Читать книгу My Star Predominant - Raymond Knister - Страница 5

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The first day of the Margate excursion had been draught after draught of intoxication. He had taken an early coach, and seen mile after mile of England sweeping past under the white morning sky, the sun kissing away the dew; the splendour of the midsummer day, matched by the portentous majesty of the sea, with its mysterious, pervasive voice. And when in the dusk, after all this, Cynthia had peeped through her silken curtains of cloud, scantly as a bride, he had to write a sonnet to George about it. But next day the reaction had come, with half-wilful forgetfulness.

He lay on a bed of grass and flowers atop a cliff above the sea, and thought he had begun a new life. No lectures, no wading through dreary, dreary books which seemed to make the brain ache and to become a muddle in the last few days before the examination. All that was over, life seemed clean and free, with boundless hours made all for poetry. He could write poems to over-span anything yet achieved. And he was firmly set into a niche, lower and quite immovable, if he chose to occupy it. He was ready to practise his profession of surgeon.

The final months of his studies now seemed something of a joke, including the grinning certainty of some of his acquaintances that he would fail. They were dumbfounded, but he had not. Perhaps he had been lucky all the way through. Hammond of Edmonton had not cavilled about giving his testimonial, in spite of that fist-shaking episode; the Court of Examiners of the Society of Apothecaries had admitted him duly to examination, and Brande, the examiner, had been a good head. It was too bad that fellows who really wanted and needed to practise might have failed. They would have more to talk about when they learned what Stephens and a few others already suspected, that he never would practise.

Upon what afternoon walk with Hunt, or what hour of high speculation with Clarke, or reading what deathless, glittering line of Shakespeare he had so resolved, he could not have said. He would be a poet or nothing, come weal, come woe. Abbey would say–what could Abbey say? Keats felt uneasily that Abbey was not unprepared for some weird action on his part, that Abbey considered him, privately, a fool. But on the other hand, what could Abbey say with any effectiveness? His erstwhile ward would be of age, and at liberty to put into execution any course of action which should not be an imposition upon the rights of others or a treason against the Crown. Again, Keats had long ached for the opportunity to impart to Abbey a few home truths regarding the relative value in the sight of gods and wondering men, of merchants, money-changers, and the divine poet whose works descended to later ages as a chief heritage of his race. He was free, now.

Free. That was the paramount consideration after all. Keats thought, looking seeingly at the sky, the grass, the oats field, and the waves far out and below him. It was enough to make you roll on the grass with twofold ease. What was to be created lay between himself and the eternal spirit of poesy, the principle of rightness in all things. A new world had opened itself to his delighted eyes at Margate, and of this the sea made half. The very streets and shops, much more the citizens, from the smug to the smugglers, were redolent of the sea; which itself meant more even than ostensible beauties of rocks, ships, caves; it spoke to him with an eternal voice which compelled him to think of eternity, past and future, and Man perched upon a pinnacle in the midst.

For all this, he could not, it seemed, write a proper poem, and was reduced to rhymed epistles, to George and to Cowden Clarke, telling of these beauties he saw. As day followed day it seemed less and less likely that he would write the important poem–perhaps ever. At first it pleased while it saddened him to know that he was dependent upon creation for happiness. Then he became uneasy, restless, depressed, almost desperate at his failure of inspiration. It was a skirmish with the blue devils so well known to his boyhood, when some obscure woe would damp the glow of his spirit, and the deaths of his mother and grandmother made it apparent that this world was one continual round of gloomy catastrophe, past and only too certainly to come.

He was glad enough after a month to get back to London and his lodgings and Tom. They went here and there, little caring how the days passed, and it was a better holiday than he had believed possible. One day they attended a bear-baiting. Two young Cockneys elbowed past them to the ring-side. The elder was instructing the other, pointing out men of wealth and sporting gentlemen by name and nickname, and strutting within the border of the ring. The keeper, waxing purple in the face from the effort to keep the throng out of the ring, finally laid about him with fists and elbows. “My eye, Bill Soames give me such a lick!” exclaimed the Cockney with gratification. The brothers burst out laughing.

“What a slang gent,” murmured Tom.

