Читать книгу The Robe of Lucifer - Fred M. White - Страница 4

Table of Contents

ONE traveller alighted at Port Gwyn Road, accepting his environments upon faith. There was a slip of worn platform, obviously pensioned from more prosperous areas, and now dank and mouldering an Lethe's Wharf. A hut, fashioned in the trunk of a decayed tree, served the dual purpose of waiting-room and ticket-office. A small steady rain pattered on the crumbling boards. Beyond lay a shelving sandbank and the sea—the only thing in motion there.

The traveller was quite alone, the station functionary having disappeared. A battered portmanteau stood at the traveller's feet. Under such circumstances, the most seasoned wanderer had fain been excused a resigned melancholy. Visions of cheerful hotels might have been fostered in that dreary spot. But Arthur Greenstrand was filled with the beatitude of a new sensation.

He turned out of the station, carrying his bag. Greenstrand had a destination and a welcome awaiting him on a contiguous spur of that ironclad coast. He saw the cliffs sweeping upwards, lifting their shoulders to the grey mist; he saw a clutch of white houses to his left, and boats keel-deep in the gritty sand. Despite the rain, a group of fisher-folk foregathered on what at one time might have been a granite quay. Thus Greenstrand's introduction to Cornwall. On the whole, he was rather disposed to like it.

No spot is devoid of redeeming features; even hell may possess natural advantages. At any rate, it is impossible for any one to refute the theory at present. Thus, the air of this place was superb. It came booming up from the Atlantic fields, crisp and fresh, and reeking with salt spume, nitrous as old wine. Greenstrand made his way across to the fishermen with a curious feeling of expansion and lightness. The group before him was picturesque enough, and lacking the vice of curiosity. There were grey beards and brown, there were deep-set eyes blue as the sea itself, there were hands oaken and wrinkled as the sails, nails with a firm rim of tar under them. The presence of a stranger excited no curiosity, and aroused no comment.

"I want to go to Port Gwyn," Greenstrand remarked.

An old sea-dog regarded him with a gaze so blank that the speaker was conscious of some confusion. He felt like a seal in the net.

"Well, you can go," the native responded gravely.

Nobody laughed, because neither rudeness nor repartee were intended. Whereupon the fishers fell to sea-chat again. As a matter of fact, they talked nothing else. They rarely saw a paper; letters came to them as birthdays, marked with gentle enthusiasm. But of all the human race, Cornish fishermen and country parsons have tapped the well-spring of true idleness; the rest are merely amateurs.

These men fish one tide daily for mackerel with hook and line; the rest of the time they spend in bed, or sitting on the shingle. To sit for hours on shingle and be happy is an art. In the winter they subsist upon salt herrings and potatoes, and sit upon a bench. Believe me, there are worse lives.

Greenstrand returned to the attack again. A man who can command the servile attention of millions is not to be baffled by a mere fisherman. The richest man in the world stood there before those primitive people, neglected and alone. Still, the situation was not without its charm.

"Do you happen to know," he asked with becoming humility, "where Mr. Julien Ray lives? I am on my way to his house."

Every face was turned quietly in his direction. Did Greenstrand but know it, this was enthusiasm, or the nearest approach to it to which the Cornish fishers aim. And it encouraged Greenstrand. Evidently Ray's fame had penetrated down here.

"Take yonder path over the cliff," one of the men explained, "and follow it till you come to the village. There's only one house there you can properly call a house, and that's Mr. Ray's. You see the path there?"

"Don't unnecessarily fatigue yourself," Greenstrand murmured as the speaker rose, the better to point out the way. "Will any one carry my bag?"

No reply came. Carrying the bag obviously implied largesse therefor, but what is vile dross compared with artistic laziness? So Greenstrand bore his own burden, like Christian of old, and rather enjoyed the sensation. He had reached a limit of civilization where money appeared to be a negative force.

And this man had literally the command of millions. He was in a position to make as much money as he desired. Did he require a yacht, or a continent, or a dodo, or a specially rare kind of canvas-back duck, he had only to give the order, and it was executed. He had everything he wanted. Yet this fact did not prevent his dragging a heavy portmanteau along three miles of vile cliff road in the pouring rain, and on an exceedingly empty stomach. For the nonce the tenant of an acre of furzy common and eke owner of a donkey was better equipped than he.

Greenstrand was, however, neither miserable nor unhappy. His old cynical boredom, his want of sympathy with humanity, seemed to have fallen from shoulders burdened with many millions. He saw the spume breaking on the rocks below, he saw the sea-wrack trailing in crystal pools, like a dead maiden's hair. The great heart of the sea throbbed responsive to his own. His lips were salt, a sense of sweetness filled his nostrils, underneath his feet the crushed wild thyme exuded a dying pungent perfume. Hundreds of ghostly sea-birds fluttered round his head, crying like familiar spirits. And God had the ocean in the hollow of His hand; the tide, spilt through His fingers, crashed upon the forehead of the world. The mystery of the sea is the mystery of life.

A benign sense of his own littleness filled Greenstrand; the consciousness of this had never been so forcibly brought home to him before. In the town he was great, men lisped his name with awe; here he was a mere unit—a wet one, without an umbrella. You can get a very good one for a guinea; but they are not to be purchased in the wilderness, even by the Squire of Golconda, who plays upon the money-market as on a barrel- organ.

