Modern selfhood in translation a study of progressive translation practices in china 1890s 1920s li
China 1890s 1920s Limin Chi
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Poetry Painting Affinity as Intersemiotic Translation A Cognitive Stylistic Study of Landscape Representation in Wang Wei s Poetry and its Translation Chengzhi Jiang
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To my father
Acknowledgments
My engagement with modern Chinese scholarship started in the early 2000s, soon after my initial foray into IB Chinese teaching in New Zealand. It was my study under the guidance of Professor Gloria Davies of Monash University, however, that sustained my enthusiasm for this engagement. Over the years, she exercised earnest patience, providing incisive counsel and constructive criticism which went a long way toward sharpening my scholarly abilities. I benefited immensely from her juxtaposition of perspicacious observations and encouraging words in our conversations and email exchanges. I regard Gloria as the epitome of an empowering and transformative mentor, who, through her own example, has inculcated in me the personal qualities essential for good scholarship so that I was able to cope with academic rigor with a tenacity and grit previously unparalleled in my life.
Throughout this journey I have been privileged to receive precious help and vital encouragement from many other people, who have greatly facilitated the completion of such a herculean project.
My special thanks go to Dr. Susan Daruvala of the University of Cambridge. I express my gratitude for her invaluable input as well as her ebullient appreciation of my work. I have incorporated many of her suggestions into the book. I indubitably take accountability for all the deficiencies and inadequacies that remain.
I am deeply indebted to Professor Rita Wilson of Monash University for her guidance and support, to Associate Professor Warren Sun for being an engaging interlocutor, to Professor Wang Yiyan of Victoria University of Wellington for her comments on my manuscript, and to Professor Li Defeng of Macau University for his encouragement and friendship. My ex-students Clarice Tse and Naomi Tse are gratefully recognized here for their help with providing the books unavailable in Hong Kong public libraries. The friendly and supportive staff at Hong Kong Central Library were instrumental in maintaining an inclusive milieu and enabling me to avail myself of the great resources in the library, from the earlier editions of Liang Qichao’s works to the microfilms of late Qing and early Republican periodicals.
I am grateful to the dedicated editors and professionals during the production of this book, notably Ms. Ramabrabha Selvaraj, for her prompt responses to my queries.
Finally, gratitude is owed to my family. Their spiritual support has been a valuable source of unremitting hope and resilience. I dedicate this book to my father Chi Xueqing, who has been my hero since childhood.
Introduction
In late nineteenth and early twentieth-century China, the term “national extinction” (wangguo) was increasingly used by progressive Chinese scholars who were alarmed by their country’s decline. They were convinced that China was doomed unless there were modern Chinese citizens to defend the nation’s interest. The forging of a modern Chinese identity became an important part of Chinese intellectual culture of the period. From then on, cultural modernization became tied to the imperative of national survival. Translation was seen by Chinese advocates of modernization as essential for China’s cultural alignment with the modern West.
This study examines the development of Chinese translation practice in relation to the rise of ideas of modern selfhood in China from the 1890s to the 1920s. The chapters that follow attempt to contribute to our understanding of the historical interweaving of continuity and discontinuity in the formation of a modern Chinese identity. The selected translations over the three decades in question reflect a preoccupation with new personality ideals informed by foreign models and the healthy development of modern individuality, in the face of crises compounded by feelings of cultural inadequacy.
In general, the translation practices of this period exhibited a range of approaches: from early attempts in the 1890s at accommodating traditional elements of storytelling in the introduction of Western ideas and values, through incipient incorporation of foreign literary techniques in addition to the importation of foreign concepts and moral ideals, to a broad choice of source countries and a dominant direct translation (zhiyi) strategy in the 1910s and early 1920s. In this study, I assign special importance to the translation of literature. In the 1890s, Liang Qichao (1873–1929) uplifted the status of fiction in his promotion of new citizens. Although Yan Fu (1854–1921) was known for his translation of Western social scientific and philosophical works, he also put a high premium on the role of literature in social transformation, stating in 1897 that fiction was “the root of orthodox history” (zhengshi zhi gen) (in Chen and Xia 1997: 27). Yan’s positing of elegance (ya) as one of his
principles of translation and his esoteric pre-Han style of translation, while running counter to the lucidity of Liang Qichao’s semi-vernacular writing, are indicative of Yan’s literary inclinations. From the 1900s onwards, increasing attention was paid to the translation of literature, with a wider choice of genres.
According to Bassnett and Lefevere (1990: vii), translation reflects a certain ideology and a poetics and as such manipulates literature to function in a given society in a given way. The history of translation is the history also of literary innovation and of the shaping power of one culture upon another, although there are also cases where it can repress innovation, distort and contain. It is therefore necessary to go into “the vagaries and vicissitudes of the exercise of power in a society, and what the exercise of power means in terms of the production of culture, of which the production of translations is a part” (ibid: 5).
In this study, translation is viewed as a primary agent of cultural change and a privileged locus of intellectual activity. In the context of late Qing and early Republican China, it provided Chinese intellectuals with imported paradigms of critical thinking, images of modern selfhood and knowledge of modern science that served as a cultural ideology. In the 1910s, this ideology came to be seen as necessary for the enlightenment of the mind. The ideals of modern selfhood that late Qing and New Culture intellectual leaders promoted represented a significant deviation from the goals of political and military reforms of earlier decades (1840s–1880s) and involved a process of personal development through exposure to a wide variety of translated works.
My research attempts to clarify how these translated works supplied the meanings for new terms and concepts that signify modern human experience and to shed light on the ways in which they taught readers to internalize the idea of the modern as personal experience.
I am particularly interested in the ways the focus on character building as nation building encouraged an ideologically motivated approach to understanding modern culture, and my investigation of translation will revolve around three interrelated aspects: (i) the construction of a recognizably modern Chinese identity through the promotion of particular concepts and attitudes; (ii) the representations of Chinese society of the late Qing and early Republican period, illustrated via comparison or contrast with accounts of foreign cultures and societies (as presented in the source works); and (iii) the role of highly influential translators and their textual selections on the development of modern Chinese elite culture.
The ethical and moral dimensions of concepts of selfhood have an effect on why individuals act or fail to act in various situations (Ricoeur 1992). Adaptation to new sources of values refashions the moral role of selfhood and brings about the transformation of identity. In this study, identity construction is presented as synonymous with character building. This is because the influential Chinese translators of this period were all focused on how Chinese citizens should acquire foreign moral and ethical values of the kind that appeared in the works they translated.
From Self-Strengthening to New Culture
In Chinese scholarship, the idea of the modern is frequently discussed as a process involving distinct phases of political and cultural development. Liang Qichao, arguably China’s leading intellectual of the late Qing and early Republican period, played a significant part in shaping this view. In 1923, Liang (in Feng 1994: 170) delineated in a treatise entitled “Fifty Years of China’s Evolution” (Wushi nian Zhongguo jinhua gailun) three phases of China’s modern development. In Phase One, the focus was on machinery (qiwu), corresponding to the importation of armoury and machinery during the Self-Strengthening Movement1 of the 1860s and 1890s, within the framework of “Chinese learning as basis, and Western learning for practical application” (Zhongxue wei ti, xixue wei yong).2 During this period, “[Western] influence on intellectual thought was insignificant”, and the few scientific books translated by government-run agencies were “among the most memorable” (ibid). Phase Two was characterized by the engagement in the installation of modern political, economic and educational institutions (zhidu) in the wake of the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895. Despite their failure in instigating reforms, the pioneering activists of this period became powerful advocates of the acquisition of Western social science and literature. According to Liang (ibid), the most valuable works produced in this period were Yan Fu’s translated books, which introduced important trends in social sciences to Chinese readers. In Phase Three, the emphasis was on culture (wenhua), marked by Chinese intellectuals’ realization of their cultural inadequacy in understanding the modern world and their questioning of the compatibility of traditional Chinese culture with modern institutions. This was the New Culture Movement of the 1910s and 1920s. Liang’s use of the word “culture” may have kept its traditional Chinese meaning of “the acquisition of civic values” or “becoming edified”, which, dating from the Western Han dynasty (206 BCE to 9 CE), involves the combination of “civility” or “good manners” (wen) and “becoming” or “changing” (hua). Given the importance Liang accorded to Meiji Japan as a model of modernization for China, it is also very likely that he borrowed wenhua from the Japanese bunka, which as a modern concept drew its meaning from European definitions of culture.3 Clearly, Liang Qichao was attempting to highlight the cultivation or edification of people when he used the word “culture”. As he observed in the same essay: “Society and culture are inseparable; therefore, it
1 I adopt the standard translation of yangwu yundong for ease of reference. The literal translation is foreign affairs movement
2 Zhongxue wei ti, xixue wei yong can also be translated as “Chinese learning as essence, and Western learning as function”.
3 There has been a plethora of notions that were associated with the word “culture”. In Europe “culture” had already acquired the modest and restricted sense of “cultivation” by the fifteenth century; in the sixteenth century, it extended from the physical into the spiritual sphere, so that it suggested the refinement of human manners and intellectual attainment. In Japan, the word took on the meaning of “national character” during the Meiji era (1868–1912). See Tessa Morris-Suzuki (2004).
is impossible to apply the old psyche to the new system. People’s self-consciousness will gradually be required” (ibid).4 While deploring the intellectual and scientific underdevelopment in China as compared to foreign countries such as the United States, Britain, Germany, Russia and Japan, he expressed hope for Phase Three to surpass the previous two phases in acquiring the quintessence of foreign cultures. We can assume that he included translation as an instrument of modernization, for the countries that he named were among those that furnished important source materials for translation projects of the New Culture period.
Despite the vagueness of Liang’s “phases”,5 his pithy summary of the change from “machinery” to “institution” and finally to “culture” and “people” has been frequently quoted in Chinese scholarship as reflecting the trajectory of China’s modernization process from the late Qing to the May Fourth period.
Translation was an important aspect of the Self-Strengthening Movement, which started in the early 1860s. Prompted by imperial decline, military defeats and foreign occupation in the wake of the Opium Wars (1839–1842 and 1856–1860), leading Chinese scholar-officials, such as Li Hongzhang (1823–1901), Zeng Guofan (1811–1872), Yixin (1833–1898) and Zhang Zhidong (1837–1909), regarded translation as crucial for building up a strong nation. They attached equal importance to the work of translation bureaus and the establishment of shipyards and arsenals. Translation activities of the Self-Strengthening period (1861–1894) centred on engineering, military and natural science, because of the senior bureaucrats’ advocacy of “Chinese learning as essence and Western learning for practical application”, an approach to China’s modern development reflective of what many Chinese intellectuals of the 1900s and since perceived as the conservative mentality of that era.
