(From The _Story-Teller_)
1922
Looking back on it from this distance of time--it began in the early
and ended in the middle eighties--I see the charm of ingenuous youth
stamped on the episode, the touching glamour of limitless faith and
expectation. We were, the whole little band of us, so deliciously
self-sufficient, so magnificently critical of established reputations
in contemporary letters and art. We sniffed and snorted, noses in air,
at popular idols, while ourselves weighted down with a cargo of
guileless enthusiasm only asking opportunity to dump itself at an
idol's feet. We ached to burn incense before the altar of some
divinity; but it must be a divinity of our own discovering, our own
choosing. We scorned to acclaim ready-made, second-hand goods. Then we
encountered Pogson--Heber Pogson. Our fate, and even more, perhaps, his
fate, was henceforth sealed.
He was a large, sleek, pink creature, slow and rare of movement, from
much sitting bulky, not to say squashy, in figure, mild-eyed, slyly
jovial and--for no other word, to my mind, so closely fits his
attitude--resigned. A positive glutton of books, he read as
instinctively, almost as unconsciously, as other men breathe. But he
not only absorbed. He gave forth and that copiously, with taste, with
discrimination, now and again with startlingly eloquent flights and
witty sallies. His memory was prodigious. The variety and vivacity of
his conversation, the immense range of subjects he brilliantly
laboured, when in the vein, remain with me as simply marvellous. With
us he mostly was in the vein. And, vanity apart, we must have composed
a delightful audience, generously censer-swinging. No man of even
average feeling but would be moved by such fresh, such spontaneous
admiration! Thus, if our divinity melodiously piped, we did very
radiantly dance to his piping.
Oh! Heber Pogson enjoyed it. Never tell me he didn't revel in those
highly articulate evenings of monologue, gasconade, heated yet
brotherly argument, lasting on to midnight and after, every bit as much
as we did! Anyhow at first. Later he may have had twinges, been
sensible of strain; though never, I still believe, a very severe one.
In any case, Nature showed herself his friend--his saviour, if also, in
some sort, his executioner. When the strain tended to become
distressing, for him personally, very simply and cleverly, she found a
way out.
A background of dark legend only brought the steady glow of his--and
our--present felicity into richer relief. We gathered hints of, caught
in passing smiling allusion to, straitened and impecunious early years.
He had endured a harsh enough apprenticeship to the profession of
letters in its least satisfactory, because most ephemeral, form--namely
journalism, and provincial journalism at that. This must have painfully
cribbed and confined his free-ranging spirit. We were filled by
reverent sympathy for the trials and deprivations of his past. But at
the period when the members--numbering a dozen, more or less--of our
devoted band trooped up from Chelsea and down from the Hampstead
heights to worship in the studio-library of the Church Street,
Kensington, house, Pogson was lapped in a material well-being
altogether sufficient. He treated us, his youthful friends and
disciples, to very excellent food and drink; partaking of these
himself, moreover, with evident readiness and relish. Those little
"help-yourselves," stand-up suppers in the big, quiet, comfortably
warmed and shaded room revealed in him no ascetic tendency, though, I
hasten to add, no tendency to unbecoming excess. Such hospitality
testified to the soundness of Pogson's existing financial position; as
did his repeated assertions that now, at last--praise heaven--he had
leisure to do worthy and abiding work, work through which he could
freely express his personality, express in terms of art his judgments
upon, and appreciations of, the human scene.
We listened breathless, nodding exuberant approval. For weren't we
ourselves, each and all of us, mightily in love with art and with the
human scene? And hadn't we, listening thus breathlessly to our amazing
master, the enchanting assurance that we were on the track of a
masterpiece? Not impossibly a whole gallery of masterpieces, since
Heber Pogson had barely touched middle age as yet. For him there still
was time. Fiction, we gathered to be the selected medium. He not only
meant to write, but was actually now engaged in writing, a novel during
those withdrawn and sacred morning hours when we were denied admittance
to his presence. We previsaged something tremendous, poetic yet
fearlessly modern, fixed on the bedrock of realism, a drama and a
vision wide, high, deep, spectacular yet subtle as life itself. Let his
confreres, French and Russian--not to mention those merely British
born--look to their laurels, when Heber Pogson blossomed into print!
And--preciously inspiring thought--he was our Pogson. He inalienably
belonged to us; since hadn't we detected the quality of his genius when
the veil was still upon its face? Oh! we knew, bless you; we knew. We'd
the right to sniff and snort, noses in air, at contemporary reputations
because we were snugly awaiting the disclosure of a talent which would
prick them into nothingness like so many bubbles, pop them like so many
inflated paper bags, knock them one and all into the proverbial cocked
hat!
