Читать книгу The Tower of Oblivion - Oliver Onions - Страница 20

I have not told you the foregoing because I am proud of it. At the best I had behaved childishly, at the worst—but we will come to that presently. Had it really been he I should probably not have had the remotest chance of ever getting past him. He would have vaulted a handrail in the dark, taken a flight in two bounds, and would have had his hand—that hand that tore books in two—on my neck. Had he recognised me he would have wanted to know what the devil I was doing in his rooms. Had he failed to recognise me I should as likely as not have gone through the window. One takes risks when one intrudes on the loves of the giants.

At the same time, I will do myself the justice to say that physical risks were not my first consideration. Vast as his strength was, it was the part of him I least feared. What I did fear, what I was now beginning to think I had not nearly sufficiently allowed for, was the enormous spiritual and mental range of the man.

Up to that moment in his life when he had become so mysteriously turned round, this very width and range had resulted in a state of balance, as the tightrope-walker is balanced by the length of his pole. But to consider either of his extremes separately was to have a cold shiver. Often I had thought, "I'm thankful I haven't your burden of personality to bear, my friend. Much better to be the millionth man and take everything on trust. The way to be happy on this earth is to be just a shell of useful and comfortable and middling habits. Stick to the second-hand things of life and let the new ones alone. Any kind of singularity is a curse, and your life is one dreadful yawning question. You've no business to have the first dawn in your eyes and the last trump in your ears like that. The world has no need of that kind of man. What you need is another world somewhere else."

And he had marvellously contrived to find this other world, and had it all, all to himself.

And here was I proposing to dig him out of it.

Can you guess now what it was that I had begun to fear more than his physical strength? It was the whole ungauged pressure of his personality. In behaving as foolishly as I had just behaved I had wished to spare both myself and him the humiliation of an intrusion on a vulgar amour. Now it occurred to be, Why a "vulgar" one at all? Vulgarity is for us smaller people, who are vulgar enough to think that anything that is created is vulgar. But Derwent Rose had so striven that every dawn was the first dawn of creation for him. He had no habits, had daily sought to see the world as if it had never been seen before. Abysses must open for him every time he passed a huddle on a park bench, protoplasmic re-beginnings stare out at him from every chance glance of a street-walker's eyes.... Oh, I am far from envying him. I should blench to have a mind like that. To no possession that I have do I cling half so dearly as I do to my narrowness and to my prejudice. I am the millionth man, and I thank God on my knees for it. One of the other kind has been my friend....

Suppose then that one day I should surprise him in some act, stupid and meaningless to myself, but as fraught with tremendousness for him as was that first command, "Let there be Light!" What would happen then? You see what I am driving at. Up to now my idea had been, quite simply, to find him. I had sought him much as I might have sought a truant schoolboy, who would consent to be scolded and brought back to ordinary life again. Small practical difficulties, mostly in connection with his altered appearance, I had anticipated, but these I had intended to deal with as they arose. In a word, I had assumed his willingness, his also, to be the millionth man.

But how if he should refuse with scorn? What was the state of his balance, not in my eyes, but in his? When I had last seen him he had trembled in equilibrium, and to his fluctuations I had off-handedly applied the terms "worse" and "better." But what were such terms to him?... I will do as I did before—try to set it out in parallel columns. Here was a missing man, a man of unusual range and powers, to whose state of poise something had happened. It was this man's daily endeavour to accept nothing at second-hand, to disregard all names, labels, customs, tags, appearances, verdicts, records, precedents. His life was one long probing into the essential nature of things. I might, therefore, expect to find:

The Derwent Rose who had said, when I had offered him the whisky, "No, no—blast it, no—water!"	or	The Derwent Rose who might have replied, "Whisky? Well, it has interesting effects sometimes. Somebody once called it a short cut to a psychic experience. If a psychic experience is what you are after, why take the roundabout way? Let's try it."
The Derwent Rose who had torn off his collar, but who had also cried, "Good God, man, I'm not bragging of my conquests—don't think I'm not ashamed!"	or	The Derwent Rose who might have growled, "Well, what is there extraordinary about that? Perhaps it isn't anything to make a song about, but don't pretend you've never heard of such a thing before. It happens every night, you know."
The Derwent Rose who had sat in a hansom with a white satin slipper as openly and innocently as I might have sat to Julia Oliphant for my portrait.	or	The Derwent Rose who might have said, "Men are men and women are women. This is also Piccadilly Circus. Look round. Can't you find anything better to do than to hunt for a man who is—not at home to anybody this evening?"
The Derwent Rose who loved beauty and hated ugliness.	or	The Derwent Rose who cared nothing for the name of anything, destroyed stale and outworn canons of beauty with a laugh, and sought a fresher loveliness in a world where nothing is common or unclean.

