Authors: Henry Williamson
He folded the typed sheets and put them in his poacher pocket. “I thought it might one day make a scene for a play.”
“How thrilling! When I see it from the pit, I’ll tell people that I sat beside the author in a broken-down hovel in Kent!” said Poppett.
“It’s damned good,” said Broughton.
“Gee, you’ve got talent, Phillip!” exclaimed Quick.
“You’re a dark horse,” murmured Poppett, taking his hand and kissing it.
Through the open window came the mellow calls of wood owls hunting in faraway woods, then darkening clouds filtered a dim moonlight.
“How about getting back?” said Broughton.
“Can you wait a little longer for my cousin?”
They waited for Willie until after 8 p.m., then left, regretfully. At first they walked in pairs, Quick and Broughton in front and arguing again, Phillip and Poppett following, holding hands. Without intention on Phillip’s part they lost the others on Reynard’s Common, and entered the woods by themselves. As they swung along one of the rides through a covert Poppett said, “Look here, how much longer am I to call you ‘P.M.’? It sounds like Number Ten Downing Street. Can’t I call you something else?”
“How about A.M.? Or simply ‘you’? Or ‘Maddison’?”
“Oh, all right, you beast! Why didn’t you look at me in the Café Royal that time?”
“When you were with the sculptor? I thought you much too grand!”
“Rubbish!”
They walked through moon shadows of oak, chestnut, and hazel, walking level but a foot apart and unspeaking. At last, “Poppett, please call me Phillip.”
“Yes, Phillip.”
“Now you’ll simply have to come down to my cottage in Devon!”
“I’d love to.”
“Why not, then?”
“Haven’t you got a bad name in the district? You know, lots of gay ladies from the town?”
“Hundreds!”
“How far do you go with them?”
“Oh—oh——” pensively, “we’re pretty good friends.”
“There
was
one, wasn’t there? That woman you call Pauline in that typescript of the novel you lent to ‘Sappho’?”
“Did Mrs. Portal-Welch let
you
see it?”
“Bits of it. Tell me, are you good friends now?”
“Our love
affaire,
dear Poppett, is ended. That is to say, we are on really good terms at last.”
“I wonder what you call really good terms——” Darkly, “I wonder if you understand women, Phillip!”
“‘The drive was dim with moonlight, and the sighful trees lost a leaf, then another leaf, as the dew-weight increased.’ Do you remember that in the typescript? It was an exact description of a walk through this very wood. Stop a moment and listen.”
They heard slight noises of wet leaves breaking off, and falling.
“I couldn’t come alone with you to your cottage, could I, Phillip? What would people say?”
“You see, it’s the dew which causes the stalk to break!”
“Oh, you
are
a beast!”
“‘What would people say?’ Well, we could be in a party! Then I’d not be responsible for anyone’s actions.”
“You
are
cautious, aren’t you?”
“Cautious! Wait until you’ve been on the back of my motor-bike, doing seventy-two on the level, seventy-eight down hills, and ninety over cliffs!”
“Ra-ther! I am a fast girl, didn’t you know? The faster you go, the better for me! I say, are we nearly at the end of the wood?”
“Not yet. When shall we go on my Norton?”
“The first fine day.”
Silence, while they swung along, hand in hand.
“Is
this
the end of the wood, Phillip dear?”
“Not yet. I say, I want to kiss you, Poppett dear!”
“Why don’t you then?”
“I’m soppy, I suppose.”
“No you’re not. You’re afraid of me!”
“God’s teeth, no!”
“‘Swearing strange oaths’, Phillip? What will you do next?”
“It’s the battle cry of the Hundred and Sixteenth Foot! By the way, do you know what a poppet is?”
“No, tell me.”
“It’s the inlet valve in the cylinder head of an aero engine.”
“And what does it do?”
“It works on a weak spring, and pops in and out with alternate suction and compression by a piston.”
“Really!”
They got over the stile, trellised below with wire-netting to keep out stoats and weasels, and left the covert for a stubble field which glimmered with dew.
“Poppett, I want to kiss you tremendously.”
“Go on then.”
A foolish silence. Phillip began to suffer; he was not sincere; he had merely been responding to her whims, a sort of toady who had begun a light flirtation and now felt—idiotic.
