Читать книгу Malice of Men - Warwick Deeping - Страница 3

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s I sit in my chair, with my little dog on my knees, in this room full of books, I can look down over the Sussex oaks at the English sea. The spring’s cold spell has passed, and the oaks are stealing into leaf, but the lacework of young leaves is dyed in different colours. One tree may be a pale, greenish gold, another have a tinge of bronze in its great dome. The distant sea is very still to-day, a sheet of grey blue silk.

If I turn my head to the right I can see the portrait of Sanchia Cherrill looking down at me with eyes that move me to many memories. Its exquisite pallor and strange, flowerlike eyes are part of the inevitable beauty and poignancy of things. Nothing was ever so dark and tragic and bitter to me as her hair. Her slim throat rises from a collar of turquoise blue velvet, a gracious and gentle stem. She had ceased to be so unhappy when Halliday painted that portrait for me, but her eyes still stir in me a protective compassion.

If life has taught me anything it has been the realization of man’s capacity for infinite self-deception. He goes through life, humbugging himself, in sex, in the struggle for self-preservation, and in the thing we used to call religion. We English are a strange people. In our commerce and our exploitations of other countries we can be ruthless realists, but our ethical and emotional world is so like our Victorian Sabbath. We seem to become suddenly afraid of a hypothetical God, the shadow cast by our own consciences, and we put on black coats and cringe, and wash our hands in invisible soap. We become sentimental, but we sin in secret.

I know that as a child I was terribly quick to divine this falseness in my elders. Some children have an intuitive clarity of mind, call it what you will, but it is no distorting glass twisting reflections into nice, deceptive patterns. There can be anguish in such clarity of consciousness, but it is an anguish that may create a hatred of all cowardice and self-deceit. It can temper the steel of one’s ruthlessness. It can teach man to be ruthless to himself.

I have loved and I have hated.

Let the ethical people hold up their hands in horror when I confess that successful and triumphant hatred has seemed almost as good to me as love.

I did not turn my other cheek to my enemy. He smote me bitterly and brutally, but when my own hour was ripe I gave back to him with ruthlessness the blows that I had taken.

Always I have craved for beauty. In my young days, like many young things, I was a dreamer; but can a man dream dreams in a world, that, beneath a conventional sleekness, conceals snobbery and cruelty and a selfishness that dresses itself in sentiment? I chose to put off my dream, take harness and fight. It was not given me to fight with the sword like the conventional gentleman of romance. My battle was in bricks and mortar, a material struggle that yet contained the essence of a dream. To my snob’s world, the Bullstrode world, I was a little commercial cad. But my dream transcended their gentleman’s relish, and became actual when theirs died.

I was born into that strange community which sells things across a counter. To the Olympians of those days we shoppies were just cads. I can remember reading a little poem by a man of notable athletic and academic culture. Its title was “Cads on Casters.” Shop-assistants peddling on bikes. It happened that I was lying under a flowering thorn in the Rote Valley when I discovered that ironical and bitter thing in the gentleman’s book of verse. My young self was full of the smell of the mayflower and of the cloth of gold in the meadows. Ringwood Castle lay black in its sheet of water under the shadow of a cloud. I had been dreaming dreams of that castle and myself.

But I was the son of a shopman. My mother ran a lodging-house in Sandbourn. I had ridden out to the Rote Valley on a primitive bike. I was not a gentleman, but a cad on a caster, and yet I could be moved to a kind of anguish by the beauty and sweet smell and the mystery of this exquisite day.

In our early days my father kept a draper’s shop at Westend on Sea. It was neither a very considerable shop, nor, I imagine, a prosperous one, situated as it was in one of those shabbily new streets where stucco or yellow brick were the mode. We had an ironmonger’s on one side of us, a greengrocer’s on the other, and opposite us a row of yellow brick houses with blunt bow windows and absurd iron railings perched on the top of a low brick wall. I remember that at Christmas my father’s shop blossomed into a display of cheap handbags and calendars, bric-à-brac and Christmas cards. I realize now that it was a pathetic little place, productive of chilblains and indigestion and flat feet. The shop was not warmed in winter, but it developed a curious cold fug of its own.

We lived over the shop.

My mother did the cooking, and sometimes helped in the shop, and a woman came in to wash and clean. Even in those days my mother was an austere little person in black, tightly corseted, and with stag’s eyes that were always afraid. She ate very little, and suffered from chilblains in winter. Life for my mother had had but a transient flowering.

My mind-picture of my father has grown a little dim. His Christian name was Alfred, and he wrote poetry. I still have a manuscript book of it, and it was very bad poetry in the style of Martin Tupper. I suppose it was this poetic urge that made my father christen me John Keats.