But once more I had to give it up. That baffling down of golden beard had obliterated every physical indication. He might be in a church—for an assignation. He might be in a drinking-hell—lost in images of beauty and sweetness and power.

And what kind of a Salle des Pas Perdus is London in which to look for a man like that? The whole thing became an illimitable phantasmagoria of virtue and vice, nobility and degradation, expressed in terms of bricks and stones and buildings and streets. Sitting brooding among his black oak furniture, I tried to envisage even that merest fragment of it all that was being enacted within a quarter of a mile at that moment. Whitfield's Tabernacle—and for all I knew an opium den within a biscuit's toss of it; the Synagogue—and the lady upstairs. I pictured the tenements behind the Shaftesbury with their iron balconies and emergency-ladders; and I saw young lovers in their stalls at the Palace. I saw the bright Hampstead buses, and the masked covertness of the flitting taxis. I heard the slap and thump of beer-pumps, children's simple prayers. Images floated before me of the gloom of cinema-interiors, the green-shaded glow-lamps of orchestras, the rippling of incandescent advertisements, the blackness of the jam factory yard. There were pockets with money in them, money to buy all the world has to sell; and there were pockets empty of the price of a cup of coffee at the back-street barrows. There were hearts with love in them, love as boundless as heaven's blue, and there were hearts from which love had passed, hearts as musty as the graves that waited for them. All but Infinity itself was to be found within a few hundred yards of where I sat.

And flitting uniquely through it all was this man whose privacy was so public, whose publicness was so unutterably private. He might be met at any step, and yet, of all the millions living, there was not one he could call contemporary. For he was the only man in the world who was growing younger instead of older. He of all men alone was passing from experience to innocence, through the murk of his former sins to the perfection of his own maximum and the unimpaired godhead of his prime.

"But you mightn't see him again for another twenty years!" Julia protested, shaking out her napkin and laughing for the sheer bewilderment of it.

I had chosen the small restaurant in Jermyn Street because it had no band to distract us.

"I know all that," I retorted. "But if you think that just sitting there loving him is going to produce him, your way may take even longer than mine."

"Pooh!" she said, breaking her roll. "You're wasting your time."

"Don't be irritating, Julia." It irritated me because it was so true. "It's my time anyway."

"No it isn't, not all of it. What about my sittings?" (There had not yet been any, by the way.) "The canvas is ready as soon as you are."

"I'll grow a beard, and then you won't want to paint me," I replied.

Her eyes had sparkled when I had told her about Derry's beard; I had thought she was going to clap her hands. Except for Derry's golden one (she had said) she had never seen a beard that wasn't nasty. I myself (she had informed me) should look a perfect horror in one, and unless I remained clean-shaven she refused to be seen about with me.... So our customary quarrel blew up. We wrangled about one trifle and another half-way through dinner. It probably did us good, for underneath we were both badly on edge. Then along the edge of the table she slid a bent little finger. It was her way of making up. The finger rested in mine for a moment.

"Well," I sighed, "I told you all I saw. I'm afraid that beard threw me quite out of my reckoning."

She mused. "I once drew him with his beard, from memory. In armour. He looked just like King Arthur come to life again. I've got it yet.... But let's look at the thing reasonably, George. I admit there's something to be said for having a pied-à-terre in his rooms. He might just possibly turn up there. It might also be—hm!—awkward if he did.... But the rest, all this hunting for him, that's a wash-out. You know it is."

I was silent. Then again I saw in her eyes what I had seen before—the beginning of a soft deep shining, as if some diver's lamp moved beneath the waters at night.

"No, I prefer my way," she said, suddenly sitting straight up.

"Doing nothing at all?"

"Fiddlesticks! I'm supposed to sit and listen respectfully when you talk, but you never listen to what I've got to say. I told you what my way was. I'll tell you again. I had tea at Daphne Bassett's flat this afternoon."

"I hope you found Puppetty well," I remarked.

The kindling eyes were steadily on mine.

"Puppetty," she said slowly, "is in the greatest favour. Puppetty has wing-portions for dinner and bovril to go to bed with. Puppetty's to have a new quilt for being a good little doggles and protecting his mummie——"

"What on earth——" I began.

Then I sat up as suddenly as if I had been galvanised.

"Julia! You don't mean——?"

She nodded, darkling devils of mischief under that cool smooth brow.

"What, that he's still looking for her?"

"He's found her. He spoke to her a couple of days ago."

"And she recognised him?"

"I didn't say that."

"Didn't she recognise him?"

"Didn't know him from Adam."

"Then how do you know it was he?"

I cannot convey the lightness of her disdain. "How do I know!—--"

I leaned back in my chair. To think that I had not thought of this, the oldest of all stratagems! Guettez la femme! Runaways are caught by it every day, and always will be. They are released from custody and placed under observation so that they may walk straight into the trap. That is why the trick is old—it never fails. And I had not thought of it!

