Lore of Proserpine. Maurice Hewlett
Читать онлайн книгу.
to a nephew. That youth, at any rate, likes the cheerful sound. He is rather fond, too, of monopolising the front of the fire in company, and thinks more of what he is going to eat, some time before he eats it, than a man should. But really I can't accuse him of anything worse than such little weaknesses. The first floor is occupied by a person of whom very little is known, who goes out chiefly at night and is hardly ever seen during the day. Tradesmen, and the crossing-sweeper at the corner, have caught a glimpse on rare occasions of a white face at the window, the startled face of a queer creature, who blinks and wrings at his nails with his teeth; who peers at you, jerks and grins; who seems uncertain what to do; who sometimes shoots out his hands as if he would drive them through the glass: altogether a mischancy, unaccountable apparition, probably mad. Nobody knows how long he has been here; for the landlord found him in possession when he bought the lease, and the ground-floor, who was here also, fancies that they came together, but can't be sure. There he is, anyhow, and without an open scandal one doesn't like to give him notice. A curious thing about the man is that neither landlord nor ground-floor will admit acquaintance with him to each other, although, if the truth were known, each of them knows something—for each of them has been through his door; and I will answer for one of them, at least, that he has accompanied the Undesirable upon more than one midnight excursion, and has enjoyed himself enormously. If you could get either of these two alone in a confidential mood you might learn some curious particulars of their coy neighbour; and not the least curious would be the effect of his changing the glass of the first floor windows. It seems that he had that done directly he got into his rooms, saying that it was impossible to see out of such windows, and that a man must have light. Where he got his glass from, by whom it was fitted, I can't tell you, but the effect of it is most extraordinary. The only summary account I feel able to give of it at the moment is that it transforms the world upon which it opens. You look out upon a new earth, literally that. The trees are not trees at all, but slim grey persons, young men, young women, who stand there quivering with life, like a row of Caryatides—on duty, but tiptoe for a flight, as Keats says. You see life, as it were, rippling up their limbs; for though they appear to be clothed, their clothing is of so thin a texture, and clings so closely that they might as well not be clothed at all. They are eyed, they see intensely; they look at each other so closely that you know what they would be doing. You can see them love each other as you watch. As for the people in the street, the real men and real women, as we say, I hardly know how to tell you what they look like through the first floor's windows. They are changed of everything but one thing. They occupy the places, fill the standing-room of our neighbours and friends; there is a something about them all by which you recognise them—a trick of the hand, a motion of the body, a set of the head (God knows what it is, how little and how much); but for all that—a new creature! A thing like nothing that lives by bread! Now just look at that policeman at the corner, for instance; not only is he stark naked—everybody is like that—but he's perfectly different from the sturdy, good-humoured, red-faced, puzzled man you and I know. He is thin, woefully thin, and his ears are long and perpetually twitching. He pricks them up at the least thing; or lays them suddenly back, and we see them trembling. His eyes look all ways and sometimes nothing but the white is to be seen. He has a tail, too, long and leathery, which is always curling about to get hold of something. Now it will be the lamp-post, now the square railings, now one of those breathing trees; but mostly it is one of his own legs. Yet if you consider him carefully you will agree with me that his tail is a more expressive remnant of the man you have always seen there than any other part of him. You may say, and truly, that it is the only recognisable thing left. What do you think of his feet and hands? They startled me at first; they are so long and narrow, so bony and pointed, covered with fine short hair which shines like satin. That way he has of arching his feet and driving his toes into the pavement delights me. And see, too, that his hands are undistinguishable from feet: they are just as long and satiny. He is fond of smoothing his face with them; he brings them both up to his ears and works them forward like slow fans. Transformation indeed. I defy you to recognise him for the same man—except for a faint reminiscence about his tail.
