The Power of the Dead (33 page)

“Oh.”

Phillip sat beside Spica. She took his hand.

“Well, Phillip, this is the day I’ve always looked forward to. Now you’re a famous figure all right. What a very sweet person your mother is. You inherit your talent from her, you know.” The large gentle eyes regarded him seriously. “You know I’m always your friend, don’t you?”

“Yes, of course.”

“And I’ve always said what I think. You know that?”

“Yes.”

“Then don’t be offended when I tell you to look after your beautiful, enduring, and tolerant Lucy. She’s not Barley, you know.”

“What makes you say that?”

She caressed his hand. “Because I’m very fond of you both. I’ll say goodbye here. Bless you.”

His mother was waiting with Pa, Ernest and Lucy. Hetty said gaily, “Well, Phillip, I am so glad everything went off all right.”

“Thank you for coming, Mother. I’m sorry I’ve kept you waiting. It looks as if Lucy and I must find the Morlands now. They’ve asked us to stay the night with them.”

“If you have time, do come down to see Father, won’t you? I must go now, to be home when he arrives from the office.”

“I wish you were coming with us to Rookhurst,” he said, feeling sad that she was looking so old.

“Perhaps I shall come again, one day.”

“Father must come, too. It is
his
country, really. Well, I suppose we must be going.”

Thomas Morland and his wife were waiting in the vestibule. Mrs. Morland was a thin elderly woman with dark eyes looking as though she had been permanently hurt. Of course, she would be the wife of Morland’s cousin, whom he put into
Possession
as the unsympathetic Evelyn Crouchend. He told her how startled he had been to hear Mr. Morland’s praise of his ‘little book’. She smiled wanly. They were driven to a house in Upper Brook Street, where, among a score of fashionable people, they listened to a string quartet playing in the drawing room, before having tea.

“I am so glad you like music,” said Mrs. Morland. “We thought of going after dinner to hear
Hiawatha
at the Queen’s Hall. There’s a very promising young conductor named Henry Flashman.”

It was a moving cantata. Whatever the modern attitude to lyric poetry, he said to Lucy, Longfellow was a true poet in
Hiawatha
. By the time the music had come to the death of Minnehaha he had withdrawn into himself, with a return of the very grief he had felt when Barley died on that winter morning when the fields of Malandine were white with rime.

*

The Morlands’ house on the edge of the Heath seemed to be inhabited by maid-servants in uniform with starched caps. What a wonderful bedroom, he said to Lucy, wide and light, with white bathroom adjoining. The soft carpets, the furniture mellowed by aromatic wax, the whisky and brandy decanters and the siphon of soda at the bed-head. He did not help himself to a drink, even out of bravado: the luxury was a little depressive, everything was so correct: and yet, at the Copleston’s house, he had tried to make everything correct. What was the truth about ‘atmosphere’? Was it but a projection from a man’s own experience? Had
Tolstoi
lived in such an atmosphere? While Lucy had a bath he sat in an envelopingly soft armchair and felt mean at his implied criticism of Morland. But the truth was he saw Morland as a writer inferior to himself. Even so, what a dreadful thing it was, to repay kindness, generosity, and
service
to another by assuming that, because Morland’s books were not really in the rare
first-class
, Morland had only done his duty to a superior writer, by paying tribute to Caesar. And yet, Morland was faithful to his
conception of the rich upper-middle class. How else could Morland write about his relations except truthfully? But
had
he? Were those old uncles true portraits? Had they really been mean and stupid in their lives? Had his own grandfather, Thomas Turney, been like that? As for Evelyn Crouchend, was any man truly like that—unless he were sensitive to the point of neurosis, and
ineffectual
in love. Was that famous character but a whipping-boy for the author’s wife, who looked to be neurotic, possibly the victim of impotent rage? So, to her, he had grown to be a monster; and Morland had built up a ‘character’ that was not really human.

Was it not Morland’s implied criticism of his characters that was his defect as an artist? But what about himself? Was he not a black pot criticising a slightly-smoked kettle?

