Authors: Henry Williamson
“As Arnold Bennett said to me the other day——”. Etc., etc. After one such exhibition Mrs. Portal-Welch had taken him apart. “You say things which are not, my dear boy.”
“I am only a verbal water-boatman, ‘Sappho’!”
“You are too young to call me ‘Sappho’——”
“Oh, I beg your pardon!”
“Have you read J. H. Fabre?”
“No, I haven’t, Mrs. Portal-Welch, I’m half-ashamed to say.”
“Then you should. He is a
real
nature writer, dealing with living realities. Now about your water-boatman metaphor. You may be like that insect with long legs which skates about the surface of a pond in all directions without apparent purpose, but do you know why it does it?”
“Well, I’m not sure, really——”
“You may not appreciate the value of modern psychological knowledge, but Freud could tell you what your water-boatman is seeking.”
“And I could tell Freud,” replied Phillip.
Phillip was not the only young man there seeking one who, hearing his words, would respond with recognition in her eyes and beauty in her face as the spirit braced the body above its interior sag of loneliness. Looking around, he noticed a rather subdued young woman with candid brow and eyes of brown which seemed to indicate that she was picturing scenes elsewhere. Before being taken to her by his hostess, he was told by that free-speaking lady that the girl was the daughter of a writer famous for short stories about Thames longshoremen.
“He’s very irritable and moody, you know—enclosed by a typical puritanical monogamatic encrustation. So his daughter made a runaway marriage with the author of
Warp
and
Woof.
You know it, I expect?”
He remembered the sensation
Warp
and
Woof
had made; it was read by everyone in the mess at Landguard in the summer of 1918. The author’s name was said to have been struck off the Old Boys’ register because he had guardedly referred for the first time in a British novel to occasional furtive habits among herded growing boys.
“I tried to read it, Mrs. Portal-Welch, but it seemed to be only about ordinary scenes of school, cricket and football, which had occurred in the author’s life—literally true perhaps but——”
“Ah, you prefer
Eric,
or
Little
by
Little,
or
Tom
Brown’s
Schooldays,
no doubt. Well, don’t tell the author that, will you? He and his wife are not very happy together, poor dears.” She went on to give details, while Phillip thought ironically of her criticisms of himself for inventing ‘facts’, while Mrs. Portal-Welch was apparently unaware of the possibly equal fault of talking about her guests.
He found the famous, or infamous, author of
Warp
and
Woof
to be a mild, modest, and gentlemanly young fellow (as Father would say) standing as though patiently beside his child wife who had the clouded brown eyes of a pre-Raphaelite beauty.
After a short introduction—“Mr. Maddison is a sentimentalist who has not yet found his writer’s feet,” Mrs. Portal-Welch led away the young author, to meet—Poppett, Phillip saw from the corner of his eye. Poppett! He felt a sudden aching for her
restfulness, for self-absorption in her beauty. Oh damn, why hadn’t he spotted her first? Still, she was not likely to be allured by cricket, football, and boys-will-be-boys talk. Having settled his mind in that direction, he said to the girl-wife, “Do you like the poetry of Francis Thompson?”
“Yes, very much!” Her eyes lost a little of their absence.
“Does your husband also like Thompson?”
“No,” she replied, with a slight shrug. “He wants to be a realist, like Tolstoi.” Her lips resumed their former downward droop.
“I’m a writer of ‘mere musings about nature’, according to Mrs. Portal-Welch,” he said. “She tells me I must read, not morbid stuff like Thompson’s verse, but scientific works like the books of J. H. Fabre, and learn how to count the hairs on the water-boatman’s legs, and ascertain the shape of its thorax and how it connects with its mate with those long legs. I say, I’m awfully sorry—really you know—I don’t suppose you’ll believe me—but there’s no connexion between the insect ‘water boatman’, and those longshoremen your famous father writes about. Do I sound mad?”
“Oh, I’m quite used to madmen! Tell me about your ‘mere musings’.”
“Well, to me the English countryside has no connexion with John Crowe’s powerful pessimistic novels about his unnative Cornwall. To me, it is full of beauty—light—grace—form—hope—a place to lie on your back with the sun on your face, your eyelids blood-red while you take a deep breath and float away in your mind into the sun.”
