Читать книгу Malice of Men - Warwick Deeping - Страница 9

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hat locked door remained as a barrier between us. I was nearly seventeen, and old for my age, and my young pride resented my mother’s tyranny. I knew that it was a proof of her love for me, but it taught me to fear a love that can be fanatical and possessive, and though I realized that her ambition was all for me I could not feel grateful to her. That was our tragedy. In coercing my young dignity she made me a humbug, and our life together consciously insincere. I did not want to hurt my mother, for whatever our elemental differences might be I had a profound affection for her, and in refraining from hurting her I had to practise all kinds of hypocrisy.

Moreover, my mother in treating sex as a noisome thing, had soiled it for me, and put me in more danger than she knew. I might conceal things from her, but refrain I could not, and part of my life became secret and surreptitious, a thing of excuses and of faked friendships and facile fabrications. My mother never knew of my adventures, nor are they worth recording here, but it was not thanks to my mother that no ultimate harm came of them.

I have always been rather like a bird. Let a hand try to clutch me, and I flew away. Most people bored me quickly, for I seemed to come to the end of them as one comes to the end of a cul-de-sac. This sensitive separativeness, the intuitive swiftness with which I summed up and shed some other creature must have saved me from much frustration and many possible entanglements. I was still dreaming and romancing, but I found no Iseults or Guineveres in Sandbourn. The girls whom I met seemed so shallow and silly, and so utterly flimsy even in their crude appeal, that I tired of such affairs even before they were consummated. I explored that sort of sex, and it bored me. Already I was beginning to learn to say no myself, perhaps because of the more beautiful fastidiousness of my dreams. I had two selves, and one self seemed to be waiting upon some ultimate and splendid romance that made the other self’s philanderings appear cheap and trashy.

Nor did my mother pander to my vanity in the way of plumage. She dressed me in the plainest of pepper and salt suits; my socks were grey or black, my ties of some neutral colour. She allowed me in pocket money sixpence a week, and one could not parade in shining armour on six poor pennies. Even those dull clothes seemed to drive me inward, and to strengthen that other self that dreamed in secret of conquered continents and dramatic achievements.

On my seventeenth birthday my mother made of it a solemn occasion. It happened during the summer holidays when St. John’s College was closed, and Mr. Theophilus Barter had taken his very large family to the East Coast for a change of air. I am afraid that Mrs. Barter caused the school to jest coarsely and irreverently, and her yearly pregnancy provoked some of us to bet on the probable sex of the next arrival. Sex and holy wedlock as exhibited by the Barters was to me particularly unlovely. But on this seventeenth birthday of mine my mother sat down to breakfast in her Sabbath clothes. A little parcel lay beside my plate, and on opening it I found a gold watch with my name inscribed upon it.

My actual watch was an old Waterbury, and I was secretly ashamed of it, and this much more magnificent timepiece caused me to colour up.

“Mater!”

I got up and kissed my mother, for her generosity touched me in some secret place.

“I hope it will go with you all through your life, my dear.”

“Of course.”

“And keep good time for you long after I have gone.”

I am afraid that I was not affected by her gently prophetic words, for I regarded my mother as a timeless creature, and death, as it might concern her, a mere abstraction. My mother’s present included a washed-gold chain, and I was busy attaching the watch to it before adoring my waistcoat.

“I don’t want you to wear it until you leave school, John.”

I was a little dashed by this, for I wanted to exhibit the watch to my friends.

“Mayn’t I wear it just for a week?”

My mother was extracting a sheet of paper from an envelope.

“Yes, perhaps for a week, dear. Now, I want you to read this.”

She passed me the letter, and I saw that it was written in Mr. Barter’s flowing hand, and that it contained his usual flowery phrases. Other boys had described such letters to me, epistles in which Mr. Barter flattered himself and his pupils, and put parents in a good temper.

“Dear Madam,

I am happy to be able to assure you that your son undoubtedly has unusual capacity, and that as a pupil at my school he has earned both the respect of the masters and the affection of his fellows. His knowledge of Latin is quite considerable, his skill in Mathematics somewhat less so. If he will apply himself with energy to the work he undertakes I can vouch for his future. At present he strikes me as being a little dreamy, and not sufficiently awake to the practical side of life. He has made great progress under our drawing-master. He has shown much enthusiasm for historical study. As to the career he might adopt, I might suggest that something that would combine the practical with the picturesque would appeal to his particular capacity.

