been ฉันรักแปลTHE SNOW GOOSE
PAUL GALLICO
THE Great Marsh lies on the Essex coast between the village of Chelmbury and the
ancient Saxon oyster-fishing hamlet of Wickaeldroth. It is one of the last of the wild
places of England, a low, far-reaching expanse of grass and reeds and half-submerged
meadowlands ending in the great saltings and mud flats and tidal pools near the restless
sea.
Tidal creeks and estuaries and the crooked, meandering arms of many little rivers
whose mouths lap at the edge of the ocean cut through the sodden land that seems to rise
and fall and breathe with the recurrence of the daily tides. It is desolate, utterly lonely,
and made lonelier by the calls and cries of the wildfowl that make their homes in the
marshlands and saltings - the wildgeese and the gulls, the teal and widgeon, the redshanks
and curlews that pick their way through the tidal pools. Of human habitants there are
none, and none are seen, with the occasional exception of a wild-fowler or native oysterfishermen,
who still ply a trade already ancient when the Normans came to Hastings.
Greys and blues and soft greens are the colours, for when the skies are dark in the long
winters, the many waters of the beaches and marshes reflect the cold and sombre colour.
But sometimes, with sunrise and sunset, sky and land are aflame with red and golden fire.
Hard by one of the winding arms of the little River Aelder runs the embankment of an
old sea wall, smooth and solid, without a break, a bulwark to the land against the
encroaching sea. Deep into a salting some three miles from the English Channel it runs,
and there turns north. At that corner its face is gouged, broken and shattered. It has been
breached, and at the breach the hungry sea has already entered and taken for its own the
land, the wall, and all that stood there.
At low water the blackened and ruptured stones of the ruins of an abandoned
lighthouse show above the surface, with here and there, like buoy markers, the top of a
sagging fence-post. Once this lighthouse abutted on the sea and was a beacon on the
Essex coast. Time shifted land and water, and its usefulness came to an end.
Lately it served again as a human habitation. In it there lived a lonely man. His body
was warped, but his heart was filled with love for wild and hunted things. He was ugly to
look upon, but he created great beauty. It is about him, and a child who came to know
him and see beyond the grotesque form that housed him to what lay within, that this story
is told.
It is not a story that falls easily and smoothly into sequence. It has been garnered from
many sources and from many people. Some of it comes in the form of fragments from
men who looked upon strange and violent scenes. For the sea has claimed its own and
spreads its rippled blanket over the site, and the great white bird with the black-tipped
pinions that saw it all from the beginning to the end has returned to the dark, frozen
silences of the north-lands whence it came.
IN the late spring of 1930 Philip Rhayader came to the abandoned lighthouse at the
mouth of the Aelder. He bought the light and many acres of marshland and salting
surrounding it.
He lived and worked there alone the year round. He was a painter of birds and of
nature, who, for reasons, had withdrawn from all human society. Some of the reasons
were apparent on his fortnightly visits to the little village of Chelmbury for supplies,
where the natives looked askance at his mis-shapen body and dark visage. For he was a
hunchback and his left arm was crippled, thin and bent at the wrist, like the claw of a
bird.
They soon became used to his queer figure, small but powerful, the massive, dark,
bearded head set just slightly below the mysterious mound on his back, the glowing eyes
and the clawed hand, and marked him off as ‘that queer painter chap that Jives down to
lighthouse.’
Physical deformity often breeds hatred of humanity in men. Rhayader did not hate; he
loved very greatly, man, the animal kingdom, and all nature.
His heart was filled with pity and understanding. He had mastered his handicap, but he
could not master the rebuffs he suffered, due to his appearance. The thing that drove him
into seclusion was his failure to find anywhere a return of the warmth that flowed from
him. He repelled women. Men would have warmed to him had they got to know him. But
the mere fact that an effort was being made hurt Rhayader and drove him to avoid the
person making it.
He was twenty-seven when he came to the Great Marsh. He had travelled much and
fought valiantly before he made the decision to withdraw from a world in which he could
not take part as other men. For all the artist’s sensitivity and woman’s tenderness locked
in his barrel breast, he was very much a man.
In his retreat he had his birds, his paintings, and his boat. He owned a sixteen-footer,
which he sailed with wonderful skill. Alone, with no eyes to watch him, he managed well
with his deformed hand, and he often used his strong teeth to handle the sheets of his
billowing sails in a tricky blow.
He would sail the tidal creek and estuaries and out to sea, and would be gone for days
at a time, looking for new species of birds to photograph or sketch, and he became an
adept at netting them to add to his collection of tamed wildfowl in the pen near his studio
that formed the nucleus of a sanctuary.