the shadow and the bone

THOMAS BURKE

a latter-day Dante finds his beatrice and commits one gesture of devotion with—the usual?—climax

Another fable of that Samuel Smiles of my youth, Ho Ling, whose mixed-grill of English and Chinese I freely paraphrase. .......and this young man (said Ho Ling) knew nothing of green hills or orchards or harvest-fields. He was a slave, and he could see but one of two things—either the chains of his slavery, or a world of legend and imagination where slavery was not. He could see the bald buildings of the world of commerce, and an office and a desk, and the pavements that led him to the desk; and he could see that other world. But he could see nothing between them—nothing of the changing sky or of the sublime mystery of the life that streamed about his daily day. He was a slave.

He lived in Poplar, and twice each day, upon six days of the week, he walked the

Commercial Road to reach his work at Aidgate, and to return from his work to bis lodging in Poplar. He knew the pattern of the whole of this two miles of pavement. The cracks in its stones, and the hollows in the wood-blocks of the road, were as familiar to him as the lines of the loathsome book in which he daily wrote columns of figures; as familiar to him as the hills and the stars to the shepherd. But beyond these lines his eyes jumped the immediate splendours about him into a world that lay a million leagues beyond the ocean at the edge of this planet. For that world nowhere touched his world of chains, and only in that world, he felt, could one be happy. (Slaves always feel like that.) In it lived people gracious of soul and body, neither slaves nor the masters of slaves. It was a world where the sea was kind, and the breezes opulent with spice, and life vibrant with hours that were each a garden of white-winged thoughts. A world, I need not tell you, that does not exist until you are dead. And perhaps not then.

But one morning he lifted his eyes from the stones that led to the wood of his desk, and his heart said "Oh!" It was a winter morning, and London was slowly revealing its features in the light of a wan sun, and its streets—even the streets of commerce—were thrilling with impetuous morning life. Great regiments poured through the gorges and the defiles. Doors of offices swallowed them, and as they disappeared reinforcements came from nowhere, and they too were swallowed. Motion, the essence of life, was flowing through the veins of the city until it came into a life as fully charged with grace and glory as any heaven our young man had imagined.

He said "Oh!" because, in lifting his eyes from the stones, he was vouchsafed a vision, and the vision told him that beauty does not dwell only in heaven. Beauty smiled upon him from an advertisement hoarding; a beauty that made all slaves free, and healed their wounds, and blessed them with understanding. It was not the beauty of green hills, or of seacoast, or of pastures. It was the beauty of a human creature that held all this other beauty distilled in its own human beauty.

The intention of the picture was to proclaim the merits of a certain cigarette, though in what way the face of a beautiful young girl leads men to desire to smoke exceptionally good cigarettes, no man outside an advertising office can say. Certainly in this case the picture failed in its intended effect. Not only did the young man fail to buy cigarettes; he had not thought of cigarettes, and did not even notice the name of the exceptional cigarette. (Another example of the elephant of business defeating itself by emulating the subtlety of the artist.) But he did notice the picture, and he noticed it with his whole being, so that he stood dumb before the flower whose perfume had pervaded all his dreams. Here was beauty, not of the unattainable world, but of this world. For the poster was not made from a drawing or a painting: it was no work of a questing imagination like his own; it was made from a photograph. By this the young man knew that somewhere in the world that girl was living, and this knowledge made the world suddenly desirable, and made Fenchurch Street as cool and green as any avenue of the countries behind the moon.

For the rest of that day, after two minutes' adoration of the picture, his mind was a conflict of extreme misery and extreme rapture —for so does all true beauty affect us. The strain and decay of his daily world were at once intensified and eased: he felt their horror more sharply because of that picture, and yet, because of it, he was solaced and strengthened to face them. He carried it away in his eye, and he saw it on the walls of the office where he hung his coat, and he saw it on his desk, and on the pages of his ledger; and from whatever angle he saw it the eyes smiled tenderly upon him.

He spent half of his lunch-hour in walking up and down before the picture, and the afternoon—a waste space to be trudged through before he could again drink at the cooling spring—he spent in imagining the girl in her marvellous home; imagining her at her marvellous tea; imagining her marvellous bedroom; imagining the foolish people about her who were blind to the miracle of her; imagining her in different dresses. He even tortured himself by imagining confident clods making love to her.

I need not descant upon the ensuing state of this young man. His life was given to a picture: every breath, every thought, every movement centred on it. If the cigarette company had not increased their sales they had at least achieved something. They had brought a young man out of the blasphemy of dreams into the blessed state of perceiving the beauty of this present paradise.

He began to spend his evenings walking around those streets of London where posters were displayed. He developed a friendly feeling for those streets where this picture was displayed, and a distaste for those where it was not. One day he found it in the advertisement pages of a newspaper, and he clipped it. And he found it in another newspaper, and he clipped it. And he found it in a weekly journal, and he clipped it. And one of these clippings he pinned over his bed, and one he pinned over his mirror, and the third he pinned over his fire-place.

Sad and foolish and glorious was the state of that young man. He did not know how happy he was. He thought he was miserable. Thinking thus, he sought for the cause of his misery, and found that it came from a desire to stand face to face with this beauty. Wondering how he could appease that desire, he came to a matter-of-fact solution which seemed to his disordered mind to be an inspiration. If that picture was a photograph, the cigarette company must have bought it from a photographer. If they bought it from a photographer, the photographer must at some time have been in contact with the original. Therefore, he had only to find the photographer, and. . . . Then, he would throw up his job, and work his way around the world until he tracked this supernal beauty. And when he had found her, he would go to her and say: "Lady, you are beautiful. I worship you!" and then retire for ever into his galley, his gesture made, his destiny fulfilled; himself a tragic figure among the world's tragic figures.