Following China’s defeat in the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895, the imperial Qing government in China was forced to sign the Treaty of Shimonoseki (Maguan tiaoyue) that included ceding territory and making reparations to Japan. This defeat led educated Chinese of the time to conclude that the reforms undertaken to date had been insufficient. They began a concerted process of introducing ideas they considered vital for China’s institutional transformation and modernization. Kang Youwei (1858–1927), his protégé Liang Qichao, Tan Sitong (1865–1898) and other late Qing reformist intellectuals urged for effective political reform towards the establishment of a constitutional monarchy in China. Adopting ideas of modernization that had fuelled the reforms of Meiji Japan, Chinese reformers solicited the support of the Guangxu Emperor (1871–1908). Their efforts culminated in the Hundred Days’ Reform (wuxu weixin or bairi weixin) in 1898. This political and educational reform movement was crushed in a coup d’état by powerful conservative opponents led by Empress Dowager Cixi (1835–1908).
4 Translations from Chinese in this book are mine unless otherwise indicated.
5 Liang’s clear-cut demarcation between Phase Two and Phase Three apparently underestimated the role late Qing reformist intellectuals, among others, had played in constructing representations of the self and the nation towards the creation of Chinese modernity.
In defence of their proposals, the reformers of the late 1890s drew heavily on popular nineteenth-century Western writings such as those that had been translated into Chinese by missionaries residing in China and well-known translators like Yan Fu (e.g. Timothy Richard’s (1845–1919) translation6 of Robert Mackenzie’s (1823–1881) History of the Nineteenth Century and Yan Fu’s translation of Thomas Huxley’s (1825–1895) Evolution and Ethics). To strengthen their arguments, they also cited success stories of modernization outside China, including accounts of Russia after the rule of Peter the Great and Prussia and, above all, reports about the rapid modernization of Meiji Japan. Japan’s modernization was of particular interest to Chinese advocates of political reform largely because of the cultural proximity between Japan and China.7 The reformist intellectuals believed that education in the broader sense included reading massive amounts of translated texts and noted that translations had contributed greatly to Japan’s reforms, enabling the Japanese to learn from the successes and failures of the West
Historical accounts published in China and in international scholarship often present the years following the 1911 revolution as being overshadowed by a deepening sense of “national humiliation” and “cultural crisis” among the Chinese, characterized by the instability of the post-Qing Chinese state, the continuing decline of the political situation and, in particular, Yuan Shikai’s (1859–1916) capitulation to Japan’s extraterritorial demands. Amid Yuan’s autocratic rule, the warlord hegemonies, the outbreak of World War I and the rapid economic growth in urban China, a new cosmopolitan elite, of whom a large number had received their education in Japan and Western countries, began to dominate the intellectual scene, bolstered by a substantial literary establishment, whose activities were organized around literary societies and the journals they published.
The New Culture Movement was instigated by new literary initiatives proposed in the journal New Youth (Xin Qingnian), notably Hu Shi’s (1891–1962) essay “Tentative Proposals for a Reform of Literature” (Wenxue gailiang chuyi), pub-
6 Richard’s translation was through the help of his Chinese assistant Cai Erkang (1851–1921). The Chinese title of the translation is Taixi xinshi lanyao
7 Many late Qing scholars wrote about the importance of learning from Japan after the Meiji Restoration. Among them was the noted educator Sheng Xuanhuai (1844–1916). He observed: “After the Japanese Meiji Restoration, Japan busied itself with the translation of Western works. Now its people have a coherent grasp of the various branches of Western learning, and derive considerable power from those translations” (Sheng in Reynolds 1993: 111). In his memorials before and during the Hundred Days’ Reform, Kang Youwei chronicled the first 23 years of the Meiji period and interpolated the history with his explanatory annotations. Kang exhorted the Guangxu Emperor to follow the Japanese example and build a Meiji-like political structure in China. For Kang (in Jiang and Zhang 2006: 66), Japan had adapted the essentials of Western civilization to their own purposes, and China should learn from the West via Japan. Liang Qichao (in Willcock 1995: 818) was also convinced that the Japanese victory was the result of Japan’s swift and successful modernization and that “behind the great success of modernization in Meiji Japan lay the ability of the Japanese to select and assimilate foreign values in the existing social and cultural tradition”.
lished in January 1917. Basing their new intellectual agenda on an essential rejection of elements of the national tradition, New Culture proponents viewed the translation of foreign literary works as a source of modern enlightenment and introduced new literature and new ideas in their endeavour to develop an enlightened national culture.
The period between the end of the First Sino-Japanese War in 1895 and the New Culture Movement of the 1910s and 1920s marks a watershed in the break with the imperial past in China. This was a time when the idea of a modern awakened China grew popular and a modern commodity culture developed rapidly in urban China. By the late 1890s, Chinese reformist intellectuals had realized the limitations of “Western learning for practical application”, advocated by self-strengtheners between the 1860s and the 1890s. They promoted a more spiritual (as opposed to the previous instrumental) conception of modernization. Meanwhile, large quantities of social scientific and literary translations were produced by publishing companies and literary societies mainly based in Beijing and Shanghai.
Under the weight of new foreign threats, the word “imperialism” (diguozhuyi) was introduced to China via Japanese in the early 1900s and appeared frequently in popular periodicals of the time, such as Liang Qichao’s Upright Discussions (Qingyi bao) (Ma 2014). Accordingly, the term “anti-imperialism” (fandi) became an important idea and was widely promoted in the early 1920s through the political discourses of the Kuomintang and the Chinese Communist Party.
Bassnett and Lefevere’s (1990: vii) observation that translation “reflect[s] a certain ideology and a poetics” is useful to consider in relation to the self-strengtheners’ slogan of “learning the superior techniques of the [Western] barbarians to control the barbarians” (shiyi zhi changji yi zhiyi), first proposed by Wei Yuan (1794–1857) in 1842. The emotional ambivalence towards Western imperialism prevalent among scholar-officials of this time persisted into the 1910s and 1920s. In fact, ambivalence continues to resonate in Chinese intellectual discourse a century later in the 2010s. In this study, the concepts, ideas and literary distortions and innovations adopted in the Chinese translation of foreign works (1890s–1920s) are examined as choices and decisions undertaken by translators who were gripped by the prospect that China was on the brink of political and cultural extinction.
The terms “nation” (minzu) and “self” (ziwo) became important in the early twentieth century. Leading Chinese intellectuals were preoccupied with the identification of the source of China’s degeneration and sought to raise awareness of impending crisis through appeals of social Darwinism and national survival. In the meantime, they set a cultural pattern of self-inspection and national improvement. Equipped with foreign-derived new ideas and the spirit of science, the intellectuals started to probe the inadequacies in the “national character” (guominxing), another Japanese-derived neologism that appeared in Chinese periodicals in 1903. Works such as A Doll’s House (to be discussed in Chap. 5) were key events in the popular dissemination of the vocabulary of character building as nation building.
Identity, Chinese Modernity and Translation
Identity, one of the most important political and cultural concepts of the twentieth century, is often examined in relation to subjectivity, understood as the psychological and emotional state of the subject.8 Anthony Giddens’s (1991: 76) definition of personal identity as an evolving project suits the purpose of this book: “We are not what we are, but what we make of ourselves”. It is “not something that is just a given, as a result of the continuities of the individual’s action system, but something that has to be routinely created and sustained in the reflexive activities of the individual” (ibid). Stephen Frosh (1991: 187) shares Giddens’s argument and considers identity to be “always in danger of being undermined, of withering away or exploding into nothingness”. To maintain the coherence of human experience and the functioning of social life, the individual continually adopts techniques intended to display agency or competence of self to others and to the social world. As societies change through the operation of political, economic and other social forces, the individual makes necessary adjustments to cope with the new challenges and situations.
In studying translated Chinese works for what they indicate about the kind of “modern identity” being promoted, I draw on the modernity frameworks of contemporary sociologists such as Jürgen Habermas and Anthony Giddens. Namely, I examine the translated texts as characteristically modern. They all display a focus on the consciousness that is needed for constructing a new self. Both Habermas and Giddens see this focus on consciousness as a hallmark of the modern age or modernity. Moreover, as Jorge Larrain (1994: 143) points out: “One of the main philosophical characteristics of modernity is that it made the human being the centre of the world, the measure of all things, …the necessary point of reference for all that goes on. But originally this conception of the ‘subject’ was…separated from history and social relations, that is to say deprived of a sense of change and of its social dimension”.
In other words, the link between individuals and society is one aspect of a characteristically modern way of thinking. Charles Taylor (1994), well known for his communitarian critique of liberal theory’s understanding of the “self”, puts a premium on the political and social recognition of one’s community and claims that the individual’s acceptance or internalization of socially significant meanings and values, along with his active exchange with the social environment, makes him part of society. Bernd Simon (2004: 61) echoes Taylor in claiming that personal identity “is increasingly required as an appropriate psychological reflection of one’s own complex social positioning in modern society”. He goes on to argue that “in modern society, the increasing prepotency of individual identity is sustained especially by the decreasing permanence and increasing interchangeability of ‘we-relations’ and
8 “Subjectivity” and “identity” are sometimes used interchangeably in this study despite their difference in historical origin and perspective, as one stresses an inner stable core and the other focuses on the making of selfhood.
finds expression, inter alia, in psychological privatization, reflexive subjectivism and individual self-expression” (ibid: 62).9
All of these statements are highly relevant to our analysis of translation practice in the late Qing and early Republican era, especially in relation to the types of issues highlighted by the translators in their own essays or translation prefaces/ postscripts.
For leading late Qing and New Culture intellectuals, being a “new” person required the “sacrifice” of “old” Confucian social-familial relations so that people could relate to each other as “humans”. This was a key feature of the translated works that were influential in the period under study.
However, because self-transformation was related to nation building, there was also the implication that reading translated works should not only benefit the “self” (ziwo) but also the “nation” (minzu). The pursuit of a modern identity in late Qing and early Republican China was further complicated by the legacy of state Confucianism, in which intellectuals perceived themselves as “spokespeople” for the Chinese public. In this regard, their writings often included “a claim of prescience” (Davies 2007: 52). Identity can only be “originary” as “it is constructed in and through language”; therefore, representations of self and the people constitute a discursive means of realizing their self-worth and identifying with the public, and “awakened articulations” thus become entangled with the larger discourse of national salvation and enlightenment (ibid: 39). With regard to translation, the translators were thus prescribing certain foreign works as necessary for nation building and the development of the person.
In the Qing dynasty, the need to liberate the individual from the shackles of Confucian moralism was initiated as early as 1823 by the eminent litterateur Gong Zizhen (1792–1841), whose positing of the fundamentality of self to the human condition and social functioning exerted a great influence on his contemporaries and later Qing-era scholars. Gong (1975: 13) started his 1823 essay “The First of My Preliminary Thoughts Between 1822 and 1823” (Kuiren zhiji taiguan diyi) with these words: “The world is created by people, and not by sages….People’s destiny is not dominated by the Way of Heaven or Great Pole but by ‘me,’ a term people call themselves”. In 1897, Tan Sitong published his 50,000-word philosophical work, entitled A Study of Benevolence (Renxue), alternatively translated as On Humanity, in which he accused absolute monarchy as being the root of social evils and argued that the creative disposition of human agency would contribute to the agendas defining a modern China.10 Tan’s promotion of a ren-centred self tallied with Yan Fu’s propagation of national strength (minli), national intellect (minzhi) and national
9 Similar statements can be found in other works. For instance, Stryker and Serpe (1982: 206) stress that “a complexly differentiated and organized society requires a parallel view of the self”. Elias (1991) affirms that, since the European Middle Ages, the balance between collective identity (“weidentity”) and individual identity (“I-identity”) has changed tremendously towards an increasing prepotency of individual identity.
