No rue? No myrrh? No nightshade? Oh,
Tremble not, spirit! All is well.
For Love’s is that lovely garden; and so,
There only pleasures dwell.
Turning over the limp fusty leaves, one by one, he browsed on:
When you are gone, and I’m alone,
From every object that I see
Its secret source of life is flown:
All things look cold and strange to me.
Even what I use – my rings, my gloves,
My parasol, the clothes I wear –
‘Once she was happy; now she loves!
Once young,’ they cry, ‘now carked with care!’
I wake and watch when the moon is here –
A shadow tracks me on. And I –
Darker than any shadow – fear
Her fabulous inconstancy.
That sphinx, the Future, marks its prey;
I who was ardent, sanguine, free,
Starve now in fleshly cell all day –
And yours the rusting key.
and then:
Your maddening face befools my eyes,
Your hand – I wake to feel –
Lost in deep midnight’s black surmise –
Its touch my veins congeal.
What peace for me in star or moon?
What solace in nightingale!
They tell me of the lost and gone –
And dawn completes the tale.
A note in pencil – the point of which must have broken in use – followed at the foot of the page:
All this means all but nothing of what was in my mind when I began to write it. Dawn!! I look at it, read it – it is like a saucer of milk in a cage full of asps. I didn’t know one’s mind could dwell only on one thought, one face, one longing, on and on without any respite, and yet remain sane. I didn’t even know – until when? – it was possible to be happy, unendurably happy, and yet as miserable and as hopeless as a devil in hell. It is as if I were sharing my own body with a self I hate and fear and shake in terror at, and yet am powerless to be rid of. Well, never mind. If I can go on, that’s my business. They mouth and talk and stare and sneer at me. What do I care! The very leaves of the trees whisper against me, and last night came thunder. I see my haunted face in every stone. And what cares he! Why should he? Would I, if I were a man? I sit here alone in the evening – waiting. My heart is a quicksand biding its time to swallow me up. Yet it isn’t even that I question now whether he ever loved me or not – I only thirst and thirst for him to come. One look, a word, and I am at peace again. At peace! And yet I wonder sometimes, if I – if it is even conceivable that I still love him. Does steel love the magnet? Surely that moon which shone last night with her haggard glare in both our faces abhors the earth from which, poor wretch, she parted to perish and yet from which she can never, never, never utterly break away? Never, never, never. O God, how tired I am! – knowing as I do – as if my life were all being lived over again – that only worse lies in wait for me, that the more I feel the less I am able to please him. I see myself dragging on and on – and that other sinister mocking one within rises up and looks at me – ‘What? And shall I never come into my own!’
Alan had found some little difficulty in deciphering the faint, blurred, pencilled handwriting – he decided to come back to this page again, then turned it over and read on:
Your hate I see, and can endure, nay, must –
Endure the stark denial of your love;
It is your silence, like a cankering rust,
That I am perishing of.
What reck you of the blinded hours I spend
Crouched on my knees beside a shrouded bed?
Grief even for the loveliest has an end;
No end in one whose soul it is lies dead.
I watch the aged who’ve dared the cold slow ice
That creeps from limb to limb, from sense to sense,
Yet never dreamed this also is the price
Which youth must pay for a perjured innocence.
Yours that fond lingering lesson. Be content!
Not one sole moment of its course I rue.
The all I had was little. Now it’s spent.
Spit on the empty purse: ’tis naught to you.
And then these Lines on Ophelia:
She found an exit from her life;
She to an earthly green-room sped
Where parched-up souls distraught with strife
Sleep and are comforted.
Hamlet! I know that dream-drugged eye,
That self-coiled melancholic mien!
Hers was a happy fate – to die:
Mine – her foul Might-have-been.
and then:
Tomorrow waits me at my gate,
While all my yesterdays swarm near;
And one mouth whines, Too late, too late:
And one is dumb with fear.
Was this the all that life could give
Me – who from cradle hungered on.
Body and soul aflame, to live –
Giving my all – and then be gone?
O sun in heaven, to don that shroud,
When April’s cuckoo thrilled the air!
Light thou no more the fields I loved.
Be only winter there!
and then:
Have done with moaning, idiot heart;
If it so be that Love has wings
I with my shears will find an art
To still his flutterings.
Wrench off that bandage too will I,
And show the imp he is blind indeed;
Hot irons will prove my mastery;
He shall not weep, but bleed.
And when he is dead, and cold as stone,
Then in his Mother’s book I’ll con
The lesson none need learn alone,
And, callous as she, play on.
He raised his eyes. The heavy rain had ebbed into a drifting drizzle; the day had darkened. He stared vacantly for a moment or two out of the rain-drenched window, and then, turning back a few of the damp cockled leaves, once more resumed his reading:
And when at last I journey where
All thought of you I must resign,
Will the least memory of me be fair,
Or will you even my ghost malign?
I plead for nothing. Nay, Time’s tooth –
That frets the very soul away –
May prove at last your slanders truth,
And me the Slut you say.
