Richardson / Nemo 7 best short stories by Henry Handel Richardson

1. Auflage 2020
ISBN: 978-3-96799-982-2
Verlag: Tacet Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, Band 125, 70 Seiten

Reihe: 7 best short stories

Henry Handel Richardson, pseudonym of Ethel Florence Lindesay Robertson, Australian novelist whose trilogy The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, combining description of an Australian immigrant's life and work in the goldfields with a powerful character study, is considered the crowning achievement of modern Australian fiction to that time. Check out this seven short stories by this author carefully selected by critic August Nemo: - The End of a Childhood. - The Bathe. - Succedaneum. - Mary Christina. - 'And Women Must Weep'. - Sister Ann. - The Coat.

Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson (3 January 1870 20 March 1946), known by her pen name Henry Handel Richardson, was an Australian author. The Fortunes of Richard Mahony is Richardson's famous trilogy about the slow decline, owing to character flaws and an unnamed brain disease, of a successful Australian physician and businessman and the emotional/financial effect on his family. It was highly praised by Sinclair Lewis, among others, and was inspired by Richardson's own family experiences. The central characters were based loosely on her own parents. Richardson also produced a single volume of short stories and an autobiography that greatly illuminates the settings of her novels, although her Australian Dictionary of Biography entry doubts that it is reliable.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Richardson, Henry Handel