Next morning John went to see Hunt. Hunt had seen those long poems, had pronounced them superb; and putting misgivings aside, Keats took great joy of them, and worked over them raptly all the afternoon. And that evening he went to see Clarke. His high spirits effervesced in impersonation of the bear-baiting. Arms and legs bent and swung stiffly, he looked like Bruin on his hind legs. He swung about, dabbed his forepaws out, mocking the growls of the bear and the excited yappings of the dogs which had not yet engaged him, then the snap of teeth, the grunting “agh!” of one getting squeezed. Keats’ wide mouth drew back in a snarl, his teeth looking evil. Clarke’s gentle mystified seriousness changed to laughter: “Are you thinking of taking up the sporting profession?”

“My eye! Arsk me someick I knows. I tykes up whatever’s a pying gyme! ... But not the profession of surgeon. The other day, for instance, I was called suddenly to open a man’s temporal artery. I did it, too–with the utmost nicety. But my mind was farther than Oberon. It was only a miracle.”

But Clarke had a treasure to show him–Chapman’s Homer. Alsager, who conducted the money-market department of The Times, had lent it him.

“Good Latona mea!” swore Keats.

A sumptuous volume lay outspread beneath the lamp. The great folio had been printed two hundred years ago, in 1616. On the title-page Keats saw not only this but an engraved, massively architectural design. He turned the broad leaves, and there were the black-printed solemn long lines like church-music. He read aloud:

“But when out of his ample breast he gave his great voice passe,

And words that flew about our eares, like drifts of winter’s snow;

None thenceforth, might contend with him; though naught admir’d for show.”

“The spontaneous breath of great poetry!” he exclaimed rapture. “Nothing else but the spontaneous breath!”

“Let us turn, as I was doing, to some of the famousest passages.”

Keats watched him, and a sense swept over him of the old story that had charmed the lonely tribes two thousand years earlier, when the minstrel sang them the ten-years war for Troy and Helen of the peerlessly devastating face. The story’s beauty was robust, primitive, as though from coarse dyes and hand-woven cloth; and if it missed the simplicity of grace in the slender fluted Ionian column, it had the power and the creative majesty of the early gods. This was the Homer he had surmised from the reverent admiration of men who had read him in the Greek. He knew in his heart that the jingles of Pope’s version could be the spirit of not that rich tale and its inevitably symbolic action. Now he could relive it in the words of old Chapman, an Elizabethan of Shakespeare’s time. Listening, he became almost breathless with excitement, rose and walked about the room, his head thrown back, eyes glowing.

“Now a great wind sweeps across my spirit,” he declared. “Much have I travelled in the realms of gold; but this bard’s is the greatest realm of all.” Abruptly he hushed again to listen to Clarke’s reading of the passage where Ulysses is cast up on the shore of Phaecia. For this he had no words, only a delighted ineffable stare. Softly he repeated: “The sea had soakt his heart through.”

One passage suggested another until they could recall no more, and started at the beginning and read silently. When next they thought of time the morning had become light. “Poor Tom will be fretting about me.”

In the street a cold October wind blew over bare houses, bare flagstones, bare trees. The sky had a faint tinge of white. Keats walked rapidly. “A new planet has swung into my ken,” he muttered. A pair of the watch met him with their staves and lanterns. “No, my friends, I am not drunk, nor a whore-master,” he felt like telling them. Every step was exultation. Farther on, a lamplighter was extinguishing the lamps on the posts. Out of an ancient beamed inn came a rowdy group of young fellows. They were living, but he had life.

Tom was in bed and did not hear him enter. Sitting down at the table, his hat and coat still on, he drew a piece of paper and a quill from among the books. His fingers seemed to move as much automatically as purposefully, and he half felt that he might do nothing, instead of writing the greatest poem he ever had attempted. He shivered slightly, and felt the cold and the oddness of the hour and his posture, then he was flooded once more with a sense of the new world which had become his.

Just as he was finishing, Tom crept shivering, half dressed and rubbing his eyes, out of the bedroom. Keats rose and kissed his cheek.

“My dear brother,” he said in calm exaltation. “I have just written an immortal poem. I think I have done it at last.” Tom took the paper eagerly and silently to the window. Keats wandered about the room, half fearing.

“Wonderful, John. Simply gorgeous.”

Keats clapped his feet together and, standing erect before his brother, read the sonnet aloud, giving every vowel its proper weight. A thrill of exultation was in the line, “Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold,” and a thrill of awe in the sonorous evocation of eternal stillness in the skies against which the merely human silence of Cortez and his men sounded like the clap of doom–the doom of the Unknown, whose curse is half lost when men know there is an Unknown. Like a half-remembered dream this came to the two boys as they read.

