Читать книгу Lord Alistair's Rebellion - Upward Allen - Страница 3

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Night clad the imperial city in a black robe stitched with fire.

The misty river rolled in from the sea through its illuminated bridges with the subdued swish of some great snake writhing its way through hoops of gold.

Out in the fog-haunted region between the bridges the movement of the red and green-eyed steam-tugs, clutching invisible barges and dragging them away into the darkness, seemed like a shadow-show in which grotesque demons were hunting the souls of men.

The two banks of the river offered a contrast full of significance.

Along the left bank white lamps that slit the dusk with the hard, bright glare of diamonds were strung like beads at measured spaces apart. A broad, smooth-paven road rattled with the wheels of traffic, and the long bend of the river revealed a sweep of stately buildings representing the power and splendour of a great civilization.

Education, law, science, government, police, had their homes side by side along that mighty façade, which thus became an entablature on which the characters of civilization were legibly impressed. Beside the ancient universities of the law stood the headquarters of the vast machinery for the teaching of the populace—that is to say, for the taming of successive generations of barbarians. The power of wealth was expressed in luxurious hotels and club-houses, in the mansion of the noble and the estate-office of the millionaire. The revenues of empire flowed in and out through the gates of one majestic pile; from another the guardians of the social order waged war against the restless ranks of crime. Last in place towered the huge palace of the imperial Legislature, supreme over all.

Across the river the low mass of the southern shore lay in obscurity. All that could be distinguished over there was a dark roof-line broken by a few tall, smokeless chimneys, rising above the water like the walls and towers of a beleaguered city encompassed by its moat. The solitary illumination on that side of the river was afforded by a high square building which broke the gloom from instant to instant with huge letters of yellow fire, spelling out uncouth, barbaric syllables in what might have been the jargon of some subterranean race of men. Seen across the river mist the tower flared out like those burning mosques beheld from afar by the voyager in the Underworld as he drew near to the city of Dis.

All night the square, ugly minaret continued to flash its monstrous hieroglyphs upon the darkness, as though the dwellers on the southern shore were signalling a message from their camp. And from time to time, when the rattle of the wheels on the hither side stayed for a moment, there was borne across the water the low, sullen hum as of a vast multitude swarming in the narrow streets and stunted houses of the hidden region beyond.

Thus the two banks of the river faced each other with something of a mutual threat.

On one side of the gulf, that low, sombre roof-line with its fitful torch-fires; on the other side, the broad illuminated rampart of civilization, crowned by its imperial keep.

A light more brilliant than the rest streamed from the summit of the ponderous clock-tower that guards the foot of Westminster Bridge.

This was the answering signal of the northern shore to that sullen camp across the river. It burned there to proclaim that the sovereign power of empire was at work beneath, judging over five hundred millions of men, and two and a half continents. All the forces of the mightiest society the world has yet beheld were focused here in the High Court of Parliament, the Board of the Anglo-Roman Raj.

Here the decrees were shaped in obedience to which invincible fleets crossed the ocean; armies were transported from one hemisphere to the conquest of another; kings were dethroned in Africa and other kings were crowned in Asia; warlike republics were extinguished under the Southern Pole, and tottering dynasties propped up in the shadow of the Himalayas; whole races of men, speaking strange tongues, and reckoning time by other constellations, had their laws and manners and religions changed for them; immemorial savagery was thrust into the forcing-house of civilization, and immemorial civilizations were rooted up; from this centre the hardy freemen of the Baltic North spread the ancient Mediterranean culture and Semitic folklore wherever the Raj extended round the globe.

Here throbbed the great piston-rod which drove the myriad wheels of government and slowly stamped deeper age after age the same Roman-Semitic imprint upon the subjugated populace at home.

