Читать книгу John Cornelius: His Life and Adventures - Hugh Walpole - Страница 16

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He had been, it seems, in the town for a considerable time already, earning a living as a tailor’s cutter and assistant. He entered the private lives of John and his mother on a certain sunny day when he sat down beside them on a bench looking out to the sea and proceeded to eat, like the King in Alice, a large sandwich out of a paper bag.

John liked in after days to talk about Mr. Lipper—and well he might, for Mr. Lipper was important. He spoke of him so often that I feel now that I must myself have known him. Perhaps I did—and better than many of my friends.

‘Joe Lipper,’ John would say. ‘White and heavy, like dough. Very fair semi-reddish hair. The eyebrows faintly red and an untidy, drooping, very pale moustache. His skin was so white and so dead and so loose that you felt you could take lumps of it in your hand. Later, when he lived with us, I would see him washing himself, a great expanse of dead-white skin and this faintly red, faintly gleaming hair on his chest. Of course he was fat and out of condition. And lazy. I never knew so lazy a man.

‘He wore a faded black suit, always very dusty. His real trade was cadging on people. He was a master at it. He had a kind of charm. Impossible to deny that he had. I felt it myself. He was gentle, had a soft voice like a woman’s, a most amiable temper. He adored to eat and to sleep. How many hours I’ve seen him lying on my mother’s bed, stripped to the waist, his eyes closed, his mouth open, and the long hairs of his moustache lifting and falling with his gentle breathing. If it didn’t put him out he would oblige anybody—and he had an extraordinary fascination for women, perhaps because he was at heart indifferent to their charms. He would grant them favours simply because it was too much trouble to deny them. He would smile and look at them between half-closed eyes and press their hands very gently and drive them quite crazy with anticipation and desire. He was never upset, never angry, never rude.

‘He fascinated and charmed my mother at once. I had realized a great change in her since my father’s death. It was as though she were relieved of a great burden. She had loved him dearly (she was full of heart, my poor mother) but her conviction that, because he was a gentleman, he had condescended in marrying her had always weighed upon her, made her self-conscious. She had also been oppressed by her mother-in-law. Now she could let herself go; she was growing stouter but, at this time, had a blooming, fresh look—her last touch of youth before she surrendered to inevitable decay. She was wearing that day, I remember, a crisp print dress; it was summer, the sea gleamed and glittered; even Joe Lipper had a sort of fleshy allure. They soon began to talk. Lipper could talk to women. He knew how to make them feel important, how to arouse their maternal care. Very quickly my mother felt that he needed looking after, and although, poor soul, she was in reality incapable of looking after anyone, her heart went readily out to anyone in need.

‘They were a fine stout pair sitting on the bench looking out to the sea. I didn’t dislike Joe. I never disliked him. He seemed to me like a faded descendant of the Jolly Miller I so often read about in fairy-stories.

‘I remember that after a while I left them and they didn’t even notice that I had gone....’

It was now that his mother and himself tried to have serious conversations on his future prospects. It was certainly time, for he was getting on for eleven years of age and it was right that he should earn something. None of his mother’s suggestions were of any practical value. He wanted to go to London and be an actor. He would write plays and act in them himself.

In the town he was beginning to be both a nuisance and a joke. He was here, there and everywhere, no respecter of persons, always poking his nose in where he wasn’t wanted. He couldn’t bear to see anything or anyone ill-treated. Any kind of cruelty roused him to a sort of madness. On one occasion he saw a group of boys throwing stones at a cat with a broken leg. He rushed into the middle of them, screaming in a high treble, hitting with his long thin arms to right and left. They mauled him, threw him down, sat on him, tore his clothes off his back. At another time he saw a big carter going up the road out of town lashing a horse that had too heavy a load. He jumped on the cart and caught the driver round the neck. He was thrown off and lashed with the carter’s whip. He gave away anything that he had—he was the most generous boy in the school. He never, of course, had very much.