“But where have you been all night?”

“Where have I been? Straddling Parnassus, Tom. With my soul, not galligaskins, needless to say.” He sat down to make a copy for Clarke, and carried it down to the street. It was still early, but a reliable-looking boy appeared, willing to run to Clarke at Clerkenwell for twopence. To make assurance double sure, Keats gave him a tester.

Going upstairs again, he felt a curious lightness about himself which was not like faintness or tipsiness and yet reminded him of both. His sleeplessness was asserting itself. Slowly he took off his hat and cloak, telling his brother to go out and bring them something for bever against his waking up.

“John, do you know what day this is?”

They both brightened. He was twenty-one. A man.

George brought him that night a knitted bookmark Fanny had made. Abbey had forbidden her to go out at night, even with him. The brothers talked quietly and gaily until midnight, regaling themselves with a bottle or two of claret.

Another evening less than a week afterward, George burst into his brothers’ lodgings breathless and brusque.

“I’ll never return to that place,” he declared, “never.”

The other two stared at him uncomprehendingly. Tom was leaning over a table, his head half sideways upon his hand. John was sitting in the middle of the room, his left foot upon his right knee, a book upon his lap, while his right hand clasped his small-boned left ankle.

It was Hodgkinson, Abbey’s partner, who had gone out of his way to put upon George and finally insulted him to his face. John leaped to his feet, upsetting the precious Chapman Clarke had loaned him.

“I am one-and-twenty,” he exclaimed, “whether you are or not, and I shall very soon tell Abbey a few quite unpalatable truths. I’ll go to-night.”

The brothers would have dissuaded him, but he had to tell Abbey his decision in regard to surgery.

“Oh, John, by the bye, Abbey has been wangling a practice for you at Tottenham.”

John stopped, stared. If a practice had been obtained for him at Tottenham, would he be compelled to accept it? No, impossible. But it might look like throwing away a future. That would seem to put Abbey in the right.

“I don’t care. I shan’t practise if I am given a practice outright. Why, Hammond is near Tottenham. I should have to compete with him.”

George laughed bitterly. “Abbey has a grudge against Hammond, too.”

“Oh, John, won’t you take it?” Tom asked. “Grandmother lived so near, many of the people would know of you, and you would do well.”

“I am not a surgeon,” said Keats, “and that is settled.” He had found a fresh cravat and kerchief, his hat and cloak, and was ready to depart, a spruce and spirited-looking little fellow.

An exaltation upheld him while he walked briskly along to the stage. But as he sat on the top deck of the coach and bowled through the streets, a sort of compunctious melancholy came over him. Life seemed to be strife and bitterness. Abbey, for example, was a needlessly complete ass! Mother had never liked him. And the way he had talked about people being above themselves and keeping fine riding-horses and playing the man of consequence! John blushed to think that he had not resented forcibly the slur against his father, though he was not fifteen at the time. Certainly Abbey knew better than to cast mud at the Keatses now. John’s hands clenched and his breathing grew slow and deep. Why shouldn’t his father keep a good riding-horse for his own use? Hadn’t he owned the livery stable with a stock of fine horses? What business of Abbey’s was it? ... Heaven knew he wished nothing concerning him was business of Abbey’s; but nearly everything, it seemed was.

At length he came to Walthamstow, its old, noble country residences of Pepys’s time, and Abbey’s house; he brought the knocker down resoundingly. The maidservant told him Fanny would come in a few minutes.

She waved gaily but silently from the stairs opposite the parlour door. Fanny Keats was a fair girl with grey eyes, well grown for her thirteen years, with that large and careless growth common in children who later will scarcely increase in stature. Somehow she reminded John of himself. When he had kissed her, he said playfully:

“So this is the time young ladies go to rest nowadays, is it? ’Twas different when I were young!”

“Oh, you poor old man!” exclaimed Fanny. “Don’t you know the fashions change? Nowadays young ladies go to bed early so that they can go to school in the morning.”

“I’m glad I got here as soon as I did. George came and told us something that made me want to come and see Mr. Abbey.”

“Oh, George was terribly angry. I would not be surprised if he never came back. He told Abbey he wouldn’t.”

“Why whisper?” asked Keats fiercely. “Do you think Abbey is eavesdropping? How does he treat you, Fanny?”