There followed a series of unintelligible scrawls. It was as if the writer had been practising a signature in various kinds of more or less affected handwritings: ‘Esther de Bourgh, Esther de Bourgh, Esther De Bourgh, E. de Bourgh, E de B, E de B, E. de Ice Bourgh, Esther de la Ice Bourgh, Esther de Borgia, Esther Césarina de Borgia, Esther de Bauch, Esther de Bausch, E. de BOSH.’ And then, this unfinished scrap:
Why cheat the heart with old deceits? –
Love – was it love in thine
Could leave me thus grown sick of sweets
And …
The words sounded on – forlornly and even a little self-pityingly – in Alan’s mind. Sick of sweets, sick of sweets. He had had enough for today. He shut the book, lifted his head, and with a shuddering yawn and a heavy frown on his young face, once more stared out of the window.
This E.F., whoever she was, had often sat in this room, alert, elated, drinking in its rosily reflected morning sunshine from that wall, happy in being merely herself, young, alone, and alive. He could even watch in fancy that intense lowered face as she stitched steadily on, lost in a passionate reverie, while she listened to as dismal a downpour as that which had but lately ceased on the moss-grown cobbles under the window. ‘It’s only one’s inmost self that matters,’ she had scribbled at the end of one of her rhymes. And then – how long afterwards? – the days, empty of everything but that horror and dryness of the heart, when desire had corrupted and hope was gone, and every hour of
solitude must have seemed to be lying in wait only to prove the waste, the bleakness, the desolation to which the soul within can come. No doubt in time they would learn even a bookworm to be a worm. ‘That is one of the charms of lit-er-a-ture’, as the bland, bearded, supercilious gentleman had expressed it. But he wouldn’t have sentimentalized about it.
Oddly enough, it hadn’t yet occurred to Alan to speculate what kind of human being it was to whom so many of these poems had been addressed, and to whom seemingly every one of them had clearer or vaguer reference. There are ghosts for whom spectre is the better word. In this, the gloomiest hour of an English spring, he glanced again at the door he had shut behind him in positive hope that it might yet open once more – that he was not so utterly alone as he seemed. Sick: sick: surely, surely a few years of life could not have wreaked such horrifying changes in any human face and spirit as that!
But the least promising method apparently of evoking a visitant from another world is to wait on to welcome it. Better, perhaps, postpone any little experiment of this kind until after the veils of nightfall have descended. Not that he had failed to notice how overwhelming is the evidence that when once you have gone from this world you have gone for ever. Still, even if he had been merely the victim of an illusion, it would have been something just to smile or to nod in a common friendly human fashion, to lift up the dingy little black exercise book in his hand, merely to show that its owner had not confided in him in vain.
He was an absurdly timid creature – tongue-tied when he wanted most to express himself. And yet, if only … His glance strayed from door to book again. It was curious that the reading of poems like these should yet have proved a sort of solace. They had triumphed even over the miserable setting destiny had bestowed on them. Surely lit-er-a-ture without any vestige of merit in it couldn’t do that. A veil of day-dream drew over the fair and rather effeminate face. And yet the young man was no longer merely brooding; he was beginning to make plans. And he was making them without any help from the source from which it might have been expected.
Seeming revenants, of course, in this busy world are not of much account. They make indelible impressions if they do chance to visit one, though it is imprudent, perhaps, to share them with the sceptic. Nonetheless at this moment he was finding it almost impossible to recall the face not of the photograph but of his phantasm. And though there was nothing in the earlier poems he had read to suggest that they could not have been the work of the former, was it conceivable that they could ever have been the work of – that other one? But why not! To judge from some quite famous poets’ faces their owners would have flourished at least as successfully in the pork-butchering line. Herrick himself – well, he was not exactly ethereal in appearance. But what need for these ridiculous unanswerable questions? Whoever E.F. had been, and whatever the authorship of the poems, he himself could at least claim now to be their only re-begetter.
At this thought a thrill of excitement had run through Alan’s veins. Surely the next best thing to publishing a first volume of verse of one’s own – and that he had now decided never to attempt – is to publish someone else’s. He had seen worse stuff than this in print, and on hand-made paper, too. Why shouldn’t he turn editor? How could one tell for certain that it is impossible to comfort – or, for that matter, to soothe the vanity of – some poor soul simply because it has happened to set out on the last long journey a few years before oneself? Mere initials are little short of anonymity, and even kindred spirits may be all the kinder if kept at the safe distance which anonymity ensures. But what about the old bookseller? An Englishman’s shop is his castle, and this battered old exercise book, Alan assumed, must fully as much as any other volume on the shelves around him be the legal property of the current tenant of the house. Or possibly the ground-landlord’s? He determined to take Mr Elliott into his confidence – but very discreetly.
