Date: 1914-12-31T15:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Ghost Stories; Supernatural Fiction; Horror
Description: Tales for reading after dark… Many are very chilling indeed, while some are only lightly touched by the supernatural. Clever character studies and unnerving psychological suspense create a singular reading experience.
Publisher: MobileRead.com
Rights: Public domain where copyright is “Life+70” or less.

PORTRAITS  IN  SHADOW

THE COLLECTED
SUPERNATURAL STORIES
OF

HUGH  WALPOLE

MobileRead Edition
2021

Sir Hugh Seymour Walpole, CBE (13 March 1884 – 1 June 1941) was an English novelist. He was a prolific and popular best-selling author in the 1920s and 1930s but has been largely neglected since his death. Walpole’s output was large and varied, including disturbing studies of the macabre, children’s stories and historical fiction.

Compilation by ECM. Contents were originally published 1915 ~ 1939. This book is in the public domain where copyright is ‘Life+70’ or less.

CONTENTS

… Cover

… Titlepage

PORTRAITS IN SHADOW

’Enery
The Twisted Inn
The Oldest Talland
Miss Morganhurst
Lizzie Rand
Mrs. Porter and Miss Allen
Major Wilbraham
The Little Ghost
Chinese Horses
The Enemy
The Tarn
The Etching
Old Elizabeth
The Dove
The Enemy in Ambush
Mr. Oddy
Mrs. Lunt
A Picture
The Tiger
The Little Donkeys with the Crimson Saddles
Ecstasy
A Silly Old Fool
Bachelors
No Unkindness Intended
A Carnation for an Old Man
The Snow
Tarnhelm
Lilac
Spanish Dusk
The Silver Mask
The Fear of Death
Mr. Huffam
The Ruby Glass
Portrait in Shadow
Seashore Macabre
Sentimental but True
The Staircase
The Whistle
Field with Five Trees
The White Cat
The Perfect Close
The Conjurer
The Faithful Servant

PORTRAITS
IN SHADOW

’ENERY

I

Mrs. Slater was caretaker at No. 21 March. Square. Old Lady Cathcart lived with her middle-aged daughter at No. 21, and, during half the year, they were down at their place in Essex; during half the year, then, Mrs. Slater lived in the basement of No. 21 with her son Henry, aged six.

Mrs. Slater was a widow; upon a certain afternoon, two and a half years ago, she had paused in her ironing and listened. “Something,” she told her friends afterwards, “gave her a start—she couldn’t say what nor how.” Her ironing stayed, for that afternoon at least, where it was, because her husband, with his head in a pulp and his legs bent underneath him, was brought in on a stretcher, attended by two policemen. He had fallen from a piece of scaffolding into Piccadilly Circus, and was unable to afford any further assistance to the improvements demanded by the Pavilion Music Hall. Mrs. Slater, a stout, amiable woman, who had never been one to worry; Henry Slater, Senior, had been a bad husband, “what with women and the drink”—she had no intention of lamenting him now that he was dead; she had done for ever with men, and devoted the whole of her time and energy to providing bread and butter for herself and her son.

She had been Lady Cathcart’s caretaker for a year and a half, and had given every satisfaction. When the old lady came up to London Mrs. Slater went down to Essex and defended the country place from suffragettes and burglars. “I shouldn’t care for it,” said a lady friend, “all alone in the country with no cheerful noises nor human beings.”

“Doesn’t frighten me, I give you my word, Mrs. East,” said Mrs. Slater; “not that I don’t prefer the town, mind you.”

It was, on the whole, a pleasant life, that carried with it a certain dignity. Nobody who had seen old Lady Cathcart drive in her open carriage, with her black bonnet, her coachman, and her fine, straight back, could deny that she was one of Our Oldest and Best—none of your mushroom families come from Lord knows where—it was a position of trust, and as such Mrs. Slater considered it. For the rest she loved her son Henry with more than a mother’s love; he was as unlike his poor father, bless him, as any child could be. Henry, although you would never think it to look at him, was not quite like other children; he had been, from his birth, a “little queer, bless his heart,” and Mrs. Slater attributed this to the fact that three weeks before the boy’s birth, Horny Slater, Senior, had, in a fine frenzy of inebriation, hit her over the head with a chair. “Dead drunk, ’e was, and never a thought to the child coming, ‘’Enery,’ I said to him, ‘it’s the child you’re hitting as well as me’; but ’e was too far gone, poor soul, to take a thought.”

Henry was a fine, robust child, with rosy cheeks and a sturdy, thick-set body. He had large blue eyes and a happy, pleasant smile, but, although he was six years of age, he could hardly talk at all, and liked to spend the days twirling pieces of string round and round or looking into the fire. His eyes were unlike the eyes of other children, and in their blue depths there lurked strange apprehensions, strange anticipations, strange remembrances. He had never, from the day of his birth, been known to cry. When he was frightened or distressed the colour would pass slowly from his cheeks, and strange little gasping breaths would come from him; his body would stiffen and his hands clench. If he was angry the colour in his face would darken and his eyes half close, and it was then that he did, indeed, seem in the possession of some disastrous thralldom—but he was angry very seldom, and only with certain people; for the most part he was a happy child, “as quiet as a mouse.” He was unusual, too, in that he was a very cleanly child, and loved to be washed, and took the greatest care of his clothes. He was very affectionate, fond of almost everyone, and passionately devoted to his mother.

Mrs. Slater was a woman with very little imagination. She never speculated on “how different things would be if they were different,” nor did she sigh after riches, nor possessions, nor any of the goods Fate bestows upon her favourites. She would, most certainly, have been less fond of Henry had he been more like other children, and his dependence upon her gave her something of the feeling that very rich ladies have for very small dogs. She was too, in a way, proud. “Never been able to talk, nor never will, they tell me, the lamb,” she would assure her friends, “but as gentle and as quiet!”

She would sit, sometimes, in the evening before the fire and think of the old noisy, tiresome days when Henry, Senior, would beat her black and blue, and would feel that her life had indeed fallen into pleasant places.

There was nothing whatever in the house, all silent about her and filled with shrouded furniture, that could alarm her. “Ghosts!” she would cry. “You show me one, that’s all. I’ll give you ghosts!”

Her digestion was excellent, her sleep undisturbed by conscience or creditors. She was a happy woman.

Henry loved March Square. There was a window in an upstairs passage from behind whose glass he could gaze at the passing world. The Passing World!… the shrouded house behind him. One was as alive, as bustling, as demonstrative to him as the other, but between the two there was, for him, no communication. His attitude to the Square and the people in it was that he knew more about them than anyone else did; his attitude to the House, that he knew nothing at all compared with what “They” knew. In the Square he could see through the lot of them, so superficial were they all; in the House he could only wait, with fingers on lip, for the next revelation that they might vouchsafe to him.

Doors were, for the most part, locked, yet there were many days when fires were lit because the house was an old one, and damp Lady Cathcart had a horror of.

Always for young Henry the house wore its buried and abandoned air. He was never to see it when the human beings in it would count more than its furniture, and the human life in it more than the house itself. He had come, a year and a half ago, into the very place that his dreams had, from the beginning, built for him. Those large, high rooms with the shining floors, the hooded furniture, the windows gaping without their curtains, the shadows and broad squares of light, the little whispers and rattles that doors and cupboards gave, the swirl of the wind as it sprang released from corners and crevices, the lisp of some whisper, “I’m coming! I’m coming! I’m coming!” that, nevertheless, again and again defeated expectation. How could he but enjoy the fine field of affection that these provided for him?

His mother watched him with maternal pride. “He’s that contented!” she would say. “Any other child would plague your life away, but ’Enery—”

It was part of Henry’s unusual mind that he wondered at nothing. He remained in constant expectation, but whatever was to come to him it would not bring surprise with it. He was in a world where anything might happen. In all the house his favourite room was the high, thin drawing-room with an old gold mirror at one end of it and a piano muffled in brown holland. The mirror caught the piano with its peaked inquiring shape, that, in its inflection, looked so much more tremendous and ominous than it did in plain reality. Through the mirror the piano looked as though it might do anything, and to Henry, who knew nothing about pianos, it was responsible for almost everything that occurred in the house.

The windows of the room gave a fine display of the gardens, the children, the carriages, and the distant houses, but it was when the Square was empty that Henry liked best to gaze down into it, because then the empty house and the empty square prepared themselves together for some tremendous occurrence. Whenever such an interval of silence struck across the noise and traffic of the day, it seemed that all the world screwed itself up for the next event. “One—two—three.” But the crisis never came. The noise returned again, people laughed and shouted, bells rang and motors screamed. Nevertheless, one day something would surely happen.

The house was full of company, and the boy would, sometimes, have yielded to the Fear that was never far away, had it not been for someone whom he had known from the very beginning of everything, someone who was as real as his mother, someone who was more powerful than anything or anyone in the house, and kinder, far, far kinder.

Often when Mrs. Slater would wonder of what her son was thinking as he sat twisting string round and round in front of the fire, he would be aware of his Friend in the shadow of the light, watching gravely, in the cheerful room, having beneath his hands all the powers, good and evil, of the house. Just as Henry pictured quite clearly to himself other occupants of the house—someone with taloned claws behind the piano, another with black-hooded eyes and a peaked cap in the shadows of an upstairs passage, another brown, shrivelled and naked, who dwelt in a cupboard in one of the empty bedrooms so, too, he could see his Friend, vast and shadowy, with a flowing beard and eyes that were kind and shining.

Often he had felt the pressure of his hand, had heard his reassuring whisper in his ears, had known the touch of his lips upon his forehead. No harm could come to him whilst his Friend was in the house—and his Friend was always there.

He went always with his mother into the streets when she did her shopping or simply took the air. It was natural that on these occasions, he should be more frightened than during his hours in the house. In the first place his Friend did not accompany him on these out-of-door excursions, and his mother was not nearly so strong a protector as his Friend.

Then he was disturbed by the people who pressed and pushed about him—he had a sense that they were all like birds with flapping wings and strange cries, rushing down upon him—the colours and confusion of the shops bewildered him. There was too much here for him properly to understand; he had enough to do with the piano, the mirror, the shadowed passages, the staring windows.

But in the Square he was happy again. Mrs. Slater never ventured into the gardens; they were for her superiors, and she complacently accepted a world in which things were so ordered as the only world possible. But there was plenty of life outside the gardens.

There were, on the different days of the week, the various musicians, and Henry was friendly with them all. He delighted in music; as he stood there, listening to the barrel-organ, the ideas, pictures, dreams, flew like flocks of beautiful birds through his brain, fleet, and always just beyond his reach, so that he could catch nothing, but would nod his head and would hope that the tune would be repeated, because next time he might, perhaps, be more fortunate.

The Major, who played the harp on Saturdays, was a friend of Mrs. Slater. “Nice little feller, that of yours, mum,” he would say. “’Ad one meself once.”

“Indeed?”

“Yes, sure enough…. Nice day…. Would you believe it, this is the only London square left for us to play in?… ’Tis, indeed. Cruel shame, I call it; life’s ’ard…. You’re right, mum, it is. Well, good-day.”

Mrs. Slater looked after him affectionately. “Pore feller; and yet I dare say he makes a pretty hit of it if all was known.”

Henry sighed. The birds were flown again. He was left with the blue-flecked sky and the grey houses that stood around the gardens like beasts about a water-pool. The sun (a red disc) peered over their shoulders. He went, with his mother within doors. Instantly on his entrance the house began to rustle and whisper.

II

Mrs. Slater, although an amiable and kind-hearted human being who believed with confident superstition in a God of other people’s making, did not, on the whole, welcome her lady friends with much cordiality. It was not, as she often explained, as though she had her own house into which to ask them. Her motto was, “Friendly with All, Familiar with None,” and to this she very faithfully held. But in her heart there was reason enough for this caution; there had been days—yes, and nights too—when, during her lamented husband’s lifetime, she had “taken a drop,” taken it, obviously enough, as a comfort, and a solace when things were going very hard with her, and “’Enery preferrin’ ’er to be jolly ’erself to keep ’im company.” She had protested, but Fate and Henry had been too strong for her. “She had fallen into the habit!” Then, when No. 21 had come under her care, she had put it all sternly behind her, but one did not know how weak one might be, and a kindly friend might with her persuasion—

Therefore did Mrs. Slater avoid her kindly friends. There was, however, one friend who was not so readily to be avoided; that was Mrs. Carter. Mrs. Carter also was a widow, or rather, to speak the direct truth, had discovered one morning, twenty years ago, that Mr. Carter “was gone”; he had never returned. Those who knew Mrs. Carter intimately said that, on the whole, “things bein’ as they was,” his departure was not entirely to be wondered at. Mrs. Carter had a temper of her own, and nothing inflamed it so much as a drop of whisky, and there was nothing in the world she liked so much as “a drop.”

To meet her casually, you would judge her nothing less than the most amiable of womankind—a large, stout, jolly woman, with a face like a rose, and a quantity of black hair. At her best, in her fine Sunday clothes, she was a superb figure, and wore round her neck a rope of sham pearls that would have done credit to a sham countess. During the week, however, she slipped, on occasion, into “déshabille,” and then she appeared not quite so attractive. No one knew the exact nature of her profession. She did a bit of “char”; she had at one time a little sweetshop, where she sold sweets, the Police Budget, and—although this was revealed only to her best friends—indecent photographs. It may be that the police discovered some of the sources of her income; at any rate the sweetshop was suddenly, one morning, abandoned. Her movements in everything were sudden; it was quite suddenly that she took a fancy to Mrs. Slater. She met her at a friend’s, and at once, so she told Mrs. Slater, “I liked yer, just as though I’d met yer before. But I’m like that. Sudden or not at all is my way, and not a bad way either!”

Mrs. Slater could not be said to be everything that was affectionate in return. She distrusted Mrs. Carter, disliked her brilliant colouring and her fluent experiences, felt shy before her rollicking suggestiveness, and timid at her innuendoes. For a considerable time she held her defences against the insidious attack. Then there came a day when Mrs. Carter burst into reluctant but passionate tears, asserting that Life and Mr. Carter had been, from the beginning, against her; that she had committed, indeed, acts of folly in the past, but only when driven desperately against a wall; that she bore no grudge against anyone alive, but loved all humanity; that she was going to do her best to be a better woman, but couldn’t really hope to arrive at any satisfactory improvement without Mrs. Slater’s assistance; that Mrs. Slater, indeed, had shown her a New Way, a New Light, a New Path.

Mrs. Slater, humble woman, had no illusions as to her own importance in the scheme of things; nothing touched her so surely as an appeal to her strength of character. She received Mrs. Carter with open arms, suggested that they should read the Bible together on Sunday mornings, and go, side by side, to St. Matthew’s on Sunday evenings. There was nothing like a study of the “Holy Word” for “defeating the bottle,” and there was nothing like “defeating the bottle” for getting back one’s strength and firmness of character.

It was along these lines that Mrs. Slater proposed to conduct Mrs. Carter.

Now unfortunately Henry took an instant and truly savage dislike to his mother’s new friend. He had been always, of course, “odd” in his feelings about people, but never was he “odder” than he was with Mrs. Carter. “Little lamb,” she said, when she saw him for the first time. “I envy you that child, Mrs. Slater, I do indeed. Backwards ’e may be, but ’is being dependent, as you may say, touches the ’eart. Little lamb!”

She tried to embrace him; she offered him sweets. He shuddered at her approach, and his face was instantly grey, like a pool the moment after the sun’s setting. Had he been himself able to put into words his sensations, he would have said that the sight of Mrs. Carter assured him, quite definitely, that something horrible would soon occur.

The house upon whose atmosphere he so depended instantly darkened; his Friend was gone, not because he was no longer able to see him (his consciousness of him did not depend at all upon any visual assurance), but because there was now, Henry was perfectly assured, no chance whatever of his suddenly appearing. And, on the other hand, those Others—the one with the taloned claws behind the piano, the one with the black-hooded eyes—were stronger, more threatening, more dominating. But, beyond her influence on the house, Mrs. Carter, in her own physical and actual presence, tortured Henry. When she was in the room, Henry suffered agony. He would creep away were he allowed, and, if that were not possible, then he would retreat into the most distant corner and watch. If he were in the room his eyes never left Mrs. Carter for a moment, and it was this brooding gaze more than his disapproval that irritated her. “You never can tell with poor little dears when they’re ‘queer’ what fancies they’ll take. Why, he quite seems to dislike me, Mrs. Slater!”

Mrs. Slater could venture no denial; indeed, Henry’s attitude aroused once again in her mind her earlier suspicions. She had all the reverence of her class for her son’s “oddness.” He knew more than ordinary mortal folk, and could see farther; he saw beyond Mrs. Carter’s red cheeks and shining black hair, and the fact that he was, as a rule, tractable to cheerful kindness, made his rejection the more remarkable. But it might, nevertheless, be that the black things in Mrs. Carter’s past were the marks impressed upon Henry’s sensitive intelligence; and that he had not, as yet, perceived the new Mrs. Carter growing in grace now day by day.

“’E’ll get over ’is fancy, bless ’is ’eart.” Mrs. Slater pursued then her work of redemption.

III

On a certain evening in November, Mrs. Carter, coming in to see her friend, invited sympathy for a very bad cold.

“Drippin’ and runnin’ at the nose I’ve been all day, my dear. Awake all night I was with it, and ’tain’t often that I’ve one, but when I do it’s somethin’ cruel.” It seemed to be better this evening, Mrs. Slater thought, but when she congratulated her friend on this, Mrs. Carter, shaking her head, remarked that it had left the nose and travelled into the throat and ears. “Once it’s earache, and I’m done,” she said. Horrible pictures she drew of this earache, and it presently became clear that Mrs. Carter was in perfect terror of a night made sleepless with pain. Once, it seemed, had Mrs. Carter tried to commit suicide by hanging herself to a nail in a door, so maddening had the torture been. Luckily (Mrs. Carter thanked Heaven) the nail had been dragged from the door by her weight—“not that I was anything very ’eavy, you understand.” Finally, it appeared that only one thing in the world could be relied upon to stay the fiend.

Mrs. Carter produced from her pocket a bottle of whisky.

Upon that it followed that, since her reformation, Mrs. Carter had come to loathe the very smell of whisky, and as for the taste of it! But rather than be driven by flaming agony down the long stony passages of a sleepless night—anything.

It was here, of course, that Mrs. Slater should have protested, but, in her heart, she was afraid of her friend, and afraid of herself. Mrs. Carter’s company had, of late, been pleasant to her. She had been strengthened in her own resolves towards a fine life by the sight of Mrs. Carter’s struggle in that direction, and that good woman’s genial amiability (when it was so obvious from her appearance that she could be far otherwise) flattered Mrs. Slater’s sense of power. No, she could not now bear to let Mrs. Carter go.

She said, therefore, nothing to her friend about the whisky, and on that evening Mrs. Carter did take the “veriest sip.” But the cold continued—it continued in a marvellous and terrible manner. It seemed “to ’ave taken right ’old of ’er system.”

After a few evenings it was part of the ceremonies that the bottle should be produced; the kettle was boiling happily on the fire, there was lemon, there was a lump of sugar…. On a certain wet and depressing evening Mrs. Slater herself had a glass “just to see that she didn’t get a cold like Mrs. Carter’s.”

IV

Henry’s bed-time was somewhere between the hours of eight and nine, but his mother did not care to leave Mrs. Carter (dear friend, though she was) quite alone downstairs with the bottom half of the house unguarded (although, of course, the doors were locked), therefore, Mrs. Carter came upstairs with her friend to see the little fellow put to bed; “and a hangel he looks, if ever I see one,” declared the lady enthusiastically.

When the two were gone and the house was still, Henry would sit up in bed and listen; then, moving quietly, he would creep out and listen again.

There, in the passage, it seemed to him that he could hear the whole house talking—first one sound and then another would come, the wheeze of some straining floor, the creak of some whispering board, the shudder of a door. “Look out! Look out! Look out!” and then, above that murmur, some louder voice: “Watch! there’s danger in the place!” Then, shivering with cold and his sense of evil, he would creep down into a lower passage and stand listening again; now the voices of the house were deafening, rising on every side of him, like the running of little streams suddenly heard on the turning of the corner of a hill. The dim light shrouded with fantasy the walls; along the wide passage and cabinets, high china jars, the hollow scoop of the window at the far-distant end, were all alive and moving. And, in strange contradiction to the moving voices within the house, came the blurred echo of the London life, whirring, buzzing, like a cloud of gnats at the window-pane. “Look out! Look out! Look out!” the house cried, and Henry, with chattering teeth, was on guard.

There came an evening when standing thus, shivering in his little shirt, he was aware that the terror, so long anticipated, was upon him. It seemed to him, on this evening, that the house was suddenly still; it was as though all the sounds, as of running water, that passed up and down the rooms and passages, were, in a flashing second, frozen. The house was holding its breath.

He had to wait for a breathless, agonising interval before he heard the next sound, very faint and stifled breathing coming up to him out of the darkness in little uncertain gusts. He heard the breathings pause, then recommence again in quicker and louder succession. Henry, stirred simply, perhaps, by the terror of his anticipation, moved back into the darker shadows in the nook of the cabinet, and stayed there with his shirt pressed against his little trembling knees.

Then followed, after a long time, a half yellow circle of light that touched the top steps of the stairs and a square of the wall; behind the light was the stealthy figure of Mrs. Carter. She stood there for a moment, one hand with a candle raised, the other pressed against her breast; from one finger of this hand a bunch of heavy keys dangled. She stood there, with her wide, staring eyes, like glass in the candle-light, staring about her, her red cheeks rising and falling with her agitation, her body seeming enormous, her shadow on the wall huge in the flickering light. At the sight of his enemy Henry’s terror was so frantic that his hands beat with little spasmodic movements against the wall.

He did not see Mrs. Carter at all, but he saw rather the movement through the air and darkness of the house of something that would bring down upon him the full naked force of the Terror that he had all his life anticipated. He had always known that the awful hour would arrive when the Terror would grip him; again and again he had seen its eyes, felt its breath, heard its movements, and these movements had been forewarnings of some future day. That day had arrived.

There was only one thing that he could do; his Friend alone in all the world could help him. With his soul dizzy and faint from fear, he prayed for his Friend; had he been less frightened he would have screamed aloud for him to come and help him.

The boy’s breath came hot into his throat and stuck there, and his heart beat like a high, unresting hammer.

Mrs. Carter, with the candle raised to throw light in front of her, moved forward very cautiously and softly. She passed down the passage, and then paused very near to the boy. She looked at the keys, and stole like some heavy, stealthy animal to the door of the long drawing-room. He watched her as she tried one key after another, making little dissatisfied noises as they refused to fit; then at last one turned the lock and she pushed back the door.

It was certainly impossible for him, in the dim world of his mind, to realise what it was that she intended to do, but he knew, through some strange channel of knowledge, that his mother was concerned in this, and that something more than the immediate peril of himself was involved. He had also, lost in the dim mazes of his mind, a consciousness that there were treasures in the house, and that his mother was placed there to guard them, and even that he himself shared her duty.

It did not come to him that Mrs. Carter was in pursuit of these treasures, but he did realise that her presence there amongst them brought peril to his mother. Moved then by some desperate urgency which had at its heart his sense that to be left alone in the black passage was worse than the actual lighted vision of his Terror, he crept with trembling knees across the passage and through the door.

Inside the room he saw that she had laid the candle upon the piano, and was bending over a drawer, trying again to fit a key. He stood in the doorway, a tiny figure, very, very cold, all his soul in his silent appeal for some help. His Friend must come. He was somewhere there in the house. “Come! Help me!” The candle suddenly flared into a finger of light that flung the room into vision. Mrs. Carter, startled, raised herself, and at that same moment Henry gave a cry, a weak little trembling sound.

She turned and saw the boy; as their eyes met he felt the Terror rushing upon him. He flung a last desperate appeal for help, staring at her as though his eyes would never let her go, and she, finding him so unexpectedly, could only gape. In their silent gaze at one another, in the glassy stare of Mrs. Carter and the trembling, flickering one of Henry there was more than any ordinary challenge could have conveyed. Mrs. Carter must have felt at the first immediate confrontation of the strange little figure that her feet were on the very edge of some most desperate precipice. The long room and the passages beyond must have quivered. At that very first moment, with some stir, some hinted approach, Henry called, with the desperate summoning of all his ghostly world, upon his gods. They came….

In her eyes he saw suddenly something else than vague terror. He saw recognition. He felt himself a rushing, heartening comfort; he knew that his Friend had somehow come, that he was no longer alone.

But Mrs. Carter’s eyes were staring beyond him, over him, into the black passage. Her eyes seemed to grow as though the terror in them was pushing them out beyond their lids; her breath, came in sharp, tearing gasps. The keys with a clang dropped from her hand.

