远与近

托马斯沃尔夫 ( 美国 1900-1938)

在小镇郊外离铁路不远的土坡上，有一所装有别致的绿色百叶窗的洁白小木屋。屋子的一侧是个园子，里面几块菜地构成整齐的图案，还有一个八月末结着熟葡萄的 架子。屋前有三棵大橡树，夏天以它浓郁的树荫遮蔽着小屋。另一侧，生机盎然地长着一溜鲜花，与邻居为界。整个环境弥漫着一种整齐、节俭而又朴素的舒适气 氛。
每天下午两点过几分，就有一辆区间特快列车路过这里。这时，这个庞然大物，刚在附近的小镇上停下喘了口气，正开始有节奏地伸展开身体，但还没有达到它全速 前进的可怕程度。它从从容容地跃入视野，随着蒸气机强有力的转动，它一掠而过，沉重的车厢压在铁轨上，发出一阵低沉平和的隆隆声，然后便消失在远处的弯道 上了。每隔一段距离，火车便将浓烟喷向道旁草地的上方。起先，从它喷出浓烟的吼叫声中可以听出它在前进。最后，一切都听不见了，只有那速度稳定而有节奏的 车轮声，渐渐消失在下午令人困倦的寂静中。
二十多年来，每当这列火车驶近小屋时，司机就拉响汽笛，听见这信号，便有一个女人出现在小屋后面的门廊里并向他挥手。最初，她身边偎依着一个很小的孩子，现在这孩子已经长成一个体态丰满的姑娘。每天，她仍旧和母亲一块到门廊去向他招手。
司机就这样常年开着车。他老了，头发变得灰白。他曾经驾驶他那重载满员的巨大火车，上万次地穿越大地。他自己的孩子已经长大成人，而且结了婚。曾有四次， 在前方的轨道上，他看见酿成悲剧的可怕的黑点，凝聚着恐惧的阴影，像炮弹一样朝着车头直射过来 —— 一次是一辆轻便马车，车上挤满一排排面容惊恐的孩子；另 一次，一辆蹩脚的汽车在铁轨上抛锚，车上的人都吓得呆若木鸡；还有一次，一个衣衫褴褛的流浪汉走在铁路边，他又老又聋，完全听不见鸣笛的警告；又一次窗内 有人忽然尖叫一声跳了出去 —— 这一切他都看见了，懂得了，凡是像他这样的人所能了解的悲哀、欢乐、危险以及劳累，他都遇到过。在那忠实的服务中，他饱经风 霜，变得满脸皱纹。他的工作使他养成了尽忠职守、勇敢和谦恭的品质。现在他老了，具备了他这一类人特有的那种尊严和智慧。
但是，不管他见过什么样的危险和悲剧，在他脑海里留下的印象都不如那座小屋和那挥动胳膊大胆而自由地向他招手的女人来得深刻。这印象美好而持久，超然于一切变更和毁灭之上，不管遇到什么样的不幸、悲哀和过失，打破他日复一日铁一般的时间表，它总是永恒不变的。
一看见这座小屋和两个女人，他就体验到一种从未有过的极不寻常的幸福。他曾在一千种光线、一百种天气里见过她们。他在冬天灰白而刺目的阳光下，隔着遍布凝霜覆盖的棕色短茬的田野，远望过她们：他也在魔术般诱人的绿色四月里看见过她们。
在她们身上，在她们所居住的那间小屋上，他怀着一种父亲对亲生孩子才有的那种柔情。她们生活的图景如此鲜明地刻印在他的心中，终于他认为自己已完全了解了 她们的生活，直至她们一天中的每一小时，每一分，每一秒。最后他决定将来当他退休时，他一定要去寻找她们，对她们说说话儿。因为他和她们之间，生活上已经 如此地融成一体了。
这一天来到了。司机终于走下火车，踏上月台，到达了那两个女人居住的小镇。他在铁轨上往返的岁月终结了。他现在只是铁路公司里享受养老金的职工，没有什么 工作要做了。他慢慢地踱出车站走到街上。小镇里的一切都显得这么不熟悉，就像他以前从未见过它一样。他走着走着，渐渐生出一种困惑慌乱的感觉。这果真是他 经过了上万次的那个小镇吗？这些房屋难道真是他从驾驶室的高窗向外看到的那些房屋吗？一切就像梦中的城市那样生疏，嘈杂。他走着，精神上茫然失措的感觉愈 加强烈了。
突然，房屋渐渐稀疏了，四散成小镇边区的村落，大街也消失为村道了 —— 那两个女人就住在这条路边。他在炎热和尘土中拖着沉重的脚步缓慢地走着，最后终于站 在他所搜寻的那所房屋面前了。他一看就知道自己找对了地方。他看到屋前那高大的橡树、花坛、菜园和葡萄架，以及远处闪光的铁轨。
是的，这正是他所要找寻的那幢房子，他开车多次经过的那块地方，他怀着如此幸福的感情所一心向往的目的地。那么现在，他既然已经找到了它，他既然已经来到 这儿，为什么他的手还畏缩着不敢推门？为什么这城镇，这道路，这土地，这通往他热爱之地的入口，却变成像某些丑恶的梦境中的景色一样那么陌生呢？为什么现 在他感到这么彷徨怀疑和绝望呢？
最后，他走进篱门，慢慢地沿小路走着，不久便登上了通往门廊的三级矮石阶。他敲了敲门。很快便听见大厅里有脚步声，门开了，一个女人站在他的面前。
顷刻间，他感到一阵极度的失望和伤心，而且后悔来到这儿。他一眼就认出：现在站在面前以一种不信任的目光看着自己的女人正是原来那个曾经向他招过千万次手 的女人。但她的面容却是生硬而消瘦，脸上的肌肉无力地松垂着，形成黄黄的 ”“ 皱褶，两只小眼睛充满猜疑，胆怯地，惴惴不安地打量着他。看到这般情景，听到 那不友好的言语，所有那一切，那种他从她的招手中所领悟到的那股大胆、自由和亲热劲儿，立即消失得无影无踪。
现在，他试图解释，告诉她自己是谁，为什么会来到这儿。他觉得自己的声音听上去既不真实而且可怕。但他还是支支吾吾地说下去，顽固地抑制着涌上心头的那种 悔恨、慌乱和疑惧交集之感。这种恐惧感在他的心中不断地上涌。淹没了他当初的全部欢乐，并使得他为自己那充满希望和温情的举动感到羞愧。
最后，这女人几乎是不情愿地邀请他进屋，高声刺耳地叫进了她的女儿。他感到一阵难堪，坐在一间又小又丑的客厅里，竭力找一些话说，而两个女人看着他，目光里含有呆滞的、困惑不解的敌意和阴沉的、畏怯的拘谨。
后来他结结巴巴地简单说了声再见，便离开了。他沿着小路走了，再顺着大道走到镇上。突然间他意识到自己已经是一个老人了。对着那伸向远方的、熟悉的铁轨 时，他内心曾是那样勇敢，充满自信，现在，在这片陌生而又不容置疑的大地面前，他心里充满了怀疑、恐惧和厌倦。那块土地离他不过一箭之遥，然而他没有看过 一眼，也不了解。他明白了，他刚失去了光闪闪的铁路的一切魔力，那条明亮的铁轨引向的远景，还有他怀着希望追求着的美好的小小世界里那一块幻想的角落，也 都一去不复返，再也得不到了。
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（英文）

