DP Tool Club 12/CD_ASCQ_12_0294.iso/vrac/manaliv1.zip/MAN-02.TXT

Text File | 1994-01-15 | 24KB | 446 lines

                         Chapter II

                 The Luggage of an Optimist


We all remember the fairy tales of science in our infancy,
which played with the supposition that large animals could
jump in the proportion of small ones.  If an elephant were
as strong as a grasshopper, he could (I suppose) spring
clean out of the Zoological Gardens and alight trumpeting
upon Primrose Hill.  If a whale could leap from the water
like a trout, perhaps men might look up and see one soaring
above Yarmouth like the winged island of Laputa.  Such
natural energy, though sublime, might certainly be
inconvenient, and much of this inconvenience attended the
gaiety and good intentions of the man in green.  He was too
large for everything, because he was lively as well as
large.  By a fortunate physical provision, most very
substantial creatures are also reposeful; and middle-class
boarding-houses in the lesser parts of London are not built
for a man as big as a bull and excitable as a kitten.
   When Inglewood followed the stranger into the
boarding-house, he found him talking earnestly (and in his
own opinion privately) to the helpless Mrs. Duke.  That fat,
faint lady could only goggle up like a dying fish at the
enormous new gentleman, who politely offered himself as a
lodger, with vast gestures of the wide white hat in one
hand, and the yellow Gladstone bag in the other.
Fortunately, Mrs. Duke's more efficient niece and partner
was there to complete the contract; for, indeed, all the
people of the house had somehow collected in the room.  This
fact, in truth, was typical of the whole episode.  The
visitor created an atmosphere of comic crisis; and from the
time he came into the house to the time he left it, he
somehow got the company to gather and even follow (though in
derision) as children gather and follow a Punch and Judy.
An hour ago, and for four years previously, these people had
avoided each other, even when they really liked each other.
They had slid in and out of dismal and deserted rooms in
search of particular newspapers or private needlework.  Even
now they all came casually, as with varying interests; but
they all came.  There was the embarrassed Inglewood, still a
sort of red shadow; there was the unembarrassed Warner, a
pallid but solid substance.  There was Michael Moon offering
like a riddle the contrast of the horsy crudeness of his
clothes and the sombre sagacity of his visage.  He was now
joined by his yet more comic crony, Moses Gould.  Swaggering
on short legs with a prosperous purple tie, he was the
gayest of godless little dogs; but like a dog also in this,
that however he danced and wagged with delight, the two dark
eyes on each side of his protuberant nose glistened gloomily
like black buttons.  There was Miss Rosamund Hunt, still
with the fine white hat framing her square, good-humoured
face, and still with her native air of being dressed for
some party that never came off.  She also, like Mr. Moon,
had a new companion, new so far as this narrative goes, but
in reality an old friend and protegee.  This was a slight
young woman in dark gray, and in no way notable but for a
load of dull red hair, of which the shape somehow gave her
pale face that triangular, almost peaked, appearance which
was given by the lowering headdress and deep rich ruff of
the Elizabethan beauties.  Her surname seemed to be Gray,
and Miss Hunt called her Mary, in that indescribable tone
applied to an old dependent who has practically become a
friend.  She wore a small silver cross on her very
business-like gray clothes, and was the only member of the
party who went to church.  Last, but the reverse of least,
there as Diana Duke, studying the newcomer with eyes of
steel, and listening carefully to every idiotic word he
said.  As for Mrs. Duke, she smiled up at him, but never
dreamed of listening to him.  She had never really listened
to any one in her life; which, some said, was why she had
survived.
   Nevertheless, Mrs. Duke was pleased with her new guest's
concentration of courtesy upon herself; for no one ever
spoke seriously to her any more than she listened seriously
to any one.  And she almost beamed as the stranger, with yet
wider and almost whirling gestures of explanation with his
huge hat and bag, apologized for having entered by the wall
instead of the front door.  He was understood to put it down
to an unfortunate family tradition of neatness and care of
his clothes.
   "My mother was rather strict about it, to tell the
truth," he said, lowering his voice, to Mrs. Duke.  "She
never liked me to lose my cap at school.  And when a man's
been taught to be tidy and neat it sticks to him."
