Lions and Shadows
Page 24
Philip, whose gentle sarcasm I had so uneasily awaited, was tact and kindness itself. If he felt any bitterness at all he expressed it only in one mild, typically prosaic remark: ‘I envy you, boy. I’d have done the same thing long ago—if I’d had the cash.’ We parted rather sadly, at the hospital gate: I hurrying off to catch a bus into the sensational, unknowable future, Philip returning slowly to the boredom and unchanging wretchedness of the great whitewashed wards. (How I wish I could have comforted him at that moment—could have foretold, clairvoyantly, what lay ahead! Why was there no fortune-teller to murmur consolingly in his ear: ‘I see a ship … a long journey … blue sky … adventures … distant countries … some money … a dark woman … your novel in the bookshop windows … marriage … love …’? Never mind, Philip: you deserved them, and you got them all.)
The Easter term passed quickly. At no other period of my life have I been so disgracefully and unashamedly lazy. I visited the medical school nearly every day, much as one drops into a club, made a few jokes with Platt, and sneaked out again, in the middle of a demonstration hour, to get a drink. My drinking companion was usually a charming, disillusioned young man named Lee, who had been at Oxford, and whose prospects of ever obtaining a medical degree appeared, at that time, to be dubious. One afternoon, Lee and I came in very drunk during a physics hour. For some reason or other, we had filled our pockets with tomatoes at the restaurant where we lunched: we now proceeded to distribute them among the female students. Some of the girls were amused; others rather huffy. The virtuous Platt was delighted: like most respecters of law and order, he enjoyed seeing other people misbehave. The demonstrator, vaguely aware of the commotion, came towards us. I dived for my note-book and opened it upside down. The demonstrator, evidently deciding to be tactful, passed our bench. But this didn’t suit my drunken caprice. I went up to him, feeling chatty, and began to ask questions about the proper use of the oscillating magnet. The questions must have been rather odd, because he looked hard at me, and answered sharply: ‘Well?’ Then, just behind me, I heard a terrible crash. I had knocked over a refractometer. Thank heavens, it wasn’t broken! The demonstrator gave me another look; but all he said was: ‘I’d better take this away.’ We were lucky not to hear any more of this incident; and I am none the less grateful to the demonstrator for his charity because, in my own case, it was sadly misplaced.
In due course, I gave the college authorities formal notice of my departure. It was necessary to find a sensible excuse: I was leaving, I told them, to get married. The Principal was very understanding and kind; he wished me luck—urging me, however, to take up the courses again as soon as I and my wife had settled down.
On March the 14th, 1929, I left London by the afternoon train for Berlin. It would be easy to dramatize my emotions on this portentous but unexciting journey—easy, because I have forgotten altogether what they were. I remember only the externals, people and places: a German who asked me to admire the overcoat he had bought in Conduit Street; Dover quay, enveloped in clammy brown fog; the third-class steamer saloon crammed with soldiers going out to the Army of Occupation at Wiesbaden; two Cambridge undergraduates with enormous red wrists, who welcomed my old school tie (some obscure kind of insularity had caused me to put it on for the first time in several years). At Ostende the train stood waiting to leave for Warsaw and Riga: the undergraduates unscrewed a Niet Spuwen notice as a souvenir. I parted from them in the waiting-room at Köln, as an official marched down the platform carrying, like a sacred banner, the wooden signboard announcing the arrival of the Berlin express.
Throughout the ten hours’ travelling which followed, huddled sleepily in my hard-backed corner seat, I thought, I suppose, of the future; but, if I did so, the view was limited. I could see no farther than that evening, when I should meet Weston, and, perhaps, Barnard himself. These two, between them, would take care of everything. I was in their hands, and content to be. One day, no doubt, I should start worrying again, making plans and patterns, trying to organize my life. One day I should rewrite The Memorial, and all those other books I’d planned. But for the moment I was only a traveller, given over, mind and body, to the will of the dominant, eastward-speeding train; happy in the mere knowledge that yet another stage of my journey had begun.
THE HISTORY OF VINTAGE
The famous American publisher Alfred A. Knopf (1892–1984) founded Vintage Books in the United States in 1954 as a paperback home for the authors published by his company. Vintage was launched in the United Kingdom in 1990 and works independently from the American imprint although both are part of the international publishing group, Random House.
Vintage in the United Kingdom was initially created to publish paperback editions of books bought by the prestigious literary hardback imprints in the Random House Group such as Jonathan Cape, Chatto & Windus, Hutchinson and later William Heinemann, Secker & Warburg and The Harvill Press. There are many Booker and Nobel Prize-winning authors on the Vintage list and the imprint publishes a huge variety of fiction and non-fiction. Over the years Vintage has expanded and the list now includes great authors of the past – who are published under the Vintage Classics imprint – as well as many of the most influential authors of the present. In 2012 Vintage Children’s Classics was launched to include the much-loved authors of our youth.
For a full list of the books Vintage publishes, please visit our website www.vintage-books.co.uk
For book details and other information about the classic authors we publish, please visit the Vintage Classics website www.vintage-classics.info
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
Version 1.0
Epub ISBN 9781446476154
www.randomhouse.co.uk
Published by Vintage 2013
2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1
Copyright © Christopher Isherwood 1938
Introduction copyright © James Fenton 2013
‘Letter to Lord Byron’ and ‘The Novelist’
copyright © 1937 and 1938 by W. H. Auden, renewed
Reprinted by kind permission of Curtis Brown Ltd.
First published in Great Britain by The Hogarth Press in 1938
Vintage
Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,
London SW1V 2SA
www.vintage-books.co.uk
Addresses for companies within The Random House Group Limited can be found at: www.randomhouse.co.uk/offices.htm
The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9780099561224
www.vintage-classics.info
Visit www.worldofstories.co.uk for all your favourite children’s classics