Читать книгу The World of William Clissold - H.G. Wells - Страница 27

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IF I had had any faltering of sympathy for my father in his destruction, Dickon's sturdier simpler faith would have sustained me. When I came to tell Dickon about it, he showed, so far as I can remember now, that he knew most of the story. Perhaps he had been put through it by schoolfellows; at any rate, all his judgments were prepared. "They made him a scapegoat," said Dickon. "They let him down." And, phrase reminiscent of rafts and pirates and all the fierce imaginations of a boy: "He got the long straw."

"They never touched his co-directors," said Dickon. "They were too high up and too near royalty. Lord Duncomby was in it. Two others. What were their names?... "But they took the stuff all right while it lasted.

Trust them," said Dickon.

That was what I, too, wanted to believe. Our father had been careless, indifferent, and they had caught him.

But he had only done what everybody did. "They don't catch me," said Dickon, gauging the realities of life.

Neither of us believed that he was essentially worse than the run of business men. We contemplated a brigand world.

In which after all he had made things that remained. All over London were great buildings he had promoted. He had altered the face of London—criminal though he was. He had been lavish with his architects, and his ideas about service flats and suchlike new methods of housing were far in advance of his times. Many of his failures have since become richly paying properties. And though he flourished in the worst period of English architecture he never put up anything absolutely detestable. I remember Dickon stopping me one day against the heavy but by no means ungainly masses of Cornwall Court.

"That's one of the Clissold offences, Billykins. They called him a scoundrel, but he gave them that. That's just one of his things. Catch a muff like Lord Duncomby doing anything as fresh as that!"

From the outset, because of our father's fate, we two saw the world lawless and adventurous. We were precocious in that. Children believe that in heaven and on earth alike there is order; they do so naturally and of necessity, and most young people and many people through life retain this early assumption that there is justice and benevolence behind and sustaining the law, that laws and customs are really wise and good. This is an illusion, or at least an exaggeration; of great provisional value no doubt in restraining youthful excesses; but it was one that our peculiar circumstances forbade us to entertain. For if we agreed that the system in which we lived was a righteous one, what could our father be but a rogue? But if it was unrighteous and casual then he was merely ill-starred.

There was a strong suggestion of the predatory animal about both of us in those days after we had left Chislehurst and set up for ourselves in Brompton. We had a mean furnished bedroom with two narrow beds, a frayed carpet, a small wardrobe, and one wash-hand stand, and a sitting-room lit by a central gas-light; the accommodation was greatly restricted by the mute corpse of a black piano the landlady refused to take away; and there was insufficient table-room and shelf-room for our books and work. Our elbows were therefore a good deal in each other's ribs. We neither of us betrayed by any word we spoke how sick with longing we were at times for the space, the freedom, and self-confidence we had had at Mowbray, but we both knew what was in the other's mind and our expressed intentions towards the future compensated for our silence about the past. We would talk long and intimately at times, late at night perhaps when there was a noise outside to keep us awake, or on the way to the College, or of a Sunday when we walked in Kensington Gardens or explored the endlessness of London to the north and west, and then through intervals of days or even weeks we would have no rational conversation at all. We would fend each other off with silly nicknames and playful and nonsensical insults and go our own mental ways alone. For days together we would elaborate some fanciful joke—our standing dish about Mr. G. for example—or invent and embroider upon a saga about some odd imaginary personality.

We had an underworld, ten times more foolish than this world of appearance, which underworld we called the Roops. The Doops followed the events of the day and the fashions of the time after their manner. The Boops had a Royal Jubilee; they had an Inventions Exhibition in which Mr. Heath Robinson would have felt at home; they held reviews of army and fleet; they worshipped curiously a god after their own image, a Mr. B. In the Boops we guyed much of our astonished chagrin at life and laughed it off. For we both had a cheated feeling about life as if something had been promised and snatched away from us.

Occasionally our excessive proximity got on our nerves. There were forces storming in us that made us want to be alone with ourselves for a time, made solitude an urgent need. Dickon would warn me of a brooding violence.

"Billykins," he would say, "your little face fatigues me. Take it right away before I buzz books at it. Lose it somewhere. Pawn it for a day or so where it will be safe from damage. See?"

"Why the hell don't you go out yourself?" I would retort, savage but preparing to depart. "Look at the rain!"

"You're insoluble—worse luck," said Dickon. "The door, my lad, is there."

As he was nearly two stone heavier than I in those days I could not banish him when the corresponding mood came upon me. I would then go with my work into the Education Library in the South Kensington Museum and there until the place closed at ten I would read and write by the glare of great spitting violet-flushing arc-lights of a type that have long since vanished from the earth. Then home to a malignant silence and bed. Or it might be, with the clouds lifting, to a tacit amnesty and talk into the small hours.

It added to the natural restlessness in Dickon's blood that he had still to find his calling in the world. In the meantime he was working, but working neither so hard nor so well as I, first at mineralogy and then at mining. "There's always something doing with mines," he said, but he never seemed convinced that that was his proper line of attack. He would have moments of pure rage against the social system that environed us, that seemed so lax and yet was so difficult and dangerous to assail. I remember him once in Holland Park. "How the devil are we to get at them?" he cried suddenly as though he had been stung. "How the devil?"

"Get at who?" said I, in the London idiom.

"In these houses. Look at them! Every one stands for thousands a year. And I can't think of a dodge against them, not a dodge. Idiot and fool I am!—unfit to survive. Like silly fat sheep inside a wire fence they are, and I'm like some brainless wolf. Look at this outfit coming along! Perambulator, two nurses, and a Newfoundland dog. Large expensive toy elephant and a ball. Fine fleecy blanket. All for one ratty, beady-eyed kid!... You ugly little mite! Where does daddy get it? Where does daddy get it?"

I was shocked. In those days I had not a tithe of Dickon's voracity. I did not want money then. I did not want money seriously until after I was married. I was under the spell of pure science then, submerged in it, and while Dickon's work was almost perfunctory I studied with all my strength. I was working in the Physical Research Laboratory under C. V. Boys, then a very young man, pink-skinned and flaxen-haired to the eyelashes, clever-handed and delicate-minded, inspiringly ingenious, rapidly understanding. How many brilliant and delightful minds have gone and go to the making of science! Boys in those days was the worst lecturer I have ever heard, so bored, so devastatingly bored, so appalled by the hour of talk before him, but in the research laboratory he had amazing flashes, he threw out sparks that set one alight. I had been taken out of the ordinary class and allowed to do some special work under him upon mineral threads and particularly fibres of quartz, and it is difficult for me to exaggerate how much I owe to him. He developed and encouraged my innate enthusiasm for physical research. I began to dream of papers read before the Physical Society; of the Philosophical Transactions, of broadening explorations below the surface of matter. And my taste for such work reinforced my distaste for money-making.

After all what use had I for money? Given a laboratory and a lodging and a few pounds for a summer holiday, what else was there to desire? Nothing that I permitted to rise to the surface of open and confessed thought.

I tried to put my point of view to Dickon.

"You're dreaming, Billy," said Dickon. "You don't know what you're in for. You think you'll give your life to science. They won't let you. You've found your little corner at the college for a bit—but nobody wants research, pure research, and so there's nobody to pay for it. Try it if you want to, for a bit. Until you need money or the college turns you out to make room for someone else. The world's a scramble and you'll have to come into it. Seeing what you are. Trust me."