DOI Artikel:
Egerton, George: The captain's book
DOI Seite / Zitierlink:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.27805#0110
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The Captain’s Book
kept a grip on the tool they had chosen, passed him in the race of
life, and drove by his shabby lodgings in neat broughams, and
forgot to greet him when they met.
What knew they of the witchery of the golden book, the
hashish of its whisperings, the incidents crowding to fill it with
all the experiences of humanity—a concordance of the soul of
man ? They merely looked upon him as belonging to the strange
race of the sons of men who never work in the immediate present,
but who lie in bed in the morning forming elaborate plans to
catch a sea-serpent.
Debts increased, little children clamoured for food and raiment;
yet the Captain, ever dreaming of his book, trod lightly and
whistled through life, mellow in note as a blackbird; tired women
stitching in narrow windows would lift their heads as they heard
him pass, and think wistfully of bird song and hazel copse down
country ways. Even when the wife of his choice, patient victim
of his procrastinations, closed her tired eyes from sheer weariness,
glad to be relieved of the burden of her sorrows, the Captain
found solace in weaving her in as the central figure of his book—
an apotheosis of heroic wifehood.
But the reaping must be as the sowing, and evil days must come
with the ingathering: his clothes grew shabbier, his friends fewer,
want rapped oftener at the door, gay romance gave place to sordid
reality, and the sore places of life blotted the pages, as the plates in
a book of surgery ; dire necessity forced the Captain to woo the
mistress he had jilted in early youth, but she laughed illusively.
The old spirit had flown from the pencil, his fingers had lost their
cunning, and younger men elbowed him out of the way; for a
man who has spent his life in dreaming ever fails to grasp the
“ modern,” the changeful spirit of the day. As time went on
the book became a subject of jest to his children, of good-natured
raillery
The Captain’s Book
kept a grip on the tool they had chosen, passed him in the race of
life, and drove by his shabby lodgings in neat broughams, and
forgot to greet him when they met.
What knew they of the witchery of the golden book, the
hashish of its whisperings, the incidents crowding to fill it with
all the experiences of humanity—a concordance of the soul of
man ? They merely looked upon him as belonging to the strange
race of the sons of men who never work in the immediate present,
but who lie in bed in the morning forming elaborate plans to
catch a sea-serpent.
Debts increased, little children clamoured for food and raiment;
yet the Captain, ever dreaming of his book, trod lightly and
whistled through life, mellow in note as a blackbird; tired women
stitching in narrow windows would lift their heads as they heard
him pass, and think wistfully of bird song and hazel copse down
country ways. Even when the wife of his choice, patient victim
of his procrastinations, closed her tired eyes from sheer weariness,
glad to be relieved of the burden of her sorrows, the Captain
found solace in weaving her in as the central figure of his book—
an apotheosis of heroic wifehood.
But the reaping must be as the sowing, and evil days must come
with the ingathering: his clothes grew shabbier, his friends fewer,
want rapped oftener at the door, gay romance gave place to sordid
reality, and the sore places of life blotted the pages, as the plates in
a book of surgery ; dire necessity forced the Captain to woo the
mistress he had jilted in early youth, but she laughed illusively.
The old spirit had flown from the pencil, his fingers had lost their
cunning, and younger men elbowed him out of the way; for a
man who has spent his life in dreaming ever fails to grasp the
“ modern,” the changeful spirit of the day. As time went on
the book became a subject of jest to his children, of good-natured
raillery