Читать книгу Prelude to Waking - Miles Franklin - Страница 7

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When we spent another night in discussion all the war uniforms and decorations were as out of mode as Christmas mistletoe after the New Year. It was well on in 1919 and I had just returned from Russia. As a joke or a jaw what one did in the war was as passé as paste, and would cut no further figure except in the yarns of dotards who on the westering horizon of life might recall and englamour the past as they whiled away an hour or two awaiting Charon's yawl.

To escape the syrtis of has-beenism a man must shun mention of what he did in the war, for unless it was profiteering it will avail him nought. Not: What did you do in the Great War, Daddy? but: What did you make out of the boobs in the Great War, Daddy? Well, I made nothing out of them, being the daddy of a commercial boob myself, and desiring such to remain.

So I lightly pass over what I did and what was done to me in the Great War. With the exception of the Russian assignment, I had come through in a way that pleased my father and aunt immensely. I had carried out my non-combatant mission to the U.S.A. acceptably, and in the field ascended to a captaincy with three wound stripes and the Military Cross. I was a satisfactory captain to the tailors, being five foot eleven when I held myself erect, and what is known as stock size, free from plum pudding protuberances fore and aft. I got the M.C. for extricating my men under fire from a desperate situation. I assure you, deah readah, we ran the right way by good luck.

"Get demobbed before the rush and establish yourself before all the pretence about gratitude to brave heroes has ceased to function," said my father. "With your record and my official connexions I can get you the choice of a number of posts. As you don't fancy the Law, I advise business. All the best people are turning that way now."

It was gentlemanly of the old boy not to refer to the Russian expedition. I had gone there by way of Murmansk following the Armistice in November. My father's influence and my honourable and not too dangerous wounds had made my inclusion possible. I was to furnish material for articles for a certain daily, the finances of which had recently been reorganized. My father was in cahoots with some of the ginks and guys concerned, and since he was in the diplomatic racket and self-made, that is a certificate of the journal's "right thinking". I was instructed, however, to gather facts at first-hand and tell the truth. But what truth may seem varies with one's thinking apparatus and opportunities for observation, and, in regard to Russia, I foolishly attempted to be a pilot instead of a Pilate. In the circumstances I thought it honest to decline my father's offer.

I have, most likely, sufficient brains to gamble in wheat, to corner the babies' canned milk, or to adulterate the adolescents' vitamins for profit, but I have not the kind of patience to ensure the unabating low-minded vigilance demanded by so dull and unadventurous an avocation. At the risk of never cutting any coupons in this world or Conan Doyle's, I insisted mulishly upon my English right to be an original, to remain unstandardized, and to preserve my nonentity.

My experience in the army at war had strengthened my desire for personal self-determination. I was set upon escape from the standardizing hag of commercial ambition. I shrank from the fag of cultivating the proclivities and interests indispensable to a captain of industry. I had had enough as a captain of infantry. I had wallowed in my own filth in the miles of communal graves where the profiteers' obsessions had culminated. The unregulated trader's heaven with its production of human quantity regardless of quality, in order to provide markets and cannon fodder, can lead in the future, as in the immediate past, only to blind alleys of cumulatively bestial and annihilating Armageddons. The traders' and warriors' activities and prizes repel me. I hungered for the adventure of exploration of the human soul and the unrestricted exercise of the mind—two hinterlands still frontier free. I knew surely that I wished to retain the right to my own inconclusions and to seek recreation in the fashioning of my own fancies. This led me to the pen.

My poor father!

My poor aunt! who recently had been robbed of my grandfather in the eighty-fifth year of his reign and the fifth month of the Armistice. He had played his rounds of golf with the best of them to within a month of his passing, yet my aunt said she could never forgive the Boche for shortening his existence.

She had an additional count against our late adversaries now for what they had done to her darling nephew, for to shell-shock was attributed my determination in the thirty-second year of my foolishness—having hitherto given but slender evidence of precocity in this field—to sit down in London and scribble, instead of to ornament the posts that yawned for me in the United States of America and elsewhere.

When the shock of my aberration had subsided my aunt renewed a campaign of patriotism. The war had not been enough. We must fight the corpse. I could make heaps and heaps of money by using my war experience. Look at Such-and-Such's and So-and-So's best sellers! I, who had been at the frontest Front, far in front of these gentlemen who were reaping social laurels and cash, could surely do better. I had been to that dreadful Russia, too.