10 For discussions about Renxue, see, for example, Ip (2009), Sakamoto (1985) and Chan (1984).
morality (minde).11 Liang Qichao (1998), who fled to Japan after the aborted attempt at nationwide reform in the summer of 1898, emphasized the importance of new citizenry and entrusted the young generation with the task of adopting a new morality befitting a modern nation-state.12 These late Qing literati’s efforts to cultivate the people, along with their nationalistic narrative of cultural resilience, wielded an enormous influence on the intellectual life and translation projects in the 1910s and 1920s.13
During the May Fourth era, the concept of the individual became elevated to the defining feature of the human in the modern intellectuals’ consideration of political, cultural and literary issues. Japan-educated modern Chinese writer Yu Dafu (1896–1945) (1935: 5) noted: “The greatest success of the May Fourth Movement consists in the discovery of the individual. In the past people lived for their emperors, the moral Way (dao), and their parents. They are now living for themselves”. The May Fourth intellectuals’ rediscovery of self and their emphasis on the value of selfexistence (ziwo cunzai) became the basis for distinguishing a modern Chinese identity from its traditional counterpart, most commonly presented in terms of the difference between the “new” and the “old”. The two rallying cries of the May Fourth Movement, i.e. democracy and science, are reflective of the May Fourth intellectuals’ apotheosization of the self and the new. Derived from foreign sources, democracy signifies new political institutions involving a new view of self vis-à-vis others; on the other hand, being scientific entails the questioning of established traditional beliefs and the remedying of old, defective mode of thinking.
New Culture leaders’ reconstitution of Chinese identity was manifested through the literary apotheosis of new people as well as new literary techniques and modern concepts derived from foreign works. Influenced by the emphasis on self and subjectivity in Western, Russian and Japanese literature, New Culture avant-gardes made presentations of the people, along with the analysis of the complexities and contradictions of their existence, an integral process of their imagination of Chinese modernity. The frequent appearance of these literary characters in translated works, presented with new narrative forms and neologisms, not only advanced readers’ understanding of themselves and their world but also actively shaped a new modern language that was being promoted as vernacular (baihua) Chinese.
Chinese modernity is often construed as a reaction to Western aggressions and to historical unequal relations between China and the West. While ideas associated with modernity and the Enlightenment in the West are regularly subjected to criticism in post-modern discourse, there has been a significant scholarly interest in alternatives to the established Western sense of modernity and in representing
11 Taken from Yan Fu’s article “On Strength” (Yuan qiang), published in 1895. See Wang (1986: 12).
12 Between 1902 and 1906, Liang Qichao published 20-odd articles on new citizenry in The New Citizen’s Gazette (Xinmin congbao). These articles were later published in book form entitled On the New Citizen (Xinmin shuo).
13 John Fitzgerald (1996: 67–8) argues that the collapse of the established order in imperial China launched literati on voyages of self-discovery in the same way as the discovery of the modern self in Europe.
modernity as a positive development for China, to the extent that the idea of Chinese modernity is often viewed by Chinese scholars as “embodying the nation-building goals of several generations of the Chinese” (Yang 2003: 8). Seen from the perspective of translation activities in early twentieth-century China, however, there was an active process of assimilating Western concepts into Chinese culture, across the twentieth century.
A good description of Chinese modernity should highlight the historicity of its formative period and the fact that it is “a mirror and consequence of the experience of European hegemony” (Mudimbe 1988: 185),14 as well as the development of a modern Chinese identity and the key features of this identity, such as “newness, progress, enlightenment, revolution, and self received from Western sources but remoulded by intellectuals in response to a specific historical context of imperialism and domestic decay” (Denton 1998: 6–7).
Denton’s statement highlights the Chinese intellectuals’ adoption of Western discourse of self and historical progress in their pursuit of Chinese modernity. Although the pluralistic nature of China’s experience of modernity can be better reflected, such descriptions do point to the importance of borrowed ideas. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century China, intellectual endeavour at the construction of a modern identity via translation contributed fundamentally to the creation of a “translated modernity” (to use Lydia Liu’s expression).15 In this regard, translation can be seen as becoming an integral part of Chinese modernity.
The Role of Translation and Translators in Translation Studies
In the present study, translation is a key source of new ideas and values, harnessed by Chinese translators to foster a strong sense of the modern self. Developments in the field of translation studies have provided useful underpinnings for my research.
In the 1970s and 1980s, translation theorists started to consider translation from the point of view of the target culture within a broader context of communication, beyond the preoccupation with the mere words on the page and the static linguistic analysis of translation shifts, which characterized earlier approaches to the study of translation. More emphasis was also placed on the reception of the translation in the target culture (e.g. Steiner 1975; Holmes et al. 1978; Van den Broeck 1978; Bassnett 1980; Toury 1980; Newmark 1981; Nord 1988; Reiss and Vermeer 1984).16 In the mid-1980s, the theses in the anthology The Manipulation of Literature evolved into
14 Although Mudimbe was dealing with the conception framework of African thinking, I think it may well apply to the Chinese thinking.
15 See Liu (1995).
16 Although these theorists have in common an emphasis on the sociocultural context and the target culture, they approach translation from quite different disciplinary perspectives.
the “cultural turn” in translation studies (Hermans 1985). The scholars who had contributed to the anthology revealed that the source text could be manipulated to create the kind of “culture” desired. Of particular importance is André Lefevere’s (1985) “Why Waste Our Time on Rewrites?” In this treatise, Lefevere gave a full presentation of his argument about the polysystem theory,17 which was further elaborated in his writings of the 1990s. He observed that the production of literature in a culture is influenced by a series of poetic, ideological and power-related elements, which can have constraining effects on both creative writing and translation and which are active both inside and outside the literary system (1992).
Subsequent years saw a surge of new investigations that extended beyond the range of linguistic and literary translation and into issues of cultural formation. In their search for an answer to how translation related to cultural dominance, cultural assertion and cultural resistance, translation scholars brought to the core questions of politics and power (Bassnett and Trivedi 1999; Tymoczko and Gentzler 2002). The new orientation in translation studies also led to a reconsideration of the power relationship between writer and reader and a re-evaluation of the authority of the source text. Since then, resistance to the notion of translation as a secondary activity has started to accelerate, and the notion that a translation might be a transparent copy of a superior original has gradually been dismissed as untenable.
In the traditional Euro-American conception of translation, the subordination of the translator to the author was typically taken for granted, just as translation was frequently contrasted unfavourably with original writing.18 Since the cultural turn, many scholarly works have examined the role of translators in the context of the interrelationship between history, society and culture and helped pull the translator out of the traditional invisibility. Among these are Translation, Rewriting and Manipulation of Literary Fame (Lefevere 1992), Constructing Cultures: Essays on Literary Translation (Bassnett and Lefevere 1998), Translation Studies (Bassnett 1980/2002), Comparative Literature: A Critical Introduction (Bassnett 1993) and The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (Venuti 1995), to mention a
17 Polysytem theory was first proposed by Israeli scholar Itamar Even-Zohar. He adopted the Russian formalists’ theory of a hierarchical literary system and studied the status and function of translated literature in target-culture systems. For Even-Zohar, semiotic phenomena, such as culture, language, literature and society, need to be studied and understood as the elements of a multiple, dynamic system. In particular, he is interested in the ways in which various semiotic systems are hierarchized within the polysystem (central vs. peripheral, canonized vs. non-canonized, primary vs. secondary) and in the struggle among the various strata. As a part of that approach, he claims it necessary to regard translated literature as a subsystem within the literary polysystem and to study translation as an activity dependent on the relations within a certain cultural system (EvenZohar 1978: 27).
18 Attempts to redress the supremacy of the original text and the marginalization of translators have never stopped. As early as 1923, Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) published his seminal essay “The Task of the Translator”, which emphasized the role of translation and translators in social progress and the evolution of human thought. It was Benjamin’s introduction to a Baudelaire translation. The text was translated by Harry Zohn in1968 and was included in Lawrence Venuti’s 2000 anthology The Translation Studies Reader.
few. In the 1990s, translation studies also started to incorporate poststructural and postcolonial thought into its realm. The role of translators was studied along the lines of cultural identity (e.g. Bassnett and Trivedi 1999; Venuti 1998; Robinson 1992, 1997; Alvarez and Vidal 1996; Delisle and Woodsworth 1995), and translation began to be seen as an expressive form of cultural identity. The beginning of the twenty-first century also saw a number of research studies focusing on the role of translators in the context of cultural change, political discourse and identity formation in a variety of contexts (e.g. Ellis and Oakley-Brown 2001; Tymoczko and Gentzler 2002; Cronin 2006). Of particular importance was the study of the sociology of translation, which integrated the work of eminent sociologists like Pierre Bourdieu, Bruno Latour, Bernard Lahire, Anthony Giddens and Niklas Luhmann into translation studies (e.g. Wolf and Fukari 2007).
Since the cultural turn of the early 1980s, it has been generally acknowledged that what distinguishes translation studies from translating is the emphasis on cultural history and the role and function of translation in the broader sociocultural context. Poststructuralist and postcolonial theorists have led translation scholars to emphasize the translator’s agency in the evolving social, political and cultural configurations that make up society. Instead of just redirecting pre-existing messages, translators give voices to new texts and intervene in them and, “in so doing, establish a subject-position in the discourse they shape” (Munday 2009: 96). In addition, scholars such as Venuti (1992) and Pym (1998) have accorded great importance to the study of the role of translators from historical perspectives. Venuti (1992: 10) posits that the objects of analysis in translation studies should not only encompass a broader spectrum of cultural forms and practices but be taken from various historical periods and put to a thoroughgoing historicization.
Amid the development of translation studies in Europe and America, ventures into non-Western traditions have breathed new life into the research on canonical Western European literature and its past. Acknowledging the limitations to their scope of enquiries, Bassnett and Lefevere (in Hermans 1999: 45) “have urged expansion [of critical studies in non-Western contexts] along these lines”. Bachmann-Medick (2009: 8) claims that the study of global translation processes calls for a reinterpretation of the transition of non-European nations to capitalism and the distinctive forms of multiple modernities, which should be perceived as a result of historical distinctions and translational ruptures.
