Short Stories 1927-1956 (9 page)

But for the life of him, Ronnie couldn’t blurt out the question that had at once offered itself. He merely went on listening.

And for a moment Mrs Cotton watched him doing so. ‘But since,’ she pressed on, ‘you have used that particular word – “inartistic”, I mean – do please enlighten me. What kind of people really enjoy Mr Charlton’s kind of writing? It was more or less new to
me
at the time; but I have noticed since then that though his performance was a little sillier than most, it was quite in the new fashion. Nowadays one has only to write a book, it seems, to make even one’s kitchen cat an animal worth adorning a newspaper with. And not merely literary men but quite young actresses, apart from soaps and cigarettes and cosmetics and that sort of thing, are invited, almost as a matter of course apparently, by editors of newspapers who must be quite
intelligent
men, to air their views on marriage, or the soul, or a future life – on
that
sort of thing. Quite as a matter of course. Do you think it much helps?’

Ronnie gallantly met her eye. ‘Whom?’ he said.

‘Ah, who? I was thinking myself of what is called the “man in the street” and the women under his roof. But then, I suppose, there have always been a few talkative sillies in the world who completely underestimate the common-sense of people in general. Or is it getting old, Mr Forbes, that makes the sillies of one’s latter days seem a little sillier than usual? My own small view is that life may be tragic and sorrowful enough in the long-run – and for the young actresses, too, poor things; they’ve much to lose: but that it isn’t – well, just Trinidad and thunderstorms. There may be things, I mean, better left unsaid.’

Ronnie stirred in his chair. He hadn’t intended this little turn to the talk. ‘Exactly,’ he agreed. ‘Still you wouldn’t suggest even Cyril Charlton meant to be as bad as all that?’

‘Be fair to me, Mr Forbes. Haven’t I already confessed that I thought him an almost entirely harmless-looking young man? “Meant to be”, indeed! I doubt if he was conscious of so much as brushing the down off a butterfly’s wing. Yet, would you believe it, my brother, Major Winslow, at that time in India, was inclined, though not for my son’s sake only, to take more
drastic
steps. It was only with the greatest difficulty that I persuaded him not to consult his lawyer.’

Yet again a curiously muffled and not quite unjangled peal of little bells sounded between the walls. Mrs Cotton had laughed. And at sound of it a remote, fiery, defiant gleam had flamed up and vanished in Ronnie’s brown eye.

‘If I may venture to say so,’ he said stoutly, ‘I think that course would have been as ill-advised as it would have been ineffective.’

Mrs Cotton graciously beamed at him. ‘I am delighted to hear you say so,’ she assured him. ‘Those were, I believe, almost the precise words I used in my reply to Major Winslow. Idle nonsense of that sort, however shallow and however false, is
not
libellous. And – whether or not
after
actual
consultation
with his lawyer, I cannot say – he came round in the end to our way of looking at it. Poor Mr Charlton! I can see him in the witness-box! But I referred to Major Winslow merely as an example of what I suppose would be called the Philistine view of Mr Charlton’s form of entertainment. My brother’s and mine. What is more, I am entrusting these little
confidences
to your ear alone, simply because even if we neither of us have any particular friendliness for this young man, we don’t bear him any ill-will. So far as I am concerned, he can be left to stew in his own juice.’ Mrs Cotton nearly doubled her substantial shape in two as she leaned forward in her chair to insist on this vulgarism.

‘You see,’ she hurried on, ‘I am taking it for granted that
you
are really interested in my son’s work, and would be far more severe on some of Mr Charlton’s shortcomings – the artistic ones, for instance – even than I should be myself: his own mother, I mean. But tell me, has this young American friend of whom you speak any intention of
publishing
his thesis? If so, I hope I may be allowed to see it. Or is it to be a little private venture
undertaken
solely with the intention of keeping to the poems and of putting Mr Charlton
right
?’

For a moment or two Ronnie pondered both these questions. They seemed to be equally crucial and dangerous. Ponder, alas! when he could hardly hear himself think, so loud were his inward execrations of the young friend in question.
Solely
with the intention of putting that silly, precious, sentimental ass of a C.C. right! – he could picture the young post-graduate’s exultant grin at such an opportunity, even to the glinting gold of his
exquisite
‘dentures’. He gave a sharp impatient tug at his hardly less exquisite Bond Street trousering, and briskly crossed his legs.

