John Cornelius E-Book

Hugh Walpole

• Herausgeber: Ktoczyta.pl
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

This is a story about the life of a genius who has only dreams. But really make dreams a reality? After all, this is not a fantasy world. Walpole wrote mainly about a character whose life was never very real, and who could not find happiness, except in strange moments because of this abyss between him and the world. Walpole’s romantic flights have a realistic break to temper them.

Leseprobe

Contents

PART I

SEA AND LAND

FOREWORD

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

PART II

THE BRIGHT-GREEN SHOES

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

PART III

FLYING GULLS

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

PART I

SEA AND LAND

FOREWORD

It has been only after much thought and consideration that I have finally decided on the form that this book must take. John Cornelius died on December 8th, 1921. During the years since his death there has appeared an official biography; also, among others, two critical works of especial importance.

Mr. Speed’s biography contains everything about Cornelius necessary for the world to know and it is written in an admirably wise and judicious spirit.

It may be said, moreover, that the constant appreciation and attention now given to Cornelius’ work, the universal fame that some of his books, especially The Bright-Green Shoes and The Flight of the Wild Swans, have now obtained for him, make any further account at present a work of supererogation. For a considerable time I was myself of this opinion. It is true that in the later years of Cornelius’ life I was his closest and most intimate friend, but I most willingly gave Mr. Speed the use of any knowledge that I might have, many hundreds of letters from Cornelius to myself, and other documents.

The fact remains, however, that I have been driven to write this book. Stefan Zweig says, in his preface to his Life of Mary Stuart: “Mystery is a spur to creative imagination.’ And here it is my creative imagination that has been most especially at work. Creative imagination working on facts should lead to something behind the facts–that I have tried here to solve some of Cornelius’ mystery is my only justification.

This book has been written in the form of a novel. I shall be perfectly content if many of my readers consider it only as a novel. And yet I would strongly maintain that it is more than a novel based on the life of John Cornelius. Cornelius enjoyed greatly to speak of himself and his life. He was the greatest egoist I have ever known and the least exasperating. For hours one could listen to him as he described his youth, his first strange days in London, his meetings with Carstang, Charlie Christian, Anne Swinnerton and many more, his marriage, his War experiences and the rest. He would give you conversations, word by word, dramatically impersonating the actors, would describe scenes in all their natural details. Many of these I copied afterwards into my notebooks.

I may myself have been sometimes in this book unjust in my verdicts, biased in my summaries.

What I have tried to do is to re-create the scene and Cornelius in the middle of it. Many things were told me by Carstang, by Anne, by Charlie Christian. They had, each one of them, his or her separate idea and notion of Cornelius. No one of them was wholly right. I cannot hope that I have been wholly right either. But I feel, as I re-read these pages, that for myself at least Cornelius, as I knew him, is here. He would himself, I am sure, have preferred this form.

He said to me once: “I would like to write my life like a novel. They say that no novel in the first person can ever be true because no one can recall conversations as they actually occurred nor remember the physical details of past scenes. But that is not so. I can recall the white shine of the paint on the little chair in my mother’s cottage and how she would say “Ah, Lordy, Lordy, what a life it is!”... But I can’t write it. It would turn into one of my less credible fairy-stories. But you shall; one day you shall. As a novel, with the sea coming in, the lifting salt waves meeting the trickling fresh-water stream, then the hats with the roses and poppies of Lady Max–and myself, watching in the wings of the theatre, shivering with cold and fright, and Carstang with his bottle of green ink, and the friends I sat with in the château at Baupon... write it all down. Even if they never believe it, it will be true all the same.’ His memory was prodigious, but not more so than that of Malleson or Rose or Roughwood, to all of whom I have listened about their childhood. Perhaps many of us, if encouraged by an attentive audience, could describe our earlier years in the same detail.

So that I have tried to do, in the way that he would like it, even to the old-fashioned chapter-headings.

Meanwhile it is of Cornelius only that I have been thinking–Cornelius whom I loved, who so often irritated me to frenzy, who was compounded of so many opposites, who, nevertheless, was of an absolute simplicity.

The one word finally to be used about him was, I think, fidelity. He was faithful; faithful to his friends, to his work–above everything else, faithful to himself.

H. W.

CHAPTER I

AT THE AGE OF FIVE HIS ADVENTURES WERE NUMEROUS; THERE WERE THE DUCKLINGS; ALSO HIS FATHER AND MOTHER

His mother was the daughter of William Baring, proprietor of the White Horse Inn at Caerlyn Sands. Baring, from all I ever heard, must have been a grand, boasting, foolish character, famous locally and known even in distant parts of Glebeshire.

I have seen a brown faded daguerreotype of himself and his wife, she a small mean-faced woman with a tight mouth and with a locket almost as large as her face hanging on her meagre bosom. He greatly took my eye, big as an ox and dressed, for the occasion of the photograph, in awkward Sunday clothes, but his eyes were open and frank, his mouth strong and smiling. He carried in his hand one of those old top-hats with a broad and curling brim. Across his great spreading waistcoat was a vast gold watch-chain and against his trouser a fine swaggering fob.

He looked as though he could swallow his mean little wife at a mouthful, but of course it wasn’t so. She swallowed him. For a time things went well with him. He made the “White Horse’ pay and was the best wrestler and boxer in North Glebeshire; a good cricketer too, I believe. Then horses were too much for him. He went to the races at Drymouth, drank more than he should, neglected his home (I should fancy out of distaste for Mrs. Baring).

He was killed in a drunken fight in Drymouth, and his widow, with her four children, went to Polchester to live with a sister. They ran a small dressmaking business there and did fairly well with it. Of the two boys, Cornelius’ uncles, one went to sea, the other died in the South of Spain somewhere.

