Читать книгу Conrad in Quest of His Youth: An Extravagance of Temperament - Merrick Leonard - Страница 3

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"How we laughed as we laboured together!

How well I remember, to-day,

Our 'outings' in midsummer weather,

Our winter delights at the play!

We were not over-nice in our dinners;

Our 'rooms' were up rickety stairs;

But if hope be the wealth of beginners,

By Jove, we were all millionaires!

Our incomes were very uncertain,

Our prospects were equally vague;

Yet the persons I pity who know not the city,

The beautiful city of Prague!"

If you can imagine the lonely shade of the man who wrote that verse returning to Literary London—where there is no longer a young man who could write it, and merely a few greybeards are left still to understand what it means—I say, if you can imagine this, you may appreciate the condition of Conrad when he went back to the Quartier Latin.

Conrad was no less sad, his disappointment was no less bitter, the society that he had sought so eagerly was no less alien to him. But while he commanded bocks for all, and mourned the change that left him desolate, the melancholy of his mood was a subtler thing—for he realised that the profoundest change was in himself.

Something should be said of the longings that had brought him back to the Quarter—longings in one hour tender, and in the next tempestuous—something hinted of the regretful years during which his limbs reposed in an official chair while his mind flew out of the official window to places across the sea where he had been young, and sanguine, and infinitely glad. To a score of places it flew, but to none perhaps so often as Paris, where he had studied art in the days when he meant to move the world.

Of course the trouble with the man was that he wanted to be nineteen again, and didn't recognise it. We do not immediately recognise that our youth is going from us; it recedes stealthily, like our hair. For a long time he had missed the zest, the sparkle, the buoyancy from life, but for the flatness that distressed him he blamed the Colony instead of his age. He confused the emotions of his youth with the scenes where he had felt them, and yearned to make sentimental journeys, fancying that to revisit the scenes would be to recover the emotions.

Because the office rewarded his mental flights ungenerously he was restrained by one of those little realities which vulgar novelists observe and which are so out of place in novels—"sordid" considerations, like ways and means. Give us lots of Blood, and the dummy over the dashing highwayman's shoulder! If you call him a "cavalier" it's Breezy Romance.

And then his Aunt Tryphena died, and left him everything.

At once he was lord of himself. Liberated by "everything," he sailed for Home, and savouring the knowledge that he was free to rove where he listed, lingered in London. Some months afterwards—when the crocuses were perking behind the Park rails, and Piccadilly was abloom with the first millinery of spring—he travelled to Dover, en route for the Past.

And lilac was everywhere—Paris was all lilac and sunshine. He drove to an hotel on the left bank. To behold it again! The grotesque clock under the glass shade, and the clothes pegs that were too large to hang clothes on, the scarlet édredon that he would throw on the floor before he got into bed, the sight of these things was sweet to him as the welcome of a woman is sweet after a passage made on a slow steamer to reach her side.

He said to the femme de chambre—she was elderly and she was plain; pretty chambermaids are all employed in farcical comedies; but she was a femme de chambre, and he felt communicative. He said, "La dernière fois que j'étais Paris, j'étais un gamin." She smiled and gave a shrug: "Monsieur n'est qu'un enfant aujourd'hui." What English servant would have earned that tip? … Oh, yes! English servants are all too truthful.

When he had scattered his things about the room, he strode out to seek the little restaurant where the dinners had been so good, and the company had been so witty years before. Well, it had vanished. Perhaps he wasn't surprised, but he loitered wistfully in the street from which the faded sign had gone, and at the flashy establishment where he dined instead, the plats lacked flavour.

By-and-by he sauntered along the Boul' Mich'. While he walked he perceived that he had ceased to look about him, and was again looking back. The sigh of names that had been long forgotten was in the plaintive night, and the air was thick with echoes. He moved along the lamp-lit boulevard seeing ghosts, and to right and left the heedless faces of the fleshly crowd were strange to him. All strange to him. This was the first impediment in his road.

"Gay Paree" is gayest in the doggerel of the English music-halls; its gaiety is declining fast, but its beauty is fadeless. No city goes to bed more worldly, and wakes up looking more innocent. At six o'clock next day, when they began to beat carpets, and Conrad flung the windows wide, some of the happiness of the wakened capital's simplicity was breathed into his heart. And his fervour, and his purse, overcame the first impediment. Within a week of his arrival he had already been called "Mon cher."

He was called "Mon cher," and other things. He puffed his "caporal" at the Café Vachette, and found that he had lost his relish for French tobacco; he sat among the cards and the dominoes at the Café d'Harcourt—bought carnations and écrevisses from the pedlars' baskets for Angèle and Suzanne; and Angèle and Suzanne proved witless compared with what their mothers had been, and he noted—not without some slight pride, for we are all patriotic abroad—that though the art of tying a veil has been granted to French women, the pretty features have been granted to the English.