My impression of him is that of a thin, dark, mercurial creature always dressed in black, flowery both in manners and in speech, a lovable but rather futile figure. He would walk to the door with customers and bow them out, rubbing ineffectual hands. I can remember the ingratiating phrase he always used “Thank you so much.” I gather that my father suffered from that most fatal of passions, the desire to please. No doubt his world was a poor, flimsy structure, and that my father knew it for what it was, but he was a timid, garrulous creature who could never teach himself to use the word that is most ruthlessly essential in any human language. My father could not say no.

That he suffered from shameful qualms, moments of bitter self-revelation is betrayed by certain pathetic moanings in his poor poems. He clung to the little things, and had not a sufficiency of the savage animal in him to run amok and dare disaster. Disaster fell upon him for this very reason. He rubbed his hands and, with ingratiating unctuousness, thanked a world that laughed at him.

My childish memories of Westend are fragmentary and queer. I wonder whether a child’s memory has a selective significance, and if the seemingly trivial may not be profoundly prophetic. Might we not treat childish memories as Freud deals with dreams, save that sex is not the one and singular urge?

It was my child’s reaction to beauty that brought me into conflict for the first time with property. Strung along the low cliff above the estuary, a terrace of little, Regency houses spread small gardens like flowery mats below green balconies. Iron railings surrounded these sanctuaries. No. 3 was inhabited by a retired ships-chandler named Dudgeon. Mr. Dudgeon had a particular passion for stocks, and early in the summer his small front garden was a mass of colour and of perfume. The iron gate of the garden was kept locked. Something in me greatly desired a posy from that pleasance, and one morning late in May I crept to those railings, insinuated a small hand, and was in the act of plucking when I heard a sudden bellowing at a window.

“Ha, you young thief!”

My hand withdrew itself. I had become aware of a hairy, terrifying face at a window. For the moment I was paralysed, but when the hairy face disappeared, I realized that the angry god was descending upon me. I turned and fled, scuttling on my small legs towards the nearest corner. Mr. Dudgeon had arrived on his doorstep.

“You young thief. I’ll put the police on you.”

I ran home to my mother. I found her in the parlour above the shop, sitting by the open window, and darning a pair of my father’s pants. I too was panting. I believed that dreadful things were going to happen to me, and I poured out my tale to my mother.

She put her work aside and took me on her knees. Had I actually picked a flower? No, I had not, and having reassured and soothed me, she gave me my first lecture on the solemn sanctities of private property.

“But, flowers, Mum, too?”

She assured me that Mr. Dudgeon’s flowers were wholly his. He had bought them or grown them, and everything inside a fence was sacrosanct.

“Supposing somebody walked into father’s shop, dear, and took things off the counter?”

I could appreciate the privacy of my father’s goods, but surely flowers were different? Didn’t God make them! I can remember my mother smiling a little sadly.

“Yes, dear, but flowers in somebody’s garden belong to somebody.”

“Do daisies belong to somebody?”

“It depends, dear. If they grow in a field with a fence or a hedge round it, they do.”

“I don’t like fences, Mum.”

“No, dear.”

“It doesn’t seem fair. If God made the flowers didn’t He make them for everybody?”

That, I expect, was rather a poser for my mother, and I don’t remember what her answer was. I doubt whether her generation had pondered these elementals, or whether Westend ever questioned their bourgeois God and the rights of property. My mother conformed to all the conventions. The struggle for existence made conformation a necessity.

We went to St. John’s Church on Sunday. It was a dim old place with pews like cattlepens, an oak gallery at the back, and windows full of greenish glass. My father wore a top hat, my mother a black bonnet. I can remember the way my father carried his hat into church, chest high, and with a kind of sacredotal carefulness as though it was precious. The hat was put very carefully under a seat. Previously, it had been taken out of a white box and ironed by my mother. Its glossiness was rather streaky, and in retrospect I can appreciate the problem of that hat. It was a symbol of poverty and respectability.

There was one occasion when, in a fit of fidgets, for the service bored me, I inadvertently kicked my father’s hat in its place under the pew seat. I can remember my mother giving me a wounded look when the hat was produced at the end of the service. The heel of my boot had left a ruffled scar on the beaver. She said nothing to me then, and my father walked home, wearing that hat as though nothing had happened.

It seemed a ridiculous and trivial incident to me, but my mother said to me before dinner: “You must be careful, dear. Hats cost money.”

Poor soul, she spent her whole life in being careful.

My particular passion in those days was for lead soldiers. I was a veritable small Frederick the Great, and I accumulated a standing army of some two hundred men, foot, horse, and artillery. It was unnecessary for my parents to ask me before a birthday or Christmas what I wanted, for the answer would always have been the same.

“Soldiers, Mum.”

