Started a new life: anguish of nostalgia for Cornwall, from Somers.
Wandering in the King’s Cross Road or Theobald’s Road, seeing his
cottage and the road going up to the moors. He wrote twice to the
headquarters at Salisbury insisting on being allowed to return. Came a
reply, this could not be permitted. Then one day a man called and left a
book and the little bundle of papers--a handful only--which the
detectives had confiscated. A poor little show. Even the scrap of paper
with _Ver mi hiu_. Again Somers wrote--but to no effect. Came a letter
from John Thomas describing events in the west--the last Somers ever had
from his friend.
Then Sharpe came up to London: it was too lonely down there. And they
had some gay evenings. Many people came to see Somers. But Sharpe said
to him:
“They’re watching you still. There were two policemen near the door
watching who came in.”
There was an atmosphere of terror all through London, as under the Czar
when no man dared open his mouth. Only this time it was the lowest
orders of mankind spying on the upper orders, to drag them down.
One evening there was a gorgeous commotion in Somers’ rooms: four poets
and three non-poets, all fighting out poetry: a splendid time. Somers
ran down the stairs in the black dark--no lights in the hall--to open
the door. He opened quickly--three policemen in the porch. They slipped
out before they could be spoken to.
Harriet and Somers had reported at Bow Street--wonderful how little heed
the police took of them. Somers could tell how the civil police loathed
being under the military orders.
But watched and followed he knew he was. After two months the American
friend needed her rooms. The Somers transferred to Kensington, to a flat
belonging to Sharpe’s mother. Again many friends came. One evening
Sharpe was called out from the drawing-room: detectives in the hall
enquiring about Somers, where he got his money from, etc., etc., such
clowns, louts, mongrels of detectives. Even Sharpe laughed in their
faces: such _canaille_. At the same time detectives inquiring for them
at the old address: though they had reported the change. Such a
confusion in the official mind!
It was becoming impossible. Somers wrote bitterly to friends who had
been all-influential till lately, but whom the _canaille_ were now
trying to taint also. And then he and Harriet moved to a little cottage
he rented from his dear Hattie, in Oxfordshire. Once more they reported
to the police in the market-town: once more the police sympathetic.
“I will report no more,” said Somers.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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