Stories of the Strange and Sinister (Valancourt 20th Century Classics)

by Frank Baker

  ‘You say,’ I said, ‘that he published some of these poems of his?’

  ‘So they did say. There were lots of writing chaps around here in those days, chaps with beards and coloured shirts. And Bob were one of them.’

  ‘Did he ever call himself Robin Starling?’

  ‘Not Robin. No. It were always Bob.’

  ‘Ah!’ I gave an exclamation of triumph. I had found the poem that had so vaguely yet so significantly lurched back into my mind, lines that I had read years ago as a schoolboy. ‘The Green Steps,’ it was called. It was about a scavenger who ‘feeds on wasted vision’. And it was by Robin Starling.

  Well, I said to myself, when Jack Williams had gone presently and I pondered over the strange lines of this forgotten old poem of the neo-Georgians – tantalizing as it is to play with the idea that this queer old scavenger is Robin Starling grown old – it just will not do. For Robin Starling, a brief and brilliant voice in the early twenties, had died almost before his evocative lyricism had had time to linger in the ear. By only a few present-day critics would even his name be remembered. And probably not one poem of about a dozen that got published in various literaries of the period would now be recalled by anybody. Except me? Was I the only person who had been moved by ‘The Green Steps’? And had lingered over it in my boyhood, feeling that it had a special meaning for me that I only half understood? I had come across no other lines by this poet; he had quite gone out of my mind; and now returned by the strangest coincidence – that he bore almost the same name and wrote about the Green Steps – and a scavenger.

  But was this coincidence? I couldn’t, of course, let it rest here. Robin Starling was dead, that was pretty certain. For now I recalled a brief obituary notice about him, that I couldn’t find in any of my old magazines. But, Jack Williams had said, the Bob Starling of twenty-five years ago had written poems; and he had tumbled over a cliff, apparently under the illusion that he was chasing somebody. Had it been an illusion? Had this old scavenger really been chasing somebody up the Green Steps that dark wild night of twenty-five years ago? Had he – ?

  Innumerable questions. The beginning of an exciting quest. All simplified, you might say, by direct questions to the man himself. Not so. For you could not get beyond that amber-like glint in his eyes, and never any more than a few words would he mutter to you, always courteous, always humble, but about as talkative as a Trappist monk in Holy Week.

  I thought about it endlessly. I read and re-read the strange, sad, yet exciting poem. Not a very good poem as we would think now. It made sense and it rhymed; but it said far more under its simple words than a first reading made clear. Was I to believe that this was not the work of the old man himself? A room stacked with manuscripts, Jack Williams had said; and literary high-yap in the twenties, coloured shirts and beards and Bloomsbury gone wild as Bloomsbury does once it goes west.

  Two burning questions. How had ‘Robin Starling’ died? And – had ‘Bob Starling’ actually been chasing somebody up those steps?

  The first question was easily answered. I wrote to a friend of mine, a critic whose pleasure it is to ponder over the oddities of literature – the forgotten ones who find their unlamented way into the Charing Cross Road book troughs. What could he tell me about Robin Starling?

  The answer was terrifyingly what I had expected. Starling, after spending the early years of his life wandering about France and England, a sort of Villon with ever a rabble of noisy scoundrels at his heels, and ever a woman to worship him, had written a handful of verse. Like Rimbaud he had become a flame, rapidly to die out, yet kindle other sleeping fires. The last two years of his life, said my friend, he had spent in the West of England. ‘You should know all about him’ (I quote from his letter), ‘since he lived in your village and gathered a rusty-fusty greenery-yallery crew around him. He went the whole hog with drink and had, I believe, one faithful woman who loved him; dead now, probably like him. His death was “correct”. Dead drunk, he ran up a steep cliff path and smashed himself to bits two hundred feet below. That was the story put round by a brother of his, anyway; and this brother had the handling of some poems published – only in the literaries – shortly after his death; I believe he wrote one critical article in praise of his work in a thing I now can’t trace, an ephemera of the middle twenties. Then the brother seems to have gone silent, and all Starling’s rackety set came to nothing. Starling’s was a brief, but certain trumpet note that died in the air before anyone heard it properly. You should make it your business to discover all you can about him. For all we know he might have left a mass of work behind him that should see the light. Does the brother still live, I wonder?’

