Читать книгу "C" - Maurice Baring - Страница 4

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In the autumn of 1919, almost a year to a day after the declaration of the armistice, I received a letter from an old college friend, Gerald Malone. He said in his letter that he was ill and that he wanted to see me on an urgent matter.

I had not seen Malone since the end of the war. At Oxford I had known him well. He was thought to be exceptionally gifted, but all the promise that he showed was destined to come to nothing. He took a disappointing degree and he worked for a time at law, but he was never called to the Bar. His father died, leaving him a small competence, which he rapidly got rid of by spending it. When his fortunes appeared to be at their lowest ebb and his situation and prospects seemed to be precarious in the extreme, and he was starting for the Colonies to begin life afresh on a ranch, he was left some money by a distant relation--not a large fortune, but enough to live on--and almost immediately after this he was offered the job of publisher's reader by a firm of publishers. He was not the only reader to the firm--he was to read novels only--and the salary he was given was not a large one. The work did not interest him, but, curiously enough, he did it well. He was successful. He now seemed to have reached smooth waters, but he made an unfortunate alliance, which resulted materially in his life being a long struggle to make both ends meet, and morally in ceaseless friction and permanent domestic misery. He fell in love with a woman of loose morals, violent passions and inflexible tenacity. They lived together for a time; they quarrelled and separated. They were reconciled again and quarrelled again. He could neither live with her nor without her. She could not be faithful, and she would not abandon him. Finally he married her, and this made the situation worse than ever. She never deserted him, nor did they have a day's happiness together. This state of material strain and moral friction lasted until his wife's death. The release, instead of making him happier, led him to the brink of despair, and I think he would have certainly taken his life had it not been for the good offices of a noble and good woman, a Mrs. Fitzclare, who had been a friend of his greatest friend, and who helped him to tide over this period of hopelessness. Then came the war. Gerald enlisted as a private, and was subsequently promoted. He served in various capacities and in various countries. He returned home after the armistice unwounded, but broken in health.

I went to see him and found him in the rooms at Gray's Inn which he had occupied since his marriage. He looked ill, indeed; his face, as well as his hair, was grey.

He was lying in a bed in a comfortless, untidy bedroom.

"I'm dying," he said, "and I have asked you to come because I am leaving you something and I want to give it you before I die."

He handed me a large parcel.

"In this parcel," he said, "you will find a bundle of unsorted papers. You are not to open it till I die. They contain not the story, but materials for the story of C."

C. was the nickname of a common college friend of ours who had been Gerald Malone's greatest friend at Oxford, and whom I had afterwards also known in a curiously intimate way.

"I want you to write his story," he went on. "I want you to write it as a novel, not as a biography, but write it you must."

I said that although ever since I had left Oxford I had been an intermittent journalist and had written several books, and had even dabbled in romantic themes, I had never written a novel, nor did I feel capable of doing so. I agreed that a biography was out of the question. We were too near the story; but we were, also, I thought and said, far too near to turn it into fiction. Some of the actors in the drama were still alive.

"No," he said, "the principal actors are dead. C. is dead, and Terence Bucknell is dead, and that's all that really matters. But you needn't publish it till you think fit. You needn't publish it for years. Not, if you like, while you are alive, or as long as any one else of that lot is alive. As a matter of fact they are nearly all of them dead now. But you must write it. C.'s story must be told. It must be put on record, and not as a dry, lifeless biography with everything left out, but as a living novel with everything put in, everything; the story, in fact, of his life, which is just what is generally left out in biographies. I haven't told it. I haven't attempted to tell it. I couldn't. I have read too many novels to write one myself. But I should like it to be told as a novel. A biography--one of those stiff tombstone eulogies--would deaden it. You can do it. You are the only person who can do it. You are the only person left alive who really knew him."

I pointed out that he, Gerald, was C.'s greatest friend, a far greater friend than I was.