Daisy Baring, Cornelius’ mother, must have been a most beautiful girl. In a faded photograph of her she is standing straight up, in her ridiculous ugly clothes, her head proudly erect, looking out into the world with an eagerness that seemed to expect, even to demand, anything and everything of it. Her eyes remind me of her son’s, filled with expectation, almost merry anticipation.

She is tall and of fine carriage in this picture of her, strong-boned, firm-flanked, peasant stock, radiant with health. Soon she was stout and, later on, grossly fat. Laughing. Courageous. Hard-working. Stupid. Yes, I am sure that that was Daisy Cornelius.

As a little girl she hated Polchester where, after her father’s death, she lived with her mother, her aunt and her brothers and sister. They lived in a poky little house beside the river at the bottom of Orange Street. She told John again and again of the Cathedral bells, the mist rising from the river, the cows lowing and the sheep bleating on market-days and the fluffy pieces of cloth and calico lying about from the dressmaking.

She was always a country girl; she hated the town and her aunt; she would long passionately for her grand, broad-chested, brave, horse-riding father. She quarrelled with her aunt although she was really so good-tempered and warm-hearted, but her aunt was mean and meagre like her mother. So she went into the country to work on a farm, and there she met John’s father who was a gentleman and owned Penny Hall, an ironic name because he and his little bow-legged father hadn’t a farthing between them.

John never saw Penny Hall where his grandfather lived. When he was grown-up and went to look for it it was gone; nothing left of it, only the rooks’ nests in the trees and the smell of dog-roses and, very faintly, the echo behind echo of the sea like a woman sighing or, when the wind was right, an old man heavily snoring.

All the same, although John never saw Penny Hall, it was there as part of his life until he died. The Cornelius family had lived in it for hundreds and hundreds of years, ever since Hans Cornelius, the Dane, built it in thirteen hundred and something. He was a Danish sailor wrecked on the coast in a storm. He made money breeding horses and married a Glebeshire girl and built that little house in the middle of the thick trees with the rooks cawing and the echo of the sea that had tried to drown him coming across the road like an old man’s snore just as it did hundreds of years later.

There they stayed, the Corneliuses, and turned into gentlemen, and one was killed at Bosworth Field and another served at Court in Henry VII’s time and one went with Raleigh on the sea, and one was killed at Sedgemoor and one was a poet in Queen Anne’s days.

At last all that they were was the little bow-legged man, John’s grandfather, who was always a bit queer in the head but, all the same, never found what he wanted in life.

They sold Penny Hall and lost what they got from it through unwise speculation and a scoundrelly lawyer. John’s grandfather lost his wits altogether and went to the Asylum at Port Merlin, and John’s grandmother lived in a cottage near the Asylum so that she might be close to him. John’s father and mother also lived in Port Merlin, where John’s mother did laundry-work and John’s father painted pictures and made sea-shell boxes and toys which he sold when he was lucky enough. Daisy Cornelius’ mother, now a shrivelled bitter little piece of needle and thread, died in Polchester, which was a good thing for everybody.

Port Merlin was, in those days in the ‘eighties, a very interesting little town; everything that John had and was and afterwards did came from that place.

He talked of it so often to myself and everyone else that I can only see it with his eyes; it is of no use to say that the Port Merlin I now write of is not the Port Merlin that anyone can go to to-day in a train or motor-car. Of course it is not: John’s Port Merlin will never be seen by anyone again.

Once upon a time–a phrase that will rightly recur often in Cornelius’ story–Merlin was one of the two principal seaports of Glebeshire, Drymouth being the other one. It supplied ships and men for Elizabeth’s navy, and even in Nelson’s time ship-building still had its place there. After the Reform Bill it sank into an undisturbed domestic peace, but, throughout the nineteenth century, it kept many of its old features, the Town Hall with the clock that has the brass figures playing the drum and fife, the Theatre with the red and gold decorations and the famous paintings of Venus and Adonis, the Penitentiary outside whose grey wall the old women on sunny days would sit and sew, the Church of St. Mark and St. Luke with the Wrecked Mariners’ Pulpit, the stocks in the Market-place, and Seamen’s Row, perhaps the oldest line of tumble-down cottages in England.

Some of these things are still there, but as with Treliss and other little Glebeshire and Cornish towns modern advertisement, modern tourists, modern traffic, have covered over the old loveliness with a new bustling life and trade, whether for final loss or profit who will be able to say until the Last Trump shall sound?

But the beautiful Theatre, the mother and father of Cornelius’ art, is gone, the old houses of Seamen’s Row where Mother Propit the witch once lived and the ghost of John Curley, the Demon Sailor, haunted are replaced with red-brick villas, there is a car park where the stocks once stood, and the old women sew no longer outside the Penitentiary.

But it must have been very much as it had been for three hundred years on May 12th, 1884, the sunny morning when John Cornelius was born. Two sounds he remembers as beating concurrently and consistently on his ears from the very first–the swish and roll of the sea only a step or two away, and the wind singing through the wallpaper....

Then as now the sea dominated the town; not time nor the constant inventions of restless man can affect that. From the very beginning John was carried and settled in the sheltered corner of the sea-wall where he could be out of the way, and his twinkling, lively, humorous, expectant eyes would lookout to the Lion Rock–shaped like a lioness, her three cubs nestled at her side–where seals often were and on stormy days you could see the white tongues of the sea rise and fall through the mist and spume. In good weather he would gather into his very soul the deep purple shadows streaked with ebony, and the green glassy fields of clear water and the long line of mother-of-pearl created by the sun from the wet sand.

