This, he had to see.
Curtis took a comfortable leather chair and opened the book at random. After a few minutes, bewildered, he went back to the beginning and started there.
He was not a man for poetry. He could tolerate Tennyson, the shorter pieces, and he liked some of the stirring stuff that everyone knew, like “Invictus”, or the one that went “Play up! Play up! and play the game”, even if talk of sands sodden red with blood seemed rather less poetic once one had seen the reality of it. A few of the men in South Africa had recited some of Mr. Kipling’s things in camp during the long evenings, and they were jolly entertaining, with proper rhymes, as if there was anything wrong with that, and a good beat, and a story that a chap could follow.
Da Silva’s poems were not like that.
They were broken fragments, not even sentences. They went…somewhere, that was clear, but the words twined round each other and broke off and led to conclusions Curtis didn’t reach but which he could feel pressing down on him, unwholesome and disturbing. There were vivid images, but they were extraordinary ones, not poetic at all in the way Curtis vaguely felt poetry should be, with trumpets or mountains or daffodils. These poems were full of broken glass and water—which was not clean water—and scaly things that moved in the dark. There was a recurring image that seemed to sum it all up somehow, of a thing in the depths. Curtis couldn’t quite tell what it was. It came in a bright flash of scales, a dark gleam, or a slither against an unwary hand, and vanished again, but it was always lurking, just out of reach, waiting.
He turned back to the opening pages and read the epigraph, a quote attributed to “Webster”.
When I look into the fish-ponds in my garden
Methinks I see a thing armed with a rake
That seems to strike at me.
When he looked up from the book again, da Silva was leaning against the bookshelves, watching him.
“I, er,” said Curtis, with the natural awkwardness of an Englishman caught reading poetry. “I just, er, picked this up.” He wondered how long the other man had been there, and how he moved so silently.
“That’s what it’s for,” da Silva agreed. “I shan’t embarrass you by asking for an opinion.”
Under normal circumstances Curtis would have liked nothing less than to be solicited for his opinion on poetry, but that stung. He might not be a literary type but he wasn’t a bloody fool, and his mind was full of unsettling things that swam in dark water.
“I didn’t understand it. I dare say I’m not meant to.” He saw the droop of da Silva’s eyelids and added, before the man could get in another dig at his philistinism, “Reminded me of Seurat, actually.”
Da Silva’s face went blank. “Of—?”
He’d wrong-footed the blighter, Curtis realised with immense satisfaction. “Seurat. The Impressionist,” he explained. “Chap who paints pictures with dots.”
Da Silva’s eyes narrowed to black slits. “I know who Seurat is. Why should my poetry remind you of him?”
He looked, for a second, just a touch defensive, not quite as self-possessed as usual, and on the instant Curtis thought that if he wrote poetry he wouldn’t much want people making cutting remarks about it. Especially not stuff like this, which seemed to be dredged up in pieces from the bottom of the writer’s mind. He had no idea what The Fish-pond told him about Daniel da Silva but he felt, instinctively, that it contained something from under the hard exterior shell, something raw, that flinched when touched.
“Seurat’s paintings,” he said, feeling his way to his own meaning. “If you look at them they’re just dots of colour, a lot of jumbled bits that don’t make any sense. If you stand back far enough, it comes together and becomes a whole picture. That’s what I thought about this.” He glanced at the book in his hand and added, “I think I’d need to be a bit further away to grasp it, mind you. Manchester, perhaps.”
Da Silva looked startled for a second, then his face lit with a smile. It was perhaps the first genuine, unstudied expression Curtis had seen from him, a combination of surprise, amusement and pleasure that made him look suddenly alive, and younger, too, without the world-weary pose. The thought came to Curtis, unbidden, that Miss Carruth had been right. Daniel da Silva was rather handsome.
“That’s the most cogent analysis I’ve heard in a while,” da Silva said. “You should review for The New Age.”
That was one of those modern, socialist, intellectual periodicals. Curtis had never picked it up in his life, as da Silva would doubtless have guessed. “Oh, above my touch,” he retorted. “Perhaps the Boy’s Own Paper needs a poetry critic.”
Da Silva laughed out loud. “An excellent idea. ‘In this issue: How to tie reef knots; thrilling tales of war; and Writing the Sonnet with General Gordon.’”