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PART I
I
THIS is the saddest story I have ever heard. We had known the Ashburnhams for nine seasons of the town of Nauheim with an extreme intimacy - or, rather with an acquaintanceship as loose and easy and yet as close as a good glove’s with your hand. -----
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DIO I
I
OVO je najtužniji priča koje sam ikada čuo. Imali smo poznati su Ashburnhams za devet sezona grada Nauheim s ekstremnim intimnosti - ili, radije s zbližavanja kao labav i jednostavan, a opet toliko blizu kao dobar rukavica je sa svojom rukom.------------------------------
1. dio
I
Ovo je najtužnija priča koju sam ikada čuo. Ashburnhamove smo znali devet sezona (?) u gradu Nauheimu izuzetno intimno - ili, bolje rečeno, naše je poznanstvo bilo neobavezno i jednostavno, a opet blisko kao što je to dobra rukavica s vašom rukom. -----
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----- My wife and I knew Captain and Mrs Ashburnham as well as it was possible to know anybody, and yet, in another sense, we knew nothing at all about them. -----
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----- Moja supruga i ja znao kapetana i gospođa Ashburnham, kao i da je moguće da znam nikoga, a ipak, u drugom smislu, znali smo da se uopće ništa o njima.-----
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----- Moja supruga i ja smo poznavali kapetana i gđu. Ashburnham onoliko dobro koliko je bilo moguće ikoga poznavati, a ipak, u drugom smislu, o njima nismo znali apsolutno ništa. -----
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-----This is, I believe, a state of things only possible with English people of whom, till today, when I sit down to puzzle out what I know of this sad affair, I knew nothing whatever. -----
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----- To je, vjerujem, stanje stvari moguće samo sa englezima, od kojih je, do danas, kada sam sjesti odgonetnuti što ja znam ove tužne afere, nisam ništa znao štogod.-----
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----- To je, vjerujem, stanje stvari koje je moguće samo sa Englezima, o kojima ja, do današnjeg dana, kad sjedam i počinjem odgonetavati ono što ja znam o ovoj tužnoj aferi, ne znam uopće ništa. -----
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----- Six months ago I had never been to England, and, certainly, I had never sounded the depths of an English heart. I had known the shallows.
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----- Prije šest mjeseci sam nikada nije bio u Engleskoj, i, naravno, nikada nisam zvučala dubine engleskog srcu. Sam znao plićaku.----------------------
----- Do prije šest mjeseci nikad nisam bio u Engleskonj i, naravno, nikad nisam odmjerio dubine jednog engleskog srca. Poznavao sam plićake.
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I don’t mean to say that we were not acquainted with many English people. Living, as we perforce lived, in Europe, and being, as we perforce were, leisured Americans, which is as much as to say that we were unAmerican, we were thrown very much into the society of the nicer English. Paris, you see, was our home. Somewhere between Nice and Bordighera provided yearly winter quarters for us, and Nauheim always received us from July to September. You will gather from this statement that one of us had, as the saying is, a “heart”, and, from the statement that my wife is dead, that she was the sufferer.
Captain Ashburnham also had a heart. But, whereas a yearly month or so at Nauheim tuned him up to exactly the right pitch for the rest of the twelvemonth, the two months or so were only just enough to keep poor Florence alive from year to year. The reason for his heart was, approximately, polo, or too much hard sportsmanship in his youth. The reason for poor Florence’s broken years was a storm at sea upon our first crossing to Europe, and the immediate reasons for our imprisonment in that continent were doctor’s orders. They said that even the short Channel crossing might well kill the poor thing.
When we all first met, Captain Ashburnham, home on sick leave from an India to which he was never to return, was thirty-three; Mrs Ashburnham Leonora — was thirty-one. I was thirty-six and poor Florence thirty. Thus today Florence would have been thirty-nine and Captain Ashburnham forty-two; whereas I am forty-five and Leonora forty. You will perceive, therefore, that our friendship has been a young-middle-aged affair, since we were all of us of quite quiet dispositions, the Ashburnhams being more particularly what in England it is the custom to call “quite good people”.
They were descended, as you will probably expect, from the Ashburnham who accompanied Charles I to the scaffold, and, as you must also expect with this class of English people, you would never have noticed it. Mrs Ashburnham was a Powys; Florence was a Hurlbird of Stamford, Connecticut, where, as you know, they are more old-fashioned than even the inhabitants of Cranford, England, could have been. I myself am a Dowell of Philadelphia, Pa., where, it is historically true, there are more old English families than you would find in any six English counties taken together. I carry about with me, indeed — as if it were the only thing that invisibly anchored me to any spot upon the globe — the title deeds of my farm, which once covered several blocks between Chestnut and Walnut Streets. These title deeds are of wampum, the grant of an Indian chief to the first Dowell, who left Farnham in Surrey in company with William Penn. Florence’s people, as is so often the case with the inhabitants of Connecticut, came from the neighbourhood of Fordingbridge, where the Ashburnhams’ place is. From there, at this moment, I am actually writing.
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