It was now that the disappointment fell, now that he cried:—

"'Oh for one hour of youthful joy!

Give back my twentieth spring!'"

The ardour of the students left him chilly, the rodomontades of his compatriots sounded merely stupid. They were all going to sacrifice themselves for an ideal, all going to England to paint persistently the class of work that England did not want. "No concessions" was their battle cry. Youth can never believe that it will live to make concessions. Your adept finds nowhere so scathing a critic as your novice.

O beautiful time when he, too, had imagined he was born with a mission! Bright morning when he had vapoured with the vainest! This afternoon the Rapsodie Anglaise was played to duller ears. The freaks seemed joyless, and he said the aspirations were "out of drawing." He was not sure that it was of immense importance whether one painted well, or ill—whether one painted at all. There were more useful things to be done in the world. He did not wish to do them, but he suggested that they were there. Then the audience hurled passages from the preface to "Mademoiselle de Maupin" at him—without acknowledgment—pelting him with the paragraphs full of shoes and potatoes until he was dizzy, and perhaps a little shaken. After all, when one has failed to pluck the grapes it is easy to proclaim that potatoes are more nourishing. On the whole he was scarcely a success in the Quarter—a success of curiosity at most—and he won no converts to his theory (advanced in the Soleil D'Or) that the greatest services to modern art were rendered by the writers of ladies' fashion articles.

"They are the Teachers who make the widest school," he urged. "Under their influence the fairest work of Nature takes an added loveliness. To them we owe the enticements of the tea-gown, the soul-compelling whisper of the silk petticoat. What other apostle of Beauty can hope to shed beauty in every home? Into how many homes do you suppose your ballades will go?" He was chatting to a poet. But the poet became diffuse.

Conrad returned to his hotel not wholly dissatisfied with the impression he had made upon the poet. In la Rue du Haut-Pavé he had one or two vigorous thoughts concerning the vanity of versification which he wished had occurred to him in the cabaret, and when he had lit the lamp he began to write. You can know very little about him if you are surprised to be told that what he wrote was verse. It was of course a monody to his Boyhood.

As his age has not been stated, and he had begun to deplore it so much, it may be as well at this point to say that he was thirty-seven. A less venerable figure than you have pictured him, perhaps, despite the chambermaid. There were, however, hours when he felt a hundred.

He felt a hundred towards the close of his stay in Paris. He had resolved to go back to London, but it had few associations for him, and he packed his portmanteaux drearily. On the evening before he crossed, his thoughts flashed to a little English watering-place where he had spent a summer when he was still proud of wearing trousers. He recalled the moment of his invitation, the thrill of its unexpectedness. A nursery, and four children: three of them his cousins, departing for the seaside next day, in fancy already on the sands. And one of the trio had exclaimed—was it Ted who began it?—one of the trio had exclaimed: "Wouldn't it be jolly if Con could come too?" He was "Con." He was Con hanging over the banisters breathless five minutes later, for Nina, and 'Gina, and Ted had descended to the drawing-room tumultuously to prefer a petition to "Ma."

"Ma says there wouldn't be beds enough," they announced with long faces, mounting the stairs; and then he stammered that he had "expected there'd be something like that," and they danced round him in a ring, crying: "We made it up. You're to come with us if you may—you're to go home and ask."

The nursery was very clear to him. He saw the gleeful group on the threshold again, and the bright pattern of the wall-paper. He could see the open window with the radiant sky across the roofs.

So they had all gone to the seaside together—he, and Nina, and 'Gina, and Ted, in charge of the governess; and the house had turned out to be a school called "Mowbray Lodge," but the boys were away. Jack, the dog, had been lost on the journey—and killed the schoolmaster's chickens when he was restored. The rows there used to be with the master! Mr. Boultbee, that was his name. There was a yellow field blazing with dandelions, Conrad remembered, and behind the shadow of the fir trees, apples swayed. He remembered the garden of Rose Villa next door, and the afternoon when Mary Page kissed her hand over the fence. Mary Page! On a sudden how close it was—all except her features—her hat trimmed with blue, and her dangling plaits, and the vibration of the time. Ted and he were enslaved by her equally—without bitterness—and used to show each other the love-letters she wrote to them both after they went home. And oh! how they longed to be back, and oh, the plans they made, which never fructified, for husbanding their pocket-money and taking her by surprise one brilliant morning!

"Qu'est-ce que vous m'offrez, monsieur? Payez-moi un bock, hein?"

"No," said Conrad, starting, "run along and play, there's a good child!" These memories had come to him at the Bal Bullier, and the band was banging, and the petticoats were whirling, and a young lady was asking to be refreshed.