Adrian Glynde (16 page)

“
Yours affectly

“
Minnie Clandon
.

“
P.S.—How sad not to see Adrian. Give him his mother's best wishes
.”

“That was a near thing,” said Bob, “a very near
thing. I wonder if she had to open the envelope to put in that postscript.”

Clara glanced again at the letter. “Astonishing, chattering little person!” she said reflectively and with a faint tinge of tenderness in her voice. “Don't you feel shaken and deafened. Bob, by the breathless, purposeless energy of it all?”

“Minnie certainly puts herself into her letters,” said Bob.

Clara nodded eloquently. “She does,” she said; “but she very nearly forgot to put Adrian into this one.”

As Clara drove from Waterloo to Liverpool Street with Adrian, he asked her suddenly: “Aunt Clara, is Mother going to be at Yarn?”

Clara, who had been watching with sad, reflective eyebrows the dome of St. Paul's swelling portentously above the huddle of buildings that clustered beneath it along the river, brought her gaze back into the cab. “Your mother? No, my dear, She's in Paris. Are you disappointed?”

“Not exactly,” said Adrian with a dry smile. “What has she gone to Paris for?”

“To buy dresses to take back to India. She gives me to understand that she is a leader of fashion in India. She sails next month.”

“For India?”

“Yes, to resume the leadership of fashion there. Where does she lead it to, I wonder?”

“Not to the Crowhursts, I suppose?” said Adrian. He blushed a little at his boldness, and they both burst out laughing.

“No,” said Clara, “presumably not to the Crowhursts but”—she sighed wearily—“round and round in an
elegant spiral, I suppose, ending at last in stark nakedness, which is the apotheosis, the heaven, of fashion.”

Adrian could not follow Aunt Clara into these metaphysical realms, but he was accustomed to similar flights of hers which, he supposed, were not really nonsense. She, meanwhile, had fallen into her reverie again, but she disturbed it to remark, as if to herself:

“Judging by evening dresses I have seen lately, I gather that the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.”

As they approached Liverpool Street she said: “We are driving over to Abbot's Randale next Thursday for Christmas. We shall be there only three or four days, because your grandfather is hard at work on a masterpiece and cannot long be interrupted.”

Adrian thought that there was a tinge of sarcasm in her tone and was somewhat shocked. “Aren't they masterpieces, then?” he asked.

“Aren't what masterpieces, my dear?”

“Grandfather's poems.”

“Oh, certainly they are. Do you doubt it?”

“I thought, from your voice, that you doubted it,” said Adrian.

Aunt Clara pursed her lips and thought for a moment. “If I have doubts,” she said, “they are that any poetry is a masterpiece. I prefer my bread and butter thin, you see, and without jam. But, as poetry goes, your grandfather's is good—oh, extremely good.” She sighed regretfully. “But what prose he would have written,” she said.

“Did Father like poetry?” Adrian enquired.

“Yes, Adrian. Your father, as a boy and a young man, used to read a great deal of poetry. If he had read less, he might… perhaps … have …” Her voice died away; her eyes studied the passing shops.

“He might have …?” Adrian prompted.

Aunt Clara suddenly woke up. “… have avoided your mother, my dear, to put it flat.”

“And that would really have been better,” Adrian, to her surprise, asserted seriously. Then he added: “But in that case I wouldn't be here.”

Clara glanced round at him. “No, my dear, I suppose you wouldn't; and that,” she said, taking his hand, “would have been a great pity.”

It had seemed natural to Adrian that Aunt Clara did not care for poetry. He could not have explained why he thought it natural, but it fitted in, in his unreflecting knowledge of her, both with the charming and amusing qualities she possessed and those she lacked. He had discovered early that there were things which it was useless to demand of her, and after a few early failures he had ceased to demand them. That no doubt was the secret of the excellent terms they were on.

Minnie Clandon was different. Of her too there were things that it was useless to demand, but they were the things that every child demands of its mother, and Adrian had not been able until a few months ago to cease to demand them of her. But apart from the fact that Minnie was his mother, Adrian would have found it much more difficult to cease to demand them of her than it had been in the case of Aunt Clara, because there was this profound difference between them, that Clara's instinctive honesty compelled her to discourage such demands, whereas Minnie Clandon, with that perverse duplicity found in frivolous and flirtatious women, did her best to force everyone she met to demand of her the very things that she was unable or unwilling to give, not only to her child, but to anyone.

