Short Stories 1927-1956 (29 page)

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 cover,’ 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:

The old man gingerly turned the leaf, and read on:

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 who
ever
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 lifted 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:

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 in 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 after-image 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
out
side 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 paint, 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!’