Of Time and the River (101 page)

It was a life that seemed so near to Eugene that he could lay his hand on it and make it his at any moment. He seemed to have returned to a room he had always known, and to have paused for a moment, without any doubt or perturbation of the soul, outside the door.

But he never found the door, or turned the knob, or stepped into the room. When he got there he couldn’t find it. It was as near as his hand if he could only reach it, only as high as his heart and yet he could not reach it, only a hand’s breadth off if he would span it, a word away if he would speak it. Only a stride, a move, a step away was all the peace, the certitude, the joy—and home for ever—for which his life was panting, and he was drowning in the darkness.

He never found it. The old smoke-gold of morning would be full of hope and joy and imminent discovery but afternoon would come and the soft grey humid skies pressed down on him with their huge numb waste and weight and weariness of intolerable time, and the empty naked desolation filled his body.

He would walk that legendary street past all those visible and enchanted substances of time and see the students passing through the college gates, the unbelievable velvet green of college quads, and see the huge dark room of peace and joy that time had made, and he had no way of getting into it.

Each day he walked about the town and breathed the accursed languid softness of grey foreign air, that had no bite or sparkle in it, and went by all their fabulous age-encrusted walls of Gothic time, and wondered what in the name of God he had to do with all their walls or towers, or how he could feed his hunger on the portraits of the Spanish king, and why he was there, why he had come!

Sometimes it was just a word, the intonation of a phrase—the way they would say “VERY” or “AMERican,” which chilled and withered all the ardours of the heart, or the way they would say “Thank YOU!” when you paid for something, crisply, courteously, yet with a quick, cautious, and obdurate finality, as if someone had swiftly and firmly closed a door lest you should try to enter it. Eugene could listen to them talk and hear all the words, the moods and tones of life and humour that he had known all his life, until it seemed that he could foresee the very stories they were going to tell, the very situations they were going to describe—and then in an instant all the familiar pattern of their speech would vanish, and their words could not have been stranger to him had they spoken in a foreign tongue.

Thus, as Eugene looked at the young undergraduates playing in the fields below the house, their shouts and cries, the boyish roughness of their play, their strong scurfed knees, and panting breath, evoked the image of a life so familiar to him that he felt all he had to do to enter it again was to walk across the velvet width of lawn that separated him from it. But if he passed these same people two hours later in the High Street, their lives, their words were stranger than in a dream, or they seemed to have an incredible fictitious quality that made everything they did or said seem false, mannered, and affected, so that when he listened to them he had a feeling of resentment and contempt for them as if they spoke and moved with the palpable falseness of actors.

Eugene would see two young fellows before a college gate, and one, fragile of structure, with a small lean head, a sheaf of straight blond hair and thin sensitive features which were yet sharply and strongly marked, would be talking to another youth, his hands thrust jauntily into the pockets of his baggy grey trousers as he talked and the worn elegance of his baggy coat falling across his hands in folds of jaunty well-worn smartness.

“I say!” the youth would be saying in his crisp, rapid, sharply blurred inflections that seemed to come out of lips that barely moved. “Where WERE you last night? We missed you at the party in old Lambert’s rooms, you know. Everyone wondered why you didn’t turn up.”

“Oh,” the other said (but the way he said this word sounded almost like “Ow” to Eugene). “Did they? I’m frightfully sorry to have missed it, but I simply couldn’t get thöh. Had dinner with a chap I know at Magdalen. His sister’s down for a day or so, and later on I simply couldn’t break away.—How was the party?”

“Ow!” the other cried, casting his head back with a strong quick movement and an exultant little laugh. “Ripping! Simply ripping! What a shame you had to miss it! Old Fenton got quite squiffy about ten o’clock,” he went on affectionately and with his exultant little laugh, “and really it was priceless! He insisted on doing an imitation of Queen Victoria sitting down to read The Times—Ow!” he cried exultantly again, casting his head up with a sharp strong movement, “the whole thing was convulsing!—To see old Fenton SETTLE down!” he cried, “to see him LOOK round SUSPICIOUSLY,” he whispered, still maintaining the perfect dramatic sharpness of his inflection as he looked round with a descriptive gesture, “to see him wait UNEASILY to see what’s going to happen—finally to see the look of BLISSFUL satisfaction and contentment gradually STEALING over his face,” he whispered rapturously, “as he settles back to read The Times in peace—OW!” he cried again, as he cast back his small head with an exultant laugh, “—the whole thing was really TOO superb!—it really was, you know! Lambert was quite convulsed! We had to lift him up and stretch him out upon the bed before he got his breath again.”

