The Wonderful Year. William John Locke

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СКАЧАТЬ accent: “Give me another glass of this obscene though harmless beverage and satisfy the needs of Monsieur and Mademoiselle, and after that leave us in peace, and if any one seeks to penetrate into this salle à manger, say that it is engaged by a Lodge of Freemasons. Here is remuneration for your prospective zeal.”

      With impressive flourish he deposited fifteen centimes in the palm of Auguste, who bowed politely.

      “Merci, m’sieu,” said he. “Et monsieur, dame——?”

      He looked enquiringly at Martin and Martin looked enquiringly at Corinna.

      “I’m going to blow twenty pounds,” she replied. “I’ll have a kummel glacé.”

      “And I’ll have the same,” said Martin, “though I don’t in the least know what it is.”

      The waiter retired. Corinna leaned across the table.

      “You’re thirty years of age and you’ve lived ten years in London and have never seen kummel served with crushed ice and straws?”

      “No,” replied Martin simply. “What is kummel?”

      She regarded him in wonderment. “Have you ever heard of champagne?”

      “More often than I’ve tasted it,” said Martin.

      “This young man,” remarked Corinna, “has seen as much of life as a squirrel in a cage. That may not be very polite, Martin—but you know it’s true. Can you dance?”

      “No,” said Martin.

      “Have you ever fired off a gun?”

      “I was once in the Cambridge University Rifle Corps,” said Martin.

      “You used a rifle, not a gun,” cried Corinna. “Have you ever shot a bird?”

      “No,” said Martin.

      “Or caught a fish?”

      “No,” said Martin.

      “Can you play cricket, golf, ride——?”

      “A bicycle,” said Martin.

      “That’s something, anyhow. What do you use it for?”

      “To go backwards and forwards to my work,” said Martin.

      “What do you do in the way of amusement?”

      “Nothing,” said Martin, with a sigh.

      “My good Fortinbras,” said Corinna, “you have your work cut out for you.”

      The waiter brought the drinks, and after enquiring whether they needed all the electricity, turned out most of the lights.

      Martin always remembered the scene: the little low-ceilinged room with its grotesque decorations looming fantastic through the semi-darkness; the noises and warm smells rising from the narrow street; the eyes of the girl opposite raised somewhat mockingly to his, as straw in mouth she bent her head over the iced kummel; the burly figure and benevolent face of their queer companion who for five francs had offered to be the arbiter of his destiny, and leaned forward, elbow on table and chin in hand, serenely expectant to hear the inmost secrets of his life.

      He felt tongue-tied and shy and sucking too nervously at his straw choked himself with the strong liqueur. It was one thing to unburden himself to Corinna, another to make coherent statement of his grievance to a stranger.

      “I am at your disposal, my dear Overshaw,” said the latter, kindly. “From personal observation and from your answers to Corinna’s enfilade of questions, I gather that you are not overwhelmed by any cataclysm of disaster, but rather that yours is the more negative tragedy of a starved soul—a poor, starved soul hungering for love and joy and the fruitfulness of the earth and the bounty of spiritual things. Your difficulty now is: How to say to this man, ‘Give me bread for my soul.’ Am I not right?”

      A glimmer of irony in his smiling grey eyes or an inflection of it in his persuasive voice would have destroyed the flattering effect of the little speech. Martin had never taken his soul into account. The diagnosis shed a new light on his state of being. The starvation of his soul was certainly the root of the trouble; an infinitely more dignified matter than mere discontent with one’s environment.

      “Yes,” said he. “You’re right. I’ve had no chance of development. My own fault perhaps. I’ve not been strong enough to battle against circumstances. Circumstances have imprisoned me, as Corinna says, like a squirrel in a cage, and I’ve spent my time in going round and round in the profitless wheel.”

      “And the nature of the wheel?” asked Fortinbras.

      “Have you ever heard of Margett’s Universal College?”

      “I have,” said Fortinbras. “It is one of the many mind-wrecking institutions of which our beloved country is so proud.”

      “I’m glad to hear you say that,” cried Martin. “I’ve been helping to wreck minds there for the last ten years. I’ve taught French. Not the French language; but examination French. When the son of a greengrocer wants to get a boy-clerkship in the Civil Service, it’s essential that he should know that bal, cal, carnaval, pal, regal, chacal take an ‘s’ in the plural, in spite of the fact that millions of Frenchmen go through their lives without once uttering the plural words.”

      “How came you to teach French?”

      “My mother tongue—my mother was a Swiss.”

      “And your father?”

      “An English chaplain in Switzerland. You see it was like this——”

      And so, started on his course, and helped here and there by a shrewd and sympathetic question, Martin, the ingenuous, told his story, while Corinna, slightly bored, having heard most of it already, occupied herself by drawing a villainous portrait of him on the tablecloth. When he mentioned details unknown to her she paused in her task and raised her eyes. Like her own, his autobiography was a catalogue of incompetence, but it held no record of frustrated ambitions—no record of any ambitious desire whatever. It shewed the tame ass’s unreflecting acquiescence in its lot of drudgery. There had been no passionate craving for things of delight. Why cry for the moon? With a salary of a hundred and thirty-five pounds a year out of which he must contribute to the support of his widowed mother, a man can purchase for himself but little splendour of existence, and Martin was not one of those to whom splendour comes unbought. He had lived, semi-content, in a fog splendour-obscuring, for the last ten years. But this evening the fog had lifted. The glamour of Paris, even the Pantheon and the Eiffel Tower sarcastically mentioned by Corinna, had helped to dispel it. So had Corinna’s sisterly interest in his dull affairs. And so, more than all, had helped the self-analysis formulated under the compelling power of the philanthropist with shiny coat-sleeves and frayed linen, at once priest, lawyer and physician who had pocketed his five francs fee.

      He talked long and earnestly; and the more he talked and the more minutely he revealed the aridity of his young life, the stronger grew within him a hitherto unknown spirit of revolt.

      “That’s СКАЧАТЬ