Читать книгу John Cornelius: His Life and Adventures - Hugh Walpole - Страница 10

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About him, around him, lie the town and the sea, the fishing-boats sailing out silently against the morning sun, the gulls rising and falling like fragments of snow-breasted wave flung sky-high, the bells ringing softly the hour, the country carts creaking up the hill to the top of the moor, the never-ceasing murmur and scurry and roar of the sea, the Market with the flowers, the fruit, the vegetables, the cows and sheep in the pens, the long tranquil silence of the night, and the old watchman still calling out as he shook his scolding rattle—‘One o’clock and a stormy sky.’

At the age of six John went for the first time to school—Mrs. Biggar’s Kindergarten in Fall Street. He did not remain there long, only two days in fact.

Mrs. Cornelius, dressed in her best and panting with the heat of her unaccustomed garments, accompanied John. Mrs. Biggar, whom John remembered as a small woman with a sharp black eye, promised Mrs. Cornelius that her little boy should not suffer corporal punishment.

On the second day, however, because she considered John impertinent (as very likely he was), she gave him several sharp taps on the back of his hand with a ruler. John gave her one look in return and walked straight home. When he told his mother what had occurred she was in complete agreement with him. The woman had broken her word and that was enough. He did not go to a school again until he was seven, but before that his father had taught him to read and write. Arithmetic and everything to do with it he never could abide.

He loved his father and grandmother dearly, but his feeling for his mother was one of passionate devotion and remained so in spite of all her shortcomings. It was perhaps because of her shortcomings that he loved her. He inherited from her her lack of orderliness and incapacity for arranging things. But most of all he felt that she needed care and protection in a way that the others did not. As her inebriety grew upon her he felt ever more strongly this protectiveness. He had throughout his life an especial care for and understanding of drunkards, although he was himself most abstemious all his days—and that too was perhaps because of his mother.

He adopted towards her from very early days a paternal attitude, chaffing her, telling her funny stories, helping her with her work (although in this he generally did more harm than good), cheering her depressed spirits. It was, I suppose, her constant bewildered despair at the muddle she was in that tempted her to the drink. She invented, like many a similar victim before and after her, a wonderfully alert system of lies, subterfuges and stratagems. However, during those early years of John’s the complaint was not severe. When she was not troubled with too much work, too little money, before she became so corpulent, there were many hours when the two of them were as happy as two people could be.

He would sing his little songs, recite his poems, tell his stories, while she sat in the rocking-chair, her large red hands planted on her knees, staring at him as though he were an elf-visitor from another world. She might well have thought so, for with his extreme thinness, his long bony face, his brilliant searching eyes he looked little like any child of hers. He remembered that once he came in crying because some woman, exasperated with his determination to tell her a story, had cried out: ‘Take your ugly face away. I can’t abide the sight of it.’

‘You aren’t ugly! You aren’t ugly!’ his mother had passionately cried, taking him to her capacious bosom. ‘I’ll give her ugly!’

But he was ugly all the same and well he knew it.

Another bond that they had was their religion. Mrs. Cornelius, although she seldom entered a church, believed in God as though He might at any moment come in and inspect the laundry. So did John.

Now John’s father was an atheist and that for the simple and to himself convincing reason of there being so much misery in the world. He but rarely spoke on these subjects, but Mrs. Cornelius, admiring him and feeling an eternal gratitude to him as she did, suffered great unhappiness and much bewilderment at his opinions. How could so fine and generous a gentleman as her husband think such dreadful things? But, worst of all, must he not suffer fearful punishment one day? And at the thought of this she would stare at him as he worked at his shell-boxes, and her eyes would fill with tears and she would long to take the little man in her arms and defend him from the Powers of Darkness.

The other great trouble that she had at this time was in the matter of John’s ‘lies.’ She knew that all small children told lies, but John’s were grander and more challenging than any others.

He would come in and tell her that he had seen an old dwarf with a bag of gold on his shoulder down by Lelant Rock looking in the pools for jelly-fish. He would assure her that he had taken some of the gold pieces and allowed them to trickle between his fingers. Why hadn’t he brought any of them home then? Oh, well, they didn’t belong to him! And the dwarf had turned surly because his fingers had been stung by a jelly-fish.

Of course children do make up stories which no one expects you to believe, and Johnny in especial had a marvellous imagination. So the dwarf with the jelly-fish might be forgiven—but what of it when Johnny comes in, stops at the door and says: ‘The Queen of England has just arrived in the town, mother.’ (He used to talk like an old man sometimes, even at the age of six.) ‘I’ve seen her white horses and she’s wearing a crown.’ In a case like this Mrs. Cornelius simply didn’t know what to do and would consult her friends and neighbours, Mrs. Garriman and Mrs. Hoskin, to see whether they had any advice to offer. John remembered Mrs. Garriman and Mrs. Hoskin very well. Mrs. Garriman was a tall, gaunt woman who believed in ghosts, spirits, table-turning, and telling the cards. Mrs. Hoskin was a little sparrow of a woman with a suspicion of a light beard on the end of her chin. Neither Mrs. Hoskin nor Mrs. Garriman liked Johnny, who bored them with his recitations and his refusal to take them as seriously as he took himself. This last characteristic was, as he never sufficiently realized, a great drawback to him in later life.

Mrs. Garriman terrified Mrs. Cornelius with her card-telling and table-turning. Since she was already sufficiently superstitious, Mrs. Garriman’s lugubrious voice saying: ‘It’s a Death in the House. That can mean nothink but a Death—and a bloody one too if I’m not mistaken,’ would disturb Mrs. Cornelius all the night long. She recognized, however, that Mrs. Hoskin was the more dangerous of the two. When Maggie Hoskin, in a gathering of friends, told many destructive little stories of other friends—well, what would happen to yourself as soon as your back was turned?

Both ladies assured Mrs. Cornelius that her boy must end in gaol or even worse. Such lies! Why, only last week he had told Mrs. Hoskin that he’d seen a mermaid sitting on a rock and combing her hair!

‘It’s only his fun,’ said Mrs. Cornelius weakly.

