Complete Short Stories (58 page)

Her death was sad. One of her many descendants – though married at thirty-six, she was already a great-grandmother – got involved in a libel action which threatened crippling damages, and came to her for help. The worry caused a nervous breakdown, the local doctor could not deal with the case, and my once ‘practised-on’ elder sister, who
had become a very good doctor, happened to be holidaying in Austria and got back too late to save her life.

What lessons I learned from my mother can be told in very few words. She taught me to despise fame and riches, not to be deceived by appearances, to tell the truth on all possible occasions – I regret having taken her too literally at times – and to keep my head in time of danger. I have
inherited her conscience, her disinterest in sartorial fashions, her joy in making marmalades and jams, and her frugality (I hate throwing away crusts) though it often conflicts with a spendthrift extravagance learned from my father. I have not inherited her dogma, which was the cause of her sadly cutting me from her will when my wife and I separated – but she remembered the children instead, and
eventually welcomed my remarriage. One word of wisdom, which she whispered to me when I was seven years old, has always stuck in my mind, and I pass it on to my children and grandchildren – by the way I became a great-grandparent last year.

‘Robert,’ she said, ‘this is a great secret, never forget it!
Work is far more interesting than play.’

Hence my obsession with work, which is also my play.

After her death I was sent that gold Tara brooch, which arrived in the mail with its pin missing. I took it to a Spanish jeweller to have a new gold pin fitted, but he assured me that a gold one would be unnecessary, since the brooch itself was not gold but pinchbeck. That surprised me. My mother had always worn it for gold, we had always accepted it as gold, and so gold it had remained until
her death. It would have distressed her to know that she had not merely been cheated by the dealer but made party to a fraud on the public… Or would she have taken this as an instance of God’s just punishment on her for indulging female vanity?

There are, I find, variant traditions in our large family about my mother’s life with Miss Briton. Some say that the old lady got justly scared about
money when defrauded of £5,000 by a wicked solicitor, but that life with her was by no means so dreary as in my account. There is even talk of musical evenings: my mother, at the piano, delighting a wide circle of friends with her powerful contralto singing. It is said, too, that my mother cancelled her voyage to India not for my father’s sake, but because of a
peremptory letter from my grandfather
at Munich: ‘If you take this foolish step, my dear Amalia, we, your loving family, are resolved to forget you.’ And that Miss Briton herself, though perhaps at my mother’s insistence, divided her inheritance among all five sisters. They even give the house a different address and disregarding the evidence of a photograph dated 1857, which shows her at the age of two, knock a couple of years
off her age.

Let them say what they like! She was my mother as well as theirs, and every legend of this sort has many variants.

‘
MY FIRST AMOROUS
adventure?’ repeated Lord Godolphin thoughtfully. ‘Well, in our family the tradition never varied much. There was always Miss Crewe, who had inducted my father and probably also my younger granduncle, Charles Martello, into the mysteries of sex. She had kept her little figure astonishingly well. That was due to her fruit diet, someone told me. In a
sense, the tradition was, I agree, somewhat incestuous.’

‘Did Miss Crewe attend to many families?’

‘Not more than a dozen or so, and all in this county. Families like ours. Miss Crewe despised the lesser landed gentry to which she belonged.’

‘May I ask what was her procedure?’

‘It was no secret and, as far as I know, never varied. It began with general theory. The next lesson was sexual anatomy.
The third was amatory practice. The fourth was deportment, or bed manners. The fifth, sixth and seventh were variety, based – I have since discovered – on Sir Richard Burton’s translation of
The Perfumed Garden
, but omitting the chapter on homosexuality.’

‘Did you ever meet Miss Crewe afterward?’

‘Of course. She was a frequent guest at the castle, exceedingly witty and with perfect manners.’

‘Did she educate the girls, too?’

‘Heavens, no! In those remote days a girl had to be
virgo intacta
and innocent as a mountain primrose. But I gather that, just before the wedding night, the bride would manage to extract at least the general sexual theory from her favourite and least discreet brother. I don’t know – we had only boys in our family. By the way, I have often wondered whether Miss
Crewe’s name derived from the act, or vice versa?’