‘Publication
was
his intention,’ he replied, ‘and not merely to do as you suggest.’ But he wished the accents in which he had uttered this confession had not sounded as if he were a company promoter apologizing for a balance sheet.

‘In other words, Mr Forbes, I am to understand, then, that your visit to me today is not solely with a view to the success of this young man’s
university
studies? You, too, have come to see me – not, of course, on your own behalf, but in kindness to your friend – in order to glean what you can of my son’s personal and private affairs?’

The challenge was unmistakable. It rang out like a trumpet, and Ronnie could neither smile now nor reply. He moistened his lips. Though of late years more and more easily bored, he was still interested in human nature. The poet’s mother had proved to be of a type he seldom encountered even on the outskirts of his ordinary orbit. He dearly enjoyed, too, a battle of wits. But this was hardly ‘wits’, and he was as yet uncertain exactly where he himself was likely to remain – on which side of the fence, that is. All he could blurt out at last sounded much less pacifying than he intended to make it.

‘You will forgive me,’ he said, ‘if I don’t entirely agree with you. I mean on the principle of the thing. Surely, Mrs Cotton, the publication of a book implies that the author of it is to that degree sharing himself with the world at large. Poetry in particular. He puts into print what he wouldn’t confide in secret even to his closest friend. It is a confessional wide as the heavens! Within certain limits, then, isn’t the world at large justified in being
interested
not merely in him as a writer but as a human being? I agree that this can go too far, that it usually does, in fact. Mere prying curiosity is odious. And there’s no need to be vulgar. But how can one separate entirely a man from his work, and especially if the
one
is,
as it were, explanatory of the other? Besides’ – he took the fence that offered itself in one sprightly bound – ‘one doesn’t have to be a Paul Pry to be grateful, say, for William Shakespeare’s second-best bed.’

Mrs Cotton smoothed down her unmodishly long skirts over her lap. She, too, paused with stooping head, as if listening, or as if her thoughts had wandered. Then once again she openly faced him.

‘In a moment or two I shall be ready and perfectly willing, Mr Forbes,’ she assured him, ‘to answer
any
question you like to ask me. I won’t say that I agree either in principle or in detail with what you have said. And – though I can only guess how dreadfully ignorant it must sound – I know nothing whatever about William Shakespeare’s second-best bed. Weren’t beds very expensive in those days? I seem to have read that somewhere. But all this apart, I should like to consider you, if I may, not only as a confidant, but as a friend. That being so, first, I propose to make a little private
confession
. Please listen to me as patiently as you can.’

All Ronnie’s native gallantry had mounted into his head at this appeal. For the first time for years he was the victim of an enlarged heart. He
composed
himself to listen.

‘You must realize in the first place that I know very little
about
books and nothing whatever about poetry. I am not even a great reader; indeed if I were, that would be quite another question. Poetry is not in me, it is not in
my
family. As a child I detested it, the very word. I was therefore made to learn as much of it as a stupid governess could make me. I see myself at this moment, with tear-grimed cheeks and nose flattened to my nursery window, looking out on a world of rain and wind, and some thumbed, dog’s-eared, horrid little book of poetry clutched in my grubby paw, containing not only poems, mind, definitely intended to do me good, but such famous pieces as “Piping down the valleys wild”, and “The Assyrian came down”. That kind of thing. Well, I hated them
all
with an almost physical hatred. Which merely means, I suppose, that even as a child I was of a practical and
matter-of-fact
turn of mind. But that, I believe, is true of many young children. As we are, so we remain; at least in deficiency of mind: it is a dreadful consideration, Mr Forbes. Whether interest in poetry and in works of the imagination would ever have been mine in happier circumstances I cannot say. I can only confess that it never has. My husband was precisely the opposite, and my son, spared, in his childhood at least, the thorns and thistles which the little donkey that I used to be discovered in what I was fed on, took after him.

