Читать книгу Despair's Last Journey - David Christie Murray - Страница 11

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It was mid-July, and even at an altitude of four thousand feet the sun could scorch at noonday. The lonely man sat at his outlook, gazing down the valley. There was a faint haze abroad, a thickening of the air so apparently slight, and in itself so imperceptible, that he would not have noticed it but for the fact that it blotted out many familiar distant peaks, and narrowed his horizon to some four or five miles. He waited for the sun to pierce this impalpable fog, but waited in vain. The sun itself was red and angry in colour, and shrunk to half its common size. Even at noontide the eye could look on it for a second or two without being unbearably dazzled.

The shade in which he sat moved slowly eastward, and had almost deserted him, when his hand felt a sudden fierce pang of pain as if an insect had stung him. He moved hastily and examined the mark of what he took for a sting. It was round, small, and red, as if the end of a hot knitting-needle had been pressed upon the skin. Whilst he sat sucking at the place to draw the pain away, and looking round in search of the insect foe, the same quick burning pang struck him on the cheek. He moved hastily again, and stared and listened keenly. There was not a buzz of wings anywhere near at hand, and not an insect in sight. But as he looked and harkened he was enlightened. A great tear of resinous gum had caught and hardened in a fork of the branches, and the sun’s rays falling on and through this were concentrated as if by a burning-glass. The fiery point had stung him.

He broke away the cause of mischief, and then looked about him with a new understanding. The forest fires had begun, and it was the smoke which so closed in the view. He could detect now a faintly aromatic smell of burning, and wondered that he had not noticed it before.

There was not a breath of air stirring, and not a hint of flame in all the haze which on every side blotted out the far-off hills, and changed to a dull tint of smoke those which still loomed upon him. At night the moon hung in the starless sky like a globe of blood, and day by day the dimness of the air increased. The cloud took no form of cloud, and not a sound came through it except for the voice of the water, and the occasional roll and clangour of the trains. The distances in view grew briefer and more brief, and within a week of the date of his discovery the nearest peaks were obliterated, and the air had grown pungent with its charge of invisible burned atoms.

He sat in the midst of this narrowed and darkened world, this world of silence and solitude, as he sat in the middle of his own despairs. His life had fallen away to this—an aching heart in a world where no man came. Had it not been for pride, he could have wept for pity of himself. Had it not been for a sense of rebellion against fate and the world, he could have died of his own disdain. He had played the fool, but the world had taken an unjust advantage of his folly. He loathed himself and it.

Thus trebly banished—from friends, from the world, from Nature—he dreamed his dreams. The past came back again.

Paul was keeping shop. The door, rarely passed by the foot of a customer, stood open to invite the world at large. Armstrong came in with his spectacles resting on his shaggy brows. Paul, who had been wool-gathering, went back to nominative, dative, and ablative. He hated the Eton Latin grammar as he had not learned to hate anything else in life.

‘Any custom?’ asked the father.

‘Nobody,’ said Paul.

‘Paul, lad,’ said Armstrong, after a lengthy pause. He cleared his throat, and laid a hand on the boy’s shoulder. ‘Yell reach your twalth birthday next week. It’s time ye were doing something in the warld.’ He pulled down his glasses and looked at the lad gravely. ‘I’ve tauld Mester Reddy ye’ll not be going back to school after the holidays. There’s over-many mouths to keep, and over-many backs to clothe, lad. Ye’ll have to buckle to, like the rest of us.’

‘Yes, father,’ said Paul. The prospect looked welcome, as almost any change does to a boy.

‘What would ye like to be?’ his father asked

‘I dunno,’ said Paul, rubbing his nose hard with the back of one freckled hand.

‘Well, I’ll thenk it over. Ye can get away to your plays now, but the serious purpose o’ life’s beginnin’ for ye.’

Paul needed no further leave. He snatched his cap and was away up the High Street before anybody could find time to tell him that his neck was unwashed, his boots unblacked or unlaced, or his collar disarranged. These reminders were an unfailing grievance to him when they came, and they seemed to hail upon him all day long. With the thought that he was entering the world and beginning his career in earnest, he thrust his hands into his corduroy pockets, swaggering in his walk, and so absorbed that he forgot to touch the street lamp-posts for two or three hundred yards. He stood overcome by this discovery, retraced his steps almost to the shop-door, in spite of his fear of being recalled, and then raced on his original way, laying a hand on each lamp-post as he passed it In this fashion he arrived at the gate of an unpretentious little house which had many reasons for looking glorious and palatial in his eyes. For one thing, it was a private house. No business of any sort was done there, and its inhabitants lived on their own money. Then it stood back from the road, behind iron railings, and had a gravel pathway leading to the front door, and a little bit of orderly garden with one drooping laburnum in it, which in its season hung clear gold blossoms over the roadway. There was a small coach-house beside the main building. It held no vehicle of any sort, but it was a coach-house all the same. Inside the house everything was neat and clean, and to Paul’s mind luxurious. There were carpets in all the living-rooms and bedrooms. There was a piano, there were marble mantelpieces with gold-framed mirrors over them, one to each front-room, and the chambers which held these splendours were familiarly used, and not merely kept for show. Paul had the run of this house, for the orphan children of his mother’s second cousin lived there, and the relationship was recognised.

