Читать книгу Mirror of Dreams - Martin Louis Alan Gompertz - Страница 4

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Major John Oxley emerged from a solemn-looking house in Harley Street with an air of determined dejection upon his usually cheerful face, and there was a certain irresolution in his step as of one who does not quite know where to go. His small, rather dapper figure and brisk step were usually marked by a crisp definiteness of purpose, but to-day, for some reason, he had the appearance of one who does not know his own mind, and he stood upon the top step as the neat maid shut the door behind him, looking, for him, most hopelessly irresolute.

The trouble at that particular moment was that he really did not know his own mind—that portion of his make-up had, in fact, let him down, and this was entirely perplexing and most frightening to a man who all his life had banked on that particular asset of his, one which he had found in the hard world of work to be in many ways infinitely superior to the similar article of equipment of most other men, and the last portion of his being he had ever expected to play him false. If his lungs or his legs, or even his heart, had refused to function in proper fashion he would have taken it philosophically, but that his mental machinery should grate like an uncared-for gear-box—this was so utterly unexpected and unthought of, that for the moment it defeated him completely.

Mechanically he settled his hat at a shade finer angle, pulled out his cigarette-case and lit a cigarette. An ultra-fashionably dressed damsel coming up the steps to the great man’s door looked at him, and for once Major Oxley—always ready to gaze at anything so attractive—stared straight through her into space. Then, as she pressed the bell viciously—she was not accustomed to men looking through her—he hurried down the steps on to the pavement, walked twenty yards, and stood still to reflect again.

What was it the doctor had said? The same old nonsense that two others had told him, that his own doctor had so insistently, and so fruitlessly, impressed upon him for the last six months, and that finally his chief at the War Office had made a last effort to drive home, before, in mean and traitorous fashion, making a disciplinary matter of it and, with the connivance of those low fellows in the Medical Directorate, arranged this interview in Harley Street, and, without asking Oxley’s permission, had written out a draft order granting him one year’s leave on medical grounds.

After a short three-quarters of an hour the pince-nezed, thin-faced, grey-haired gentleman in the house he had just left had told him, coldly and firmly, that he was to go away—he had intimated brusquely that he did not care where Major Oxley went—the further the better; that he was to sleep ten hours out of every twenty-four and twelve on Sundays; that the rest of the day could be spent in any form of physical exercise he liked, the more strenuous the better, provided that it did not prevent him sleeping, which for the first month or so it might do if he were not extremely careful. He was to read as much as he pleased of the lightest and cheapest kind of fiction he could lay hands on, but on no account to read detective stories, nor touch any kind of work at all—that he could eat or drink anything he pleased, but that, for the first week, he was to cut his tobacco by fifty per cent., and thereafter progressively up to eighty per cent. of his present allowance—the balance of twenty per cent. remaining would be quite enough to send any ordinary strong man to his grave in reasonably quick time. The doctor was Scotch and a non-smoker. Lastly, he was to thank Providence that he was a soldier who could be forcibly restrained from work and not a civilian over whom no such wholesome discipline exists. Consequently, the doctor trusted that he would never see him again, and that, after a year or eighteen months, Major Oxley would resume the usual current of the normal soldier’s existence, having learnt his lesson. The fee would be three guineas—thank you.

Oxley, who had not slept ten hours in the last eight days, and that only with the aid of drugs, was still able to smile a rather wan smile at the recollection of the way in which he had been handled; he was still man enough to realise that he had broken one of the commandments in overworking for about seven years on end, and must, therefore, take his inevitable punishment with as much of a grin as he could muster. He must further resign himself to the loss of the job which he had first created and then filled with an ability and zeal which his few-worded chief—behind his back, of course—called entirely superhuman. He had, moreover, hung on until the bitter end, and only when the last voluminous reports and schemes had been handed in did his tired grasp relax for an instant, only to find that it had gone completely and refused to come back. The machine appeared to have seized from hot bearings and, as far as he could be thankful for anything, Oxley was thankful to find that there was hope for the future. The Harley Street man had thrown that in gratis—perfect recovery was certain, in time, provided he did implicitly what he was told to do now and for the next year or so.