So he bought some good note-paper, and wrote to the cigarette company, stating that he had observed with interest the picture by which they were then advertising their goods —which was fact—and proceeding with the fiction that the photograph was so good that he desired to have some pictures of his wife made by the same photographer. Could they supply him with the name of the photographer V

The cigarette company, with that courtesy which distinguishes those who have anything to sell, expressed their regret that they were not in a position to supply the name of the photographer of the picture in question: they had purchased it from the well-known advertising agency, Slogan and Associates, whose address was such-and-such. They had no doubt that Slogan and Associates would be happy to supply him with the name of the photographer, and They Were, His Faithfully.

So, on the same good note-paper, he wrote to Slogan and Associates, and Slogan and Associates, whose offices were spotted with white cards that flamed red-lettered exhortations to their staff to "Do It Now", answered sixteen days later that they had purchased the picture in question from a photographer in Blackfriars Road.

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That day, during his lunch-hour, to Blackfriars Road he went, heartened on his journey by many a sight of the world's essence of beauty. But at Blackfriars Road he learned that the photographer had left there some time ago, and was to be found at an address in Camden Town. He devoted the evening to the Camden Town journey, found the photographer at home, and, again using fiction out of its true purpose of entertainment, announced that he was connected with a West End theatre which sought to dress its new show with London's Loveliest Chorus, and that the lady of the cigaretteposter had caught the manager's eye. Where could she be found?

The photographer, whom I will call Bert Stude (because his name was nothing like that) was an affable and unaffected young man, although he wore a velvet coat and silken hair and the rest of the make-up which marks the camera-artist from the common artist. He received his visitor with a friendly and honest smile. And after the smile he said "Blimey!" And then: "Blimey—now you've done me. I took that picture—lemmesee—coupler years ago. Friend o' mine—City man— brought her along. I only dug it out about three months ago. Occurred to ine that it might suit the Poo-Jah cigarette people. They was using girls just then. So I bunged it along to my agents. They took it like a shot. Nice price, too. But where she is now—ah! One thing I can tell you. She used to live at Kensington—89, Grummant Road. Whether she's there now. . . . Might be, o' course. Might not. Still, it's worth trying. Nice girl, she was. Iris Lone was her name."

So the next night he put on his best suit and his best hat, which made him look slightly ridiculous, and went to Grummant Road, which is not one of the best roads of Kensington. He knocked at the door of the house to which he had been directed, and when it was answered he took off his ridiculous hat, and asked for Miss Iris Lone. The agreeable person who answered the door told him that Mrs. Lone and her daughter had lived there as paying-guests, but had left a year ago. When he asked if the agreeable person knew the address to which they had moved, she said she did not; and when he pressed for clues she had none to give, save that Mrs. Lone had had an account at the local branch of the Imperial Bank, whose manager would surely know her present address.

So the next day, by an unconvincing excuse of illness, he contrived to leave the office after lunch, and reach the Kensington branch of the Imperial Bank before closing-time. He asked to see the manager, and after some minutes spent in a glass cage, he was conducted to the manager's desk, and asked for the present address of a client of his, Mrs. Lone. My friends need not be troubled with his adventures in this office, for we are all aware that there are two things which can seldom be extracted from bank managers, and the other one is information. The manager fixed his eyes on the ridiculous hat, and while his lips said that he regretted that his position debarred him from giving information concerning his clients, his eyes sang loudly: "Where did you get that hat?"

So the ridiculous hat went away, and went back to Grummant Road, Kensington, and knocked again at the house that had once sheltered the world's beauty. This time our young man made a rapid pass of his hand to the hand of the agreeable person who answered the door, and besought her to ransack her memory for some clue to the present whereabouts of Mrs. Lone. Whereupon the agreeable person recalled that Mrs. Lone had removed her goods to an address unknown by the aid of a firm of furniture removers whose premises were to be found in a street near Olympia.

Well, the young man went from Grummant Road to the premises of the furniture removers, and there, in the cause of romance, which is the world's first and best lie, he lied again. He represented himself as a nephew of the family returned from the colonies— to which the ridiculous hat was confirmation—and begged them to search their records for the address to which the family moved.

Very courteously—being a commercial house—they searched their records; and within twenty minutes they gave him the new address of the family. The new address of beauty. The address where he might see glory and loveliness face to face. They remarked on the address. They said that families often moved from that place to Kensington, in the natural course of progress, but seldom from Kensington to that place.

"What place?" said our young man. "That place," they said, indicating the paper which, such was his excitement, he had not even looked at.

When he looked at it, although, in company, he was a young man of sober deportment, he said "Good God!" The address was 16 Jasmine Terrace Poplar. His own address was 22 Jasmine Terrace Poplar. For the last twelve months she had been living in his own street. There would be no need for him to battle round the world in quest of beauty. She was in his own street.

Which is where (said Ho Ling, reaching for the jar of rice-spirit) beauty always lives.

At least (he added, reaching for a glass) so they tell me. But he never saw her beauty again, for he married her, and spent his life in looking for more advertisement-posters.