He rang the bell, and a fresh-coloured, prettyish girl in a smart cap came to the door.

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘it’s you, is it! Come to see the young ladies, are you?’ Paul nodded with his hands in his pockets.

‘You’re in pretty fettle!’ said the girl. ‘Look at your boots! Look at your hair! Look at the smut on your nose!’

Paul looked at his boots, tried to look at his hair, squinted downwards in search of the smut, and said: ‘Bother!’

‘All right,’ the girl responded. ‘You’ll find ’em in the garden. They’ll be rare and proud to see you.’

Paul, somewhat shamefaced, took the familiar way into the garden, and stood rooted. A small striped tent of pink and white had been set up on the unshaven grass-plot, and five or six girls, all in white dresses, were seated near it round a tea-table. One, who had black hair and dark eyes, wore a crimson sash, and the rest had blue sashes with prodigious bows. Paul knew them all with one exception, but after the first glance he had eyes for the exception only. She was a lackadaisical young person of eighteen, with pale sandy ringlets and a cold-boiled-veal complexion; but he thought her a creature of another sphere, and his heart shivered with a strange, delicious sense of worship. He stood and stared, and his inward thoughts were poorly translated by his aspect, as happens with most people How long the dream held him he did not know, but the Vision turned, and he met the young person’s eye.

‘Who is that dirty boy? asked the Vision. ‘I suppose he wants to speak to you, Zillah.’

Zillah, who was the elder of the two orphan girls, turned, and blushed till she looked the colour of her sash. But she rose from her seat and came to Paul and whispered to him:

‘You mustn’t come here to-day, Paul We’ve got company. And goodness gracious, child, how untidy you are to be sure!’

Then shame fell like an avalanche, and Paul went altogether dizzy and silly under the shock of it How he got home he never knew, but an hour later he was in the back-kitchen, standing on a mat in his stocking-feet, with his shirt-sleeves turned up to his elbows, and was polishing his boots until the leather grew hot beneath the brush. He washed himself in a frenzy of remorse and resolve, and scoured his hands with yellow soap, silver sand, and a stubbly scrubbing-brush until they tingled. Then he fell upon the family stock of hair-oil, which was kept in a medicine-bottle in the kitchen cupboard, and, except on Sundays, was held sacred to the girls. Then he put on a clean collar (which was a daring and outrageous defiance of authority, which allowed but two a week), and prepared to face consequences. The family brush and comb were kept in a small bag which hung on a nail beside the scratched and defaced old family looking-glass, and Paul was artistically at work upon his hair when his mother entered the kitchen. The excellent woman sat down to laugh, and Armstrong came in with his customary vague air of patient thinking.

‘William,’ said Mrs. Armstrong, ‘look at our Paul. Niver tell me the hage of merricles is past Why, I believe he’s fell in love!’

It was the perpetual astonishment of Paul’s life that his mother always knew and understood the things he would not have her know and understand. Even now, at his tent-door, seeing all these dead hours so clearly that he forgot his present existence altogether, he thought of her half-malicious, wholly-humorous intuition with wonder. Why had she never understood the things he would have given so much to have her understand?

Armstrong smiled with a melancholy, tired sweetness.

‘Larn to be tidy, lad,’ he said. ‘I like a self-respecting fellow that honours his own person.’

‘M’m,’ said Mrs. Armstrong. ‘You’ve got a five days’ beard on, William.’

He looked at her, stroking his own bristly chin.

‘Ay,’ he said. ‘This’ll be Thursday. Paul, just be getting me my razor and the brush and soap-box, there’s a good lad.’

