Stories of the Strange and Sinister (Valancourt 20th Century Classics) Read Free

drink for he. No more of they songs and poems. Job after job he takes and comes slinking home with his pay-packet till Stella could scream. Never any fun like the old days. That’s why she left en. She was a high-spirited maid and wasn’t born to bide with angels.’
    ‘Wait a bit, wait a bit!’ I cried. I had been half listening, half following another train of thought in my mind. And now at last I understood the significance (for me) of the Green Steps. Going to a cupboard in my study where I keep piles of old literaries and periodicals, I searched for what I wanted: copies of the London Alchemist for 1923 - 4 .
    ‘You say,’ I said, ‘that he published some of these poems of his?’
    ‘So they did say. There were lots of writing chaps around here in those days, chaps with beards and coloured shirts. And Bob were one of them.’
    ‘Did he ever call himself Robin Starling?’
    ‘Not Robin. No. It were always Bob.’
    ‘Ah!’ I gave an exclamation of triumph. I had found the poem that had so vaguely yet so significantly lurched back into my mind, lines that I had read years ago as a schoolboy. ‘The Green Steps,’ it was called. It was about a scavenger who ‘feeds on wasted vision’. And it was by Robin Starling.
    Well, I said to myself, when Jack Williams had gone presently and I pondered over the strange lines of this forgotten old poem of the neo-Georgians – tantalizing as it is to play with the idea that this queer old scavenger is Robin Starling grown old – it just will not do. For Robin Starling, a brief and brilliant voice in the early twenties, had died almost before his evocative lyricism had had time to linger in the ear. By only a few present-day critics would even his name be remembered. And probably not one poem of about a dozen that got published in various literaries of the period would now be recalled by anybody. Except me? Was I the only person who had been moved by ‘The Green Steps’? And had lingered over it in my boyhood, feeling that it had a special meaning for me that I only half understood? I had come across no other lines by this poet; he had quite gone out of my mind; and now returned by the strangest coincidence – that he bore almost the same name and wrote about the Green Steps – and a scavenger.
    But was this coincidence? I couldn’t, of course, let it rest here. Robin Starling was dead, that was pretty certain. For now I recalled a brief obituary notice about him, that I couldn’t find in any of my old magazines. But, Jack Williams had said, the Bob Starling of twenty-five years ago had written poems; and he had tumbled over a cliff, apparently under the illusion that he was chasing somebody. Had it been an illusion? Had this old scavenger really been chasing somebody up the Green Steps that dark wild night of twenty-five years ago? Had he – ?
    Innumerable questions. The beginning of an exciting quest. All simplified, you might say, by direct questions to the man himself. Not so. For you could not get beyond that amber-like glint in his eyes, and never any more than a few words would he mutter to you, always courteous, always humble, but about as talkative as a Trappist monk in Holy Week.
    I thought about it endlessly. I read and re-read the strange, sad, yet exciting poem. Not a very good poem as we would think now. It made sense and it rhymed; but it said far more under its simple words than a first reading made clear. Was I to believe that this was not the work of the old man himself? A room stacked with manuscripts, Jack Williams had said; and literary high-yap in the twenties, coloured shirts and beards and Bloomsbury gone wild as Bloomsbury does once it goes west.
    Two burning questions. How had ‘Robin Starling’ died? And – had ‘Bob Starling’ actually been chasing somebody up those steps?
    The first question was easily answered. I wrote to a friend of mine, a critic whose pleasure it is to ponder over the oddities of literature – the forgotten ones