当我在索尔兹伯里同你在一起时，你被一封过去的一个同伴写的恐吓信吓坏了，求我去见那个写信人帮你说说。我去了。其结果是我遭殃[27a]，被迫负起你所作所为的全部责任。 当你没拿到学位，不得不从牛津下来，这时你打电报到伦敦，求我过来一下。我二话没说就去了[27b]：你要我带你去戈灵，因为在那种情况下你不想回家。 在戈灵你看上一处房子，我为你租了下来，其结果不管怎么看对我又是一场灾难[27c]。有一天你来找我，以个人名义求我帮忙，给一份牛津本科生杂志写点东西，该杂志即将由你的哪个朋友出版发行，此人我从未听说，也丝毫不知道他的背景。为了让你高兴—— 为了让你高兴我什么没做过? ——我把原来要给《周六评论》的一页悖语寄给了他。几个月后就发现自己因为该杂志的性质而站在了伦敦中央刑事法院的被告席上。这又成了刑事庭指控我的一部分罪状。我被传去为你朋友的文章和你本人的诗辩护。对前者我无从辩解；至于后者，出于对你羽毛未丰的文学和年轻气盛的生命恪守不渝的忠诚，我苦辩力辩到底[27d]，绝不承认你会写出有伤风化的文字。可到头来我照样进了监狱，就因为你朋友的本科生杂志和那首《不敢说出自己名字的爱》。在圣诞节时我给你一份用你在致谢信中的话说是“非常漂亮的礼物”，我知道你本来就看上它了，那礼物最多大约值四五十英镑。等到我遭了难，破了产，法警封了我的藏书，要卖了来抵买那份“非常漂亮的礼物”所欠的钱。正因为此庭令是在我家执行的。在那可怕的最后关头，我被你抢白，被你的抢白所激，对你父亲采取行动，申请将他逮捕了，在我万般无奈之中能抓住让我脱身的最后一根稻草，就是那可怕的费用。我当着你的面告诉过律师，我没钱，付不起那吓人的费用，我手头一点钱也没有。我所说的，你晓得，句句是实话。在那个致命的星期五，如果我能从阿汶代尔旅馆脱身的话，本可以不用在汉弗雷斯的办事处有气无力地同意宣告破产，而是逍遥自在地呆在法国，远离你和你父亲，他那令人恶心的明信片可以不管，你的来信也可以不理[27e]。可是旅馆的人绝对不让我走。你同我在那里住了十天，后来竟带了你的一个友伴来与我同住，这令我大为生气，你会承认我生气是有道理的。 那十天的旅馆费用差不多是140英镑，旅馆说要是不把账付清，就不让我把行李提走。这就把我困在伦敦了。要不是这笔账，我早就在星期四去了巴黎。27
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When I told the solicitor I had no money to face the gigantic expense, you interposed at once. You said that your own family would be only too delighted to pay all the necessary costs: that your father had been an incubus to them all : that they had often discussed the possibility of getting him put into a lunatic asylum so as to keep him out of the way: that he was a daily source of annoyance and distress to your mother and to everyone else: that if I would only come forward to have him shut up I would be regarded by the family as their champion and their benefactor: and that your mother’s rich relations themselves would look on it as a real delight to be allowed to pay all costs and expenses that might be incurred in any such effort. The solicitor closed at once, and I was hurried to the Police Court. I had no excuse left for not going. I was forced into it. Of course your family don’t pay the costs, and, when I am made bankrupt, it is by your father, and for the costs — the meagre balance of them — some ￡700. At the present moment my wife, estranged from me over the important question of whether I should have ￡3 or ￡3. 10 a week to live on, is preparing a divorce suit, for which, of course, entirely new evidence and an entirely new trial, to be followed perhaps by more serious proceedings, will be necessary. I, naturally, know nothing of the details. I merely know the name of the witness on whose evidence my wife’s solicitors rely. It is your own Oxford servant, whom at your special request I took into my service for our summer at Goring.