His fun! And the child not yet seven years of age! His fun! Mermaids indeed!

Nevertheless they did like to hear the child sing. By the time he was seven he could sing like a bird. There can have been none of the angel-boy treble about him, and Charlie Christian has told me of the way John looked, standing with his long skinny neck stretched, his big mouth immensely wide, and his funny thin fingers beating the time as he gave his audience ‘Oft in the Stilly Night,’ ‘The Young May Moon is Beaming, Love,’ ‘The Harp that Once.’ He was about seven and a half when Charlie first heard him; he knew all those songs then and many more.

The trouble about him was that once he had started nothing could stop him. There were none of the shy affectations of the professional singer about him. Nor did he need an accompaniment. He could sing anywhere, at any time, to anybody.

At seven years of age he went to school again, to Rush’s Day School.

Rush’s had been a famous town school in its day, but in the late ’eighties and early ’nineties a more practical Board School type of education destroyed it. Anything but practical it must have been according to all that I have heard of it, but it did two fine things for John: gave him Mr. Bartholomew for an inspiring influence and introduced him to the two most faithful and devoted friends of all his life. Mr. Bartholomew was one of those little old men whom you meet in the books of Dickens and Borrow, in ‘drab-coloured pantaloons and a nankeen waistcoat.’ He was a deliberate and theatrical survival from an age that seemed to him the only real and beautiful one.

But he had a passion for books—not for your moderns, of course, and John well remembered his disgust when at a later stage he caught him with Cometh Up as a Flower in his hand. He would have nothing to say to Swinburne or ‘Festus’ Bailey or Rossetti. They were all too recent for him. But Beddoes and the early Tennyson and Clough and Charles Auchester and the real Classics behind these—Pope and Gray and Boswell and Cowper ... the eighteenth century was his passion ... Dr. Johnson his god ... he would read Rasselas to his slumbering pupils, pushing snuff up his nostrils, tickling the scanty grey hair on his head with the end of a ruler, suddenly breaking into Pope’s Iliad, dancing about in ecstasy, discovering a boy, his head on his desk, fast in slumber, bringing the ruler down with a little scream of anger on the urchin’s head ... how often John acted him to us, how we laughed and felt as though we ourselves had known him intimately ... but he was a blessing and a wonder to John all the same.

Anne and Charlie he met both on the same day when he had been a week or so at Rush’s.

He was turning down the hill out of the High Street and had reached the little square patch of ground known as the Rock. She was standing, her satchel of school-books in her hand, laughing and sticking her tongue out at some boys who had been teasing her. She must have been a big girl for her age (she was two years older than John), rosy-cheeked and tallow-haired, freckled and untidy, broad in the beam, laughing and fearless and careless then as always. I don’t know whether Anne is the heroine of this book or no. There was, before the Great War, a fashion among novelists for free-and-easy and jolly and give-you-a-blow-or-a-kiss kind of heroines. They couldn’t, poor dears, survive the cynical post-War intellectual spirit. They had in fact very few brains but a lot of heart; the post-War heroines were exactly the opposite. Anne was, I am afraid, something of a pre-War heroine in physique, courage, and good temper, but she had plenty of brains and a sort of healthy irony when she liked. The boys, shouting and laughing at her, vanished, and she threw some pebbles after them. When she saw John she stared as people very often did on first seeing him.

She spoke to him, and as they were going the same way they started off together. They liked one another very much at once. John told her that his mother did laundry and his father made boxes and painted pictures. Anne said that her name was Anne Swinnerton, that her father was dead and that she lived with her mother in a little house above Carp Cove. She went to school at Miss Bensatt’s Academy. She liked everything—sailing, fishing, swimming, dancing. Reading? No, she hadn’t any time for reading. They agreed to meet on the following day.

On that same morning John, running, had collided with a small, broad-shouldered, sturdy boy who had simply said: ‘Look out, you!’ John was so thin and his legs so unsteady that the sturdy boy had held him up and waited until his breath came back. John grinned and the boy grinned. They stayed there talking; at least John talked as he always did, saying everything that came into his head. The sturdy boy looked at him with his quiet, observant blue eyes and said almost nothing. It did finally appear that the boy’s name was Charlie Christian and that his father owned a fishing-smack with his two brothers, was a prominent member of the Port Merlin lifeboat and an important Methodist. It was Charlie’s characteristic then and always to observe rather than communicate. His suspicions of his fellow human beings were as deep as the sea; he trusted no one until he had good sound reason. However, the one person in all his life whom he did trust from the very beginning was John Cornelius; he trusted him and saw that, because of his simple impetuosities, he needed protection. From that very first day he made protecting John his business. He had no idea then, of course, what a life business it was going to be. John had no especial thought either that on this important day he had made the two best friendships he was ever to make. I am not sure whether he was ever to recognize it. We are always slightly indulgent towards those who show us that, without reservation, they love us and believe in us. John was always, without intending it, a little patronizing towards Anne and Charlie. Not that they minded. They stood a great deal from him before the end. Their reasons for loving him, though, were real and solid ones. On the whole he deserved that devotion.

And so we come to the Great Shell-box affair. John always considered this the beginning of all his real troubles—his and his family’s. ‘If ever I write my own life,’ he would say to me, ‘that business shall be shown to be the root of the matter.’

He recalled every detail of it, acted it for us over and over again. He had been one half-holiday with his grandmother to visit his grandfather in the Asylum. The old man hadn’t been so very well, complaining of pains in the head, and the little grandmother was distressed. You couldn’t do anything for him when he was ill. He just sat there rocking himself like a sick monkey and altogether forgetting that he was King Solomon. He looked so pathetic, so helpless, clung to his wife’s hand so passionately, begging her not to leave him, that the visit was truly upsetting.

They had, however, scarcely been in John’s home for ten minutes before John’s father came in like a conquering hero. He had suffered for many years, I am sure, from an appalling sense of failure. He made the best of it, but he knew that this was not where he ought to be, allowing his poor wife to work her heart out for their sustenance. There was some strain of weakness somewhere, a fear of himself (perhaps because of his father’s insanity); he was an artist whose talents had led him nowhere, a gentleman married to a washerwoman (although that he never for a moment regretted), ineffectual, with ideas of form and colour that he could never make marketable. He must have become shyer and shyer, ever more reserved, ever more secretly unhappy as the years went on. Why didn’t he try some more practical and profitable occupation? Well, he did later, as you shall hear.

