OVERLOOKED
By
MAURICE BARING
London: William Heinemann
1922
To
M.A.T
OVERLOOKED
PART I
THE PAPERS OF ANTHONY KAY
CHAPTER I
When my old friend and trusted adviser, Doctor Kennaway, told me that
I must go to Haréville and stay there a month or, still better, two
months, I asked him what I could possibly do there. The only possible
pastime at a watering-place is to watch. A blind man is debarred from
that pastime.
He said to me: "Why don't you write a novel?"
I said that I had never written anything in my life. He then said that
a famous editor, of the _Figaro_, I think, had once said that every
man had one newspaper article in him. Novel could be substituted for
newspaper article. I objected that, although I found writing on my
typewriter a soothing occupation, I had always been given to understand
by authors that correcting proofs was the only real fun in writing a
book. I was debarred from that. We talked of other things and I thought
no more about this till after I had been at Haréville a week.
When I arrived there, although the season had scarcely begun, I made
acquaintances more rapidly than I had expected, and most of my time was
taken up in idle conversation.
After I had been drinking the waters for a week, I made the acquaintance
of James Rudd, the novelist. I had never met him before. I have, indeed,
rarely met a novelist. When I have done so they have either been elderly
ladies who specialized in the life of the Quartier-Latin, or country
gentlemen who kept out all romance from their general conversation,
which they confined to the crops and the misdeeds of the Government.
James Rudd did not certainly belong to either of these categories. He
was passionately interested in his own business. He did not seem in
the least inclined to talk about anything else. He took for granted I
had read all his works. I think he supposed that even the blind could
hardly have failed to do that. Some of his works have been read to
me. I did not like to put it in this way, lest he should think I was
calling attention to the absence of his books in the series which have
been transcribed in the Braille language. But he was evidently satisfied
that I knew his work. I enjoyed the books of his which were read to me,
but then, I enjoy any novel. I did not tell him that. I let him take
for granted that I had taken for granted all there was to be taken for
granted. I imagine him to wear a faded Venetian-red tie, a low collar,
and loose blue clothes (I shall find out whether this is true later), to
be a non-smoker--I am, in fact, sure of that--a practical teetotaler,
not without a nice discrimination based on the imagination rather than
on experience, of French vintage wines, and a fine appreciation of all
the arts. He is certainly not young, and I think rather weary, but still
passionately interested in the only thing which he thinks worthy of any
interest. I found him an entertaining companion, easy and stimulating.
He had been sent to Haréville by Kennaway, which gave us a link.
Kennaway had told him to leave off writing novels for five weeks if he
possibly could. He was finding it difficult. He told me he was longing
to write, but could think of no subject.
I suggested to him that he should write a novel about the people at
Haréville. I said I could introduce him to three ladies and that they
could form the nucleus of the story. He was delighted with the idea,
and that same evening I introduced him to Princess Kouragine, who is
not, as her name sounds, a Russian, but a French lady, _née_ Robert, who
married a Prince Serge Kouragine. He died some years ago. She is a lady
of so much sense, and so ripe in wisdom and experience, that I felt her
acquaintance must do any novelist good. I also introduced him to Mrs.
Lennox, who is here with her niece, Miss Jean Brandon. Mrs. Lennox,
I knew, would enjoy meeting a celebrity; she sacrificed an evening's
gambling for the sake of his society, and the next day, she asked him
to luncheon. In the evening he told me that Miss Brandon would be a
suitable heroine for his novel.
I asked him if he had begun it. He said he was planning it, but as it
was a holiday novel, and as he had been forbidden to work, he was not
going to make it a real book. He was going to write this novel for
his own enjoyment, and not for the public. He would never publish it.
He would be very grateful, all the same, if I allowed him to discuss
it with me, as he could not write a story without discussing it with
someone.
I said I would willingly discuss the story with him, and I have
determined to keep a record of our conversations, and indeed of
everything that affects this matter, in case he one day publishes the
novel, or publishes what the novel may turn into; for I feel that it
will not remain unpublished, even though it turns into something quite
different. I shall thus have all the fun of seeing a novel planned
without the trouble of writing one myself.
"Of course you have the advantage of knowing these people quite well,"
he said. I told him that he was mistaken. I had never met any of them,
except Princess Kouragine, before. And it was years since I had seen her.
"The first problem is," he said, "Why is Miss Brandon not married? She
must be getting on for thirty, if she is not thirty yet, and it is
strange that a person with her looks----"
"I have often wondered what she looks like," I said, "and I have made my
picture of her. Shall I tell it you, and you can tell me whether it is
at all like the reality?"
He was most anxious to hear my description. I said that I imagined
Miss Brandon to be as changeable in appearance as the sky. I explained
to him that I had not always been blind, that my blindness had come
comparatively late in life from a shooting accident, in which I lost one
eye--the sight of the other I lost gradually afterwards. I had imagined
her as the lady who walked in the garden in Shelley's _Sensitive Plant_
(I could not remember all the quotation):
"A sea-flower unfolded beneath the ocean."
