Читать книгу The Royal Road to Romance - Richard Halliburton - Страница 3

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May had come at last to Princeton. There was no mistaking it. The breeze rustling through our wide-flung dormitory windows brought in the fresh odors of blossoming apple orchards and the intangible sweetness of bursting tree and flower. I had not noticed this fragrance during the day, but now that night had come, it filled the air and permeated our study. As I slouched on the window-seat looking out upon the moon-blanched campus, eleven muffled booms came from the hour bell in Nassau Hall. Eleven o’clock!—and I had not even begun to read my economics assignment for to-morrow. I glanced at the heavy text-book in my hand, and swore at the man who wrote it. Economics!—how could one be expected to moil over such dulness when the perfume and the moon and all the demoralizing lure of a May evening were seething in one’s brain?

I looked behind me at my four roommates bent over their desks dutifully grubbing their lives away. John frowned into his public accounting book; he was soon to enter his father’s department store. Penfield yawned over an essay on corporation finance; he planned to sell bonds. Larry was absorbed in protoplasms; his was to be a medical career. Irvine (he dreamed sometimes) was struggling unsuccessfully to keep his mind on constitutional government. What futility it all was—stuffing themselves with profitless facts and figures, when the vital and the beautiful things of life—the moonlight, the apple orchards, the out-of-door sirens—were calling and pleading for recognition.

A rebellion against the prosaic mold into which all five of us were being poured, rose up inside me. I flung my book away and rushed out of the apartment on to the throbbing shadowy campus. The lake in the valley, I knew, would be glittering, and I turned toward it, surging within at the sense of temporary escape from confinement. Cool and clean, the wind, frolicking down the aisle of trees, tousled my hair, and set my blood to dancing. Never had I known a night so overflowing with beauty and with poetry. The thought of my roommates back in that penitentiary room made me shout with impatience. Except Irvine, they were so restrained, so infallible, so super-sane, so utterly indifferent to the divine madness of the spring moonlight.

All the afternoon of that day I had spent in the woods beside Stony Brook, lost in a volume of Dorian Gray. And now as I tramped down-hill to the lake, I began to recite aloud to the trees and the stars, lines from it that had burned themselves into my memory: “Realize your youth while you have it” ... the sound of my own voice startled me, but the woods echoed back the phrase approvingly, so I took courage. “Don’t squander the gold of your days, listening to the tedious, or giving your life away to the ignorant and the common. These are the sickly aims, the false ideals, of our age.” ... “Sickly aims, sickly aims,” the crickets chirruped after me. “Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you. Be afraid of nothing. There is such a little time that your youth will last—such a little time. The pulse of joy that beats in us at twenty”—I was already a year past twenty—“becomes sluggish. We degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were too much afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we had not the courage to yield to. Youth! Youth! There is absolutely nothing in the world but youth!”

A wave of exultation swept over me. Youth—nothing else worth having in the world ... and I had youth, the transitory, the fugitive, now, completely and abundantly. Yet what was I going to do with it? Certainly not squander its gold on the commonplace quest for riches and respectability, and then secretly lament the price that had to be paid for these futile ideals. Let those who wish have their respectability—I wanted freedom, freedom to indulge in whatever caprice struck my fancy, freedom to search in the farthermost corners of the earth for the beautiful, the joyous and the romantic.

The romantic—that was what I wanted. I hungered for the romance of the sea, and foreign ports, and foreign smiles. I wanted to follow the prow of a ship, any ship, and sail away, perhaps to China, perhaps to Spain, perhaps to the South Sea Isles, there to do nothing all day long but lie on a surf-swept beach and fling monkeys at the coconuts.

I hungered for the romance of great mountains. From childhood I had dreamed of climbing Fujiyama and the Matterhorn, and had planned to charge Mount Olympus in order to visit the gods that dwelled there. I wanted to swim the Hellespont where Lord Byron swam, float down the Nile in a butterfly boat, make love to a pale Kashmiri maiden beside the Shalimar, dance to the castanets of Granada gipsies, commune in solitude with the moonlit Taj Mahal, hunt tigers in a Bengal jungle—try everything once. I wanted to realize my youth while I had it, and yield to temptation before increasing years and responsibilities robbed me of the courage.

June and graduation.... I was at liberty now to unleash the wild impulses within me, and follow wherever the devil led. Away went cap and gown; on went the overalls; and off to New York I danced, accompanied by roommate Irvine (whom I had persuaded with little difficulty to betray commerce for adventure), determined to put out to sea as a common ordinary seaman before the mast, to have a conscientious, deliberate fling at all the Romance I had dreamed about as I tramped alone beside Lake Carnegie in the May moonlight.

Our families, thinking it was travel we wanted, offered us a de luxe trip around the world as a graduation present. But we had gone abroad that way before, and now wanted something less prosaic. So we scorned the Olympic and, with only the proceeds from the sale of our dormitory room furnishings in our pockets, struck out to look for work on a freighter.

To break into the aristocracy of labor was by no means as easy as we had believed. Somewhat to our dismay we found that wafting Princeton Bachelor of Arts degrees under the noses of deck agents was not a very effective way of arousing their interest in our cause. In desperation Irvine and I attempted a new method of attack. We gave each other a “soup bowl” hair-cut, arrayed ourselves in green flannel shirts, and talking as salty as possible descended upon the captain of the Ipswich, a small cargo boat, with the story that this was the first time in twenty-one years we’d ever been on land. The skipper was a bit suspicious, but our hair-cuts saved the day. He “signed us on”—and may as well have since we had a peremptory letter in our pocket from the president of the shipping company instructing him to do so.

And so at last on a July morning as our little Ipswich sailed out of New York harbor for Hamburg I waved gratefully at Lady Liberty. But she did not notice me. She does not flirt with ordinary seamen.