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惊天事件
A Shocking Accident
韦盖利
译
Graham Greene
1
Jerome was called into his
housemaster's room in the break between the second
and the third
class on a Tuesday
morning. He had no fear of trouble, for he was a
warden - the name that the
proprietor
and headmaster of a rather expensive preparatory
school had chosen to give to approved,
reliable boys in the lower forms (from
a warden one became a guardian and finally before
leaving,
it was hoped for Marlborough
or Rugby, a crusader). The housemaster, Mr
Wordsworth, sat behind
his desk with an
appearance of perplexity and apprehension. Jerome
had the odd impression when
he entered
that he was a cause of fear.
'Sit down, Jerome,' Mr Wordsworth said.
'All going well with the trigonometry?'
'Yes, sir.'
'I've had a
telephone call, Jerome. From your aunt. I'm afraid
I have bad news for you.'
'Yes, sir?'
'Your father has had an accident.'
'Oh.'
Mr Wordsworth
looked at him with some surprise. 'A serious
accident.'
'Yes, sir?'
Jerome worshipped his father: the verb
is exact. As man re-creates God, so Jerome re-
created
his
father
-
from
a
restless
widowed
author
into
a
mysterious
adventurer
who
travelled
in
far
places - Nice, Beirut,
Majorca, even the Canaries. The time had arrived
about his eighth birthday
when
Jerome
believed
that
his
father
either
'ran
guns'
or
was
a
member
of
the
British
Secret
Service.
Now
it
occurred
to
him
that
his
father
might
have
been
wounded
in
'a
hail
of
machine-
gun bullets'.
Mr Wordsworth played with
the ruler on his desk. He seemed at a loss how to
continue. He
said, 'You know your
father was in Naples?'
'Yes, sir.'
'Your aunt heard from the hospital
today.'
'Oh.'
Mr
Wordsworth said with desperation, 'It was a street
accident.'
'Yes, sir?' It seemed quite
likely to Jerome that they would call it a street
accident. The police
of course fired
first; his father would not take human life except
as a last resort.
'I'm afraid
your father was very seriously hurt indeed.'
'Oh.'
'In fact,
Jerome, he died yesterday. Quite without pain.'
'Did they shoot him through the heart?'
'I beg your pardon. What did you say,
Jerome?'
'Did they shoot him through
the heart?'
'Nobody shot him, Jerome. A
pig fell on him.' An inexplicable convulsion took
place in the
nerves of Mr Wordsworth's
face; it really looked for a moment as though he
were going to laugh.
He closed his
eyes, composed his features and said rapidly as
though it were necessary to expel
the
story as rapidly as possible. 'Your father was
walking along a street in Naples when a pig fell
on him. A shocking accident. Apparently
in the poorer quarters of Naples they keep pigs on
their
balconies. This one was on the
fifth floor. It had grown too fat. The balcony
broke. The pig fell on
your father.'
Mr Wordsworth left his desk rapidly and
went to the window, turning his back on Jerome. He
shook a little with emotion.
Jerome said, 'What happened to the
pig?'
2
This was not
callousness on the part of Jerome, as it was
interpreted by Mr Wordsworth to his
colleagues (he even discussed with them
whether, perhaps, Jerome was yet fitted to be a
warden).
Jerome was only attempting to
visualize the strange scene to get the details
right. Nor was Jerome
a boy who cried;
he was a boy who brooded, and it never occurred to
him at his preparatory school
that the
circumstances of his father's death were comic -
they were still part of the mysteries of life.
It was later, in his first term at his
public school, when he told the story to his best
friend, that he
began
to
realize
how
it
affected
others.
Naturally
after
that
disclosure
he
was
known,
rather
unreasonably, as Pig.
Unfortunately his aunt had no sense of
humour. There was an enlarged snapshot of his
father
on the piano; a large sad man in
an unsuitable dark suit posed in Capri with an
umbrella (to guard
him
against
sunstroke),
the
Faraglione
rocks
forming
the
background.
By
the
age
of
sixteen
Jerome was well
aware that the portrait looked more like the
author of Sunshine and Shade and
Ramblers in the Balearics than an agent
of the Secret Service. All the same he loved the
memory
of his father: he still
possessed an album fitted with picture-postcards
(the stamps had been soaked
off long
ago for his other collection), and it pained him
when his aunt embarked with strangers on
the story of his father's death.
'A shocking accident,' she would begin,
and the stranger would compose his or her features
into the correct shape for interest and
commiseration. Both reactions, of course, were
false, but it
was terrible for Jerome
to see how suddenly, midway in her rambling
discourse, the interest would
become
genuine.
'I
can't
think
how
such
things
can
be
allowed
in
a
civilized
country,'
his
aunt
would
say. 'I suppose one has to regard Italy as
civilized. One is prepared for all kinds of things
abroad, of course, and my brother was a
great traveller. He always carried a water-filter
with him.
It was far less expensive,
you know, than buying all those bottles of mineral
water. My brother
always
said that his filter paid for his dinner wine. You
can see from that what a careful man he
was, but who could possibly have
expected when he was walking along the Via Dottore
Manuele
Panucci
on
his
way
to
the
Hydrographic
Museum
that
a
pig
would
fall
on
him?'
That
was
the
moment
when the interest became genuine.
Jerome's father had not been a very
distinguished writer, but the time always seems to
come,
after
an
author's
death,
when
somebody
thinks
it
worth
his
while
to
write
a
letter
to
the
Times
Literary Supplement announcing the
preparation of a biography and asking to see any
letters or
documents or receive
anecdotes from friends of the dead man. Most of
the biographies, of course,
never
appear - one wonders whether the whole thing may
not be an obscure form of blackmail and
whether many a potential writer of a
biography or thesis finds the means in this way to
finish his
education at Kansas or
Nottingham. Jerome, however, as a chartered
accountant, lived far from the
literary
world. He did not realize how small the menace
really was, or that the danger period for
someone
of
his
father's
obscurity
had
long
passed.
Sometimes
he
rehearsed
the
method
of
recounting
his
father's
death
so
as
to
reduce
the
comic
element
to
its
smallest
dimensions
-
it
would be of no use to refuse
information, for in that case the biographer would
undoubtedly visit