Читать книгу The Station - Robert Byron - Страница 4

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Letters from foreign countries arrive in the afternoon. Each envelope advertises a break in the monotony of days; each reveals on penetration only one more facet of a standard world. But latterly another kind has come, strangely addressed, stranger still within. "We learn," runs one, "that you are safely returned to your own glorious country and are already in the midst of your dearest ones, enjoying the best of health...PS.—We have experienced no cold this year hitherto." "I am proud," says another, "that the all-bountiful God has allowed us to see you again...May he guard you from all evil, world without end. Send me from England ten metres of black stuff that I may make a gown." As the unfamiliar hieroglyphics resolve, memory evokes the senders, their fellows, and the weeks of their company. Till the whole excursion into their impalpable world stands defined as the limits of a sleep. But the experience, being personal, is framed in a larger retrospect. The colour of their environment lives by contrast with my own. Without that measure, its romance fades away.

Conveniently, as it happens, the period previous to this particular adventure from the earth falls within a year. It is precisely a period; because September witnessed my departure from a latitude whither, in the August following, I was to return. On the home journey we travelled from Constantinople; up the Black Sea by Rumanian boat to Constanza; from there to Bucharest; and on to Vienna, where an industrial exhibition, housed in three buildings each larger than the Albert Hall, consisted wholly of saucepans. There followed a few days in Paris. And so back to England, to a garden of Michaelmas daisies; with the bracken turning to gold, and thin blue columns of smoke filling the air with the scent of burning leaves. Cubbing had begun, disclosing those unknown hours when the dew sparkles thick in the hazy light and the trees and plants are twice alive. Ultimately the middle of November brought an upper floor in London, connected, despite the proximity of the Marylebone Road, with that zenith of residential snobbery, the Mayfair telephone exchange.

The house in which body and soul were now enshrouded was kept by Mrs. Byrne, an Irish Catholic. The upper floor had formerly been tenanted by a dotard, to whose tappings and ravings came responses in kind from an incurable ex-officer next door. But his death had coincided with my return to England. And, needing a room, I was immediately ensconced upon the bed which for six years had quaked beneath the struggles of the demented.

The other tenants, as they arrived, proved not less distinctive than he who had departed. Above, the Misses Jimmie led lives of mouse-like though sinister seclusion. While below, a Mademoiselle Péron, having a pale face and flamboyant hair, spent such hours as could be spared from the drama, in pacing the hall, sparsely wrapped in soiled cretonne. Her pom was the permanent inmate of this oil-clothed passage, where the air hung thick with kitchen whiffs and the odour of collected dust. To the intermediate and "drawing-room" floor she introduced a tenant of her own, an attaché at one of the Balkan legations. The common staircase thus became a channel of turbulent domesticity which spared its other patrons no embarrassment.

Outside, the fogs rolled up to stay and the organ-grinders gathered. Through the former only the blurred yellow stars of answering electric lights proclaimed the street's other wall. Of the latter there were often two, equidistant, mingling crises of discord with their own intrinsic melancholy. On alternate afternoons came an old man with bowler hat and concertina, whose répertoire, constant through nine months, started with a Highland jig, and, continuing with "The Lakes of Killarney" and "The British Grenadiers," ended on "God Save the King." Meals, other than a greasy breakfast, were to be had near by at a pleasant, economical restaurant, frequented, as I discovered, by people who did not wish to be seen. Since I myself, being inevitably tired and dishevelled, was in a like case, the annoyance was mutual. Later on, the clientele became uncomfortably swollen owing to the misadventure of one of the waiters' wives, whose dismembered person was discovered in a trunk. She had already forsaken her husband; in which example I had followed her on account of his persistence in speaking Italian. It was noticeable that the queue of cars outside the doors of the establishment was transformed by this circumstance from the £400 to the £800 class.

