Читать книгу Malice of Men - Warwick Deeping - Страница 6

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think that the most unlovely years of my life were those between fourteen and twenty.

It is difficult to write dispassionately of sex at a period when it was treated like some dirty and unregenerate child to be shut up in a dark cupboard for punishment. The thing had to be frightened into furtiveness. I was living in a world of antimacassars, bric-à-brac, mantelboards, ormolu, lace curtains, wool mats, chiffoniers, over-ornamented stuffiness. Women wore bustles, leg of mutton sleeves, and high boots. They seemed to swell suggestively about the hips and bosom, though tight corsets compressed their waists in the clasp of a convention. The Victorians, in their determination to conceal sex, only emphasized it.

All this now is mere domestic history. The Naughty Nineties began the revolution, and the Great War completed it. I will admit that the Victorians in their cold passion for moral completeness were up against nature, and that as Die Hards in the sex-war they were doomed to defeat. Whether any normal man has ever attained complete chastity I do not know. The ideal may be a splendid one, and possible for the few, but I confess that my own chastity was a relative virtue, and that my sex world was chaos until I met the one woman who made fleshly crudities appear like meat in a butcher’s shop.

Lugard had left, and a boy named Porter ruled the school. He was a tall, bleached, dandified youth with queer, staring, blue eyes. It was Porter who introduced me to sex. He took me up to the Furze Hills one summer day after school, promising to show me a grass-snake which other boys swore they had seen. It was credited with being six feet long.

“I know all about snakes, Lancaster.”

Sex was my snake in the grass. Porter discovered it to me among the furze bushes, and I fled from him in disgust and shame. The thing shocked me. I wanted to run to somebody and ask them to tell me the truth, and to be comforted and reassured, but there was no one to whom I could go. I could not bring myself to tell my mother, for somehow she seemed to have become involved in the revelation. If my father had been alive I could have made my confession to him, and being a gentle soul he might have been able to help me.

I had changed, and so had my mother.

I had been promoted to trousers, and the new garments seemed to stimulate my growth.

We had window-boxes now at No. 42, and sun-blinds, and a curtain over the front door when the sun was in strength. The summer life of Sandbourn became more vivid to me. There were the donkeys, the bathing machines with their striped awnings, and the winches that drew them up and down the beach, the nigger minstrels, and the man who sold Chelsea buns. I had a passion for Chelsea buns. Bath-chairs and parasols passed up and down the parade. Mild and respectable families spent their holidays upon the beach, with children and buckets and spades. Even now I can hear the massed murmur of voices that rose from the Sandbourn front on the hot day in summer, like some insect hum, with the drone of a barrel-organ threading through it.

I often think how ironical and strange it was that my father’s suicide should have given my mother the opportunity and the provocation to make a success of her own individual adventure. No. 42 had become a super-lodging house. My mother’s position was such that she could sit with dignity and select her clients. I cannot remember an occasion when any of our rooms were empty for more than a week at a time, and I believe our establishment raised its charges. My mother seemed different. It was her black satin period when she wore a heavy gold chain set with amethysts, and a lace cap. She was a very dignified person, and growing rather stout. She had resumed her association with the established Church, and paid for two seats at St. Jude’s on the Parade.

I think my mother must have fashioned herself upon that cynosure of all good women, Queen Victoria.

She became the little autocrat of No. 42 Regal Terrace, and a woman of property, and I suppose I was the most precious of her possessions. My collars and ties and teeth were under her supervision. She read my school reports with an air of gentle severity. What was I learning at St. John’s College? A little Latin, some trigonometry and algebra, a little bad French, some English history, but nothing that was likely to be of use to me in my attack upon life. The school bored me badly, and already I was dreaming of the days when I should escape from it, and could, if I so chose, cheek old Barter with impunity in the public street. Education was like most academic interference with the young, completely unimaginative and sterile. The masters were bored, and so were we.

The academic interference of a day-school is confined to stated hours, but my mother’s emotional interference with my young life was limited by no casual clock. It was a kind of universal, an atmosphere, an affectionate but exacting face that waited for my comings in, and asked questions about my goings out. My mother’s love was like Queen Victoria watching with severity over the morals of her people. Many of my escapades would have left my mother completely unamused. She did not understand the cheerful, engaging swashbuckling side of life. So many material things were to her, not nice. I suppose some little Lord Fauntleroy would have been her ideal, but I did not belong to the pale breed of prigs. I was a dark, mercurial, imaginative child, and a veil of secrecy descended between me and my mother.

In fact, there were two mothers in Edith Lancaster, the consoling creature I had loved, and the possessive little maternal empress whom I feared and hated.

My mother wished me to learn to play the piano.

I had no urge towards music, but I persuaded her to compromise and allow me to have drawing-lessons. Mr. Sweeting, hearing of my urge, offered to give me lessons, of course without charge. I can understand how bored poor Edwin was with his Angela and her tyranny of temper and of tears, and I believe he found refreshment in teaching me draughtsmanship. Like many performers with the pencil and brush, he was a better pedagogue than painter. He gave me three evenings a week, and the things he taught me were to prove of infinite value.

It is obvious to me now that my mother, like most of the Victorians, was terrified of sex. Even sofa and table legs were draped on occasions in chintz trousers, and my mother treated sex with the same secretive prudishness. Socially, we were in a position of peculiar isolation. The social grading of Sandbourn was arranged on a scale of absurd and delicate snobbery. We could not know the professional classes. Nor were we considered sufficiently important to mix with the more eminent tradesmen, the Brighthouses and Sandmans and Pembertons who were the leading drapers, grocers, and iron-mongers. The society of the second grade shopkeepers, and in particular that of the butchers and fishmongers would have been allowed us, but my mother refused to cultivate it.