  O, my Scavenger, how dear you became to me! How lovingly I studied you from that day, watching your devouring broom over the sea-washed streets in the sleeping morning when sometimes I rose early and walked to the harbour to see what news lay in the east! How keenly I observed the sharp inward curve of your nostrils, your fastidious yet workmanlike hands, your shuffling yet ambassador walk! Like a man with a train of princes behind him, all ghosts, you seemed to me. Bowing in to life the great ones of the earth, and then waiting for them to be flung out by the wind to drift in the streets and come under the drag of your brush. Ushering in and gathering up, day by day you assumed more importance for me. There was a major work in you, I said. A major work for a novelist of supreme imagination and superb craft. Henry James, Flaubert and Dostoevsky linked as one, could not do justice to you.

  For some time I made no attempt to gather up the threads of the story. Good stories linger in the air like flower scents of autumn smoke, about the tongue like wine, about the touch like silk; and shift and struggle before the eyes like the ever-changing patterns and colours seen through a child’s kaleidoscope. They do not mature in a hurry. Were I to rush forward and breast the tape of truth, should I indeed have won the truth? For truth is the whole tale, and had it yet ended? Had I, perhaps, to wait till the Scavenger died and the contents of that back room could be examined?

  Then, one night, something very strange happened and I was suddenly dragged, as it were by the scruff of a too inquisitive neck, right into the heart of the tale. Now it is mine, gone for ever, and as I relate it, so it will cease to be his or mine. It will be anybody’s, and anybody can learn what they like from it.

  It was a night in January, after days of rain and gales, gales that battered the side of our cottage and made it sway like a ship in a full and roaring sea. A Moby Dick night; and the high spring tides seventeen feet up in the fifteen-foot harbour, the boats all swaying their masts like a wind-thrashed forest of leafless larches. The fishermen had been to the boats in the early evening, before the tide came high, setting their tackle straight, prepared for a bad night. Boards were up in houses down by the quay and in the low, flat parts of the village street. At the Ship Tavern, where we drink what is left to drink these days, I went with some friends and we talked about old times as you do when there are high storms and fine music in the wind; and we drank a good deal, sitting there in the long kitchen till near closing time; when suddenly everybody looked to the door which had swung wildly open.

  ‘God bless my soul,’ said an old fisherman, ‘ ’tes the first time in nigh thirty years I see Bob Starling come in here.’

  I said nothing, but watched him. I was aware that I was drunk, in a sort of guarded drunkenness, prepared for anything, knowing this was the night I would get the story I wanted, and didn’t want. He stood in the dark passage between the bar and the kitchen, and he asked, so quietly that it could hardly be heard, for a double whisky. Doubles aren’t served now in this almost liquorless corner of England; he had to be content with a single. Drinking it at one nervous quick gulp he asked for another. I watched. He was a most extraordinary figure, in a long dirty leather jacket reaching nearly to his knees, his long thin legs in brown corduroy trousers much too short for him, which showed
black woollen socks, full of holes, and made his feet seem huge. Over the leather jacket he had a mackintosh cape; on his head a yellow sou’wester cap tied under the chin, that gave his sharp ruddy face a babylike innocence. I thought he should be sitting in a pram dressed just as he was, sucking a dummy or playing with a rattle.

  The second whisky went as quickly as the first. He asked for a third and was refused. He could have beer, he was told. But no, he didn’t want beer. Out he went, with no sign of recognition to a soul, giving only a peering, darting look round the kitchen, as though he were looking for somebody; out he went and the door swung to and fro behind him, letting in a shivering snarl and twist from the wind.

