SNOWFLAKES: BEST SHORT STORIES OF NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 霍桑经典短篇小说英文原版
WHEN THE WORLD WAS YOUNG: BEST SHORT STORIES OF JACK LONDON 杰克·伦敦经典短篇小说英文原版
內容簡介：
O.
Henry 1862-1910, Born William Sydney Porter, on September 11,1862, in
Greensboro, North Carolina, he was the famous American short-story writer, who
wrote under the pseudonym O. Henry,
pioneered in picturing the lives of
lower-class and middle-class New Yorkers.
Porter
attended school for a short time, then clerked in an uncle''s drugstore. At the
age of 20 he went toTexas,
working first on a ranch and later as a bank teller. In 1887 he married and
began to write freelance sketches. A few years later he founded a humorous
weekly, the Rolling Stone . When this failed, he became a reporter and
columnist on the Houston Post .
He
was indicted in 1896 for embezzling bank fundsactually a result of technical
mismanagement,and was imprisoned in Columbus, Ohio. During his three-year
incarceration, he wrote adventure stories set inTexasandCentral Americathat quickly became
popular and were collected in Cabbages and Kings .
Released
from prison in 1902, Porter went to New York City, his home and the setting of
most of his fiction for the remainder of his life, writing prodigiously under
the pen name O. Henry. His popular collections of stories included The Four
Million; Heart of the West and The Trimmed Lamp; The Gentle Grafter and The
Voice of the City; Options; and Whirligigs and Strictly Business.
欧·亨利是一位高产的作家，一生共留下了一部长篇小说和三百多篇短篇小说。他的短篇小说构思精巧，风格独特，与当时其他作家着重表现纽约等大城市的上层社会不同，欧·亨利一直着力于表现繁华都会以及西部乡村里普普通通的“小人物”，描写了美国民众的日常生活以及他们对浪漫和冒险生活的追求。其以语言幽默、结局出人意料（即“欧·亨利式结尾”）而闻名于世。代表作有短篇小说《爱的牺牲》A Service of Love、《警察与赞美诗》The Cop and the Anthem、《带家具出租的房间》The
Furnished Room、《麦琪的礼物》The Gift of the Magi、《最后的常春藤叶》（The Last Leaf）等。
In an art exhibition the other day I saw a painting that had
been sold for $5,000. The painter was a young scrub out of the West named
Kraft, who had a favourite food and a pet theory. His pabulum was an
unquenchable belief in the Unerring Artistic Adjustment of Nature. His theory was
fixed around corned-beef hash with poached egg. There was a story behind the
picture, so I went home and let it drip out of a fountain-pen. The idea of
Kraft—but that is not the beginning of the story.
Three years ago Kraft, Bill Judkins a poet, and I took our
meals at Cypher’s, on Eighth Avenue. I say “took.” When we had money, Cypher got it “off of ” us, as he expressed it. We had no
credit; we went in, called for food and ate it. We paid or we did not pay. We
had confidence in Cypher’s sullenness and smouldering
ferocity. Deep down in his sunless soul he was either a prince, a fool or an artist.
He sat at a worm-eaten desk, covered with files of waiters’ checks so old that I was sure the bottomest one was for clams that
Hendrik Hudson had eaten and paid for. Cypher had the power, in common with
Napoleon III. and the goggle-eyed perch, of throwing a film over his eyes,
rendering opaque the windows of his soul. Once when we left him unpaid, with egregious
excuses, I looked back and saw him shaking with inaudible laughter behind his
film. Now and then we paid up back scores.
But the chief thing at Cypher’s was Milly. Milly was a waitress. She was a grand
example of Kraft’s theory of the artistic adjustment of
nature. She belonged, largely, to waiting, as Minerva did to the art of
scrapping, or Venus to the science of serious flirtation. Pedestalled and in
bronze she might have stood with the noblest of her heroic sisters as “Liver-and-Bacon Enlivening the World.”
She belonged to Cypher’s. You expected to see her colossal figure loom through that reeking
blue cloud of smoke from frying fat just as you expect the Palisades to appear through
a driftingHudson Riverfog. There amid the steam
of vegetables and the vapours of acres of “ham and,” the crash of crockery, the clatter of steel, the screaming of “short orders,” the cries of the hungering
and all the horrid tumult of feeding man, surrounded by swarms of the buzzing
winged beasts bequeathed us by Pharaoh, Milly steered her magnificent way like
some great liner cleaving among the canoes of howling savages.
Our Goddess of Grub was built on lines so majestic that they
could be followed only with awe. Her sleeves were always rolled above her
elbows. She could have taken us three musketeers in her two hands and dropped
us out of the window. She had seen fewer years than any of us, but she was of
such superb Evehood and simplicity that she mothered us from the beginning.
Cypher’s store of eatables she poured out upon
us with royal indifference to price and quantity, as from a cornucopia that
knew no exhaustion. Her voice rang like a great silver bell; her smile was
many-toothed and frequent; she seemed like a yellow sunrise on mountain tops. I
never saw her but I thought of theYosemite.
And yet, somehow, I could never think of her as existing outside of Cypher’s. There nature had placed her, and she had taken root and grown
mightily. She seemed happy, and took her few poor dollars on Saturday nights
with the flushed pleasure of a child that receives an unexpected donation.
It was Kraft who first voiced the fear that each of us must
have held latently. It came up apropos, of course, of certain questions of art
at which we were hammering. One of us compared the harmony existing between a Haydn
symphony and pistache ice cream to the exquisite congruity between Milly and
Cypher’s.
“There is a certain fate hanging over
Milly,” said Kraft, “and if it
overtakes her she is lost to Cypher’s and to us.”
“She will grow fat?” asked Judkins, fearsomely.
“She will go to night school and become
refined?” I ventured anxiously.
“It is this,” said Kraft, punctuating in a
puddle of spilled coffee with a stiff forefinger. “Caesar
had his Brutus—the cotton has its bollworm, the chorus
girl has her Pittsburger, the summer boarder has his poison ivy, the hero has
his Carnegie medal, art has its Morgan, the rose has its—”
“Speak,” I
interrupted, much perturbed. “You do not think that
Milly will begin to lace?”
“One day,” concluded Kraft, solemnly, “there will come to Cypher’s for a plate of beans a millionaire lumberman from Wisconsin, and
he will marry Milly.”
“Never!” exclaimed Judkins and I, in horror.
“A lumberman,” repeated Kraft, hoarsely.
“And a millionaire lumberman!” I sighed, despairingly.
“From Wisconsin!” groaned Judkins.
We agreed that the awful fate seemed to menace her. Few
things were less improbable. Milly, like some vast virgin stretch of pine
woods, was made to catch the lumberman’s eye. And well we knew the habits of the Badgers, once fortune
smiled upon them. Straight toNew Yorkthey hie, and lay their goods at the feet of the girl who serves them beans in
a beanery. Why, the alphabet
itself connives. The Sunday newspaper’s headliner’s work is cut for him.
For a while we felt that Milly was on
the verge of being lost to us.
It was our love of the Unerring Artistic Adjustment of Nature
that inspired us. We could not give her over to a lumberman, doubly accursed by
wealth and provincialism. We shuddered to think of Milly, with her voice
modulated and her elbows covered, pouring tea in the marble teepee of a tree
murderer. No! In Cypher’s she belonged—in
the bacon smoke, the cabbage perfume, the grand, Wagnerian chorus of hurled
ironstone china and rattling casters.
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