영어로 읽는 고전 _ 로버트 히첸스의 피의 부름
로버트 히첸스의 『피의 부름(The Call of the Blood)』은 20세기 초에 쓰인 소설이다. 이야기는 사랑, 아름다움, 그리고 복잡한 인간관계라는 주제에 초점을 맞추며, 주로 헤르미오네 레스터라는 인물과 그녀의 삶에서 중추적인 두 남성 — 예술가 에밀 아르투아와 약혼자 모리스 델라레이 — 과의 교류를 중심으로 전개된다. 헤르미오네가 자신의 인간관계를 탐색해 나가는 동안, 서사는 지성과 육체적 아름다움 사이의 대비, 그리고 그들의 관계를 형성하는 감정의 저류를 탐구한다. 소설의 서두에서 헤르미오네는 에밀 아르투아의 편지 모음을 읽으며 그의 방문을 기다리고 있다. 그녀는 평범한 외모에도 불구하고 주변 사람들을 사로잡는 매력적인 정신과 지성을 지닌 여성으로 묘사된다. 두 사람이 만나면서 그들 사이의 역학 관계가 발전하며, 우정의 깊이와 그녀가 잘생겼지만 지적으로는 덜 뛰어난 모리스 델라레이와 갑작스러운 약혼을 한 것에 대한 에밀의 호기심이 드러난다. 도입부는 풍부한 인물 묘사와 다층적 대화를 소개하며, 헤르미오네가 결혼, 개성, 그리고 진정한 사랑의 본질에 대한 사회의 시선에 응답하는 가운데 실존적 주제들을 탐구하기 위한 분위기를 조성한다.
Classics Read in English _ The Call of the Blood by Robert Hichens
Robert Hichens's The Call of the Blood, written in the early years of the twentieth century, opens with a woman reading letters — and in that stillness, in the space between one man's written words and another man's promised arrival, the entire architecture of the novel reveals itself.
Hermione Lester is not beautiful. Hichens states this plainly, without apology, because the novel's central argument depends on it. She is a woman whose power resides not in the arrangement of her features but in the quality of her attention — the way her mind moves, the way her presence makes a room feel more inhabited, more awake. Those who know her are drawn not to her face but to the intelligence that burns behind it, and Hichens renders this magnetism with a precision that makes conventional beauty feel like a lesser currency.
Then there is Emile Artois — artist, observer, the kind of friend who understands Hermione so thoroughly that his understanding itself becomes a form of intimacy more dangerous than romance. He arrives at her door carrying a question he is too civilized to ask directly: why has this extraordinary woman, this mind he has spent years conversing with as an equal, chosen to marry Maurice Delarey — a man whose gifts are entirely physical, whose beauty is undeniable but whose depths, Emile suspects, may not survive serious excavation?
Hichens does not frame this as a simple triangle. It is something more sophisticated and more painful: a study of the war between what the mind admires and what the blood demands. Hermione is not a woman deceived by a handsome face; she is a woman who has heard something calling from beneath the surface of her carefully constructed intellectual life — something primal, ungovernable, and older than reason. The title is not metaphor but diagnosis. The blood calls, and in Hichens's world, even the finest mind must eventually answer — though the cost of answering, and the cost of refusing, may prove to be indistinguishable.
Among the contents
On a dreary afternoon of November, when London was closely wrapped in a yellow fog, Hermione Lester was sitting by the fire in her house in Eaton Place reading a bundle of letters, which she had just taken out of her writing-table drawer. She was expecting a visit from the writer of the letters, Emile Artois, who had wired to her on the previous day that he was coming over from Paris by the night train and boat.
Miss Lester was a woman of thirty-four, five feet ten in height, flat, thin, but strongly built, with a large waist and limbs which, though vigorous, were rather unwieldy. Her face was plain: rather square and harsh in outline, with blunt, almost coarse features, but a good complexion, clear and healthy, and large, interesting, and slightly prominent brown eyes, full of kindness, sympathy, and brightness, full, too, of eager intelligence and of energy, eyes of a woman who was intensely alive both in body and in mind. The look of swiftness, a look most attractive in either human being or in animal, was absent from her body but was present in her eyes, which showed forth the spirit in her with a glorious frankness and a keen intensity.
