Читать книгу Captain Macedoine's Daughter - William McFee - Страница 3

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There is an hour or so before the train comes puffing round the curve of the Gulf from Cordelio, and you are gone down into the garden for a while because the mosquitoes become tiresome later, and the great shadows of the cypresses are vanishing as the sun sinks behind the purple islands beyond the headlands. You will stay there for a while among the roses and jasmine, and then you will come in and say: "There it is!" And together we will slip and stumble and trot down the steep hillside to the level-crossing, and we will run along to the little station, so like ours in America. And when the train is come creaking and groaning and squealing to a standstill, I shall climb in, while you will stand for a moment looking.... You will wave as we start with the usual prodigious jerk, and then you will run back and climb up to the house again, banging the big iron gate securely shut....

All just as before.

But this time there is this difference, that I am not coming back. I am ordered to return to England, and I am to sail to-morrow morning. Now, as I have told you more than once, it is very difficult to know just how anything takes you because you have at your command an alluring immobility, a sort of sudden static receptiveness which is, to an Englishman, a Westerner that is, at once familiar and enigmatic. And when one has informed you, distinctly if ungrammatically, in three languages, that one is going away for good, and you assume for a moment that aforementioned immobility, and murmur "C'est la guerre," I ask you, what is one to think?

And perhaps you will recall that you then went on brushing your hair precisely as though I had made some banal remark about the weather. A detached observer would say—"This woman has no heart. She is too stupid to understand." However, as I am something more than a detached observer, I know that in spite of that gruff, laconic attitude of yours, that enigmatic immobility, you realize what this means to us, to me, to you.

So, while you are down in the garden, and the light is still quite good by this western window, I am writing this for you. As we say over in America, "Let me tell you something." I have written a book, and I am dedicating it to you. As you are aware, I have written books before. When I explained this to you you were stricken with that sudden silence, that attentive seriousness, if you remember, and regarded me for a long time without making any remark. Well, another one is done and I inscribe it to you. Of course I know perfectly well that books are nothing to you, that you read only the perplexing and defaced human hieroglyphics around you. I know that when you receive a copy of this new affair, through the British Post Office in the Rue Franque, you will not read it. You will lay it carefully in a drawer, and let it go at that. And knowing this, and without feeling sad about it, either, since I have no fancy for bookish women, I am anxious that you should read at least the dedication. So I am writing it here by the window, hurriedly, in words you will understand, and I shall leave it on the table, and you will find it later, when I am gone.

Listen.

The fact is, this dedication, like the book which follows after it, is not merely an act of homage. It is a symbol of emancipation from an influence under which I have lived for two thirds of your lifetime. I must tell you that I have always been troubled by visions of beings whom I call dream-women. I was a solitary child. Girls were disconcerting creatures who revealed to me only the unamiable sides of their natures. But I discovered that I possessed the power of inventing women who, while they only dimly resembled the neighbours, and acquired a few traits from the illustrations in books, were none the less extraordinarily real, becoming clearly visualized, living in my thoughts, drawing sustenance from secret sources, and inspiring me with a suspicion, never reaching expression, that they were really aspects of myself—what I would have been if, as I sometimes heard near relatives regret, I had been born a girl. And later, when I was a youth, and began to go out into the world, all those vague imaginings crystallized into a definite conception. She was everything I disliked—a tiny, slender creature with pale golden hair and pathetic blue eyes, and in my dreams she was always clinging to me, which I detested. I regarded myself with contempt for remaining preoccupied with a fancy so alien to my temperament. You might suppose that an image inspiring such antagonism would soon fade. On the contrary, she assumed a larger and larger dominion over my imagination. I fancied myself married to her, and for days the spell of such a dire destiny made me ill. It was summer time, and I lived on the upper floor of my mother's house in an outlying faubourg of London, from the windows of which one could look across a wide wooded valley or down into the secluded gardens of the surrounding villas. And one evening I happened to look down and I saw, between the thickly clothed branches of the lime-trees, the woman of my dreams sitting in a neighbour's garden, nursing a baby, and rocking herself to and fro while she turned her childish features and pale blue eyes toward the house with an expectant smile. I sat at my window looking at this woman, some neighbour's recently married daughter no doubt, my thoughts in a flurry of fear, for she was just as I had imagined her. I wonder if I can make you understand that I did not want to imagine her at all, that I was helpless in the grip of my forebodings? For in the dream it was I who would come out of the drawing-room door on to the lawn, who would advance in an alpaca coat, put on after my return from business, a gold watch-chain stretched athwart my stomach, carpet slippers on my soft, untravelled feet, and would bend down to that clinging form....

