Читать книгу Undertow - Arthur Hamilton Gibbs - Страница 4

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As he stepped out of the door of the Pig and Whistle, Philip Hatherley Jocelyn, Master of Arts of the University of Oxford, paused on the threshold.

Dusk and a spattering of electric lights were creeping over the small country town. A thin drizzle turned it all into a minor key.

“Raining again!” he muttered. With his left hand he hung his walking stick on his right forearm. Both hands were needed for that reluctant top button of the many-times-cleaned waterproof. “Is this the thousandth or the millionth time I’ve stood here going through precisely this gesture?”

His eyes went first left, up the street, and then right, down it. He might as well have shut them, for all the difference it made. He could have recited the names, habits and character of every occupant on both sides of that street, in both directions.

He muttered again. “It’s as regular as cleaning one’s teeth, or ... yes, by Jove ...” for a breath he paused, then went on with a hesitant rush, as though he had dared himself to put the half-thought into actual words ... “or going to the bathroom!”

Having said it, he tingled all over, with the sense of having deliberately flung a bomb into the middle of the High Street. He glanced quickly up and down, half expecting everybody to come rushing to the shop doors to see what had happened.

But nobody even noticed him, except the postman, who nodded as he went by on clumping feet, and all he said was, “ ‘Evening, Mr. Jocelyn!”

Philip Jocelyn sighed with relief. “Good evening, Digby!” he said. Then with an inner chuckle he added to himself, “Heavens, if they only knew I’d compared it all to that!”

He was indeed like a slot-machine that must perforce deliver itself as soon as the penny has dropped. Every day during the week there was the dinning of Latin and French verbs into thick heads in the fuggy classrooms of the small preparatory school; on Wednesday afternoons a brief escape, alone, over the countryside, with a sketchbook concealed in his waterproof pocket; at night, after the indifferent meal, a frantic hunt for a plausible excuse to dodge off to his room and avoid the stodgy conversation of his three colleagues, every one of whose anecdotes and ideas had been worn threadbare. Every Saturday, the silly business of cricket mercifully finished and the small boys led off to gorge themselves with tea and jam, he changed his clothes and hurried down the hill into Uxminster: then, first, a pint of beer, threepence, in a heavy pewter mug, while he played a hundred up, sixpence, on the rocky old table in the inn parlor with any one of the citizenry who happened to be there. Nine Saturdays out of ten it was the citizen who paid, for Jocelyn had been the Pig and Whistle champion for three consecutive years. Billiards over, there came the pause on the inn doorstep, the smell of corks and sawdust still in his nostrils, and then the buttoning of the waterproof, the momentous decision as to whether he should walk up the street first and down last, saving the bookshop to the end, or whether he should go straight to the bookshop. First or last, there was a ritual to be observed,—not on any account to plunge in right away, but to stand in front of the window and savor the colors of the book jackets, note the more and more exotic use of glaring reds and blacks, yellows and greens, in cubistic contrast. Then, underneath the books, there was always a display of writing pads fitted with blotting paper, of more and more gorgeous self-filling pens that had ousted the old sober black kind clean out of the market ... lovely things that made one’s mouth water. Philip Jocelyn would rattle the change in his pocket and sigh and turn sternly away to the second but equally fascinating window on the other side of the door. There, there were pictures, landscapes in water color, lithographic reproductions of the old masters; occasionally—and it was always a breath-taking moment to see if it had gone—a pencil drawing of his own, signed only with initials and priced humbly at half a crown.

Then at last, with everything accomplished in due order, he was free to go inside. Having passed the time of day with John Sampson, the admirable old gentleman all of whose life had been devoted to the selling of books in this identical shop, Philip Jocelyn would make his way into the back room and reach the crowning point of every Saturday. Ranged on innumerable shelves, without any pretence of order, were thousands of old books, second-hand, third-hand, heaven only knew what-hand, a literary Tom Tiddler’s ground, with prices all the way from a pound—the unattainable—to twopence; and at that figure even an assistant schoolmaster could add to his library.

To-night as he came up to the door of the shop and shook off the raindrops from his hat, Jocelyn was still under the influence of the mood that had made him fling his bomb. To look at, there was nothing to distinguish him in any way from the rest of what he called the citizenry. With clothes on, or off, he melted into any crowd, whether in the street or in a swimming bath. There was no prophetic note of originality in the color of either his skin or his tie. His fair hair was parted like everybody else’s and brushed in the same way. His features were without eccentricity of eyebrows, nose or chin. Yet there was one element of difference which made him emerge from his otherwise natural camouflage,—the fact that when he walked along, his blue eyes showed a man who was somewhere else, not there at all.

To-night the customary thrill had gone out of the bookshop window. It didn’t seem even to matter whether his last week’s sketch had been sold or not. Some in-turning thought, springing from nowhere,—but all the same it had interfered with his touch at billiards—was possessing him, had already driven him to a sarcastic comment on his surroundings which was, and he knew it, merely taking out on others the measure of his own self-contempt.

Life—to him the grandest and most significant word in the language—was meant to be lived spaciously, freely, deeply. Yet all that mankind had done was to build cages for itself, and now, like the subjected wolves in the zoo, paced forever up and down, gazing ceaselessly, longingly, but ineffectually, through the relentless iron bars.

