The Power of the Dead (43 page)

“Did Willie ever rant before her?”

“When he spoke bitterly, or in distress, it was always against himself, for his shortcomings, and failure to understand fully another’s point of view. He even praised my mother to me for not liking his ideas, because they were too revolutionary and
therefore
outside ordinary living. He used to say, ‘If anyone dislikes me, I feel that it is always my own fault for failing to understand. After all, other people’s opinions should always be more important than one’s own’.”

“Yes, he said that to me once, Mary. I’ve tried to act up to it, but usually fail.”

All that night Phillip was restoring the critical self-awareness of Donkin, putting back the former hard lines; and when the next day, having met Cabton’s train, he brought over a corrected galley, Cornelian went in to read it. While tea was being laid he came to where Phillip was lying on the sands and said, “No, don’t get up. I came to say that it’s exactly right. Well done. Half a dozen galleys will have to be reset, but it will be worth it.”

*

Try as he might, Phillip could induce no flow of
camaraderie
in Cabton. In Mr. Cornelian’s presence he gave out a feeling of being slightly superior to all he beheld: not exactly from self-sufficiency, but of living independently of the feelings of other people.

“What sort of books do you like best, Cabton?”

“Oh, no sort in particular. Why?”

“I just wondered. Have you read Conrad’s
Mirror
of
the
Sea
,
or
Heart
of
Darkness
?”

“Yes.”

“What do you think of Conrad?”

“He’s all right for those who like that sort of thing. But he’s unreal.”

“What about reality in Hardy? Have you read any of his stuff?”

“He”—with a jerk of his thumb in the direction of the
white-haired
Cornelian sitting on the sands with his flannel trousers rolled to the knee and exposing many varicose veins—“gave me
Jude
the
Obscure
to read. Hardy never knew a real working man.”

“But it was a different age, surely? Hardy knew stone-masons and other working men at first hand.”

“But he’d never been one himself.”

This seemed ironic to Phillip: for according to Anders, Cabton wrote about country people and he had never been out of London. Still, the story was the thing, no matter how it came into being.

In the morning there was a letter from Anders, forwarded from Rookhurst, enclosing one from Coats with a report by Edward Cornelian on the earlier novels published by Hollins, which Phillip intended to rewrite, so that they would lead directly to the theme of
The
Phoenix
.

Phillip showed this report to Cabton while preparing breakfast. Cabton merely glanced at it before saying, “I shouldn’t take any notice of what that old fool says. Why, just look at those veins in his legs, obviously signs of gout. I saw bottles and bottles of port in his cupboard when I went to his house in Chelsea, and he used my visit as an excuse to open one as soon as I was inside, although I told him I don’t drink.”

“Aren’t varicose veins due to thin walls of the veins?”

“Anyway, what does he know about writing? He tried to tell me what to write. I told him I never know what I’m going to write. It just comes, once I get an idea. He’s all literary, trying to fit in everything.”

“But sympathetic, surely?”

“Yes, to get letters from famous writers, and sell them when they’re dead. He’s got a lot from Conrad, he showed them to me—not that I was interested. Anyone can see that Conrad had to flog himself to write.”

“But he produced passages of great beauty, don’t you think?”

Phillip took the tent Lucy had brought down to the sea-wall and set it up in a hollow of the low grassy sandhills near the
marshman’s
cottage. There he slept alone. The weather continued fine. The tent was among wild dogswood bushes. He cooked on a fire of driftwood dried in the sunshine. Lying awake at night he heard the wavelets of the high tide falling on the sea-wall. One afternoon Lucy and Billy came over to visit him, having walked barefoot through the sandhills. She and Phillip bathed on the incoming tide, while Billy paddled. Cabton hung back, not wanting to admit that he could not swim. Afterwards they all sat, Phillip and Lucy and Billy with bare feet, in the parlour having tea. Edward Cornelian said that Lucy’s feet were most beautiful, reminding him of Jefferies’ description of the young girl Amaryllis in his novel. Not that Lucy had ‘thick, sturdy ankles’, on the contrary, he said; but she possessed the serenity that was the ideal of all artists.