In conversations such as these, in the choice and accent of the words, the sharp crisp and yet blurred inflections of the speech, even in the jaunty nonchalance of hands in pockets, the hang and fold of the coat, in the exultant little laugh and the sharp strong upward movement of the small lean head, there was something alien, suave, and old. To Eugene it seemed to be the style of a life that was far older, more suavely knowing and mature, than any he had ever known, so that at such a time as this, these young boys who on the playing fields had almost the appearance of tousled overgrown urchins, now seemed far more assured and sophisticated than he could ever be.

At the same time, the sound and inflection of their words—their assured exercise of a style of language that knew exactly where to use and how to inflect such words as “very,” “quite,” “superb,” “priceless,” “terribly,” “marvellous,” and so on—this style and use seemed to Eugene almost false, fictional, affected, and theatrical.

He felt this way chiefly because he had read about such people all his life in books and for the most part had heard them speak in this manner only in smart plays upon the stage. He was always connecting these young Englishmen with actors in the theatre, and for a moment his mind would resentfully accuse them of being nothing but cheap and affected actors themselves and, bitterly, of “trying to talk with an English accent”—a phrase which obviously had no meaning, since they were only speaking their own language in the way they had been taught to speak it.

But then, at tea-time, Eugene would see these youths again in Buol’s, flirting, with the clumsy naďveté of a grubby schoolboy, with a leering rawboned hag of a waitress, and obviously getting the thrill of their lives from the spurious grins which this dilapidated strumpet flashed at them through her artificial teeth. Or, as he went up the road towards his house at night, he would pass them standing in the dark shadows of the stormy trees, with their arms clumsily clasped around the buttocks of a servant girl, and their lives seemed unbelievably young, naked, and innocent again.

Around Eugene was the whole structure of an enchanted life—a life hauntingly familiar and just the way he had always known it would be—and now that he was there, he had no way of getting into it. The inn itself was ancient, legendary, beautiful, elfin, like all the inns he had ever read about, and yet all of the cheer, the warmth, the joy and comfort he had dreamed of finding in an inn was lacking.

Upstairs the halls went crazily up and down at different levels, one mounted steps, went down again, got lost and turned around in the bewildering design of the ancient added-on-to structure—and this was the way he had always known it would be. But the rooms were small, cold, dark, and dreary, the lights were dim and dismal, you stayed out of your room as much as possible and when you went to bed at night you crawled in trembling between clammy sheets, and huddled there until the bed was warm. When you got up in the morning there was a small jug of warm water at your door with which to shave, but the jug was too small, you poured it out into the bowl and shaved yourself and added cold water from the pitcher, then, in order to get enough to wash your face and hands. Then you got out of the room and went downstairs as quickly as you could.

Downstairs it would be fine. There would be a brisk fire crackling in the hearth, the old smoke-gold of morning and the smell of fog, the crisp cheerful voices of the people and their ruddy competent morning look, and the cheerful smells of breakfast, which was always liberal and good, the best meal that they had: kidneys and ham and eggs and sausages and toast and marmalade and tea.

But at night there would come the huge boiled-flannel splendour of the dinner, the magnificent and prayerful service of the waiter, who served you with such reverent grace from heavy silver platters that you felt the food must be as good as everything looked. But it never was.

Eugene ate at a large table, in the centre of the dining-room, provided by a thoughtful management for such isolated waifs and strays as himself. The food looked very good, and was, according to the genius of the nation, tasteless. How they ever did it he could never tell: everything was of the highest quality and you chewed upon it mournfully, wearily, swallowing it with the dreary patience of a man who has been condemned for ever to an exclusive diet of boiled unseasoned spinach. There was a kind of evil sorcery, a desolate and fathomless mystery in the way they could take the choicest meats and vegetables and extract all the succulence and native flavour from them, and then serve them up to you magnificently with every atom of their former life reduced to the general character of stewed hay or well-boiled flannel.