当我告诉律师我没钱支付这巨额费用时，你马上提出，说你自己家里将很乐意支付所有的费用，说你父亲是你们大家的祸害，你们常常商量是不是把他送疯人院了事，说你父亲成天弄得你母亲还有别的人不得安生，如果我能为你们出头，让他就范，那全家人就会把我当作英雄和恩人，而你母亲有钱的亲戚朋友会因为允许他们代为偿付此举的一切费用而满心欢喜。 律师当即拍板，我就被催着去了治安法庭。你这么一说我就没有理由不去了。我被迫卷了进去。当然，你家并未支付那些费用，我是被你父亲，为那些费用，弄得破了产——为了区区的700英镑。我妻子，因为我每周生活费应该是3英镑还是3英镑10先令这一重大问题而同我反目，目前正准备提出离婚。这一来，当然又得是完全另一套的证据，另一场的审判，接着可能是更为严重的官司。其中细节我自然是不得而知，只知道证人的名字，我妻子的律师所倚重的就是他的证词。他就是你本人在牛津的仆人，因你特别请求，我们在戈灵度夏时雇用了他。
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But, indeed, I need not go on further with more instances of the strange Doom you seem to have brought on me in all things big or little. It makes me feel sometimes as if you yourself had been merely a puppet worked by some secret and unseen hand to bring terrible events to a terrible issue. But puppets themselves have passions. They will bring a new plot into what they are presenting, and twist the ordered issue of vicissitude to suit some whim or appetite of their own[29a]. To be entirely free, and at the same time entirely dominated by law, is the eternal paradox of human life that we realise at every moment; and this, I often think, is the only explanation possible of your nature, if indeed for the profound and terrible mysteries of a human soul there is any explanation at all, except one that makes the mystery more marvellous still[29b].
但是，我确实用不着再举更多的例子来说明了，不管是大事小事，你好像都给我带来莫名其妙的厄运。这使我有时觉得你本人似乎不过是为哪只神秘的、看不见的手所操纵的傀儡，来把一个可怕的局面弄得更加不可收拾。但是傀儡们自己也并非无情无欲。他们也会让要他们表演的东西平添曲折，心血来潮便把人间炎凉兴衰的前因后果扭曲，以遂他们的哪个心愿[29a]。要全然的自由，同时又要全然地受制于律法，这是我们时时感受到的人生永恒的吊诡；而这一点，我常常想，只能是你性情的唯一可能的解释，如果说对人性那深邃可怕的神秘，除了越说越神之外，的确能有什么解释的话[29b]。
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Of course you had your illusions, lived in them indeed, and through their shifting mists and coloured veils saw all things changed[30a]. You thought, I remember quite well, that your devoting yourself to me, to the entire exclusion of your family and family life, was a proof of your wonderful appreciation of me, and your great affection. No doubt to you it seemed so. But recollect that with me was luxury, high living, unlimited pleasure, money without stint. Your family life bored you. The “cold cheap wine of Salisbury,” to use a phrase of your own making, was distasteful to you. On my side, and along with my intellectual attractions, were the fleshpots of Egypt. When you could not find me to be with, the companions whom you chose as substitutes were not flattering.
当然，你有你的幻想，说实在是生活在这些幻想中。透过那游移的薄雾、有色的薄纱，一切全看走样了[30a]。我记得很清楚，你以为一心一意与我相伴，将你的家庭和家庭生活置之度外，便证明了你对我美妙的欣赏和深厚的情谊。在你看来无疑是如此。但是追忆当时，与我相伴便是奢侈，便是高雅生活，便是无限的欢娱、不尽的金钱。你的家庭生活使你腻烦。用句你自己的话说，“索尔兹伯里那廉价的冷酒”败你的兴。在我这边，除了我心智上的魅力外还有口腹声色之乐。当你找不到我作伴时，退而求其次的人选就令人不敢恭维了。
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You thought again that in sending a lawyer’s letter to your father to say that, rather than sever your eternal[31a] friendship with me, you would give up the allowance of ￡250 a year which, with I believe deductions for your Oxford debts, he was then making you, you were realising the very chivalry of friendship, touching the noblest note of self-denial[31b]. But your surrender of your little allowance did not mean that you were ready to give up even one of your most superfluous luxuries, or most unnecessary extravagances. On the contrary. Your appetite for luxurious living was never so keen. My expenses for eight days in Paris for myself, you, and your Italian servant were nearly ￡150: Paillard alone absorbing ￡85. At the rate at which you wished to live, your entire income for a whole year, if you had taken your meals alone, and been especially economical in your selection of the cheaper form of pleasures, would hardly have lasted you for three weeks. The fact that in what was merely a pretence of bravado you had surrendered your allowance, such as it was, gave you at last a plausible reason for your claim to live at my expense, or what you thought a plausible reason: and on many occasions you seriously availed yourself of it, and gave the very fullest expression to it: and the continued drain, principally of course on me, but also to a certain extent, I know, on your mother, was never so distressing, because in my case at any rate, never so completely unaccompanied by the smallest word of thanks, or sense of limit[31c].