John, I fancy, was his one cherished companion, his one pride and delight. To see little Mr. Cornelius, Charlie said, sitting in his chair, his legs crossed under him Turk-wise, while John sang, that was a pleasant sight. Yes, it must have been.

Melancholy or no, on this particular afternoon he came in radiant. Mrs. Cornelius was getting out the tea-things, her mother-in-law half asleep in the rocking-chair (for she was a considerably old lady), John kneeling on the rough wooden seat in the window looking at an illustrated volume of Hans Andersen that Mr. Bartholomew had given him. ‘I remember as though it were yesterday. I was reading “The Clogs of Fortune” and I can quote you the opening words: “Every author has something peculiar in his style of writing, and those who are unfriendly to him quickly fasten upon this peculiarity, shrug their shoulders and say, ‘There he is again!’ ” And I remember that I was thinking “When I come to write I hope I will have something peculiar!” ’

The birds were singing in their cage and the warm sun coming in through the open window off the sea in a rhythm of heat like the rhythm of the waves. ‘I remember,’ John used to tell us, ‘looking up and thinking at once: “Why, what’s happened to father?” I’d never seen him look so triumphant before. There he stood, a parcel in his hand, beaming on us all. I loved him so dearly that it was as though we were one person, and at once I too was bursting with happiness and there was the scent of the sun and the mignonette in the window and the hot cakes that mother had been baking. How happy we all were even before we knew any reason! Father went to his wife and kissed her, then he kissed his mother, then he kissed his son.

‘ “Mother—all of you,” he said. “Our fortune’s made!” Then he undid the parcel and showed us a red leather box studded with gold nails. The lid was a plain and shiny wood. A very handsome box indeed.

‘ “This belongs to Lady Mary Madox,” he said quite reverentially.

‘ “And who may she be?” asked my mother.’ (John imitated all their voices so that you could see them living and moving in front of you.)

‘ “She lives in London. She’s staying here for her health with Mr. Carmichael who’s a cousin of hers. He showed her one of my boxes and she’s delighted and has sent this box, which she values more than anything she has, for me to paint a picture on the lid and decorate the sides with the best of my shells. She’ll pay handsomely for it.” ’

‘ “How much?” asked my mother.

‘ “And take it back to London and then there’ll be more orders, many orders——”

‘ “How much is she paying for it?” my mother asked again, rubbing her red hot hands on her apron.

‘ “Ten pounds if she likes it,” said my father.

‘ “And if she doesn’t like it?” asked my mother.

‘ “Of course she’ll like it, darling,” my father said, going up and kissing her. “I’ll paint such a beautiful picture——”

‘ “This!” I cried, rushing at him. “This! This! This!” and I showed him the picture in the Hans Andersen of the Wild Swans flying past the window.

‘ “Yes, yes!” he cried, as excited as I was. “That will do beautifully.”

‘It seemed as though our chance had truly come at last. We had always profoundly believed in my father’s talent, and indeed I still think that for delicacy and a certain romantic charm the pictures that he painted are very delightful. They were, of course, in the fashion of their time—I mean the Royal Academy fashion, not at all the kind of things that a young man called Aubrey Beardsley was just then beginning to be famous for. They were frankly pretty rather than anything else—but he had imagination, father had, and the picture of the Wild Swans on Lady Mary Madox’s box was the finest thing he ever did.

‘Yes, how excited we all were! We were quite certain that our fortunes were made for ever!

‘My father was a changed man, a new energy seemed to possess him. He could hardly wait to begin his work on the box. He described the old lady who had sent for him and shown great astonishment that he should be a gentleman. He described her to us, a funny old woman with a moustache on her upper lip, one shoulder higher than the other, a voice like a man’s, and leaning on a cane—“like one of those old ladies in Thackeray’s novels,” said father, although that meant nothing to any of us.

‘She had been inclined to patronize him and he’d been inclined to be angry. It was clear that she thought herself a very grand old lady indeed. I drank in every word of his description and saw the whole scene as though I had been present, my father, so small in body, so great in soul, very quiet, telling her a little about himself and not very much, and the old lady, feeling herself a grand patroness, delighted with herself for doing this small thing. Little I realized that one fine day I should know the old lady so well!’

They sat up ever so late talking about it and building, of course, tremendous castles in Spain. All that John’s father had ever wanted, he explained to them gently, was some kind of a Chance. That Chance had, for one reason or another, always been denied him. This old lady—Lady Max her friends called her—had tremendous influence in London. She was very rich and to her house everyone of importance went. If she liked the box when it was finished she would have it in her drawing-room and all the grand people in London would see it. There would then come Orders and Orders and Orders ...

John’s father, sitting beside his wife, her hand in his, explained that he had always had so many ideas in his head—wonderful unique ideas—but had been discouraged because there was no one in this little town who understood them.

It might be—it was in fact very likely—that they must go to London to live. At this John’s mother looked frightened and dismayed. What would they say in London to a fat red-faced washerwoman?

But at the word ‘London’ John’s heart beat fast. London was to him the centre of all glory and splendour, where theatres abounded and the Tower of London and Westminster Abbey and Madame Tussaud’s. Of this last he had read in an illustrated pamphlet lent to him at school. What a place! Where Kings, Queens, Soldiers lived in close proximity to hundreds of murderers!

That quiet sentence of his father did something to him—it made London not only a possibility but also a necessity.

In the early hours of the morning John woke to find his father seated at the little table working on the box. With his long, skinny, naked legs he jumped out of bed and ran across the room. He watched breathlessly. ‘I was frozen with cold. The candle jumped up and down. Neither of us cared. London and fortune were looking in at us through the window.’

Unfortunately Mrs. Cornelius couldn’t hold her tongue, and she must tell Mrs. Garriman and Mrs. Hoskin all about it. Mrs. Garriman ‘did’ the cards and said that a piece of good fortune, a journey and a man with dark hair were all in store for the Cornelius family.

