Читать книгу Self Condemned - Percy Wyndham Lewis - Страница 9

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He sprang into the taxi and crouched with his hands cupped around his face as it shook and rattled preparatory to starting. Then he straightened himself, and sat bolt upright, in the centre of the seat. Nature had given its answer. The judgement of his mother uprooted him, as it were. He had to accept detachment from all that his family had meant for him. Or at least this must be so in the deepest sense. She was an ignorant, worldly old woman, it was true. But he remained shaken.

He realized, as he drew very near to himself, in the dark of the obstreperous old vehicle, how his personality must strike other people; his sister, or his mother, for instance. He was un exalté, a fanatic, a man apt to become possessed of some irrational idea, which would blind him to everything, as if it were in a delirium. No: he was quite the opposite, or so it would seem. He was a man whose bearded mask was haunted by an ironic smile at all times, as much as was his mother's, a man inclined to meet with a sceptical eye the enthusiast, every variety of emportement. Yet he was now declaring it as his intention to behave in so eccentric a manner that an explanation—a theory—seemed to be demanded. It must have been some such mental process, this, which had brought his mother to ask herself whether this 'brilliant' and amusing son of hers were not, at bottom, stupid. To be so level-headed, so 'realist', qualifying so little for the term 'dreamer', and yet suddenly to act in a way reminiscent of romantic adolescence, could only be explained by some sudden alteration, some disturbance of the personality, or else, it must signify the presence of some streak which had never been suspected even by those nearest to him. There were only these two explanations available. He forced his face into a bitter travesty of a smile. To be so realistic that you came to appear a dreamer, to be so sceptical that you acted like a man possessed of some violent belief, this was an irony indeed! So to be sitting as he had been just now in a room with his nearest and dearest, calmly and matter-of-factly announcing his line of action, watching dismay and embarrassment deepening upon their faces, he had had the sensation of being demented. He might just as well have been explaining to them that he was really Napoleon Bonaparte, or an isosceles triangle. They could not have been more amazed and shocked.

The taxi crossed the canal bridge and entered the circular road within the precincts of Regent's Park. René in his cab began to circle around the slumbering Zoo animals, the lions, the elephants, the anthropoid apes, all dreaming of Africa, Siberia, and Malaya, Bengal and the Polar Sea. What was in fact their dream-life was in the cages and pools, on the imitation rocks, and in the miniature savannahs of the Zoological Gardens. But their real life of course was where lions live under the blazing suns, or where the Polar bear prowls upon the ice caps. They step back, when they close their eyes in sleep, into the reality, out of the squalid nightmare of Regent's Park. Oh, where was his real life! For it certainly was not in the restaurant towards which he was speeding. But he soon left behind the sleeping snakes and snoring tigers, and the reflections that their proximity provoked. He began to think that, after all, his lecture-room might be his habitat, as the river-side was the water-rat's, and the prairie was the buffalo's. As he creaked and banged along in this deliberately archaic London 'hackney' vehicle, his mind darted from one absurdity to another. It was human stupidity he was reacting against. Yet he was now obliged to justify himself to a number of persons typically stupid. His darling mother, and dear old Mary as loyal as she was obstinate, were fundamentally as unenlightened as Mrs. Harradson, at least as that concerned the matter in hand. He would not dream of describing himself to Mrs. Harradson as a 'hero', would he? No, but he had just committed that absurdity with his sister, the best woman in the world, but completely deluded. The delusion under which the majority sleepwalked its way from decade to decade, from disaster to disaster, had numbed her mind as much as that of any other Mrs. Everyman. His mother, too, was numbed, was part of the same somnambulism, and age now was super-added. No means of enlightening her. She was the dearest person in the world, but, to come down to brass tacks, it was she who was the fool, not he. This he agreed sounded very conceited, and he had not the least idea how it was that he came to be awake, while all these others slept. It was an explicable accident, it signified no superiority. He just had suddenly woken up.

However, faced with this overwhelming difficulty, he had made use of the term hero, as a stimulus to the imagination. His sister, of course, would regard what he was doing as heroic—that would be her way of thinking of it if she could understand; if her intelligence were not numbed and doped groupishly by mass hypnotism. And her intelligence was quite a good one, as a matter of fact.

So he picked his way among people who could not see: dealing in this way with the blind produced in him sometimes the sensation of being an Invisible Man; at others, of being brutally concrete in an unsubstantial universe. During this period he began to acquire a consciousness of his physical presence which was extremely disagreeable. He thought of himself as an animal among delicate and vapourish humans. Even his hairiness embarrassed him. At times his acute self-consciousness would take the form of feeling that he was on view, an exhibit. He had thought once or twice that Essie had been looking at him in an odd kind of way. And in fact so she had. But the reason for that was not what he supposed, but was merely that she had seen that he was concealing something. Anyone who is inexpertly engaged in covering something up is bound to attract attention, and also to appear absurd. There was nothing he dreaded so much as the absurd, in himself, a part of his French idiosyncratic legacy, exaggerated if anything in the course of its grafting to a British stock. But his growing sense of the absurd in everything was painful and to suspect its presence in himself supremely uncomfortable. Once or twice he had observed Mrs. Harradson and asked himself if he was a male Mrs. Harradson. What was the rational, after all? Where was one to look for the norm? The nervous impetuousness of his movements, of which he was perfectly aware, he had once compared with the charlady's. However, he had concluded, with a laugh, if it is a question of the human kind and its essential absurdity, then of course all right, why should I care? In so absurd a place it was hardly likely that he himself could be otherwise than absurd.

