Frank Baker Page 11

  He had been a great scholar of mediæval poetry; his early work had resembled the lyrics of the Eliza­bethans and was rare in our days, when sharp spasmodic verses with little rhythm and less sense were the fashion. The paper said that the poet was an interesting example of a man born out of his period; he had no sympathy whatever with any contemporary movements. As a youth he had worked in obscurity, nobody but a few friends—amongst them an old classical poet of accepted in­tegrity—recognizing his unique talent. He had been very poor. Then suddenly he had changed his style completely, with it his name and, so it seemed, his very identity. He wrote furiously passionate verses, archaic drinking songs, and vagabond love poems. Then he was honoured by critics and became popular; he was published and quoted as the most representative of our younger poets. His later life had been eccentric and savage in the extreme. He was compared favourably to Marlowe, a great Elizabethan poet whose violent young life had been cut short in a drunken quarrel.

  I read my paper and sipped my coffee, re-creating the incidents of last night and trying to find a reasonable explanation for it all. I wondered whether the poet and Olga had been lovers; what sort of a woman she was; where she lived and what she did. Chiefly I wondered how I could contrive to see her again.

  A clock struck the half after two; I hurried up, paid my bill, and dashed out. I was forty minutes late. The Underwriter had been inquiring for me; he had wanted somebody to go to Lloyd’s, and in my absence he had had to send an older man who was already very busy.

  “You’re for the carpet,” said a colleague as I came into the room.

  I was summoned into the private room. It was a close, airless place, surrounded by panels of frosted glass, with a thick carpet on the floor and a large desk in the middle. Hanging on the wall was a painting of a sailing ship tossing in a heavy sea. It was the nearest the Underwriter had ever got to peril on the high seas.

  He was sitting at his desk, alone in the room. For several seconds he did not look up as I came in. Then, still without looking at me, he asked me whether I imagined this was an office or a club for my amusement. I did not answer, knowing I could not trust myself to speak calmly. His yellow wig was bent over a docket of claims papers. The massive scarlet tome, Lloyd’s Register, lay at his elbow. He went on talking, telling me that I must remember my position as junior clerk; reminding me how many there were ready to step into my position.

  My fingers clenched and unclenched. I had an impulse to tear his wig from his head and pour ink over his bald pate. Never had I wanted so badly to hurt a man. I think he knew it, for he looked up suddenly and must have seen tears of vindictive passion brim­ming in my eyes.

  “Get out,” he said, “and think over what I have said to you.”

  I stumbled out without saying I was sorry, which was clearly what he had expected. The rest of the day he purposely tempted me to open rebellion; ringing his abominable little bell at every conceiv­able opportunity; sending me here for a pen, there for his spectacles; to the fourth floor for information that he never glanced at; to the basement storeroom for foreign registers that he threw aside.

  Going down to the storeroom later in the afternoon to return one of these registers, I felt so sick and tired I did not care any more what the Underwriter might do. I stayed talking to the old fellow who had charge of the place. He was a curiously romantic figure, old and shabby, yet with a fund of antiquarian information which amused me. He would tell me stories about London in the Victorian days when he had been a dashing youth; about music-halls in the ’nineties; about his early travels with a concert party up and down the coast towns of England. All that had gone. Now he had to spend his days in an artificially lit room under the earth, honoured by nobody, surrounded by volumes and papers caked with dust, hemmed in by hot-water pipes. I liked him. He had a certain warmth, and a contempt for his superiors which he made no attempt to conceal.

  I told him about my adventures the previous night. Then sud­denly, in a burst of confidence—for I had told nobody else—about the face I had fallen in love with.

  He said he knew; he knew what it was to fall in love with a face and never see it again. His eyes grew sad. He looked comical, his little tufts of yellow-white hair sprouting haphazardly from his nearly bald head. I remember there was a large pimple nestling in the hollow between his nose and upper lip.

  “Why don’t you get out of here before you’re old and it’s too late?” he said. “You’re a foolish young fellow if you stay here.”

  Then the house telephone rang; somebody in the claims depart­ment wanted a foreign register file. I hurried upstairs, conscious I had stayed here a long time and might be called for another and more serious homily.

  But nothing happened. It was a Friday, and the Underwriter, who generally went down to his country house for the week-end, left early. He sent me out to summon a taxi. It was the only command of his that I ever executed with any willingness, since it meant getting rid of him. I watched him as he passed my desk on his way out; a ridiculous hard black hat on his head; the inevitable umbrella, even in this heat, hanging on his wrist, a fat newspaper folded under his arm. I had a sudden desire to strip him of his clothes; to witness his shame at the revelation of his pot-belly. Naked, I knew he would be comic and I should cease to hate him, only laugh at him.

  I could not get away very early. There were many things to be put in order before I went. Old declaration policies to be entered; a basket of letters and documents to be filed away; and other small matters which all occupied me some time. I felt strangely conscien­tious about it all. I had a curiously tidy mind which could never bear to leave things in a state of disorder.