The whimsical side of the argument tickled Greenstrand. What on earth was the good of all his money to him at this moment? Here, the unit plodded along in the wet; there, the capitalist was all-powerful. To-morrow he could say to himself, "I will go out and make some millions;" to-day he couldn't smoke a cigarette, because he hadn't any matches. You can't light a pipe with a cheque-book, though you may set a continent ablaze with one. And what is the use of tobacco at a guinea a pound when the rain gets into one's pouch? For once in a way Greenstrand could afford to indulge in the philosophy of the poor, a luxury usually denied to the rich.

And he was rich beyond the dreams of a philanthropist, or a religious man of business. Fortune had selected him as the recipient of her most frequent favours. In plain English, Arthur Greenstrand's late lamented father had invented a chemical process by which coal—or, at any rate, an equally good substitute—could be manufactured from refuse matter. The thing was simplicity itself. You had only to take a waste piece of ground, a huge pile of matter out of place—anything material, in fact—and charge the whole mass with the formula. A few hours afterwards it was, to all practical purposes, coal. Just think what this means!

It means one of the great necessities of life at the door of every dweller in towns. It means the same thing in every great ocean port all over the world. It means something like solid profit for allowing people to take away, at a fancy price, what you do not require for yourself. It means that you can shut up any coal-field in the country by depreciating the market value, and then demanding anything you like for your own article. In Greenstrand's case it meant the possession of so much money that he was bent, and almost broken, under the weight of it. Not that he had taken any unfair advantage of the family discovery to the detriment of others; he was too honest for that. But the possession of so large a fortune was to him the salt in the herring-barrel, the hair in the cider-press. It had crushed all ambition, all that was good out of him. Ambition, to the possessor of millions, is impossible. Why strive for fame or reputation in politics, or art in letters, when you can buy it as a cabman does his beer—by the quart? Consider what a man can do in politics—provided that he has means—by keeping one hand rigidly over his mouth, and the other constantly in his pocket!

It may be urged, perhaps, that a man of genuine ambition could put this wealth out of his life, and start from scratch, like the other runners in the race. But, whatever his faults might have been, Greenstrand was no fool. On the contrary, he was a man who knew his world very well indeed. He knew that genius does not necessarily imply success; besides, he did not labour under the delusion that the afflatus divine was his. Looking round him, he could see that the huckster's instinct was requisite to-day to turn "Shakespeare and the musical glasses" into good business, and that "the popular taste"—a thing he abhorred—was the thing to cater for to become successful. Suppleness Greenstrand did not possess. No; success, as we understand her to-day, was not for him.

It is a great deal easier, and more soothing, to be misunderstood and shunned with a large income and a house in Park Lane, than it is in a cottage furnished on the hire system. The slights are not so pointed. Also, your blighted genius has his corners, like the rest of us. Greenstrand preferred to view the drama from the stalls. The pit may be the best place in the house, but there would not be much trouble in persuading the pittite to change seats with an occupant of the dress circle.

Yet, without doubt, the possession of so much money embittered Greenstrand's life. Blessed—or cursed—with a sense of humour and a cynical temper, he judged the sycophants who fawned upon him correctly. He saw the worst and most sordid side of life; he gradually lost his faith in all that is good and pure. Belief in God or man he had none; in his eyes every action had a motive. There was no future state—nothing. The rest was a blank, and every man a devil in disguise. He had no friends, and all those who knew him were actuated by designs upon the coaly millions. Greenstrand hated the world, but he hated himself most of all. There was only one thing worse than life—death.

There is a certain temptation to the rich man to become his own deity. What can one expect else from the being whose calves are all golden ones?

Thus Greenstrand. He had tried everything, and found it empty. Society he had exhausted in a year. He could discern no real difference between Lady Midas, prating of the price of her carpets, and the Duchess of Sang Azul, smothered in diamonds what time there was an execution in Prehistoria Castle. The same vulgar ostentation ruled all, and reduced them to a common plane. In his despair, Greenstrand had even tried religions—not one of which he had found to fit. The bishop in lawn, escorted to the pulpit by a cringing throng of acolytes, and preaching the simple doctrine of a single Christ, drove back his soul in revolt from the blasphemy; the Methodist, unlettered, agibe with jealousy, and spattering frantic diatribes, flavoured with the gall-political, at those he would fain rub shoulders with, disgusted him.

There was a certain egotism underlying Greenstrand's lack of faith in everything. Had he been less clever, he had been a happier man. Instead of which, he was driven back upon himself by the open flattery of others. Perhaps none really cared for him, because he took no pains to conceal his contempt for others. If he had one grain of Platonic affection in his nature, it was for Julien Ray, the poet. Ray was the tonic his consumptive vanity needed, the North wind blowing over the hotbed of schisms and doubts which choked a really kindly nature.

Now, here was a man possessing unlimited wealth, a fine intellect, good health, and a fair presence, and yet there was no more unhappy individual in England. Why? It would have puzzled Greenstrand to answer the question. What is termed the perfectly happy man, the one who has everything he can require, and no wish ungratified, must be intensely miserable. Fancy any human being with nothing to long for, no ultimate goal to reach, no Promised Land afore! Picture the misery of him! Greenstrand was the individual in question.

Think of it! This man might have done anything, become anything. With his wealth and intelligence, nothing was impossible to him. That probably accounted for the fact that he was standing at this moment, tired and wet, dragging a portmanteau along, and regarding a little village lying in a hollow at his feet, girt in by broomy hills, and washed by the creamy tide. Our refined tramp stood there with a look of something like admiration in his eyes. However extravagant her moods are, Nature is never a snob; her work is thoroughly artistic. Greenstrand smiled with the feeling of one who stumbles by accident upon a perfect picture.