“Oh, God! Oh, God!” she whispered. He did not turn his head to grasp what it was that she saw in the passage. The terror had been transferred from himself to her.

The colour in her cheeks went out, leaving her as though her face were suddenly shadowed by some overhanging shape.

Her eyes never moved nor faltered from the dark into whose heart she gazed. Then, there was a strangled, gasping cry, and she sank down, first onto her knees, then in a white faint, her eyes still staring, lay huddled on the floor.

Henry felt his Friend’s hand on his shoulder.

Meanwhile, down in the kitchen, the fire had sunk into grey ashes, and Mrs. Slater was lying back in her chair, her head back, snoring thickly; an empty glass had tumbled across the table, and a few drops from it had dribbled over on to the tablecloth.

“The Story-teller” magazine Feb 1915

The Golden Scarecrow (1915)

THE TWISTED INN

Mr. Bannister chose his carriage with some care. He was always careful in the train because if you had work to do it was obviously necessary to have the place to yourself – when people were talking nothing could be done.

It was a dark, windy day in late November. The platform at King’s Cross was nearly deserted, and it was all very cold and gloomy. The book stall stared vacantly across the empty lines and its books and papers fluttered discontentedly as though they protested indignantly against their unhappy neglect – a porter pushed a load of luggage vacantly down the platform and ran into Mr. Bannister; he apologized still vacantly and passed on, dreaming.

Mr. Bannister chose his carriage – a dirty, unappetizing third class furnished with six highly coloured representations of “The Spa Longton,” “The Beach,” “Hicheton-on-Sea,” “The Station Hotel, Trament,” “The High Street, Wotton” – illustrations that were neither truthful nor entrancing.

Mr. Bannister was thin and wore glasses; he had high cheekbones and sandy hair – his eyes were pale grey, watery and red at the edges; his great coat was threadbare and shiny, his collar was a little frayed and his trousers had never been intended to turn up. Mr. Bannister was a journalist.

Times were hard just then, and, to be strictly truthful, his meals had, of late, been desperately uncertain. On Monday there had been breakfast, on Tuesday lunch, on Wednesday an excellent supper, owing to the happy discovery of a new friend; but today there had, as yet, been nothing – he sat in the corner of his carriage and thought of sausages.

During a year and a half he had worked on the Daily Post and pay had been, on the whole, regular. He was a bachelor and claims on his purse were few, so things had gone well with him. But the Daily Post had found the world a cold and unfeeling place and had passed silently away, leaving very few to regret its departure. Mr. Bannister missed it very sincerely, and he discovered how hard life could be. Everything that he handled seemed to be a lost cause, and one paper after another faded away at his eager touch – he depended, eventually, for his living, on the crimes and misfortunes of his fellow men – the world seemed to his tired brain a procession of thieves and murderers with the divorce courts for a background.

Today he was hurrying down to a little village in a remote part of Wiltshire to investigate a crime of the night before. It was an affair of the usual kind – a woman had been murdered and there were suspicions of a lover. Mr. Bannister went to it as he would to his bath or morning cigarette – to his heated brain, murder was the game that everybody played; and he must be back again by the evening to report on a religious revival meeting in Clapham. The clouds were lifting – it was long since he had had two jobs in one day, and the Telegraph had given him both of them. The Telegraph was an excellent paper.

They had told him that he must be prepared, if necessary, to sleep there during the night – it would be annoying if that were to happen – he would miss the revival. He determined, therefore, to be as speedy as possible, and he would, he hoped, be able to catch the four-thirty train back to town.

It was dark and stormy and the wind whistled outside the carriage – the scudding clouds seemed to catch the top of the trees and drag them in their own hurrying direction – but the riots clung to the grey earth and the furious heavens tossed the trees back again to their original abiding-place.

Mr. Bannister’s coat was thin and he shivered in his corner – it was too dark to see, and the train shook so that it was impossible to write; he flung his notebook down and stared moodily out of the window. He was very hungry and was inclined to regard the world as an evil place; his mind flew back to his younger days when his ambition had challenged heaven and his poverty had seemed certain proof of genius. He had breakfasted on Swinburne, lunched on Pater, and dined on Meredith – now his library had been sold to pay his debts and his debts were still unpaid; he was very hungry.

At a small wayside station there came an old woman – a very massive old woman with a bright print skirt of blue and an immense bosom; she had also a large basket, a bundle of sticks and a little boy. The basket and the sticks she placed carefully at her side; the boy she flung behind her – he fell into the corner and crouched there, against the cushions, softly sobbing.

From her treatment of the boy, Mr. Bannister concluded that she was cruel, and he hated her cruelty – so he looked at her sternly and frowned. She sat staring straight in front of her, her hands planted firmly on her knees – she was an enormous woman.

It was growing very dark and horribly cold – it was curiously dark for that time of day, Mr. Bannister thought – moreover, the pangs of hunger came crowding upon him, and, to forsake their company, he plunged into conversation.

“It is strangely dark for the hour,” he said, and he coughed nervously. But the woman made no reply; only the little boy ceased his sobbing and sat up in his corner to stare amazedly at Mr. Bannister.

“It is a dreary day,” he said with a little sigh – but perhaps the wind and the noise of the train had drowned his words, for she gave no answer and sat there without movement.

She was rude as well as cruel, he thought, and he leaned back in his corner and desolately thought of murders and religious meetings and the profitable emotions of highly strung people.

He sat thus for a very considerable time. The train rushed furiously forward, and the landscape grew darker and darker. “There must be a terrible storm coming,” thought Mr. Bannister – he watched the ebony blackness of the sky, the dark wavering outlines of fantastic trees, the sudden whites and grays of spaces of cloud and the clear shining of sudden pools.

Within the carriage there was silence, and obscurity gathered in the corners and hid the coloured views mercifully in its arms; the outline of the enormous woman was black against the window and the curve of her great basket stood out hooplike in front of her.

Every now and again the train stopped, but no one ever seemed to get in or out, and the desolate little stations with their pathetically neat gardens stared at the train forlornly as though they would have liked to stay and talk for a little time.

Mr. Bannister felt quite sorry for the little gardens – he was arriving at that state of worldwide sympathy consequent on an empty stomach. He was growing vaguely uneasy – he should surely have arrived at his destination some time before. He was afraid lest he should have passed his station, and so he spoke again to the woman.

“Can you tell me,” he said politely, “whether we have passed Little Dutton? I am afraid that I must have missed it.”

But she did not answer him, and her silence frightened him so that he dared not speak to her again. The consequences of missing his stations would be very serious indeed at such a crisis in his affairs. There were plenty of other persons ready to take his place and the Telegraph could scarcely afford to pay men who missed their trains.

He could not understand the darkness. He had left King’s Cross in the morning and, slow though the train had been, it could not be more than lunch-time now. But the carriage was most horribly dark, and only vaguely from beyond the window he caught distant outlines of trees and somber houses.

Then suddenly he saw a star. There could be no mistake. Vividly, brilliantly, it sparkled at him through the carriage windows. A star! Then the darkness was no pretense, no sudden and furious storm as he had supposed. It was night.

But it couldn’t be. He was to have arrived at Little Dutton before one, and now it was dark. Then there came to him the horrible certainty that he had slept – there could be no other possible explanation. He must have slept for hours, and Little Dutton must have been left, far, far behind. The horrible discovery left him breathless. He would have to pay for all those miles that he had travelled, and he had nothing to give for them. He had ten shillings; it had been in his eyes a treasure trove on which he would have many meals in the future, and now it must go to pay for a fruitless journey, and even then it would not be enough. He began to speak excitedly to the woman.

“I have slept – I must have been sleeping for hours. Look, there’s a star – and I only left King’s Cross an hour ago and it was morning. I must have passed Little Dutton hours ago. It is really dreadfully unfortunate – I can’t think how it happened. I’ve never done anything like that before. But where are we going to now? Shall I be able to get out somewhere and change and be back in Little Dutton tonight? It’s really most dreadfully important – I haven’t the least idea—”

And then suddenly the train stopped. Through the carriage window a station lamp gleamed mistily. The large woman collected hurriedly her basket, her sticks and her little boy and vanished through the door. Mr. Bannister hurriedly followed her.

He leaned out over the platform. It was a tiny wayside station with two lamps and a wild porter with a long beard. He cried discordantly: “All change! All change!” and rushed furiously up and down and looked into every carriage.

“All change!” he cried at Mr. Bannister and hurried on.

So Mr. Bannister got out and faced the situation. His watch, he found, had stopped; it was bitterly cold and the wind drove furiously down the platform. Above his head the stars and a round-faced jesting moon watched him coldly and without feeling.

He grasped the porter by the arm and tried to explain the situation. “I want to get back to Little Dutton to night – I must get back – it’s very important.”

“Little Dutton!” The porter looked at him and laughed in the depths of his beard. “Never heard of it. But you can’t, anyhow. You can’t get anywhere tonight. Six in the morning—”

“There are no trains!” Mr. Bannister stared at him miserably. “Oh, but that is most unfortunate. Then I must sleep here!” He thought dismally of his ten shillings and all the noble plans that had been nipped in the bud. “There is an inn?”

“Oh, yes,” said the porter, and again he laughed. “Yes, there is an inn,” and he passed off down the platform.

Mr. Bannister pulled his poor cloak more tightly about him and searched for a road. It was visible enough, stretching whitely for a time in front of him and then of a sudden fearfully black where the trees closed darkly in on it. Down this went Mr. Bannister and cursed himself for a fool. By an unnecessary and ill-judged sleep he had, perhaps, missed the turning point of his career, and how he was to get back in the morning he had no idea. It occurred to him as strange that the porter had never asked him for his ticket – it was indeed a most fortunate chance and, at the thought of it, his spirits went up a great many degrees and he felt a little warmer.

He disliked the blackness of the road and fancied that he was followed. For a moment he stopped and listened to make sure, and it seemed to him that the footsteps also stopped. Then suddenly there flashed across the road in the moonlight a rabbit. His heart beat furiously and he almost screamed. Then the silence and the perplexing moon light were too much for him, and he took to his heels and ran, panting, down the dark road.

The wind whistled as he ran – it caught his coat and wrapped it, confused, round his legs – it slapped him on the face and brought water to his eyes.

Then, at a turn of the road, he came upon the inn. It stood out very plainly in the moonlight, and he wondered whether it was the brilliant white spaces and the dark caverns of shadows that gave it its strange appearance. For that it was strange there could be no question. It stood there on the edge of a wide and moonlit moor. There seemed to be no other houses near it. It was a thing of gables and overhanging eaves and large diamond-paned windows – it was strangely crooked in shape, and, looked at from the road, seemed to lean curiously to one side. There were lights in the lower windows and the door stood ajar. He passed through it into the dim, uneven hall.

It was dark and musty, with a close, unpleasant feeling of closed windows – on his right the door was open and he turned into a small room, dusty, with the desolate air of a place long forsaken by human beings. Prim chairs of a faded pink chintz and hard little wooden legs, a round and shiny table, bare save for a little green worsted mat in the middle, and a stiff horsehair sofa were the only furniture of the room. On the walls there was nothing to hide the faded green of the wallpaper with the single exception of a large photo graph hanging by the door. Onto this the quivering light of a cracked lamp shining from the windowsill flung an uncertain light. Mr. Bannister started at it with horror. It was the photon graph of the large-bosomed woman in the train. She glared down at him as she had stared before into space – cold, menacing, horrible.

Then he found at his side a little man whom he knew to be the innkeeper – a man round as a ball, with a chubby face and bright brown buttons on his waistcoat.

“I should like a bed,” explained Mr. Bannister. “I have most unfortunately missed my train, and I cannot leave until five tomorrow morning. What are your charges?”

“The room will be three shillings – breakfast extra,” said the little landlord – he had a voice like a chaffinch.

“And I will have some bread and cheese and beer,” said Mr. Bannister. “Could you tell me the time?”

The landlord looked at him – his eyes dilated, his cheeks grew white and his hand shook. Then he leaned forward as though he would whisper in Mr. Bannister’s ear; then, as suddenly, he stepped back again, and vanished through the door out into the passage.

Mr. Bannister chose one of the hard pink chintz chairs and waited for the bread and cheese. The room was a room of a thousand ghosts, and the lamp on the table created a shifting curtain of shadow that crept from corner to corner and stole, like the fingers of a gigantic hand, over the dark green wall. Through the little diamond-paned window glimmered the white expanse of the moor under the moon – a magic lake of frosted silver.

He felt very sleepy and hungry. He had no thought now of the expenses of tomorrow and of the letting slip of so great an opportunity. His one wish was for food and a splendid bed into which he might sink down, down, down, with the sheets billowing great waves about him, and so sail on a sea of dreams to a land where journalists were kings and hunger was for those who deserved it.

The eyes of the photograph followed him round the room and he moved from one hard little chair to another in a hopeless attempt to avoid their gaze, but he gave it up and slipped back into his corner and closed his eyes. Soon his head was nodding and he thought that he slept – but it was a very confused sleep, for people came creeping into the room and out again, and he thought that they were bringing his bread and cheese, but they only looked at him and then crept away, silent as they had come.

Then at last he awoke with a start, for someone was in the room – he sat up in his chair and rubbed his eyes; at the table were seated two men, bending over the lamp, their heads nodding as they talked and flinging giant shadows on the wall behind them. They wore curious huge black hats that fell, villainously, with most sinister effect, over one ear; they wore, more over, black cloaks that hung in somber folds behind them over the backs of the pink chintz chairs – he could not see their faces. At their side were large glasses filled with ale, and they glittered in the light of the lamp. Then Mr. Bannister, sitting silently in his dark corner, overheard their conversation.

“They are all asleep. There is no one here.”

“No – the man is alone – we are the only travellers.”

“The box is under the bed. You know your directions. I will be waiting for you at the bottom of the passage—”

“One blow will be sufficient. When I strike I strike hard.”

These muttered sentences struck terror into Mr. Bannister’s heart, his hands gripped the sides of his chair and his legs shook so that they knocked against each other.

Against whom could their plot be in tended? Supposing it should be meant for himself? At the thought he nearly screamed aloud. But it could not be for him. They did not know that he was there; he was a traveller and there was no box beneath his bed – at any rate no box of which he had any knowledge. The woman looked down at him from the wall and he shuddered. She was in it, you might be sure.

The men were silent, but their great hats still nodded against the wall. He had seen a play once at the Kensington and the villain had worn a hat like that. He had been a horrible man, that villain, and Mr. Bannister had hissed from the upper circle. Then it came to him in a flash that it must be the landlord of whom they had been speaking; he had wanted to speak to him be fore and he had been horribly afraid – it was the little rosy-cheeked landlord with a voice like a canary whom these men were plotting to murder.

The men were no longer silent, for one of them was snoring – his head had sunk down onto the table and his arms sprawled in front of him; the other also was asleep – only his head was flung back and his hands were clenched – and, even now, his face was hidden under the shadow of his hat.

Mr. Bannister thought it strange that such villains should fall asleep so speedily, but now was the moment for escape. He would go and warn the landlord. He rose, trembling, from his chair and crept softly round the table, his eyes fixed on the sleepers.

One of them moved, and Mr. Bannister stood transfixed with terror, his hands clasping the edge of the table, his breath coming in short gasps, his eyes round as saucers – but nothing followed. They were, both of them, sound asleep, and he turned to the door. The handle creaked in his grasp, and he thought that this must certainly waken them, but there was still no movement, and he escaped.

The passage was as dark as the grave. There was, he thought, no time to be lost, and he groped his way by the wall. The passage was heavy with the smell of decaying things. Mr. Bannister thought of cabbage and a damp church in winter-time.

He knew that he must hasten, but progress was very slow and the passage seemed to have no end. He had a con fused feeling that people were on all sides of him, and he imagined white faces in the dark and the soft steps of hidden pursuers. He could not understand why the passage was so long. The inn had not seemed a very large place – but this was interminable. The air grew thicker and thicker around him and he wondered whether he was descending into the heart of the earth. The thought of a living grave terrified him, and he leaned against the damp wall, his poor coat flapping against his trembling knees, and his hands stretched in front of his face as though to guard it from unseen horrors into which he might at any moment plunge.

Then, with a sigh of relief, he saw light ahead, and, to his surprise, found himself back in the little entrance hall through which he had passed on his first arrival. But had he? As he glanced around him it seemed strangely familiar, and yet he had thought that he had come straight from the door into the narrow passage. On his right he saw an ancient and trembling staircase that vanished into a higher floor. It was perhaps up this that the landlord had gone – at any rate, he must warn him, and then he would escape out of this place as soon as might be.

The stairs led him on to a dim passage and he could not see the end of it, but opposite to him there was a door. There might be other doors to right and left, but he could not face the darkness that stretched on either side, and so he turned the handle and entered the room.

It was an enormous bedroom and through the open window streamed the light of the moon. There was very little furniture in the room. A large oak cupboard stood to the right of the window, and in the centre there was an enormous bed – an ancient four-poster with faded red curtains and little wooden lions carved on the posts.

From one of these posts a body was hanging. At the sight of it his throat became horribly dry; his eyes burnt in his head like fire; suddenly frozen into stone, he stood there, choking with horror. It was the body of a little man, and it hung with its limbs swaying a little from side to side. The head lolled forward and was strangely grey in the light of the moon. It was the little landlord with a voice like a chaffinch. Mr. Bannister could see his brown buttons shining with the swaying of the body.

“I am too late. Oh, dear, I am too late,” he cried, and then he turned to flee. But, as he turned with the handle of the door in his grasp, he heard steps on the stair. Someone was coming stealthily with muffled feet. “Stockings!” thought Mr. Bannister. He turned back into the room. He knew that the steps would not pass the door. He looked at the moon and then he looked at the body swaying in front of him and then he looked at the oak cupboard. “They will find me here,” he thought; “they will think that I have done – that.”

He rushed wildly to the window, but there was no escape there. There was a hideous drop that he dared not face. Then he saw the cupboard and he flew into it, closing the door behind him.

It seemed to be full of spiders’ webs – they clung about his face and his hands and were thick about his hair, but he knelt there with his back against the wall, watching for the door to open.

It opened slowly, and into the light of the moon they stepped softly, their dark cloaks trailing behind them and the shadow of their black hats hiding their faces. “I knew who it would be,” thought Mr. Bannister. He sank down in a heap on the floor of the cupboard and his teeth chattered in his head. He knew that there was no escape.

They did not seem to notice the body that swayed to and fro from the bed post. They stepped slowly across the room, flung back the door of the cupboard and dragged out Mr. Bannister.

He fell in a heap at their feet. “I didn’t do it,” he cried. “I didn’t, really. You know I didn’t – I never saw him before tonight. I had only asked him for a bed and some bread and cheese. I have come from London. I have missed my train. I was going to Little Dutton.”

They dragged him across the floor, one on each side of him, and in a moment the room seemed to be full of people. They poured in through the door and stood in an excited crowd sound him, and they all talked at the same time.

They wore, for the most part, large white cotton nightcaps, and many of them held little brass candlesticks with little candles burning brightly – the flames guttered a little in the breeze from the open window.

“I told you so – I knew he’d done it – he must die at once – in the middle of the night, too.”

But he could only cry helplessly: “I didn’t do it, I tell you. I was going to Little Dutton and night came on so quickly—” but he couldn’t get any further because he couldn’t remember what came next.

And then the door opened and the crowd made way respectfully. It was the woman of the train. She came to ward him smiling grimly, and he knew that his doom was sealed.

“You tell them!” he cried, crawling toward her. “You know that I was in the train. I was in the same carriage. Tell them I didn’t do it – you know I couldn’t!”

But she smiled grimly and motioned with her hand. Someone brought forward a rope, and in a moment it was about his neck.

“No – no – not that!” he cried. “I am a journalist. It is murder!” But they raised him in their arms, and he knew that they were going to hang him from the bedpost by the side of the little landlord. The nightcaps closed round him; the candles flickered in the breeze; the woman watched him with quiet eyes.

“This is Little Dutton,” she said to him, and she touched him on the arm. “I hope you will forgive my waking you, sir, but this is Little Dutton, and you would have passed it.”

He thanked her as he rubbed his eyes; She was sitting soberly opposite him, the basket on her knees, and the little boy watched him silently from the corner.

“Oh, thank you.” He gathered his gloves and his stick. “I have been sleeping, I am afraid – thank you very much.”

As he stepped out onto the platform he looked at his watch. It was a quarter to one – lunch-time; and he was very hungry.

And so it was a dream. He was conscious of a feeling of intense regret. The wind passed howling down the platform; the porter frowned at him as he gave up his ticket – the main street of Little Dutton stretched drearily in front of him.

For a moment he had touched Romance. For a moment he had been the centre of a crowd – he had lived. Now he was back again – a journalist in quest of a sordid murder case.

He wrapped his shabby coat around him and sighed. Was it, after all, a dream? Perhaps for a moment he had wakened – for a moment he had been Bannister the Romantic – Bannister the centre of life and death.

He turned into a shabby restaurant and ordered a chop. Opposite him there sat a commercial traveller, a little run to seed.

“Cold,” said Mr. Bannister.

“Very,” said the traveller – and then added as he watched the dust whirl past the window: “It’s a dull world.”

“Not so dull,” said Mr. Bannister, and he winked as one who has been through a great experience. “I could tell you things …” he said – and he laughed.

“The Smart Set” Jun 1915

THE OLDEST TALLAND

Mrs. Comber explained to Miss Salter that, although she had been living in Cornwall all these years, she was only now, during this stay at Rafiel, beginning truly to appreciate it.

“You see, my dear, a school’s a school, and it does somehow rather take the edge off an appreciation of beauty having to keep the little boys clean and ordering the mutton, although I must say that our matron is a thoroughly capable woman – she comes from Marlborough, where she was for a term, but couldn’t endure it because – Well, I’m wandering from the subject – what I mean is that one does see things on a holiday that one hasn’t quite time for perhaps during term-time.”

Rafiel was all the more beautiful for the five days’ rain that had but now submerged and obscured it. It was incredible after the dirty grey that it had so recently presented that it could now, so transcendently, glitter and shine. Mrs. Comber had watched it first from the heights of Sea View Villa. From that point it lay huddled, packed together between the hills, with its boats drawn up in rows together inside its square little harbour. Seen thus on a fine day, it caught blue from the sea and green from the hills, and wrapped its slates and stones in reflected lights. From a height it was something that might at any moment be overwhelmed by the sea – something pretty but insignificant.

How different in the heart of it! Mrs. Comber, as she picked her way along the tiny cobbled streets, exclaimed at every step that she took. At first the place offered you a straight and somewhat dingy street, with nothing very different from other streets in other Cornish towns. One or two little shops suggested to the hungry visitor saffron buns, apples and peppermints, and for the untidy inhabitant there were bootlaces, buttons and pins. There was also a Methodist chapel.

But it was when the village had tumbled so far as the post office that it suddenly made up its mind that it would, from that moment, be as incredible, as haphazard, as beautiful as water, bricks and Nature would allow it to be. Three little streets went dancing into the sea, little streets with shapeless roofs, steps leading up to green-painted doorways that hung in mid-air, streets with cobbles and dark, mysterious caverns and bursting, bulging windows, and across these three little streets a river ran for no reason at all, except that it gave an opportunity for more hanging balconies and green-and-blue reflections of painted doors and shutters. And then the streets and the river were, in an instant, pulled up by the little harbour – a square, shimmering space of blue water – with all the brown and blue-masted boats riding upon it like hounds in leash, and the grey stone pier blocking it from the sea.

The whole village hangs over this blue square and is reflected in it; the sky is painted there, and also the hills. Every mood, every glory, every temper of the place is to be found there. Beyond the stone wall there is the Atlantic, with sharp, jagged rocks (they are called the Peaks) as gateways on either side. All of this is within the compass of five minutes; it is as ancient as it can be, as crooked and unexpected and childish. There are wilder seas here than anywhere on the English coast, save, perhaps, on the Land’s End, and the saffron buns, the buttons and the peppermints are very often in danger of being swept away altogether.

And meanwhile on the face of that little square harbour every mood of earth and sky is reflected.

Mrs. Comber took it, on her first vision of it, into the arms of her most extravagant enthusiasm. Her enthusiasms were always perfectly genuine affairs, for, although she always liked to have someone with whom they might be shared, she demanded no audience for their exhibition.

She nearly filled one of the three merry little streets, her cheeks blazing with excitement, a hard black hat slipping, it seemed, from her head, her hair threatening descent, her green skirt, short and showing thick square-toed shoes, her large, good-natured mouth and black, laughing eyes.

Full of health, good temper and colour she was, and she seemed to push back the street from her on both sides with her strong arms.