Lucy liked him, and under the stimulus of her smiles he began to joke, rather clumsily, on the vicissitudes of marriage to one with the artistic temperament.

“Arnold Bennett, you may recall, says somewhere that all great novelists ‘begin clumsily, poor dears’. He was writing about Hardy’s first novel, which has remained unpublished. Edmund Gosse told me, when he read it in manuscript, that it had a title
something like ‘The Lady and the Mason’, and was full of comical errors about a social world of which the young Hardy knew nothing. And now your husband, who has written a very fine novel, wants to republish his juvenilia.” He turned to Cabton. “You, my dear fellow, will never make the same mistake. Your talent is clear and direct, forthright.”

“Ah, he is fortunate to have such expert guidance from the start, Mr. Cornelian.”

“At least Cabton will never write the first thing that comes into his head, without practising the critical faculty, as you appear to have done in those early novels of yours.”

“But surely one is practising the critical faculty in wanting to demolish them, and true them up, Mr. Cornelian?”

“Get on with new work, my dear fellow. Have you started your novel of nineteen fourteen and so through the war?”

“Well, as I think I mentioned when we met in Romano’s, I want an earlier novel to lead to the Great War. So I think I should really begin in the early ’nineties——”

“It shows poor critical judgment to begin at a period which you cannot have known, since it must have been before your time. No! Start off in the summer of nineteen fourteen and plunge straight into the war. Or are you impervious to the voice of experience?”

“But surely ‘the voice of experience’ was not always right in the past? Even creative writers have gone hopelessly wrong at times. Look at Byron’s opinion of Keats, sir. He wanted Keats to write like Byron. Keats wanted every line written by other poets to be loaded with ore. Yet both were creative writers, and if they could be wrong about other creative writers, isn’t it possible that a
non-creative
writer, a critic, might be wrong too?”

“What do you say to that, Cabton?” asked Cornelian.

Cabton’s face wore an expression of sardonic indifference. “Oh, I just get an idea and write. If it’s no good, I tear it up.”

Edward Cornelian went on to say that all writers had their blind spots, and if they did not take care, they would come to a poor end, usually on the bottle. He continued in this strain, humorously prophesying a drunkard’s end for Phillip, until Lucy said it had been most enjoyable, but now it was time to go back to see to Peter and baby Rosamund. She blushed, because she had not mentioned the baby so far, when Mr. Cornelian showed pleasure and told her to be sure to bring the baby over
one afternoon. When she was leaving she said to Phillip outside, “I’ll try to come over and cook your breakfast for you, if you would like me too.”

“Yes, come as early as you can. Do you think I went too far with Cornelian, with my simile of creative writer and critic with salmon and lamprey?”

“Oh no, he was ragging you, and you were ragging him back, that was all.”

Lucy came over at half-past eight, and was crouched over the driftwood fire when Phillip saw Cornelian, with serious face, approaching over the crest of the sandhill. The old fellow returned a subdued good-morning to his greeting of, “Hullo, sir! Just in time for breakfast! Lucy has brought over some mushrooms.”

“May I speak with you privately for a moment?”

Standing in an adjoining hollow, out of sight of tent and cottage roof, Edward Cornelian said, “Why did you insult me yesterday afternoon?”

“I’m awfully sorry, Mr. Cornelian——”

“Your remarks about the relationship of critics and writers were most offensive.”

Lamely the younger man repeated that he was very sorry, but he had not been serious in his later remarks. “I thought we were ragging one another.”

“Yes, but despite a superficial gaiety, there was, I felt, an undercurrent of dislike in all your remarks to me. This feeling culminated when you said that the creative writer was like a
clean-run
salmon in the estuary, and the critic was a lamprey which fastened on it and sucked its life away. Such a simile can hardly have a basis in anything but a grudge against myself. Is it because I, as was my duty, to both you and to Coats, advised against republication of those early novels?”

“But, Mr. Cornelian, how can there be any parallel?”

