Читать книгу The Staff at Simson's - Frederick Niven - Страница 10
ОглавлениеFENWICK'S PROCESSION
Not only those at the club, viewing the procession, and Peter in the streets, letting it go by, but old Fenwick, the calender-man, has his place here. The voices of that gala day that had come up to Mr. Robert and his guests, indistinctly, as the sound of surf on a distant beach, and to Pringle were heard distinct, if fragmentary, Fenwick heard also in a sense. They were heard by him as inverted echo—if such a thing could be, heard across two thousand years, and in another land.
The warehouse closed that day at one, as though it were a Saturday, and not all the members of staff had been at work even in the forenoon. Wem Mackay, he being a Rifle Volunteer, and the Volunteers having to take part in the pageant, was let off for the entire day by Sandy Bain, his department head.
"You'll have a guid view o't," remarked Sandy, "standing at attention maist of the time. I dinna envy you. Oh, them sojers' buttons!"
Maitland, when asked by Mr. Gilmore what he intended to do on the great day, replied that he would "push off home," when the office closed. So the cashier had told him he might just as well not come in at all, seeing he lived so far out. Corbett had arrived that morning wearing knickerbockers, had come in the back way and taken a bicycle down to the basement in the lift. The office-boy, for some reason, had to ring the bell every time he went down there, to the annoyance of Duncan Ramsay, who had had an altercation with his wife over breakfast regarding where they were to meet to see the procession. Corbett was going to take advantage of the closure of the warehouse for half-a-day to cycle out to Loch Lomond. Mr. Maxwell dashed off at twelve to meet his elegant wife and have lunch with her at F. & F's. Lunch over, they would stroll uphill and take their places on two gilt chairs reserved for them in a window of Sauchiehall Street. Tom Huntley planned to take the air in Queen's Park—which he would have, belike, practically all to himself, apart from the thrushes and the park-keepers. Some were all agog with plans to view the procession. Some had other plans.
Old Fenwick, with the closing of the warehouse, hurried eastward. Doubtful, indeed, if any one, seeing him on his way, would have hazarded that there went one who led a sacrificial life. He was a man hardly of medium height, but very powerfully built. There was something simian in his gait. The calendering with its accompaniment of dust and fluff rising before him from the whirling cloth, to tickle his nostrils, had caused his nose to give false accusation against him; but should any one who took him at first glance for a tippler halt him, let us say, to ask for a direction, closer scrutiny might well cancel the inference of his nose. Immediate would be the impression that he was by no means as ogreish or as bibulous as he seemed at casual glance. The childlike candour in the eyes looking up into the inquirer's, and he obviously anxious to do what he could to assist, would negative that first superficial opinion of him.
His father he but dimly remembered and in early years he had been the support of an infirm mother. After her death he was the support of a sister suffering from what in those days was spoken of as a lingering and incurable disease. There had been occasions when the pain she suffered seemed to him, looking on, beyond mortal endurance. There had been an occasion on which, damp with the sweat of agony, she moaned through clenched teeth, "Walter, Walter, can't you——" and no more.
"Can't I do what, Janet?"
"Can't you help me somehow, Walter? It would be so easy. You are not kind to let me live, you are not kind. God is not kind. Oh, God forgive me for saying that to you, Walter."
He reported that spasm to the doctor, and the reply had been that it was to be expected. To be expected! Then could not something be done to ease the pain? "Not yet," the doctor had told him.
Always, even on ordinary days, Fenwick hurried home, knowing well that from half-past eight till half-past six is a long time to an invalid. On this day of celebration he almost ran as though to make the comparative brevity of his absence from that invalid still more brief for her. It was in a dismal section of the city that, by financial necessity, he lived, and it was typical of the man that he had made of the room and kitchen there something of a sanctuary. The effect was achieved to a considerable extent in the usual way for those who, in such neighbourhoods, do not accept the greyness as normal, achieved by aid of geraniums in pots along the window-sills, and by fern-filled bowls hanging in the window recesses.
There was that in the man which made him squirm often—and then laugh away his disgust—when, turning into the close, he was confronted by a notice which read, Commit no Nuisance. Terrible, terrible world! Tut, tut, terrible world that folks should need to be told to commit nae nuisance! And these women with folded arms, aye gossiping at their doorways—they gied him a scunner. Always he offered a little bow to them in passing and raised a hand to his shabby bowler in salute. To lift it from his head would be either to embarrass them or to make them think he was deriding them; so he gave his small bow and touched his hat and scurried up the stairs.
It was on record by the gossips at their doors that he had been seen sometimes to come home with flowers, a bunch of violets tucked away among their own leaves held in one of his great hands, crooked at his side, as though in an endeavour to hide it from them. Even carrying a sheaf of daffodils, less easy to smuggle past, he had been seen on a Saturday afternoon of Spring, ascending the stairs. And books, too—often books—they had seen him bearing home. Well, he minded his ain business, and he didna put on airs, and he had a sister rale poorly in his hoose, and he paid a woman to go and redd it up and sit with her while he was at work, and he saw to it that the stairs were washed when it was his turn.
