Читать книгу The Sun Cure - Alfred Noyes - Страница 3

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The furnished apartments—a drawing-room floor in North Street—had been for two years in the occupation of the curate at St. Margaret's and had ceased to look like furnished apartments. They had even become a passable expression of the Rev. Basil Strode's individuality. His were the colored reproductions, issued by the Arundel Society, of Old Masters. Framed in very broad frames of plain fumed oak, they replaced the gaudy but minatory texts and the Christmas-number supplements wherewith aforetime Mrs. Barrow had decked her walls. He had even provided the background on which the pictures hung—an unpatterned paper of olive green surmounted by a deep ivory-tinted frieze. He had swept from the mantelpiece Mrs. Barrow's collection of insane crockery, each item of which declared that it was "A Present from Helmstone." In their place, on a strip of green velvet that repeated the tone of the wallpaper, were three brass vases, small, severe, ecclesiastical in type, filled with flowers of the color prescribed by the church for that particular octave.

It was the Rev. Basil Strode who had provided a room's noblest embellishment—books chosen with care and lovingly used. His were the slim books of contemporary verse, through which, as his conservative weekly journal advised him, most progressively, it was his duty to keep in touch with the new age. His was the cottage piano in rosewood, and his—it must be regretfully added—was the mechanical player which could be attached to it. He had a fair range of hymn-tunes that he could play without its intervention.

On the rather sensational occasions when Miss Pettigrew had fainted at the harmonium during a week-day service, he had borne her to the vestry in his muscular arms and on his return had taken her place at the harmonium—the hymn-tune being fortunately in his repertoire. "And all," as Miss Bird said subsequently to her sister, "with the most masterly ease and coolness." He required the mechanical player for more ambitious efforts. It is to be feared that when the Misses Bird passed under the curate's open windows on a summer evening and heard what could be recognized as Chopin's Funeral March they did not realize how much of the rendition was due to the advances of modern science.

Barbara Lane, on the other hand—the daughter of Admiral Lane, and the prettiest girl in the parish—seemed to be always faintly amused at him. This was unfortunate, for he admired her, had proposed to her, and had been told that, if ever he committed a burglary, she might consider it.

In appearance the Rev. Basil Strode was far removed from the curates of comedy depicted by the late Phil May. He was a handsome man. He had the head of a thinker, though not of a creator. His eyes were beautiful and melancholy, his mouth was small and delicate, his profile inevitably suggested stained glass. He was tall and his figure might have served as an artist's model. With Swedish exercises before his bath each morning, he kept it up to concert pitch. He had been in the first rank of amateur tennis-players at Oxford, but he played no games now. He had an esthetic conviction that games were not in the picture.

The chin was just a little weak, the eyes were just a little too soft, the skin was perhaps a little too dark. At times he looked like an ordained gipsy.

He was not, his vicar admitted, a good parish priest. But he was a potent and eloquent preacher, had a pleasant voice, and got considerably less flat than the vicar himself when intoning the Litany. He enjoyed the ornate ritual of St. Margaret's, though he was far indeed from falling into Romish error. He had no wish to institute the confessional, but when middle-aged ladies felt constrained to tell him somewhat intimate and appalling stories about themselves, he listened with sympathy and gave salutary advice.

The sun streamed into his sitting-room this morning as he entered it. He was not one of those curates who in the privacy of their lodgings give way to careless dressing and college blazers. He dressed as punctiliously for breakfast as for more solemn occasions. He glanced at the low table before the fireplace, on which his breakfast and one letter awaited him. He then selected a piece of toast from the rack, applied a simple test to it, laid it down on his plate, frowned slightly, and rang the bell.

"Yes, sir," said Mrs. Barrow, who entered with decent humility.

Mr. Strode tapped the toast with one finger. "Hard again," he said in a pained voice.

"Sorry, sir. And I told the gel myself. You'd like fresh made, sir?"

"I should. And, Mrs. Barrow," he added in a low vibrant tone, "I do not wish to wait for fresh toast every morning. Not every morning. I say nothing of the waste. You will see to that? Thank you."

He poured out his tea, but he did not open his letter.

He knew the handwriting. It was that of an old friend who was rather a nuisance—a man who was capable of embracing every opinion except the orthodox—a man whose many enthusiasms were hardly distinguishable from violence—a man who habitually spoke of the most delicate matters in a way that was cheerful and even slangy—a man who had far more affection than reverence for the Rev. Basil Strode.