Paul obeyed, and then betook himself to the timber-grove, where he sat rapt into meditations on the Vision. He had read whatever came within his reach, good, bad, or indifferent, and his conscious thoughts were always a patchwork of phrases. When he was put to mind the shop he read the penny weeklies. He was fresh from one of the works of J. F. Smith, the un-remembered prose laureate of the London Journal, who would have been reckoned a giant of invention if he had lived in these days, and a sentence from his latest chapter got into Paul’s head and went round and round: ‘There lay the fair, gifted, almost idolized girl.’ In Mr. Smith’s moving page the fair, gifted, almost idolized girl was dying, and Paul did not as yet know enough of the story-teller’s craft of that day to be sure that she would recover in the next chapter. She mixed herself with the lady of the sandy ringlets who had described him as a dirty boy, and the pathos of the situation lent an added anguish to his thoughts. How beautiful was the lady of the ringlets, how ethereal in aspect, how far removed, how worshipful, how adorable! How refined was her voice, how elegant her accent! She had spoken of him as a b’y, but that was a local fashion, and Paul knew no better. She was far and far away—a being of the skies, at once an aristocrat and an angel. He began to make verses about her, of course—ghastly, fustian stuff, at the recollection of which the Solitary shuddered, and then laughed. But from that day forward Paul had spasmodic rages of personal cleanliness and adornment.

There was a jar of goose-oil always kept on the top of the baking-oven in the back-kitchen, and, learning that goose-oil was an unfailing specific for the growth of whiskers and moustache, he began to rub his lip and cheeks with this unguent Many a time when he was left alone he lit a candle, and getting his face between it and the mirror, tried to trace on the outline a fringe of hair. He found an occasional momentary satisfaction in burned cork, but the joy was futile, and impermanent.

He met the Vision in the street one day when he was carrying a parcel, and the shame of his menial employment, and the sense of the coarseness of his clothes made him long for the earth to open. The fact that the young person did not know him, or look at him, or think about him, made no difference. The young head was filled with absurd dreams. Sometimes he was a prince in disguise. He was being bred up to know nothing of his princedom, so that he might be splendidly and properly astonished when the revelation came. At other times he recognised his lowly origin, and went away into the boy’s Somewhere—a noble country full of beneficent chances—and came back great and glorious, in gloves and patent-leather boots, and a hat and moustache, and conquered the Vision and married her. At other times he died, with his great heart unspoken, and was buried in the parish churchyard.

But whilst he was full of all manner of ambitions and yearnings, and dreams which nobody else in the wide world dreamed about, a family conclave was held to decide what Paul should be. One Simmons, a dapper, perky draper in the High Street, wanted a shop-boy, and Mrs. Armstrong was for asking the place for Paul There was not a grain of ambition in the household, and the melancholy fact was that there was no money to bind Paul apprentice anywhere. But Paul would have none of the draper. He was cuffed in corners by the maternal hand, but he held his own. He would run away, he declared, he would drown himself, he would do anything rather than submit to that. So finally he was turned into the ramshackle old printing-office, where all his elder brothers had been before him, and learned to sort pie, and to roll at press, and to sweep the floors, and to blow old dusty type-cases clean. He wore a brown-paper apron tied about his waist with string, and lived so obscured in printer’s ink, for which he seemed to have a natural affinity, that he hardly looked like a white boy at all.

He was still a liar, but he told his lies on paper now, and hid them. He told them in prose and verse—prose which was measled with ‘Oh’s,’ and ‘Alas’s,’ and full of great windblown phrases of bombast, like inflated bladders, each with one little parched pea of meaning to rattle inside it The verse was mainly such as might have been written by a moderately illiterate absurd old man who had found life a vanity, and had deserved his discovery.

There was one idle and worthless journeyman in the ramshackle office, and one only. He kept the place like a pigsty, and the floor was littered with boards on which unlocked formes of type fell about into confusion. Paul could pick his way through these blindfold, and many and many a night in the dark he raged out his verses, marching to and fro with the four big dim windows staring dully at him, wall-eyed with countless paper patches, seen as darker blots on the darkness.

One night he was there in hiding. He had played truant from Sunday-school and chapel, and had been all day in the fields, hungry, but happy beyond all dreaming. And, oh! the Sundays! the dreary, bestial days, with Sunday-school at half-past nine and chapel at eleven, and Sunday-school at half-past two and chapel at half-past six and family prayers at nine, and bed at half-past nine, and books forbidden, and speech a crime, and whistling a felony. Paul had broken loose, and knew not what to look for, and cared little for the hour. For his head was full of verses, and his heart was full of the summer day, and for the first time in his life he had gone to Nature, and forgotten his thrice-thirty-times copied emotions, and had dared to speak in his own voice. The lines he had made that day were unutterably sacred and sweet to him. The dreaming Solitary, staring down the gorge, heard the boy’s awestruck whisper, and, forgetting all the rest of the verses, remembered this one only: