tobacco英文原文 everything that rise must coverage 上升的一切必将汇合

Everything That Rise Must Coverage

Her doctor had told Julian's mother that she must lose twenty pounds on

account of her blood pressure, so on Wednesday nights Julian had to take her

downtown on the bus for a reducing class at the Y

. The reducing class was

designed for working girls over fifty, who weighed from 165 to 200 pounds.

His mother was one of the slimmer ones, but she said ladies did not tell their

age or weight. She would not ride the buses by herself at night since they had

been integrated, and because the reducing class was one of her few pleasures,

necessary for her health, and free, she said Julian could at least put himself out

to take her, considering all she did for him. Julian did not like to consider all

she did for him, but every Wednesday night he braced himself and took her.

She was almost ready to go, standing before the hall mirror, putting on her hat,

while he, his hands behind him, appeared pinned to the door frame, waiting

like Saint Sebastian for the arrows to begin piercing him. The hat was new and

had cost her seven dollars and a half. She kept saying, “Maybe I shouldn't

have paid that for it. No, I shouldn't have. I'll take it off and return it tomorrow.

I shouldn't have bought it.”

Julian raised his eyes to heaven. “Yes, you should have bought it,” he

said. “Put it on and let's go.” It was a hideous hat. A purple velvet flap came

down on one side of it and stood up on the other; the rest of it was green and

looked like a cushion with the stuffing out. He decided it was less comical

than jaunty and pathetic. Everything that gave her pleasure was small and

depressed him.

She lifted the hat one more time and set it down slowly on top of her

head. Two wings of gray hair protruded on either side of her florid face, but

her eyes, sky-blue, were as innocent and untouched by experience as they

must have been when she was ten. Were it not that she was a widow who had

struggled fiercely to feed and clothe and put him through school and who was

supporting him still, “until he got on his feet,” she might have been a little girl

that he had to take to town. “It's all right, it's all right,” he said. “Let's go.” He

opened door himself and started down the walk to get her going. The sky was

a dying violet and the houses stood out darkly against it, bulbous liver-colored

monstrosities of a uniform ugliness though no two were alike. Since this had

been a fashionable neighborhood forty years ago, his mother persisted in

thinking they did well to have an apartment in it. Each house had a narrow

collar of dirt around it in which sat, usually, a grubby child. Julian walked with

his hands in his pockets, his head down and thrust forward and his eyes glazed

with the determination to make himself completely numb during the time he

would be sacrificed to her pleasure.

The door closed and he turned to find the dumpy figure, surmounted by

the atrocious hat, coming toward him.

“Well,” she said, “you only live once and paying a little more for it, I at

least won't meet myself coming and g

oing.”

“Some day I'll start making money,” Julian said gloomily

- he knew he

never would -

“and you can have one of those jokes whenever you take the

fit.” But first they would move.

He visualized a place where the nearest neighbors would be three miles

away on either side.

“I think you're doing fine,” she said, drawing on her gloves. “You've only

been out of school a year. Rome wasn't built in a day.”

She was one of the few members of the Y reducing class who arrived in

hat and gloves an

d who had a son who had been to college. “It takes time,”

she said, “and the world is in such a mess. This hat looked better on me than

any of the others, though when she brought it out I said, ?Take that thing back.

I wouldn't have it on my head,? and she

said, ?Now wait till you see it on,? and

when she put it on me, I said, ?We

-

ull,? and she said, ?If you ask me, that hat

does something for you and you do something for the hat, and besides,? she

said, ?with that hat, you won't meet yourself coming and going.?”

Julian thought he could have stood his lot better if she had been selfish, if

she had been an old hag who drank and screamed at him. He walked along,

saturated in depression, as if in the midst of his martyrdom he had lost his

faith.

Catching sight of his long, hopeless, irritated face, she stopped suddenly

with a grief-

stricken look, and pulled back on his arm. “Wait on me,” she said.

“I'm going back to the house and take this thing off and tomorrow I'm going to

return it. I was out of my head. I can pay the gas bill with that seven-

fifty.”

He caught her arm in a vicious grip. “You are not going to take it back,” he

said. “I like it.”

“Well,” she said, “I don't think I ought. . .”

“Shut up and enjoy it,” he muttered, more depr

essed than ever.

“With the world in the mess it's in,” she said, “it's a wonder we can enjoy

anything. I tell you, the bottom rail is on the top.

Julian sighed. “Of course,” she said, “if you know who you are, you can

go anywhere.” She said this every

time he took her to the reducing class.

“Most of them in it are not our kind of people,” she said, “but I can be

gracious to anybody. I know who I am.”

“They don't give a damn for your graciousness,” Julian said savagely.

“Knowing who you are is good

for one generation only. You haven't the

foggiest idea where you stand now or who you are.”

She stopped and allowed her eyes to flash at him. “I most certainly do

know who I am,” she said, “and if you don't know who you are, I'm ashamed

of you.”

“Oh hell,” Julian said.

“Your great

-

grandfather was a former governor of this state,” she said.

“Your grandfather was a prosperous land

-owner. Your grandmother was a

Godhigh.”

“Will you look around you,” he said tensely, “and see where you a

re

now?” and he swept his arm jerkily out to indicate the neighborhood, which

the growing darkness at least made less dingy.

“You remain what you are,” she said. “Your great

-grand-father had a

plantation and two hundred slaves.”

“There are no more slaves,” he said irritably.

“They were better off when they were,” she said. He groaned to see that

she was off on that topic. She rolled onto it every few days like a train on an

open track. He knew every stop, every junction, every swamp along the way,

and knew the exact point at which her conclusion would roil majestically into

the station: “It's ridiculous. It's simply not realistic. They should rise, yes, but

on their own side of the fence.”

“Let's skip it,” Julian said.

“The ones

I feel sorry for,” she said, “are the ones that are half white.

They're tragic.”

“Will you skip it?”

“Suppose we were half white. We would certainly have mixed feelings.”

“I have mixed feelings now,” he groaned.

“Well let's talk about something pleasant,” she said. “I remember going

to Grandpa's when I was a little girl. Then the house had double stairways that

went up to what was really the second floor - all the cooking was done on the

first. I used to like to stay down in the kitchen on account of the way the walls

smelled. I would sit with my nose pressed against the plaster and take deep

breaths. Actually the place belonged to the Godhighs but your grandfather

Chestny paid the mortgage and saved it for them. They were in reduced

circumstances,” she said, “but reduced or not, they never forgot who they

were.”

“Doubtless that decayed mansion reminded them,” Julian muttered. He

never spoke of it without contempt or thought of it without longing. He had

seen it once when he was a child before it had been sold. The double stairways

had rotted and been torn down. Negroes were living in it. But it remained in

his mind as his mother had known it. It appeared in his dreams regularly. He

would stand on the wide porch, listening to the rustle of oak leaves, then

wander through the high-ceilinged hall into the parlor that opened onto it and

gaze at the worn rugs and faded draperies. It occurred to him that it was he,

not she, who could have appreciated it. He preferred its threadbare elegance to

anything he could name and it was because of it that all the neighborhoods

they had lived in had been a torment to him - whereas she had hardly known

the difference. She called her insensitivity “being adjustable.”

“And I remember the old dar

ky who was my nurse, Caroline. There was

no better person in the world. I've always had a great respect for my colored

friends,” she said. “I?d do anything in the world for them and they'd. . .”

“Will you for God's sake get off that subject?” Julian s

aid. When he got on a

bus by himself, he made it a point to sit down beside a Negro, in reparation as

it were for his mother's sins.

“You're mighty touchy tonight,” she said. “Do you feel all right?”

“Yes I feel all right” he said. “Now lay off.”

She pursed her lips. “Well, you certainly are in a vile humor,” she

observed “I just won't speak to you at all.”

They had reached the bus stop. There was no bus in sight and Julian, his

hands still jammed in his pockets and his head thrust forward, scowled down

the empty street. The frustration of having to wait on the bus as well as ride on

it began to creep up his neck like a hot hand. The presence of his mother was

borne in upon him as she gave a pained sigh. He looked at her bleakly. She

was holding herself very erect under the preposterous hat wearing it like a

banner of her imaginary dignity. There was in him an evil urge to break her

spirit. He suddenly unloosened his tie and pulled it off and put it in his pocket

She stiffened. “Why must you look like that when you take me to town?” she

said. “Why must you deliberately embarrass me?”

“If you'll never learn where you arc,” he said, “you can at least learn

where I am.”

“You look like a thug,” she said.

“Then I must be one” he murmured.

“I'll just go home” she said. “I will not bother you. If you can?t do a

little thing? like that for me . . .”

Rolling his eyes upward, he put his tie back on. “Restored to my class,”

he muttered. He thrust his face toward he

r and hissed, “True culture is in the

mind, the mind,” he said, and tapped his head, “the mind.”

“It's in the heart,” she said, “and in how you do things and how you do

things is because of who you are.”

“Nobody in the damn bus cares who you are.”

“I care who I am” she said icily.

The lighted bus appeared on top of the next hill and as it approached,

they moved out into the street to meet it. He put his hand under her elbow and

hoisted her up On the creaking step. She entered with a little smile, as if she

were going into a drawing room where everyone had been waiting for her.

While he put in the tokens, she sat down on one of the broad front seats for

three which faced the aisle. A thin woman with protruding teeth and long

yellow hair was sitting on the end of it. His mother moved up beside her and

left room for Julian beside herself. He sat down and looked at the floor across

the aisle where a pair of thin feet in red and white canvas sandals were planted.

His mother immediately began a general conversation meant to attract anyone

who felt like talking.

“Can it get any hotter?” she said and removed from her purse a folding

fan, black with a Japanese scene on it, which she began to flutter before her.

“I reckon it might could,” the woman with the protruding teeth said,

“but I know for a fact my apartment couldn?t get no hotter.”

“It must get the afternoon sun,

looked up and down the bus. It was half filled. Everybody was white. “I

see

we have the bus to ourselves,” she said. Julian cringed.

“For a change,” said the woman across the aisle, the owner of the red

and white canvas sandals. “I come on one the other day and they were thick as

fleas -

up front and all through.”

“The world is in a mess everywhere,” his mother said. “I don't know

how we?ve let it get in this fix.”

“What gets my goat is all those boys from good families stealing

automobile tires,” the woman with the protruding teeth said. “I told my boy, I

said you may not be rich but you been raised right and if I ever catch you in

any such mess, they can send you on to the reformatory. Be exactly where you

belong.”

“Training tells,” his mother said. “Is your boy in high school?”

“Ninth grade,” the

woman said.

“My son just finished college last year. He wants to write but he?s

selling typewriters until he gets started,” his mother said.

The woman leaned forward and peered at Julian. He threw her such a

malevolent look that she subsided against the seat.

On the floor across the aisle there was an abandoned newspaper. He got

up and got it and opened it out in front of him. His mother discreetly

continued the conversation in a lower tone but the woman across the aisle said

in a loud voice,

“Well that?s nice. Selling typewriters is close to writing. He

can go right from one to the other.”

“I tell him,” his mother said, “that Rome wasn't built in a day.”

Behind the newspaper Julian was withdrawing into the inner compartment of

his mind where he spent most of his time. This was a kind of mental bubble in

which he established himself when he could not bear to be a part of what was

going on around him. From it he could see out and judge but in it he was safe

from any kind of penetration from without. It was the only place where he felt

free of the general idiocy of his fellows. His mother had never entered it but

from it he could see her with absolute clarity.

The old lady was clever enough and he thought that if she had started

from any of the right premises, more might have been expected of her. She

lived according to the laws of her own fantasy world outside of which he had

never seen her set foot. The law of it was to sacrifice herself for him after she

had first created the necessity to do so by making a mess of things. If he had

permitted her sacrifices, it was only because her lack of foresight had made

them necessary. All of her life had been a struggle to act like a Chestny and to

give him everything she thought a Chestny ought to have without the goods a

Chestny ought to have; but since, said she, it was fun to struggle, why

complain? And when you had won, as she had won, what fun to look back on

the hard times! He could not forgive her that she had enjoyed the struggle and

that she thought she had won.

What she meant when she said she had won was that she had brought

him up successfully and had sent him to college and that he had turned out so

well-good looking (her teeth had gone unfilled so that his could be

straightened), intelligent (he realized he was too intelligent to be a success),

and with a future ahead of him (there was of course no future ahead of him).

She excused his gloominess on the grounds that he was still growing up and

his radical ideas on his lack

of practical experience. She said he didn?t yet

know a thing about “life,” that he hadn?t even entered the real world

- when

already he was as disenchanted with it as a man of fifty.

The further irony of all this was that in spite of her, he had turned out so

well. In spite of going to only a third-rate college, he had, on his own initiative,

come out with a first-rate education; in spite of growing up dominated by a

small mind, he had ended up with a large one; in spite of all her foolish views,

he was free of prejudice and unafraid to face facts. Most miraculous of all,

instead of being blinded by love for her as she was for him, he had cut himself

emotionally free of her and could see her with complete objectivity. He was

not dominated by his mother.

The bus stopped with a sudden jerk and shook him from his meditation.

A woman from the back lurched forward with little steps and barely escaped

falling in his newspaper as she righted herself. She got off and a large Negro

got on. Julian kept his paper lowered to watch. It gave him a certain

satisfaction to see injustice in daily operation. It confirmed his view that with

a few exceptions there was no one worth knowing within a radius of three

hundred miles. The Negro was well dressed and carried a briefcase. He looked

around and then sat down on the other end of the seat where the woman with

the red and white canvas sandals was sitting. He immediately unfolded a

newspaper and obscured himself behind it. Julianí

s mother's elbow at once

prodded insis

tently into his ribs. “Now you see why I won't ride on these buses

by myself,” she whispered.

The woman with the red and white canvas sandals had risen at the same

time the Negro sat down and had gone farther back in the bus and taken the

seat of the woman who had got off His mother leaned forward and cast her an

approving look.

Julian rose, crossed the aisle, and sat down in the place of the woman

with the canvas sandals. From this position, he looked serenely across at his

mother. Her face had turned an angry red. He stared at her, making his eyes

the eyes of a stranger. He felt his tension suddenly lift as if he had openly

declared war on her.

He would have liked to get in conversation with the Negro and to talk

with him about art or politics or any subject that would be above the

comprehension of those around them, but the man remained entrenched

behind his paper. He was either ignoring the change of seating or had never

noticed it.

There was no way for Julian to convey his sympathy.

His mother kept her eyes fixed reproachfully on his face. The woman

with the protruding teeth was looking at him avidly as if he were a type of

monster new to her.