   Mrs. Duke weakly gasped that she was sure he must have
had a good mother; but her niece seemed inclined to probe
the matter further.
   "You've got a funny idea of neatness," she said, "if it's
jumping garden walls and clambering up garden trees.  A man
can't very well climb a tree tidily."
   "He can clear a wall neatly," said Michael Moon; "I saw
him do it."
   Smith seemed to be regarding the girl with genuine
astonishment.  "My dear young lady," he said, "I was tidying
the tree.  You don't want last year's hats there, do you,
any more than last year's leaves?  The wind takes off the
leaves, but it couldn't manage the hat; that wind, I
suppose, has tidied whole forests to-day.  Rum idea this is,
that tidiness is a timid, quiet sort of thing; why, tidiness
is a toil for giants.  You can't tidy anything without
untidying yourself; just look at my trousers.  Don't you
know that?  Haven't you ever had a spring cleaning?"
   "Oh yes, sir," said Mrs. Duke, almost eagerly.  "You will
find everything of that sort quite nice."  For the first
time she had heard two words that she could understand.
   Miss Diana Duke seemed to be studying the stranger with a
sort of spasm of calculation; then her black eyes snapped
with decision, and she said that he could have a particular
bedroom on the top floor if he liked: and the silent and
sensitive Inglewood, who had been on the rack through these
cross-purposes, eagerly offered to show him up to the room.
Smith went up the stairs four at a time, and when he bumped
his head against the ultimate ceiling, Inglewood had an odd
sensation that the tall house was much shorter than it used
to be.
   Arthur Inglewood followed his old friend -- or his new
friend, for he did not very clearly know which he was.  The
face looked very like his old schoolfellow's at one second
and very unlike at another.  And when Inglewood broke
through his native politeness so far as to say suddenly, "Is
your name Smith?" he received only the unenlightening reply,
"Quite right; quite right.  Very good.  Excellent!"  Which
appeared to Inglewood, on reflection, rather the speech of a
new-born babe accepting a name than of a grown-up man
admitting one.
   Despite these doubts about identity, the hapless
Inglewood watched the other unpack, and stood about his
bedroom in all the impotent attitudes of the male friend.
Mr. Smith unpacked with the same kind of whirling accuracy
with which he climbed a tree -- throwing things out of his
bag as if they were rubbish, yet managing to distribute
quite a regular pattern all round him on the floor.
   As he did so he continued to talk in the same somewhat
gasping manner (he had come upstairs four steps at a time,
but even without this his style of speech was breathless and
fragmentary), and his remarks were still a string of more or
less significant but often separate pictures.
   "Like the day of judgement," he said, throwing a bottle
so that it somehow settled, rocking on its right end.
"People say vast universe... infinity and astronomy; not
sure... I think things are too close together... packed up;
for travelling... stars too close, really... why, the sun's
a star, too close to be seen properly; the earth's a star,
too close to be seen at all... too many pebbles on the
beach; ought all to be put in rings; too many blades of
grass to study... feathers on a bird make the brain reel;
wait till the big bag is unpacked... may all be put in our
right places then."
   Here he stopped, literally for breath -- throwing a shirt
to the other end of the room, and then a bottle of ink so
that it fell quite neatly beyond it.  Inglewood looked round
on this strange, half-symmetrical disorder with an
increasing doubt.
   In fact, the more one explored Mr. Smith's holiday
luggage, the less one could make anything of it.  One
peculiarity of it was that almost everything seemed to be
there for the wrong reason; what is secondary with every one
else was primary with him.  He would wrap up a pot or pan in
brown paper; and the unthinking assistant would discover
that the pot was valueless or even unnecessary, and that it
was the brown paper that was truly precious.  He produced
two or three boxes of cigars, and explained with plain and
perplexing sincerity that he was no smoker, but that
cigar-box wood was by far the best for fretwork.  He also
exhibited about six small bottles of wine, white and red,
and Inglewood, happening to note a Volnay which he knew to
be excellent, supposed at first that the stranger was an
epicure in vintages.  He was therefore surprised to find
that the next bottle was a vile sham claret from the
colonies, which even colonials (to do them justice) do not
drink.  It was only then that he observed that all six
bottles had those bright metallic seals of various tints,
and seemed to have been chosen solely because they have the
three primary and three secondary colours: red, blue, and
yellow; green, violet and orange.  There grew upon Inglewood
an almost creepy sense of the real childishness of this
creature.  For Smith was really, so far as human psychology
can be, innocent.  He had the sensualities of innocence: he
loved the stickiness of gum, and he cut white wood greedily
as if he were cutting a cake.  To this man wine was not a
doubtful thing to be defended or denounced; it was a
quaintly coloured syrup, such as a child sees in a shop
window.  He talked dominantly and rushed the social
situation; but he was not asserting himself, like a superman
in a modern play.  He was simply forgetting himself, like a
little boy at a party.  He had somehow made a giant stride
from babyhood to manhood, and missed that crisis in youth
when most of us grow old.