Unfortunately youth, with a fine illogic, though having all the time
there is before it, easily waxes impatient. In our eagerness for his
public recognition, his apotheosis, we did, I am afraid, hustle our
great man a little. Instead of being satisfied with his nocturnal
coruscations--they brilliant as ever, let it be noted--we just a
fraction resented the slowness of his progress, began ever so gently to
shove that honoured bulky form behind and pull at it in front. We
wanted the tangible result of those many sacred and secret morning
hours during which his novel was in process of being formed and
fashioned, gloriously built up. Wouldn't he tell us the title,
enlighten us as to the theme, the scheme, thus allaying the hunger
pangs of our pious curiosity by crumbs--ever so small and few--dropped
from his richly furnished table? With exquisite good-humour, he fenced
and feinted. Almost roguishly he would laugh us off and launch the
conversation into other channels, holding us--after the first few
vexatiously outwitted seconds--at once enthralled and delicately
rebuked.
But at last--in the late spring, as far as I remember, of the second
year of our devotion--there came a meeting at which things got pressed
somehow to a head. Contrary to custom feminine influence made itself
felt.
And here I pause and blush. For it strikes me as so intimately
characteristic of our whole relation--in that earlier stage, at
least--that I should have written all this on the subject of Heber
Pogson without making one solitary mention of his wife. She existed.
Was permanently in evidences--or wasn't it, rather, in eclipse?--as a
shadowy parasitic entity perambulating the hinterland of his domestic
life. She must have been by some years his junior--a tall, thin,
flat-chested woman, having heavy, yellowish brown hair, a complexion to
match, and pale, nervous eyes. Her clothes hung on her as on a
clothes-peg. She affected vivid greens--as was the mistaken habit of
Victorian ladies possessing the colouring falsely called "auburn"--but
clouded their excessive verdure to neutrality by semi-transparent
over-draperies of black. Harry Lessingham, in a crudely unchivalrous
mood, once described her as "without form and void," adding that she
"had a mouth like a fish." These statements I considered unduly harsh,
yet admitted her almost miraculously negative. She mattered less, when
one was in the room with her, than anything human and feminine which I,
so far, had ever run across. And I was at least normally susceptible,
I'm very sure of that.
As a matter of course, on our arrival at the blest house in Church
Street, we one and all respectfully greeted her, passed, to put it
vulgarly, the time of day with her. But there intercourse ceased. At
some subsequent instant she faded out--whether into space or into some
adjacent connubial chamber, I had no notion. I only realized, when the
act was accomplished, that we now were without her, that she had
vanished, leaving behind her no faintest moral or emotional trace.
But, on the occasion in question, she did not vanish. We fed her at
supper. And still she remained--in the interests of social propriety,
as we imagined, since for once the Pogson symposium included a
stranger, an eminently attractive lady guest.
Harry Lessingham had begged to bring his sister with him. He told me of
this beforehand, and I rejoiced. Lessingham had long been dear to me as
a brother; while that Arabella should only be dear to me as a sister
was, just then, I own, among the things I wished least. I craved,
therefore, to have her share our happy worship. She had a pretty turn
for literature herself. I coveted to see her dazzled, exalted,
impressed--it would be a fascinating spectacle. Before I slept that
night, or rather next morning, I recognized her coming as a disastrous
mistake. For she had received insufficient instruction in ritual, in
the suitable forms of approach to so august a presence as that of our
host. She played round him, flickering, darting, like lightning round a
cathedral tower, metal tipped. Where we, in our young male modesty, had
but gently drawn or furtively shoved, she tickled the soft, sedentary
creature's ribs as with a rapier point. And--to us agitated
watchers--the amazing thing was, that Pogson didn't seem to mind. He
neither rebuked her nor laughed her off; but purred, veritably purred,
under her alternate teasing and petting like some big, sleek cat.
At last, with a cajoling but really alarming audacity, she went for him
straight.
"Of course, dear Mr. Pogson, Harry has told me all about your wonderful
novel," she said. "I am so interested, so thrilled--and so grateful to
you for letting me join your audience to-night. But I want quite
frightfully to know more. Speaking not only for myself, but for all who
are present, may I implore a further revelation? Pray don't send us
empty away in respect of the wonderful book. It would be so lovely
while we sit here at your feet."...
