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The Spike: or, Victoria College Review, June 1928

A Fragment

A Fragment

The house in which Antony was born stood in a rural Hampstead Street, where to-day still survive some of those old almond trees whose blossoms so excited him as a child. An old brick wall topped here and there by scrambling ivy hid the house from the passer-by, who would catch a glimpse of it, however, beyond the rhododendrons on the lawn, through the lofty wrought iron gates.

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When he entered the sensitive visitor would be immediately surprised by the number and variety of the trees in that narrow strip of garden. Trees were to have always for Antony a special significance, recurring interwoven with the years, in a pattern which was pleasing yet not without a sombre implication. In one of his earliest dreams, which with slight variation repeated itself more than once, he was watching a ceremony before an upright pillar in an ancient grove. Curious symbols were engraved upon the pillar, and after the departure of the worshippers he crept forward to examine them. Wherupon there arose a sudden tempest of wind, and a fierce mutter stirred among the trees. The very earth seemed to quake as the tall column tottered and fell towards him. In vain he attempted to extricate his arm from its fragments. Shuddering and weeping with terror and pain, he would call for his mother; knowing that in her arms he would slip past the dark shadows of the trees to a sunlit meadow, where the flowers were white and the music of a little stream would lull him to sleep.

But certainly less ill-omened were the trees that flourished in that Georgian garden, and Antony wondered at the regular procession of leaf and flower: the almond blossom, the laburnum, the lilac, and the lime, and the dear funny fig-tree. When the sun was hot it was possible actually to watch the chestnut leaves as they unfolded, and later when he was about to set off on his summer holiday the foreign catalpa would decorate itself in an amazing manner. On those English summer evenings a warm sweet air would stir through his open window, reminding him of the bright colours of the garden below, and also, with a pang of anticipation, of the fields out yonder, the whirr of the haycutter, and the long lazy twilights.

The porch of the house had columns of weathered Portland stone, the bricks were small and rich in colour, the proportion of the windows to the facade was harmonious. It was pleasant to look up at it through the weeping ash, be-neath which they had tea on summer afternoons; and on from returning from his walk in the dying daylight of an autumn evening, to see the lighted windows, somehow inextricably mingled with the scent of burning leaves and the soft gleam of the Michaelmas daisies, as his little footsteps tiredly stirred the gravel.

In the hall was an old map of London, which had an effect of picturesqueness in conjunction with the brass ornaments and candlesticks on the table below it. When the front door was open and the sunlight had concentrated on the red geraniums, the scene called to mind one of those old Dutch paintings, in which the decorative value of the map on the wall is insisted upon with such delicate assurance. To the young Antony that map had a very important meaning. It corresponded with, was the secret seal of the great town, which lay out yonder far-flung beneath his nursery window, in its varying moods, weeping in the rain, smiling in the sun. On that buoyant river he had gone bravely with his mother to Kew, in lilac time; and once, an even greater adventure, down past the incoming ships to Greenwich, where they had played among the long green shadows in the elm-studded park. The streets in that map were actually those through which he drove or walked. They were the streets whose long misty perspective would allure him in winter time, although he was terrified by the staring dark rimmed windows of their endless houses. In one of those streets, on a spring morning, from some narrow patch of garden, a pear tree had dripped its fragrance upon him, fulfilling page 7 its mysterious destiny. And that sense of soft recurrent inevitability, right in amidst the harshness of things, was to be the lyrical element, the leit-motif of his days.

Opposite the map on the other side of the hall rose two Corinthian columns, through which was a pleasant vista to the Adams chimney-piece in the reception-room. Two corresponding columns lent the place an air of dignity, and gave colour to the belief that at one time it had been used as a courthouse. The anteroom beyond the archway was tall and grave and dark, yet it could be gay enough on a midsummer day from the flashes of sunlight through the stirring leaves. By the side of its narrow window was a doorway with a fanlight of quite unexpected beauty. The short passage into which it opened served as a landing to a narrow spiral stair, which communicated with the cellars and ascended to a spacious linen cupboard near Antony's nursery. And how much more entrancing it was, with its lurking shadows and mysterious creakings, than the formal stair-case in the hall! The door in the passage beyond the spiral stair opened into the dining-room, on whose well-proportioned panels the candle-light would gleam fantastically on party nights. The central plaque in the Adams chimney-piece depicted a procession in honour of Venus, the participants holding aloft torches and emblems of love; in one of the two side panels the goddess was represented rising from the sea-foam, and in the other at play with the sacred doves. The ceiling paintings, dating from the period of Angelica Kauffman, contained flowers pleasantly dimmed by age.

His mother's drawing-room was reached from the reception-room by a door to the left of the fireplace. It was delicately soft and gray with bright patches from the china and coloured stipples, and fragrant with lavender and the scent of brightly burning wood fires. It happened that the trees before the house, in particular the tall copper-beech, tended to make the room over dark, so that a deep projecting window had been built out to the east, and on gloomy days this seemed actually to thrust in a shaft of light. There as in a sentient focus would seem to mingle the dancing light, the sweet scent of the room and the sound of his mother's voice.