As I have told you, it was about that time that I left the faubourgs and went to live in a studio among artists. Without knowing it, I took the most certain method of depriving that woman of her power. Beyond the shady drives and prim gardens of the faubourg her image began to waver, and she haunted my dreams no more. And I was glad of this because at that time I was an apprentice to Life, and there were so many things at which I wanted to try my hand that I had not time for what is known, rather vaguely, as love and romance and sentiment and so forth. I resented the intrusion of these sensuous phantoms upon the solitudes where I was struggling with the elementary rules of art. I was consumed with an insatiable ambition to write, to read, to travel, to talk, to achieve distinction. And curiously, I had an equally powerful instinct to make myself as much like other young men, in manner and dress and ideas, as possible. I was ashamed of my preoccupation with these creatures of my imagination, believing them peculiar to myself, and I hurried from them as one hurries from shabby relations. But before I was aware of it I had fallen into the toils of another dream-woman, an experienced, rapacious, and disdainful woman. I saw her in studios, where she talked without noticing me save out of the corner of her eye. I saw her at picture exhibitions, where she stood regarding the pictures satirically, speaking rapidly and disparagingly from between small white teeth and holding extravagant furs about her thin form. I had a notion, too, that she was married, and I waited in a temper of mingled pride, disgust, and fortitude for her to appear in the body. And then things began to happen to me with bewildering rapidity. In the space of a week I fell in love, I lost my employment, and I ran away to sea.

Now it is of no importance to you what my employment was or how I lost it. Neither are you deeply interested in that sea upon which I spend my days, and which is to bear me away from you to-morrow. You come of inland stock, and the sea-coast of Bohemia, a coast of fairy lights and magic casements, is more in your way. But I know without asking that you will be eager to hear about the falling in love. Indeed this is the point of the story.

The point is that an average young Englishman, as I was then, may quite possibly live and prosper and die, without ever getting to know anything about love at all! I told you this once, and you observed "My God! Impossible." And you added thoughtfully: "The Englishwomen—perhaps it is their fault." Well, it may be their fault, or the fault of their climate, which washes the vitality out of one, or of their religion, which does not encourage emotional adventure to any notable degree. The point is that the average young Englishman is more easily fooled about love than about anything else in the world. He accepts almost any substitute offered to him in an attractive package. I know this because I was an average young Englishman and I was extensively fooled about love. The whole social fabric of English life is engaged in manufacturing spurious counterfeits of the genuine article. And I fell, as we say in America, for a particularly cheap imitation called Ideal Love.

Now you must not imagine that, because I had, as I say, fallen in love with Ideal Love, I was therefore free from the dream-woman of whom I have spoken. Not at all. She hovered in my thoughts and complicated my emotions. But I can hear you saying: "Never mind the dream-woman. Tell me about the real one, your ideal." Well, listen. She was small, thin, and of a dusky pallor, and her sharp, clever features were occasionally irradiated with a dry, satirical smile that had the cold, gleaming concentration of the beam of a searchlight. She had a large number of accomplishments, a phrase we English use in a most confusing sense, since she had never accomplished anything and never would. But the ideal part of her lay in her magnificent conviction that she and her class were the final embodiment of desirable womanhood. It was not she whom I loved. Indeed she was a rather disagreeable girl with a mania for using men's slang which she had picked up from college-boys. It was this ideal of English womanhood which deluded me, and which scared me for many years from examining her credentials.

