Читать книгу Ploughman of the Moon - Robert William Service - Страница 7

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My memories of the Long Grey Town are sunshine memories. No doubt there were dark days but they left no impression. One remembers the good and forgets the evil. And my last summer there was notably radiant. I discovered a woodland glade, with a stretch of greensward and a spring bubbling up from a bed of water-cress. The Fairy Dell and the Magic Spring I christened them, and they became our favourite haunt. For Pat's benefit I spun a fantastic yarn about them. Fairies danced beneath the midnight moon and gnomes trooped under the trees, while the Magic Spring had gifts of healing for mind and body. But I had not bargained for Pat's Irish credulity. He swallowed all the stuff I made up and begged for more. I had been reading Grimm and Andersen, and it was easy to invent on similar lines. What was to me a game, he took seriously, so I tried to make my stories as credible as possible. It was flattering to find an older lad listening to me with such rapt attention, and judging from the quantities of the water he drank I suspect he believed in the virtues of the Magic Spring.

This was my discovery of my story-telling gift. It came so easily to me I was amazed other boys listened avidly. I never believed in fairy tales, but I could make others do so. While I talked with my tongue in my cheek, they hearkened goggle-eyed. Silly stuff, but if they liked it, it was all right with me.... But if I thought little of my gift of making up stories, I was rather perky about my reciting. Now in the Third Reader I enlarged my repertoire from its selections: On Linden when the sun was low ... The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold ... Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note ... Where dark as winter was the flow of Iser rolling25 rapidly ... Oh, how I loved the hackneyed lines and mouthed them mightily!

But always I returned to Burns. Apart from his being in a way a family connection, I felt a spiritual kinship with him. Sprawling on a grassy mound I would try to convince Pat that Burns was greater than Shakespeare. He liked the Anglicized verse, while I preferred the Doric. It was the tongue of our town and every word was vital. But I savoured him at his saltiest, and read with gusto about The Lass that made the bed for me, and the Louse in the lady's bonnet. I preferred humour to sentiment and liked it racy. Already I felt an urge to shock people. This with my contempt for fairies are traits in my character that revealed themselves early ...

One day, after I had spun an unusually convincing yarn, he surprised me by saying: "Ye ken, ye've got something I havna' got." I answered, thinking of his courage and his practical cleverness: "I'd give you all I've got for what you've got." And I meant it too. I admired him so, I would gladly have changed places with him. But one day he turned the tables on me and I ceased to be the dominant one.

He had returned from a visit to the city, where his father had taken him to the theatre to see Barry Sullivan, the red-haired Irish Hamlet. The play was King Richard Third, and Pat paced the sward ranting: "a horse, a horse, me kingdom for a horse." I thought it grand and was not surprised when he told me it was his intention to become an actor. He was ablaze with enthusiasm, particularly as one of our village boys had gone to America and won to fame as a Shakespearian player. Aunt Jeannie told me that my father had had a fight with this boy over a girl. His name was Robert Mantell.

Pat brought some paper-backed copies of the tragedies to the dell, and there we strutted and spouted. He made me take the female rôles, which did not over-please me; yet, while I did not understand much of what I read, I liked the sound of it. I rather think Pat had more enthusiasm than talent. However, he had listened to his father for so long he knew how to deliver blank verse. It must26 have been a quaint sight to see us two kids shouting and sawing the air in the green glade by the babbling spring.

Then one day my parents retrieved me, and I was spirited away to the city. I had no time to tell Pat, but I pictured him pacing the Dell, awaiting me to play Lady Macbeth to his Thane of Cawdor. I imagine he missed me miserably, just as I did him. For despite our differences we clicked marvellously. He was more sentimental than I and listened emotionally to those stories I told with my tongue in my cheek. I found I could play on his feelings, even hold him spellbound. This power excited me, inspiring me to more daring inventions. It was so easy. One idea led to another till the trouble was to curb myself. Yet, though it gave me a sense of superiority, I had nothing to be elated about. He had all the qualities that make for success. He was constructive, responsible, born to lead. I had none of these. Dreamer and fumbler, I was of the stuff of which failures are made.