The natives looked at her, as they looked at all tourists, with a friendly indifference that was ready at any moment to develop into friendly attention if pounds, shillings and pence were in the air. The Rafiel citizens are not mercenary, but as most of them are supporting families on something approaching forty pounds a year, “tourists” may often make considerable difference to personal comfort. Friendliness, moreover, is invited, and as, again, most of the aforesaid citizens have never in their lives penetrated farther into the heart of the world than St. Tryst, a town seven miles away (many of them have never seen a train), conversation with visitors is instructive and entertaining.

At the same time, be it understood, there is never intimacy.

Of these things Mrs. Comber knew nothing. You may be the wife of a schoolmaster in Cornwall for a number of years without knowing anything about Cornwall. The school had always swallowed up all possible backgrounds. This was the first time that Cornwall was considered for itself, and Mrs. Comber, in the burning joy of her enthusiasm, determined to take the inhabitants of Rafiel entirely to her heart.

Here she was, staying at a dull pension, and her husband away on the golf links all day – why, of course, the only thing to do was to get to know the place and the people. Anything more attractive than the people were, too! How readily they all said “Good day,” how pleasantly they smiled, how amiably they chattered with one another on their bright little doorsteps! As the sun shone and the cobbles glittered, and the sky was blue upon blue and then blue upon that again, Mrs. Comber could have kissed the old fishermen one by one, and the old ladies one after another.

As a matter of fact, the thing that she did do, in the heat of her enthusiasm, was to trample with one of her square-toed shoes upon a small and dirty girl, to send the little thing sprawling, to pick her up with a thousand exclamations, to kiss her dirty mouth, and to carry her, after explanations, back to her family.

Her family, as Fate would have it, was the Talland family.

The Tallands and the Tresennens divide Rafiel between them. They have so divided it ever since that legendary day when the first of the Tallands stood on one of the Peaks and flung rocks at the first of the Tresennens, who stood on the other of the Peaks and did his best to respond in kind.

Relations are outwardly friendly enough between the two families (there is very little bad temper in Rafiel), but through all the centuries there has been no intermarriage between them, and the rivalry is unremitting, never forgotten, never allowed to lapse.

At the head of the Tallands at this time there ruled an old lady of mythical age. She was so old that the next oldest inhabitant in Rafiel (and he was over ninety) was supposed to be a child to her. Nobody knew how old she was, and she was popularly supposed to have had no beginning; and it was expected that death would never succeed in catching her. As far as appearance went, there was nothing of her face to be seen except a sharp nose, a sharper chin, and two eyes sharper still. The nose and the chin met, and the eyes blazed. These blazing eyes stared at you from the blackness of a dark and low-roofed kitchen. Huddled amongst cushions she faced the world from her corner by the fireplace – faced the world and cursed the Tresennens.

The Talland stronghold was a crooked and uneasy house perched behind the post office, a little way up the hill, and resting there, as it seemed, on one foot, and leering down at the post office and the harbour with a wink and a snigger; with every wind it threatened collapse. The Tallands had lived there now for a very long time, and it had the advantage of being higher in position than the chief castle of the Tresennens, although the Tresennens, from their windows, could see everyone who went in and out of the Talland doorway.

Here in her dark corner old Mrs. Talland, like the most sinister and patient of spiders, had been sitting for years and years and years.

A long time ago – ten or fifteen years back, it might be – something had happened to the old lady’s throat, and her voice disappeared.

The family had at first looked on this event as an unmixed blessing, and some of the younger branches had suggested that the occasion ought to mark the end of the old lady’s rule. Little these youngsters knew. After the accident Mrs. Talland’s power was redoubled. Now that she could speak no more, her eyes, always fierce enough, had twice their former power. She attained a kind of mystical splendour that had been absent before, and, with the exception of her hard-faced youngest daughter, a maiden lady of some sixty years, who washed and fed her, the family trembled before her glance. Her eldest son, the greatest bully in Rafiel, quailed when she looked at him, and during these years of her rule the Tresennen family did not dare set their feet within a stone’s throw of the Talland house.

And it was of the Tresennen family that Mrs. Talland was always thinking. In the days of her youth – and the number of years ago that was only Mrs. Talland knew – she had been concerned in strange happenings up on the windy hill with old Mother Perith, happenings that were connected with broomsticks and wax dolls and fires and skulls and strange weeds from the hedges.

She had not forgotten anything that she had learnt then. Brooding there in her fireplace, she knew the things that she could do to the Tresennens, if she needed. But it was a long time now since she had called those powers to her aid…. Scornfully she thought to herself that the Tresennens could be kept in their proper place without any need for such assistance.

Fiercely, with furious determination, she bent her will to keeping herself free, independent from any assistance in this world or the next. Clergymen, visitors, doctors had forced upon her, from time to time, their officious presences…. She had sent them all packing. They had fled before her glance.

Let her once, her old heart fiercely determined, give in to anyone, and her power would be gone and the Tresennens triumph.

There in her stronghold she kept back the world. Then into the kitchen, noisily, with friendship shining about her and in and out of her, Mrs. Comber burst.

The Tresennens, from their windows, marked her entry.

Mrs. Comber stood, smiling, in the doorway, holding tightly by the hand the youngest of the Tallands. Gathered in a little group by the fireplace were other Tallands, a number of them, and huddled amongst her cushions, with her hands shaking a little on her lap and her eyes flaming, was the oldest of them all. Behind her chair stood the gaunt, bony Janet Talland, whose duty it was to keep her mother clean and fed.

The room was very close, as it had every reason to be, because the street-door was generally shut, and the little diamond-paned window never opened. The air was heavy with the odour of fish, dying geraniums, saffron buns and tobacco.

Mrs. Comber addressed herself to Miss Janet Talland.

“I do hope I’m not in any way interrupting or interfering, but I was silly enough – careless, perhaps I ought to say – to knock over your little girl; at least, they tell me this is her home. And how I came to do it I can’t think, except that I was admiring your beautiful town and didn’t really notice where I was going, which is a silly trick that I really must try—” She broke off and patted the head of the youngest of the Tallands. “I don’t think I hurt you, dear, did I? She cried just a little at first, but it was more fright than anything else, being knocked down suddenly—”

The Tallands had had strange tourists within their castle before, but never any tourist like this tourist. Mrs. Comber, so glowing with colour, so voluble, so eager, froze them into silence. Old Mrs. Talland leaned forward in her chair, and her dry fingers rattled together on her lap.

“Come ’ere, Annie,” said Miss Janet Talland. “What be ’ee at, gettin’ in the lady’s way?”

Annie disengaged herself from Mrs. Comber’s grasp and shuffled across the floor, whimpering.

“I do hope—” began Mrs. Comber. She stopped because she was bewildered by the sudden, sweeping disappearance of most of the Talland family through the street-door. Only the old lady and her grim-faced daughter remained. “I do hope,” went on Mrs. Comber, more cheerfully than ever, “that you won’t visit the accident on poor little Annie. It wasn’t in the least poor Annie’s fault. If I’d only looked where I was going—”

It was then that Mrs. Comber noticed old Mrs. Talland. Nobody could have looked, to the outside observer, more helpless and ready for charity. “Here,” said Mrs. Comber at once to herself, “is a person to do good to. Here is the very interest that I have been wanting.”

“I hope you don’t mind,” said Mrs. Comber gaily, “my just stopping a moment or two. I’m not interrupting you in anything, am I? Because just tell me if I am, and go on doing just the things that you’d do if I weren’t here. Make me at home, you know.” She sat down in a chair by the fire quite close to Mrs. Talland.

The old woman leant forward still farther and stared at her. It was many months now since any visitor had braved her presence, but no visitor within her memory had braved her as this one did. The flaunting, highly coloured, bold-faced thing! Mrs. Talland always disliked seeing youth and vigour and energy – it made her feel old – but this noise and heartiness in one who was no longer young simply disgusted her. She would have liked to slap Mrs. Comber’s red cheeks. She looked up at her daughter. Why was Janet not sending the woman to the right-about, as she generally did? She was actually allowing her to sit there.

Janet had at first been taken aback by Mrs. Comber’s energy, and then, as the minutes passed, her slow brain began to move. She knew well enough the things that her mother was thinking. She knew how she must hate the impertinence of this woman. But also she knew that for many, many years now she had served the old woman and received no return for it, had served her faithfully and obeyed her in everything. In the woman’s heart, although she had not known it until now, for many years resentment had been growing. Supposing that she should disobey her now? A fierce, hot pleasure was in her breast at the thought of getting some revenge at last. Moreover, this woman, were she treated gently, would bring things into the house – jellies and fruits and custards. And oh, how the old tyrant would hate it!

“Sit you down, ma’am,” Janet said slowly. “You aren’t disturbing us, I assure ’ee. Mother can’t tark – ’er speech is gone this many a year.”

“Poor old woman! Poor old woman!” said Mrs. Comber, her voice full of compassion.

“But she ain’t deaf, all the same,” said Miss Talland, fearful lest the tourist should drive her mother to some sudden frenzy. “ ’Er ’earing’s arl right.”

Mrs. Comber was filled with the most genuine feelings of pity and tenderness. She hated anyone to be as feeble and desolate as this poor old lady. The room seemed to her dirty and uncared-for. And how terrible to be unable to speak and to be in the hands of that cruel-looking woman. Mrs. Comber felt that she would never sleep again did she not relieve in some way Mrs. Talland’s condition.

“Oh, but I am sorry!” she cried, and her large black eyes were full of tenderness. “How dreadful not to be able to talk! I don’t know what I should do if such a thing were to happen to me. Although, perhaps,” she went on, laughing gaily, “some people would say it was a good thing, because, you know, I do talk so much, too much; and it’s a trick I’ve tried to break myself of ever since I was a girl, and I’ve never been able to.”

Mrs. Talland’s hands rapped against each other in an agony. What was this horrible thing, and what, above all, was Janet about? It was then that, flinging a sharp glance at her daughter, she caught a first glimpse of the thoughts that were passing behind those cold eyes. Janet stood, gaunt and severe, with her hands folded in front of her, and about her mouth there lingered the suspicion of a grim smile.

“Yes,” she said, “it do be ’ard for mother, for she was always one to love a good tark, and now she must sit there and listen, as you might say.”

“Oh, dear, dear, I am sorry,” said Mrs. Comber. She found it so difficult to force herself to remember that Mrs. Talland was not deaf as well as dumb. “But, really, Mrs. Talland, I want to do everything I can to help you.” Here Mrs. Talland’s hands were more frantic than ever. “Yes, I will, indeed. If there’s anything I can do. Perhaps, Miss Talland, you can suggest—”

“Well,” said Miss Talland slowly, “mother do have a likin’ to jellies and them soup squares, as you are so kindly askin’. The doctor ’asn’t been in for a long time, but the last day ’e was ’ere I remember ’is sayin’ that a drop o” soup and a little jelly—”

Surely about Mrs. Talland’s ears the world must have seemed, at that moment, to be tumbling. In her breast there was a fierce, dogged determination to fight to the bitter end, but it was the first rebellion that she had had to meet for many a long year…. And then from Janet – Janet, the most faithful of servants.

She did what she could with her face, striving to fling into her eyes all the hatred and loathing and disgust that was in her heart. Oh, if she could have spoken what things she would have said!

“Well,” continued Mrs. Comber amiably, “that’s very good of you, Miss Talland, to tell me the kind of thing. But do you really mean to tell me that the doctor hasn’t been here for a long time?”

“No, that ’e ’asn’t.” Miss Talland did not add that, owing to the plain speaking of the Talland family on his last visit, he had uttered a solemn vow never to cross their threshold again.

“And he looks such a nice, kind man,” said Mrs. Comber. “I really must speak to him, because a doctor can be such a help sometimes. I remember once when a little boy of mine was ill that I was in such trouble about him because he’d got a rash, but it might have been just from overeating himself in the hot weather. But our doctor was so clever about him. Really, if he hadn’t been there – well,” she continued brightly, getting up from her chair, “I mustn’t trouble you any longer, Miss Talland. I’m sure you must have heaps to do, and I must be getting along. But I have enjoyed this talk so much. It is so nice getting to know you all. Good-bye, Mrs. Talland. Be assured that I will do everything for you that’s possible, and I’ll speak to the doctor about coming to see you. I’ll look in myself again in a little time. I’m so glad we’ve made one another’s acquaintance. Good-bye.”

Mrs. Comber shook hands with the unresponsive Janet, and was gone.

It must be confessed that, for a moment, as the two women faced one another, Janet’s courage forsook her. Mrs. Talland had not established her rule during all these years for nothing. The old woman’s eyes were living flames. As she sat up amongst her cushions her whole body was tense with hatred, horror, surprise, vindictive longing to get at someone and tear limb from limb.

Certainly, at that instant, those things that had belonged to Mother Perith many years ago might now have found themselves once more a home. Janet had often seen her mother look angry before, but she had never seen her anything like this. She faced her mother’s eyes – drew fire from them during a long moment, and then, slowly stealing back her gaze, she smiled. Mrs. Talland knew then that the moment had come that she had dreaded ever since she had lost her voice. Her rule was threatened.

But, worse than that, from the Tresennen windows, eyes – eager, mocking eyes – were watching. They had seen that woman come. They would see her come again.

It was well, at that moment, for Mrs. Comber that she was not within reach of Mrs. Talland’s long and grasping fingers.

Very shortly after this, Mrs. Comber, up at Sea View Villa, met the doctor, who had been invited in to bridge. She talked to him a great deal, and amongst other things she mentioned the Tallands.

“Of course, it’s really no business of mine, doctor, but that poor old woman did look so uncared-for there, with only that grim, ugly woman to look after her. She looked as though she needed company so badly, and I thought, perhaps, if you were to go in and just give her a bright word—”

“I’m afraid bright words, Mrs. Comber,” said the doctor, “are not things that the Talland family care for very much. Last time I was there they were so rude to me that I vowed I’d never go again. But still – I promise you – I’ll try once more.”

“Of course,” said Mrs. Comber, “they’re difficult.”

“Just as though,” the doctor said to his wife afterwards, “she’d been visiting Cornish fishermen all her days.”

In her own mind Mrs. Comber concluded that the doctor had been rough with the poor people, and, of course, they didn’t like that.

Nevertheless, the doctor kept his word and went, and, to his great surprise, was allowed by Janet to examine the old lady and to suggest medicines. Janet did not, indeed, say much to him during the visit; for the most part she remained, with her hands folded, grimly watching her mother, but the doctor was permitted to do what he would.

“Really, Mrs. Comber,” he said after his visit, “you’re a wonderful person. I don’t know what you’ve done to them, but a month ago it was as much as my life was worth to go inside their door.”

And Mrs. Comber was pleased. She now paid a visit every afternoon, and sat there sometimes for half an hour talking to Mrs. Talland. She did not in the least mind the fact that Mrs. Talland was unable to answer her. She liked to have someone to whom she might talk without interruption.

Then she brought the vicar’s wife, who brought tracts and left them on Mrs. Talland’s table. And from their windows the Tresennens watched it all….

And Mrs. Comber was really happy, and spent much more than she could afford on jellies and soups and chickens.

The younger Tallands had watched these things with dumb, gasping amazement. They had always left the treatment of the head of the family in Janet’s capable hands. Janet had invariably good reasons for everything that she did, and it was to be supposed, therefore, that she had good reasons for what she did now. Slowly some inkling of the truth stole in upon them. Very, very slowly they understood.

Meanwhile, what old Mrs. Talland suffered no human being will ever know. She wrote desperately words on the slate that she was given for expressing her desires. But her old fingers were very shaky now.

“Burn,” “Woman,” “Hate,” “Hell,” could be deciphered.

If eyes could have slain, Janet would long ago have been dead. When the washing, dressing and undressing periods arrived, Mrs. Talland would have bitten or strangled or torn her daughter had she been able, but Janet was a very strong woman.

Had only a week passed since this horrible creature’s first arrival? Already the other Tallands, the sons, the daughters-in-law, paid less attention to her. No longer did they come in with soft step “lest Granny should be sleepin’.” They pretended not to hear her when she rattled her slate-pencil at them.

They did not often come to her now and amuse her with the gossip of the town.

She could do nothing – she could do nothing.

Her doom had come upon her.

At last the definite moment of defeat came. Little Annie, who had always, until now, been in the utmost terror of her great-grandmother, was left in charge whilst Janet was busily employed with shopping.

The girl looked at the old woman and then defiantly, if just a little timidly, began to whistle between her teeth in a way that she had always understood was abominable to an older person.

Mrs. Talland rattled her pencil against her slate.

Annie continued to whistle.

Mrs. Talland stamped with her foot (it was a very feeble tap); she clapped her hands together, gnashed her two teeth.

Annie paused a moment, her legs apart, facing the chair.

“Shan’t!” she said, and then, appalled by her daring, ran from the room.

The old woman was alone. Shaking from head to foot, she did what she had not done for many years: she got up from her chair. Leaning on her stick, she tottered to a drawer that was near. From this she extracted something, then tottered back to her place.

With her cap off her head, the cushions tumbling about her, muttering, she began to turn and twist the thing that she had in her hands. It was a piece of old, soiled, grimy wax.

Her brain was fiery with thoughts of that red-faced woman who had ruined her life.

She turned the wax, muttering.

But it would not twist; it was so hard and old. It fell from her nerveless fingers and lay amongst the ashes in the hearth. Her last resort was gone. The old world had faded, the old gods and devils had fled. There was a new order now, a new world.

The end of her life had come. Tired, thin tears trickled slowly down the dried furrows of her cheeks.

Twenty-four hours later she was dead.

“Poor thing,” said Mrs. Comber when she heard of the funeral. “But I’m glad that I did a little something to brighten her last hours.”

“The Story-teller” magazine Feb 1917

All Soul’s Night (1933)

MISS MORGANHURST

It may be that in future years when critics and commentators look back upon the European War, one of the aspects of it that will seem to them strangest will be the attitude of complete indifference that certain people assumed during the course of it. Indifference! That is an inefficient word. It is not too strong to say that hundreds of men and women in London during those horrible years were completely unconscious, save on the rare occasions when rationing or air-raids forced them to attend, that there was any war at all. There were men in clubs, women in drawing-rooms… old maids and old bachelors… old maids like Miss Morganhurst.

How old Miss Morganhurst really was, for how long she had been raising her lorgnette to gaze scornfully at Society, for how many years now she had been sitting down to bridge on fine sunny afternoons with women like Anne Carteledge and Mrs. Mellish and Mrs. Porter, for how many more years she had lived in No. 30 flat at Hortons, she alone had the secret – even Agatha, her sour and confidential maid, could not tell.

No one knew whence she came; years ago some young wag had christened her the “Morgue,” led to that diminutive by the strange pallor of her cheeks, the queer bone-cracking little body she had and her fashion of dressing herself up in jewellery and bright colours that gave her a certain sort of ghastliness. She had been for years an intimate of all sorts of sets in London: no one could call her a snob – she went just everywhere, and knew just everyone; she was after two things in life – scandal and bridge – and whether it were the old Duchess of Wrexe’s drawing-room (without the Duchess of course) or the cheapest sort of provincial tea-party, she was equally at home and satisfied. She was like a ferret with her beady eyes – a dressed-up ferret. Yes, and like the “Morgue” too, a sniff of corruption about her somewhere.

People had said for many years that she was the best bridge-player in London, and that she lived by her winnings. That was, I daresay, true enough. Her pale face looked as though it fed on artificial light, and her over-decorated back was always bent a little, as though she were for ever stooping over a table.

I’ve seen her play bridge, and it’s not a sight one’s likely to forget – bent almost double, her hooky fingers of a dull yellow loaded with rings pointing towards some card and her eyes literally flashing fire. Lord! how these women played! Life and death to them truly… no gentle card-game for them. She was a woman who hated sentiment; her voice was hard and dry, with a rasp in it like the movement of an ill-fitting gate. She boasted that she cared for no human being alive, she did not believe in human affection. Her maid, Agatha, she said, would cut her throat for twopence; but, expecting to be left something in the will, stayed on savagely hoping.

It is hard, however, for even the driest of human souls to he attached to nothing. Miss Morganhurst had her attachment – to a canine, fragment of skin and bone known as Tiny-Tee. Tiny-Tee was so small that it could not have been said to exist had not its perpetual misery given it a kind of spasmodic loveliness. It is the nature of these dogs to shiver and shake and tremble, but nothing ever lived up to its nature more thoroughly than Tiny-Tee. Miss Morganhurst (in her own fierce rasping way) adored this creature. It never left her, and sat on her lap during bridge shuddering and shivering amongst a multitude of little gold chains and keys and purses that jangled and rattled with every shiver.

Then came the war, and it shook the world to pieces. It did not shake Miss Morganhurst.

For one bad moment she fancied that bridge would be difficult and that it might not be easy to provide Tiny-Tee with her proper biscuits. She consulted with Mrs. Mellish and Mrs. Porter, and after looking at the thing from every side they were of opinion that it would be possible still to find a “four.” She further summoned up Mr. Nix from the “vasty deeps” of the chambers and endeavoured to probe his mind. This she did easily, and Mr. Nix became quite confidential. He thoroughly approved of Miss Morganhurst, partly because she knew such very grand people, which was good for his chambers, and partly because Miss Morganhurst had no kind of morals and you could say anything you liked. Mr. Nix was a kindly little man and a diplomatic, and he suited himself to his company; but he did like sometimes to be quite unbuttoned and not to have “to think of every word.”

With Miss Morganhurst you needn’t think of anything. She found his love of gossip very agreeable indeed; she approved, too, of his honourable coda You were safe with him. Not a thing would he ever give away about any other inhabitant of Hortons. She asked him about the food for Tiny-Tee, and he assured her that he would do his best. And the little dinners for four?… She need not be anxious.

After which she dismissed the war altogether from her mind. It would, of course, emphasise its more unagreeable features in the paper. That was unfortunate. But very soon the press cleverly discovered a kind of camouflage of phrase which covered up reality completely. “The honourable gentleman, speaking at Newcastle last night, said that we would not sheathe the sword until—”

“Over the top! those are the words for which our brave lads are waiting—”

“Our offensive in these areas inflicted very heavy losses on the Germans and resulted in the capture of important positions by the Allied troops.”

It seemed that Miss Morganhurst read these phrases for a week or two, and easily persuaded herself that the war was non-existent. She was happy that it was so. It appears incredible that anyone could have dismissed the war so easily, but then Miss Morganhurst was surely impenetrable.

I have heard different explanations given by people, who knew her well, of Miss Morganhurst’s impenetrability. Some said that it was a mask, assumed to cover and defeat feelings that were dangerous to liberate; others, that she was so selfish and egoistic that she really did not care about anybody. This is the interesting point about Miss Morganhurst. Did she banish the war entirely from her consciousness and give it no further consideration, or was she, in truth, desperately and with ever-increasing terror aware of it and unable to resist it?

She gave no sign until the very end; but the nature of that end leads me to believe that the first of the two theories is the correct one. People who knew her have said that her devotion to that wretched little canine remnant proves that she had no heart, but only a fluent sentimentality. I believe it to have proved exactly the opposite. I believe her to have been the cynic she was because she had, at some time or other, been deeply disappointed. She had, I imagine, no illusions about herself, and saw that the only thing to be, if she were to fight at all, was ruthless, harsh, money-grubbing, and, above all, to bury herself in other people’s scandal. She was, I rather fancy, one of those women for whom life would have been completely changed, had she been given beauty or even moderate good looks. As life had not given her that, she would pay it back. And after all, life was stronger than she knew….

She did not refuse to discuss the war, but she spoke of it as of something remotely distant, playing itself out in the sands of the Sahara, for instance. Nothing stirred her cynical humour more deeply than the heroics on both sides. When politicians or kings or generals got up and said before all the world how just their cause was and how keen they were about honour and truth and self-sacrifice, and how certain they were, after all, to win, Miss Morganhurst gave her sinister villainous chuckle.

She became something of a power during the bad years, when the air-raids came and the casualties mounted higher and higher, and Roumania came in only to break, and the Russian revolution led to the sinister ghoulishness of Brest-Litovsk. People sought her company. “We’ll go and see the ‘Morgue,’” they said; “she never mentions the war.” She never did; she refused absolutely to consider it. She would not even discuss prices and raids and ration-books. Private history was what she cared for, and that generally on the scabious side, if possible. What she liked to know was who was sick of her, why so-and-so had left such-and-such a place, whether X – was really drinking, and why Z – had taken to cocaine. Her bridge got better and better, and it used to be a real trial of strength to go and play with her in the untidy, overfull, over-garish little flat. The arrival of the Armistice was, I believe now, her first dangerous moment She was suddenly forced to pause and consider; it was not so easy to shut her eyes and ears as it had been, and the things that she had, against her will, seen and heard were now, in the new silence, insistent She suddenly, as I remember noticing about this time, got to look incredibly old.