   As he shunted his big bag, Arthur observed the initials
I. S. printed on one side of it, and remembered that Smith
had been called Innocent Smith at school, though whether as
a formal Christian name or a moral description he could not
remember.  He was just about to venture another question,
when there was a knock at the door, and the short figure of
Mr. Gould offered itself, with the melancholy Moon, standing
like his tall crooked shadow, behind him.  They had drifted
up the stairs after the other two men with the wandering
gregariousness of the male.
   "Hope there's no intrusion," said the beaming Moses with
a glow of good nature, but not the airiest tinge of apology.
   "The truth is," said Michael Moon with comparative
courtesy, "we thought we might see if they had made you
comfortable.  Miss Duke is rather --"
   "I know," cried the stranger, looking up radiantly from
his bag; "magnificent, isn't she?  Go close to her -- hear
military music going by, like Joan of Arc."
   Inglewood stared and stared at the speaker like one who
has just heard a wild fairy tale, which nevertheless
contains one small and forgotten fact.  For he remembered
how he had himself thought of Jeanne d'Arc years ago, when,
hardly more than a schoolboy, he had first come to the
boarding-house.  Long since the pulverizing rationalism of
his friend Dr. Warner had crushed such youthful ignorances
and disproportionate dreams.  Under the Warnerian scepticism
and science of hopeless human types, Inglewood had long come
to regard himself as a timid, insufficient, and "weak" type,
who would never marry; to regard Diana Duke as a
materialistic maidservant; and to regard his first fancy for
her as the small, dull farce of a collegian kissing his
landlady's daughter.  And yet the phrase about military
music moved him queerly, as if he had heard those distant
drums.
   "She has to keep things pretty tight, as is only
natural," said Moon, glancing round the rather dwarfish
room, with its wedge of slanted ceiling, like the conical
hood of a dwarf.
   "Rather a small box for you, sir," said the waggish Mr.
Gould.
   "Splendid room, though," answered Mr. Smith
enthusiastically, with his head inside his Gladstone bag.
"I love these pointed sorts of rooms, like Gothic.  By the
way," he cried out, pointing in quite a startling way,
"where does that door lead to?"
   "To certain death, I should say," answered Michael Moon,
staring up at a dust-stained and disused trapdoor in the
sloping roof of the attic.  "I don't think there's a loft
there; and I don't know what else it could lead to."  Long
before he had finished his sentence the man with the strong
green legs had leapt at the door in the ceiling, swung
himself somehow on to the ledge beneath it, wrenched it open
after a struggle, and clambered through it.  For a moment
they saw the two symbolic legs standing like a truncated
statue; then they vanished.  Through the hole thus burst in
the roof appeared the empty and lucid sky of evening, with
one great many-coloured cloud sailing across it like a whole
county upside down.
   "Hullo, you fellows!" came the far cry of Innocent Smith,
apparently from some remote pinnacle.  "Come up here; and
bring some of my things to eat and drink.  It's just the
spot for a picnic."