As the car inserted its decrepit bulk into the Albany Street traffic and crawled noisily past Great Portland Street Station into Great Portland Street, hot on the scent of the absurd, he recognized that his mother had behaved with absurdity in conspiring with Mr. Harding to beget him, in an embrace that is not objectively edifying and is accompanied by pants and grunts and expressions of ridiculous and unmerited approval of the dull solicitor whose name he bore. Dignified as she was in the antechamber of death, lying exhausted by life in that chair to which she seemed glued, in that, her present form, his mother had little connection with the young Frenchwoman who passed almost half her life in a bed with Mr. Harding, for the sole purpose of bringing into life René and his three sisters. All the values were wrong in that bed. Neither of the excited couple considered what they were doing or they would have quitted the bed immediately. Of course his mother now, with a great big bearded monster like himself in front of her, must dimly realize how frivolous she had been (for she was not such a brute as Essie); and today she had, with disgust, even believed that she had given birth to a fool, into the bargain, pauvre chérie!

His mind now shifted to that boldly-bland-eyed lady, probably awaiting him not far from Piccadilly—the absurdly mesquin and petty centre of this jellyfish of a city. As his taxi propelled itself into the broad street ending in Broadcasting House, his face wrinkled up as though he had been confronted with a peculiarly involved historical problem.

As he drew nearer to Essie her figure began to loom more insistently in his mind: at the same time his mind flashed back to the figures of Mr. and Mrs. Harding, père and mère, as life-long inhabitants of a handsome four-poster; for the nocturnal half of life Essie and he at night had beds that were twins. Same thing, same idea, but less oppressively barbarous. Why did he and Essie live together? Same idea. Nothing would have induced him to live with a man of Essie's disposition and mediocre intellect. For though smart enough, she had not a fraction of Mary's or of his mother's judgement. Their marriage had been a bus-accident. No offspring had resulted. A good thing. The male offspring would have resembled Essie more or less. Sex would have been unpleasantly prominent. Big staring eyes and all that. This was absurd. Human dignity would have been sacrificed to an exaggerated idea of size of population required. The piling up of huge populations immoral. Cannon-fodder. What nations wanted was smaller and smaller populations, not bigger and bigger. Quality not quantity. He gave a ghost of a ho-ho-ho. Here he was legislating for Overman. In the Yahooesque mass the nightly tête-à-tête between the sheets was one of the sole compensations for a life-sentence of hard labour. 'Je divague,' he muttered, as the cab stopped at the door of the 'Toulousaine'.

Hester was sitting, demure and wide-eyed, near the vestiaire. He led her into the restaurant, mentally prescribing for himself some tonic consommation in view of the unpleasant task which lay before him. Also, a quiet corner—surtout somewhere really quiet with no eavesdroppers. He did in fact find, in the upstairs rear of the 'Toulousaine', a table which answered to his requirements.

Next came the meal. He discovered that he felt hungry. He had enough of the Frenchman in him to succumb very quickly to the attractions of a well-arranged menu. Hester, although never losing sight of the problem of the waistline, was nevertheless rather fond of food. They ordered what would have seemed a somewhat elaborate meal to the average Englishman. The sommelier, who knew René, took matters a step farther: and before he had left, they had decided, after the cocktails, on a wine decidedly on the heavy side, and, in a word, his plan for a somewhat austere meal, with some brandy to brace him up, had been forgotten. Or it would be more true to say that good reasons had been found, under the pressure of hunger, to feed, even to overfeed, rather than merely to stimulate as had originally been intended.

Essie watched the proceedings with a certain surprise. What, she asked herself, was the cause of this lavish repast? She enquired if anything serious had taken him up to St. John's Wood; for he had not explained why he was going and she considered that it might be that something up there had produced this appetite and unusual conviviality. His melancholy response convinced her that it was nothing to do with that visit: so she thought she would wait and watch, and when the wine began to have its effect something doubtless would emerge.

As if escaping from something, he gave himself up almost childishly to the delights of the table. The wine of the Rhône rolled down his throat, the brandies of Normandy attacked his membranes and caused his animal fires to blaze. By the time he was through with this meal he gave up all idea of explaining to Hester that he had planned a change of life. His well-being was such that the charms of Essie assumed great prominence: he ho-ho-ho'd as he lifted his glass and nothing in the world could have been more different from what he had foreseen. He tripped brilliantly out of the restaurant and Essie was actually a little tipsy. In the taxi he behaved like an amorous student. And once or twice, when the sterner side of his nature had attempted to intervene, he pushed it away with a ho-ho-ho. When, some time later, his glands emptied and his head as clear as a bell, this hairy faun in a jack-knife jump sprang into his own pillowless bed, it was without a shadow upon his conscience.