Sweet to its sepals was the unfolding rose.
Why, then—though wind-blown, hither, thither,
I languish still, rot on, and wither
Yet live, God only knows.
A queer, intent, an almost hunted expression drew over Mr. Elliott’s greyish face as he read on.
“Now I wonder,” he said at last, firmly laying the book down again and turning an eye as guileless as an infant’s to meet Alan’s scrutiny, “I wonder now who could have written that? Not that I flatter myself to be much of a judge. I leave that to my customers, sir.”
“There is an E.F. cut out on the corner,” said Alan, “and,” the words came with difficulty, “there is a photograph inside. But then I suppose,” he added hastily, automatically putting out his hand for the book and withdrawing it again, “I suppose just a loose photograph doesn’t prove anything. Not at least to whom it belonged—the book, I mean.”
“No, sir,” said the bookseller, as if he thoroughly enjoyed little problems of this nature; “in a manner of speaking I suppose it don’t.” But he made no attempt to find the photograph, and a rather prolonged pause followed.
“It’s quiet in that room in there,” Alan managed to remark at last. “Extraordinarily quiet. You haven’t yourself, I suppose, ever noticed the book before?”
Mr. Elliott removed both pairs of spectacles from the bridge of his nose. “Quiet is the word, sir,” he replied, in a voice suiting the occasion. “And it’s quieter yet in the two upper rooms above it. Especially of a winter’s evening. Mrs. Elliott and me don’t use that part of the house much, though there is a good bit of lumber stowed away in the nearest of ’em. We can’t sell more than a fraction of the books we get, sir, so we store what’s over up there for the pulpers. I doubt if I have even so much as seen the inside of the other room these six months past. As a matter of fact,” he pursed his mouth and nodded, “what with servant-girls and the like, and not everybody being as commonsensical as most, we don’t mention it much.”
The bookseller’s absent eye was now fixed on the rain-soaked street, and Alan waited, leaving his “What?” unsaid.
“You see, sir, the lady that lived with Dr. Marchmont here—his niece, or ward or whatever it may be—well, they say she came to what they call an untimely end. A love affair. But there, for the matter of that you can’t open your evening newspaper without finding more of such things than you get in a spring season’s fiction. Strychnine, sir—that was the way of it; and it isn’t exactly the poison I myself should choose for the purpose. It erects up the body like an arch, sir. So.” With a gesture of his small square hand Mr. Elliott pictured the effect in the air. “Dr. Marchmont hadn’t much of a practice by that time, I understand; but I expect he came to a pretty sudden standstill when he saw that on the bed. A tall man, sir, with a sharp nose.”
Alan refrained from looking at the bookseller. His eyes stayed fixed on the doorway which led out into the world beyond, and they did not stir. But he had seen the tall dark man with the sharp nose as clearly as if he had met him face to face, and was conscious of a repulsion far more deadly than the mere features would seem to warrant. And yet; why should he have come to a “standstill” quite like that if... But the bookseller had opened the fusty mildewed book at another page. He sniffed, then having rather pernicketily adjusted his spectacles, read over yet another of the poems:
Esther! came whisper from my bed.
Answer me, Esther—are you there?
’Twas waking self to self that’s dead
Called on the empty stair.
Stir not that pit; she is lost and gone,
A Jew decoyed her to her doom.
Sullenly knolls her passing bell
Mocking me in the gloom.
The old man gingerly turned the leaf, and read on:
Last evening, as I sat alone—
Thimble on finger, needle and thread—
Light dimming as the dusk drew on,
I dreamed that I was dead.
Like wildering timeless plains of snow
Which bitter winds to ice congeal
The world stretched far as sight could go
’Neath skies as hard as steel.
Lost in that nought of night I stood
And watched my body—brain and breast
In dreadful anguish—in the mould
Grope to’rd its final rest.
Its craving dreams of sense dropped down
Like crumbling maggots in the sod:
Spectral, I stood; all longing gone,
Exiled from hope and God.
