Dickson McCunn - Complete 'Gorbals Die-hards' Series. Buchan John

was nettled. “It’s very old Highland,” he said. “It means the son of a dog.”

      “Which—Christian name or surname?” Then the young man appeared to think he had gone too far, for he smiled pleasantly. “And a very good name too. Mine is prosaic by comparison. They call me John Heritage.”

      “That,” said Dickson, mollified, “is like a name out of a book. With that name by rights you should be a poet.”

      Gloom settled on the young man’s countenance. “It’s a dashed sight too poetic. It’s like Edwin Arnold and Alfred Austin and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Great poets have vulgar monosyllables for names, like Keats. The new Shakespeare when he comes along will probably be called Grubb or Jubber, if he isn’t Jones. With a name like yours I might have a chance. You should be the poet.”

      “I’m very fond of reading,” said Dickson modestly.

      A slow smile crumpled Mr. Heritage’s face. “There’s a fire in the smoking-room,” he observed as he rose. “We’d better bag the armchairs before these fishing louts take them.” Dickson followed obediently. This was the kind of chance acquaintance for whom he had hoped, and he was prepared to make the most of him.

      The fire burned bright in the little dusky smoking-room, lighted by one oil-lamp. Mr. Heritage flung himself into a chair, stretched his long legs, and lit a pipe.

      “You like reading?” he asked. “What sort? Any use for poetry?”

      “Plenty,” said Dickson. “I’ve aye been fond of learning it up and repeating it to myself when I had nothing to do. In church and waiting on trains, like. It used to be Tennyson, but now it’s more Browning. I can say a lot of Browning.”

      The other screwed his face into an expression of disgust. “I know the stuff. ‘Damask cheeks and dewy sister eyelids.’ Or else the Ercles vein—’God’s in His Heaven, all’s right with the world.’ No good, Mr. McCunn. All back numbers. Poetry’s not a thing of pretty round phrases or noisy invocations. It’s life itself, with the tang of the raw world in it—not a sweetmeat for middle-class women in parlours.”

      “Are you a poet, Mr. Heritage?”

      “No, Dogson, I’m a paper-maker.”

      This was a new view to Mr. McCunn. “I just once knew a paper-maker,” he observed reflectively, “They called him Tosh. He drank a bit.”

      “Well, I don’t drink,” said the other. “I’m a paper-maker, but that’s for my bread and butter. Some day for my own sake I may be a poet.”

      “Have you published anything?”

      The eager admiration in Dickson’s tone gratified Mr. Heritage. He drew from his pocket a slim book. “My first fruits,” he said, rather shyly.

      Dickson received it with reverence. It was a small volume in grey paper boards with a white label on the back, and it was lettered: Whorls - John Heritage’s Book. He turned the pages and read a little. “It’s a nice wee book,” he observed at length.

      “Good God, if you call it nice, I must have failed pretty badly,” was the irritated answer.

      Dickson read more deeply and was puzzled. It seemed worse than the worst of Browning to understand. He found one poem about a garden entitled “Revue.”

      “Crimson and resonant clangs the dawn,”

      said the poet. Then he went on to describe noonday:

      “Sunflowers, tall Grenadiers, ogle the roses’ short-skirted ballet.

       The fumes of dark sweet wine hidden in frail petals

       Madden the drunkard bees… “

      This seemed to him an odd way to look at things, and he boggled over a phrase about an “epicene lily.” Then came evening: “The painted gauze of the stars flutters in a fold of twilight crape,” sang Mr. Heritage; and again, “The moon’s pale leprosy sloughs the fields.”

      Dickson turned to other verses which apparently enshrined the writer’s memory of the trenches. They were largely compounded of oaths, and rather horrible, lingering lovingly over sights and smells which every one is aware of, but most people contrive to forget. He did not like them. Finally he skimmed a poem about a lady who turned into a bird. The evolution was described with intimate anatomical details which scared the honest reader.

      He kept his eyes on the book, for he did not know what to say. The trick seemed to be to describe nature in metaphors mostly drawn from music-halls and haberdashers’ shops, and, when at a loss, to fall to cursing. He thought it frankly very bad, and he laboured to find words which would combine politeness and honesty.

      “Well?” said the poet.

      “There’s a lot of fine things here, but—but the lines don’t just seem to scan very well.”

      Mr. Heritage laughed. “Now I can place you exactly. You like the meek rhyme and the conventional epithet. Well, I don’t. The world has passed beyond that prettiness. You want the moon described as a Huntress or a gold disc or a flower—I say it’s oftener like a beer barrel or a cheese. You want a wealth of jolly words and real things ruled out as unfit for poetry. I say there’s nothing unfit for poetry. Nothing, Dogson! Poetry’s everywhere, and the real thing is commoner among drabs and pot-houses and rubbish-heaps than in your Sunday parlours. The poet’s business is to distil it out of rottenness, and show that it is all one spirit, the thing that keeps the stars in their place. I wanted to call my book Drains, for drains are sheer poetry carrying off the excess and discards of human life to make the fields green and the corn ripen. But the publishers kicked. So I called it Whorls, to express my view of the exquisite involution of all things. Poetry is the fourth dimension of the soul. Well, let’s hear about your taste in prose.”

      Mr. McCunn was much bewildered, and a little inclined to be cross. He disliked being called Dogson, which seemed to him an abuse of his etymological confidences. But his habit of politeness held.

      He explained rather haltingly his preferences in prose.

      Mr. Heritage listened with wrinkled brows.

      “You’re even deeper in the mud than I thought,” he remarked. “You live in a world of painted laths and shadows. All this passion for the picturesque! Trash, my dear man, like a schoolgirl’s novelette heroes. You make up romances about gipsies and sailors, and the blackguards they call pioneers, but you know nothing about them. If you did, you would find they had none of the gilt and gloss you imagine. But the great things they have got in common with all humanity you ignore. It’s like—it’s like sentimentalising about a pancake because it looked like a buttercup, and all the while not knowing that it was good to eat.”

      At that moment the Australian entered the room to get a light for his pipe. He wore a motor-cyclist’s overalls and appeared to be about to take the road. He bade them good night, and it seemed to Dickson that his face, seen in the glow of the fire, was drawn and anxious, unlike that of the agreeable companion at dinner.

      “There,” said Mr. Heritage, nodding after the departing figure. “I dare say you have been telling yourself stories about that chap—life in the bush, stockriding and the rest of it. But probably he’s a bank-clerk from Melbourne. Your romanticism is one vast self-delusion, and it blinds your eye to the real thing. We have got to clear it out, and with it all the damnable humbug of the Kelt.”

      Mr. McCunn, who spelt the word with a soft “C,” was puzzled. “I thought a kelt was a kind of a no-weel fish,” he interposed.

      But the other, in the flood-tide of his argument, ignored the interruption. “That’s the value of the war,” he went on. “It has burst up all the old conventions, and we’ve got to finish the destruction before we can build. It is the same with literature and religion, and society and politics. At them with the axe, say I. I have no use for priests and pedants. I’ve no use for upper classes and middle classes. There’s only one class that matters, the plain