Читать книгу Prelude to Waking - Miles Franklin - Страница 4

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"I have come," announced Merlin, as she seated herself on a settee in Lady George's drawing-room, and I cast a platonic glance at her lyrical legs and ankles.

At that date (circa 1924-5) fashion decreed that women for public appearance should free their bodies in knee-length smocks with necks and arms uncovered, while the legs were displayed in pink silk stockings. In this instance the result was comforting to sight and reassuring to reason. In my tight soft collar, clumsy trousers and fusty padded coat, I wished, enviously, that the vogue would similarly emancipate men.

"I have come," repeated Merlin.

"So much is obvious," said I, reflecting how few feminine legs and ankles are anything but an affront to the would-be amorous, and puzzling that amour should he so dependent upon externals.

"I want your help and comfort, Niggeh old grub."

"You wax garrulous. You should eschew repetition," said I, parking my feet on one of Lady George's ugliest chairs, and pulling at my cigarette.

Merlin comes to me occasionally to seek diagnostical discussion. I go to her intermittently to untie the more tangible knots into which I caracole.

"Some of the epigrammatists of Mayfair are attributing a liaison to us," said she, just like that.

"Liaisons are for various purposes, usually preposterous, and mostly have the same dull, disillusioning result," I replied, knocking the ash off my cigarette into one of Lady George's hideous ornaments.

"The word," said she, "suggests but one purpose to suburbia. In this instance, if you will not contradict the inference—the suburban inference—I shall be grateful for the subterfuge."

"This has the novelty of the unexpected, the undeserved. Pray proceed."

"Will you—what I mean is, you will, but how shall we provide a little fuel?"

"I thought such works of inspiration grew all a-hoh till they reached the crest all a-whoop, thence down hill all a-wop! Phut!"

"The Freudian species might, but ours is to be strictly Shavian."

"How disappointing, after your auspicious opening."

"Now you are merely imitating the Alarics and Almerics. I mean it to be a concession."

"I thought that such epics were an obsession."

"My concession is to an obsession. While one is in Mayfair one must..."

"...not be odd. I understand. But supposing that I acquiesce?"

"Of course you'll acquiesce. It'll be a tower of refuge."

She sighed as a happy young woman should not have done.

"Supposing I acquiesce," I persisted, "what about Rosalita?"

"I'll write to her," said Merlin.

I was at that date the sub-tenant of Lady George's flat on—is it Curzon Street or Cavendish Place?—I never can remember which at the distance of half the earth or half a year. To obviate invidiousness it shall herein be Curdish Street. In any case it had a Mayfair telephone number and was one of those genteel little slums, which like putrefaction in aristocratic cheese, reek in and out of Mayfair in the same dialect as Whitechapel's.

From one window I could see the buses passing up and down Piccadilly, and when I stepped out on the street only a small building obstructed a view of the buses passing along Park Lane. Doubtless that is what I paid for, because what I was rooked for that flat would have hired me a five-roomed apartment on Riverside Drive, with every modern amenity. There were no modern amenities in the Curdish Street apartment. The solid inconveniences were inclusive. The discomforts were extras.

As Miss Hazel Seatray, arriving upon me from Chicago armed with a letter of introduction from my friend Freda, exclaimed, "Why do they call it a flat, when it's really a dinky little house?"

"Why, that I cannot tell," said I, "unless it be that we English are a greatly imaginative people."

"In Noo York we'd call it a Bowery slum, but here it belongs to the nobility."

"Noblesse oblige!"

"It is just the strangest thing the way you don't care at all about your entrances here. I got mixed up with all those barrels of beer and couldn't find your door till a chauffeur showed me it was right beside me. I thought I was coming into some dungeon where murders are committed."