Christmas set in early. The small shops sported tinsel and stockings; the large, elaborate tableaux, ugly fancy dresses, and bazaars in cotton wool grottoes. In the country, hunt balls began. Staying in a house for one of them, I found myself alone at breakfast with a man whom I had previously insulted in print under the impression he was someone else. I explained this, and then, since the rest of the party elected to remain in bed till lunch, we discussed the army and Parliament as alternative careers. Being a soldier, he maintained that the former offered wider scope. At home we enjoyed our own ebullient function, attended by flutterings on behalf of the master's wife, whose official patronage had not been requested. Apart from the peculiar pasts of those who control them, the local packs of hounds are distinguished for hunting over country which contains a larger percentage of wire than any known area outside New Zealand. This, however, does not save them from focusing to themselves those latent social aspirations and malignities which are investing English country life with an artificiality comparable to that of London, and less excusable. It seems there are only a few who still comprehend the spirit of the countryside and the unconscious details that compose it: the trees and hedges closing to eternal forest in the blue distance; the whistle of a train down the wind; shadows of clouds running atilt the fields; the riders on the crest of a hill where a clump of beeches and a tussocky rampart of prehistory stand between them and the sky; the stripes of a new-ploughed field glinting in the leaden dusk of winter sunsets; the reins slipping through sodden gloves; and at last that elusive shiver, common to all countries, of the arriving night. The perception of such, of the happiness they give, is waning. It is the point-to-point that clamours on the morrow. Bookmakers and fish and chips; snuffling tents; champagne picnics; tweed skirt and plus four; shooting-stick and glasses; the altitude of behaviour in a cutting wind. Better take a walk up the back drive.

In London again, the New Year opened. Resentfully its first nondescript months allowed the days to lengthen. Birds twittered in the adjoining square. A dozen daffodils stood above the gas-stove. It was imperative to seek the country.

Having in past years reached Ireland from Holyhead, the call of the unknown and the saving of 4s. 6d. now involved a night journey to Fishguard. The sea was calm; the train beyond, ramshackle and unreal, empty. Slowly we wound up the coast, the gulls crying unhappily over the sedges and sad, peaty hills stretching mysteriously inland. The fields, uneven and gorse-grown, seemed shrunk between their banks. A salt wind blew cold through the window. To one released from the turbid interiors of London these details obtruded themselves. At length the station was reached; a drive, a bath, and breakfast.

The sun shone, and all varieties of rhododendrons—huge clumps, single bushes, and cone-shaped, broad-leaved trees from the Himalayas—blazed their permutations of red, white, and purple. Tree ferns drooped; aloes poised grey armouries above the lawns; butterflies embarked on tentative flights. The house, of fabricated stone, sparkled like a porcupine of Gothic quills within its wooded cup. Beneath the trees, anemones and violets fought the moss. Primroses were on the banks; wild strawberry flowers between the brambles in the clearings. The sun lay hot on the face of the hill, calling the scents of the earth and its buds. Below, the tree-tops fell down to a river, which reappeared on the horizon to meet the sea. Here lay the town, Catholic cupola and Protestant spire distinguishable, with a many-arched bridge at the mouth and ships at anchor within the mole. Sometimes we motored; but to such objectives as a spit of sand, or a mountain where gold was found. At the foot of the latter the chauffeur uttered warning that those who ascended never returned. Throughout the afternoon we persisted, plodding from each promised summit to its superior, till there lay beneath us an enormous tract of land, turbulent and irregular, without habitation or cultivation, where five years ago the rebels killed any man who ventured. In the distance the hills rose to mountains again. Over them a storm was in progress. The colour of the land, of the sodden heather and soft brown virgin turf, had risen to the sky. There was a brown in the clouds; a brown in the gold of the misty rays that pierced them; a brown in the battle of the wind. Might the chauffeur, perhaps, have been right?

From here, after a day of poignant gloom in Dublin, I travelled west. The first house had been historically an abbey, displaying the form of such in every crocket of its eighteenth century exterior. The second was no less a castle. In the back parts the marks of Cromwell's cannon balls might still be seen. The nineteenth century, however, had witnessed a reversion to more chivalrous methods of defence. Each bedroom had been slitted anew with openings for the cross-bow; each archway punctured for the engulfing of unwanted guests in boiling oil. The garden, too, was peculiar in that not only was it extensively and emotionally romantic, but was impregnated in addition with the excited phantasy of the early Victorian engineer. The lake, instead of nestling, as lakes are wont, in a hollow, hung suspended on a platform. Separate streams, whose mingling waters might have been the delight of poets, were carried one above the other. A miniature suspension bridge, long-previous prototype of Menai and Clifton, spanned elsewhere the pellucid brook, riven immediately beneath to spume and roar in imitation of the lately discovered Zambezi. Fringed by bamboo, narcissi and grape hyacinths flowered in the grass.

