佐倉セミナーハウス公開講座　１日目のテキストです

This all happened in England a long time ago, when that George who spoke English with a heavy German accent and hated his sons was King. At that time there lived in London a lady who had nothing to do but give parties. Her name was Flora, Lady Neville, and she was a widow and very old. She lived in a great house not far from Buckingham Palace, and she had so many servants that she could not possibly remember all their names; indeed, there were some she had never even seen. She had more food than she could eat, more gowns than she could ever wear; she had wine in her cellars that no one would drink in her lifetime, and her private vaults were filled with great works of art that she did not know she owned. She spent the last years of her life giving parties and balls to which the greatest lords of England; and sometimes the King himself; came, and she was known as the wisest and wittiest woman in all London.
But in time her own parties began to bore her, and though she invited the most famous people in the land and hired the greatest jugglers and acrobats and dancers and magicians to entertain them, still she found her parties duller and duller. Listening to court gossip, which she had always loved, made her yawn. The most marvelous music, the most exciting feats of magic put her to sleep. Watching a beautiful young couple dance by her made her feel sad, and she hated to feel sad.
And so, one summer afternoon she called her closest friends around her and said to them, “More and more I find that my parties entertain everyone but me. The secret pf my long life is that nothing has ever been dull for me. For all my life, I have been interested in everything I saw and been anxious to see more. But I cannot stand to be bored, especially if they are my own. Therefore, to my next ball I shall invite the one guest I am sure no one, not even myself, could possibly find boring. My friends, the guest of honor at my next party shall be Death himself!
A young poet thought that this was a wonderful idea, but the rest of her friends were terrified and drew back from her. They did not want to die, they pleaded with her. Death would come for them when he was ready; why should she invite him before the appointed hour, which would arrive soon enough? But Lady Neville said, “Precisely. If Death has planned to take any of us on the night of my party, he will come whether he is invited or not. But if none of us are to die, then I think it would be charming to have death among us; perhaps even to perform some little trick if he is in a good humor. And think of being able to say that we had been to a party with Death! All of London will envy us, all of England!”
The idea began to please her friends, but a young lord, very new to London, suggested timidly, “Death is so busy. Suppose he has work to do and cannot accept your invitation?”
“No one has ever refused an invitation of mine,” said Lady Neville, “Not even the King.” And the young lord was not invited to her party.

She sat down then and there and wrote out the invitation. There was some dispute among her friends as to how they should address Death. “His Lordship Death” seemed to place him only on the level of a viscount or a baron. “His Grace Death" met with more acceptance, but Lady Neville said it sounded hypocritical. And to refer to Death as “His Majesty” was to make him the equal of the King of England, which even Lady Neville would not, dare to do. It was finally decided that all should speak of him as “His Eminence Death,” which pleased nearly everyone.
Captain Compson, known both as England’s most dashing cavalry officer and most elegant rake, remarked next, “That’s all very well, but how is the invitation to reach Death? Does anyone here know where he lives?”
“Death undoubtedly lives in London,” said Lady Neville, “like everyone else of any importance, though he probably goes to Deauville for the summer. Actually, Death must live fairly near my own house. This is much the best section of London, and you could hardly expect a person of Death’s importance to live anywhere else. When I stop to think of it, it’s really rather strange that we haven’t met before now, on the street.”
Most of her friends agreed with her, but the poet, whose name was David Lorimond, cried out, “No, my lady, you are wrong! Death lives among the poor. Death lives in the foulest, darkest alleys of this city, in some vile, rat-ridden hovel that smell of ;” He stopped here, partly because he had never been inside such a hut or thought of wondering what it smelled like. “Death lives among the poor,” he went on, “and comes to visit them every day, for he is their only friend.”

--
Then an idea came to her. “My hairdresser has a sick child, I understand,” She said. “He was telling me about it yesterday, sounding most dull and hopeless. I will send for him and give him the invitation, and he in his turn can give it to Death when he comes to take the brat. A bit unconventional, I admit, but I see no other way.”

It was Captain Compson, however, who pointed out the one thing that no one else had noticed. “Look at the handwriting itself,” he said. “Have you ever seen anything more graceful? The letters seem as light as birds. I think we have wasted our time speaking of Death as His This and His That. A woman wrote this note.”

But the hairdresser refused to speak, though they gathered around him and begged him to say who had given him the note. At first they promised him all sorts of rewards, and later they threatened to do terrible things to him. “Did you write this card?” he was asked, and “Who wrote it, then? Was it a living woman? Was it really Death? Did Death say anything to you? How did you know it was Death? Is Death a woman? Are you trying to make fools of us all?”
Not a word from the hairdresser, not one word, and finally Lady Neville called her servants to have him whipped and thrown into the street. He did not look at her as they took him away, or uttered a sound.

　けれども髪結い師は、何も話そうとはしなかった。皆で彼を取り囲み、誰が彼に手紙を渡したのか、話すように頼み込んだのだがだめだった。最初は何でも望みのものを褒美に取らせよう、と約束してみた。次には酷い目に遭わせると脅しつけてみた。「自分で書いたのではないのか？」彼は問いただされた。「では、書いたのは誰なんだ。それは生きた人間の女だったのか？本当に死神が書いたというのか？死神は何かお前に語ったのか？どうしてそれが死神だと分かった？死神というのは女なのか？私たちを騙そうとしているのではあるまいな。」
　髪結い師からは何も聞き出すことはできなかった。一言も、彼は語ることはなかった。とうとうネヴィル夫人は召使い達を呼んで、彼を打ちのめして、通りに放り出すように命じた。召使い達に引き出されていく時も、髪結い師はネヴィル夫人の方に目を向けることもせず、一言さえも口からもらすことはなかった。


She could not have been more than nineteen. Her hair was yellow, and she wore it long. It fell thickly upon her bare shoulders that gleamed warmly through it, two limestone islands rising out of a dark golden sea. Her face was wide at the forehead and cheekbones, and narrow at the chin, and her skin was so clear that many of the ladies there; Lady Neville among them ; touched their own faces as though their own skin had rasped their fingers. Her mouth was pale, where the mouths of the other women were red, and orange and even purple. Her eyebrows, thicker and straighter than was fashionable, met over dark, calm eyes that were set so deep in her young face and were so black, so uncompromisingly black, that the middle-aged wife of a middle-aged lord murmured, “Touch of the gypsy there, I think.”
“Or something worse,” suggested her husband’s mistress.

“--- Do all of you want me to stay? For if one of you says to me, no, go away, then I must leave at once and never return. Be sure. Do you all want me?”
And everyone there cried with one voice, “Yes! Yes, you must stay with us. You are so beautiful that we cannot let you go.”
“We are tired,” said Captain Compson.
“We are blind,” said Lorimond, adding, “especially to poetry.”
“We are afraid,” said Lord Torrance quietly, and his wife took his arm and said, “Both of us.”
“We are dull and stupid,” said Lady Neville, “and growing old uselessly. Stay with us, Lady Death.”
And then Death smiled sweetly and radiantly and took a step forward, and it was as though she had come down among them from a great height. “Very well,” she said. “I will stay with you. I will be Death no more. I will be a woman.”

“Not one,” said Death. “There is no one quite so weary of being human, no one who knows better how meaningless it is to be alive. And there is no one else here with the power to treat life” ; and she smiled sweetly and cruelly – “the life of your hairdresser’s child, for instance, as the meaningless thing it is. Death has a heart, but it is forever an empty heart, and I think, Lady Neville, that your heart is like a dry riverbed, like a seashell. You will be very content as Death, more so than I, for I was very young when I became Death.”