“Life’s too appallingly prosy. Here for seven years I’ve been imagining romance; it’s time I tried to live it a little. Yes, I’ll go to-morrow.... London ... garret ... poverty ... struggle ... triumph....”
And at this point, any one caring to listen at my door might have heard issuing from those soft blankets a sound resembling the intermittent harshness of a buzz-saw going through cordwood.
CHAPTER III
GRILLED KIDNEY AND BACON
I was awakened at eight o’clock by the alarm in my watch, and lay a few minutes debating whether or not I should rise. I have always rebelled against the convention that makes us go to bed at night and get up in the morning. How much less primitive to go to bed in the morning and get up at night! But in either case we should abhor crude and violent awakenings. We should awake rhythmically, on pulsing ripples of consciousness. Personally, I should like to be awakened by gentle music, viols and harps playing soft strains of half-forgotten melodies. I should like to be roused by the breath of violets, to open my eyes to a vista of still lake on which float swans whiter than ivory.
What I did open my eyes to was a vista of shivery sunshine, steely blue sky, and snow on the roofs of the neighbouring sky-scrapers. I was indeed comfortable. Outside the heat-zone of my body the sheets were of a delectable coolness, and from head to heel I felt as if I were dissolving in some exquisite oil of ease.
Lying there enjoying that ineffable tranquillity, I subjected myself to my morning diagnosis. My soul is, I consider, a dark continent which it is my life’s business to explore. This morning, then, in my capacity of explorer, I started even as Crusoe must have done when he saw the naked footprint in the sand. Extraordinary phenomenon! I had actually awakened of the same mind as that in which I fell asleep.
Propping myself up I lit a cigarette.
“Well, young fellow,” I greeted my face in the mirror, “so we’re still doubtful of ourself? Want to make fresh start, go to London and starve in garret as per romantic formula? What foolishness! But let’s be thankful for folly. Some day we’ll be wise, and life will seem so worn and stale and grey. So here’s for London.”
With that I sprang up and disappeared into the bath-room from which you might have heard a series of grunts and groans as of some one violently dumb-belling; then a series of snorts and splutters as of some one splashing in icy water; then the hissing noise one usually associates with the rubbing down of horses. After all of which, in a pink glow and a Turkish bath-robe, appeared a radiant young man.
Taking down the receiver of my telephone I listened for a moment.