Crowded Out! and Other Sketches

S. Frances (Susie Frances) Harrison

Informations

• Publié par: sauc
• Publié le: 08 décembre 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 42
• Langue: English

Extrait

Project Gutenberg's Crowded Out! and Other
Sketches, by Susie F. Harrison
Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be
sure to check the copyright laws for your country
before downloading or redistributing this or any
other Project Gutenberg eBook.
This header should be the first thing seen when
viewing this Project Gutenberg file. Please do not
remove it. Do not change or edit the header
without written permission.
Please read the "legal small print," and other
information about the eBook and Project
Gutenberg at the bottom of this file. Included is
important information about your specific rights and
restrictions in how the file may be used. You can
also find out about how to make a donation to
Project Gutenberg, and how to get involved.
**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla
Electronic Texts**
**eBooks Readable By Both Humans and By
Computers, Since 1971**
*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands
of Volunteers!*****
Title: Crowded Out! and Other SketchesAuthor: Susie F. Harrison
Release Date: August, 2005 [EBook #8652] [Yes,
we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
[This file was first posted on July 29, 2003]
Edition: 10
Language: English
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG
EBOOK CROWDED OUT! AND OTHER
SKETCHES ***
Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Robert Prince and
the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
This file was produced from images generously
made available by the Canadian Institute for
Historical Microproductions.
CROWDED OUT!
And other Sketches,
BY SERANUSThe Story of Monsieur, Madame, and the Pea-
Green Parrot.
The Bishop of Saskabasquia.
"As it was in the Beginning."
A Christmas Sketch.
The Idyl of the Island.
The Story of Delle Josephine Boulanger.
The Story of Etienne Chezy d'Alencourt.
"Descendez a l'ombre, ma jolie blonde."
The Prisoner Dubois.
How the Mr. Foxleys Came, Stayed, and Never
Went Away.
The Gilded Hammock.PREFACE.
I present these "Sketches" in all proper fear and
humility, to my Canadian public, hoping that the
phases of colonial life they endeavor to portray will
be recognized as not altogether unfamiliar. Some
of them are true, others have been written through
the medium of Fancy, which can find and inhabit as
large a field in Canada as elsewhere; for, to my
mind, there is no country, no town, no village, as
there is no nation, no class of society, nor
individual existence, that has not its own deep and
peculiar significance, its own unique and personal
characteristics that distinguish it from the rest of
the world.
SERANUS.
Crowded Out.
I am nobody. I am living in a London lodging-
house. My room is up three pair of stairs. I have
come to London to sell or to part with in some
manner an opera, a comedy, a volume of verse,
songs, sketches, stories. I compose as well as
write. I am ambitious. For the sake of another, one
other, I am ambitious. For myself it does not
matter. If nobody will discover me I must discovermyself. I must demand recognition, I must wrest
attention, they are my due. I look from my window
over the smoky roofs of London. What will it do for
me, this great cold city? It shall hear me, it shall
pause for a moment, for a day, for a year. I will
make it to listen to me, to look at me. I have left a
continent behind, I have crossed a great water; I
have incurred dangers, trials of all kinds; I have
grown pale and thin with labor and the midnight oil;
I have starved, and watched the dawn break
starving; I have prayed on my stubborn knees for
death and I have prayed on my stubborn knees for
life—all that I might reach London, London that has
killed so many of my brothers, London the cold,
London the blind, London the cruel! I am here at
last. I am here to be tested, to be proved, to be
worn proudly, as a favorite and costly jewel is
worn, or to be flung aside scornfully or dropped
stealthily to—the devil! And I love it so this great
London! I am ready to swear no one ever loved it
so before! The smokier it is, the dirtier, the dingier,
the better. The oftener it rains the better. The more
whimsical it is, the more fickle, the more credulous,
the more self-sufficient, the more self-existent, the
better. Nothing that it can do, nothing that it can
be, can change my love for it, great cruel London!
But to be cruel to me, to be fickle to me, to be deaf
