Читать книгу Old Wine and New - Warwick Deeping - Страница 31

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He lunched at a little tea-shop in Kensington; he did not know the name of the street, and it did not matter. The tea-shop’s scheme of decoration was black, mauve and orange, and the waitresses were dressed to the same bright coloured toilet. He was allowed a plate of tongue, a roll and a tiny pat of pale butter, and a cup of very bad coffee. That—too—did not matter, for the spring had come, and in his blood were the stirrings of a second youth, a post-war rejuvenation.

Afterwards he found his way into Kensington Gardens, and sat down on a chair by the Round Pond, and watched the children, and dreamed. A westerly wind was blowing, and ruffling the water, and the incipient greenness of the trees seemed reflected in the April grass. The sky was in movement, and to Scarsdale came a sudden sense of the spaciousness of life, its blue and white fluidity, its chant of voices, its eternal youth.

“Man, what makest thou of life?”

His mood was both futurist and retrospective. He reviewed those years of gentle celibacy in Canonbury Square; bookish years, slippered years, when he had asked for nothing but the production of a nice, erudite, gentlemanly Pater cum Stevenson essay. He had been a purist, something of a spinster working coloured wools into pretty patterns, a diner out at clubs with a mild, literary flavour.

And suddenly he marvelled. He watched the children and the flickering water, and wondered how he had been content to grow—or rather not to grow—in that particular way. He had been a topiary person, a yew tree clipped in May, its young greenness restrained, growing older but remaining the same neat formal thing, the slave of the shears.

For what was life if you did not live it, and did not thrust both hands deep into the blue water? A man might be full of information and yet be no more than a dictionary, a gradus, and as unlike life as London is like a library. He sat in judgment upon himself, seeing the pre-war Scarsdale as one of those very futile people who, with a nice complacency, criticize other men’s creations, while themselves producing no live thing. Almost he had belonged to the little crowd that speaks superiorly of “fiction,” while assuming it a quite cultured business to write the lives of the great fictionists. He had been one of those little sniffling, armchair pedants whom Dickens had loathed.

He had not done anything. He had not loved and swaggered and got gloriously drunk, or gone dirty and hungry, or fought nature with naked hands, or taken gulps of sea water. He had not raged with jealousy or lust. He had not thirsted to kill. He had seen no brothel or no marriage-bed. He had not kissed and been kissed as though the whole of life hung on a pair of lips. He had done nothing but scribble, or help to handle the bodies of other men who had been in the battle line. He had written with a little prim air of authority upon things he had never experienced.

Yes, he had been one of those bright little spinster men whom you meet in cities, little dogs that yap and do not understand why the mastiffs and the boar-hounds pay no heed to them.

Suddenly he laughed; he put his head back and laughed.

“Even that youngster’s fist got me.”

But some other youthfulness had smitten him. How that girl’s face lit up when she smiled!