In this study, I am particularly concerned with the decisions involved in translation, such as the choice of foreign works and translation strategies, which bear upon the historical conditions of the Chinese experience of modern selfhood. The challenge, then, is to go beyond the words on the page and examine what they reveal of translation practice at the given time by considering the sociocultural context in which these translated works were produced. The agency of translation in shaping distinctive forms of intercultural communication in late Qing and early Republican China is central to this study. These forms of intercultural communication indicate the active role of translators in promoting a cosmopolitan view of modern selfhood, prior to its politicization under the KMT and CCP.
Approaches to Researching Chinese Translation History
and Overview of Chapters
Following John Fairbank (2005) and Ren Shukun (2009), the May Fourth era in the present study covers the period between 1917 and 1927. However, as the book is focused on the New Culture aspect of May Fourth, it deals with events primarily up to 1924.
The 30-year period between the end of the First Sino-Japanese War and the waning of the New Culture Movement is often described in the People’s Republic of China as “anti-imperialist”. As noted earlier, the word “imperialism” was imported into Chinese in the early 1900s. The fact that the Chinese translation of foreign works has always been saddled with a political mission (that of “national salvation”) makes it important for us to distinguish between the broader and more cosmopolitan understanding of “national salvation” from the 1890s to the 1920s and the idea of “national salvation” that became tied to the political doctrines of the KMT and CCP from the mid- and late 1920s onwards. I am mindful that there are well-established accounts of translation activities of the period in question that highlight their nation-saving or “revolutionary” aspects from a CCP historiographical perspective. The approach I have taken emphasizes certain liberal, cosmopolitan aspects of translation in the period.
In Chinese studies, May Fourth is generally accepted as marking the beginning of a decisive cultural difference that, since the 1990s, has been referred to as “Chinese modernity” (Zhongguo xiandaixing). In English language scholarship, the works of scholars such as David Der-wei Wang (1997), Lydia Liu (1995) and Leo Ou-fan Lee (1999), as well as Wen-Hsin Yeh’s (2000) edited volume Becoming Chinese, show general agreement that the dramatic intellectual shifts of the May Fourth period and thereafter were facilitated by cultural trends that first emerged in the late nineteenth century.
We know from studies of late Qing translations (e.g. Huters 2005; Fogel 2004; Wong 1999; Liu 1995) that late Qing constructions of modern selfhood were fundamentally informed by Western and Japanese definitions. Yan Fu, well-known for his translation of social Darwinist and liberal concepts from Western sources, and Liang Qichao, who not only patronized translation projects of the time but also acquired significant reputation for his translated fiction from and via Japanese, were the most prominent intellectuals of the time to instil in their countrymen a modern sense of self. They also promoted a new linear consciousness of time and history, in which what was new and modern was presented as contrasting values with the past. Their translations enabled New Culture intellectuals to scrutinize China through, as it were, “foreign eyes”. Comparisons between China and the West brought into sharp relief problems in Chinese society (shehui, a neologism of Western origin introduced into China via Japan in the late nineteenth century) of the time.
Less than two decades from the time Yan Fu and Liang Qichao published their key translations of social science and fiction, the New Culture Movement developed in a significantly more radical direction. The New Culture quest for paragons of
spiritual rebellion against old values and ways of life led the intellectuals to call for a literary revolution to inaugurate a modern written vernacular. It was in this vernacular that works from diverse Western and Japanese philosophers and litterateurs, from Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906) to Kuriyagawa Hakuson (1880–1923), were translated. Meanwhile, portrayals of the plight of the working people in the literature of Russia and Eastern European countries highlighted the dark aspects of social reality and encouraged the cultivation of compassion and universal love. The translation activities of New Culture intellectuals, consisting mainly of editors and major contributors of the journal New Youth, became an integral part of the New Culture mission of constructing the modern self. This New Culture emphasis on self-development bifurcated by 1920, when intellectuals such as Chen Duxiu (1879–1942) and Li Dazhao (1888–1927) began to promote the cause of communism, leading to the breakup of the New Youth organizational core.
Recent scholarship has tended to highlight differences and divisions between various models of modernity or between key historical actors in Chinese intellectual life of the late Qing and early Republican period. In my view, while it is important to acknowledge the contributions that non-New Culture intellectuals and writers made to the enrichment and pluralism of the May Fourth intellectual thought, the depth and breadth of the New Culture inquiry into modern selfhood should not be discredited.19 Equipped with an extensive education background and writing in a period of warlordism and burgeoning print culture, New Culture advocates did take an unconventional approach to sociocultural issues; they helped to make the May Fourth “a period of greatest intellectual debate and creativity in twentieth-century China” (Schwarcz 2003: 236–7).
Since the publication of Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1983), in which Anderson stresses the image of nationhood as held in the minds of members of a nation and the forging of national consciousness through modern publishing, the rise of modernity has generally been considered to have been accompanied by print capitalism or the fruits of modernization in general. In examining modernity as modernization of beliefs and values, however, most scholarly publications fail to direct the reader’s attention to the material culture in which this process of selftransformation was located. Since the 1990s, Sinology has started to include sociocultural institutions and the educational and economic milieu in its inquiries. Denton’s (1998) The Problematic of Self in Modern Chinese Literature, Lee’s (1999) Shanghai Modern, Shu-mei Shih’s (2001) The Lure of the Modern, Davies’s
19 Scholarly attempts at dethroning the centrality of New Culture radicals in constructing the Chinese experience of modernity became prevalent in the late 1990s and early 2000s. With the mounting of undue blame put on the May Fourth paradigm, some scholars have cautioned against the other extreme in the decentring of May Fourth. For instance, Vera Schwarcz (2003: 236) points out that some scholars in The Appropriation of Cultural Capital: China’s May Fourth Project conflate the political autocracy that led to the flattening of historical and literary imagination in communist societies with the intellectual arrogance of cultural innovators during the May Fourth Movement. Schwarcz (ibid) argues that if China’s post-1919 literature and history became an arid terrain, the blame does not rest primarily with May Fourth intellectuals.
(2007) Worrying About China and the treatises in Liu and Tang’s (1993) anthology Politics, Ideology, and Literary Discourse in Modern China, to mention but a few, point to a broader approach to combine intellectual inquiry with the cultural apparatus of translation that has sustained the growth of Chinese modernity and modernism.
In China, published works on translation history were few before 1990, and these include Ma Zuyi’s (1984) A Concise History of Translation in China: Before the May Fourth Movement (Zhongguo fanyi jian shi: Wusi yiqian bufen) and Chen Yugang’s (1989) Historical Material for Translated Literature in China (Zhongguo fanyi shigao). The 1990s saw the publication of about a dozen such works, but the majority of these did little more than outline historical facts, much as what Ma and Chen did in the 1980s. The 1990s, however, also saw bilingual Chinese scholars such as Lawrence Wang-chi Wong publishing on the history of Chinese translation in both English and Chinese. Wong’s (1999) Reinterpreting Faithfulness, Comprehensibility and Elegance: A Study of Translation in Twentieth-Century China (Chong shi xin, da, ya: Ershi shiji Zhongguo fanyi yanjiu) is a work that has been widely cited and discussed in mainland Sinophone scholarship since the 2000s. Wong’s incorporation of functional approaches in his case studies of late Qing and early Republican translators provided an innovative way of interpreting historical sources. Another important work to appear in Chinese (2002), following its initial publication in English (1995), is Lydia Liu’s Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity – China, 1900–1937. Liu examined the process by which new words, meanings, discourse and modes of representation arose, circulated and acquired legitimacy with the host language due to, or in spite of, the latter’s contact/collision with the guest language. Liu’s probe into literary representations of the emerging new relationships between individual, nation and culture not only advanced scholarly understanding of the complexities involved in translation or “translingual practice” but also opened new perspectives for postcolonial critiques of May Fourth.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, there was a significant increase in the number of studies on the translations of late Qing and early twentieth-century China. Influenced by Party historians of earlier decades, some of these works hailed Lu Xun as a Marxist imbued with “a revolutionary sense of responsibility” (geming zerengan) (Meng and Li 2005: 127) and gave prominence to the contributions that Lu Xun and others made to the spread of Bolshevik and Marxist literature, while the translations of other prominent New Culture intellectuals such as Zhou Zuoren and Hu Shi remained marginalized. Moreover, the preoccupation of many writers with a comprehensive history or all-inclusive account of the translation activities of the period precluded in-depth inquiry into many of the important issues encountered. Nonetheless, several scholars writing in Chinese attempted to employ appropriate theoretical models to “combine analysis and argumentation with historical description” and “draw conclusions out of historical data” (Wang 2003: vii). Among them were the contributors to the anthology Translation and Creation: On Translated Fiction in Early Modern China (Fanyi yu chuangzuo: Zhongguo jindai fanyi
xiaoshuo lun) (Wong 2000)20 and Eva Hung (Kong Huiyi), author of Translation, Literature and Culture (Fanyi, wenxue, wenhua) (2000) and Rewriting Translation History (Chongxie fanyi shi) (2005). Hu Cui’e’s (2007) Literary Translation and Cultural Engagement: A Cultural Study of Late Qing Fiction Translation (Wenxue fanyi yu wenhua canyu: Wanqing xiaoshuo fanyi de wenhua yanjiu) is one of the earliest books written by mainland Chinese scholars in which insights from the cultural studies of translation were drawn upon to investigate Chinese translation history. In the book, Hu examined late-Qing fiction translation from historical, functional and cultural perspectives. She analysed the political and cultural reasons for the popularity of the domesticated translation strategy and presented translation as the transformation of Chinese culture through new ideas primarily between 1902 and 1909. Similar works produced in mainland China include Ren Shukun’s (2009) An Investigation of Literary Translation During the May Fourth Period (Wusi shiqi waiguo wenxue fanyi yanjiu) and Wang Xiaoyuan’s (2010) Translation Discourse and Ideology: Literary Translation in China, 1895–1911 (Fanyi huayu yu yishixingtai: Zhongguo 1895–1911 nian wenxue fanyi yanjiu).
The present study is focused on the impact of key translations in late Qing and early Republican China on the development of models of modern selfhood and modern ways of seeing and feeling in Chinese intellectual culture. It is my hope that this study will contribute to the recognition of the fundamental role that translation played in the construction of modern senses of self, society and nation. Such an investigation requires the researcher to have an open attitude such that the translated works can be examined more fully as culturally hybrid artefacts, reflective of the exigencies of the time and the views of the translators. The translations produced by the late Qing and New Culture intellectuals, while often reflecting a nation-building goal, were largely attempts at imagining and fashioning a Chinese identity in keeping with the requirements of the modern world. A cosmopolitan outlook, derived from translated works, was manifested through Yan Fu’s preoccupation with evolutionism and liberalism, Liang Qichao’s concern with moral ideals of “new citizens” and New Culture emphasis on “wholesome individualism”, “humanism” and the transformation of the national character in pursuit of universal values of empathy and love.
