(精選word)英語(yǔ)短篇小說(shuō)theswingbymarygavell

1、(完整word版)英語(yǔ)短篇小說(shuō)TheSwingByMaryGavell(完整word版)英語(yǔ)短篇小說(shuō)TheSwingByMaryGavell(完整word版)英語(yǔ)短篇小說(shuō)TheSwingByMaryGavellThe SwingBy Mary Gavell As she grew old, she began to dream again. She had not dreamed much in her middle years; or, if she had , the busyness of her days, converging on her the moment she awoke,

2、 had pushed her dreams right out of her head, and any fragments that remained were as busy and prosaic as the day itself. She had only the one son, James, but she had also mothered her younger sister after their parents died, and she had done all of the office work during the years when her husbands

3、 small engineering firm was getting on its feet. And Juliuss health had not been too good, even then; it was she who had mowed the lawn and had helped Jamie to learn to ride his bicycle and pitched balls to him in the backyard until he learned to hit them.But she was dreaming again now, as she had w

4、hen she was a child. Oh, not the lovely foolish dreams of finding oneself alone in a candy store, or the horrible dreams of being pursued through endless corridors without doors by nameless terrors. But as her days grew in quietness and solitude for James was grown and gone, and Julius was drawing i

5、n upon himself, becoming every day more small and chill and dim color and life and drama were returning to her dreams.But on that first night when she heard the creak of the swing, she did not think that she was dreaming at all. She had been lying in bed quite awake, she thought, in the little room

6、that used to be Jamies for nowadays her reading in bed, and afterward her tossing and turning, disturbed Julius. The swing was not an ordinary one. Julius had put it up, in one of the few flashes of poetry in all his worrisome, hardworking life, when Jamie was only a baby and nowhere near old enough

7、 to swing in it. The ladder Julius had was not tall enough, and he had to buy a new one, for the tree was tremendous and the branch on which he proposed to hang the swing arched a full forty feet from the ground, and much thought and consideration and care were given to the chain, and the hooks, and

8、 the seat. The swing was suspended from so high, and its arc was so wide, that riding in it was like sailing through the air with the leisurely swoop of a wheeling bird. One seemed to travel from one horizon to the other. And how proud Julius had been of it when Jamie was old enough to swing in it,

9、and the neighborhood children had stood around to admire and be given a turn, for there was no other swing like it.The swing was hardly ever used now; it was only a treat, once in a while, for a visiting child, and occasionally when she was outside working in her flower border she would sit and rest

10、 in it for a moment or two, idling, pushing herself a little with a toe. But the rhythmic creak of the chains was so familiar that she could not mistake it, she thought. Could the wind be strong enough to move it, if it came from the right angle She finally gave up thinking about it and went to slee

11、p.Nor did she think of it the next day, for they were due for Sunday dinner at Jamess house. He lived in a suburb on the opposite side of the city just the right distance away, she often thought, far enough so that aging parents could not meddle and embarrass and interfere, but near enough so that s

12、he could see him fairly often. She loved him with all her heart, her dear, her only son. She was enormously proud of him, too; he was a highly paid mathematician in a research foundation, and expert in a field so esoteric that she had given up trying to grasp its point. But secretly she took some cr

13、edit, for it was she who had kept the engineering firms books balanced and done the income tax who had played little mathematical games with him before he had ever gone to school and had sat cross-legged with him on the floor tossing coins to test the law of probability. Oh, they had had fun togethe

14、r in all sorts of ways; they had done crossword puzzles together, and studied the stars together, and read books together that were over his head and sometimes over hers too. And he had turned out well; he was a scholar, and a success, and a worthy citizen, and he had a pretty wife, a charming home,

15、 and two handsome children. She could not have asked for more. He was the light and the warmth of her life, and her heart beat fast on the way to his house.She drove. She had always enjoyed driving, and nowadays Julius, who used to insist on doing it himself, let her do it without a word. They drove

16、 in silence mostly, but her heart was as light as the wind that blew on her face, and she hummed under her breath, for she was on her way to see James. Julius said querulously, “I could have told you youd get into a lot of traffic this way and youd do better to go by the river road, but I knew you w