  A little after five I was left alone in the room with one irritable man who always stayed late in a feverish attempt to catch up with his work. My friends had said good-bye and wished me an enjoyable holiday. I went on entering policies with no sound in the room save the scratch of the other man’s pen. Morose and surly, he sat some feet away from me. We did not speak.

  Now it was quiet I did not mind the place. I even derived a certain satisfaction from the knowledge that I should not see it again for two long weeks.

  I worked quietly. I did not want to go home; I wanted to go to the café on the chance that I might see the woman again. Once I walked to the telephone box thinking I would call my friend and ask him to meet me. But I checked the impulse. I knew I must spend this last evening with my mother. I drove the haunting face from my mind, remembering what the old clerk had said about faces seen once and never again. It was inevitable, I told myself, that I should never see her again.

  So I worked in the forsaken room, till about half after six. Then I put away the last policy and went upstairs, six floors, to wash my hands. The liftman had gone home and there were few left in the building. I washed, came down again, found my hat and a book I was trying in vain to read, bade good-night to the other man, and left the room.

  By the lift gate I met the old filing-clerk coming laboriously up the stairs from below. He also had been kept late. I felt suddenly affectionate towards him and invited him to come and drink with me. He accepted.

  “I’m going to Wales to-morrow,” I told him as we sat on high stools in a tavern opposite, drinking beer.

  “So you told me,” he said. “You’re a lucky young fellow. Never seem to get farther than Southend myself.”

  I told him I was going to think things out.

  “That’s right,” he said. “The best thing you can do is to get work on a farm and never return to London again. You ought to do that. You’ve got guts—— But I—I’m played out, done for.”

  I reassured him uncomfortably, knowing that what he said was true. He was only a wreck; nothing could launch him again.

  “Whatever you do,” he said solemnly, “don’t take a wife, not you. Have your fun, but don’t you marry. That’s the only thing that saved me from——”

  I
never discovered what bachelordom had saved him from. For from outside we suddenly heard the loud chattering of the birds, a sound as yet unfamiliar enough to compel attention.

  We ran out with others in the bar, and were in time to see them flying low over Leadenhall towards London Bridge. Something dropped to the ground from amongst them. It was a black bowler hat, similar to that worn by the Underwriter. I ran to pick it up, but already a policeman had it, and was examining it while he scratched his head half humorously. It was dented, battered, and covered with dung. Nobody knew to whom it belonged.

  “Whose is it?” I asked the policeman.

  “Don’t know. Like to see if it fits?”

  We all laughed. The old clerk came up behind me and wrinkled his eyes over the hat.

  “Looks like his, don’t it?”

  “You mean the Underwriter?”

  “Ah,” he said. “That’s right. The Underwriter, God blast his soul.”

  He spat and looked up into the sky. The birds had flown out of sight.

  “Anyhow,” I said, “somebody lost their dignity when they lost that.”

  “Yes,” he agreed gloomily. “And it won’t be long, ask me, before we all lose it.”

  *

  I spent that evening with my mother. We sat in the garden and later walked up to the ridge. I wanted to talk to her about last night, but something prevented me. I found it hard to speak to anybody about what had happened in the café.

  Lillian was in one of her sweetest moods, very quiet, sad at my going away from her, but wanting me to have a good holiday.

  “For you don’t like London, do you, son?” she asked me, with a slow smile. Then she sighed and said she wished we could live in the country.

  “How lovely it would be to see a field again, or a cow, or a wild flower.”

  I tried to urge her to come with me to Wales, but she dismissed the idea as impossible. I think she knew that I wanted to go alone.

  “I expect you will find a new girl,” she said, “a milkmaid or some­thing. And then you will have to speak in Welsh.”

  We were sitting on one of the seats above the tennis-courts. The sky was shadowy towards the City, with a rosy mist that softened the rigid outlines of buildings.

  “I wish we could have rain, and I wish the birds would go away,” sighed my mother.

  “They won’t go away yet,” I murmured.

  She asked me what I thought “they” would do about them. I said, what could anybody “do” about them?

  “You can’t do anything about the stars,” I added. “You can’t move them about.”

  “Oh, but they’re different,” she laughed. “They don’t come and drink up half our water or drop their business all over our back gardens.”

  “They might,” I said. “They might, if somebody wanted them to.” And I asked her, did she really believe in God?

  “So you think God sent the birds?” she said quickly. “Well, per­haps he did. After all, he used to send boils and frogs and plagues. Perhaps he did send the birds, son. There’s no knowing.”

  She sighed again and said, “What’s it all for?”

  It was late. The tennis players had left the courts.

  “How quickly time goes,” said Lillian. “We used to say when I was a little girl, ‘Time flies; I cannot.’ Now what does that mean, do you think?”

  I said I supposed it meant that time rushed on and we had no power to arrest its progress.

  “Whatever we do we can’t alter our fate. We can’t put the clock back and do it all over again in a better way. We’ve just got to go on making mistakes till we’re too old to make any more. I wish I was your age, Mother.”

  She told me I was a funny boy. “Mad, like my father, who went gadding about all over Europe and never found any­where to rest for long.”