  Everybody started to chat about him. But suddenly, in my curiously alert condition, driven by the subconscious voice who commands most clearly under the stimulus of alcohol, I leapt up from my seat, snapped good night to my friends, and swung out of the door as though a pistol had shot me forward. Across the square, where the moon plunged from a continent of massed clouds, I could see him. He was going quickly up the cliff path, towards his own cottage, in that forward-leaning pensive walk of his, his great feet most oddly delicate, like a ballet dancer wearing enormous clogs. I got just behind him; then slackened my speed. He was muttering. ‘The tide’ll bring him back. It’s a seventeen-foot tide, like it was then, and it’ll throw him back, God help me.’

  I nearly ran back to the Ship. I confess I was, for a few seconds, frightened. What had I stumbled upon? Leaning over the wall of the slipway I looked down to the harbour, which seemed to have come adrift in a churning mass of muddy sea. The night was roaring and howling, the wind playing havoc with slates and tiles and anything it could snatch. Dustbin lids clattered along the cobbled alleyways. Waiting there, gathering strength from the gale, I lost sight of old Starling. Had he gone up the Green Steps to his cottage? I didn’t know. But suddenly I found my legs again and a new zest for life within me. When huge winds blow, either you must skulk with your face turned to the wall like a cornered rat; or else you must let the wind take you and blow you where it will. With enough liquor inside me, I felt suddenly mad, wild and very young. I had almost forgotten about old Starling. All I wanted to do was to soar up the cliff path like a rocket, charge round the corner, bellow some insult at the windows of a cottage where lived a rigid nonconformist family I disliked (and who disliked me), race recklessly up the dark slippery steps and find my way to the long slopes above the town and the harbour where you can watch the moon or the sun in a great expanse of sky. In short, if you like to put it more simply, I was flaming drunk and didn’t care a damn what happened.

  And so I went charging up the Green Steps, for the first (and only) time in my life not caring whether I stumbled and fell, only determined to get to the top and fill my lungs with wind.

  I didn’t get there as quickly as I had intended. Singing and shouting I don’t know what, I stumbled half-way up, and nearly fell, reached out a hand to grab at something. My fingers closed round a door-knob. The door tottered open on weak hinges and I burst forward into a room dimly lit by a lamp with an untrimmed wick. I smelt the smoke of many years of oil-lamps. Bits of plaster dribbled down walls black with smoke. I was in old Starling’s cottage, hurled into it, it seemed; and there he stood, his back to an inner door, his teeth chattering, the most abject picture of stark terror I had ever encountered.

  I stared at him, he at me, and we didn’t move for nearly a minute. Then he muttered in his thin cracked voice: ‘You’ve come then. You’ve come to take your revenge.’

  I was stark sober all at once. ‘Who do you think I am?’ I asked quietly.

  ‘Him. Him I killed. A night like this too, when the wind got me and drove me to do it. You swore you’d come back, that was your last dying cry up the cliff when the – ’ His words trailed away. (I was to notice how he had a habit of not finishing his sentences.)

  ‘I’m not the man you killed – if you did kill a man. I’m your neighbour down the cliff. You know me. Look at me.’

  I went a bit closer, turned up the spluttering lamp, and smiled at him in a forced sort of way. I didn’t feel like smiling. I felt oddly angry. I felt it was a pity I wasn’t ‘him’; I felt he deserved what he so dreaded.

  ‘You’re not – you’re not him – then why did you come up the steps like that, the way he always did, drunk and blind and mad after his nights down in the – and she, poor girl, having to keep a meal for him, keep him alive somehow, year in and year out, feeding a drunken maniac who had the insolence to think he could live as other people didn’t because he could write poetry that – it’s the highest tide for years and it was the night I killed him. He always said, his cry rang in my ears – but I’ve done the right thing, haven’t I?’

  He spoke in a disconnected, gasping way.

  ‘I’m sure you’ve done the right thing,’ I said, feeling none so sure. ‘But look, couldn’t you calm down? I’m not here to hurt you any way. I burst in by mistake. I admit I was drunk; but I’m sober as a judge now – ’

  ‘Not a judge, no, don’t talk about a judge. I escaped. They wouldn’t judge me. They wouldn’t believe me.’