She, in fact, sat by his side, her chair placed decidedly close to his.
"If you would read us a chapter.... A chapter is impossible?"...
Her charming, pliant mouth; her charming dancing eyes; her caressing
voice--I won't swear even her caressing hands didn't, for a brief
space, take part--all wooed him to surrender.
"Well, a page then, a paragraph? Ah! don't be obdurate. The merest
sentence? Surely we may claim as much as that? Picture our pride, our
happiness."
She enclosed us all in a circular and sympathetic glance, which ended,
as it had started, by meeting his mild eyes, lingering appealingly upon
his large, pink countenance.
Pogson succumbed. No, he wouldn't read; but, since she so amiably
desired it....
"More than anything in all my life!" with the most convincing and
virginal sincerity.
... He thought he might rehearse a passage, which wasn't--as he gladly
believed--altogether devoid of merit. He did rehearse it. And we broke
into applause the more tempestuous because suspicion of a chill queerly
lay upon us. A chill insidious as it was vague, disturbing as it
was--wasn't it? we silently, quite violently, hoped so--ridiculously
uncalled for.
"After all, that passage is thundering good, you know," Harry
Lessingham announced, as though arguing with himself, arguing himself
out of that same invidious chill, an hour later.
Arabella had refused a hansom, declaring herself excited, still under
the spell, and so wanting to walk. Leaving the Church Street house, the
three of us crossed into Campden Grove, with a view to turning down
Campden House Road, thus reaching Kensington High Street.
"It was out of sight of the average--packed with epigram; worthy of all
we've ever believed or asked of him. It takes a master of technique, of
style, to write like that."
"Beloved brother, which of us ever said it didn't?" Arabella took him
up sweetly.
Slender, light-footed, the train of her evening gown switched over her
arm, beneath her flowing orange and white-flowered satin cloak, she
walked between us.
"Why, it was good to the point of being inevitable. One seemed--I
certainly did--to know every phrase, every word which was coming. None
could have been other, or been placed otherwise than it was--and that's
the highest praise one can give to anybody's prose, isn't it? One
jumped to the perfect rightness of the whole--a rightness so perfect as
to make the sentences sound quite extraordinarily familiar."
This last assertion dropped as a bomb between Lessingham and myself.
"By the way," the girl presently said, as our awkward silence
continued, "has either of you happened to read, or re-read, Meredith's
'Egoist' just lately?"
Lessingham stopped short, and in the light of a neighbouring gas-lamp I
saw his handsome, boyish face look troubled to the point of physical
pain.
"What on earth are you driving at? What do you mean, Arabella--that
Pogson is a plagiarist?"
"Don't eat me, Harry dearest, if I incline to use a shorter, commoner
expression."
"A thief?"
"An unconscious one, no doubt," she threw off quickly, fearful of
explosions, possibly, in her turn. "He may have been betrayed by his
own extraordinary memory."
"But this is horrible, horrible," Lessingham cried. "All the names,
though, were different."
Arabella appeared to have overcome her fear of explosions. Her charming
eyes again danced.
"Exactly," she said. "That was the peculiar part of it, the thing which
riveted my attention. He had--I mean the names of the characters and
places were different--were altered, changed."
Lessingham stood bare-headed in the light of a gas-lamp. He ran the
fingers of his left hand through his crisp fair hair, rumpling it up
into a distracted crest. I could see, could almost hear, the travail of
his honest soul. Loyalty, faith and honour worked at high pressure to
hit on a satisfactory explanation.
Suddenly he threw back his head and laughed.
"Why, of course," he cried, "it's as clear as mud. Pogson wasn't
betrayed by anything. He did it on purpose. Don't you understand, you
dear goose, you very-much-too-clever-by-half dear goose? It was simply
his kindly joke, his good-natured little game. And we, like the pack of
idiots which--compared with him--we are, never scented it. You
pestered--yes, Arabella, most unconscionably pestered him to read an
excerpt from his novel; and to pacify you he quoted a page from
Meredith instead."
Harry Lessingham tucked his hand under the folds of the orange and
white-flowered cloak, and taking the girl affectionately by the elbow,
trotted her down the sloping pavement towards Kensington High Street.
"All the honours of war rest with Pogson," he joyfully assured her.
"You made an importunate, impertinent demand for bread. He didn't mean
to be drawn; but was too civil, too tender-hearted to put you off with
a stone, so slyly cut you a slice from another man's loaf. Does it
occur to you, my sweet sister, you've been had--very neatly had?"