Night after night, as the dwellers on the southern shore gazed across at the majestic citadel of the Raj, they saw that beacon burning, the symbol of the unresting watchfulness of their rulers against the assaults of foes within and without. That steady flame shone out defiance alike to the foreign invader and the traitor within the gates; to the rebels who scoured the African veldt, and the more dangerous rebels who skulked through the streets and alleys of the imperial capital. On all alike, on the encroaching Tsar as on the plotting Maharajah, on far-off savages and on felons crouching at the gates, the Genius of the Raj was seen to keep its never-closing eye.

More than a mile away, round the curving bank of the river, where the warehouses of Mammon clustered thickly round the temple of Jehovah, there rose another Symbol, invisible in the night, soaring high above the intervening territory of squalor.

This Symbol was intended to represent a Roman gibbet, the gibbet on which a Redeemer had been put to death two thousand years ago, in a remote corner of that ancient Mediterranean realm of which this modern civilization was heir.

In the night these two Symbols confronted each other, the Flame and the Cross, as though they were the warring ensigns of Ahura-Mazda, the Spirit of Light, and Anru-Mainya, the Spirit of Darkness.

On the midmost arch of Westminster Bridge a young man stood alone, leaning over the parapet, and sounding with his eyes the black depth of the water below.

His whole air and appearance were out of harmony with the spot where he found himself, and suggested that he must have strayed there from some gayer quarter of the town. An opera hat was thrust back on his head, and a silk-lined overcoat, thrown open in front, allowed his waistcoat, of white satin, to become soiled by contact with the grime of the bridge. He held a cane of rich and fanciful design in one hand; the other hand, resting loosely on the ironwork of the balustrade, showed more than one curious and valuable ring.

He leaned on the bridge dully, his head drooping as though he were tired. Although his face was that of a man not yet thirty years of age, it bore marks which showed that he had lived too eagerly, without heed to life’s immitigable laws. Already the forehead was crossed with faint lines, though there was no thinning of the black hair that curled above. The beauty of the face was marred by the flush of intemperance, and the sensuous underlip contradicted the refinement of the sensitive nostrils. The dark, restless eyes and delicate chin completed the impression of passion and weakness which was left by the whole face.

On the pavement of St. James’s such a figure would have seemed at home. Seen where it was, like a tropical bird blown ashore on some bleaker landscape, it provoked the curiosity of the passers-by.

Some of them took offence at the unusual sight. A group of roughs returning from some haunt of vice on the north side to their dens across the river eyed the well-dressed loiterer with envious contempt, and tried to hustle him as they went by. Their leader, a hulking Irishman, encouraged them in a coarse speech, which still breathed faintly of the sea-scented glens of Connemara.

Something in the voice or in the words startled the lounger. He turned his head quickly, and gave the ruffian a questioning look, under which he slunk to one side, and passed on with his friends. In the dark streets where their homes lay they might not have been abashed so easily. But their courage for violence ebbed on the well-lighted bridge. Few crimes are committed at high noon.

A policeman sauntering on to the bridge shortly afterwards caught sight of the stranger, and seemed to become interested in his doings. Instead of pursuing his way when he had reached the farther end of the bridge, the officer halted, and stood about on the pavement by St. Thomas’s Hospital, keeping his eyes fixed on the figure that overhung the balustrade so persistently.

Two shop-boys coming along in their turn had their sense of humour tickled by the young man’s forlorn attitude. One of them gave vent to a ribald jest.

“Look,” he said aloud to his comrade, “there’s Jesus Christ.”

So closely wrapped in his own thoughts was the lounger that it was many seconds after they had been uttered before the words succeeded in penetrating to his consciousness. The last sound of the youths’ trampling feet had died away at the end of the bridge before he woke up sufficiently to ask himself with a resentful air: “What made him say that?”

He found himself unable to dismiss the jeer from his mind, in which it went on echoing with such tormenting insistence that at last he stood up and shook himself, unconsciously making a physical effort to change the pattern in the brain’s kaleidoscope.

But the suggestion which so irritated him was not to be got rid of in that fashion. It chimed in too well with the whole tenor of his meditation since he had found his way on to the bridge. The half-formed questions which had been baffling his attempts to give them definite shape now all at once began to come together and settle down into one question, precipitated, as it were, by that profane mockery.