Neither I nor my father had told her of my failure in that field. Nor did I confess that I had written war stuff right along between campaigns and when convalescing. I had tempered it, too, knowing that the truth would be insupportable to the feeble and debauched souls of vicarious warriors and heroes. The rarities who faced the truth told me that my stuff, though brilliant, would not be permitted to appear through any publishing house or journal they knew of. The older men among these said, "Keep it by you for five years. Ordinary people by that time may be able to face facts."

My aunt continued to demand faked stuff full of heroic mush and propagandists' infamies, so that pot-bellied old men and flabby old women could still stew in a sense of their own racial superiority, and the coming generation of youngsters be duped anew to swashbuckling. Were they casuistically or merely stupidly blind to the fact that our reign as overlords of the globe was glimmering to its close? Or was it because they lacked first-hand impact with the U.S. and could not envisage the might and majesty of sheer raw power and energy that it is? Just to cross that country from east to west was enough to assure even a lay observer that there, in working order, is material power unconquerable by any other national agglomeration, or any that would combine against it. As soon as John Bull had begun war with the Kaiser England was doomed to suffer such irrecoverable wounds and wastage that the Union Jack—and every other Jack—had become automatically second to Old Glory. But among the diehards it was had form, almost treason, to admit awareness of this. They were habituated to empire, so clung to sinking glory and turned wanly from the realization that we must, and were still endowed to aim at ethical leadership in débâcle. There our future hope of greatness lay. Let profit and glory bellow where they would!

Though debarred from exposing a bestiality so stupid that one could never again in this life have any respect for the whole class of war-whoopers, I stood firm. I would not present war "nicely" for the sustenance of toad-like hypocrites who demanded idealized brutalities. "Dreadful, of course—war is not a picnic—but nevertheless magnificent in the heroic qualities it develops." I vaulted clear of the memory of the great idiocy, the unforgivable betrayal. Having survived incarceration in that demoniac hell of brutality, of stenches and vermin and filth beyond man's portrayal in language, I was pursued by a longing to express dainty gossamer fragments about life's loveliness.

Dedicated to a mistress who would brook no divided allegiance, I was fortunate that my grandfather had left me a legacy as evidence of his appreciation of my agreeing that the war was exterminating the Liberal principles of England. This, with my back pay, would be enough for my simple wants for a couple of years.

Only Merlin cheered me still.

"You haven't a wife or child or mother or father or sister depending on you," said she. "Develop your mind. Thinkers are the rarest wealth of any nation. The grabbers of the earth would never get anywhere, only that they grab ideas as well as sources of raw material."

"I'm not so sure."

"Don't be afraid to use your thinking apparatus. The nation with the cleverest ideas and sanest ideals is going to be among the survivors in the next era."

"I'm not so sure," I repeated despondently. "We may be swarmed over by the people with the numbers. Some beast of prey will organize them to manufacture munitions; any kind of creature is good enough to use a machine-gun. He doesn't need even animal courage, because he can be chained. The fewer ideas the better."

"Ah, ha!" ejaculated Merlin with sang-froid. "That's where poison gas or other increasingly efficient engines for mass murder are going to be the saving of the clever ones. Lethal machines will make it necessary to weed out the morons and other duds as ruthlessly as superfluous cabbage plants. As machines take the place of unskilled labourers they won't be kept to devour food like locusts when alive and to pollute the earth when dead. There may be marvellous possibilities to counter the menace of rabbit birth-rates."

"Can you find me a retreat within my means," I asked, "where I may meditate on these inspiring possibilities and express myself in dainty gossamer fragments about life's loveliness, as well as make my testimony about the new system in Russia."

In pursuance of what Merlin calls the lunatic half of their composition, male builders, during four years, had abandoned the building of houses in England to assist other nationals in the making of ruins in Flanders and France, with the inevitable result of a house famine in London and elsewhere. I was therefore surprised next day to have the option of a large bed-sitting-room with a kitchenette attached, and the luxury of a decent char in attendance. It was in West Central, in a street that was a curious mixture. Its miscellaneous character was an inheritance from the pre-motor-car way of living when the privileged had to have their servitors within reach, and the rich and the poor therefore lived side by side. Highly respectable dwellings intersected the area like the sound parts in aristocratic cheese. A long-ago gentleman's home near by now served as a hostel for the most 'self-respecting of self-supporting females such as secretaries, medical students and lecturers, while ladies of a different caravanserai infested the beat outside the wine shop on an opposing corner, and, on occasion, mistakenly disputed their territory with tamely monogamous wives.

