2024年4月25日发(作者：电脑闪屏怎么解决)

A Shocking Accident

By Graham Greene

1

Jerome was called into his housemaster's room in the break between the second

and the third class on a Tuesday morning. He had no fear of trouble, for he was a

warden -- the name that the proprietor and headmaster of a rather expensive

preparatory school had chosen to give to approved, reliable boys in the lower forms

(from a warden one became a guardian and finally before leaving, it was hoped for

Marlborough or Rugby, a crusader). The housemaster, Mr Wordsworth, sat behind his

desk with an appearance of perplexity and apprehension. Jerome had the odd

impression when he entered that he was a cause of fear.

“Sit down, Jerome,” Mr Wordsworth said. “All going well with the

trigonometry?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’ve had a telephone call, Jerome. From your aunt. I’m afraid I have bad news

for you.”

“Yes, sir?”

“Your father has had an accident.”

“Oh.”

Mr Wordsworth looked at him with some surprise. “A serious accident.”

“Yes, sir?”

Jerome worshipped his father: the verb is exact. As man recreates God, so

Jerome recreated his father -- from a restless widowed author into a mysterious

adventurer who traveled in far places -- Nice, Beirut, Majorca, even the Canaries. The

time had arrived about his eighth birthday when Jerome believed that his father either

“ran guns” or was a member of the British Secret Service. Now it occurred to him that

his father might have been wounded in “a hail of machine-gun bullets”.

Mr Wordsworth played with the ruler on his desk. He seemed at a loss how to

continue. He said, “You know your father was in Naples?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Your aunt heard from the hospital today.”

“Oh.”

Mr Wordsworth said with desperation, “It was a street accident.”

“Yes, sir?” It seemed quite likely to Jerome that they would call it a street

accident. The police of course had fired first; his father would not take human life

except as a last resort.

“I’m afraid your father was very seriously hurt indeed.”

“Oh.”

“In fact, Jerome, he died yesterday. Quite without pain.”

“Did they shoot him through the heart?”

“I beg your pardon. What did you say, Jerome?”

“Did they shoot him through the heart?”

“Nobody shot him, Jerome. A pig fell on him.” An inexplicable convulsion took

place in the nerves of Mr Wordsworth’s face; it really looked for a moment as though

he were going to laugh. He closed his eyes, composed his features and said rapidly as

though it were necessary to expel the story as rapidly as possible. “Your father was

walking along a street in Naples when a pig fell on him. A shocking accident.

Apparently in the poorer quarters of Naples they keep pigs on their balconies. This

one was on the fifth floor. It had grown too fat. The balcony broke. The pig fell on

your father.”

Mr Wordsworth left his desk rapidly and went to the window, turning his back on

Jerome. He shook a little with emotion.

Jerome said, “What happened to the pig?”

2

This was not callousness on the part of Jerome, as it was interpreted by Mr

Wordsworth to his colleagues (he even discussed with them whether, perhaps, Jerome

was yet fitted to be a warden). Jerome was only attempting to visualize the strange

scene to get the details right. Nor was Jerome a boy who cried; he was a boy who

brooded, and it never occurred to him at his preparatory school that the circumstances

of his father’s death were comic -- they were still part of the mysteries of life. It was

later, in his first term at his public school, when he told the story to his best friend,

that he began to realize how it affected others. Naturally after that disclosure he was

known, rather unreasonably, as Pig.

Unfortunately his aunt had no sense of humor. There was an enlarged snapshot of

his father on the piano; a large sad man in an unsuitable dark suit posed in Capri with

an umbrella (to guard him against sunstroke), the Faraglione rocks forming the

background. By the age of sixteen Jerome was well aware that the portrait looked

more like the author of Sunshine and Shade and Ramblers in the Balearics than an

agent of the Secret Service. All the same he loved the memory of his father: he still

possessed an album filled with picture postcards (the stamps had been soaked off long

ago for his other collection), and it pained him when his aunt embarked with strangers

on the story of his father’s death.

“A shocking accident,” she would begin, and the stranger would compose his or

her features into the correct shape for interest and commiseration. Both reactions, of

course, were false, but it was terrible for Jerome to see how suddenly, midway in her

rambling discourse, the interest would become genuine. “I can’t think how such

things can be allowed in a civilized country,” his aunt would say. “I suppose one has

to regard Italy as civilized. One is prepared for all kinds of things abroad, of course,

and my brother was a great traveler. He always carried a water-filter with him. It was

far less expensive, you know, than buying all those bottles of mineral water. My

brother always said that his filter paid for his dinner wine. You can see from that what

a careful man he was, but who could possibly have expected when he was walking

along the Via Dottore Manuele Panucci on his way to the Hydrographic Museum that

a pig would fall on him?” That was the moment when the interest became genuine.

