Читать книгу Self Condemned онлайн

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The taxi crossed the canal bridge and entered the circular road within the precincts of Regent's Park. René in his cab began to circle around the slumbering Zoo animals, the lions, the elephants, the anthropoid apes, all dreaming of Africa, Siberia, and Malaya, Bengal and the Polar Sea. What was in fact their dream-life was in the cages and pools, on the imitation rocks, and in the miniature savannahs of the Zoological Gardens. But their real life of course was where lions live under the blazing suns, or where the Polar bear prowls upon the ice caps. They step back, when they close their eyes in sleep, into the reality, out of the squalid nightmare of Regent's Park. Oh, where was his real life! For it certainly was not in the restaurant towards which he was speeding. But he soon left behind the sleeping snakes and snoring tigers, and the reflections that their proximity provoked. He began to think that, after all, his lecture-room might be his habitat, as the river-side was the water-rat's, and the prairie was the buffalo's. As he creaked and banged along in this deliberately archaic London 'hackney' vehicle, his mind darted from one absurdity to another. It was human stupidity he was reacting against. Yet he was now obliged to justify himself to a number of persons typically stupid. His darling mother, and dear old Mary as loyal as she was obstinate, were fundamentally as unenlightened as Mrs. Harradson, at least as that concerned the matter in hand. He would not dream of describing himself to Mrs. Harradson as a 'hero', would he? No, but he had just committed that absurdity with his sister, the best woman in the world, but completely deluded. The delusion under which the majority sleepwalked its way from decade to decade, from disaster to disaster, had numbed her mind as much as that of any other Mrs. Everyman. His mother, too, was numbed, was part of the same somnambulism, and age now was super-added. No means of enlightening her. She was the dearest person in the world, but, to come down to brass tacks, it was she who was the fool, not he. This he agreed sounded very conceited, and he had not the least idea how it was that he came to be awake, while all these others slept. It was an explicable accident, it signified no superiority. He just had suddenly woken up.