Short Stories 1927-1956 (54 page)

Unlike Poe himself, however, the professor had endeavoured to be
moderate
. As briefly as possible, he had told of the poet’s last few sombre and disastrous days at Baltimore, that final ignominy when he had been found in a high fever, half naked, and scarcely sane, in the clutches of political miscreants who had confined him merely in order that he should serve their purpose at the voting booth. He had spoken of the horror and solitude of his death in the public hospital, that last forlorn cry of: ‘Is there any help? … Lord help my poor soul!’ He had lamented that all this had occurred within a few hours of the first occasion in the poet’s life when,
restored
to the Elmira whom in his early days he had loved and been cheated of, promise for the future had never seemed for him so fair, so full of hope, and rich with opportunity.

And as he said the words, a sudden overwhelming billow of mistrust had swept over the lecturer’s soul. It was as if a complete flock of geese were disporting themselves on his grave. Why, in heaven’s name, instead of
perhaps
a glimpse of Goya’s serene yet appalling picture,
The
Pest
House,
had Rembrandt’s curiously detached study,
An
Anatomical
Lesson,
flickered at this moment across his mind? And this when his paper was on the point of completion – fourteen minutes to nine?

Solely, it seemed, by reason of the presence of this one silent stranger yonder, who, as he himself raised his eyes from his desk to peer at him over his spectacles, had answered him look for look, scrutiny for scrutiny, a moment before. The lecturer had made no statement he was ashamed of; nothing false, nothing even dubious. And yet his words seemed to have lost their savour. But however that might be, he reminded himself that one cannot by mere wish to do so blot out the past. The mind itself must be its own sexton beetle. One cannot unsay the said, even in a lecture. The very
attempt would be ludicrous. He was being fanciful. He was falling a victim to what he cordially despised – the artistic temperament! So late in life! He had come to lecture, yet to judge from this sudden disquietude, he was being ‘larned’. Well, he must hasten on. Life, like a lecture, is a succession of moments. Don’t pay too extreme an attention to any one or two; wait for the end of the hour.

‘I think perhaps,’ he was declaring at this moment, ‘the most salient, the most impressive feature of Poe’s writings, as with Dean Swift’s, though the two men had little else in common, is his own personal presence in them. Even in his most exotic fantasies, some of them beautiful in the sense that the phosphorescence of decay, the brambles and briars of the ruinous, the stony calm of the dead may be said to be beautiful; some so sinister and macabre in their half-demented horror that if we ourselves encountered them even in dream we should awake screaming upon our beds – even here the sense of his peculiar personality is so vivid and immediate that, as we read, it is almost as if the poet himself stood in the flesh before us – in his customary suit of solemn black, the wide marmoreal brow, the corrosive tongue, the saturnine moodiness.

‘Flaubert’s ideal of the impersonal in fiction indeed was utterly beyond Poe. His presence pervades such a tale as
The
Pit
and
the
Pendulum,
The
Cask
of
Amontillado,
or
The
Tell-tale
Heart
no less densely than it pervades his
William
Wilson,
his
Masque
of
the
Red
Death,
his
Ligeia,
and
The
Haunted
Palace.
This may in part be due to the fact that his was a mind at once acutely analytical and richly imaginative. This is a rare but by no means unique combination of what only appear to be contradictory
faculties
. Incapable of compromise, Poe had remained preposterously
self-sufficient
, self-immolating, and aloof; and, in spite of occasional gleams of sunshine, a moody, melancholy, and embittered man. He was thus alike the master and the victim of his destiny. If not a positive enemy of society, there is little to suggest that – apart from literature – he was ever much concerned with the social problems, causes, principles, and ideals of his own time and place. With some justification perhaps – as events have proved – he
distrusted
democracy, detested the mob, and he warned his fellow-countrymen of the sordid dangers incident to an ignorant republic. These views
nonetheless
were those of an egotist rather than an aristocrat. By birth he was of little account – the son of a mere travelling actor.