"Yes," he said, "that is true. I was a greater friend, but when you knew him he talked to you, he told you more than he told any one. He knew me too well to want to tell me things. You knew him more intimately than I did, although I was a nearer friend. He often told me this himself."

"But surely," I said, "the interesting thing about C.'s story is its truth, and to turn it into fiction would be to falsify and to desecrate it."

"I don't want you to write an ordinary novel," he said, "I want you to tell the story of C. as you saw it, in the first person. What you don't know you can fill in from the papers I have left you. You can, if you like, say at the start you are doing that. In that way you will be able to tell all that there is to be told, all that we know. That will be enough. The main facts are enough. You will understand when you read my notes. I want you to begin quite straightforwardly to tell how you met him for the first time; then life at Oxford and in London, and all that we knew and felt about him, and spare Leila nothing."

"I don't think I can do it," I said.

"I beg of you as a dying request to try," he said. "My ghost will haunt you unless you try. Do what you can. You must try."

I said I would try, as I saw that my resistance was making him worse. We were then interrupted by a visit from the doctor. I waited in the sitting-room while the doctor visited him.

Gerald's sitting-room was an epitome of his life. The room was most untidy. Over the chimney piece there was a large map of the city of Rome and a crucifix. On the chimney piece a small photograph of his wife as she had been when he first knew her, and a lot of pewter cups--school and college trophies of sprinting. On the single bookshelf which ran round the walls were books of all kinds: Dante, Plato, Sherlock Holmes, Alice in Wonderland, Theocritus, Monte Cristo, Chess Strategy, Herrick's poems, Boswell, Mommsen, Catullus, Gregorovius, The House on the Marsh, The Mysteries of Paris, Gibbon, The Diary of a Nobody, Ganot's Physics, The Time Machine, and Jules Verne, but no novels. On the table was a bottle of brandy and a half-smoked cigar in a tray full of ashes, and an almost finished, rather mouldy-looking tongue. On the open piano there was the score of the Geisha, which had been his wife's favourite opera. In the corner of the room there was a broken gramophone. The chintzless armchairs had many holes torn and burnt in them. The carpet was threadbare and covered with stains. There were no pictures on the walls except a large photogravure of a lady playing the organ near a stained glass window, which I imagined must have belonged to his wife. I waited till the doctor came out, so as to have a few words with him. The doctor told me he thought Gerald was very bad. I mustn't stay long--it was bad for him to talk. I asked if there was no one looking after him. The doctor said that Gerald appeared to have no relations alive, but there was a Mrs. Fitzclare, who was nursing him. She had become a nurse during the war, and had remained one; she had left him a message saying she would be back immediately, and asking him to wait; she was admirable. It was she who had sent for him some days previously. She had been with Malone all the day before and all night, and had only just gone out to fetch something, and he was expecting her now at any minute. I could stay till she arrived if I liked. The doctor looked into the bedroom and said that Gerald was dozing. He waited for about five minutes in the sitting-room; then Mrs. Fitzclare arrived. I had known her for years, and I will anticipate nothing by saying anything about her now. I waited in a small ante-room while the doctor gave her a few instructions. He then left us. She told me that she thought Gerald was dying, and that she was not going to leave him. There would be another nurse coming in the evening for the night, but she would be here as well. Gerald had been born and baptised a Catholic, but during his life he had worried little about religion until latterly, but now he wanted to see a priest, and there was one coming presently.

"Gerald was very anxious to see you," she said; "it will be a great load off his mind now that he has seen you."

I then left his rooms with my parcel. Mrs. Fitzclare promised to let me know how he went on. That evening I got a telephone message from her saying that Gerald was a shade better, but there was no hope. He had seen the priest and had received the last Sacraments. She would ring me up in the morning. The next morning she telephoned to me that Gerald had died at four o'clock in the morning.

