Читать книгу The Pretender - Robert William Service - Страница 12
ОглавлениеA BOTTLE OF INK
The disadvantage of persistent globe-trotting is that it makes the world so deplorably provincial. With familiarity the glamour of the far and strange is swept away, till at last there is nothing left to startle and delight. Better, indeed, to leave shrines unvisited and shores unsought; then may we still hold them fondly under the domination of dream.
Much had I read of the lure of London, of its hold upon the heart; but to the end I entirely failed to realise its charm. To me in those grim December days it always remained the City of Grime and Gloom, so that I ultimately left it the poorer by a score of lost illusions.
Drawing near the Great Grey City—how I had looked forward to this moment as, alert to every impression, I stared from the window of the train! Yet at its very threshold I shrank appalled. Could I believe my eyes? There confronting me was street after street of tiny houses all built in the same way. Nay, I do not exaggerate. They were as alike as ninepins, dirty, drab cubes, each with the same oblong of sordid back-yard, the same fringe of abortive front garden. Oh what a welter of architectural crime! Could it be wondered at that the bricks of which they were composed seemed to blush with shame?
Then the roofs closed in till they formed a veritable plain, on which regiments of chimneys seemed to stand at attention amid saffron fog. Then great, gloomy corrugations, down which I could see ant-like armies moving hither and thither: then an arrest in a place of steam and smoke and skurrying and shouting: Charing Cross Station.
How it was spitefully cold! Autos squattered through the tar-black mud. A fine drizzle of rain was falling, yet save myself no one seemed to mind it—so cheery and comfortable seemed those red-faced Islanders in their City of Soot. Soot, at that moment, was to me all-dominant. Eagerly it overlaid the buildings of brick; joyfully it grimed those of stone. It swathed the monuments, and it achieved on the churches daring effects in black and grey. After all, it had undoubted artistic value. Then a smudge of it settled on my nose, and with every breath I seemed to inhale it. Finally a skittish motor bus bespattered me with that tar-like mud and I felt dirtier than ever.
But what amount of drizzle could damp my romantic ardour as suitcase in hand I stood in Trafalgar Square? Here was another occasion for that sentimental reverie which was my specialty, so I began:
"Alone in London, in the seething centre of its canorous immensity. Around me swirl the swift, incurious crowds. Oh, City of a million sorrows! here do I come to thee poor, friendless, unknown, yet oh! so rich in hope. Shall I then knock at thy countless doors in vain? Shall I then—"
A sneeze interrupted me at this point. It is hard to sneeze and be sentimental; besides, I recognised in the words I had just spoken those I had put into the mouth of Harold Cleaveshaw, hero of my novel, The Handicap. But then Harold had posed in the centre of Madison Square and addressed his remarks to the Flatiron Building, while I was addressing the Nelson Monument and a fountain whose water seemed saturated with soot.
Do not think the moment was wasted, however. Far from it. The likeness suggested an article comparing the two cities. For instance: New York, a concretion; London, an accretion; New York, an uplift; London, an outspread; New York, blatant; London, smug; New York, a city on tiptoe, raw, bright, wind-besomed; London, the nightmare of a dyspeptic chimney-sweep; New York, a city born, organic, spontaneous; London, an accident, a patchwork, a piecing on; and so on.
Pondering these and other points of contrast, I wandered up Charing Cross Road into Oxford Street. In a bookshop I saw, with a curious feeling of detachment, a sixpenny edition of my novel, The Red Corpuscle. Somehow at that moment I could scarcely associate myself with it. So absorbed was I becoming in my new part that the previous one was already unreal to me. I took up the book with positive dislike, and was turning it over when an officious shop-boy suggested:
"Don't you want to read it, mister?"
"Heaven forbid!" I replied; "I wrote it."
He sniffed, as much as to say, "Think you're smart, don't you?"
Up Southampton Row I chanced, and in a little street off Tavistock Square I found a temporary home. A cat sleeping on a window-sill suggested Peace, and a donkey-cart piled high with cabbages pointed to Plenty. But as cabbages do not find favour in the tyrannical laboratory of my digestion, I vetoed Mrs. Switcher's proposal that I take dinner in the house. However, I ordered ham and eggs every morning, with an alternative of haddock or sausage and bacon.
These matters settled, I found myself the tenant of a fourth-floor front in a flat brick building of triumphant ugliness. I could see a melancholy angle of the square, some soot-smeared trees stretching in inky tentacles to a sullen sky, a soggy garden that seemed steeped in despairing contemplation of its own unworthiness.
For Mrs. Switcher, my landlady, I conceived an enthusiastic dislike. A sour, grinding woman who reminded me of a meat-axe, I christened her Rain-in-the-Face in further resemblance of a celebrated Indian Chief. But if I found in her no source of a sympathetic inspiration, in the near-by Reading-room of the British Museum there certainly was. In that studious calm, under battalions of books secure in their circles of immortality, I was profoundly happy. Often I would pause to study those about me, the spectacled men, the literary hack with the shiny coat-sleeve of the Reading-room habitué, the women whose bilious complexions and poky skirts suggested the league of desperate spinsterhood.