Not till he had finished breakfast did Mr. Strode feel able to face the sort of senseless tirade that his polemical friend wrote to him, couched as it always was in nervous but ill-chosen language.

He shook his head sadly, as he drew the sheet from the envelope. The first three words seemed to come at him like a kick in the face.

The three words were: "Hallo, Old Fruit!"

Strode smiled a little wearily. Old days at Oxford were recalled to him. But when would Harry Dalston be able to see that those days no longer existed and adapt himself to changed circumstances? It was not the familiarity that Basil minded. From an old friend who had been at school and college with him familiarity was justifiable. A bishop might write a familiar letter to another bishop. But a bishop would not say, "Hallo, Old Fruit!" And Basil Strode was gradually crystallizing into a mental condition where the bishop was conclusive and did not admit of argument.

It was all so lamentable, too, for Dalston was such a good fellow really. He was a musician. He was a scholar, with some contempt for the academic lines of scholarship. He was a man of boundless energy. At an early stage of his career—when he was but a boy—he had been in the first half-million to discover Omar via Fitz-Gerald. He was a magnificent apostle, but with an uncomfortable leaning towards false gods. Not always. He had been sound, as Basil admitted, in his advocacy of the Swedish exercises.

But Harry Dalston was a predestined rebel, and rebels are habitually defective in taste and judgment—qualities that Basil valued. Then again, Harry Dalston thought at least as much about his body as he did about his mind, and considerably more than he did about his soul. Basil Strode could not, of course, be in sympathy. It is true he took care that his personal appearance should be in accord with the dignity of his office, and that he took such physical exercise as his health required. But even this latter now seemed to him something of a humiliation. He inhabited a machine that could keep in order only if it were allowed to propel itself by its own power for an average distance of six miles per diem. That was the way he put it, and was annoyed at being rebuked by Dalston for irreverent criticism of the designs of his Creator. Whatever he might have done at Oxford in his youth—of which Dalston took a malicious joy in reminding him—Basil Strode's view was now that brother ass should be beaten and starved into quiescence. Dalston, on the other hand, denounced the fast as "a spiritual toot with offensive next-morning effects." And yet the friendship continued, and Basil Strode went on with his reading of Harry's letter.

"I want to tell you," wrote Harry, "some months ago I went into the 'Return-to-Nature' literature. Did a chunk of Thoreau, dipped into old Walt again, likewise George Borrow—bless him! The passion for truth and nature revived in me. This grand hot weather helped. I said to myself, 'Dammy, I'll do it, and chance who calls me a crank!' Do what? Why, pull off this dirty civilization and pitch it into the waste-basket, go back to the first garden of all, soak up the sunlight by day and sleep under the stars by night. But you can keep your hair on. The police have not got me yet. On my departure from all conventions I sacrificed on the altar of conventionality. That is to say, I got up old Giffen from the village—him what builds and carpents—and made him erect an eight-foot-high palisade, impenetrable to the vision, round thirty square yards of turf at the bottom of my paddock here. You remember the stream there? It runs right through the middle of my enclosure. It's a desert island with a door to it within ten minutes' walk of my house. When the job was finished old Giffen said to me: 'Going to keep some sort of a wild beast there, sir, if I may ask?' I told him he'd guessed it.

"So he had. But in this case, all that the creature required was to take sun-baths in peace.

"There are times when the grasshopper is a burden, and the observation of slight necessary civilities towards people I dislike leaves me frantic and murderous. When the world seems stacked with fools and one can no longer suffer them, when one's life is rotten music played by a rotten mechanical contrivance. At one time such moods led me to drink enough whisky to wash a tramcar—anything to get unconscious sleep. Now I go back to my desert island and to nature. I lie naked in the sun or in the water of the stream. I hear no cackle. I see nothing but the blue above me. And solitude, silence and the sun cast out the devil.

"At first I came here for just an hour or two at a time. But at this moment I have been here for four days and three nights consecutively. My servants believe I am in London, partly perhaps because I told them I was going there. During that time I have worn no clothes, eaten nothing but uncooked fruit, drunk nothing but water, owed nothing to civilization but one blanket, which I have not used, a pipe and its concomitants, a volume of Tolstoi and writing materials. (Tolstoi, by the way, is an artist and an apostle, but he is also a blighter.) I have lost (only temporarily, I trust) any desire for alcohol. I am at peace with all mankind including those composers whom I most hate. I am rested. I am in accord with nature.