《The Far and the Near 》 by  Thomas Wolfe

On the outskirts of a little town upon a rise of land that swept back from the railway there was a tidy little cottage of white boards, trimmed vividly with green blinds. To one side of the house there was a garden neatly patterned with plots of growing vegetables, and an arbor for the grapes which ripened late in August. Before the house there were three mighty oaks which sheltered it in their clean and massive shade in summer, and to the other side there was a border of gay flowers. The whole place had an air of tidiness, thrift, and modest comfort.
Every day, a few minutes after two o’clock in the afternoon, the limited express between two cities passed this spot. At that moment the great train, having halted for a breathing-space at the town near by, was beginning to lengthen evenly into its stroke, but it had not yet reached the full drive of its terrific speed. It swung into view deliberately, swept past with a powerful swaying motion of the engine, a low smooth rumble of his heavy cars upon pressed steel, and then it vanished in the cut. For a moment the progress of the engine could be marked by heavy bellowing puffs of smoke that burst at spaced intervals above the edges of the meadow grass, and finally nothing could be heard but the solid clacking tempo of the wheels receding into the drowsy stillness of the afternoon.

Every day for more than twenty years, as the train had approached this house, the engineer had blown on the whistle, and every day, as soon as she heard this signal, a woman had appeared on the back porch of the little house and waved to him. At first she had a small child clinging to her skirts, and now this child had grown to full womanhood, and every day she, too, came with her mother to the porch and waved.