There had been Oxford; at the time a seeming basking in the exterior sun. But looked back at now, from the appalling inadequacy of thirty-five, he knew it had been only a mirage, the fostering ground of false visions dissipated at the first contact with the outside world. Like the rest, he had struggled feebly, uttered his faint protest, eyes round with refusal to believe; only at last, while his fellow pilgrims bowed their meek necks beneath the common yoke of grubbing for bread and butter, to find himself a spiritual beachcomber, assistant master in a second-rate preparatory school, to whom unfortunate little animals, whom he himself was helping to cage in their turn, said “Yes, sir!” and “No, sir!” The irony of it, when all the while there was something more, a way out, if only he could discover the secret of breaking through. The thing that he was now was not alive, in the sense of really living. He was nothing but a stale chrysalis, thirty-five years gone, and if he didn’t look out he might die in his brittle casing before he had ever lived. Considered aloofly, and not as though he personally were involved at all, he knew that that would be a tragedy, just as John Sampson the bookseller, or, for that matter, Digby the postman, was a tragedy. That was the infernal paradox,—that life ordained that so few people should ever come to life ...

Ah, well! He sighed deeply, turned his back on it all and walked into the warmth and glow of the shop.

The only people in it were three women thumbing the current novels in the lending library and a girl to whom John Sampson was showing different boxes of fancy note paper engraved with, presumably, her initials. She would have it perfumed and then write to some hefty lad on it; and he, poor fool, would dream of her body and suffer....

Jocelyn knew her and the women as well. In the local interchange of bridge teas it would have been impossible to escape knowing them. As they stood there, he could see them in their drawing-rooms, manipulating teacups, surrounded by “art” lamp shades, miniature “leaning towers”, imported on their Cook’s tour to Florence and Pisa, cheek by jowl on the mantelpiece with an early Victorian atrocity of a clock, equally atrocious collections of china perched precariously on pieces of furniture which they called “what nots”; every single thing in the room a betrayal of their pathetic desire to really break through.

To-night the mere idea of their small talk rattling about his ears, and having to smile back and say “Yes ... no ... really?” stirred him to another revolt. “I’ll be damned if I will!” he muttered; and, assuming a desperate hurry, he raised his wet hat to them generically, nodded to John Sampson, and dived into the back part of the shop.

In that world of old books he was safe from Latin declensions and French irregular verbs as well as from drab people who had the effect of rubbing in his own drabness and futility,—safe also from himself, for in those yellowing pages was a drug which, as surely as a pipe of opium, wafted Philip Jocelyn from the frustrated existence of Uxminster into a contact with minds which had known what he himself was vainly seeking. All his dim perceptions, his undernourished beliefs, his inert and flabby longings, were there carried to full flower. There he could find himself as he would have liked to be, as he occasionally dared to tell himself he really was, but for ... but for what? Some lacking element that had been denied him?

He sent a frowning glance along the shelves. Twice he paused, pulled out a book, turned over the flyleaf; but each time the answering note did not seem to be there and the book went back. Then a title in French stood out. He murmured it aloud with an upward inflection of self-interrogation. “Le Roi Pausole?”

The old red leather of its binding felt soft and warm to the touch. He read the opening paragraph with a chuckle and then began to turn the pages. As the delicate drawings of startlingly arranged nudity hit him one after the other, he could feel the back of his neck growing red. He glanced up quickly to make sure that none of those women had followed him in. King Pausolus had no kingdom in Uxminster! Then he went back to the beginning and began to read, absorbed, excited, fascinated, repelled. Normally there was a great gulf between Philip Jocelyn’s mind and that kind of book, but this evening it seemed that a bridge had been flung across.

When he finally became aware of time once more, his wrist watch told him that he would have to hurry if he was going to get back to school in time to snatch a few glutinous, lukewarm mouthfuls before dinner would be declared over by the headmaster’s rising and mumbling a grace. Willy-nilly a man must eat, even though he has discovered treasure. He looked inside the cover for the price, and groaned. It was five shillings. Desperately he fingered the change in his pocket. Would he have to count pennies all his life? Five shillings ... it would mean cutting down on tobacco again for a month, going without that mug of beer for four mortal Saturdays! All his life he had had to cut down, stint, go without. He had had to crawl through Oxford in the shadow of penury, metaphorically lurking down side streets because he couldn’t afford to do the things the others did.... Spaciousness, depth,—were they just empty words, high-sounding nothings? And yet, was there any worth-while thing in the world you could ever get without having to give up something else to get it? Faust had to give up his soul, Shelley his life, Romain Rolland his country. Perhaps one day he himself ...

Jocelyn tightened his grip on the book and hurried over to the cash desk where the bookseller sat quietly going over his figures for the day.

“Look here!” he burst out. “Do you mind if I owe you for this? I’ll be able to pay it off in about a month ... even if I don’t have the luck to sell a couple of sketches.”

Old John Sampson reached out a hand and took the book, glanced at the price and handed it back. “Of course,” he said. “I’ll make a note of it.”

A surge of gratitude swept through Jocelyn. “Thanks most awfully,” he said. “It’s frightfully decent of you. I’m ... I’m very much obliged. Good night!”

He slid the book into the deep pocket of his waterproof, and as he closed the shop door carefully and went off with long strides up the wet street, his eyes showed that the inner Jocelyn had escaped again.