先讀課文﹕
Treasure Island 金銀島
by Robert Louis Stevenson
Chapter 1 The Old Sea-dog 指一個老水手at the Admiral Benbow 旅館名
Squire Trelawney, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having asked
me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from the beginning
to the end, keeping nothing back, but the bearings of the island, and that
only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I take up my pen in
the year of grace 17__ and go back to the time when my father kept the Admiral
Benbow inn and the brown old seaman with the sabre cut first took up his
lodging under our roof.
I remember him as if it were yesterday, as he came plodding to the inn door,
his sea-chest following behind him in a hand-barrow--a tall, strong, heavy,
nut-brown man, his tarry pigtail falling over the shoulder of his soiled
blue coat, his hands ragged and scarred, with black, broken nails, and the
sabre cut across one cheek, a dirty, livid white. I remember him looking
round the cover and whistling to himself as he did so, and then breaking
out in that old sea-song that he sang so often afterwards:
"Fifteen men on the dead man's chest [1]-- Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!"
in the high, old tottering voice that seemed to have been tuned and broken
at the capstan bars. Then he rapped on the door with a bit of stick like
a handspike that he carried, and when my father appeared, called roughly
for a glass of rum. This, when it was brought to him, he drank slowly, like
a connoisseur, lingering on the taste and still looking about him at the
cliffs and up at our signboard.
"This is a handy cove," says he at length; "and a pleasant sittyated grog-shop.
Much company, mate?"
My father told him no, very little company, the more was the pity.
"Well, then," said he, "this is the berth for me. Here you, matey," he cried
to the man who trundled the barrow; "bring up alongside and help up my chest.
I'll stay here a bit," he continued. "I'm a plain man; rum and bacon and
eggs is what I want, and that head up there for to watch ships off. What
you mought [might] call me? You mought call me captain. Oh, I see what you're
at-- there"; and he threw down three or four gold pieces on the threshold.
"You can tell me when I've worked through that," says he, looking as fierce
as a commander.
And indeed bad as his clothes were and coarsely as he spoke, he had none
of the appearance of a man who sailed before the mast, but seemed like a
mate or skipper accustomed to be obeyed or to strike. The man who came with
the barrow told us the mail [郵車﹐兼搭客] had set him down the morning
before at the Royal George [地名], that he had inquired what inns there
were along the coast, and hearing ours well spoken of, I suppose, and described
as lonely, had chosen it from the others for his place of residence. And
that was all we could learn of our guest.
He was a very silent man by custom. All day he hung round the cove or upon
the cliffs with a brass telescope; all evening he sat in a corner of the
parlour next the fire and drank rum and water very strong. Mostly he would
not speak when spoken to, only look up sudden and fierce and blow through
his nose like a fog-horn; and we and the people who came about our house
soon learned to let him be [alone]. Every day when he came back from his
stroll he would ask if any seafaring men had gone by along the road. At
first we thought it was the want of company of his own kind that made him
ask this question, but at last we began to see he was desirous to avoid
them. When a seaman did put up at the Admiral Benbow (as now and then some
did, making by the coast road for Bristol) he would look in at him through
the curtained door before he entered the parlour; and he was always sure
to be as silent as a mouse when any such was present. For me, at least,
there was no secret about the matter, for I was, in a way, a sharer in his
alarms. He had taken me aside one day and promised me a silver fourpenny
on the first of every month if I would only keep my "weather-eye open for
a seafaring man with one leg" and let him know the moment he appeared. Often
enough when the first of the month came round and I applied to him for my
wage, he would only blow through his nose at me and stare me down [瞪著我
看得我不敢抬頭], but before the week was out he was sure to think better
of it, bring me my four-penny piece, and repeat his orders to look out for
"the seafaring man with one leg."
