The Green Room by Walter de la Mare

Author:Walter de la Mare
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Biblioasis
Published: 2018-08-13T15:06:21+00:00

He hadn’t any desire to sleep again that night. Dreams might come; and wakeful questions pestered him. How old was she when the first of the poems was written? How old when no more came, and she herself had gone on—gone on? That barren awful road of disillusionment, satiety, self-disdain. Had she even when young and untroubled ever been happy? Was what she had written even true? How far are poems true? What had really happened? What had been left out? You can’t even tell—yourself—what goes on in the silent places of your mind when you have swallowed, so to speak, the dreadful outside things of life. What, for example, had Measure for Measure to do with the author of Venus and Adonis, and what Don Juan with Byron as a child? One thing, young women of his own day didn’t take their little affairs like that. They kept life in focus. But that ghost! The ravages, the point, the insidiousness, the very clothes!

Coming to that, then, who the devil had he been taking such pains over? The question kept hammering at his mind day after day; it was still unanswered, showed no promise of an answer. And the Arcadian scene beyond the windows suddenly became an irony and a jeer. The unseen bird itself sang on in vulgar mockery, ‘Come off of it! Come off of it! Come off of it! Dolt, dolt, dolt!’

He turned away out of the brightness of the light, and fixed his eyes on the bulky brown paper package that contained the printed volumes. It was useless to stay here any longer. He would open the package, but merely to take a look at a copy and assure himself that no ingenuity of the printer had restored any little aberration of spelling or punctuation which he himself had corrected three times in the proofs. He knew the poems—or some of them—by heart now.

With extreme reluctance he had tried one or two of them on a literary friend—“An anonymous thing, you know, I came across it in an old book.”

The friend had been polite rather than enthusiastic. After, cigarette between fingers, idly listening to a few stanzas, he had smiled and asked Alan if he had ever read a volume entitled Poems of Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell.

“Well, there you are! A disciple of Acton’s, dear boy, if you ask me. Stuff as common as blackberries!”

And Alan had welcomed the verdict. He didn’t want to share the poems with anybody. If nobody bought them and nobody cared, what matter? All the better. And he wasn’t being sentimental about them now either. He didn’t care if they had any literary value or not. He had entrusted himself with them, and that was the end of the matter. What was Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba? What?

And what did it signify that he had less right to the things even than Mrs. Elliott—who fortunately was never likely to stake out any claim. The moral ashbins old women can be, he thought bitterly.

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