"If it comes to that, Miss Lessingham by no means stands alone," I
interrupted. "We've all been had, as you so gracefully put it, very
neatly and very extensively had."
For though I trusted Lessingham's view was the correct one--trusted so
most devoutly--I could not but regret the discomfiture of Arabella. Her
approach to our chosen idol may have slightly lacked in reverence; she
may, indeed, in plain English, have cheeked him. But she had done so in
the prettiest, airiest manner. Pogson's punishment of her indiscretion,
if highly ingenious, still struck me as not in the best taste. For was
it not at once rather mean and rather cheap to make so charming a
person the subject, and that before witnesses, of a practical joke?
If, after all, it really was a joke. That insidious, odious chill which
earlier prompted my tempestuous applause, as I woefully registered,
hung about me yet. Unquestionably Arabella Lessingham's visit to Church
Street showed more and more, when I considered it, as a radical
mistake! From it I date the waning of the moon of my delight in respect
of both Pogson and herself. I had bowed in worship, equally sincere,
though diverse in sentiment, before each; and to each had pledged my
allegiance. To have them thus discredit one another represented the
most trying turn of events.
For a full month I cold-shouldered the band, abjured the shrine, and
avoided the lady. Then, while still morose and brooding, my trouble at
its height, a cousin--in the third degree--rich, middle-aged, and
conveniently restless, invited me to be his travelling companion. We
had taken trips together before. This one promised fields of wider
adventure--nothing less than the quartering of southern Europe, along
with nibblings at African and Asiatic Mediterranean coasts. It was the
chance of a life-time. I embraced it. I also called at the house in
Church Street to make my farewells. I could do no less.
I have used the word "resigned" in describing Pogson. To-day that word
notably covered him. Our friend appeared depressed; yet bland in his
depression, anxious to mollify and placate rather than reproach. His
attitude touched me. I hardly deserved it after my neglect--to which,
by the way, he made no smallest reference. But as I unfolded my plans,
he increasingly threw off his depression and generously entered into
them. Would have me fetch an atlas and trace out my proposed itinerary
upon the map. It included names to conjure with. These set wide the
flood-gates of his speech. He at once enchanted and confounded me by
his knowledge of the literature, art, history, of Syria, Egypt, Italy,
Greece, and the Levant.
For the next three-quarters of an hour I had Pogson at his best. And
oh! how vastly good that same best was! Under the flashing,
multi-coloured light of it, he routed my suspicions; put my annoyance
and distrust to flight. As he leaned back in the roomy library chair,
filled to veritable overflowing by his big, squashy, brown-velvet
jacketted person--Pogson had put on flesh of late; put it on sensibly,
as I remarked, even during the few weeks of my absence--he reconquered
all my admiration and belief.
As I rose to depart:
"Ah! you fortunate youth," he thus genially addressed me; "thrice
fortunate youth, in your freedom, your enterprise, your happy
elasticity of flesh and spirit! What won't you have to tell me of
things actually seen, of lands, cities, civilizations, past and
present, and the storied wonder of them, when you come back!"
"And what won't you have to read to me in return, dear Master," I
echoed, eager to testify to my recovered faith. "By then the book will
be finished on which all our hopes and affections are set. Ten times
more precious, more illuminating than anything I have seen, will be
what I hear from you when I come back!"
But, as I spoke, surely I wasn't mistaken in thinking that for an
agitating minute the pinkness of Pogson's large countenance sickly
ebbed and blanched. And while my attention was still engaged by this
disquieting phenomenon, I became aware that Mrs. Pogson had joined us.
Silently, mysteriously, she faded--the term holds good--into evidence,
as on so many former occasions she had silently, mysteriously faded
out.
Dressed in one of those verdant gowns, so dolorously veiled in
semi-transparent black, she stood behind her husband's chair. Her eyes
met mine. They were no longer nervous or in expression vague; but oddly
aggressive, challenging, defiantly alight.
"Oh, yes," she declared, "by then Heber will have completed his great
novel, without doubt."
When uttering his name, she laid a thin, long-fingered hand upon his
rounded shoulder, and to my--little short of--stupefaction, I saw
Pogson's fat, pink hand move up to seek and clasp it.
On me this action--hers soothing, protective; his appealing,
welcoming--produced the most bewildering effect. I felt embarrassed and
abashed; an indecently impertinent intruder upon the secret places of
two human hearts. That any such intimate and tender correspondence
existed between this so strangely ill-assorted couple I never dreamed.