“Why,” he reflected, with a growing sense of anger at the comparison—“why did he call me that?”

It was not because he attributed any serious intention to the jester that he argued thus with himself. He was in that mood when everything around us appears mysterious and fraught with some revelation to which we only need a key. The words of the shop-boy became for him a hint from the night itself, like the cryptic utterances of the characters in a play of Maeterlinck’s.

“What likeness is there between Christ and me?” he went on, putting the problem before himself more distinctly.

What likeness, indeed, between this spoilt child of civilization, to whom the world seemed to have given of its best, for whom Christianity could be no more than a legend, and that buffeted Redeemer hanging on his gibbet in the Syrian sun of two thousand years ago?

And yet an insult cannot rankle unless it is barbed with truth. From the inner cells of memory, where they had been stored up in past days by a religious mother, certain words and phrases were already coming forth, as though moved by some subtle affinity, to answer that uncomfortable question.

Despised and rejected of men—they ran something like that. And again: Stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. There were other words which should have followed, surely, but he tried in vain to draw them forth.

Despised and rejected of men. The flush darkened on the young man’s cheek as he flung back his head with a rebellious and angry glance at the river’s northern bank, where the shining walls and towers of the city of Ormuzd seemed to overhang the gulf—the glance which an exile gives at the city which has driven him forth.

He had fled to the spot, stunned by one of those buffets which life is ever waiting to deal to those who have not learnt their lesson aright. And his ears still smarted with the scream of the newsboys who were proclaiming in every street that Lord Alistair Stuart had failed.

In London men like Alistair Stuart fail every day, and go under, leaving scarcely a ripple on the smooth surface of a society which hastens to forget all disagreeable things. But Lord Alistair’s catastrophe had been able to eclipse for one night the comedy of politics and the tragedy of war. For he happened to be one of the few in whom the world is interested, and when the world is interested in a man it will not suffer him to go down to sheol in peace. Its hisses are the reaction of its cheers, and those who court its notice put their lives to the hazard, like Esther when she went to touch the sceptre of Ahasuerus.

The world knew Alistair Stuart in two characters—as the brother and heir-presumptive of the Duke of Trent and Colonsay, and as the lover of Molly Finucane.

To the outer world, for which newspapers are written and formal histories compiled, he was the brother of one of its most important citizens. The Duke of Trent was distinguished not only by his rank, but by his service to the State. By an ironical coincidence the same Gazette which revealed the fact that Lord Alistair Stuart had filed his petition also contained the notification that his brother had kissed hands as Secretary of State. It was impossible that the moralists of the pulpit and the press should overlook the striking example of the idle and industrious apprentice, and the younger brother’s disgrace was deepened by the elder’s triumph.

In that inner world whose newspapers are the boudoirs and the smoking-rooms, and which goes for its history to memoirs and chronicles of the back-stairs, the name of Alistair Stuart had gained celebrity in connection with a personage of whom the pulpit might not know, and the press might not tell.

Molly Finucane had achieved one of those reputations which have given certain women a place in history. In the ancient world she might have had princes to fight for her, and poets to sing her praise. In the modern world she was a figure of evil, regarded with a feeling like that which inspired the legends of the succubi. An element of mystery attached to her extraordinary career. It was said that she could neither dance nor sing, that she was astonishingly ignorant, and that her speech and ways smelt of the gutter. Even beauty was denied her. The men whom she had ruined themselves could not explain the secret of her power over them; she overcame her victims like a malarial fever. Some men could meet her day after day without succumbing; others lost themselves from the first; others again began by despising her as an ugly little street-girl, and ended by giving her their wives’ jewels.

