В первой половине текста рассказа сосредоточена большая часть употреблений существительных feeling и sensation, что свидетельствует
о росте эмоционального напряжения в душе героя до момента встречи
с мистером Тандремом. К концу рассказа возвышенное настроение Нильсона падает — существительные feeling и sensation употребляются по одному разу в одном предложении. В последнем предложении окончательно расстроенный после прогулки в парке Нильсон принимается за свою утреннюю газету.
Итак, в рассказе ритмичность употребления существительных feeling и sensation позволяет читателю испытывать тончайшие чувственно-эмоциональные переживания главного героя.
Что же так подействовало на радостное настроение Нильсона в момент его любования цветущим деревом? Нильсон улыбается, глядя на сверкающие на солнце ярко-зеленые листочки и слушая пение черного дрозда, и думает, что он — единственный человек, который видит такую красоту. Но внезапно оказывается не один, еще кто-то, очень похожий на него, такой же собственник, как и он, любуется деревцем! В этот момент и портится настроение Нильсона, происходит это совершенно инстинктивно, хотя джентльмены пытаются соблюсти нормы приличия и поддержать разговор.
Симметрия рассказа определяется сходством в характеристиках
и описании внешности Нильсона и Тандрема. В начале рассказа мы знакомимся с Нильсоном, вторая половина рассказа начинается с аналогичного описания Тандрема. Он тоже известное лицо в Лондонском Сити. По внешности Тандрем — совершенный двойник Нильсона: He was about Mr. Nilson’s own height, with firm well-coloured cheeks, neat brown moustaches, and round, well-opened clear grey eyes, and he was wearing a black frock coat. …he had his morning paper clasped behind him… В этом почти полном лексическом параллелизме ясно ощущается авторская ирония — забавно, что эти собственники похожи как две капли воды, духовно и физически.
Оба испытывают неловкость при встрече, так как являются соседями уже в течение пяти лет, но ни разу не разговаривали друг с другом — Mr. Nilson perceived at once the awkwardness of his position… detecting a slight nervousness in his neighbour’s voice. Их очаровали айва в цвету и пение дрозда, но оба они внезапно застигнуты врасплох. Параллелизм их переживаний Голсуорси отражает в следующих предложениях: It struck him suddenly that Mr. Tandrem looked a little foolish; A shade passed over Mr. Tandram’s face, as if he, too, had suddenly noticed something about Mr. Nilson. После прощания они тоже ведут себя одинаково, хотя стараются избежать копирования друг друга: Mr. Nilson retraced his steps towards his garden window, walking slowly so as to avoid arriving at the same time as his neighbour. Они оба поднимаются по ступеням своих домов: …Mr. Tandram mount his scrolled iron steps… Mr. Nilson ascended his own in turn. Они оба останавливаются на последней ступени, чтобы в последний раз взглянуть на деревце, искрящееся на солнце.
В ритмичном параллелизме конструкций, применяющихся в описании поведения героев рассказ,а также слышна ирония автора, обращающего внимание читателя на то, что вся жизнь собственников подчинена определенным правилам, которые они никогда не нарушают, их поведение до смешного предсказуемо. Собственники представляют собой именно класс, они идентичны в своем восприятии жизни и ее ценностей. Это — деловые, эмоционально сухие люди, даже когда им невольно приходится открывать красоту, символом которой в рассказе является цветущее дерево, они сразу хотят обладать ею. Если кто-то посягает на их чувство собственности, у них сразу портится настроение. И невдомек им, что красоту можно только воспевать, как это делает дрозд, а не обладать ею. Тех редких мгновений, когда душа полна сильных чувств, собственники стесняются.
