Debt to Dickens这篇文章的电子版!

Debt to Dickens这篇文章的电子版!

A DEBT TO DICKENS
Pearl S. Buck
I have long looked for an opportunity to pay a certain debt which I have owed since I was seven years old. Debts are usually burdens, but this is no ordinary debt, and it is no burden, except as the feeling of warm gratitude may ache in one until it is expressed. My debt is to an Englishman, who long ago in china rendered an inestimable service to a small American child. That child was myself and that English man was Charles Dickens. I know no better way to meet my obligation than to write down what Charles Dickens did in china for an American child.
First, you must picture to yourself that child, living quite solitary in a remote Chinese countryside, in a small mission bungalow perched upon a hill among the rice fields in the valleys below. In the near distance wound that deep, treacherous, golden river, the Yangtze, and some of the most terrifying and sinister, as well as the most delightful and exciting moments of that child’s life, were spent beside the river. She loved to crawl along its banks upon the rocks or upon the muddy flats and watch for the lifting of the huge four-square nets that hung into the moving yellow flood, and see out of that flood come perhaps again and again an empty net, but sometimes great flashing, twisting silver bodies of fish. She accepted a bowl of rice and cabbage often at meal time and sat among the peasants on the threshing floor about the door and ate, usually in silence, listening and listening, answering their kindly, careless questions, bearing with shy, painful smiles their kind, teasing laughter at her yellow curls and unfortunate blue eyes, which they thought so ugly. She was, as she knew, very alien. Upon the streets of the great city where sometimes she went she learned to accept the cry of foreign devil, and to realize she was a foreign devil. Once when she was very very small, before she knew better, she turned as worms sill, and flung back a word she had learned among the boat folk when they quarreled. It was a word so wicked that the youth who called her foreign devil ran howling with terror, and thereafter she went more contentedly, not using the word any more because of its great wickedness, but knowing she had it to use if she needed it very much.
She grew from a very tiny child into a bigger child, still knowing she was alien. However kindly the people about her might be, and they were much more often kind than not, she knew that she was foreign to them. And she wondered very much about her own folk and where they were and how they looked and at what they played. But she did not know. In the bungalow were her parents, very busy, very, very busy, and when she had learned her lessons in the morning quickly, they were too busy to pay much heed to her and so she wandered about a great deal, seeing and learning all sorts of things. She had fun. But very often she used to wonder, “Where are the other children like me? What is it like in the country where they live?” she longed very much, I can remember, to have some of them to play with. But she never had them.
To this small, isolated creature there came one day an extraordinary accident. She was an impossibly voracious reader. She would like to have had children’s books, but there were none, and so she read everything, ----Plutarch’s “Lives” and Foxe’s “Martyrs,” the Bible, church history, and the hot spots in Jonathan Edwards’s sermons, and conversations out of Shakespeare, and bits of Tennyson and Browning which she could not understand at all. Then one day she looked doubtfully at a long row of somber blue books on a very high shelf. They were quite beyond her reach. Later she discovered this was because they were novels. But being desperate she put a three-cornered bamboo stool on top of a small table and climbed up and stared at the bindings and in faded black titles she read “Oliver Twist,” by Charles Dickens, and for the essential realism of his portrayal of life among the poor and the lower-middle class of England. Oliver Twist (1838) is a novel by Charles Dickens about the boy Oliver Twist who starts his career in the workhouse, then falls into the hands of a gang of pickpockets and housebreakers, and is finally received into the house of Mrs. Maylie, his aunt.). She was then a little past seven years old. It was a very hot August day, in the afternoon about three o’clock, when the household was asleep, all except the indefatigable parents, and they were very, very busy. She tool “Oliver Twist” out of his place ----it was fat and thick, for “Hard Times” was bound with it ----and in great peril descended, and stopping in the pantry for a pocket full of peanuts, she made off to a secret corner of the veranda into which only a small, agile child could squeeze, and opened the closely printed pages of an old edition, and discovered her playmates.
How can I make you know what that discovery was to that small, lonely child? There in that corner above the country road in China, with vendors passing beneath me, I entered into my own heritage. I cannot tell you about those hours. I know I was roused at six o’clock by the call to my supper, and I looked about dazed, to discover the long rays of the late afternoon sun streaming across the valleys. I remember twice I closed the book and burst into tears, unable to bear the tragedy of Oliver Twist, and then opened it quickly again, burning to know more. I remember, most significant of all, that I forgot to touch a peanut, and my pocket was still quite full when I was called. I went to my supper in a dream, and read as late as I dared in my bed afterward, and slept with the book under my pillow, and woke again in the early morning. When “Oliver Twist” was finished, and after it “Hard Times,” I was wretched with indecision. I felt I must read it all straight over again, and yet I was voracious for that long row of blue books. What was in them? I climbed up again, finally, and put “Oliver Twist” at the beginning, and began on the next one, which was “David Copperfield.” I resolved to read straight through the row and then begin at the beginning once more and read straight through again.
This program I carried on consistently, over and over, for about ten years, and after that I still kept a Dickens book on hand, so to speak, to dip into and feel myself at home again. Today I have for him a feeling which I have for no other human soul. He opened my eyes to people, he taught me to love all sorts of people, high and low, rich and poor, the old and little children. He taught me to hate hypocrisy and pious mouthing of unctuous words. He taught me that beneath gruffness there may be kindness, and that kindness is the sweetest thing in the word, and goodness is the best thing in the world. Eh taught me to despise money grubbing. People today say he is obvious and sentimental and childish in his analysis of character. It may be so, and yet I have found people surprisingly like those he wrote about ----the good a little less undiluted, perhaps, and the evil a little more mixed. And I do not regret that simplicity of his, for it had its own virtue. The virtue was a great zest for life. If he saw everything black and white, it was because life rushed out of him strong and clear, full of love and hate. He gave me that zest, that immense joy in life and in people, and in their variety.
He gave me, too, my first real glimpse of a kindly English God, a sort of father, to whom the childlike and the humble might turn. There was no talk of hell in his books. He made Christmas for me, a merry, roaring English Christmas, full of goodies and plum puddings and merriment and friendly cheer. I went to his parties over and over again, for I had no others. I remember one dreadful famine winter the thing that kept me laughing and still a child was “Pickwick Papers.” I read it over and over, and laughed, as I still laugh, over the Wellers and the widow and Mr. Pickwick and all his merry company. They were as real to me as the sad folk outside the compound walls, and they saved me.