The Complete Fiction of H. P. Lovecraft. H. P. Lovecraft

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СКАЧАТЬ him for his past mistakes. His impassioned lectures in defence of Villon, Poe, Verlaine, and Oscar Wilde were applied to himself as well, and in the short Indian summer of his glory there was talk of a renewed engagement at a certain cultured home on Park Avenue. But then the blow fell. A final disgrace, compared to which the others had been as nothing, shattered the illusions of those who had come to believe in Galpin’s reform; and the young man abandoned his name and disappeared from public view. Rumour now and then associated him with a certain “Consul Hasting” whose work for the stage and for motion-picture companies attracted a certain degree of attention because of its scholarly breadth and depth; but Hasting soon disappeared from the public eye, and Galpin became only a name for parents to quote in warning accents. Eleanor Wing soon celebrated her marriage to Karl Trever, a rising young lawyer, and of her former admirer retained only enough memory to dictate the naming of her only son, and the moral guidance of that handsome and headstrong youth. Now, in spite of all that guidance, Alfred Trever was at Sheehan’s and about to take his first drink.

      “Boss,” cried Schultz, as he entered the vile-smelling room with his young victim, “meet my friend Al Trever, bes’ li’l’ sport up at Lawrence—thas’ ’n Appleton, Wis., y’ know. Some swell guy, too—’s father’s a big corp’ration lawyer up in his burg, ’n’ ’s mother’s some lit’ry genius. He wants to see life as she is—wants to know what the real lightnin’ juice tastes like—so jus’ remember he’s me friend an’ treat ’im right.”

      As the names Trever, Lawrence, and Appleton fell on the air, the loafers seemed to sense something unusual. Perhaps it was only some sound connected with the clicking balls of the pool tables or the rattling glasses that were brought from the cryptic regions in the rear—perhaps only that, plus some strange rustling of the dirty draperies at the one dingy window—but many thought that someone in the room had gritted his teeth and drawn a very sharp breath.

      “Glad to know you, Sheehan,” said Trever in a quiet, well-bred tone. “This is my first experience in a place like this, but I am a student of life, and don’t want to miss any experience. There’s poetry in this sort of thing, you know—or perhaps you don’t know, but it’s all the same.”

      “Young feller,” responded the proprietor, “ya come tuh th’ right place tuh see life. We got all kinds here—reel life an’ a good time. The damn’ government can try tuh make folks good ef it wants tuh, but it can’t stop a feller from hittin’ ’er up when he feels like it. Whaddya want, feller—booze, coke, or some other sorta dope? Yuh can’t ask for nothin’ we ain’t got.”

      Habitués say that it was at this point they noticed a cessation in the regular, monotonous strokes of the mop.

      “I want whiskey—good old-fashioned rye!” exclaimed Trever enthusiastically. “I’ll tell you, I’m good and tired of water after reading of the merry bouts fellows used to have in the old days. I can’t read an Anacreontic without watering at the mouth—and it’s something a lot stronger than water that my mouth waters for!”

      “Anacreontic—what ’n hell’s that?” several hangers-on looked up as the young man went slightly beyond their depth. But the bank defaulter under cover explained to them that Anacreon was a gay old dog who lived many years ago and wrote about the fun he had when all the world was just like Sheehan’s.

      “Let me see, Trever,” continued the defaulter, “didn’t Schultz say your mother is a literary person, too?”

      “Yes, damn it,” replied Trever, “but nothing like the old Teian! She’s one of those dull, eternal moralisers that try to take all the joy out of life. Namby-pamby sort—ever heard of her? She writes under her maiden name of Eleanor Wing.”

      Here it was that Old Bugs dropped his mop.

      “Well, here’s yer stuff,” announced Sheehan jovially as a tray of bottles and glasses was wheeled into the room. “Good old rye, an’ as fiery as ya kin find anyw’eres in Chi’.”

      The youth’s eyes glistened and his nostrils curled at the fumes of the brownish fluid which an attendant was pouring out for him. It repelled him horribly, and revolted all his inherited delicacy; but his determination to taste life to the full remained with him, and he maintained a bold front. But before his resolution was put to the test, the unexpected intervened. Old Bugs, springing up from the crouching position in which he had hitherto been, leaped at the youth and dashed from his hands the uplifted glass, almost simultaneously attacking the tray of bottles and glasses with his mop, and scattering the contents upon the floor in a confusion of odoriferous fluid and broken bottles and tumblers. Numbers of men, or things which had been men, dropped to the floor and began lapping at the puddles of spilled liquor, but most remained immovable, watching the unprecedented actions of the barroom drudge and derelict. Old Bugs straightened up before the astonished Trever, and in a mild and cultivated voice said, “Do not do this thing. I was like you once, and I did it. Now I am like—this.”

      “What do you mean, you damned old fool?” shouted Trever. “What do you mean by interfering with a gentleman in his pleasures?”

      Sheehan, now recovering from his astonishment, advanced and laid a heavy hand on the old waif’s shoulder.

      “This is the last time for you, old bird!” he exclaimed furiously. “When a gen’l’man wants tuh take a drink here, by God, he shall, without you interferin’. Now get th’ hell outa here afore I kick hell outa ya.”

      But Sheehan had reckoned without scientific knowledge of abnormal psychology and the effects of nervous stimulus. Old Bugs, obtaining a firmer hold on his mop, began to wield it like the javelin of a Macedonian hoplite, and soon cleared a considerable space around himself, meanwhile shouting various disconnected bits of quotation, among which was prominently repeated, “ . . . the sons of Belial, blown with insolence and wine.”

      The room became pandemonium, and men screamed and howled in fright at the sinister being they had aroused. Trever seemed dazed in the confusion, and shrank to the wall as the strife thickened. “He shall not drink! He shall not drink!” Thus roared Old Bugs as he seemed to run out of—or rise above—quotations. Policemen appeared at the door, attracted by the noise, but for a time they made no move to intervene. Trever, now thoroughly terrified and cured forever of his desire to see life via the vice route, edged closer to the blue-coated newcomers. Could he but escape and catch a train for Appleton, he reflected, he would consider his education in dissipation quite complete.

      Then suddenly Old Bugs ceased to wield his javelin and stopped still—drawing himself up more erectly than any denizen of the place had ever seen him before. “Ave, Caesar, moriturus te saluto!” he shouted, and dropped to the whiskey-reeking floor, never to rise again.

      Subsequent impressions will never leave the mind of young Trever. The picture is blurred, but ineradicable. Policemen ploughed a way through the crowd, questioning everyone closely both about the incident and about the dead figure on the floor. Sheehan especially did they ply with inquiries, yet without eliciting any information of value concerning Old Bugs. Then the bank defaulter remembered the picture, and suggested that it be viewed and filed for identification at police headquarters. An officer bent reluctantly over the loathsome glassy-eyed form and found the tissue-wrapped cardboard, which he passed around among the others.

      “Some chicken!” leered a drunken man as he viewed the beautiful face, but those who were sober did not leer, looking with respect and abashment at the delicate and spiritual features. No one seemed able to place the subject, and all wondered that the drug-degraded derelict should have such a portrait in his possession—that is, all but the bank defaulter, who was meanwhile eyeing the intruding bluecoats rather uneasily. He had seen a little deeper beneath Old Bugs’ mask of utter degradation.

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