From force of habit, he wandered towards Oxford Street to take a bus for Whitehall until he remembered that strong-minded men—his painstaking, excellent G.S.O.3 primarily—would eject him forcibly if he appeared in the little room which had been his so long. Possibly his chief would interfere and put him under arrest and have him marched under escort to his club, to be fed and put to bed, or taken to Victoria Station to spend the week-end at the chief’s place in Sussex under the firm supervision of Mrs. Chief, who would certainly make him have breakfast in bed and force food upon him every two hours.

Where should he go so as to kill time until he could try to sleep? And then he bethought himself of Mrs. Carruthers’ hospitable roof in Chelsea, where she lived, sometimes alone and sometimes with Oxley’s schoolday friend, her son Tom. He hailed a passing taxi and tried to stimulate his numbed brain with further tobacco.

At the same moment his chief hung up the telephone receiver after a few minutes’ brisk chat with the same house in Harley Street and heaved a sigh—he was alone—as he penned an order appointing Oxley’s successor. Three days later various international gentlemen—mostly of Hebraic extraction—read with great thankfulness that Major Oxley’s place would know him no more in the Intelligence Department at the War Office, and passed the good news by devious channels to the Middle East, where other gentlemen wept tears of relief. One of them went so far as to buy two extra expensive dancing-girls as a thank-offering.

“Got the sack,” said Major Oxley laconically, as he was ushered into Mrs. Carruthers’ morning-room. “Going to take the dole. Got a year to kick my heels in, during which, if anyone sees me within ten miles of any form of work, I am to be shot at dawn.”

“I’m so glad,” said Mrs. Carruthers, a brisk, white-haired little dame, quite unfeelingly.

Oxley subsided into a chair, and Mrs. Carruthers looked him over as she pushed away the letter she had been writing.

“Extraordinarily glad!” she reiterated. “It’s just about time.”

“Rub it in!” retorted Oxley. “I came here for sympathy and drink, and you offer neither. I shall go and drown myself off the Embankment, I think, only the water looks muddy and cold to-day. I’d better wait until Monday—perhaps it’ll be fine then.”

“Yes, do wait until Monday,” said Mrs. Carruthers soothingly. “The paper says it’s going to be fine over the week-end. Besides, that will give me time to get some black for the funeral. Beer, I suppose?” she added, as the maid came in in response to the bell she had pressed.

“A good, honest, plebeian taste in these democratic days. Moreover, the doctor told me alcohol kills more slowly than tobacco.”

“What else did he say, John?”

“Merely what you and Tom and everybody else has been saying. Lead a dog’s life—eating, sleeping, and taking that loathsome drug—exercise. I—me—that have jeered at my fellow-men on the subject of exercise ever since the time at school when I found that I was not constructed to hit a ball with a stick like such creatures as Tom. Where is it?”

“Out, buying camp kit, I think,” replied his mother, indicating Oxley as the person to whom the beer was to be offered—a quite unnecessary proceeding, since the servants knew Oxley well, had known him, in fact, for very many years. The cook, indeed, could remember him as a small, quaint boy with a dislike for games, quite different from Master Tom, who radiated athletic glory.

“Then he goes definitely?” said Oxley, considering the amber liquid which the maid poured out for him.

“Quite definitely.”

“How long for?”

“A year at least,” said Mrs. Carruthers with a little sigh. “Possibly more. One never knows. He’ll tell you all about it after lunch. What are you doing this week-end?”

“Nothing,” replied Oxley truthfully, and then suddenly realised just what that meant. “Nothing for a whole blooming year—just stagnate—go to some loathly health resort and play some loathsome game.” He foresaw himself conscientiously learning golf or some other form of ball-chasing in an effort to avoid going mad from boredom. “Nothing!” he reiterated, and his lips twitched a little.

“Near the breaking-point,” commented Mrs. Carruthers mentally, and subconsciously began to think out meals such as might be suitable to a sick man of his type. Then aloud:

“You’d better send for your things after lunch, then. Simmons can get them from the club porter if you phone what you want. There’s no need for you to go back yourself; you told me often that they know your ways and can pack a week-end suitcase for you.”