“Why, Mr. Abbey doesn’t trouble much about me,” she told him in the same low tone. “I think he’s funny. You know the kind of people who think they are good-natured? He is like that. I have to smile inside.” She giggled. John nodded, smiling. Fanny was a charming girl.

“And Mrs. Abbey? Yes, she’s good to me. You couldn’t tell, most of the time, that I wasn’t one of the family. And yet I know it.”

“Good. You try to be as happy as you can, don’t you? Tom has been wondering whether you could get away some time for a frolic. It is too dull and cold now for picnics, but we can read, and draw, and make toffee.”

“Next summer I’ll be fourteen and can go on picnics.”

“You’ll be a young lady then. I want my sister to be a perfect lady in all her ways, you know,” he said in a kind of playful earnestness.

“And you will be a poet, like that Mr. Hunt who owns the Paper?”

“I have written some fine ones since that one was printed. Some day I shall come over and read them to you.”

“It will be splendid if you become a poet and write books of poems for me to read!”

“It will indeed,” said Keats warmly. “I wouldn’t want a better audience. But, Fanny, it is past your bedtime, and I have not seen Mr. Abbey.”

“Very well. Give my love to Tom and George. Be sure!” They kissed. “And, John, don’t be downcast. I am quite happy, I am, really.”

“Yes, Fanny. Good night.” Tears stood in Keats’s eyes as he watched his sister go upstairs. They waved at each other silently as she passed along the balustrade.

The maidservant appeared and told him that Mr. Abbey wished to see him.

A large, stout, pasty-faced man sat beside a table in the back parlour smoking a long pipe and reading an evening newspaper. He wore white cotton stockings and breeches and half-boots, as he had for years since they had gone out of fashion, and he was the only man on the Exchange or the streets in such garb. Vile torpor of mind, Keats thought it. Mrs. Abbey, a tall, lean lady with a kind of amiably saturnine dark face, sat opposite him, sewing.

“Well, John, my boy?” said Abbey.

“How do you do, Mrs. Abbey?” Mrs. Abbey inclined her head, seeming to keep her eyes upon her sewing.

“How has Tom been keeping under your care?” she asked.

“He is not strong, but he seems the better for his foreign voyage.”

“Mrs. Abbey, my dear,” said Abbey, “don’t you think the children might want your attention now.” She rose and left the room.

“Is it true,” asked Keats, “that your partner accused my brother George of attempting to defraud you?”

“Why, I–– No. Why, sir, George tells me he is angry at Hodgkinson, but what have I to do with that? Hodgkinson is my partner, and George has been a satisfactory clerk. I would not willingly dissolve with the one nor dismiss the other. But if one of them or both choose to leave my service, what can I say?”

“Then I shall see him myself, and find out whether my brother is to be insulted with impunity.”

“Why, there was no insult,” said Abbey, drawing at his pipe. “Mr. Hodgkinson could not find some papers, and, I presume in a manner of joking, he accused George of putting them away. But George took umbrage. I suspect there has been bad blood between the two, but I have no complaint to make of either of them,” he added, with an infuriating chuckle.

“Let that be as it may,” John said coolly, “I trust some satisfaction will be possible, whether you uphold him or not.”

“I uphold him!” said Abbey, as though in indignant surprise.

“Oh, I made a mistake. So you do not uphold George? Very well. We know where we stand: my brothers and I versus Hodgkinson. But another matter, concerning my own future–I do not intend to practise as a surgeon.”

Abbey put his feet on the floor, and almost dropped the pipe from his mouth. “Not intend to be a surgeon! Why, what do you mean to be?”

“I mean to rely upon my ability as a poet.”

“John, you are either mad or a fool, to talk in so absurd a manner.”

“My mind is made up,” said the young man very quietly. “As you know, I am one-and-twenty. You also know there are certain moneys due me which will keep me sustained until the productions of my pen bring me more.”

“I am not sure that there is much until your sister comes of age. I think you will find yourself in the workhouse in time.” Abbey’s cheeks had become purple, with fine veins running in them. “Perhaps you do not know, sir, that I have been about securing an opening for you in Tottenham–a good practice among people to whom your family is known. And this is the way, sir, you accept it. This is the way you reward the efforts I have made in your behalf!”

“For any services you have given me or my family beyond what your bond calls for, I thank you, sir. And now, seeing nothing more to say, I will bid you good evening.”

“There will be a speedy termination to all this.”

“Good evening, sir.”