Just before this window, on the lawn that sloped to the lower garden, was a blackthorn tree, for which he cherished a deep affection. It was for him the herald of the spring, proclaiming its advent with a shrill call of triumph. Thus early in life he was impressed by the miracle of its reappearance; in spite of the utter rigour of winter the green leaves would burst forth again, and the black-birds once more whistle fiercely to one another. One year when he had been confined to the house by some childish ailment, and the long winter never seemed to end, his mother pointed out to him the blackthorn blossoming there amid the snow: even in the winter of our discontent, the radiance of hope might not be utterly dispelled. Out of this incident, and the fairy tales which stirred his by wish imagination, he elaborated on those long days a story which would seem to possess a deeper significance.

A knight clad in black armour rode forth to cut down that tree, whilst he, all in white, galloped to do battle with him; yet never might slay him, until he should guess his name. So that the attacker proceeded unharmed, and he must0 page 8 ever be on the watch. With such naive symbolism he regarded then the forces, as they say, of good and evil, that clash of interests without which life would be a drab and savourless thing; the conflict which the artist, in his turn, modulates into a new and more finely ordered frenzy. It was to happen, in the springtime of his days, that a woman, wild and sweet and keen, would bring into his life a love that was not to come to fruition. But such a love could not be thus destroyed, out of hand. It intertwined itself in his consciousness, became the perfume of his dreams, the colour of his reveries, and each year in spring when the kestrel-like note of the wryneck proclaimed that the sap was rising in the trees, it was to achieve a delicate efflorescence.

The long winter of which I had been speaking ended at last in a fierce gale, which came raging up from the south-west and dropped as suddenly as it had begun. In the golden sunshine the air was like liquid amber, and across the blueness of the sky billowy clouds jostled their way. A few days later, Antony noticed from his nursery window that the wild cherry-tree was a mass of pinkish blossom, and he rushed down to greet it. Never had he felt such rapturous excitement; it seemed that the song of the blackbird had never expressed so wild a longing. That same morning as he was playing in the garden, he heard over the high wall the sound of a barrel-organ. It was a quick tripping tune with little sobs in it, like laughing and crying at once, he thought. Clambering up the ivy he looked over at the organ-grinder in the street below. With him was a little girl of about his own age. When he saw her tattered dress and noticed that her toe was peering through her boot, he had a sudden choking feeling of pity, and ran into the house for the half-crown that he had been keeping for some special purpose. On his return he found that they had departed, and imagining that he heard the strains of music, he rushed down the hill that led to the Heath. At intervals through his life the emotional memory of this event was to recur: the sunlit distance, the sense of the wind in his hair, the gradually awakening realisation that his search was in vain, the persistence of the melody which saddened him yet gave him a kind of consolation, the fact that the cherry-tree was still so beautiful in spite of the heaviness of his heart, and through it all, somehow, somewhere, a feeling of reassurance.

From the drawing-room a second door opened on to a passage which communicated with the garden. The wrought iron work of the little entrance porch, which achieved an effect of chinoiserie in that so English setting, excited his childish admiration, especially in autumn time, when the lacquer-red leaves of the Virginia creeper fluttered about it. Many years later, suddenly conscious of the sheer beauty of a strip of Chinese characters in a Limehouse shop, Antony remembered such an autumn day and saw again with an unnatural distinctness the beady eyes of a little lizard peering at a tiny red leaf which swayed in a spider's web. Close to the porch were two leaden tanks, on which the inscription 1727 in the decorative figuring of the period, bore witness to the actual date of the house. In these tanks his mother had planted irises, which gave a fabulous display of purple in the early summer; the mourning iris, she informed him, for the Greeks believed that the Goddess Iris acted as guide to the souls of the departed. And she related how King Thotmes had brought back the flower from Syria, and enamoured of it, caused it to be depicted on his tomb.

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A path with Korean moss between the flags and wallflowers at its edges led to the lower garden, in which flourished all manner of summer flowers; columbine, love-in-a-mist, bleeding-heart, tall hollyhocks, and clumps of delphiniums, sky-blue, violet-blue and indigo. How intensely thrilling it was to gaze into the immeasurable depth of that colour until the dizzy flight of the bees became a wavy pattern in blue, and the summer afternoon itself was a bowl of Delft, abrim with the intoxicating honey of romance! As he lay on the grass he would sink into some ancient tale of chivalry: strangely disturbing was the beauty of those fair ladies; the reward for a valour which seemed beyond computation was the red rose of a smile; if he might only kiss those pale hands, the knight would endure incredible ardours, and seek no greater boon.

White hands, fleur-de-lys, the white iris, whose roots rested on the lips of the buried knight, his imperfectibility! Yet, so the story concluded, he had been faithful to their memory in the winters of his discontent, returning each year when the fruit trees blossomed to pay them homage, until the very end. He had sought that perfection beyond perfection, he had delved into a mystery so deep that to ease the pain and smart of it, man must delude himself with ever more intricate symbolism: the white shell on which Venus rose from the blue-green sea; the robe disclosing Helen's breast; the holy grail which gleamed in the darkness and had an odour surpassing the rarest spiceries. This passionate search for the unattainable was the law of life, and he that lulled himself to other knowledge was a fool or a coxcomb. Such dim feelings flickered in the mind of the boy on those summer afternoons. And looking up he would see the faint bubble of the dome of St. Paul's, and the vague outline of the Surrey Hills beyond the intricate streets of the pulsing town.

—P. W. Robertson.