Recently an old woman had been murdered in her little frowsy shop hard by for the pathetically few pence in her frowsy little till, and Merlin herself lived not a stone's throw distant, in a slightly larger flat than that offered me. There she kept her Daddy, because her aunt was no longer able to suffer him when the high heroism of the war period had exploded. The descendant of the Crusading de Giltinane had been equally dispirited when the expression of his thoughts was counted raving in the miniature villa adjacent to St Botolph in the Turnips.

The direct landlord of my premises was a cobbler. Outside the art of cobbling he had his physical being in the basement. My flat was under the roof, and under me lived two most respectable families, one above the other. The Cobbler was hesitant about my taking possession. I referred him to Merlin, because the place was a catch, taking one thing like the reasonable rent with another like the dearth of such apartments.

When Merlin came home from work she and I presented ourselves before the Cobbler together. He asked if she was my wife. I said no. He asked if we were contemplating marriage.

"You've got marriage on the brain," said Merlin. "I'm too busy for such tomfoolishness, and besides, I know too much about men."

The Cobbler, a pigeon-breasted thin little man with popping blue eyes and a walrus moustache that ambushed the sagging lines of a lugubrious mouth with three fangs—two up and one down—hinted that he wished to speak with Merlin alone. She promptly dismissed me.

"You see wot it is," said the shoe-mender, "I'm a respectable man."

"I hope so, or I should have nothing to do with you."

"An' it's this way, you see; I gotta boy to think of, and the Coram Street and Southampton Row beauties are pretty thick around here; an' wot I don't want to have is a string of them kind of females runnin' up an' down me stairs. If you was gain' to marry him, I know it would be orlright."

I should have thought that the kind of thing the Cobbler would rather take up man to man.

"If that's all your trouble, the only females running up and down will he me and a few of his older friends, and you must come in some evening and have tea with my Daddy and get him to talk about Australia." The emergence of her Australianism, and the prospect of harbouring a writer to add ton to his establishment, reassured the Cobbler.

"I told him," said Merlin, in repeating the conversation, "that if the Southampton Row beauties disport themselves to your undoing he has only to inform me, and I'll settle their hash for them."

"That," I complained, "was not quite nice of you, Merlin. Surely you know that I would never—"

"No," said Merlin, "I don't! You seem a dear, and quite human, but sex in men appears to be a virulent fungus quite separate from their humanness, and I have never yet seen a man who was fit to be off a chain when its lunacy enters into him. On the human side a man can have intelligence, affection, even be possessed of taste and refinement: yet let the sex fungus sprout and all this goes by the board. Hired creatures! Ugh! You can see young gins around the north of Australia nursing half-white babies, the same thing around any South Sea Island beach. It's not white women who are their fathers."

A conclusion so irrefutable reduced me to a meek murmur.

Thus, having been demobbed, and guaranteed by Merlin, I was sheltered by the Cobbler and settled in Marken Street, W.C.1, with promise of that lively sense of satisfaction which attends the healthy operation of creative faculties. I was nagged, however, by the Russian experiment. The Russians—their food, their music, their temperament—were a powerful new enthusiasm, which enlarged and enriched the world for me. Their gargantuan revolution, their prodigious plan for a better way of life, had gone to my head. It was a revelation. I must testify or be stymied on the green of my spiritual and intellectual progress. I set to work with zest. This testament was the first fruits of my freedom and beliefs that had been smelted in the furnace of war. For my cause's sake I was moderate and academic, and the result seemed good to me. Not to anyone else. To the rabid partisans it was too mild; to the "right thinkers" it was all wrong. It alarmed them, for the beneficiaries of plunder are furnished with a sixth and seventh and more senses to detect on the farthest horizon the smallest and faintest cloud that might threaten their privileges.

"Lay it by for a while," advised Merlin. This was absolution. I was freed to my dreams and meditations.

My graduation from hell had awakened me to the comfort of ordinary things. The day's most trivial routine, the "good morning" of the paper man, the importunities of children, the resigned patience of old people, now eased me with a softening gratitude, like shade in the heat of noonday. The glory of dawn and dusk, day and night, the loveliness of birds and flowers, the companionship of animals, filled me with rapture. All the hours of all the days would not give time enough to impart the saving news of this realization to my fellows. Wisps of gossamer loveliness accepted me as their medium, and enough acceptances to lure me on came from periodicals indistinct or of distinction.

The anguish of having two countries, one by birth, blood and affection, the other by affection and congeniality, was subsiding. I was being nationally reabsorbed. I was reverting to type. In re-charting myself, the English cast of my mind was reappearing, so that I knew I was going to be more comfortable mentally in England, freer to sit and meditate on my own uncertainties; in short, freer to be a crank; and so much has to be saved by cranks.