And you I loved, who once loved me,
And shook with pangs this mortal frame,
Were sunk to such an infamy
That when I called your name,
Its knell so racked that sentient clay
That my lost spirit lurking near,
Wailed, like the damned, and fled away—
And woke me, stark with Fear.
He pondered a moment, turned back the leaf again, and holding the book open with his dumpy forefinger, “A Jew now,” he muttered to himself, “I never heard any mention of a Jew. But what, if you follow me,” he added, tapping on the open page with his spectacles, “what I feel about such things as these is that they’re not so much what may be called mournful as morbid, sir. They rankle. I don’t say, mind you, there isn’t a ring of truth in them—but it’s so put, if you follow me, as to make it worse. Why, if all our little mistakes were dealt with in such a vengeful spirit as this—as this, where would any of us be? And death... Say things out, sir, by all means. But what things? It isn’t human nature, And what’s more,” he finished pensively, “I haven’t noticed that the stuff sells much the better for it.”
Alan had listened but had not paid much attention to these moralizings. “You mean,” he said, “that you think the book did actually belong to the lady who lived here, and that—that it was she herself who wrote the poems? But then you see it’s E.F. on the cover, and I thought you said the name was Marchmont?”
‘Yes, sir, Marchmont. Between you and me, there was a Mrs., I understand; but she went away. And who this young woman was I don’t rightly know. Not much good, I fancy. At least...” he emptily eyed again the blurred lettering of the poem. “But there, sir,” he went on with decision, “there’s no need that I can see to worry about that. The whole thing’s a good many years gone, and what consequence is it now? You’d be astonished how few of my customers really care who wrote a book so long as wrote it was. Which is not to suggest that if we get someone—someone with a name, I mean—to lay out the full story of the young woman as a sort of foreword, there might not be money in it. There might be. It doesn’t much signify nowadays what you say about the dead, not legally, I mean. And especially these poets, sir. It all goes in under ‘biography.’ Besides, a suicide’s a suicide all the world over. On the other hand—” and he glanced over his shoulder, “I rather fancy Mrs. E. wouldn’t care to be mixed up in the affair. What she reads she never much approves of, though that’s the kind of reading she likes best. The ladies can be so very scrupulous.”
Alan had not seen the old bookseller in quite so bright a light as this before.
“What I was wondering, Mr. Elliott,” he replied in tones so frigid they suggested he was at least twenty years older than he appeared to be, “is whether you would have any objection to my sending the book myself to the printers. It’s merely an idea. One can’t tell. It could do no harm. Perhaps whoever it was who wrote the poems may have hoped some day to get them printed—you never know. It would be at my expense, of course. I shouldn’t dream of taking a penny piece and I would rather there were no introduction—by any one. There need be no name or address on the title page, need there? But this is of course only if you see no objection?”
Mr. Elliott had once more li
fted by an inch or two the back cover of the exercise book, as if possibly in search of the photograph. He found only this pencilled scrawl:
Well, well, well! squeaked the kitten to the cat;
Mousie refuses to play any more! so that’s
the end of that!
He shut up the book and rested his small plump hand on it.
“I suppose, sir,” he inquired discreetly, “there isn’t any risk of any infringement of copyright? I mean,” he added, twisting round his unspectacled face a little in Alan’s direction, “there isn’t likely to be anybody who would recognize what’s in here? I am not of course referring to the photograph, but a book, even nowadays, may be what you may call too true spoken—when it’s new, I mean. And it’s not so much Mrs. E. I have in mind now as the police,” he whispered the word—“the police.”
Alan returned his blurred glance without flinching.
“Oh, no…” he said. “Besides I should merely put E.F. on the title page and say it had been printed privately. I am quite prepared to take the risk.”
The cold tones of the young man seemed to have a little daunted the old bookseller.
“Very well, sir. I will have just a word with a young lawyer friend of mine, and if that’s all right, why, sir, you are welcome.”
“And the books could be sold from here?”
“‘Sold?’ Why, yes, sir—they’ll have plenty of respectable company, at any rate.”
But if Alan had guilelessly supposed that the mere signing of a cheque for £33 10s. in settlement of a local printer’s account would finally exile a ghost that now haunted his mind far more persistently than it could ever have haunted Mr. Elliott’s green parlour, he soon discovered his mistake. He had kept the photograph, but had long since given up any attempt to find his way through the maze in which he found himself. Why, why should he concern himself with what an ill-starred life had done to that young face? If the heart, if the very soul is haunted by a ghost, need one heed the frigid dictates of the mind? Infatuated young man, he was in servitude to one who had left the world years before he was born, and had left it, it seemed, only the sweeter by her exit. He was sick for love of one who was once alive but was now dead, and—why should he deny it? Mrs. E. wouldn’t!—damned.
Still, except by way of correspondence he avoided Mr. Elliott and his parlour for weeks, until in fact the poems were finally in print, until their neat grey deckled paper covers had been stitched on, and the copies were ready for a clamorous public! So it was early one morning in the month of June before he once more found himself in the old bookseller’s quiet annexe. The bush of lilac, stirred by the warm languid breeze at the window, was shaking free its faded once-fragrant tassels of bloom and tapering heart-shaped leaves from the last dews of night. The young poplars stood like gold-green torches against the blue of the sky. A thrush was singing somewhere out of sight. It was a scene worthy of Arcady.
Alan had trailed through life without any positive need to call on any latent energy he might possess. And now that he had seen through the press his first essay in publishing a reaction had set in. A cloud of despondency shadowed his young features as he stared out through the glass of the window. Through the weeks gone by he had been assuring himself that it was no more than an act of mere decency to get the poems into print. A vicarious thirty pounds or so, just to quiet his conscience. What reward was even thinkable? And yet but a few nights before he had found himself sitting up in bed in the dark of the small hours just as if there had come a tap upon the panel of his door or a voice had summoned him out of dream. He had sat up, leaning against his bed-rail, exhausted by his few hours’ broken sleep. And in the vacancy of his mind had appeared yet again in silhouette against the dark the living presentment of the young face of the photograph. Merely the image of a face floating there, with waxen downcast lids, the features passive as those of a death-mask—as unembodied an object as the afterimage of a flower. There was no speculation in the downcast eyes, and in that lovely longed-for face; no, nothing whatever for him—and it had faded out as a mirage of green-fronded palm trees and water fades in the lifeless sands of the desert.
He hadn’t any desire to sleep again that night. Dreams might come; and wakeful questions pestered him. How old was she when the first of the poems was written? How old when no more came, and she herself had gone on—gone on? That barren awful road of disillusionment, satiety, self-disdain. Had she even when young and untroubled ever been happy? Was what she had written even true? How far are poems true? What had really happened? What had been left out? You can’t even tell—yourself—what goes on in the silent places of your mind when you have swallowed, so to speak, the dreadful outside things of life. What, for example, had Measure for Measure to do with the author of Venus and Adonis, and what Don Juan with Byron as a child? One thing, young women of his own day didn’t take their little affairs like that. They kept life in focus. But that ghost! The ravages, the point, the insidiousness, the very clothes!
Coming to that, then, who the devil had he been taking such pains over? The question kept hammering at his mind day after day; it was still unanswered, showed no promise of an answer. And the Arcadian scene beyond the windows suddenly became an irony and a jeer. The unseen bird itself sang on in vulgar mockery, ‘Come off of it! Come off of it! Come off of it! Dolt, dolt, dolt!’
He turned away out of the brightness of the light, and fixed his eyes on the bulky brown paper package that contained the printed volumes. It was useless to stay here any longer. He would open the package, but merely to take a look at a copy and assure himself that no ingenuity of the printer had restored any little aberration of spelling or punctuation which he himself had corrected three times in the proofs. He knew the poems—or some of them—by heart now.
With extreme reluctance he had tried one or two of them on a literary friend—“An anonymous thing, you know, I came across it in an old book.”
The friend had been polite rather than enthusiastic. After, cigarette between fingers, idly listening to a few stanzas, he had smiled and asked Alan if he had ever read a volume entitled Poems of Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell.