From the very beginning John, like every other Port Merlin child, breathed the sea, in all its moods and habits, into his very soul, and that is why so many of the stories–The Mermaid who lost her Comb, The Crab with the Broken Claw, The Big Seal and the Little Seal, The Fisherman and his Three Sons–have the very sound and smell of the sea in every line of them.

But John Cornelius, from the start, had an endless curiosity and wonder about his fellow human beings so that the town was very soon as important to him as the sea. It must have been from very very early years that his father began to take him about with him everywhere. There was but very little room for him in the small overcrowded cottage.

His mother never had any of the gifts of tidiness or natural arrangement of things, nor, I fear, had she a passion for cleanliness. The three rooms all smelt alike of steaming clothes, and always Daisy Cornelius was behindhand with her laundry and meals were not prepared, beds not made, nothing brushed or put away. Daisy Cornelius did not mind the confusion, and stout, red-faced, perspiring, would be always in a bustle, always despairing because things were not done, always amazed at the muddle of life, always cheerful except when she had drunk a drop too much and then her temper was uncertain.

It was natural enough then that John’s father should be most of his time out of doors and, as soon as he could walk, little John would be with him. Even before that, father Cornelius (who was a small man) would carry the child to some safe and warm place and then, sitting there, would paint his pictures or the lids of his shell-boxes or read aloud from Shakespeare or chat with neighbours or talk to his son about Penny Hall and the old days when he was a gentleman and went to dances in the family carriage.

John was a very ugly baby and soon grew into a yet more ugly boy. He developed almost at once that long and gawky body that would one day be well known. I have seen a cheap bad photograph of him when he was five or so, standing with his hand on a plush-covered table, a large white pillar and a storm-rolling sea in the background. He is wearing a sailor suit far too small for him so that his bony wrists project awkwardly from the sleeves, and his lanky legs with the thin ankles have little to say to the trousers that cover them. On his head is a ridiculous kind of jockey-cap, a prophecy of the curious hats that in later years so uncertainly failed to cover his head. There is here his sharp bony nose, his loose large mouth, here too his beautiful, lively eyes and the expression of sweetness and friendliness to all the world that led him into so many friendships, so many errors, so many misunderstandings.

“What a hideous, attractive child!’ you might say, looking at this photograph. “I am fortunate,’ he once said to me, “to have had so many friends in my life, being, I suppose, the ugliest man in the world.’ And then his impossibly childlike vanity would, of course, come in. “But what a charming ugliness!’

Merlin in those days was a kind of family affair, everyone knew everyone else. Snobbish it was, as all small English towns were and are and always will be. Merlin’s snobbishness was of a very special variety, for the great family of the West-Darlings still made it their headquarters. There was the Great House on the hill above the town, and Sir George West-Darling in his carriage with the two white horses, and Lady West-Darling, very like Queen Victoria both in regal dignity and homely maternal care for those whom she called her “people.’

One of John’s very first public appearances was on the occasion when he was all but run over by the West-Darling carriage. He remembers the metal of the harness flashing in the sun and one great white horse rearing. He had run out into the middle of the street to see the man strike the drum on the Town Hall clock. The hour was three, and as the bell sounded the sea rushed in from the edge of the sky, the great white legs of the horse were raised, there was a cry and a shout. He fell on his face. But he was not hurt. That surely was a miracle and showed him, even if nothing else did, that he was destined for wonderful things.

Covered in dirt he was held in his father’s arms while the pseudo-Queen Victoria leant graciously from the carriage and said that it was not the coachman’s fault, but nevertheless...

She was, I am sure, greatly surprised by the strange little boy who, face muddy and chin bleeding, looked at her full of excitement. “You’re a brave little fellow,’ she said, and gave him half a crown. Then she drove on. That was the first time that he had held any coin larger than sixpence in his hand.

He gave it at once to his father. Neither then nor ever could he hold on to money. He gave it away as soon as he got it. And his father threw it into the road. He was trembling with rage; it might be the reaction of that moment of horror, of terror when he thought his son was killed.

But he felt that he had been patronized. He saw Penny Hall, the dining-room with the dark-brown panelling, with the sound of the sea and the smell of the roses and the whirr of the haymaking machine coming in through the window on a fine summer day. I know just how he felt. “I’m as good as she is. Every bit as good.’

But Johnny didn’t care. He never gave the half-crown a thought. He was happy because he had been the centre of attraction. A small crowd had collected, morbidly hoping that there had been a bad accident, but the ugly boy stood there, his clothes and face very dirty, laughing and ready, for twopence, to recite the poem his grandmother had taught him–”Little Nell and the Caged Bird.’

However, his father hurried him away. He was taken home and washed; that evening his father talked and talked–about Penny Hall, the grand family of Cornelius, and the ancestor who had written poetry in the reign of Queen Anne....

For John, Port Merlin was, all his life, a town blazing with colour. When, as a grown man, he returned to it he must have found that it was not so, for all the houses in Glebeshire are grey.

Nevertheless he insisted. The Theatre was red and gold, there were the coloured windows in the Church, there were the booths brilliant with flowers on market-days, there was the shining metal of the clock on the Town Hall. Perhaps he was right. What we believe to be true is true if we believe it hard enough. About the Theatre especially there could not be colour enough. The playbills were bright yellow with red lettering: sometimes he would see scenery being carried in through the big side door–blue mountains, red houses, and once a Chinese temple....

In his own home there were many bright things. For the first ten years of his life he slept in the front room which served as kitchen, dining-room and laundry. The windows had flowered calico curtains, red roses and green leaves. On his little bed was a rag counterpane, fragments of every possible colour worked into a crazy quilt. The room was steamy with heat; there were pots of mignonette in the windows and the floor was gritty with the sand that people brought in on their boots and shoes from the seashore. On a little table near one window stood the toys and boxes that his father was making, and these were always brilliant in colour, toy soldiers shining with red paint, dolls with orange skirts and green jackets with silver beads. The boxes were painted crimson and very bright blue, and on to their brilliance the shells, silver and rose-pink and white like snow, were stuck with glue; you could smell the glue, the paint, the mignonette, the sea-sand, the humid damp from the drying clothes. He smelt it, he told me, all his life.