“Icarus,” she said, and quoted Francis Thompson. “‘O Dismay, I, a wingless mortal sporting, With the tresses of the sun! Ere begun, Falls my singed song down the sky, Even the old Icarian way!”
“Yes,” he said. “‘Rags and Rubbish’, Mrs. Portal-Welch summed up Thompson and his verse to me, once.”
“Her!” retorted the beautiful pale girl, giving him a look of her wide-spaced brown eyes.
“It’s bad manners to discuss one’s hostess, as it is one’s guests; but speaking only in a literary sense, I do find that some literary figures discompose one, so that one says anything, and plays the vapid fool.”
“I know, Mr. Maddison. You’re like all sensitive artists: chameleonic. Here she comes.”
Mrs. Portal-Welch was making her way towards them: a determinedly bright, kind figure in purple velvet offset with gold brocade, one able to make at any moment’s notice definite pronouncements on literature and the
literati;
having no reserve, she said what came into her mind—and when he responded with a matrix of her manner she at once dismissed it.
“Barbara, I want you to meet Hugh Walpole——”, and taking the girl’s arm, swept away with her.
Left alone, Phillip went into the hall; the thick smoke in the room was oppressive. Where was the lavatory? The tapping of a typewriter drew him downstairs, and knocking on the basement door, he was bidden to enter.
Before him at the kitchen table sat a small, middle-aged man at an ancient typewriter like a model of the inside of Albert Hall including the organ. Telling himself to remember this Compton Mackenzie-like simile, Phillip said, “I’m afraid I’ve interrupted your literary work, sir.”
“You have not! And it isn’t
my
literary work! It’s my wife’s!”
“How interesting, sir. Do you like literature?”
“I
hate
literature!”
Phillip decided to ask no more questions. The quiet small gentleman wearing gold-wired spectacles then said, “What was that noise upstairs? Was anyone being murdered?”
“Not more than usual,” replied Phillip, beginning to enjoy himself. “I mean,” he hastened to add, thinking that his remark was perhaps an implied criticism, “in a sense we are all being murdered, or murdering, by degrees. Oh!” he added, realising that he was probably talking to Mrs. Portal-Welch’s husband—“I mean generally speaking, sir! I really wasn’t implying any criticism of this afternoon’s gathering of the
literati!”
“I was hoping you were!”
Phillip laughed, and dropped his pretence of upper-class aloofness. “I suppose all writers are egoists, in a way.”
“You’ve found that out, too, have you?”
“I’ve been one myself for a year.”
“Ah,” said the amateur typist, leaning back on his wooden chair. For a moment his face was sad; then he looked up, having put away personal thoughts. “So
you’re
a writer, are you?”
“I try to be.”
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-five.”
“Fortunate youth! You have plenty of time in which to give it up!”
“Yes, I suppose it’s an utterly unnatural occupation, sir. I mean, life goes on, moment by moment, each with its visual records, until the mind is like a junk shop. Sometimes I think that the difference between youth and age is merely the number of visual records that impinge. But I mustn’t lay down the law.”
“Why not? Every other man and woman lays down the law, why not you? We couldn’t be in a worse mess, so a few more good intentions won’t matter either way.”
“The world has always been like that, I suppose.”
“Oh, no! It began with the idea of democracy, and the heresy that all men are born equal. Don’t you believe the world was always like that row upstairs!”
“Well, sir, I mustn’t keep you from your work. By the way, is there a——”
“You want the throne? Over there, down that passage.”
Peering at a sheet of manuscript, the typist assaulted it with the index fingers of both hands, making the noise of a machine-gun as he filled up a blank afternoon—something to do—anything rather than confront the grey inner weight of loneliness.
When Phillip returned to the drawing-room Poppett threaded her way through the crowd and said in a low voice, “‘Sappho’ is going to ask you to stay to supper to meet Violet Hunt, who liked your piece in the
English
Review,
and I want to protect you from that literary praying mantis with the face of an angel. Listen. I’ve already agreed to go to Charley Underlight’s studio, and they said I might bring you. So will you tell ‘Sappho’ that you’re already engaged—but don’t say anything about me, will you?”
“All right, but are you sure you won’t be bored with me?”
“I shouldn’t ask you if I thought I would.” She lowered her voice. “Listen, Phillip. You leave now, and I’ll follow you. Wait for me round the corner by the ’bus stop. Then we’ll go to my flat. I’ve got some simply heavenly gramophone records I want you to hear!”