17、ouldnt listen,” but she was so happy that she forbore to mention that whenever she took the river road he remarked how much longer it was, and only answered, “I expect youre quite right, Julius. Well come back that way.”They did go home by the river road, and it seemed very long; she was a little de

18、pressed, as she often was when she returned from Jamess house. “I love him with all my heart” the words walked unbidden into her mind “but I wish that when I ask him how he is he wouldnt tell me that there is every likelihood that the Basic Research Division will be merged with the Statistics Divisi

19、on.” He had kissed her on the cheek, and Anne, his wife, had kissed her on the cheek, and the two children had kissed her on the cheek, and he had slipped a footstool under her feet and had seated his father away from drafts, and they had had a fire in the magnificent stone fireplace the architect h

20、ad dreamed up and the builder added to the cost, and Anne had served them an excellent dinner, and the children had, on request, told her of suitable As in English and Boy Scout merit badges. They had asked her how she had been, and she told them, in a burst of confidence, that she had had the ancie

21、nt piano tuned and had been practicing an hour a day. They looked puzzled. “What are you planning to do with it, Mother?” Anne asked. “Oh, well nothing, really,” she said, embarrassed. She said later on that she had been reading books on China for she was so terribly ignorant about it, and they aske

22、d politely how her eyes were holding up, and when she said that she was sick of phlox and was going to dig it all up and try iris, James said mildly, “You really shouldnt do all that heavy gardening anymore, Mother.” They were loving, they were devoted, and it was the most pleasant of ordinary famil

23、y Sunday afternoons. James told her that he had another salary increase, and that the paper he had delivered before the Mathematical Research Institute had been, he felt he could say without exaggeration, most well received, and that they were getting a new station wagon. But what, she wondered, did

24、 he feel, what did he love and hate, and what upset him or made him happy, and what did he look forward to Nonsense, she thought, I cant expect him to tell me his secret thoughts. People cant, once theyre grown, to their parents. But the terrible fear rose in her that these were his secret thoughts,

25、 and that was all there was.That night she heard the swing again, the gentle, regular creak of the chains. What can be making that noise, she wondered, for it was a still night, with surely not enough wind to stir the swing. She asked Julius the next day if he ever heard a creaking sound at night, a

26、 sound like the swing used to make. Julius peered out from his afghan and said deafly, “Hah?” and she answered irritably, “Oh, never mind.” The afghan maddened her. He was always chilly nowadays, and she had knitted the afghan for him for Christmas, working on it in snatches when he was out from und

27、er foot for a bit, with a vision of its warming his knees as they sat together in the evenings, companionably watching television, or reading, or chatting. But he sat less and less with her in the evenings; he went to bed very early nowadays, and he had taken to wearing the afghan daytimes around hi

28、s shoulders like a shawl. She was sorry immediately for her irritation, and she tried to be very thoughtful of him the rest of the day. But he didnt seem to notice; he noticed so little now.Other things maddened her too. She decided that she should get out more and, heartlessly abandoning Julius, sh

29、e made a luncheon date with Jessie Carling, who had once been a girl as gay and scatterbrained as a kitten. Jessie spent the entire lunch discussing her digestion and the problem of making the plaids match across the front in a housecoat she was making for herself. A couple of days later, she paid a

30、 call on Joyce Simmons, who had trouble with her back and didnt get out much, and Joyce told her in minute detail about her son, dwelling, in full circumstantial detail, on the virtues of him, his wife, and his children. She held her tongue, though it was hard. My trouble, she thought wryly, is that

31、 I think my son is so really superior that a kind of noblesse oblige forces me not to mention it.The next time she heard it was several nights later. She sat up in bed and, half aloud, said, “Im not dreaming, and it certainly is the swing!” She threw on her robe and her slippers and went downstairs,

32、 feeling her way in the dark carefully, for though sounds seemed not to reach Julius, lights did wake him. Softly she unlocked the back door and, stepping out into the moonlight, picked her way through the wet grass and in sight of the big oak, she saw it swooping powerfully through the air in its w

33、ide arc, and the shock it gave her told her that she had not really believed it. There was a child in the swing, and she paused with a terrible fear clutching at her. Could it be a sleepwalking child from somewhere in the neighborhood And would it be dangerous to call out to the child, or would it b