Nemo, August

Leseproben

I
With the brim of his wide-awake turned down, the collar of his overcoat up to his ears, Jerome Mocs stepped into the street. It was late afternoon, and the air smelt of coming rain; the sky was spread with cloud as evenly as with mortar from a trowel. The young man shot a single glance of distaste round him; then, hunching his shoulders, made for a narrow street that led to the centre of the town. He walked listlessly, dragging his feet. Yet rather than chance brushing up against a passer-by, he went to the trouble of stepping off the pavement into the road. In his present mood the very sight of his fellow-men was odious to him. For he was that most distracted of mortals, the creative artist whose inspiration has failed him. The rich flow of musical ideas, the power to bend these rhythmically to his will, to compress them in the chosen form, everything alike had deserted him, and as abruptly as once it had descended. He was left hollow as a clock emptied of its works; left flat, cold, purposeless; a CUI BONO in the flesh. — For, without this power that was mine a moment back, who am I, what am I? A straw driven before the wind; a null; a parasite at life’s board. — And, on top of this, the envy, the murderous envy, of those who were still masters of their genius. No! envy was not the word: it was at once too much and too little. What he felt was more like the hurt and bewilderment of a child who has been shut out, for no conscious fault, from a lamp-lit festivity, at which all but him make merry. Sven Arped preached patience . . . but Sven was old in comparison: his early fires had burned low. And he, Jerome Mocs, was still so young. Beard in hand, Arped taught that these blanks, these breaks in one’s continuity, served an end: they obliged the artist to come to grips with life in the raw, from which he might distil further sublimates; had, in short, a reproductive value. Sven himself at such times sought the company of women; found, in women’s simple, unsophisticated minds, a wholesome contrast to the subtleties of art, to the eternal and damnable preoccupation with colour and line. And, then, so wild were his extravagances that his name burned on men’s lips. But he, Mocs, had still no use for women as a surrogate. His attitude to them was one either of contempt or of exaggerated awe. — Again, there was Gregor Muthesius, the poet. Gregor drowned suspense in alcohol, went blind and deaf to his barrenness, till he could rise once more full of pristine vigour for his task of beating out a super-reality in words. (But then Gregor had the physique of a lion-hunter, and could permit himself the luxury of debauch.) And so it was with all the rest: each had his peculiar trick of surmounting these breaks in his artistic being, when impulse died at the spring. He, Jerome Mocs, alone had not learned wisdom. And this time the loss hit him harder than ever before. For he had been on the edge of completing what he believed to be his masterpiece, a free symphonic rhapsody that should carry his name far beyond the select inner circle — had not the great Ricchi himself promised it a hearing? And he had swept forward, gaily, audaciously, prodigal of his riches, never doubting that they would last him to the end. Then, the block had come, and he had risen one morning to find his verve gone, his grip loosened, his mind dry as a drained keg. Angry, incredulous, he had fought like one possessed to recapture the flow: in vain. Worse still, he began to be invaded by doubts, to look critically at his beloved work; and gradually a feeling of aversion for it grew up in him that fell not far short of hatred. — Oh! surely no other anguish could compare with this? . . . just as no other human joy touched the joys of creation: this acme of lightness, this sense of walking on rainbows, this supreme surrender to a force outside oneself! Some, he knew, went on doing hodman’s work in place of a creator’s; claiming that a skill born of long practice carried you over the bare patches. But Arped was not one of them, nor yet Gregor, nor, by God, he, Jerome Mocs! He was still jealous as a girl of his immaculateness. There was no room for compromise in him. Rather, and savagely, he descended into hell. And in hell he remained. * * * At moments on this particular afternoon, when he touched bottom, he threw back his head and swept the sky with a look that resembled a shaken fist, or a dog’s bared teeth. Put into words it would have run: Oh, You up there! . . . You, Who have granted us artists but a single faculty — that of aping You, of playing the Creator-and Who then freakishly and thievishly rob us of the power to do it . . . . At one such moment his sullen eyes, in falling, met those of a girl who had paused on the kerb to decipher a scrap of writing. She had glanced up unthinkingly as he drew near; but she did not look away again — he saw to that! It pleased him suddenly to fix her eyes with his, to pin them fast, paying out his own evil mood in the look, till his victim reddened and made off. And he did not so much as turn his head after her, though she had been both young and winsome. But the little encounter diverted him, and on the next likely object he tried the trick anew. And again a woman started, and shrank, and quickened her pace. The third, on the other hand, held out his look and paid it back in kind. After this the thing became a game, a means of killing time; and gradually he fell to classing the eyes he caught. There were those that met his frankly, and as frankly fled. Those that fell like smitten doves, only to flutter up again a second later. Some peeped demurely from behind their curtain of lash; others — the few — pretended to be outraged, indignant. But there also met him the flattered eyes of little work-girls, which fawned shyly, or laughed an arch response; as well as those of riper women, which hung on his with the scantly veiled allure of a Mona Lisa. Oh, these women’s eyes. Till, all at once, the biter was bit, the fisher tangled in his own net. Suddenly he found himself gazing into two eyes which neither fled, nor beckoned, nor repelled; which gave back his look with the ingenuous freedom of a child’s, and yet were very woman’s in their depth and knowledge. He had never seen eyes like them: he could not tear his away. And so dreamlike was the state he had fallen into, that it needed a push from a passer-by to wake him to the fact that they were the eyes of no living person. What he stood staring at was but the drawing of a woman’s face, life-sized, and traced by a master-hand. — With a laugh at his own folly he turned on his heel. Then, however, curiosity pricked him, and he stooped to see whose was the face that had duped him. The picture was here used as an advertisement, other posters surrounded it; but it was now some days old, and of the lettering that had originally accompanied it, not a trace remained. So he was none the wiser. Stepping back, with his head tilted slightly to one side, he took another long look. Then, since a fine rain had begun to fall, and his game for the day was spoilt, he went to seek shelter. But that night, when he fought by means of any trifle to ban the thought of his impotence, of all the eyes whose secrets he had filched, these counterfeits alone came back with any clearness. Again he sank his own in them. And now he saw that they held a vital spark, a kind of spiritual promise, which none of the living had possessed: as if the unknown artist had condensed and compressed in them a sum of human experience. And gradually it began to seem that their message was aimed specially at him; as if these eyes were striving to make some wordless revelation to him, of mysteries in his art, in life, to which he had not yet attained. — And this idea grew till it became a certainty. Next morning, for the first time since the break, he did not sit with his head between his hands, despairing. His coffee gulped down, he went out and back on his steps of the day before. Walking more and more swiftly as he drew near the place where the picture had stood. For a sudden fear seized him lest it should have vanished overnight, have been pasted over or torn off. And so it was. In its stead he now faced the announcement of a BAL PARE. Then the hunt began. He scoured the streets, head down before a biting wind, running from one quarter of the town to another, gyrating round advertisement columns, without success. Not till late in the day was his search crowned. Then, once again, the mysterious eyes met his. And this time, too, beneath the portrait, he was able to make out the half-torn lettering of a name. Bianca Josefa del S. . . . Bianca Josefa del S . . . . Who was she? Where was she to be found? * * * “Has anyone seen young Mocs these days?” Sven Arped put the question to his circle, having sucked in, with a hiss, the foam left by a BOCK on his drooping moustachios and opulent beard. “Upon my soul, the lad has become a living conundrum — a walking riddle! In place of a how-do, does he now meet you, he buttonholes you to inquire, with dry lips: harkee, have ever you heard tell of a Bianca Josefa — a Bianca Josefa with an S? (An S, mark you!) Who is she? Where is she to be found? . . . this Bianca Josefa and her appendage! — Boys, what madness is this? For no farther does the fellow get. He stops short — like a winged bird — and will say no more.” But when he walked the next night at his young friend’s side, now in the inky shadow of the houses, now in the river of...