We adjoined forsooth a purveyor of fermented and spirituous liquors, and in Curdish Street's repertory of perfumes that of stale alcohol was raffishly about my door. My immediate landlady was the wife of the uncle of a practising marquess. There are marquesses and viscounts a-plenty who, again to quote Hazel, don't amount to a hill of beans, the abler and more robustious profiteers of our decade having put their noses out of credit in Lombard Street; but in passing, Lord George was the scion of a house blue-mouldy with purposeless dereliction.

He and his peers and compeers, who sip tea or gulp a piggin of grog in the windows of Piccadilly, are brothers royal of the poor relations in Sydney, described as Domain loafers. The Australians are proud of their Domain, where free speech sprouts on Sundays on the parent model. The climatic democracy, which enables gentlemen who spurn toil and lack hereditary incomes nevertheless to approximate the Piccadillians' ideal of existence by hibernating under an aboriginal fig-tree instead of in a leather arm-chair, has been celebrated by a native poet:

It's grand to be an unemployed And lie in the Domain, And wake up every second day— And go to sleep again.

It's even grander and equally abandoned to snooze on Piccadilly, one's blue blood willy-nilly holding one in place with mellow high-toned grace. Ah, Piccadilly! Piccadilly, as a tony, towny, dilly-downy, towny, tony Place, for the joy of Percy, Bert, or even Willy; Piccadilly, smart or silly, Piccadilly holds the ace!

Lady George had been a dashing widow, and Lord George dashed decrepit when she assumed his name, because in Mayfair certain privileges attend the male person such as an income or a residence, and, in the case of the titled, no matter how derelict, social precedences.

It may have been precedence that lured Lady George—and residence, there being at that date a house famine—for or on what the couple lived outside of what they welshed sub-tenants for their flat, that was not a flat, numerous inmates of their set often conjectured. Perhaps their exercise of this branch of post-war profiteering was sufficient; though small in scope it was virulent. This sub-tenant octopus is credited with sapping the vitals of the London drama; and extended residence in that shelter in Curdish Street would have drowned me in permanent pot-boiling with not one but dozens of perfidious society novels to my score.

However, Lady George's depredations concern not this tale, except thereby.

"This flat with its modish address is the duck of a place for suspicion to sprout from," pursued Merlin.

"Is that why you chose it?" Merlin has always chosen my abodes since our first meeting.

"No, but we must make the most of it while we have it. You from a literary point of view, I from...

"Don't you get me balled-up in a misunderstanding with Rosalita," I stipulated.

She wrote to Rosalita that night, but that I did not know till some time later, nor Rosalita's reply, which was:

If it amuses you, go ahead with my ardent send-off. You'll be safe with my old spot of psycho-analysis—my lordy, how unromantically, disappointingly safe!

For in such a way do the obsessed regard the unpossessed.

Ma Foi!

But this is ahead of my exposition.

What I said was, "To boil the pot of this rendezvous, I'll wreathe a smart novel in the Mayfair mannah around you and this liaison de convenance."

"It might begin that way, but it would end up as self-revelation," she said indifferently.

"Is that what you think of all my literary success?"

"A novel by you about me would not be me, but only what you thought of me. Men's heroines are the awfullest stuffed monkeys."

"Well, so are women's heroes. Men and women couldn't endure each other as such except for the illusions and delusions in which they gyrate around each other."

"Sex is only a phase of adolescence—a very unpleasant one, I'm beginning to feel. The regret is that we never live long enough to see what we might do if we surmounted it. From adolescence we go direct to senility."

"True, O Queen! This prolongation of life they talk about is mostly prolongation of senility."

"Yes, and extension of youth is charlatanry to prolong adolescence and its capers, not to surmount it and have a wedge of adultness between that and senility."

"It is for the prolongation of adultery that they rush the quacks."

"In that case, what does it matter whether we have war or not, or order or anarchy? Sometimes I'm tired of being honest and virtuous, and wonder how the others get on."

"You sound like SOS for a rest cure."

"I need diversion. Begin your novel. I bet it won't be what you think it's going to be."

I accepted the challenge forthwith.