Still, and rather mysterious, elusive and rare. He said I was right
about the variability, but that he saw her differently. It was true
she was pale, delicate, and extremely refined, but her eyes were the
interesting thing about her. She was like a sapphire. She looked better
in the daytime than in the evening. By candle-light she seemed to fade.
She did not remind him of Shelley at all. She was not ethereal nor
diaphanous. She was a sapphire, not a moonstone. She belonged to the
world of romance, not to the world of lyric poetry. Something had been
left out when she had been created. She was unfinished. What had been
left out? Was it her soul? Was it her heart? Was she Undine? No. Was she
Lilith? No. All the same she belonged to the fairy-tale world; to the
Hans Andersen world, or to Perrault. The Princess without ... without
what? She was the Sleeping Beauty in the wood, who had woken up and
remembered nothing, and could never recover from the long trance. She
would never be the same again. Never really awake in the world. And yet
she had brought nothing back from fairyland except her looks.
"She reminds me," he said, "of a line of Robert Lytton's: 'All her
looks are poetry and all her thoughts are prose.' It is not that she is
prosaic, but she is muffled. You see, during that long slumber which
lasted a hundred years----" Rudd had now quite forgotten my presence and
was talking or, rather, murmuring to himself. He was composing aloud.
"During that long exile which lasted a hundred years, and passed in a
flash, she had no dreams."
"You mean she has no heart," I said.
"No, not that," he answered, "heart as much as you like. She is kind.
She is affectionate. But no passion, no dreams. Above all, no dreams.
That is what she is. The Princess without any dreams. Do you think that
would do as a title? No, it is not quite right. _The Sleeping Beauty in
the World?_ No. Why did Rostand use the title, _La Princesse Lointaine_?
That would have done. No, that is not quite right either. She is not far
away. She is here. She looks far away and isn't. I must think about it.
It will come."
Then, quite abruptly, he asked me what I imagined the garden of the
hotel looked like. I said that I had never been here before and that I
had only heard descriptions of the place from my acquaintances and from
my servant, but I imagined the end of the garden, where I had often
walked, to be rather like a Russian landscape. I had never been to
Russia, but I had read Russian books, and what I imagined to be a rather
untidy piece of long grass, fringed with a few birch trees and some
firs, the whole rather baked and dry, reminded me of the descriptions in
Tourgenev's books.
Rudd said it was not like Russia. Russia had so much more space. So much
more atmosphere. This little garden might be a piece of Scotland, might
be a piece of Denmark, but it was not Russian.
I asked him whether he had been to Russia. Not in the flesh, he said,
but in the spirit he had lived there for years.
Perhaps he wanted to see how much the second-hand impressions of a blind
man were worth.
He soon reverted to the original subject of our talk.
"Why is Miss Brandon not married?" he said.
I said I knew nothing about her, nothing about her life. I presumed her
parents were dead. She was travelling with her aunt. They came here
every year for her aunt's rheumatism. Mrs. Lennox had a house in London.
She was a widow, not very well off, I thought. I told him I knew nothing
of London life. I have lived in Italy for the last twenty years. I very
seldom went to London, only, in fact, to see Kennaway. I told him he
must find out about Miss Brandon's early history himself.
"She is very silent," he said.
"Mrs. Lennox is very talkative," I told him.
"What can I call it?" he asked, in an agony of impatience. "She has
every beauty, every grace, except that of expression."
"_The Dumb Belle?_" The words escaped me and I immediately regretted
them.
"No," he said, quite seriously, "she is not dumb, that is just the
point. She talks, but she cannot express herself. Or rather, she has
nothing to express. At least, I think she has nothing to express: or
what she has got to express is not what we think it is. I imagine a
story like Pygmalion and Galatea. Somebody waking her to life and then
finding her quite different from what the stone image seemed to promise,
from what it _did_ promise. At any rate I have got my subject and I am
extremely grateful. It is a wonderful subject."
"Henry James," I ventured.
"Ah, James," said Rudd, "yes, James, a wonderful intellect, but a
critic, not a novelist. The French could do it. What would they have
called it? _La Princesse désenchantée,_ or _La Belle revenue du Bois_?
You can't say that in English."
"Nor in French either," I thought to myself, but I said aloud, "_Out of
the Wood_ would suggest quite a different kind of book."
"A very different kind of book," said Rudd, quite gravely. "The kind of
book that sells by the million."
Rudd then left me. He was enchanted with the idea of having something to
write about. I felt that a good title for his novel would be _Eurydice
Half-regained_, but I was diffident about suggesting a title to him,
besides which I felt he would not like it. Miss Brandon, he would
explain, was not like Eurydice, and if she was, she had forgotten her
experiences beyond the Styx.