It was a crisp October afternoon, and along Iffley Road the wind was
chivvying the yellow leaves. We stood at the window watching the
flappers opposite play hockey. One of them had a scarlet tam-o'-shanter
and glorious dark hair underneath it.... A quiet tap at the door, gentle
but definite, and in came Mrs. Beesley.
If you have been at our digs, you know her by sight, and have not
forgotten. Hewn of the real imperial marble is she, not unlike Queen
Victoria in shape and stature. She tells us she used to dance featly and
with abandon in days gone by, when her girlish slimness was the
admiration of every greengrocer's assistant in Oxford--and even in later
days when she and Dr. Warren always opened the Magdalen servants' ball
together. She and the courtly President were always the star couple. I
can see her doing the Sir Roger de Coverley. But the virgin zone was
loosed long ago, and she has expanded with the British Empire. Not
rotund, but rather imposingly cubic. Our hallway is a very narrow one,
and when you come to visit us of an evening, after red-cheeked Emily
has gone off to better tilting grounds, it is a prime delight to see
Mrs. Beesley backing down the passage (like a stately canal boat) before
the advancing guest. Very large of head and very pink of cheek, very
fond of a brisk conversation, some skill at cooking, slow and full of
dignity on the stairs, much reminiscent of former lodgers, bold as a
lion when she thinks she is imposed upon, but otherwhiles humorous and
placable--such is our Mrs. Beesley.
She saw us standing by the window, and thought we were watching the
leaves twisting up the roadway in golden spirals.
"Watching the wind?" she said pleasantly. "I loves to see the leaves
'avin' a frolic. They enjoys it, same as young gentlemen do."
"Or young ladies?" I suggested. "We were watching the flappers play
hockey, Mrs. Beesley. One of them is a most fascinating creature. I
think her name must be Kathleen...."
Mrs. Beesley chuckled merrily and threw up her head in that delightful
way of hers. "Oh, dear, Oh, dear, you're just like all the other
gentlemen," she said. "Always awatchin' and awaitin' for the young
ladies. Mr. Bye that used to be 'ere was just the same, an' he was
engaged to be marrit. 'Ad some of 'em in to tea once, he did. I thought
it was scandalous, and 'im almost a marrit gentleman."
"Don't you remember what the poet says, Mrs. Beesley?" I suggested:
"Beauty must be scorned in none
Though but truly served in one."
"Not much danger of you gentlemen bein' too scornful," said Mrs.
Beesley. Her eyes began to sparkle now that she saw herself fairly
embarked upon a promising conversation. She sidled a little farther into
the room. Lloyd winked at me and quietly escaped behind her.
"Seeing as we're alone," said Mrs. Beesley, "I come to you to see about
dinner to-night. I knows as you're the father of 'em all." (That is her
quaint way of saying that she thinks me the leading spirit of the three
who dig with her.) "How about a little jugged 'are? Nice little 'ares
there are in Cowley Road now. I thinks 'are is very tender an' tasty.
That, an' a nice 'ot cup o' tea?"
The last 'are had been, in Tennyson's phrase, "the heir of all the
ages," so I deprecated the suggestion. "I don't think hare agrees with
Mr. Williams," I said.
"'Ow about a pheasant?" said Mrs. Beesley, stroking the corner of the
table with her hand as she always does when in deep thought. "A
pheasant and a Welsh rabbit, not too peppery. That goes well with the
cider. Dr. Warren came 'ere to dinner once, an' he had a Welsh rabbit
and never forgot it. 'E allus used to say when 'e saw me, ''Ow about
that Welsh rabbit, Mrs. Beesley?' Oh, dear, Oh, dear, 'e _is_ a kind
gentleman! 'E gave us a book once--''Istory of Magdalen College,' I
think he wrote it 'imself."
"I think a pheasant would be very nice," I said, and began looking for a
book.
"Do you think Mr. Loomis will be back from town in time for dinner?"
asked Mrs. Beesley. "I know 'e's fond o' pheasant. He'd come if he
knew."
"We might send him a telegram," I said.
"Oh, dear, Oh, dear!" sighed Mrs. Beesley, overcome by such a fantastic
thought. "You know, Mr. Morley, a funny thing 'appened this morning,"
she said. "Em'ly and I were making Mr. Loomis's bed. But we didn't find
'is clothes all lyin' about the floor same as 'e usually does. 'I wonder
what's 'appened to Mr. Loomis's clothes?' said Em'ly.
"'P'raps 'e's took 'em up to town to pawn 'em.' I said. (You know we 'ad
a gent'man 'ere once that pawned nearly all 'is things--a Jesus
gentleman 'e was.)
"Em'ly says to me, 'I wonder what the three balls on a pawnbroker's
sign mean?'
"'Why don't you know, Em'ly?' I says. It means it's two to one you never
gets 'em back."
Just then there was a ring at the bell and Mrs. Beesley rolled away
chuckling. And I returned to the window to watch Kathleen play hockey.
