五只小猪16
时间：2024-12-17 01:18:20
（单词翻译:单击）
Narrative of Angela Warren
Dear Mr. Poirot,
I am keeping my promise to you and have written down all I can remember of that terrible time
sixteen years ago. But it was not until I started that I realized how very little I did remember. Until
the thing actually happened, you see, there is nothing to fix anything by.
I’ve just a vague memory of summer days—and isolated incidents, but I couldn’t say for certain
what summer they happened even! Amyas’s death was just a thunderclap coming out of the blue.
I’d had no warning of it, and I seem to have missed everything that led up to it.
I’ve been trying to think whether that was to be expected or not. Are most girls of fifteen as
blind and deaf and obtuse as I seem to have been? Perhaps they are. I was quick, I think, to gauge
people’s moods, but I never bothered my head about what caused those moods.
Besides, just at that time, I’d suddenly begun to discover the intoxication of words. Things that I
read, scraps of poetry—of Shakespeare—would echo in my head. I remember now walking along
the kitchen garden path repeating to myself in a kind of ecstatic delirium “under the glassy green
translucent wave”…It was just so lovely I had to say it over and over again.
And mixed up with these new discoveries and excitements there were all the things I’d liked
doing ever since I could remember. Swimming and climbing trees and eating fruit and playing
tricks on the stable boy and feeding the horses.
Caroline and Amyas I took for granted. They were the central figures in my world, but I never
thought about them or about their affairs or what they thought and felt.
I didn’t notice Elsa Greer’s coming particularly. I thought she was stupid and I didn’t even think
she was good-looking. I accepted her as someone rich but tiresome, whom Amyas was painting.
Actually, the very first intimation I had of the whole thing was what I overheard from the
terrace where I had escaped after lunch one day—Elsa said she was going to marry Amyas! It
struck me as just ridiculous. I remember tackling Amyas about it. In the garden at Handcross it
was. I said to him:
“Why does Elsa say she’s going to marry you? She couldn’t. People can’t have two wives—it’s
bigamy and they go to prison.”
Amyas got very angry and said: “How the devil did you hear that?”
I said I’d heard it through the library window.
He was angrier than ever then, and said it was high time I went to school and got out of the
habit of eavesdropping.
I still remember the resentment I felt when he said that. Because it was so unfair. Absolutely
and utterly unfair.
I stammered out angrily that I hadn’t been listening—and anyhow, I said, why did Elsa say a
silly thing like that?
Amyas said it was just a joke.
That ought to have satisfied me. It did—almost. But not quite.
I said to Elsa when we were on the way back: “I asked Amyas what you meant when you said
you were going to marry him, and he said it was just a joke.”
I felt that ought to snub her. But she only smiled.
I didn’t like that smile of hers. I went up to Caroline’s room. It was when she was dressing for
dinner. I asked her then outright if it were possible for Amyas to marry Elsa.
I remember Caroline’s answer as though I heard it now. She must have spoken with great
emphasis.
“Amyas will only marry Elsa after I am dead,” she said.
That reassured me completely. Death seemed ages away from us all. Nevertheless, I was still
very sore with Amyas about what he had said in the afternoon, and I went for him violently all
through dinner, and I remember we had a real flaming row, and I rushed out of the room and went
up to bed and howled myself to sleep.
I don’t remember much about the afternoon at Meredith Blake’s, although I do remember his
reading aloud the passage from the Phaedo describing Socrates’ death. I had never heard it before.
I thought it was the loveliest, most beautiful thing I had ever heard. I remember that—but I don’t
remember when it was. As far as I can recall now, it might have been any time that summer.
I don’t remember anything that happened the next morning either, though I have thought and
thought. I’ve a vague feeling that I must have bathed, and I think I remember being made to mend
something.
But it’s all very vague and dim till the time when Meredith came panting up the path from the
terrace, and his face was all grey and queer. I remember a coffee cup falling off the table and being
broken—Elsa did that. And I remember her running—suddenly running for all she was worth
down the path—and the awful look there was on her face.
I kept saying to myself: “Amyas is dead.” But it just didn’t seem real.
I remember Dr. Faussett coming and his grave face. Miss Williams was busy looking after
Caroline. I wandered about rather forlornly, getting in people’s way. I had a nasty sick feeling.
They wouldn’t let me go down and see Amyas. But by and by the police came and wrote down
things in notebooks, and presently they brought his body up on a stretcher covered with a cloth.
Miss Williams took me into Caroline’s room later. Caroline was on the sofa. She looked very
white and ill.
She kissed me and said she wanted me to go away as soon as I could, and it was all horrible, but
I wasn’t to worry or think about it any more than I could help. I was to join Carla at Lady
Tressillian’s because this house was to be kept as empty as possible.
I clung to Caroline and said I didn’t want to go away. I wanted to stay with her. She said she
knew I did, but it was better for me to go away and would take a lot of worry off her mind. And
Miss Williams chipped in and said:
“The best way you can help your sister, Angela, is to do what she wants you to do without
making a fuss about it.”
So I said I would do whatever Caroline wished. And Caroline said: “That’s my darling Angela.”
And she hugged me and said there was nothing to worry about, and to talk about it and think about
it all as little as possible.
I had to go down and talk to a Police Superintendent. He was very kind, asked me when I had
last seen Amyas and a lot of other questions which seemed to me quite pointless at the time, but
which, of course, I see the point of now. He satisfied himself that there was nothing that I could
tell him which he hadn’t already heard from the others. So he told Miss Williams that he saw no
objection to my going over to Ferriby Grange to Lady Tressillian’s.
I went there, and Lady Tressillian was very kind to me. But of course I soon had to know the
truth. They arrested Caroline almost at once. I was so horrified and dumbfounded that I became
quite ill.
I heard afterwards that Caroline was terribly worried about me. It was at her insistence that I
was sent out of England before the trial came on. But that I have told you already.
As you see, what I have to put down is pitiably meagre. Since talking to you I have gone over
the little I remember painstakingly, racking my memory for details of this or that person’s
expression or reaction. I can remember nothing consistent with guilt. Elsa’s frenzy. Meredith’s
grey worried face. Philip’s grief and fury—they all seem natural enough. I suppose, though,
someone could have been playing a part?
I only know this, Caroline did not do it.
I am quite certain on this point, and always shall be, but I have no evidence to offer except my
own intimate knowledge of her character.
End of Angela Warren’s Narrative.
©2005-2010英文阅读网