‘Nor, though he had, it is true, been brought up in the traditions of a gentleman of the Southern States and abhorred all New Englanders, was he by any means a giant among pygmies. Longfellow, Emerson, Washington Irving, Bryant, Whittier, Thoreau, Oliver Wendell Holmes were in varying degrees his contemporaries; and, first cousin to him, in mind if not in blood, Nathaniel Hawthorne. Since, too,
The
Gold
Bug,
like
The
Murders
in
the
Rue
Morgue,
is one of the earliest tales of its genre in English, and
Treasure
Island
is one of its remoter off-spring, one might add Fenimore Cooper. He had lived, that is, in one of the Golden Ages of English literature – not that of our own day, the Brass.

‘As for J. R. Lowell, an admirable critic of the widest range, in his
knowledge
alike of books, men, and affairs, though he was responsible for the caustic summary of Poe’s work as three-fifths genius and two-fifths fudge, he was one of his closest and loyalest friends.

‘I am not,’ announced at last the professor, wearily, and never before had he been so tired of the sound of his own voice, ‘I am not a mathematician, and cannot check Professor Lowell’s vulgar fractions. But even if allowance be made for the fact that here in England even the parochial are inclined to sneer at the provincialism of all things American, it must be remembered that for years Poe was anathema, a man accursed among his own people. And it is certainly not in this country that since his death his work has been neglected. It had
not
been a beneficent influence’ – the professor had once more assured his audience; and that not merely because ‘it is easier to
imitate
fudge than works of genius. What a man does, however, must not
mislead
us in our judgment of what he
is.
Poe was a round peg in a square hole. The wise and the prudent in this world make the best they can of these
conditions
. Not so this ill-fated, saturnine, sinister poet. Whatever our debt to him may be,
he
flatly refused to follow their example.’

During the pause that completed this sentence – perhaps a tenth part of a second – some imp in the professor’s mind engaged in a violent argument with him as to which kind of peg and in what kind of hole he was himself just now; and then reminded him that pegs and holes may be of many shapes other than merely square or round – ovals, hexagons, oblongs,
polygons
. But he knew this imp of old, and dismissed him.

And now his lecture, which for the first time in his placid career had been little short of a martyrdom, was all but over. Though his air and manner conveyed no symptom of what was in his mind, hotly debating, ill at ease, dejected, not a little indignant, he had come to his peroration. Yet once again he lowered his head for a final fleeting glimpse of the stranger in the doorway, and ejaculated the few sentences that remained.

The last syllable had been uttered. His task was done. He had shut his mouth. For an instant he stood in silence facing his listeners – an
intellectual
St Sebastian – no less mute and more defenceless than an innocent in the dock. At the next he had turned stiffly, had gravely inclined his head in the direction of his chairman, and had sat down. He crossed his legs, he closed his eyes, he folded his arms. Though the electric vibrations of the hideous arc-lamp over his head continued to quiver beneath his skull, though a vile disquietude still fretted his soul, he had come back safely into
his shell again. A moment before he had been a public spectacle; now he was private again; his own man and all but at liberty. Even better, he had ceased to criticize himself.

He was listening instead to his chairman, a smallish man in a clerical collar, and, in spite of that clerical collar, attired in a suit of a cloth much nearer grey than black. He had a square head, square shoulders, square hands, and a plain, good-natured, eager, and amusing face. Those hands were now in rapid motion in a mutual embrace one of the other; and, with enviable ease and fluency, he was assuring his audience how much they had all been
instructed
and entertained. He was rapidly confessing, too, that he had
himself
come to the meeting that evening knowing very little of Mr Edgar Poe’s works. The name was familiar – but some of us hadn’t much time for fiction. So far as he himself was concerned, life
was
real and earnest. He had, it is true, taken a hasty glance at a page or two of what appeared to be a very clever and harmless tale entitled
The
Purloined
Letter,
and
believed
he could recite then and there the first few lines of
Annabel
Lee,
not
by the way to be confused with an old wholesome favourite of his,
Nancy
Lee.
Their lecturer, however, had not, he fancied, mentioned this particular piece, and had passed over this story, though he had referred to others that were concerned with an even graver crime than that of pilfering, nay – let us give the dog the name he deserves –
stealing
a letter. He meant, brutal murder. There were far too many murders in the fiction of our own day. On the other hand, an orang-outang, whatever its extremes of conduct may be, has not been given a conscience. He is not
morally
responsible. Man, whether his descendant or not,
is.