The study takes into account the emergence and development of translation as a “field”, in which certain types of symbolic and material capital circulate, to use Bourdieu’s concept of the field.21 In this regard, I will include in my discussion specific aspects of translation as cultural production, such as the running of journals for the publication of translated works, the number of print runs and translation
20 See Vittinghoff (2000) and Du (2000) for reviews of this book.
21 For Pierre Bourdieu, the field is the site where different forms of symbolic and material capital are disseminated, while his habitus is the set of socially learnt dispositions, skills and ways of acting, which are acquired through the activities and experiences of everyday life. Bourdieu brings the individual and society together and reconciles the subjective and the objective. Translation scholarship has taken a cue from Bourdieu’s sociological theory of symbolic goods in an effort to adapt it to the investigation of translation practice. For more information, see, for example, Gouanvic (2005).
manuscript fees, with the assumption that translation is an inevitable by-product of modernization.
Throughout the book, I adopt Toury’s broad definition of a translation: “any target text which is presented or regarded as such within the target system itself, on whatever grounds” (1980: 37). Many of the translated texts in the study may well be called “rewritings”, which, in Lefevere’s use of the term, include what have traditionally been conceived as both adaptations and translations (Lefevere 1992: 47). The translators who worked in the particular cultural and political environment of the late Qing and early Republican China were mostly men who belonged to an exclusive group. They were well trained in Chinese and had studied in Britain, the United States and Japan before they made their names as translators and cultural innovators.22
The personal views and personal agendas of these translators were often evident in their treatment of the foreign source texts. I will analyse the translators’ selection of source texts and their approaches to translation to indicate how their translations served to highlight key beliefs and values that were important to them. Insofar as the translator of a foreign work is a reader who translates, it is necessary to note that there is always an “unpredictable and potentially transformative to and fro of a reciprocal, open-ended exchange” between the foreign work and its Chinese translator (Armstrong 2008: 219). The translator, as a reader-cum-translator, plays an important part in deciding how foreign wordings can acquire an expressive power in Chinese.
The following is a brief overview of the seven chapters.
Chapter 1 examines translation activities in the 1890s and 1900s. During this period, the vast bulk of translations of Western scientific and literary works were carried out, championed and produced mainly by the Chinese educators and publishers who were disillusioned with the government’s earlier attempts at military emulation of the West. The chapter provides an organized account of the development of translation as part of modern publishing and education and then considers how translations were selected for the purpose of popularizing modern values.
During the last two decades of the Qing dynasty (1890s–1900s), intellectual discourse started to be actively reshaped by Chinese translators, writers and critics in response to the social and political problems of the day. Chapter 2 singles out Yan Fu and Liang Qichao, “the twin beacons of reformist thought in the period after 1895” (Huters 2005: 205), for an examination of how the importation and manipulation of Western ideas contributed to the construction of an alternative cultural imaginary. Despite their deep attachment to cultural traditions, Yan and Liang effected the popularization of important Western concepts and values that helped to link the Chinese experience with the rest of the world. The chapter will focus on Yan’s translation of social Darwinism and liberalism and Liang’s translation of political and adventure fiction as key events in the history of modern Chinese translation.
Chapter 3 (the 1900s and early 1910s) traces the formative trajectory of the new generation of Chinese intellectuals, who became New Culture leaders in the late
22 Liang Qichao was not educated overseas, but he travelled extensively.
1910s and mid-1920s, and examines the role of translation in shaping their views of China and China’s place in the modern world. They were brought up in a world of Chinese learning but became acquainted in their teens with Western ideas, as conveyed in the translations of Yan Fu and Liang Qichao, as well as other translators like Lin Shu (1852–1924). The chapter treats their exposure to Western knowledge and engagement in promoting literary and social changes through translation practice as important factors that shaped the up-and-coming intellectual elite’s understanding of modern selfhood, guiding them towards discovering and fostering values essential for the construction of a modern Chinese identity.
Chapter 4 explores the field of translation production as an aspect of social mobilization in urban China in the mid-1910s and mid-1920s, as Western ideas were being widely disseminated via a modern education system and in public culture. It examines how leading literary societies and their journals contributed to the rise of a modern intellectual discourse in China. The focus is on New Youth (Xin qingnian), the vehicle for the literary revolution and the modern written vernacular, and Short Story Monthly (Xiaoshuo yuebao), a flagship magazine of the Association for Literary Studies (Wenxue yanjiu hui), and on how the intellectuals associated with these magazines forged an avant-garde identity that became a highly desired image among their followers.
Chapters 5, 6, and 7 are case studies of New Culture intellectuals’ use of translation in their construction of modern individuality. The translations of Hu Shi and the Zhou brothers (i.e. Lu Xun and Zhou Zuoren) are selected for analysis. Different in their selection of source texts as they were, they underscored the importance of individual morality, self-reflection and human feeling in their translation of literature while at the same time exemplifying modern vernacular writing in Chinese and experimenting with new literary forms. Their translations, along with their appropriation and propounding of individualism and humanism, became a counternarrative to the old literary and cultural traditions. They challenged the traditional understanding of family and social relations and offered a cosmopolitan perspective on the development of modern personality. Such a cosmopolitan, liberal-democratic conception of self can be perceived as a significant aspect of these New Culture intellectuals’ efforts to affirm a new morality and a belief in the social possibilities of the individual and as a representation of a unique vision of Chinese modernity. The activism implicit in their translation practice is thus best described as progressive.
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– Az istenért, asszonyom, ne essék kétségbe! Majd ha felgyógyul a király, meglássa, visszaveszi…
– Magad se hiszed, a mit mondasz, – zokogott a marquise, – hisz leszámoltam én már mindennel, csak a világ hálátlansága bánt! Nem hogy a nagyok, a kiket én nem tettem nagyokká, feledkeznek meg rólam, de nem jutok eszükbe még barátaimnak, cselédeimnek – még koldusaimnak sem! *
Még most is dobog a szívem… Ma igazán azt hittem, elvesztünk! Kopognak, én nyitom az ajtót, egy köpenybe burkolt, aranysujtásos ember áll előttem, – biztosra vettem, a mitől a marquise tart, teljesedik, t. i. a királyné elfogat és börtönbe hurczoltat bennünket. Egy sikolylyal már be akartam csapni az orra előtt az ajtót, mikor egyszerre észrevettem, hogy az ismeretlen se nem katona, se nem rendőr, hanem versaillesi lovász-öltönyt visel. Mosolygott… Mire magamhoz tértem, már úrnőm is ott állt mellettem. Úgy örült, hogy végre versaillesi egyenruhát lát megint!
– Kicsoda vagy?… Tán bizony egyszer valamikor nálam is szolgáltál?
– Nem, asszonyom… engem ide küldöttek –
– Kicsoda?
– Asszonyomnak egy igaz barátja…
– De kicsoda?
– Azt nem tudom, nem mondták. Csak azt mondták: az az igaz barát kéreti Pompadour marquiset, jöjjön el az Eremitage kertjébe egy bizalmas szóra. Én majd elkisérjem, – a kocsi ott vár a túlsó sarkon…
– Kelepcze, – tőrbe akarnak ejteni! – kiáltott fel a marquise.
– Az Istenért, ne menjen el! – toldottam meg én.
– Azt is üzenteti a jóbarát, ne féljen asszonyom semmitől.
– De hát ki az, – férfi vagy nő?
– Nem tudom…
Soká töprengtünk a dolog felett. Végre úrnőm mégis elhatározta magát. Kiosontunk a házból, – az aranyozatlan versaillesi kocsi csakugyan ott várt a sarkon. A lovász köpenyébe burkolódzott s felült a bakra, – tovavágtattunk. Egész úton lázasan törtük a fejünket: ki lehet az a rejtélyes barát? A herczegek és marsallok közül senki se merne ilyesmit koczkáztatni… még leginkább valami alantas közeg lehet a jó barát, tán ép Lebel, vagy valami más komornyik. Hisz Lebel ép az Eremitage főfelügyelője, – persze, hogy ő az a rejtélyes jóakaró! Neki van valami fontos közleni valója… Ez a feltevés cseppet sem kedvetlenítette el úrnőmet, boldog volt, hogy bármi áron is visszajuthat, ha csak egy perczre is, Versaillesba…
Kerülő utakon végre megérkeztünk. A park kis hátsó kapuja nyitva volt, – nekem feltünt, hogy a mint beosontunk rajta, az ott álló gárdista az inkognito jeléül «hátra arczot» csinált, s úgy tisztelgett fegyverével… Lovász barátunk előre futott, mi a nyomában siettünk tova a nyirott bokrok alatt, melyeknek árva galyait már nyelte a ködös, téli alkonyat. Végre a naplemente vörös csíkjai közt megpillantottuk az Eremitage kecses falait. Oh, a boldog idők, mikor még úrnőm pásztornőnek öltözve itt várta friss tejjel királyi kedvesét!… Lihegve értünk a lépcsőhöz, – persze, hogy Lebel a rejtélyes jó barát! Hisz ott áll, vár reánk…
*
– Lebel, – suttogja a marquise – hát magának mégis eszébe jutottam? Köszönöm…
De a komornyik még csak nem is mosolyog, csak mereven int, menjünk befelé. Bemegyünk: Luynes herczeg és felesége állnak ott, ép oly mereven, mint Lebel.
– Herczegem… herczegné…
Némán intenek: csak menjünk beljebb. A marquise előre fut, én egy szalonnal hátrább maradok s ép utol akarom érni, mikor az ajtón át látom, hogy úrnőm a másik teremben zokogva borul térdre valaki előtt és felsikolt: – Felség!…
Ki az, – a király? Nem, – szívdobogva láttam: a gyertya halvány fénye mellett egy szenvedő, szelid arczú nő kel fel a bergère-ről és nyújtja kezét a térdelőnek. A királyné volt, a jó királyné!…
Én, mintha gyökeret vert volna a lábam, mozdulni se mertem. Tán azért hallottam meg egyet-mást beszédjükből.
– Marquise, – szólt a felséges asszony halkan – ön nem a királyt, hanem a férjemet vette el tőlem. És lássa, most… bukásában… én mégis gondolok önre!
– Oh, hisz jó felséged az egyedüli…
– Azt hittem, kajánul fogok örülni e fordulatnak, de nem tehetek róla: jobban tudok én megbocsátani, mint gyűlölni. Lássa, most csak sajnálni tudom önt…
– Királyné!…
– Önt elhagyta a király… most tán meg fogja érteni, hogy mit szenvedtem én, mikor engem hagyott el a férjem önért. Úgy éreztem, szenvedésünk valami titkos kapcsot teremt közöttünk, hát
azért hivattam önt. Egy embert szerettünk, egy embert siratunk… Beszéljen!
Soká beszélgettek halkan, – aztán, mintha együtt sírtak volna tovább. A végén a királyné ezzel búcsuztatta el úrnőmet:
– Ne féljen a fiam boszújától. Én mindent megteszek önért…
…
Ma már harmadszor voltunk ott titokban a felséges asszonynál. Ezúttal keveset hallhattam meg a beszédjükből, csak annyit vettem ki, hogy a királyné vallásos életre igyekszik téríteni úrnőmet.