How that personage haunted my dreams, I need scarcely tell you. On stormy
nights, when the wind shook the four corners of the house and the surf roared
along the cove and up the cliffs, I would see him in a thousand forms, and
with a thousand diabolical expressions. Now the leg would be cut off at
the knee, now at the hip; now he was a monstrous kind of a creature who had
never had but the one leg, and that in the middle of his body. To see him
leap and run and pursue me over hedge and ditch was the worst of nightmares.
And altogether I paid pretty dear for my monthly fourpenny piece, in the
shape of these abominable fancies.
But though I was so terrified by the idea of the seafaring man with one
leg, I was far less afraid of the captain himself than anybody else who
knew him. There were nights when he took a deal more rum and water than
his head would carry; and then he would sometimes sit and sing his wicked,
old, wild sea-songs, minding nobody; but sometimes he would call for glasses
round and force all the trembling company to listen to his stories or bear
a chorus to his singing. Often I have heard the house shaking with "Yo-ho-ho,
and a bottle of rum," all the neighbours joining in for dear life, with
the fear of death upon them, and each singing louder than the other to avoid
remark. For in these fits he was the most overriding companion ever known;
he would slap his hand on the table for silence all round; he would fly up
in a passion of anger at a question, or sometimes because none was put,
and so he judged the company was not following his story. Nor would he allow
anyone to leave the inn till he had drunk himself sleepy and reeled off
to bed.
His stories were what frightened people worst of all. Dreadful stories they
were--about hanging, and walking the plank [2], and storms at sea, and the
Dry Tortugas [3], and wild deeds and places on the Spanish Main. By his
own account he must have lived his life among some of the wickedest men
that God ever allowed upon the sea, and the language in which he told these
stories shocked our plain country people almost as much as the crimes that
he described. My father was always saying the inn would be ruined, for people
would soon cease coming there to be tyrannized over and put down, and sent
shivering to their beds; but I really believe his presence did us good.
People were frightened at the time, but on looking back they rather liked
it; it was a fine excitement in a quiet country life, and there was even
a party of the younger men who pretended to admire him, calling him a "true
sea-dog" and a "real old salt" and such like names, and saying there was
the sort of man that made England terrible at sea.
In one way, indeed, he bade fair to ruin us, for he kept on staying week
after week, and at last month after month, so that all the money had been
long exhausted, and still my father never plucked up the heart to insist
on having more. If ever he mentioned it, the captain blew through his nose
so loudly that you might say he roared, and stared my poor father out of
the room. I have seen him wringing his hands after such a rebuff, and I
am sure the annoyance and the terror he lived in must have greatly hastened
his early and unhappy death.
All the time he lived with us the captain made no change whatever in his
dress but to buy some stockings from a hawker. One of the cocks of his hat
having fallen down, he let it hang from that day forth, though it was a
great annoyance when it blew. I remember the appearance of his coat, which
he patched himself upstairs in his room, and which, before the end, was nothing
but patches. He never wrote or received a letter, and he never spoke with
any but the neighbours, and with these, for the most part, only when drunk
on rum. The great sea-chest none of us had ever seen open.
He was only once crossed, and that was towards the end, when my poor father
was far gone in a decline that took him off. Dr. Livesey came late one afternoon
to see the patient, took a bit of dinner from my mother, and went into the
parlour to smoke a pipe until his horse should come down from the hamlet,
for we had no stabling at the old Benbow. I followed him in, and I remember
observing the contrast the neat, bright doctor, with his powder as white
as snow and his bright, black eyes and pleasant manners, made with the coltish
country folk, and above all, with that filthy, heavy, bleared scarecrow
of a pirate of ours, sitting, far gone in rum, with his arms on the table.
Suddenly he--the captain, that is--began to pipe up his eternal song:
"Fifteen men on the dead man's chest-- Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum! Drink
and the devil had done for the rest-- Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!"
