Текст книги "Oscar and Lucinda"

Автор книги: Peter Carey

Соавторы: Peter Carey,Peter Carey
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anyway.

I am rich, she thought. I can do what I like. It is only pennies. It is only a little fun. My mama would not condemn me to loneliness

forever.

Tomorrow she would have won or lost, but whatever happened, hap piness would be denied her. She could be happy now, not then. For if she won, she would know herself a robber. She was already rich. She had wealth she had not earned. To wish for more was sinful, greedy. But if she lost, it would be worse. Then she would feel not remorse, but terror. Her money was her cloak, her armour. She was a miser, counting it, feeling panic to be parted from it. She knew this already. She would go running to the Woollahra vicarage with her tail between her legs. She would read her Bible and attend Evensong. But now she was drunk on the game and only wanted more of it. The cards were sharp and clear, their blues pure ultramarine, their reds a brilliant carmine like the hearts of popish effigies. She saw the expression in Miss Malcolm's eyes. She heard the beast bellow from the mud flats. She patted her neck and felt her palm licked by loose, untidy flames of hair. The sight of her! It would drive her mama to a brushing frenzy, but Lucinda did not care about anything except cards and how to get the next hand moving.

"Come," she said, "look how attractive I can make the stakes." And she emptied the contents of her purse-the equivalent of sixteen jam jars-on to the blanket.

Mr d'Abbs was amused and pleased. He was about to pigeon-hole her childlike and then she looked up and he caught the clear green challenge in her eyes and then he did not know what it was he felt.

Personal Effects

Mrs Burrows did not like to be needed too much. It put her off. It was this which was the impediment in her relationship with Mr Jeffris, not the fact that he was a clerk employed by Mr d'Abbs. Where Mr Calvitto had cold eyes and would allow himself to show no passion, Mr Jeffris had an incendiary nature which one felt to be only just held in control. Tears sprang easily to his tortoiseshell brown eyes. His hands were often clenched or thrust hard in his pockets. He was a stranger to irony and sarcasm. He was as direct as a knife. And apart from his great passion for the widow of Captain Burrows, his great obsession in life was that he should be an explorer of unmapped territories. He was not tall like Burke, or well educated like Mitchell. But you could not hear him talk and doubt that he would finally triumph. Mr Jeffris was really very handsome. He had a great mane of coalblack hair, a high forehead, finely shaped full lips and fierce, animated dark eyes. He was neat, precise, self-critical. He was the youngest son of Covent Garden costers and dedicated to his own improvement. He was, in almost every respect, a perfect match for Mrs Burrows, except that he needed her. Mr Calvitto had passion, but it was of a different type. It was as cold as a windowpane in a warm room. It was this she trusted. She liked a little distance, the emotional equivalent of what Captain Burrows, always billeted up-country, had provided her with in miles. The difference between Mr Calvitto and Mr Jeffris is best illustrated by their reaction to that small tin trunk which Captain Burrows's commanding officer had labelled "Cpt. BurrowsPersonal Effects." The trunk contained a pair of gloves, some letters from Mrs Burrows, an envelope containing certain cards depicting Cossacks, and sixteen

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Personal Effects

leatherbound diaries containing maps, descriptions of journeys, raids against the blacks, and small pen sketches of various bivouacs, river crossings, etc.

Mr Calvitto, on being invited to inspect the diaries, told her plainly that her husband had no talent with the pen. He made disparaging remarks about his English composition and drew her attention to the dashes which Captain Burrows used instead of commas and full stops. He did not end there. He read a sentence out loud and made it sound ridiculous. He showed her how the

"settler's hut attacked by blacks" could not help but fall flat on the ground the minute the sketch was complete.

Mrs Burrows, like Mr Jeffris, believed in "improvement." Mr Calvitto offered "improvement" in large dollops, or at least that chastisement which Mrs Burrows had learned to be the precursor of improvement. And although she twice slapped his face in response to things he said, she could not help but be spoiled for Mr Jeffris's enthusiastic response.

