‘Well, when that happened I groped round the room for my electric torch. At last I found it, and I think if I had not found it just then I should have suffered even more than I have suffered. I staggered downstairs and into the Great Hall, and flashed the lamp on the table. They were all sitting rigidly, their eyes looking up and focused on the door into the Long Gallery. I peered into their faces one by one. Their eyes were wide, yet drawn in, as though asquint; their heads were strained back on their shoulders; their mouths were open, and foam was on their lips. And then I flashed my torch up towards the door into the Long Gallery, and there — and there——’
The cloud army had advanced so far that it was looming down on them. Two striding horns of vapour preceded it. As the little man cried ‘and there — and there——’ a blinding flash leapt from one to the other, so that these enflamed and curled tentacles drove down at them, or so it seemed most terrifyingly to Mr Packard, and the rending crash of thunder which followed hard upon it hurled its echoes round the world. And then, with inchoate fury, the storm drove forward to the attack. And then the little man leapt to his feet and flung his arms above his head and screamed out as though in agony, ‘Look up there! Look up there!’ Mr Packard moved towards him, but in a second the yokel had him by the shoulders. ‘Leave him to me,’ he shouted against the thunder, ‘I know what to do.’ And he began to propel the little man before him. Mr Packard, oblivious of the rain, stared after them. With a horrid regularity the little man flung up his arms and screamed, ‘Look up there!’ and presently they turned a corner and disappeared, and the screams grew fainter. For a moment Mr Packard stared upwards too, and then, as another flash speared down to the sea, he came to himself, and turning up the collar of his coat, started to run through the blinding rain back to the hotel.
‘Written in Our Flesh’
MR TIMOTHY FRONE put down his pencil. It was true, he supposed, that one could write poetry, he knew it was true that one could write prose, de profundis, but only a human type-writer could pen newspaper paragraphs about inane and despicable minutiae when his heart was in his boots. He couldn’t, anyway, though his next meal — his very life — depended upon it. But was he so anxious to live? Three weeks ago he had been, when he had first seen his novel on sale at Mr Denny’s shop in the Strand, and then a little later at the bookstall at Waterloo. He had bought three copies — all he could afford — to encourage the others — the price of a paragraph. That first excitement and tempered elation over, he had waited desperately for news. He had longed to ring up his publishers to learn how it was going. But he had waited three weeks and then gone round to see them, and had sat trembling in the waiting-room till his summons had come. The Senior Partner received him with resigned and practised amiability. ‘Not very good news, I’m afraid, Mr Frone,’ he said, holding out his cigarette case.
And Mr Frone had said, ‘Oh, I’m sorry to hear that,’ and he had fixed his eyes on a pile of manuscripts on Mr Dickinson’s table which seemed to be wavering slightly like an earthquake-shaken pagoda.
‘Can’t get the reviews,’ continued Mr Dickinson. ‘As you know I have always believed in your novel, but it is impossible for a book, however distinguished, to make its way unless the reviewers help it. We have advertised it, of course, but a book by an unknown writer cannot be helped much by advertising unless we can append to the bare announcement of its publication some extracts from a favourable review by a well-known critic.’
‘No, I realise that,’ said Mr Frone. ‘Isn’t it selling at all?’
‘We subscribed two hundred and twenty copies — to such depths has the novel business sunk! We have had small repeats here and there, but I’m afraid the total is not yet three hundred.’
‘Then it’s what you would call a hopeless dud, I suppose?’ said Mr Frone.
Mr Dickinson looked down at his fingers, which were tapping his desk.
‘Oh, it’s too soon to pronounce quite such a depressing verdict as that, and, as I have said, I know it to be good work. It just wants a push and then it would start to sell. For example, if Reginald Stall were to mention it favourably in one of his Wireless talks I am certain we should sell at least five thousand copies.’
‘Oh, really,’ said Mr Frone, ‘is he so influential as all that?’
‘Most certainly he is. He can make or break, but he can only break by keeping silence, for even a slating from him is very much better than nothing. Yet there is no man whose opinion I less respect. All the same, you can’t manage anything in that direction, I suppose?’
‘I’m very much afraid not. I have a friend on the Banner who knows him, but he told me that Mr Stall never notices any book if he is asked to do so.’
‘Unless the suppliant has a handle to his or her name,’ rejoined the publisher dryly.
‘Well, then, I suppose there is nothing I can do,’ said Mr Frone.
‘Only by mobilising any journalistic influence you may possess. I have been in this game too long to retain any illusions. I’d rather be a Charles Garvice with good Press backing than a Joseph Conrad without any. The best may come to the top, but the upward pressure from the right friends in the right newspaper offices is the easiest way for it to do so. Perhaps that is too cynical, but the publication of fiction is not calculated to foster credulous optimism. However, we must hope for the best.’
‘Poor little devil,’ thought Mr Dickinson when Mr Frone had gone, ‘he always reminds me of a small bird with a broken wing.’
It was the impression left by this interview which had frustrated Mr Frone’s attempts to make much headway with ‘A Day in the Life of Queen Souriya’, although the editor of the Echo had been quite enthusiastic, and for three chatty paragraphs on the subject had offered to pay £1 17s. 6d. — one week’s rent and seven meals. But Mr Frone lacked the heart to improvise.
The room in which he lived and worked and slept was the epitome of utter and shameless shabbiness. Had it been on the top floor it would have been quite unarguably a garret. He looked round it, and a sense of final disgust and defeat and nauseating repulsion surged through him; such as greatly oppresses those with the instincts of gentlemen — however simple their tastes — when squalor is their inevitable portion and somehow they feel they have not quite deserved it. And then there was a rap on the door and Mr Waller thrust his vital, bustling person into the room.
‘I’ve got news for you, Tim,’ he exclaimed, ‘very, very good news. Stall is going to review your book from 2LO tonight.’
Mr Frone’s heart gave a hard thump, missed three beats, so that he leaned forward quickly to get his breath, and then began working spasmodically and uncertainly, and he had to cough sharply to disguise the fact that this rather urgent inconvenience was troubling him.
‘Well, that is good news,’ he said; ‘are you sure?’ (How desperately he wanted to be sure.)
‘Yes, quite. He was in the office today and asked me to tell him about you, as he was very impressed with the book. I filled him up with the right stuff I can assure you. I asked his typist afterwards, and she said you were down for tonight for certain.’
‘It certainly will make a difference,’ said Mr Frone. ‘I’ve been feeling rather depressed about it. It hasn’t begun to sell yet, and I was afraid it was destined to be a hopeless failure.’
‘Well, you needn’t worry any more; you’re a made man. Every library will be clamouring for copies tomorrow morning, and your publishers’ Trade Department will look as if it had been hit by a hurricane.’
‘I’d like to hear what he has to say,’ said Mr Frone.
‘Then come along to my rooms tonight. My wireless set is primitive, but it usually functions.’
‘That’s awfully good of you. What time shall I come?’
‘The rag-time pundit clears his throat precisely at 9:25. Come along at nine and we’ll have a drink to tomorrow’s Best Seller,’ said Mr Waller, and he dashed away on one of his many occasions.
When he had gone Mr Frone put his han
d to his left side. Good heavens! how his heart was going, it seemed to leap, die and then struggle and stutter. That was what the doctor had meant by saying he must avoid sudden strains and shocks, but he couldn’t have meant such wonderful shocks as this; no one could die from hearing such news as that. He must go out, he couldn’t sit still. He walked to St James’s Park and leaned over the bridge. Small beady-eyed ducks looked expectantly up at him, and then dived, necks strained forward, gleaning stray scraps of fodder from the lake’s bottom. Trim, cruising gulls cocked their heads and screamed nervously at him; a gusty breeze raised tiny waves, and a pair of mallards planed down, raised a spray flurry and shook their tails.
Mr Frone’s heart regained its rhythm, his tingling nervousness subsided, and he sat down on a bench overlooking the water. What a blessed relief to be able to think about his book again. Ever since he had felt in his bones it was a failure he had been unable to recall it to his mind without almost physical nausea. The years he had spent upon it! In a sense he had given his life to it, conceived it, borne it, lived with it and known that it was good. He would probably never write another. He knew that he was not a natural novelist, he was too autobiographical, his imaginative power and impulse were sluggish and feeble, and writing a book was a great and agonising ordeal for a person of his intellectual type. If only all the careless people who read a novel a day could realise the sheer, maddening, torturing difficulty of finding words with which to say just what one wanted to say and just as one wanted to say it! One had a sense of death when one wrote finis. A stage of life was past, a child had been born, a purpose fulfilled, and simultaneously came nostalgia, exhaustion, a sense of nearing death. Perhaps that was only true of novels as autobiographical as his, wherein one’s consciousness attempted the miracle of explaining itself to itself. What had it really done? Seen itself in a glass darkly — caught a glimpse, a fleeting glimpse, of reality — certainly it had obeyed an urgent instruction, whatever its origin, whatever its justification. Possibly it was just trying to draw a pig with one’s eyes shut. Anyhow, when one had done it, one longed, for some obscure reason, to have an audience, even for something so personal and subjective and so self-compelled. That was rather a mystery. The author always wishes for company, always longs to get that warming, quickening certainty that someone is saying to himself as he reads, ‘I understand. We’re in the same boat, even if we’re just sinking together.’ How brutal then, how remorselessly brutal, to know that all had been for nothing, that the audience was amusing itself elsewhere, that one had written an absolute and unsaleable dud. That was how he had felt, but he needn’t feel it any longer. By this time tomorrow, if what his publishers said was true, and it surely must be, the audience would be eagerly assembling and some of them would be beginning to say, ‘I understand,’ and that lifelong loneliness of his would be passing away, that spiritual loneliness. And he’d have money enough for two rooms, no more vile degrading hack prostitution, perhaps enough even to travel — not that he’d even learn properly how to spend money, for you couldn’t teach poor old dogs new expensive tricks. Yes, now he could think of his book with a most blessed feeling of happiness and hope and confidence. After all it wasn’t so bad. Here and there he had contrived just the effect he had aimed at. It was not too well-constructed perhaps, but well enough; and certain episodes had leaped to life, and he was certain that here and there he had done just precisely what he had tried to do. What had recommended it to this so miracle-working an oracle as Mr Stall? He must have hundreds of novels to choose from, so that the very few he selected to review must have seized his attention in some sharp and dominating way. Was there anything in Written in Our Flesh to attract so eclectic and godlike an authority? Heaven knew he was modest enough; life had given him precious little reason to be otherwise. All the same it might have a certain sincerity, perhaps a precision of attack, an absence of pose. It might carry a conviction that it had all happened and that most of it had hurt. Even a hardened reviewer, if he were as acute and accomplished a critic as Mr Stall, would take from a book like that what the author had meant to have had taken. Waller had called him ‘a Rag-Time Pundit’, but he was not remarkable for reverence towards his colleagues. Anyhow, he’d know the answers to these tentative questions in a few hours. How marvellous, how unbelievable it sounded! These people passing by him in endless, strolling nonchalance might have his name on their lips by tomorrow. ‘Have you read Written in Our Flesh by a fellow called Frone? Reginald Stall recommended it most highly. I tried to get a copy at Hatchards’ today but they were sold out, not a copy left.’ What childish nonsense, and yet how irresistibly exciting! And it hadn’t happened yet! But it would. He felt a sudden insistent desire to go back to his room and take up his book, from which for the last three weeks he had deliberately averted his eyes, as it lay gathering dust on the top shelf of his tiny bookcase, take it up and open it — as Mr Stall must have done — and begin to read through it from the beginning and pause, as Mr Stall must have done, at certain felicities of phrasing, evidences of insight, and those unmistakable shadings of expression, which reveal the born writer. All of which was rather absurd, as he almost knew the book by heart, but to the author a praised passage is always worth re-reading — though there could be for him no such pleasant surprises, such quiet little shocks of appreciation, as must have come to Mr Stall and persuaded him to select the book containing them from the towering tumulus of fiction at his august disposal, for the subject of part one of his most potent and oracular disquisitions. Rather absurd, of course, but Mr Frone felt compelled to do so. He walked hurriedly back to Number 5 Manton Street, smacked the dust from its paper jacket and settled himself to peruse Written in Our Flesh.
There were even fewer women in the book than there had been in its author’s life, but there had been one of some significance in each, and in each case she had disappeared rather early from the proceedings.
He turned over the pages, but instead of reading the passages of which he felt fairly satisfied, he would examine again one or two of those which were concerned with his heroine, though that was a somewhat grandiose term with which to describe the fleeting wraith whose breath had barely clouded the mirror of the first third of the book, and whose influence so thinly affected the other two-thirds.
For she had broken off her engagement with him and married someone else when he was twenty-four. Well, then, let him read again that passage where the heroine breaks off her engagement with the hero — God save the mark — aged twenty-four and married someone else.
Harry dear, I love you in a way and I don’t love this other man, but I’m one of those women who can and must deliberately and in a way contentedly crush their sense of decency, the better but weaker side of them, to powder, if they are compelled to choose between a failure and a success. You aren’t and never could be a success. I know it, I know it — as I mean success! If you like I am a frigid, calculating, though oh, so respectable, prostitute! I am selling myself, but I know I am right to do so, for it is what my nature tells me I must do. I have stated the case to myself fairly. I have set my love for you against the clothes, the luxuries, the ease, the sense of security, the never having to think about money. I was never meant to have to think about money. If you were a different kind of man I’d be your mistress after I was married. I’m that sort of woman, for I love you, I love you, but you are not that kind of man. Harry darling, I can’t bear darned socks, darned sheets, darned cheapness any more. I may be selling myself, but think what I shall be able to buy with the price! God bless you!
Well, what would Mr Stall think of that? Not much probably. For it was unlikely that he would recognise it as a verbatim report. But it was. That passage occurred at the end of Chapter VI, and from then on Written in Our Flesh was quite lacking in feminine interest or complication.
Mr Frone then decided to read over some other passages which were more likely to have tickled the highly critical palate of Mr Stall. He did so, and then began to feel very sleepy.
He looked at his watch — 5:30. Time to rest a while before going to dinner. But before settling himself down, he took up a foolscap sheet headed ‘A Day in the Life of Queen Souriya’ and tore it into very small pieces and threw the scraps into the waste-paper basket. And then he lay back in his one easy-chair and closed his eyes. As he grew drowsy a curious picture began to form itself in some back area of his brain. He seemed to be watching an enormous beast, half animal, half reptile, which was stretched back as far as he could view it down a street and cramming the pavement with its bulk. This beast was on the move and passing its length through the door of a building. And above the door was inscribed the motto, ‘Book Club’. The beast was furnished with tentacles and fins, and, as he could see by glancing through a window, it was seizing with its tentacles books at random and pulling them down from shelves and thrusting them under its fins. And this beast seemed to be so fluid of composition that it was flowing both in and out of the door of this building, and that portion entering seemed to merge in and pass through that portion coming out, and the effect reminded him of an attempted impression of a fourth dimensional figure in a work he had read devoted to that recondite subject. This beast had one other peculiarity — it owned no head. ‘That,’ he said to himself, just before he dropped off to sleep, ‘is the aspect of the reading public which obsesses the Unread, but I cannot imagine why it should have come to me, for after today I shall no longer be included in that category.’
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