A requiem Mass was said for him at a church in Maiden Lane. Mrs. Fitzclare, myself and a Major Jackson, with whom he had served in the war, were the only people present. I asked Mrs. Fitzclare if I might call on her, as there were several things I wanted to ask her about Gerald, but she told me that she was just starting for France.

"I have another sick friend there," she said, "and I only delayed starting because of Gerald. We may meet later, but I am almost always abroad now." But we never have met again, as I lived in one continent and she in another.

I opened Gerald's parcel on the afternoon of the day he was buried. It was a large, untidy parcel, done up in an old map--Gerald was always passionately fond of maps--and tied up and sealed. I opened it while it was still daylight, and as I opened it a great quantity of papers of every size, shape and substance, came tumbling out. The papers were all unsorted and in an incredible state of confusion. They consisted of letters, envelopes, old programmes, signed menus, telegrams even, fragments of diaries, notes, some sketches of incidents in his childhood, descriptions of places, pencil sketches, some water-colours, interrupted fragments of narrative, hints for possible stories or poems, isolated sentences and dates. No chronology was observed, and no order, but separate items were sometimes conjecturally dated in pencil. There were letters from C., letters from Gerald, letters from other people, some faded photographs of people and places, some kodak films, photographs of college groups and places in England and abroad. I turned over one item after the other, reading a bit here and a bit there, and I suddenly realised that it had become dark. I had some tea, and read on and on till it was past dinnertime, and then, after the briefest of meals, I went on reading till far into the night.

As I read these faded papers a host of slumbering, long-forgotten memories crowded round me. Many little absurd incidents which I had not thought of for years rose up clearly before me, and I saw faces I had not thought of for years, and wandered once more in once familiar scenes, and heard voices and accents of friends and acquaintances some of whom were dead, others of whom were still alive somewhere, but lost sight of in the changes of life. I was hypnotised by this poignant melancholy peep-show. And through it all the figure of C., his face and his voice, kept coming back with startling vividness. A thousand aspects of him came to life once more, and as I sat brooding over all these dead scraps the story that was revealed, or half revealed, was, I thought, a strangely moving one.

It was one o'clock in the morning when I had finished the greater part of the papers, and as I sat thinking over all the story the most vivid of all these peeps into the past was the occasion of my meeting with C., an incident which he alluded to in one of the letters. It was purely by accident that I made C.'s acquaintance.

I had passed the necessary examination at school admitting me to the University, and to be a member of X---- College, but I had not been able to go up when the time came, owing to an attack of rheumatic fever. When the Michaelmas term came I decided that it would be waste of time to go up to the University. I spent the autumn till Christmas at a crammer's in London. The crammer, Mr. Spark, urged me to go up to Oxford in January, even if I only stayed there a year. He said that nothing made up for the loss of University experience. I had then in my own mind decided not to take his advice. I spent Christmas with my family in Sussex, and when Christmas was over I accepted an invitation to stay with some friends of my family, Mr. and Mrs. Roden (this is not their real name). Mr. Roden was a retired business man. He was very well off, cultivated, and a patron of the arts. His wife was the sister of C.'s father. I did not know this at the time. I had not seen the Rodens since I was a child. I was surprised at receiving the invitation, but my parents said I must accept it, and assured me that I should enjoy myself. I remember starting full of scepticism as to their forecast. Gerald's papers brought back that visit now, which after so many years was completely blurred. I remembered as if it was yesterday the shyness and apprehension I felt as I drove from the station alone in a one-horse brougham, and I remembered that the coachman seemed to shut his eyes tight when he addressed you. It was the first time I had ever been to a country-house party. The house was modern, and I felt once more the impression of comfort you received directly you entered the front hall. I was often invited to the house subsequently, but I have quite forgotten the details of those many other visits. But as I looked at C.'s handwriting on paper stamped with "Elladon House, Southampton," I saw the large hall or gallery in which there was a bright wood fire burning, some oak pillars, and many modern pictures: Corot, Daubigny and Rossetti. At a large tea-table the family and guests were eating tea loudly and noisily; the cracker stage had been reached; some one was wearing a paper cap. Mrs. Roden walked up to me, bubbling with welcome. She was older than I remembered her to be. Her hair was white, and she wore a long, trailing, sage-green tea-gown and a white fichu. She was handsome and picturesque. Mr. Roden, with his bald, shiny head, his grey hair rather longer at the back than most people's, greeted me in his rather squeaky, piping voice.