Mr Jeffris arrived on Tuesdays and Thursdays with his own writing paper and pen. He wore an old-fashioned box-pleated jacket in the style of his hero, Major Mitchell. He sat down at the gate-legged table in the parlour and transcribed from Captain Burrows's diaries. He had a neat, graceful hand with certain flourishes of his own invention. He did not make rude faces about the little brass gewgaws and porcelain knick-knacks with which Mrs Burrows had decorated the room. Mr Calvitto, on the other hand had, on first being alone with her in her house, told her bluntly that she had no taste. He had picked things up and put them down. She had been standing in the parlour. She had a small porcelain elephant in her hand. He had been opposite her, with his back to the window. He had his top hat in his hand.

She had the elephant in her hand when they kissed. Later she found it on a dressing table. When Mr Jeffris admired this elephant, he put himself on her level, and this level was not high enough. Paradoxically, his natural affection for the elephant made her as fond of him as of a friend survived from early childhood.

Neither Mr Jeffris nor Mr Calvitto realized what a peculiar state Mrs Burrows was in. She gave no appearance of being anything but in control. Her period of mourning was over and her widow's weeds given to a charity, but she was still rocked and buffeted by the wake left by Captain Burrows's murder, the news

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Oscar and Lucinda

of which had reached her in three successive waves.

First there had been a polite letter of condolence delivered by a major. Then there had been the newspaper reports. Burrows had been hacked with axes the blacks had stolen from shearers on the Manning. He had been thrust through the neck and eyes with spears. And then, when she was still gasping, the personal effects arrived. Amongst the diaries was an envelope containing sixteen picture cards, numbered one to sixteen, like the cigarette cards little boys collected. Each card bore the title "Rape by Cossacks." She was not shocked by the coupling there depicted (or less shocked than she might have imagined), nor by the exaggerated male genitalia, but rather the combination of this with sword and scimitar, with hacked breasts, with women's mouths screaming wide with pain, eyes bulging with terror, and not even this, horrible as it was, but the question as to why Captain Burrows, who had liked to nestle his head sleepily at her breast, should carry cards like this upon his person. She could not get these pictures out of her head. They disturbed her and frightened her. There was no one she could speak to about them. And when she laid them out, like a hand of patience, on the gate-legged table on a Tuesday night, she was not in her normal mind at all. When Mr Jeffris arrived, she took his coat and led him to his normal seat. He saw he was to sit down. He sat. She held his coat and watched him while he studied the cards.

"Do they please you?" she asked.

"Please me?" ;.' c

She looked at him, with his slippery pretty lips half-opened. She did not need to hear his answer. She saw his eyes. He was not in control of himself. He was frightened of what he had seen. This was no use to her at all. She was already frightened. What use was it for him to be frightened, too?

She gathered in the cards and put them in their envelope. She refused to discuss the matter with him. He was concerned for her. She liked him to be concerned. But she did not like the timidity. She had always thought him a brave man, strong, manly. She now began to say frightful things to him, in a perfectly ordinary way. She talked quickly; breathlessly, it is true, but this had been her style before. She straightened out the white tablecloth on the gate-legged table and said that the blacks should straight away be poisoned.

She did not know why she said these things.

It did not occur to Mr Jeffris that she was not well, for the views she was expressing were only different from much opinion in New South

Personal Effects

Wales in that they were unambiguously put. He was, himself, fearful of the blacks in the Manning and the Macleay. It was likely he would one day have to confront them himself. He attempted to explain their behaviour to Mrs Burrows, not so much to calm her as to still, through explication, his own anxiety. These blacks, he said, were the most murderous of all, having been dispossessed of their lands and driven into the dense, tumbled country of the "Falls." They had their backs against the wall.

But this sort of talk did nothing to ease Mrs Burrows. She did not hear the words, but smelt something she would name as "unmanly." Her cheeks got hot spots on them and her face took on a chiselled look, pointed, clenched around the jaw, with tendons showing in her neck. She talked of calling out the army, of a final all-out war against the blacks. Mr Jeffris replied, but what he was addressing was only the thin, sharp ice on the deeper puddle of Mrs Burrows's argument in which blacks, the Cossacks and Captain Burrows all took on the forms of fish with teeth like knives.

Mrs Burrows did not feel safe. She said this often, but was not

understood.

When she returned from Mr d'Abbs's with Mr Calvitto, she resolved to show him the cards also. It was all that was on her mind while they disported in her bed. She placed them on the little night table where she would put the tea things afterwards. She made the pot which they then drank-it was their custom-sitting up in bed.