  ‘Let’s sit down and have a talk. I believe – ’

  ‘You shouldn’t have come in here like that. It was a wicked thing to do, scaring me a night like this when the boats – as they did years ago and him trying to write poetry all the time, a maze of wild words he was, blood and bone and sun and moon raced in his veins, wild as a devil and greedy like a pig.’

  He wouldn’t move away from the door to the inner room.

  ‘Tell me this,’ I said very gently, ‘are you talking about Robin Starling?’

  ‘Yes, that’s what he called himself and he was to be the great apocalyptic poet of the age, and because of that he could trample on everything and everybody and stamp up the Green Steps back and down without thought for a soul. And Stella pouring out her love to him, always ready to take him back, whatever he did. I loved her too, but I never got her. Never.’ He snapped his teeth and snarled on the word.

  ‘Who was Robin Starling? Your brother?’

  ‘Oh, closer than that, much closer. There are relationships, if you can understand, that are not defined in the books, closer than brother to brother, husband to wife, friend to friend, mother to child, much closer, so close that neither of us could breathe decent air. We lived here together, the three of us, him and me and Stella, and listen, what I shall tell you is the whole truth, what they won’t believe, which is why I’m left alive to tell it now, because if they’d believed I’d have been hanged for it, justice they call that and – you don’t believe me, do you, I can see you don’t?’

  ‘I believe every word you say. Please go on. I shan’t tell anybody.’

  ‘But I wish you to. I want everyone to know. When a man’s committed a great crime the burden’s too much to bear if nobody will believe he bears it. Will you tell them, will you tell the whole truth to help me bear it?’

  ‘Yes, if you want me to, yes, I will.’ (And this story began to be written from that moment.)

  ‘But what is the truth?’ I asked. ‘You and him, this poet, Robin Starling, who was so close to you that – ’

  ‘All lived together and life was hell. For years I never spoke, never warned, only watched what was happening to him, the rot and the disease of his mind while he wasted his wonderful words on to paper at the price of other people’s hearts. He wrote in the blood of others. And I watched him, never warning, never speaking. Silent all the time and in the evening – there was plenty to drink in those days, a man could get drunk on a few shillings, and Stella, she would have to sell things of her own, little bits of jewels given to her by her mother; she valued them, and paintings and books, they all had to go to get money for drink while I never said a word. Then I warned him; I said, if this doesn’t stop I shall make it stop. He wouldn�
��t listen. Sometimes in the grey morning light when he woke up all bleary and sick and parched in the throat with Stella beside him, then he would listen to me; and he’d agree, he’d say yes, he’d mend his ways, turn another direction, give up poetry and all the cheap tricks he’d turned his rotting mind to.

  ‘In the mornings he’d admit to me that his fine spate of words meant nothing. He juggled words in a hat, like a conjuror; and people believed that what came out had the divine fire, but never had – a jingle, a prolonged nursery rhyme, that was all he was, aping all the raging poets who’ve ever dishonoured their manhood and left misery behind them. Yes, in the morning he’d see a little sense. But then, as time went on, he saw less and less; and even in the morning he’d drink, drink himself drunk again so that he could pour out more words. In there, behind me, I’ve got stacks of his writings, foolscap sheets with long lists of words on them and lines of poems he never finished. He never stopped; he was devoured by a fire.

  ‘It wouldn’t have mattered if it hadn’t been for her. I couldn’t stand by and watch her throw herself away; and other women he’d take when he wanted them, and always expect her to take him back as she always did. Then I got jealous, I wanted her for myself, I wanted to give her the things he couldn’t give, a decent home and nice things like she longed to have from life. But she would never see me; never believed I had any independent existence . . . So it went on that way – years.’

  There was a long pause. I still did not know what to make of the story. ‘What did you do?’ I mumbled. ‘I mean – had you got work of your own?’

  ‘Me? I was a shadow. I was what was to be. Didn’t I tell you I was close to him, so close that I never left him for a second? I hadn’t any work, only to watch him and trip him up; and he knew it all the time and would try to throttle me. Many a time he’d wake screaming, his hands round my throat, trying to shake the life out of me. Then she’d stop him somehow and I’d be safe again. It was him or me – don’t you see – always him or me – one of us had to go. Well, he went.’