How many had perished in the maelstrom of desire which she created none could say. But there was a ghastly story of the young Earl of St. Luc, who had put an end to his life at the age of twenty because his trustees refused him the means to set up an establishment for Molly Finucane. An ineffaceable impression had been made by the two contrasted pictures of the desolate mother weeping over her boy’s dead body, as it was dragged all stained and dripping from the moat surrounding the ancient keep of the St. Lucs, and of the wide-mouthed, stupid Irish girl, planted in a reek of tobacco smoke on a table crowded by tipsy youths, repeating to them in her cracked, shameless voice the latest and most brutally coarse refrain of the street.

It was a year, perhaps two years, since the tongue of scandal had first singled out the name of Alistair Stuart from among the rest of those who singed their wings in this fatal flame. Gradually it became known that Molly Finucane had given him a devotion which no other man had ever been able to buy with gold or blood or tears. For his sake she had refused at the last moment to take possession of the miniature palace furnished for her by the great Brazilian broker, Mendes; who had simply shrugged his shoulders and ordered the house to be kept vacant and ready for her. Stuart and she had gone to live together in a faded corner of Chelsea, in a house surrounded by elms with black trunks and yellow leaves.

The house in Chelsea loomed large in the mind of the new generation. It was regarded as a citadel of sin, as the headquarters of a cult which gloried in its moral degeneracy. Alistair Stuart assumed the character of a high-priest among the pagans, as they chose to call themselves—poets whose verses echoed still more faintly the faint autumnal sighs of Verlaine; wits whose epigrams were brilliant with the phosphorescence of corruption; men in whom genius was a vice, and vice an affectation. Hatred of the middle classes was the watchword of this sect, which was recruited from penniless younger sons, from university failures, from a whole class for whom the Protestant Church has no refuge, but who in Catholic countries end often in the monastery. They waged war on the Victorian Age, on its religion, on its art, on its commercialism, but, above all, on its Puritanism.

In the eyes of this brotherhood of the unfit bankruptcy was rather meritorious than disgraceful, and the fifty thousand pounds which Stuart had spent without possessing represented so much spoil taken from the Philistines. Stuart’s own first proceeding after he had signed the warrant for his civil degradation had been to send forth invitations for a supper to celebrate the event.

His bankruptcy had been in one sense voluntary. Although he had cut himself off from intercourse with his family when he took the house in Chelsea, he knew that Trent would have helped him to make terms with his creditors. But he knew also that Trent would have required him to give up Molly Finucane. He had filed his petition with a light heart, in the belief that the disgrace would fall more heavily on his brother than on himself.

For the éclat resulting from his act he had been prepared, but not for the effect of the éclat on his own mind.

He had been on his way to a club in Piccadilly overlooking the Green Park, which served as a meeting-ground for those members of the cult who kept on terms with respectability. Almost on the club steps he was arrested by the sight of his name in large letters on a news-bill, bringing the sharp reminder that he had forfeited his right of entry.

It was a shock to him to find that his exploit had suddenly lost its charm. He bought a paper as he walked on, and read of his brother’s promotion to the Cabinet. The unforeseen coincidence intensified his discomfiture. This brother of his, whom he had always looked on as a dullard and a prig, whom he had so often sneered at among his own friends, was standing there crowned in front of the footlights, while he, Alistair, was being hissed off the stage. In a flash he saw the ruin he had made of his life, and was dismayed.

And as he wandered miserably through the streets the question that had risen and struggled for expression in his mind was—Why? Why had his brother so far surpassed him in the race? Why were the honours and rewards of life bestowed on some and not on others? Why had he, Alistair, steered his bark upon the rocks?

Standing there between that visible theatre of his brother’s triumph, on the north side of the river, and the unknown hooligan realm upon the south, with which there stole upon him a daunting sense of affinity, he pondered the question; and while he pondered it, the feeling grew upon him that it would not be answered by itself, that it was a part of a more tremendous issue, that the meaning of life was involved in it, and the eternal mystery of the world.

Alistair looked back for some clue to the tangled skein of his career; and by-and-by the vista of the past took on distinctness, like one of those marvellous canvases of Rembrandt from whose dingy surface there gradually peeps out a whole magical landscape charged with light.