My American

by Stella Gibbons

  “It’s no use, my girl. You’ll never get one.”

  This prophecy annoyed Miss Grace very much, for as it happened she was not trying to Get One. She dressed to please herself and to feel nice, and that is why most women do dress, despite the winsome old theory that they dress to attract men and to annoy other women.

  “‘Here is sixpence for your fare,” said Mr. Danesford to Amy. “Mr. Antrobus’s copy has been lost in the post and he has had to rewrite it and his secretary is ill. You will be back by one.” He turned to the galley-proofs of “How to Make a Model Seaplane,” on his desk.

  The large white houses round Regent’s Park looked shut up and listless in the brassy sunlight of late summer, and massive trees like banks of dark cloud hung on the horizon across the withered lawns of the Park. Men lay there in shirtsleeves with newspapers over their faces and the London County Council school children were camped with prams and babies and bottles of lemonade under the dusty trees. A strange heavy sound rolled out in the distance where the Mappin terraces showed grey against the sky; the lions in the Zoo felt end-of-seasonish and bored.

  But once Amy had pushed open the green door in the high wall surrounding Number 73, and carefully shut it behind her, the sad, end-of-summer feeling fled completely. Here was a green square of lawn freshened by a circular spray that made a cool hissing noise, and the beds surrounding it on three sides were crammed, their very earth was utterly hidden, by the gorgeous staring faces of every imaginable kind of dahlia in every produceable shade of red, yellow, purple, crimson, magenta pink, and white. The old brick wall behind them was bare and perfectly displayed their glory. Amy stopped dead and stared, and slowly a smile of pure pleasure crept over her face. She did not notice beautiful things much as a rule, her fancy being too alert for the exciting, the dramatic, the strange, but this was as if someone had burst into a bugle call right in her face, and she just had to stop and listen.

  The house was tall, and newly painted dazzling white. The curtains were of frilled white net and the copper door-knocker was made like the torso of a merman, and matched the copper bands on the black tubs on either side the green front door. These tubs were covered with the curled green-white heads of the monster Chinese chrysanthemums which are sold in the flower shops of Wigmore Street for half-a-crown apiece. The doorstep was washed with pale green hearthstone and at one side of the door glittered a long band of mirror coolly reflecting the green door and part of the blossoms in the tub. Amy slowly advanced, her whole person experiencing a completely unfamiliar feeling as though it were expanding like a flower-stem in water or cold hands held to the warmth of a fire. For the first time in her life she was surrounded by beauty and order, produced to perfection by wealth and by the exercise of an unconventional but completely self-confident taste. The taste just happened to match her own, which was stirring in its youthful sleep, and she was dazzled, moved and satisfied all in one delightful moment.

  A fat little man in a blue and white striped jacket opened the door and asked her crossly in a foreign voice what she wanted.

  “Mr. Antrobus is expecting me; I’m from The Prize,” she answered, composedly. Her errand was a perfectly proper one, and she was determined to get inside the house, for over the man’s shoulder she could see that it looked just as exciting as the outside.

  He nodded, and was standing aside to let her come into the hall when a shout, uttered in what can only be described as a kind of powerful squeak, came from upstairs:

  “Come up, will you? I’m not quite ready.”

  The man nodded and smiled at her and went away quickly down the hall towards a faint and delicious smell of cooking, and Amy went on alone.

  The stairs were carpeted with what looked like velvet, the red of plum juice, and all up one side were the most exciting pictures imaginable, which she longed to stop and stare at. There was “Derby Day” (she knew that because of a visit she had once made to the Tate Gallery) and one of a boat with a white figure in it going across water to a tall island crowned with dark trees, and one of a bulky, horned monster brooding over the roofs of a town, and another of a city in flames with a strange frozen sea in the distance—oh! she tried to take them all in at once as she hurried up the stairs to the landing, across which a door stood half open.

  She went over to it, and knocked.

  “Come in and sit down, will you,” absently said the same voice. “There’s the New Yorker on the sofa and a box of peppermint creams. Shan’t be long.”

  She went obediently to the sofa, which was covered in shiny pink stuff with shells on it, and opened the New Yorker and put a sweet into her mouth, but of course she did not look at the paper, she only held it up and pretended to look at it while she stared round the room. It had not much furniture except the sofa she was sitting on and a large desk between the french windows. Here Mr. Antrobus was sitting with his back to her. The room was tidy except for papers bursting out of the desk and scattered on the red carpet; all along the top of the desk were photographs of young people and children in modernist frames. The pale green walls were adorned by only one picture, in which a naked lady floated on the sea in a shell while two others waited to wrap her in a cloak. Amy admired this very much, and studied it for some time. But indeed, she admired all of this red, pink and pale green room, and felt that she would like to write her stories in just such a retreat with its pleasant view over the park.

  “Do you smoke? There are cigarettes in that green box on the mantelpiece,” suddenly said the writer, still without turning round, his hand moving steadily over the paper.

  “No, thank you, I don’t,” she answered, just stopping herself in time from saying, “They make a nasty taste in my mouth,” by remembering how she herself hated being interrupted when she was writing.