There were two yellow canary birds in a cage hanging in front of one of the windows between the calico curtains and they sang all day long. They had been given to his father once, instead of payment, for some work done. Although these pleasant friendly things were around him, nevertheless when the candle was blown out and the room was dark save for the ruby glow of the dying fire he would, night after night, lie there fighting his fears. He could hear through the thin door the murmur of the voices of his father and mother, but soon they would die away. He was terrified of the dark and with good reason, for he knew, so very much better than most, of all the strange and fearful inhabitants of the dark. The old women who sewed in the sun outside the Penitentiary, they had many tales to tell him–of the man with one eye who, on a dark night, comes up from the sea across the sand; he has teeth like a dog and sometimes he drops on all-fours and crawls; he scratches on the window-pane with his long nails. Then there is the old woman with a face as black as jet and the white cat on her shoulder. You wake up and see her sitting at the end of the bed, she rolls the whites of her eyes. Her cat stretches itself and then slowly begins to walk across the bed towards you. Also there is the very old man who eats little children. He is shrivelled like a monkey and you can hear him crunching bones with his teeth. There is the policeman, seven feet high, who carries a lantern. He snatches little boys, takes them under his arm and locks them into a prison cell, quite dark, water dripping from the walls and toads crawling across the floor.

Then there were other nightmare figures of whom Cornelius told me; these are all I remember. There were, of course, the good fairies, the kind old woman with a basket full of gold and silver, the mermaids who sang such beautiful songs, the prince who carried you for a ride on his great white charger, the dear old lady with the spinning-wheel, and many more, but these good creatures never came in the dark. Only when there was a moon did they come out and enjoy the fun.

But although he was afraid of the dark all his life long he was not a coward. He could not help his fear, but he could help surrendering to it. He would lie there, his eyes wide open, his heart hammering, and repeat to himself the prayer that his grandmother had taught him:

“Now I lay me down to sleep,

I give my soul to Christ to keep.

Wake I now or wake I never,

I give my soul to Christ for ever.’

He loved his grandmother, and with justice. She must have been a very sweet old lady. She was small of body, neat and fragile. She liked bright colours, and although she had white hair and was sixty-nine years of age when John was five she seemed always youthful and had great zest and vitality.

She must have been dreadfully poor and often, I suspect, had not enough to eat, because she was too proud to let John’s parents know.

She lived in two rooms at the top of the town close to the Asylum. She paid visits to the Asylum twice a day, at ten o’clock in the morning and six in the evening. Whatever her health or the state of the weather she paid her visits just the same. The pathetic thing was that the old man never recognized her as his wife but thought that he was King Solomon and she the Queen of Sheba. He called her always “Your Majesty’ and bowed to her a great deal. Sometimes his grandmother took John with her on these visits. It did not seem to the little boy, who already lived so much in the world of his imagination, strange to play this game of his grandfather being a mighty king. The old man, who had a grizzled untidy beard, wore a black skull-cap and a long faded tail-coat, sat in his corner by the fireplace in the long room where the harmless lunatics read books, played games and indulged their fancies.

“Welcome, welcome, Your Majesty,’ the old man would cry, his eyes shining with pleasure, and, after a most beautiful curtesy, John’s grandmother would sit down close to her husband and tell him all that she had been doing, how that she had picked three primroses in the wood beyond Penrhyn, or that her cat Isabel had caught a baby rabbit, or that she had baked a gingerbread cake and here it was in her basket. It did not seem to the old man at all strange that the Queen of Sheba should do these things, and he would tell her in return, in a quick whispering voice, of his multitudes of black slaves and the room with the pillars of silver, and how very shortly they would enjoy their meal of roasted peacock and lark’s tongues and cakes made of honey and cinnamon. At the same time he would stretch his old skinny hand towards the gingerbread, but she would not allow him to have it yet because if she did he would eat it all up at once, which would be very bad for his digestion.

He must have been a very dear old man, much more agreeable than the real King Solomon. He had not an evil thought against anyone in the world and was always perfectly happy. They loved him in the Asylum.

John’s grandmother was filled with stories and she had the best faculty of a story-teller, that she believed in them all profoundly herself.

“Did that really happen?’ John would ask her, his big mouth open, his eyes wide.

“Of course it did,’ she would say, nodding her head. “Don’t you believe people when they say things couldn’t happen. It’s only stupid people who say that.’

“Mother says there aren’t such things as unicorns.’

“How does she know?’ says John’s grandmother scornfully. “Has she been everywhere? Has she been to Africa?’

“No. She hasn’t,’ says John.

“Well, then. As a matter of fact she’s never been out of England.’

The truth must have been that old Mrs. Cornelius did not get on any too well with her daughter-in-law, and I cannot but feel a certain sympathy for John’s mother who had no imagination and was compelled to live with people who suffered perhaps from too much.

Sure enough it is that it was John’s mother who had to make a living for all of them because her husband earned but little with his pictures and his shell-boxes. She was cheerful enough though, and never could grow out of a feeling of intense gratitude because her husband, being a gentleman, had condescended to marry a simple farm-girl.

She was very garrulous, saying the same thing over and over again and always with the hope that this time she would make her meaning plain.

“Oh dear, oh dear, I told him that it was a shilling more that he owed us–yes, a shilling on the two shirts, the one with the blue stripes and the white one with the holes in the sleeves. Two shirts, one with the blue stripes...’