"Now I can go back for a while, and I am going back tonight. My servants believe that I return by the late train, after they are all in bed. But before I go back I write this to offer you my example as your one chance of salvation.

"The nearer the pulpit, the further from God! Do as I have done. Wake naked at night with the stars above you, and you may come to that sense of proportion which is the base of humor and of religion. Read your 'Sartor Resartus' again. Set the breadth and depth of the sun against the formulas of your creed. Study a small bug in the grass and wonder whether he may not matter more than you in the scheme of things. Above all, forget the little bug-house poets who flatter you into thinking that your armchair interest in bosh on hand-made paper indicates an original and unconventional mind. Get rid of the bats in your belfry. Get rid of your chains, and the bandage on your eyes, and the opiate in your brain. Be religious as I am.

"P.S. 'Ware ants. They bite like sin. I cleared them all out of here before I started."

In the heat of the moment Basil considered the letter insolent, even from an old friend. That reference to the mechanical piano-player, for instance, was quite unnecessary. How could a man of irregular life and unorthodox opinions venture to tackle an ordained priest on the subject of religion? How could a great (though in some respects erroneous) thinker like Tolstoi be described as a blighter? Dalston's discovery was no discovery at all. It was as old as the hills. What did it all amount to? A rather bad-tempered man who let himself be tremendously upset by the merest trifles, and then drank whisky to excess, and found benefit from a few days of vegetarian diet, sun-baths and a rest-cure. That was all there was to it, and it was quite commonplace. It was precisely what anybody with any medical knowledge would have expected.

This verdict would be dispatched to Dalston in due course. Meanwhile there were various parish matters. He called upon the vicar to express a conscientious opinion, and he was snubbed—delicately and gently snubbed but still snubbed. He was no sooner back at his rooms than a parishioner—an old lady with the brains of a hen and with much the same vociferousness—called to say that she had been unable to distinguish between his sermon of the previous evening and flat atheism. She had felt it her duty to utter one word of warning. She was only a poor old woman, but the Scripture said that out of the mouths of babes and sucklings, as Mr. Strode would remember.

All was not well with Chalkdene. There had been a burglary of Miss Pettigrew's house last night. She had lost some very valuable articles, and the thief had not been caught, so that it might happen at the old lady's house also, at any moment now. Basil gathered that she attributed these things to his own subversive influence. Then came an anonymous post-card, referring to genuflections as "antics," and asking Mr. Strode why he did not go over to Rome at once. Mr. Strode's shoe-lace came untied publicly, and in retying it he broke it. Mrs. Barrow sent up toast at luncheon that was as hard as her own unregenerate heart.

By the parcel-post, at two o'clock, there came another missive from Dalston, a book this time, a book in light orange covers, by a German, on sun-bathing. It was crowded with pictures that aptly symbolized (as Basil thought) the final dilemma which our paradoxical civilization was so rapidly approaching. There were pictures of what, at first, appeared to be savages in the South Sea Islands, but, on closer inspection, were highly civilized young persons disporting themselves naked among pine-forests. There were pictures of permanently waved young women, with carefully arranged flowers in their hair, performing ecstatic physical exercises on the seashore. There were pictures of equally well-barbered and equally ecstatic young gentlemen leaping naked over sunlit snow-fields on skis. But those were rather chilly, he thought.

There was one picture where the rebels against civilization seemed to be crawling in and out of a vast mud pie, like hilarious lizards. This almost primeval picture was called "The Mud-Wallow." There was another picture in which the exponents of the new return to Nature looked as if they had quietly taken the place of the Greek figures in a public park, and were holding their breath lest you should discover the change. There were others in which they looked like frogs, posing for the camera, of course, but considerably more at ease in that less exacting rôle. The very German rhapsody of the letter press—"how proudly is the sunlight from the manly chest reflected"—was hardly supported by the art of the photographs. All too often the illustrations brought to Basil's mind the poor "forked radishes" of "Sartor Resartus." He knew nothing of this new continental craze; and, at first, he was a little appalled. He wondered if the modern world was really going mad. He read the remarks of the author on "The Mud-Wallow" twice, the second time with a marked German accent, which made it more effective:

"Out of pure unbounded joy of body, and love of Nature, I used to hurl myself in wet weather prone on the earth, naked, in soft, muddy ground. Thus was born my idea of 'The Sporting Mud Bath.' And, strange to say, this opened the way back to Nature, even to those whose hearts had been all too closely shut through an unhappy upbringing. There was always a noise of ungovernable merriment at this spot. The warm tenacious mass stuck to our skin. We tumbled ourselves into the mud, kneading it with our whole bodies"—Basil didn't like the phrase—"and it made us strong and shapely. All our ideas were turned right round. Ask yourselves, my happy sunshine friends, and even today you will not be able to say which was finer: to go slowly into the mud, dirtying your clean skin, or to push each other in bodily."

But what really made Basil sit up was the English editor's introduction to the book, in which a famous dignitary of his own church was quoted. "The author of this book," said Dean Finch, "is a bit of a fanatic, but it will do good. I am in favor of publishing."

Now Basil had great faith in this particular luminary of his church, and, moreover, Dalston had scrawled sardonically at the side of the dean's remark, "I wish the photographer had got him!" Basil resented this. Dean Finch was a thoughtful person; and Dalston didn't seem to see that the dean was really supporting what was best in Dalston's own gospel. The mud-wallow, of course, was extravagant, but not the sunlight treatment, of which science had been telling us so much lately. There was a good deal in all that; and he began to turn the pages of "Man and Sunlight" with a new sympathy, since it had received the dean's blessing. It is true that, when Mrs. Barrow brought the coffee in, Basil hastily dropped his napkin over the picture of those light young ladies and gentlemen, dancing an innocent ring of roses in one of the glades of Eden. "Happy was their laughter," as the author said, "and there were harmony and sunshine in their hearts." But such things, Basil felt, were for a more exalted stage of civilization than Mrs. Barrow had yet reached. The sunlight treatment in itself, of course, was excellent.

There was a new kind of glass that might be put in his bedroom window. But the book firmly repudiated such feeble makeshifts. The sun-bather was not to skulk behind screens if he desired to regain his natural glory. He must be free to "catch the wild-goat by the hair"; yes, even the great Victorian poet supported that "back to Nature" impulse, on occasion; and Basil was insidiously drawn into a train of thought that surprised himself. It was to have more than surprising consequences. He still condemned Dalston's letter; but he condemned it now for a different reason.

Dalston was a prosperous lawyer, with a practice which he delegated chiefly to subordinates. He was also a landowner, in a small way, and he could satisfy a whim by erecting a palisade round what he called his private desert-island. But it was unreasonable to tell a poor curate in lodgings to do the same thing, although—well—well—he would go out for a walk instead. He paused a moment before his book-shelves to select a companion—one of the slim books of recent verse which Dalston had described in his crude way as "bug-house poetry." "Bug-house," he understood, was American slang for "lunatic."

An American professor who once stayed at Helmstone for the summer had given him some really interesting information of that sort. It might be compared with our own "bee in the bonnet." Any insect, to an American, was a "bug"; but they usually "geared things higher" in America, owing to the size of their country; and so they magnified the English metaphor and spoke of "bats in the belfry." But it was just like Dalston to condemn these books as—what had he called them in his last letter?—"the little passports of pseudo-modernity."

Basil, himself, had often been baffled by the elderly critics who, in their frantic anxiety not to fall behind the age, had advised him to take these odd productions seriously. But, in a sense, it was his duty to keep up with the times, in their artistic developments, and it involved no mental fatigue. Half an hour a week, at tea-time, was all that he usually spent on it, and it enabled him to keep abreast of what the bright young people were doing and thinking. It was most unreasonable of Dalston to criticize this. Dalston was always crying out against conventions; and yet, as soon as one or two of the bright young people (by no means so dazzingly young either) really did attack the duller conventions of our literature, and go to the expense of producing an entirely new kind of work on hand-made paper, Dalston began to talk of the convention of unconventionality and "bosh."

Almost at random, and very much as (according to Darwin) butterflies choose their mates, he selected a slim book—his latest acquisition—in a cover startlingly patterned with lozenges of red and yellow. It was entitled "Leap-Frog." One had to admit that there was a piquancy, even in their titles, which was lacking in Browning's "Paracelsus" and Arnold's "Thyrsis." It had a natural attraction for the young. He slipped it into his pocket and set out, unconscious of what awaited him, for the great adventure of his life.