I do not want to leap ahead in this history, but it seems fit I should tell of my next meeting with Pat. It was thirteen years later, when I had almost forgotten him.

It has often worried me, my faculty for forgetting people. I get so absorbed in the present, the past becomes vague and unreal. I do not mean to be ungrateful, but when I am separated from my friends a curtain drops between us, gradually blotting them out. So the memory of Pat faded, and the brightest chapter of my childhood became like a dream. The innocent boy that was I died in the Fairy Dell, and maybe his ghost haunts it to this day. Perhaps two boys died there and two ghosts stride the greensward, and the willows remember them, and the Spring babbles of their limpid joy ...

Well, it happened that I paid a farewell visit to my aunts before sailing on the Great Adventure. In the evening I took a walk to the Iron Works, for I loved to see the blast furnaces opened and the molten metal run out. I was returning by a row of sordid little houses when a voice hailed me. I stared at a tall young fellow, lounging in soiled clothes in a narrow doorway.27

"Don't you know me? I'm Pat Dougan." I had a sense of shock, but I was pleased to see him again.

"Well, well," I said, "this is a surprise. After all these years.... We're no longer kids."

"No, I'm married. Have a kid of my own. Another on the way."

I felt sorry for him. He was only twenty-three. Oh, how glad I was to be free! He must have sensed my feeling, for he went on bitterly: "Yes, I'm in a trap, done for. Not that I should complain. The wife's a good lass, and I suppose I'm lucky; but God! how I wish I'd run off to be a sodjer." There seemed to be nothing I could say, so I silently took stock of him. He was well-knit and nicely proportioned. I imagined he was solid muscle yet quick withal. "You look fine," I said.

"Oh, yes, I'm fighting fit. I'm a bricklayer's helper. Carrying a hod up a ladder develops every muscle you've got. But to think of the days when Father used to read Shakespeare and I wanted to be an actor! And here I am a hodman, with no chance to be better."

"Don't say that. A fellow has to make his chance. I'm going to risk mine in America."

"Wish I could go along with you."

"Well, when I get there I'll see if there's a good field for you."

His eyes lit up with hope and he gripped my hand. "That's a go. Maybe we'll string along yet. Oh, I'll never forget the old days. You know, I sometimes go back to the Spring and think of the times we had. Remember you wanted to write?"

"Maybe I'll try my hand at it yet."

"Good luck to you. But I'll never be an actor. Shadows we are and shadows we pursue ... Remember how Father used to roll out those lines?"

"Indeed I do.... Is he well?"

"Dead. Some years ago. Lost his voice coughing soot. It broke his heart he could no longer spout Shakespeare.... Well, come on ben; the wife will make you a cup o' tea."

The single room was bare of ornament, yet a good fire blazed, for coal was cheap. A bairn cried in a cot and a little woman rose from soothing it. She would have been slight but she was heavy with28 another. She was pretty in a frail way, with a bunch of bright hair. She looked at me curiously as she poured tea though she said nothing. However, Pat gave her little chance. He talked as if my coming had roused him from despair. I could see hope kindling in his eyes. His wife looked at him with pathetic anxiety. She made a sympathetic appeal to me and I felt sure he would never do anything to hurt her.

"Remember to write," he said. "You're going to a grand country where a man's got a chance to find his own level. It's a Godsend you dropped by. Somehow I feel the luck's going to turn. Well, I'll do my damnedest to make it. So long, old boy...."

As I walked home I felt depressed. Here was I, free, with all the promise of the future, and he going back to his sordid home and his hod. And I thought of his father.... "Wasted lives!" I sighed. "Oh, there are so many like that. They never get a chance." Then I thought of his little wife, and a light flashed in my mind. No wonder she looked at me in that peculiar way. I recognized her now. It was Nellie Purdie, the girl I had championed in the schoolroom.