“Poppett, to be serious, I would like to bring you here to listen to the nightingales in May. I came here last spring——”
“I know, with that Trevelian girl. You were both in love with love, it was on your two faces! You never went to bed together, did you?”
He knew that Mrs. Portal-Welch had been discussing him with Poppett. They crossed the stubble and approached the under-keeper’s tarred wooden cottage, near Reynard’s Lane.
“Is this the end of the wood?”
“Yes. I’m sorry the walk was not very interesting—I’m afraid I’m a bore——”
“Don’t be silly!
You
don’t understand women. You’re a pessimist. You lack confidence. Your attitude should be, ‘Come with me if you want to, I find pleasure in your company, but if you don’t want to, it will be your loss.’ Honestly, Phillip, if you consider what others
may
be thinking of you all the time, you create the very atmosphere you are wanting to avoid!”
“But any man can do the heavy egoist, pretending love in order to get a girl. I can’t. If I love anyone, I show it. Although I know I’ll probably be lost by doing that.”
“That’s your trouble. You’re a pessimist, as I told you, and afraid of women.”
“And as I told you, I can’t act. I’m soppy, I suppose.”
“Oh, no you’re not. Far from it. My fiancé is like you, in face and form, I mean. He’s a handsome man!”
“This moonlight is most deceptive, Poppett!”
“It’s most revealing, Phillip! You’ve got a fine profile. Honestly, you have. I suppose this
is
the end of the walk?” as they turned into the road to the station.
“Very nearly.”
“Oh.”
“Why do you say ‘oh’?”
“Don’t you know?”
“For me ‘Great Pan is Dead!’”
At these words, one of Julian’s innumerable quotations idly recalled, she stopped and faced Phillip, putting her hands on his shoulders and looking up into his face. He set himself to outstare her, thinking that the moonlight gave her face the effect of white marble, a Rodin vision from the fire-formed rocks of creation. She was acting, of course, seeing herself as in a ballet. It was rather thrilling when her fingers reached up and touched his face. “What made you say that, Phillip?”
“I was thinking of what a friend once said, in connexion with a line of Swinburne—‘Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean, The world has grown grey with thy breath.’”
“‘Great Pan is dead’ was a terrible cry, Phillip! It passed from mouth to mouth all along the Mediterranean coast. My father says that was the cry of the world, knowing that it was the end of Nature, and the beginning of the planet’s death. He thinks that the human spirit has evolved to its limit, and from now on the scientific mind will learn to control Nature, and eventually destroy the earth. We haven’t had Armageddon yet.”
“My cousin thinks the war will come again with the Germans, because they were not treated with magnanimity. He blames the hard-faced, hard-hearted old men—Sir Eric Geddes, quoting Clemenceau, saying, ‘Germany is a lemon to be squeezed until the pips squeak’—the pips being the starving German children under our naval blockade. My cousin can’t think of anything else. Frivolous, otherwise happy talk, hurts him. That’s why he left us this evening.”
“My father was in the war, too. He’s a sculptor, not a very popular one, I’m afraid. He says romantic art died in 1914.”
“Does he like Rodin?”
“Very much. But he says Rodin belongs to the Golden Age, which perished on the Somme.”
They walked to the station side by side. He felt less unsure of himself now; and one remark of hers aroused longing. “Part of
you was killed in the war, Phillip. I wish I could bring it to life again.” He held her hand to his side, and they came in silence to the row of oil-lamps along the station.
At first it seemed that they were the only passengers going to London, it being Sunday night; but out of the shadows came Otis B. Quick, patient American boy running towards them and embracing both him and Poppett. Phillip thought that Quick was a nice man.
“Broughton said he wasn’t going to wait, and I guess I felt lonely without you two.”
At Charing Cross Phillip and Poppett did not kiss. Was it all a game? He was inspired by her glances, he could see the beauty of her shoulders under her coat. It was warming to be with a girl so pretty and naturally eager.
“Goodbye, it has been such a happy day, hasn’t it? Thank you both for coming. Goodnight, Poppett, goodnight, Otis. You’re both such nice people.”
“When shall we meet again?” Two faces looked at him out of the waiting taxi. The one that mattered said, “I may not be able to get there, but I’ll try to be at ‘Sappho’s’ party next Sunday afternoon.”