В рассказе наблюдаем еще один ритмический аспект — это постоянный контраст между описаниями монотонной ежедневной жизни собственника и описанием красоты. Он выражается по-разному. Во-первых, посредством употребления прилагательных, обозначающих цвет. В описании внешности Нильсона сквозят неприятные холодные цветовые тона: clear grey eyes, brown moustaches, black frock coat. В описании деревца автор использует прилагательные, обозначающие светлые и яркие цвета: young pink and white blossoms, little bright green leaves. Во-вторых, посредством слов различных функциональных стилей, используемых в описании походки и вообще образа жизни Нильсона и в описании цветущей айвы. Действия Нильсона постоянно характеризуются глаголами формального стиля: he descended / ascended the scrolled iron steps, proceeded to pace the circular path, resumed his promenade, etc. Деревце и птица, поющая в его ветвях, описываются словами разговорного стиля, наибольшую экспрессивность придает описанию употребление идиом:
The little tree was so alive and pretty!
…a blackbird …burst into song…
…the blackbird …was chanting out his heart.
Контрастное употребление существительного heart также бросается
в глаза читателю: Mr. Nilson saw… a little tree, in the heart of whose branches the bird was perched. Поэтическая метафора в описании дерева
и сухая физиология в описании ощущения Нильсона: the sensation — as if some sweet liquor in course within him, together with a faint aching just above his heart.
В одном из последних абзацев деревце сравнивается с живым существом — the Japanese quince seemed more living than a tree. Эта персонификация, цель употребления которой довольно прозрачна, контрастирует
с черствостью, автоматизмом и монотонностью поведения Нильсона
и Тандрема.
В заключение необходимо отметить, что творческий метод автора рассказа отличается большим разнообразием в использовании семантических средств. Ритмичность употребления ключевых слов, сознательное повторение описательных конструкций, ритм, создающийся контрастным употреблением лексики определенных функциональных пластов языка, создают незабываемый колорит произведения Голсуорси.
1. Текст рассказа Джона Голсуорси «The Japanese Quince» цитируется по изданию: Perrine L. Story and Structure. Harcout, Brace & World, Inc. New York — Chicago — Burlingame, 1959.
2. Голсуорси Дж. Сага о Форсайтах. Предисловие автора. М. : Известия, 1994, С. 5—8.
3. American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. Dell Publishing Co., Inc., New York, 1970.
4. Cambridge International Dictionary of English. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1995.
5. Hornby A.S. Oxford Student’s Dictionary of Current English. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1993.
6. New Expanded Webster’s Dictionary. P.S.I. & Associates, Inc., Miami, 1988.
Marriages, like chemical unions, release upon dissolution packets of the energy locked up in their bonding. There is the piano no one wants, the cocker spaniel no one can take care of. Shelves of books suddenly stand revealed as burdensomely dated and unlikely to be reread; indeed, it is difficult to remember who read them in the first place. And what of those old skis in the attic? Or the doll house waiting to be repaired in the basement? The piano goes out of tune, the dog goes mad. The summer that the Turners got their divorce, their swimming pool had neither a master nor a mistress, though the sun beat down day after day, and a state of drought was declared in Connecticut.
It was a young pool, only two years old, of the fragile type fashioned by laying a plastic liner within a carefully carved hole in the ground. The Turners’ side yard looked infernal while it was being done; one bulldozer sank into the mud and had to be pulled free by another. But by midsummer the new grass was sprouting, the encircling flagstones were in place, the blue plastic tinted the water a heavenly blue, and it had to be admitted that the Turners had scored again. They were always a little in advance of their friends. He was a tall, hairy-backed man with long arms, and a nose flattened by football, and a sullen look of too much blood; she was a fine-boned blonde with dry blue eyes and lips usually held parted and crinkled as if about to ask a worrisome, or whimsical, question. They never seemed happier, nor their marriage healthier, than those two summers. They grew brown and supple and smooth with swimming. Ted would begin his day with a swim, before dressing to catch the train, and Linda would hold court all day amid crowds of wet matrons and children, and Ted would return from work to find a poolside cocktail party in progress, and the couple would end their day at midnight, when their friends had finally left, by swimming nude, before bed. What ecstasy! In darkness the water felt mild as milk and buoyant as helium, and the swimmers became giants, gliding from side to side in a single languorous stroke.