It seemed to Jerome that there were two possible methods of recounting his

father’s death—the first led gently up to the accident, so that by the time it was

described the listener was so well prepared that the death came really as an

anti-climax. The chief danger of laughter in such a story was always surprise. When

he rehearsed his method Jerome began boringly enough.

“You know Naples and those high tenement buildings? Somebody once told me

that the Neapolitan always feels at home in New York just as the man from Turin feels

at home in London because the river runs in much the same way in both cities. Where

was I? Oh, yes. Naples, of course. You’d be surprised in the poorer quarters what

things they keep on the balconies of those sky-scraping tenements -- not washing, you

know, or bedding, but things like livestock, chickens or even pigs. Of course the pigs

get no exercise whatever and fatten all the quicker.” He could imagine how his

hearer’s eyes would have glazed by this time. “I’ve no idea, have you, how heavy a

pig can be, but these old buildings are all badly in need of repair. A balcony on the

fifth floor gave way under one of those pigs. It struck the third floor balcony on its

way down and sort of ricochetted into the street. My father was on the way to the

Hydrographic Museum when the pig hit him. Coming from that height and that angle

it broke his neck.” This was really a masterly attempt to make an intrinsically

interesting subject boring.

The other method Jerome rehearsed had the virtue of brevity.

“My father was killed by a pig.”

“Really? In India?”

“No, in Italy.”

“How interesting. I never realized there was pig-sticking in Italy. Was your father

keen on polo?”

In course of time, neither too early nor too late, rather as though, in his capacity

as a chartered accountant, Jerome had studied the statistics and taken the average, he

became engaged to be married: to a pleasant fresh-faced girl of twenty-five whose

father was a doctor in Pinner. Her name was Sally, her favorite author was still Hugh

Walpole, and she had adored babies ever since she had been given a doll at the age of

five which moved its eyes and made water. Their relationship was contented rather

than exciting, as became the love-affair of a chartered accountant; it would never have

done if it had interfered with the figures.

One thought worried Jerome, however. Now that within a year he might himself

become a father, his love for the dead man increased; he realized what affection had

gone into the picture-postcards. He felt a longing to protect his memory, and uncertain

whether this quiet love of his would survive if Sally were so insensitive as to laugh

when she heard the story of his father’s death. Inevitably she would hear it when

Jerome brought her to dinner with his aunt. Several times he tried to tell her himself,

as she was naturally anxious to know all she could that concerned him.

“You were very small when your father died?”

“Just nine.”

“Poor little boy,” she said.

“I was at school. They broke the news to me.”

“Did you take it very hard?”

“I can’t remember.”

“You never told me how it happened.”

“It was very sudden. A street accident.”

“You’ll never drive fast, will you, Jemmy?” (She had begun to call him

“Jemmy”.) It was too late then to try the second method -- the one he thought of as the

pig-sticking one.

They were going to marry quietly in a registry-office and have their honeymoon

at Torquay. He avoided taking her to see his aunt until a week before the wedding, but

then the night came, and he could not have told himself whether his apprehension was

more for his father’s memory or the security of his own love.

The moment came all too soon. “Is that Jemmy’s father?” Sally asked, picking

up the portrait of the man with the umbrella.

“Yes, dear. How did you guess?”

“He has Jemmy’s eyes and brow, hasn’t he?”

“Has Jerome lent you his books?”

“No.”

“I will give you a set for your wedding. He wrote so tenderly about his travels.

My own favorite is Nooks and Crannies. He would have had a great future. It made

that shocking accident all the worse.”

“Yes?”

Jerome longed to leave the room and not see that loved face crinkle with

irresistible amusement.

“I had so many letters from his readers after the pig fell on him.” She had never

been so abrupt before. And then the miracle happened. Sally did not laugh. Sally sat

with open eyes of horror while his aunt told her the story, and at the end, “How

horrible,” Sally said. “It makes you think, doesn’t it? Happening like that. Out of a

clear sky.”

Jerome’s heart sang with joy. It was as though she had appeased his fear for ever.

In the taxi going home he kissed her with more passion than he had ever shown and

she returned it. There were babies in her pale blue pupils, babies that rolled their eyes

and made water.

“A week today,” Jerome said, and she squeezed his hand. “Penny for your

thoughts, my darling.”

“I was wondering,” Sally said, “what happened to the poor pig?”

“They almost certainly had it for dinner,” Jerome said happily and kissed the

dear child again.

Review Questions:

1. How old is Jerome at the beginning of the story?

2. What sort of school was Jerome at, and why?

3. How did the headmaster at the prep school tell Jerome about his father’s death?

How did Jerome react to the news?

4. Jerome uses two different methods to tell the story to strangers or new

acquaintances. What are his two methods?

5. How do Jerome’s feelings for his father develop as he grows up? Pick out the

phrases that describe these feelings.

6. What sort of person is Jerome? What was it about his father’s death that pained him

so much?

7. Why will Sally evidently make Jerome a very good wife?

8. What attitude does Greene have towards his characters?