The Power of the Dead (28 page)

Standing outside the restaurant he thought that here, too, had come Ernest Dowson, in hopeless love with ‘Cynara’, the
coffee-house
-keeper’s daughter, flinging ‘roses, roses riotously with the throng, To put thy pale, lost lilies out of mind’. And through this very doorway had walked J. M. Synge, remote from his western world’s childhood ever harping in his mind. And John Davidson, who had waded into the sea, and out of life at Dymchurch, never to be seen again. Suddenly to remove himself from the air—to live only in the occasional thought of a friend, or in the mind of a reader of poetic anthologies, in the spirit of some woman who had cared for him! O God, he himself had sat on the same sea-wall along the Romney Marsh with Barley, on the way to Dover and the Rhône valley to the Mediterranean; and later he had taken Lucy there, to imagine Barley smiling as she watched Lucy playing so gently with Billy … ‘Drive my dead thoughts over the universe’—Shelley’s cry to the West Wind. These holy poets, these saints. … Francis Thompson seeing the reflections of life passing in the window as he was seeing them now—the poet in rags, his boots broken, his mind hazed by laudanum, crying to his Mistress of Vision …

Dear Francis Thompson, companion of the spirit in that swampy summer of 1917 in Flanders: his poems had stood up to the reality of Third Ypres: they had revealed grace beyond the disgrace of life moving backwards into chaos.

It was two minutes to two by the clock. He thought of how he had first known Romano’s in company with several other young members of the Parnassus Club in 1920. G. B. Shaw had come to lecture in the little upstairs room in Long Acre hired for one evening a week for 5
s
. The great man had entered with a slightly marionettish stride, but to talk with bright penetration, his reddish-grey beard held well up. He had remained after the address and discussed his early life with surprising, and endearing, frankness. Here was the phoenix arisen from the ashes of disaster in those early Dublin and Liverpool days: his two sisters mocking ‘Sonny’s’ tears, mother ever upbraiding father. To Phillip it had been a revelation. He had thought, It is just like my early life, except that Father was always so cross with Mother. I, too, must always try and bear with, and transcend, mortification. In Romano’s upstairs supper room, where G.B.S. had taken them, he had eaten a nut chop and drunk fruit juice and water, whereby to hold himself lightly and well in body against the later ‘battle
of the brain’ in those terrible small hours, each a miniature
Passchendaele
, which temporarily destroy the poet’s fortitude.

*

A church clock struck the two hours. He drew a deep breath, and stood still to collect himself before going in to enquire for Mr. Edward Cornelian; to find that he was expected. A waiter took him upstairs, and there at a far table, overlooking the street, sat the man whom he recognized at once as the famous critic, and beside him the remote, almost chaste, countenance—a word more apt than face—of Thomas Morland, world-famous for his sequence of novels, generally supposed to be based upon the older
generations
of his own family.

Phillip walked forward lightly, eagerly, feeling that he was about to be recognised by his own kind at last. He heard Edward
Cornelian
say, “Well, my dear fellow, to sum up: we both agree that Evelyn Crouchend will have to die; but not the way you have
arranged
his death in your first draft.” He looked at his watch. “We have a moment before the young man is due, and I think I can recapitulate in that time.”

Phillip sat down at an empty table, to wait. How awful, he was too early. He pretended to be writing in his pocket-book, while overhearing what the famous critic was saying. This was the stuff of literary history!

“Let me be frank. The so-called virtue of tolerance,” said Cornelian with a loosening of already loose lips as he smiled at the creator of
The
Crouchend
Saga
, “can lead not only to the death of art, but to the extinction of society. Nature advances by tension, not by relaxation of physical laws. In your book as it stands, my dear fellow, your over-extended tolerance not only trembles on the verge of sentimentality, but brings one perilously near to what Oscar Wilde said of one of Dickens’ characters—‘Only a man with a heart of stone would fail to laugh at the death of Little Nell’. No, my dear fellow, Evelyn should die appalled by the terrors of his mind arising from within, the materialist without sensitivity come at last to realise that his property cannot save him, and that he has nothing else to fall back upon. His final loneliness should purge the reader with pity and terror. As now written, his death by a picture falling on him when his house is on fire is a mere accident happening outside the story. He might as well have fallen under a train at Waterloo Station, or had a chimney pot drop on his head.”

At this moment Thomas Morland observed a thin young man getting up from a table to approach them with a smile. To
Morland
the eyes were the arresting feature: deep blue, with a look about them suggesting a capacity for reflection beyond the normal; but which now were in free play upon the living scene. Here was modesty, here was that rare quality of balance, he thought, that had gone to the creation of the world of the otter.

“You have had luncheon?”

“Oh yes, thank you, Mr. Morland.”

“Will you have some coffee, and brandy? A cigar?”

“May I have some coffee, sir?”

Edward Cornelian said, “I have been reading your new novel. It is good stuff. But I’ll talk to you about it later. How is the farm progressing?”

Phillip told them of his dilemma; they listened; Cornelian with one ear thrust towards Phillip, Morland looking like a benevolent judge, his eyes alight with understanding and sympathy.

“There’s a novel in what you have told us,” said Cornelian.

“Part of a novel, as I’ve seen it, sir——”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake drop the ‘sir’. We are all writers here,” retorted Cornelian, testily.

“‘Emotion recollected in tranquillity’,” said Thomas Morland softly. “I don’t think any writer can see a subject in perspective while he is one of his own characters. ‘Ripeness is all’.”

“Oh, he won’t make your mistakes, Tom,” replied Cornelian, a little maliciously. “Maddison’s characters in the novel I have just read are objectively created, that is with compassion, because he has no axe to grind, or old scores to pay off.”