It was then that she gave Mr Calvitto the envelope. He lit a cigarette and blew a thin trail of smoke into the air. And then, in the manner of one performing a wearisome duty, he opened the envelope and looked at the cards, one by one, occasionally sipping his cup of tea, occasionally inhaling smoke from his cigarette. He nibbled at a biscuit. He said nothing. Mr Calvitto was dark with long wiry muscles, black hair which grew all over him in small tight whorls. He was lean like a racing dog. He had a long, thin, hooded penis which now, as he turned one more card, rose visibly beneath the sheet.

He looked at her and smiled, an unsugary expression, not weak, as austere as whisky with no water. She pressed herself against him, shivering, as once, in the potteries of Stratford, she had pressed wet clay against a plaster mould.

She would be a plate, God save her. Let the aproned decorators paint dancing Cossacks around her rim, or dead blacks like spokes around a poisoned water-hole.

40

Not in Love

The vicar of Woollahra was not in love. She was not pretty enough for him to be in love with. She was also too young. She was not "suitable." A great deal of this judgement about suitability was a function not of his assessment of his personal needs but of his highly developed social sense.

Sydney (or that tiny part of it he knew as "Sydney") would not think her suitable. And he liked to be liked. He did not like, although he thought himself a radical, to feel himself outside the comfort of the fold. He did not like to be criticized. And yet this was what was now happening to him all the time. No one-barring the Bishop-said anything to his face. But he could not accompany the girl to the waiting room of a solicitor-at-law without feeling, even amongst the clerks and message boys-this social shiver. He did not know about Jimmy d'Abbs and the games of cards, and yet he knew-without naming it for himself-that there was something. He saw the signs, just as you can posit, from the whorled skin of the sea, the presence of an unseen rock. Three weeks ago Sydney did not know her, and then only that she had put a cauliflower on the front desk at Petty's Hotel. Then it was remarked-this was before she abandoned the crinoline Mrs Ahearn had made for her in Parramatta-how oddly she dressed. And then they switched and said how well.

She played cards with Jimmy d'Abbs et al. But afterwards she took tea with the vicar of Woollahra. It was as if she had broken some law of nature, been ice and steam at the same instant-the two activities were mutually exclusive.

The vicar of Woollahra then took her shopping and Society, always feeling shopping to be a most intimate activity, was pleased to feel the steam pressure rising in itself as it got ready to be properly

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Not in Love

scandalized-its pipes groaned and stretched, you could hear the noises in its walls and cellars. They imagined he had paid for her finery. When they learned this was not so, that the girl had sovereigns in her purse-enough, it was reported, to buy the priest a pair of onyx cufflinks-the pressure did not fall, but stayed constant, so that while it did not reach the stage where the outrage was hissing out through the open valves, it maintained a good rumble, a lower note which sounded like a growl in the throat of a smallish dog.

Society-if you call it that, Lucinda would not-did not know what to do. It could not tolerate to see the two of them together, and yet it was in some way tickled. It squirmed and grimaced and hooted with derision to see him move with such a confident and manly stride, as if nothing were wrong. It could not have been funnier if he had walked beside a billy-goat and called it sweetheart. And as for "her"-she swung her arms. Indeed she did. Like a toy soldier. This might not have been so irritating if she had not walked beside "dear, good Dennis Hasset." Let her walk like this beside Jimmy d'Abbs or Harvey Fig or the Italian atheist. Let her drink wine and dance with them, and jolly good luck to her, in this life at least. But let her not walk in the places where Miss Barley Wilkes or Miss Harriet Crowley might more rightfully, and virtuously, tread. They watched the handsome vicar of Woollahra like a sleepwalker on a window ledge. He went with her to Jimmy d'Abbs's office to discuss the purchase of a glassworks. Even then he did not get it. He emerged as innocent as he went in. His friends tried to speak to him but he would not hear them. On this account he broke off relations with his friend Tom Wilson, the professor of classics at the university, the man he liked to call "the only educated man in Sydney." This happened on the very day the glassworks were finally purchased and when, in theory anyway, his association with Miss Leplastrier should end.

