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

who find their unlamented way into the Charing Cross Road book troughs. What could he tell me about Robin Starling?
    The answer was terrifyingly what I had expected. Starling, after spending the early years of his life wandering about France and England, a sort of Villon with ever a rabble of noisy scoundrels at his heels, and ever a woman to worship him, had written a handful of verse. Like Rimbaud he had become a flame, rapidly to die out, yet kindle other sleeping fires. The last two years of his life, said my friend, he had spent in the West of England. ‘You should know all about him’ (I quote from his letter), ‘since he lived in your village and gathered a rusty-fusty greenery-yallery crew around him. He went the whole hog with drink and had, I believe, one faithful woman who loved him; dead now, probably like him. His death was “correct”. Dead drunk, he ran up a steep cliff path and smashed himself to bits two hundred feet below. That was the story put round by a brother of his, anyway; and this brother had the handling of some poems published – only in the literaries – shortly after his death; I believe he wrote one critical article in praise of his work in a thing I now can’t trace, an ephemera of the middle twenties. Then the brother seems to have gone silent, and all Starling’s rackety set came to nothing. Starling’s was a brief, but certain trumpet note that died in the air before anyone heard it properly. You should make it your business to discover all you can about him. For all we know he might have left a mass of work behind him that should see the light. Does the brother still live, I wonder?’
    O, my Scavenger, how dear you became to me! How lovingly I studied you from that day, watching your devouring broom over the sea-washed streets in the sleeping morning when sometimes I rose early and walked to the harbour to see what news lay in the east! How keenly I observed the sharp inward curve of your nostrils, your fastidious yet workmanlike hands, your shuffling yet ambassador walk! Like a man with a train of princes behind him, all ghosts, you seemed to me. Bowing in to life the great ones of the earth, and then waiting for them to be flung out by the wind to drift in the streets and come under the drag of your brush. Ushering in and gathering up, day by day you assumed more importance for me. There was a major work in you, I said. A major work for a novelist of supreme imagination and superb craft. Henry James, Flaubert and Dostoevsky linked as one, could not do justice to you.
    For some time I made no attempt to gather up the threads of the story. Good stories linger in the air like flower scents of autumn smoke, about the tongue like wine, about the touch like silk; and shift and struggle before the eyes like the ever-changing patterns and colours seen through a child’s kaleidoscope. They do not mature in a hurry. Were I to rush forward and breast the tape of truth, should I indeed have won the truth? For truth is the whole tale, and had it yet ended? Had I, perhaps, to wait till the Scavenger died and the contents of that back room could be examined?
    Then, one night, something very strange happened and I was suddenly dragged, as it were by the scruff of a too inquisitive neck, right into the heart of the tale. Now it is mine, gone for ever, and as I relate it, so it will cease to be his or mine. It will be anybody’s, and anybody can learn what they like from it.
    It was a night in January, after days of rain and gales, gales that battered the side of our cottage and made it sway like a ship in a full and roaring sea. A Moby Dick night; and the high spring tides seventeen feet up in the fifteen-foot harbour, the boats all swaying their masts like a wind-thrashed forest of leafless larches. The fishermen had been to the boats in the early evening, before the tide came high, setting their tackle straight, prepared for a bad night. Boards were up in houses down by the quay and in the