你还以为，给你父亲送去一份律师信，说是与其斩断同我那地久天长的[31a]友谊，你宁愿放弃一年250英镑的津贴——我相信这是扣掉你在牛津的欠债后他当时给你的款子——这么做体现了为朋友甘愿受苦的肝胆义气[31b]。但是放弃那小小的年金，并不意味着你愿意放弃哪怕一种穷奢极欲的享乐，或是哪一样最不需要的挥霍。恰恰相反。你对奢侈生活的追求是前所未有的强烈。同你和你的意大利仆人在巴黎，我八天的开销是150英镑：光是在帕拉德就花了85英镑。照你所希望的这样生活开销下去，就是你一个人吃饭，同时在消遣玩乐方面也特别地节约从事，选比较便宜的，你整年的所有进项也供不了三个星期。你放弃年金不过是虚张声势，而如此一来造成的事实，却让你至少是名正言顺地来靠我的钱过活，或者你认为是名正言顺：在许多时候你是认认真真觉得自己名正言顺，并且表现得淋漓尽致。如此不断地掏钱，当然主要掏的是我的钱，但我知道也令你母亲破了些财，从来没有这样令人心烦过，因为在我这儿，无论怎么说，从来就没听过起码是小小的一声道谢，或是见过一点适可而止的表示[31c]。
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You thought again that in attacking your own father with dreadful letters, abusive telegrams, and insulting postcards you were really fighting your mother’s battles, coming forward as her champion, and avenging the no doubt terrible wrongs and sufferings of her married life. It was quite an illusion on your part; one of your worst indeed. The way for you to have avenged your mother’s wrongs on your father, if you considered it part of a son’s duty to do so, was by being a better son to your mother than you had been[32a]: by not making her afraid to speak to you on serious things: by not signing bills the payment of which devolved on her: by being gentler to her, and not bringing sorrow into her days. Your brother Francis made great amends to her for what she had suffered, by his sweetness and goodness to her through the brief years of his flower-like life. You should have taken him as your model. You were wrong even in fancying that it would have been an absolute delight and joy to your mother if you had managed through me to get your father put into prison. I feel sure you were wrong. And if you want to know what a woman really feels when her husband, and the father of her children, is in prison dress, in a prison cell, write to my wife and ask her. She will tell you.
你还以为，写信拍电报寄明信片去咒骂侮辱自己的父亲，你这是在替你母亲出头，为她打抱不平，为她在婚后所受的无疑是可怕的屈辱和痛苦报仇。这真是你的一大幻想，真是你最糟糕的一个幻想。要为你母亲所受的苦找你父亲报仇，假如你认为这是做儿子的部分责任，那就得改弦更张[32a]，做个好儿子；就不要弄得她不敢同你谈重大的事情；就不要签些账单到头来都算到她头上；就要更好地待她，别让她的日子雪上加霜。你的兄长弗兰西斯，在他短短的如花般的生命中，就以他的温良随和大大减轻了你母亲的痛苦。你应该以他为楷模才是。你以为要是假我之手让你父亲入狱，对你母亲会是天大的喜事，哪怕是这样想当然也是错的。我的确感到你错了。如果你想知道，一个女人，看着自己的丈夫、自己孩子的父亲身着囚衣，陷于囚牢，到底会有什么感觉，那就写信给我妻子问问她吧。她会告诉你的。
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I also had my illusions. I thought life was going to be a brilliant comedy, and that you were to be one of many graceful figures in it. I found it to be a revolting and repellent tragedy, and that the sinister occasion of the great catastrophe[33a], sinister in its concentration of aim and intensity of narrowed will-power, was yourself, stripped of that mask of joy and pleasure by which you, no less than I, had been deceived and led astray.