I remember coming down to dinner in a frantic hurry, thinking I was late and finding myself the first, except for Mrs. Roden, a married niece of hers, and a grown-up boy who was standing by the fireplace looking down into the fire. He turned round and smiled at me, and said: "How do you do?" and I suppose it was taken for granted that we knew each other already. In reality I had never seen him before, and I did not find out till the next day that he was a nephew of Mrs. Roden. This was C.

I wondered whether I ought to know who he was and whether I had seen him before. I felt convinced of the contrary, and yet I had the impression that I knew him already, and that I knew him quite well. There are some people like that. When you see them for the first time you feel that you have known them all your life.

I took into dinner a tall, dark girl, dressed in black, who was the daughter of a well-known painter, Sir Gabriel Carteret. She was studying painting, she said, and meant to devote her whole life to it. She would never marry; she intended to give up her whole life to art. She was, I afterwards learnt, a girl of great talent. She drew and painted in a masterly way, and she had already exhibited some pictures which people said were superior to her father's. But, after an artistic career of three or four years, she fell in love with a Polish pianist, married him, and never painted another picture. She is still alive and, I believe, still extremely happy with her Polish pianist, who tours the world giving concerts from Brussels to Tokio and from Aberdeen to the Cape of Good Hope. C. sat on the other side of Miss Carteret, and I saw him now once more as I turned to my right-hand neighbour, trying to make conversation with the lady artist. He seemed to be not exactly shy, but at his wits' ends for something to say. I caught his eye once or twice, and it twinkled. I wondered then more whether I ought to know who he was, and whether I had possibly ever seen him before, and at the same time I knew I hadn't.

After dinner, when the move was made and the men were left to drink their port and smoke, I found myself next to C., and the first thing he said to me was: "I did admire the way you talked to that girl." He meant Miss Carteret. "I couldn't think of anything to say to her."

We then talked of other things. He told me he was at Oxford, and that he had gone up at Michaelmas, and had just finished his first term. I told him how I had been on the verge of going there myself; how it had been put off, and what the crammer had said; and how I had settled not to go. He swept all that aside and said I must, of course, come to Oxford, and I must come to X----, which was the jolliest college at Oxford, the only college, the best college.

Mr. Roden, who was inquisitive of the conversation of others, overheard this remark, and said to us:

"It is like all other colleges in that respect."

Then he went on with another conversation.

C. went on about Oxford. He poured out the advantages. He said I would regret it all my life if I didn't go there. I said I thought that I had missed my opportunity; that I had dropped out of the running, and would no longer find myself with my contemporaries. I was afraid I had missed the right moment. C. said that was all nonsense. I must go up, and that was an end of it. Then some one on his other side claimed his attention, and another picture came before me: C. listening with courtesy and deference to an old man who was not, I think, very amusing. At the time it didn't strike me that his face, or that anything about him, was remarkable. All that I was conscious of then was that I seemed to know him, and that he seemed to know me, and that as far as I knew we had never met before. I certainly did not give his appearance a thought at the time. I merely wondered who he was.

A salmon-pink programme enclosed in C.'s letter to Gerald summoned up another picture before me. It was the programme of a village concert which we all went to one night. I heard once more the uncertain unison of the glee singers, and a village maiden who in a pianoforte solo seemed always on the point of reaching the top note of a difficult run and never attaining it; a sailor singing a sentimental song of which the refrain was "For greed of gold," and the vicar, apprehensive of indelicacy, stopping his encore after the third verse; the Rodens' butler singing "To-morrow will be Friday," and the chaos of the toy symphony at the end, with a cuckoo that cuckooed backwards.

