The Purple Cloud
Page 29
Time, fixedly noting for ever and ever that onemoment. The cloud-mass of fine penetrating _scoriae_ must have instantlystopped their works, and they had fallen silent with man. But in theirinsistence upon this particular minute I had found something sohideously solemn, yet mock-solemn, personal, and as it were addressed to_me_, that when my own watch dared to point to the same moment, I wasthrown into one of those sudden, paroxysmal, panting turmoils of mind,half rage, half horror, which have hardly once visited me since I leftthe _Boreal_. On the morrow, alas, another awaited me; and again on thesecond morrow after.
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My train was execrably slow, and not until after five did I arrive atthe entrance-gates of the Woolwich Royal Arsenal; and seeing that it wastoo late to work, I uncoupled the motor, and leaving the others there,turned back; but overtaken by lassitude, I procured candles, stopped atthe Greenwich Observatory, and in that old dark pile, remained for thenight, listening to a furious storm. But, a-stir by eight the nextmorning, I got back by ten to the Arsenal, and proceeded to analyse thatvast and multiple entity. Many parts of it seemed to have been abandonedin undisciplined haste, and in the Cap Factory, which I first entered, Ifound tools by which to effect entry into any desired part. My firstsearch was for time-fuses of good type, of which I needed two or threethousand, and after a wearily long time found a great numbersymmetrically arranged in rows in a range of buildings called theOrdnance Store Department. I then descended, walked back to the wharf,brought up my train, and began to lower the fuses in bag-fulls by ropesthrough a shoot, letting go each rope as the fuses reached the cart.However, on winding one fuse, I found that the mechanism would not go,choked with scoriae; and I had to resign myself to the task of openingand dusting every one: a wretched labour in which I spent that day, likea workman. But about four I threw them to the devil, having done twohundred odd, and then hummed back in the motor to London.
* * * * *
That same evening at six I paid, for the first time, a visit to my oldself in Harley Street. It was getting dark, and a bleak storm thathooted like whooping-cough swept the world. At once I saw that even _I_had been invaded: for my door swung open, banging, a lowered catchpreventing it from slamming; in the passage the car-lamp shewed me ayoung man who seemed a Jew, sitting as if in sleep with dropped head, aback-tilted silk-hat pressed down upon his head to the ears; and lyingon face, or back, or side, six more, one a girl with Arlesiennehead-dress, one a negress, one a Deal lifeboat's-man, and three ofuncertain race; the first room--the waiting-room--is much morenumerously occupied, though there still, on the table, lies the volumeof _Punch_, the _Gentlewoman_, and the book of London views inheliograph. Behind this, descending two steps, is the study andconsulting-room, and there, as ever, the revolving-cover oakwriting-desk: but on my little shabby-red sofa, a large lady much toobig for it, in shimmering brown silk, round her left wrist a _trousseau_of massive gold trinkets, her head dropped right back, almost severed byan infernal gash from the throat. Here were two old silvercandle-sticks, which I lit, and went upstairs: in the drawing-room satmy old house-keeper, placidly dead in a rocking-chair, her left handpressing down a batch of the open piano-keys, among many strangers. Butshe was very good: she had locked my bedroom against intrusion; and asthe door stands across a corner behind a green-baize curtain, it had notbeen seen, or, at least, not forced. I did not know where the key mightbe, but a few thumps with my back drove it open: and there lay my bedintact, and everything tidy. This was a strange coming-back to it, Adam.
But what intensely interested me in that room was a big thing standingat the maroon-and-gold wall between wardrobe and dressing-table--thatgilt frame--and that man painted within it there. It was myself in oils,done by--I forget his name now: a towering celebrity he was, and rathera close friend of mine at one time. In a studio in St. John's Wood, Iremember, he did it; and many people said that it was quite a great workof art. I suppose I was standing before it quite thirty minutes thatnight, holding up the bits of candle, lost in wonder, in amused contemptat that thing there. It is I, certainly: that I must admit. There is thehigh-curving brow--really a King's brow, after all, it strikes menow--and that vacillating look about the eyes and mouth which used tomake my sister Ada say: 'Adam is weak and luxurious.' Yes, that iswonderfully done, the eyes, that dear, vacillating look of mine; foralthough it is rather a staring look, yet one can almost see the darkpupils stir from side to side: very well done. And there is the longishface; and the rather thin, stuck-out moustache, shewing both lips whichpout a bit; and there is the nearly black hair; and there is the rathervisible paunch; and there is, oh good Heaven, the neat pink cravat--ah,it must have been _that--the cravat_--that made me burst out intolaughter so loud, mocking, and uncontrollable the moment my eye restedthere! 'Adam Jeffson,' I muttered reproachfully when it was over, 'couldthat poor thing in the frame have been you?'
