Where the Clocks Chime Twice Read online

  Wilde said of him, “Frank has dined in every house in London —once.” He could capture ground with a sudden assault, but he could not hold it. He lost his friends, betrayed their trust—no one could rely on him; and that same noisiness, that ill-bred forcefulness that made him socially intolerable, spoilt him as a writer. His actual writing is poor. I did not realise quite how poor it was till I compared the French with the English version of My Life and Loves. His books are only readable because their subject matter is sensational. He had in The Man Shakespeare something new and definite to say. In several of his short stories he struck an exciting plot. In his Portraits he wrote intimately and indiscreetly of persons about whom one is inquisitive. Unfortunately you cannot believe a word he says.

  His anecdotes about Maupassant’s priapism and Carlyle’s impotence are typical. He takes two rumours which probably have a basis in fact and makes them the subject of a confession. The men who are reported to have made these confessions are no longer in the world to contradict him or defend themselves. And who could believe the scene where he pretends to have been completely ignorant of Wilde’s inclinations until the scandal broke? His memoirs are valueless as history. If he survives as a legend, as part of a pattern, as a motif in the mosaic of literary history during the close of the nineteenth and the opening of the twentieth centuries—that is the most that can be hoped for. But his effect in 1906 on a twenty-year-old poetess must have been apocalyptic. He was then in the middle fifties. Though his political career was ruined, his literary reputation was still untarnished. He had not yet alienated many of his more worth-while friends. He was, however, conscious of the tide’s turn against him. He needed the adulation of the young to restore his self-esteem. He took trouble over the very young.

  “Did you always lunch at the Café Royal?” I asked her.

  “Except the last time. We lunched at Kettner’s then.” She paused, hesitated. “Is Kettner’s going still?” she asked. It was very flourishing, I told her.

  “Is it still the same kind of place?”

  “I suppose it is.”

  “He took me to a private room.”

  “I’m not sure if you’d find those still.”

  Dinners in private rooms in restaurants went out with the modern flat. I saw the tail end of their vogue. They would seem very unhygienic to a generation that is used to the centrally heated amenities of the modern apartment building. But there was a rakish rococo air about the whole procedure—the curtained stairway, the discreet waiters, the eighteenth-century engravings, the chaise-longue—that provided its own special stimulus; married couples got a kick out of going there and being mistaken for what they weren’t.

  “If that was your last lunch, I gather it wasn’t a success,” I said.

  She smiled, then flushed. “I’m afraid he must have thought me very childish; girls weren’t so sophisticated then. Ann Veronica seemed a very daring book. And besides, that room; it was tiny; I felt so big and clumsy. He was a little man, you know.”

  She paused, smiled wryly. “I must have been a disappointment to him. He never asked me out again. But he printed my poems: the poems I sent him afterwards. I was very happy about that. I should have been miserable if I’d thought he only accepted them because he had thought I was the kind of girl who might____” She checked; there was an abstracted look upon her face. “Did you read My Life and Loves?” she asked.

  I nodded.

  “They say, don’t they, that the things which you regret in middle age are not the things you’ve done but the things you haven’t done. That’s not true, you know. I was so glad I hadn’t, when I read that book. I used to wonder sometimes when I read his other books and when I read about him, whether if I had behaved differently he might not have been a different person. There was so much that was fine in him. It all seemed to be going to waste. I might have saved him. But when I read that book, oh, it was all so materialistic, all that lovemaking and no conception of what love might be. I realised that I couldn’t ever have made the slightest difference. It was too late, or I was the wrong person. I don’t know which. Anyhow, I was very glad I hadn’t.”

  “You never saw him again, not after that last lunch?”

  She shook her head. “Very soon after that I went out to India: my sister was married to a civil servant.”

  “You did not say good-bye?”

  “I didn’t tell him I was going. I dramatised myself. I pictured myself writing a tremendous poem on the way out. He’d be astonished to get an envelope in my handwriting with an Indian postmark. Then he’d read the poem. He’d be even more astonished. He’d feel guilty and ashamed. ‘I never realised she was capable of thaf, he’d think. My next poems would be better still. He’d be impatient to get me back. He’d write me beseeching letters. I’d go on postponing my return. That’s how I’d punish him, for his own good. You know how a young girl daydreams.”

  “And it didn’t turn out that way at all?”

  She laughed. “The third day out I met the man I married.”

  “And you wrote no more poems.”

  “I wrote no more poems.”

  Her bungalow was only five minutes’ walk from Northolme. Most weeks I would drop in there for a gossip. Sometimes after lunch she would take her coffee on my verandah. Our conversation always came round to the same topics, the poets and personalities of the Edwardian decade. She could not ask me too many questions, about Wells and Bennett and Ford Madox Hueffer, and those ‘left-overs’ from the ’90s—Symons, Le Gallienne, Davidson. What had happened to them all? ‘I’ve not talked in this way for forty years,” she said.