She wore her triumph with such present moderation that I knew I had not heard the last of it.

"Yes," she continued, "she told me all about it. It was on Monday evening, about seven o'clock, and she was coming up the little street by St. James's Church, where the Post Office is. She fancied she'd noticed a man following her, a very big handsome man with a golden beard."

"Is that her description of him?" I interrupted.

"Yes. That's why I wasn't much surprised when you told me about his beard. Then outside the Post Office the outrage happened. He spoke to her. Spoke to her, George. Try to realise it."

"Well, if she'd no idea who he was it wasn't a pleasant thing to have happen."

She gave a soft laugh. "He's very good-looking," she said brazenly.

"Julia, if you were naturally a catty sort of woman——"

"Don't interrupt, George. I am artificially then. If you don't want to hear go out and look for hansoms. And whatever else you're sententious about don't be sententious about women. Now I've forgotten what I was going to say."

"You said he spoke to her outside the Post Office."

"Behave yourself then. He did speak to her, and she set Puppetty at him."

"What!" I cried.

"Quite so, dear George. As you say. Fearfully pleased and excited really. Quite a romance. And of course she'd have given anything not to set Puppetty at him."

"Then why in the name of goodness did she?"

Julia gave an exhausted sigh. "If ever you marry, George, heaven help Lady Coverham!... Why did she? Because she had to. She's that sort. They've got to do certain things because that sort does, but they do so wish they needn't! Virtue's a funny thing. If you don't want that ice may I have it?"

"But look here," I said presently. "If he'd said straight out, as any man in his position would have done, 'I say, I know this is a bit unusual, but my name's Derwent Rose, and there's something I want to explain'—and so on—you see what I mean. Then she'd have known who he was."

"Well, I'm afraid I'm not responsible for what he didn't say."

"What exactly did he say?"

She gave a shrug. "What do men say? They don't stop me outside post offices. You never did; if all this hadn't happened I don't suppose I should ever have known you one scrap better. I dare say he was a bit rattled too. Anyway she didn't stop to think. She just set the dog at him, legged it, and she's as pleased as Punch still."

"You're quite sure she didn't recognise him?"

"Oh, quite. She'd tell me in a minute. She'd love to be able to say she'd had Derwent Rose at her feet."

"I suppose so," I sighed. "Did you ask her what aged man this—marauder—looked?"

"What do you think? Of course I did. Doesn't everything turn on that? But she could only tell me, 'Oh, about thirty-three or four—thirty-five perhaps.' The very thing we want to know ... but she was in such a hurry to be virtuous...."

Her brow was no longer smooth. Her voice rose a little and then dropped again.

"You see how much turns on which it is—thirty-five or thirty-three. You say he was struggling with himself that night, sweating with funk, wanting to hang on. And yet the moment you turned your back he bolted, and he's riding about with ladies in hansoms."

"Come, my dear!" I protested. "There's nothing in that! All men drive about with women. For that matter I drove you part of the way here."

But she cut me impatiently short.

"Oh, I don't mean that at all! That's nothing to me! I don't care who he takes in hansoms; I've nothing to gain and nothing to lose. I want him to have just whatever he wants. But I told you he knew nothing about women. He's never been in love in his life. Oh, I'm explaining badly, but what I mean is that if you're going to find him by going through London with a dustman's besom and scraper, that's as much as to say that he isn't happy. That's what hurts me. He was miserable at thirty-five before—miserable and ashamed. But the moment he's thirty-three again——"

I watched the long white fingers that tapped softly for a minute on the table before she resumed.

"Then he's all right," she said in a low and moved voice. "He was writing the Vicarage then. I saw—oh, quite lots of him. He used to 'blow in,' as he called it, with a 'Hallo, Julia! I'm having rather a devil of a good time these days; writing a book that will make some of 'em sit up and take notice; I've done a quarter of it in three weeks; how's that for a little gentle occupation?' Yes, I saw quite a lot of him at thirty-three. I had a studio near Cremorne Road. It wasn't really a studio, but a sort of gutted top floor, big enough to have given a dance in, and my bed was behind a curtain that was drawn right across one end. I used to give him tea there—Patum Paperium sandwiches he liked—and he was sweet. Once I'd an illustration to do for some stupid story or other, about a sort of Sandow-and-Hackenschmidt all rolled into one, and do you know what he did? He looked at my drawing, took it to the window, and then laughed. 'I say, Julia, this will never do!' he said. 'When a man lifts a heavy thing like that he does it from the earth, you understand—you do everything that's worth doing from the earth. So you've got to see his feet are right. Anybody likely to come in here? No? Right; I don't mind you. Got anything heavy here? You get your paper and pencil.' And he stripped to the belt and picked up my sewing-machine and posed for me. He did...."