We read _Wisden_ in the winter on cold nights before a leaping fire and
it brings back to us the sense of new-mown grass, the feel of a cricket
ball and the stir of sunlight. It is a substitute for cricket: and the
old harassing doubt creeps up again, the doubt whether any literature is
anything beyond a substitute, the focus of an unfulfilled desire. We
know how old people drug themselves with novels. Every day they go down
to the library and choose a new book, and for twenty-four hours cease to
be themselves, becoming again in a story of adventure and young love all
that they were and are not. Does not foiled ambition, we ask ourselves,
always seek to realise itself in plays and pictures. Inevitably some
side of ourselves must remain undeveloped, and through a process that
the advanced psychologists describe as sublimation, we find that
undeveloped side a substitute for its expression. Is a book anything
more than a spade digging down to our subconsciousness, to our real
self? Is anything ever quite what we take it for?
Influence: they’ll talk for hours about it from the pulpit. Influence:
every little thing, every word and thought and act. It has its effect on
someone somewhere. I can still hear a certain old parish priest’s thin
voice falling across the dark silence of benediction. It was his pet
theme: influence. “They will tell you in the big world,” he used to say
to us, “that the strong man can be independent of his actions, that they
fall from him as raindrops from a sloping roof. It may be so. Perhaps:
for the very few, the very strong. But the water that falls from the
clouds rests somewhere. It may slip from the sloping roofs, but it will
find its level. Its level where it must complete its task, where it will
rot wood, rust iron, or make the corn golden for the hands of man. Your
acts, your words, your thoughts, they are like the falling rain.
Somewhere they will create beauty or decay. They will never fall
unheeded.”
He was right, of course. Every moment of the day we impart, as we
receive, impressions. But the nature of those impressions. It is there
that I’m just a little doubtful. That “as we sow we reap” theory. It
looks all right. It ought to be all right. But life has a way of
contradicting theories. It isn’t always the good tree that bears good
fruit. Sometimes, unquestionably; but one fact is worth a string of
arguments. Or rather, perhaps, there’s no argument that can withstand a
fact. And here, as my contribution to the argument, is the story of
Pussy Willow, as she told it me a couple of months ago raffishly across
the table of a dingy restaurant, in one of those back streets that
filter through from Shaftesbury Avenue across Soho.
I drop in there quite often after closing time. There’s dancing there
and music, if you can so grace an unwashed foreigner’s strumming on a
banjo. And they’ve got a licence to carry on till twelve. I don’t know
how they got it. They don’t even call themselves a club. But they’ll
dump a property sandwich down in front of you and serve you, up till
midnight, with villainous concocted cognac at half-a-crown a glass. It’s
like most of those Soho Bohemian places: a poisonous atmosphere to live
in, but amusing and profitable enough to visit now and again. I like to
sit quietly in a corner and watch a crowd of people, laughing and
quarrelling and drinking--and try to make stories up round each of them,
wondering who is in love with whom, and who will be so and so’s
successor. Sometimes I signal to one of them to come and share a drink
with me; more often they come across of their own accord and await an
invitation.
It was in this way that I met, or should rather say, perhaps, re-met,
Pussy Willow. A plump, flashily, but poorly dressed woman planted
herself down in front of me and announced that she was two sheets in the
wind.
“Mine being,” she concluded, “a double Scotch, and water, not too much
of it.”
“Admirable,” I answered. “One double, waiter, and a benedictine.”
She swallowed her double at a gulp, then leant forward across the table.
“You don’t know who I am?” she said.