It was now my intention to proceed to the north of Scotland. Yet another valued fraction of life's little day was mouldered in the Free State capital.[*] At six o'clock I boarded a steamer lying forlornly in the Liffey. And, after a strange meal of tongue and khaki pickles, at which the other passengers drank tea, I slept in solitary peace till awakened by the steward's announcing the banks of the Clyde. Only he whose reason has survived it, can grasp the implication of a Glasgow Sunday. To obtain a glass of beer it was necessary to affirm on paper my bona fides as a traveller and order a hot omelette. Late in the afternoon of the following day I arrived in the Highlands, having taken sixty hours to accomplish a single journey in the British Isles.

[* Travellers are advised to take consolation in a pink wax bust of Queen Victoria, with tow hair and glass teeth, exhibited on the ground floor of the Art Gallery.]

The colour of Scotland was the antithesis of Ireland, a liquid silvery light deepening the purple mountains to damson and the cold green of pines and firs to an equal tone. Snow lay still along the summit of the Cairngorms. Over the heather the curlews wailed and the grouse called, "Go back, go back." On top of the hills, blue hares scurried in and out of the clouds. A pink granite obelisk commemorating King Edward's coronation also emerged, strangely urban at the height of 3,000 feet. At times we fished, struggling waist-deep in a current that was taking daily toll of similar invaders. To those who have not previously wielded a salmon rod in a gale, the experience is a memorable one. Only, however, when a third suit had been torn from my back by the flies' preference of tweed to fish, did I retire indoors, to spend the remaining days in a dinner-jacket.

Once more I returned to London—to find my sitting-room transformed, in the exuberance of Mrs. Byrne's good heart, from dull mustardy yellow to vociferous canary. With May and the coming of summer a new complexion overspread the routine of days. Pansies and bachelor's buttons twinkled in shallow boxes outside the greengrocer's shop on the way to the restaurant. Sunbeams crashed into the lumber-rooms of the dealers, bringing new life to furnishings not old enough to be antique. The paving-stones were hot; the shop-fronts let down sunblinds; from the road came the smell of basking tar and the fumes of exhausts. And when, having worked till half-past seven, the hour called to chase the gossamers of organised pleasure, there was a new thrill in thrusting the naked bosom of a stiff shirt upon the undarkened summer evening. The days, aided by the Government, had succeeded after all. Pale green feathered the tree-tops in the square. Railings and front doors bore the laconic boards of decorators. Enormous cars bowled through the streets. It was the Season, unanimously acclaimed, with the eternal optimism of the Press, as the most brilliant since the war. Débutantes were photographed; their idiosyncrasies, pet lizards and back hairs, noted. In the provinces, tired huzzifs consumed the details of their waistlines. In London they seemed frousled and uncouth, either speechless or prisoned in the opposite extreme of chatter.

An analysis of those metropolitan activities which provide the newspapers' dessert must infringe the moral copyright of too large a body of publicists to be attempted. To me, successive evenings seemed each a compartment; band of ballroom, gramophone of attic; each a dungeon of stereotyped outlook; one and all attuned to the quality of the buffet. A face, a charm, might salve the wreckage of the night; both probably were otherwise employed. Sometimes the compartments opened into one another, and the party succeeded and became an entertainment. Old ladies found vodka in the lemon squash, young ones men whose knowledge of the fox was hatred. Princesses ate free food that others might honour them with ribbons and stars. The joined of God came together, though the judge had put them asunder. Such occasions were rare. But each reinforced hope eternal of the next. At the brink of all yawned that festal pit, the night-club. Formerly, in those sparse hours snatched from the cold years of education, what ecstasy had filled these temples of illicit bibbing. Now, crouched over the spine of an eighteen-shilling kipper, the glamour had departed. And there was the morning to be faced, punctual and sane. Truly, my sympathies are with the law. Why, then, break it?