The engineer had grown old and gray in service. He had driven his great train, loaded with its weight of lives, across the land ten thousand times. His own children had grown up, and married, and four times he had seen before him on the tracks the ghastly dot of tragedy converging like a cannon ball to its eclipse of horror at the boiler head—a light spring wagon filled with children, with its clustered row of small stunned faces; a cheap automobile stalled up the tracks, set with the wooden figures of people paralyzed with fear; a battered hobo walking by the rail, too deaf and old to hear the whistle’s warning; and a form flung pas his window with a scream—all this he had seen and known. He had known all the grief, the joy, the peril and the labor such a man could know; he had grown seamed and weathered in his loyal service, and now, schooled by the qualities of faith and courage and humbleness that attended his labor, he had grown old, and had the grandeur and the wisdom these men have.

But no matter what peril or tragedy he had known, the vision of the little house and the women waving to him with a brave free motion of the arm had become fixed in the mind of the engineer as something beautiful and enduring, something beyond all change and ruin, and something that would always be the same, no matter what mishap, grief or error might break the iron schedule of his days.

The sight of this little house and these two women gave him the most extraordinary happiness he had ever known. He had seen them in a thousand lights, a hundred weathers. He had seen them through the harsh light of wintry gray across the brown and frosted stubble of the earth, and he had seen them again in the green luring sorcery of April.

He felt for them and for the little house in which they lived such tenderness as a man might feel for his own children, and at length the picture of their lives was carved so sharply in his heart that he felt that he knew their lives completely, to every hour and moment of the day, and he resolved that one day, when his years of service should be ended, he would go and find these people and speak at last with them whose lives had been so wrought into his own.

That day came. At last the engineer stepped from a train onto the station platform of the town where these two women lived. His years upon the rail had ended. He was a pensioned servant of his company, with no more work to do. The engineer walked slowly through the station and out into the streets of the town. Everything was as strange to him as if he had never seen this town before. As he walked on, his sense of bewilderment and confusion grew. Could this be the town he had passed ten thousand times? Were these the same houses he had seen so often from the high windows of his cab? It was all as unfamiliar, as disquieting as a city in a dream, and the perplexity of his spirit increased as he went on.

Presently the houses thinned into the straggling outposts of the town, and the street faded into a country road—the one on which the women lived. And the man plodded on slowly in the heat and dust. At length he stood before the house he sought. He knew at once that he had found the proper place. He saw the lordly oaks before the house, the flower beds, the garden and the arbor, and farther off, the glint of rails.

Yes, this was the house he sought, the place he had passed so many times, the destination he had longed for with such happiness. But now that he had found it, now that he was here, why did his hand falter on the gate; why had the town, the road, the earth, the very entrance to this place he loved turned unfamiliar as the landscape of some ugly dream? Why did he now feel this sense of confusion, doubt and hopelessness? At length he entered by the gate, walked slowly up the path and in a moment more had mounted three short steps that led up to the porch, and was knocking at the door. Presently he heard steps in the hall, the door was opened, and a woman stood facing him.

And instantly, with a sense of bitter loss and grief, he was sorry he had come. He knew at once that the woman who stood there looking at him with a mistrustful eye was the same woman who had waved to him so many thousand times. But her face was harsh and pinched and meager; the flesh sagged wearily in sallow folds, and the small eyes peered at him with timid suspicion and uneasy doubt. All the brave freedom, the warmth and the affection that he had red into her gesture, vanished in the moment that he saw her and heard her unfriendly tongue.

And now his own voice sounded unreal and ghastly to him as he tried to explain his presence, to tell her who he was and the reason he had come. But he faltered on, fighting stubbornly against the horror of regret, confusion, disbelief that surged up in his spirit, drowning all his former joy and making his act of hope and tenderness seem shameful to him.

At length the woman invited him almost unwillingly into the house, and called her daughter in a harsh shrill voice. Then, for a brief agony of time, the man sat in an ugly little parlor, and he tried to talk while the two women stared at him with a dull, bewildered hostility, a sullen, timorous restraint.

And finally, stammering a crude farewell, he departed. He walked away down the path and then along the road toward town, and suddenly he knew that he was an old man. His heart, which had been brave and confident when it looked along the familiar vista of the rails, was now sick with doubt and horror as it saw the strange and unsuspected visage of the earth which had always been within a stone’s throw of him, and which he had never seen or known. And he knew that all the magic of that bright lost way, the vista of that shining line, the imagined corner of that small good universe of hope’s desire, could never be got again