With this decision, he got up – dismayed to discover that it was now a full half-hour after closing time. Nonetheless he found the old bookseller sitting at his table and apparently lost to the cares of business beneath a wire-protected gas bracket now used for an electric bulb. The outer door was still wide open, and the sullen clouds of the last of evening seemed to have descended even more louringly over the rain-soaked streets. A solitary dog lopped by the shrouded entrance. Not a sound pierced the monotony of the drizzle.
‘I wonder,’ Alan began, keeping the inflexions of his voice well in check, ‘I wonder if you have ever noticed this particular book? It is in manuscript … Verse.’
‘Verse, sir?’ said the bookseller, fumbling in a tight waistcoat pocket for the silver case of his second pair of spectacles. ‘Well, now, verse – in manuscript. That doesn’t sound as if it’s likely to be of much value, though finds there have been, I grant you. Poems and sermons – we are fairly glutted out with them nowadays; still, there was this Omar Khayyám fuss, sir, so you never know.’
He adjusted his spectacles and opened the book where the book opened itself. Alan stooped over the old man’s shoulder and read with him:
Once in kind arms, alas, you held me close;
Sweet to its sepals was the unfolding rose.
Why, then – though wind-blown, hither, thither,
I languish still, rot on, and wither
Yet live, God only knows.
A queer, intent, an almost hunted expression drew over Mr Elliott’s greyish face as he read on.
‘Now I wonder,’ he said at last, firmly laying the book down again and turning an eye as guileless as an infant’s to meet Alan’s scrutiny, ‘I wonder now who could have written that? Not that I flatter myself to be much of a judge. I leave that to my customers, sir.’
‘There is an E.F. cut out on the cover,’ said Alan, ‘and’ – the words came with difficulty – ‘there is a photograph inside. But then, I suppose,’ he added hastily, automatically putting out his hand for the book and withdrawing it again, ‘I suppose just a loose photograph doesn’t prove anything. Not at least to whom it belonged – the book, I mean.’
‘No, sir,’ said the bookseller, as if he thoroughly enjoyed little problems of this nature; ‘in a manner of speaking I suppose it don’t.’ But he made no attempt to find the photograph, and a rather prolonged pause followed.
‘It’s quiet in that room in there,’ Alan managed to remark at last. ‘Extraordinarily quiet. You haven’t yourself, I suppose, ever noticed the book before?’
Mr Elliott removed both pairs of spectacles from the bridge of his nose. ‘Quiet is the word, sir,’ he replied, in a voice suiting the occasion. ‘And it’s quieter yet in the two upper rooms above it. Especially of a winter’s evening. Mrs Elliott and me don’t use that part of the house much, though there is a good bit of lumber stowed away in the nearest of ’em. We can’t sell more than a fraction of the books we get, sir, so we store what’s over up there for the pulpers. I doubt if I have even so much as seen the inside of the other room these six months past. As a matter of fact’ – he pursed his mouth and nodded – ‘what with servant-girls and the like, and not everybody being as commonsensical as most, we don’t mention it much.’
The bookseller’s absent eye was now fixed on the rain-soaked street, and Alan waited, leaving his ‘What?’ unsaid.
‘You see, sir, the lady that lived with Dr Marchmont here – his niece, or ward, or whatever it may be – well, they say she came to what they call an untimely end. A love affair. But there, for the matter of that you can’t open your evening newspaper without finding more of such things than you get in a spring season’s fiction. Strychnine, sir – that was the way of it; and it isn’t exactly the poison I myself should choose for the purpose. It erects up the body like an arch, sir. So.’ With a gesture of his small, square hand Mr Elliott pictured the effect in the air. ‘Dr Marchmont hadn’t much of a practice by that time, I understand; but I expect he came to a pretty sudden standstill when he saw that on the bed. A tall man, sir, with a sharp nose.’
Alan re
frained from looking at the bookseller. His eyes stayed fixed on the doorway which led out into the world beyond, and they did not stir. But he had seen the tall dark man with the sharp nose as clearly as if he had met him face to face, and was conscious of a repulsion far more deadly than the mere features would seem to warrant. And yet; why should he have come to a ‘standstill’ quite like that if …? But the bookseller had opened the fusty, mildewed book at another page. He sniffed, then having rather pernicketily adjusted his spectacles, read over yet another of the poems:
Esther! came whisper from my bed.
Answer me, Esther – are you there?
’Twas waking self to self that’s dead
Called on the empty stair.
Stir not that pit; she is lost and gone
A Jew decoyed her to her doom.
Sullenly knolls her passing bell
Mocking me in the gloom.
The old man gingerly turned the leaf, and read on:
Last evening, as I sat alone –
Thimble on finger, needle and thread –
Light dimming as the dusk drew on,
I dreamed that I was dead.
Like wildering timeless plains of snow
Which bitter winds to ice congeal
The world stretched far as sight could go
’Neath skies as hard as steel.
Lost in that nought of night I stood
And watched my body – brain and breast
In dreadful anguish – in the mould
Grope to’rd its final rest.
Its craving dreams of sense dropped down
Like crumbling maggots in the sod:
Spectral, I stood; all longing gone,
Short Stories 1927-1956 Page 22