_October, 1912._
"PEACOCK PIE"
Once a year or so one is permitted to find some book which brings a real
tingle to that ribbon of the spinal marrow which responds to the
vibrations of literature. Not a bad way to calendar the years is by the
really good books they bring one. Each twelve month the gnomon on the
literary sundial is likely to cast some shadow one will not willingly
forget. Thus I mark 1916 as the year that introduced me to William
McFee's "Casuals of the Sea" and Butler's "Way of All Flesh"; 1915 most
of us remember as Rupert Brooke's year, or the year of the Spoon River
Anthology, if you prefer that kind of thing; 1914 I notch as the season
when I first got the hang of Bourget and Conrad. But perhaps best of
all, in 1913 I read "Peacock Pie" and "Songs of Childhood," by Walter de
la Mare.
"Peacock Pie" having now been published in this country it is seasonable
to kindle an altar fire for this most fanciful and delightful of
present-day poets. It is curious that his work is so little known over
here, for his first book, "Songs of Childhood," was published in
England in 1902. Besides, poetry he has written novels and essays, all
shot through with a phosphorescent sparkle of imagination and charm. He
has the knack of "words set in delightful proportion"; and "Peacock Pie"
is the most authentic knapsack of fairy gold since the "Child's Garden
of Verses."
I am tempted to think that Mr. de la Mare is the kind of poet more
likely to grow in England than America. The gracious and fine-spun
fabric of his verse, so delicate in music, so quaint and haunting in
imaginative simplicity, is the gift of a land and life where rewards and
fames are not wholly passed away. Emily Dickinson and Vachel Lindsay are
among our contributors to the songs of gramarye: but one has only to
open "The Congo" side by side with "Peacock Pie" to see how the
seductions of ragtime and the clashing crockery of the Poetry Society's
dinners are coarsening the fibres of Mr. Lindsay's marvellous talent as
compared with the dainty horns of elfin that echo in Mr. de la Mare. And
it is a long Pullman ride from Spoon River to the bee-droned gardens
where De la Mare's old women sit and sew. Over here we have to wait for
Barrie or Yeats or Padraic Colum to tell us about the fairies, and Cecil
Sharp to drill us in their dances and songs. The gentry are not native
in our hearts, and we might as well admit it.
To say that Mr. de la Mare's verse is distilled in fairyland suggests
perhaps a delicate and absent-minded figure, at a loss in the hurly
burly of this world; the kind of poet who loses his rubbers in the
subway, drops his glasses in the trolley car, and is found wandering
blithely in Central Park while the Women's Athenaeum of the Tenderloin
is waiting four hundred strong for him to lecture. But Mr. de la Mare is
the more modern figure who might readily (I hope I speak without
offense) be mistaken for a New York stock broker, or a member of the
Boston Chamber of Commerce. Perhaps he even belongs to the newer order
of poets who do not wear rubbers.
One's first thought (if one begins at the beginning, but who reads a
book of poetry that way?) is that "Peacock Pie" is a collection of poems
for children. But it is not that, any more than "The Masses" is a paper
for the proletariat. Before you have gone very far you will find that
the imaginary child you set out with has been magicked into a
changeling. The wee folk have been at work and bewitched the
pudding--the pie rather. The fire dies on the hearth, the candle
channels in its socket, but still you read on. Some of the poems bring
you the cauld grue of Thrawn Janet. When at last you go up to bed, it
will be with the shuddering sigh of one thrilled through and through
with the sad little beauties of the world. You will want to put out a
bowl of fresh milk on the doorstep to appease the banshee--did you not
know that the janitor of your Belshazzar Court would get it in the
morning.
One of the secrets of Mr. de la Mare's singular charm is his utter
simplicity, linked with a delicately tripping music that intrigues the
memory unawares and plays high jinks with you forever after. Who can
read "Off the Ground" and not strum the dainty jig over and over in his
head whenever he takes a bath, whenever he shaves, whenever the moon is
young? I challenge you to resist the jolly madness of its infection:
Three jolly Farmers
Once bet a pound
Each dance the others would
Off the ground.
Out of their coats
They slipped right soon,
And neat and nicesome,
Put each his shoon.
One--Two--Three--
And away they go,
Not too fast,
And not too slow;
Out from the elm-tree's
Noonday shadow,
Into the sun
And across the meadow.
Past the schoolroom,
With knees well bent
Fingers a-flicking,
They dancing went....
Are you not already out of breath in the hilarious escapade?
The sensible map's quarrel with the proponents of free verse is not that
they write such good prose; not that they espouse the natural rhythms of
the rain, the brook, the wind-grieved tree; this is all to the best,
even if as old as Solomon. It is that they affect to disdain the
superlative harmonies of artificed and ordered rhythms; that knowing not
a spondee from a tribrach they vapour about prosody, of which they know
nothing, and imagine to be new what antedates the Upanishads. The
haunting beauty of Mr. de la Mare's delicate art springs from an ear of
superlative tenderness and sophistication. The daintiest alternation of
iambus and trochee is joined to the serpent's cunning in swiftly
tripping dactyls. Probably this artifice is greatly unconscious, the
meed of the trained musician; but let no singer think to upraise his
voice before the Lord ere he master the axioms of prosody. Imagist
journals please copy.
One may well despair of conveying in a few rough paragraphs the gist of
this quaint, fanciful, brooding charm. There is something fey about much
of the book: it peers behind the curtains of twilight and sees strange
things. In its love of children, its inspired simplicity, its sparkle of
whim and Æsopian brevity, I know nothing finer. Let me just cut for you
one more slice of this rarely seasoned pastry.