Short Stories 1927-1956 (10 page)

‘The critics, on the other hand – though I was unable to follow all that they said, which was not, of course, at great
length
– were exceedingly kind. I don’t mean that they were more than just – how could I? They were
exceedingly
kind. Some thirty copies of the book, I was given to understand, were sent to the newspapers, and about eight were sold. But apart from the bills I paid I have never had any particulars. For the time being my son found a good deal of happiness in his venture. And then I think the merely practical side of it began to bother him a little. He fancied that we, that I, had been dreadfully cheated. I had gone off to this Mr Crown, I should have mentioned, without my son’s knowledge. But it wasn’t so much the money involved – though I happened to learn afterwards he did
not
pay fees for the reviews – it was – well, I suppose, the humiliation. My son was grieved and ashamed at what such things come to. He had been kept by his father, for his own sake perhaps, too long out of the world to realize its sense of proportion. Nevertheless, he went on writing. But with more and more difficulty. A dreadful despair seemed to have come over him. He shunned everyone. He had been – mortally – wounded. But I, even then, was
powerless
to help him. We know so little of what is passing in any other mind – even those nearest to us. And then – at last … Well, there is no need to go into that.’

She had paused again, and the pair of them, so far as their eyes were
concerned
, seemed to be like two funereal birds hovering over some morsel which neither of them had much appetite for – though it was part of God’s plenty – and which it was hardly in the nature of things that they should be able to
share.
Nevertheless Ronnie was conscious rather of a void than of any very definite dainty, and he could only blink.

But the pause had come at an opportune moment. So hot and airless was the low-pitched room in which they sat, so heavy the odour of the flowers around them, that but a few instants before, though his gaze had remained fixed on Mrs Cotton’s face, his glazing orbs from sheer sleepiness had
actually
rocked in his head. Now he was wide awake again; and he had need to be, for Mrs Cotton was hastening on.

‘To our second venture, as you may be aware, Mr Forbes, the critics were
less kind. They, too, couldn’t fully understand what my son was after, though better than I could. Could
you
?’

At this her visitor’s round and somewhat fresh-coloured face perceptibly paled. Yet again the trumpet had sounded. For a breath he hesitated, and then bolted the lump that had come into his throat. ‘I don’t know the poems well enough to say,’ he said.

Mrs Cotton turned away. ‘Well, I am grateful to you for
that
,’
was her unexpected retort. But her voice had trailed off a little as if from some
inward
rather than from any mere physical fatigue.

‘That being so, you will the more readily realize, then,’ she continued, ‘that when, after the publication of my son’s second book – which was, as a matter of fact, destined to be his last – it became clear to me that even those who are supposed to understand such things were unable to follow him, to grasp his meaning, to share even his
intention
– when I saw that
so
far
he had absolutely failed, it was a very bitter grief to me. Not for my own sake, though what mother is not
practically
ambitious for her children? – but for his. I had realized you see – and it is here that I hope you will be most patient with me and will forgive me if I repeat myself – I had realized that to some minds and to some spirits poetry is what religion is to others – the most precious, the most certain, the most wanted thing life has to give. And now that he had fallen silent I could at least realize too if only in part the affliction it meant to him. Not that, because he was silent, the beauty and meaning – the divination – of life were gone
too.
Not that; surely not that! That would be such a lie as no Cyril Charlton even is capable of. It was still there – within him; between himself and his Maker.

‘I once came across somewhere a passage in a book – I can’t remember its title or even its author, but being eager and interested as I was then, it stamped itself on my memory: “He that has never seen this beauty must hunger for it as for all his welfare, he that has known it must love and
reverence
it as the very beauty; he will be flooded with awe and gladness.” Well, surely, even if it be averred that these early hopes and desires were nothing but a fool’s paradise – and
that
I refuse to believe; and even though you may regret the folly, still you cannot deny that to my son they
were
a paradise? No more then would I deny the hope of its continuance, though the gates should be shut for ever that gave others a glimpse of it.’ She paused, her small square hands clenched in her lap.

