FullReads

CHUMMIE: Blessed if it ain’t Marge! And what would you like for a Christmas present?

MARGE: I want to spend a week or so at the house of the great poet, Lord Inmemorison. If you really wish to please me, you will use your influence to get me a job there. Your uncle being Inmemorison’s butler, you ought to be able to work it.

CHUMMIE: Might. What would you go as?

MARGE: Anything–but temporary parlour-maid is my strong suit.

CHUMMIE: And what’s your game?

MARGE: I’m sick of patronizing politicians and want to patronize a poet. When all’s said and done, Inmemorison is a proper certificated poet. Besides, I want to put something by for my rainy autobiography.

CHUMMIE: Oh, well. I’ll try and lay a pipe for it. May come off or may not.

Chummie managed the thing to perfection. My sister Casey wrote me one of the best testimonials I have ever had, and by Christmas I was safely installed for a week. Chummie’s uncle treated me with the utmost consideration, and it is to him that I owe many of the thrilling details that I am now able to present to the panting public. Although there was a high leather screen in the drawing-room which was occasionally useful to me, my opportunities for direct observation were limited.

Lord Inmemorison had a magnificent semi-detached mansion (including a bath-room, h. and c.) in one of the wildest and loneliest parts of Wandsworth Common. The rugged beauty of the scenery around is reflected in many of his poems.

There were, as was to be expected, several departures from ordinary convention in the household. Dinner was at seven. The poet went to bed immediately after dinner, and punctually at ten reappeared in the drawing-room and began reading his poems aloud.

The family generally went to bed at ten sharp.

I heard him read once. There were visitors in the house who wished to hear the great man, and it was after midnight before a general retirement could take place. He had a rich, sonorous, over-proof, pre-war voice, considerable irritability, and a pretty girl sitting on his knee. The last item was, of course, an instance of poetical licence.

The girl had asked him to read from “Maud” and he had consented. He began with his voice turned down so low that in my position behind the screen I could only just catch the opening lines:

“Hail to thee, blithe spirit!
Bird thou never wert…”

He opened the throttle a little wider when he came to the passage:

“His head was bare, his matted hair
Was buried in the sand.”

He read that last line “was serried in the band,” but immediately corrected himself. And the poignant haunting repetition of the last lines of the closing stanza were given out on the full organ:

“And everywhere that Mary went–
And everywhere that Mary went–
And everywhere that Mary went–
The lamb was sure to go.”

It was a great–a wonderful experience for me, and I shall never forget it.

I have spoken of his irritability. It is not unnatural in a great poet. He must live with his exquisite sentient nerves screwed up to such a pitch that at any moment something may give.

For example, one evening he was sitting with a girl on his knee, and had just read to her these enchanting lines in which he speaks of hearing the cuckoo call.

INMEMORISON (
gruffly and suddenly

): What bird says cuckoo?

GIRL ( with extreme nervous agitation ): The rabbit.

INMEMORISON: No, you fool–it’s the nightingale.

The girl burst into tears and said she would not play any more. I think she was wrong. Whenever I hear any criticism of myself I always take it meekly and gently, whether it is right or wrong–it has never been right yet–and try to see if I cannot learn something from it. What the girl should have said was: “Now it’s your turn to go out, and we’ll think of something.”