'The Excursion'-- part 1 of 2
rba...@hotmail.com
(about 6000 words/10 printed pages); rbadac recommends you print it out for
now, and read it later at your leisure, with a nice cup of tea.
Don't worry about copyrights. There is not another place in the universe
where this would be of any use to anyone, besides here. And *that's* a whole
separate debate.
The Excursion
Filing out of the club after an excellent lunch, we boarded the omnibus in a
festive mood. Cracking good idea this was, to have guided tours of the very
stamping grounds of the great supernatural authors ! And easy, too-- most of
the time we never went far; last week we'd driven all of six blocks to see
where Arthur Machen stayed in his little room, drinking his tea and smoking
his tobacco, and catching fleas by brushing treacle on newspapers. The week
before had been a double-header, when we had seen the town dwellings of both
Henry James *and* Edith Wharton. All quite jolly, and a welcome diversion
from smoke-filled parlours and ergonomically-faulty wingbacks. Several hoped
we'd have a jaunt in the country soon, perhaps out in Kent where all those
other authors were born, so that they could bring their guns and get a bit of
shooting in.
This possibility was indeed anticipated when the bus took the road out of
London, and there was an animated buzz of speculation as to our proposed
point of arrival. Would it be a haunted bridge, a magic well? de la Mare's
cottage, or E.F. Benson's house in Rye? Didn't Lord Dunsany have a tavern out
here somewhere?
'Who's driving this week?' called out Sir William Aye, O.B.E., who was ready
for action and had his jodhpurs on. Necks craned to look. There was a screen
concealing the steerage, and a sign on it that said, "NO TALKING TO THE
DRIVER."
'Appears it's to be a surprise,' answered Lord Randolph Pound-Sterling.
'Suppose we'll find out when we get there.'
Naturally this gave the excursion an even more mysterious air, and theories
flew hot and heavy for some minutes. 'Oh, for God's sake,' muttered Lady
Pagston-Hathaway. 'Somebody go find out who's driving this damned thing.'
Fitz-James O'Brian McNaughton-Cross crept forward and lifted a corner of the
screen. Foul-smelling smoke from a cheap cigar rolled out from underneath it.
A familiar apelike figure hunched over the wheel.
'Criminy, it's that rotter rbadac-- !!' he cried, in a dismay that was echoed
by everyone on the bus. That selfsame personage turned to regard us with a
leer. 'I see the conventional safeguards of privacy are wasted on this lot,'
he observed. Quickly donning a gas mask, he twisted the valve on a tank he
had secreted in the cab with him.
Some of us tried to rush the front, but to no avail. The gas did its work
instantaneously.
When we awoke, the windows were edged with frost, and the passing landscape
was a bleak, rime-covered waste. It was as cold as charity. Our teeth were
chattering, despite the horsehair blankets someone had thrown over us while
we were unconscious; when we sought to draw them closer around us, we found
that we were each of us handcuffed to our seats.
Howls of protest and heartfelt curses ! Upon our rude awakening rbadac peered
around the screen, grinning evilly. On his head was a huge fur hat.
'Welcome to the land of Gogol !' he said.
My heart sank. Farewell, English countryside, farewell tight little island.
Already I longed for it desperately, knowing it was far, far away. Shanghaied
as shamefully as the hungover new crew of an East Indian Dutch packer we had
been, and rbadac had driven us to Russia.
We drove through coniferous Carelian forest, past expansive and icy
marshlands populated by noisy black terns. We passed elk and reindeer. We
passed cows. On our left, a thatch-roofed hut came into view, from the
chimney of which oily black smoke poured. Outside it, two or three
disconsolate locals stood motionless, like *matryoshkas*, and watched us
rumble past.
'Look, a Red Lodge !' exclaimed Wilfred, Earl of Barnett, who was immediately
shouted down.
Not long after, rbadac indicated with a sweep of his hand the domes and
spires of a vast darkling city that sprawled across the approaching horizon.
' "The window through which Russia looks out onto Europe." Our destination,
ladies and gentlemen,' he announced. And there it was, the Palmyra of the
North, *nee* Petrograd, *nee* Leningrad, and only recently rechristened with
its original name.