to me, to be blind to me! Would I change then? I
might. As yet it does not know me. I pass through
its streets, touching here a bit of old black wall,
picking there an ivy leaf, and it knows me not. It is
holy ground to me. It is the mistress whose hand
alone I as yet dare to kiss. Some day I shallpossess the whole, and I shall walk with the firm
and buoyant tread of the accepted, delighted lover.
Only to-day I am nobody. I am crowded out. Yet
there are moments when the mere joy of being in
England, of being in London, satisfies me. I have
seen the sunbeam strike the glory along the green.
I know it is an English sky above me, all change, all
mutability. No steady cloudless sphere of blue but
ever-varying glories of white piled cloud against the
gray. Listen to this. I saw a primrose—the first I
had ever seen—in the hedge. They said "Pick it."
But I did not. I, who had written there years ago,—
I never pulled a primrose, I,
But could I know that there may lie
E'en now some small or hidden seed,
Within, below, an English mead,
Waiting for sun and rain to make
A flower of it for my poor sake,
I then could wait till winds should tell,
For me there swayed or swung a bell,
Or reared a banner, peered a star,
Or curved a cup in woods afar.
I who had written that, I had found my first
primrose and I could not pluck it. I found it fair be
sure. I find all England fair. The shimmering mist
and the tender rain, the red wallflower and the ivy
green, the singing birds and the shallow streams—
all the country; the blackened churches, the grass-
grown churchyards, the hum of streets the
crowded omnibus, the gorgeous shops,—all thetown. God! do I not love it, my England? Yet not
my England yet. Till she proclaim it herself, I am
not hers. I will make her mine. I will write as no
man has ever written about her, for very love of
her. I look out to-night from my narrow window and
think how the moonlight falls on Tintern, on
Glastonbury, on Furness. How it falls on the
primrose I would not pluck. How it would like to fall
on the tall blue-bells in the wood. I see the lights of
Oxford St. The omnibuses rattle by, the people are
going to see Irving, Wilson Barrett, Ellen Terry.
What line, of mine, what bar, what thought or
phrase will turn the silence into song, the copper
into gold?—I come back from the window and sit at
the square centre table. It is rickety and
uncomfortable, useless to write on. I kick it. I would
kick anything that came in my way to-night. I am
savage. Outside, a French piano is playing that
infernal waltz. A fair subject for kicking if you will.
But, though I would I cannot. What a room! The
fire-place is filled with orange peel and brown
paper, cigar stumps and matches. One blind I
pulled down this morning, the other is crooked. The
lamp glass is cracked, my work too. I dare not look
at the wall paper nor the pictures. The carpet I
have kicked into holes. I can see it though I can't
feel it, it is so thin. My clothes are lying all about.
The soot of London begrimes every object in the
room. I would buy a pot of musk or a silken scarf if
I dared, but how can I?
I must get my bread first and live for beauty after.
Everything is refused though, everything sent back
or else dropped as it were into some bottomless pitor gulf.
Here is my opera. This is my magnum opus, very
dear, very clear, very well preserved. For it is three
years old. I scored it nearly altogether, by her side,
Hortense, my dear love, my northern bird! You
could flush under my gaze, you could kindle at my
touch, but you were not for me, you were not for
me!—My head droops down, I could go to sleep.
But I must not waste the time in sleep. I will write
another story. No; I had four returned to-day. Ah!
Cruel London! To love you so, only that I may be
spurned and thrust aside, ignored, forgotten. But
to-morrow I will try again. I will take the opera to
the theatres, I will see the managers, I will even tell
them about myself and about Hortense—but it will
be hard. They do not know me, they do not know
Hortense. They will laugh, they will say "You fool."
And I shall be helpless, I shall let them say it. They
will never listen to me, though I play my most
beautiful phrase, for I am nobody. And Hortense,
the child with the royal air, Hortense, with her
imperial brow and her hair rolled over its cushion,
Hortense, the Châtelaine of Beau Séjour, the
delicate, haughty, pale and impassioned daughter
of a noble house, that Hortense, my Hortense, is
nobody!
Who in this great London will believe in me, who
will care to know about Hortense or abou