Why tell the whole? The blows of the basement hammer every day grew more and more between; and each blow every day grew fainter than the last; the wife sat frozen at the window, with tearless eyes, glitteringly gazing into the weeping faces of her children; the bellows fell; the forge choked up with cinders; the house was sold; the mother dived down into the long church-yard grass; her children twice followed her thither; and the houseless, familyless old man staggered off a vagabond in crape; his every woe unreverenced; his grey head a scorn to flaxen curls!
還用再說下去嗎?總之,地下室里的錘子一天緊似一天地敲下去,可是每一記都一天比一天輕;妻子凍僵了似地坐在窗邊,無淚的眼睛,光閃閃地直瞪著幾個小孩的哭泣的臉;風箱不動了,熔爐里塞滿了爐灰,房子賣掉了,母親鉆進了教堂墓地里的長長的青草下面,兩個孩子也都相繼跟著她去了;于是這個無家無室的老頭帶著黑紗搖搖晃晃地離開了,做流浪漢去了;他的各種悲哀都是不值得同情的,他的白發(fā)成為少婦們的詛咒對象!
Death seems the only desirable sequel for a career like this; but Death is only a launching into the region of the strange Untried; it is but the first salutation to the possibilities of the immense Remote, the Wild, the Watery, the Unshored; therefore, to the death-longing eyes of such men, who still have left in them some interior compunctions against suicide, does the all-contributed and all-receptive ocean alluringly spread forth his whole plain of unimaginable, taking terrors, and wonderful, new-life adventures; and from the hearts of infinite Pacifics, the thousand mermaids sing to them — "Come hither, broken-hearted; here is another life without the guilt of intermediate death; here are wonders supernatural, without dying for them.
這樣一種生涯,唯一值得想望的結果就是死;可是死只是走向那個"未經(jīng)證實"的異域;它不過招呼你到那遼闊的"遠方","蠻荒","水鄉(xiāng)","無涘無際的"一切可能的地方的第一聲。因此,那種求死而內心里還是不肯自殺的人,眼睛看到的是,那個慷慨豪爽與虛懷若谷的海洋已在誘人地展開它整個不可想象的景致,加上從那無垠的太平洋的中間,無數(shù)的人魚都在對他們叫喊——"到這里來,傷心的人們呀;這里是不會有犯死罪的另一種生活;這里是超自然的奇跡,是永生的。