As to character I am happy to assure you that I have nothing but good things to say of your son.”

My mother must have preened herself over that letter, but though it flattered me I was acutely conscious of its insincerity. What humbug! And yet, Old Barter had laid a flowery finger upon a particular quality. Dreaminess. As to my morals he knew nothing about them, and cared less, and had he discovered scandalous scribblings on my moral blackboard, he would have hastened to efface them with a discreet duster.

“I want to talk to you seriously, John, about your future.”

My future!

“Yes, Mother.”

“You are seventeen, my dear, and it is time to think of such things.”

Whither did my dreams and my ambition urge me? What did I want to be? I had to confess that I had not given the matter serious consideration, and still more must I admit that I was full of youth’s passion to play the hero somehow or somewhere without being compelled to submit to the boring process of acquiring the necessary knowledge. I wanted to shine naturally and instantly by reason of my own radiance. But my mother was in a concrete and pragmatical mood. She could say that nothing that is worth while can be accomplished without hard work. She added, with a little regal swelling of her figure, that she had laboured to give me my opportunity, and that she now had the wherewithal to make of me a gentleman. She did not put it quite in that way. She confessed that she could afford to have me educated for one of the professions.

What would I choose to be? Doctor, lawyer, schoolmaster, priest? I was not drawn to any of these professions. They did not appear to offer me drama or shining armour, or easy and glittering conquests.

“I really don’t know, Mater.”

“You must think, John, think.”

I thanked her and said that I would reflect upon the problem of my future, and I often wonder if she was disappointed in me on that particular day. I did not realize then, as I realize now what all her brave and patient scrapings and economies had meant to her. She might be a little, lace-capped tyrant, but her tyranny had been inspired by a fanatical tenderness which was beyond the deserts and the comprehension of my crude youth. She had been ready to lock doors against me in order that I might go in the way she thought best for me. I had, in secret, resented her interference, without understanding how few people can love one sufficiently to trouble to interfere.

The Sweetings were in residence with us at the time, and it occurred to me that I might consult Mr. Sweeting on the problem of my future. That Mr. Sweeting, as a dolce far niente person who had not been driven by economic stresses to the earning of a living, might not prove a wise and adequate mentor and guide, was neither here nor there. Mr. Sweeting had taught me to use a pencil, and to sketch in a desultory sort of way, and when I appealed to him, his advice, rather like his face, was weakly hirsute and desultory.

“Why not one of the A’s, John?”

We were sitting on the beach, and I was lobbing pebbles into the sea.

“The A’s, sir?”

“The arts, my dear boy. I flatter myself that I have helped to rouse in you some feeling for the graphic art.”

Mr. Sweeting was a nice ass, but his bland enthusiasm both pleased and flattered me.

“An artist?”

“Why not? Or architecture? I have noticed that you have a feeling for houses.”

This was true, for I had been spending some of my time in sketching odd bits of picturesques in the old town. I had even made a black and white study of Ringwood Castle.

“An architect?”

Mr. Sweeting was an enthusiast for the neo-gothic and the picturesque, and I myself was a mock medievalist, and too uncritical at that time to realize that the phase was poor, sentimental confectionery.

“I rather like the idea, sir.”

He was pleased.

“Just think of it, my dear boy, if one could rebuild a place like Sandbourn? This horrible, flat, Regency stuff! And the stucco! Philistinism! There’s an inspiration in educating the public, à la Ruskin.”

The idea stuck in my head. It seemed to offer a rather spacious and creative sort of life in which I could display myself to the world in concrete things. I should be the artist and the protagonist, a man who planned and saw to it that humbler creatures carried out the work. So struck was I with the idea that I broached it to my mother, quoting Mr. Sweeting as its instigator.

My mother was not very enthusiastic. I imagine that she had no great faith in poor Mr. Sweeting as a mentor and guide, but she did accept the suggestion. She went to interview Mr. Gregson and to consult him about it.

The outcome of their conference was rather a shock to me.

How would I like to be attached to the firm of Hickman & Snoad to learn the practical side of building before being apprenticed to some recognized architect, preferably in London? Mr. Gregson was a wise old gentleman. I imagine that he proposed to test my whim in the school of realism, and to prescribe Snoad as a possible antidote to Sweeting.