In those first days of my return, miserably uncomfortable and despairing, because of the inefficiency resulting from muddle and lack of the modern machinery of mechanical existence, I recalled discussions I had had with my friend Sherwood. Upon the outbreak of war I had been in Chicago eluding my father's designs by tutoring a plutocrat's son, whose "maw" had coveted my English accent, and in my free time consorting effulgently with my fellows-who-would-be of the writing craft. Sherwood has since become a bigwig among these, but then he was doing something like myself by day and pounding his typewriter far into the night. With a good many thinkers, he used to believe that there was no explanation of war but the grand lunacy of all those participating. Nevertheless, when the conflagration burst upon us he aligned himself with the French and British. This surprised me. Looking on dispassionately, it seemed to me, as it did to President Wilson, that one side made as plausible a case as the other for a catastrophe that could never be excused.

"Oh, no," said Sherwood confidently. "France and England must be helped to win. Their superiority lies in their being less efficiently organized." This in a day when every sociologist in the English tongue had been fervent in worship of Germany's organizing efficiency!

"The human race in the mass is still so undeveloped spiritually that too much organization is a menace. I'll show you what I mean. Look at this filthy slum!" He waved his arm to indicate that down-at-heel area between Rush Street Bridge and Chicago Avenue, and west from Lincoln Park Way to North Clark Street and farther, in the midst of which his genius had sought an inexpensive aerie. "That sort of thing is better in the hands of Muddle than in the hands of Efficient Organization. Under Efficient Organization at present it might be graded up a little, but it would become a hermetically sealed prison, standardizing mediocrity and less than mediocrity; whereas, under Muddle, an odd example of genius might develop unnoticed and get out through some crack. That's why I'm for England and France. Genius still has a one-in-ten chance of escaping with its life amid the disorganization."

His postulate had constantly aroused irritation in me during the days when my chances of dying in the mud of France or Flanders were being increased from one to ten by conceited and unorganizable old muddlers; but, having survived, I now recognized the golden truth of it, and saw in Marken Street one of those cracks in disorganization through which talent might escape unhampered by authority.

Yes, England, his own, own, desultory, casual land was the place for one who at thirty-two wanted to throw over material prospects in order to simmer. He would pass unnoticed in London. In the strident, opulent, standardized new world he might come under the ban of "right thinking" and have his head examined as to his sanity that he did not plunge into the vortex of psychological, college-induced efficiency and industry to produce therefrom an automobile to take the place of his legs, and the dollars to patronize between working hours some recreation show designed to obviate any possibility of or necessity for thought.

Yes, you know...

Even in England my father ( though he was tinctured with American ideas of success ) and my aunt felt that my crankiness had to be explained as shell-shock.

I longed to meet Sherwood again to tell him what a useful gift his exposition had been and also that I had recovered from socialistic sentimentality about the proletariat. As to Muddle v. Organization, I now believed that to fill the bellies of the proletariat and furnish them with modern gadgets and leave it at that would be only half the battle, or perhaps have worse results than laissez-faire. Equally fundamental is it to ensure for the supernormal minds and characters the freedom to think and experiment. A nation may waste a percentage of the mediocre to the brewers and lechers: ordinary activities can be relegated in large part to machines, but the nation failing to recognize and cherish its supernormals, or afraid to explore new realms of thought, is travelling backwards. The fruits of the thought and discoveries of the highly-endowed must be employed in the service of all mankind—regardless of sex or colour: not continue to be the private property of the groups of plunder, and by them used as weapons to maintain their privileged caste. After the grand war to end war and save freedom one would have thought that such trite general premises would find universal acceptance, but to breathe them, however gently, startled my relatives and their circle as bolshevism. Bolshevist and its derivatives were superseding socialist and anarchist and fenian as misapplied epithets of abuse. The cat for which the masters of finance and industry had really engaged in the grand war to end war was wriggling boldly out of the hag. It was clear to him that his masters never seriously intended him for the pond: there was no stone in the sack and its mouth was loosely tied. He shook the bells on his collar inscribed Status Quo. He sat up and began to clean his face in readiness for a saucer of milk. Cream would come later. His owners did not see him as a scarred old warrior whom another Armageddon would remove from his position as the World's Top Tom.

The pipe dreams of proletarian brotherhood were receding with the delusions of trench fever. The old money order had simply changed its nationality from the pound to the dollar, and the dollar, though not so heavy in content, was more plentiful and had a growing monopoly of all the new gadgets for making itself heard and felt.