“That is what I am seeking to discover. All I know is that I have praised your recent work to a publisher, and highly
recommended
him to push it with all his resources. Why then did you insult me as you did?”

Phillip repeated that he was sorry that his words had seemed serious.

“There is another matter,” went on Cornelian. “You spoke about critics making it their business to write to authors, and then
of selling the letters, when the authors were dead, for considerable sums. What made you say that?”

“Well, you had been telling us that it wouldn’t be long before somebody—was it a Doctor Sidney Cockerell?—would seek my acquaintance with a view to getting letters from me, as he had from Hudson and Conrad. Really, I was just fooling about,
saying
anything.”

“Yes, I notice that you say anything that comes into your head; but all the same, I feel that your remarks were based on a dislike of myself, because I wrote as I. did about your early novels.”

“I see now that I should have rewritten them, before sending them in. They will be quite different, I assure you, Mr. Cornelian. Well, sir, I do hope that you will not remain hurt by my silly remarks.”

“Are you now suggesting that I am one to bear a grudge?”

“Oh no, no! I’d better say no more, the fact is I have a rather worrying decision to make soon, a family matter, which has been preying on my mind for a long time now. But I won’t bother you with that. In fact, I rather fancy it has already been decided for me. Please let me give you some mushrooms, Lucy has picked some specially for you and Miss Beach.”

“Thank you, but I dare not touch them. But do not let me keep you from your breakfast. Have you seen Cabton?”

“I lent him a fleabag, when he didn’t return to my cottage, and he said he was going to make a shelter for himself in the bushes somewhere.”

“He tells me that he has a young lady friend coming to visit him, whom he met at your house. A Miss Felicity Ancroft.”

After breakfast Phillip walked with Lucy part of the way to Wildernesse. She had brought a letter with her from Mr.
Grandison
, the solicitor, in reply to one from Phillip, saying that he would go ahead with the details of the proposed autumn auction as soon as he knew what items had been selected for disposal.

“We’ll do it at the beginning of September, shall we, Lucy? Grandison thinks that it should be held about Old Michaelmas Day, the tenth of October, when the weather is usually fine. By the way, Felicity is coming here, apparently. To see Cabton.”

He left Lucy at a valley leading to the lighthouse. The sun was over the mainland, and in the eastern light the village buildings across the water looked to be sharper, greyer, while the tide at flood was a mirror in which a second village, spectral and distorted,
hovered wanly. He moved along the jetsam line, making for Aery Point, where the coast curved to the north and the open Atlantic was before him.

It was a haunted shore, it belonged to the past, because all was now safe in print. He felt that he must never return; all was now gone into ancient sunlight.

He sat by the seaward line of the sandhills, and made a fire for companionship, while past him floated the restless hollow mutter of ocean lapsing under miles of wave-sounds. He lay on his back, letting loose sand slip through his fingers, while the sun swung up into the southern sky, and the air was filled with the roar of the ebb tide becoming more tumultuously broken upon the gravel banks of the North Tail. Melancholy deepened in the vacuum of his heart. The sea was empty, so were the sands stretching under a mirage to the northern hills. He had thought that when
The
Phoenix
was written the ghost of Willie would find rest. All began, all ended, with oneself. There were ghosts, aye there were ghosts: but they lived in the human heart. There they had their dwelling, to leave it with the coming of love.
I
am
all
your
friends
, he could hear her saying. O Barley, bright vision with Michael and All Angels, come to me.

The breaking moment passed. Bruce’s spider had more reality than ‘a poet’s tearful fooling’. He thought of Flecker’s play
Hassan
he had seen in London soon after the war. The music of Delius had been beyond resignation, a serene acceptance of immortal longing, of beauty accompanying the lovers who had rejected life, and chosen death, for one hour of love. Then, leaving Death the antic behind, the caravan setting out for Samarkand. ‘Always we must go a little farther.’

James Elroy Flecker, dead of consumption: all that was left of him were his poems, some learned by heart in the Malandine cottage before the coming of Barley.