His "friend" Wilson had turned out as small-minded as the rest. He had claimed Miss Leplastrier stayed up all night gambling with "types" like Harvey Fig. This made Dennis Hasset's hands into tense claws and he cried out: "Agggh." He had reached a state which he could call "unhappy." He wrote the word on a piece of paper, then tore it up and threw it in the fire. It seemed to him, swivelling back and forth on his squeaky chair, that he had been, until his offer to assist with us

Oscar and Lucinda

the purchase of the Prince Rupert's Glassworks, a mostly happy man. And he soon became nostalgic for the time he could sit reading alone in his study, or feel his long, athletic form being admired as he stretched across the pleasant slippery chintz surfaces of Mrs Wilson's armchairs. And even if there were moments-like this one

– when he could sit alone in his study, it was not the same as hitherto. Anger, like a blow-fly, had been let into the room and buzzed against the sunlit glass. He did not understand this anger. He thought it all his, but a great deal of it was Lucinda's. She carried an intensity, a nervous tension, with her. She could not sit in a hitherto peaceful armchair without your being aware of a great reservoir of energy being somehow, against all the laws of physics, contained. Even when she was not here, he felt her restlessness. And he was angry-although it was unchristian of him-that this one calm corner, the place in his life where he might be free from the demands of parishioners had now been stolen from him. He could not concentrate on his Dickens or his Wilkie Collins. He was irritated, even whilst praying. If Lucinda was sitting in the house, he would wish her gone. If she was not, he might sit in a small chair by his window, looking constantly up the dusty road, wishing-he did not think it right to pray for it-for the plume of dust that might herald the arrival of her hansom.

But on the evening of the day he had ended his friendship with Tom Wilson, he did not need to wait for her. She arrived promptly at dusk, in order that they might celebrate the purchase. She was on time, but they were somehow not synchronized. They did not feel the way they were meant to. Lucinda had that fearful, tight-chested sensation she experienced after she had lost too much money at her cribbage. But this feeling was not caused by anything so doubtful, but by something which should be morally uplifting, i.e., the purchase of a factory. She was expected to be triumphant. She tried to be.

Dennis Hasset was still living the hurt of his argument with Professor Wilson. He was sick at heart, and angry. He poured dry sherry for a toast but launched straight into the story. It gave his voice a hard metallic edge and his eyes, although he did not intend it so, looked balefully, accusingly at Lucinda who could not, in the face of this, bring herself to sit down. She stood upright as if it were she, not Wilson, who was in the dock., «

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Not in Love

Dennis Hasset was inclined to forget Lucinda was only a girl, just as he was also inclined to forget she was not a child. He told her what was said about her.

Lucinda held her shoulders square and smiled. Her upper lip became very thin, but otherwise she did not show him how hurt she was. She could not see why she should be hated so much. She could see, of course. They did not like Mr d'Abbs because he laughed and had a little fun, because he wore a velvet smoking-jacket and was Christian enough not to be frightened when an atheist sat at his table. But she could also not see. She felt so small and weak in the face of the moving water-wall of hatred.

She should be sorry that Mr Hasset had argued with his friend. It was her responsibility. She should care for him and nurse him in the loss, just as she should properly celebrate the purchase she had begged him negotiate on her behalf. She raised her glass and smiled in a way she now knew was attractive. It involved a pursing of the lips, sleepy lids around the eyes. She knew, because she had performed it for the mirror, that it gave her a humorous, dare-devil appearance. But the room was cold. The curtains were drawn. The glass, greenish stuff from Melbourne, seemed black-and being an excellent conductor it was very cold to touch. She stood behind it. She imagined herself a portrait suspended in the gloom.

"Well," she turned. "1 must go."

She had not known she was going to say this. She looked at Dennis Basset's face. His mouth slightly open, his forehead suddenly carved by two deep clefts of frown.

"We are having beef," he said. He put his glass down. He put his two hands together. She felt his misery come out to swamp her. She could not bear his disappointment. She could not look at his face and feel its pain.

"I am so sleepy," she yawned.