At each week-end, each attainment of a garden, the plants had jumped; some were out, others were dead; there was none of the customary imperceptible procession. From home I brought boughs of light green beech, which caught the children's eyes to the taxi roof, and embowered the room from floor to ceiling with the freshness of a summer rain. Later came rhododendron and azalea. So the days lengthened and began to shrink again, till the eve of that incalculable moment, the eclipse.

My imagination had been fired. People whispered of a great black shadow that should come rushing over land and sea, trillions of miles to the minute. It was, they said, a sight that Englishmen had not witnessed for two centuries, and would not for another one. We should tell our grandchildren. Determining to tell mine, I telephoned to the owner of a car. At half-past seven in the evening we left London for the north.

It was ten o'clock when we reached Stamford. Stopping at the hotel for a slice of ham, we encountered an inebriate cleric, who, being a guest and therefore able to obtain it after hours, stood us a whisky each. More, he regaled our meal with tales of his youth; informed us, â propos his prowess at the butts, that he had been a "bogshootah at Caembridge in the year umptah"; and made much of the fact that in his parish the public-house was kept by the sacristan's sister, whose respect for the Church permitted her to take liberties with the law—one advantage at least of his profession. He, also, then decided to accompany us to the eclipse; but became disengaged from the dashboard where he was travelling, half-way down the High Street. Cheered by this jovial offspring of a sombre calling, we proceeded to Doncaster. There, in the small hours of the morning, we fell in behind the rest of England.

It was as though the Germans had landed in the South. Through the night, headlight to tail, a continuous queue of cars rushed feverishly towards the Orkneys; cheap cars, sports cars, limousines; bicycles, motor and push; every variety of wheeled automaton, directed by every variety of human being, blazing searchlights, flickering wicks, came tearing in pursuit of this astronomical phenomenon. By the road meals were cooking, bodies sleeping, tents encamped, motors overturned. Haggard policemen waved at corners. In the Yorkshire villages, the cottagers stood at lighted doors; hotel-keepers beckoned; garage proprietors thanked God. Viewed from a hill-top, the stream hummed back into the dark, mile upon mile, like a vast illuminated snake. The first glimmer filtered up from the Antipodes. We had motored from day to day. Then the lights of Richmond twinkled in the void. With the rest of the world, we took to our feet.

Lit by gas flares, we bore with the crowd to the appointed wold. Only Epsom has witnessed such a scene; and that by day. Beshawled matrons sold rasping tea with sandwiches that no mouth could encompass. Boys make jokes. Flappers shrieked. Hawkers bawled the menace of the corona and the efficacy of smoked celluloid to preserve the sight. Over the cold, sopping grass we trudged. A girls' school chattered hysterically on a wall; a widow stood apart, tense with the weaving of a mystic spell. It was light. Out of space hailed a friend who had motored with aged mother since tea-time yesterday, and was this moment arrived. It was lighter. We waited. We talked. Then the minute of the eclipse began. Half the hour passed in hopeless commonplace. At length a kind of scenic effect was set in motion. With a series of jerks the visibility changed. The cows galloped hither and thither in troubled herds. The crowd breathed, hallooed, and was silent. The jerks became quicker; women gulped; parsons expired. Till suddenly a deep blue veil swept over the country and slowly lifted.

Hurrying down, we breakfasted at York and continued, stupid with sleep, to a neighbouring house for lunch. There my companion collapsed. I returned by train.

It was July. Parties had become freakish. Night upon night Mrs. Byrne stitched me into a new variation on the theme of a pirate king. Nor was there any symptom of cessation. None the less, nerves frayed and bank impatient, I decided to exchange the husks of the swine for more solid comfort. The rooms were re-let. I packed my chattels into boxes and trunks, suit-cases, cloths, and crates. And, with nineteen shillings' extra luggage crowded on the taxi, I bade Mrs. Byrne good-bye as she barred the egress of Mademoiselle Péron's pom upon the doorstep. There followed a month of peace at home amid the sweet soporific of phloxes, peace such that no single event has remained to chart it. Till the last days of preparation and purchase were come.

For through all this English year, a varied complement of days but coloured with the thread of a discontent, the sunlit image of a mountain had shone like the star to the wise men. It was arranged, throughout, that I should return; that I should assume, if only temporarily, my own enterprise in a world of arid sequences. In dejection the image had called hope. In presumption, rapture. Now it was at hand. Content stretched illimitable.