So she talked on and no one listened, which is the sad lot of all garrulous people.

At the age of five he could not venture by himself, but, his hand in his father’s, or trotting along a short way behind him or running ahead and looking back like a little dog to see whether his father were there, he would be always on the move.

He must have had, from the very beginning, that inexhaustible physical energy afterwards so characteristic of him. He was never tired, he told me. To the end of his life he did not know what physical weariness was.

Scenes remained in his mind in bright isolated pictures. And he would say to me: “The street was so crowded that I’d hold on to father like a monkey. The lights just coming out in the shops, and suddenly as though a door opened you’d get a tang from the sea. The cliffs were at the end of the High Street then. I’d hear the sea and there’d be a musical-box in the shop-window. I remember it quite vividly. It had a shepherd and a shepherdess on the lid. It said “Old Musical-Box: Ten and sixpence” on the card. How I longed to go in and ask the shopman to play it! But what was the use?... Father and I were obviously unable to pay for it. That was the time’ he went on, laughing, “when I used to steal things. Oh yes, and for years after–I couldn’t see what was wrong in it. I’d give anyone anything of mine if they wanted it. Then I discovered you were punished if they caught you. I suppose the game suddenly didn’t seem worth the candle. But I’ve never seen anything very wrong in it.’

A picture that he had most clearly in his mind was a day when there was a sudden fall of snow. Snow doesn’t fall very often in Glebeshire, but on this occasion it was, he fancies, a few days before Christmas.

He’d been longing for the snow to come because Santa Claus preferred reindeer and a sleigh. “I don’t know how old I was before I was finally persuaded that Santa Claus was only a myth. I don’t know that I’m really persuaded even now. After all, can’t you see every hair in his white beard, track every kindly wrinkle in his red cheeks? Don’t you know more about him than about many of your close friends? You’d trust him anywhere, wouldn’t you? Don’t you think of him as a marvellously wise old bird who, in spite of his good heart, knows a wonderful lot about the people he visits? Don’t you feel that he knows you yourself a great deal better than most of your friends do, forgives your weaknesses and wishes you luck?’

In any case on this afternoon the snow fell, and at first the sun was shining. The snow fell like silver threepenny-bits and, for a rarity, it lay. The roofs, the window-sills were white. He knelt up in the front window between the gay curtains and prayed to God (in whom he always believed as a child does. How exasperating he could be about religion! It seemed to mean to him at once so much and so little) to make the snow last until Christmas Day. He was called out by some other children and they began to build a snow man. But of course by the morning all the snow was gone. Rain fell. He would have cried with disappointment had there not been, as there always was with him, some new excitement to take the beautiful snow’s place.

But the excitement of all excitements for him was centred round the Theatre, the beloved Theatre Royal of Port Merlin. This was created in him in the first place undoubtedly by his father, to whom the Theatre was always a palace of miracle and wonder. John was more than five years old when he saw his first real play; the stage-door keeper was a rather grand, condescending friend of his father’s.

As this old man was one of the most important people, as it turned out, in John Cornelius’ life, he is worth a description. But John could never describe him very well except that he was a little man with a squint who took snuff. He thought, it seems, that he was about the most important man in Port Merlin, and to strangers he could be very haughty and unpleasant indeed. He would address the actors and actresses as they passed through into the Theatre with a great deal of dignity. He was called “Mr. Darlington.’

“Any letters, Mr. Darlington?’

“No, Miss Feather.’

“Oh dear, I did think... Are you quite sure?’

“Quite sure, Miss Feather.’

John’s father was a gentleman, as everyone knew, and Mr. Darlington was a snob. Moreover, Cornelius senior made him a present one day of one of his shell-boxes.

He often had tickets to dispose of when the piece wasn’t going very well, and in this way Cornelius often went to a play, taking his wife or his mother or a crony of his. He would tell John afterwards and thus the boy knew all about The Bells, Colleen Bawn, Lord Lytton’s Money, Caste, and many another almost before he could talk.

Everyone in the town, of course, knew the ugly, long-legged, excited little boy, and he was afraid of no one. Until he went to his first day-school no one was unkind to him or ill-treated him, so that he had complete confidence in everyone. Even before his sixth year he would go up to anyone and recite one of his little pieces to them. Afterwards when we come to the play-writing and singing time...!

At home no one ever quarrelled. His mother would be often in despair–”Oh, Lordy, Lordy!... Better I was dead. Better for everyone.’

That would be when a garment was lost in the laundry or she hadn’t had time to cook a proper meal or her back was aching. John’s father was marvellous at consoling her. A comic sight it must have been for a cynical observer to see that little man take that very large woman and hug her and pat her broad back and pinch her cheeks. But the Cornelius family did not think it comic, and soon Mrs. Cornelius would be wiping her eyes, young John dancing like a grasshopper on his long legs, and Cornelius Papa sitting down to the little table to stick shells on to his boxes. They were a very devoted, feckless, untidy, good-natured family.

The one real trouble at this time–and it became very much worse later on–was that Mrs. Cornelius was a little too fond of the bottle. John’s father, a very sober man, was afraid of this as of nothing else in life, and his son grew to be afraid of it too. From very early days they were conspirators together in this affair.

It was in his sixth year that John was first made aware of the unkindness that there is in the world. That moment, small in itself, big in its consequences, may well be counted the first real event in his history, the first moment of fear of his fellow-man. He had known before this, as I have already said, what fear is in dreams. Now he was to know what it is in the world of fact. He was five years old and some four months. It was a quiet, sunny autumn afternoon and the sea coming in like a whisper and a promise, gulls flying and settling and screaming over some piece of dead fish or whatever, while the thump of the mining-stamps tramped like the tread of men from over the brow of the moor.