Her nose seemed longer, her chin hookier, her hands bonier, and little brown spots like sickly freckles appeared on her forehead.

Her dress got brighter and brighter. She especially affected a kind of purple silk, I remember.

The Armistice seemed to disappoint her. It would have done us people a lot of good to get a thorough trouncing, I remember her saying. What would have happened to herself, and her bridge, had we had that trouncing I don’t think she reflected. So far as one could see, she regarded herself as an inevitable permanency. I wonder whether she really did. She developed, too, just about this time, an increased passion for her wretched little dog. It was as though, now that the war was really nearing its close, she was twice as frightened about that animal’s safety as she had been before? Of what was she afraid? Was it some ghostly warning? Was it some sense that she had that fate was surely going to get her somewhere, and that now that it had missed her through air-raids it must try other means? Or was it simply that she had more time now to spend over the animal’s wants and desires? In any case she would not let the dog out of her sight unless on some most imperative occasion. She trusted Agatha, but no one would take so much care as one would oneself. The dog itself seemed now to be restless and alarmed as though it smelt already its approaching doom. It got, so far as one could see, no pleasure from anything. There were no signs that it loved its mistress, only it did perhaps have a sense that she could protect it from outside disaster. Every step, every word, every breath of wind seemed to drive its little soul to the very edge of extinction – then, with shudderings and shiverings and tremblings, back it came again. They were a grim pair, those two.

Christmas came and passed, and the world began to shake itself together again. That same shaking was a difficult business, attended with strikes and revolutions and murder and despair; but out of the chaos prophets might discern a form slowly rising, a shape that would, stand for a new world, for a better world, a kindlier, a cleaner, honester….

But Miss Morganhurst was no prophet. Her sallow eyes were intent on her bridge-cards – so, at least they appeared to be.

After the catastrophe, I talked with only one person who seemed to have expected what actually occurred. This was a funny old thing called Miss Williams, one of Miss Morganhurst’s more shabby friends – a gossip and a sentimentalist – the last person in the world, as I would have supposed, to see anything interesting.

However, this old lady insisted that she had perceived, during this period, that Miss Morganhurst was “keeping something back.”

“Keeping what back?” I asked. “A guilty secret?”

“Oh, not at all,” said Miss Williams. “Dear me, no. Dahlia wouldn’t have minded anything of that kind. No, it’s my belief she was affected by the war long before any of us supposed it, and that she wouldn’t think of it or look at it because she knew what would happen if she did. She knew, too, that she was being haunted by it all the time, and that it was all piling up, ready, waiting for the moment…. I do hope you don’t think me fantastical—”

I didn’t think her “fantastical” at all, but I must confess that when I look back I can see in the Miss Morganhurst of these months nothing but a colossal egotism and greed.

However, I must not be cruel. It was towards the end of April that fate, suddenly tired of waiting, took her in hand, and finished her off.

One afternoon when, arrayed in a bright pink tea-gown, she was lying on her sofa, taking some rest before dressing for dinner, Agatha came in and said that her brother was there and would like to see her. Now Miss Morganhurst had a very surprising brother – surprising, that is, for her. He was a clergyman who had been for very many years the rector of a little parish in Wiltshire. So little a parish was it that it gave him little work and less pay, with the result that he was, at his advanced age, shabby and moth-eaten and dim, like a poor old bird shut up for many months in a blinded cage and let suddenly into the light I don’t know what Miss Morganhurst’s dealings with her brother had been, whether she had been kind to him or unkind, selfish or unselfish; but I suspect that she had not seen very much of him. Their ways had been too different, their ambitions too separate. The old man had had one passion in his life, his son, and the boy had died in a German prison in the summer of 1918. He had been, it was gathered, in one of the more unpleasant German prisons. Mr. Morganhurst was a widower, and this blow had simply finished him – the thread that connected him with coherent life snapped, and he lived in a world of dim visions and incoherent dreams.

He was not, in fact, quite right in his head.

Agatha must have thought the couple a strange and depressing pair as they stood together in that becoloured and becrowded room, if, that is to say, she ever thought of anything but herself. Poor old Morganhurst was wearing an overcoat really green with age, and his squashy black hat was dusty and unbrushed.

He wore large spectacles, and his chin was of the kind that seems always to have two days’ growth upon it. The bottoms of his trousers were muddy, although it was a dry day. He stood there uneasily twisting his hat round and round in his fingers and blinking at his sister.

“Sit down, Frederick,” said his sister. “What can I do for you?”

It seemed that he had come simply to talk to her. He was going down to Little Roseberry that evening, but he had an hour to spare. The fact was that he was besieged, invaded, devastated by horrors of which he could not rid himself.

If he gave them to someone else might they not leave him? At any rate he would share them – he would share them with his sister. It appeared that an officer, liberated from Germany after the Armistice, had sought him out and given him some last details about his son’s death.

These “details” were not nice. There are, as we all know, German prisons and German prisons. Young Morganhurst seemed to have been sent to one of the poorer sort He had been rebellious and had been punished; he had been starved, shut up for days in solitary darkness… at the end he had found a knife somewhere and had killed himself.

The old man’s mind was like a haystack, and many details lost their way in the general confusion. He told what he could to his sister. It must have been a strange meeting: the shabby old man sitting in one of those gaudy chairs trying to rid himself of his horror and terror and, above all, of his loneliness. Here was the only relation, the only link, the only hope of something human to comfort him in his darkness; and he did not know her, could not see how to appeal to her or to touch her… she was as strange to him as a bird of paradise. She on her side, as I now can see, had her own horror to fight. Here at last was the thing that throughout the war she had struggled to keep away from her. She knew, and she alone, how susceptible she was! But she could not turn him away; he was her brother, and she hated him for coming – shabby old man – but she must hear him out.

She sat there, the dog clutched, shivering to her skinny breast. I don’t suppose that she said very much, but she listened. Against her will she listened, and it must have been with her as it is with some traveller when, in the distance, he hears the rushing of the avalanche that threatens to overwhelm him. But she didn’t close her ears. From what she said afterwards one knows that she must have heard everything that he said.

He very quickly, I expect, forgot that he had an audience at all. The words poured out. There was some German officer who had been described to him and he had grown, in his mind, to he the very devil himself. He was a brute, I daresay, but there are brutes in every country….

“He had done simply nothing – just spoken back when they insulted him. They took his clothes off him – everything. He was quite naked. And they mocked him like that, pricking him with their swords…. They put him into darkness… a filthy place, no sanitation, nothing…. They twisted his arms. They made him imagine things, horrible things. When he had dysentery they just left him…. They made him drink… forced it down his throat….”

How much of it was true? Very little, I daresay. Even as the old man told it details gathered and piled up. “He had always been such a good boy. Very gentle and quiet – never any trouble at school…. I was hoping that he would be ordained, as you know, Dahlia. He always loved life… one of the happiest boys. What did they do it for? He hadn’t done them any harm. They must have made him very angry for him to say what he did – and he didn’t say very much…. And he was all alone. He hadn’t any of his friends with him. And they kept his parcels and letters from him. I’d just sent him one or two little things….”

This, more than anything else, distressed the old man: that they’d kept the letters from the boy. It was the loneliness that seemed to him the most horrible of all.

“He had always hated to be alone. Even as a very little boy be didn’t like to be left in the dark. He used to beg us…. Nightlights, we always left night-lights in his room.. . But what had he done? Nothing. He had never been a bad boy. There was nothing to punish him for.”

The old man didn’t cry. He sniffed and rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand, and once he brought out a dirty handkerchief. The thing that he couldn’t understand was why this had happened to the boy at all. Also he was persecuted by the thought that there was something still that he could do. He didn’t know what it might be, but there must be something. He had no vindictiveness. He didn’t want revenge. He didn’t blame the Germans. He didn’t blame anybody. He only felt that he should “make it up to his boy” somehow. “You know, Dahlia,” he said, “there were times when one was irritated by the boy. I haven’t a very equable temper. No, I never have had. I used to have my headaches, and he was noisy sometimes. And I’m afraid I spoke sharply. I’m sorry enough for it now – indeed, I am. Oh, yes! But, of course, one didn’t know at the time….”

Then he went back to the horrors. They would not leave him, they buzzed about his brain like flies. The darkness, the smell… the smell, the filth, the darkness. And then the end! He could not forget that. What the boy must have suffered to come to that! Such a happy boy!… Why had it happened? And what was to be done now?

He stopped at last and said that he must go and catch his train. He was glad to have talked about it. It had done him good. It was kindly of Dahlia to listen to him. He hoped that Dahlia would come down one day and see him at Little Roseberry. It wasn’t much that he could offer her. It was a quiet little place, and he was alone, but he would be glad to see her. He kissed her, gave her a dim bewildered smile, and went.

Soon after his departure Mrs. Mellish arrived. It is significant of Mrs. Mellish’s general egotism and ignorance that she perceived nothing odd in Miss Morganhurst! Just the same as she always was. They talked bridge the next afternoon. Bridge. Four women. What about Norah Pope? Poor player. That’s the worst of it. Doesn’t see properly and won’t wear glasses. Simply conceit. But still, who else is there? Tomorrow afternoon. Very difficult. Mrs. Mellish admits that on that particular day she was preoccupied about a dress that she couldn’t get back from the dressmakers. These days. What has come to the working-classes? They don’t care. THEY DON’T CASE. Money simply of no importance to them. That’s the strange thing. In the old days you could have done simply everything by offering them a little more…. But not now. Oh, dear no!… She admits that she was preoccupied about the dress, and wasn’t noticing Dahlia Morganhurst as she might have done. She saw nothing odd. It’s my belief that she’ll see nothing odd at the last trump. She went away.

Agatha is the other witness. After Mrs. Mellish’s departure she came in to her mistress. The only thing that she remarked about her was that “she was very quiet.” Tired, I supposed, after talking to that Mrs.

Mellish. And then her old brother and all. Enough to upset anyone.

Miss Morganhurst sat on the edge of her gaudy sofa looking in front of her. When Agatha came in she said that she would not dress just yet. Agatha had better take the dog out for a quarter of an hour. The maid wondered at that because that was a thing that she was never allowed to do. She hated the animal. However, she pushed its monstrous little head inside its absurd little muzzle, put on her hat and went out.

I don’t know what Miss Morganhurst thought about during that quarter of an hour, but when at the end of that time Agatha returned, scared out of her life with the dog dead in her arms, the old lady was sitting in the same spot as before. She can’t have moved. She must have been fighting, I fancy, against the last barrier – the last barrier that kept all the wild beasts back from leaping on her imagination.

Well, that slaughtered morsel of skin and bone finished it. The slaughtering had been the most natural thing in the world. Agatha had put the creature on the pavement for a moment and turned to look in a shop window. Some dog from the other side of the street had enticed the trembling object. It had started tottering across, uttering tiny snorts of sensual excitement behind its absurd muzzle. A Rolls-Royce had done the rest. It had suffered very little damage, and laid out on Miss Morganhurst’s red lacquer table, it really looked finer than it had ever done. Agatha, of course, was terrified. She knew better than anyone how deeply her mistress had loved the poor trembling image. Sobbing, she explained. She was really touched, I think – quite truly touched for half a minute. Then, when she saw how quietly Miss Morganhurst took it, she regained her courage. Miss Morganhurst said nothing but “Yes.” Agatha regained, with her courage, her volubility. Words poured forth. She could needs tell madame how deeply, deeply she regretted her carelessness. She would kill herself for her carelessness if madame preferred that. How she could! Madame might do with her what she wished….

But all that Miss Morganhurst said was “Yes.”

Miss Morganhurst went into her bedroom to dress for dinner, and Tiny-Tee was left, at full length in all her glory, trembling no longer, upon the red lacquer table.

Agatha went downstairs for something, spoke to Fanny, the portress, and returned. Outside the bedroom door, which was ajar, she heard a strange sound, like someone cracking nuts, she described it afterwards. She went in. Miss Morganhurst, her thin grey hair about her neck, clad only in her chemise, was sitting on her bed swinging her bare legs. At sight of Agatha she screeched like a parrot. As Agatha approached she sprang off the bed and advanced at her – her back bent, her fingers bent talon-wise. A stream of words poured from her lips. Every horror, every indecency, every violation of truth and honour that the war had revealed through the press, through books, through letters, seemed to have lodged in that brain. Every murder, every rape, every slaughter of innocent children, every violation of girls and old women – they were all there. She stopped close to Agatha and the words streamed out. At the end of every sentence, with a little sigh, she whispered – “I was there! I was there!… I’ve seen it.”

Agatha, frozen with horror, remained; then, action coming back to her, she fled – Miss Morganhurst pursued her, her bare feet pattering on the carpet. She called Agatha by the name of some obscure German captain.

Agatha found a doctor. When they returned Miss Morganhurst was lying on her face on the floor in the darkness, hiding from what she saw. “I was there, you know,” she whispered to the doctor as he put her to bed.

She died next day. Perhaps, after all, many people have felt the war more than one has supposed…

“Pictorial Review” May 1920

The Thirteen Travellers (1921)

LIZZIE RAND

Lizzie Rand was just forty-six years of age when old Mrs. Roughton McKenzie died leaving her all her money. Months later she had not thoroughly realised what had happened to her.

Until that day of Mrs. McKenzie’s death she had never had any money. She had spent her life, her energies, her pluck and her humour in the service of one human being after another, and generally in the service of women. It seemed to her to be really funny that the one who had during her life begrudged her most should in the end be the one who had given her everything; but no one had ever understood old Mrs. McKenzie, and as likely as not she had left her money to Lizzie Rand just to spite her numerous relations. Lizzie had expected nothing. She never did expect anything, which was as well perhaps, because no one ever gave her anything. She was not a person to whom one naturally gave things; she had a pride, a reserve, an assertion of her own private liberty that kept people away and forbade intimacy. That had not always been so. In the long ago days when she had been Adela Beaminster’s secretary she had given herself. She had loved a man who had not loved her, and out of the shock of that she had won a friendship with another woman, which was still perhaps the most precious thing that she had. But that same shock had been enough for her. She guarded, with an almost hitter ferocity, the purity and liberty of her soul.

All the women whose secretaries she had afterwards been had felt this in her, and most of them had resented it. Old Mrs. McKenzie had resented it more than any of them. She was a selfish, painted, over-decorated old creature, a widow with no children and only nephews and nieces to sigh after her wealth. One of Lizzie’s chief duties had been to keep these nephews and nieces from the door, and this she had done with a certain grim austerity, finding that none of them, cared for the aunt and all for the money. The outraged relations decided, of course, at once that she was a plotting, despicable creature; it is doing her less than justice to say that the idea that the money would be left to her never for a single instant entered her head. Mrs. McKenzie taunted her once for expecting it.

“Of course you’re waiting,” she said, “like all of them, to pick the bones of the corpse.”

Lizzie Rand laughed.

“Now is that like me?” she asked. “And, more important, is it like you?”

Mrs. McKenzie sniggered her tinkling, wheezy snigger. There was a certain honesty between them. They had certain things in common.

“I don’t like you,” she said. “I don’t see how anyone could. You’re too self-sufficient – but you certainly have a sense of humour.”

There had been a time once when many people liked Lizzie, and she reflected now, with a little shudder, that perhaps only one person in the world, Rachel Seddon, the woman friend before-mentioned, liked and understood her. Why had she shut herself off? Why presented so stiff, so immaculate, so cold a personality to the world? She was not stiff, not cold, not immaculate. It was, perhaps, simply that she felt that it was in that way only that she could get her work done, and to do her work thoroughly seemed to her now to be the job best worth while in life.

During the war she had almost broken from her secretaryship and gone forth to do Red Cross work or anything that would help. A kind of timidity that had grown upon her with the years, a sense of her age and of her loneliness, held her back. Twenty years ago she would have gone with the first. Now she stayed with Mrs. McKenzie.

Mrs. McKenzie died on the day of the Armistice, November 11, 1918. Her illness had not been severe. Lizzie had had, at the most, only a week’s nursing; it had been obvious from the first that nothing could save the old lady. Mrs. McKenzie had not looked as though she were especially anxious that anything should save her. She had lain there in scornful silence, asking for nothing, complaining of nothing, despising everything. Lizzie admitted that the old woman died game.

There had followed then that hard, bewildering period that Lizzie knew by now so well where she must pull herself, so reluctantly, so heavily towards the business of finding a new engagement. She did not, of course, expect Mrs. McKenzie to leave her a single penny. She stayed for a week or two with her friend Rachel Seddon. But Rachel, a widow with an only son, was so tumultuously glad at the return of her boy, safe and whole, from the war, that it was difficult for her just then to take any other human being into her heart. She loved Lizzie, and would do anything in the world for her; she was indeed for ever urging her to give up these sterile companionships and secretaryships and come and make her home with her. But Lizzie, this time, felt her isolation as she had never done before.

“I’m getting old,” she thought “And I’m drifting off… soon I shall be utterly alone.” The thought sent little shivering ghosts climbing about her body. She saw in the gay, happy, careless, kindly eyes of young Tom Seddon how old she was to the new generation.

He called her “Aunt Liz,” took her to the theatre, and was an angel… nevertheless an angel happily, almost boastfully, secure in another, warmer planet than hers.

Then came the shock. Mrs. McKenzie had left her everything – the equivalent of about eight thousand pounds a year.

At first her sense was one of an urgent need of rest. She sank back amongst the cushions and pillows of Rachel’s house and refused to think… refused to think at all…. She considered for a moment the infuriated faces of the McKenzie relations. Then they, too, passed from her consciousness.

When she faced the world again, she faced it with the old common sense that had always been her most prominent characteristic. She had eight thousand a year. Well, she would do the very best with it that she could. Rachel, who had appeared to be more deeply excited than she over the event, had various suggestions to offer, but Lizzie had her own ideas. She could not remember the time when she had not planned what she would do when somebody left her money.

She took one of the most charming flats in Hortons, bought beautiful things for it, etchings by D. T. Cameron, one Nevinson, and a John drawing, some Japanese prints; she had books and soft carpets and flowers and a piano; and had the prettiest spare room for a friend. Then she stopped and looked about her. There were certain charities in which she had been always deeply interested, especially one for Poor Gentlewomen. There was a home, too, for illegitimate babies. She remembered, with a happy irony, the occasion when she had tried to persuade Mrs. McKenzie to give something to these charities and had failed…. Well, Mrs. McKenzie was giving now all right. Lizzie hoped that she knew it.

There accumulated around her all the business that clusters about an independent woman with means. She was on committees; many people who would not have looked twice at her before liked her now and asked her to their houses.

Again she stopped and looked about her.

Still there was something that she needed. What was it? Companionship? More than that Affection, a centre to her life; someone who needed her, someone to whom she was of more importance than anyone else in the world. Even a dog….

She was forty-six. Without being plain she was too slight, too hard-drawn, too masculine, above all too old to be attractive to men. An old maid of forty-six. She faced the truth. She gave little dinner-parties, and felt more lonely than ever. Even it seemed there was nobody who wanted to make her a confidante. People wanted her money, but herself not at all. She was not good conversationally. She said sharp sarcastic things that frightened people. People did not want the truth; they wanted things to be wrapped up first, as her mother and sister had wanted them years ago.

She was a failure socially, in spite of her money. She could not be genial, and yet her heart ached for love.

At this moment Mr. Edmund Lapsley appeared. Lizzie met him at a party given by Mrs. Philip Mark in Bryanston Square. Mrs. Mark was an old friend of Rachers, a kindly and clever woman with an ambitious husband who would never get very far.

Her parties were always formed by a strange mixture dictated first by her kind heart and second her desire to have people in her house who might possibly help her husband. Edmund Lapsley originated in the former of these impulses. He was not much to look at – long, lanky, with a high bony head, a prominent Roman nose and large, cracking fingers. He was shabbily dressed, awkward in his manner, and apprehensive.

It was his eyes that first attracted Lizzie’s attention. They were beautiful large brown eyes, with the expression of a lost and lonely dog seated deep in their pupils. He sat with Lizzie in a corner of the crowded drawings room to arrange his long legs so that they should not be in the way, cracked his long fingers together and endeavoured to be interested in the people whom Lizzie pointed out to him.

“That’s Henry Trenchard,” Lizzie said, “that wildlooking boy with the untidy hair…. He’s very clever. Going to be our great novelist…. That’s his sister, Millie. Mrs. Mark’s sister, too. Isn’t she pretty? She’s the loveliest of the family. That stout clergyman is a Trenchard cousin. They all hang together in the most wonderful way, you know. His wife ran away and never came back again. I don’t think I wonder; he looks heavy….” And so on.

Lizzie wondered to herself why she bothered. It was not her habit to gossip, and Mr. Lapsley was obviously not at all interested.

“I beg your pardon,” she said; “you don’t want to know who these people are.”

“No,” he said in a strange, sudden, desperate whisper. “I don’t. I lost my wife only three months ago. I’m trying to go out into the world again. I can’t. It doesn’t do any good.” He gripped his knee with one of his large bony hands.

“I’m so sorry,” Lizzie said. “I didn’t know. How tiresome of me to have gone on chattering like that! You should have stopped me.”

He seemed himself to be surprised at the confession that he had made. He stared at her in a bewildered fashion like an owl suddenly flashed into light. He stared, saying nothing. Suddenly in the same hurried, husky whisper he went on: “Do you mind my talking to you? I want to talk to somebody. I’d like to tell you about her.”

“Please,” said Lizzie, looking into his eyes, they were tender and beautiful, so unlike his ugly body, and full of unhappiness.

He talked; the words tumbled out in an urgent, tremulous confusion.

They had been married, it appeared, ten years, ten wonderful happy years. “How she can have cared for me, that’s what I never understood, Miss – Miss —”

“Rand,” said Lizzie.

“I beg your pardon. Difficult to catch… when you are introduced…. Never understood. I was years older than she. I’m fifty now – forty when I married her, and she was only twenty. Thirty when she – when she died. In childbirth it was. The child, a boy, was born dead. Everyone prophesied disaster. They all told her not to marry me, she was so pretty, and so young, and so brilliant. She sang, Miss Rand, just like a lark. She did, indeed. She was trained in Paris. I oughtn’t to have proposed to her, I suppose. That’s what I tell myself now, but I was carried off my feet, completely off my feet. I couldn’t help myself at all. I loved her from the first moment that I saw her. You know how those things are, Miss Rand. And, in any case, I don’t know. Ten perfect years, that’s a good deal for anyone to have, isn’t it? And she was as happy as I was. It may seem strange to you, looking at me, but it was really so. She thought I was so much cleverer than I was – and better too. It used to make me very nervous sometimes lest she should find me out, you know, and leave me. I always expected that to happen. But she was so charitable to everyone. Never could see the bad side of people, and they were always better with her than with anyone else. We’d always hoped for a child, and then, as the years went on, we gave it up. Edmund, she said to me, we must make it up to one another. And then she told me it was going to be all right. You wouldn’t have believed two ordinary people could be so happy as we were when we knew about it. We made many plans, of course. I was a little apprehensive that I’d be rather old to bring up a child, but she was so young that made it all right – so wonderfully young…. Then she died. It was incredible, of course. I didn’t believe it… I don’t believe it now. She’s not dead. That’s absurd. You’d feel the same if you’d seen her, Miss Rand. So full of life, and then suddenly… nothing at all. It’s impossible. Nature isn’t like that. Things gradually die, don’t they, and change into something else. Not suddenly….”

He broke off. He was clutching his knees and staring in front of him. “I don’t know why I talk to you like this, Miss Rand… I hope you’ll forgive me. I shouldn’t have bothered you.”

“I’m pleased that you have, Mr. Lapsley.” She got up. She felt that he would be glad now to escape. “Won’t you come and see me? I have a flat in Hortons Chambers in Duke Street, No. 42…. Do come. Just telephone.”

He looked up at her, not rising from his seat. Then he got up.

“I will,” he said. “Thank you.”

He was still staring at her, and she knew that he had something further to say. She could see it struggling in his eyes. But she did not want him to confess any more. He would be the kind of man to regret afterwards what he had done. She would not burden his conscience. And yet she had the knowledge that it was something very serious that he wanted to tell her, something that had been, in reality, at the back of all his earlier confession.

She refused the appeal in his eyes, said good-night, took his hand for a moment and turned away.

Afterwards she was talking to Katherine Mark.

“I see you were kind to poor Mr. Lapsley,” Katherine said.

“How sad about his wife!” Lizzie answered.

“Yes. And she really was young and beautiful. No one understood why she married him, but I’ve never seen anything more successful…. I didn’t think he’d come tonight, but I’m fond of him. Philip doesn’t care for him much, but he reminds me of a cousin of ours, John Trenchard, who was killed in Russia in the second year of the war. But John was unhappier than Mr. Lapsley. He never had his perfect years.”