34、e better to go up and put out a hand to catch the swing gently and stop it She walked nearer softly, afraid to startle the child, her heart beating with panicky speed. It seemed to be a little boy and, she noticed, he was dressed in ordinary clothes, not pajamas, as a sleepwalker might be. Nearer sh

35、e came, still undecided what she should do, shaking with fear and strangeness. She saw then that it was James. “Jamie? she cried out questioningly, and immediately shrank back, feeling that she must be making some kind of terrible mistake. But he looked and saw her, and, bright in the moonlight, his

36、 face lit up, as it had used to do when he saw her, and he answered gaily, “Mommy!”She ran to him and stopped the swing he had slowed down when he saw her and knelt on the mossy ground and put her arms around him and he put his arms around her and squeezed tight. “Im so glad to see you!” she cried.

37、“Its been such a long time since Ive seen you!”“Im glad to see you too,” he cried, grinning, and kissed her teasingly behind the ear, for he knew it gave her goose bumps. “You know,” he said, “I like this airplane, and sometimes I go r-r-r-r- and thats the engine.” “Well,” she said, “it is sort of l

38、ike flying. Like an airplane, or maybe like a bird. Do you remember, Jamie, when you use to want to be a bird and would wave your arms and try to fly?”“That was when I was a real little kid,” he said scornfully.She suddenly realized that she didnt know how old he was. One tooth was out in front; cou

39、ld that have been when he was six Or seven Surely not five One forgot so much. She couldnt very well ask him; he would think that very odd, for a mother, of all people, should know. She noticed, then, his red checked jacket hanging on the nail on the tree; Julius had given him that jacket for his si

40、xth birthday, she remembered now; he had loved it and had insisted on carrying it with him all the time, even when it was too warm to wear it, and Julius had driven a little nail in the oak tree for him to hang it on while he swung; the nail was till there, old and rusty.“Mommy, how high does an air

41、plane fly?” he asked.“Oh, I dont know,” she said, “two thousand feet, maybe.”“How much is a foot?”“Oh, about as long as Daddys foot I guess thats why they call it that.”“Have people always been the same size?”“Well, not exactly. They say people are getting a little bigger, and that most people are a

42、 little bigger than their great-granddaddies were.”“Well she saw the trap too late, then if feet used not to be as big, why did they call it a foot?”“I dont know. Maybe that isnt why they call it a foot. We should look it up in the dictionary.”“Does dictionary tell you everything”“Not everything. Ju

43、st about words and what they mean and how they started to mean that.”“But if theres a word for everything, and if a dictionary tells you about every word, then how can it help but tell you about everything?”“Well,” she said, “youve got a good point there. Ill have to think that one over.”Another tim

44、e he would ask, “Why is it, if the world is turning round all the time, we dont fall off?” “Gravity. You know what a magnet is. The earth is just like a big magnet.”“But where is the gravity If you pick up a handful of dirt, it doesnt have any gravity.”“Well, I dont know. The center of the earth, I

45、guess. Well, I dont really know,” she said.She felt as if the wheels of her mind, rusty from disuse, were beginning to turn again, as if she had not engaged in a real conversation, or thought about anything real, in so long that she was like a swimmer out of practice.They talked for an hour, and the

46、n he said he had to go, with the conscientious keeping track of time he had used to show when it was time to go to school.“See you later, alligator,” he said, and the answer sprang easily to her lips: “After a while, crocodile.”He came every night or two after that, and she lay in bed in happy antic

47、ipation, listening for the creak of the swing. She did not go out in her robe again; she hastily dressed herself properly, and put on her shoes, for she had always felt that a mother should look tidy and proper. There by the swing they sat, and they talked about the stars and where the Big Dipper wa

48、s, and about what you do about a boy who is sort of mean to you at school all the time, not just now and then, the way most children are to each other, only they dont especially mean it, and about what you should say in Sunday school when they say the world was made in six days but your mother has e

49、xplained it differently, and about why the days get shorter in winter and longer in summer.She bloomed; she sang around the house until even Julius noticed it, and said, disapprovingly, “You seem to be awfully frisky lately.” And when Anne phoned apologetically to say that they would have to call off Sunday dinner because James had to attend a committee meeting, she was not only perfectly understanding as she always tried to be in such instances