【英文原著类】LOST FACE(丢失的脸).pdf

LOST FACE
LOST FACE
by Jack London
1
LOST FACE
LOST FACE
It was the end. Subienkow had travelled a long trail of bitterness and
horror, homing like a dove for the capitals of Europe, and here, farther
away than ever, in Russian America, the trail ceased. He sat in the snow,
arms tied behind him, waiting the torture. He stared curiously before him
at a huge Cossack, prone in the snow, moaning in his pain. The men had
finished handling the giant and turned him over to the women. That they
exceeded the fiendishness of the men, the man's cries attested.
Subienkow looked on, and shuddered. He was not afraid to die. He
had carried his life too long in his hands, on that weary trail from Warsaw
to Nulato, to shudder at mere dying. But he objected to the torture. It
offended his soul. And this offence, in turn, was not due to the mere pain
he must endure, but to the sorry spectacle the pain would make of him.
He knew that he would pray, and beg, and entreat, even as Big Ivan and
the others that had gone before. This would not be nice. To pass out
bravely and cleanly, with a smile and a jest--ah! that would have been the
way. But to lose control, to have his soul upset by the pangs of the flesh,
to screech and gibber like an ape, to e the veriest beast--ah, that was
what was so terrible.
There had been no chance to escape. From the beginning, when he
dreamed the fiery dream of Poland's independence, he had e a
puppet in the hands of Fate. From the beginning, at Warsaw, at St.
Petersburg, in the Siberian mines, in Kamtchatka, on the crazy boats of the
fur-thieves, Fate had been driving him to this end. Without doubt, in the
foundations of the world was graved this end for him-- for him, who was
so fine and sensitive, whose nerves scarcely sheltered under his skin, who
was a dreamer, and a poet, and an artist. Before he was dreamed of, it
had been determined that the quivering bundle of sensitiveness that
constituted him should be doomed