“Well, there you are! A disciple of Acton’s, dear boy, if you ask me. Stuff as common as blackberries!”
And Alan had welcomed the verdict. He didn’t want to share the poems with anybody. If nobody bought them and nobody cared, what matter? All the better. And he wasn’t being sentimental about them now either. He didn’t care if they had any literary value or not. He had entrusted himself with them, and that was the end of the matter. What was Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba? What?
And what did it signify that he had less right to the things even than Mrs. Elliott—who fortunately was never likely to stake out any claim. The moral ashbins old women can be, he thought bitterly. Simply because this forlorn young creature of the exercise book had been forced at last to make her exit from the world under the tragic but hardly triumphant arch of her own body, this old woman had put her hand over her mouth and looked “volumes” at that poor old henpecked husband of hers even at mention of her name. Suicides, of course, are a nuisance in any house. But all those years gone by! And what did they know the poor thing had done to merit their insults? He neither knew nor cared, yet for some obscure reason steadily wasted at least five minutes in untying the thick knotted cord of the parcel instead of chopping it up with his pocket knife in the indignant fashion which he had admired when he visited the printers.
The chastest little pile of copies was disclosed at last in their grey-blue covers and with their enrichingly rough edges. The hand-made paper had been an afterthought. A further cheque was ·due to the printer, but Alan begrudged not a farthing. He had even incited them to be expensive. He believed in turning things out nicely—even himself. He and his pretty volumes were “a pair!”
Having opened the parcel, having neatly folded up its prodigal wrappings of brown paper, and thrown a
way the padding and hanked the string, there was nothing further to do. He sat back in Mr. Elliott’s old Windsor chair, leaning his chin on his knuckles. He was waiting, though he didn’t confess it to himself. What he did confess to himself was that he was sick of it all. Age and life’s usage may obscure, cover up, fret away a fellow creature at least as irrevocably as six feet of common clay.
When then he raised his eyes at some remote inward summons he was already a little hardened in hostility. He was looking clean across the gaily-lit room at its other occupant standing there in precisely the same attitude—the high-heeled shoe coquettishly arched on the lower of the three steps, the ridiculous flaunting hat, the eyes aslant beneath the darkened lids casting back on him their glitter from over a clumsy blur that was perfectly distinct on the cheek-bone in the vivid light of this June morning. And even this one instant’s glimpse clarified and crystallized all his old horror and hatred. He knew that she had seen the tender first-fruits on the table. He knew that he had surprised a gleam of triumph in her snakish features, and he knew that she no more cared for that past self and its literary exercises than she cared for his silly greenhorn tribute to them. What then was she after?
The darkening glittering spectral eyes were once more communicating with him with immense rapidity, and yet were actually conveying about as empty or as mindless a message as eyes can. If half-extinguished fires in a dark room can be said to look coy, these did. But a coyness practised in a face less raddled and ravaged by time than by circumstance is not an engaging quality. “Arch!” My God, “arch” was the word!
Alan was shivering. How about the ravages that life’s privy paw had made in his own fastidious consciousness? Had his own heart been a shade more faithful would the horror which he knew was now distorting his rather girlish features and looking out of his pale blue eyes have been quite so poisonously bitter?
Fortunately his back was turned to the window, and he could in part conceal his face with his hand before this visitor had had time to be fully aware what that face was saying. She had stirred. Her head was trembling slightly on her shoulders. Every tinily exquisite plume in the mauve ostrich feathers on her drooping hat trembled as if in sympathy. Her ringed fingers slipped down from the door to her narrow hip; her painted eyelids narrowed, as if she were about to speak to him. But at this moment there came a sudden flurry of wind in the lilac tree at the window, ravelling its dried-up flowers and silky leaves. She stooped, peered; and then, with a sharp, practised, feline, seductive nod, as bold as grass-green paint, she was gone. An instant or two, and in the last of that dying gust, the door above at the top of the narrow staircase, as if in a sudden access of bravado, violently slammed—‘Touch me, tap at me, force me, if you dare!’
The Green Room Page 4