“Yes, that’s something,” Lizzie acknowledged.

It was strange to her afterwards that Edmund Lapsley should persist so vividly in her mind. She saw him with absolute clarity almost as though he were with her in her flat She thought of him a good deal. He needed someone to comfort him, and she needed someone to comfort. She hoped he would come and see her.

He did come, one afternoon, quite unexpectedly and without telephoning first. Fortunately she was there, alone, and wanting someone to talk to. At first he was shy and self-conscious. They talked stiffly about London, and the weather, and the approaching Peace, and whether there would ever be a League of Nations, and how high prices were, and how impossible it was to get servants and when they got them they went…. Lizzie broke ruthlessly in upon this. “It isn’t the least little good, Mr. Lapsley,” she said, “our talking like this. It’s mere waste of time. We both know plenty of people to whom we can chatter this nonsense. Either we are friends, or we are not. If we are friends, we must go a little further. Are we friends?”

He seemed to be at a loss. He blinked at her.

“Yes,” he said.

“Well, then,” she looked at him and smiled. “I don’t want to force your confidence, but there was something that you were anxious to tell me about the other night, some way in which I could help you. I stopped you then, but I don’t want to stop you now. I’ll be honoured indeed if there’s anything I can do.”

He gulped, stammered, then out it came. At the first hint of his trouble it was all that Lizzie could do to repress an impatient gesture. His trouble was – spiritualism.

Of all the tiresome things, of all the things about which she had no patience at all, of all the idiotic, money-wasting imbecilities! He poured it all out. He had read books, at last a friend had taken him… A Dr. Orloff, a very wonderful medium, a very trustworthy man, a man about whom there could be no question.

On the first occasion the results had been poor – on the second occasion his Margaret had spoken to him, actually spoken to him. Oh! but there could be no doubt! Her very voice…. His own voice shook as he spoke of it.

Since then he had been, he was forced to admit, a number of times – almost every day… every day… every afternoon. He talked to Margaret every day now for half an hour or more.

He was sure it was right, he was doing nobody any harm… they two together… it could not be wrong, but… He stopped. Lizzie gave him no help. She sat there looking in front of her. She despised him; she was conscious of a deep and bitter disappointment. She did not know how he could betray his weakness, his softness, his gullibility. She had thought him… She looked up suddenly, knowing that his voice had stopped. He was gazing at her in despair, his eyes wide with an unhappiness that struck deep to his heart “You despise me!” he said.

“Yes,” she answered. “I do.” But she was aware at the same time that she could have gone across to him and put her hand on his head and comforted him. “That’s all false! You know it is. You’re only deluding yourself because you want to persuade yourself – it’s weak of you. Your wife can’t come to you that way.”

“Don’t take it from me!” His voice was an agonised cry. “It’s all I have. It’s true. It’s true. It must be true!”

They were suddenly in contact… she felt a warm sense of protection and pity, a longing to comfort and help so strong that she instinctively put her hand to her heart as though she would restrain it.

“Oh, I didn’t mean,” she cried, “that I’d take anything away from you. No, no – never that. If you thought that I meant that, you’re wrong. Keep anything you’ve got. Perhaps I’m mistaken. The mediums I’ve known have been charlatans. That’s prejudiced me. Then I don’t think I want my friends to come back to me in quite that way…. If it’s true, it seems to be forcing them, against their will, as it were. Oh! I know a great many people now are finding it all true and good. I don’t know anything about it. I shouldn’t have said what I did. And then you see I’ve never lost anyone whom I loved very much.”

“Never?” Mr. Lapsley asked, staring at her with wide-open eyes.

“No, never, I think.”

He got up and came across to her, standing near to her, looking down upon her. She saw that she had aroused his interest, that she had suddenly switched his attention upon herself.

She had aroused him in the only way that he could be aroused, by stirring his pity for her. She knew exactly how suddenly he saw her – as a lonely, unhappy, deserted old maid. She did not mind; that the attention of any one single human being should be centred upon her for herself was a very wonderful, touching thing.

Silence fell between them; the pretty room, grey and silver in the half-light, gathered intimately around them. When at last he went away it seemed that the last ten minutes had added years to their knowledge of one another.

A strange time for Lizzie followed. Edmund Lapsley had rushed into her life with a precipitate urgency that showed how empty before it had been. But there was more than their mere contact in the affair. She was fighting a battle; all her energies were in it; she was ruthless, savage, tooth-and-nail; he should be snatched from this spiritualism.

It was a silent battle. He never spoke to her again of it. He did not say whether he went or not, and she did not ask him. But soon they were meeting almost every day, and she felt with a strange, almost savage pleasure that her influence over him grew with every meeting. She discovered many things about his character. He was weak, undecided, almost subservient, a man whom she would have despised perhaps had it not been for the real sweetness that lay at the roots of him. She very quickly understood how this girl, Margaret, although so young and so ignorant of the world, must have dominated him. “Any woman could!” she thought almost angrily to herself, and yet there was a kind of pride behind her anger.

She would not confess to herself that what she was really fighting was the memory of the dead girl, or, if she confessed at all, it was to console herself with the thought that it was right for him now to “cheer up a little.”

Cheer up he did; it was curious to watch the rapidity with which he responded to Lizzie’s energy and humour and vitality.

At last she challenged him:

“Well, what about Dr. Orloff?” she asked.

He looked at her with a sudden startled glance, then almost under his breath he said: “I don’t go any more; I thought you didn’t want me to.”

So sudden a confession of her power took her breath away. She asked her next question.

“But Margaret?” she said. He answered that as though he were arguing some long-debated question with himself:

“I don’t know,” he replied slowly. “You were right. That wasn’t the proper way to bring her back, even though it were genuine. I must tell you, Miss Rand,” he said suddenly flinging up his head and looking across at her, “you’ve shown me so many things since we first met. I was getting into a very bad way, indulging myself in my grief. Margaret wouldn’t have liked that either, but it wasn’t until I knew you that I saw what I was doing. Thank you.”

“Oh, you mustn’t!” She shook her head. “You mustn’t take me for Gospel like that Mr. Lapsley. You make me frightened for my responsibility. We are friends, and we must help one another, but we must keep our independence.”

He shook his head, smiling.

“There’s always been somebody who’s taken my independence away,” he said. “And I like it.”

After he had gone she had the tussle of her life. She ate dinner alone, then sat far into the night fighting. Why should she fight at all? Here was the charge given straight into her hand, the gift for which she had longed and longed, the very man for her, the man whom she could care for as she would her child. Care for and protect and guide and govern. Govern! Like a torch flaring between dark walls that word lit her soul for her. Govern! That was what she wanted; all her life she had wanted it.

She wanted to feel her power, to dominate, to command. And all for his good. She loved him, she loved his sweetness and his goodness and his simplicity. She could make him happy and contented and at ease for the rest of his days. He should never have another anxiety, never another responsibility. Why fight then? Wasn’t it obviously the best thing in the world, both for him and for her? She needed him. He her. She abandoned herself then to happy, tender thoughts of their life together. What it would be! What they could do with old Mrs. McKenzie’s money! She sat there trying to lose herself in that golden future. She could not quite lose herself. Threading it was again and again the warning that something was not right with it, that she was pursuing some course that she should not. The clock struck half-past eleven. She gave a little shiver. The room was cold. She knew then, with that little shiver, of what she had been thinking. Margaret Lapsley….

Why should she he thinking of her? She was dead. She could not complain. And if she were still consciously with them, surely she would rather that he should he cared for and loved and guarded than pursue a lonely life full of regrets and melancholy. What kind of girl had she been? Had she loved him as he had loved her? How young she had died! How young and fresh and happy!… Lizzie shivered again. Ah! She was old. Fifty and old – old in thoughts and hopes and dreams. Pervaded by a damp mist of unhappiness, she went to bed and lay there, looking into the dark.

With the morning her scruples had vanished. She saw Margaret Lapeley no more. She was her own sane, matter-of-fact mistress. A delightful fortnight followed. All her life afterwards Lizzie looked hack to those fourteen days as the happiest of her time. They were together now every afternoon. Very often in the evening too they went to the theatre or music. He was her faithful dog. He agreed with all her suggestions, eagerly, implicitly. Mentally, he was not stupid; he knew many things that she did not, and he was not so submissive that he would not argue. He argued hotly, growing excited, calling out protests in a high treble, then suddenly laughing like a child. For those days she abandoned herself utterly. She allowed herself to be surrounded, to be hemmed in, by the companionship, the care, the affection…. Oh, it was wonderful for her! Only those who had known her years and years of loneliness could appreciate what it was to her now to have this. She warmed her hands at the fire of it and let the flames fan their heat upon her cheeks.

Once she said to him:

“Isn’t it strange that we should have made friends so quickly? It isn’t generally my way. I’m a shy character, you know.”

“So am I,” he answered her. “I never would have talked to you as I have if you hadn’t helped me. You have helped me. Wonderfully, marvellously. I only wish that Margaret could have known you. You would have helped her too.”

He talked to her now continually of Margaret, but very happily, with great contentment.

“Margaret would have loved you,” he liked to say. Lizzie was not so sure.

Then suddenly came the afternoon, for days past now inevitable, when he asked her to marry him.

They were sitting together in the Horton flat. It was a day of intense heat. All the windows were wide open, the blinds down, and into the dim, grey shadowy air there struck shafts and lines of heat, bringing with them a smell of dust and pavements. The roses in a large yellow bowl on the centre table flung their thick scent across the dusky mote-threaded light. The hot town lay below them like a still sea basking at the foot of their rock.

“I want you to marry me, Lizzie,” he said. “It may seem very soon after Margaret’s death, but it’s what she would have wished, I know. Please, please don’t refuse me. I don’t know how I have the impertinence to ask, but I must. I can’t help myself—”

At his words the happiness that had filled her heart during the last fortnight suddenly left her, as water ebbs out of a pool. She felt guilty, wicked, ashamed. She had never before been so aware of his helplessness and also of some strange, reproaching voice that blamed her. Why should she be blamed? She looked at him and longed to take his head in her hands and kiss him and keep him beside her and never let him go again.

At last she told him that she would give him her answer the next day.

When at last he left her, she was miserable, weighted with a sense of some horrible crime. And yet why? What was there against such a marriage? She was pursued that evening, that night. Next day she would not see him, but sent down word that she was unwell and would he come tomorrow? All that day, keeping alone in her flat, feeling the waves of heat beat about her, tired, exhausted, driven, the whole of her life stole past her.

“Why should I not marry him? Why must I not marry him?”

The consciousness that she was fighting somebody or something grew with her through the day. Towards evening, when the heat faded and dusk swallowed the colours and patterns of her room, she seemed to hear a voice: “You are not the wife for him. He will have no freedom. He will lose his character. He will become a shadow.”

And her answer was almost spoken to the still and empty room. “But he will be happy. I will give him everything. Why may I not think of myself at last after all these years? I’ve waited and waited, and worked and worked….”

And the answer came back: – “You’re old. You’re old. You’re old.” She was old. She felt that night eighty, a hundred.

She went to bed at last; closed her eyes and slept.

She woke suddenly; the room swam in moonlight. She had forgotten to draw her blinds. The high, blue expanse of heaven flashing with fiery stars broke the grey spaces of her room with splendour.

She lay in bed watching the stars. She was suddenly aware that a figure stood there between her bed and the thin shadowy pane. She gazed at it with no fear, but rather as though she had known it before.

It was the figure of a young girl in a white dress. Her hair was black, her face very, very young, her eyes deep and innocent, full of light. Her hands were lovely, thin and pale, shell-coloured against the starry sky.

The women looked at one another. A little unspoken dialogue fell between them.

“You are Margaret?”

“Yes.”

“You have come to tell me to leave him alone?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Oh, don’t you see? He won’t be happy. He won’t grow. His soul won’t grow with you. You are not the woman for him. Someone else – perhaps – later – but oh! let me have him a little longer just now. I love him so! Don’t take him from me!”

Lizzie smiled.

“You beautiful dear! How young you are! How lovely!”

“Leave him to me! Leave him to me!”

The moon fell into fleecy clouds. The room was filled with shadow.

With the morning nothing had been dimmed. Lizzie was happy with a strange sense of companionship and comfort.

When Edmund came she saw at once that he was greatly troubled.

“Well?” he asked her.

“You’ve seen Margaret!” she cried. “Last night!” He nodded his head.

“It may have been a dream….”

“You don’t want to marry me….”

“Oh, yes! Don’t think I would go back….” She put her hands on his shoulders.

“It’s all right, Edmund. I’m not going to marry you. I’m too old. We’re friends for always, but nothing more. Margaret was right.”

“Margaret!” He stared at her. “But you didn’t know her!”

“I know her now,” she answered. Then, laughing, “I’ve got two friends instead of one husband! Who knows that I’m not the richer?”

As she spoke she seemed to feel on her cheek the soft, gentle kiss of a young girl.

“Pictorial Review” Jan 1921

The Thirteen Travellers (1921)

MRS. PORTER AND MISS ALLEN

One of the largest flats on the fourth floor of Hortons was taken in March, 1919, by a Mrs. Porter, a widow. The flat was seen, and all business in connection with it was done, by a Miss Allen, her lady companion. Mr. Nix, who considered himself a sound and trenchant judge of human nature, liked Miss Allen from the first; and then when he saw Mrs. Porter he liked her too. These were just the tenants for Hortons – modest, gentle ladies with ample means and no extravagant demands on human nature. Mrs. Porter was one of those old ladies, now, alas, in our turbulent times, less and less easy to discover – “something straight out of a book,” Mr. Nix called her. She was little and fragile, dressed in silver grey, forehead puckered a little with a sort of anticipation of being a trial to others, her voice cultured, soft, a little remote like the chime of a distant clock. She moved with gestures a little deprecatory, a little resigned, extremely modest – she would not disturb anyone for the world….

Miss Allen was, of course, another type – a woman of perhaps forty years of age, refined, quiet, efficient, her dark hair, turning now a little grey, waved decorously from her high white forehead, pince-nez, eyes of a grave, considering brown, a woman resigned, after, it might be, abandoning young ambitions for a place of modest and decent labour in the world – one might still see, in the rather humorous smile that she bestowed once and again upon men and things, the hint of defiance at the necessity that forced abnegation.

Miss Allen had not been in Mrs. Porter’s service for very long. Wearied with the exactions of a family of children whose idle and uninspiring intelligences she was attempting to governess, she answered, at the end of 1918, an advertisement in the “Agony” column of The Times, that led her to Mrs. Porter. She loved Mrs. Porter at first sight.

“Why, she’s a dear old lady,” she exclaimed to her ironic spirit – “dear old ladies” being in those days as rare as crinolines. She was of the kind for which Miss Allen had unconsciously been looking: generous, gentle, refined, and intelligent Moreover, she had, within the last six months, been left quite alone in the world – Mr. Porter had died of apoplexy in August, 1918. He had left her very wealthy, and Miss Allen discovered quickly in the old lady a rather surprising desire to see and enjoy life – surprising, because old ladies of seventy-one years of age and of Mrs. Porter’s gentle appearance do not, as a rule, care for noise and bustle and the buzz of youthful energy.

“I want to be in the very middle of things, dear Miss Allen,” said Mrs. Porter, “right in the very middle. We lived at Wimbledon long enough, Henry and I – it wasn’t good for either of us. Find me somewhere within two minutes of all the best theatres.”

Miss Allen found Hortons, which is, as everyone knows, in Duke Street, just behind Piccadilly and Fortnum and Mason’s, and Hatchard’s and the Hammam Turkish Baths and the Royal Academy and Scott’s hat-shop and Jackson’s Jams – how could you be more perfectly in the centre of London?

Then Miss Allen discovered a curious thing – namely, that Mrs. Porter did not wish to keep a single piece, fragment, or vestige of her Wimbledon effects. She insisted on an auction – everything was sold. Miss Allen attempted a remonstrance – some of the things in the Wimbledon house were very fine, handsome, solid mid-Victorian sideboards and cupboards, and chairs and tables.

“You really have no idea, Mrs. Porter,” said Miss Allen, “of the cost of furniture these days. It is quite terrible; you will naturally get a wonderful price for your things, but the difficulty of buying—”

Mrs. Porter was determined. She nodded her bright bird-like head, tapped with her delicate fingers on the table and smiled at Miss Allen.

“If you don’t mind, dear. I know it’s tiresome for you, but I have my reasons.” It was not tiresome at all for Miss Allen; she loved to buy pretty new things at someone else’s expense, but it was now, for the first time, that she began to wonder how dearly Mrs. Porter had loved her husband.

Through the following weeks this became her principal preoccupation – Mr. Henry Porter. She could not have explained to herself why this was. She was not, by nature, an inquisitive and scandal-loving woman, nor was she unusually imaginative. People did not, as a rule, occur to her as existing unless she saw them physically there in front of her. Nevertheless she spent a good deal of her time in considering Mr. Porter.

She was able to make the Horton flat very agreeable. Mrs. Porter wanted “life and colour,” so the sitting-room had curtains with pink roses and a bright yellow cage with two canaries, and several pretty watercolours, and a handsome fire-screen with golden peacocks, and a deep Turkish carpet, soft and luxurious to the feet. Not one thing from the Wimbledon house was there, not any single picture of Mr. Porter. The next thing that Miss Allen discovered was that Mrs. Porter was nervous.

Although Hortons sheltered many human beings within its boundaries, it was, owing to the thickness of its walls and the beautiful training of Mr. Nix’s servants, a very quiet place. It had been even called in its day “cloistral.” It simply shared with London that amazing and never-to-be-overlauded gift of being able to offer, in the very centre of the traffic of the world, little green spots of quiet and tranquillity. It seemed, after a week or two, that it was almost too quiet for Mrs. Porter.

“Open a window, Lucy dear, won’t you,” she said. “I like to hear the omnibuses.”

It was a chill evening in early April, but Miss Allen threw up the window. They sat there listening. There was no sound, only suddenly, as though to accentuate the silence, St. James’s Church clock struck the quarter. Then an omnibus rumbled, rattled, and was gone. The room was more silent than before.

“Shall I read to you?” said Miss Allen.

“Yes, dear, do.” And they settled down to Martin Chuzzlewit.

Mrs. Porter’s apprehensiveness became more and more evident She was so dear an old lady, and had won so completely Miss Allen’s heart, that that kindly woman could not bear to see her suffer. For the first time in her life she wanted to ask questions. It seemed to her that there must be some very strange reason for Mrs. Porter’s silences. She was not by nature a silent old lady; she talked continually, seemed, indeed, positively to detest the urgency of silence. She especially loved to tell Miss Allen about her early days. She had grown up as a girl in Plymouth, and she could remember all the events of that time – the balls, the walks on the Hoe, the shops, the summer visits into Glebeshire, the old dark house with the high garden walls, the cuckoo clock and the pictures of the strange old ships in which her father, who was a retired sea-captain, had sailed. She could not tell Miss Allen enough about these things, but so soon as she arrived at her engagement to Mr. Porter there was silence. London shrouded her married life with its thick, grey pall. She hated that Miss Allen should leave her. She was very generous about Miss Allen’s freedom, always begging her to take an afternoon or evening and amuse herself with her own friends; but Miss Allen had very few friends, and on her return from an expedition she always found the old lady miserable, frightened, and bewildered. She found that she loved her, that she cared for her as she had cared for no human being for many years, so she stayed with her and read to her and talked to her, and saw less and less of the outside world.

The two ladies made occasionally an expedition to a theatre or a concert, but these adventures, although they were anticipated with eagerness and pleasure, were always in the event disappointing. Mrs. Porter loved the theatre – especially did she adore plays of sentiment – plays where young people were happily united – where old people sat cosily together reminiscing over a blazing fire, where surly guardians were suddenly generous, and poor orphan girls were unexpectedly given fortunes.

Mrs. Porter started her evening with eager excitement. She dressed for the occasion, putting on her best lace cap, her cameo brooch, her smartest shoes. A taxi came for them, and they always had the best stalls, near the front, so that the old lady should not miss a word. Miss Allen noticed, however, that very quickly Mrs. Porter began to be disturbed. She would glance around the theatre and soon her colour would fade, her hands begin to tremble; then, perhaps at the end of the first act, perhaps later, a little hand would press Miss Allen’s arm:

“I think, dear, if you don’t mind – I’m tired – shall we not go?”

After a little while Miss Allen suggested the Cinema. Mrs. Porter received the idea with eagerness. They went to the West-End house, and the first occasion was a triumphant success. How Mrs. Porter loved it! Just the kind of a story for her – Mary Pickford in Daddy Long Legs. To tell the truth, Mrs. Porter cried her eyes out. She swore that she had never in her life enjoyed anything so much. And the music! How beautiful! How restful! They would go every week….

The second occasion was, unfortunately, disastrous. The story was one of modem life, a woman persecuted by her husband, driven by his brutality into the arms of her lover. The husband was the customary cinema villain – broad, stout, sneering, and over-dressed. Mrs. Porter fainted and had to be carried out by two attendants. A doctor came to see her, said that she was suffering from nervous exhaustion and must be protected from all excitement…. The two ladies sat now every evening in their pretty sitting-room, and Miss Allen read aloud the novels of Dickens one after the other.

More and more persistently, in spite of herself, did curiosity about the late Mr. Porter drive itself in upon Miss Allen. She told herself that curiosity itself was vulgar and unworthy of the philosophy that she had created for herself out of life. Nevertheless it persisted. Soon she felt that, after all, it was justified. Were she to help this poor old lady to whom she was now most deeply attached, she must know more. She could not give her any real help unless she might gauge more accurately her trouble – but she was a shy woman, shy, especially, of forcing personal confidences. She hesitated; then she was aware that a barrier was being created between them. The evening had many silences, and Miss Allen detected many strange, surreptitious glances thrown at her by the old lady. The situation was impossible. One night she asked her a question.

“Dear Mrs. Porter,” she said, her heart beating strangely as she spoke, “I do hope that you will not think me impertinent, but you have been so good to me that you have made me love you. You are suffering, and I cannot bear to see you unhappy. I want, oh, so eagerly, to help you! Is there nothing I can do?”

Mrs. Porter said nothing. Her hands quivered; then a tear stole down her cheek. Miss Allen went over to her, sat down beside her and took her hand.

“You must let me help you,” she said. “Dismiss me if I am asking you questions that I should not. But I would rather leave you altogether, happy though I am with you, than see you so miserable. Tell me what I can do.”

“You can do nothing, Lucy dear,” said the old lady.

“But I must be able to do something. You are keeping from me some secret—”

Mrs. Porter shook her head….

It was one evening in early May that Miss Allen was suddenly conscious that there was something wrong with the pretty little sitting-room, and it was shortly after her first consciousness of this that poor old Mrs. Porter revealed her secret. Miss Allen, looking up for a moment, fancied that the little white marble clock on the mantelpiece had ceased to tick.

She looked across the room, and for a strange moment fancied that she could see neither the clock nor the mantelpiece – a grey dimness filled her sight. She shook herself, glanced down at her hands, looked up for reassurance, and found Mrs. Porter, with wide, terrified eyes, staring at her, her hands trembling against the wood of the table.

“What is it, Lucy?”

“Nothing, Mrs. Porter.”

“Did you see something?”

“No, dear.”

“Oh, I thought… I thought…” Suddenly the old lady, with a fierce impetuous movement, pushed the table away from her. She got up, staggered for a moment on her feet, then tumbled to the pink sofa, cowering there, huddled, her sharp, fingers pressing against her face.

“Oh, I can’t bear it… I can’t bear it… I can’t bear it any more! He’s coming. He’s coming. Oh, what shall I do? What shall I do?”

Miss Allen, feeling nothing but love and affection for her friend, but realising strangely too the dim and muted attention of the room, knelt down beside the sofa and put her strong arms around the trembling, fragile body.

“What is it? Dear, dear Mrs. Porter. What is it? Who is coming? Of whom are you afraid?”

“Henry’s coming! Henry, who hated me. He’s coming to carry me away!”

“But Mr. Porter’s dead!”

“Yes….” The little voice was now the merest whisper. “But he’ll come all the same…. He always does what he says!”

The two women waited, listening. Miss Allen could hear the old lady’s heart thumping and leaping close to her own. Through the opened windows came the sibilant rumble of the motor-buses. Then Mrs. Porter gently pushed Miss Allen away. “Sit on a chair, Lucy dear. I must tell you everything. I must share this with someone.”

She seemed to have regained some of her calmness. She sat straight up upon the sofa, patting her lace cap with her hands, feeling for the cameo brooch at her breast. Miss Allen drew a chair close to the sofa; turning again towards the mantelpiece, she saw that it stood out boldly and clearly; the tick of the clock came across to her with almost startling urgency.

