. We liked him so much. Look, Charlotte has
gone up to change. I must fly after her.'
They were gone at last. Charlotte leaned out and waved. Someone
threw a slipper after the taxicab.
In the throng at the gate, Lisby was aware of Captain Oliver edging
his way toward her.
'Miss Avery,' he said in her ear, 'may I speak to you a moment
alone?'
'In the morning room,' said Lisby, very pale. For some unfathomable
reason she picked up her bouquet from the hall table before preceding
him into the little yellow room.
A picture glowing with evening appeared in the frame of the
window. In the foreground, the black trunk of the mulberry tree, about


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which still dangled a few heart-shaped leaves of sour green, and to the
right the long silver plumes of the pampas grass, had a strange
significance, as if the words 'black, gold, silver' were being reiterated in
a poem. The blue October mist lay beyond, veiling the lawn, and a little
sumac tree burned like a torch at the edge of the mist. A bird that had
abandoned music for the winter made a grasshopper sound.
The pampas grass. Charlotte had tried to dig it up-a vulgar
interloper, she had said. Lisby clung desperately to her thoughts. She
did not want to hear waht this man had to say. She sank down on the
sofa and began mechanically to take her bouquet to pieces. The color
was drained out of her face, and she looked ghastly in the cyclamen
shade that was so becoming to Brenda.
'So you knew Simon Byrne,' said Captain Oliver, looking down at
her. 'I wonder...perhaps you could help me, Miss Avery? I was with
him when he died.'
'Have you, perhaps, a message...for my sister?' asked Lisby
faintly, arranging little sprigs of heather on her knee.
'That's waht I don't know,' he said with a sigh. 'There is something
I'd like to tell someone-but not the wrong person. You see, Simon
meant a great deal to me. Could you tell me, did she ever give him a
little tree, a willow? I suppose it was one of those Chinese things.'
'No,' said Lisby, very low, 'she never gave him anything.'
'I am going to tell you,' said Captain Oliver, as if making a sudden
decision. 'A secret would be safe with you, wouldn't it? He was badly
hurt, you know. His wound never healed. He was terribly ill all the
time; but the odd thing was that through it all, he was never less than
himself. They couldn't do anything to Simon. They couldn't strip him of
a single one of his qualities. It was as if he had some inward source of

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happiness, a core of peace in his heart. The camp was short of doctors
and they were only too pleased to make use of me, so I was able to
make things a little easier for him.'
'I am glad,' she said, bent over her flowers, 'that he had you to look
after him.'
'The night before he died,' went on Captain Oliver, in a low
deliberate voice, 'he dictated a letter to his mother in South Africa. He
was a bit of a poet, you know. It was a very touching letter. I Suppose
she has it now, poor soul. I said, "Is there no one else, Simon?" He
shook his head. "There was a girl," he said, "but she never knew she
was my girl." I asked him to tell me about her, thinking it might
comfort him. He said,"She is a little, quiet creature-like mignon-
ette--and her eyes go light and dark with her thoughts. I knew in my
bones she was meant for me. I felt her cheek against mine. It was
soft and cool-like young buds, as I always imagined it would be. And
the pain went away and I went to sleep. You know, Bobert, she
wouldn't mind my dreaming that. She has such exquisite compassion.
When I said good-bye, she gave me the loveliest thing she had-a little
willow tree. It was smashed to bits in may kit when the shell got us." I
thought to myself, "Perhaps she did care, that girl." He died toward
morning, very peacefully, without speaking again.'
Lisby sat very still. 'So cold...so cold,' she said, chafing her hands
as if the hands of the dying lay between them.
'So you were his girl,' said Robert Oliver.
'He was my dear, dear love,' whispered Lisby. She bowed her head
on her knees and wept soundlessly.
He thought, 'It is sad for a girl when her first avowal of love has to


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be made to a third person.' And, going softly to the door, he turned the
key in the lock and let imself out by the window.
'Lisby cried her eyes out after you left,' wrote Brenda to Charlotte.
'But at night she looked so radiant, one might have thought it was her
wedding day. There were dozens of letters for you by the evening post
(I've sent them on) and some for me. I sorted them out, and said, as
one usually does, "None for you, I'm afraid, Lisby darling." She looked
at me so strangely, and said, "I have had mine-one that was never
written." What could she have meant? I said, "What on earth do you
mean?" But I knew from the look on her face that it is one of those
things she will never tell.'
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