嘉定同济大学现代大学英语精读Unit新SpringSowing原文

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Spring Sowing

It was still dark when Martin Delaney and his wife Mary got up. Martin

stood in his shirt by the window, rubbing his eyes and yawning, while

Mary raked out the live coals that had lain hidden in the ashes on the

hearth all night. Outside, cocks were crowing and a white streak was

rising form the ground, as it were, and beginning to scatter the

darkness. It was a February morning, dry, cold and starry.

The couple sat down to their breakfast of tea, bread and butter, in

silence. They had only been married the previous autumn and it was

hateful leaving a warm bed at such and early hour. Martin, with his

brown hair and eyes, his freckled face and his little fair moustache,

looked too young to be married, and his wife looked hardly more than a

girl, red-cheeked and blue-eyed, her black hair piled at the rear of her

head with a large comb gleaming in the middle of the pile, Spanish

fashion. They were both dressed in rough homespuns, and both wore the

loose white shirt that Inverara peasants use for work in the fields.

They ate in silence, sleepy and yet on fire with excitement, for it was

the first day of their first spring sowing as man and wife. And each

felt the glamour of that day on which they were to open up the earth

together and plant seeds in it. But somehow the imminence of an event

that had been long expected loved, feared and prepared for made them

dejected. Mary, with her shrewd woman's mind, thought of as many things

as there are in life as a woman would in the first joy and anxiety of

her mating. But Martin's mind was fixed on one thought. Would he be able

to prove himself a man worthy of being the head of a family by dong his

spring sowing well?

In the barn after breakfast, when they were getting the potato seeds and

the line for measuring the ground and the spade, Martin fell over a

basket in the half-darkness of the barn, he swore and said that a man

would be better off dead than.. But before he could finish whatever he

was going to say, Mary had her arms around his waist and her face to his.

And there was a tremor in her voice. And somehow, as they embraced, all

their irritation and sleepiness left them. And they stood there

embracing until at last Martin pushed her from him with pretended

roughness and said:

at this rate.

Still, as they walked silently in their rawhide shoes through the little

hamlet, there was not a soul about. Lights were glimmering in the

windows of a few cabins. The sky had a big grey crack in it in the east,

as if it were going to burst in order to give birth to the sun. Birds

were singing somewhere at a distance. Martin and Mary rested their

baskets of seeds on a fence outside the village and Martin whispered to

Mary proudly:

little cluster of cabins that was the centre of their world, with

throbbing hearts. For the joy of spring had now taken complete hold of

them.

They reached the little field where they were to sow. It was a little

triangular patch of ground under an ivy-covered limestone hill. The

little field had been manured with seaweed some weeks before, and the

weeds had rotted and whitened on the grass. And there was a big red heap

of fresh seaweed lying in a corner by the fence to be spread under the

seeds as they were laid. Martin, in spite of the cold, threw off

everything above his waist except his striped woolen shirt. Then he spat

on his hands, seized his spade and cried:

kind of a man you have, Mary.

sunset to see what kind of a man I have got.

The work began. Martin measured the ground by the southern fence for the

first ridge, a strip of ground four feet wide, and he placed the line

along the edge and pegged it at each end. Then he spread fresh seaweed

over the strip. Mary filled her apron with seeds and began to lay them

in rows. When she was a little distance down the ridge, Martin advanced

with his spade to the head, eager to commence.

the first sod!

the ridge and running up to him .Her fingers outside her woolen mittens

were numb with the cold, and she couldn't wipe them in her apron. Her

cheeks seemed to be on fire. She put an arm round Martin's waist and

stood looking at the green sod his spade was going to cut, with the

excitement of a little child.

anybody saw us like this in the field of our spring sowing, what would

they take us for but a pair of useless, soft, empty-headed people that

would be sure to die of hunger? Huh!

eyes were fixed on the ground before hm. His eyes had a wild, eager

light in them as if some primeval impulse were burning within his brain

and driving out every other desire but that of asserting his manhood and

of subjugating the earth.

the same time and gazed distantly at the ground. Then Martin cut the sod,

and pressing the spade deep into the earth with his foot, he turned up

the first sod with a crunching sound as the grass roots were dragged out

of the earth. Mary sighed and walked back hurriedly to her seeds with

furrowed brows. She picked up her seeds and began to spread them rapidly

to drive out the sudden terror that had seized her at that moment when

she saw the fierce, hard look in her husband's eyes that were

unconscious of her presence. She became suddenly afraid of that pitiless,