Stories of the Strange and Sinister (Valancourt 20th Century Classics) Read Online Free PDF Page A

thought of the wild and happy parties that must have taken place here years ago. I saw the old scavenger bending down to pick up a sheet of yellowed paper. ‘His,’ he muttered. ‘His words. All meaningless. All meaningless.’
    He handed the paper to me and turned his back. Taking a poker he toyed the ashes with it, then crouched on a chair, holding his long hands out to no spark of warmth. Above him on the wall was a great patch of dampness, furry and mildewed, like a map of some fabulous country. Suddenly I knew that I hadn’t a word of consolation to give and I turned back to the door, feeling desperately miserable. I wished I had been ‘him’, that slain self who so tormented him.
    At the door, ‘I know he’ll come back to you one day,’ I said; and felt that it was true.
    Then I went outside, closed the door, and walked inch by inch up the slippery steps to the hill-side where the pure moon had soared through a gap in the black clouds. The wind was easing off a little. The night was fresh and the salt of the sea strong in my nostrils. I read the lines on the bit of paper he’d given me.
    ‘Landlocked in this sandpride of westfallen moonflowers
    I (in my archery) to you before wisdom its windows
    Swings follywards, turn with the splint of the stinging finger.’
    It made no sense, but it was strangely contemporary. I could see by the freshness of the ink that it had only recently been written. But the writing was of an old man.
    He is still living, still the village scavenger, and never a word have I had with him from that day, and never shall I. I am tormented whenever I see him; and yet there is a strange feeling of certainty within me about him, as though I knew that he would find the way up the steps and follow, as he wished to follow, that once-hated, bitterly-resented truer self of his whom he killed years ago. When I see him I know that because of the great division in him the great union is already achieved. He is a poet who has had to work out fatally in his own nature the disintegration of our times. Like the Poet, the Scavenger is lifted outside the laws of men. One by one his own words go into the dust-cart to be burnt in the waste land behind the village. The smoke of those words rises and drifts over the roofs to the sea. And the lines that he wrote which moved me as a boy prophesy for him the destiny he desires.

II
    My Lady Sweet, Arise
    Miss Polly Ponsonby lived in a small yellow-bricked cottage in Baker’s Lane, a narrow, wooded, little hill winding down by the side of a recreation park in Sydenham. It had been her father’s house, and after his death, just before the war, she had inherited it. He had been a chiropodist who, in his spare time, played the flute, Polly accompanying him on the piano. They had always been very fond of music, a fact which Mrs Ponsonby, who had died when Polly was a girl of ten, had resented. For she had had no ear for music and was tormented daily when Polly began to learn the violin, then to take singing lessons from Dr Murdoch, the organist at the parish church. Mrs Ponsonby had no use for that sort of thing. Polly and her father were secretly happier when she passed away, leaving them to hours of peaceful music-making on long winter nights after Mr Ponsonby returned from his consulting room in Sydenham High Street.
    After Mr Ponsonby’s death, Polly, then aged forty-seven, decided it was wrong to live alone. So she took lodgers, usually young men or women who had business in the City and were out all day.
    One of these lodgers, Barley Merton, an actress working in repertory at the Sydenham Hippodrome, became a close friend of Polly’s. She was ‘such a lady,’ often talking of her family in the country, and her young brother Ryland (known as ‘Rye’) who did something very important in the West End – Polly never knew what. And Barley liked old Polly, so there was a pleasant friendly atmosphere in the cottage.
    Polly was a grotesque to look at. There