영어로 읽는 고전 _ 로버트 히첸스의 샛길
로버트 히첸스의 『샛길(Bye-Ways)』은 19세기 후반에 쓰인 소설이다. 이야기는 데즈먼드 렌프루와 그의 새 아내이자 명성의 요구와 자유에 대한 갈망 사이에서 고투하는 저명한 여배우 클레어 사이의 복잡한 관계를 중심으로 전개된다. 두 사람이 모로코로 신혼여행을 떠나면서, 이 이야기는 욕망, 정체성, 그리고 그들을 둘러싼 신비로운 인물들의 집요한 존재감이라는 주제를 탐구한다. 소설의 도입부는 데즈먼드 렌프루가 모로코의 야영지에서 잠들지 못한 채 누워, 밤의 소리에 불안해하며 클레어와의 결혼을 되돌아보는 장면으로 시작된다. 클레어의 아름다움과 유명인으로서의 아우라가 그의 마음을 사로잡고 있으며, 그녀를 지키고자 하는 집착적 욕망 역시 마찬가지다. 렌프루의 불안은 호위 병사들이 사라진 것을 알아차리면서 커지고, 클레어가 텐트에 없다는 사실을 발견하면서 극에 달한다. 그녀를 찾아 나선 끝에, 그는 클레어가 한 공연에 넋을 잃고 빠져 있는 모습을 발견하게 되며, 이를 통해 그녀와 뱀 부리는 사람 사이의 연결이 드러난다. 이 뱀 부리는 사람은 클레어 자신의 연극적 기질을 비추는 인물이기도 하다. 이 첫 번째 만남은 클레어의 정체성과 그녀를 형성하는 힘들에 대한 탐구의 무대를 마련하며, 예술과 삶, 그리고 그들을 둘러싼 이국적 풍경 사이의 더 깊고 얽힌 연결을 암시한다.
Classics Read in English _ Bye-Ways by Robert Hichens
Robert Hichens's Bye-Ways, written in the waning years of the nineteenth century, opens not in a London theater or a Mayfair drawing room, but in the vast, unsettling darkness of a Moroccan night — and it is precisely this displacement that gives the novel its strange, feverish power.
Desmond Renfrew lies awake in his tent, listening to the desert breathe. He is a newly married man, and yet there is no peace in him. His wife, Claire, is an actress of considerable renown — a woman whose beauty has been public property long before it became his private possession. And therein lies the fracture at the heart of the story: Renfrew does not simply love Claire, he covets her, guards her, as though fame itself were a rival he must outwit. His devotion is tender on the surface but possessive at its root, and Hichens allows us to feel this unease from the very first page.
When the camp's soldiers vanish without explanation and Claire's tent is found empty, Renfrew's anxiety curdles into something closer to dread. His search leads him not to danger, but to revelation: Claire, standing transfixed before a snake charmer, her eyes alight with a recognition that has nothing to do with her husband. The scene is electric in its implications. The charmer — part performer, part conjurer — is Claire's dark mirror, a figure who commands attention through the same mysterious alchemy she wields on stage. In this single nocturnal encounter, Hichens collapses the distance between art and instinct, between the woman Renfrew married and the untamed self she has never surrendered. Morocco, with its labyrinthine shadows and ancient rituals, becomes more than a backdrop; it is the landscape of Claire's inner life laid bare, and the territory where this marriage will either deepen or unravel.
Among the contents
The petulant whining of the jackals prevented Renfrew from sleeping. At first he lay still on his camp bed, staring at the orifice of the bell tent, which was only partially covered by the canvas flap let down by Mohammed, after he had bidden his master good-night. Behind the tent the fettered mules stamped on the rough, dry ground, and now and then the heavy rustling of a wild boar could be heard, as it shuffled through the scrub towards the water that lay in the hollow beyond the camp. The wayward songs of the Moorish attendants had died into silence. They slept, huddled together and shrouded in their djelabes. But their wailing rapture of those old triumphant days when on the heights above Granada, beneath the eternal snows, their brethren walked as conquerors, had been succeeded by the cries of the uneasy beasts that throng the mountains between Tangier and Tetuan. And Renfrew said to himself that the jackals kept him from sleeping. He lay still and wondered if Claire were awake in her tent close by. If so, if her dark eyes were unclouded, what journeys must her imagination be making! She was so sensitive to sound of any kind. A cry moved her sometimes with a swift violence that alarmed those around her. The message of a note of music shut one door on her soul, opened another, and let her in to strange regions in which she chose to be lonely.