As for his more private life, unknown to the gossips on the landings: What might have been called his sacrifice had, after all, recompense for him. Its true name, its fair name, was devotion. And that devotion was not only dutiful. In his boyhood, when his widowed mother was alive, all had been scrimp-scrimp, to make ends meet. No viewing of football matches for him on Saturday afternoons. He had spent them in the Free Library, a gnomish customer there. When, reading a book, he had come on reference to another in it which he did not know, he would rise and scuttle to the counter and fill in a slip for it. He became a pleasing curiosity to the librarians in Miller Street, odd, even to them.
By the time we dropped in at Simson's to see who was who there, he had created a world of his own. He had availed himself of more than public libraries. With more pence to spend he had collected a small private library. There was an extraordinary questing eagerness in the man. References to foreign literature had moved him to the acquiring, with grammar and dictionaries, of at least a reading, if not a speaking French, Spanish, Italian. Sometimes his sister would beg of him to go out more and not, as she said, to mind her, but he was fixed in his ways by then. He was less lonely when alone with his books than when in the midst of a group of men at the warehouse—not that he took pride in that. There are those, no doubt, who desire to have proof of their difference from and superiority to their fellows, but old Fenwick was not of that company. He had no sense of superiority to any. He regretted rather than gloried in that feeling of distance from others when it pounced upon him.
As for what is called sex-life—what is there to tell of Fenwick? It is possible that his libido (a word not in the currency in his days) was vicariously satisfied or placated in books. One may recall, in this connection, his stories of Byron's physical unwontedness, of Nell Gwynn, of what the Duke of Wellington said to the young subaltern—stories not precisely of the normal genre of bawdy story as understood by those of the staff at Simson's, who relished such. It may be that eventually sexual stir did not bother him. The faces of lassies going by in the streets or seen on the stairs could not match the imagined one of Penthesilea, nor compare with Queen Nefertiti's, a cheap print of whose sculptured head was among his possessions.
By fifty-five (he was that age, and looked older, in the year of this Royal visit) he had made his own world of the mind.
On the day of the procession his sister was none too bad. The woman—Mrs. Hamilton—who came to sit with her in his absences, at the cost of five shillings a week, assured him of that, with a happy nod as she rose on his entrance and by a whispered "A guid day," as she stepped out on to the stairhead and he gave that odd little bobbing bow of his, closing the door on her.
"Do you not want to go to the procession?" his sister inquired suddenly. "Call the woman back," she ordered, "and go and see it."
Procession! No, no, not he. He had brought home some macaroons for afternoon tea. There was a reference in Laurence Sterne to macaroons that made them one of his favourite accompaniments to the afternoon tea they had together on Saturdays and Sundays.
In the evening, after supper, he took from his shelves (that were a perennial source of amazement to the factor when he came to collect the rent) an appropriate book for that day. The voices of two women of Syracuse, visiting Alexandria to see the Adonis festival, chattered in that room in Glasgow, across two thousand years. Outside in the street was considerable hubbub, as though those who had been cheering lustily during the afternoon were loath to make an end of uproar. Of these outer sounds, of the singing—bibulous singing, often—he was hardly aware. He was lost in his book, with Gorgo and Praxinoë. As they got ready to go out to see the sights, Praxinoë reviled her husband for his choice of a domicile, and Gorgo warned her that the wean was listening. Gorgo ejaculated admiration for her friend's attire, inquiring of her, "How much did the stuff cost you just off the loom?" Then out they went into the surging streets of Alexandria, where at first Praxinoë compared the crowd with ants and, later, heated and tashed, on the endless road, with swine. "Here come the king's war-horses!" She had her toes trodden upon, snatched Eunoë away from a rearing horse, exclaiming that of all things she dreaded, horses and snakes came first. There was a rending sound—her muslin veil was torn, and her fine shawl was in jeopardy because of the jostling mob. When a rude stranger commented on these chatterboxes who spoke with the broad vowels, she grew heated at the criticism, and responded that Dorian women might surely lawfully speak Doric. Another stranger helped them to a place of vantage where they might gaze their fill at the four-in-hands and the uniforms of the cavalrymen.
Some one violently opened a window of a room in the lower storey (Fenwick and his sister lived in the top flat to escape at least the sound of feet tramping overhead) and shouted to a friend in the street. That, for a moment, deflected him. It was a vulgarity to his mind. It announced the same thoughtlessness of others as did the ceaseless mounting and descending on the stairs with loud temulent amity or loud dispute.
He sighed an "Och, aye" of acceptance and glanced at Janet, but she seemed not to have been disturbed, propped on pillows, gazing before her, lost in some happy dream that a book which lay open in her hands had no doubt conjured up—though it was of another sort from the one in which he found solace.
He returned to Alexandria and the Psalm of Adonis—old Fenwick, calender-man at Simson's.
