영어로 읽는 고전 _ 로버트 히첸스의 검은 스패니얼과 다른 이야기들
로버트 히첸스의 『검은 스패니얼, 그리고 다른 이야기들(The Black Spaniel, and Other Stories)』은 20세기 초에 쓰인 단편 소설집이다. 이 책은 동물 학대와 생체 해부를 둘러싼 도덕적 갈등과 집착에 대한 심리적 이야기로 문을 열며, 교양 있는 여행자 버논 커스티븐, 저명한 의사 피터 디밍 박사, 그리고 그들의 공통 친구인 화자를 중심으로 전개된다. 이 소설집은 유럽의 살롱에서 북아프리카의 사막까지 아우르며, 사교계 드라마와 기이한 저류, 그리고 분위기 있는 기행 작품들을 혼합한 것으로 추정된다. 소설집의 도입부는 화자가 로마에서 디밍을 버논에게 소개하는 장면을 따라가며, 만찬 중 동물에 관한 토론은 버논이 자신의 사랑하는 스패니얼이 도난당해 생체 해부에 사용되었음을 밝히면서 격렬해진다. 영국으로 돌아온 후 사건은 긴장되고 기이한 방향으로 전개된다. 디밍은 갑작스럽게 로마를 떠나고, 도버에서 안색이 좋지 않은 모습을 보이며, 버논은 곧 윔폴 스트리트에서 디밍의 옆집을 임대하면서 자신의 동기를 감춘다. 화자가 디밍의 '검은 스패니얼'을 끌어내려는 시도는 자신의 폭스테리어가 디밍의 집 안에서 고통에 비명을 지르며 도망치는 것으로 끝나고, 얼마 지나지 않아 화자가 자리를 비운 사이에 디밍이 개에게 물린 상처로 인한 패혈증으로 사망했다는 소식이 전해진다. 일 년 후, 이제 적극적인 동물 보호 운동가가 된 버논은 충동적으로 거리의 판매상에게서 검은 스패니얼을 구매하고, 리모델링하여 하나로 합쳐진 윔폴 스트리트의 집에서 화자를 다과에 초대하며, 그 개와 디밍의 그림자를 둘러싼 미스터리와 긴장감은 여전히 살아 있는 채로 남겨진다.
Classics Read in English _ The black spaniel, and other stories by Robert Hichens
Robert Hichens's The Black Spaniel, and Other Stories, published in the early twentieth century, announces its intentions with a title story that lodges itself under the skin like a splinter — small, sharp, and impossible to ignore.
The tale begins innocuously enough. Rome. A dinner party. The narrator introduces two men who should, by all social logic, become friends: Vernon Kersteven, a cultured traveler of deep feeling, and Dr. Peter Deeming, a physician of considerable reputation. Conversation turns to animals, as conversations among civilized people sometimes do — and then, without warning, the evening ruptures. Vernon reveals that his beloved black spaniel was stolen and delivered into the hands of vivisectionists. The confession is not melodramatic; it is quiet, precise, and devastating, the kind of wound that does not bleed visibly but poisons everything it touches.
What follows is Hichens at his most unsettling. Deeming flees Rome with the haste of a man who has heard something he cannot unhear. He surfaces at Dover looking hollowed, diminished, as though the crossing has aged him by years. Then Vernon appears on Wimpole Street — not across London, not at a comfortable distance, but next door to Deeming's own house, his motives wrapped in an impenetrable silence. The narrator, caught between two men he can no longer fully read, attempts to probe the mystery, only to have his own fox-terrier scream in agony inside Deeming's home and bolt in terror. Shortly after, Deeming is dead — blood poisoning from a dog bite, the official report states, as though the explanation itself were a door slammed shut against further inquiry.
A year passes. Vernon, now a passionate crusader for animal welfare, buys a black spaniel from a street vendor on impulse — or is it impulse? He receives the narrator for tea in the conjoined Wimpole Street houses, now renovated into a single dwelling, the wall between Deeming's world and his own erased as completely as a memory one has decided to overwrite. And yet Deeming's shadow has not departed. It lingers in every room, in the click of the spaniel's nails on the floorboards, in the unanswered questions that hang in the air like the scent of something burning in a locked room. Hichens ends not with resolution but with resonance — a final image so loaded with suppressed meaning that the reader leaves the story not knowing what happened, only knowing, with absolute certainty, that something did.
Among the contents
IN the big hall of the Grand Hotel at Rome I introduced Peter Deeming to Vernon Kersteven.
The two men were friends of mine, and I wanted them to like each other; and, perhaps because they were both fond of me, I thought that they would get on well together, and that we should form a happy and a lively trio at dinner. Was this the fancy of an egoist? I have sometimes wondered since.
At the time I speak of I had known Deeming for over two years, having met him first in London at a friend’s house. Vernon was a comparatively recent acquaintance whom I had encountered when I was travelling in Algeria; but already in my heart I gave him the dearer title, for I had come to like him greatly, and I knew that my sympathy was returned.
The two men were very different—in their appearance, their natures, their ways of life—but differences sometimes seem to make for pleasant intercourse, and even for intimacy. We often love ourselves; but do we generally love those who markedly resemble us?