Mrs. Hoskin was really the dangerous one. She was very vain, self-centred, and never forgot a slight or an injury. Bitterness, jealousy, vanity, these were her masters, so it was natural enough that good prospects for the Cornelius family should upset her very badly.

John remembered her, a small dark woman with her hair done up on the top of her head in a bun, looking in through the door, her ugly monkey-face furrowed with smiles.

‘Any news? Oh, I do ’ope it’s good. I do indeed.... ’Asn’t ’e finished it yet? Takes time of course. Anythink good always does.’ She made a great impression on John. He never forgot her and, later, when some reviewer stung him for a moment with some hostile remarks, he’d say: ‘That’s Mrs. Hoskin speaking.’ He took the Witch in The Wood-Cutter’s Green Clothes from her, I am sure.

Cornelius had promised that the box should be finished within ten days. That was wild wintry weather and the rain beat on the window-panes and the sea boomed on the beach so that you had to shout to make yourself heard. John remembered that the weather was important because of the shells. Cornelius found most of the shells himself, but he would buy them sometimes from an old man who knew just where to go for the largest and most beautiful.

The old man was tied to his bed with rheumatism, so that Cornelius did not have this time shells as perfect in their colour-gradations as he might have wished.

Those that he had he did marvels with. I’ve seen the box, so I know. Any close friend of John’s has seen the box. Shell-boxes are considered things of cheap and vulgar taste, but this box had a quality all its own. The picture on the lid must seem now old-fashioned. In any case Cornelius was not a great painter. The swans are flying through the evening sky while a young girl, kneeling beside her window, watches them. The swans are very white, the evening sky very blue, the girl’s face very pink—and yet there is a freshness here, a simplicity of vision, a sincerity of faith that make it not altogether absurd to sustain Cornelius as a humble companion of William Blake. That good man would have discovered the spirit behind the workmanship of this old shell-box and welcomed it. John, whose imagination so often ran ahead of fact, allowed himself full liberty while the shell-box was making. Although he was, as yet, only seven years of age, he had already fully determined to be a famous writer—a writer of many things but especially of plays. There was nothing very odd about that because fifty years ago many children dreamt of being writers; to-day it is airmen or motor-racers they’ll be! But I think it can be said here that John Cornelius never, from his eighth year onwards, had the faintest doubts about his future destiny. There were to be many occasions when everyone doubted but he. He was, at one and the same time, the vainest and most humble of God’s creatures, and that is true, perhaps, of many who are certain of their destinies.

During the whole of that week he was as bad as his mother and went strutting about the town and the school telling everyone that the Cornelius family was shortly departing for London and that his father was going to be the Court Painter.

‘But your father wasn’t going to be the Court Painter,’ I would interrupt at this point. ‘To begin with, there isn’t a Court Painter. That was a downright lie.’

‘It didn’t seem to me a lie,’ John would answer. ‘I simply saw the whole scene—father, mother, myself, grandmother, all marching down the London streets to a band between admiring crowds, the Palace gates swinging open, the Queen there in her crown, stepping forward, welcoming my father, and all of us having high tea in the Palace drawing-room.’

Myself: ‘You were only seven, of course.’

Cornelius: ‘When I imagine things they seem to me truer than what people call reality.’

Myself: ‘Yes. That’s why some people think you such a terrible liar.’

The opinion of both the town and the school was, I imagine, pretty equally divided about him. He had his warm friends and defenders who, even at this early time, felt that there was something special and peculiar about him, recognized also his courage, his independence and his passionate fidelity. To many others, even when he was little more than a baby, he was exasperating and irritating with his egotism, his insistence on his own importance, his physical oddities, and his constant certainty that he was right.

His schoolfellows were, I expect, considerably impressed by this approaching glory of his. They didn’t know, as yet, that he was a liar. Port Merlin was, in those days, a long way from London, and to the children at the school such things might happen as taking tea with the Queen at Buckingham Palace. Why not? The Queen had to have tea some time!

But it was after the Shell-box affair that John felt that he simply had to go to London: he had, in the face of the world, given his word and, in the face of the world, he must redeem it.

Well, the shell-box was finished at last and within the appointed time. The family had never seen anything so beautiful.

It was years later that John’s mother told him of the awful temptation under which she suffered on this night when the shell-box, completed, stood on the little table ready to be delivered up to the old lady on the following day.

The temptation was to destroy the shell-box. She woke up, just as the clock was striking two, and, as she described it to her son, the Devil leapt at her and had her by the throat. She sat up in bed and, in the moonlight, saw her husband fast asleep beside her. There was the box, brought from the other room, all the red and crimson and faint-pink shells coloured by the moon to a delicate and iridescent beauty.

The box in her eyes looked so lovely that she could not doubt but that it would make her husband famous in the world for ever. That fame would mean that she would lose him. She had, ever since she married him, been afraid that this should one day occur. He was so fine a gentleman, so greatly superior to her in every way, the only thing that she could do for him was to work. Now others would do the work, and he and the boy would be carried where she could not follow them. Very easily she could tear the lid off the box and throw it into the fire that still showed some glowing embers.

The Devil had so powerful an influence that she told her son she could see him bending over her, dressed in black tights, with a red feather in his hair. She might—who knows?—have yielded, but at that moment her little husband, in his sleep, turned towards her, and with the sigh of a child, rested his head on her ample breast. So, lying down, she put her arms around him and defied the Devil.

Mrs. Hoskin came in to see the finished box and paid it many a compliment. ‘Never did I see anythink more beautiful. They birds are flying as natural as natural. ’Owever you can do it, Mr. Cornelius, I can’t think!’

Nevertheless young John caught the wicked malice in her eye. She remained for him, his life through, the principle of evil as the ‘Bird-Man’ was the opposite. Whether there ever was a Bird-Man no one will ever know, and I expect that Mrs. Hoskin herself was never anything but a little ill-natured, overworked woman who kept a grubby little shop with sweets, tobacco and penny novelettes. She scarcely deserved the grand rôle that Cornelius gave her.