Adrian's processes as regards the two women were entirely unconscious, for his self-awareness was still almost exclusively emotional: there was little or nothing
of explicit intelligence in it. He would have been amazed and puzzled if he had been informed of the fact that he had a very clear notion of his aunt's limitations. But Clara had been right when she told Bob that Minnie had done wonders to develop Adrian during the summer holidays, for he was now beginning consciously to use his intellect, and the first person he was focusing it upon was Minnie herself. His remark to Clara in the cab, the remark in reply to her indiscreet reference to his father and mother, was the first outward evidence of it.

But Clara herself was still free from his conscious scrutiny. He knew at once, for instance, that it was natural to her to dislike poetry, and her confession of that dislike did not have the smallest influence on his own attitude. But he had not achieved this through conscious thought. His own attitude to poetry was governed by his attitude to his grandfather. His grandfather attracted and interested him enormously. His grandfather had told him a mysterious, absorbing story, a story which threw a revealing light on all sorts of hidden feelings, and had told him that this story was poetry. That was enough to assure him of poetry's supreme value. And if it had not been enough, Aunt Clara's statement that his father used to read poetry would have completed his conviction. Her corollary that poetry had been responsible for his father's unfortunate marriage had left him entirely unaffected. He had never himself read poetry: the poetry he had been made to learn and say by heart at Waldo and Charminster he had looked upon and still looked upon merely as a part of school and therefore as quite separate from this other poetry, this mysterious thing into which his grandfather had given him an exciting glimpse. Having heard from Aunt Clara on the drive to Liverpool Street that his grandfather was engaged on
what she had with a faint ironic tinge called “a masterpiece,” Adrian on the first occasion that he found himself alone with the old man asked him whether it was the story of the old Chinese and the crystal tank.

“Yes,” said Oliver, “it is; but the working out of the story took me much further than I had expected. It is turning into a great long business about man's search for wisdom. But how did you know I was working on a poem at present?”

“From Aunt Clara,” said Adrian, “she said you were engaged on a masterpiece.”

“‘Engaged on a masterpiece,' she said, did she? But your Aunt doesn't care much about poetry.”

“No,” said Adrian, “she prefers prose.”

Oliver looked at the boy with an amused twinkle in his eye. “And which do you prefer?” he asked.

Adrian blushed. “I'm afraid I don't know anything about either,” he said. “Of course I've had to learn poetry for repetition at school, but when it's work it's different somehow.”

“But
don
'
t
you read books for your own amusement?”

“Oh, yes,” said Adrian.

“And what do you read?”

“Oh, just anything I come across. I read
Bulldog Drummond
last term, and
Mr. Polly
.”

“
Mr. Polly
? Wells! H … m! I suppose you might do worse. And what else?”

“Oh,
Treasure Island
.”

“And did you like
Treasure Island
?”

“Not much,” said Adrian, and then added: “it wasn't
bad
.”

“Perhaps,” said his grandfather, “you found it too exciting. I used to love exciting books when I was your age, but now I simply can't endure them. The novel of adventure, in which there is a rapid succession of
exciting events, is to me insufferably tedious. I yawn and yawn. The only way an author can entice me into enduring the monotony of it is to butter it liberally with psychology. What I mean is that all I care about is the adventures that happen inside people, adventures of the mind, adventures of the soul. If the writer will give me plenty of that I'll be content to swallow his action. Do you see what I mean?”

“You mean your narrowness comes from breadth.”

The old man turned amazed speculation upon Adrian, but Adrian had not intended to astonish him and was not aware that he had done so.

“Mr. Heller, my music-master, said that,” he added calmly. “He said he was a narrow and prejudiced old man and that he had a perfect right to be, because he had given all the composers a fair trial and had chosen his gods, but that I had no right to be narrow yet.”

Oliver Glynde nodded his head approvingly. “He's quite right,” he said. “And who are his gods?”

“His gods are Beethoven and Bach, and William Byrd, and after them Handel, Haydn, and Mozart.”

“Good. He and I belong to the same religion.”

“And who are your gods, Grandfather? I mean, among poets.”