And yet—and yet—it was all a little too much a conformation to the highest standards of gentility. David Torrence must have felt this extremely, when invited to Morland’s house for a meal. For when he had asked Morland at dinner if he had met Torrence Morland had replied, guardedly, “I thought his eyes seemed to be dead,” while Mrs. Morland had added, “He was probably very tired.”

In the morning, thanking Mr. and Mrs. Morland for ‘such a jolly visit’—feeling that was how the younger generations of
Harrovian
Crouchend nephews would have spoken—they left for
Paddington
, three hours before the train was due to leave. The blue rug was put round Lucy’s knees by the chauffeur, there was a restrained wave at the door, and away they were driven, feeling relief. When the chauffeur held out his battered ancient
portmanteau
, Phillip gave him a ten shilling note, wondering if it should have been a pound. Would the driver, as in a magazine story, pause ‘to give an icy thank-you’ to show what he thought of so paltry a sum? But the Harrods’ service-chauffeur bowed pleasantly as he told a porter to take the luggage to the Cloak Room and leave it there.

“They were awfully kind, weren’t they?”

“Yes.”

“Did you enjoy it all?”

“Oh yes. Did you?”

“Yes. But I’m glad it’s over. Aren’t you?”

“In a way, yes.”

At the bookstall he bought copies of all the morning papers, and with the bundle went to the buffet room. Every paper had a
story, some with the photograph taken before the ceremony in the ante-room. There he was, with slightly open mouth, holding one end of a piece of paper shaped like a cheque in one hand while Morland held the other and they were shaking hands.

“Look at this in
The
Graphic
. ‘Heir to more than a thousand acres held by the Maddison family since the fourteenth century writes work of stupendous imagination says Thomas Morland, O.M.’ Whoever put that in? Nuncle will strafe me to hell for that.”

He opened
The
Mirror
.

“‘Otters sport in the lake under Wayland Down, where trout exceeding six pounds in weight are preserved by the youthful winner of this year’s Grasmere Memorial Prize for Literature’. Strewth! Where the devil do they get it all from?”

He opened
The
Telegram
.

“Beausire wrote this, I bet. ‘Mr. Maddison’s spiritual search for his lost tame otter is akin to that of Tristan for Isolde. Lutra was the pet of his young wife,
nee
Teresa Jane Lushington, who died giving birth to her first-born, a boy called William, in January 1925. Mr. Maddison is now married to Lucy Amelia Copleston, a niece of Lady Kilmeston’. What will your people say to that, Lucy?”

“Oh, I don’t suppose they’ll see it.”

He opened
The
Crusader
.

“‘One day a struggling author in a remote labourer’s cottage, yesterday his work was hailed by all fashionable and artistic London. Mr. Thomas Morland, O.M., declares the prize novel (
£
100 and a gold medal) to be work of unquestioned genius’. Let’s leave this place, people are beginning to stare at us.”

They took a taxi to the publishers.

*

The trade department of Mashie & Co., Ltd.—a small room with a counter—was filled with pale young men and girls. After peering in Phillip closed the door quickly and went upstairs by the side-entrance, and into the typist’s annexe adjoining Mr. Driver’s room overlooking the western end of Covent Garden market. The telephone bell was ringing behind the closed door; so, leaving Lucy, he went up to the sales manager’s office. It seemed to be full of men; so he climbed one more flight of stairs to the production room, where sat a thin young man who had sent him the galley proofs, and later the page-proofs.

“Well,” he said, “how do you feel now that you’ve broken all Mashies’ records for sales in one day since we published
The
Crucifix
many years ago? The office is in a state of complete chaos! We’ve had orders for three thousand copies by post this morning—an entire sackful of letters from the booksellers! And ever since we opened the office we’ve been besieged by messengers. It’s due to the broadcast in the B.B.C. news last night, didn’t you hear it? ‘Hamlet’ is in a fume, asking why you didn’t let him know, so that he could have run off a large impression to meet the demand. Now he can’t make up his mind whether or not to have plates made and sent to several printers, or to run off ten thousand copies from standing type. The trouble is that our printers haven’t the machinery to cope with such an order under a fortnight, even by working overtime.”

“I think I ought to see Mr. Driver.”

“You won’t find him too pleased that Coats is to have your next novel.”

“I did my best to get him to take it.”