“Now, dear Mrs. Porter, what is it that is alarming you?” she said.

Mrs. Porter cleared her throat. “You know, Lucy, that I was married a great many years ago. I was only a very young girl at the time, very ignorant of course, and you can understand, my dear, that my father and mother influenced me very deeply. They liked Mr. Porter. They thought that he would make me a good husband and that I should be very happy…. I was not happy, Lucy dear, never from the very first moment!”

Here Mrs. Porter put out her hand and took Miss Allen’s strong one. “I am very willing to believe that much of the unhappiness was due to myself. I was a young, foolish girl; I was disturbed from the very first by the stories that Mr. Porter told me, and the pictures he showed me. I was foolish about those things. He saw that they shocked me, and I think that that amused him. From the first it delighted him to tease me. Then – soon – he tired of me. He had mistresses. He brought them to our house. He insulted me in every way possible. I had years of that misery. God only knows how I lived through it. It became a habit with him to frighten and shock me. It was a game that he loved to play. I think he wanted to see how far I would go. But I was patient through all those many years. Oh! so patient! It was weak, perhaps, but there seemed nothing else for me to be.

“The last twenty years of our married life he hated me most bitterly. He said that I had scorned him, that I had not given him children, that I had wasted his money – a thousand different things! He tortured me, frightened me, disgusted me, but it never seemed to be enough for him, for the vengeance he felt I deserved. Then one day he discovered that he had a weak heart – a doctor frightened him. He saw perhaps for a moment in my eyes my consciousness of my possible freedom. He took my arm and shook me, bent his face close to mine, and said: ‘Ah, you think that after I’m dead you will be free. You are wrong. I will leave you everything that I possess, and then – just as you begin to enjoy it – I will come and fetch you!’ What a thing to say, Lucy, dear! He was mad, and so was I to listen to him. All those years of married life together had perhaps turned both our brains. Six months later he fell down in the street dead. They brought him home, and all that summer afternoon, my dear, I sat beside him in the bedroom, he all dressed in his best clothes and his patent leather shoes, and the band playing in the Square outside. Oh! he was dead, Lucy dear, he was indeed. For a week or two I thought that he was gone altogether. I was happy and free. – Then – oh, I don’t know – I began to imagine – to fancy…. I moved from Wimbledon. I advertised for someone, and you came. We moved here…. It ought to be… it is… it must be all right, Lucy dear; hold me, hold me tight! Don’t let me go! He can’t come back! He can’t, he can’t!”

She broke into passionate sobbing, cowering back on to the sofa as she had done before. The two women sat there, comforting one another. Miss Allen gathered the frail, trembling little body into her arms, and like a mother with her child, soothed it.

But, as she sat there, she realised with a chill shudder of alarm that moment, a quarter of an hour before, when the room had been dimmed and the clock stilled. Had that been fancy? Had some of Mrs. Porter’s terror seized her in sympathy? Were they simply two lonely women whose nerves were jagged by the quiet monotony and seclusion of their lives? Why was it that from the first she, so unimaginative and definite, should have been disturbed by the thought of Mr. Porter? Why was it that even now she longed to know more surely about him, his face, his clothes, his height… everything.

“You must go to bed, dear. You are tired out. Your nerves have never recovered from the time of Mr. Porter’s death. That’s what it is…. You must go to bed, dear.”

Mrs. Porter went. She seemed to be relieved by her outburst. She felt perhaps now less lonely. It seemed, too, that she had less to fear now that she had betrayed her ghost into sunlight. She slept better that night than she had done for a long time past. Miss Allen sat beside the bed staring into the darkness, thinking….

For a week after this they were happy. Mrs. Porter was in high spirits. They went to the Coliseum and heard Miss Florence Smithson sing “Roses of Picardy,” and in the Cinema they were delighted with the charm and simplicity of Alma Taylor. Mrs. Porter lost her heart to Alma Taylor. “That’s a sweet girl,” she said. “I would like to meet her. I’m sure she’s good.”

“I’m sure she is,” said Miss Allen. Mrs. Porter made friends in the flat. Mr. Nix met them one day at the bottom of the lift and talked to them so pleasantly. “What a gentleman!” said Mrs. Porter afterwards as she took off her bonnet.

Then one evening Miss Allen came into the sitting-room and stopped dead, frozen rigid on the threshold. Someone was in the room. She did not at first think of Mr. Porter. She was only sure that someone was there. Mrs. Porter was in her bedroom changing her dress.

Miss Allen said, “Who’s there?” She walked forward. The dim evening saffron light powdered the walls with trembling colour. The canaries twittered, the clock ticked; no one was there. After that instant of horror she was to know no relief. It was as though that spoken “Who’s there?” had admitted her into the open acceptance of a fact that she ought for ever to have denied.

She was a woman of common sense, of rational thought, scornful of superstition and sentiment. She realised now that there was something quite definite for her to fight, something as definite as disease, as pain, as poverty and hunger. She realised too that she was there to protect Mrs. Porter from everything – yes, from everything and everybody!

Her first thought was to escape from the flat, and especially from everything in the flat – from the pink sofa, the gate-legged table, the bird-cage and the clock. She saw then that, if she yielded to this desire, they would be driven, the two of them, into perpetual flight, and that the very necessity of escaping would only admit the more the conviction of defeat. No, they must stay where they were; that place was their battleground.

She determined, too, that Mr. Porter’s name should not be mentioned between them again. Mrs. Porter must be assured that she had forgotten his very existence.

Soon she arrived at an exact knowledge of the arrival of these “attacks,” as she called them. That month of May gave them wonderful weather. The evenings were so beautiful that they sat always with the windows open behind them, and the dim colour of the night-glow softened the lamplight and brought with it scents and breezes and a happy murmurous undertone. She received again and again in these May evenings that earlier impression of someone’s entrance into the room. It came to her, as she sat with her back to the fireplace, with the conviction that a pair of eyes were staring at her. Those eyes willed her to him, and she would not; but soon she seemed to know them, cold, hard, and separated from her, she fancied, by glasses. They seemed, too, to bend down upon her from a height. She was desperately conscious at these moments of Mrs. Porter. Was the old lady also aware? She could not tell. Mrs. Porter still cast at her those odd, furtive glances, as though to see whether she suspected anything, but she never looked at the fireplace nor started as though the door was suddenly opened.

There were times when Miss Allen, relaxing her self-control, admitted without hesitation that someone was in the room. He was tall, wore spectacles behind which he scornfully peered. She challenged him to pass her guard and even felt the stiff pride of a victorious battle. They were fighting for the old lady, and she was winning….

At all other moments she scorned herself for this weakness. Mrs. Porter’s nerves had affected her own. She had not believed that she could be so weak. Then, suddenly, one evening Mrs. Porter dropped her cards, crumpled down into her chair, screamed, “No, no… Lucy!… Lucy! He’s here!…”

She was strangely, at the moment of that cry, aware of no presence in the room. It was only when she had gathered her friend into her arms, persuading her that there was nothing, loving her, petting her, that she was conscious of the dimming of the light, the stealthy withdrawal of sound. She was facing the fireplace; before the mantelpiece there seemed to her to hover a shadow, something so tenuous that it resembled a film of dust against the glow of electric light. She faced it with steady eyes and a fearless heart.

But against her will her soul admitted that confrontation. From that moment Mrs. Porter abandoned disguise. Her terror was now so persistent that soon, of itself, it would kill her. There was no remedy; doctors could not help, nor change of scene. Only if Miss Allen still saw and felt nothing could the old lady still hope. Miss Allen lied and lied again and again.

“You saw nothing, Lucy?”

“Nothing.”

“Not there by the fireplace?”

“Nothing, dear…. Of course, nothing!”

Events from then moved quickly, and they moved for Miss Allen quite definitely in the hardening of the sinister shadow. She led now a triple existence: one life was Mrs. Porter’s, devoted to her, delivered over to her, helping her, protecting her; the second life was her own, her rational, practical self, scornful of shadow and of the terror of death; the third was the struggle with Henry Porter, a struggle now as definite and concrete as though he were a blackmailer confining her liberty.

She could never tell when he would come, and with every visit that he paid he seemed to advance in her realisation of him. It appeared that he was always behind her, staring at her through those glasses that had, she was convinced, large gold rims and thin gold wires. She fancied that she had before her a dim outline of his face – pale, the chin sharp and pointed, the ears large and protuberant, the head dome-shaped and bald. It was now that, with all her life and soul in the struggle for her friend, she realised that she did not love her enough. The intense love of her life had been already in earlier years given. Mrs. Porter was a sweet old lady, and Miss Allen would give her life for her – but her soul was atrophied a little, tired a little, exhausted perhaps in the struggle so sharp and persistent for her own existence.

“Oh, if I were younger I could drive him away!” came back to her again and again. She found too that her own fear impeded her own self-sacrifice. She hated this shadow as something strong, evil, like mildew on stone, chilling breath. “I’m not brave enough…. I’m not good enough…. I’m not young enough!” Incessantly she tried to determine how real her sensations were. Was she simply influenced by Mrs. Porter’s fear? Was it the blindest imagination? Was it bred simply of the close, confined life that they were leading?

She could not tell. They had resumed their conspiracy of silence, of false animation and ease of mind. They led their daily lives as though there was nothing between them. But with every day Mrs. Porter’s strength was failing; the look of horrified anticipation in her eyes was now permanent. At night they slept together, and the little frail body trembled like a leaf in Miss Allen’s arms.

The appearances were now regularised. Always when they were in the middle of their second game of “Patience” Miss Allen felt that impulse to turn, that singing in her ears, the force of his ironical gaze. He was now almost complete to her, standing in front of the Japanese screen, his thin legs apart, his hostile, conceited face bent towards them, his pale, thin hands extended as though to catch a warmth that was not there.

A Sunday evening came. Earlier than usual they sat down to their cards. Through the open window shivered the jangled chimes of the bells of St. James’s.

“Well, he won’t come yet.” was Miss Allen’s thought. Then with that her nightly resolve: “When he comes I must not turn – I must not look. She must not know that I know.”

Suddenly he was with them, and with a dominant force, a cruelty, a determination that was beyond anything that had been before.

“Four, five, six….” The cards trembled in Mrs. Porter’s hand. “And there’s the spade, Lucy dear.”

He came closer. He was nearer to her than he had ever been. She summoned all that she had – her loyalty, her love, her honesty, her self-discipline. It was not enough.

She turned. He was there as she had always known that she would see him, his cruel, evil, supercilious face, conscious of its triumph, bent toward them, his grey clothes hanging loosely about his thin body, his hands spread out. He was like an animal about to spring.

“God help me! God help me!” she cried. With those words she knew that she had failed. She stood as though she would protect with her body her friend. She was too late.

Mrs. Porter’s agonised cry, “You see him, Lucy!… You see him, Lucy!” warned her.

“No, no,” she answered. She felt something like a cold breath of stagnant water pass her. She turned back to see the old woman tumble across the table, scattering the little cards.

The room was emptied. They two were alone; she knew, without moving, horror and self-shame holding her there, that her poor friend was dead.

“Hutchinson’s Story Magazine” Feb 1921

The Thirteen Travellers (1921)

MAJOR WILBRAHAM

I am quite aware that in giving you this story, just as I was told it, I shall incur the charge of downright and deliberate lying.

Especially I shall be told this by anyone who knew Wilbraham personally. Wilbraham was not, of course, his real name, but I think that there are certain people who will recognise him from the description of him. I do not know that it matters very much if they do. Wilbraham himself would certainly not mind did he know. (Does he know?) It was the thing, above all, that he wanted those last hours before he died: that I should pass on my conviction of the truth of what he told me to others. What he did not know was that I was not convinced. How could I be? But when the whole comfort of his last hours hung on the simple fact that I was, of course I pretended to the best of my poor ability. I would have done more than that to make him happy.

Most men are conscious at some time in their lives of having felt for a member of their own sex an emotion that is something more than simple companionship. It is a queer feeling quite unlike any other in life, distinctly romantic, and the more so, perhaps, for having no sex feeling in it.

Wilbraham roused just that feeling in me I remember, with the utmost distinctness, at my first meeting with him. It was just after the Boer War, and old Johnny Beaminster gave a dinner-party to some men pals of his at the Phoenix.

There were about fifteen of us, and Wilbraham was the only man present I’d never seen before. He was only a captain then, and neither so red-faced nor so stout as he afterwards became. He was pretty bulky, though, even then, and, with his sandy hair cropped close, his staring blue eyes, his toothbrush moustache, and sharp, alert movements, looked the typical traditional British officer.

There was nothing at all to distinguish him from a thousand other officers of his kind, and yet, from the moment I saw him, I had some especial and personal feeling about him. He was not in type at all the man to whom at that time I should have felt drawn, but the fact remains that I wanted to know him more than any other man in the room, and, although I only exchanged a few words with him that night, I thought of him for quite a long time afterwards.

It did not follow from this, as it ought to have done, that we became great friends. That we never were, although it was myself whom he sent for, three days before his death, to tell me his queer little story. It was then, at the very last, that he confided to me that he, too, had felt something at our first meeting “different” from what one generally feels, that he had always wanted to turn our acquaintance into friendship and had been too shy. I also was shy – and so we missed one another, as I suppose, in this funny, constrained-traditional country of ours, thousands of people miss one another every day.

But although I did not see him very often, and was in no way intimate with him, I kept my ears open for any account of his doings. From one point of view – the club window outlook – he was a very usual figure, one of those stout, rubicund, jolly men, a good polo player, a good man in a house-party, genial-natured, and none-too-brilliantly brained, whom everyone liked and no one thought about. All this he was on one side of the report, but, on the other, there were certain stories that were something more than ordinary.

Wilbraham was obviously a sentimentalist and an enthusiast; there was the extraordinary case shortly after I first met him of his championship of X., a man who had been caught card-sharping and received a year’s imprisonment for it. On X. leaving prison, Wilbraham championed and defended him, put him up for months in his rooms in Duke Street, walked as often as possible in his company down Piccadilly, and took him over to Paris. It says a great deal for Wilbraham’s accepted normality, and his general popularity, that this championship of X. did him no harm. Some men, it is true, did murmur something about “birds of a feather,” and one or two kind friends warned Wilbraham in the way kind friends have, and to them he simply said:

“If a feller’s a pal he’s a pal.”

There followed a year or two later the much more celebrated business of Lady C. I need not go into all that now, but here again Wilbraham constituted himself her defender, although she robbed, cheated and maligned him as she robbed, cheated and maligned everyone who was good to her. It was quite obvious that he was not in love with her; the obviousness of it was one of the things in him that annoyed her. He simply felt, apparently, that she had been badly treated – the very last thing she had been – gave her any money he had, put his rooms at the disposal of herself and her friends, and, as I have said, championed her everywhere.

This affair did very nearly finish him socially and in his regiment. It was not so much that they minded his caring for Lady C. – after all, any man can be fooled by any woman – but it was Lady C.’s friends who made the whole thing so impossible. Well, that affair luckily came to an end just in time. Lady C. disappeared to Berlin, and was no more seen.

There were other cases, into which I need not go, when Wilbraham was seen in strange company, always championing somebody who was not worth the championing. He had no “social tact,” and for them, at any rate, no moral sense. In himself he was the ordinary normal man about town; no prude, but straight as a man can be in his debts, his love affairs, his friendships, and his sport. Then came the war. He did brilliantly at Mons, was wounded twice, went out to Gallipoli, had a touch of Palestine, and returned to France again to share in Foch’s final triumph.

No man can possibly have had more of the war than he had, and it is my own belief that he had just a little too much of it.

He had been always perhaps a little “queer,” as we are most of us “queer” somewhere, and the horrors of that horrible war undoubtedly affected him. Finally he lost, just a week before the Armistice, one of his best friends, Ross McLean, a loss from which he certainly never recovered.

I have now, I think, brought together all the incidents that can throw any kind of light upon the final scene.

•   •   •   •   •

In the middle of 1919 he retired from the Army, and it was from this time to his death that I saw something of him. He went back to his old rooms at Horton’s in Duke Street, and as I was living at that time in Marlborough Chambers in Jermyn Street, we were within easy reach of one another. The early part of 1920 was a “queer time.” People had become, I imagine, pretty well accustomed to realising that those two wonderful hours of Armistice Day had not ushered in the millennium, any more than those first marvellous moments of the Russian revolution produced it.

Everyone has always hoped for the millennium, but the trouble since the days of Adam and Eve has always been that people have such different ideas as to what exactly that millennium shall be. The plain facts of the matter simply were that during 1919 and 1920 the world changed from a war of nations to a war of classes, that inevitable change that history has always shown follows on great wars.

As no one ever reads history, it was natural enough that there should be a great deal of disappointment, and a great deal of astonishment. Wilbraham, being a sentimentalist and an idealist, suffered more from this general disappointment than most people. He had had wonderful relations with the men under him throughout the war. He was never tired of recounting how marvellously they had behaved, what heroes they were, and that it was they who would pull the country together.

At the same time he had a naïve horror of Bolshevism and anything unconstitutional, and he watched the transformation of his “brave lads” into discontented and idle workmen with dismay and deep distress. He used sometimes to come round to my rooms and talk to me; he had the bewildered air of a man walking in his sleep.

During these months I came to love the man. The attraction that I had felt for him from the very first deeply underlay all my relations to him, but as I saw more of him, I found many very positive reasons for my liking. He was the simplest, bravest, purest, most loyal and most unselfish soul alive. He seemed to me to have no faults at all, unless it were a certain softness towards the wishes of those whom he loved. He could not bear to hurt anybody, but he never hesitated if some principle in which he believed was called in question.

He was the best human being I have ever known, or am ever likely to know.

Well, the crisis arrived with astonishing suddenness. About August 2nd or 3rd I went down to stay with some friends at the little fishing village of Rafiel in Glebeshire.

I saw him just before I left London, and he told me that he was going to stay in town for the first half of August; that he liked London in August, even though his club would be closed and Horton’s delivered over to the painters.

I heard nothing about him for a fortnight, and then I received a most extraordinary letter from Box Hamilton, a fellow clubman of mine and of Wilbraham’s. Had I heard, he said, that poor old Wilbraham had gone right off his “knocker”? Nobody knew exactly what had happened, but suddenly one day at lunch-time Wilbraham had turned up at Grey’s – the club to which our own club was a visitor during its cleaning – had harangued everyone about religion in the most extraordinary way, had burst out from there and started shouting in Piccadilly; had, after collecting a crowd, disappeared and not been seen until the next morning, when he had been found nearly killed after a hand-to-hand fight with the market men in Covent Garden.

It may be imagined how deeply this disturbed me, especially as I felt I was myself to blame. I had noticed that Wilbraham was ill when I had seen him in London, and I should either have persuaded him to come with me to Glebeshire, or stayed with him in London. I was just about to pack up and go to town when I received a letter from a doctor in a nursing-home in South Audley Street, saying that a certain Major Wilbraham was in the home, dying, and asking persistently for myself. I took a motor to Drymouth, and was in London by five o’clock.

•   •   •   •   •

I found the South Audley Street nursing-home, and was at once surrounded with the hush, the shaded rooms, the scents of medicine and flowers, and some undefinable cleanliness that belongs to those places.

I waited in a little room, the walls decorated with sporting prints, the green baize centre table laden with volumes of Punch and the Tatler. Wilbraham’s doctor came in to see me, a dapper, smart little man, efficient and impersonal. He told me that Wilbraham had at most only twenty-four hours to live, that his brain was quite clear, and that he was suffering very little pain, that he had been brutally kicked in the stomach by some man in the Covent Garden crowd, and had there received the internal injuries from which he was now dying.

“His brain is quite clear,” the doctor said. “Let him talk. It can do him no harm. Nothing can save him. His head is full of queer fancies; he wants everyone to listen to him. He’s worrying because there’s some message he wants to send – he wants to give it to you.”

When I saw Wilbraham he was so little changed that I felt no shock. Indeed, the most striking change in him was the almost exultant happiness in his voice and eyes.

It is true that after talking to him a little I knew that he was dying. He had that strange peace and tranquillity of mind that one saw so often with dying men in the war.

I will try to give an exact account of Wilbraham’s narrative; nothing else is of importance in this little story but that narrative. I can make no comment. I have no wish to do so. I only want to pass it on as he begged me to do.

“If you don’t believe me,” he said, “give other people the chance of doing so. I know that I am dying. I want as many men and women to have a chance of judging this as is humanly possible. I swear to you that I am telling the truth, and the exact truth in every detail.”

I began my account by saying that I was not convinced.

How could I be convinced?

At the same time I have none of those explanations with which people are so generously forthcoming on these occasions. I can only say that I do not think Wilbraham was insane, nor drunk, nor asleep. Nor do I believe that someone played a practical joke.

Whether Wilbraham was insane between the hours when his visitor left him and his entrance into the nursing-home I must leave to my readers. I myself think he was not.

After all, everything depends upon the relative importance that we place upon ambitions, possessions, emotions – ideas.

Something then suddenly became of so desperate an importance to Wilbraham that nothing else at all mattered. He wanted everyone else to see the importance of it as he did. That is all.

•   •   •   •   •

It had been a hot and oppressive day; London had seemed torrid and uncomfortable. The mere fact that Oxford Street was “up” annoyed him. After a slight meal in his flat he went to the promenade concert at Queen’s Hall. It was the second night of the season – Monday night – Wagner night.

He had heard no Wagner since August 1914, and was anxious to discover the effect that hearing it again would have upon him. The effect was disappointing.

The “Meistersinger” had always been a great opera for him. The third act music that the orchestra gave to him didn’t touch him anywhere. He also discovered that six years’ abstinence had not enraptured him any more deeply with the rushing fiddles in the “Tannhäuser” overture, nor with the spinning music in the “Flying Dutchman.” Then came suddenly the prelude to the third act of “Tristan.” That caught him, the peace and tranquillity that he needed lapped him round, he was fully satisfied and could have listened for another hour – a little strange, he told me, because the first half of the third act had always bored him with Tristan’s eternal dying. He got up and went away, not caring to stay and listen to the efforts of an inadequate contralto to over-scream the orchestra in the last agonies of “Götterdämmerung.”

He walked home down Regent Street, the quiet melancholy of the pipe music accompanying him, pleasing him, and tranquillising him. As he reached his flat ten o’clock struck from St. James’s Church. He asked the porter whether anyone had wanted him during his absence – whether anyone was waiting for him now. (Some friend has told him that he might come up and use his spare room one night that week.) No, no one had been. There was no one there waiting.

Great was his surprise, therefore, when opening the door of his flat he found someone standing there, one hand resting on the table. His face turned towards the open door. Stronger, however, than Wilbraham’s surprise was his immediate conviction that he knew his visitor well, and this was curious, because the face was undoubtedly strange to him.

“I beg your pardon,” Wilbraham said, hesitating.

“I wanted to see you,” the stranger said, smiling.

When Wilbraham was telling me this part of his story he seemed to be enveloped – “enveloped” is the word that best conveys my own experience of him – by some quite radiant happiness; he smiled at me confidentially as though he were telling me something that I had experienced with him, and that must give me the same happiness that it gave him.

“Ought I to have expected – ought I to have known?” he stammered.

“No, you couldn’t have known,” the stranger answered. “You’re not late. I knew when you would come.”

Wilbraham told me that during these moments he was surrendering himself to an emotion of intimacy and companionship that was the most wonderful thing that he had ever known. It was that intimacy and companionship, he told me, for which all his days he had been searching. It was the one thing that life never seemed to give; even in the greatest love, the deepest friendship, there was that seed of loneliness hidden. He had never found it in man or woman.

Now it was so wonderful that the first thing that he said was:

“And now you’re going to stay, aren’t you? You won’t go away at once?”

“Of course I’ll stay,” he answered, “if you want me.”

His guest was dressed in some dark suit; there was nothing about him in any way odd or unusual. His face thin and pale. His smile kindly.

His English was without accent. His voice was soft and very melodious.

But Wilbraham could notice nothing but his eyes; they were the most beautiful, tender, gentle eyes that he had ever seen in any human being.

They sat down. Wilbraham’s overwhelming fear was lest his guest should leave him. They began to talk, and Wilbraham took it at once as accepted that his friend knew all about him – everything.

He found himself eagerly plunging into details of scenes, episodes that he had long put behind him – put behind him for shame, perhaps, or for regret or for sorrow. He knew at once that there was nothing that he need veil nor hide – nothing. He had no sense that he must consider susceptibilities or avoid self-confession that was humiliating.

But he did find, as he talked on, a sense of shame from another side creep towards him and begin to enclose him. Shame at the smallness, meanness, emptiness of the things that he declared.

