Читать книгу The World of William Clissold - H.G. Wells - Страница 8

Table of Contents

My life, I confess, seems to me to be short, distressingly short, preposterously short in comparison both with the vast range of my thoughts in space, and with the huge perspectives of the past and the future in which we think nowadays. I doubt if man had quite the same sense of abbreviation before this measuring by astronomical distances and geological ages began. And life is not only short, but things in it are out of proportion. The rules of perspective are reversed, and the remotest memories loom largest and are the most vivid. Things that happened five-and-twenty years ago are often distant and obscure enough, but the things that happened in my childhood are things of yesterday. I am no longer the young man I was. He and I have almost lost identity. Nevertheless, I am still intensely the child I used to be.

I suppose this is because most things are first seen and heard and felt in childhood, and our minds file these early impressions as key-pictures and refer the later ones to them. So they are continually refreshed. But later experiences are no longer used as new points of reference.

A hundred times, perhaps, in the course of my life and in a score of places, for example, I have seen autumnal horse-chestnut leaves reflected in brown water and the branches of a horse-chestnut tree coming down close to that still mirror, but it is definitely as a child that I think of seeing them, and all the other occasions are in comparison vague and unassigned. I was in the old punt on the great pond at Mowbray. The silvery sheet of water had that convex effect one always got there upon a day of absolute calm. It was like a very smooth broad buckler. I think that effect of curvature must have been due to the way the reeds and bushes shaded the edges, or perhaps to some trick in the angle of the reflection of the pines up the slope. Far away against a background of dark bushes, some of them still deep green and some a rusty red, floated a little squadron of motionless swans, the old bird marvellously tranquillised since his days of terrifying aggression in the early summer. Even the ducks and the friendly attendant dab-chick among the lily leaves were silent. Everything was so still that I remember being startled by the sudden "plop" of a falling husk into the crystalline water behind me.

I suppose it is the sodden horse-chestnut leaves scattered over the wet stone pavement in the yard behind this house that have released this group of memories. The armchair and Dickon's study fade to nothingness. I sit again in the punt with a row of glossy brown conkers all neatly bored beside me. I have bored them with a long nail rather tediously and have had to be careful of the palm of my hand. One or two I have broken. There are leaves in the bottom of the punt, and a thin and scattered remnant clinging insecurely here and there among the branches about me. I have been seeking a perfectly golden leaf without a patch of green or brown upon it, I have tried the taste of a horse-chestnut and have disapproved of it and spat out and watched the fragments of my mouthful sinking slowly and eddying down through the clear water and thought how queer it was that some should spin and whirl about and some sink swift and straight, and I have wondered if the hooflike end of the leaf-stem accounts for the name of the tree. And now I am sitting motionless, suddenly aware of the tremendous quiet of the day.

It is as if the whole world paused. It is as if God was present, God whom they talk about so much in church....

Yes, I am almost as much back there as I am present in this room. Perhaps for the first time in my life I observed serenity on that day.

Half a century ago that was, right at the other end of life, and it is more vivid than yesterday. That must have been our first year at Mowbray in the beginnings of my strange father's last burst of success before his tragic downfall. We went to Mowbray from Bexhill, and everything was new and larger and finer about us.

I was nearly eight then, and at Mowbray I seem to have awakened quite suddenly to beauty and wonder. I do not recall any perception of beauty and loveliness at Bexhill. I think the summer must have been exceptionally fine and kindly. At that age I was entering upon a fresh phase of development, and the novelty and spaciousness of the new life stimulated me. As I sit here brooding at this writing-pad I live again a score of vivid, small, and yet intensely significant moments, and most of them are in the open air in the park and particularly round and about the great pond. Hardly any are indoors. I do not recall very much of the Mowbray interiors. Indoors at that time, I think, I was always reading, reading, reading.

In that punt it was I first became aware of the science of optics. I discovered something remarkable about the handle of a little fishing-net that I had put into the water. I was holding it quite still in the hope of presently whipping it up with some minnows, and I perceived that it was bent sharply at the surface of the water. I forgot the minnows and began to move the net to and fro and higher and deeper. It seemed bent, but it was not really bent. The bending shifted as I shifted the net. I puzzled over that distortion.

And in that old punt I puzzled over the riddle of reflection as well as of refraction. I found that if I crouched down with my nose just above the side of the punt I saw nothing of the bottom at all, only blue sky and tree branches. Then, as I rose, suddenly the still bottom with its roots and dead leaves and slimy weeds and the shoals of minute fish hovering above it came into view. I experimented. I extended and retracted myself. I tried to catch the exact moment between squatting and standing, when the mirror became transparent and the bottom appeared.

There was an afternoon at Mowbray, it must have been earlier in the year, in the summer, when I first discovered forget-me-nots. At the upper end of the pond near where the stream came in there were shallows and floating masses of green weed with pink blossoms and thick, widespread clumps of sedges, and half hidden amidst these sedges were clouds of flowers of a divine, incredible blue. Either I had never seen forget-me-nots growing before or I had never observed them. I went to and fro, peering from the bank, and then took off my shoes and stockings and waded into the water and mud until my knickerbockers, in spite of all the tucking up I gave them, were soaked. And I picked handfuls of these the loveliest of all English wild-flowers.

Then suddenly came horror, the unqualified horror of childhood. My legs were streaming with blood. The sharp blades of the sedge leaves had cut them in a score of places. Fresh gouts of blood gathered thickly along the cuts, and then darted a bright red ribbon down my wet and muddy skin. "Oh! Oh!" I cried in profound dismay, struggling and splashing back to the bank and still holding my forget-me-nots with both hands.

Still do I remember most vividly my astonishment at the treachery of that golden, flushed, and sapphire-eyed day.

That it should turn on me!