Astronomer’s Wife (1937)
Kay Boyle
There is an evil moment on awakening when all things em to pau. But for women, they only falter and may be t in action by a single move: a lifted hand and the pendulum will swing, or the voice raid and through every room the pul takes up its beating. The astronomer’s wife felt the interval gaping and at once filled it to the brim. She fetched up her gentle voice and nt it warily down the stairs for coffee, swung her feet out upon the oval mat, and hailed the morning with her bare arms’ quivering flesh drawn taut in rhythmic exerci: left, left, left my wife and fourteen children, right, right, right in the middle of the dusty road.
The day would proceed from this, beat by beat, without reflection, like every other day. The astronomer was still asleep, or feigning it, and she, once out of bed, had come into her own posssion. Although scarcely ever out of sight of the impenetrable silence of his brow, she would be abnt from him all the day in being clean, busy, kind. He was a man of other thin
gs, a dreamer. At times he lay still for hours, at others he sat upon the roof behind his telescope, or wandered down the pathway to the road and out across the mountains. This day, like any other, would go on from the removal of the spot left there from dinner on the astronomer’s vest to the vere thrashing of the mayonnai for lunch. That man might be each time the new arching wave, and woman the undertow that sucked him back, were things she had been told by his silence were so.
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In spite of the earliness of the hour, the girl had heard her mistress’s voice and was coming up the stairs. At the threshold of the bedroom she paud, and said: “Madame, the plumber is here.”
The astronomer’s wife put on her white and scarlet smock very quickly and buttoned it at the neck. Then she stepped carefully around the motionless spread of water in the hall.
“Tell him to come right up,” she said. She laid her hands on the bannisters and stood looking down the wooden stairway. “Ah, I am Mrs. Ames,” she said softly as she saw him mounting. “I am Mrs. Ames,” spoken soft as a willow weeping. “The professor is still sleep
ing. Just step this way.”
The plumber himlf looked up and saw Mrs. Ames with her voice hushed, speaking to him. She was a youngish woman, but this she had forgotten. The mystery and silence of her husband’s mind lay like a chiding finger on her tips. Her eyes were gray, for the light had been extinguished in them. The strange dim halo of her yellow hair was still uncombed and sideways on her head.
beermmayFor all of his heavy boots, the plumber quieted the sound of his feet, and together they went down the hall, picking their way around the still lake of water that spread as far as the landing and lay docile there. The plumber was a tough, hardy man; but he took off his hat when he spoke to her and looked her fully, almost insolently in the eye.
“Does it come from the wash-basin,” he said, “or from the other…?”
“Oh, from the other,” said Mrs. Ames without hesitations.spread spectrum
In this place the villas were scattered out few and primitive, and although beauty lay withoesteban>medal of honor
ut there was no reflection of her face within. Here all was awkward and unfit; a n of wrestling with uncouth forces gave everything an austere countenance. Even the plumber, dealing as does a woman with matters under hand, was grave and stately. The mountains round about emed to have cast them into the shadow of great dignity.
Mrs. Ames began speaking of their arrival that summer in the little villa, mourning each event as it followed on the other.乐趣 英文
“Then, just before going to bed last night,” she said, “I noticed something was unusual.”
pullawayThe plumber cast down a folded square of sack-cloth on the brimming floor and laid his leather apron on it. Then he stepped boldly onto the heart of the island it shaped and looked long into the overflowing bowl.
“The water should be stopped from the meter in the garden,” he said at last.
“Oh, I did that,” said Mrs. Ames, “the very first thing last night. I turned it off at once, in my nightgown, as soon as I saw what was happening. But all this had already run in.”
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The plumber looked for a moment at her red kid slippers. She was standing just at the edge of the clear, pure-eming tide.
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joyo“It’s no doubt the soil lines,” he said verely. “It may be that something has stopped them, but my opinion is that the water als aren’t working. That’s the trouble often enough in such cas. If you find a valve you wouldn’t be caught like this.”
Mrs. Ames did not know how to meet this rebuke. She stood, swaying a little, looking into the plumber’s blue relentless eye.
“I’m sorry—I’m sorry that my husband,” she said, “is still—resting and cannot go into this with you. I’m sure it must be very interesting…”
“You’ll probably have to have the traps aled,” said the plumber grimly, and at the sound of this Mrs. Ames’s hand flew in dismay to the side of her face. The plumber made no move, but the t of his mouth as he looked at her emed to soften. “Anyway, I’ll have a look from the garden end,” he said.
