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《最后的常春藤叶》英文原版
In
a little district west of Washington Square the
streets have run crazy and broken
themselves into small strips called
curves. One Street crosses itself a
time or two. An artist once discovered a valuable
possibility in this street. Suppose a
collector with a bill for paints, paper and canvas
should,
in traversing this route,
suddenly meet himself coming back, without a cent
having been paid
on account!
So, to quaint old Greenwich Village the
art people soon came prowling, hunting for
north windows and eighteenth-century
gables and Dutch attics and low rents. Then they
imported some pewter mugs and a chafing
dish or two from Sixth Avenue, and became a
At the top of a squatty,
three-story brick Sue and Johnsy had their studio.
familiar for Joanna. One was from
Maine; the other from California. They had met at
the
table d'hôte of an Eighth
Street
salad and bishop sleeves so
congenial that the joint studio resulted.
That was in May. In November a cold,
unseen stranger, whom the doctors called
Pneumonia, stalked about the colony,
touching one here and there with his icy fingers.
Over
on the east side this ravager
strode boldly, smiting his victims by scores, but
his feet trod
slowly through the maze
of the narrow and moss-grown
Mr.
Pneumonia was not what you would call a chivalric
old gentleman. A mite of a little
woman
with blood thinned by California zephyrs was
hardly fair game for the red-fisted,
short-breathed old duffer. But Johnsy
he smote; and she lay, scarcely moving, on her
painted iron bedstead, looking through
the small Dutch window-panes at the blank side of
the next brick house.
One
morning the busy doctor invited Sue into the
hallway with a shaggy, grey eyebrow.
clinical thermometer.
lining-u on the side of the undertaker
makes the entire pharmacopoeia look silly. Your
little
lady has made up her mind that
she's not going to get well. Has she anything on
her mind?
instance
?
doctor; there is nothing of
the kind.
may filter through
my efforts, can accomplish. But whenever my
patient begins to count the
carriages
in her funeral procession I subtract 50 per cent
from the curative power of
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medicines.
If you will get her to ask one question about the
new winter styles in cloak
sleeves I
will promise you a one-in-five chance for her,
instead of one in ten.
After the doctor
had gone Sue went into the workroom and cried a
Japanese napkin to
a pulp. Then she
swaggered into Johnsy's room with her drawing
board, whistling ragtime.
Johnsy lay,
scarcely making a ripple under the bedclothes,
with her face toward the
window. Sue
stopped whistling, thinking she was asleep.
She arranged her board and began a pen-
and-ink drawing to illustrate a magazine
story. Young artists must pave their
way to Art by drawing pictures for magazine
stories that
young authors write to
pave their way to Literature.
As Sue
was sketching a pair of elegant horseshow riding
trousers and a monocle of the
figure of
the hero, an Idaho cowboy, she heard a low sound,
several times repeated. She
went
quickly to the bedside.
Johnsy's eyes
were open wide. She was looking out the window and
counting -
counting backward.
and
Sue look
solicitously out of the window. What was there to
count? There was only a
bare, dreary
yard to be seen, and the blank side of the brick
house twenty feet away. An old,
old ivy
vine, gnarled and decayed at the roots, climbed
half way up the brick wall. The cold
breath of autumn had stricken its
leaves from the vine until its skeleton branches
clung,
almost bare, to the crumbling
bricks.
there
were almost a hundred. It made my head ache to
count them. But now it's easy. There
goes another one. There are only five
left now.
three
days. Didn't the doctor tell
you?
have old ivy leaves to
do with your getting well? And you used to love
that vine so, you
naughty girl. Don't
be a goosey. Why, the doctor told me this morning
that your chances for
getting well real
soon were - let's see exactly what he said - he
said the chances were ten to
one! Why,
that's almost as good a chance as we have in New
York when we ride on the
street cars or
walk past a new building. Try to take some broth
now, and let Sudie go back to
her
drawing, so she can sell the editor man with it,
and buy port wine for her sick child, and
pork chops for her greedy
self.
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