2. 职称英语
  3. I didn’t know at the time what happened next. Sartoris didn’t tell me until

I didn’t know at the time what happened next. Sartoris didn’t tell me until

游客2023-12-05  61
问题     I didn’t know at the time what happened next. Sartoris didn’t tell me until later, afterward. Perhaps up to that time he had not anything more than instinct and circumstantial evidence to tell him that he was being betrayed: evidence such as being given by Spoomer some duty not in his province at all and which would keep him on the aerodrome for the afternoon, then finding and freeing the hidden dog and watching it vanish up the Amiens road at its clumsy hard gallop.
    But something happened. All 1 could learn at the time was. that one afternoon Sartoris found the dog and watched it depart for Amiens. Then he violated his orders, borrowed a motor bike and went to Amiens too. Two hours later the dog returned and repaired to the kitchen door of the men’s mess, and a short time after that, Sartoris himself returned on a lorry(they were already evacuating Amiens)laden with household effects and driven by a French soldier in a peasant’s smock. The motor bike was on the lorry too, pretty well beyond repair. The soldier told how Sartoris had driven the bike full speed into a ditch, trying to run down the dog.
    But nobody knew just what had happened, at the time.
    But I had imagined the scene, before he told me. I imagined him there, in that bit of a room full of French soldiers, and the old woman(she could read pips, no doubt: ribbons, anyway)barring him from the door to the living quarters. I can imagine him, furious, baffled, inarticulate(he knew no French)standing head and shoulders above the French people whom he could not understand and that he believed were laughing at him. "That was it," he told me. "Laughing at me behind their faces, about a woman. Me knowing that he was up there, and them knowing I knew that if I busted in and dragged him out and bashed his head off, I’d not only be cashiered, I’d be clinked for life for having infringed the articles of alliance by invading foreign property without warrant or something. "
    Then he returned to the aerodrome and met the dog on the road and tried to run it down. The dog came on home, and Spoomer returned, and he was just dragging it by the scruff of the neck from the refuse bin behind the men’s mess, when the afternoon patrol came in. They had gone out six and come back five, and the leader jumped down from his machine before it had stopped rolling. He had a bloody rag about his right hand and he ran toward Spoomer stooped above the passive and stiff-legged dog. "By gad," he said, "they have got Cambrai!"
    Spoomer did not look up. "Who have?"
    "Jerry has, by gad!"
    "Well, by gad," Spoomer said. "Come along, now. 1 have told you about that muck."
    A man like that is invulnerable. When Sartoris and I talked for the first time, I started to tell him that. But then I learned that Sartoris was invincible too. We talked, that first time. "I tried to get him to let me teach him to fly a Camel," Sartoris said. "I will teach him for nothing. I will tear out the cockpit and rig the duals myself, for nothing."
    "Why?" I said. "What for?"
    "Or anything. 1 will let him choose it. He can take an S. E. if he wants to, and I will take an Ak. W. or even a Fee and I will run him clean out of the sky in four minutes. I will run him so far into the ground he will have to stand on his head to swallow. "
    We talked twice: that first time, and the last time. "Well, you did better than that," I said the last time we talked.
    He had hardly any teeth left then, and he couldn’t talk very well, who had never been able to talk much, who lived and died with maybe two hundred words. "Better than what?" he said.
    "You said before that you would run him clean out of the sky. You didn’t do that: you did better: you have run him clean off the continent of Europe." [br] The "I" in the first paragraph is______.
选项 A、the narrator
B、the protagonist
C、the antagonist
D、an outsider
答案 A
解析
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