On the following afternoon Mr. Cornelius went up the town with his treasure. It happened to be a half-holiday, and young John sat with Charlie Christian on the sand-dunes looking out to sea. So it was, strangely enough, that Christian had his share in this early adventure of Cornelius’ as he was to have his share in many later ones.

The two little boys sat looking solemnly out to sea and, so John affirms, for the best part of the time said nothing whatever. In any case Charlie was the one human being with whom John could always be silent—with anyone else he must talk his mind and imagination out, although he had, rather unexpectedly, the gift of being a good listener.

Since, in 1920, Boles’ malicious portrait of him was published in Uncivil Sketches the impression of him as a kind of long-legged, gyrating eel from whose wide mouth egoistic vapourings ceaselessly flowed has never quite died out in America, a country where Boles is rated more highly than he is in England.

Anyone who knew Cornelius saw at once the falsity of this caricature in many, many particulars, but Boles was clever enough (and honest enough from his point of view) to emphasize as well some real weaknesses of John’s. Not that it matters now. John had his enemies and detractors after his success like everyone else. Quite a number of them in fact. All his life he pretended not to mind that people should not like him. As a matter of fact he hated to be disliked unless he detested the disliker. The trouble was that he could never detest anyone for more than half an hour: the result of this was that so many people could hurt him—and did.

He remembered that on that afternoon the sun began to sink, a round red ball in waves of grey cloud. Slowly spears of bronze started up from the floor of the shell-cold sea, and as the waves of grey caught that red sun the spears cleft the heavens and stood like an approaching army on the world’s rim.

At last Charlie said: ‘You’ll be seeing none of the boys after you go to London.’

‘I’ll ask you to London,’ John remembered saying.

But Charlie shook his head.

‘I like fishing,’ he said.

He must have felt the drama of John’s approaching fate because he did something very unlike his undemonstrative self. He felt in his pocket and produced a large, stained jack-knife.

‘I don’t want it,’ he said. ‘I’ve got another.’

John hated knives, guns, ropes, whips—anything that could possibly hurt either man or animal. But he took Charlie’s present and thanked him.

‘I expect father will be back,’ he said, and they went to the cottage.

I had two accounts of the scene that followed, two very excellent ones: one from Charlie, the other from John himself. Charlie had two very marked characteristics: he never forgot anything, and he had not many words in his vocabulary. His account of anything was limited strictly to fact, a police report, and behind the facts you must build the picture.

He had scarcely seen Mrs. Cornelius before, and when he was introduced to the big, floppy, red-faced woman sitting on the bed, when he realized, without, of course, analysing it, her distress, anxiety, intense agitation, he felt at once that he was intruding; he had always beautiful, courtly manners.

But John wouldn’t let him go. His sense of the dramatic wanted Charlie to be there to share in the triumph. Mrs. Cornelius really didn’t notice him but sat there on the bed, crushing someone’s damp chemise between her hands, murmuring over and over again: ‘Oh, Lordy! ... Lordy! Why doesn’t he come? What’s keeping him?’

So the two boys just stood there, Charlie rubbing his hand up and down against the sympathetic corduroy of his little trousers while the birds sang in their cage and the room darkened.

The door opened just after Mrs. Cornelius had lit the gas over the mantelpiece, and Cornelius came in.

There was scarcely a need, Charlie told me, for Cornelius to say anything. ‘Come to think of it, I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a man’s face more tragic than his was. It may have been the gaslight but he looked tragic all right.’

He went to the table without a word to anyone. With fumbling hands he undid the parcel he was carrying and he placed the shell-box on the table where it had stood until an hour or two ago. Then, looking straight at his wife, he told her.

The old woman had received him uncivilly in the first place. She had been in a temper about something before he arrived. She had told him to leave the box, but he wanted to see her look of surprised pleasure when he showed it her. So he showed it her.

Surprised pleasure had not been her reaction, for she had held the box scornfully to the light, glanced at the painting, screamed out: ‘What do you say those things are? Birds?’ and had thrown the box on to the floor with such violence that many of the shells were broken. She had rated him like a cheated fishwife, told him that he had misunderstood her intentions completely, that his picture was a miserable daub, his shells ridiculous. Moreover, he had ruined her beautiful box. It was ruined for ever. He could pick the thing up and take it away with him. She never wanted to see either him or it again. So he picked the thing up and came away.

He sat down at the table and began, fumblingly, to straighten some of the shells. Mrs. Cornelius got up from the bed, came over to him, put her arms round him and kissed him. Charlie slipped away out of the room without anyone noticing.

John was exceedingly sharp for his years and he realized at once that it was only his father who needed any consoling. ‘I don’t know how it could have been with anyone as young as I was, but I knew instantly that this was the end of everything for father. A little thing, an absurd thing—but you can say all the same that my father was killed by a shell-box, one of those absurd cheap things that you see in little shops in watering-places. Killed,’ he would say, his face all working, dramatically pointing with his long fingers, ‘by that box on the table there.’

He wasn’t killed at once. People seldom are. There was no melodrama. Very little was said. Everything went on apparently the same—only Mrs. Cornelius drank a little more. Mrs. Garriman and Mrs. Hoskin were in the house more often, and John began to grow up.

He must have been a funny-looking boy round his eighth year. It’s a fact, I believe, that many people in the town thought him a bit ‘off his head’ like King Solomon, his grandfather.

He was pretty popular at school. He was clever, he learned by heart with extraordinary facility, but often enough in class he would sit staring at the large coarsely-coloured Bible pictures on the wall, making up stories in his head about them when he should have been working.

He was such an odd-looking boy, with his big nose and his small bright eyes and his untidy mop of hair, his long thin legs and arms in grey jacket and trousers far too small for him. Everyone—masters and boys alike—must have felt both the egotism and the sweetness of his nature. Often the children would tease him, especially if Charlie were not near. He would insist on telling them stories, and of these stories he was always the hero. To tease him was easy, however—one allusion to madness and the story would die on his lips and he would turn, walk away, his head forward, his long arms swinging. This, even in those early days, was his one haunting fear. Beyond this he hated to be laughed at, not because he was vain (although if to consider yourself a completely exceptional person is vanity he was vain) but because he always thought the unkind jeerer might be right!