A thousand ghosts haunted that great dome. It was a mosaic of faces of dead and gone authors, wistfully watching to see if you would read their books. And if you did, how they hovered down from the greyness and smiled sweetly on you; other ghosts there were too, ghosts of the famous ones who had bent over these very benches, who had delved into that mine of thought just as I was delving. Here they had toiled and triumphed, even as I would toil and triumph. Spurred and exalted, under that great dome where the only sound seemed to be the whirr of busy brains, I spent hours of rarest rapture.
To the solitary the spirits whisper. Ideas came to me at this time in a bewildering swarm, and often I regretted some fancy lost, some subtlety unset to words. So by book-browsing, by curious roaming, by brooding thought, my mental life extended its horizons. Yet knowing no one, speaking to no one, living so much within myself, each day became more dreamlike and unreal. There were times when I almost doubted my own identity, times when, if you had assured me I was John Smith, I would have been inclined to agree with you.
With positive joy I watched my money filter away. "Good!" I reflected. "I shall soon be penniless, reduced to eating stale crusts and sleeping on the iron benches of the Embankment. Who can divine the dazzling possibilities of vicissitude? All my life I have battled with prosperity; now, at last, I shall achieve adversity. I will descend the ladder of success. I will rub shoulders with Destitution. I may even be introduced to Brother Despair."
Enthusiasm glowed in me at the thought, and absorbed in those ambitious dreams I cried: "Thank God for life's depths, that we may have the glory of outclimbing them."
And here be it said, we make a mistake when we pity the poor. It is the rich we should pity, those who have never known the joy of poverty, the ecstasy of squeezing the dollar to the last cent. How good the plain fare looks to our hunger! How sweet the rest after toil! How exciting the uncertainty of the next day's supper! How glorious the unexpected windfall of a few coppers! Was ever nectar so exquisite as that cup of coffee quaffed at the stall on the Embankment after a night spent on those excruciating benches? Never to have been desperately poor—ah! that is never to have lived.
My shibboleth at this time was a large bottle of ink which I bought and placed on my mantelpiece. Through a haze of cigarette smoke I would address it whimsically:
"Oh, exquisite fluid, what magic words are hidden in thine ebon heart! What lover's raptures and what gems of thought! Let others turn to dusty ledgers your celestial stream, to bills of lading and to dull notarial deeds; to me you are the poet's dream, the freaksome fancy of the essayist, the stuff that shapes itself in precious prose. In you, oh most divine elixir, fame and fortune are dissolved. In you, enchanted liquid, strange stories simmer, and bright humour bubbles up. Oh, magical bottle, of whom I will make life and light, gold and jewels, laughter and tears, thrill to your dusky heart with the sense of immortality!"
It was while surveying the garbage heap in the rear of Mrs. Switcher's premises that there came to me the idea of a short story, to be called The Microbe.
Through reading an article in a magazine Mr. Perkins, a middle-aged clerk in a dry-salter's warehouse, becomes interested in the Germ Theory. Half-contemptuous at first, he begins to make a study of it, and soon is quite fascinated. Being of a high-strung, imaginative nature, the thing gets on his nerves, and he begins to think germs, to dream germs, to dread germs every moment of his life. He fears them in the air he breathes, in the food he eats, even on the library books that tell him all about them.
Mr. Perkins becomes obsessed. He refuses to kiss the somewhat overblown rose of his affections, to enter a train, an omnibus, a theatre. He analyses his food, sterilises his water, disinfects his room daily, till his landlady gives him notice. Finally he can no longer breathe the air of a microbe-infected office, and he resigns the situation he has held for twenty years to become a tramp. Yet even here, in the wind on the heath, on the hill's top, by the yeasty sea, there is no peace for him. He broods, he fasts, he becomes a monomaniac. Then he thinks of the germs in his own body, of the good microbes and the naughty microbes fighting their vendetta from birth to death, his very blood their battleground.
No longer can he bear it. He realises the impossibility of escape. He himself is a little world, a civil war of microbes. How he hates them! Yet there remains to him his revenge. Ha! Ha! He has the power to destroy that world. So beggared, broken, desperate, he returns to London, and with a wild shriek of joy he throws himself from the Tower Bridge.
Yea, even in the end he has been destroyed by a microbe, the most deadly of all, the terrible Microbe called Fear.
One morning, dreamily incubating my story, I happened to glance out of my window. I was gazing absently on my corner of the lugubrious square when a little figure of a girl came into view. She wore a grey mantle, and her face was like a splash of white. Walking with a quick, determined step, in a moment she had disappeared.
In about five minutes I happened to look up again. There was the same slim figure rounding the corner, to again disappear.
"Something automatic about this," I said; "it's getting interesting." So, taking out my watch, I judged the time, and in another five minutes I looked up. Yes, there was my girl in grey walking with the same purposeful stride.
"This is getting monotonous," I observed, after I had seen her appear and disappear a few more times. "Such persistent pedestrianism destroys my powers of concentration. Let me then sally forth and see what this mysterious young female is celebrating. Perhaps if I stare at her hard enough she will choose either Russell or Bloomsbury Square for her constitutional, and not distract a poor, hard-working story-grinder at his labours."
But when I got outside I found she had gone, so I decided to seek my beloved Reading Room and look up some articles on microbes.