– Szegény bűnösök vagyunk mindannyian. Én boldog leszek, ha egy lelket megmenthettem az örök üdvösségnek. Menjen kolostorba, édes barátnőm, – én ott sem fogom elhagyni önt, majd fölkeresem… Reám mindig számíthat…
– Köszönet, felség, – ismételgeté úrnőm. S csókokkal halmozta el a jó királyné kezét.
– Megteszi, úgy-e?
– Megteszem, igérem… *
Versailles, 1757. február.
Olyan hirtelen jött ez a nagy fordulat, hogy alig tudok számot adni magamnak a mai nap titokzatos eseményeiről. Mi ez, – varázslat?
Versaillesben vagyunk ismét… Úrnőm nem mehetett el ma délután a királynéhoz az Eremitageba. Nagyon elkésve én futottam oda egyedül. A felséges asszony reszkető hangon kérdezte:
– Mi történt, hol a marquise? A király tán börtönre vettette…
Hűvösre vált a délután s a kastély alatti parkon vigasztalanul borongott át a késő őszi szomorúság. Károgó varjuk szálltak el a táj felett s lassú szárnycsapásaikkal meg-megszaggatták a gyűlekező köd hosszan húzódó fátyolait. Az elárvult lombozat már csak tüzes színében őrizte a forró nyár emlékeit s most, hogy a naplementi szellő átsóhajtott rajta, vergődve szakadtak el galyaiktól az utolsó levelek. Tévetegen szállingóztak alá az út avarába lábainkhoz… Halkan beszélgetve jó ideje sétálgattunk már együtt: a ház asszonya, meg én. Régi jó barátnőm volt s most, hogy a tájékra vetődtem, önkénytelen a kastély szomorú vendége felől kérdezősködtem. Mikor a mellékösvényről a park fősétányához értünk, az öreg dáma megfogta a karomat.
– Nézze,… ott jön!
Fellegekbe fulva ép akkor nyugodott le a nap s a füstös, vörös csíkok fénye még egyszer megvilágította a kastély barokfedelét. Végignéztem a ködbe-vesző, hosszú sétányon. A sorakozó bükkfák csupasz gallyai, mint ezer meredt kar, feketén rajzolódtak ki s ivük alatt egy nyúlánk, magas női alak állott a sárga avarban. Talpig feketében volt, – egy hirtelen mozdulattal ép akkor állhatott meg. Mintha aggodalmasan figyelt vagy hallgatózott volna, mutatóujját sebesen a halántékához kapta s ijedten hajolt előre. Öreg barátnőm felsóhajtott: – «igy megy ez már évek óta…»
Nem tudom, meglátott-e bennünket, vagy sem, de lehajtott fővel egyszerre sietve indult meg felénk. Jött azzal a nyugtalanító elevenséggel, melylyel a rögeszme kergeti a beteg lelkeket, jött
utóbb már fulva, lihegve. Egyszerre aztán ott állt előttünk, mint egy szomorú jelenés. Megdöbbentem. Még mindig szép, sőt tán fiatal is volt az a keskeny, finom arcz, de valami örökös, halálos ijedtségtől sápadt. Megragadta a karomat s jobb keze mutatóujjával ismét a halántékához kapott.
– Hallotta? – kérdezte.
A hogy hallgatózott, elkezdett egész testében reszketni.
– Hallotta a lövést? Most!… most… Oh egek – –
Aztán a szivéhez kapott és behunyta a szemét. Öreg barátnőm ekkorra már gyöngéden átfogta a derekát és csitítva vezette tovább. Mentek csöndesen előre a bükkfasétányban a naplemente vérvörös csíkjai felé.
Leültem a korhadó lóczára s hosszan elgondolkoztam a felett a pisztolylövés felett, melyet ez a szegény asszony egyre hallani vél. Hiába, – szerelemben ép azok a legtragikusabb helyzetek, a hol voltakép senkise hibás, és a hol mégis bűnné válik minden, még a lemondás is.
I.
Ösmertem én, ha csak futólagosan is, mind a hármójukat, –ösmertem a szelid és tudós német professzort, Belinszky Henriket, a feleségét, a szép és komoly Orbán Ilonát, sőt találkoztam Szobránczy Ákossal is. De ő akkor még nem szerepelt az asszony életében… Emlékszem a kaszinóból erre a mélázó szemű, tán kissé ideges és zárkózott idealistára, ki senkivel se beszélt és karosszékében ülve csak gondteli arczczal bámult maga elé órákhosszat.
Én, nem tudom már micsoda alkalomból, párszor meglátogattam a tudós Belinszky tanárt. Ott laktak ők kint Budán egy elvadult kert közepén, egy elfelejtett régi házban. Könyvtár volt ebben a furcsa
lakásban minden szoba, s valóságos könyvbarlang volt magának a mesternek a dolgozószobája. Lehetett akkor vagy ötvenkétéves, de sokkal idősebbnek látszott. Ez a szemüveges német óriás azok közé a galamblelkü filozófok közé tartozott, a kik tán sohasem is voltak fiatalok, hanem naiv lelkesedésükben örökké gyermekek maradtak. Torzonborz szakállas arczából annyi örömteli jósággal tudott az emberre nézni! Alig volt nyelvünk eredetének alaposabb ismerője nála s bizony azért még mindig csak törve beszélt magyarul, – hát sziléziai német volt ő, ki a diákévek alatt szemüvegen át, könyvből olyan lelkesen megszerette Magyarországot, hogy elhatározta: nyelvkutatásunknak fogja életét szentelni. Hozzánk költözött, aztán bejárta a Don, Krim s az Ural tájait s kereste az avar és kozár nyomokat nyelvünkben. Végül pedig meg is házasodott.
A tudós tanár megható gyöngédséggel tudta elbeszélni élete ez egyetlen idylljét. Ép Erdélyből tért haza, hol az ó-székely irást akarta kibetűzni, mikor egy félreeső völgy düledező udvarházában tanúja volt egy régi magyar uri család végső pusztulásának. A világtól elfeledve a legnagyobb nyomorban akkor halt meg Orbán Ábris, a híres gavallér, ki miután mindenét elkártyázta, itt a vadonban húzta meg magát gyermekleányával. A kis Ilona ép tizenötéves lett, –rokon és barát nélkül ott állt a világban egyedül, koldus árván…
– Tudja, úgy megsajnáltam szegénykét! – mondta a jó professzor. – Felhoztam Pestre és taníttattam, betettem a tanítóképezdébe. Apja, anyja voltam egyszerre… Csak a negyedik évben, akkor keveset lehettem vele; hosszú hónapokig Németországban kellett időznöm. És mire visszajöttem, nem ismertem rá többet a tizenkilenczéves szép hajadonra…
Belinszky tanár zavarba jött és szinte szégyenkezve sütötte le becsületes szemét.
– Negyvenhatéves voltam már, de hát mit tehettem róla? –beleszerettem. Soká nem mertem bevallani neki, míg végre egy napon… Ilona! – tette hozzá aztán hangosabban.
Megigazította szemüvegét és boldog mosolylyal tárta fel a szomszéd szoba ajtaját. Női szoba volt ez, de szintén könyvekkel
telve s az iróasztal mellől most kissé fáradtan kelt fel a fiatal asszony. Sötétszőke haja keretében sajátságosan finom és tartózkodó arcz volt ez, melynek komolyságát csak emelték az elül összenőtt, dús szemöldökök. Nyugodt, de mélytekintetü szeme erős belső életet árult el.
– Íme, itt az én kis munkatársam! – mondotta a professzor vigan, – nyelvgyökök és ragok közt élünk, ezer mértföldre a jelentől, de azért boldogok vagyunk, úgy-e?
– Igen, nagyon boldogok, – felelte az asszony merengve.
– Bizony, már hat esztendeje, úgy-e?
Most is emlékszem: Belinszkyné valami végtelen hálás gyöngédséggel nézett a férjére.
II.
Hat esztendeje volt már férjnél, – nos nem sokkal ezután történt, hogy találkozott Szobránczy Ákossal. Találkoztak egy kongresszusi ünnepélyen, hová a híres professzornak el kellett mennie, –véletlenül egymás mellé kerültek a vacsoránál. És nem volt ez a fiatalos szerelem villámcsapása: két ilyen magában élő, bizalmatlan léleknél az a villámcsapás nem hathatott keresztül a tartózkodás és a kételyek vértjén. Mindketten szenvedtek ők már az életben eleget arra, hogy védve legyenek minden ellen, – még a hirtelen boldogság ellen is. De hát van mégis egy dolog, a mi össze tudja kötni a mélyen érző lelkeket: a szomorúság s ők valami rokonszenves meleget éreztek egymás melankóliájában.
A beszélgetés folyamán önkénytelen elcsudálkoztak, hogy olyan egyformán gondolkoznak.
– Valóban sohse hittem volna… mondotta Szobránczy Ákos, – az ember a legjobb barátaival, úgy látszik sohse ismerkedik meg! Hogy eddig nem találkoztunk!…
– Mi sehova se járunk, – felelt Belinszkyné elgondolkodva, – és nem is a férjem, hanem én nem vágyódom a világba. Tudja, én sokat szenvedtem gyermek- és leánykoromban, annyit, hogy még mindig örülök az egyhangú békének…
– Igaza van. Különben én se járok már sokat társaságba.
A fiatal asszony félénken kérdezte:
– Bizonyára… csalódott?
– Hisz ha legalább csalódtam volna! nevetett Ákos keserűen.
– Akkor… ráunt?
– Azt sem, – de tudja, az ember belefárad a keresésbe. Nem jó az, annyi szép álmot szőni s annyi idealizmussal menni neki a világnak! Könnyű a józan embereknek, de lássa, én ma harminczhárom éves vagyok és még mindig várom, hiába várom a boldogságot! Azt a nagy szerelmet, a mit megérdemelnék! Fáradt vagyok és ideges.
Belinszkyné kiváncsian nézett a kissé sápadt, szőke fiatal emberre. Mintha igazában csak most látta volna meg először. Maguk se tudták, miért, de beszélgetésük mindegyre bizalmasabbá vált.
– Lássa én szerencsésebb vagyok önnél, – mondotta az asszony, – én sohse érek rá szép álmokat szőni. Boldogság, szerelem? Mikor a férjem megkért, elcsodálkoztam… de aztán belenyugodtam, mert Henrik bácsinak – akkor még így hívtam –mindig igaza volt. És igaza is volt, mert boldog vagyok. Olyan áldott, jó ember, neki köszönhetek mindent…
Mikor felkeltek az asztaltól, álmélkodva néztek egymásra.