That is what it amounted to. For years after I had discovered that she thought me beneath her because I was not a college-boy, she continued to impose her personality upon me. Whenever I imagined for a moment that I might love some other kind of woman, I would see that girl's disparaging gray eyes regarding me with an attentive, satirical smile. And this obsession appeared to my befuddled mentality as a species of sacrifice. I imagined that I was remaining true to my Ideal! If you demand where I obtained these ideas, I can only confess that I had read of such sterile allegiances in books, and I had not yet abandoned the illusion that life was to be learned from literature, instead of literature from life. And, moreover, although we are accustomed to assume that all young men have a natural aptitude for love, I think myself that it is not so; that we have to acquire, by long practice and thought, the ability and the temperament to achieve anything beyond tawdry intrigues and banal courtships, spurious imitations which are exhibited and extensively advertised as the real thing. And again, while it may be true, as La Rochefoucauld declares in his "Maxims"—the thin book you have so often found by my chair in the garden—that a woman is in love with her first lover, and ever after is in love with love, it seems to me that with men the reverse is true. We spend years in falling in and out of love with love. The woman is only a lay figure whom we invest with the vague splendours of our snobbish and inexperienced imagination. A great passion demands as much knowledge and experience and aptitude as a great idea. I would almost say it requires as much talent as a work of art; indeed, the passion, the idea, and the work of art are really only three manifestations, three dimensions, of the same emotion. And the simple and sufficient reason why this book should be dedicated to you is, that but for you it would not have been written.

And very often, I think, women marry men simply to keep them from ever encountering passion. Englishwomen especially. They are afraid of it. They think it wicked. So they marry him. Though they suspect that he will be able to sustain it when he has gotten more experience, they know that they themselves will never be the objects of it, so they trick him with one of the clever imitations I have mentioned. Everything is done to keep out the woman who can inspire an authentic passion. And the act of duping him is invariably attributed to what is called the mothering instinct, a craving to protect a young man from his natural destiny, the great adventure of life!

However, after a number of years of sea-faring, during which I was obsessed by this sterile allegiance, and permitted many interesting possibilities to pass me without investigating them, I was once more in London, in late autumn. I call this sort of fidelity sterile because it is static, whereas all genuine emotion is dynamic—a species of growth. And I realized that beneath my conventional desire to see her again lay a reluctance to discover my folly. But convention was too strong for me, and by a fairly easy series of charitable arrangements I met her. And it was at a picture-show. I remember pondering upon this accident of place as I made my way along Bond Street in the afternoon sunshine, for I could not help thinking of that disdainful dream-woman who posed, in my imagination, as an authority on art. This, I suppose, was due to my prolonged study of the Italian Renaissance, a period to which I had kept my reading for a number of years. I remember giving up my ticket to a sleek-haired, frock-coated individual, and passing along a corridor hung with black velvet, against which were hung one or two large canvases in formidable gold frames, cunningly illuminated by concealed electric globes. A haughty creature stood by a table loaded with catalogues and deigned to accept my shilling. And then, feeling strange and gauche, as is only felt by the sea-farer ashore when he steps out of his authentic milieu, I passed through into the gallery, a high, dignified chamber full of the quiet radiance of beautiful pictures, the life-work of a man whom I had known. I found myself regretting that fate had not permitted me to remain in such an environment; but one cannot avoid one's destiny, and mine is to have an essentially middle-class mind, a bourgeois mentality, which makes it impossible for me to live among artists or people of culture for any length of time. I should say that the reason for this is that such folk are not primarily interested in persons but in types and ideas, whereas I am for persons. Flowers and trees, perfumes and music, colours and children, are to me irrelevant. But every man and woman I meet is to me a fresh problem which engages my emotions. The talk about types is incomprehensible to me, for each fresh individual will throw me into a trance of speculation. But only when one has lived among clever people can one realize how tedious and monotonous their society can be. I was thinking about the man who had painted these pictures and how he had delighted to frighten me with his obscene comments about women, when I saw a woman far down on the left, a woman in an enormous hat, holding extravagant furs about her thin form, and talking to a tall, handsome man from between her small white teeth.