Phillip thought that Cornelian had aimed this remark at the characterisation of Evelyn Crouchend in
Possession
, said to be based on the novelist’s cousin, whose wife Morland had married. He kept an open expression on his face.

“What do you want to do, most of all?” asked Thomas Morland.

“To write a series of novels beginning at the end of the
nineteenth
century, eighteen ninety-three, and leading up to the Great War,” said Phillip, feeling a slight constriction that he was
exposing
his subconscious mind.

“Why go so far back?” Cornelian cut in sharply. “Why not plunge directly into nineteen fourteen?”

This was a shock. Why had he exposed his most secret idea,
which even to himself he sheered away from formulating? He kept his gaze on the table-cloth, and felt the cold drip of sweat under his arm-pit.

Thomas Morland’s lips were now slightly pursed; he drew in a breath as though to speak, but held it. Then he said in a soft, controlled voice, “I must tell you, Maddison, how greatly I
enjoyed
your book. The prose flows like water from a spring on one of your high moors. You are a West Countryman?”

“Only by adoption. I was born in Kent—now part of London.”

“But your forbears lived in the West Country.”

“Yes.”

“My forbears originated under Cranborne Chase,” murmured Thomas Morland. “We were small copyholders. There is a Morland Down near the border of Wil’shire and Dorset.”

“I can see the dark-blue tree-line of the ox-drove on top of the Chase from our bit of land, Mr. Morland. My father and uncles used to walk there and back, making a wide circle, when they were boys.”

“How came you to write about the moors and rivers of
Devonshire
when you are a ‘moonraker’?” asked Cornelian.

Phillip told them about his cottage in South Devon after the war.

“And you had a tame otter living in your cottage with you?”

Both noticed that the young man lowered his gaze at this point. Hitherto he had been frank and open about himself: now he seemed to close up, the sight of his eyes becoming unfocus’d.

“Have you still got the otter?” asked Cornelian.

“It escaped one night.”

“Did you track it down, as you describe in your book?”

“Yes. But it escaped from hounds, the last time I saw it, into salt water, which carries no scent.”

“I remember the tide-head scene. It actually got away then?”

“Yes.”

“Then why did you kill it off at the end of the hunt?”

Morland, who had seen that the young man’s eyes had filled with tears, said gently, “But otters are still hunted to death by hounds, in spite of a growing revulsion after the blood-shed of the war.”

The critic continued his own line. “What puzzled me when I read it was a feeling that your beast was more than an otter.
You appear to have had an extraordinary affection for your beast, in fact, the search for its mate after she had been torn by hounds might almost be the animal equivalent of
Tristan
and
Isolde
” He peered hen-like at his wristlet watch. “Good gracious, I must soon be on my way to Coats’.” He turned to Phillip. “Will you be able to meet me there later—Satchville Street, you know it I expect—at three-thirty? I must have a word now with Morland about a private matter——”

Phillip was already on his feet, thanking Mr. Morland for his hospitality, and then the critic for ‘making such a meeting with both of you possible’; and with a bow, he left them.

“Of course it was his wife’s tame otter,” said Cornelian. “Coats heard about it from Norse. His wife was very young and had a remarkably clear intelligence. His book is the result, almost, of the transmigration of souls.”

“But if you already knew that, Eddy, why did you persist in questioning him?”

“To see to what extent he was prepared to be truthful, my dear fellow.” The critic peered again at his wristlet watch. “Now let me briefly recapitulate my points about your novel,
For
Rent
——”

Thomas Morland suddenly felt tired. He reflected that Eddie Cornelian had set out, in youth, to be a creative writer, and had never brought it off.

“My main objection is that you have cheated us of the
inevitability
of Evelyn’s death scene, in his bed, a lonely old man—fearful, anxious, tormented—the inevitable nemesis of failure ever to have shared his personality with any living person.” He looked with sly innocence at his old friend. “So you’re in the know too, about Maddison having got the Grasmere? We’ll meet again at the Aeolian Hall, then.”

*

Phillip saw Mr. Cornelian again later in the afternoon and, after an exhilarating talk about
The
Phoenix
, went away carrying the bundle of typescript under one arm, to call on Anders Norse. As he took long, confident strides towards Adelphi Terrace from Satchville Street he recalled that the Duke of Gaultshire owned a great deal of London, W.C., and would it be taking advantage of a war-time acquaintanceship if he sent him a copy of the otter book? After all, the Duke was a great man for natural history. Yes, he would send a copy.

Arriving at Anders’ basement, he told him that Edward
Cornelian had praised the novel, but suggested that the climax, just before the drowning of Donkin, should be strengthened.

“He said that everyone takes it too calmly, that no tears are shed. Of course you haven’t read it, but I didn’t want to stress the irony, as Hardy did sometimes in his novels. To tell the truth, the ending moved me so much that I was afraid of sentimentality.”

Anders knew that Phillip’s cousin, and great friend, had been drowned; but all he said was, “What are you going to do, take Cornelian’s advice?”

“I’m going back by the evening train, and will bring it up to you after the week-end.”

“Are you in a great hurry now?”

“No.”

“I wonder if you’d run your eye over this for me.” He took a typed Mss. from his desk. “I’d like your opinion. This came in yesterday by post, out of the blue. I know nothing about the author, A. B. Cabton.”

The first sentence was arresting. He read on; the scene
described
stood out of the paper, the whole page was alive.

“It’s good stuff, Anders. This chap can write.”

“I’m so glad to hear you say that. As I said, I know nothing about the author. He sent it in from an address in East London. I thought of sending it to Coats.”