– Valóban, mintha már nagyon régóta ismerném… mondotta Ákos melegen. – Mint régi barátok ismerkedtünk meg…
Aztán elváltak. De ennek az estének az emléke nem hagyott mélyebb nyomot az Ilona lelkében. Örült annak a felfedezésnek, hogy az embernek a távolban is lehetnek ösmeretlen barátai s
egyenes lelke naiv örömével mondta el benyomásait a professzornak. Előbbi életébe visszamélyedve bizonyára nem nélkülözte volna a Szobránczy ösmeretségét. Ákos még másnap töprengve gondolt a beszélgetésre, de aztán megadóan vont vállat és ment fel hivatalába, a minisztériumba. Ösmerte ő a hirtelen rokonszenv e muló fellegeit és czéltalannak tartotta az egészet. Jobb szerette magányát és bizonynyal nem ment volna el Belinszkyékhez, ha egy legközelebbi véletlen találkozásnál maga a professzor meg nem hívja. Márczius folyamán aztán többször ellátogatott a budai remetelakba. A tudós tanár méltányolta széleskörű műveltségét, az asszony pedig mindjobban szerette dallamos hangját hallani. Ilona nagyon boldognak érezte magát s mégis valahogy jól esett neki az a boldogtalanság, a mi ebből a hangból reááradt. Érdekelni kezdte az Ákos keserűsége, és mert őszintén segíteni szeretett volna rajta, minduntalan az ő szerelemtelen életébe helyezkedett bele. Véget nem érő beszélgetésekbe, költői ábrándokba mélyedtek, melyekből hovatovább mind álmélkodóbban ébredtek fel. Utóbb már nem is kellett beszélgetniök többé, csak együtt hallgattak s ez mindennél kellemesebb volt. Ákos aztán néha a zongorához ült és játszott.
Egy kora áprilisi estén Szobránczy már alig szólt egy szót, csak órák hosszat mesterien játszotta Chopint. Mikor az utolsó, töprengő mazurka is elhangzott és felállt, beszélni akartak volna, de nem tudtak, – nem merték a bűvös hangulatot megszakítani. Ákos búcsúszó nélkül ment el és Ilona sóhajtva kelt fel karosszékéből. Leült iróasztalához, hogy folytassa férje munkáját, de agya zsibbadt volt és a toll kiesett ujjai közül. Úgy érezte megful. Kinyitotta az ablakot s a holdfénynyel a tavasz első meleg szellője balzsamosan áradt az arczába. Sajátságos láz járta át tagjait.
– A tavasz! – mormogta meglepődve és összerezzent. Sohse vette még eddig észre…
Másnap maga se tudta miért, elégedetlen volt magával és panaszkodott a férjének, hogy nem tud dolgozni. A professzor csitította, de ő csak leült iróasztalához és szinte kedvetlenül gondolt arra, hogy Szobránczy majd eljön és megzavarja. Valahogy haragudott rá, hibákat keresett benne… De Ákos nem jött el és
mikor nagy sokára eljött, egyáltalán nem találták meg többé az előbbi költői hangulatot. Mindketten tartózkodókká lettek, – Ilona szinte ellenségesen hallgatott. Szobránczy pedig keserűvé és gúnyossá vált. Így telt el a tavasz és nem is békéltek meg csak a nyár elején, mikor Belinszkyék hosszabb útra készültek DélOroszországba. Ekkor valahogy megdöbbentek, – zavarodottan siettek kibeszélni magukat, de minduntalan elakadt a szavuk. Ilona volt a nyugodtabb: ő még mindig nem ébredt fel… de Ákos a válás pillanatában azt érezte, hogy ezredrészét se mondta el annak, a mit el akart mondani. Megigérték, hogy írnak egymásnak.
Nos, ezalatt a három hónap alatt nőtt nagyra a Szobránczy Ákos szenvedélye. Míg az egyszerűbb, vagy indulatosabb sziveknek egymás közelsége kell a megnyilatkozhatásra, – addig e benső életü, mélyérzésü lelkeknek ép a távollét kellett, hogy kiküzdhessék magukban szerelmüket: Ilonának, hogy felébredjen, Ákosnak meg, hogy nagyon is éber és bizalmatlan szivét elaltassa. Mikor magában volt, jobban el tudott bánni kételyeivel. Ezerszer átgondolta azt a tavaszt, szive dobogott a megszakadásig, – és még se tudta, még se merte elhinni, hogy itt az igazi! Mikor annyira fáradt volt már a szerelmi kisérletezésektől!… Csakis akkor vesztette el a fejét, mikor burkolt czélzásaira Ilona nem felelt s egyre kevesebbet írt neki. Akkor ő csak annál több levelet küldött utána s egészen kétségbeesett. Szeptemberben már mindennap kifutott Budára nézni, megjöttek-e? Mit akart voltakép? Megijedt ettől a kérdéstől, aztán rimánkodott tisztességesebb énjéhez: csak egyszer akarna még vele beszélni, megvallani neki… Hisz akkor tán úgy is válniok kell – – Végre egy napon nyitva találta a házat. Hallotta az Ilona lépteit… Vajjon lát-e majd reményt a szemeiben? De csak rémület volt a kijövő fiatal asszony arczán.
– Az Istenért! Henrik beteg… nagybeteg!
Mintha forgószél kapta volna meg őt, egyszerre feledte a kettőjük dolgát, – feledte hosszú időkre. A szerelmes ember mindent szeret abban, a kit szeret még a másért való aggodalmát is és Ákos gyöngéd szive egész hevével látott neki a betegápolásnak. Borzasztó időket éltek át, – heteken keresztül kínos aggodalomban virrasztottak a szegény professzor felett. Mintha minden elmosódott volna közöttük, ott ültek egymás mellett idegenekként és csak susogva váltottak egy-két szót az orvos rendeleteiről. Mikor Ilonát elnyomta az álom, Ákos egy párszor félve rápillantott más szemekkel, de a beteg egy nyögésére menten szégyenkezve fordította félre a tekintetét… Nem tudta, nem sejtette egyikőjük sem, hogy e közös aggodalmuk mögött ép ez alatt nőtt legnagyobbat szenvedélyük. Az orvos még mindig nem tudott megnyugtatót mondani. Szobránczy azt hitte, az asszony eszét veszti annak az utolsó krizisnek az éjszakáján, ott állt kint az ebédlőben a borongós hajnalban, mikor végre Ilona halkan belépett.
– Meg van mentve!… az orvos mondja, élni fog… oh, köszönöm édes jó –
Arcza csakúgy ragyogott, alakja szinte felszabadult, megnőtt. Tárt karokkal sietett a hű barát felé. Keze már-már a férfi vállát érintette, mikor egyszerre torkán akadt a szó, lába gyökeret vert.
Karjai lehanyatlottak. Alig hallhatóan suttogta:
– Köszönöm…
Ákos reszketett egész testében: «Ilona!»… De az asszony még sápadtabban hátrált előle. A hogy fölvetette tekintetét, szemeik találkoztak. És elmondtak, bevallottak egymásnak mindent… Ilona felébredt.
Felébredt, – de nem tavaszi boldog hajnalra, hanem vigasztalanul komor őszi naplementére, melynek egén perczrőlperczre enyésztek a remény tűnő fényei. Bármerre próbált is menekülni, nem látott többé a sötétben… Az a nyugvó, mélyen érző lélek végre hát mozgalomba jött, de az öröm, mely hullámzásba hozta, nyomban pusztító viharrá lett felette. – Mialatt a lábbadozó beteg a szomszédban szunnyadt, Ilona ott gyötrődött magában és törte a kezeit. Már nem sírt többet, csak merően bámult a levegőbe. Olykor riadtan vetette fel a fejét és hitetlenkedve nézett körűl az olyan ismerős könyvtárszobában.
– Bűnös asszony vagyok! – suttogta, a halántékához kapva és megijedt a maga hangjától, – de nem, még nem. És nem is leszek az soha! Az érzésemről nem tehetek… de annak az áldott jó embernek rosszat tenni nem fogok. Őt elhagyni… soha!
– Hát akkor mit tegyek? – Segély után nézett körül. Megrázta a fejét. «Rajta, fel, – felkelni!» mondotta határozottan.
Többszöri sikertelen próbálkozás után végre talpra állt és kiegyenesedett.
– Igen, le akarom, le fogom küzdeni, ha belehalok is… – Lassan elindult a betegszoba felé. Feje kábult volt, – az elmult napok emlékei zavartan folytak össze agyában. Azóta Ákos már többször volt náluk és be akart hatolni, «csak egy szóra», de ő sohse fogadta.
– Leküzdöm… már le is küzdöttem, – mormogta és letérdelt az ágy mellé. Megragadta s megcsókolta a férje kezét.
A beteg fölébredt:
– Te vagy az, édes gyermekem? Miért sírsz… hiszen már jobban vagyok!
– Oh hál’ Istennek! – zokogott Ilona.
Odakint csöngettek.
– Bizonyosan Szobránczy, – mondta a tanár gyönge hangon, –hadd öleljem meg…
Felesége ijedten kelt fel.
– Ne, – ne ereszszük be! Pihenned kell…
V.
Teltek a napok. A beteg állapota rohamosan javult, nappal már a kereveten nyugodott, sőt járni is próbált. Ilona még mindig nem beszélt Ákossal, – Szobránczy mint eddig, úgy ezután is kijárt Budára, sőt most párszor sikerült is behatolnia a betegszobába. De Ilona nem mozdult a férje párnája mellől, görcsösen fogta a kezét és mialatt a professzor beszélt, csak esdeklően nézett vendégükre. Küzdött kétségbeesetten és hitte, remélte, hogy legyőzi érzelmeit…
Egy napon végre az orvos előadta a terveit. Nincs többé veszély, de a betegnek okvetetlen hosszabb időre délvidékre kell költöznie.
– Jobb ma, mint holnap, – mondotta, – a tanár úrnak semmi esetre se szabad itt maradnia ebben a nedves-hideg világban.
A professzor persze kötelességeire hivatkozott. Az alkudozások alatt lépett be Szobránczy.
– Igen, – erősködött az orvos, – legalább egy évre el kell mennie innen. Mikor indulhatnak?
A szegény tudós végre is megijedt:
– Oh, hát a napokban, úgy-e Ilona? Ilona elsápadt, Szobránczy is összerezzent.
– Egy évre!… suttogták mind a ketten úgy szólván egy lehelletben. És az asszony most már nem kerülte az Ákos tekintetét, hanem nézett a szemeibe reménytelenül.
– Hát bizony bucsuznunk kell! – mondotta a professzor megadóan, – nem akarom önt többet kifárasztani, édes jó
Szobránczy barátom Isten áldja meg… És aztán hosszan megköszönte a hű ápolását.
Ákos felkelt és búcsúra nyújtotta a kezét Ilonának. A szivük szakadt meg… érezték, hogy nekik valahogy másként kellene búcsúzniok és mégis nem tehettek mást, hidegen, udvariasan kezet fogtak.