It seemed to her that his club was the last place he ought to be in this week-end, wandering around like a ghost, answering sympathetic inquiries about his health and his plans.

“And you and Tom can take the car down somewhere to-morrow for the day and get out into the fresh air. He’s been in too much of late; it’ll do you both good.”

Oxley caught at it as a drowning man catches at a straw. The one thing he wanted to do was to get away from his kind for the moment, from the men who led the same life as he had led, who lived in offices and did the work that he was now forbidden to do. He was sensitive and shrank from all their well-meant inquiries and sympathy—felt, moreover, that he would be looked upon as something rather queer, somebody whose mind was not functioning as it should. And the average man’s mind never fails to function in its inefficient fashion. He can speak with tender pride of a sluggish liver or a halting leg—but a mind! It was one degree worse than doubtful nerves, unless, perhaps, they were the same thing. And Oxley thought of the unfortunates who had gone under during the war, not victims of respectable bullets or shells or gas or even decent germs of disease, but of strange, unaccountable lesions somewhere inside which unfitted them to do what he considered real work—brain work—the work that distinguishes the man from the horse or dog.

Undoubtedly the Carruthers’ house was the place for the week-end while he considered with what the future might be filled. Moreover, in listening to Tom he would forget about himself, because he knew Tom would talk to him—Tom always did—and he knew that he would disagree more or less flatly with nine-tenths of what Tom said, and that is entirely healthy. Then, perhaps, he would sleep and his rather numb mind would get number and more restfully dog-like, instead of suddenly coming to life and spinning in ill-balanced circles, as it had done every night for the last week. He might even sleep without any of those little tablets.

He burbled meaningless thanks, and Mrs. Carruthers renewed her thoughts about the breaking-point and thanked God for the possession of a little house and a small car whereby she was able, upon occasion, to help those who were down and out, either financially or in any other of the various complicated ways which modern life brings in its train.

Thus, when Tom came back from his morning with various outfitters—sellers of tents and camp gear—fitters-out of wanderers in strange places—with long lists of orders and schedules of stores, he found John Oxley dozing in an armchair, the first fifteen minutes’ undrugged sleep that Oxley had had for over a fortnight, while his mother sat knitting opposite and put her finger on her lips as he entered.

Then, after lunch, the two men sprawled in chairs in Tom’s room, absorbing pipes in restful quiet, so that John Oxley almost went to sleep and began to feel that perhaps some day life would come all right again and he might regain what he held to be his manhood, the power of highly concentrated brain work, and which he was almost convinced that he had lost for ever only last night. He listened dreamily to Tom talking of his arrangements for his projected trip—as yet only of initial routes and stores and tents and the like—concrete, rather non-committal details, so far, with nothing much of the purpose that lay behind them.

Even so there was just enough material for John to argue. Sizes of tents and strength of following, for instance. John was narrow-mindedly convinced that he had forgotten more than Tom had ever known about travel, and considered his friend to be an idle sybarite.

“The proper way to travel,” he emphasised, “is with what you, or you and your horse, can carry—a small suitcase in Europe. I’ve been to Constantinople and up and down the Balkans heaps of times with that—a pair of decent saddle-bags and a couple of blankets, if you’re going off the beaten route. I did half Kurdistan on that scale and lived like a fighting cock. You can always get shelter and food from the local scallywags. What’s the good of cumbering yourself with store-boxes and a string of servants and buying pack-animals? You lose all the fun of it. Go and live with the people and eat their food and share their life.”

“Yes, and catch their bugs,” retorted Tom. “But, anyway, there aren’t any people where I’m going, so that scheme doesn’t work. At least, in most of the country there aren’t supposed to be any people. And even if there were, the white man doesn’t thrive on the kind of food they eat.”

“Rot!” said Oxley, with a sudden spark of his old vitality coming back. “I’ve lived on Arab grub for weeks on end—eaten with my fingers—and flourished on it. You soon get accustomed to it and like it.”

“Arabs and Kurds aren’t Ladakhi Thibetans,” said Tom. “Moreover, you’ve got an ostrich stomach—I haven’t.”

