Читать книгу Old Wine and New - Warwick Deeping - Страница 26

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Scarsdale walked. After that outburst of Taggart’s, culminating in the smashing of his medicine bottle, he felt that the new world and the new Taggart had to be reviewed. Not that Mr. Taggart had ever been completely Sabbatarian, or so wholly a private secretary to Jehovah that the casual man in him had been effaced. The Taggart of the pre-war days had had his cheerful material moments when he had visited the Cheshire Cheese, and other houses, and had eaten and drank mightily. Some quite ridiculous association of ideas had led Scarsdale to think of him as Og of Bashan. When Taggart had allowed his gastronomic god full liberty, the divine afflatus had expressed itself in ptarmigan and port.

But what were the realities? Morley of Messrs. Morley & Taggart, had inherited from the whiskers of his father that excellent religious journal Sabbath, and also a publishing business that had issued Law and Church literature. It was the elder Morley who had discovered to the world those novels by a lady who was known as W.O.A.D. Not that the lady had dyed herself blue, or painted the world red. The letters stood for the Wife of a Dean. W.O.A.D.’s novels had had a perfume of their own; they had smelt of vestries, and harvest festivals, and footstools, and the roses in ecclesiastical gardens, and virginal emotion. Woad’s young women had worn bustles and leg-of-mutton sleeves, and had been full of religious experiences and unborn babies. Occasionally, by way of warning, the Dean’s wife had permitted her public to smell sawdust and patchouli, but only just sufficiently so to allow them a protesting thrill.

Messrs. Morley & Taggart had made considerable profits out of Woad’s novels. Their publishing catalogue had been carefully edited. They had issued books that were good for children as well as books that were good for adults. “My Life among the Zulus” was a classic. “Darwin Defied” had had a considerable circulation. As for Sabbath it had become in the ’eighties and ’nineties a kind of habit in the homes of the nice minded, like roast beef at midday, and cold beef and baked potatoes for Sunday supper. Its familiar blue cover associated itself with the tea-tray and the muffineer. That it was incredibly dull and inhuman did not matter in that age of pleasant, placid dulness.

But the times had ceased to be dull and placid. Obviously so. A breath of reality had shaken the world, and also Mr. Taggart. He had been contentedly religious, between moments of cynicism, and splurges into ptarmigan and port, while the publications of Messrs. Morley & Taggart were productive. But when the new world reverted to a kind of bloody naturalness, and men and women wanted life and each other, and Sabbath ceased to circulate, Mr. Taggart broke his medicine bottle and swore.

Scarsdale walked up the Strand, but the Strand seemed to him more crowdedly so, and still full of remnants of the khaki world. The traffic was more aggressive, the pavements less suited to the stroller. But for the moment Scarsdale was not concerned with the Strand; it was just so much noise and material hustle. He had been a little shocked by the explosion of port and ptarmigan Taggart. Of course you had to allow a man a streak of humanity, even when he edited a paper that was as decorous as a bishop’s apron, but in the old days there had been an episcopal solidity about Taggart, a flatulent earnestness. Somehow you did not expect to hear a bishop squeal when donations to this or that failed to flow like Macaulay’s Tiber. And Taggart had squealed, because his pocket was less well-filled. Well, and why not? The pocket is the most sacred part of modern dress, its holy of holies. Also it is human to squeal. And was not he—Scarsdale—just as much concerned about the future contents of his pocket, and had not Taggart’s outburst shocked him because it had scared him just a little? Virtue, as the Greeks understood it, has a stomach, heart—and head. Also it may be the father of children.

Scarsdale came to Trafalgar Square. He walked round it as though to assure himself that the sacred place had not been violated, and that Nelson still watched over England. Yes, Nelson was up there, undisturbed by the voices of little Communist cads. The month of April, and on the wall separating the pavement from the platform, girls and Australian soldiers sat two by two, unashamedly interested in life and in each other. Some arms were around other waists. Slim legs dangled beside the stouter legs of the victors. And for some reason this mating in the open air of those brown men and the young wenches made Scarsdale feel shy and superfluous, and very much three-and-forty and the wearer of a bowler hat. He had been no warrior, but a mere scullion in the house of Æsculapius, and the Red Cross had been less expressive than the bomb and bayonet. He wandered round to the terrace below the National Gallery, and leaning on the parapet, allowed himself to stand and stare. Whitehall seemed to flow like a broad and stately river to wash the feet of the Mother of Parliaments. Yonder were Westminster and Father Thames. Nelson’s lions were calmly couchant.

Scarsdale meditated. Mr. Taggart became a mere monkeyish figure surprised in a chattering rage because of a shortage of nuts, and Scarsdale’s eyes saw other figures, Nelson among the clouds, the lions, Australia and its wench, the ever-moving crowd, the inevitable buses. Yes, the very buses were inevitable, and the voice of Big Ben the voice of a tradition.

There came into Scarsdale’s mind the word—revolution. Taggart had used it, but he had used it with a worried wildness. And what was revolution, a turning over or a turning round, mere upheaval or an ascending spiral? His consciousness seemed to enlarge itself under that April sky, and in the heart of this great city. These solid flagstones and buildings seemed to pivot about the slender column of the Admiral, and the clouds were like white sails set to the wind. The roar of the traffic was ceaseless.

Scarsdale had a feeling that he was in the midst of movement, and suddenly it seemed to him that this city was a great grey gyroscope steadily spinning. Almost and for him it revolved about the slender stem of Nelson’s column. The roar of the traffic was the music of its motion. The piece of symbolism fascinated him. He saw the lions turning round, and the radii of the streets, and the houses, and the buses and taxis and the human crowd. All of it would go on spinning.

What was this London but a creation of man’s urge to express himself, a thing willed in brick and stone and steel; alive, gyrating. And did the centripetal and centrifugal forces balance, or was there some subtle nexus holding humanity together? Habit! Yes, habit. Habit and tradition. The necessity of man to man. And it seemed to Scarsdale that he was being granted a moment of illumination. He saw such a city as London as a mystical gyroscope, weaving colours as it spun, and the colours were the merged hues of man’s activities. The colours might change, as political favours change, but the swing of the wheel would continue.