Читать книгу The Tower of Oblivion - Oliver Onions - Страница 9

Among the things that have contributed to the wordly success of Sir George Coverham, Knight, has been that author's rigid exclusion from his books of everything that does not commend itself to the average common sense of his fellow-beings. The most he seeks in his modest writings—I speak of him in the third person because, as Derry's head dropped over his knees, it seemed impossible that this Sir George Coverham and I could be one and the same person—the most he seeks is a line somewhere between ordinary experience and the most, rather than the least, attractive presentation of it. In a word, his books are polite, debonair, and deliberately planned so as not to shock anybody.

Therefore in some ways he may be quite the wrong person to be writing this story of Derwent Rose. For example: he had known Rose for some fifteen years, and, not to mince matters, there had been many highly impolite things in Rose's life during that time. More than once it had seemed a very good thing indeed that he had had to work hard for his money. The great mental concentration necessary for the writing of some of his books must have kept him out of a good deal of mischief.

So I (I am allowing myself the man and Sir George Coverham the novelist gradually to reunite, as they gradually reunited that evening)—I, his friend, had already done what we all do when we are completely bowled over. I had instinctively sought refuge from his lunatic announcement in trifles—any trifle that lay nearest to hand. Suddenly I found myself wondering why he was afraid to take a drink, and why I had had to draw his curtains lest the sound of the buses and taxis should call him out into the streets.

But presently he had recovered a little. He was even able to look at me with the faint shadow of a smile.

"Well, that's the lot," he said. "I've given you the whole thing in a nutshell. You heard that lecture and you know me. You can fill in the rest for yourself."

Suddenly I looked at my watch. It was not yet half-past nine. I got on to my feet.

"You'd better get your hat and come down to Haslemere with me," I said. "We can catch the ten-ten. You're all on edge about something and you want a change. Leave word here that you'll be back in a week, and come along."

But he did not move, except to shake his head.

"I expected you'd say that. It's what anybody would say. It simply means that you haven't taken it in yet. No, since we've started we'll go on—unless you'd rather not. I warn you there's a good deal to be said for not going on."

"Why not talk about it down at Haslemere?"

Once more there was the hint of irascibility.

"Do you want to hear or don't you?"

Slowly I sat down again, and he resumed his former attitude of cracking nuts with his palms for nutcrackers.

"There's not an atom of doubt about what I'm going to tell you," he began. "Not an atom. Unless I'm mistaken you saw for yourself this afternoon—though of course you didn't know what you were seeing. You simply thought I looked younger, didn't you?"

I waited in silence.

"And I fancy my manner got a bit on your nerves—does a bit now for that matter?"

This also I let pass without remark.

"Well, let's start from that point. You said I looked thirty-five. Well, it's just that that's getting on your nerves—the less amiable side of my character when I was thirty-five, and—and—well, when you go you might take that bottle of whisky with you and make me sign the pledge or something. I'm trying—I'm honestly trying—to hang on, you see."

I sighed. "I wish you could make it a bit plainer," I said.

"I'm making it as plain as I can. Is this plain—that something's happened to me, I don't know what, and I'm getting younger instead of older?"

"Derry——" I began, half rising; but he held up one heroically-moulded hand.

"Let me finish. And if I happen to go to sleep suddenly you just walk straight out, do you hear? Walk right out and shut the door. You're to promise that. There are some things I won't ask even a pal to go through.... So there it is. Instead of getting older like everybody else I'm simply getting younger. I'm perfectly sober—I haven't had a drink for five days—and I tell you I shall go on till I'm thirty, and then twenty-five, and then twenty, and then, at sixteen or thereabouts—that fellow wasn't very sound on his ages to-night—I shall die. Now have you got it?"

Even about human nature there are some things that you have to accept as it were mathematically. I am no mathematician, but I do know (for example) that the common phrase "mathematically certain" is a misnomer. The whole essence of mathematics lies, not in its certainties, but in its assumptions, its power to embrace any concept whatever and pin it down in the form of a symbol. Once you have adopted the symbol you don't trouble about what lies behind it. You merely proceed to reason on it.

It can only have been in some such way that I accepted Derwent Rose's mad statement and was willing to see what superstructure he was prepared to raise upon it. I was even able to speak in an almost calm and ordinary voice.

"Tell me how you know all this," I said.

He was logical and prompt.

"By my knowledge of myself, and also by my memory. I know what I was at thirty-five, and I know what I did; well, I simply know that I'm that man again, and that I shall go on and re-do more or less what he's already done. At some point in my life I must have got turned round, and now I'm living it backwards again. And put multiple personality quite out of your head. That's the whole point. I'm not anybody else, and I shan't be anybody else. At this moment I'm Derwent Rose, as he always was and always will be, but simply back at the mental and physical stage when he wrote An Ape in Hell."

To-day, looking back, it gives me an indescribable ache at my heart to remember the sudden and immense sense of relief his words gave me. I breathed again, as if a window had been opened and a draught of cool fresh air let in.