John often told of it with that eager egotism that took it for granted that anything happening to himself must be interesting to everybody even to its smallest detail.

“It was on one of those very still days with ivory cumuli of cloud resting on the horizon. I’d wandered off by myself and to that part of the beach where a fresh-water stream comes down through the sand to meet the sea. Before it reached the sand this stream was bordered with tall grasses. There were irises there in their proper season. A duck and half a dozen ducklings had come down to the stream and the ducklings were swimming about. They were irresistibly lovely to me and I seemed to know just what they were thinking and feeling and saying to one another. One duckling was less venturesome than the others and stayed close to its mother, but with a rather self-satisfied air like the child in the family who won’t take risks and puts its money in the money-box very carefully. You think I’m inventing all this just to amuse you? I assure you I’m not. It happened just as I’m telling you–’ (Cornelius would often break into his stories like this, throwing his head up, frowning, challenging anyone to disbelieve him)–”I was watching them, kneeling by the stream, and I heard people shouting. I looked up and saw a crowd of men and boys coming over the sand-dune. And then, ahead of them, appearing from nowhere, outlined for a moment against the sky, an old crazy man whom I knew well, “Old Laces” they called him. Everyone knew “Laces.” He was one of the harmless lunatics who lived in the Asylum but was allowed to roam about as he pleased. They called him “Laces” because he went about with a box slung over his shoulder in which were some odds and ends, shoe-laces and reels of cotton and such things. He never tried to sell anything, but the box gave him pleasure, made him feel important perhaps. He was a quite harmless, good-natured old man and everyone liked him. But to-day they had set on him and were driving him down to the sea. They were shouting and laughing and cried out that they were going to give him a bath. He ran down the sand-bank and came right to where I was. He didn’t recognize me. He was by far too terrified for that. I’d never seen fear in a human face before. He had a grey straggly beard like my grandfather and was dressed in an old ragged black coat, and his trousers were torn. His cheek was bleeding where a stone had struck him. But it was his eyes! His eyes! They were staring with insanity and fear. His breath came in desperate little gasps. Another stone struck him just as he reached me and he fell on his knees. He gave one dreadful choking cry and rolled over. I remember that I saw the duck and her brood scurrying into the grasses. I couldn’t move. I stared and stared and stared. The white cumuli of cloud rolled up over the sea making a noise like drums. It was exactly like one of the worst of my nightmares. The men and boys came up and were silent because “Old Laces” was dead.

“Silly, unintentional, like most cruelty.’

On that day, Cornelius always said, his life really began.

CHAPTER II

THE GREAT SHELL-BOX; AND HOW JULIET SPOKE FROM THE BALCONY

From the age of five years to eight John Cornelius must have led a quiet, domestic and very happy existence. During those years only two events of major importance occurred; it is with these that this chapter deals. He may be seen, a small restless enquiring figure, growing in vitality if not in beauty, moving up and down, in and out, talking to anybody, for ever asking questions, afraid of no one (although alert now against circumstance after the death of “Old Laces’).

About him, around him, lie the town and the sea, the fishing-boats sailing out silently against the morning sun, the gulls rising and falling like fragments of snow-breasted wave flung sky-high, the bells ringing softly the hour, the country carts creaking up the hill to the top of the moor, the never-ceasing murmur and scurry and roar of the sea, the Market with the flowers, the fruit, the vegetables, the cows and sheep in the pens, the long tranquil silence of the night, and the old watchman still calling out as he shook his scolding rattle–”One o’clock and a stormy sky.’

At the age of six John went for the first time to school–Mrs. Biggar’s Kindergarten in Fall Street. He did not remain there long, only two days in fact.

Mrs. Cornelius, dressed in her best and panting with the heat of her unaccustomed garments, accompanied John. Mrs. Biggar, whom John remembered as a small woman with a sharp black eye, promised Mrs. Cornelius that her little boy should not suffer corporal punishment.

On the second day, however, because she considered John impertinent (as very likely he was), she gave him several sharp taps on the back of his hand with a ruler. John gave her one look in return and walked straight home. When he told his mother what had occurred she was in complete agreement with him. The woman had broken her word and that was enough. He did not go to a school again until he was seven, but before that his father had taught him to read and write. Arithmetic and everything to do with it he never could abide.

He loved his father and grandmother dearly, but his feeling for his mother was one of passionate devotion and remained so in spite of all her shortcomings. It was perhaps because of her shortcomings that he loved her. He inherited from her her lack of orderliness and incapacity for arranging things. But most of all he felt that she needed care and protection in a way that the others did not. As her inebriety grew upon her he felt ever more strongly this protectiveness. He had throughout his life an especial care for and understanding of drunkards, although he was himself most abstemious all his days–and that too was perhaps because of his mother.

He adopted towards her from very early days a paternal attitude, chaffing her, telling her funny stories, helping her with her work (although in this he generally did more harm than good), cheering her depressed spirits. It was, I suppose, her constant bewildered despair at the muddle she was in that tempted her to the drink. She invented, like many a similar victim before and after her, a wonderfully alert system of lies, subterfuges and stratagems. However, during those early years of John’s the complaint was not severe. When she was not troubled with too much work, too little money, before she became so corpulent, there were many hours when the two of them were as happy as two people could be.

He would sing his little songs, recite his poems, tell his stories, while she sat in the rocking-chair, her large red hands planted on her knees, staring at him as though he were an elf-visitor from another world. She might well have thought so, for with his extreme thinness, his long bony face, his brilliant searching eyes he looked little like any child of hers. He remembered that once he came in crying because some woman, exasperated with his determination to tell her a story, had cried out: “Take your ugly face away. I can’t abide the sight of it.’