Although he had friends at the school—and especially Mr. Bartholomew for whom he always bought a bunch of flowers on his birthday and laid it on his desk—and, among the children, Anne and Charlie, he cared most for the company of mature people. He had, by now, friends all over the town, the two night-watchmen who called the hours, the old woman who went round with her barrow selling handkerchiefs and laces, the old women knitting along the wall, many of the fishermen, including by now Charlie’s splendid father, Anne’s mother, who was a little flighty, giggling, pretty lady greatly interested in gentlemen, and above all, two old ladies, the widow and virgin sister of a clergyman, who lived in a cottage near the Cornelius family. These two old ladies, Mrs. Gordon and Miss Gracie, soon became more exciting to him than any others because they wrote poetry—religious verse which was frequently published in the Glebeshire Sentinel.

And now John had himself written a play! It was founded on Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale, which the two old ladies had read to him, taking parts alternately. A good deal of it John did not understand, but the main point was abundantly clear—that the King Leontes had been unjustly jealous of his lovely wife Hermione, so she pretended to be dead, and then, many years after, when Leontes had bitterly repented his jealousy, she pretended to be a statue, slowly came to life, stepped from her pedestal and threw her arms foolishly about her silly husband’s neck. What a scene this must have been!—the two old ladies in their small cottage room, crowded with bric-à-brac, very hot and smelling of tea and plum cake, read with trembling voices the great closing scenes of this wonderful play.

Myself: ‘You were all very excited?’

Cornelius: ‘Excited! That’s not the word. When Miss Grade came to Leontes’ cry, “Oh! She’s warm. If this be magic, let it be an art Lawful as eating”—and the gentlemen near at hand make enthusiastic comments, “She embraces him”; “She hangs about his neck”—I could stand it no longer but jumped up from my chair and waved my arms and cried:

‘ “Oh, good, good, good!”

‘And then I embraced Miss Gracie as though she was responsible for the whole thing, and we all cried a little.’

John saw no harm in cribbing from Shakespeare, and although he situated his play in London rather than in Sicilia the affair of the statue was common to both Shakespeare and Cornelius. But then Shakespeare himself had borrowed it from somewhere, so what matter?

The only trouble with John’s play was that it was too short—six pages, in a very large infantile hand, of an exercise-book. On the other side this brevity made it quick in the reading, and that was fortunate because he insisted on reading it to everyone. He was so brimful himself of enchanted happiness that he should be a creator of this kind, that (now as always) he was certain that everyone must wish to share in his own joy.

He was beginning now to read ferociously. He was afraid of no one when it came to book-borrowing. He was passing a house one evening and he could see into the sitting-room, the blind not being drawn. The wall opposite the window was lined with books. He rang the bell, and a white-haired, bespectacled, severe-eyebrowed lady opened the door.

‘I beg your pardon,’ John said, ‘but I passed your window and saw the books you have. Wouldn’t you lend me one or two, ma’am? I’d take the greatest care of them.’

‘Certainly not,’ said the lady very indignantly. ‘I never heard of such a thing,’ and she tried to close the door.

John slipped inside and looking at her very beseechingly cried: ‘Oh, please, ma’am, do! Please do! If you will, I’ll read you a play I’ve written—I will indeed.’

The lady told him afterwards that she was greatly astonished and that he looked unlike anything she’d ever seen before—and then the idea of a child like that writing a play! But it was his little deep-set burning eyes that conquered her. Before she knew it she was with him in the sitting-room and he, in a frenzy of excitement, was pulling out one book after another.

It was on her shelves that he first found Lavengro and Romany Rye, Kinglake’s Crimea, Macaulay’s History of England, Feats on the Fiord, and Charles Kingsley’s Heroes. They became great friends, the lady and he. She was a widow and her name was Mrs. Winchester.

Now it happened that he knew very well old Jimmy Lipscombe who was the bill-poster of the town. Jimmy had a wooden leg and a shaggy black mongrel of a dog as constant companions. He went stumping about, talking to himself and the dog. He was one of the people in the town who loved to hear John recite and sing. He never could have enough of it. In return he would often give John a spare poster which John would tack on to the front-room chimney-piece at home. They were always coloured yellow, with red lettering.

One morning Jimmy was going about everywhere posting up:

GREAT SENSATION!

Theatre Royal

Port Merlin

———

shakespeare’s

ROMEO AND JULIET

———

miss ada montgomery

as

juliet

Three Performances Only

thursday, friday and saturday

July 7, 8, 9, at 8 p.m.

Doors Open 7.30 p.m.

I must confess that there are certain episodes in John’s early life that follow along very conventional lines. I don’t know how many novels in my youth contained the episode of the young stage aspirant who, adoring the beautiful leading lady, is graciously kissed by her on the forehead!

Thackeray made good use of it once. But the differences here are that in the first place Johnny, unlike Mr. Pendennis, was only eight years old when he spoke for the first time to his Miss Fotheringay, and secondly he was thinking more of himself, I am afraid, than of the great artist. Of himself and Shakespeare, I might perhaps venture.

As soon as he read Jimmy’s announcement he made love to Mr. Darlington. Mr. Darlington sat inside his stuffy little box like a squirrel in a cage. Pasted on to the faded wallpaper behind him were photographs signed ‘Yours in the Pink, Wal. Peach,’ or ‘Yours very sincerely, Flossie Armstrong,’ or (as John remembers especially well because she was so lovely a lady) ‘Yours, dear Mr. Darlington, ever sincerely, Connie May.’

‘Do you think,’ he asked Mr. Darlington, ‘Ada Montgomery is as beautiful as Connie May?’

‘A bit long in the tooth she must be. Long time since she was here.’

‘Juliet was only fourteen,’ John remembered that he priggishly remarked, and Mr. Darlington wisely replied: ‘That’s the whole trouble with Juliet if you ask me—all the Juliets I’ve ever seen. If they’re fourteen or thereabouts they can’t act, and if they can act, they’re a damned sight more than fourteen.’