‘What became of her in the end?’

‘She died in harness, so to speak, and – they say – with a saintly smile on her face.’

‘Tell me, though, Godolphin: What was the tradition among your tenantry?’

‘The tradition of first amorous adventure? I found it a trifle ambiguous.
I mean that the women were, or pretended to be, not quite so
practical
as
the men. Take Jock Miller, for example; he was our head cowman and a Scot. One Sunday his wife approached him shyly: “Husband, dinna ye conseeder it high time that oor Duncan should be
instructed
?”

‘“What do ye mean by ‘instructed’, wife?”

‘“I mean instructed into God’s holy mysteries o’ natural reproduction. Hoo bairns are made… Ye maun begin wi’ the pollination o’ flowers.”

‘“Och, aye, wife!
Mebbe I maun do as ye advise me.”

‘A week later, she asked him: “Husband, hae ye done as I asked wi’ oor Duncan? Or did it slip your memory?”

‘“Aye, wife, it did sae. But I’ll gae to him the noo wi’ the instruction.”

‘He found Duncan: “Duncan, laddie” he said, “ye mind what we did wi’ they twa bonny lassies ahint the kirk wall last Sabbath eve?”

‘“Aye, father!”

‘“Weel, Duncan, your mither
would hae ye ken that that was
preecisely
what the bees do wi’ they bonny primroses on the mountain.”’

At this point, everyone in turn began detailing his own first amorous adventure – some comic, some sad, some horrific, few reprintable in a decent family journal. One poor fellow had found himself in bed with an ancient prostitute – brought there, while he was drunk and fast asleep, by witty
Cambridge friends – and got a bad dose from her. Another unfortunate, a clergyman’s son, had been raped by a little flaxen-haired monster for the bet of a box of chocolates. Another had been lured by nuns into a nunnery, very early one morning, at the back of a famous surfing beach at Sydney: apparently that was common practice.

Then, because I had kept silent and was clearly more than a little
embarrassed, they mobbed me: and Lord Godolphin insisted on hearing the very worst.

‘Very well, gentlemen,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to be a spoilsport…’ And this is what I told them:

‘I apologize for being the odd man out, but, as my mother used to say, “Tell the truth and shame the Devil.” I was born in July 1895 of what was then called “good family” – meaning a coat of arms and no recent surrounding
scandal. As Godolphin will tell you, before World War One, only cads slept with unmarried girls of good family, and divorces in good families were all but unthinkable. When the war broke out and death was soon heavy in the air, such old-established conventions often broke down. Indeed, the phenomenon of “war babies” engendered by lovers just off the trenches – with three-to-one odds against
their unmaimed survival – won almost universal sympathy in the not-so-good families.

‘One day, when I was a nineteen-year-old lieutenant, at our fusiliers’ mess near the ruined village of Laventie in France, our caddish colonel announced that he was ashamed to hear that he still had cock-virgin warts – warts meant lieutenants – under his command. All such had to parade
under the assistant adjuntant
that evening to be duly deflowered at the red-light establishment at Armentières reserved for officers. I did not admit to my cock-virginity. That was because I held a strong superstition that its loss would prejudice the magical power of survival that had so far taken me through five months of trench warfare – the average life of a wart was six weeks at that time. This parade order had been
given shortly before the battle of Loos, where all our four company commanders were killed, with hundreds of other ranks, and the caddish colonel himself got wounded, not to return. I escaped with a slight cut on the hand from a shell splinter and was left to command a much reduced company without even a second lieutenant to help me.

‘I remained a resolute C.V. for the next year. In July 1916,
at High Wood, I got five wounds from an eight-inch shell, including one through my right lung, half an inch from my heart. I was left bleeding to death but knew I would survive; and did, though officially reported “died of wounds”. They patched me up for another return to the trenches in 1917: and, now a captain but still a C.V., I found myself temporarily commanding the battalion, everyone else
having been killed or wounded. Then I got bronchitis and pneumonia and was soon reported medically unfit for further service overseas. So I fell in love with an eighteen-year-old girl – of good family and therefore also a virgin – and married her. It would be embarrassing to recall our embarrassment and amorous gropings when we found ourselves naked in bed together at Brown’s Hotel on January 23,
1918. But at least we were not persuaded by the warning hoots of sirens and the crash of bombs – during one of the zeppelin raids on London – to take refuge in the hotel cellars.’