  It was probably in the main for that reason that now she talked of them so voraciously. But also it was in part, I think, because the early part of her life was now at the end becoming more real to her than the long middle section. In The Linden Tree J. B. Priestley had a moving conversation between an old man and a young girl, in which something was said about truth being found among the very young and the very old; they were nearer to ‘the way in and the way out’. Perhaps ‘the Colonel’s Widow’ was becoming again the young girl who had written Dowsonian sonnets. I began to wonder which was mattering more to her in retrospect —the long stretch of worthily spent years when she had been an irreproachable memsahib, or the months when she had lunched with a rake in the Domino Room at the Café Royal.

  How long had it all gone on? I asked her. About a year. And how often had they met: nine times. She was living in the country, it had not been easy for her to get up; she was closely chaperoned. Her parents would have been shocked to know that she was lunching with a married man. There was no telephone in her parents’ house. Very few private houses did have telephones. “But of course we wrote each other letters.” Or rather, I fancy, she wrote him letters and he acknowledged them.

  It was not difficult to picture the situation. The poems that even though imitative had a quality of freshness; that would make an editor say: “Well, there’s a hundred to one chance she may amount to something”; poems that were promising enough, since they were signed with a girl’s name, to make a man like Harris feel curious about their author. As she came into the office, a large wholesome-looking girl with fine eyes, fresh colouring and an engaging mixture of shyness and self-confidence, it was easy to guess how Harris thought, “Yes, this is worth my time.”

  He had many irons in the fire, so many plans and projects, literary, financial, amatory. But he was always ready to slip in one more iron, waiting for the appropriate moment. He was in no hurry. And then one day a mood of irritation, of loneliness, the need to rehabilitate himself in his own esteem would make him decide. “It’s high time I brought that thing to a head.” So he had booked the private room at Kettner’s.

  She had never been more than a sideshow; one scene in an unimportant sideshow, and when she had been ‘childish’ he had shrugged his shoulders. There were so many who were not childish. He probably barely noticed the cessation of her manuscripts and letters. Within t
wo years if he had remembered her name, he would have found it hard with the mind’s eye to recall her features. He would have been surprised could he have foreseen that half a century hence, in 1950, the year for which he had prophesied his own apotheosis, almost the only person south of the Red Sea to whom he was still a living influence was the girl he had lunched once at Kettner’s.

  She kept deferring to him in her conversation. “As Frank used to say …”, “Frank told me once. …” All her original observations were put in that way into quotation marks.

  “The artist suffers for the eventual benefit of mankind. The crucifixion is a symbol of the artist’s treatment by the masses.”

  “That sounds like Frank Harris,” I remarked. She flushed. “Well, it’s true, isn’t it? And after they’ve persecuted him all his life, they bury him in the Abbey.”

  A direct echo out of Harris. He had set the imprint of his mind on her. I thought of the heroine of Hugh Kingsmill’s novel. Though he had altered all the circumstances, he told me whom he had had in mind. He showed me the letter of congratulation that she wrote him when the book was published. I have followed her career. It has brought her renown and riches, a successful marriage and proud progeny. How much of it does she owe to Harris; how often does she think of Harris, and in what way? So I brooded as I listened to her predecessor repeating sentiments whose truth had become discredited because they had been mouthed so often by one whose whole philosophy was warped with self-deception.

  It was on that note of query that I had planned to end this sketch. I had half written it in my mind, during my walks along the shore, when something altogether unexpected happened; one of those storms-in-a-teacup that make life in a small community at the same time stimulating and exasperating.

  A guest at her house had noticed in the kitchen a collection of spills made out of the pages of a book. Opening out the spill he had noticed that the book in question was The Struggle for World Power—a sociological study written by John Strachey, in his pro-Moscow period. “That’s an expensive way of making spills,” he said.

  “It’s all that book’s worth,” she retorted. “To be burnt page by page.”

  Her guest repeated the incident at the club. It quickly went the rounds. Finally it reached the ears of the Librarian. “But that’s a book she took out of the club library. She said she’d lost it. She was very apologetic. She paid the purchase price of it. Pretty decent of her, I thought, as we’d had it for years, and it was half in pieces. She lost two other books at the same time. She paid for both of them as well.”

  “What were the books?”

  “I can’t remember now, I’ll have to check.”

  They were both Left Book Club publications. The inference was obvious. She had been weeding out the Library.

  “I wonder if she’s been doing the same thing at the Carnegie?” someone asked.

  Enquiries were made; and it was found she had. Das Kapital had gone, and John Reid’s Ten Days that Shook the World.

  A member of the Club Committee called on her. She made no attempt to conceal her action. She admitted it and proudly. “When you see a poisonous snake you kill it. Books like that should be kept under lock and key.”

  The club was split into three factions, or perhaps three and a half; the half being represented by the extreme right who felt that she had gone too far, that she had made them look ridiculous, ‘let down the side’ in fact; a phrase in very general use in Seychelles.

  The attitudes of the three main sides may be exemplified by the summing-up by three characters with whom the reader is familiar. The Brigadier from Praslin spoke up for her. “She’s very poorly off,” he said. “Lives on short commons, I shouldn’t be surprised. Must have been a real sacrifice to buy five new books; fifty rupees at least; when a person makes a sacrifice like that for an ideal, in my humble opinion we should respect her.”