He let himself go with John, dropped his dignity and sense of class importance. In fact, as he told him, he was always forgetting that John was only eight years old. This irritated him. It always annoyed him that John should think so much of himself.

‘Life’ll teach yer! Life’ll teach yer!’ he would remark gloomily.

‘I want it to,’ said John—and yet he could be a child too when he liked, as for instance when at a moment’s notice he would leave Shakespeare and Mr. Darlington and run down the street after the fire-engine, waving his long arms and running so wildly that you’d think he’d crack his thin knees at any moment.

He was determined to get into the Theatre for the first performance of Romeo and Juliet. It wasn’t easy. There were no free tickets this time and Mr. Darlington was quite honest and straightforward.

‘It’s no use you hanging around this time, Johnny. Ada Montgomery’s got a sort of world celebrity. She’s acted in America. Last time she was here the house was sold right out. It’ll be the same this time.... No, it will be of no use your reading your play to me. You’ve done that once already. And I’m not so mighty set on plays. I’m like the girl in the sweet-shop. Too much of it around all the time. No, I tell you it’s no good.’

John says he remembers that he promised to pick Mr. Darlington a large bunch of flowers. But that didn’t move him.

‘Now it’s no use your going on. I tell you there won’t be a empty seat.’

Every day, as soon as school was over, John hung around the Theatre. There was a lot of bustle, scenery going in and out, actors and actresses coming and going for rehearsal.

So it was that John discovered Mr. Beakin. Dear Mr. Beakin!

‘I suppose,’ John would continue, ‘I owe everything, if you look into it, to Sam Beakin. I don’t see any other way that I’d have got into that Theatre, and if I hadn’t, why, then I wouldn’t ... but listen and I’ll tell you.’ Then he’d throw his head back, wink with his left eye at myself who’d heard the story so very often before, and regale the flattered third party with the whole affair.

‘No one remembers Sam Beakin nowadays of course. No one perhaps in the whole world but myself. Just after this tour with Ada Montgomery he was with Irving at the Lyceum. After that again with Tree at His Majesty’s. Then he became too fat and, I’m afraid, too fond of the bottle. He dropped out of engagements and of friends. I found him in wretched rooms in Bloomsbury, and ... but that’s another story.

‘What happened now was that I was standing (eight years and a bit I was at the time) outside the Theatre Royal, Port Merlin, waiting for some kind of miracle. I believed in miracles then, I believe in them now. Sam Beakin comes along, traditional actor of the time, coat with velvet collar, cane with gold top, hat hitched on one side of his head. But he was a fine-looking man in those days, not so fat, broad-chested, holding his head up, full of confidence and childlike vanity and self-absorption. Even then, I expect, much too fond of drink and women.

‘Well, he was striding along to the stage-door, swinging his cane, and he saw me. He was to play Mercutio and he was reciting some of the Queen Mab speech aloud, and as he got up to me I continued it for him. I was only eight but my father had first read the play to me when I was three, I should think. And I’d read it again and again since the announcement of its performance.

‘I always had complete confidence in the friendliness of everybody and I looked up at him grinning. I expect I danced a little on both feet. It’s a habit I still have. We were almost inside the stage-door, and Mr. Darlington, within his little box, was being dignified, fussy, self-important.

‘ “What the devil’s this, Darlington?” Beakin said, and Mr. Darlington answered very solemnly, “It’s a boy I know, Mr. Beakin, sir. He’s mad about the theatre.”

‘It was a piece of luck for me, of course, that Beakin was there at all. Often enough the company wouldn’t arrive at the town where they were performing until the actual day. But on this occasion the first part of the week had been empty. During the preceding week they’d been at Weymouth. So Sam was free of care, a little inebriated perhaps, full of charity.

‘ “He’s pestering me,” Mr. Darlington said, “to get him in to the performance to-morrow night. I tell him it can’t be done.”

‘ “Want to see me as Mercutio, do you?” says Sam Beakin grinning.

‘I answered fervently something or another, and it was then he really noticed me. Beakin told me years later that he thought I was the ugliest boy he’d ever seen in his life. All the same striking. That’s the way I used to hit people, you know,’ Cornelius would add, throwing his untidy hair back from his forehead.

To cut John’s reminiscences short, what happened was that Sam Beakin promised to get him into the Theatre. And he kept his promise.

John wanted to bring his father in too. He assured him that it would be all right, that Mr. Beakin would do anything for him and that he’d promised to listen to his play. But something had happened to John’s father. He seemed to have no enterprise any longer. He sat there, looking through the window at the cobble-path, the shoulder of the sand-dune and the tangled cup of the sea....

So John went alone, with a clean white collar and the grey trousers that were so much too short and tight for him. He carried a bunch of flowers that he intended to give to Miss Montgomery. He was quite confident that he would speak to her.

When he reached the stage-door there was a tremendous bustle, and for a little while he was afraid that he would never be able to reach Mr. Darlington. This was agonizing.

The crowd around him was cheerful and humorous, consisting very largely of members of the orchestra, scene-shifters, friends of the company. Many of them knew Johnny.

‘Hullo, young Cock o’ the Walk. Where are you going to?’

‘I’ve been asked to come—Mr. Beakin asked me. Please will you—would you mind? Mr. Darlington wants me.’

John, when he wished, had very beautiful manners which he inherited from the Ancient Scandinavian, who was, so tradition said, always charming to ladies before he assaulted them. Some big man handed him through to Mr. Darlington, who was by far too officially busy to pay any attention to him. But it happened that someone pushed an arm through the swinging door with the words ‘Mr. Beakin’s drink there yet?’ and a big pewter pot was handed over. John caught the arm and, with the drink, was pulled to the other side of the door.

‘I’m the boy——’ Johnny began, clutching his flowers in one hand and holding on to the hairy arm with the other.

‘Oh, ’e said something about a boy.’

At least that’s how John told the story. He said that he was never so passionately excited again. That isn’t true, of course, because he was so frequently and so easily excited.