I cannot quite state why the tendency toward Orientalism--Orientaldress--all the manner of an Oriental monarch--has taken full possessionof me: but so it is: for surely I am hardly any longer a Western,'modern' mind, but a primitive and Eastern one. Certainly, that cravatin the frame has receded a million, million leagues, ten thousandforgotten aeons, from me! Whether this is a result due to my ownpersonality, of old acquainted with Eastern notions, or whether,perhaps, it is the natural accident to any mind wholly freed fromtrammels, I do not know. But I seem to have gone right back to the verybeginnings, and resemblance with man in his first, simple, gaudyconditions. My hair, as I sit here writing, already hangs a black, oiledstring down my back; my scented beard sweeps in two opening whisks to myribs; I have on the _izar_, a pair of drawers of yomani cloth likecotton, but with yellow stripes; over this a soft shirt, or quamis, ofwhite silk, reaching to my calves; over this a short vest ofgold-embroidered crimson, the _sudeyree_; over this a khaftan ofgreen-striped silk, reaching to the ankles, with wide, long sleevesdivided at the wrist, and bound at the waist with a voluminous gaudyshawl of Cashmere for girdle; over this a warm wide-flowing torrent ofwhite drapery, lined with ermine. On my head is the skull-cap, coveredby a high crimson cap with deep-blue tassel; and on my feet is a pair ofthin yellow-morocco shoes, covered over with thick red-moroccobabooshes. My ankles--my ten fingers--my wrists--are heavy with gold andsilver ornaments; and in my ears, which, with considerable pain, I boredthree days since, are two needle-splinters, to prepare the holes forrings.
* * * * *
O Liberty! I am free....
* * * * *
While I was going to visit my old home in Harley Street that night, atthe very moment when I turned from Oxford Street into Cavendish Square,this thought, fiercely hissed into my ears, was all of a sudden seethingin me: 'If now I should lift my eyes, and see a man walking yonder--justyonder--_at the corner there_--turning from Harewood Place into OxfordStreet--what, my good God, should I do?--I without even a knife to runand plunge into his heart?'
And I turned my eyes--ogling, suspicious eyes of furtivehorror--reluctantly, lingeringly turned--and I peered deeply withlowered brows across the murky winds at that same spot: but no man wasthere.
Hideously frequent is this nonsense now become with me--in streets oftowns--in deep nooks of the country: the invincible assurance that, if Ibut turn the head, and glance _there_--at a certain fixed spot--I shallsurely see--I _must_ see--a man. And glance I must, glance I must,though I perish: and when I glance, though my hairs creep and stiffenlike stirring amobse, yet in my eyes, I know, is monarch indignationagainst the intruder, and my neck stands stiff as sovereignty itself,and on my brow sits more than all the lordship of Persepolis and Iraz.
To what point of wantonness this arrogance of royalty may lead me, I donot know: I will watch, and see. It is written: 'It is not good for manto be alone!' But good or no, the arrangement of One planet, Oneinhabitant, already seems to me, not merely a natural and proper, butthe _only_ natural and proper, condition; so m
uch so, that any otherarrangement has now, to my mind, a certain improbable, wild, andfar-fetched unreality, like the Utopian schemes of dreamers andfaddists. That the whole world should have been made for _me_alone--that London should have been built only in order that _I_ mightenjoy the vast heroic spectacle of its burning--that all history, andall civilisation should have existed only in order to accumulate for_my_ pleasures its inventions and facilities, its stores of purple andwine, of spices and gold--no more extraordinary does it all seem to methan to some little unreflecting Duke of my former days seemed thepossessing of lands which his remote forefathers seized, and slew theoccupiers: nor, in reality, is it even so extraordinary, I being alone.But what sometimes strikes me with some surprise is, not that thepresent condition of the world, with one sole master, should seem thecommon-place and natural condition, but that it should have come to seem_so_ common-place and natural--in