It was at that concert that C. and I were introduced to some friends of theirs who were staying in the neighbourhood, whom I will call Lord. They were there with their daughter, and I sat next to Mrs. Lord at the concert, whose conversation was bewilderingly disconnected.

"Are you at Oxford or at Cambridge?" she asked me, and when I said I hoped to go to Oxford she said it was so interesting to have been at both.

I only listened with half an ear to Mrs. Lord's rambling discourse. I thought all the time what an exceedingly beautiful creature her daughter was. She sat a little further up in the row, not far from C. She had corn-coloured hair, sky-blue eyes, a dazzling skin, and a celestial smile. Could that radiant creature really have been the same person as the Mrs. Fitzclare whom I had seen and talked to that very morning at Gerald's funeral? Yes, the eyes were the same, and the smile was, if anything, more beautiful, but life had rubbed out all the radiance and joy with a hard piece of pumice-stone. Perhaps the sharpest of all the pictures these papers evoked was that of C. at that concert looking at Miss Lord. What a fresh look of undisguised, devout, complete, enthusiastic, unmixed admiration!

It was owing to that visit that I made C.'s acquaintance, and had I not met C. I should not have gone to Oxford. My parents thought it unwise, but Mr. Spark, the crammer, persuaded them it was the wiser course.

After living through all that early meeting once more, I could hardly bear to look at the papers again. I put them away and went to bed. The crowd of ghosts was too thick; the ghosts were too real.

The next morning, in the sober light of day, I tackled the papers once more in a serious manner, and I began the business of sorting them. The work took me about a week. Then I was able to sum up my impressions and face the question of what was to be done with them.

The disconnected facts and dates and scraps of this disordered, rambling, chaotic record enabled me to focus what I knew already, and what I had guessed had taken place. I regretted that Gerald had not co-ordinated the papers himself; that he had not himself tried to mould an organic whole out of the rich material. There was something in the matter, as it told itself fragmentarily, that I from the outside, with my comparatively cheap journalistic experience and stereotyped habit of writing, could not hope to achieve. Nevertheless I felt bound to try and keep the promise I made to my dying friend.

The question arose, How was it to be done? I agreed with Gerald that a biography was impossible if the story was to be told. I had no experience of novel-writing. On the other hand, I felt, after reading the papers, that it was not possible to do what Gerald suggested, namely, to tell the story from my point of view in the first person. If fiction it was to be, it must, I thought, be direct fiction based on the material that Gerald had provided for me. That material would be more or less the limit of my field of knowledge. I must work it out as best I could, inventing as little as possible.

I finally settled, after thinking it over, to try and tell the story in the shape of direct fiction. A novelist, when he does this, is, as far as his characters are concerned, omniscient. I am not. I am well aware that in this case my omniscience is limited to Gerald's papers, and yet, to make the story coherent, I shall have to try as far as possible to get into C.'s mind and tell his story from that point of view.

It is not possible to tell the whole story, because nobody knows it. C. on certain matters was the most reticent man in the world. He was one of those men who can tell the whole world, as some poet says, what he dared or would not tell to his dearest and nearest friends. He would have told--and I believe he did tell--the world through the medium of the written word; but the record of what he told is, as far as we know, at present irretrievably lost, so that all we have now are the few and disjointed facts of a brief and troubled life: the stray jottings of one friend; a few letters and the surmises of another friend, who is conscious of the uncertainty of his intuition and of his total inexperience in presenting fact in the guise of fiction.

I have, of course, changed all the names of persons and places; even the names I have mentioned so far are fictitious, but I have tried to keep to the facts.

I may have omitted much that is vital. At least, I have invented no data of my own.

WALTER WRIGHT.

New York,

July, 1922.

Per te poeta fui.

--Dante.