‘I have finished, Mr Forbes. As you see, I live here a quiet and retired life. I believe that no good thing in this world – since it is a world founded on divine reason – can be eventually wasted. I believe therefore that whatever there is of this infinite grace in my son’s poems will find in time its own haven, even though they may be completely forgotten here on earth.
Meanwhile
I keep my lesson. Cyril Charlton, and much else that I won’t burden
you with, taught me at any rate once and for all that there is a danger worse than death to this “very beauty”, and that it comes, not from the enemies, but from these so-called
“lovers”
of poetry – these parasites – their
jealousies
, their quarrels, their pretences, their petty curiosity, their suffocating silliness. I will have none of it. I am determined – determined that this precious “world-at-large” – your own words – shall leave my son and all he loved and the dreams from which there is now no waking, at
peace.
His memory, himself, safe here with me; to the end.’

She had risen from her chair as she finished speaking. With hands clutched on her bodice, her small pupils glinting like semi-precious stones, she stood over poor Ronnie, and dared him to do his worst. There were tears in the eyes now challenging him, tears, he realized, not of weakness but of strength, and squeezed out of a spirit, stable as adamant, which would not swerve by an inch if the need came to stride off exulting to the stake.

And as, not apparently in any desire for air, and certainly not for retreat, but merely to conceal her feelings – and maybe from herself – Mrs Cotton turned her back on her visitor and marched over to the French windows, Ronnie stirred awkwardly in his chair. The attitude in which he had been listening to this prolonged declamation had become a little strained. He stirred – as if he were ‘coming to’. And, ‘what the devil,’ he was thinking ruefully, if a little vacantly, ‘what the devil had he or his young American friend to do with any “
stake
”!’

The windows had been flung open to their fullest gape. The tepid April air of the garden thinned in on the boxed-up atmosphere. It pierced with its sweet earthy freshness the pent-in odours of the forced flowers. Ronnie breathed and breathed again. The drowsy cadences of a blackbird from some shrubbery out of view fell on his ear like waterdrops into the basin of a fountain. And then suddenly from quite near at hand resounded the sudden shrill battle-cry – incredibly defiant, even formidable, for a creature so minute – of a wren.

Mrs Cotton had paused, her hand on the window-frame, only, it seemed, to regain her self-possession. She turned at last, and with a gesture waved as it were all these last few confidences between them aside.

‘So you see, Mr Forbes,’ she said, ‘now that I have said what I have said, and it has not been an easy task, I must resign the rest to you. You will
forget
any resentment I may have shown. But as I look back on Mr Charlton I find it difficult to be fair to him. I believed at the time that he at least meant well, that he had my son’s reputation at heart only and solely because he himself really
cared
for poetry, whereas I … What else can I do then but commit myself entirely into your hands? You have come this long distance. You are bound to consider your friend’s interests. I feel then I must leave
you absolutely at liberty to use your own judgment as to what shall be
proclaimed
on the housetops and what not. You have not supposed, at least, that I want what my son has done to be forgotten. Though its innermost secrets may be hidden from me, I can at least be aware that to other minds they
may
be very precious.’ Her arms fell loosely to her sides. Even in youth her short, rather dumpy figure could never have been of any particular
feminine
grace; yet Ronnie was fated to remember that gesture. It had reminded him, absurdly enough, not of Velasquez’s
Surrender
,
but of a ballet dancer by Degas.

‘And now’ – she was almost timidly inviting him – ‘I hope you will stay and take tea with us – my daughter-in-law will join us presently.’

Ronnie dutifully murmured a word or two about trains, but she tossed them aside. ‘You must let it be part of our compact,’ she said, eying him almost archly but with an ironic intentness. ‘Meanwhile I must leave you for a moment.’

She paused at the door at which Ronnie had entered. ‘The picture
immediately
behind you,’ she said, ‘is a portrait of James when he was a child of seven. It was painted by an artist – an R.A. – who is now, I believe, out of fashion. But he was not so then. The old gentleman with the pug-dog in his lap next to it
(a really good picture, I have been told), is my son’s great grandfather – on my husband’s side. And in that album on the whatnot you will find photographs and some pieces of manuscript. Please look at
anything
that may interest you.’

