【英文原著类】Manalive(活人).pdf

Manalive
Manalive
by G. K. Chesterton
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Manalive
Part I
The Enigmas of Innocent Smith
Chapter I
How the Great Wind Came to Beacon House
A wind sprang high in the west, like a wave of unreasonable happiness,
and tore eastward across England, trailing with it the frosty scent of forests
and the cold intoxication of the sea. It a million holes and corners it
refreshed a man like a flagon, and astonished him like a blow. In the
inmost chambers of intricate and embowered houses it woke like a
domestic explosion, littering the floor with some professor's papers till
they seemed as precious as fugitive, or blowing out the candle by which a
boy read "Treasure Island" and wrapping him in roaring dark. But
everywhere it bore drama into undramatic lives, and carried the trump of
crisis across the world. Many a harassed mother in a mean backyard had
looked at a five dwarfish shirts on the clothes-line as at some small, sick
tragedy; it was as if she had hanged her five children. The wind came, and
they were full and kicking as if five fat imps had sprung into them; and far
down in her oppressed subconscious she half-remembered those coarse
comedies of her fathers when the elves still dwelt in the homes of men.
Many an unnoticed girl in a dank walled garden had tossed herself into the
hammock with the same intolerant gesture with which she might have
tossed herself into the Thames; and that wind rent the waving wall of
woods and lifted the hammock like a balloon, and showed her shapes of
quaint clouds far beyond, and pictures of bright villages far below, as if
she rode heaven in a fairy boat. Many a dusty clerk or cleric, plodding a
telescopic road of poplars, thought for the hundredth time that they were
like the plumes of a hearse; when this invisible energy caught and swung
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Manalive
and clashed them round his head like a wreath or salutation of seraphic
wings. There was in it something more inspired and authoritative even
than the