Ten minutes later they were in a large studio annexe to a house in an adjoining road. Before she had gone to the literary
salon
—or was it saloon with all that tobacco smoke?—Poppett apparently had been re-doing the parquet floor surrounds with dark oak-varnish stain. The brush stood in water in a jam pot. He offered to continue the work, but she said not now, and they sat before the gas fire.
He felt constrained, and said before he could think, “Do you paint your face also, Poppett?”
“Are you trying to be rude?”
“Not at all,” he replied, recovering from the shock of his sudden gaucherie to say, “I meant, surely when you dance on the stage you have to have
some
sort of make-up? But perhaps it’s done by a ‘dresser’?”
“You know I’m not a ballerina! What you just said was an afterthought, wasn’t it?”
“It was.” There followed an awkward and almost wretched silence. He felt they disliked one another.
“You’re not at home at ‘Sappho’s’, are you?” she said.
“I can’t be myself there.”
“You’re very sensitive to atmosphere.”
“Yes,” he said, and before he could think, began to stroke her hair.
“I feel I want to purr,” she whispered. “What were you talking about to Barbara?”
“Francis Thompson.”
“Was that all?”
“Yes. ‘Great Pan is dead’.”
“Don’t stop stroking my head. I love it.”
He felt quite chummy, but did not kiss her. She got up to play records of
Petrouchka.
Too soon it was time to leave for the Underlights’ studio. As he was helping her on with her overcoat she said, “Dam’ bad coat this, I look as though I am going to have twins.”
“I have a son of twelve months old.”
“I’ve got several illegits,” she replied, not to be outdone.
They walked arm in arm under the street lamps. All he knew about Charles Underlight was his theatrical posters. When they arrived he heard dance music. And he was wearing tweed coat, riding breeches, fleecy camel-hair stockings, and nailed brogues, ready for a walk to the chalk quarry! (He had come prepared to ask Poppett & Co. to leave ‘Sappho’s’ party.) However, Mrs. Underlight soon reassured him. He danced with her in stocking’d feet.
Afterwards he took Poppett to the Café Royal. “This,” he said, “is the very table where I sat when first I saw Tenby Jones with a model. It was in December, 1915. When is he going to paint you?”
“Do you know, I’ve not the least idea!”
“But I thought you said——”
“Yes, I did, to tease Jimmy.”
“Oh yes, Broughton.”
“What do you think of him?”
“Well, I’m prejudiced, Poppett, for he likes my work.”
“So do I.”
“I’d no idea that
you
liked it!”
“Brilliant, darling! That was a wonderful scene you read to us in the chalk quarry last Sunday. Jimmy has been talking about it ever since.”
This was a new aspect of Poppett.
They drank more coffee. She looked at her tiny wristlet watch. “I must fly, my sweet! My ’bus goes from Shaftesbury Avenue. It’s been lovely with you.”
The night over London was fine, the moon shone above Eros.
“May I see you home? I don’t want to leave you, you see! Let me call a taxi!”
He sat still beside her, unsure of her now. “Do you mind asking the driver to stop at the end of Alexandra Road, Phillip?”
They got out, and walked down the road. “Are you sure I’m not taking you out of your way, Phillip?”
“Not at all.”
They walked on. At her gate she said, “Would you like to come in for some tea? Don’t make a sound, will you?”
He walked on the welts of his shoes, to avoid the tap of nailed soles, keeping in the shadows of the moon.
Inside her flat there was still a smell of varnish. “Sorry about this, Phillip.”
“I can smell only your Eau de Nil, is that it?”
“Ah, the voice of experience! I’ll put on the kettle.”
They sat by the gas fire waiting for the kettle to boil on the ring. “What’s that other manuscript in your pocket? Anything about me?”
“Would you like to hear it?”
“M’m!” She snuggled beside him. When he had read it she said, “You really did want to kiss me in the woods, after all! I thought you did. Now tell me, how do you know so much about Tenby Jones?”
“I watched him while he was watching me,”
“How often have you seen him?”
“Twice in the Café Royal during the war, and once again in France. He was painting among the ruins of Albert when I passed on a wheeled stretcher to the Field Ambulance.”
“Were you wounded?”