He had had always behind his mistakes and sins a sense that he was a rather unusual, interesting person; if only his friends knew everything about him they would be surprised at the remarkable man that he really was. Now it was exactly the opposite sense that came over him. In the gold-rimmed mirror that was over his mantelpiece he saw himself diminishing, diminishing, diminishing. First himself, large, red-faced, smiling, rotund, lying back in his chair: then the face shrivelling, the limbs shortening, then the face small and peaked, the hands and legs little and mean, then the chair enormous about and around the little trembling animal cowering against the cushion.

He sprang up.

“No, no! I can’t tell you any more – and you’ve known it all so long. I am mean, small, nothing. I have not even great ambition – nothing.”

His guest stood up and put his hand on his shoulder. They talked, standing side by side, and he said some things that belonged to Wilbraham alone, that he would not tell me.

Wilbraham asked him why he had come – and to him.

“I will come now to a few of my friends,” he said. “First one and then another. Many people have forgotten me behind my words. They have built up such a mountain over me with the doctrines they have attributed to me, the things that they say that I did. I am not really,” he said, laughing, his hand on Wilbraham’s shoulder, “so dull and gloomy and melancholy as they have made me. I loved life; I loved men; I loved laughter and games and the open air. All things that they have forgotten. So from now I shall come back to one or two. I am lonely when they see me so solemnly.”

Another thing he said: “They are making life complicated now. To lead a good life, to be happy, to manage the world, only the simplest things are needed – love, unselfishness, tolerance.”

“Can I go with you and be with you always?” Wilbraham asked.

“Do you really want that?” he said.

“Yes,” said Wilbraham, bowing his head.

“Then you shall come and never leave me again. In three days from now.”

Then he kissed Wilbraham on the forehead and went away.

I think that Wilbraham himself became conscious as he told me this part of his story of the difference between the seen and remembered figure and the foolish, inadequate reported words. Even now, as I repeat a little of what Wilbraham said, I feel the virtue and power slipping away. But on that day when I sat beside Wilbraham’s bed the conviction in his voice and eyes held me so that, although my reason kept me back, my heart told me that he had been in contact with some power that was a stronger force than anything that I myself had ever known.

But I have determined to make no personal comment on this story. I am here simply as a narrator of fact.

Wilbraham told me that after his guest left him he sat there for some time in a dream. Then he sat up, startled as though some voice, calling, had wakened him, with an impulse that was like a fire suddenly blazing up and lighting the dark places of his brain. I imagine that all Wilbraham’s impulses in the past, chivalrous, idealistic, foolish, had been of that kind – sudden, of an almost ferocious energy and determination, blind to all consequences. He must go out at once and tell everyone of what had happened to him.

I once read a story somewhere about some town that was expecting a great visitor. Everything was ready, the banners hanging, the music prepared, the crowds waiting in the street.

A man who had once been for some years at the court of the expected visitor, saw him enter the city, sombrely clad, on foot. Meanwhile, his chamberlain entered the town in full panoply with the trumpets blowing and many riders in attendance. The man who knew the real king ran to everyone telling the truth, but they laughed at him and refused to listen. And the real king departed quietly as he had come.

It was, I suppose, an influence of this kind that drove Wilbraham now.

What followed might, I think, have been to some extent averted, had his appearance been different. London is a home of madmen, and casually permits any lunacy, so that public peace is not endangered. Had poor Wilbraham looked a fanatic, with pale face, long hair, ragged clothes, much would have been forgiven him, but for a staid, middle-aged gentleman, well-dressed, well-groomed, what could be supposed but insanity, and insanity of a very ludicrous kind?

He put on his coat and went out. From this moment his account was confused. His mind, as he spoke to me, kept returning to that visitor. What happened after his guest’s departure was vague and uncertain to him, largely because it was unimportant. He does not know what time it was when he went out, but I gather it must have been about midnight. There were still people in Piccadilly.

Somewhere near the Berkeley Hotel he stopped a gentleman and a lady. He spoke, I am sure, so politely that the man he addressed must have supposed that he was asking for a match, or an address, or something of the kind. Wilbraham told me that very quietly he asked the gentleman whether he might speak to him for a moment, that he had something very important to say; that he would not, as a rule, dream of interfering in any man’s private affairs, but that the importance of his communication outweighed all ordinary conventions; that he expected that the gentleman had hitherto, as had been his own case, felt much doubt about religious questions, but that now all doubt was once and for ever over, that—

I expect that at that fatal word “religious” the gentleman started as though he had been stung by a snake, felt that this mild-looking man was a dangerous lunatic and tried to move away. It was the lady with him, so far as I can discover, who cried out, “Oh, poor man, he’s ill!” and wanted at once to do something for him.

By this time a crowd was beginning to collect, and as the crowd closed around the central figures more people gathered upon the outskirts and, peering through, wondered what had happened, whether there was an accident, whether it was a “drunk,” whether there had been a quarrel, and so on.

Wilbraham, I fancy, began to address them all, telling them his great news, begging them with a desperate urgency to believe him. Some laughed, some stared in wide-eyed wonder, the crowd was increasing, and then, of course, the inevitable policeman, with his “move on, please,” appeared.

How deeply I regret that Wilbraham was not there and then arrested. He would be alive and with us now if that had been done. But the policeman hesitated, I suppose, to arrest anyone as obviously a gentleman as Wilbraham, a man, too, as he soon perceived, who was perfectly sober, even though he was not in his right mind.

Wilbraham was surprised at the policeman’s interference. He said that the last thing that he wished to do was to create any disturbance, but that he could not bear to let all these people go to their beds without giving them a chance of realising first that everything was now altered, that he had had the most wonderful news.

The crowd was dispersed, and Wilbraham found himself walking alone with the policeman beside the Green Park.

He must have been a very nice policeman, because, before Wilbraham’s death, he called at the nursing-home and was very anxious to know how the poor gentleman was getting on.

He allowed Wilbraham to talk to him, and then did all he could to persuade him to walk home and go to bed. He offered to get him a taxi. Wilbraham thanked him, said he would do so himself, and bade him good-night, and the policeman, seeing that Wilbraham was perfectly composed and sober, left him.

After that the narrative is more confused. Wilbraham apparently walked down Knightsbridge and arrived at last somewhere near the Albert Hall. He must have spoken to a number of different people. One man, a politician apparently, was with him for a considerable time, but only because he was so anxious to emphasise his own views about the Government. Another was a journalist, who continued with him for a while because he scented a story for his newspaper. Some people may remember that there was a garbled paragraph about a “Religious Army Officer” in the Daily Record.

He stayed at a cabman’s shelter for a time and drank a cup of coffee and told the little gathering there his news. They took it very calmly. They had met so many queer things in their time that nothing seemed odd to them.

His account becomes clearer again when he found himself a little before dawn in the park and in the company of a woman of the town and a drunken, broken-down pugilist. I saw both these persons afterwards and had some talk with them. The pugilist had only the vaguest sense of what had happened. Wilbraham was a “proper old bird,” and had given him half-a-crown to get his breakfast with. They had all slept together under a tree, and he had made some rather voluble protests because the other two would talk so continuously and prevented his sleeping. It was a warm night and the sun had come up behind the tree “surprisin’ quick.”

The woman was another story. She was quiet and reserved, dressed in black with a neat little black hat with a green feather in it. She had yellow, fluffy hair, and bright, childish, blue eyes, and a simple, innocent expression. She spoke very softly and almost in a whisper. She spoke of her life quite calmly as though she had been a governess or a waitress at a tea-shop. So far as I could discover, she could see nothing odd in Wilbraham, nor in anything that he had said. She was the one person in all the world who had understood him completely and found nothing out of the way in his talk. Strange when you come to think of it. The one person in the world.

She had liked him at once, she said. “I could see that he was kind,” she added earnestly, as though to her that was the most important thing in all the world. No, his talk had not seemed odd to her. She had believed every word that he had said. Why not? You could not look at him and not believe what he said.

Of course, it was true. And why not? She had known lots of things funnier than that in her sordid life. What was there against it? She had always thought that there was something in what the parsons said, and now she knew it. It had been a great help to her, what the gentleman had told her. Yes, and he had gone to sleep with his head in her lap – and she had stayed awake all night thinking – and he had woken up just in time to see the sunrise. Some sunrise that was, too!

That was a curious little fact, that all three of them, even the battered pugilist, should have been so deeply struck by that sunrise. Wilbraham on the last day of his life, when he hovered between consciousness and unconsciousness, kept recalling it as though it had been a vision.

“The sun – and the trees suddenly green and bright like glittering swords – and the sky pale like ivory. See, now the sun is rushing up, faster than ever, to take us with him – up, up, leaving the trees like green clouds beneath us – far, far beneath us—”

The woman said it was the finest sunrise she had ever seen; and, at once, when she saw it, she began to think of a policeman. He’d be moving them on, naturally, and what would he say when he found her there with a gentleman of the highest class? Say that she had been robbing him, of course. She wanted to move away, but he insisted on going with her, and they woke up the pugilist, and the three of them moved down the park.

He talked to her all the time about his plans. He was looking dishevelled now, and unshaven and dirty. She suggested that he should go back to his flat. No, he wished to waste no time. Who knew how long he had got? It might be only a day or two. He would go to Covent Garden and talk to the men there.

•   •   •   •   •

She was confused as to what happened after that. When they got to the market, the carts were coming in and the men were very busy.

She saw the gentleman speak to one of them very earnestly, but he was very busy and pushed him aside. He spoke to another, who told him to clear out.

Then he jumped on to a box, and almost the last sight she had of him was his standing there in his soiled clothes, a streak of mud on his face, his arms outstretched and crying: “It’s true! It’s true! Stop just a moment! You must hear me!”

Someone pushed him off the box. The pugilist rushed in then, cursing them and saying that the man was a gentleman, and had given him half-a-crown, and then some hulking great fellow fought the pugilist and there was a regular mêlée. Wilbraham was in the middle of them, was knocked down and trampled upon. No one meant to hurt him, I think. They all seemed very sorry afterwards.

He died two days after being brought into the nursing-home. He was very happy just before he died, pressed my hand, and asked me to look after the girl.

“Isn’t it wonderful,” were his last words to me, “that it should be true after all?”

•   •   •   •   •

As to Truth, who knows? Truth is a large order. This is true as far as Wilbraham goes, every word of it. Beyond that? Well, it must be jolly to be so happy as Wilbraham was.

“The Chicago Tribune” Nov 13 1921

The Silver Thorn (1928)

THE LITTLE GHOST

I

Ghosts? I looked across the table at Truscott and had a sudden desire to impress him. Truscott has, before now, invited confidences in just that same way, with his flat impassivity, his air of not caring whether you say anything to him or no, his determined indifference to your drama and your pathos. On this particular evening he had been less impassive. He had himself turned the conversation towards Spiritualism, séances, and all that world of humbug, as he believed it to be, and suddenly I saw, or fancied that I saw, a real invitation in his eyes, something that made me say to myself: “Well, hang it all, I’ve known Truscott for nearly twenty years; I’ve never shown him the least little bit of my real self; he thinks me a writing money-machine, with no thought in the world besides my brazen serial stories and the yacht that I purchased out of them.”

So I told him this story, and I will do him the justice to say that he listened to every word of it most attentively, although it was far into the evening before I had finished. He didn’t seem impatient with all the little details that I gave. Of course, in a ghost story, details are more important than anything else. But was it a ghost story? Was it a story at all? Was it true even in its material background? Now, as I try to tell it again, I can’t be sure. Truscott is the only other person who has ever heard it, and at the end of it he made no comment whatever.

It happened long ago, long before the war, when I had been married for about five years, and was an exceedingly prosperous journalist, with a nice little house and two children, in Wimbledon.

I lost suddenly my greatest friend. That may mean little or much as friendship is commonly held, but I believe that most Britishers, most Americans, most Scandinavians, know before they die one friendship at least that changes their whole life experience by its depth and colour. Very few Frenchmen, Italians or Spaniards, very few Southern people at all, understand these things.

The curious part of it in my particular case was that I had known this friend only four or five years before his death, that I had made many friendships both before and since that have endured over much longer periods, and yet this particular friendship had a quality of intensity and happiness that I have never found elsewhere.

Another curious thing was that I met Bond only a few months before my marriage, when I was deeply in love with my wife, and so intensely preoccupied with my engagement that I could think of nothing else. I met Bond quite casually at someone’s house. He was a large-boned, broad-shouldered, slow-smiling man with close-cropped hair turning slightly grey, and our meeting was casual; the ripening of our friendship was casual; indeed, the whole affair may be said to have been casual to the very last. It was, in fact, my wife who said to me one day, when we had been married about a year or so: “Why, I believe you care more for Charlie Bond than for anyone else in the world.” She said it in that sudden, disconcerting, perceptive way that some women have. I was entirely astonished. Of course I laughed at the idea. I saw Bond frequently. He came often to the house. My wife, wiser than many wives, encouraged all my friendships, and she herself liked Charlie immensely. I don’t suppose that anyone disliked him. Some men were jealous of him; some men, the merest acquaintances, called him conceited; women were sometimes irritated by him because so clearly he could get on very easily without them; but he had, I think, no real enemy.

How could he have had? His good-nature, his freedom from all jealousy, his naturalness, his sense of fun, the absence of all pettiness, his common sense, his manliness, and at the same time his broad-minded intelligence, all these things made him a most charming personality. I don’t know that he shone very much in ordinary society. He was very quiet and his wit and humour came out best with his intimates.

I was the showy one, and he always played up to me, and I think I patronised him a little and thought deep down in my subconscious self that it was lucky for him to have such a brilliant friend, but he never gave a sign of resentment. I believe now that he knew me, with all my faults and vanities and absurdities, far better than anyone else, even my wife, did, and that is one of the reasons, to the day of my death, why I shall always miss him so desperately.

However, it was not until his death that I realised how close we had been. One November day he came back to his flat, wet and chilled, didn’t change his clothes, caught a cold, which developed into pneumonia, and after three days was dead. It happened that that week I was in Paris, and I returned to be told on my doorstep by my wife of what had occurred. At first I refused to believe it. When I had seen him a week before he had been in splendid health; with his tanned, rather rough and clumsy face, his clear eyes, no fat about him anywhere, he had looked as though he would live to a thousand, and then when I realised that it was indeed true I did not during the first week or two grasp my loss.

I missed him, of course; was vaguely unhappy and discontented; railed against life, wondering why it was always the best people who were taken and the others left; but I was not actually aware that for the rest of my days things would be different, and that that day of my return from Paris was a crisis in my human experience. Suddenly one morning, walking down Fleet Street, I had a flashing, almost blinding, need of Bond that was like a revelation. From that moment I knew no peace. Everyone seemed to me dull, profitless and empty. Even my wife was a long way away from me, and my children, whom I dearly loved, counted nothing to me at all. I didn’t, after that, know what was the matter with me. I lost my appetite, I couldn’t sleep, I was grumpy and nervous. I didn’t myself connect it with Bond at all. I thought that I was overworked, and when my wife suggested a holiday, I agreed, got a fortnight’s leave from my newspaper, and went down to Glebeshire.

Early December is not a bad time for Glebeshire. It is just then the best spot in the British Isles. I knew a little village beyond St. Mary’s Moor, that I had not seen for ten years, but always remembered with romantic gratitude, and I felt that that was the place for me now.

I changed trains at Polchester and found myself at last in a little jingle driving out to the sea. The air, the wide open moor, the smell of the sea delighted me, and when I reached my village, with its sandy cove and the boats drawn up in two rows in front of a high rocky cave, and when I ate my eggs and bacon in the parlour of the inn overlooking the sea, I felt happier than I had done for weeks past; but my happiness did not last long. Night after night I could not sleep. I began to feel acute loneliness and knew at last in full truth that it was my friend whom I was missing, and that it was not solitude I needed, but his company. Easy enough to talk about having his company, but I only truly knew, down here in this little village, sitting on the edge of the green cliff, looking over into limitless sea, that I was indeed never to have his company again. There followed after that a wild, impatient regret that I had not made more of my time with him. I saw myself, in a sudden vision, as I had really been with him, patronising, indulgent, a little contemptuous of his good-natured ideas. Had I only a week with him now, how eagerly I would show him that I was the fool and not he, that I was the lucky one every time!

One connects with one’s own grief the place where one feels it, and before many days had passed I had grown to loathe the little village, to dread, beyond words, the long, soughing groan of the sea as it drew back down the slanting beach, the melancholy wail of the seagulls, the chattering women under my little window. I couldn’t stand it. I ought to go back to London, and yet from that, too, I shrank. Memories of Bond lingered there as they did in no other place, and it was hardly fair to my wife and family to give them the company of the dreary, discontented man that I just then was.

And then, just in the way that such things always happen, I found on my breakfast-table one fine morning a forwarded letter. It was from a certain Mrs. Baldwin, and, to my surprise, I saw that it came from Glebeshire, but from the top of the county and not its southern end.

John Baldwin was a Stock Exchange friend of my brother’s, a rough diamond, but kindly and generous, and not, I believed, very well off. Mrs. Baldwin I had always liked, and I think she always liked me. We had not met for some little time and I had no idea what had happened to them. Now in her letter she told me that they had taken an old eighteenth-century house on the north coast of Glebeshire, not very far from Drymouth, that they were enjoying it very much indeed, that Jack was fitter than he had been for years, and that they would be delighted, were I ever in that part of the country, to have me as their guest. This suddenly seemed to me the very thing. The Baldwins had never known Charlie Bond, and they would have, therefore, for me no association with his memory. They were jolly, noisy people, with a jolly, noisy family, and Jack Baldwin’s personality was so robust that it would surely shake me out of my gloomy mood. I sent a telegram at once to Mrs. Baldwin, asking her whether she could have me for a week, and before the day was over I received the warmest of invitations.

Next day I left my fishing village and experienced one of those strange, crooked, in-and-out little journeys that you must undergo if you are to find your way from one obscure Glebeshire village to another.

About midday, a lovely, cold, blue December midday, I discovered myself in Polchester with an hour to wait for my next train. I went down into the town, climbed the High Street to the magnificent cathedral, stood beneath the famous Arden Gate, looked at the still more famous tomb of the Black Bishop, and it was there, as the sunlight, slanting through the great east window, danced and sparkled about the wonderful blue stone of which that tomb is made, that I had a sudden sense of having been through all this before, of having stood just there in some earlier time, weighed down by some earlier grief, and that nothing that I was experiencing was unexpected. I had a curious sense, too, of comfort and condolence, that horrible grey loneliness that I had felt in the fishing village suddenly fell from me, and for the first time since Bond’s death, I was happy. I walked away from the cathedral, down the busy street, and through the dear old market-place, expecting I know not what. All that I knew was that I was intending to go to the Baldwins’ and that I would be happy there.

The December afternoon fell quickly, and during the last part of my journey I was travelling in a ridiculous little train, through dusk, and the little train went so slowly and so casually that one was always hearing the murmurs of streams beyond one’s window, and lakes of grey water suddenly stretched like plates of glass to thick woods, black as ink, against a faint sky. I got out at my little wayside station, shaped like a rabbit-hutch, and found a motor waiting for me. The drive was not long, and suddenly I was outside the old eighteenth-century house and Baldwin’s stout butler was conveying me into the hall with that careful, kindly patronage, rather as though I were a box of eggs that might very easily be broken.

It was a spacious hall, with a large open fireplace, in front of which they were all having tea. I say “all” advisedly, because the place seemed to be full of people, grown-ups and children, but mostly children. There were so many of these last that I was not, to the end of my stay, to be able to name most of them individually.

Mrs. Baldwin came forward to greet me, introduced me to one or two people, sat me down and gave me my tea, told me that I wasn’t looking at all well, and needed feeding up, and explained that Jack was out shooting something, but would soon be back.

My entrance had made a brief lull, but immediately everyone recovered and the noise was terrific. There is a lot to be said for the freedom of the modern child. There is a lot to be said against it, too. I soon found that in this party, at any rate, the elders were completely disregarded and of no account. Children rushed about the hall, knocked one another down, shouted and screamed, fell over grown-ups as though they were pieces of furniture, and paid no attention at all to the mild “Now, children” of a plain, elderly lady who was, I supposed, a governess. I fancy that I was tired with my criss-cross journey, and I soon found a chance to ask Mrs. Baldwin if I could go up to my room. She said: “I expect you find these children noisy. Poor little things. They must have their fun. Jack always says that one can only be young once, and I do so agree with him.”

I wasn’t myself feeling very young that evening (I was really about nine hundred years old), so that I agreed with her and eagerly left youth to its own appropriate pleasures. Mrs. Baldwin took me up the fine broad staircase. She was a stout, short woman, dressed in bright colours, with what is known, I believe, as an infectious laugh. Tonight, although I was fond of her, and knew very well her good, generous heart, she irritated me, and for some reason that I could not quite define. Perhaps I felt at once that she was out of place there and that the house resented her, but in all this account I am puzzled by the question as to whether I imagine now, on looking back, all sorts of feelings that were not really there at all, but come to me now because I know of what happened afterwards. But I am so anxious to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and there is nothing in the world so difficult to do as that.

We went through a number of dark passages, up and down little pieces of staircase that seemed to have no beginning, no end, and no reason for their existence, and she left me at last in my bedroom, said that she hoped I would be comfortable, and that Jack would come and see me when he came in, and then paused for a moment, looking at me. “You really don’t look well,” she said. “You’ve been overdoing it. You’re too conscientious. I always said so. You shall have a real rest here. And the children will see that you’re not dull.”

Her last two sentences seemed scarcely to go together. I could not tell her about my loss. I realised suddenly, as I had never realised in our older acquaintance, that I should never be able to speak to her about anything that really mattered.

She smiled, laughed and left me. I looked at my room and loved it at once. Broad and low-ceilinged, it contained very little furniture, an old four-poster, charming hangings of some old rose-coloured damask, an old gold mirror, an oak cabinet, some high-backed chairs, and then, for comfort, a large armchair with high elbows, a little quaintly shaped sofa dressed in the same rose colour as the bed, a bright crackling fire and a grandfather clock. The walls, faded primrose, had no pictures, but on one of them, opposite my bed, was a gay sampler worked in bright colours of crimson and yellow and framed in oak.

I liked it, I loved it, and drew the armchair in front of the fire, nestled down into it, and before I knew, I was fast asleep. How long I slept I don’t know, but I suddenly woke with a sense of comfort and well-being which was nothing less than exquisite. I belonged to it, that room, as though I had been in it all my days. I had a curious sense of companionship that was exactly what I had been needing during these last weeks. The house was very still, no voices of children came to me, no sound anywhere, save the sharp crackle of the fire and the friendly ticking of the old clock. Suddenly I thought that there was someone in the room with me, a rustle of something that might have been the fire and yet was not.

I got up and looked about me, half smiling, as though I expected to see a familiar face. There was no one there, of course, and yet I had just that consciousness of companionship that one has when someone whom one loves very dearly and knows very intimately is sitting with one in the same room. I even went to the other side of the four-poster and looked around me, pulled for a moment at the rose-coloured curtains, and of course saw no one. Then the door suddenly opened and Jack Baldwin came in, and I remember having a curious feeling of irritation as though I had been interrupted. His large, breezy, knickerbockered figure filled the room. “Hullo!” he said, “delighted to see you. Bit of luck your being down this way. Have you got everything you want?”

II

That was a wonderful old house. I am not going to attempt to describe it, although I have stayed there quite recently. Yes, I stayed there on many occasions since that first of which I am now speaking. It has never been quite the same to me since that first time. You may say, if you like, that the Baldwins fought a battle with it and defeated it. It is certainly now more Baldwin than – well, whatever it was before they rented it. They are not the kind of people to be defeated by atmosphere. Their chief duty in this world, I gather, is to make things Baldwin, and very good for the world too; but when I first went down to them the house was still challenging them. “A wee bit creepy,” Mrs. Baldwin confided to me on the second day of my visit. “What exactly do you mean by that?” I asked her. “Ghosts?”

“Oh, there are those, of course,” she answered. “There’s an underground passage, you know, that runs from here to the sea, and one of the wickedest of the smugglers was killed in it, and his ghost still haunts the cellar. At least that’s what we were told by our first butler, here; and then, of course, we found that it was the butler, not the smuggler, who was haunting the cellar, and since his departure the smuggler hasn’t been visible.” She laughed. “All the same, it isn’t a comfortable place. I’m going to wake up some of those old rooms. We’re going to put in some more windows. And then there are the children,” she added.

Yes, there were the children. Surely the noisiest in all the world. They had reverence for nothing. They were the wildest savages, and especially those from nine to thirteen, the cruellest and most uncivilised age for children. There were two little boys, twins I should think, who were nothing less than devils, and regarded their elders with cold, watching eyes, said nothing in protest when scolded, but evolved plots afterwards that fitted precisely the chastiser. To do my host and hostess justice, all the children were not Baldwins, and I fancy that the Baldwin contingent was the quietest.