And then, of course, they argued indefinitely over Tom’s kit—the futility or necessity of sleeping-bags and Whymper tents and the like. Oxley advocated a poncho, which, he explained, was a sort of blanket with a hole in the middle, through which you put your head, and which served as bedding, waterproof, or tent, as desired. Nothing further was required by any reasonable man, unless he happened to be going to the North Pole.

And as for servants, what good were they? Couldn’t Tom cook his own food over three stones? Oxley had done that for days on end, it seemed, in the desert. He was apparently masquerading as a sheikh or a Buddhoo or something in that line with quite a lot of nasty-minded people looking for him. They looked for him so hard at one period that, in self-defence, he had been forced to join in with them and help in the hunt for himself. It was a lengthy and vastly amusing story with a lot of side-lights on Middle Eastern morals mixed up with the adventures, or rather misadventures, of a plump and comely Armenian lady of kind heart, but easy manners and Eastern untrustworthiness, wherein for a short period Oxley had successfully sustained the rôle of a Syrian dancing-girl. He was short and slim with just the hands and feet for the part.

That night Oxley slept for at least five hours, and woke up in the morning with the feeling that the doctors had talked even more nonsense than he thought. Whereupon Tom put him into the car and removed him for the day into woods of beech and oak and such things entirely different from offices in London. By the time they returned, Oxley was convinced he was so completely restored that before going to bed he played with a cipher for twenty minutes. At the end of that time the twinges at the back of his head told him that he was a fool, and he cast the papers into the fire and went to bed, didn’t get to sleep for three hours, and resolved, finally, to be good and obey orders.

Even so, in the morning, after a cold bath and a hearty breakfast, he looked more like himself than he had for weeks, and Tom felt that he might safely broach his project, which he did as Oxley sprawled in the armchair in his room, smoking the first tobacco of the day—a considerable advance on last week, when the prelude to the most feeble breakfasts had been half a dozen cigarettes.

“What are you going to do?” asked Tom as he sorted books, assisted, or rather hindered, by a large Airedale puppy, a year or two old, who sometimes answered to his name of “Tosh.”

“God knows!” said Oxley. “Switzerland for a start, I think—probably walk for a bit, perhaps even go in for that disgusting form of hard labour known as climbing. It has the saving grace of being one degree less inhuman and less detestable than trying to hit a ball.”

“Come and walk with me,” said Tom. “I’m going to walk for miles and possibly climb a certain amount. Much better for you than Switzerland, where you’ll meet all sorts of people you know and don’t really want to see. You’ve never seen my sybaritic corner of the world, where people have luggage and pack-animals and servants. It’ll broaden your narrow little views on the art of travel.”

Oxley looked at him.

“Mean it, Tom? What the devil good will I be to you? You know my views of things—you know I disagree with nine-tenths of your ways of doing things on trek. Also you’re off on one of your hare-brained stunts in search of something or somewhere that doesn’t exist, and I shall chuck buckets of cold water horse-sense over it until such remnants of mind as you’ve got will force you to come home again.”

“Not a bit. I always welcome cold water—keeps one braced up and the faculties going. Either you disagree with me and so strengthen my belief in my own views, or else you come to agree with me eventually, and then I know that I’m even righter than I thought I was.” Tom stopped for a minute to light his pipe. “Come along and get out of your Middle East grooves—disappear for a year or so.”

“What are you going for?” queried Oxley. “Let’s know the worst, and then I’ll see.”

“I know quite well what I’m going for, but I don’t quite know where I’m going or what’s going to happen or whether I shall find it. But I’m going to connect up some disconnected links in a chain, or try to. Sort of thing you’ve crocked yourself trying to do, only there aren’t any offices or secret codes—it’s all open air with nobody to worry you and no report to make at the end of it. Once upon a time I had dreams ...” Tom spoke rather diffidently now.

“Meaning you’ve never woken up; we all know that.”

“... had dreams,” continued Tom imperturbably. “Then I found an old mirror and saw things from my dreams in it.”

Oxley leant forward and tried to imitate the Harley Street manner.

“ ‘Sleep ten hours a day and twelve on Sundays. Eat and drink anything you like, but cut down tobacco.’ Poor old bird, I didn’t know it was as bad as that. And you really look quite well. Have you seen anybody about it yet?”

