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Ivan Heald was a colleague of Courlander—a colleague any man in Fleet Street would have been glad to possess. Heald was original, and he created a record in so far as he was the first and, so far as I know, the only man to be employed by a British daily paper to write a “funny story” each day. He made a wide reputation, a reputation that, no doubt, pleased him, but he had no real ambition. People who “got on” rather amused him—that is to say, if their success was won at the expense of experience of life. I never met a man more full of zest for life, a man more eager for experience, a man who retained his youth so successfully. He was vivid, careless, tolerant and, in spite of every appearance to the contrary, essentially serious-minded. It was the simple pleasures of life that attracted him.
He had no scholarship, but his mind was well ordered, and his appreciation of natural and artistic beauty was of the keenest.
I remember that when we were holidaying together at Oxford he would become almost angry with me because I [139] ]could not immediately perceive the beauty of certain lines—the outlines of trees, the curve of a table-napkin, the pattern made by the ropes of a tent, and so on.
“You should get Eddie or Norman Morrow to go a walk with you,” he said. “They would make you see things.”
He loved folk-songs, Irish peasants, the plays of Synge, the Russian Ballet, the Thames, the homely comfort of a country inn. His feeling for family life was strong, and Friday evenings at the Healds’, where one met his mother and sisters, as clever if not so vivid as he himself, were one of the great recurring pleasures of many men’s lives.
He was wounded in Gallipoli, nursed back to health, transferred to the R.F.C., and died (in all probability, for the exact manner of his death is not certainly known) in the air. A death he would have desired. But Ivan Heald should not have died, and sometimes I am tempted to think that he still lives, that something in him still lives—something that was rich and strange and beautiful. The other day I came across one of the little notes he used to scribble to me. It is written from Ireland, and because it is so like him I give it here:
Dear Gerald,—If only I had the nice stiff paper and the delicate pen nib, I would try to write a letter to you like the ones you send me. There came a thrill yesterday. As I sat in my little parlour toying with my last month’s Ulster Guardian, there leapt out of the page your poem, Fashioned of Dreams You Are [reprinted from a magazine]. It was as though the sea between us had suddenly shrunk to a couple of glasses of whisky. I shall never pass a Poet’s Corner again without looking for you. There are poets here, too. An old-age pensioner describing a wonderful fish he had seen told me that it was “a gay and antic fish, fresh and smart and soople.” I shall leave for [140] ]home to-morrow evening and see you on Sunday night, and if there is one bottle of red wine left in the world, you and I will surely drag it out of the dust. How the bottles must wonder under their cobwebs at this strange turn of fate—that the Master Butler may either transform them into sparkling phrases and beautiful thoughts through rare fellows like us, or send them to dreary death in the paunch of fools like ——
Ivan.
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Dixon Scott used to throw me into little ecstasies by his reviews in The Manchester Guardian, and I often used to wonder if I should meet him. Our paths crossed for a brief minute not long before we left England—he to meet his death in France, and I to sit and wait in Serbia. It was at the end of one of my evenings in the Café Royal, where one used to sip absinthe, smoke a cigar, and listen to Orage. It was “Time, gentlemen, please”: 12-30 A.M.: in Army parlance, 0030 hours. We were all very merry as we crowded into Regent Street, and I heard a voice behind me say: “Dixon Scott.”