At first I had supposed "the dead man's chest" to be that identical big
box of his upstairs in the front room, and the thought had been mingled
in my nightmares with that of the one-legged seafaring man. But by this
time we had all long ceased to pay any particular notice to the song; it
was new, that night, to nobody but Dr. Livesey, and on him I observed it
did not produce an agreeable effect, for he looked up for a moment quite
angrily before he went on with his talk to old Taylor, the gardener, on
a new cure for the rheumatics. In the meantime, the captain gradually brightened
up at his own music, and at last flapped his hand upon the table before him
in a way we all knew to mean silence. The voices stopped at once, all but
Dr. Livesey's; he went on as before speaking clear and kind and drawing
briskly at his pipe between every word or two. The captain glared at him
for a while, flapped his hand again, glared still harder, and at last broke
out with a villainous, low oath, "Silence, there, between decks [curse words]!
"
"Were you addressing me, sir?" says the doctor; and when the ruffian had
told him, with another oath, that this was so, "I have only one thing to
say to you, sir," replies the doctor, "that if you keep on drinking rum,
the world will soon be quit of a very dirty scoundrel!"
The old fellow's fury was awful. He sprang to his feet, drew and opened
a sailor's clasp-knife, and balancing it open on the palm of his hand, threatened
to pin the doctor to the wall.
The doctor never so much as moved. He spoke to him as before, over his shoulder
and in the same tone of voice, rather high, so that all the room might hear,
but perfectly calm and steady: "If you do not put that knife this instant
in your pocket, I promise, upon my honour, you shall hang at the next assizes.
"
Then followed a battle of looks between them, but the captain soon knuckled
under, put up his weapon, and resumed his seat, grumbling like a beaten
dog.
"And now, sir," continued the doctor, "since I now know there's such a fellow
in my district, you may count I'll have an eye upon you day and night. I'm
not a doctor only; I'm a magistrate; and if I catch a breath of complaint
against you, if it's only for a piece of incivility like tonight's, I'll
take effectual means to have you hunted down and routed out of this. Let
that suffice."
Soon after, Dr. Livesey's horse came to the door and he rode away, but the
captain held his peace that evening, and for many evenings to come
1) 生詞自查。
2) 作者介紹﹕Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson (13 November 1850 -- 3 December
1894) was a Scottish novelist, poet, essayist and travel writer. His best-known
books include Treasure Island (1883), Kidnapped, and Strange Case of Dr
Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
3) 註解﹕[1] Stevenson found the name "Dead Man's Chest" among a list of
island names in a book by Charles Kingsley in reference to the Dead Chest
Island in the British Virgin Islands. As Stevenson once said, "Treasure
Island came out of Kingsley's At Last: A Christmas in the West Indies (1871);
where I got the 'Dead Man's Chest' - that was the seed". That is, Stevenson
saw the three words "Dead Man's Chest" in Kingsley's book among a list of
names, germinating in Stevenson's mind it was the "seed" which then grew
into the novel.
In Treasure Island Stevenson only wrote the chorus, leaving the remainder
of the song unwritten, and to the reader's imagination:
"Fifteen men on the dead man's chest--
...Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!
Drink and the devil had done for the rest--
...Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!"
[2] Walking the plank was a form of murder or torture thought to have been
practiced by pirates, mutineers and other rogue seafarers. The victim was
forced to walk off the end of a wooden plank or beam, the final six feet
of which extended over the side of a ship. The victim, sometimes with hands
bound or weighed down, then drowns in the water or is killed by sharks (which
would often follow ships). [3] The Dry Tortugas are a small group of islands,
located at the end of the Florida Keys, USA, about 70 miles (113 km) west
of Key West, and 37 miles (60 km) west of the Marquesas Keys, the closest
islands. Still further west is the Tortugas Bank, which is completely submerged.
The first Europeans to discover the islands were the Spanish in 1513 by
explorer Juan Ponce de Leon.
4) 史蒂文森的“金銀島”也是本世界名著。島上有海盜埋藏的財寶。第一人稱的人
是個小孩﹐跟隨那裡的紳士們一起乘船去找寶。船上水手中混進了海盜﹐到達島上
後就打了起來。欲知結果﹐請網上找書一讀。
选择“Disable on www.wenxuecity.com”
选择“don't run on pages on this domain”
