【英文原著类】MOON-FACE AND OTHER STORIES(月亮的脸和其他).pdf

MOON-FACE AND OTHER STORIES
MOON-FACE AND
OTHER STORIES
BY JACK LONDON
1
MOON-FACE AND OTHER STORIES
MOON-FACE
John Claverhouse was a moon-faced man. You know the kind, cheek-
bones wide apart, chin and forehead melting into the cheeks plete
the perfect round, and the nose, broad and pudgy, equidistant from the
circumference, flattened against the very centre of the face like a dough-
ball upon the ceiling. Perhaps that is why I hated him, for truly he had
e an offense to my eyes, and I believed the earth to be cumbered
with his presence. Perhaps my mother may have been superstitious of the
moon and looked upon it over the wrong shoulder at the wrong time.
Be that as it may, I hated John Claverhouse. Not that he had done me
what society would consider a wrong or an ill turn. Far from it. The evil
was of a deeper, subtler sort; so elusive, so intangible, as to defy clear,
definite analysis in words. We all experience such things at some period in
our lives. For the first time we see a certain individual, one who the very
instant before we did not dream existed; and yet, at the first moment of
meeting, we say: "I do not like that man." Why do we not like him? Ah,
we do not know why; we know only that we do not. We have taken a
dislike, that is all. And so I with John Claverhouse.
What right had such a man to be happy? Yet he was an optimist. He
was always gleeful and laughing. All things were always all right, curse
him! Ah I how it grated on my soul that he should be so happy! Other men
could laugh, and it did not bother me. I even used to laugh myself--before
I met John Claverhouse.
But his laugh! It irritated me, maddened me, as nothing else under the
sun could irritate or madden me. It haunted me, gripped hold of me, and
would not let me go. It was a huge, Gargantuan laugh. Waking or sleeping
it was always with me, whirring and jarring across my heart-strings like an
enormous rasp. At break of day it came whooping across th