i only knew one poet in my life:
and this, or something like it, was his way.
how it strikes a contemporary.
three days after the inquest denis came up to town to interview a timber merchant as to a contract about which there had been a difference of opinion. he looked down on the man through his eyeglass, carried all his points, and departed, leaving exasperation in his wake. after this, finding he had some hours to spare before he need catch his train to bredon, he went to pay a call on his cousin lettice.
denis was, like his friend gardiner, the son of a clergyman; but not of a poor country parson. denis's father was honorary canon of rochester and rural dean; he held a family living, and had besides a comfortable income of his own. there was some excuse for the double name. the merions were a penniless irish family with a pedigree derived from the ancient kings (all irish pedigrees derive from the ancient kings). the smith and the money had come to them together, a couple of generations back, from an eccentric old bachelor who had loved and lost one of the daughters of the house. marrying late, canon merion-smith was over fifty when his only son was born and his wife died. denis had only a nurse to mother him, but he did not suffer; he was a very happy small boy, who from his babyhood never thought of anything but engines. he was not at all like his father, an easy-going irishman with a strong sense of humor, but they were inseparable friends, who explored the path of knowledge hand in hand. there was no question of parental authority. denis did what was[pg 35] required either because he considered it reasonable, or else to please his father, to whom the staid small boy was a perpetual fund of amusement.
canon merion-smith taught his son at home till he was fourteen, and then, rather doubtfully, sent him to rochester, whither his friend harry gardiner had preceded him. doubtfully, because he was beginning to distrust his own training. he did not think denis would be happy at school; but he had no desire to be the parent of a prig. denis was not happy. he hated arbitrary rules; he could never get into his head that it was not his to reason why. only gardiner made his schooldays endurable. he stayed at rochester till he was nearly seventeen, and then passed unexpectedly without extra coaching straight into woolwich. he was very clever, and strikingly handsome in a thin, aristocratic way, but he thought no more of his abilities than of his good looks. denis was proud, but he had not a trace of vanity. he was an example of the not uncommon blend of class arrogance and personal modesty.
he passed out of woolwich first in his batch, went to chatham, to rangoon, saw active service in a frontier campaign—the most unhappy years of his life. he had gone into the army to please his father, but he hated discipline, and his heart was set on aeronautics. when canon merion-smith died, denis resigned his commission and devoted himself to the problems of flight. the way of inventors is hard. he lost all his own money and some of gardiner's, who came back into his life in time to do the beloved aeroplane a service which denis, conservative in gratitude, never forgot. he brought himself to the verge of bankruptcy. at his last sixpence he fell in with sydney wandesforde, a well-known motor-racing amateur, who had transferred his interest to the new sport, and was as keen on the practical side of flying as denis on the theoretical. he had what denis had not—a bottomless purse and family influence to back it. they joined forces, and from that time denis's future was assured.
his cousin lettice—l?titia jane smith—had been in[pg 36] his life for many years, since she, with her mother and sisters, came to settle in the village of which canon merion-smith was incumbent. rosabel and stella were charming, half irish and half french; but lettice, the eldest, had always been denis's ally. she was deliberate where they were quick, silent while they chattered, methodical instead of happy-go-lucky. they were clever, but she was the born student, patient, accurate, thorough. the household was always short of money, so lettice, who suffered in that atmosphere of elegant muddle, left home as soon as she could and set up for herself. she was very fond of her relations, and they of her, but she found them trying to live with. lettice had a temper; she said herself it was a dumb devil. still, since it was very strictly dumb, you had to know her well, and watch her carefully, before you discovered its existence.
she now occupied an attic in pimlico, and worked all day in the british museum library. she might have been more comfortable in a boarding-house, but she preferred solitude, or rather silence; she was perennially interested in her fellow-creatures, but she did not want to be talked to by them. she was always the spectator, never the actor, having eyes, and ears, a synthetic mind, and that delicate sense of humor, pity and irony in one, which is a lamp to the feet of its possessor.
but what marked lettice off from other people was her passion for self-obliteration. most of us in our hearts love to fill the center of the stage. lettice was miserable there. she liked to be the fly on the wall. yet she was unselfish as well as selfless, gentle, accommodating, all things to all men. she was like a penny-in-the-slot machine for doing good: you put in your need, out came her response: and she asked no more gratitude than the machine. to thank her was like touching the horns of a snail. a harmless whim in many ways, yet with elements of danger; for tastes of this sort strengthen as they grow, and lettice's friends were beginning to fear she would fade away altogether to an impersonal ghost, unless something happened to call her back.