I had English guardsmen, Prussians in dark blue and with spiked helmets, Frenchmen in red trousers, Russians in dark green. My corps d’élite was a troop of lancers in red, white and blue. I first saw them in the window of Mr. Cumine’s shop, and I took my mother to view them early in December.

“Aren’t they lovely, Mum?”

I suppose in my childish way I liked the coloured panoply of mimic war, the nice order and pageantry of the painted battle-line. Also, in my small way, I was exercising power.

When I next went to visit Mr. Cumine’s window in High Street the box of lancers had gone. I felt grieved. Someone else must have bought those soldiers.

I ran home to tell my mother.

“Mum, they’ve gone.”

“What, dear?”

“The lancers.”

She pretended to console me, but on Christmas morning I found the box of soldiers in the pillowcase that my father as Father Christmas hung at the foot of my bed. I did not want to go to church that morning; I wanted to stay behind and parade my new cavalry, but being overruled by convention I slipped one of the lancers into my pocket, and kept taking it out to look at it during the service.

I remember another Christmas when I disgraced myself. I had set my heart on a box of grenadiers in scarlet tunics and black busbies advancing with bayonets fixed. The box was marked four and sixpence, and I realize now that the Lancaster finances must have been precarious. The present from my parents proved to be an absurd little box, in which, when a drawer was opened, two bell tents erected themselves. Six miserable little lead figures without the spice and dignity of swords or rifles inhabited the red box.

I was terribly disappointed. I remembered blurting out my dissatisfaction.

“Silly old present. Can’t have cost sixpence.”

It was one of the rare occasions when my mother spoke to me with gentle bitterness.

“If you are so ungrateful I had better take the present away.”

“Yes, it’s a silly thing. I don’t want it.”

My mother did take the box away, but when I saw her face after she had shut the present away in a drawer, sudden contrition assailed me. I remember running to her and pressing my face against her body, while I grasped her skirt with both fists. Nothing was said between us, but when the box of tents was ultimately returned to me I never failed to erect those tents on a corner of the table where my army was paraded.

As for schooling, my parents sent me to a mixed school for the very young kept by two elderly sisters. I did not take kindly to class culture, perhaps because even in those days I was too passionate a little individualist, and my wits found no pleasure in consuming educational mincemeat, but went exploring on their own. They were good women, the Misses Dewman, palely sedulous in imparting elementary education, and I for one must have tried their patience very sorely. The elder, Miss Jane, was for ever saying to me: “John Lancaster, you must learn to pay attention.”

It was at this dame-school that I had my first love affair and my first scuffle with a rival, both of which adventures ended unhappily for me. My angel was a little, fair-haired thing called Ethel. She was the perfect minx, even at the age of seven, but I thought her the most beautiful and exquisite creature on earth. I dreamed of rescuing her from savages and wild beasts. I was the fairy prince in armour.

I had a rival, a little, bull-headed, hard-eyed bandit named Stanley Fisher. He was an inch or two shorter than I was, but thick and fat. I suppose in my princely and amorous serenity I had despised Stanley. He was a stupid little oaf in school, and apt to be repulsively wet-nosed in winter.

We clashed over Ethel on the footwalk outside the Dewman wall. Both of us wished to walk home with Ethel. We grappled hand to hand, and suddenly I found myself down on my knees, and realizing with shocked shame that Stanley was stronger than I was. Even now I can recall the little arrogant face of my conqueror.

My sudden shame was such that I got up off my knees and slunk away. It was not the result of cowardice, but acute and sensitive self-humiliation. My little, princely self had been put down by a boy whom I despised. I suppose I should have flown at him with hot fury, and tried my luck at punching, but my anger had turned upon myself. I loved my little self so dearly, and it had been shamed in that scuffle, and my pride was in tears.

Stanley went off with the lady, and I slunk home. I had a bloody mark on one knee where the gravel had chafed it, and when my mother spoke of it, I lied to her. I said that I had fallen down in the playground while playing “Touch Wood.”

But this trivial incident was a spicule of steel that entered into my small soul. I was not the princely creature that I had dreamed myself to be. I grew up a wiry lad, and that early licking may have taught me that I had to be strong in other ways, quick-witted, resourceful, agile. My contest was to be with circumstances rather than with men, for in subduing circumstance to one’s will, one becomes the master of crude flesh.

I had no more scuffles with Stanley Fisher because I somehow knew that he could lick me. I was a little Agag, and hating myself and him for the homage I had to pay. I pretended to laugh and dodge him when he was truculent, but I hated him with my whole small soul, and I hated myself almost as fiercely. Even in those days I used to ponder the problem of how one dealt with and smashed the world’s Stanley Fishers. Would boxing lessons help, or sedulous exercise with the bedroom water-jug for the development of one’s biceps? I was to realize that there were other strengths, and that in a policed world, one does not master men and things with naked fists.