THE POET'S ADMIRER.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIX, Issue 21115, 24 February 1932, Page 17

THE POET'S ADMIRER.

BY' FRANCIS GRIBBLE.

While a prisoner of war in German}', .{Arthur Lomax wrote a poem. A fellow prisoner, transferred to Switzerland as unfit for further service, .learnt it by heart, and sent it to a great ■daily paper to be published under his initials/. Jt was, as the literary editor declared, f the goods," a, melodiously bitter cry, nvruiig from the exile's heart; the sort of jioem that oven a man who does not know he is a poet may write if he lias lived the life." Its popularity surprised even- the editor who had praised st ; and tho poet presently learnt that many letters from admirers of his genius {bad reached the office. " Open them," he wrote to his friend, •f s and let me know if there is anything port ant in them." Important, as men of business understand the word, they could not very well ■be; and. if they were important in the sentimental sense—well sentiment was a thin* that Arthur ,Lomax ought to have avoided, because lie was a married man.

Not very much married, but still anarried. His had been one of those hasty war •vpddings which moved some people to •enthusiasm and others to mockery. He Jiad met Grace, and married her, almost without knowing her, while liome oil short leave. A. wire, handed to him at ihe church door, had recalled him to the •front; and he had had plenty of time since then to ask himself whether he had jeally found his heart's affinity. He had not faced that awkward question. but it had faced him, suggested by scraps of news in smuggled papers, and •the social gossip of new arrivals, freshly ■captured. " ' Carry on ' is the motto, and they're

jiving up to it—carrying on with every mail they meet —especially the newlyanarried ones." So, cynical boys talked, and their talk naturally frightened those nervous prisoners whose wives were little more #han casual acquaintances. It frightened {Arthur Lomax. He tried to escape, and was caught and sentenced to. " solitary." It was while <loing " solitary " that, he wrote his poem that crv from the heart ; and he left his Jonelv ceil in a mood which disposed him ■jto be susceptible to the flattering compliments of which a summary reached iiim from his friend in Switzerland. " I liopo you won't mind my telling -vou how much I enjoyed your poem. 1 Tthought it perfectly lovely." " That poem of yours was top-hole. I (flon't care very much for poetry as a jrule. but —" " I.adv Breul presents her compliments ■to •« A.L.,' and hopes she is not indiscreet •in asking—" H ... , . Most of the compliments were as nana! ißs'that—too trivial to do more than tickle « poet's vanity for a passing moment. But there was one letter which differed from the others as day from night, or as fire from ice. His friend had not summarised, but. copied it, and Arthur Lomax stowed the copy away in Ins pocket-book, feeling that it was, as the / editor had felt that his verses were, ' the goods." f It was, of com se, a woman s letter, «nd, therefore, more gratifying to the jioet than commendation from any of the critics would have been. f " I wonder," he began to speculate, having so much leisure for speculation • so little else to speculate about. Ho wondered who his mysterious correspondent was', and whether she was pld or voung, and whether the initial A., (which was its only signature, stood for •Adelaide, or Alice, or Annabel. He also Sound himself wondering whether — But about that he did not continue to (wonder for very long, for the tone of JLhe letter left very little room for doubt. St was unquestionably the letter of a Woman not only willing but anxious to " follow the matter up." It was not quite a love_letter— that would have been too brazen;"hut it certainly read as if it were intended to pave the way for love letters; and it concluded with a hint;— ' "Do you ever look at the ' personal column ' in ' The Times" ? 1 always do. An invitation, if ever there was one. (A most improper invitation, it will be agreed, for a lady to address to a / granger, merely because her heart bad been'touched by his poetry. An invitation. it will also be agreed, which it behoved a young married man —or a middleaged married man, for that matter to ignore. But then Arthur Lomax was so very ■little married. Three weeks before the wedding, Grace and he had been / grangers': and separation had follow ea }o quickly, and he bad been taken Prisoner a very few days after leaving her. She wrote to him, of course, in his raptivity; but her letters were censored letters. Passages were blacked out o them; and thev were written, not for Ins eyes alone, but with the knowledge—so chilling to sonic correspondents that they would be read, not only by some grim German official, but also by pert minxes in Carey Street. Conditions, these, which might; well frjgeze the life out of a lo\e letfpr. , He had,'of course, made that excuse for what disappointed him in Graces letteis; hut be was getting tired of making it and found himself much less disposed to make it, now/ that this stranger s letter had come to him. He began to draw comparisons; or perhaps, the comparisons .drew themselyes, fj " She understands, but Grace—- / Somehow or other, the letter seemed to throw light' on Grace and give him a grievance against her. Beading and rereading it, lie first, doubted Grace and then lost his belief in her. prace he became convinced, was a bundle of nun, incapable of understanding—too frivolous even to trv to understand—satisfied to enjoy herself—engaged in " carrying on. She bad caught him-an easy capture—- ' fresh from the trenches, in a mood to respond to fluff, and feline ways, and ballroom music. And suppose, now that he was tied to her, this other woman—- " There's heart there, he told himself, reading the letter over yet again; and - he weighed heart against fluff. On short leave he bad preferred fluff In captivity he preferred heart. Lack of heart was now the crime of crimes to him. It was cruelty; it was desertion; it Was treason. If she be not fair to me. .What care I how fair she be / He quoted those lines, and then S'VV 5 his imagination free rein to play with his anonymous correspondent. She bad told him very little about herself. The little that she had told him might not be true. She might be some disappointed old maid, approaching the dangerous She might squint; she might be gaunt and angular, or she might be grotesquely fat; and for such physical drawbacks even a double portion of heart may well seem to a young man an imperfect compensation. _ But the tendency of a young man s mind is to be galla'it and to clothe a beautiful mind with a beautiful body. Arthur Lomax's imagination did so. The picture which it conjured up helped him through a second spell of ' solitary —the punishment for a second attempt to escape; arid he came out of his cell, that time, with the uneasy conscience of a man who suddenly realises that he is living a double life " I wonder." He was still wondering when he heard cf the armistice. " So I'm married to Grace and I've fallen in love with " Fallen in love with this strange woman iwho understood and sympathised, but of whom he really knew next to nothing else except that site regularly looked at the " personal column " in " The Times." There was no doubt about it, lie feared—none whatever. A fragment of a French song came to his mind to mock him: Kt Ton revient toujour#, A pea premiers amours. What nonsense that was. One might return to old hobbies, old games, old fooks, old interests: bilt an old love was •he one tiling to which, in real life, nobody returned. " The heart," he said to himself, " may ihe held tip, but it never turns back. If