   With a sudden impulse Michael snatched two of the small
wine bottles, one in each solid fist; and Arthur Inglewood,
as if mesmerized, groped for a biscuit tin and a big jar of
ginger.  The enormous hand of Innocent Smith appearing
through the aperture, like a giant's in a fairy tale,
received these tributes and bore them off to the eyrie; then
they both hoisted themselves out of the window.  They were
both athletic, and even gymnastic; Inglewood through his
concern for hygiene, and Moon through his concern for sport,
which was not quite so idle and inactive as that of the
average sportsman.  Also they both had a light-headed
celestial sensation when the door was burst in the roof, as
if a door had been burst in the sky, and they could climb on
to the very roof of the universe.  They were both men who
had long been unconsciously imprisoned in the commonplace,
though one took it comically, and the other seriously.  They
were both men, nevertheless, in whom sentiment had never
died.  But Mr. Moses Gould had an equal contempt for their
suicidal athletics and their subconscious transcendentalism,
and he stood and laughed at the thing with the shameless
rationality of another race.
   When the singular Smith, astride of a chimney-pot, learnt
that Gould was not following, his infantile officiousness
and good nature forced him to dive back into the attic to
comfort or persuade; and Inglewood and Moon were left alone
on the long gray-green ridge of the slate roof, with their
feet against gutters and their backs against chimney-pots,
looking agnostically at each other.  Their first feeling was
that they had come out into eternity, and that eternity was
very like topsy-turvydom.  One definition occurred to both
of them -- that he had come out into the light of that lucid
and radiant ignorance in which all beliefs had begun.  The
sky above them was full of mythology.  Heaven seemed deep
enough to hold all the gods.  The round of the ether turned
from green to yellow gradually like a great unripe fruit.
All around the sunken sun it was like a lemon; round all the
east it was a sort of golden green, more suggestive of a
greengage; but the whole had still he emptiness of daylight
and none of the secrecy of dusk.  Tumbled here and there
across this gold and pale green were shards and shattered
masses of inky purple cloud, which seemed falling towards
the earth in every kind of colossal perspective.  One of
them really had the character of some many-mitred,
many-bearded, many-winged Assyrian image, huge head
downwards, hurled out of heaven -- a sort of false Jehovah,
who was perhaps Satan.  All the other clouds had
preposterous pinnacled shapes, as if the god's palaces had
been flung after him.
   And yet, while the empty heaven was full of silent
catastrophe, the height of human buildings above which they
sat held here and there a tiny trivial noise that was the
exact antithesis; and they heard some six streets below a
newsboy calling, and a bell bidding to chapel.  They could
also hear talk out of the garden below; and realized that
the irrepressible Smith must have followed Gould downstairs,
for his eager and pleading accents could be heard, followed
by the half-humourous protests of Miss Duke and the full and
very youthful laughter of Rosamund Hunt.  The air had that
cold kindness that comes after a storm.  Michael Moon drank
it in with as serious a relish as he had drunk the little
bottle of cheap claret, which he had emptied almost at a
draught.  Inglewood went on eating ginger very slowly and
with a solemnity unfathomable as the sky above him.  There
was still enough stir in the freshness of the atmosphere to
make them almost fancy they could smell the garden soil and
the last roses of the autumn.  Suddenly there came from the
darkening garden a silvery ping and pong which told them
that Rosamund had brought out the long-neglected mandoline.
After the first few notes there was more of the distant
bell-like laughter.
   "Inglewood," said Michael Moon, "have you ever heard that
I am a blackguard?"
   "I haven't heard it, and I don't believe it," answered
Inglewood, after an odd pause.  "But I have heard you were
-- what they call rather wild."
   "If you have heard that I am wild, you can contradict the
rumour," said Moon, with an extraordinary calm; "I am tame.
I am quite tame; I am about the tamest beast that crawls.  I
drink too much of the same kind of whisky at the same time
every night.  I even drink about the same amount too much.
I go to the same number of public-houses.  I meet the same
damned women with mauve faces.  I hear the same number of
dirty stories -- generally the same dirty stories.  You may
reassure my friends, Inglewood, you see before you a person
whom civilization has thoroughly tamed."
   Arthur Inglewood was staring with feelings that made him
nearly fall off the roof, for indeed the Irishman's face,
always sinister, was now almost demoniacal.
   "Christ confound it!" cried out Moon, suddenly clutching
the empty claret bottle, "this is about the thinnest and
filthiest wine I ever uncorked, and it's the only drink I
have really enjoyed for nine years.  I was never wild until
just ten minutes ago."  And he sent the bottle whizzing, a
wheel of glass, far away beyond the garden into the road,
where, in the profound evening silence, they could even hear
it break and part upon the stones.