‘You won’t find any theatre like that ever any more. It was one of the curious things about Merlin, as I remember it, that you were conscious of the sea everywhere. The “Royal” was right in the middle of the town and yet, quite easily, if you went in the interval to the front of the Theatre for a breath of air, you could hear, if there was any sea on, the echo of the waves pounding on the beach. It must have been a kind of echo—it was like the musical rhythm in a sea-shell held up to the ear.

‘But inside the Theatre that night there was the smell of gas, of wet paint, of beer, of sweating human bodies. It was a little, compact eighteenth-century building and they’d had the good sense, or perhaps simply the carelessness, to leave the old red and gold on the pillars and the exteriors of the boxes. The ceiling was painted with a fine, now faded, representation of Venus and Adonis, considered by many Merlin citizens indecent because of the general nudity.

‘On this present occasion they had been repainting the doors and walls of the lobby. That smell of new paint, which somehow had salt in it because I was always thinking of the sea, I shall have in my nostrils till my dying day.’

The man with the hairy arms led John to a corner behind the stage and whispered to him fiercely that he was to stay exactly there and not move for the rest of the evening.

Exactly there he stayed with a wing of scenery stretching forward to the right of him, a ladder against the wall on his left, and in front of him a straight pattern of light and colour holding a strip of stage, a piece of scenery painted with ancient buildings, and a large papier-mâché tree with a big hole in it.

So, and thus, he saw his first Shakespearian play, standing there without moving a limb even in the intermission, shivering with cold (for there was a terrible draught), excitement, pleasure, anticipation. For on this night he knew for the first time that this was where he ought to be. It was to be his fate to know that always and yet never to translate that knowledge into fact. From the night of Romeo and Juliet he was to be a frustrated human being.

He shivered so that his teeth chattered, for, as the evening went on, he was convinced that it was he who had written the play and not Shakespeare. He had even created Ada Montgomery. He did not see her with any critical eye, for he was responsible for her. When she stood on the balcony and it trembled ominously she flashed a side-look to the wings so fierce and angry that Johnny wondered how anyone could survive it. And yet a moment later in a deep melodious tone she was ravishing the elderly and pigeon-breasted Romeo:

‘O gentle Romeo!

If thou dost love, pronounce it faithfully;

Or if thou think’st I am too quickly won,

I’ll frown and be perverse and say thee nay,

So thou wilt woo; but else, not for the world.

In truth, fair Montague, I am too fond,

And therefore thou mayst think my ’haviour light....

To which the elderly Romeo, in a voice sadly feminine and shrill, replied:

‘Lady, by yonder blessed moon I swear

That tips with silver all these fruit-tree tops ...’

‘That tips with silver ...’ Had not Johnny known that exactly? Not the fruit-trees, but the dunes with their rough dark grasses, the fresh-water stream running into the sand, and the moon first stretching its long finger over the thin ridge of the dark sea, then spreading until it marbled the wet shore to mother-of-pearl, then flashing all the running stream into a glitter and sparkle of silver?

He had seen his friend Mercutio, now handsome indeed in doublet, hose and feathered hat. Johnny’s heart beat with ancient friendship, for he felt as though he had known Mr. Beakin for ever and ever!

‘He was an old, old friend, you know, and the finest thing in physical splendour I’d ever seen, pushing up his stomach into his chest and shaking his black curly wig under his broad-brimmed hat:

“She is the fairies’ midwife and she comes,

In shape no bigger than an agate-stone

On the forefinger of an alderman.

Drawn with a team of little atomies

Athwart men’s noses as they lie asleep ...”

‘I tell you I could repeat every word of it when I was five. There was a bright baby for you!

‘Anyway on this occasion when the scene changed to Capulet’s house and Beakin strode off, brushing right past me, I didn’t attempt to stop him, for it was still Mercutio, my Mercutio, who was dancing in my brain.’

Then the moment came. Ada Montgomery had cried:

‘O, look! Methinks I see my cousin’s ghost

Seeking out Romeo, that did spit his body

Upon a rapier’s point. Stay, Tybalt, stay!

Romeo, I come! This do I drink to thee!’

At once, after the curtain fell, John remembered, Ada Montgomery sat up in her nightdress and gave vent to a terrific sneeze. She was a large-faced, large-bosomed lady and her sneeze was like a thunderclap.

‘Just kept it in, by God!’ she cried and strode to the wings.

Fate decided that she should run straight into Johnny, nearly fall, fold her arms about him to steady herself, so that he found himself enwrapped in rolls of white cotton, his hands pressed against steel corsets, and savour of peppermint, lily of the valley and good honest beer.

‘What the hell——’ cried the lady (or so John always insisted). Then: ‘Body of God, it’s a boy!’

She stood staring at him, then she laughed.

John, so soon as he could get his breath, was entirely at his ease and presented his bunch of flowers, now, alas, crushed and faded.

He explained that he was a friend of Mr. Beakin’s who had permitted him—that he worshipped Ada Montgomery—Shakespeare also—that he had gathered these flowers for her.

She sat down on an upturned box, spread her legs and scratched her thigh while the scene-shifters pushed the shabby scenery apart.

‘And you want to be an actor? ... Well, you could be a comic with a mouth like that. How old are you? Eight? And you know this damned play by heart? What do you think of me? A bit more than fourteen, eh? Christ! Should think I was! Want to come to London?’

‘Yes, if you don’t mind,’ said John.

‘I mind! A lot of bloody good my minding anything does. There I am, swearing in front of a kid. Here! I must go and change! Lord, if you aren’t the oddest ...’

Johnny then asked if he might come and see her in London.

See her? Of course he could.

Where did she live?

She called to a scene-shifter and got the back of an envelope and the stub of a pencil. In a childish hand she wrote:

Ada Montgomery,

11 Dickens Mansions,

Taggart Street,

Portland Place.

‘There! Come and see me!’

If he’d been a prettier little boy she’d have kissed him. As it was, she nodded in a friendly manner and went off, taking the bunch of flowers. But Johnny, stepping out to see where she went to, observed that round the corner and mounting the crooked little staircase to her dressing-room, she dropped the withered bunch.

He was practically-minded. He had the address. So he stood, heart, soul filled with ambition and an eight-year-old conquest of the world, to watch the rest of the performance.