The Green Room

by Walter De la Mare

  The book he was now examining was not exactly a penny “blood.” In spite of appearances it must have cost at least sixpence. The once black ink on it pages had faded, and mildew dappled the leaves. The handwriting was irregular, with protracted loops. And what was written in the book consisted of verses, interlarded with occasional passages in prose, and a day or a date here and there, and all set down apparently just as it had taken the writer’s fancy. And since many of the verses were heavily corrected and some of them interlined, Alan concluded—without any very unusual acumen!—that they were homemade. Moreover, on evidence as flimsy as this, he had instantly surmised who this E.F. was, and that here was not only her book, but a book of her own authorship. So completely, too, had his antipathy to the writer of it now vanished out of memory, so swiftly had the youthful, tragic face in the photograph secreted itself in his sentiments, that he found himself reading these scribbled “effusions” with a mind all but bereft of its critical faculties. And of these the young man had hitherto rather boasted himself.

  Still, poetry, good or bad, depends for its very life on the hospitable reader, as tinder awaits the spark. After that, what else matters? The flame leaps, the bosom glows! And as Alan read on he never for an instant doubted that here, however faultily expressed, was what the specialist is apt to call “a transcript of life.” He knew of old—how remotely of old it now seemed—what feminine wiles are capable of; but here, surely, was the truth of self to self. He had greedily and yet with real horror looked forward to his reappearance here, as if Mr. Elliott’s little parlour was the positive abode of the Evil One. And yet now that he was actually pecking about beneath the very meshes of his nets, he was drinking in those call-notes as if they were cascading down upon him out of the heavens from the throat of Shelley’s skylark itself. For what is Time to the artifices of Eros? Had he not (with Chaucer’s help) once fallen head over ears in love with the faithless Criseyde? He drank in what he had begun to read as if his mind wore a wilderness thirsty for rain, though the pall of cloud that darkened the window behind him was supplying it in full volume. He was elated and at the same time dejected at the thought that he was perhaps the very first human creature, apart from the fountain-head, to sip of these secret waters.

  And he had not read very far before he realized that its contents referred to an actual experience as well as to one of the imagination. He realized too that the earlier poems had been written at rather long intervals; and, though he doubted very much if they were first attempts, that their technique tended to improve as they went on—at least, that of the first twenty poems or so. With a small ivory pocket paper-knife which he always carried about with him he was now delicately separating page 12 from page 13, and he continued to read at random:

  There was sweet water once,

  Where in my childhood I

  Watched for the happy innocent nonce

  Day’s solemn clouds float by.

  O age blur not that glass;

  Kind Heaven still shed thy rain;

  Even now sighs shake me as I pass

  Those gentle haunts again.

  He turned over the page:

  Lullay, my heart, and find thy peace

  Where thine old solitary pastures lie;

  Their light, their dews need never cease,

  Nor sunbeams from on high.

  Lullay, and happy dream, nor roam,

  Wild though the hills may shine,

  Once there, thou soon would’st long for home,

  As I for mine!

  and then:

  Do you see; O, do you see?—

  Speak—and some inward self that accent

  knows

  Bidding the orient East its rose disclose—

  And daybreak wake in me.

  Do you hear? O, do you hear?—

  This heart whose pulse like menacing

  night-bird cries?

  Dark, utter dark, my loved, is in these eyes

  When gaunt good-bye draws near.

  and then, after a few more pages:

  “There is a garden in her face:”

  My face! Woe’s me were that my all!—

  Nay, but my self, though thine its grace,

  Thy fountain is, thy peach-bloomed wall.

  Come soon that twilight dusky hour,

  When thou thy self shalt enter in

  And take thy fill of every flower,

  Since thine they have always been.

  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 inconsistency.

  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 ever 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. Oh 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 re
ad 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:

  To-morrow 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 shall 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 Cesarina 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 to-day. 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 even 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. None the less 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 rebegetter.

  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. None the less 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 loped 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;