THE RAGE OF MISS NANCY PRICE
ONE day I met Miss Nancy Price in Sloane Street as I was walking home to Cadogan Square, and she asked me to write a letter to one of the papers against cruelty to animals. I have often written letters to the papers, but nearly always had the sense to refrain from posting them, and I was reluctant to do it. Miss Nancy Price was raging, for she had seen a case of cruelty to rabbits, and no milder word will describe the effect that such cruelties always have on her; and to make it worse it had occurred on the Sussex downs which she loves. She came to our house with me, and gradually I became infected with her fury, so that I wrote not a letter, but a poem, and some of the indignation that I caught from her may be seen in the last verse, though all were equally violent:
Sometimes I think an angry dawn
Leaps up in Heaven against men,
As though a sword were partly drawn
To end the nations there and then.
I suppose I had intended to make my point with a bit of an exaggeration; but, reading it now, it does not seem so much of an exaggeration as it did.
About that time, I think the same day, I attended the annual dinner of the Shakespear Reading Society, of which I succeeded Sir Johnstone Forbes-Robertson as president, and Miss Nancy Price and Mr. Walter de la Mare were there as distinguished guests. When I asked Mr de la Mare to come he exacted the rather unusual condition that he would not have to make a speech; but we were glad to get him even on those terms. I was not able to remain silent; and, though what I had to tell them was mainly negative, I expressed my convictions when I said that we know nothing about the mind of Shakespear, except that it was like a clear lake under a bright dawn, reflecting all things that might chance to pass or lie round it; that he was the perfect dramatist, deeply feeling the emotions of each character in any of his plays as it came upon the stage, so that under that character’s words lay the real sincere feelings that it was proper for that character to have. But of Shakespear’s private opinions, if he had any, and his views about politics, religion or anything else, I said that we know nothing. Nothing, unless perhaps at the end of the last play a personal longing gleams through the words of Prospero, a longing to give up writing plays and to rest.
I wrote some more tales, poems and articles, and went back to Ireland and to shooting our dinner, and the ominous year came in and still the sirens slept. In February I wrote an article calling attention, or trying to call it, to a real need, the need of an association to protect dead poets from misquotation, and as such an association would often have idle hours I suggested that it should also undertake some similar work, such as the prevention of the desecration of graves. I called my article “Improving the Poets,” and I gave nine examples of glaring improvements undertaken by whimsical printers. Would any printer permit a labourer from the street to come in and interfere with his skilled work? Why then should he ever intrude his unskilled labour amongst the work of a poet. My article showed two cases of dignitaries of the Church, well-educated men needing no instruction from me, but perfectly helpless in the hands of some printer throwing down a query-mark meaninglessly in the middle of a sentence, to be left there for ever. This was printed in John o’ London’s Weekly on June 9th, 1939, and probably several people read it, and can hardly have disagreed that those nine improvements were blemishes; but there is a certain inertia that weighs on the world, as imperceptibly as the air, and yet exerting vast pressure on every square foot, and I do not dream that my article availed to do aught against it. But that inertia broods over far greater evils than this, and under its influence, so beneficent to them, they thrive as the malarial mosquito thrives in the mist of the marshes. In London, a few weeks earlier than the time that I wrote this article, I was asked to speak at King’s College in London University, and instead of speaking of poetry, or other of man’s treasuries, I talked for a change about some of our principal follies. I instanced a machine whose sole purpose is to remove all nutriment from rice. This makes the rice very white to look at, though why white should be any better than pink or green, God knows; and it also causes the disease of beri-beri, which among those who only eat rice kills thousands. And there had been some very interesting articles in The Times, describing a great journey in tropical Asia, when the porters died one by one, not from the rigours of nature, but solely from the work of this deadly machine. One student, an Indian, asked me, when I had finished, if I knew that unpolished rice was brown and dirty. I asked him if he knew what beri-beri was, and received the astonishing answer: “Certainly I do. Many members of my family suffered from it.”
There was no more to be said.
It is terrible to think of that machine quietly grinding out death, and to fear that the vast power of that inertia is greater than the power of any words one can use. If there was anything to be said for the machine some controversy might arise and the inertia might be overthrown. But there is nothing to be said for it; no doctor in all the world would speak for it; and it is only there to make rice look white in shop-windows.
For six days in March 1937 and two days in January 1938 I had worked on the first four chapters of a novel, to which I now returned, doing two more days on it in February 1939; and on March 3rd I at last settled down to it and, barring an occasional broadcast, wrote nothing else until I finished it on April 27th three days after our return to London. This novel I called The Story of Mona Sheehy, and it was published that autumn by Messrs. Heinemann, just as the era of which it told was swept away by one of those tides of war that do at certain times sweep over continents, and which President Wilson invented a scheme to stop, as King Canute with another tide had done before him. But my novel told of Ireland, where it is not admitted that anything much has happened; at any rate nothing requiring one to take sides, or to do anything about.
When I said that I finished The Story of Mona Sheehy on April 27th, I should have said that I finished the last chapter of it, chapter 38; but chapter 32 I left till May 6th, for it tells of a motor-race and, though one can imagine things that one has not seen, I do not think one could tell of a motor-race if one had never witnessed one. Such a description would not be honest, and anyone describing such a race who had never seen one would throw in heaps of words instead of scenes. I can give an example of this style: in 1914, just after war had started, some paper, feeling that it must be topical, had stories about the war, in one of which I read the words, “the great cruiser sank like a stricken bull under the crowning mercy of the final stroke.” I don’t think that one single word of that means anything: I have heard of something similar being found in architecture, where a house had been burnt and a part of it, previously hidden, was seen to be a heap of broken bricks thrown in anyhow. The bull and the crowning mercy, and all the rest of it, are like those bricks. So before presuming to say what a racing motor was like, I went to see one, and the secretary of the Brooklands track with the greatest kindness sent me tickets for it. We went to see the race, and it was an entirely new experience: motors moved in the landscape faster than I had seen anything move in a landscape before: here was speed on an entirely new scale, and a train that came by at the time seemed quaintly antique. I had known that part of the country when it was all woods, but the change from hazels to asphalt seemed no stranger than this new speed.
And some time that summer I played another game of living chess, this time against Elaine Sanders, who was then somewhere about fourteen, but a Kentish player of considerable repute, and lady chess-champion of England. And she beat me. Of course the Press was there, but I was also interviewed about the game afterwards at my home in Kent and my interviewer let out that the game had gone the way that the world, or at any rate the Press, wanted. But after telling me that, he gave me every chance to get even by asking me questions about what I would do to Miss Elaine Sanders if I met her over an ordinary chess-board. But I missed the opportunity that would have been so welcome to a champion wrestler or prize-fighter. For I had lost the game, and there was an end of it. —
Back in Cadogan Square that June we heard the sirens muttering in their sleep, for practices and preparations were being made. For the first time we heard that wailing noise with which the world is familiar, and the long and lovely note of All Clear.