Now Mrs. Phillips brought to my cottage new printed drawings, a shopping basket, flowers — elegant gifts which I found difficult to acknowledge, for the man and the nature of his gifts seemed to require a matching light elegance, and I found myself in my letters to him straining for effect, trying to make myself worthy of his generosity, trying to give myself a sensibility equivalent to his own.
One sunny morning, about coffee time, I saw Pitton standing outside the overgrown box-bordered enclosure at the side of the lawn, the enclosure once attached to the house that, as I had heard from Bray, had stood on the site formerly (and possibly had older, religious antecedents).
The weeds in the enclosure had grown tall, stalky with fine white flowers. But Pitton had cut his annual path through the weeds to the orchard, one swath up, one swath down. The path had been cut low, revealing level, tightly knitted grass, the grass in one swath lying at a contrary angle to the grass in the other, the two swaths showing as two distinct colors, one green, one almost gray.
And Pitton now, in the middle of the morning, was standing on the lawn just outside the enclosure, standing still, looking down at the grass. The overgrown box trees made an arch above the entrance to the enclosure. Pitton was framed in this wild green arch; behind him was the two-swathed path between the tall white-flowered weeds, like a passage in a maze. He was leaning forward, looking fixedly down, legs oddly apart, as though he were standing on sloping or uneven ground. His woolen tie — winter and summer Pitton wore a tie — hung straight down; his tie didn’t rest on his paunch.
He reminded me of a man I had seen thirteen years before, a forest Indian in a new mission settlement in the Guiana highlands, in South America. The settlement was on the bank of a river, not one of the great continental rivers, but a narrow river of these highlands, with big boulders on the banks, and big smooth boulders, sometimes neatly cracked, in the riverbed itself.
It was a Sunday morning, and the Indian was dressed as formally as Pitton was now dressed. The Indian was in blue serge trousers and a white shirt. He had gone to the Sunday morning service in the mission chapel. The settlement was in a new clearing; the stumps of felled trees still looked raw; the forest still pressed on three sides. And now after that morning service the Indian was on his way back to his forest village, taking the path at the edge of the clearing, just above the river, which in sunlight was the color of pale wine, and at dusk became black. Night here made for anxiety. Daylight was always reassuring.
Something on the path had caught the man’s attention, had alarmed him; and he had stopped to consider what he had seen, the thing that didn’t belong to the path — a twig perhaps, a leaf, a flower — and perhaps hinted at a terrible danger. For the Indians here there was no such thing as natural death. There was a killer abroad always, the kanaima, a man like any other in appearance, never known or suspected to be the killer; and he it was who eventually killed everybody. Stock still, then, the Indian on his way back from the chapel stood on the path above the river in the morning sunlight, in his blue trousers and white shirt, wondering whether (in spite of what the missionaries had told him and his fellows) the thing he had just seen on the path wasn’t a sign that the kanaima, who got everyone in the end, hadn’t finally come for him. It was a narrow path between big sunken boulders; the Indian didn’t make room for me when I got to him. I walked around him; he didn’t look at me.
It was with a similar stance and abstraction that Pitton stood outside the overgrown enclosure. But he knew he had caught my attention, and he was waiting for me to go to him. When I was almost upon him he lifted and slowly swung his left leg so that he stood upright. A stiff, deliberate movement — it might have been a wooden leg. But the face Pitton lifted to me was alight with passion. I had never seen him so stirred. His eyes were bright, moist, staring; his nostrils were quivering. He was full of news. Bursting with news.
He said, “I’ve been drinking champagne. He called me to his garden and gave me champagne.”
And more than the wine had made Pitton muzzy. It was the sunlight, the occasion, the luxury, the hour of the morning, the unexpected development of this bewildering summer, play piling upon play. If I hadn’t come upon him, he would, I feel, have gone home to share his news with his wife.
He said again, getting muzzier by the minute, contemplating the moment, eyes almost wild, “Champagne.”
I heard another version of this event about a month later from Alan. The summer was over, more or less. Alan was wandering about the grounds in a matelot outfit, like a sailor figure of one of the earliest poems my landlord had sent me, in my first summer, after the poems about Shiva and Krishna.
Alan said, “He’s in great antediluvian form. I hear he’s been feeding Pitton pink champagne.” And the idea so amused Alan that the full laugh he started on began to choke him. Recovering, he said, “Pink champagne at ten o’clock in the morning. He told me that Pitton was absolutely slain. Absolutely slain.”
And I felt now that that other story, about Woolworth’s, hadn’t been improved on by Alan, but by my landlord. He had stored up the story of Pitton and the champagne, as Pitton himself (and Pitton’s wife no doubt) had stored it up. He had stored it up to tell it to visitors like Alan, people who knew and cherished his reputation as a man with a style of before the deluge. Yet the impulse that morning, the need to celebrate the moment, would have been genuine. Later would have come the ideas he had of his own romance; later would have come his wish to make the story, to tell the tale, to spread his legend.
After the long morbid withdrawal, the near death of the soul, he had revived. But what had also revived was the idea of who he was. That was shown in the disproportionately large and thickly lettered signature on his new drawings; it was even bigger than the signature on the printed poems he had sent me about Shiva and Krishna while he was still very low, pressed down into himself. The personality that had survived its illness now had a smaller area for play; it was also a smaller personality. It could play only with people like Alan — there were not many like Alan, not many who knew his, my landlord’s, legend now — and Pitton.
“ISN’T IT nice to have rich friends?” Alan had said. But that was Alan’s own fantasy; that was the vision he preferred to have of the place where he came to stay. The Phillipses knew better. They knew how many things at the manor needed to be done; they knew how little could be done.
The manor had been created at the zenith of imperial power and wealth, a period of high, even extravagant, middle-class domestic architecture. The extravagance of houses like the manor lay partly in the elaborateness of the modern systems — plumbing, heating, lighting — that had been built into them at the time of the building. Whatever their architectural style or whimsies, and though in certain particulars (thatched roof, use of flintstones) they might aim at local, rustic effects, houses like the manor were a little like steamships. They had been built with that confidence; not just the confidence of wealth, but also the confidence of architects and technicians in the systems they were putting in. And it was that industrial or technical confidence — the confidence which in other manifestations had created the wealth that had built the manor — that now made the manor an expensive place to look after. The manor had been built like a steamship. But like a steamship, it was liable to breakdown and obsolescence. A boiler exploded in the manor one day; another time a bit of the roof was blown off. Each accident would have cost thousands.