For if he only meant memory, then the thing wasn't so bad. The maniacal idea that had sent that cold shiver up my spine was capable of an ordinary explanation after all. For what else is memory but the illusion that one is living backwards again in this sense? How many ancient loves, hates, angers, can we not re-experience in any idle hour we choose to give over to reverie? Beyond a doubt Rose had in some way been abusing this mysterious faculty, and Surrey and the pine-woods was the place for him.

"I see," I said at last. "I confess you frightened me for a moment. Anyway that's all right. You only have what we all have more or less. You merely bring greater powers than the rest of us to bear on an ordinary phenomenon. I don't want to talk about your work, but it always did seem to me that you went to rather appalling heights and fearsome depths for the stuff of it. Personally I don't think either heaven or hell is the safest place to go to for 'copy.' Too terrifying altogether."

He seemed to consider this deeply. He was almost quiet again now. Again he cracked invisible nuts, and his heels and toes rose and fell gently and alternately on the carpet.

"That's rather a new idea you've given me, George," he said at last. "I admit I hadn't thought of that. It might explain the beginning anyway—the turn-round. I suppose you mean I've been too close to the flames or the balm, and have got singed or the other thing, whatever you call it. I see. Yes.... It's probably nothing to do with the thyroid after all. I've been reading the wrong books. I never thought of the writings of the Saints. Or the Devils.... By the way, some of the Saints induced the stigmata on themselves by a sort of spiritual process, didn't they?"

I frowned and moved uneasily in my chair. I wasn't anxious to hear Derwent Rose either on ecstasy or blasphemy. But he went on.

"So that's useful as far as it goes. But—you'd hardly call this spiritual, would you?"

I think I mentioned that he wore a soft white collar, pinned and tied with exquisite neatness. A moment later he wore it no longer. Without troubling about pin, studs or buttons, with a swift movement he had ripped the collar, tie and half the shirt-band from his neck, and showed, of an angry and recent purply-red, vivid on his magnificent throat, two curved marks like these brackets—().

Now I am not more squeamish than most men. I am far from having lived the whole of my life in cotton-wool. But it needed no course in medical jurisprudence to tell me what those marks were—the marks of teeth, and of a woman's teeth. I was deeply wounded. Rose's amusements in this sort were no affair of mine, and I strongly resented this humiliation both of himself and of me.

But his hand gripped my arm like a vice. Suddenly I saw a quite new pair in his grey-blue eyes. It was a swift fear lest, instead of helping him, I should turn against him.

"Good God, man!" he cried in a high voice. "Don't think that! Don't think I'm such a cur as to—oh, my God, that isn't the point! I'm not bragging about my conquests!... The point is that these marks are ten years old and they weren't there last night!"

I tried to free myself from his grip, but he wouldn't let me go. He ran agitatedly on, repeating himself over and over again.

"There isn't much imagination about that, is there? That isn't fancy, is it? That doesn't happen to any man any day, does it? A man would be likely to remember that, wouldn't he? He wouldn't forget it, if it was only for the shame of it! Is that just ordinary memory? And how would you feel when everything was healed over and forgotten, and you'd settled decently down, and hoped everything was forgiven you—and then you were to be dragged back over the ploughshares like that! I tell you you've got to see it all crowding back on you again, before you realise that forgetting's the greatest happiness in life!... I tell you on my word of honour that that happened ten years ago, when I was thirty-five before, and that it wasn't there last night! Now tell me I'm drunk or dreaming!"

Stupefied I stared at him. The issue was plain. Either he was telling the truth, or he was not. Either those marks were as recent as they looked or as old as he said. He was to be believed or disbelieved. There was no middle way.

And my heart sank like a stone in my breast as suddenly I found myself believing him. He saw that I did, and fumblingly sought to fasten the collar again. But he had torn both buttonhole and band, and could only cover up those shameful marks by turning up the collar of his dark blue jacket. He sat with his collar turned up for the rest of our talk.

Presently I felt a little more master of myself. I had moved over to the sofa and was sitting by his side. He, this youthful Hercules of forty-five, who wrote books and made you think of boats and horses, was weeping softly. He was weeping for misery and hate of what, apparently, he must go through again. Stupidly my eyes rested on the carefully lettered and numbered shelves of books, and then on the slovenly litter of the table. The electric light gave the merest flicker—they were doing something at the power-station—and then burned quietly on. It shone on the black oak furniture and the saddlebag chairs, on our two hats on the table, on the neatly curtained recess where the hats should have been. It was impossible not to see that in its contrast of orderliness and disorder the very room showed two sharp and distinct phases. Almost with voices the inanimate things seemed to cry it aloud. The man who had catalogued those bays of books had been the author of The Hands of Esau. He who now threw everything down on to that disgraceful table was he who had written An Ape in Hell.

He still wept quietly. I put my hand on his knee.

"All right, Derry," I said. "Try to pull yourself together. You say you can't begin at the beginning. Very well, begin anywhere you like. I dare say something can be done. It may turn out to be—oh, shellshock or something."

But already my heart told me that it would turn out to be nothing of the kind.