“Bob Snoad’s in the business.”

My mother asked me if that mattered. Considered rationally, it did not, for my old enemy had ceased to grow, and had become a rather undersized and tame person. No longer did he inspire either fear or respect in me. I felt that I could have licked him with one hand, and that, as a creative person, I was his master.

“They don’t do much in the town, Mater.”

“They are the principal firm, John.”

“Yes, I know. But may I think it over? I’ve got ideas rather beyond Hickman & Snoad.”

My mother did not quarrel with my young arrogance. I think she must have approved of it.

“That’s as it should be, my dear. A boy should have ambition, but Mr. Gregson does believe that some practical knowledge may be useful.”

Followed—an interlude.

It was my last year at school, and I had been told to ponder the problem of my future. St. John’s College was a breeding ground for snobs, and though no one talked in those days of the inferiority complex, it was very much in being. I had always been sensitive on the subject of No. 42 Regal Terrace, and I am ashamed to confess that I was secretly ashamed of my mother’s way of earning a living. Also, I was in the spotty and loutish period of my life when an unlovely arrogance may mount a sensitive diffidence and ride it. I think I began to boast at school of the future that was in store for me; I even hinted that I might go up to Cambridge. It was Crawford our cricket captain who called my bluff; he was a sallow, cocky lad with a sharp tongue, and we did not love each other.

“Rot. You’ll never pass an exam, Lanks.”

He had an irreverent way of shortening my name to Lanks, and as the expression rather fitted my physical appearance at that period, the name had stuck.

“I could pass anything if I tried.”

“What’s the idea?”

“I may be a doctor. I think, though, I would rather go to a London hospital.”

Crawford sneered at me.

“You’d never pass the matric.”

“Rot!”

“Besides, a doctor has to be something of a sahib.”

I don’t know where he got that word from, but the implication was instantly evident to me. I went hot about the ears. Crawford’s father was a biggish farmer in the neighbourhood, and Crawford was always boasting of his father’s five hundred acres. I tried to think of something to say that would block Crawford’s insolence, but as is the way on such occasions I could find no bitter and crushing retort. Should I smack Crawford’s face? But I happened to know that Crawford could box, and that if we came to blows he might have the better of me with fists as well as with tongue.

I tried hauteur.

“I’m not a snob. After all, what have you to be so cocky about?”

He gave me a supercilious grin. I expect he felt that he had my measure.

“Who’s the snob, Lanks? It was you who began blowing off.”

Which was true, and I could find nothing to say, and the laugh was against me. I can remember walking away with dignity and feeling furious with myself. Why had I flunked the crisis and Crawford’s fists? Was it because something in me felt small and inferior, and my own silly, sensitive pride had flinched and slunk away? The absurd incident humiliated me acutely. I found myself brooding over it. The thing was like some ribald King’s Jester bouncing into the middle of my dreams, and chastening them with some mocking jibe. “Prithee, Lanks, why this thusness? Would Sir Lancelot have been afraid of Master Crawford’s fists?” I became rather an aloof and sulky young lout during those last days at school. I refused to play cricket or kick a football about. I hinted darkly that I had discovered other and more significant urges in life, and that I was concerned with a career. Yes, I would be an architect, an artist, no mere games-fool. I persuaded my mother to buy me two or three text-books on architecture. I even took one to school with me, and sat and studied it during the breaks, and when twitted, retorted with dark sententiousness, that I was interested in art.

I remember Crawford telling me that I ought to let my hair grow. This time I found an apt retort. Crawford was one of those fellows who always had inky fingers.

“I will, if you’ll use a nailbrush.”

“That’s damned cheek, Lanks.”

“Oh, go away and hit or kick something. Not me. I’m busy.”

And for some reason unknown to me he left me alone.