   "Moon," said Arthur Inglewood, rather huskily, "you
mustn't be so bitter about it.  Everyone has to take the
world as he finds it; of course one often finds it a bit
dull --"
   "That fellow doesn't," said Michael decisively; "I mean
that fellow Smith.  I have a fancy there's some method in
his madness.  It looks as if he could turn into a sort of
wonderland any minute by taking one step out of the plain
road.  Who would have thought of that trapdoor?  Who would
have thought that this cursed colonial claret could taste
quite nice among the chimney-pots?  Perhaps that is the real
key of fairyland.  Perhaps Nosey Gould's beastly little
Empire Cigarettes ought only to be smoked on stilts, or
something of that sort.  Perhaps Mrs. Duke's cold leg of
mutton would seem quite appetizing at the top of a tree.
Perhaps even my damned, dirty, monotonous drizzle of Old
Bill Whisky --"
   "Don't be so rough on yourself," said Inglewood, in
serious distress.  "The dullness isn't your fault or the
whisky's.  Fellows who don't -- fellows like me I mean --
have just the same feeling that it's all rather flat and a
failure.  But the world's made like that; it's all
survival.  Some people are made to get on, like Warner; and
some people are made to stick quiet, like me.  You can't
help your temperament.  I know you're much cleverer than I
am; but you can't help having all the loose ways of a poor
literary chap, and I can't help having all the doubts and
helplessness of a small scientific chap, any more than a
fish can help floating or a fern help curling up.  Humanity,
as Warner said so well in that lecture, really consists of
quite different tribes of animals all disguised as men."
   In the dim garden below the buzz of talk was suddenly
broken by Miss Hunt's musical instrument banging with the
abruptness of artillery into a vulgar but spirited tune.
   Rosamund's voice came up rich and strong in the words of
some fatuous, fashionable coon song: --

        "Darkies sing a song on the old plantation,
         Sing it as we sang it in days long since gone by."

   Inglewood's brown eyes softened and saddened still more
as he continued his monologue of resignation to such a
rollicking and romantic tune.  But the blue eyes of Michael
Moon brightened and hardened with a light that Inglewood did
not understand.  Many centuries, and many villages and
valleys, would have been happier if Inglewood or Inglewood's
countrymen had ever understood that light, or guessed at the
first blink that it was the battle star of Ireland.
   "Nothing can ever alter it; it's in the wheels of the
universe," went on Inglewood, in a low voice: "some men are
weak and some strong, and the only thing we can do is to
know that we are weak.  I have been in love lots of times,
but I could not do anything, for I remembered my own
fickleness.  I have formed opinions, but I haven't the cheek
to push them, because I've so often changed them.  That's
the upshot, old fellow.  We can't trust ourselves -- and we
can't help it."
   Michael had risen to his feet, and stood poised in a
perilous position at the end of the roof, like some dark
statue hung above its gable.  Behind him, huge clouds of an
almost impossible purple turned slowly topsy-turvy in the
silent anarchy of heaven.  Their gyration made the dark
figure seem yet dizzier.
   "Let us..." he said, and was suddenly silent.
   "Let us what?" asked Arthur Inglewood, rising equally
quick though somewhat more cautiously, for his friend seemed
to find some difficulty in speech.
   "Let us go and do some of these things we can't do," said
Michael.
   At the same moment there burst out of the trapdoor below
them the cockatoo hair and flushed face of Innocent Smith,
calling to them that they must come down as the "concert"
was in full swing, and Mr. Moses Gould was about to recite
"Young Lochinvar."
   As they dropped into Innocent's attic they nearly tumbled
over its entertaining impedimenta again.  Inglewood, staring
at the littered floor, thought instinctively of the littered
floor of a nursery.  He was therefore the more moved, and
even shocked, when his eye fell on a large well-polished
American revolver.
   "Hullo!" he cried, stepping back from the steely glitter
as men step back from a serpent; "are you afraid of
burglars? or when and why do you deal death out of that
machine gun?"
   "Oh, that!" said Smith, throwing it a single glance; "I
deal life out of that," and he went bounding down the
stairs.