“I think you’ll find that ‘Hamlet’s’ chief gripe is that you didn’t let him know in time about the Grasmere.”

“It wasn’t my secret.”

Mr. Driver looked as though he had suffered a financial loss from which his firm wouldn’t recover.

“So you’ve already gone to Coats, as all the up and coming young writers seem to go. Well, I suppose one should not really expect—how can I put it—that the artistic temperament should be fettered in any way by the—the—obligations that we ordinary folk consider to be the thing.”

Mr. Driver waved a pencil, and looked at an overflowing waste-paper basket. “I suppose all that remains is for me to congratulate you on having such a great success. I suppose they’ve told you upstairs that we’re literally overwhelmed with orders which we are not in a position to fulfil for some time?”

“Yes.”

“And Coats is to do your next book?”

“Yes, in the autumn, Mr. Driver.”

“I suppose you knew about the award some time ago?”

“Yes. I was asked to keep it to myself. I did try to get you to pay me
£
50 for the novel, you know.”

“Well, it’s done now. And your novels aren’t in the same class as your animal books. By the way, did you tell your agent, Norse?”

“Yes, in confidence, Mr. Driver.”

“But not your publisher? But there, I must not reproach you. And if I may dare to offer you some advice, such as it is, I think you should not regard yourself as a novelist. You have often told me about some of your adventures in your past life, and most amusing they have been, too; but when I have read of the same incidents, romanticised a little no doubt, all the vitality you showed while telling me, all the humour, is absent from the printed page.”

At this point the Sales Manager came into the room and said, with a face almost woeful, “Mr. Driver, Harrods have just
telephoned
, they want an extra five hundred copies, in addition to their order by post this morning.”

Mr. Driver sighed, and dropped his pencil on the desk. “There, you
see
?” he said to Phillip.

*

Pa and Ernest were waiting outside Reading Station, sitting motionless in the Crossley tourer.

“Ha,” said Pa.

“Have you seen the papers?” asked Phillip.

“No,” said Ernest.

“Thank goodness.”

They drove back mile after mile upon the winding grey road that rose to the uplands of the Great Plain, past beech hangers and wilderness tracts of thorn and rounded barrows of the ancient dead. It was summer weather, and in coppice and brake the nightingales were in full song. Now the course of his life was running full. ‘Young landowner awarded Grasmere Prize for finest book of the year by any British writer under 41 years of age’. ‘Literary prize awarded to book of undoubted genius’, says Thomas Morland O.M. ‘Shy young man unable to make a speech, yet writes a book unsurpassed for clarity and truth to Nature’. And all that from a compound of suffering and regret removed from the page—an almost total refraction of light rays through the prism of the mind.

He sat beside a Lucy enjoying the sight of familiar fields and coppices, Lucy beginning secretly to glow with imminent warm thoughts of Peter and the little one within her, who would play through sunlit hours with their big brother, dearest Billy, the more cherished in her heart because she was ‘Mummy’ to him. The faces of children were still smiling in her imagination as the motor descended to the valley and climbed to the last ridge, whence fell before them a prospect upon the plain of Colham, and the distant
blue line of the hills above the Chase. Now they were descending the winding lane sunken through the wreckage of Rookhurst Forest and its wild growth of sycamore, elder, thorn and bramble among its rotted beech-stumps—a perfect sanctuary for the wild birds she loved; but to the man beside her an extension of a memory of timber-tracks long since tipped and splintered by the
shellfire
of Third Ypres.

For Lucy, a happy cluster of thatched cottages of the village around the church tower, the fields faintly green after re-seeding with permanent pasture mixtures; for Phillip, the grave of Willie under the churchyard yews, Willie who had not compromised, but given his life for the truth as he had seen it. Perhaps, when
The
Phoenix
was published in the late autumn, people would understand.

*

Skirr Farmhouse; two excited little boys; broad beaming face of Mrs. Rigg, Pa and Ernest having a drink before tea (Ernest the teetotaller always drank port because, he said, ‘it didn’t count’). Then they had gone, Pa wondering about his tomato plants because the sky was dulling over, and their going left no feeling of absence behind them, because there had been no feeling of warmth.

“The childer was both so good as gold, ma’m.”