But this incident had rankled. It drove me into one of those escapades that seemed to flatter my young vanity. Much to my mother’s annoyance Nos. 40 and 41 Regal Terrace had been converted into a boarding-house whose owner and manager was a large and somewhat colourful lady with golden hair, by name Mrs. Braithwaite. My mother was provoked, not only by Mrs. Braithwaite’s crowding competition, but by the lady’s person, for she was flowery and flavicomous, and rather suggestive of the bar or the stage. Undoubtedly she was a somewhat sensational and perfumed person, and inevitably offensive to my mother, who was able to say that Mrs. Braithwaite dyed her hair, and was no better than she should be. Moreover, Mrs. Braithwaite had two blooming daughters, Ethel and Lily, both blonde and buxom, with fresh complexions and unabashed blue eyes. These girls were for ever on the next door balcony, and I am sure my mother believed that they were there with a purpose, to act as honeypots to attract male boarders. Ethel played the piano, Lily sang. She had a shrill soprano voice, and her singing was yet another offence to my mother. It might disturb the respectable amenities of our much more decorous house. I believe Mrs. Sweeting complained of it, and through the Braithwaites we lost the Sweetings, but not because of Lily’s voice.

It seems that poor Mr. Sweeting found the next door balcony humanly interesting. He was caught in conversation with one of the young women, and later there was a scene. I happened to pass up the stairs in the midst of it, and could not help hearing what his Angela was saying to him.

“At your age, Edwin! Perfectly disgusting and ridiculous. Flirting with a young person who might be a barmaid. So undignified!”

Poor Edwin! His Angela removed him from the baleful influence of those houris, and my mother lost her oldest and most profitable patrons.

To me she had issued a warning.

“John, you are not to speak to those young women next door.”

But I am sorry to say that my mother’s attempt to coerce me clashed both with my mood of the moment and my inclination. I had begun to look more critically in my mirror, and to be more careful of my tie and hair. I was not a bad-looking lad in a dark, slim way. I had good teeth and rather intense eyes, but my face was too broad and my nose too short. It was rather an Irish face, in those days I was not pleased with it. I gathered that I had no profile, and that my chin stuck out too much, and that my mouth was too large. I did not realize that there is a more vital significance in a face that is a little rugged, and irregular and individual. I was foolishly full of the glorious Apollo idea. Also, my plumage was so inexorably drab. My mother allowed me no colour.

Possibly, it was her doting tyranny that made me mischievous, nor had I any suspicion of how it would react upon us both. I was attracted by Ethel Braithwaite. She was provokingly fair to my incipient swarthiness. We always seemed to be meeting outside one or other of the houses, and when she smiled upon me, I smiled back.

She was the first woman who told me I ought to shave.

Malicious candour challenging my virility!

I found myself sitting on the beach beside her, hidden from our windows by the parade wall. I realize now that Ethel Braithwaite was the complete and perfect jade, a honeypot full to the brim with self-love and vanity. She was ready to provoke anything in trousers, and to ogle promiscuously butcherboys and errant old gentlemen, but in my comparative innocence I found Ethel infinitely disturbing. She could be arch or coy, suddenly sentimental and melting, and just as suddenly farouche and prudish. She had the whole game of sex-appeal instinct in her, from eyes to finger-tips.

How old was I?

I lied to her, and said I was eighteen.

“You look older than that.”

“Do I?”

“A young man like you ought to shave.”

Actually she brushed my chin playfully with a soft, fat hand.

“You ought to get your mother to buy you a razor.”

She seemed to know just how to provoke me. She teased me about my mother. She called me “Mother’s darling.” She would sit and let me hold her hand, and then when I became incipiently tender, repulse me.

“Don’t be silly. You’re only a boy.”

We used to meet in the evening by The Monument, and go and sit by some fishing-boat on the Old Town beach. I suppose she was just amusing herself at my expense, and that the emotions she roused in me flattered her vanity. She too was a creature to whom I owe some sort of gratitude, in that she educated me into understanding what my dream woman should not be. At the time I was just an amorous, sex-plagued boy, not foreseeing the fact that this wench was to be the cause of a tragedy.

I think it must have been one of the maids who tattled to my mother about my intimacy with Ethel Braithwaite. We may have been spied upon. All that I know is that I came back one evening to hear my mother’s voice calling to me from an upper landing.

“John.”

“Yes, Mater.”

“Come here at once. I want to speak to you.”

I knew from my mother’s voice that there was trouble in the air. I found her sitting very upright in her pear-wood chair with its queer barley-sugar arm-rests. Her face looked pinched and thin, and though her hands were clasped in her lap, fingers, and wrists and arms were rigid and tense.

“Where have you been?”

“Out walking.”

I dare say my face betrayed me.

“Don’t lie to me. You have been out with that girl from next door.”