我呢，也有我的幻想。 我以为生活会是一出绝妙的喜剧，而你会是剧中一个风雅备至的人物。后来却发现它原来是一个令人反感、令人恶心的悲剧。而带来大灾难的险恶祸端[33a]，其险其恶在于苦心孤诣、志在必得，就是剥去了欢娱和喜乐面具的你本人。那面具不但骗了我，也骗了你误入歧途。
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You can now understand — can you not?—a little of what I am suffering. Some paper, the Pall Mall Gazette I think, describing the dress-rehearsal of one of my plays, spoke of you as following me about like my shadow: the memory of our friendship is the shadow that walks with me here: that seems never to leave me: that wakes me up at night to tell me the same story over and over till its wearisome iteration makes all sleep abandon me till dawn[34a]: at dawn it begins again: it follows me into the prison-yard and makes me talk to myself as I tramp round: each detail that accompanied each dreadful moment I am forced to recall: there is nothing that happened in those ill-starred years that I cannot recreate in that chamber of the brain which is set apart for grief or for despair: every strained note of your voice, every twitch and gesture of your nervous hands, every bitter word, every poisonous phrase[34b] comes back to me: I remember the street or river down which we passed, the wall or woodland that surrounded us, at what figure on the dial stood the hands of the clock, which way went the wings of the wind, the shape and colour of the moon. 对我正蒙受的痛苦，你现在应该明白一二了吧——难道还能不明白吗？有份报纸，我想是《泼尔穆尔报》吧，报道了我一出戏的彩排，说你像影子似的跟随着我：对你我友谊的回忆，就是在这里随我左右的影子，像是永不分离似的——深夜里唤我醒来，一遍又一遍地说着同一个故事，直磨得人睡意全无，醒到天明[34a]；天明时分又开始了，跟着我到牢房外的院子里，害得我一边步履沉重地走着一边喃喃自语——我被迫回想着每一个痛苦时刻的每一点细节，在那些个倒霉的年头里发生的事，没有哪一件我不能在那留给悲伤和绝望的脑室里再造重演：你每一点不自然的话音、每一个紧张兮兮的手势、每一句冷言恶语[34b]，都涌上了心头；我记着我们到过的街道和河流，四周的墙壁和树林，时钟的针正指着哪一点，风正吹向哪一面，月色月影又是什么模样。
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There is, I know, one answer to all that I have said to you, and that is that you loved me: that all through those two and a half years during which the Fates were weaving into one scarlet pattern[35a] the threads of our divided lives you really loved me. Yes: I know you did. No matter what your conduct to me was I always felt that at heart you really did love me. Though I saw quite clearly that my position in the world of Art, the interest my personality had always excited, my money, the luxury in which I lived, the thousand and one things that went to make up a life so charmingly, so wonderfully improbable as mine was, were, each and all of them, elements that fascinated you and made you cling to me: yet besides all this there was something more, some strange attraction for you: you loved me far better than you loved anybody else. But you, like myself, have had a terrible tragedy in your life, though one of an entirely opposite character to mine. Do you want to learn what it was? It was this. In you Hate was always stronger than Love. Your hatred of your father was of such stature that it entirely outstripped, o'erthrew, and overshadowed[35b] your love of me. There was no struggle between them at all, or but little[35c]; of such dimensions was your Hatred and of such monstrous growth. You did not realise that there is no room for both passions in the same soul. They cannot live together in that fair carven house[35d]. Love is fed by the imagination, by which we become wiser than we know, better than we feel, nobler than we are: by which we can see Life as a whole[35e]: by which, and by which alone, we can understand others in their real as in their ideal relations[35f]. Only what is fine, and finely conceived, can feed Love. But anything will feed Hate[35g]. There was not a glass of champagne you drank, not a rich dish you ate of in all those years, that did not feed your Hate and make it fat. So to gratify it, you gambled with my life, as you gambled with my money, carelessly, recklessly, indifferent to the consequence. If you lost, the loss would not, you fancied, be yours. If you won, yours, you knew, would be the exultation, and the advantages of victory[35h]. 我知道，对我所说的这一切，是有一句话可以回答的。那就是你爱我：在那两年半里，命运将我们两个互不相干的生命丝丝缕缕编成了一个血红的图案[35a]，你的确真心爱过我。没错，这我知道。不管你那时对我的举止态度怎样，我总觉得在你心中是真爱我的。虽然我看得也很清楚，我在艺术界的地位和人格的魅力、我的金钱和生活的豪华，那使我的生活变得非常人所及的美妙与迷人的方方面面，每一样都让你心醉神迷，对我紧跟不舍。然而在这一切之外，还有某种东西，某种对你的奇怪的吸引力：你爱我远胜过爱别的什么人。但是你，同我一样，生活中也有过可怕的悲剧，虽然二者之悲，完全不同。想知道这是什么吗？这就是，你的心中恨总是比爱强烈。你对你父亲的仇恨是如此之强烈，完全超过了、压倒了、掩盖住了[35b]对我的爱。你的爱恨之间根本就没有过孰是孰非的斗争，要有也很少[35c]：你仇恨之深之大，是如此的面面俱到、张牙舞爪。你并未意识到，一个灵魂是无法同时容纳这两种感情的。在那所精雕细刻出来的华屋中它们无法共处一室[35d]。爱是用想象力滋养的，这使我们比自己知道的更聪慧，比自我感觉的更良好，比本来的为人更高尚；这使我们能将生活看作一个整体[35e]；只要这样、只有这样，我们才能以现实也以理想的关系看待理解他人[35f]。惟有精美的、精美于思的，才能供养爱。但不管什么都供养得了恨[35g]。在所有那些年里，你喝的每一杯香槟，吃的每一盘佳肴，没有哪一样不能用来养你的仇恨，使它发胖膨胀。为了满足你的仇恨之需，你拿我的生命下赌，一如你拿我的金钱下赌，漫不经心、满不在乎，不管后果如何。要是你输了，输的，你心想，也不是你的；要是你赢了，赢的，你明白，将是胜者的狂欢和赢家的实惠[35h]。