All she could think was that she must play cards. She was a despicable person. Then she was despicable, and that was that. But she must go. She told a number of lies, one after the other, teetering above each other, a house of cards, all constructed in order that she might abandon the vicarage and fly-as fast as she could down the Glenmore Hill-to the house in Rushcutters Bay where they would lay a hand of shining cribbage across a grey wool-covered table. Netting Hill, you may not know it, derives its distinctive street plan from the racecourse which Anally bankrupted its-developer, Mr John Whyte. And while it is true that four years at Oriel had not only given Oscar a passion for racehorses, but produced sixteen smudge-paged clothbound notebooks in which were recorded not the thoughts of Divine Masters, not musings on the philosophy of the ancients, but page after page of blue spidery figures which recorded-you could not sit on your backside at Oxford and collect data like this but must travel, by train, by coach, by foot, so that a map of your journeys would be a spider web across the south of England-the names of horses, their sires and dams, their position at last start, the number of days since the last start, the weight carried at the last time, whether they were rising in class, or falling in class, who was the owner, who the jockey and so on, and so while he had this great passion (it was more extensive than I have suggested-his system of weighting would require a bigger book than Pittsburgh Phil's) and had wed his father's scientific methods to the sweating, mud-stained bride of racing, he had come to live in Netting Hill totally in ignorance of the fact that a ghostly imprint of a racecourse lay over its streets.

He did not hear the thunder of two-year-olds down Lansdowne Road. He did not see mud fly in the right turn on Stanley Crescent. He saw the name of Ladbroke, of course. You cannot miss a Ladbroke in Netting Hill. It is there on Square and Road and Terrace. But Ladbroke's was not yet a famous firm of London bookmakers and if the street names were coded messages from the future, Oscar did not know how to read them.

He came to Notting Hill, or so he insisted, only because he was familiar with the area, or the more genteel part of it. He had been

14«

If He Ask a Fish, Will He Give Him a Serpent?

accustomed to staying at the Wardley-Fishes' town house in Ladbroke Square, an address the Queen's physician, being unaware of the pigeeries a mile away in Netting Dale, and having visited, presumably, on a day the wind was blowing from the south-east, had claimed to be the most salubrious in London.

Oscar, being permanently in London, could no longer expect to be billeted at Ladbroke Square, which was, in any case, closed down again, with the servants left starved on half-pay and no scraps of fat to sell off at the back door while they waited for Lady Wardley-Fish to decide she was, once again, bored with the country.

Oscar's accommodation was on the south side of the Uxbridge Road, a block away from the rattle of the omnibuses and wagons and coaches. He had become a schoolteacher, and had a room in the third-floor attic of Mr John Colville's School for Boys. He was a Reverend Mr and chose to wear the collar but at this moment you would not know whether he wore it or not for he was lying in his bed, fully clothed, with the sheet clenched between his neat white teeth. His disgraceful shoes-scuffed quite white around the inner heelslay where they had recently fallen, the right one on its side on the black floorboards, the left standing upright with its toe curling upwards. You would not need to be a cobbler to know my great-grandfather's shoes were too big for him.

The room was cold. There was a grate but it was empty. The brass kindling box was shut but it did not serve to hold kindling in any case, but those letters, written in Theophilus's tight, small hand on an inexplicably expensive crisp white bond, which served to lacerate a conscience which was already as unhealthy as Sir Ian Wardley-Fish's liver.

He knew he was vile. His eyes were wide, staring at the sloping attic ceiling which bore brown marks like an unsavoury old mattress. It was the sabbath. The bells of St John the Evangelist had stopped some ten minutes before but the note for the day was declared more exactly, it seemed to him, by the stench of pig fat being rendered by the dangerous inhabitants of Netting Dale. Greyhound Row, where Mr Colville's school was situated, was genteel and quiet. Only the whisk-whisk of Mrs Fenn's straw broom broke the silence of the sabbath. Mr Fenn, the tailor, had his freshly painted bright green shutter firmly closed. The butcher's shop next door had a bright brass hasp and staple threaded with a heavy black enamelled padlock. Mr Brewer-he whose establishment was next to the butcher's-would, on this day, sell no cheese, no corn, no paper cones of boiled sweets and was, this

Oscar and Lucinda

could be relied on, in his pew with his family at St John's.

The Swann Inn, near the tollgate, was firmly closed but Oscar, lying in his bed above Mr Colville's empty school, could see the smudge of Brickfield's smoke across the yellow sky. He could hear the barking dogs. It was a great place for dogs, for dog-fanciers and dog-stealers. Certain individuals also wagered on the dogs.

He had become vile. The vileness was perhaps the product of the shape of Notting Hill, that he was made by this map, or chose the map without knowing he was doing it, was drawn to it like iron filings towards the magnetic horseshoe shapes of its street plan. Ever since his association with Wardley-Fish he had come to Notting Hill, and ever since that time he had been vile. He did not blame his friend for this. His friend gambled no more.