‘I have heard of mothers, Mr Forbes, who have been jealous of the love and intimacy between a child and its father. That’s beyond my
understanding
. But when my husband died, I was for many years my son’s only real company. You can be delicate in spirit as well as in body – a delicacy, I mean, that is nonetheless the very reverse of weakness. So, you see, as time went on, he was practically compelled to confide in
me.
Apart from the craving to express oneself – though that, too, is not in me – little though you may be supposing it just now! – there is the craving to share what comes of it, afterwards. I can understand that. And while I could listen with all my heart and soul, to
share
I could only pretend. My son soon realized this, though I hid it from him as much as I could.

‘Yet I tried – believe me, Mr Forbes, I honestly tried – to educate, to force myself into his way of thinking. You’d be vastly amused to hear how much poetry I have read solely with that end in view, and almost always with complete unsuccess.’

A sudden unbosoming smile swept over her face, like a burst of sunshine over corn-shocks at harvest-tide. ‘If I go on like this,’ she broke off, ‘you will be suspecting that I think it is
my
confessions you are after!’

Ronnie greeted this sally as amply as he knew how, inwardly
speculating
the while how it came about that with so easy and bountiful a field to glean Cyril Charlton had carried off so mingy a sheaf. Why, even a raw
reporter
…! But Mrs Cotton was hastening on.

‘Egotist or not,’ she was saying, ‘I toiled on at my task, and at least
became
a little more capable of realizing the force and the strain of my son’s secret idolatry. There was only one thing in the world for him – poetry. At first I believe he hadn’t the faintest desire or intention to share this craving with any other human being except his father. Afterwards, I happened to be there, and – there wasn’t anybody else. And though I had fallen far short of any true appreciation, I had become aware of two things: first, that there
is
such a thing as poetry, and next, that I had a pretty shrewd notion of what poetry
isn’t.

‘Poetry, Mr Forbes, as I have tried to understand it,’ – she waved her hand towards the window – ‘is all
there,
just waiting for us. But it won’t
necessarily
show itself at call or even at need.
Un
paysage
est
un
état
de
l’âme
; and so of poetry. One must – am I right? – have the mind, the sense, the spirit within – to invoke it.
That
I realize. It is a way of looking at things, a way of feeling about them, almost of being them – a way of
living.
And it is, I suppose – you will let me go groping on – as inseparable, if you
have
that particular sense and insight – as inseparable, I say, from the world at large and everything in it as its scent is from a flower. And no
more
inseparable
either, for just as you can extract its scent from a flower and shut it up in a bottle, so you can extract the poetry from the life around and within you and put it into words and them into a book.
Is
that so? Am I even in the right direction?’ She stooped towards her silent visitor as if her very life might depend upon his answer – an answer that nonetheless failed to come. ‘Well, I am being dreadfully clumsy, dreadfully commonplace. But I believe all that as surely, though maybe as gropingly, as a blind man
believes
that there is such a thing as light.

‘Yet the thing itself is hidden from me, shut out from me. Try as I may, I cannot grasp or share it. On the one side my son, almost coldly conscious, I might say, of these volcanic feelings, pursuing this strange mystery, this mirage, eating his heart out, never satisfied, ready to sacrifice anything, everything, for its sake; and on the other, myself – stuttering and
pretending
, but so far as heart and soul are concerned, absolutely as dumb and
insensitive
as a fish.

‘In spite of this, he was always generosity itself to me, though I knew that if the worst ever came to the worst even a mother would have to be sacrificed on that altar. But at last, as you know, his poems were published. Published.’

The rather flat yet mobile face had cleared at the word as if, for the moment at least, these riddles and perplexities were over, as if she had steered clear of the reefs. ‘You will be amused to hear that I myself arranged all that: the printing, the paper, the binding –
his
final choice, of course. I saw the publisher, a Mr Crown, in London, again and again, and settled
everything
– expenses, advertising, commission, everything. He, too, in spite of his dingy little office and a
very
extraordinary secretary, seemed to be a most enthusiastic admirer of poetry, though, as I have since discovered – and here Mr Charlton could give me surprisingly little
information
– I was treated on severely business-like principles. Indeed between ourselves, Mr Forbes, I soon began to suspect not merely this gentleman’s enthusiasm but, well, his honesty also. So far eventually as our little book was concerned it might just as well, on his side, have been soap or sugar!