A Summer Serial—II

Samuel Deronda

BY JOHN WAIN Samuel Deronda, on the threshold of manhood, is faced with the ruin of his attempts to woo Minnie Stroney, the office belle. This situation is due partly to his own personal deficiencies, which are, considerable, and partly to the enterprise of his rival, Dennis. Walking homeward one evening, deep in thought, he pauses before his favourite news-stand.

WHAT Samuel was looking for on the news-stand was simply his usual bi-weekly purchase, a small but thick newspaper whose function was to bring to its readers, 104 times a year, the same piece of urgently important news, viz., that the female human body is marked off from the male by certain differences in shape. His eyes wandered slowly, as usual, over the newspapers and magazines offered for sale; but this time he hardly saw them. His physical sight was well-nigh obliterated by the desperate clarity of his inner vision. There sat Minnie Stroney, at her desk, nylons crossed, nails polished, red- gold hair gleaming like a squirrel's tail in the fluorescent lighting; as lovely as, if a trifle more spreading than, the unbraced Amazon who stared, astonished to find herself caught under the studio lamps, on the front page of the current bi-weekly. And there stood Dennis in his T-shirt, with his little moustache and Tony Curtis haircut. Flushing hectically, Samuel Deronda relived the latest of his long series of humiliations at the hands of Dennis. He had been, that very lunch-time, waiting outside the office to see if Minnie came out alone; if she had, he would have invited her to accompany him to the milk-bar where he took his lunch, , his reasoning being that she had to get herself some lunch any- way, and she might as well do so where he could see her—for Samuel was a careful spender. Hardly had he established him- self, however, when Dennis had lounged splendidly out of the Packing Department and across the road. 'On patrol, Buster?' he had asked with a sniggering laugh. 'Waiting it out, eh?' Samuel did not like the way Dennis always hailed him as 'Buster,' a form of address he had picked up from the cinema. But before he could reply, Dennis had entered the building, to reappear shortly with Minnie on his arm. On seeing Samuel still there, he had burst into a loud and insolent laugh. 'That's raight, mai man,' he had said, 'keep your ai on the orfis whaile we're aout. So long, sucker,' he had added in his normal voice. Meanwhile Minnie Stroney had stared straight ahead, affecting not to see Samuel.

Power ! That was what Samuel Deronda hungered for. He did not mind what form it took, but power he must have, power of the kind that would compel Minnie to respect him. It could be physical strength, such as Dennis possessed; or wealth, as enjoyed by Mr. Vincent, the managing director; or fame, as typified by, say, Gilbert Harding. Any form would do : but power, power! Come quickly and save Samuel from despair !

"Ere y'are, mate,' the newsvendor was saying impatiently, holding out the bi-weekly dose of sex-obsession. `Wassa matta?' he cried, when Samuel still took no notice. "Ere, you wanna git yersoaf seen to! Yer woolgevverin'! Wikey, wikey!' he shouted. A small crowd began to collect.

Crimson, Samuel fumbled for his coppers as reality flooded back upon him.

'Cor crikey!' the newsvendor cried. 'Asleep on 'is flippin' feet, no flippin' erra'. 'Ere, mate,' he added, leaning forward, 'I'll tell yer what you want. You want oner these 'ere!'

With a sweeping gesture, he picked up a small magazine, one of a tiny, neglected stack at the rear of his stand. Playing to the now spellbound gallery, he held it up prominently.

'Poertry!' he shouted. 'About your cuppa Rosie, I should say!'

The bystanders giggled. His mind labouring, Samuel slowly worked towards an understanding of the position. He was being insulted. The man was pretending to offer him a magazine of poetry because he seemed daft. It was like Dennis over again.

Then it occurred to him that the tables might still be turned. Scowling, he waved aside the bi-weekly newspaper. He could always get it somewhere else, and the female form was unlikely to change overnight. Instead, he took the poetry magazine out of the man's hand.

'Ecktually,' he said, 'I'll have this. I been looking for a copy all over London.'

He seized the magazine; it was like grasping a nettle.

'Got somethink of mine in, I believe,' he said casually.

`Blimey, I guessed right,' said the newsvendor. He passed his hand over his forehead and pretended to stagger. 'A poertry writer! No wonna 'e don't take no notice wha'ya say to 'im!'

The bystanders glanced at Samuel curiously, as if expecting him to burst into song or fall down in a fit. Unexpectedly, this did not embarrass him; it was even rather pleasant, for once, not to be overlooked.

'How much is it?' he said loftily.

'Remindered. Fruppence,' said the newsvendor, stacking the bi-weekly back into its place. if he could not sell one, he would sell the other.

Samuel walked away with the magazine sticking out of his pocket. Though, as we have seen, a careful youth, he considered threepence a not excessive sum to pay for his dignity; besides, he had rather liked the way they looked at him.

Like his father, Samuel was in the habit of walking home to save the fare, and, as he now threaded his way through the less- crowded streets, he began to look round for a dustbin into which he might throw the poetry magazine. If there had been one handy, this history would end here, with Samuel still hopelessly out- pointed in his bout with Dennis. But it was hard just to throw the magazine down in the street; unlike a crumpled newspaper, it did not look the kind of thing one would want to toss away from one while walking along. Someone might even pick it up and come running after him with it; in which case he would once again be branded as daft.

in any case, he had paid threepence, which was as much as his bus fare would have ,been. Was it conceivable that the magazine offered anything approaching three pennyworth of diversion?

