A Bouquet

Pink Roses — By Gilbert Cannan

It seems that the curtain has hardly fallen upon his last appearance, but here is Mr. Cannan on the stage again. Again, with charming bravery he faces the lights, the music, the humming, hungry audience. What has he to offer? What new impersonation, what fresh, original ‘turn’? And are we to discover, behind him, a vast bounding landscape, very rich in light and shadow, or something gay, exquisite, dotted with bright colours like fruits, with just a line of sea to give him his far horizon? …

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Trevor Mathew, denied the Great Adventure because of a systolic murmur of the heart, ‘was beginning to think he was losing his sense of humour.’ ‘He sat down in a hard green garden chair.’ … ‘Fifteen yards away from him a girl was sitting’ … ‘her eyes were fixed on him’ … ‘her left eyelid drooped, and she gave an inviting jerk of the head’ … ‘Never in his life had Trevor spoken to an unknown lady.’ ‘Their chairs had been fifteen yards apart. He kept exactly’ (note that: as Dostoevsky would have said) ‘fifteen yards behind her. As she reached Hyde Park Corner she stopped. He stopped, too, fifteen yards behind her.’ And so into the Café Claribel, where he sat at a table ‘fifteen yards away.’

It is surely evident from this remarkable opening, with its ever so simple refrain of ‘Fifteen yards away,’ that our expert performer is grown ambitious of attracting the sympathies of a larger, simpler audience than was his formerly. But we must go carefully; there may be more in this than meets the astonished eye.

How friendly her smile was! How charming to be in sympathy with another human being fifteen yards away. He did not wish it to be any nearer, nor did he desire the adventure to proceed any further. On the other hand he would not have it come to an end. As it was it had in it an exquisite quality of happiness, of fulfilment, of poignancy—just a hint. He did not require more.

Let us be just to Mr. Cannan. If this exact measurement can convey happiness, fulfilment, just a hint of poignancy even, he cannot have marked it off so lightly. These be no common garden fifteen yards. May they not be the shy beginnings of a courtship between Science and Literature—the measuring of fifteen yards of soul? …

Our tentative question is almost answered on the very next page: ‘I never thought I should be happy again.’ It seemed to him that ‘he was wronging his friends to be made happy by such a little thing as the scent and page 25 sweetness of a nosegay of fresh roses’… How far away? Come, we all know it by this time. Now ladies and gentlemen, please, once more, and all together, ‘fifteen yards away.’

This new sense in our hero makes us eager for a fuller description of him…. ‘As he had an ample allowance the rise in prices did not affect him at all, and he remained untouched, always perfectly dressed and careful to eat in the atmosphere to which he was accustomed…. It was not that he did not notice shabbiness. He did, especially in boots, but he put it down to slovenliness. He was an only son.’

Here, again, you observe, the apparently innocent statement is broken in upon very strangely by the ‘especially in boots,’ and the sudden hammer-like stroke, ‘he was an only son.’ Did the boots also have to be a certain distance away before—but to return to our Pink Roses.

Trevor did not see the lady again until one evening outside the café, when he bought a pup, ‘fortunately a male,’ from an old man. She was standing by, and the innocent creature broke the ice between them; in two minutes he was in her fiat and telling her, ‘I wanted to stay at Cambridge. I could easily have got a Fellowship. I did History in my first two years and got a First. I wanted to go on with it, but my governor insisted on my taking Law. I got a First in that, too, but there isn't much Law in practising. I mean it isn't often you get a legal point…. Her lips were parted, her eyes shone, her bosom rose and fell.’ Until, ‘suddenly in Trevor there came tumbling in a series of swift painful realizations that this evening was somehow very important, and that it was what he had been waiting for through the weary months of almost catalepsy. It was his chance to assert himself, to break his arranged life that was left untouched when all other arranged lives had been broken.’…

And thus, to heal his hurt, to make him forget his too page 26 infinitely cherished friends whom the war had broken, that he might be ‘disturbed out of the nauseated lethargy in which his grief had left him’ and ‘have something working in his soul to withstand the corrosion of the war,’ excusing himself ‘on the ground that it was better for his mother to have him restored to some kind of sanity, than reduced to a frozen and insensible imbecility by the mental strain which was as bad, if not worse, than the physical strain of the trenches,’ the brilliant, captivating young Cambridge man decides to allow the frail but doting lady to love him for one whole year. Why not? ‘She was so completely, even abjectly, his, as to give him an indomitable sense of possession. She was as much his as the pup …’ And Mr. Cannan is sure enough of himself to cry for his hero, ‘After that the deluge.’

But not even the sure hand of our author can make a whole satisfying meal of such an intimacy, complete with its trip to Brighton and pink satin bedroom bows, enriched by a coloured maid, a magnificent motor-car, a black chauffeur, and two comic Jews. Let us hasten to assure the reader that other meats are provided; the table veritably groans under hearty English fare. Here is the lawyer's office, dusty, traditional, with its pompous old chief and the case that never is settled; here the rosy-cheeked, silver-haired mother who trusts her boy; here the girl whose grey eyes ‘cannot but look direct,’ and who is to have what is left of Trevor after the Lady of the Roses has taught him all there is to know about women; here is the foolish old inventor in his ‘tattered and stained dressing-gown,’ whose explosions blow off ‘one eyebrow’; and everywhere there are large slabs of war-time conversation for ravenous youth to munch between the courses. None but the dainty or the rich need go empty away.

Surely it is a little pity that the very unpleasant subject of the war should find a place in all this plenty. Need we be told of these twinges of indigestion suffered by our hero as he takes a bite of now this—now that? They are page 27 never more than slight twinges, never serious pangs, and as often as not cured by a chuckle. But their effect is, somehow, disastrous upon the fragile, fast-fading flowers behind which Mr. Cannan has chosen to make his bow.