“I have two heavens,” said the old man, “one for gods who are the gods of everyone who loves literature, gods who are high above our feeble ambitions and emulations: the other for the gods whom I regard as my masters and humbly try to imitate. In the first heaven are Shakespeare, and Dante, and I think … yes, I
think
, Wordsworth. In the second are a strangely assorted three: Racine, Landor, and John Donne, whose picture, there, you so often look at.”

“And must I read all those if I want to know about poetry?”

“No, old man, I wouldn't try any of them except Shakespeare for a long time yet. But there are plenty of others you would enjoy, and several of them I ought to have put in the first heaven sitting on the steps of the great ones' thrones. I will give you the poems of Keats. But when you read poetry you must not forget, if you want to enjoy it to the full, that it not only means what it says in words but also a great many things it doesn't say. It has meanings as music has meanings. You would say, wouldn't you, that a Sonata by Beethoven had a perfectly definite meaning of its own?”

“Yes,” said Adrian, remembering Mr. Heller's playing of the Appassionata and the Waldstein.

“But it is a meaning that has no need of words—that cannot, in fact, be put into words. Well, the sound of poetry has a meaning of its own, and so has the rhythm, and these meanings reinforce the meaning of the words. As for the words, they also have many meanings besides the one particular meaning of which they tell.”

“Yes,” said Adrian, “we talked about that, didn't we, when you told me the story of the old Chinee?”

Oliver nodded. “So you see that what a poet does when he writes poetry is to say something to you as fully as forcefully and as unforgettably as possible. He entices your mind, your heart, and all your senses into making you accept what he offers. If say ‘Pass the jam,' I am saying a perfectly plain thing, I am simply shying a wellaimed brick at your mind. But when I write a poem I make an organised attack on you. I shy a dozen bricks all at once, each brick aimed carefully. One hits your head, another your heart, five hit your five senses, another your love of dancing, another your love of music, another your love of beautiful shapes and colours, another catches you on the soul. That's what poetry does: it bombards every part of your defences at once.”

Adrian appeared to be puzzled. “Then why … how does Aunt Clara … manage to hold out against the bombardment?”

“A … h!” The old man burst into a laugh. “Trust your Aunt Clara to hold out,” he said. Then, serious once more, he explained: “Poetry conquers only those who wish to be conquered. If you don't yield to it, it can't touch you.”

“Then Aunt Clara is one of those who don't like being bombarded?”

Oliver laughed again. Precisely,” he said. “Dear Clara never gives herself beyond a certain point.”

That remark of his grandfather's came as a revelation to Adrian. It illuminated what he had hitherto not consciously seen; it recalled and explained childish disappointments, the pained sense, once a great sorrow to him, that Aunt Clara did not love him as he loved her. No, Aunt Clara did not give herself, that was it. But it was this very fact, he next moment felt, though he could not have explained why, that made her say such delightfully amusing things.

“You mustn't tell your aunt I said that,” said his grandfather,” because there's nothing that more annoys people who don't give themselves than to be told so.”

“Did Father give himself, then?” Adrian asked.”

“Oh, completely,” replied the old man fondly. “He was as open and unfettered as the sky. Why, didn't he end by giving his life?”

The holiday life at Abbot's Randale and at Yarn seemed to Adrian, by its contrast with Charminster, much richer and freer and more delightful than it had seemed when he had come to it from Waldo. The quiet and restfulness after the everlasting turbulence, the long leisurely vacancy of the days after the weeks of cast-iron routine, the beauty of the rooms in his grandfather's house and the civilisation of the meals filled him with delight. It was wonderful to be able to slink away after lunch to his grandfather's study and play the little piano and stare at the death-mask of John Donne, instead of having to rush to the rowdy boot-room to change into chilly shorts and shirt for fives or football; to realise that in the evening there would be no prep., no prayers, nothing to do but to talk or read the volume of Keats which his grandfather had given him; and, best of all, to awake in the morning and suddenly to discover that no crashing bell was on the point of wrecking the early morning peace, that there was at least an hour in which to lie and dream of what he would do during the day, of the new tune he had begun to compose, or of Ronny, who, though away in unknown surroundings, was extraordinarily real, extraordinarily near to him as he lay thinking of him now and holding long imaginary conversations with him.