For you will not be too much astonished to hear that this girl for whom I had cherished this sterile fidelity had become in all essentials the dream-woman who had been the bane of my life for so long. Perhaps she had always been the same and the illusion of youth had blinded me to her identity. Perhaps, on the other hand, she had really changed, for she was now twenty-five instead of twenty-one—ominous years in a woman's life. At any rate, I had changed for a certainty. While I still struggled against the bondage her personality imposed upon me, I no longer struggled in vain. I had been drawing stores of strength from toil, from the sea, from the bizarre phantasmagoria which the countries of the East had unrolled before my eyes. And I think she saw this at once, for she had no sooner introduced me to her companion, an actor who had recently married an eminent actress twice his own age, than she made our excuses and proposed an immediate departure.

But it was too late. As we drove in a swiftly moving taxi-cab through the gay streets of West London, and on out to Richmond, where she was staying with friends, I knew that in the end I should be free. She was soon to be married, and in her satirical gray eyes I saw a desire to hold me permanently in a condition of chivalrous abnegation. On these terms I might achieve some sort of destiny without endangering her dominion. But I felt the winds of freedom blowing from the future on my face. I did not see then how it would come about: I did not even imagine the long years of moody and unprofitable voyaging which lay before me. But she saw that her own ideal of masculine modern womanhood no longer appeared to me the supremely evocative thing she claimed it to be, so that in time, in time, her power would depart. I can see her now, turned slightly away from me in the cab, regarding me over her shoulder from beneath that enormous hat, studying even then how she could keep me true to that worn-out creed, weighing who knows what reckless plans in her cool, clever brain....

But it was a long time! For years yet I saw her before me whenever I thought of other women, and her disparaging, slightly satirical smile would interpose itself and hold me back from experimenting with fresh emotions. Even when war came and our spiritual and emotional worlds came crashing about our ears, her power waned but did not depart. I had no choice between this shadowy, reluctant fidelity and a descent into regions where I had neither the means nor the temperament to prosper. And so it went, until suddenly one day the whole thing came to an end. You will remember how I abruptly abandoned the story upon which I was engaged, and told you I had begun upon a tale you had told to me, the tale of Captain Macedoine's Daughter? Behold it, transmuted into something you would never recognize, as is the way of stories when a novelist of romantic tendencies gets at them! And what I want you to observe is that the inspiration, as far as I am concerned, was based upon your brief yet intensely vivid projection of your life in that dull street in a Saloniki faubourg, a street so like many of ours in the faubourgs of London, stretching away into dim, dusty distances; but unlike ours in that beyond it rose ranges of hard, sharp mountains that looked as though they had been cut out of pasteboard, and stuck against a sky so unreal in its uncompromising blueness that it seemed to be aniline-dyed. And as the days passed, and the story grew, here by the blue waters of the Gulf I suddenly realized that the spell of the dream-woman had been broken, that behind my story of Captain Macedoine's Daughter another story was working out—the ghost of a story if you like—the drama of the end of an illusion. My old antagonist had met her match at last. She tried to frighten me with her slightly satirical smile. She invoked the innumerable memories and sentiments in which I had been born and reared. But she had met her match. I took her by the arm and opening the door, thrust her gently outside. And then, while you were down there in the garden, I went on to write the tale of Captain Macedoine's Daughter.

There is another long-drawn shriek—the train is leaving the station next to ours—and I take a last look out upon the well-remembered view. Across the shining waters of the Gulf the lights of the city are glittering already against the many-coloured façades, with their marble and cedar balconies, their bright green jalousies and gay ensigns. Already the war-ships in the rade are picked out in bright points, and the mast-head lights are winking rapid messages to each other. The western sky over the headland is a smoky orange with pale green and amber above, and the moon, an incredibly slender crescent of pure silver, hangs faintly over Mount Pagos. It is quite dark down under the cypresses, and a smell of humid earth mingles with the perfume of the jasmine.

Yes, I am now quite ready. No, I have left nothing behind, except perhaps....

Well, it is for you to say.

Bairakli. W. M.