A SHORT STORY.

C COPYRIGHT.)

the heart moves at all, it goes forward." He felt quite suro of that. Tho cer.tainty had him in its grip when the great day came, and the delay in the repatriation of prisoners gave liim time to consider what ho would do—and even to do it. There was no time-table. Grace, who was in Devonshire, would not be expecting him ori any particular day. He could make the most of the uncertainty of the railway services, and see his mysterious stranger before letting Grace tcnow that he was back. And then ? He did not know. What happened then would depend upon the temptation offered. At any rate he would make the plunge. Perhaps barbed wire disease had unbalanced his mind. Certainly he was a tired man, seeking, adventure, but sympathy, persuaded that, in marrying so hastily, ho had missed sympathy and so missed his way in life. And here, or so he was persuaded, sympathy awaited him: freely offered by 0110 who did not even owe it to him. Why decline the gift ? So he made tho plunge and inserted his " personal " advertisement: " A.L. is in London. Will A. kindly communicate address?" After a day's interval the answer appeared ; A. will be glad to hear from A.L. Box 777." Then Arthur Lomax wrote his letter. He could not say much in it. ITe needed to guard himself against the chance, however remote, that lie was the victim of a practical joke; but as he was resolved to pursue the adventure whereever it might lead him, he signed his own name and asked whether he might call. And the answer, this time, was a telegram: " Come to lunch at one, Osborne Villa, Richmond Hill. Ask for Miss Clitlieroe. -A." That was even greater kindness than he had hoped for—kindness so great, indeed, as to make him feel uneasy. Tho lady's precipitation was rather alarming. It suggested a desperato hurry to be wooed; and, when one came to think of it, the women in a desperato hurry to be wooed were not, as a rule, tho women best worth wooing. So lie began to feel nervous. He had been out of the world so long that its ways might have changed dur ing his absence. Was it not too much to expect, lie asked himself, that the dreams which he had dreamed behind the barbed wire of a prison camp, while condemned to " solitary," would really be fulfilled in the noisy world of hotels, and tubes and taxis ? Suppose the heroine of his dreams turned out to be plain and elderly! Suppose she gushed and simpered! The fluff and the finery in the Ritz lounge put these thoughts into his head. He began to long for fluff as well as sympathy no less intensely than lie had been longing for sympathy as well as fluff. In the camp lie had taken it for granted that he was going to find it. In tho lounge, and then in the taxi, uncomfortable doubts assailed him; and it was in a doubting mood that ho climbed the stairs to the drawing rooni at Osborne Villa, where lie found both his portrait and his poem, framed, included among the ornaments 011 tho mantelpiece. " Rather quick work," he soliloquised. A little too quick, indeed, to please him. It made him feel as if a perfect stranger wero putting him on the same level as a popular actor; and there was also a proprietorial air about tho proceedings which annoyed him.

