'Polly heerd it,' said Toodle, jerking his hat over his shoulder in the direction of the door, with an air of perfect confidence in his better half. 'It's all right.'
'But I ask you if you heard it. You did, I suppose, and understood it?' pursued Mr Dombey.
'I heerd it,' said Toodle, 'but I don't know as I understood it rightly Sir, 'account of being no scholar, and the words being - ask your pardon - rayther high. But Polly heerd it. It's all right.'
'As you appear to leave everything to her,' said Mr Dombey, frustrated in his intention of impressing his views still more distinctly on the husband, as the stronger character, 'I suppose it is of no use my saying anything to you.'
'Not a bit,' said Toodle. 'Polly heerd it. She's awake, Sir.'
'I won't detain you any longer then,' returned Mr Dombey, disappointed. 'Where have you worked all your life?'
'Mostly underground, Sir, 'till I got married. I come to the level then. I'm a going on one of these here railroads when they comes into full play.'
As he added in one of his hoarse whispers, 'We means to bring up little Biler to that line,' Mr Dombey inquired haughtily who little Biler was.
'The eldest on 'em, Sir,' said Toodle, with a smile. 'It ain't a common name. Sermuchser that when he was took to church the gen'lm'n said, it wam't a chris'en one, and he couldn't give it. But we always calls him Biler just the same. For we don't mean no harm. Not we.
'Do you mean to say, Man,' inquired Mr Dombey; looking at him with marked displeasure, 'that you have called a child after a boiler?'
'No, no, Sir,' returned Toodle, with a tender consideration for his mistake. 'I should hope not! No, Sir. Arter a BILER Sir. The Steamingine was a'most as good as a godfather to him, and so we called him Biler, don't you see!'
“波利听到了,”图德尔把帽子越过肩膀朝门口的方向猛地一挥,露出对他那口子完全信任的神气。“一切都很好。”
“既然看来您一切都由她作主,”董贝先生原以为丈夫是家庭中更有力的人物,本打算把他的意见对他说得更加明确,以便加深他的印象,但却没有成功,就说道,“我想用不着再对您说什么了。”
“什么也不用说,”图德尔说道,“波利听到了。她没有打盹儿,先生。”
“这么说,我不想再留您了,”董贝先生失望地回答道。
“您过去在哪里工作?”
“过去大部分时间是在地下,先生,直到我结婚以后才到地面上来。这里修建了铁路,通车以后我就在一条铁路上工作。”
As the last straw breaks the laden camel's back, this piece of information crushed the sinking spirits of Mr Dombey. He motioned his child's foster-father to the door, who departed by no means unwillingly: and then turning the key, paced up and down the room in solitary wretchedness.
It would be harsh, and perhaps not altogether true, to say of him that he felt these rubs and gratings against his pride more keenly than he had felt his wife's death: but certainly they impressed that event upon him with new force, and communicated to it added weight and bitterness. It was a rude shock to his sense of property in his child, that these people the mere dust of the earth, as he thought them should be necessary to him; and it was natural that in proportion as he felt disturbed by it, he should deplore the occurrence which had made them so. For all his starched, impenetrable dignity and composure, he wiped blinding tears from his eyes as he paced up and down his room; and often said, with an emotion of which he would not, for the world, have had a witness, 'Poor little fellow!'
It may have been characteristic of Mr Dombey's pride, that he pitied himself through the child. Not poor me. Not poor widower, confiding by constraint in the wife of an ignorant Hind who has been working 'mostly underground' all his life, and yet at whose door Death had never knocked, and at whose poor table four sons daily sit but poor little fellow!
就像最后一根稻草把满负重载的骆驼的背压断一样,图德尔曾经在地下工作过的这个信息使董贝先生的情绪再也支撑不下去了。他向他儿子奶妈的丈夫指了指房门,于是图德尔没有一点不愿意的样子,离开了这个房间。然后,董贝先生把钥匙转了一下,锁上了门,独自一人在房间里可怜地踱着步子。虽然他古板和固执地保持着尊严与镇静,可是他还是抹去了使他眼睛变得模糊的泪水,怀着他决不愿意在别人面前显露出来的情绪,不时说道,“可怜的小家伙!”
注释:It is of no use: 是没有用的
例句:
1. It is of no use to talk to him; he is as deaf as a post.
跟他说话毫无用处,因为他一点也听见。
2. It is of no use boasting of being rich on a desert island.
在无人岛上夸耀富有也是白费力气。