A moment afterwards the door had been firmly shut behind her, the sound of her footsteps had died away, and Ronnie was alone. He sat for a few moments perfectly still, his brown eyes fixed almost gloatingly on the garden. Then a sudden shuddering yawn overtook him. He knew how sleepy, but had not noticed how physically exhausted, he was. Heavens, what a labyrinth of a trap he had walked into! … But how amusing!

His glance strayed at last to the three-tiered galaxy of flowers on their white-painted shelves in the alcove – early geraniums, wax-like hyacinths, modest flowering musk, and, above all, the peach-like exotic freesia. Then he got up from his chair, yawned again as he turned about, took a pace or so backwards, and fixed his eyes on the portrait of the poet as a boy of seven.

The heavy gilt frame had woefully tarnished. But the brick red of the tartan kilt and plaid and the mustard yellow of the flaxen corkscrew curls that dangled from under a glengarry about the apple-cheeked,
china-blue-eyed
face had kept all their ‘pristine bloom’. If the artist had ever really had his eye on his subject he had assuredly detected no symptom of genius there. The stolid little boy that stood in the canvas
looked
about as intelligent as a bullfinch or a Dutch cheese. Nonetheless – as though symbols will out – he stood armed, as if for mental fight, the point of his cross-hilted wooden
toy sword poised straight out of the picture and full in the direction of Ronnie’s stomach.

Ronnie was nothing if not critical – but less so of pictures than of elegant literature. He could easily manage to swallow
Cherry
Ripe
and even
Bubbles,
but there was something in the technique of this particular painter that raised his gorge. Indeed the portrait was damnably unfair – on the part of the painter. For, after all, if there
was
a remarkable feature in the verse that little James had lived to make obscure, it was its technical mastery. ‘Mental fight’, then, there must have been. ‘You can’t,’ Ronnie adjured the child in the picture a little wearily – ‘you can’t build any sort of Jerusalem anywhere without it, and certainly not in that rather less green and, in places, positively unpleasant land that England had rapidly been becoming since you, my poor innocent, were seven!’

Of James’s particular Jerusalem, nonetheless, he had only the vaguest intimations. He would look it up again perhaps when he got back to
London
. He might even attempt to worm his way into its secret citadel. But now, anyhow, there was no need to worry about it. He was tired. Poetry of that kind is all very well while you are young and active, and the trailing clouds haven’t completely shredded off. ‘But, heavens!’ Ronnie inwardly ejaculated again, as he continued to gaze at this infant Samuel in tartan, ‘give
me
his mamma every time.’ Typically English too, almost British, in her own queer way, and overwhelmingly worth writing even to America about. How his young friend would lap her up! And the subtlety of it all!

The female spider was, of course, notorious not only for its voracity but its astuteness. They even devoured their many husbands. Mrs Cotton had put down, it seemed, every single card in her hand face upwards on the bright green table; and Ronnie had lost – every single trick! She had
hopelessly
queered his pitch. And yet, as he had sat there, transfixed by those small glittering eyes, a warm (and rather un-Ronnieish) camaraderie had sprung up in his mind. Affection at first sight!

His glance drifted down from the portrait to a full-length photograph that stood in an old leather frame on the Pembroke table immediately
beneath
it. He stooped and looked closer. Yes, it was without any doubt a photograph of James’s mother herself and one taken at about the same date as that of the picture. Square and plump and substantial in figure even then; in a neat tight-fitting bodice and flounced flow-away skirts, she stood there, one small shapely hand on a Victorian ‘occasional’ chair, looking as straight and decisively out at the camera as her son at his R.A. And the camera had been kinder than the painter. The wide open face was smiling; there was an almost audacious sparkle of coquetry in the eyes; and even Ronnie’s worldly-wise but still susceptible masculine heart responded to this
charming
feminine challenge.