Taxi drives away—where? Otis and Poppett to sleep together, valve responding to piston? What was it to do with him? Tender feelings arise but to fade.
He decided to walk home. He could get there by 10.30, and so keep his word. And walking above Thames on the footbridge beside the railway he thought of Spica, still in the marble and awaiting the hand, or the heart, of a Rodin to bring her out of the cold wave of life, out of the white Tyrrhenian stone of antiquity formed before Great Pan had arisen with Anadiomene out of the sea. The thought shook him; he fumbled in his pockets for notebook and pencil, and tried to write by moonlight; but it was gone under the vision of dark eyes in a pale face, classically beautiful in a moment now passed for ever. Ah, if only it had been Spica!
*
On the following Sunday afternoon he went across London to ‘Sappho’s’
salon.
He had another manuscript in the poacher pocket of his blue barathea jacket. It was called
A
Walk
Through
the
Woods,
and had been written after he got home the previous Sunday night.
Phillip was in confident mood. Anders Norse had sold his falcon short story to
Pan
Magazine
for eighteen guineas, and
spoken of the possibility of five times that sum from one of the American magazines, publication to be simultaneous in both countries.
In the garden, when he arrived at the house in St. John’s Wood he saw a pretty girl in the sky-blue uniform of the W.R.A.F. hoeing weeds in the gravel of the carriage sweep, and recognised the daughter of the house. He was talking to her when from the drawing-room above stone steps came the notes of
Vesti
la
Giuba
so powerfully loud that they caused people strolling in the street to stop and listen. He, too, was amazed at the tremendous voice, and when the singing was over he said to the girl, “Is that a Caruso record on a sterterophone?”
“No, it’s a tenor from the Royal Danish Opera House.”
“It’s tremendous! He must be very famous!”
“He’s just arrived in England, to find work here. Do go in, I’ll finish this hoeing, and then join you.”
He was approaching the steps when he heard the noises of typing in the basement room, and glancing through the barred window saw a man sitting at a table beside a pile of manuscript. The front door was open. He entered the drawing-room hazy with tobacco smoke and found himself among about fifty men and women of all ages, most of them standing, but some of the older ones sitting down. These had already ‘arrived’—he recognised, from photographs in literary magazines, Netta Syrett, May Sinclair, Dorothy Richardson, Rose Macaulay; and, sitting between crutches, J. D. Woodford. The younger writers were all standing, among them a fat and happy young man in a brown suit and wearing a pink shirt which matched the colour of his face. Having presented himself to his hostess, and been introduced for the fourth time to the lean ex-conscientious objector who was confident of being a leading European novelist when the European paper-shortage ended, Phillip was passed on to the tenor, to whom he said, “Sir, you are going to be world famous!”
“Mr. Melchior does not understand English,” said Mrs. Portal-Welch.
“Has he had an audition at Covent Garden? No? Then I will go tomorrow and arrange one. I heard several Wagnerian tenors last season, and there was no one there to touch this chap. Is he going to sing again?”
“I will ask him. But I think it best not to mention the audition until it materialises. You haven’t brought your friend Mr. Warbeck, have you? That’s a good thing! He is a slack-twisted
young man, and quite impossible. Now I will ask Lauritz Melchior if he will sing again.”
Before the fat young man sang the Prize Song from
The
Master
singers
someone opened the windows, for the vibratory power of the top notes was almost too much for the ear-drums.
After the exhilaration of the singing, Phillip felt lonely. Where was Poppett? Neither Broughton nor Quick was there. What was there to say to the other people? One day they would know what he was, he thought. Until then—all they saw was the camouflage behind which he concealed his spirit in communication, almost every moment of his conscious living, with those dead poets and writers living in his thoughts, and helping him. And accompanying this belief was an acceptance of what Spica had said: that he would never find anyone like himself while he was alive.
*
What Phillip did not realise at that time was that he was suffering from profound nervous exhaustion, out of which he had created a private world of fantasy wherein sense and nonsense were combined—the nonsense arising in momentary relief from the burden of the private world upon which all emotion was expended. At such times his talk was almost deliberately vapid and inconsequential. During some of the Thursday evening lectures he had set out to play the fool, to raise a laugh at the expense of some of the lecturers who gave their services at the Parnassus Club. At such times he invented incidents and gave them out as facts.