Read Online Charles Palliser by The Quincunx - Free Book Online Page B

found how frightened I was at the prospect. To this end he seized me with relish and held me under the surface while I struggled and fought. I really believed I was drowning and I recollect that when he at last released me and I pulled myself onto the bank and lay there gasping and spluttering, I was sure that I was going to die. I looked at a nearby gate — just an ordinary gate into a field — and I recall to this day how it looked exactly like a picture in a frame. And for several days I found that everything I looked at seemed to be framed in this way, as if I were seeing it for the first time.
    Strangely enough, Harry’s method seemed to work, for my fear of being underwater vanished and I became so skilful that he and I would compete to see who could swim fastest beneath the sluice of the water-gate. But the following summer he was too busy with his work to continue to teach me and my mother refused to let me swim alone —
    though I was privately convinced that I was safer without than with my professor.
    I turned more and more towards books. Parcels of them arrived regularly from Uncle Marty and there were, besides, many in the house. I read whatever was in 32 THE

    HUFFAMS

    the library (by which I should be understood to mean, scattered throughout the house for there was no room set aside for that purpose) and soon discerned that there were several distinct categories. There were new books sent to my mother and myself from London and these were romances, novels, tales for children, and so on. Then there were much older volumes — none of them less than fifty or sixty years old — most of which were on dry and dreary subjects connected with estate management and farming, but there were also books of history and travel among these as well as a Latin primer. I knew they formed a distinct group for, apart from their age, they had very plain book-plates with only a heraldic design of an eagle, above which were the initials “D. F.” These were to be distinguished from another group of books that were for the most part twenty or thirty years old and from which the book-plates seemed to have been removed. These volumes were entirely devoted to the subject of law and I put them aside in disgust. And finally there were a number which I supposed to have belonged to my mother when she was my age, though I was not sure of this because there was no name inscribed inside them. To speak more accurately, in all but a few instances the edge of the fly-leaf had been cut off.
    Now that I could read for myself I perused all of The Arabian Nights — those exotic but often brutal and even indecent stories from whose full force my mother had tried to shield me. I particularly enjoyed the long tale in which the resourceful — but, as it seemed to me, surely often unscrupulous! — youth Alia ad Deen plunged into a series of extraordinary adventures as a result of which he was able to enrich his impoverished mother. And now I read to the very end the tale of Syed Naomaun who followed his wife to the graveyard one night and found her with a female goul.
    I contracted the habit — or acquired the ability, for I do not know which to call it — of losing myself (or perhaps finding myself ?) in a book and cutting myself off from the world. (And, to anticipate for a moment, this was often to prove very useful.) I read works of philosophy, travel, history and literature before I even knew what these words meant or how to distinguish between them. The strange bye-ways I wandered down, the vistas I glimpsed, the dark windings I passed through — all these I cannot hope to enumerate. Though often confused and befogged I was constantly excited by a glimpse of something vast and profound and mysterious. I lost myself amid the spacious
    “orotund lucubrations” of the last century (the great Cham), or the helter-skelter rushing of the drama and prose of the century before. I read — and above all in Shakespeare — of passions whose nature