I wondered how I was to reply. I knew that the letter she would like best would contain news of Southwood: the small details of every day, even to the condition of my dahlias. How was I to deal with my bizarre journey to Istanbul? To mention it only in passing[171] would seem both unnatural and pretentious, but to describe the affair of Colonel Hakim and the gold brick and General Abdul would cause her to feel that my mode of life had entirely changed, and this might increase her sense of separation and of loneliness near Koffiefontein. I asked myself whether it would not be better to refrain from writing at all, but then on the last page her paper had slipped in the machine and the print ran diagonally up into the previous line she had typed, I look forward so to your letters because they bring Southwood close to me. I put her letter away with others of hers that I kept in a drawer of my desk.
It was quite dark now, and yet more than an hour would have to pass before Chicken arrived, so I went to choose a book from my shelves. Like my father, I rarely buy new books, though I dont confine my reading, as he did, to almost a single author. Modern literature has never appealed to me; to my mind it was in the Victorian age that English poetry and fiction reached the highest level. If I had been able to write myself and in my boyhood before my mother found me the position at the bank I sometimes had that dream I would have modelled myself on one of the minor Victorians (for the giants are inimitable): perhaps R.L. Stevenson or even Charles Reade[172]. I have quite a collection too of Wilkie Collins[173], though I prefer him when he is not writing a detective story, for I dont share my aunts taste in that direction. If I could have been a poet I would have been happy in a quite humble station, to be recognized, if at all, as an English Mahony and to have celebrated Southwood as he celebrated Shandon (it is one of my favourite poems in Palgraves Golden Treasury). Perhaps it was Miss Keenes mention of St. Johns Church, the bells of which I can hear on a Sunday morning while I am working in the garden, that made me think of him and take down the volume.
It was quite dark now, and yet more than an hour would have to pass before Chicken arrived, so I went to choose a book from my shelves. Like my father, I rarely buy new books, though I dont confine my reading, as he did, to almost a single author. Modern literature has never appealed to me; to my mind it was in the Victorian age that English poetry and fiction reached the highest level. If I had been able to write myself and in my boyhood before my mother found me the position at the bank I sometimes had that dream I would have modelled myself on one of the minor Victorians (for the giants are inimitable): perhaps R.L. Stevenson or even Charles Reade[172]. I have quite a collection too of Wilkie Collins[173], though I prefer him when he is not writing a detective story, for I dont share my aunts taste in that direction. If I could have been a poet I would have been happy in a quite humble station, to be recognized, if at all, as an English Mahony and to have celebrated Southwood as he celebrated Shandon (it is one of my favourite poems in Palgraves Golden Treasury). Perhaps it was Miss Keenes mention of St. Johns Church, the bells of which I can hear on a Sunday morning while I am working in the garden, that made me think of him and take down the volume.
Theres a bell in Moscow,
While on tower and kiosk O
In Santa Sophia
The Turkman gets;
And loud in air
Calls men to prayer
From the tapering summit
Of tall minarets.
Such empty phantom
I freely grant them;
But there is an anthem
More dear to me
Tis the bells of Shandon,
That sound so grand on
The pleasant waters
Of the River Lee.
The lines on Santa Sophia had never before rung so true: that dingy mausoleum could not compare with our St. Johns and the mention of it would remind me always of Colonel Hakim.
One book leads to another, and I found myself, for the first time in many years, taking down a volume of Walter Scott. I remembered how my father had used the volumes for playing the Sortes Virgilianae a game my mother considered a little blasphemous unless it was played with the Bible, in all seriousness. I sometimes suspected my father had dog-eared various pages[174] so that he could hit on a suitable quotation to tease and astound my mother. Once, when he was suffering severely from constipation, he opened Rob Roy apparently at random and read out, Mr. Owen entered. So regular were the motions and habits of this worthy man I tried the Sortes myself now and was astonished at the apposite nature of the quotation which I picked: I had need of all the spirits a good dinner could give, to resist the dejection which crept insensibly on my mind.
It was only too true that I was depressed: whether it was due to Miss Keenes letter or to the fact that I missed my aunts company more than I had anticipated, or even that Tooley had left a blank behind her, I could not tell. Now that I had no responsibility to anyone but myself, the pleasure of finding again my house and garden had begun to fade. Hoping to discover a more encouraging quotation, I opened Rob Roy again and found a snapshot lying between the leaves: the square yellowing snapshot of a pretty girl in an old-fashioned bathing-dress taken with an old-fashioned Brownie. The girl was bending a little towards the camera; she had just slipped one shoulder out of its strap, and she was laughing, as though she had been surprised at the moment of changing[175]. It was some moments before I recognized Aunt Augusta and my first thought was how attractive she had been in those days. Was it a photograph taken by her sister, I wondered? But it was hardly the kind of photograph my mother would have given my father. I had to admit that it was more likely he had taken it himself and hidden it there in a volume of Scott which my mother would never read. This then was how she had looked she could have hardly been more than eighteen in the long ago days before she knew Curran or Monsieur Dambreuse or Mr. Visconti. She had an air of being ready for anything. A phrase about Die Vernon printed on one of the two pages between which the photograph lay caught my eye: Be patient and quiet, and let me take my own way; for when I take the bit between my teeth, there is no bridle will stop me. Had my father deliberately chosen that page with that particular passage for concealing the picture? I felt the melancholy I sometimes used to experience at the bank when it was my duty to turn over old documents deposited there, the title-deeds of a passion long spent. I thought of my father with an added tenderness of that lazy man lying in his overcoat in the empty bath. I had never seen his grave, for he had died on the only trip which he had ever taken out of England, and I was not even sure of where it lay.