I am not accusing you. Believe me, I am not complaining. You must forgive me if for a moment, now and again, it seems as if my pen had been dipped in gall (怨恨；苦味).
You must forgive me; for my boy, our boy, lies dead there beneath the flickering (摇曳的) candles.
I have clenched (握紧) my fists against God, and have called him a murderer, for I have been almost beside myself with grief (悲痛).
Forgive me for complaining. I know that you are kindhearted, and always ready to help.
You will help the merest stranger at a word. But your kindliness is peculiar (独特的). It is unbounded. Anyone may have of yours as much as lie can grasp with both hands.
And yet, I must say it, your kindliness works sluggishly.
You need to be asked. You help those who call for help; you help from shame, from weakness, and not from sheer (纯粹的) joy in helping.
Let me tell you openly that those who are in affliction (痛苦) and torment (折磨) are not dearer to you than your brothers in happiness.
Now, it is hard, very hard, to ask anything of such as you, even of the kindest among you.
Once, when I was still a child, I watched through the judas (窥视孔) in our door how you gave something to a beggar (乞丐) who had rung your bell. You gave quickly and freely (大量地), almost before he spoke.
But there was a certain nervousness and haste in your manner, as if your chief anxiety were to be speedily rid of him; you seemed to be afraid to meet his eye.
I have never forgotten this uneasy and timid way of giving help, this shunning (回避) of a word of thanks. That is why I never turned to you in my difficulty.
Oh, I know that you would have given me all the help I needed, in spite of your doubt that my child was yours.
You would have offered me comfort, and have given me money, an ample (丰富的) supply of money; but always with a masked (掩蔽的) impatience, a secret desire to shake off trouble.
I even believe that you would have advised me to rid myself of the coming child. This was what I dreaded (担心) above all, for I knew that I should do whatever you wanted.
But the child was all in all to me. It was yours; it was you reborn - not the happy and care-free you, whom I could never hope to keep; but you, given to me for my very own, flesh of my flesh, intimately intertwined with my own life.
At length I held you fast; I could feel your life-blood flowing through my veins (血管); I could nourish you, caress you, kiss you, as often as my soul yearned (向往).
That was why I was so happy when I knew that I was with child by you, and that is why I kept the secret from you.
Henceforward (今后) you could not escape me; you were mine.
But you must not suppose that the months of waiting passed so happily as I had dreamed in my first transports. They were full of sorrow and care, full of loathing for the baseness of mankind.
Things went hard with me. I could not stay at work during the later months, for my stepfather's relatives would have noticed my condition, and would have sent the news home.
Nor would I ask my mother for money; so until my time came I managed to live by the sale of some trinkets (小件饰物).
A week before my confinement (分娩), the few crown-pieces (克朗) that remained to me were stolen by my laundress (洗熨衣物的女工), so I had to go to the maternity (产科的) hospital.
The child, your son, was born there, in that asylum (救济院) of wretchedness (悲惨), among the very poor, the outcast (流浪的), and the abandoned. It was a deadly place.
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Everything was strange, was alien (陌生的). We were all alien to one another, as we lay there in our loneliness, filled with mutual hatred, thrust (推挤) together only by our kinship (关系) of poverty and distress (不幸) into this crowded ward (病房), reeking (散发) of chloroform (三氯甲烷) and blood, filled with cries and moaning.
A patient in these wards loses all individuality (个性), except such as remains in the name at the head of the clinical (临床的) record.
What lies in the bed is merely a piece of quivering flesh, an object of study...
I ask your forgiveness for speaking of these things. I shall never speak of them again. For eleven years I have kept silence, and shall soon be dumb (不说话的) for evermore.
Once, at least, I had to cry aloud, to let you know how dearly bought was this child, this boy who was my delight, and who now lies dead.
I had forgotten those dreadful hours, forgotten them in his smiles and his voice, forgotten them in my happiness.
Now, when he is dead, the torment (痛苦) has come to life again; and I had, this once, to give it utterance (表达). But I do not accuse you; only God, only God who is the author of such purposeless affliction (痛苦).
Never have I cherished an angry thought of you. Not even in the utmost agony of giving birth did I feel any resentment (怨恨) against you;
never did I repent (后悔) the nights when I enjoyed your love; never did I cease to love you, or to bless the hour when you came into my life.
Were it necessary for me, fully aware of what was coming, to relive that time in hell, I would do it gladly, not once, but many times.
Our boy died yesterday, and you never knew him. His bright little personality has never come into the most fugitive contact with you, and your eyes have never rested on him.
For a long time after our son was born, I kept myself hidden from you. My longing (渴望) for you had become less overpowering. Indeed, I believe I loved you less passionately.
Certainly, my love for you did not hurt so much, now that I had the boy. I did not wish to divide myself between you and him, and so I did not give myself to you, who were happy and independent of me, but to the boy who needed me, whom I had to nourish, whom I could kiss and fondle (爱抚).
I seemed to have been healed of my restless yearning (渴望) for you. The doom seemed to have been lifted from me by the birth of this other you, who was truly my own.
Rarely (罕有地), now, did my feelings reach out towards you in your dwelling. One thing only - on your birthday I have always sent you a bunch of white roses, like the roses you gave me after our first night of love.
Has it ever occurred to you, during these ten or eleven years, to ask yourself who sent them? Have you ever recalled having given such roses to a girl?
I do not know, and never shall know. For me it was enough to send them to you out of the darkness; enough, once a year, to revive (苏醒) my own memory of that hour.