[pg 37]
she should have been merion-smith too; she owed the affix to the same irish grandmother from whom denis had inherited his profile, his accent, his superstitions, and his family pride. he had been known to send back a letter addressed to the name of smith. lettice, on the other hand, had dropped the hyphen with all celerity. denis might lecture her on her slackness; she concurred amiably so long as she was with him, and then went on her way exactly as before. lettice on the surface was all sweet pliability, but underneath lay solid rock. denis faced the world as an obstinate, pugnacious irishman, whereas a skilful hand could guide him with a silken thread. lettice read him like a book and made soft fun of him, but always with a reserve of peculiarly tender affection; she thought a great deal of her cousin. and denis thought a great deal—a very great deal—of her. he was aware that in half her innocent speeches she was, to put it gracefully, having him on; but what did that matter? lettice was lettice. he did not analyze his friends; he idealized them.
denis was received at no. 33 canning street by the daughter of the house, a smart young person in silk stockings who invited him, with never a "sir" to her sentence, to step up and find miss smith in the top back attic. the stairs were dark; denis, gloomily reflecting on the decadence of the lower classes, fell over a pair of boots and trod in a dust-pan which flew up and hit him. he was not in the best of tempers when he knocked at his cousin's door.
"come in!" called out an abstracted voice, wearily raised; and he obeyed. there stood lettice in the middle of the floor, holding out with both arms before her nose a newspaper which enwrapped her, mind and body. lettice had been known, when she came in from the museum after her day's work, to read through the whole of a novel, standing under the gas, before she moved to take off her hat. it took some time for denis's presence to penetrate, and then she lowered her arms slowly and looked round.
"o-oh," she said. "i thought you were the milk. sit down, sit down."
[pg 38]
she folded up her paper and poked it under a book, took away his hat and stick, and fetched the milk from the passage, hurrying slowly, as her custom was. denis sat down, and discovered that he was very glad to be with her again. a cooling fountain in life's dry, dreary sand, that was what lettice represented. she was not a beauty; she had none of the attributes of a heroine. her nose was nondescript, her complexion poor, her mouth large, though there was character in the full under lip; character also, and brains, in the big forehead which she hid beneath her soft brown hair. for the rest, she had drooping shoulders and a long slim neck; she chose and put on her clothes like a frenchwoman; but her best points were the set and shape of her graceful little head, and the somewhat misleading sweetness of her hazel eyes.
her room was a long white attic, one end curtained off. there was a window in the gable facing west, and in the window a table overflowing with manuscripts and books; sheets of foolscap covered with her graceful writing, an old english text, a latin grammar, a treatise on court hand. she was trying to make up for a haphazard education by teaching herself. as she passed on her way to the cupboard, she drew a sheet of paper out of the muddle and presented it to denis.
"now you can just look through that while i'm making the tea, and see if there are any mistakes," she enjoined him in the minute expressive voice which was one of her charms to those who found her charming. denis found himself faced by a latin exercise. when he had learned all his cousin could tell him about the wreaths and the roses that adorned the girls and the queens, he turned the page, and came on something more attractive. in her hours of ease lettice was a poet. looking up from her task with the bread knife, she saw what he was doing, turned a deep pink, and silently but swiftly removed the sheet from the fingers. denis laughed.
"haven't you anything to show?"
"no, i haven't," said lettice, acerb and forbidding.
[pg 39]
"'sheep on a lonely road,
gray in the gray—'"
denis quoted maliciously. the poet covered her ears with her hands.
"oh, do-o-on't!"
"well, let me see the rest of it!"
"well, it isn't finished; it's no good looking at a thing till it's finished, is it?" retorted lettice in a soft flurry of exasperation. her poetry was dug out of her own soul, and she suffered the pains of vivisection in hearing it discussed. denis knew this well, and lettice knew he knew it. looking like an affronted kitten, she retired into a silence that the brutal critic might have called sulky, and seemed disposed to stay there. but denis knew how to make his peace. just then the kettle boiled over. he was quick to lift it off—and to put it down again in a hurry, shaking his fingers. before he could find his handkerchief, down swooped lettice's arm; she seized the handle, bore it away, took her time over filling the teapot, ostentatiously stayed to settle the cozy; then, having displayed beyond possibility of oversight the superior hardness of her palm, she replaced the kettle on the hob, and returned to her toasting fork, exuding vainglory.
this incident settled, they talked of the aeroplane. this was invariably lettice's first question, and it brought down a shower of information, all water on a duck's back. considering what excellent brains she had, it was surprising how dense she could be when she chose. when denis's fluent irish tongue ran dry, she was ready with her next question.
"and did you have a nice time at grasmere with dear harry?"
"no, i didn't," said denis with unexpected force. "i had a perfectly beastly time!"
"dear, dear! how was that?"
