Читать книгу Harmer John - Hugh Walpole - Страница 10

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Feb. 7, 11.30 P.M.—... which isn’t what I meant to say to her in the least, but she aggravates me so intensely sometimes that I say what I don’t mean at all. The truth is that, unless I’m very careful, I shall be in another year or two nothing but a cross, sour old woman. It was because of my fear of this, I suppose, that I stopped this Diary six months back. What’s the use of recording the thoughts, fears, likes and dislikes of a bad-tempered old maid whom nobody wants and who, thank God, herself wants nobody. I meant never to open this shabby old book again. But I have a new reason—not a bad one either. At any rate it isn’t myself this time.

The strange thing is that I’m getting back some of the hot temper and nasty liveliness of fifteen years ago. Who ever would have supposed it? Fifteen years’ superb indifference and now suddenly I want to wring Maude’s beautiful neck until her head’s round the other way! And the difference isn’t in Maude. She’s always been a pig. The difference is in myself. Yes, and in Ma Penethen and in Judy. All of us widows or virgins. Us women—and all because there’s a man in the house.

Not altogether that either. Our dear friend Reuben with his yellow poll has been with us for years, and we weren’t excited. But this new man is something special. It’s certainly because of him that I’ve opened this book again. There is to be in these pages as little of myself as I can manage. One creeps in all the same, of course, but I have some of my old novel-writing instinct back again. After the schoolgirl’s pap that I’ve been serving out for the last ten years—what a relief! Perhaps—who knows—some of my poor lost talent will come whistling back, the talent that Ruff once said was going to burn the Thames dry! Poor Ruff, if he could only see me now!

The house is so quiet that it isn’t difficult to bring those years back again. I haven’t thought of them for ages. Haven’t I? No, I truly have not. But this man brings them back whether I will or no. There is something in common between us there. The belief in things that I had then—the belief that he has now. That belief that he has irritates me, of course. When he was talking to me the other night I turned on him like a savage. I told him that he might as well know once for all that I hated sentimentality above all things. All this talk about changing the world! As though you could ever change anybody! And he just smiled and said that that was the last thing that he wanted to do, that he didn’t want to change anything or anybody. He just had his ideas, and if two or three other people thought as he did it would be nice to try a few things. I told him that he was deceived in people, they weren’t as nice as he thought them, or loyal or true or anything—they were all rotten somewhere, and that one only made a fool of oneself by believing in people.

He laughed and said that he was sure he’d met more rotten people than I had, but he’d found most of them good somewhere—all this with his funny accent and his singulars and plurals and pronouns all wrong, and his large blue eyes that are like a baby’s or a hero of one of Crockett’s novels. I said he was romantic and idealistic and sentimental, all things that I loathed, and that we’d never get on. And then he laughed and I laughed, and Maude came in and was angry at his wasting his time even with an old woman like me covered with wrinkles, and I liked that. I’d do anything to spite Maude.

Then there’s no doubt that he’s kind and polite—both things that I like and see little enough of here. He asked me whether there had never been a time when I’d believed in things, and I said yes, there had been. And I saw myself that day Harland took my first story for The Yellow Book, and asked me to go and see him, and how rosy the world looked, and what a darling Harland was, and how I loved every one! And the night Ruff told me he loved me, that night at Chris’s party when Oscar Wilde came, and Ada Leverson was there, and Max, and I seemed to be sitting with my hand on the very wheel that turned the world round! And that first month that I had with Ruff when we went up to that little inn by Ullswater, the nights and the days! ... Yes, yes, there was a time when I too believed!

As I sit here the rain has begun, the only sound save for the clock on the stairs in all the world, and although it’s pattering on my window-pane, it’s from behind my Cathedral wall that it seems to come. As always! Everything comes from inside the Cathedral, the carts, the horses, the errand-boys, the bicycles, the old ladies—a whole ghostly world—so that as I sit here for so many long hours together in this room I have grown to imagine that building peopled with ghosts—all the trade and traffic of a ghostly hemisphere.

And now to-night the rain is the ghostliest of the lot, footstep after footstep pattering down that long dark nave, figures grey and shadowy staring from behind every tomb and from under every brass. For years I have been sitting here thinking that my life was over, and now suddenly the stream seems to be trickling down from the hills again, the dry bed beginning to be moistened. The very energy of that man downstairs seems to have touched me, laugh at him though I may.

Feb. 15.—Our friend the Swede is getting on. He is making acquaintances everywhere. People take to him, which is strange enough in a conservative little place like this where the very word “foreigner” frightens every one. He has started his gymnasium or whatever he calls it. He has taken three rooms over the market-place—where Bassett the dentist was—has hired an old sailor and his son as assistants and already has some clients.

Little Longstaffe of St. Paul’s has taken him up warmly, old Bently of the Bank goes to him to get his stomach down, and they say that the Choir School is going to have him for some hours a week, and that even the School itself may condescend to give him work.

It might easily develop into a craze here. During the last few years every one has been after any new thing, and what with Mrs. Sheringham and the Pageant last year, and the Regatta, and doing “Elijah” in the Cathedral, and the Benson Company coming to the Assembly Rooms, there’s no knowing where we may end. I’m sure I wish Johnson or Johanson, or whatever his name is, all the luck. They can’t manage his name here, and every one calls him Harmer John, and that will stick, I should think.

Personally and privately he isn’t as tiresome as I at first expected. He hasn’t impressed upon me any more of his views about the goodness of humanity; he is, in fact, a great deal more practical than I had fancied him, but if I were responsible for him (which, thank God, I’m not), two things would worry me.