But all's of a piece. The crossing-sweeper now has shaggy legs which end in hoofs. His way of looking at young people is very unpleasant;—and one had always thought him such a kindly old man. The butcher's boy—what a torso!—is walking with his arm round the waist of the young lady in Number seven. These are lovers, you see; but it's mostly on her side. He tilts up her chin and gives her a kiss before he goes; and she stands looking after him with shining eyes, hoping that he will turn round before he gets to the corner. But he doesn't.
Wait, now, wait, wait—who is this lovely, straining, beating creature darting here and there about the square, bruising herself, poor beautiful thing, against the railings? A sylph, a caught fairy? Surely, surely, I know somebody—is it?—It can't be. That careworn lady? God in Heaven, is it she? Enough! Show me no more. I will show you no more, my dear sir, if it agitates you; but I confess that I have come to regard it as one of the most interesting spectacles in London. The mere information—to say nothing of the amusement—which I have derived from it would fill a volume; but if it did, I may add, I myself should undoubtedly fill a cell in Holloway. I will therefore spare you what I know about the Doctor's wife, and what happens to Lieutenant-Colonel Storter when I see him through these windows—I could never have believed it unless I had seen it. These things are not done, I know; but observed in this medium they seem quite ordinary. Lastly—for I can't go through the catalogue—I will speak of the air as I see it from here. My dear sir, the air is alive, thronged with life. Spirits, forms, lovely immaterial diaphanous shapes, are weaving endless patterns over the face of the day. They shine like salmon at a weir, or they darken the sky as redwings in the autumn fields; they circle, shrieking as they flash, like swallows at evening; they battle and wrangle together; or they join hands and whirl about the square in an endless chain. Of their beauty, their grace of form and movement, of the shifting filmy colour, hue blending in hue, of their swiftness, their glancing eyes, their exuberant joy or grief I cannot now speak. Beside them one man may well seem rat, and another goat. Beside them, indeed, you look for nothing else. And if I go on to hint that the owner of these windows is of them, though imprisoned in my house; that he does at times join them in their streaming flights beyond the housetops, and does at times carry with him his half-bewildered, half-shocked and wholly delighted fellow lodgers, I have come to the end of my tether and your credulity, and, for the time at least, have flowered myself to death. The figure is as good as Plato's though my Pegasus will never stable in his stall.
We may believe ourselves to be two persons, at least, in one, and I fancy that one at least of them is a constant. So far as my own pair is concerned, either one of them has never grown up at all, or he was born whole and in a flash, as the fairies are. Such as he was, at any rate, when I was ten years old, such he is now when I am heavily more than ten; and the other of us, very conscious of the flight of time and of other things with it, is free to confess that he has little more hold of his fellow with all this authority behind him than he had when we commenced partnership. He has some, and thinks himself lucky, since the bond between the pair is of such a nature as to involve a real partnership—a partnership full of perplexity to the working member of it, the ordinary forensic creature of senses, passions, ambitions, and self-indulgences, the eating, sleeping, vainglorious, assertive male of common experience—and it is not to be denied that it has been fruitful, nor again that by some freak of fate or fortune the house has kept a decent front to the world at large. It is still solvent, still favourably regarded by the police. It is not, it never will be, a mere cage of demons; its walls have not been fretted to transparency; no passing eye can detect revelry behind its decent stucco; no passing ear thrill to cries out of the dark. No, no. Troubles we may have; but we keep up appearances. The heart knoweth its own bitterness, and if it be a wise one, keepeth it to itself. I am not going to be so foolish as to deny divergences of opinion, even of practice, between the pair in me; but I flatter myself that I have not allowed them to become a common nuisance, a cause of scandal, a stumbling-block, a rock of offence, or anything of that kind. Uneasy tenant, wayward partner as my recondite may be, he has had a relationship with my forensic which at times has touched cordiality. Influential he has not been, for his colleague has always had the upper hand and been in the public eye. He may have instigated to mischief, but has not often been allowed to complete his purpose. If I am a respectable person it is not his fault. He seeks no man's respect. If he has occasionally lent