Tales of crime were, alas! very prevalent in these days, much too
prevalent
, he feared. Quite respectable and well-educated people not only read but wrote them. They were yet another symptom of the unrest of the age. The professor had, of course, referred to America – the United States. Was it to be credited that in that great English-speaking country the harmless if slightly colloquial expression, ‘Taking a man for a ride’, actually signified consigning a fellow-soul into eternity? On the other hand Mr Edgar Poe, he gathered, could not be held responsible for the present sad state of Chicago. He understood he was a Virginian, a Southerner, and though one of the tales mentioned by the professor bore what he feared was the only too
appropriate
title,
MS
.
Found
in
a
Bottle,
the poet, it seemed, had lived not only prior to the Civil War, but long before the days of Prohibition. That, however, was only a blessing in disguise. For in view of what the lecturer had said of Mr Poe’s sad and afflicting end, they must remember that those
responsible
for the Volstead Act had
meant
well. There were tragedies in every life, skeletons in every cupboard. And the lecturer’s subject was no
exception
.
As for his marriage with a wife then only fourteen years of age, though no doubt it is true that Juliet in the play was also of equally tender years, she was emphatically not Romeo’s first cousin. He himself could not approve of this arrangement. We mustn’t run headlong into wedlock.

Then, again, he heartily agreed with the lecturer that the piece
To
Helen
was a remarkable feat for a lad in his early teens –
most
remarkable. But he deplored any suggestion that
all
lads of fourteen should be encouraged to be equally precocious. There were dangers. Even, too, though a man may be his own worst enemy, he may yet attain renown as a writer. Poe himself had. Nevertheless he implored them one and all to remember that it is better by far for ever to hold one’s peace than to write, however attractively, what it may some day be too late to recall. That solemn thought, he gathered, was their lecturer’s urgent lesson to them this evening.

Before, he concluded, before inviting that stronghold of their society, Miss Alibone, to propose a vote of thanks to Professor Monk, he would like to announce that at their next meeting their old friend Mr Alfred Okes, so busy in so many fields, was to talk to them on the subject of conchology – the science of sea-shells, from the whelk to the conch – the latter being famous in mythology, though it was frequently mispronounced. And on
that
occasion there would be lantern slides.

‘I ask you, sir’ – he suddenly rounded on the professor with the most
tactful
and endearing of smiles – ‘I ask you, sir, to accept our heartiest, our most cordial thanks for your most entertaining, informative, and, I will add, even edifying discourse. We have been well fed.’

The professor unsealed his tired eyes, looked up, smiled a little wanly, and hastily pocketed his paper. In a few minutes, the hall already nearly empty, he had followed his chairman down the five well-worn, red-druggeted steps into the ante-chamber. There he was welcomed by a row of empty wooden chairs, a solid grained table, a copper-plate engraving in a large black frame over the chimneypiece of a gentleman in side-whiskers, whose name, owing to the foxed condition of the print, he had been unable to decipher, and the ashes of a fire in the grate. It had been feebly alight when he arrived. It was now dead out. Why did this seemingly harmless chamber at this moment resemble the scene of a nightmare? He could not tell. His chairman seemed to be finding nothing amiss with it. He was adjusting his grey woollen muffler, he had bidden him a hearty good-night, he had turned away, adding jovially over his shoulder, as he hurried forth: ‘Ah, Professor Monk, here’s a little friend to see you – eager no doubt to drink at the fountain-head. Come in, my dear’ – and was gone.