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Hate blinds people. You were not aware of that. Love can read the writing on the remotest star[36a], but Hate so blinded you that you could see no further than the narrow, walled-in, and already lust-withered garden of your common desires. Your terrible lack of imagination, the one really fatal defect of your character, was entirely the result of the Hate that lived in you. Subtly, silently, and in secret, Hate gnawed at your nature, as the lichen bites at the root of some sallow plant, till you grew to see nothing but the most meagre interests and the most petty aims. That faculty in you which Love would have fostered, Hate poisoned and paralysed. When your father first began to attack me it was as your private friend, and in a private letter to you. As soon as I had read the letter, with its obscene threats and coarse violences, I saw at once that a terrible danger was looming on the horizon of my troubled days: I told you I would not be the catspaw between you both in your ancient hatred of each other: that I in London was naturally much bigger game for him than a Secretary for Foreign affairs at Homburg[36b]:[36.1] that it would be unfair to me to place me even for a moment in such a position: and that I had something better to do with my life than to have scenes with a man drunken, déclassé, and half-witted as he was. You could not be made to see this. Hate blinded you. You insisted that the quarrel had really nothing to do with me : that you would not allow your father to dictate to you in your private friendships: that it would be most unfair of me to interfere. You had already, before you saw me on the subject, sent your father a foolish and vulgar telegram, as your answer. That of course committed you to a foolish and vulgar course of action to follow. The fatal errors of life are not due to man’s being unreasonable: an unreasonable moment may be one’s finest moment. They are due to man’s being logical. There is a wide difference. That telegram conditioned the whole of your subsequent relations with your father, and consequently the whole of my life. And the grotesque thing about it is that it was a telegram of which the commonest street-boy would have been ashamed. From pert telegrams to priggish lawyers’ letters was a natural progress and the result of your lawyer’s letters to your father was, of course, to urge him on still further. You left him no option but to go on. You forced it on him as a point of honour, or of dishonour rather, that your appeal should have the more effect. So the next time he attacks me, no longer in a private letter and as your private friend, but in public and as a public man. I have to expel him from my house. He goes from restaurant to restaurant looking for me, in order to insult me before the whole world, and in such a manner that if I retaliated I would be ruined, and if I did not retaliate I would be ruined also. Then surely was the time when you should have come forward, and said that you would not expose me to such hideous attacks, such infamous persecution, on your account, but would, readily and at once, resign any claim you had to my friendship?[36c] You feel that now, I suppose. But it never even occurred to you then. Hate blinded you. All you could think of (besides of course writing to him insulting letters and telegrams) was to buy a ridiculous pistol that goes off in the Berkeley, under circumstances that create a worse scandal than ever came to your ears. Indeed the idea of your being the object of a terrible quarrel between your father and a man of my position seemed to delight you. It, I suppose very naturally, pleased your vanity, and flattered your self-importance. That your father might have had your body, which did not interest me, and left me your soul, which did not interest him, would have been to you a distressing solution of the question. You scented the chance of a public