How ridiculous this artificial segregation seems to me now! Here in Sandbourn were some twenty-thousand specimens of Homo sapiens living in little cliques and coteries, and refusing to recognize the realities of their common flesh. The professional people might accept my mother’s fees for professional attendance, but they could not recognize us as socially knowable. The Brighthouses could not mingle with the Snapes, because the Brighthouse shop had six windows, the Snape shop a paltry two. The vicar of St. Jude’s called twice a year upon my mother who was a member of his congregation, but my mother was not admitted to the vicaress’s drawing-room. The complacencies and snobberies of a country that called itself Christian may seem incredible to a community that flatters itself that it has shed such absurdities, but this isolation had its effect upon me.

I had no accredited girl friends.

Nor was any comradeship possible with young things of the other sex. At the best it would have been a giggling, genteel, silly business, parentally censored. They tell me that the girls’ schools of those days were as full of “smut” as was our precious college, the product of a cheap curiosity that was thwarted. Our unwise virgins would not allow the lamp of life to burn.

My mother seemed to avoid all social contacts. She kept me like a young celibate, a colt alone in a field with the gate padlocked. I was driven back on dreams, a dramatization of my romantic urges. Always I was very conscious of her gentle severity, of a watchfulness that never relaxed. My mother might repress the young animal in me, but she could not dominate my dreams.

I was full of dreams.

I was allowed to read Scott’s novels, except on Sunday.

My mother even allowed me Tennyson.

Swinburne would have shocked her.

I dreamed myself into some of Scott’s heroes, especially into Ivanhoe. I was the knight on horseback, rescuing blond damsels. I spurred my destrier, fewtered my spear, and sent other fellows crashing.

It happened that I was on the balcony of No. 42. The Sweetings had gone to London for a week. It was a Wednesday afternoon in April and a half holiday. I had no right to be on the balcony, but in a mood of self-glorification I was a young Richard of the Lion Heart watching from my place of privilege imaginary champions contending in the tilting field.

I saw three young men on horses ride down the stone ramp leading from Regents Parade to the beach. At low tide a half moon of firm and yellow sand stretched from The Monument to Signal Hill. There were no groins here, and the bathing machines had not yet trundled down to their summer quarters, and no children were busy with buckets and spades. These three young cavaliers lined up their horses on the sand and went galloping eastwards, racing each other.

I knew them by sight. All Sandbourn knew them by sight. They were the three young Bullstrodes of Beaulieu, Beverley, Fitzroy and Gavin. They might ride down into Sandbourn like young gods from Olympus, but in those days Beaulieu and Sandbourn were worlds apart. I have it on good authority that even Dr. Warwick, the leading Sandbourn physician, had to enter Beaulieu House by the back door. The Ionic portico with its stately steps was sacred to the chosen few. I was not conscious of feeling jealous of the young men. They rode reality on horseback, and my obscure self was only mounted on dreams, but I was able to translate them into my dreams, and to regard them as mysterious, stately and romantic creatures who moved in a more spacious and wonderful world than mine.

I left the balcony and ran down on to the beach. It was not mere curiosity that moved me. These young men had for me an illusion of otherness; I was attracted by them. It was as though I wanted to look into their faces, and perhaps to be noticed by them as they passed. It did not occur to me that they might regard me as a casual and obscure little cad whom men of honour ignored.

The three Bullstrodes had turned their horses and were coming back, and I stood in the centre of the sandy trackway and watched this miniature cavalry charge. It so fascinated me that I forgot that I might be in the way. The lad on a black horse was leading, a big brown figure, bending forward in the saddle, hatless, and with the sun shining on its reddish head. This was Beverley the eldest. Gavin, on a roan, came next, and Fitzroy’s bay seemed to be falling behind. I could hear the heavy breathing of the horses, and the soft thudding of their hoofs. They had an April sky behind them, and that yellow sand, and a slip of the shimmering sea.

I don’t think I realized that I was in the way until Beverley Bullstrode was within thirty yards of me. I could see his big, ruddy face with its high, baldish forehead, and jug of a jaw. His very blue eyes seemed to glare. He came straight at me like some hot and arrogant young colonel of horse leading a charge that should trample all cropheads into the dust.

I can remember him shouting at me.

“Get out of the way, you damned little fool.”

I stood quite still, for his hot and galloping arrogance had shocked me. He made his horse swerve, and as he passed I felt the wind of his passing hit my cheek.

Again he shouted: “You silly little fool.”

The other two went past me, Gavin, with a smile on his mischievous face, Fitzroy sweating and grim. I turned about, and watched the sand flying, feeling like some scullion lad who had been cursed and mud-splashed by these young lords of the earth.

It was my first moment of conscious and deliberate hatred. I had hated boys like Snoad and Pym, but such hatred had been mere childish emotion. This sudden blaze in me was different; it was like a red weal left by a whip on the proud flesh of my young manhood.

“Get out of the way, you silly little fool.”

I faced about again and walked away along the sands, suddenly and acutely conscious of the significance of this incident. I had dreamed dreams of that other and mysterious world, and behold it had descended upon me and scorned me as a mere human excrescence on life’s sands. The wise men may say what they will about hatred being the stigma of an inferior culture, but in the season of one’s burning youth such a stigma may be a stimulus, a secret and passionate wound. I did not forget. I did not want to forget. I cherished my hatred. It was as though the thing was to be one of the leit motivs of my insurgent life.