" She seems to think she can take possession of me without even asking leave," he reflected.

That ruffled him. He clung to the prewar view that it was for the man to make the first advances. He began to consider in what words he would express that view when the door opened and, before he could turn round, he heard his own name called; " Arthur." " Grace."

An embarrassing situation truly. It might be hard to decide which of them should have felt the more embarrassed, or which of them should have spoken first, or what would have been the most appropriate thing for either of them to say: but Grace had the quicker wit, and held the key to the position. " So you weren't expecting to see me, Arthur ?" " 1 —I—'pon my word, I "

It was so hard to explain. Any explanation but the true one would have sounded incredible; and as for offering the true explanation—with Grace looking so charming and glad to see him—he felt that he could not. Grace went 011:

" Annie Clitheroe's my cousin. I came up to stay with her, so as to be in town when you arrived. They told mo at tho War Office "

It was very sweet of her. It made him feel terribly ashamed of having embarked on his absurd romantic adventure. But it did not unravel tho tangle. What was ho to say to Grace ? What was he to say to her cousin when she entered the room ?

" You're staying with your cousin ? And does she—does she V

But he did not finish that question. He could not frame it, not knowing exactly what it was that he wanted to ask; and Grace did not give him time to ask anything at all. She came so close, and she looked so charming, that there really was nothing for him to do except take her in his arms and pray to Providence to show him some way out of the mess. And Grace herself, instead of Providence, came to the rescue.

" Arthur," she said softly, laying her head on his shoulder and looking up. " Grace, darling." " So you were the naughty boy, Arthur, and thought you'd fallen in love with the naughty gill who wrote you a nice letter about your poetry." Ho nodded, knowing that he was going to be forgiven, and that Grace would, somehow or other, get him out of his trouble with Miss Clitheroe. But Grace had not quite finished. " And you never guessed it was I who wrote the letter?" He was so staggered that he let her go for a moment. Then, patting his arm round her again: " You!" he exclaimed. " Yes, me." " But you didn't know that you were writing to me." 80 he, too, had a grievance; but Grace left him no time to air it. " I didn't know for certain, of course," she said. " That's why I didn't sign my name, and used Annie's initial instead of my own. I'd only got your initials to go by—those and my instincts. But a woman's instincts are wonderfully true guides, and [ trusted mine. It, seemed Such a splendid chance of writing you a real letter—(he sort of letter that I couldn't write when I thought that those horrid girls in the Censor's Office would read it and might make sarcastic remarks about it." " Hut suppose—" She had expected that supposition and was ready for it. " Suppose it hadn't been you, after all ? Well, that wouldn't have mattered a bit because, whoever it was, if it hadn't been you he'd have been turned down without finding out who I was, and you'd have known nothing about it until I told you. But it was you; and my letter was such a be.'iutiful letter that you fell head over ears in love with the writer and never guessed that you were falling in love with me, over again. And—and—you're glad it was me, Arthur, aren't you V Of course he was glad—how glad she understood when he kissed her. " Here comes Annie," she concluded. " She knows all about ifc. so you needn't blush or feel shy when I introduce you to her." Nor did he; and they laughed over the incident together at lunch, and were perfectly happy.