Here was I, a young man who needed a razor, being treated like a small boy, and my self-love was offended. Surely, the time had arrived for my mother to recognize the responsible or irresponsible self in me? Mother’s darling! Ethel Braithwaite’s gibes seemed to prick my skin.

“I’m not lying. I have.”

“Didn’t I tell you to have nothing to do with those people?”

“I must have friends, Mater.”

“Friends! I know just what those girls next door are worth. A boy like you is so easily taken in. Friends, indeed!”

I asked my mother somewhat sullenly what fault she had to find with our neighbours. Had she ever spoken to them? Wasn’t she being prejudiced?

She did not deign to argue with me.

“I am a little wiser than you are, John. I know trash when I see it. Understand that you are not to go about with that girl.”

“What harm is there—?”

“Tarnish, my dear. I won’t have you tarnished in that way.”

Some day I was to realize how right my mother was, even in her prejudices. Tarnish! The word was to remain with me like the title of some book, or the cry of a passionate prophet. I was to learn that it is not life’s elementals that foul one, but our way of hashing them up with humbug. Sentimentality is the drug with which we dose ourselves.

But my sulky young self-love was on its dignity, and I mumbled something about my being too old to be treated like a kid. My mother abated nothing of her tyranny. She forbade me to go out again with Ethel Braithwaite, and there our conflict ended for the moment. I took myself and a sulky silence out of my mother’s room, and she may have been too willing to accept my silence as a sign of surrender. Perhaps, even her protective love did not wish to push me too far.

I did not see Ethel Braithwaite again for some days. Was I avoiding her? Perhaps. To me it seemed rather a silly business, though I will admit that my mother’s words had not been without their effect on me. Tarnish! And then raw sex ambuscaded me. I happened to see Ethel sitting on the beach with another fellow, a man who was much older than I was. He had white flannel trousers and a straw hat, and a cocky little black moustache. I was jealous. I hung about and watched them. They appeared to be getting on very well together. The man lay on his back on the beach, and Ethel kept leaning over him.

I was furious. I waited until they separated, and then I followed Ethel Braithwaite back along the parade. I overtook her. I was foolish enough to ask her who her friend was, and foolish enough to show my feelings.

She was supercilious and patronizing.

“What’s that matter to a kid like you? Boys shouldn’t ask silly questions.”

She had me raw, and I said an unpardonable thing to her.

“I suppose you’d flirt with any cad.”

I had one of the surprises of my life. I have never seen any face grow so swiftly coarse and evil as the face of that girl. I had insulted her shamefully, and she turned on me like a spitting cat.

“You silly little fool.”

Her eyes flared at me. Her full lips, drawn back over her teeth, looked raw and thin. She flounced away, and turned to cross the road in the direction of No. 41 Regal Terrace. And suddenly I felt bitterly foolish and ashamed, as though she had clawed my silly self and left my heart exposed. I stood gawking there, quite forgetting that the windows of No. 42 might be watchful and jealous eyes.

If only my mother had waited for five minutes!

If only she had controlled herself and suffered me to confess that I had seen Ethel Braithwaite as she was! As I stood on the edge of the pavement before crossing the road a dogcart went by with Gavin Bullstrode holding the reins. He had a girl beside him, and he was looking down into her face with that sleepy, insolent smile of his. He did not see me and I went on and across the road and up the steps to our green front door.

I opened and closed it as quietly as I could. I pulled off my school cap and was about to climb the stairs when I heard my mother calling me.

“John, come here at once.”

There was anger in her voice, and more than anger, a kind of stifled anguish. The sharpness of it seemed to suddenly grow blunt and to splinter itself into strange fragments of sound. Something seemed to be falling. The sound lasted for a second or two, and ended in a kind of thud. Silence. I was conscious of acute and immoderate fear. I stood looking up the stairs.

“Mother.”

There was no voice to answer me. I went storming up the stairs and on the second landing I found my mother lying with her head close to the banisters. There was blood on her forehead. She was utterly and terrifyingly still, but I remember the fingers of one hand making a kind of twitching movement.

I bent over my mother and touched her cheek.

“Mother.”

She did not seem to hear me, and in my fear I went rushing down the stairs, calling to the maids.

“Martha, Jane, my mother has fallen downstairs.”

I did not realize that I should never hear her voice again.