  After this he wrote steadily for a little while and she intently studied his broad back, covered by a blue suit rather like Lord Welwoodham’s, and his hair, which was a brighter brown than most men’s because it had no oil on it, but very thin and fluffy. Fancy him going on writing Barty for all those years, she thought. He must seem like an absolutely real person to him by this time. But she did not think fancy him going on having ideas for the Barty stories all those years, because she herself had so many ideas that it never occurred to her other people might run short of them.

  “Ah!” suddenly exclaimed Mr. Antrobus, so loudly that he made her jump. “There!” And he put a bit of green blotting paper over the sheet and she watched his short white hands thump and smooth it firmly. “There we are. Sorry to have kept you waiting.” And he turned round in his chair and smiled at her, fixing her steadily with the brightest and clearest blue-grey eyes she had ever seen, set off by a forehead high and white as her own, above which the brown hair stood up in a silly little fluffle. Between this undignified hair and small weak mouth set in a too-heavy chin there was the superb beak of a Roman nose matching the splendid brow and slow-moving, bright observant eyes. But the face on the whole was a face whose features contradicted one another, and though Amy could not put the point clearly in her own mind, she dimly felt that Mr. Antrobus’s character did not hold all his features together and unify them. He’s a muddly sort of a man, she thought, politely returning his steady look.

  “You put it in the envelope. Here you are.” He gave her the manuscript and watched her while she deftly put it away. “Tell Lord Welwoodham how sorry I am there’s been this bother.” While he was saying this in his rather pettish, high voice he was taking in every detail of her face and dress, sitting sideways with one white hand hanging over the edge of the table. As she carefully licked the envelope, he said abruptly:

  “Do you read Barty?”

  “Oh yes!” She looked up and smiled. “Every month.”

  “And do you enjoy it?”

  “Oh yes, very much.” But as she spoke she remembered feeling that Barty wasn’t exciting enough for her.

  “What other books—stories—do you read?”

  Amy hesitated.
Instinct warned her that here was a mind-poker; and she did not at all like having her mind poked into. She said enthusiastically:

  “Thrilling Tales of Space I read, quite often, and all the Tarzan books.”

  “Not love stories? No, you’re not old enough to enjoy, those yet, are you? What are you, sixteen? Have a peppermint—oh, they’re on the couch. Do have one,” and he gave her such a wonderfully friendly, warm, affectionate smile, as though there were a secret between them, that she suddenly felt happy, and thought: He is nice! Nevertheless, she still had a faint feeling warning her not to tell him the truth about anything—except her age, there was no harm in that.

  “Thank you very much. I’m nineteen in October.” She put a sweet in her mouth.

  “Are you! You look about sixteen. Well, you’re quite old enough to like love stories, then. Do you read Peg’s Paper?”

  “Not very often. The girls are all such sops.”

  Mr. Antrobus laughed. “Have you any brothers?”

  “No,” she answered.

  “And no boy of your own that you’re—walking out—with?”

  “I haven’t got a boy friend,” she retorted rather tartly, recalling sundry boring yet embarrassing comments from the Beedings on this subject.

  “No boy friend. I see.” Mr. Antrobus looked pleased, as though someone had given him a present, as indeed, someone had. For the next time he sketched a typist in a novel she would say she had a boy friend, not that she walked out with someone. For Mr. Antrobus, who was over seventy, had reached that stage in his career as a writer when he was too busy, too popular, too dignified, too well-known and too lazy to go and sit behind The Evening News in Lyons Corner House and listen to typists for himself. As a young man he had been as passionately and burningly devoted to his art as any young man to a mistress. Now they were still together, but they had had forty children and were used to one another’s ways; that was all, but it was not the same thing as it had been forty years ago.

  A faint sadness came over the writer’s mind as he dimly realized the change, and to banish it he glanced round the rich, peaceful colours of the room, then said abruptly:

  “Do you like this room?”

  “Oh yes! It’s lovely!” she answered earnestly, pleased to be able to speak truthfully at last to Mr. Antrobus, who was so nice. “And the garden’s lovely, too, and that little sea-man on the front door and all those pictures up the stairs! I’ve never seen anything so lovely, except the inside of St. Paul’s.”

  Mr. Antrobus let out a joyous crow, and slapped his knee. The perfect story for his speech this evening at the Anglo-American Literary Society’s Annual Dinner! It would be crowded with all his literary friends, who said, “George is a darling, and has heaps of taste and it’s all bad. That house of his——!”

  “I didn’t think there could be a house like this, Mr. Antrobus,” she went on, her face pink, her eyes shining. “Only in a book, I mean——” then stopped, alarmed lest the mind-poker should notice her that speech implied that she read other works than Tarzan and Thrilling Tales of Space.

  But she need not have worried. Mr. Antrobus had caught fire from her enthusiasm, the shade of sadness had passed, he was himself again, and proud with good reason of the career that he and his mistress-gift had made between them.