St. Petersburg.
'Nikolai Gogol, 1809-1852, was one of the greatest figures of Russian
literature,' rbadac droned through the loudspeaker system as we crossed the
Neva River. 'After working as a government clerk, he made an unsuccessful
attempt at acting, after which he became a writer. He won quick fame with his
EVENINGS ON A FARM NEAR DIKANKA (1831-32), and continued his career with the
collections MIRGOROD and ARABESQUES (both 1835), several plays, and his
novel, DEAD SOULS (1841). His short stories are regarded as some of the best
examples of the form. He was admired by Pushkin, Nabokov, and Dostoevsky,
who--'
'I HATE YOU !!' screamed Robert Suggs-Biddle. 'Turn up the heat !!'
'-- who, speaking of himself and his literary companions, said, "We have all
come from under 'The Overcoat' ". How many of you knew it was a ghost story?'
A few raised their hands, or tried to. rbadac suppressed a snicker. 'Sorry,'
he said, tossing the keys back to J. Maxwell Sullivan-Gilbert. 'When you get
uncuffed, come up here and drive, will you? I can't give an effective
presentation from behind the wheel.'
Nor could he effectively defend himself from our ire, as became evident when,
while the rest of us freed ourselves, rbadac produced a pistol. 'No hard
feelings I hope. None of you had papers, so I had to pass you all off as
Islamic terrorist prisoners. So, how many ghosts in 'The Overcoat'? One, or
two?'
He showed slides, of featureless government offices, of snuffboxes and shoes,
of inkwells and insects; periodically he would show a slide which seemed to
be nothing but a picture of an incredibly large fist. He played Borodin and
Mussorgsky, and belabored us with obscure questions while we shivered in our
blankets. We detested rbadac's 'immersion' techniques; the most salient point
we could glean from our seminar on 'The Overcoat' was that we all needed one
badly.
Max drove us into St. Petersburg. I confess the initial sight of it
completely took our collective breath away, and for the present we forgot the
underhanded machinations that had brought us there.
The city, built on several islands connected by literally hundreds of
bridges, is a riot of sumptious palaces, monuments, statuary, wrought-iron,
brooding columnar buildings, mosaics, icons, and Russian, Italianate, and Art
Nouveau architecture. There is simply nothing like it anywhere else on earth.
The lecture over for the time being, rbadac handed out a hidden cache of
Russian Army Surplus uniform coats and caps he had apparently procured in
exchange for several cartons of Chesterfields. They cost us yet another
pompous quote. ' "The aspect of St. Petersburg," said Olympe Audoard, "is
more conducive of astonishment than admiration...if it is not quite perfectly
beautiful, it is none the less completely strange." '
The wardrobe change was, all things considered, a welcome one; dressed as we
were, there was a reduced likelihood of our being stopped for identification
by the usual authorities, though there was now the slight possibility we
might all end up in Chechnya.
We stopped on the Nevsky Prospekt, the most elegant and renowned avenue in
the city. Here was the teeming heart of St. Petersburg, for tourists and
residents alike; everything was here, shops, restaurants, hotels, bookstores,
museums, theatres-- and all steeped in centuries of the Russian's tempestuous
legacy. Nevertheless, while we ambled and gawked at the myriad sights and
sounds of this historical thoroughfare, rbadac pursued us like a blackfly.
'Gogol lived just up that street,' he whined. 'That's where he wrote TARAS
BULBA. There's his publisher's. There's his favorite cafe. There's the
Saltykov-Shchedrin Library. All the literati hung out there, Pushkin,
Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, all the rest.'
We stood in awe before the unbelievably fantastic Church of the Spilt Blood,
and marvelled at its multi-colored onion domes and Byzantine construction.
The Griboedov Canal. Kazan Square. The Stroganov Palace. The immense Russian
Museum. All these, and it was just what was on or near the Nevsky Prospekt,
just the tip of the iceberg, so to speak. St. Petersburg was full of things
like that.
