死亡约会 Part I Chapter 3（2）（在线收听）

Ordinary commonplace tourist’s talk. And yet, somehow, Dr Gerard felt a queer conviction thatthese overheard scraps of dialogue were all singularly unreal. They were a mask—a cover forsomething that surged and eddied underneath—something too deep and formless for words…Again he shot a covert glance from behind the shelter of Le Matin.

Lennox? That was the elder brother. The same family likeness could be traced, but there was adifference. Lennox was not so highly strung; he was, Gerard decided, of a less nervoustemperament. But about him, too, there seemed something odd. There was no sign of musculartension about him as there was about the other two. He sat relaxed, limp. Puzzling, searchingamong memories of patients he had seen sitting like that in hospital wards, Gerard thought:

‘He is exhausted—yes, exhausted with suffering. That look in the eyes—the look you see in awounded dog or a sick horse—dumb bestial endurance…It is odd, that…Physically there seemsnothing wrong with him…Yet there is no doubt that lately he has been through much suffering—mental suffering—now he no longer suffers—he endures dumbly—waiting, I think, for the blow tofall…What blow? Am I fancying all this? No, the man is waiting for something, for the end tocome. So cancer patients lie and wait, thankful that an anodyne dulls the pain a little…’

Lennox Boynton got up and retrieved a ball of wool that the old lady had dropped.

‘Here you are, Mother.’

‘Thank you.’

What was she knitting, this monumental impassive old woman? Something thick and coarse.

Gerard thought: ‘Mittens for inhabitants of a workhouse!’ And smiled at his own fantasy.

He turned his attention to the youngest member of the party—the girl with the golden-red hair.

She was, perhaps, nineteen. Her skin had the exquisite clearness that often goes with red hair.

Although over thin, it was a beautiful face. She was sitting smiling to herself—smiling into space.

There was something a little curious about that smile. It was so far removed from the SolomonHotel, from Jerusalem…It reminded Dr Gerard of something…Presently it came to him in a flash.

It was the strange unearthly smile that lifts the lips of the Maidens in the Acropolis at Athens—something remote and lovely and a little inhuman…The magic of the smile, her exquisite stillnessgave him a little pang.

And then with a shock, Dr Gerard noticed her hands. They were concealed from the groupround her by the table, but he could see them clearly from where he sat. In the shelter of her lapthey were picking—picking—tearing a delicate handkerchief into tiny shreds.

It gave him a horrible shock. The aloof remote smile—the still body—and the busy destructivehands…