There would be a thick heavy soup of dark mahogany, a piece of boiled fish covered with a nameless, tasteless sauce of glutinous white, roast beef that had been done to death in dish-water, and solid, perfect, lovely brussels sprouts for whose taste there was no name whatever. It might have been the taste of boiled wet ashes, or the taste of stewed green leaves, with all the bitterness left out, pressed almost dry of moisture, or simply the taste of boiled clouds and rain and fog. For dessert, there would be a pudding of some quivery yellow substance, beautifully moulded, which was surrounded by a thin sweetish fluid of a sticky pink. And at the end there would be a cup of black, bitter, liquid mud.

Eugene felt as if these dreary ghosts of food would also come to life at any moment, if he could only do some single simple thing— make the gesture of an incantation, or say a prayer, or speak a magic word, a word he almost had, but couldn’t quite remember.

The food plagued his soul with misery, bitter disappointment, and bewilderment. For Eugene liked to eat, and they had written about food better than anyone on earth. Since his childhood there had burned in his mind a memory of the food they wrote about. It was a memory drawn from a thousand books (of which Quentin Durward, curiously, was one), but most of all it came from that tremendous scene in Tom Brown at Rugby, which described the boy’s ride with his father through the frosty darkness, in an English stage-coach, the pause for breakfast at an inn, and the appearance of the host, jolly, red-faced, hospitable, who had rushed out to welcome them.

Eugene could remember with a gluttonous delight the breakfast which that hungry boy had devoured. It was a memory so touched with the magic relish of frost and darkness, smoking horses, the thrill, the ecstasy of the journey and a great adventure, the cheer, the warmth, the bustle of the inn, and the delicious abundance of the food they gave the boy, that the whole thing was evoked with blazing vividness, and now it would almost drive Eugene mad with hunger when he thought of it.

Now it seemed to him that these people had written so magnificently about good food not because they always had it, but because they had it rarely and therefore made great dreams and fantasies about it, and it seemed to him that this same quality—the quality of LACK rather than of POSSESSION, of desire rather than fulfilment— had got into everything they did, and made them dream great dreams, and do heroic acts, and had enriched their lives immeasurably.

They had been the greatest poets in the world because the love and substance of great poetry were so rare among them. Their poems were so full of the essential quality of sunlight because their lives had known sunlight briefly, and so shot through with the massy substance of essential gold (a matchless triumph of light and colour and material in which they have beaten the whole world by every standard of comparison) because their lives had known so much fog and rain, so little gold. And they had spoken best of April because April was so brief with them.

Thus from the grim grey of their skies they had alchemied gold, and from their hunger, glorious food, and from the raw bleakness of their lives and weathers they had drawn magic. And what was good among them had been won sternly, sparely, bitterly, from all that was ugly, dull, and painful in their lives, and, when it came, was more rare and beautiful than anything on earth.

But that also was theirs: it was another door Eugene could not enter.

LXIX

Later, Eugene could remember everything except the way he found the house and came to live there. But a man named Morison, who was staying at the “Mitre” when Eugene got there, found the house and gave him the address. He was a man of twenty-eight or thirty years, but he constantly seemed younger, much younger, no older than the average college youth, an illusion that was never permanent, however, and never for a moment convincing, because one felt constantly that everything about the man was spurious.

He had been, he said, a lieutenant in the flying corps, and had just the month before resigned his commission. And he said he had resigned his commission because he had received an appointment from the government in the African colonial service, and had been sent up to the university to take a special six months’ course in Colonial Administration, after which he would be “sent out” to assume his new duties in the Colonies. Finally, he was, he said, by birth, an Edinburgh Scotsman, although his family were by blood more English than Scotch, and he had lived most of his life in England. His references to his family were casual, easy, and indefinite, but carried with them, somehow, the connotations of aristocratic distinction.