“You aren’t ugly! You aren’t ugly!’ his mother had passionately cried, taking him to her capacious bosom. “I’ll give her ugly!’

But he was ugly all the same and well he knew it.

Another bond that they had was their religion. Mrs. Cornelius, although she seldom entered a church, believed in God as though He might at any moment come in and inspect the laundry. So did John.

Now John’s father was an atheist and that for the simple and to himself convincing reason of there being so much misery in the world. He but rarely spoke on these subjects, but Mrs. Cornelius, admiring him and feeling an eternal gratitude to him as she did, suffered great unhappiness and much bewilderment at his opinions. How could so fine and generous a gentleman as her husband think such dreadful things? But, worst of all, must he not suffer fearful punishment one day? And at the thought of this she would stare at him as he worked at his shell-boxes, and her eyes would fill with tears and she would long to take the little man in her arms and defend him from the Powers of Darkness.

The other great trouble that she had at this time was in the matter of John’s “lies.’ She knew that all small children told lies, but John’s were grander and more challenging than any others.

He would come in and tell her that he had seen an old dwarf with a bag of gold on his shoulder down by Lelant Rock looking in the pools for jelly-fish. He would assure her that he had taken some of the gold pieces and allowed them to trickle between his fingers. Why hadn’t he brought any of them home then? Oh, well, they didn’t belong to him! And the dwarf had turned surly because his fingers had been stung by a jelly-fish.

Of course children do make up stories which no one expects you to believe, and Johnny in especial had a marvellous imagination. So the dwarf with the jelly-fish might be forgiven–but what of it when Johnny comes in, stops at the door and says: “The Queen of England has just arrived in the town, mother.’ (He used to talk like an old man sometimes, even at the age of six.) “I’ve seen her white horses and she’s wearing a crown.’ In a case like this Mrs. Cornelius simply didn’t know what to do and would consult her friends and neighbours, Mrs. Garriman and Mrs. Hoskin, to see whether they had any advice to offer. John remembered Mrs. Garriman and Mrs. Hoskin very well. Mrs. Garriman was a tall, gaunt woman who believed in ghosts, spirits, table-turning, and telling the cards. Mrs. Hoskin was a little sparrow of a woman with a suspicion of a light beard on the end of her chin. Neither Mrs. Hoskin nor Mrs. Garriman liked Johnny, who bored them with his recitations and his refusal to take them as seriously as he took himself. This last characteristic was, as he never sufficiently realized, a great drawback to him in later life.

Mrs. Garriman terrified Mrs. Cornelius with her card-telling and table-turning. Since she was already sufficiently superstitious, Mrs. Garriman’s lugubrious voice saying: “It’s a Death in the House. That can mean nothink but a Death–and a bloody one too if I’m not mistaken,’ would disturb Mrs. Cornelius all the night long. She recognized, however, that Mrs. Hoskin was the more dangerous of the two. When Maggie Hoskin, in a gathering of friends, told many destructive little stories of other friends–well, what would happen to yourself as soon as your back was turned?

Both ladies assured Mrs. Cornelius that her boy must end in gaol or even worse. Such lies! Why, only last week he had told Mrs. Hoskin that he’d seen a mermaid sitting on a rock and combing her hair!

“It’s only his fun,’ said Mrs. Cornelius weakly.

His fun! And the child not yet seven years of age! His fun! Mermaids indeed!

Nevertheless they did like to hear the child sing. By the time he was seven he could sing like a bird. There can have been none of the angel-boy treble about him, and Charlie Christian has told me of the way John looked, standing with his long skinny neck stretched, his big mouth immensely wide, and his funny thin fingers beating the time as he gave his audience “Oft in the Stilly Night,’ “The Young May Moon is Beaming, Love,’ “The Harp that Once.’ He was about seven and a half when Charlie first heard him; he knew all those songs then and many more.

The trouble about him was that once he had started nothing could stop him. There were none of the shy affectations of the professional singer about him. Nor did he need an accompaniment. He could sing anywhere, at any time, to anybody.

At seven years of age he went to school again, to Rush’s Day School.

Rush’s had been a famous town school in its day, but in the late ‘eighties and early ‘nineties a more practical Board School type of education destroyed it. Anything but practical it must have been according to all that I have heard of it, but it did two fine things for John: gave him Mr. Bartholomew for an inspiring influence and introduced him to the two most faithful and devoted friends of all his life. Mr. Bartholomew was one of those little old men whom you meet in the books of Dickens and Borrow, in “drab-coloured pantaloons and a nankeen waistcoat.’ He was a deliberate and theatrical survival from an age that seemed to him the only real and beautiful one.

But he had a passion for books–not for your moderns, of course, and John well remembered his disgust when at a later stage he caught him with Cometh Up as a Flower in his hand. He would have nothing to say to Swinburne or “Festus’ Bailey or Rossetti. They were all too recent for him. But Beddoes and the early Tennyson and Clough and Charles Auchester and the real Classics behind these–Pope and Gray and Boswell and Cowper... the eighteenth century was his passion... Dr. Johnson his god... he would read Rasselas to his slumbering pupils, pushing snuff up his nostrils, tickling the scanty grey hair on his head with the end of a ruler, suddenly breaking into Pope’s Iliad, dancing about in ecstasy, discovering a boy, his head on his desk, fast in slumber, bringing the ruler down with a little scream of anger on the urchin’s head... how often John acted him to us, how we laughed and felt as though we ourselves had known him intimately... but he was a blessing and a wonder to John all the same.

Anne and Charlie he met both on the same day when he had been a week or so at Rush’s.