"oh, things went wrong," said denis vaguely. he wanted to tell the whole story—lettice seemed to purify and sweeten all she took into her knowledge, and this badly needed sweetening. he hated it; he hated his evasions at[pg 40] the inquest, what gardiner called his adroitness; he hated soiling his fingers; he was vaguely dissatisfied with his friend. but since, for gardiner's sake, he could not tell her all, he told her nothing. half-truths were no good with lettice. "by the by, why didn't you come?" he said. "i was expectin' you all the time. i couldn't think where you'd got to. you as good as promised to turn up!"
"were you very disappointed?"
"no. no, i can't say i was—not altogether. i want you to meet harry, but i didn't want you this time. queer chap he is—you may think you know a man, but you never do."
lettice's eyebrows moved upwards ever so little. "how do you mean queer?"
"oh, i don't know. he has all sorts of cranks. last time he was at bredon, that cold spell when all the pipes were burstin', nothing would do but he must sleep out in the garden all the time. and it was just the same at grasmere, though it rained cats and dogs. you can't be even with his fads," denis added with a sigh, extending himself in his chair, his long legs stretched half across the hearth. "he's off almost at once to that place in the ardennes i was tellin' you about. i've promised to run over there next summer. i wish you'd come too, lettice, as you didn't bring it off this time."
"you said you didn't want me," murmured lettice reproachfully.
"i didn't want you when things were all beastly. but i do want you to meet harry. i want your opinion of him."
to this lettice made no reply. she set a few slow, neat stitches in the cloth she was embroidering.
"whereabouts is it, this place in the ardennes?"
"near bouillon. you can get there for next to nothing, if that's what you're thinkin' of, but i wish you'd let me take you. i did rather well over that deal this morning and i'm rollin'. after all, you're as good as my sister. you might just as well."
lettice did not thank him; that was taken for granted.[pg 41] they understood each other so well that words were often superfluous.
"if it's not very expensive i might manage it myself," she said. "my old man in harley street says i've got to take a holiday, so i suppose i must go somewhere, just to satisfy him. and i should rather like to see the ardennes."
"have you been to the doctor again? why didn't you tell me before, lettice? what does he say?"
"he says," said lettice with inimitable unction, "that i am in a state of thorough nervous exhaustion, and ought to take six months' rest. so."
"then i hope you're going to do it!"
lettice smiled. she did not look particularly docile. denis was beguiled into lecturing her about her health, though he knew it was time wasted—nay, rather, time misspent. for miss smith was like a pig, and if you pulled her one way she was apt to go the other. in this case, however, it seemed that she had fairly made up her mind before he came to a holiday abroad, for presently she let slip that she had been studying a guide to the ardennes, which she had borrowed from a neighbor below. denis sent her down to borrow it again.
while she was away he wandered about, looking at her books. under a fat dictionary he came upon the paper she had been reading when he entered, and he pulled it out to see if she still took what he called the radical rag. its name stared him in the face: the westmorland gazette. it was doubled back at page four: fatality at grasmere.
he wheeled as she came into the room. "lettice, how on earth did you get hold of this thing?"
she stopped dead for a moment, then came on.
"i ordered it."
"what for?"
"because i'd seen something about the accident, and i wanted to know more. so i went to finch's at the corner and asked him to get me the local paper, and he did."
lettice had a talent for explaining the obvious.
"where did you see anything about the accident?"
[pg 42]
"there was a paragraph in my halfpenny rag."
"confound!" said denis, black as a thunder-cloud.
lettice smiled, recovering her equanimity as he lost his. "well, you shouldn't go and make interesting things like aeroplanes and become a public character," she murmured pianissimo.
"why didn't you tell me that you knew?"
she looked at him, allowing her speakingly derisive eyes to retaliate that question.
"i couldn't tell you about it, it wasn't my affair," said denis hotly and confusedly. "gardiner doesn't want the story all over the place. how could i help it, lettice? but when i was talkin' about easedale, i think you might have let me know you knew!"
"my dear child, i couldn't begin on it if you didn't, could i?" said lettice patiently. "i was simply longing to ask questions. it was nice, proper, lady-like feeling made me hold my tongue, what you always say you like. and now you're cross with me! well, well."
denis was cross; he stood crumpling the paper in his hands, visibly fuming. lettice took it away from him and smoothed it out.
"i shan't talk about it to mr. gardiner when i come to rochehaut, if that's what you're afraid of."
"are you really comin' to rochehaut?"
"don't you want me now you know i know?"
she looked at him with those impish eyes.
"you know too much, lettice!" said her cousin, discomfited, half laughing. she turned away with her small foreign shrug.
"dear, dear! there's no pleasing some people!"