Would he, in other words, be justified in taking the step of actually opening the magazine and beginning to read it?

Halting, he opened it. He was confronted by a page with the word POEM in capitals at the top. That was all right. Then he began to spell out the words which occupied the rest of the page.

The first two lines ran : Anyone's seawhorl nowhere in the forever darkness Me appoint towns upward the meantime terrible.

Samuel rubbed his eyes. The word 'poetry' had previously held a simple, if vague, meaning for him. It had been a matter of

Ti turn ti turn ti turn ti turn Ti turn ti turn ti rum.

As far as subject-matter had been concerned, it had mainly meant flowers, deeds of violence on bridges, and similar topics. One of the teachers at his school had once explained to the class that poets were very important people. Why, Samuel had not quite

grasped; but evidently it was regarded as an important activity to write about flowers, or deeds of violence on bridges, in a turn ti turn way.

Poets. Important. Important. Poets.

What dogrose spiralling in the otherwise innocent Butkus/mg day's eye?

Samuel stood still, thinking. He had seen a film, not long pre- viously, in which one of the actors played the part of a poet.

He had worn a large tie, and odd clothes generally, and spoken in a way that, without being able to analyse it, Samuel had recog- nised as being distinctive. The other characters in the film had taken this man with an inexplicable seriousness. They had, it is true, patronised him, but they had not neglected him or treated him harshly. It was impossible, Samuel realised as he looked back on this film, to imagine Dennis going up to this character and calling him Buster and making him feel inferior. Any such, attempt would have made Dennis himself look a fool; the aura that surrounded the poet had been such as to protect him from that kind of attention. At the time, Samuel had not thought much about the matter, but he thought about it now. It suddenly seemed to have become a matter of personal concern to him.

He turned the page. Here was another poem, written, it seemed, by someone else. It did not seem much different from the first one he had read.

My guilty tripod, like an earthquake spout Stomachs the grassblood and the ears of light, Till seaweed fries.

The main trick seemed to be to mention the sea as often as possible; apart from that, all you had to do was keep it moving in a mist of images. Samuel could not, of course, have put it like that; any more than he could have described, in terms of essential literary history, the precise point at which he had dipped his egg- cup into the stream of English poetry; these are for his intellectual betters to speculate on. This, meanwhile, is a success story.

A thin man in a pin-striped suit ran into Samuel from behind, sending him lurching against a lamp-post.

`Mind where yer ruddy well going!' he expostulated.

`Watcher loiterin' for then?' the clerk retorted. `Standin' there day-dreaming, watcher expect?'

`Day-dreaming yer ruddy self,' Samuel returned with dignity. `I was just 'avin' a read.' He held up the magazine so that the pin- striped man could see its title. 'It was so intressin' I couldn't wait till I got 'atm.'

The pin-striped man was about to pass on without comment when the title of the magazine, which included the word 'poetry,' caught his eye. Immediately he shot Samuel a look of real hatred.

'Wastin' yer own flippin' time and everyone else's,' he snarled in a new voice, thin and cold with hostility. `Standin' about loin' nothin'. Throwin' yer flippin' time away.'

Again the immediate reaction! And not merely immediate, but strong! Once again Samuel Was faced with a situation he could not analyse, but which he recognised as a strong one. He could not know, for instance, that his interlocutor was employed by the Inland Revenue, and that some of the hatred felt by that institu- tion for the artist, of whatsoever kind, had, as it were, brushed on to him as he sat at his desk. The word 'poetry' called up, for this man, a mental vision of the kind of person to whom he and his kind had vowed never to show quarter. By standing still in the street, the better to scan a magazine of poetry, Samuel had annoyed this official much as if he had spat on him.

This, in its own way, was power. The newsvendor staggering, the income tax clerk glaring with venom : it was hard to think of any other pose, so easily assumed, that brought one so immediately to the forefront of people's consciousness. He looked at the man almost gratefully and, without prolonging the squabble, passed on.

That evening, after supper, Samuel sat by his open window, his wishes spiralling upwards in the summer air. The magazine lay open across his knee. The minutes, the hours, passed. Then, waveringly, he reached out for a pad of lined letter-paper, which he kept for writing to Minnie on, though he had not yet thought of anything sufficiently effective to write to her. In a trance, staring as if hypnotised, he took out a chewed pencil and began to write, slowly and carefully, After ten minutes the top sheet of the pad was covered with a mess of words resembling the mess of words on the, page of the magazine before him. One was elegantly printed, the other was crudely scrawled in pencil; but both were equal in the sight of the literary nurseries. They were poems.

Ten evenings later Samuel was again sitting at his open win- dow, and again the summer night was the recipient of his con- fidences. But this time it was not the magazine that lay open on his knee. It was a typewritten letter, 'We have much pleasure in accepting,' etc. It had begun already. Samuel was an accredited, about-to-be-published poet. He was one of the unacknowledged legislators of the world,

(To be continued in four further instalments)