“And then I actually found one of the things that had been in the dreams and the mirror ... that peak over there.” He pointed to a photograph of a magnificent rock peak with a great hanging glacier on one face.

Oxley turned his head with a curious, bird-like twist to look at the picture.

“Nasty, cold-looking place. Looks as if there wasn’t a pub for miles. Are you going there again?”

“And once I saw a ghost....”

“You couldn’t have, because there aren’t any such things. I should burn those books over there on mysticism and muck generally, if I were you, and read the murder columns in the daily papers or some healthy literature of that sort. News of the World is as good value as you can buy when you’re out of sorts.”

“And lastly I got an invitation to go to a monastery which I don’t think anybody’s ever visited.”

Oxley threw up his hands and subsided into his chair with a groan.

“You’ll be turning Roman before you know where you are—not that I mind them. Most monks I know seem cheerful souls with cultivated palates and sense enough to drink wine instead of whisky. I respect the Church of Rome for showing a lot of horse-sense in matters like that. But you won’t last five minutes, Tom—they’ll chuck you out for lack of common sanity, and you’ll float round again till you become a medium or something. I’d no idea it was as serious as this.”

“Not that kind of monastery,” said Tom. Oxley was regaining his health at some speed, it seemed, and Tom was grateful, for Oxley was the very best friend he had. “A Buddhist monastery, or, to be more correct, a Lamaist monastery in the back of beyond, with a Skushok, which means a reincarnation of Buddha. It would do you good to go to a place like that. They’ve never seen a typewriter or a telephone, let alone a wireless set or a cinema.”

“I know the sort of place—seen pictures of them in the papers. But it would be a change from anything else I’ve seen, though, and I might save you from being reincarnated or losing your astral body or some catastrophe of that kind if I did go. But what about the chain and the missing links?”

“I’ve given it you—at least, most of them. I want to find the ones in between.”

Oxley counted on his fingers.

“Item—dreams, which mean indigestion. I always told you, dutifully echoing your mother, that you eat too fast. Item—a looking-glass—awfully unlucky things to break—the pieces always seem to get alongside of your bed and then you invariably hop out without your slippers one morning. Item—a ghost. A more difficult problem that, because it can’t strictly be put down to indigestion since you’re awake. Still more difficult since you can’t really have seen one, and therefore your trouble must be older than I thought. Item—an invitation to a Lamaist monastery by a reincarnation of Buddha who hasn’t got a wireless set. I fail to see a chain of any description.”

“You’ve forgotten the mountain.”

“All mountains have bits of rock and bits of snow and all look equally beastly and inhospitable. I’ve seen heaps of them—in the distance, whenever possible.”

“Well, are you coming?” asked Tom. Behind Oxley’s jeers he thought he detected an inclination to close with the offer.

“When are you going?”

“Sailing Thursday week, or, rather, taking the P. and O. express that day to Bombay and then Kashmir via Pindi, where Sanderson will have got things ready. You remember Bob Sanderson in Mespot?”

“He used to be comparatively sane and ate his food slowly and stuck to facts. And what do we do after Kashmir—get reincarnated?”

“Walk or sometimes ride—walk for a few weeks, and then walk some more—and then do a bit more walking.”

“The Felix stunt, in other words.” Then suddenly his tone changed from the mocking to the serious. “Yes, I’ll come, Tom, and thanks very much. You won’t find any chain or any links or anything of that sort, but it’ll do us good all round. What kit do I want? The only bit of India I’ve ever seen is the somnolent south—seven months of it, just before the war. I didn’t like it, but the north sounds different. I’m in your hands, but, for the Lord’s sake, cut down the kit a trifle and travel reasonably.”

And thus it happened that Major John Oxley faded from the paths of the Intelligence Service and fled from the lure of the Middle East, abandoned prophecies of gas warfare and air horrors wilder far than any of Tom Carruthers’ dreams, and bought a berth on the P. and O. mail-steamer, Narkunda, bound for a land where people still ride horses and kill each other with such antiquated things as rifles and knives and, generally speaking, behave more or less like human beings instead of trying to be machines and, consequently, retain quite a large amount of the natural human animal’s inefficiency and interest.