  Leslie Harris was on her side also, though for a different reason. “Nobody wanted to read those books. The Struggle for World Power is out of date. Strachey’s disowned it. With those fifty rupees we can buy something we really need. Just the job. Let’s hope she turns some more of our trash into spills.”

  But Leslie and the Brigadier were in the minority. Five-sixths of the club endorsed Stanley Jones’s point of view. Stanley Jones as a clergyman’s son had no doubt suffered during his youth from tiresome, interfering women. He was righteously indignant. Who was this silly old fool to decide what they could read and what they couldn’t? That was the worst of these Indian Army people. Thought they owned the universe; all that memsahib nonsense.

  So they argued. But something assured me that it was not the memsahib side of her that had turned a Left Book Club treatise into spills.

  Next time I saw her I asked her what had started her on this anti-communist campaign. “Their censorship,” she said, “their muzzling of the artist. There’s no health in a country where an artist isn’t free to speak out of his own heart.”

  Muzzling of the artist. That was not the Colonel’s Widow speaking: any more than it had been the Colonel’s Widow who had wanted to found an orphanage. Her resentment sprang from a far earlier training; a loud brash voice booming across a restaurant.

  “But aren’t you yourself imposing your own censorship?” I said. “Hasn’t the other side a right to express its own opinions?”

  She shook her head. “Not when it’s the voice of evil speaking.”

  There was a fierce, resolute expression in her eyes. At that moment she was a Colonel’s Widow. “They’ll expect me to resign from the club, I suppose. But I don’t care,” she said. “It’ll be a nuisance and I shall miss it; but I mustn’t let myself worry about that.” She paused, and her expression changed, became soft and tender, so that for a moment I could see a flash of the girl that she had been—the girl who had written poetry, who had listened adoringly to that booming voice. “I don’t care whatever any of them say. I’m right; I know I am. Frank would have said I was.”

  7. Last Days in Mahé

  On My second evening in Mahé, the Edmondses had taken me for a drive round the north point of the island. I sat in front, Bo and the children were behind. We were driving slowly so that I could appreciate the scenery. We were going uphill and round a bend when my view of the landscape was suddenly obstructed by a lorry. The lorry was in the centre of the road and moving fast. Edmonds put on his brakes and stopped his car. The lorry in an attempt to swing over to its own side, hit us a glancing blow that smashed a lamp and damaged a mudguard: nobody was hurt. The lorry was an army vehicle that had been converted into a bus and christened ‘Bon Courage’.

  The accident took place shortly after six. It was twenty past nine before we could continue. Those next three hours gave me some interesting sidelights on the island’s life. During the whole three hours only one other car—the Attorney-General’s—came along the road. The local police station did not have a telephone and there was no means of getting into touch with Victoria, so that the Attorney-General himself had to go back for the chief police officer. To the considerable crowd that had by this time gathered, the chauffeur of ‘Bon Courage’ explained with lavish gesticulation what he was anxious to believe had happened. His nine or ten passengers, however, had disappeared. It was a moonless night, and when the police eventually arrived, the car tracks on which would have to be based the evidence as to what had happened were invisible to the eye. With the help of torches the police started to take measurements. There was considerable discussion as to the point at which the measurements should be taken. Some little while after agreement had been reached, the police inspector arrived and fresh measurements were taken; this time with greater chance of accuracy as the headlights of the police car were turned on, so that the tracks of the two cars stood out.

  The owner of the lorry had not in the meantime been idle; feeling that the evidence might prove unfavourable, he had sent emissaries to brief ‘the tribune of the people’, and the dramatic quality of the situation was en
hanced by the arrival of Charles Collet and his wife who in turn proceeded to take measurements. Finally the brakes, both of the lorry and the car, were tested. It was then discovered that the bumpers of the lorry had been forced back upon the wheel, so that Goliath had suffered more than David. It took quite a while to straighten out the injury. Everyone made a time of it.

  Seven weeks later I received an official summons commanding in His Majesty’s name that “all business being laid aside and all excuse whatever ceasing”, I attend as a witness before the Chief Justice in the Supreme Court of Seychelles. The summons came during my final week in Mahé. As I was spending my last two days as the Governor’s guest, I decided to move into Victoria right away. I sent my luggage in by Maurice to the Continental, myself walking in over the Beauvallon Gap.

  A recent arrival at Northolme, a young man of twenty-three who was making a world tour, decided to come in too. I would have preferred to have been unaccompanied. I like walking alone and thinking out my stories, and though I liked Frank Mayston, I found his company exhausting. His conversation consisted exclusively of questions. He was the son of a West Country landowner, a man with large estates in Devonshire and Somerset, who was anticipating death duties by cutting into capital. “The last half of one’s capital,” he had told his son, “is practically unproductive. Money’s only worth what it can buy from one day to the next. Think how the Germans who saved in 1910 must have regretted their caution when the mark collapsed. We may be feeling in the same way in i960.”