scandal and flew to it. The prospect of a battle in which you would be safe delighted you. I never remember you in higher spirits than you were for the rest of that season. Your only disappointment seemed to be that nothing actually happened, and that no further meeting or fracas had taken place between us. You consoled yourself by sending him telegrams of such a character that at last the wretched man wrote to you and said that he had given orders to his servants that no telegram was to be brought to him under any pretence whatsoever. That did not daunt you. You saw the immense opportunities afforded by the open postcard, and availed yourself of them to the full. You hounded him on in the chase still more. I do not suppose he would ever really have given it up. Family instincts were strong in him. His hatred of you was just as persistent as your hatred of him, and I was the stalking-horse for both of you, and a mode of attack as well as a mode of shelter[36d]. His very passion for notoriety was not merely individual but racial[36e]. Still, if his interest had flagged for a moment your letters and postcards would soon have quickened it to its ancient flame. They did so. And he naturally went on further still. Having assailed me as a private gentleman and in private, as a public man and in public, he ultimately determines to make his final and great attack on me as an artist, and in the place where my Art is being represented. He secures by fraud a seat for the first night of one of my plays, and contrives a plot to interrupt the performance, to make a foul speech about me to the audience, to insult my actors, to throw offensive or indecent missiles at me when I am called before the curtain at the close, utterly in some hideous way to ruin me through my work. By the merest chance, in the brief and accidental sincerity of a more than usually intoxicated mood[36f], he boasts of his intention before others. Information is given to the police, and he is kept out of the theatre. You had your chance then. Then was your opportunity. Don’t you realise now that you should have seen it, and come forward and said that you would not have my Art, at any rate, ruined for your sake? You knew what my Art was to me, the great primal note by which I had revealed, first myself to myself, and then myself to the world; the real passion of my life; the love to which all other loves were as marsh water to red wine, or the glow-worm of the marsh to the magic mirror of the moon. Don’t you understand now that your lack of imagination was the one really fatal defect of your character? What you had to do was quite simple, and quite clear before you, but Hate had blinded you, and you could see nothing. I could not apologise to you father for his having insulted me and persecuted me in the most loathsome manner for nearly nine months. I could not get rid of you out of my life. I had tried it again and again. I had gone so far as actually leaving England and going abroad in the hope of escaping from you. It had all been of no use. You were the only person who could have done anything. The key of the situation rested entirely with yourself. It was the one great opportunity you had of making some slight return to me for all the love and affection and kindness and generosity and care I had shown you. Had you appreciated me even at a tenth of my value as an artist you would have done so. But Hate blinded you. The faculty “by which, and by which alone, we can understand others in their real as in their ideal relations” was dead in you. You thought simply of how to get your father into prison. To see him “in the dock,” as you used to say: that was your one idea. The phrase became one of the many scies of your daily conversation. One heard it at every meal. Well, you had your desire gratified. Hate granted you every single thing you wished for [36g]. It was an indulgent Master to you. It is so, indeed, to all who serve it [36h]. For two days you sat on a high seat with the Sheriffs, and feasted your eyes with the spectacle of your father standing in the dock of the Central Criminal Court. And on the third day I took his place. What had occurred? In your hideous game of hate together, you had both thrown dice for my soul, and you happened to have lost. That was all[36i].