  So we came home, and I made her sing to me, watching her hands over the keys, listening to her familiar tunes. She sang an old hymn:

  “Now the day is over, night is drawing nigh;

  Shadows of the evening steal across the sky.”

  I kissed her and we went to our rooms. My bag lay packed with clothes and books by my bedside. I lingered, putting in a few more things and taking others out. I wrote a note to Annie, which I should give to her in the morning, asking her to look after Lillian and write to me should anything trouble her.

  The windows of my room were closed. I opened them with sud­den impatience, not caring then whether a bird flew in or not. But no bird came; only moths fluttered in and blundered against the lamp.

  I could see the light through the yellow blinds of my mother’s room; her shadow as she combed out her hair before the mirror on her dressing-table. I turned over the pages of the few books I was taking with me. There was one about wild flowers, for I knew nothing of flowers and wanted to learn about them in the country. On a sudden impulse I added the poetry of Keats to my collection.

  I was happy yet unhappy; a strange mixture of emotions flowed in me. My mother seemed to have sung a valediction to many things. The day was gone. There would never be another Friday similar to this.

  The next morning, struggling with my heavy bag, I got to one of the London stations and caught my train for Shrewsbury. There was a great crowd, and I had difficulty in obtaining a seat. We were packed close together, and I thought I would never endure the heat. But when the train moved out, a slight breeze broke the stillness.

  I had newspapers and journals to read on the way, but for a long time I did not touch them. The news seemed the same every day. I watched London moving away from me. Warehouses, factories, ranks of massive chimneys like dirty fingers pressed upon the sky; rows of dark little houses with back alleys where children waved their hands to the passing train. Then sub­urban towns, many miles of them, all alike. Cricket-fields, tennis-courts, a nursery for seedlings. More hedges, a field or two, rows of straw-coloured houses and industrious little gardens; trees and wild flowers in the banks; river, cornfield, village church, cart-track, cow, horse, harvester; apple trees, dahlias, hayricks; old men lean­ing over gates; young men driving the reapers over corn.

  So I left London behind me for awhile and came to this country which is now our home.

  The evening comes; rain is swelling those clouds at the end of the valley. The year is changing; long, dark evenings will soon be here. When I continue my story, I think most likely it will be in the corner by our fireside, with candlelight to help you guide your pen.

  What were the words? . . . “Now the day is over——” Well, yes—and so it is. I must try to remember the tune.

  II

  THE MOUNTAIN

  It is Autumn, the Fall.

  When I look out of this window and see the Michaelmas daisies locked close together as though to try to resist the wind that beats them; when I see leaves like crinkled bits of charred paper clinging weakly to knuckled boughs; when I see the stream from the moun­tain bursting angrily down the valley, bearing leaves and branches with it; when I see these things I am tempted to ask what is the purpose of all this Life when we too, no longer strong enough to withstand the stream, must suffer ourselves to be carried away upon it?

  Then I am reminded of another Fall, more than half a century ago, when I first looked upon this country and saw as I had never seen before that I too was a part of the endless stream of Life which flowed around me; that I too was governed by the same law which governs seed, flower, and fruit.

  Sixty years ago. I left London, impatient to discover some harmony within myself that might constitute a surer foundation to my life. My last thoughts had been of my mother; her song, with its fatalistic words, was ringing in my mind: “Now the day is over.” I had a premonition that more than a day was passing.

  I thought of my mother with a feeling of guilt as though I owed her something I had made no effort to pay. But I could not kee
p her image with me for long. The farther the train penetrated into the heart of the country, the harder I found it to concentrate upon one who, I knew, belonged to the past. Another face belonged to the future. “Olga, Olga . . .” I murmured the word over and over again to myself until it merged into the metrical drumming of the train over the rails.

  I stayed at a small village not far from Cader Idris. I had taken a room in the house of the local schoolmaster and his wife. From my window I could see the fast, cold waters of the river and mountainous hills on the other side. It was all new and magical to me; so quiet, so detached from the tumult of the life I had left, I could hardly believe it to be in the same world.

  I took my meals with the family. The schoolmaster was an amiable man with a thirst for con­troversy. He would seek to engage me in long discussions about the political state of the world, discussions which I tried to avoid. He was eager to hear all about the birds. They had seen nothing of them in this part of the island, though they had once or twice flown over Aberystwyth. I told him what I could, but I was happier when we forgot these things and he chose to sing some of his native songs, while his son—a youth of seventeen—improvised accompaniments on the violin. Then something old and forgotten came out of these two, father and son. They were Celts, belonging to that strange race of men whose ancestry is lost in legend. They allowed something to speak through them with­out restraint. The boy drew from his violin a quality of savage tenderness which was almost a brazen echo of the deepest thoughts of the mind; he somehow fused the physical yearnings of man into a spiritual reality, held firm in the intangible quality of one drawn-out note. When he played, his face burnt with a subtle joy he could never have explained. He had rich yellow hair, long and loose, and full, liquid eyes. I loved him.