Collected Letters Volume Two: Books, Broadcasts and War, 1931–1949. Walter Hooper. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: Walter Hooper
Издательство: HarperCollins
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Жанр произведения: Биографии и Мемуары
Год издания: 0
isbn: 9780007332663
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was looking in the wrong place—then wondering if I was bewitched—finally the very gradual dawn of the truth. We must really get on with some wiring as soon as possible.

      But perhaps the offence itself hardly annoys me more than F.K.’s reaction which consists in chuckling and saying, ‘Ah you Irish! I love to listen to dear Mrs. Moore—wouldn’t be happy without a grievance. Its really most remarkable’. He is, I think, in every mental characteristic (not moral, for of course he is no pessimist) the most complete P’daita that ever walked: in some respects he surpasses his original. What a magnificent conversation they could have had, say, in politics!

      And talking of the revolting, you will hardly believe the following. The junior parrot (you remember) has just got engaged. As soon as the news was out, his friends and owners, in other words the rest of the junto, all made a raid on his rooms—placed copies of ‘Married Love’ and ‘Lasting Passion’ under every cushion—put a large nude india rubber doll in his bed—plastered his walls with lewd good wishes—finished his whisky and beer—and retired. Such is his senility that it was left to him to spread this story as an excellent joke with his own mouth. I should like to be able to argue ‘If the fellows of a college behave like this, how much more will the rest of the world’, but I’m afraid things are so topsy-turvey—or ‘arsie-versy’ as the Elizabethans say—that it is the other way round, and for sheer blockheaded vulgarity our common room is just the place to look. Would a jeu d’esprit of this sort be tolerated in barracks?

      The reservoir to the West of thee top wood is finished. It has been covered with earth so that the total effect is now that of a big plateau jutting out from the hillside, at present of brown mud, but soon, I hope, of smooth bright grass; and there is a little tile-roofed building on it-I suppose protecting a man hole into the interior. The silhouette which I see every evening against the sunset is therefore roughly as drawn, and on the whole I think it is agreeable. It often gives me an odd sensation as I progress homewards to tea along the cliff edge to look at this very distinctive shape in all its novelty and to reflect that, if God pleases, it will someday be as immemorially familiar to you and me as the contour of the Cave Hill. On such occasions you must picture me equipped with both axe and spade for the standard public work at present is ‘the extraction of roots’—I admit I have been making slow progress, but that is not because the work is turning out impracticable, but because of many interruptions.

      While at Cambridge (staying, as I foretold you in a posh hotel, at the expense of the Board. Four of us had to hold an examiners meeting one evening, and accordingly, just like the heroes of a romance, called for fire, lights, and a bottle of claret in a private room. All that was Jacking was to have prefaced the order by tweaking the landlord’s nose with a ‘Hark’ee, rascal!’ This was in the University Arms which perhaps you know)-while in Cambridge or rather on my long, slow, solitary, first class journey there and back through fields white with frost—I read Pater’s Marius the Epicurean. This is the best specimen extant of the Epicurean-aesthetic business: which one wrongs by reading it in its inferior practitioners such as George Moore and Oscar Wilde. As you probably know it is a novel—or,