Lord Godolphin cast me a baleful glance in the silence that followed. Then he said slowly: ‘In
our
family, we considered it bad taste to discuss marital intercourse… Still, my dear fellow, I suppose it was my own fault
for insisting.’

The Shout

‘“The Shout” had been written in 1926, but I could not find a publisher until 1929, when it appeared in a signed limited edition as one of
The Woburn Books
. Unfortunately, the publisher insisted that it should be reduced from eight thousand to five thousand words, which was too drastic a condensation, and I have since lost the original version.’ – R.G., introduction to
Occupation:
Writer
. This ‘drastic condensation’ would account for Graves’s erroneous reference to ‘Friday’ in the original text, when Richard speaks to the cobbler, and which I have amended to ‘Monday’.

The following handwritten comment appears in the proof copy of the original edition in R.G.’s library: ‘1927. Written at Hammersmith. First draft at Cairo; March 1926.’ Thus the 1924 date given in the
Collected
Short Stories
is most probably a misprint.

The following text was eliminated from ‘The Shout’ when it appeared in
Occupation: Writer
(1950). It had previously preceded the present opening lines:

[This story occurred to me one day while I was walking
in the desert near Heliopolis in Egypt and came upon a stony stretch where I stopped to pick up a few misshapen pebbles; what virtue was in them I do not know, but I somehow had the story from them, and three years later found it coming true to me. (True in an undistorted way, of course, with a most important character added, and with the macabre strangeness illuminated.) It is not just literature
or an Ufa film-scenario. The asylum cricket-match was played at Littlemore, near Oxford, the sandhills are those just beyond the Royal St David’s Golf Links at Harlech, though with an added Egyptian cruelty. It will be found that Crossley,
when he tells the story, admits that he has varied it each time he has told it; thus, in a way, apologising for its distortions of actual event.]

Avocado Pears

‘“Avocado Pears” is also a true story. The narrator was T.W. Harries of Balliol College, Oxford, who died soon afterwards while on a visit to India.’ R.G., ibid.

Old Papa Johnson

‘“Old Papa Johnson” is a true story; I omitted it from
Goodbye to All That
partly because it was too long for an incidental anecdote and partly because “Papa Johnson” himself might have objected. “Desolation Island”
was South Georgia.’ – R.G., introduction to
Occupation: Writer
.

Está En Su Casa

‘“Está En Su Casa”, “founded on fact” as the Victorians used to say in the days before writers had to worry about libel actions, records my happy return to Majorca in 1946.’ – R.G., ibid.

Bins K to T

‘“Bins K to T” is written in self-criticism of my absent-minded habit of pocketing pencils and match-boxes.’ – R.G.,
ibid.

An Appointment for Candlemas

‘“An Appointment for Candlemas” brought members of the revived British witch cult to my door in search of information about flying ointments and such like.’ R.G., introduction to
Collected Short Stories
.

She Landed Yesterday

‘Nor can I claim to have invented the factual details even of “She Landed Yesterday” […] In fact, a correspondent who read “She Landed
Yesterday” reproached me for not mentioning the two French copper coins found in the coffin-doll’s pocket.’ – R.G., ibid.

Abbreviations:

C   Catacrok!
London: Cassell & Co. Ltd., 1956

CSS  Collected Short Stories
New York: Doubleday & Co. Inc., 1964; London: Cassell & Co. Ltd., 1965

MO  Majorca Observed
London: Cassell & Co. Ltd.; New York: Doubleday & Co. Inc., 1965

OW   Occupation: Writer
New York: Creative Age Press, 1950; London: Cassell & Co. Ltd., 1951

Honey and Flowers
:
The Green Chartreuse
, July
1913.