Читать книгу The Killer and the Slain - Hugh Walpole - Страница 6

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From 1919 until March 1929 Tunstall was in London, or in any case did not return to Seaborne. His mother and father died. Their little house by the sea was sold. It seemed that no fragment or memory of them remained.

I worked in the antique shop and, during those years, the boom years that followed the War, we did sufficiently well. In 1924 my first novel, The Sandy Tree, was published. I will not now, when my hopes have been so sadly disappointed, say very much of my almost delirious excitement at that time. The shore of the world is scattered with the bones of disappointed artists. I had written several novels before The Sandy Tree and sent them to various publishers. They were refused and I destroyed them. But on that morning when I received the letter saying that The Sandy Tree had been accepted I knew such joy that I was, for a while, insane. I realized on that morning that with a little luck I might be encouraged to be an entirely different human being--genial, friendly, communicative. My mother and father were almost as wildly delighted and all our friends and acquaintances were told of the event. I corrected my proofs as though they were the very blood of my body. As the day of publication approached I could scarcely sleep and ate almost nothing. Then my six presentation copies arrived in their dark-blue covers and I gave the first one that I handled to my father and mother. They both thought the book wonderful and looked at me with new eyes. Then came the day of publication. Weeks followed. Nothing happened at all. There were some reviews, none very rapturous, one or two advertisements. Some jocular remarks were made by our acquaintances. It was altogether too queer and unusual a book for their understanding. After a month the book was as though it had never been. I told myself that this always happened to a first novel of any peculiar merit. I told myself that I was so unusual that it would take time for me to be discovered by the people who really understood me.

But in my heart I had been dealt a dreadful blow. All my life long I had looked forward to the day when I would be an author before the world. I consoled myself, at moments of bitter loneliness or disappointment, with this self-prophecy of my future glory. Now I had tried and I had failed.

In 1926 my father died. He was ill for a week from some sort of fever and then quite suddenly one evening passed away. On the last day of his life he spoke to me in a very touching manner.

He lay there seeming to me to be cleansed of all his grossness by approaching death. His eyes were dim but of a great kindness and even tenderness. I sat beside his bed and suddenly tears began to fall. I loved him for the first time and learned all that I had missed. But he himself was gay and even jocular. He had always been a merry man.

'All our lives together, John, I've loved you and you've not loved me. You've wanted to get away from me. Something in me has shocked you. But I've understood that, for I've always seemed to be both myself and yourself--the rake and the puritan bound into one body. I've not been physically faithful to your mother and she has known it and forgiven me. But I have loved her dearly all through life. Don't be too shocked at things, John. Men are partly animals, you know, and the animal in man isn't as evil as the devil in man--the devil's weapons are meanness, treachery, betrayal of heart, coldness, uncharitableness, not fornication and all lasciviousness. Remember not to judge or you may yourself be judged. It was the man whose house was swept and cleaned that took in the seven new devils.'

That was the way my father talked, in a kind of scriptural style. He pressed my hand, and that night about ten he coughed and cried out and died.

I took on the business.

I should say something here about Seaborne itself, for I loved it so much until a certain evening and after that came most bitterly to hate it as, afterwards, I will write down. In Elizabeth's day it had been quite a flourishing seaport with a bustling trade. It was well situated between the hills and having in front of it a natural harbour with a strong breakwater. This was needed, for the houses of the little town went to the water's edge and, during three-quarters of the year, the storms could be terrific.

The Upper Town was like any other seaside resort in Glebeshire, with a High Street, a Methodist chapel, a tourist hotel, 'The Granby', a Smith's bookshop with its messenger-boy sign, a hosier's, a grocer's, a china-ware and our own antique shop.

Above the Upper Town, straggling up the hill, were decent villas with pleasant gardens. All this was conventional, but the Lower Town was very unconventional. It reminded one of Polchester in piccolo, for Polchester's Seatown on the Pol was at one time--and not so very long ago--as wild and neglected as any place you could find in England.

Seaborne's Lower Town wasn't wild and neglected. It was simply deserted. It had fallen into a still and gloomy sea-green, slimy decay. Any sea traffic there was had moved to the New Harbour, that also boasted a new pier with a hall and a cinema.

So the Lower Town harbour had surrendered to history. The houses that abutted on the sea had still some remnants of Elizabethan architecture, and there were proposals once or twice a year that something should be done with this part of the town. 'The Green Parrot,' a very low sort of pub, hanging right over the water, and with one foot on the old deserted grass-grown landing-stage, was in reality a fine little building with the remnants of an Elizabethan staircase and spy-hole. 'The Green Parrot' had in fact a long and exciting history had anyone taken the trouble to delve into it.

I little thought, at the time of my father's death, that I was, in my own destined moment, to add to that history. Possessing the twisted and restless imagination of a romantic novelist, the Lower Town appealed greatly to my taste and fancy. I liked especially on an early spring or midsummer evening to wander quite alone under the shadows of the warped and tumbled houses, looking upward into a sky faintly green with the piercing silver of a newborn star, and then down, beyond the rotting wood iridescent with slime, into the water that heaved as though it were asleep and reflected, a little out of focus, the glass of windows, the tufts of greenery between the window-joints, the pushing eaves, the drunken chimneys, and, behind them all, the line of quiet hill like a smudged drawing, grey and still. That is how it was. Green and grey, still and crooked, waiting, sleepily speculative, on the edge of the Atlantic.

On these evenings there were few passers-by. Even 'The Green Parrot' was not greatly patronized. In the daytime tourists visited the Lower Town and found it 'picturesque.' They bought postcards of it. But on my evenings I was a solitary, and loved to be so.