On the other hand his vanity and arrogance made him an easy mark for the mockers. He thought that he knew more than anyone else in the town, and yet he would be ignorant of many simple things. He was always telling children stories that were obviously quite untrue. He said, for instance, that there was a Chinese City under the sea near Fortress Rock. He said that, on calm days, he had seen it and he would describe the temples with their bells and the rose-red walls of the palaces. He would recite his poems, in his high shrill voice, to anyone who would listen. He would act characters from plays that he had read, looking ridiculous in his ill-fitting clothes, with his large nose and mouth and ears, his whimbley-shambley body....

Only they would, any of them, listen when he sang. He was not ridiculous then.

But his unpopularity grew and it happened one day that a band of boys chased him along the High Street and down the hill, calling out: ‘Who’s a playwriter? Where’s the playwriter?’ and throwing stones after him. He minded this terribly but was too proud to complain. He wished to be loved by everybody, but possibly he was never to learn the important lesson that people not only like you for what you are but also for your individual attitude to them. No, he was never to learn this. He would always be too sincerely himself.

Then he came home one day and found his mother sitting in a chair and crying. He tried to comfort her by making her laugh. When he imitated people like Mr. Bartholomew or the butcher up the road or (not unkindly) Mrs. Swinnerton she always laughed and forgot her troubles. But not to-day. Half an hour before she had promised to marry Mr. Lipper. On the whole Johnny was glad and for one reason especially. His mother was often damp and chilled with the laundry-work. Mrs. Garriman had told by the cards that she would die of a consumption. She had yielded increasingly to nips of whisky and gin. John thought that Joe Lipper would keep her sober. Joe was sober himself. He enjoyed eating much more than drinking.

But she was greatly disturbed. She pulled John to her and hugged him and fondled his untidy hair and kissed his eyes.

‘Oh, Lordy, Lordy, I don’t know, I’m sure. I’m sure I don’t know. It may be for the best, dearie, and Joe says he’ll work, and what’s more he says he’ll have you taught the tailoring, Johnny, but here am I getting married again and there’ll be a man in the house.... You like Joe, don’t you, Johnny? Gertie Garriman says the cards spell trouble, but I’m sure I don’t know. It’s trouble anyway whichever way you look at it. What’s life for but troubles?’

‘I’m not going to be a tailor, mother,’ John said.

‘Oh, but why not, Johnny? Why in heaven’s name not? It’s a good trade and Joe will see you through it. Everyone says he’s a good worker if he wants to be.’

‘I’m not going to be a tailor, mother.’

‘Oh, Lordy, Lordy.... What are you going to be?’

‘I’m going to London to make a name. I’m going to be famous. First you suffer the most awful things and then you get to be famous.’

John used to tell me that after saying this he was aware suddenly of a kind of illumination. He knew that it would be so. He would suffer terrible things and be famous....

Myself: ‘I wonder how many small boys have known the same kind of illumination. And then what has it come to?’

John: ‘Oh, I daresay ... but what I didn’t know then, and know now, is that being famous isn’t the point. Anyone can be famous if they want to hard enough. The point is—to find—what? I don’t know. The thing that gives you tranquillity. The Peace of God perhaps. My little fish found it in the great floating piece of seaweed ... the best, most shining piece of seaweed, where the little fish could lose himself as the light pierced it and the warmth came from the sun.... I think I never loved my mother more than at that moment when she told me that she was going to marry Joe Lipper. I realized that our lives parted there—at that exact point. That now we would always be separated. I was handing her over to somebody else. I had a tremendous proprietary feeling towards her, and when the boys chased me through the street throwing stones at me it was she whom I felt they were hurting. And now, poor mother, she would be in Joe Lipper’s hands. I wasn’t at all sure that he would be able to look after her. I knew how lazy and selfish he was. But it was those two old women, Garriman and Hoskin, I was chiefly afraid of. When I was about, although I was only a boy, they had a kind of fear of me. I could be in a rage sometimes and say things that really got into their thick salty unwashen hides.