At any rate, while awaiting the reassembling of the forces for freedom on bolshevistic or any less totalitarian scale I hailed the genius cracks provided by good old muddle. I now appreciated one of those deliciously unbelievable ladies whom England produces. In 1915, apropos my expressed despair in face of unavoidable muddle, she had contended, "In muddle lies the secret of our supremacy. If you did away with it, all our charm would be gone. England would be done!"

At that date I had faintingly murmured, "Alice in Wonderland is a literal transcript. Its author was a mathematician."

Today I sang in my heart "Hi! Ho! High Hunting! Me for the Genius Cracks!"

The romance of the Cobbler's life was his son. The Cobbler was a widower and so remained that his son might have something better than his father had known. During the last two years of the war the Cobbler had cobbled for the army's dirty, disinherited, smelly feet. Now he cobbled for the more circumscribed understandings of Bloomsbury. He had obtained the lease of his house cheaply since it was condemned as a habitation, but could not be demolished because of the house famine. The Cobbler furnished it from the second-hand shop next door and sub-let it in floors, thereby living rent free and getting in enough to keep the boy at school, though this undersized, walrus-moustached, pop-eyed, worse than-toothless citizen was no rack-renter. Lady George was his better in that.

"He's a real true parent," said Merlin, "who provides for his offspring like the higher animals and birds. He's not one of these creatures begging in the streets and proclaiming without shame that he has three or five young children in the gutter with no prospects of providing for them."

The Cobbler had found women, except as a wife, unprofitable. So he engaged the mellifluous Mrs Brindle as char, and shared her with the other tenants. He kept a bedroom-study behind the shop for his swanky son, who at present was at Harrow.

"Isn't it a pity there isn't something better for the poor little man to do with him than make a snob of him?" Merlin has a vigorous derry on the affectations induced by English Public School processes, not only in those who attend them, but in those who ape them. "The boy will be made a torture to himself and his pop-eyed walrus cobbler of a dad."

She herself had a restless old wallaby of a dad and thought him a treasure, so I remarked, "Young Cobbler will have to get over it. I had to when I went to the U.S.A. They thought I was half-witted, but I quickly adjusted myself."

"But you went to something grand and rich, and this poor little devil...It's going to be hard on the Cobbler, but I shall stand by him."

That meant, of course, that I, too, should have to stand by.

Those were delicious days, though I found the muse an elusive jade. Anything to postpone starting work! Any excuse to wait for inspiration instead of hugging method and industry! I could dream essays and novels like quicksilver in the brain; but when it came to putting them abjectly on paper everything intervened, even letters to my father, even letters to my aunt, who thought me a victim of shell-shock and bolshevism.

But though I dreamed and meditated consumingly I wrote succinctly too. The pleasantly-functioning char made my breakfast and often prepared a little lunch so that I could put in an uninterrupted day with only my evening meal to seek. It was summertime and the mechanical shortcomings not quite so discommoding. It was princely to stroll around to good old Fleming's ( the best value for the money in London), or to "The Tea Kettle" or "The Pot of Cream" or "The Sportsman" in Soho, when I felt a bit above myself, and thence into the pit of a theatre. Generally the shortest queue advertised the play with a thought in it for me, and thus back to my rickety, sagging, typical London bed.

It was so enchantingly unhasting in the post-war material scramble that no wonder my aunt thought me wanting. It was her terror that it should become known that her brilliant Captain M.C. nephew was mouldering in a shabby creaking place over a cobbler's shop reached by frowsy uneven stairs from a passage the width of the door and lit by a fly-spotted gas jet; but I welcomed her surreptitious calls. Her respectability was of the order to reassure chars and cobblers, and I always addressed her loudly as "Aunt" while we were passing my landlord's door.

Thus we each found satisfaction in our affairs. The Cobbler was uplifted by slaving for his son, I was engrossed in coaxing my thoughts, and Merlin contented to be supporting her Daddy. The nous of it, to have gone speculating in a Genius Crack!

"I hope I may simmer in this beatific state indefinitely," I said to Merlin.

"You'll be all right till you come to the boil about some woman; then if she's an average specimen you'll settle down as the matrimonial beast of burden. But if it should be some other man's property, heaven knows how it may disrupt you."

"I think I'm old enough now—gone thirty-two—to expect normality. The lack of sirens will be my safeguard. Of course, given the right siren, I could go mad with love."

"So could I, given a man such as—well, what right have I to expect the supernormal to waste himself on me: and as so many ordinary fellows have been killed, I'll step out and leave the remnants that are not enough to go round for the women who have not had their share of lovers, pestiferous or otherwise. I have other resources of mind to occupy me."

Merlin the abstract!