【英文原著类】The Beast in the Jungle(林中兽).pdf

The Beast in the Jungle
The Beast in the Jungle
Henry James
1
The Beast in the Jungle
CHAPTER I
What determined the speech that startled him in the course of their
encounter scarcely matters, being probably but some words spoken by
himself quite without intention--spoken as they lingered and slowly
moved together after their renewal of acquaintance. He had been conveyed
by friends an hour or two before to the house at which she was staying; the
party of visitors at the other house, of whom he was one, and thanks to
whom it was his theory, as always, that he was lost in the crowd, had been
invited over to luncheon. There had been after luncheon much dispersal,
all in the interest of the original motive, a view of Weatherend itself and
the fine things, intrinsic features, pictures, heirlooms, treasures of all the
arts, that made the place almost famous; and the great rooms were so
numerous that guests could wander at their will, hang back from the
principal group and in cases where they took such matters with the last
seriousness give themselves up to mysterious appreciations and
measurements. There were persons to be observed, singly or in couples,
bending toward objects in out-of-the-way corners with their hands on their
knees and their heads nodding quite as with the emphasis of an excited
sense of smell. When they were two they either mingled their sounds of
ecstasy or melted into silences of even deeper import, so that there were
aspects of the occasion that gave it for Marcher much the air of the "look
round," previous to a sale highly advertised, that excites or quenches, as
may be, the dream of acquisition. The dream of acquisition at Weatherend
would have had to be wild indeed, and John Marcher found himself,
among such suggestions, disconcerted almost equally by the presence of
those who knew too much and by that of those who knew nothing. The
great rooms caused so much poetry and history to press upon him that he
needed s