The next May, the pool was filled as usual, and the usual after-school gangs of mothers and children gathered, but Linda, unlike her, stayed indoors. She could be heard within the house, moving from room to room, but she no longer emerged, as in the other summers, with a cheerful tray of ice and brace of bottles, and Triscuits and lemonade for the children. Their friends felt less comfortable about appearing, towels in hand, at the Turners’ on weekends. Though Linda had lost some weight and looked elegant, and Ted was cumbersomely jovial, they gave off the faint, sleepless, awkward-making aroma of a couple in trouble. Then, the day after school was out, Linda fled with the children to her parents in Ohio. Ted stayed nights in the city, and the pool was deserted. Though the pump that ran the water through the filter continued to mutter in the lilacs, the cerulean pool grew cloudy. The bodies of dead horseflies and wasps dotted the still surface. A speckled plastic ball drifted into a corner beside the diving board and stayed there. The grass between the flagstones grew lank. On the glass-topped poolside table, a spray can of Off! had lost its pressure and a gin-and-tonic glass held a sere mint leaf. The pool looked desolate and haunted, like a stagnant jungle spring; it looked poisonous and ashamed. The postman, stuffing overdue notices and pornography solicitations into the mailbox, averted his eyes from the side yard politely.
Some June weekends, Ted sneaked out from the city. Families driving to church glimpsed him dolefully sprinkling chemical substances into the pool. He looked pale and thin. He instructed Roscoe Chace, his neighbor on the left, how to switch on the pump and change the filter, and how much chlorine and Algitrol should be added weekly. He explained he would not be able to make it out every weekend — as if the distance that for years he had traveled twice each day, gliding in and out of New York, had become an impossibly steep climb back into the past. Linda, he confided vaguely, had left her parents in Akron and was visiting her sister in Minneapolis. As the shock of the Turners’ joint disappearance wore off, their pool seemed less haunted and forbidding. The Mur-taugh children — the Murtaughs, a rowdy, numerous family, were the Turners’ right-hand neighbors — began to use it, without supervision. So Linda’s old friends, with their children, began to show up, «to keep the Murtaughs from drowning each other». For if anything were to happen to a Murtaugh, the poor Turners (the adjective had become automatic) would be sued for everything, right when they could least afford it. It became, then, a kind of duty, a test of loyalty, to use the pool.
July was the hottest in twenty-seven years. People brought their own lawn furniture over in station wagons and set it up. Teenage offspring and Swiss au-pair girls were established as lifeguards. A nylon rope with flotation corks, meant to divide the wading end from the diving end of the pool, was found coiled in the garage and reinstalled. Agnes Kleefield contributed an old refrigerator, which was wired to an outlet above Ted’s basement workbench and used to store ice, quinine water, and soft drinks. An honor system shoebox containing change appeared beside it; a little lost-and-found — an array of forgotten sunglasses, flippers, jtowels, lotions, paperbacks, shirts, even underwear — materialized on the Turners’ side steps. When people, that July, said, «Meet you at the pool», they did not mean the public pool past the shopping center, or the country-club pool beside the first tee. They meant the Turners’. Restrictions on admission — were difficult to enforce tactfully. A visiting Methodist bishop, two Taiwanese economists, an entire girls’ Softball team from Darien, an eminent Canadian poet, the archery champion of Hartford, the six members of a black rock group called the Good Intentions, an ex-mistress of Aly Khan, the lavender-haired mother-in-law of a Nixon adviser not quite of Cabinet rank, an infant of six weeks, a man who was killed the next day on the Merritt Parkway, a Filipino who could stay on the pool bottom for eighty seconds, two Texans who kept cigars in their mouths and hats on their heads, three telephone linemen, four expatriate Czechs, a student Maoist from Wesleyan, and the postman all swam, as guests, in the Turners’ pool, though not all at once. After the daytime crowd ebbed, and the shoebox was put back in the refrigerator, and the last au-pair girl took the last goosefleshed, wrinkled child shivering home to supper, there was a tide of evening activity, trysts (Mrs. Kleefield and the Nicholson boy, most notoriously) and what some called, overdramatically, orgies. True, late splashes and excited guffaws did often keep Mrs. Chace awake, and the Murtaugh children spent hours at their attic window with binoculars. And there was the evidence of the lost underwear.