One is that he got the rooms, or did the business of getting them, through Fletch. Now Fletch hates him—hated him on sight—and is of course a perfect devil in anything to do with money. I tried to warn him about Fletch, but he only laughed and said that he had been kind to him and made him special terms, and that he was sure that he was honest. Fletch honest!

The second thing is our dear little friend Maude. The man is fascinated by her, and in that, to do him justice, there’s nothing very remarkable. She has fascinated plenty before him. She’s the prettiest girl in the place, and she has ways ... ! Moreover, she herself is really taken with him, his physique, I suppose, his laugh and the rest. Then he’s really something new for her. She has never been farther than a trip to Drymouth, and the men of this town are not Adonises. She is determined to catch him, and dances round him like a puppy round a juicy bone.

There is something good in the girl, I daresay. I have never been able to be fair to her. She’s so young that her character can’t be formed yet, and he may form it for her. They go for walks together; she’s been several times to his gymnasium. The trouble is that she’s bone selfish. He’ll please her until she’s tired of him. I don’t know. As I say, this may change her. She’s become more serious in the last fortnight than I’ve ever before known her.

She is nicer to me, too—quite polite, and when I went to bed with one of my headaches the other night, brought me some tea herself. We had a funny little conversation on that occasion. I was lying there like an old scarecrow, sallow as a fog, and she was looking lovely, all youth and life and colour.

“You don’t like me, Miss Midgeley, do you?” she said. “You never have. Why don’t you?”

“Don’t bother me with your questions,” I said, “my head’s too bad.”

“I’m not so silly as you think,” she said. “I want to get away from here and improve myself. What chance has a girl got in a stuffy old town like this?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I answered, “there are plenty of ways of improving yourself here if you like.”

“I want to see foreign countries,” she said. “Mr. Johnson’s been telling me wonderful things.”

So he’s been playing Othello to her Desdemona? But Desdemona is not her type. Cressida, perhaps? And if Othello had married Cressida? ...

Feb. 24.—The man’s mad. Eaten up with idealism and fantastic desires. He’s been here a little over two months and he wants to strip every Polcastrian naked, pull down the town, beat drums in the Cathedral, anything impossible you like. We were a funny lot the other night gathered in the kitchen (one of the finest old rooms in Polchester, yes, or in England for that matter). The wind was curling down the chimney, Ma Penethen and Judy were playing patience, Fletch reading the paper, Maude making eyes at Johnson.

Suddenly he comes out with it, speaking to the air—what he wanted to do. What he wanted to do! To have a wonderful town, a town of craftsmen, modern Donatellos; to pull down the slums, Seatown and the rest; to build magnificent streets up from the river with statues and towers; to have the most splendid architects, the most wonderful sculptors to come down to us and start a school here; for every one in the town who cared for beauty to work to make the town beautiful, to work not for gain but for love of art and your country; even a little—one street, a statue or two—and other towns would see, admire, and imitate; to pay some great architect to design new buildings instead of the Seatown slums; to develop our own school of craftsmen, nineteenth and twentieth-century craftsmen, who would work with their hands as they did in the Florence of the Renaissance—no machinery, no ceaseless reproduction of beautiful things, but the beautiful things themselves, each one made by the loving hands of the loving craftsman. And with this we Polcastrians are to have beautiful bodies, not too fat and not too scraggy, and we are to have beautiful children, and to lead beautiful lives—jolly lives, he explained, all of us in good health and loving one another and speaking the truth and being jolly. Oh dear! Shades of William Morris! The idiot! ...

I burst forth. I couldn’t see Fletch looking at him over the top of his paper with those cold glass eyes without wanting to protect him as though he had been a baby in a perambulator playing with a snake. And yet I had to attack him. I did, too. I asked him whether he knew our town, whether he knew the parsons and the old women. I reminded him that only the other day he had told me that he didn’t want to change anybody, and that here he was, propaganding with all the silly old-woman business that cranks had tried over and over again—and always failed. He looked at me as though he had been lost in sleep and I had jerked him awake. He said, as he had said the other day, that he didn’t want to change anybody, but he thought people weren’t as happy as they might be or as beautiful as they ought to be, and that if a few saw things as he did they could band together and do a little, and that then others perhaps would join them. He said that he had always thought that it would be nice to have a few men and women working together as they used to in Florence. He knew that many others had tried it, but they hadn’t altogether failed if they had worked hard. That there was the most wonderful Cathedral here, and that he loved the town because his mother had lived near to it. But that he didn’t want to alter anybody.... He only dreamt sometimes ...

Then Maude broke out, jumping up and banging on the table. She thought Mr. Johnson’s ideas were beautiful and that I was always down on everything, and then to every one’s amazement she burst into tears and rushed out of the room. Johnson got up and stood staring after her, his eyes shining. All Fletch said was, slowly, “Pull down Seatown! Why, Mr. Johnson, you don’t understand things here!”

And all the shadows in the Cathedral pressed close and listened with their ears up against the wall, and a little titter went down the nave, the echo of an echo! I heard it behind the rustle of Fletch’s paper.

Johnson stood there looking at the door through which Maude had flung herself, as though carved in stone. Then he turned round to me.

“You was talking sense, I’m sure, Miss Midgeley,” he said. “I dream sometimes, and it’s foolish to dream aloud. I don’t hope Miss Penethen’s really upset.”

That brought out from Judy a ferocious, “Oh, Maude’s all right. Don’t you worry.”

Then he sighed as a dog does just before it settles to sleep, and sat down at the table again.

Am I a little queer, I wonder, living in this funny old house so long? Am I being drawn back into life again? Is it against my own will? I like him. How can I help it? He would drag the maternal out of any woman—yes, even out of me. And on the other side of the wall they titter, I am sure, long after I am asleep.