Читать книгу Coloured Spectacles - Frederick Niven - Страница 9

Table of Contents

Those foggy nights when sirens wailed up and down the river and the street-lamps were amber blurs, and even indoors there was an attempt at nimbus round the chandeliers, had their own charm. There seems, looking back, to have been some white magic at work in them—granted, that is, there do exist Powers dark and light, malignant and beneficent, that there is not merely chaos.

I did not know, a child in a sub-tropic city with the musical Spanish speech all round me, how the name of Fortuny, Mariano Fortuny, was to become like a spell, a talisman. For I did not know, any more than any other, of the future—how I was to be taken aboard a ship, the Santona of the black-painted ports, to see the Andes fade away; from a region of mañanas and poco tiempos, purple shadows, tall poplars, and tracts of yellow sand, be set down in a land of drawling and sometimes even uncouth speech where the humid atmosphere gets into the bones.

It was in that land, soon after our arrival, on an evening of yellow fog and sticky pavements, that there came into our home a crate of cast-off books and magazines, residue from the library of a scholarly relative—the cast-offs not carried away by the second-hand book-dealer whom the widow had called in to make an offer for the "lot." The scholar whose they were I never knew. I can but gauge his taste from a miniature or two, an old snuff-mull with an inscription on the silver disc upon its lid, a collet ring, and this residue of reading matter.

The widow went to her own place and then these books were dumped upon us. The period is now ancient history, when street cries were more common than now, not so widely prohibited; and in the distance as I pored over these magazines a voice was wailing "Ca-a-ler-ooo!" on a note that recalled to my mind Defoe's Journal of the Plague which had been retailed to me by a religious nurse who objected to fairy tales as untruth.

What "Ca-a-ler-ooo!" meant I did not know. It occurred to me, I well remember, that it might be, "Bring out your dead," in the Doric of this country. It was melancholy beyond words and I had not by then come to know the charm of the northern melancholy that is in its voice and its ballads. I thought that people might well die, drop off like flies, on those nights of choking yellow fog. But it was explained to me that the lamentation in the night was only of a man hawking fresh oysters. As they go round with a bell and cry "Muffins and crumpets!" in the forenoon in London so, in Scottish cities, were they wont in the evening to wander forth, these fish men (or should it be bivalve men?), distressing those who did not know that the tone of infinite grief in their voices was neither here nor there—distressing even those who knew, I should think, for though it was only of oysters that they called the voice was that of a lost soul.

Among these magazines thrown away there was waiting for me a face looking out of a page with, underneath, a name I had not heard before but a name that, in those days, sounded far more friendly to me than the names of total strangers who, I was told, were my blood-kin! It was a name that sounded different from those over the shop doors—MacTavish, MacConnochie, and all the others that I was getting accustomed to.

"Mariano Fortuny," I read.

The fog without was so profound and pressing that the room leaked it. In that atmosphere I read of Mariano Fortuny how ". . . he mentioned to one of his friends his childish awe of the great city of Tarragona, in whose market they played, and his frights at night when, lying under the tables of the fish-vendors, he heard the discordant 'All's well!' of the serenos, or night watchmen, or was haunted by a half-famished dog hunting for a bone."

On reading that I had to look back again at the face of this man. He knew. The engraving of him was more real and alive than the faces of many really living people, and as I read on again it was as if I sat at his feet while he and his friend, Regnault, told me of their coloured travels, told me in that drab night (a night of glamour by then) that:

"We are living, as you know, in a little Moorish house, in a little palace of the Thousand and One Nights. We have heaped above our doors, above the beams of our patio, decorations from the Alhambra, and you shall see shortly a picture begun only a few days ago—a workroom of Moorish women, which represents our patio itself, and in the background the door of our bedroom. Each time that we mount our terrace we are dazzled by the light of this city of snow which descends from our feet to the sea, like a grand staircase of white marble, or a brood of white gulls. Upon a neighbouring terrace the negresses stretch carpets to expose them to the sun, or Moorish women hang upon lines to dry their haiks and their linen, yellow caftans with silver embroidery, caftans of rose-coloured silk, of delicate green, foulards threaded with gold, etc. My eyes at last see the Orient. I believe, God pardon me, the sun which lights you is not the same as ours."

That old magazine is still in my possession and when I look at it again I think what a remarkable storehouse we all have inside our skulls, what a medley of treasures, what strange juxtapositions of these—quaint associations, such as a foggy night in Glasgow and sunlight in Tangier.