Short Stories 1927-1956 by Walter de la Mare Page B

and a shivering leaden day together! On the other hand, the house might prove to be empty. Imagine that, and rain pelting down upon its abandoned porch! However, the porter had settled the question: ‘Mrs Cotton’s house’ – his very words. She was still there, then. But had the inquiring emphasis he had put on the name suggested something the least bit formidable? Ronnie shuddered. He did so dislike raw, unpleasant, intractable people.
    What a silly expedition! It all came of this touching greed on the other side of the Atlantic for the academic; this thesis craze. But data at second hand, was that really quite proper? Ronnie was still dubious. Surely any young zealot bent on a thesis should conduct his own investigations, should himself play sexton to his dead and buried subject, and with his own privy paw, dig it up again. It was the least one would expect of him.
    Yet here was this young American friend of his – and with the most endearing enthusiasm in the world – calmly devolving this little obligation on himself. Ronnie had agreed, of course, that James Cotton’s poems were worth excavation, and that could hardly be said of most of his contemporaries . Brief life was here their portion. And though a few of them were still alive, their works were almost as dead as mutton. Not so James Cotton: precisely the reverse in fact. His achievement had been rivalled only by his promise – a promise, however, which could scarcely be said to have been kept, since after the publication of that first ‘slender’ volume – to use the reviewers’ unanimous epithet – it had dwindled away into a mere pamphlet, the contents of which had been luminous enough in sparks, but in general so obscure as to be almost disconcerting.
    What these later poems ‘promised’ – and four whole years separated the two books – well, Ronnie couldn’t for the life of him imagine. It was veiled in an Egyptian darkness. Not that he knew even the little of James Cotton there was to know by heart. By no means. He felt a little conscience-stricken at thought of it – just in case in an hour or two he might be in for a catechism on the subject.
    The truth was, of course, that in American seats of learning nowadays there are not nearly enough themes-for-theses to go round. You can hardly see literature for the littérateurs. For that very reason it was a stroke of pure luck for his young friend to have chanced on James Cotton. Except for an article – ‘an appreciation’ – published about nine years before in one of the heavier reviews, James was still practically virgin soil. And what an owlish and incredible performance that had been.
    Take, for example, the lovely country in which Ronnie was now disporting himself. There hadn’t been a single word in the article from start to finish to suggest what delightfully Blake-like surroundings the young poet had enjoyed in his childhood. The little shallow stream that was now tinkling at Ronnie’s side over its sunny stones beneath a screen of vast-boughed elms with their clanking chaffinches; that hill over there, almost gaudy from crown to base with budded larch – it was all so rich, so gentle and so deliciously English.
    And then, after the barest mention of Ashenham, to have asserted that the poet had gone and died in foreign parts! Byron and Shelley were exiles, of course, and so was Landor. Keats had gone to die in Rome. Cyril Charltonin his paper had been eloquence itself about all that. But Trinidad! Ronnie, all alone as he was, all but burst out laughing at the sound of the syllables in his mind. A charming asphaltic island, no doubt, but if you were pulling the long and sentimental bow why not have said Tobago – which has at least a pleasing suggestion of tapioca. But Trinidad! Those dreadful d’s – like the slabs of a sarcophagus.
    And his enthusiastic young American friend in every single letter on the subject had been so emphatic about Trinidad. He had even coquetted with