Peter Ibbetson Part 12

How easy and simple it seemed to lead a life without fear, or reproach, or self-seeking, or any sordid hope of personal reward, either here or hereafter!--a life of stoical endurance, invincible patience and meekness, indomitable cheerfulness and self-denial!

After all, it was only for another forty or fifty years at the most, and what was that? And after that--_que scais-je?_

The thought was inspiring indeed!

By luncheon-time (and luncheon consisted of an Abernethy biscuit and a gla.s.s of water, and several pipes of s.h.a.g tobacco, cheap and rank) some subtle change would come over the spirit of my dream.

Other people did not have high resolves. Some people had very bad tempers, and rubbed one very much the wrong way.

What a hideous place was Pentonville to slave away one's life in! ...

What a grind it was to be forever making designs for little new shops in Rosoman Street, and not making them well, it seemed! ...

Why should a squinting, pock-marked, bowlegged, hunch-backed little Judkins (a sight to make a recruiting-sergeant shudder) forever taunt one with having enlisted as a private soldier? ...

And then why should one be sneeringly told to "hit a fellow one's own size," merely because, provoked beyond endurance, one just grabbed him by the slack of his trousers and gently shook him out of them onto the floor, terrified but quite unhurt? ...

And so on, and so on; constant little pin-p.r.i.c.ks, sordid humiliations, ugliness, meannesses, and dirt, that called forth in resistance all that was lowest and least commendable in one's self.

One has attuned one's nerves to the leading of a forlorn hope, and a gnat gets into one's eye, or a little cinder grit, and there it sticks; and there is no question of leading any forlorn hope, after all, and never will be; all _that_ was in the imagination only: it is always gnats and cinder grits, gnats and cinder grits.

By the evening I had ignominiously broken down, and was plunged in the depths of an exasperated pessimism too deep even for tears, and would have believed myself the meanest and most miserable of mankind, but that everybody else, without exception, was even meaner and miserabler than myself.

They could still eat and drink and be merry. I could not, and did not even want to.

And so on, day after day, week after week, for months and years....

Thus I grew weary in time of my palling individuality, ever the same through all these uncontrollable variations of mood.

Oh, that alternate ebb and flow of the spirits! It is a disease, and, what is most distressing, it is no real change; it is more sickeningly monotonous than absolute stagnation itself. And from that dreary seesaw I could never escape, except through the gates of dreamless sleep, the death in life; for even in our dreams we are still ourselves. There was no rest!

I loathed the very sight of myself in the shop-windows as I went by; and yet I always looked for it there, in the forlorn hope of at least finding some alteration, even for the worse. I pa.s.sionately longed to be somebody else; and yet I never met anybody else I could have borne to be for a moment.

And then the loneliness of us!

Each separate unit of our helpless race is inexorably bounded by the inner surface of his own mental periphery, a jointless armor in which there is no weak place, never a fault, never a single gap of egress for ourselves, of ingress for the nearest and dearest of our fellow-units.

At only five points can we just touch each other, and all that is--and that only by the function of our poor senses--from the outside. In vain we rack them that we may get a little closer to the best beloved and most implicitly trusted; ever in vain, from the cradle to the grave.

Why should so fantastic a thought have persecuted me so cruelly? I knew n.o.body with whom I should have felt such a transfusion of soul even tolerable for a second. I cannot tell! But it was like a gadfly which drove me to fatigue my body that I should have by day the stolid peace of mind that comes of healthy physical exhaustion; that I should sleep at night the dreamless sleep--the death in life!

"Of such materials wretched men are made!" Especially wretched young men; and the wretcheder one is, the more one smokes; and the more one smokes, the wretcheder one gets--a vicious circle!

Such was my case. I grew to long for the hour of my release (as I expressed it pathetically to myself), and caressed the idea of suicide.

I even composed for myself a little rhymed epitaph in French which I thought very neat--

Je n'etais point. Je fus.

Je ne suis plus.

Oh, to perish in some n.o.ble cause--to die saving another's life, even another's worthless life, to which he clung!

I remember formulating this wish, in all sincerity, one moonlit night as I walked up Frith Street, Soho. I came upon a little group of excited people gathered together at the foot of a house built over a shop. From a broken window-pane on the second floor an ominous cloud of smoke rose like a column into the windless sky. An ordinary ladder was placed against the house, which, they said, was densely inhabited; but no fire-engine or fire-escape had arrived as yet, and it appeared useless to try and rouse the inmates by kicking and beating at the door any longer.

A brave man was wanted--a very brave man, who would climb the ladder, and make his way into the house through the broken window. Here was a forlorn hope to lead at last!

Such a man was found. To my lasting shame and contrition, it was not I.

He was short and thick and middle-aged, and had a very jolly red face and immense whiskers--quite a common sort of man, who seemed by no means tired of life.

His heroism was wasted, as it happened; for the house was an empty one, as we all heard, to our immense relief, before he had managed to force a pa.s.sage into the burning room. His whiskers were not even singed!

Nevertheless, I slunk home, and gave up all thoughts of self-destruction--even in a n.o.ble cause; and there, in penance, I somewhat hastily committed to flame the plodding labor of many midnights--an elaborate copy in pen and ink, line for line, of Retel's immortal wood-engraving "Der Tod als Freund," which Mrs. Lintot had been kind enough to lend me--and under which I had written, in beautiful black Gothic letters and red capitals (and without the slightest sense of either humor or irreverence), the following poem, which had cost me infinite pains:

I.

_F, i, fi--n, i, ni!

Bon dieu Pere, j'ai fini...

Vous qui m'avez lant puni, Dans ma triste vie, Pour tant d'horribles forfaits Que je ne commis jamais Laissez-moi jouir en paix De mon agonie!_

II.

_Les faveurs que je Vous dois, Je les compte sur mes doigts:_ _Tout infirme que je sois, ca se fait bien vite!

Prenez patience, et comptez Tous mes maux--puis computez Toutes Vos severites-- Vous me tiendrez quitte!_

III.

_Ne pour souffrir, et souffrant-- Bas, honni, bete, ignorant, Vieux, laid, chetif--et mourant Dans mon trou sans plainte, Je suis aussi sans desir Autre que d'en bien finir-- Sans regret, sans repentir-- Sans espoir ni crainte!_

IV.

_Pere inflexible et jaloux, Votre Fils est mort pour nous!

Aussi, je reste envers Vous Si bien sans rancune, Que je voudrais, sans facon, Faire, au seuil de ma prison, Quelque pet.i.te oraison ...

Je n'en sais pas une!_

V.

_J'entends sonner l'Angelus Qui ra.s.semble Vos Elus: Pour moi, du bercail exclus.

C'est la mort qui sonne!

Prier ne profite rien ...

Pardonner est le seul bien:_ _C'est le Votre, et c'est le mien: Moi, je Vous pardonne!_

VI.

_Soyez d'un egard pareil!

S'il est quelque vrai sommeil Sans ni reve, ni reveil, Ouvrez-m'en la porte-- Faites que l'immense Oubli Couvre, sous un dernier pli, Dans mon corps enseveli, Ma conscience morte!_