– Ilona úgy érezte, nem birja tovább. Mikor látta Szobránczyt eltűnni az ajtóban, futott a lakás legutolsó szobájába és a fejéhez kapott:
Ezután a búcsú után ne lássam egy évig?… Megőrülök! Hisz arra csak van jogom, hogy egyszer utóljára beszélhessek vele s megmondjam neki, hogy… hogy nem szerethetem – –
Eltelt másnap, harmadnap: Szobránczytól semmi hír nem érkezett. Ilona azt hitte, eszét veszti. Hogyan, Ákos elhagyta volna őt?… Hisz pár nap mulva már utazniok kell!
Végre a következő nap délelőttjén megkapta azt a levelet. Szobránczy Ákos írt, hogy beteg és kérte, látogassa meg őt.
Komor, késő őszi délután volt. Három óra lehetett már s Ilona kimenőre készen ott állt az ablaknál. Bámult ki a dermedő világba, szeretett volna feleszmélni, de nem tudott: a gondolatok eszeveszett hajszával kergették egymást agyában s ő egyiket se tudta megfogni. Tán már huszadszor tette le kalapját.
– Őrültség, én egy tisztességes asszony, hogy mehetnék egy legényember lakására? – De aztán eszébe jutott, hogy Ákos beteg s hogy milyen odaadással ápolta volt az ő betegét.
– Beteg – folytatta ijedten, – ki tudja, mi baja van!… Bűn az, ha azt mondom neki, hogy válnunk kell?… Megyek, megyek!
Már ott volt az ajtónál s még egyre visszafordult. Maga is megdöbbent, hogy így szinte búcsúzott a lakásban mindentől… Úgy érezte, valami láthatatlan nagy súly nehezedik a vállaira, a mi alatt össze fog roskadni. Háromszor is bepillantott a betegszobába, férje nyugodtan aludt s az ujonnan érkezett német rokon őrködött mellette. Kirohant és egy nagyot lélegzett. Mintha az egész ház és egész multja beláthatatlan messzeségbe sodortattak volna tőle…
Aztán kocsiba ült és végig robogott a városon. Megálltak a néptelen, elegáns utczában. Majd kiégett a szeme, mikor megkérdezte: itt lakik Szobránczy Ákos úr?…
Az ajtó becsukódott s ő szívdobogva támaszkodott oda a félrehúzott, nehéz függönyhöz. Azt érezte: egész eddigi élete bezárult mögötte s ő soha többet vissza nem mehet azon az ajtón a kint hagyott emlékekhez. A délután fénye álmosan szűrődött be a szobába s első perczre alig látott valamit a derengő homályban.
Hátul égett a tűz a kandallóban s fellobbanó lángja olykor megcsillant a műtárgyakon és megvilágította a puha keleti szőnyegek virágait. Csend volt, – most egyszerre felkelt valaki az ódon karosszékből. Csak az arczát láthatta a sötétben, ép mert olyan sápadt volt… Jött feléje Ákos, küzdve magával, olykor megmegállva. Alig tudott megszóllalni:
– Bocsásson meg… Nem vagyok talán olyan beteg, mint maga gondolta. De ne féljen, – nem tőrbe akartam én csalni, – nem volna az méltó a mi szerelmünkhöz…
Ott állt előtte s félrehajtva fejét nézett rá végtelen gyöngéden.
– Eljöttem, – suttogá Ilona az ajtófélfához kapaszkodva, eljöttem megmondani magának, hogy… hogy… – Tovább nem tudta mondani. Viharszerű szédület fogta el… Már csak az Ákos szemeit látta s ezek a szemek most egyszerre mintha egész közelből néztek
volna rá, úgy hogy ő behunyta az övéit. Ajkai égni kezdtek és zsibbasztó forróság áradt egész valójába.
Ott volt a karjai közt. Hosszú csók volt az, hosszú, mint egy édes örökkévalóság, mely alatt két ember lelke kicserélődik. És nem érzéki diadal, hanem rajongó tiszta hév: a tizennyolczéves leány első csókja, a mit elkésve kap meg huszonhatéves korában… asszony korában. Ajkaik alig tudtak elszakadni egymástól. Végre
Ilona feje az Ákos vállára hanyatlott, de szemét még mindig nem nyitotta ki. Kezeik keresték egymást és a hogy görcsösen összefogódzkodtak, úgy érezték, immár semmi se tudná őket többet elválasztani.
Egyszerre Ilona felriadt és elképedve nézett Szobránczyra:
– Végem van… most már bűnös asszony vagyok! megcsókoltam egy másik embert…
Ákos megadóan hajtotta le a fejét.
– Ne mondja bűnnek azt, a mi nekem a legszentebb – az én szegény szerelmem…
Aztán szokatlan hévvel ragadta meg az asszony karját. Elszánt komolysággal nézett a szemébe.
– Ilona, értsen meg! nem akarok én bűnös szerelmet, – nem fér az meg az én becsületes lelkemmel. Jőjjön, üljünk le. Azért kérettem ide, hogy nyugodtan beszélhessek magával. Most kell határoznunk… Keressünk jövőt szerelmünknek, – módot, menekvést ebből a rettenetes helyzetből. Segítsen nekem, – én már megőrülök…
Leültek egymás mellé s kezet kézben tartva lázas sietséggel kezdtek el beszélni. Halkan suttogtak sokáig: keresték a kibúvó ajtót, melyen át megmenthették volna boldogságukat.
Törték a fejüket, meghányták-vetették az egész reménytelen helyzetet, vitatkoztak, megpróbáltak mindent. Hiába… Ákos összecsapta a kezeit és keserűen kiáltott fel:
– Hisz én is ember vagyok! nekem is van jogom a boldogsághoz! Végre itt a várva-várt eszmény… és nem lehet az enyém! Van igazság az égben? Ilona, – menjünk világgá…
Ilona eltakarta arczát. De aztán felkelt.
– Nem, – azt a jó embert nem hagyhatom el soha!
Ákos arcza elváltozott.
– Hát akkor mit teszünk? – kérdezte sötéten.
Egymásra néztek: megdöbbenve, azzal a sivár kétségbeeséssel, a mi már nem ismer tanakodást, a mi már itélet. Agyukban a gondolatok veszedelmes örvénye kezdett keringeni – homályosan érezték, hogy most már nem ők rendelkeznek magukkal, hanem valami láthatatlan rémes hatalom sodorja őket az ismeretlen felé. Olyan vigasztalan volt a világ odakint, olyan kaján és ellenséges! Menekültek előle, egy forró ölelésben tapadtak egymáshoz.
– Ilona, angyalom. – fuldokolt Ákos, – se veled, se nélküled… Szeretlek minden fájdalmammal… Szeretlek mindhalálig! – –
– Mindhalálig… ismételte halkan Ilona, és erre a szóra, úgy érzé, valami csudálatos fényesség gyúl ki a lelkében. Arcza lázban égett, – rajongva, átszellemülten kiáltott fel.
– Ákos, hallgass rám… meg tudnál halni értem?
Szobránczy szilajon vetette fel a fejét.
– Meg. – Aztán rekedten tette hozzá: és te, – meg tudnál halni velem?
– Tied vagyok Ákos, – együtt halunk meg!…
Borzongva keltek fel s léptek hátra. És a hogy egymásra néztek, érezték, mint száll le kettőjük közé valami fagyos rém: a végzet, a halál. Lassan közeledtek ismét és aztán szótalan fogtak kezet. Sokáig hallgattak, végre Ilona törte meg a csöndet!
– Ákos… mikor?
Szobránczy arcza kemény kifejezést öltött. Nyugodtan odament egy szekrényhez. Mikor visszajött, letette a kis forgópisztolyt az asztalra.
– Bűn volna ez? – tépelődött komoran, – hisz meghalni, lemondani csak szabad!
– Ákos, suttogta Ilona a kebléhez kapva, – ide czélozz, a hol úgy fáj, a szivembe.
Szobránczy kínosan jajdult fel:
– Én öljelek meg téged? Nem tudnám megtenni angyalom… soha, soha! Előbb én halok meg. Aztán te jösz, – légy erős. Együtt halunk meg…
– Együtt!
Az a láthatatlan hatalom mind rémesebben sodorta őket magával. Búcsúztak emlékeiktől.
– Anyám… – susogta az asszony – atyám! Oh, hogy látom őt magam előtt… És Henrik, a jó, az áldott…
Aztán Ákoson volt a sor. Ilona segíteni akart neki, de ő csak szenvedélyesen szorította magához.
– Nincs nekem rajtad kívül senkim, a kitől búcsúzzam!
És ettől fogva egyre kétségbeesettebben tapadtak egymáshoz. Nem mertek «utolsó», csak «utolsóelőtti» csókokat adni, – nem merték egymás kezét elereszteni. Sok idő telt el… Végre Ilona kiszakította magát. Mint a ki nem birja tovább, eltakarta arczát és rohant a szoba közepére.
Szobránczy Ákos felkapta a pisztolyt és sietve lépett utána. Átkarolta hátulról és mialatt ajka a visszahanyatló arczot kereste, a maga szivének irányozta a revolvert.
– Még egy utolsóelőtti csókot, Ilona! – most egy – utolsót…
Dördült a fegyver. S az asszony rémes sikolylyal fordult meg.
VII.
Vérében ott vonaglott előtte a szőnyegen Szobránczy Ákos és a kandalló fénye élesen világította meg eltorzult vonásait. Ilona jajveszékelve borúlt rá s abban a perczben mindent feledve, csak arra gondolt, hogy az a drága kedves, borzasztó kínokat szenved és neki segíteni kell rajta.
– Egek… Ákos… mit tettél?
Feltépte a ruháját. Csak úgy ömlött alóla a vér
– Jer… jer… hörögte a haldokló.
De az asszony nem értette. Csak annál kétségbeesettebben borult rá, ölelte és csókolta szederjes ajkait.
– Hisz itt vagyok… itt vagyok…
Élesztgette, ápolta eszelős gyöngédséggel. Fogta a fejét és zokogva rimánkodott neki:
– Ákos, – ne hagyj el. Felelj!
De Szobránczy szemei már üvegesedni kezdtek.
– Oh de fáj! – susogta kínosan, – borzasztó meghalni!…
És Ilona nézte, az élet mint enyészik el előle és csak tehetetlenül törte a kezeit. Ott térdelt Ákos felett, – ki tudná megmondani, mennyi ideig? Teltek a nehéz perczek, félórák után órák… Még mindig szorongatta a hűlő kezet, de zokogása már elfuló nyöszörgéssé vált. Utóbb csak üres szemmel, néma fájdalommal meredt a drága kedvesre.
Akkor egyszerre valami neszre felriadt. A kandallóban összeesett a zsarátnok és sötét lett a szobában. Pillanat mulva a novemberi sötétségen át halaványan szűrődött be az utczai világítás fénye és kisértetiesen esett a halott elváltozott, torz arczára. Ilona iszonyodva ugrott talpra. Rekedt kiáltás szakadt fel melléből s karjait meredten
