Читать книгу Undertow - Arthur Hamilton Gibbs - Страница 5

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The town of Uxminster lay snuggled into a gentle fold of hills on the border of Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire. It could not be said to “boast” a population of ten thousand souls because the verb “to boast” is far too active. Nobody cared what the population amounted to. Most of them didn’t know. If a new house went up, or a shop changed hands, it was a subject of nodding speculation for some days and then mental inertia descended once more. What was good enough for their fathers’ fathers was good enough for them. What was the use of trying to stir people up with all these newfangled things they put in the newspapers? Did all the song and dance about India help to get Bill Carter a job, and him with his wife seven months along? Why didn’t they stop all the talk and do something?

And so, summer and winter, the only factory in the community went on turning out its prescribed number of chair legs at so many farthings a dozen, and the greengrocers sold their vegetables, and Bill Carter’s wife’s child was born, and somebody else’s died, and that girl from the linen draper’s got married to the chemist’s assistant—and high time too—and the swing door of the Pig and Whistle opened and shut with the regularity of a baby’s breathing.

The High Street had not in any sense been made. It had come into gradual being through the centuries, conforming to the line of the fold in the hill. The houses on one side were lower than those on the other. The street itself widened and narrowed, turned and then widened again. Houses and shops were mixed indiscriminately, some with bottle-glass windows whose ledges were splashed with bright-colored flower boxes, others with bulging bays; and the roof line was a crazy picturesque jumble of different heights and shapes.

There was a pastry shop and tea room called The Old Brown Cosey. Its upper storey projected beyond the lower; and if any further proof of its being Elizabethan were needed, one had only to turn an appreciative eye on the eight-inch beams that made a rich design all down its front. One of the greengrocers came next, and then the chemist, who would rather have parted with his eyeteeth than the gigantic flagons of colored fluid that threw out emerald and ruby rays when the lights were turned on at night. Across the street was the linen draper and next to him John Sampson’s bookshop; and on the opposite side again was the post and telegraph office, recognizable as such only by a brass plate nailed above the ramshackle door. Its windows were a hodgepodge of gumdrops, sticky homemade sweets, and toys. The only modern note was the movie house, the entrance to which was next to the Pig and Whistle. The auditorium had once been the inn yard, silent since the last coach had rattled out, now noisy once more with the shuffle of many feet and the pounding of the piano which “accompanied” the months’-old films that eventually found their way there.

The only people who from personal experience knew anything of the outside world were the doctor and the vicar, their wives and daughters; plus the hunting and golf-playing occupants of the dozen or so country estates scattered over the neighboring slopes, who came swooping down into Uxminster for a brief hour to shop for the minor things they had forgotten in London.

The keynote was acceptance, to all intents and purposes apathy. Uxminster was the hub of their universe. If you were born there, you grew up and spent your life there, doing as everybody else did, without questioning, without wonder.

After ten years of it, Philip Jocelyn, an importation, had almost succumbed to its slumbrous rhythm. There was a quality of hypnosis in the untaxing routine of the day’s work, in the unperceived blending of one season into another, in the unconscious response to the instinct of safety which demands the throwing out of roots into the immediately surrounding group life. Because none of his counteracting impulses were sufficiently strong to function from within, and because, hitherto, no outside spur had come to prick him, he had settled down into it as an old hulk settles into the oozy mud left by the receding tide.

Such expressions of self-contempt as he had indulged in on the steps of the inn were few and far between, like the momentarily remembered voice of some one who had died,—some other Philip Jocelyn not quite stillborn.

Physically speaking, his range of experience was nil. He had undergone no bodily danger, no trial of muscle, even, that demands the last ounce and then the little more. He had known no illness such as takes one to the brink of the Styx and leaves an indelible imprint on the mind by establishing a new point of departure. All his days had been petty, his adventures only those timid flutterings of the mind engendered by a beautiful face in the crowd, or by the sudden vision of startlingly white shoulders seen from the front row of the pit. These, after the first moment’s ecstasy, flooded him with fear, angry fear, that made him wrench his eyes away again and again in shame and confusion. Did the woman realize what she was doing,—that by leaving her shoulders naked she made him see her whole body naked? It was more than suggestion: it was a form of prostitution; and, damn her, she had no right to make him feel like that! What was the man next to her made of, that he could go on sitting quietly as though unaware of her? Was it because he was her husband, and therefore a woman’s mere shoulders meant nothing? Or was it because ... Oh, God, he must stop! It was dangerous to go on thinking things like that. The flesh was something to ignore, to cover up and hide away, to have nothing to do with at any price. There was something ... frightening about it, because it went on tugging at you....

So Philip Jocelyn pulled the blinkers down over his eyes, over his mind, and took his romance second-hand, through the pages of books; satisfying his creative instinct, to some measure at least, by brief expeditions on a bicycle from which he returned with sketches of crumbling arches in Norman churchyards, a corner of a market in the Grand’Place at Caudebec, an old tumbled cottage with lilies sprouting out of the thatch.

It never occurred to him to call himself an artist; and yet beauty drew him like a magnet. He could stand speechless, tingling all over, at the sound of a chime of bells rolling over a quiet countryside, at the spectacle of a group of children splashing in a stream, the sun glinting off their wet bodies, at the stupendous majesty of a Gothic cathedral silvered by the moon. These were imperishable treasures, hoarded away secretly as a dog buries a bone, never to be talked about to any one,—because there was no one to understand these things, no one who would do anything else but laugh at him. And perhaps they would be right, after all. It was no part of a man’s job to be moved by things like that. All the men who got to the top of the tree, who had their photographs in the magazines, were essentially masculine. They rode to hounds, or shot lions in Africa, or rose up in court and dominated juries by their intensive maleness. None of them seemed to be cursed with his strain of weakness, of ... of femininity. Was that the word? Was it weakness or femininity which made him want to risk sharing his sense of beauty with some one, which made him desire to talk to some human soul as he had never talked, without self-consciousness, to—yes, by Jove—to throb at the touch of a warm hand clasping his own and come rushing out at last into that unknown wonderland of sympathy and understanding which, after all, only a ... a woman ...

Even in the darkness—and he could never have made the confession in daylight—he felt his whole body begin to burn as he went marching on up the hill that Saturday night, his newly bought book banging against his leg with every stride, his back to the lights of Uxminster, his face towards those of the school. The school.... He suddenly stopped in his tracks, making an odd sound in the back of his throat as he stared up at its square ugliness, almost as though seeing it for the first time. “I wonder,” he muttered, “if it really is a school, or not, after all, a prison?”