Wardley-Fish had a parish and worked hard on his sermons. And in any case it was not the gambling which was vile. Through gambling, imbued with God's grace, he had managed to feed and clothe himself. It is true there had been hard and hungry times when he felt himself alone and lost. (One bad spell in 1862 lasted from after Easter almost up to Trinity.) But although he had lost he was, as they said at the track, "ahead." He worked hard. He travelled to Newmarket and Newbury, Catterick and Sandown Park. He collected his information and classified it. Indeed, you could look at his results and say he did it all himself, without God's help. But this was not how Oscar saw it. He saw God's hand everywhere about-bookmakers' favourites boxed in at the rails, carried off at the turn, interfered with, broken down, playing up at the barrier and particularly the case of the 2–1 favourite Sailor Boy who-he had this from Jim Clements, the jockeyheld his breath from the top of the straight in the two-year-old handicap at Newmarket and thus allowed Desire to win at 33-1.

He also bet without his system. He had lost money to Magsmen and Macers. He had bet on dried peas, spinning tops, and the progress of ants along a gold-tipped walking stick. He had played cribbage for two or three pounds a game. But he had never bet from greed or avarice. The state of his coal scuttle, the condition of his shoes, all attested to that. He would only bet for a proper godly purpose.

It was not gambling itself which was vile. What was vile was his passion, the extraordinary excitement he felt, the appetite which made him place a bet on every race on the card, not because it was wise, but just so he could maintain his frenzy and cheer home his chosen beasts until he was almost too hoarse to make himself understood at the railway ticket counter. What was vile was the need that took

If He Ask a Fish, Will He Give Him a Serpent?

possession of him at a moment like this when he knew that, at this very instant, in Netting Dale, they would be gathering their dogs together.

He shifted his bite on his sheet.

No matter what godly purpose his gambling was turned towards, it was not godly to pursue it on the sabbath.

This business with dogs was evil. It was Wardley-Fish-though not, dear Lord, his fault-who had taken him to this place. Oscar had been shocked, but excited too. There was the dangerous smell of the city poor: musty cotton, fustian, toasted herrings. Men sat in rows on benches with their dogs. Later, when the clock was running, they would cry out, but at first, when they were just entered, there was a curious quiet about the men and their dogs. They stroked and patted. There was a soft cooing like a dove house.

They all looked towards the pit. It was not a very large pit, about six feet in diameter, and painted a bright white. In the middle of the pit was a dark grey mound. The mound was soft, moving. The mound was composed of rats, clustering together, crawling over each other. The men cooed.

Then they stopped. They shifted on their seats, spat, coughed, said something softly to a neighbour or called out a raw-throated joke.

A fox terrier was placed into the ring. The fox terrier was called Tiny. It wore a woman's bracelet for a collar. It took the rats one by one, picked them up like fruit from a bowl, broke them while the dock ricked and the men roared so loud you could not hear your companion speak to you. On the day he first witnessed this, Oscar would not have believed he would ever be tempted to bet on such a thing. But the temptation came, not because he wished to see creatures put to death, but because it was a sabbath and there was no other betting to be had. Betting was like this: a monster that, must be fed.

He bit his sheet, and wondered, as he wondered often, if it might not be this, his need to feed the monster, that lay behind the scrubbed face of his seemingly Christian desire, i.e., to accumulate money in order to dare the formless terror of the ocean, to bring the word of Christ to New South Wales.

And yet the monster could not be the motive. For when he had made the commitment-two years before he lay in bed fretting over ratshe had imagined there would be no money to raise. The Church Missionary Society would pay his fare. He would need a sun-helmet (3s) and, apart from that, only a piece of celluloid (10s) to overcome his panic of the sea.

42 Called

Wardley-Fish did not like the people that he knew. They bored him. He imagined them as sturdy beasts grazing in a dense and matted pasture, chewing, swallowing, regurgitating at one end, plopping at the other. Naturally he did not show them what he felt. He acted jovially, even fondly, and what he showed was not exactly false-he felt all these things in a distant sort of waybut were certainly greatly magnified. He worried about his father's bleeding face, and he laughed at his brother's stories about the poacher he had netted in a pit-trap. He could ride with them all day and drink with them all night-they were round and comfortable in every part, and not a sharp edge to cut through the cushions of complacency.