Howard Phillips Lovecraft - Dreamer on the Nightside. Frank Belknap Long

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СКАЧАТЬ “She has a daughter about your age. I was careful not to tell her I have two grandsons who have the foolish idea they are young Casanovas.”

      “I’ll be careful to give her the contrary impression,” I assured him. “That’s not such a good idea with some girls, though. Is she stunningly beautiful?”

      “What a decadent generation this is! Is that the first thing you think about when you meet a very sensible, attractive young lady?”

      I had not intended to end that phone call on a note of levity. But HPL had surprised me a little by engaging in the amiable sort of chiding which up to that time was of fairly rare occurrence in his letters. One never knows anyone well until one has met him in person, and from that moment his correspondence will often take on a more exuberant kind of informality.

      Parkside Avenue is far out in Brooklyn, almost as far as the more distant regions of historic Flatbush and the sea-bright traceries of Coney Island which never fail to bring to mind some New England seacoast town. I have never otherwise cared too much for Brooklyn, but have always preferred it to the vast, sprawling wasteland of the Bronx, where there is little of an associational nature that appeals to me. Just the thought of meeting HPL for the first time, however, blurred all distinctions between the boroughs.

      Sonia resided in a four room, first floor apartment in a red brick building not more than four stories in height, and Howard was sitting on one of the two stone walls that ran from the entrance to the street and enclosed a small garden of flowering plants.

      As I approached the apartment house there was no one else in sight, and I was certain it was HPL even before I was close enough to recognize him from the two photographs he had sent me. At that time he had grown quite stout, for a normally lean man about five-eleven in height. (He often referred to his weight at that period as ridiculous and was glad that he had succeeded in becoming lean again some two years later.) He looked a great deal older than thirty-two, and his rather settled, fortyish aspect struck me as at least more in accord with his “elderly gentleman” pretense than the distinctly collegiate look which not a few men manage to retain until the onset of middle age.

      It was only when he rose and grasped my hand in greeting that I realized there was still a certain boyishness about him that could not be concealed. It was particularly noticeable in the region of his eyes, and his voice was not that of a middle-aged man.

      “Belknapius!” he said, quite simply, just as he had done on the phone. “Well…well! You look just as I thought you would.” He paused to pass his hand across his brow. “I guess we’d better get away from this glare. Soaking up the sun’s rays to saturation point is just what my old bones need. But I’ve been sitting here reading for half an hour and it has given me a slight headache. Sonia thinks I should wear reading glasses, but I hate the feel of them on my nose. I’ll wait a few more years, when I’ll probably go stumbling around anyway.” (He had worn glasses once, I remembered, from the first photograph of him I had ever seen, but I did not remind him of that.)

      I wish I could say that the book he had just set down on the red brick neo-Colonial wall was some forbidden volume hoary with age, dating back at least to Nyarlathotep’s Cthulhu-contending reign. But unhappily it was leather bound and as modern looking as the wall—a guidebook to the historical antiquities of Brooklyn which Sonia had recently given him.

      “We may as well go inside,” he reiterated, gesturing toward the apartment house entrance, which had a coolly inviting look. “Sonia was delighted when I told her Parkside Avenue was just a stone’s throw away to you…”

      “I never seem able to keep an appointment on time,” he added, self-castigatingly. “Usually I’m a half-hour late—or more.” (He could sometimes be two hours late, as I discovered subsequently when his failure to arrive at the American Museum of Natural History at an early hour in the afternoon forced me to phone him twice, and despair of seeing him before the shadows lengthened in the Hall of Man and made the glass-encased, fossilized skulls assume a more ominous aspect.)

      “I’ve never been able to rush,” he said. “It makes some people here justifiably angry and it’s something I’ll have to remedy. But long-established habits are difficult to overcome when you’ve been so long out of touch with the rushing about people can’t seem to avoid in a city like New York. No one in Providence would think of rushing so much—at least, no one on the Hill. Boston is bad enough in that respect, but New York—”

      “You get accustomed to it,” I said. “I don’t like it any more than you do. But there are some things you have to take in stride, or the enormity of having everyone go into a rage will begin to wear on your nerves.”

      “Some people take offense so easily—and for trivial reasons,” he said. “But I know that my lateness is not trivial, and I’ll have to make more of an effort to get to places on time.”

      “What did you think of the Manhattan skyline?” I asked. It was the most trite of the many unnecessary questions which visitors from elsewhere have to endure. But I really wanted to know.

      “I’ve seen it before, in some of my earliest dreams,” he said. “When I first read the Arabian Nights I was sure that pinnacles so shiningly splendid had to exist somewhere. And that made me see them, almost as they are. The reality is just a little more breathtaking, but the very shape of many of the towers against the sky is no different from the way they looked when I just shut my eyes and tried to recapture what I’d seen in dreams. I usually succeeded so well that the skyline brought back a feeling of familiarity when I saw it from the train window for the first time.”

      “It’s not exactly Arabian,” I said.

      “But that’s just it. It’s fabulously Arabian, in a superior way. More magnificent, more strange than any Middle Eastern skyline could possibly be. But oriental notwithstanding. It would have widened the eyes of a desert wayfarer, I’m sure, even without a jinni towering over it. I could have seen a jinni with very little additional effort. But it wasn’t necessary for me to conjure one up.”

      “Well I suppose you could say all that about it,” I conceded. “But to a native-born New Yorker it doesn’t have quite that kind of associational aspect. It even depresses me a little at times, because it dwarfs the individual so much. When I think of all that massed impersonal wealth and power, my identity as an individual has a tendency to shrivel to the dimensions of a gnat.”

      “I don’t give that part of it a thought,” Howard said. “I can separate the things that please me from this decadent industrial age. In Prospect Park and in what little I’ve seen of Manhattan there are scenic vistas of pure enchantment. White stone pillars and weaving boughs against a sunset sky—elm-shaded streets that could just as easily be in Providence, with just as many Georgian houses that have defied the years.”

      If the conversation I am quoting seems distinctly long-winded and rather remote from the pleasure he had clearly experienced on greeting me in person for the first time, it was no different from the manner Howard usually spoke when he was carried away by anything that enabled him to travel into the past on monorails of his own imagination. And my question had provided him with an opportunity to do just that, despite his stated intention to retreat indoors from the glaring sun.

      “I caught just a glimpse of those streets when we arrived yesterday, before we descended into the subway,” he went on, after a pause. “The photographs in the guidebooks I studied don’t begin to do them justice. Street after street of dwellings virtually unchanged, with no new, ugly buildings towering over them as they do further uptown. Nothing but small-paned windows and fan-lighted doorways greeted my ancient eyes for ten or twelve blocks.”

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