He was turning down the hill out of the High Street and had reached the little square patch of ground known as the Rock. She was standing, her satchel of school-books in her hand, laughing and sticking her tongue out at some boys who had been teasing her. She must have been a big girl for her age (she was two years older than John), rosy-cheeked and tallow-haired, freckled and untidy, broad in the beam, laughing and fearless and careless then as always. I don’t know whether Anne is the heroine of this book or no. There was, before the Great War, a fashion among novelists for free-and-easy and jolly and give-you-a-blow-or-a-kiss kind of heroines. They couldn’t, poor dears, survive the cynical post-War intellectual spirit. They had in fact very few brains but a lot of heart; the post-War heroines were exactly the opposite. Anne was, I am afraid, something of a pre-War heroine in physique, courage, and good temper, but she had plenty of brains and a sort of healthy irony when she liked. The boys, shouting and laughing at her, vanished, and she threw some pebbles after them. When she saw John she stared as people very often did on first seeing him.

She spoke to him, and as they were going the same way they started off together. They liked one another very much at once. John told her that his mother did laundry and his father made boxes and painted pictures. Anne said that her name was Anne Swinnerton, that her father was dead and that she lived with her mother in a little house above Carp Cove. She went to school at Miss Bensatt’s Academy. She liked everything–sailing, fishing, swimming, dancing. Reading? No, she hadn’t any time for reading. They agreed to meet on the following day.

On that same morning John, running, had collided with a small, broad-shouldered, sturdy boy who had simply said: “Look out, you!’ John was so thin and his legs so unsteady that the sturdy boy had held him up and waited until his breath came back. John grinned and the boy grinned. They stayed there talking; at least John talked as he always did, saying everything that came into his head. The sturdy boy looked at him with his quiet, observant blue eyes and said almost nothing. It did finally appear that the boy’s name was Charlie Christian and that his father owned a fishing-smack with his two brothers, was a prominent member of the Port Merlin lifeboat and an important Methodist. It was Charlie’s characteristic then and always to observe rather than communicate. His suspicions of his fellow human beings were as deep as the sea; he trusted no one until he had good sound reason. However, the one person in all his life whom he did trust from the very beginning was John Cornelius; he trusted him and saw that, because of his simple impetuosities, he needed protection. From that very first day he made protecting John his business. He had no idea then, of course, what a life business it was going to be. John had no especial thought either that on this important day he had made the two best friendships he was ever to make. I am not sure whether he was ever to recognize it. We are always slightly indulgent towards those who show us that, without reservation, they love us and believe in us. John was always, without intending it, a little patronizing towards Anne and Charlie. Not that they minded. They stood a great deal from him before the end. Their reasons for loving him, though, were real and solid ones. On the whole he deserved that devotion.

And so we come to the Great Shell-box affair. John always considered this the beginning of all his real troubles–his and his family’s. “If ever I write my own life,’ he would say to me, “that business shall be shown to be the root of the matter.’

He recalled every detail of it, acted it for us over and over again. He had been one half-holiday with his grandmother to visit his grandfather in the Asylum. The old man hadn’t been so very well, complaining of pains in the head, and the little grandmother was distressed. You couldn’t do anything for him when he was ill. He just sat there rocking himself like a sick monkey and altogether forgetting that he was King Solomon. He looked so pathetic, so helpless, clung to his wife’s hand so passionately, begging her not to leave him, that the visit was truly upsetting.

They had, however, scarcely been in John’s home for ten minutes before John’s father came in like a conquering hero. He had suffered for many years, I am sure, from an appalling sense of failure. He made the best of it, but he knew that this was not where he ought to be, allowing his poor wife to work her heart out for their sustenance. There was some strain of weakness somewhere, a fear of himself (perhaps because of his father’s insanity); he was an artist whose talents had led him nowhere, a gentleman married to a washerwoman (although that he never for a moment regretted), ineffectual, with ideas of form and colour that he could never make marketable. He must have become shyer and shyer, ever more reserved, ever more secretly unhappy as the years went on. Why didn’t he try some more practical and profitable occupation? Well, he did later, as you shall hear.

John, I fancy, was his one cherished companion, his one pride and delight. To see little Mr. Cornelius, Charlie said, sitting in his chair, his legs crossed under him Turk-wise, while John sang, that was a pleasant sight. Yes, it must have been.

Melancholy or no, on this particular afternoon he came in radiant. Mrs. Cornelius was getting out the tea-things, her mother-in-law half asleep in the rocking-chair (for she was a considerably old lady), John kneeling on the rough wooden seat in the window looking at an illustrated volume of Hans Andersen that Mr. Bartholomew had given him. “I remember as though it were yesterday. I was reading “The Clogs of Fortune” and I can quote you the opening words: “Every author has something peculiar in his style of writing, and those who are unfriendly to him quickly fasten upon this peculiarity, shrug their shoulders and say, “There he is again!’ ” And I remember that I was thinking “When I come to write I hope I will have something peculiar!” ’

The birds were singing in their cage and the warm sun coming in through the open window off the sea in a rhythm of heat like the rhythm of the waves. “I remember,’ John used to tell us, “looking up and thinking at once: “Why, what’s happened to father?” I’d never seen him look so triumphant before. There he stood, a parcel in his hand, beaming on us all. I loved him so dearly that it was as though we were one person, and at once I too was bursting with happiness and there was the scent of the sun and the mignonette in the window and the hot cakes that mother had been baking. How happy we all were even before we knew any reason! Father went to his wife and kissed her, then he kissed his mother, then he kissed his son.

“ “Mother–all of you,” he said. “Our fortune’s made!” Then he undid the parcel and showed us a red leather box studded with gold nails. The lid was a plain and shiny wood. A very handsome box indeed.

“ “This belongs to Lady Mary Madox,” he said quite reverentially.

“ “And who may she be?” asked my mother.’ (John imitated all their voices so that you could see them living and moving in front of you.)