It wasn't until we were settled in the dining room of the Grand Hotel Europe,
well-fed with roast goose, cabbage rolls, lentil soup, *blinis*, smoked
salmon, chilled red and black caviar, champagne, and what was indisputably
the last word in vodka, that we paid much attention to what rbadac said, and
then only because it was his treat.
' "St. John's Eve" was his first published story. Petrus is in love with
Pidorka, but he can't marry her without money. He lets himself be drawn into
an unholy pact with Basavriuk (Satan), who tempts him with wealth to commit a
ghastly sacrifice.'
'A typically moralistic horror story,' I said, 'illustrating the unsoundness
of the Faustian bargain. That's what it's about.'
'That's what it *appears* to be about,' countered rbadac. 'But if it were,
why would it contain all the seemingly irrelevant detail? the unrelated
wedding story in which the aunt gets splashed with vodka and set afire? the
roast lamb that comes back to life on its plate? the crying devil at the
end--?'
I was beginning to lose patience with this nit-picking. 'Folkloristic
window-dressing, digressions, local color, call it what you like. It was his
first story ! What does it matter?' I helped myself to another *blini* and
caviar. 'You seem to disagree with the Faust interpretation. What do *you*
think it's about?'
'I don't know,' rbadac answered glumly. He seemed lost for a moment. 'I think
it's about last year's snow,' he said finally.
I rolled my eyes. The waiter came over, and rbadac said, '*Shchiot,
pazhalusta.*' He withdrew, and returned with the check. rbadac pulled out a
wad of rubles big enough to choke a Cossack's favorite battle horse and paid
the tab. Several of us stared.
'You dirty capitalist,' said Paul Montgomery-Leone. 'Where did you get all
that dough?'
'Just a small deposit I'm supposed to make at a Manhattan bank later this
month,' rbadac answered, grinning. 'I get a commission.'
The Russian Museum is home to over 380,000 paintings and *objets d'art*, but
we were only permitted to look at one of them for any length of time. 'Never
mind that,' rbadac insisted, pulling a knot of us away from a wonderful Marc
Chagall canvas. 'What we want is over here.'
I was fully prepared to argue the point that so far rbadac had not failed to
successfully avoid any semblance to what the rest of us wanted, but of course
I never got the chance. We were dragged in a group to cluster around a
painting tucked away down a dim hall off the main concourse.
It was a portrait of a man, with a bronze-colored face, haggard, with high
cheekbones, in an Oriental-looking robe. The staring eyes appeared alive,
burning with some dreadful inner aspect, and seemed to follow you about the
room.
The total effect of the painting gave us a queasy feeling. We looked at it,
and each other, nervously, as if we had suddenly been revealed in some
unsavory practice without our knowing it, or had had our minds read without
permission.
We barely heard the words rbadac was reading from a dingy, dog-eared
notebook: 'Better to endure all the bitternesses of possible persecution than
cause even the shadow of persecution for someone else. Save the purity of
your soul. He who has talent in him must be purer in soul than anyone else.
Another will be forgiven much, but to him it will not be forgiven. A man who
leaves the house in bright, festive clothes needs only one drop of mud
splashed from under a wheel, and people all surround him, point their fingers
at him, and talk about his slovenliness, while the same people ignore many
spots on other passers-by who are wearing everyday clothes. For on everyday
clothes the spots do not show.'
He shut the book and motioned toward the exit. Shaking ourselves out of our
trance, we went that way.
'The story was in ARABESQUES, but Gogol rewrote it and changed the ending.
The new version was published in 1842. In the first one, the portrait
transforms into an insignificant landscape. This was a segue from the second
ending.
'The portrait is of the Devil, the realism with which it was done Gogol
claims is not Art. The passage I read was the advice of the artist to his son
to keep his motive pure. Gogol is beginning to apply these constraints to his
own work. But is *that* Art? this seeking of a moral justification? And does
your answer change if that was *really* the Devil?'
We passed outside, and it was night, but not night. At around sixty degrees
North latitude, the sun only just dips below the horizon, and actual darkness
only lasts about an hour. The rest of the night is a diffuse, glowing
twilight, the 'unconsummated dusk' of Pushkin.
Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.