This Was Ivor Trent полностью

Two Lives and a Destiny was not only a success in England. It had a big sale in America and was translated into several European languages.

As a result, my name acquired a life of its own. I no longer possessed it exclusively. Suddenly, therefore, I had a background.

All sorts of doors opened to me. I was deluged with requests to write articles on this, that, or the other—on anything, on nothing. I was interviewed. I was asked to lecture. The world suddenly became quite a different place. My publisher, Bickenshaw, suddenly became quite a different person. So different, in fact, that I almost waited to be introduced. Agents wrote to me, enclosing little booklets in which were modestly outlined the inestimable advantages conferred by their services. Hundreds of people who had read the book wrote to me. One correspondent accused me of plagiarising an unpublished work of his own. Every photographer in London wrote to me, craving a sitting—at no obligation to myself. Old school fellows I had forgotten wrote to me, saying they weren’t surprised I had written a book because they remembered how jolly good my essays used to be. Scores of people wrote to me saying that their father was exactly like the father in my book. And everyone in the United Kingdom with the name of Trent wrote to me—saying they were distant relatives, and how bad times were with them.

So 77 Potiphar Street was no longer a possible address.

I took a flat. I joined two or three clubs. I went to dinners, parties, country houses. I had a good private income and my appearance was a success. I met all sorts of people—eminent, amusing, influential. And, gradually, I accepted their assumptions about me.

I accepted their assumptions about me. Not one of them was true, not one of them bore any relation to what I was, but I accepted them. How, otherwise, could I meet these people? You lose your background unless you adapt yourself to it. Also, I told myself that all this was temporary. It was amusing to be a celebrity for a year or two. Above all, life had cheated me. Success was a type of revenge. So my real self—the naked, empty Ivor Trent—stood on the bank and watched the successful Ivor Trent swirling round the social vortex.

But although I left Potiphar Street, I kept my rooms there. By now Captain Frazer’s experiment had completely collapsed, so I gave Mrs. Frazer money to save them from bankruptcy. This was not generosity. Instinctively I knew that I could only write in this room overlooking the river. That sounds the merest superstition, but it is nevertheless a fact that I have never been able to work anywhere but here. I have tried again and again—always with the same result.

But there was a deeper reason why I retained these rooms. I knew that I belonged to the nomads who drifted in and out of this house, for I, too, was a rootless person. I, too, had no place in the world. I, too, was a bankrupt—on a very different level, it is true, but a bankrupt none the less.

I did not see Elsa and I did not write to her. When I returned to these rooms (two or three years after the publication of Two Lives and a Destiny) to write my second book, she had gone—and I did not ask Mrs. Frazer if she knew where she was.

I hated her.

That is difficult to explain, but it is essential to explain it.

I had become a man whose external life bore no relation whatever to his interior one. Outwardly, I was a success. Inwardly, I was a failure. I had rebelled against this secret knowledge. I refused to admit this inner emptiness. To do that would be to go into the desert—and wait for a miracle. But I dared not do that.

I rebelled, and the last ten years of my life are the history of that rebellion. My relations with others are incidents in that history. Wrayburn once told me that I had evaded my “spiritual destiny,” and that my relations with others “represented my time-killing activities.” But he did not know how true these statements were, for I deceived even him.

Only I—and Elsa—knew the truth about Ivor Trent. Only she and I knew the real Ivor Trent, the man who was empty and naked—the man who had made a book out of the debris of his life. To others, I was what I appeared to be. So I turned to these others and deserted Elsa.

I turned to them because I was determined to prove to myself that I had power. I would make others acknowledge that power so that it might seem real to me. If they believed in it, I, too, might be able to believe in it.