‘But gradually, bit by bit, they were invading our cottage more and more. Mother liked a gossip and a warming drink and Mrs. Garriman’s fortune-telling and Mrs. Hoskin’s stories. How they hated me, those two! And it showed how deep and strong was my mother’s love for me that she would never hear a word against me from either of them. But they could hurt her through me—when they told her how the town laughed at me, and the boys shouted after me and the rest.

‘She’d nod her head and say: “You wait, Gertie. You just wait. He’ll be famous one day, you see!”

‘But they’d mock at my wanting to be an actor. An actor with that face and figure!

‘I thought that possibly they would not be in the cottage so much when Joe had married mother. And I would be gone of course. Now that mother was going to marry again London for me was a certainty!’

The point for him now was how to get there. There was an old clay pig-faced money-box that he had, and into this from time to time he had put pennies, sixpences and even shillings.

Now he burst it open and discovered that in all it amounted to some twelve shillings and odd pence—not enough to go to London with!

There were people—Mr. Bartholomew, Miss Gracie and others—whom he could ask to lend him something. But there oddly enough he denied himself. He had never hesitated to ask anyone for anything that he needed, but now some sort of superstition stopped him—he wanted to earn his way to London.

So he thought of the Theatre. He was always thinking of it. Mr. Darlington, alas! had died in the last year of a chill that had turned to pneumonia. There now sat in his place a big bull-faced man who ‘knew not Joseph.’ His great merit, however, was that he was often asleep. The Theatre in fact was fast slipping downhill. No one seemed to trouble any more as to the standard of acting or plays. The house was now never more than half full.

It was quite easy now for John to slip through the door, and then he would swim, like a fish, in and out among the chairs in the darkened empty theatre or sit somewhere hidden in the dusky corners listening to rehearsals or overhearing two or three very shabby Thespians discussing their unsuccessful fates.

On this special occasion he intended business and pushed his way on to the stage. A very tenth-rate company held the boards that week, and their programme changed easily and lightly from Fair Rosamond to The Private Secretary, from The Private Secretary to The Lyons Mail.

It was Fair Rosamond that they were rehearsing when John found his way into the middle of them, and a stout, blowzy lady in the exaggerated puffed sleeves and the small waist of the period was reclining in a very rickety bower discussing with a thin unshaven out-at-elbows friend some topic of the social world.

It can be imagined that they stared when John appeared, gave a low bow and asked for their assistance. He explained at once what he wanted and, I suppose, with that intensity he always gave to any discussion of his own affairs. He intended to go to London; he hadn’t money enough; he thought they might help him. But, he explained, he expected to work for his fee.

No other of the episodes of his childhood did John enjoy to describe so greatly as this, his first public appearance in any theatre. For it began by their gathering round and wondering what on earth this strange-looking boy was doing there.

‘At that time I used to wear a pair of long thick fisherman’s trousers that Charlie had found for me somewhere—these and a short, very short-in-the-sleeves, brown norfolk jacket that Miss Gracie had given me. I didn’t mind how ridiculous I looked, then or ever. But I was worried by the clumsiness of my movements. Never was a boy so awkward as I. I really seemed to have no control over my limbs at all, and when I was excited, as I so often was, I would crack my fingers and jerk my knees as though I had St. Vitus’ dance. And this for someone who wanted to be an actor and a dancer was very unfortunate.

‘On this occasion I was so desperately in earnest that I didn’t care what I did. I told them that I had to go up to London to earn my living and that I must have the means to get there. So they laughed and asked me what my plans were. So I said I had twelve shillings in my money-box but that wasn’t enough and they must provide the rest.

‘So then they laughed a lot more and asked me what I could do. I strode to the front of the stage and out into the darkness spouted some of my pieces: “Friends, Romans, countrymen,” “When Death on the plain appears” and “Annabel Lee.” When, with my hand on my stomach, my voice trembling with emotion, I cried:

‘ “Tell me, my heart, can this be love?”