  “Yes, you know,” he said excitedly, leaning towards her with his little, deeply-lined white hands hanging between his knees, “I love this house, it’s got all the things in it I’ve loved best ever since I was a boy, and longed for, even the red carpet on the stairs—did you notice it?” (She nodded eagerly.) “And ‘Derby Day’ … I was very poor when I was young, you know, young No-Boy-and-No-Brothers. My father was an assistant in a big shoe shop in Colchester and my brothers and I went to a National School and my mother washed and mended and slaved for us like a navvy’s wife—only it was worse for us, because we dam’ well had to keep up some sort of an appearance. (My father wore a collar and tie at work, you see.) My head was always full of stories and people, people, people, all struggling and bursting to get out. It was like having a circus inside me; I couldn’t get the people out fast enough, the clowns joking, and the exquisite fairy on her black horse, and the great-eyed Punchinello watching her, shaken with coughing, and the ring-master in his trousers that were too tight, and the captive lions snarling——” He broke off, and was silent for a moment, staring down at the carpet; then held up the middle finger of his right hand.

  “Do you see that?”

  She came closer, bending forward curiously, and saw that the finger carried a little round raised corn of yellow-white skin, on the top joint at the left, just below the fingernail.

  “That’s the mark of my trade. That’s where the pen presses,” said George Antrobus. And Amy pulled her glove a little tighter over her own right middle finger, which carried a smaller but identical mark.

  “It’s the most delightful trade in the world, you know, young No-Boy-and-No-Brothers,” he went on. “If you’re my kind of writer. It’s pain and grief to some of us, of course, but not to me. Never to me. I don’t know what it means to have to hunt for ideas. Even now, after forty years of steady work, they come faster than I can get them down. That’s pretty wonderful, isn’t it? It’s a gift, of course; just a gift like gorgeous red hair or a singing voice; you can only use it properly or abuse it. If you use it properly you’ve every right to be proud of what you’ve done with it, but not of the gift itself. Go down on your knees fasting and thank Whatever you believe in for the gift itself.”

  He was silent for a moment, staring at the floor, while Amy watched him, enthralled. He was saying things that she seemed to have known ever since she could remember, but could not put into words. And he was like her about his writing, too! He had so many ideas that he did not know which one to do first! He loved doing it! He wrote with a pen, not with a typewriter! Oh, he was nice, Mr. Antrobus! She was so glad that Mr. Danesford had sent her; there would be all kinds of lovely things to think over when she was in bed that night.

  “And when I was a spotty yob in a greasy suit I used to plan this house, furnished with all the pictures and colours I loved—bright rich colours that I never saw in the hideous little houses of our friends in Colchester because they show the dirt and it costs money to keep them clean. (I hate mud colour,” said Mr. Antrobus violently, “there isn’t one shred of mud colour in this house from attic to cellar). Then, I sold my first short story to Anderson’s Weekly, and they paid me ten guineas for it, and I knew, when I opened that envelope and that cheque fell out on to the brown serge tablecloth in our front parlour, that everything was going to be all right and I’d never have to worry about money again.”

  “Ten guineas!” exclaimed Amy. “For one story, Mr. Antrobus?” (The amounts paid to The Prize contributors were very properly kept a secret from the editorial-assistant, and in any case they were not often so much as ten guineas.)

  “Yes. For one story,” he nodded smiling. “Does that seem a lot to you?”

  “Yes,” she answered dreamily, but she was really thinking that it must have been even nicer than the money to see his name for the first time in print—“by George Antrobus.”

  “What was it called, Mr. Antrobus?”

  “A Butterfly’s Revenge. It was about a silly little wife who poisoned her husband.”

  She nodded politely. Wives … husbands … that did not sound exciting. But perhaps his other books were better.

  “My gift’s been wonderfully faithful to me,” he went on, looking at the trade-mark on his finger. “I only hope I’ve been as faithful in my turn. I just tell stories, you know, that’s all,” he added, suddenly looking up at her with an expression, sly, humble and innocent all at once. “Just stories. Oh, I’m no stylist; don’t pretend to be. No time for it. The people all want to come out—open the door! No time to polish the key and oil the lock.”

  “What’s a stylist?” inquired Amy.

  “It’s a man who lets the matter get i
n the way of the manner … (damn, I meant the other way round; that comes of trying to be epigrammatic). No … a stylist is a man who cares more about how he says a thing than about what he says. Is that clear to you, No-Boys?”

  She nodded. Which am I? she was thinking.

  “It’s stories, you know, that everybody wants,” confided Mr. Antrobus, bending a little towards her and lowering his voice as though imparting a secret. “Just stories. Bless their hearts, if you can tell stories they’ll come round you like the pigeons in Trafalgar Square, and pay your bills for you, and write you letters correcting your grammar and spelling, and educate your children for you, and keep your memory green (with luck) when you’ve been dead twenty years. Bless their hearts. So if you can tell stories, No-Boys,” concluded Mr. Antrobus, turning again to his desk, “your fortune’s made. Now you have one more peppermint cream, and here,” he felt in his pocket, “is five shillings for a taxi because I’ve kept you talking to me and it’s a quarter to one. Good-bye.”