Nevertheless, from early morning until ten at night, the noise was terrific and you were never sure how early in the morning it would recommence. I don’t know that I personally minded the noise very greatly. It took me out of myself and gave me something better to think of, but, in some obscure and unanalysed way, I felt that the house minded it. One knows how the poets have written about old walls and rafters rejoicing in the happy, careless laughter of children. I do not think this house rejoiced at all, and it was queer how consistently I, who am not supposed to be an imaginative person, thought about the house.

But it was not until my third evening that something really happened. I say “happened,” but did anything really happen? You shall judge for yourself.

I was sitting in my comfortable armchair in my bedroom, enjoying that delightful half-hour before one dresses for dinner. There was a terrible racket up and down the passages, the children being persuaded, I gathered, to go into the schoolroom and have their supper, when the noise died down and there was nothing but the feathery whisper of the snow – snow had been falling all day – against my window-pane. My thoughts suddenly turned to Bond, directed to him as actually and precipitately as though he had suddenly sprung before me. I did not want to think of him. I had been fighting his memory these last days, because I had thought that the wisest thing to do, but now he was too much for me.

I luxuriated in my memories of him, turning over and over all sorts of times that we had had together, seeing his smile, watching his mouth that turned up at the corners when he was amused, and wondering finally why he should obsess me the way that he did, when I had lost so many other friends for whom I had thought I cared much more, who, nevertheless, never bothered my memory at all. I sighed, and it seemed to me that my sigh was very gently repeated behind me. I turned sharply round. The curtains had not been drawn. You know the strange, milky pallor that reflected snow throws over objects, and although three lighted candles shone in the room, moon-white shadows seemed to hang over the bed and across the floor. Of course there was no one there, and yet I stared and stared about me as though I were convinced that I was not alone. And then I looked especially at one part of the room, a distant corner beyond the four-poster, and it seemed to me that someone was there. And yet no one was there. But whether it was that my mind had been distracted, or that the beauty of the old snow-lit room enchanted me, I don’t know, but my thoughts of my friend were happy and reassured. I had not lost him, I seemed to say to myself. Indeed, at that special moment he seemed to be closer to me than he had been while he was alive.

From that evening a curious thing occurred. I only seemed to be close to my friend when I was in my own room – and I felt more than that. When my door was closed and I was sitting in my armchair, I fancied that our new companionship was not only Bond’s, but was something more as well. I would wake in the middle of the night or in the early morning and feel quite sure that I was not alone; so sure that I did not even want to investigate it further, but just took the companionship for granted and was happy.

Outside that room, however, I felt increasing discomfort. I hated the way in which the house was treated. A quite unreasonable anger rose within me as I heard the Baldwins discussing the improvements that they were going to make, and yet they were so kind to me, and so patently unaware of doing anything that would not generally be commended, it was quite impossible for me to show my anger. Nevertheless, Mrs. Baldwin noticed something. “I am afraid the children are worrying you,” she said one morning, half interrogatively. “In a way it will be a rest when they go back to school, but the Christmas holidays is their time, isn’t it? I do like to see them happy. Poor little dears.”

The poor little dears were at that moment being Red Indians all over the hall.

“No, of course, I like children,” I answered her. “The only thing is that they don’t – I hope you won’t think me foolish – somehow quite fit in with the house.”

“Oh, I think it’s so good for old places like this,” said Mrs. Baldwin briskly, “to be woken up a little. I’m sure if the old people who used to live here came back they’d love to hear all the noise and laughter.”

I wasn’t so sure myself, but I wouldn’t disturb Mrs. Baldwin’s contentment for anything.

That evening in my room I was so convinced of companionship that I spoke.

“If there’s anyone here,” I said aloud, “I’d like them to know that I’m aware of it and am glad of it.”

Then, when I caught myself speaking aloud, I was suddenly terrified. Was I really going crazy? Wasn’t that the first step towards insanity when you talked to yourself? Nevertheless, a moment later I was reassured. There was someone there.

That night I woke, looked at my luminous watch and saw that it was a quarter past three. The room was so dark that I could not even distinguish the posts of my bed, but there was a very faint glow from the fire, now nearly dead. Opposite my bed there seemed to me to be something white. Not white in the accepted sense of a tall, ghostly figure; but, sitting up and staring, it seemed to me that the shadow was very small, hardly reaching above the edge of the bed.

“Is there anyone there?” I asked. “Because, if there is, do speak to me. I’m not frightened. I know that someone has been here all this last week, and I am glad of it.”

Very faintly then, and so faintly that I cannot to this day be sure that I saw anything at all, the figure of a child seemed to me to be visible.

We all know how we have at one time and another fancied that we have seen visions and figures, and then have discovered that it was something in the room, the chance hanging of a coat, the reflection of a glass, a trick of moonlight that has fired our imagination. I was quite prepared for that in this case, but it seemed to me then that as I watched the shadow moved directly in front of the dying fire, and delicate as the leaf of a silver birch, like the trailing rim of some evening cloud, the figure of a child hovered in front of me.

Curiously enough the dress, which seemed to be of some silver tissue, was clearer than anything else. I did not, in fact, see the face at all, and yet I could swear in the morning that I had seen it, that I knew large, black, wide-open eyes, a little mouth very faintly parted in a timid smile, and that, beyond anything else, I had realised in the expression of that face fear and bewilderment and a longing for some comfort.

III

After that night the affair moved very quickly to its little climax.

I am not a very imaginative man, nor have I any sympathy with the modern craze for spooks and spectres. I have never seen, nor fancied that I had seen, anything of a supernatural kind since that visit, but then I have never known since that time such a desperate need of companionship and comfort, and is it not perhaps because we do not want things badly enough in this life that we do not get more of them? However that may be, I was sure on this occasion that I had some companionship that was born of a need greater than mine. I suddenly took the most frantic and unreasonable dislike to the children in that house. It was exactly as though I had discovered somewhere in a deserted part of the building some child who had been left behind by mistake by the last occupants and was terrified by the noisy exuberance and ruthless selfishness of the new family.

For a week I had no more definite manifestation of my little friend, but I was as sure of her presence there in my room as I was of my own clothes and the armchair in which I used to sit.

It was time for me to go back to London, but I could not go. I asked everyone I met as to legends and stories connected with the old house, but I never found anything to do with a little child. I looked forward all day to my hour in my room before dinner, the time when I felt the companionship closest. I sometimes woke in the night and was conscious of its presence, but, as I have said, I never saw anything.

One evening the older children obtained leave to stay up later. It was somebody’s birthday. The house seemed to be full of people, and the presence of the children led after dinner to a perfect riot of noise and confusion. We were to play hide-and-seek all over the house. Everybody was to dress up. There was, for that night at least, to be no privacy anywhere. We were all, as Mrs. Baldwin said, to be ten years old again. I hadn’t the least desire to be ten years old, but I found myself caught into the game, and had, in sheer self-defence, to run up and down the passages and hide behind doors. The noise was terrific. It grew and grew in volume. People got hysterical. The smaller children jumped out of bed and ran about the passages. Somebody kept blowing a motor-horn. Somebody else turned on the gramophone.

Suddenly I was sick of the whole thing, retreated into my room, lit one candle and locked the door. I had scarcely sat down in my chair when I was aware that my little friend had come. She was standing near to the bed, staring at me, terror in her eyes. I have never seen anyone so frightened. Her little breasts panting beneath her silver gown, her very fair hair falling about her shoulders, her little hands clenched. Just as I saw her, there were loud knocks on the door, many voices shouting to be admitted, a perfect babel of noise and laughter. The little figure moved, and then – how can I give any idea of it? – I was conscious of having something to protect and comfort. I saw nothing, physically I felt nothing, and yet I was murmuring, “There, there, don’t mind. They shan’t come in. I’ll see that no one touches you. I understand. I understand.” For how long I sat like that I don’t know. The noises died away, voices murmured at intervals, and then were silent. The house slept. All night I think I stayed there comforting and being comforted.

I fancy now – but how much of it may not be fancy? – that I knew that the child loved the house, had stayed so long as was possible, at last was driven away, and that that was her farewell, not only to me, but all that she most loved in this world and the next.

I do not know – I could swear to nothing. What I am sure of is that my sense of loss in my friend was removed from that night and never returned. Did I argue with myself that that child companionship included also my friend? Again, I do not know. But of one thing I am now sure, that if love is strong enough, physical death cannot destroy it, and however platitudinous that may sound to others, it is platitudinous no longer when you have discovered it by actual experience for yourself.

That moment in that fire-lit room, when I felt that spiritual heart beating with mine, is and always will be enough for me.

One thing more. Next day I left for London, and my wife was delighted to find me so completely recovered – happier, she said, than I had ever been before.

Two days afterwards, I received a parcel from Mrs. Baldwin. In the note that accompanied it, she said:

I think that you must have left this by mistake behind you. It was found in the small drawer in your dressing-table.

I opened the parcel and discovered an old blue silk handkerchief, wrapped round a long, thin wooden box. The cover of the box lifted very easily, and I saw inside it an old, painted wooden doll, dressed in the period, I should think, of Queen Anne. The dress was very complete, even down to the little shoes, and the little grey mittens on the hands. Inside the silk skirt there was sewn a little tape, and on the tape, in very faded letters, “Ann Trelawney, 1710.”

“The Red Book Magazine” Oct 1922

All Soul’s Night (1933)

CHINESE HORSES

Miss Henrietta Maxwell, when she was about thirty-five years of age, suffered suddenly from misfortune. She had been for many years quite alone in the world, an only child whose parents had been killed in a carriage accident when she was ten years of age. Then she had acquired an almost masculine independence and self-reliance. Until lately things had gone well with her. Without being rich, she had had, until that fatal August of 1914, quite enough to live upon. She had taken a house in St. John’s Wood, not far from Lord’s, with an adorable garden, panelled dining-room, and a long music-room at the back. She had soon loved this house so much, so deeply, that she had bought it. Then, when the war came, she threw herself completely into it, nursed in France, worked with desperate seriousness and the severity of a Brigadier-General over those whom she commanded. Towards the end of 1917 she broke down, had insomnia, came back to England to rest, found it a much longer business than she had expected, and was not really her old self again until after the Armistice. Perhaps she would never be her old self again. Before the war she had not known what nerves were. Now she knew very well.

Then Miss Maxwell discovered that her finances were queer. In the first place it cost twice as much to live as it had done. Her little staff of three were loyal and affectionate, but they had to be fed. Some investments into which she was led by a kindly but rather feckless friend had done anything but well. She was warm-hearted, and hated to refuse the adorable spare bedroom to a friend, with the result that there was always someone coming or going. People dropped in for meals in the jolliest and most unexpected way. There was nothing that she loved so much as to hear people praise the house. Some of the praise she knew was insincere, but every now and then she heard that real catch in the throat, the “Oh, my dear, but it’s lovely!” when the first glimpse was caught of the corner of the library with the long windows looking out on to the trees, the dark blue ceiling, the white bookshelves, the gold mirror, and the very best picture she had, a lovely Clausen water-colour-cottages, a silver-grey pool, and faintly blue hills. In her own heart of hearts she thought that nobody’s books looked quite so perfect in their shelves as did hers. They seemed to like the room that they were in. They wanted to show her that they did, and there was so much sun in that library that some of the most cynical books in the world became quite amiable and kindly from living in that particular corner of that room. In fact, after reading Stendhal one winter very seriously, she moved him bag and baggage from the rather chilly corner by the door and put him in the sun-drenched spot near the window, and hoped it would do him good.

She adored the house, every nook and cranny of it, from the basement, which ought to have been dark and was not, up to the two little rooms at the top, which were so hot in fine weather that nobody could sleep there and so cold in the winter that you had to wear a fur coat when you went into them. But the house on the whole was of a fine temperature, and it had a way of always keeping one warm room on a cold day, and one really cool one in the height of the summer, so that it surprised you. In fact it looked after you, and seemed to take the greatest care that it should have as few dilapidations as possible. Best of all was its colour. Miss Maxwell adored the colour. She said, what was true enough, that there were a great many grey days in London, and that you couldn’t have too much orange, too much purple, and too many burning reds. That is not to say that she went in for all the eccentric colours of which people are so fond today, so that you do your dining-room in black and orange, and for the first month it looks like the back-cloth of an Eastern musical comedy, and the second month it looks like the shop of a decorator who is not quite able to make both ends meet, and the third month it looks so shabby and dusty that you have to change all its colours and start over again. No, she was not eccentric. She had silver-grey wallpapers and white bookcases. Then she had also certain things she had found abroad: some bronzes, two splendid Chinese horses, some Japanese prints, some Spanish shawls, and upstairs, in a little dressing-room next her bedroom, a beautiful little collection of English pottery. All these things she adored with a personal, individual adoration. She didn’t understand the people to whom possession meant nothing at all. The Chinese horses and a Wedgwood bowl and two Jane Austen first editions and the Clausen picture were quite as personal to her as certain of her friends; a great deal more personal than most of her acquaintances. But all these things were sunk in the final, adorable charm of the house itself. The house was her friend, her counsellor, her consoler in distress, her doctor when she was ill, her companion when she couldn’t sleep, someone who loved her and was intensely grateful for her own love. All this she felt when the horrible time came when she suddenly had to let the house and leave it because she couldn’t afford to live there until times were better.

•   •   •   •   •

She was successful in her let; that is, she discovered a very pretty girl who loved the house at first sight, who was apparently quiet and orderly, who didn’t keep dogs and didn’t care for dancing (so she said). She was so pretty, this Miss March, that it really was charming to see her in the house. She was ready also to take on the little staff of three, and she told Miss Maxwell that she would be delighted to see her whenever she liked to call. The actual leaving the house, therefore, was not so terrible as Miss Maxwell had expected. It was horrible, of course, but Miss Maxwell went down to Eastbourne, sat beside the sea, and thought about that pretty creature moving in and out, up and down, and counted the months until things would be better, her investments would go up, and she would be able to go back again.

That was at first, but gradually, day by day, she felt more and more that the house was longing for her. She suddenly, on the wildest spur of the moment, when she was shopping and was intending to go back to her lodging and have her lunch, took a train up to London instead, walked through the dusky afternoon to St. John’s Wood, looked through the little gates, rang the bell, asked if Miss March were at home, was told by a severe-looking woman that she was not, and crept back to Eastbourne again. The sight of the severe-looking woman made things very much worse. What had happened to the dear little house-parlourmaid who loved everything in the house quite as much as Miss Maxwell? This woman evidently loved nothing and nobody. She wrote to Miss March and received a rather stiff little letter in return saying that the staff had been added to, that one of the water-pipes had burst, and that a sister of Miss March had caught a severe cold by sleeping in the little room under the roof. Miss Maxwell, feeling exactly as though she had had a daughter who had gone to her first ball and been found by a number of people to be plain and awkward, came up to London and saw Miss March. The girl didn’t seem so pretty as she had been. She was discontented and pouted. St. John’s Wood was such a long way from everywhere, and she did hope that she hadn’t mislaid any of the books, but one never knew what a friend would do when one’s back was turned, and it was strange how little conscience people had about books, anyway. Some odd people came in to tea while Miss Maxwell was there; loud, noisy people who cared nothing, Miss Maxwell was certain, for beautiful things, probably laughed at the Chinese horses and thought books were stuffy. The end of this was that Miss Maxwell took two little rooms just round the corner – poky little rooms with a slatternly landlady, but from their windows you had a view of the house, could look right into the garden, and even, if you hung out far enough, could see into the library. Here Miss Maxwell planted herself and waited.

•   •   •   •   •

We all know what obsessions can be, and there is nothing stranger in life than the very little distance that is needed to lend enchantment. Miss Maxwell had always adored her house, but seen as it was now, in fragments, with a coloured lawn, a brick wall, and several trees defending it, it was magical. Try as she would, Miss Maxwell could not concentrate upon anything else. The house protested. Of course it did. It was reproaching Miss Maxwell every minute of its poor life for allowing it to fall into such unsympathetic hands. It could do nothing: it could only exclaim and wait for the day of its deliverance, and the best that Miss Maxwell could do was to settle as near to it as possible.

After a while, when summer came down upon London, and all the trees were rich and full, and flowers were scenting the by-ways of St. John’s Wood, Miss Maxwell became afraid of her obsession. “You are really getting queer,” she said to herself one evening, as she looked at herself in the glass, “and must look out or you will be doing something silly.” What she had been doing that afternoon was practically to press her nose against the railings and look through a rather dusty laurel into the garden beyond. There, in the garden, very pretty in a pink summer frock, was Miss March, giving tea to a rather stout gentleman with a round face like a moon. Miss Maxwell, as she peered through, soon discovered two things – one that the gentleman with the moon face was rich, and another that he was in love with Miss March. She judged the first because of his clothes, his self-satisfied air, and his gestures, which were as though he was scattering gold upon the grass and didn’t mind if the sparrows ran away with most of it. For the other, there could be no mistake. His eyes, as Miss Maxwell told herself, were liquid with love, and when Miss March very daintily gave him some sugar in his tea, he didn’t look at the sugar at all, but only at Miss March, which in a gentleman who was quite obviously fond of his food was proof positive.

That evening, having a gay old woman to supper, she discussed the affair, and the first thing that the gay old woman said was: “Why, my dear, if he’s rich and in love with that young woman, he’ll soon propose to her, she will accept him, and then leave the house.”

“Why should they leave the house?” asked Miss Maxwell, her heart beating fast at the mere idea.

“Why, you don’t suppose,” said the gay old woman, “that a man who’s rich and fat will live in a poky little house in St. John’s Wood! Oh, my dear, I beg your pardon,” she went on; “of course, I don’t mean ‘poky.’ Of course it’s a jewel of a house, but not the thing for married people, who will have motor-cars and large dinner-parties, and possibly an aeroplane or two.”

This idea was terrific. The one thought that Miss Maxwell had was that Miss March should leave the house. She didn’t in the least mind at the moment who took it next. It might be herself. A rich old uncle in South Africa might die, or shares go up, or she herself might discover a new sort of radium, or the heavens might fall. The great thing was for Miss March to go.

“Do you think,” said the gay old woman, “that he has proposed to her yet?”

“Oh, no,” said Miss Maxwell. “The way she was giving him sugar proved that. If he had proposed, she would have been much less interested. I am quite sure that she wants him to propose.”

“Well, then,” said her friend, “if she wants him to propose, and he’s in love with her, there you are then.”

The next stage in this story was that Miss Maxwell actually met and spoke to the stout gentleman. She was always hanging about the little leafy street that ran past the gate of her house, and one afternoon, about six, the gentleman came out of the gate in a great hurry, his face rather flushed, ran straight into her, and nearly knocked her down. He was dreadfully distressed about this.

Miss Maxwell laughed in her frank, charming way.

“Harm? No, I should think not,” she said. “I am very glad to have met you.”

“Glad to have met me?” he stammered, looking very foolish.

“Yes,” she said, “because, as a matter of fact, that is my house. You have been going into it a great deal lately. I love it more than anything else on earth. I had to let it, but I simply hated doing it. I’m always wondering how it’s getting on, and now you can tell me.”

“How it’s getting on?” he repeated. He was obviously one of those gentlemen to whom new ideas come rather slowly. “Why, it’s all right, I think.”

“Do you go into it much?” she asked.

They were by this time quite unconsciously walking down the road together.

“Do you go up to the very top of it and down to the very bottom of it? Are the Chinese horses all right? Of course, I ought to have put them away, and the Wedgwood and a lot of the books, but I simply couldn’t bear that the house should be without them. I did send Jane Austen to the Bank.”

“Send Jane Austen to the Bank?” he repeated. He was gazing at her with admiration. He was obviously a gentleman on whom the other sex made a strong appeal.

“Yes, my first editions of her. They are very good and worth a great deal of money, but they’re worth much more to me. Any amount of coin. You don’t collect first editions, I suppose?”

“Well, no, not exactly,” he said, stammering.

“How do you mean, ‘not exactly’?” said Miss Maxwell sharply. “You either collect first editions or you don’t. You can’t do it half and half.”

“No; I see what you mean,” he answered, laughing. “That was stupid of me. But I am stupid.”

She liked that. It was extraordinary how intimate you could become with some people in a very short time.

“You like Miss March very much, don’t you?” she said.

“How do you know that?” he asked, blushing. He blushed very often.

“I saw you having tea with her on the lawn,” she answered. “I looked through the railings.”

“Yes, I do like her very much. She is very pretty. I’m thinking of asking her to be my wife. I want a wife,” he went on, confidentially, just as though he had said he wanted a new hat. “I’m forty-two, and have been a widower for seven years and every year it has been more and more difficult.”

“What has?” she asked him.

“Being a widower,” he answered.

“That’s not a very good reason for marrying Miss March,” she said.

“Oh, but I do like her immensely,” he answered. “She’s so pretty and kind!”

“Pretty she is,” said Miss Maxwell. “What you have to ask yourself is as to whether she will be kind when she’s hooked you. There’s such a difference before and after.”

“Hooked me?” He stopped. They were near St. John’s Wood Road station. “What a horrible idea!”

“Well, of course she wants to marry you,” said Miss Maxwell. “Very soon she’ll not be as young as she is now, and you’re rich, and I should think good-natured.”

“How do you know so much about me?” he asked, staring at her in amazement.

“I’m observant,” said Miss Maxwell.

“I should just think you are!” he said, looking at her, quite obviously ablaze with admiration.

“Tell me one thing,” said Miss Maxwell. “If you propose to her and she marries you, will you live in this house?”

“I should think not. As it is, she says it’s too small for her, and miles away from anywhere.”

“Too small for her and miles away from anywhere!” Miss Maxwell retorted, indignantly. “She is no more worthy of that house than she is of you! However, I hope she’ll marry you,” she added.

On that they parted, and it was quite astonishing how often afterwards they met. And yet it was perhaps not altogether astonishing, for Miss Maxwell was so often in that road, and the gentleman, whose name was Mr. Herbert Willings, had reached that stage in courtship when very frequent visits are necessary. Moreover, he had the nature that demands a sympathetic friend. It was a delight to him, he confessed it frankly, to have someone to whom he could confide every stage of his courting progress. There was a little public garden round the corner, a very small one and a dusty, but it had in it a bench, and upon this bench Miss Maxwell and Mr. Willings used to sit, and he poured out to her his longings, his hopes, and asked her endless questions as to what she thought about Miss March’s character. Because, after all, he was forty-two, and behind his ardour was a natural middle-aged caution. He didn’t, he confided to Miss Maxwell, want to make a mistake this time, from which she inferred that his first marriage had not been a complete success.

She herself was pulled in two opposite directions. She was as certain as she had ever been of anything that Miss March would make him very miserable. She had a kind of tenderness for him, he was so childish and so naïf, and she really didn’t want him to be miserable for the rest of his days, as he undoubtedly would be if he married Miss March. On the other hand, it might be good for him to be less comfortable, less stout, and have to face for once the realities of life. And then she wanted him to marry, she wanted it terribly. She tried to make him understand a little what she felt about the house. She made him pay special visits to various rooms into which, it was quite evident, Miss March had not intended him to enter. She asked him all sorts of questions about the hang of the curtains, whether the carpets were brushed, how many pieces of china had been broken, and he was caught once by Miss March counting the cups and saucers behind the glass case in her bedroom, and this, as he told Miss Maxwell, made her extremely angry. He had never seen Miss March angry before, and quite frankly he hadn’t liked it. Miss Maxwell soon perceived that he would never have her feelings about the house. He simply didn’t understand those things. A picture, if it had plenty of colour, wasn’t bad on a wall, and a row of books, were they nicely bound, looked pleasant in a bookcase. He had to confess that he didn’t read very much himself, but liked a good detective story when he was sleepy after a hard day’s work. He thought the Chinese horses rather absurd, and treated her to quite a long lecture on the Yellow Peril, and how just at present Europe was all in pieces. It was the time we had to look out. He was very serious about this, and started at her in amazement when she said that if only the Yellow Peril brought her another pair of Chinese horses she wouldn’t mind very much what happened to Europe. The weeks advanced, and at last the moment arrived when he intended to propose. He asked her advice very often as to the proper time and place in which to make his venture. She told him that in her opinion nothing was better than tea-time on the lawn, the shadows stealing across the grass, sparrows twittering, flowers sleepily closing their eyes, and plenty of little pink cakes on the table. And then as fate and the English climate would have it, the rain came down. Although it was July, it was as cold as December. Tea on the lawn was impossible, and a whole ten days went by when Mr. Willings had so nasty a cold that proposing was a physical impossibility. Then the fine day came.

•   •   •   •   •

Miss Maxwell knew very well that the day had arrived. When she saw the sun splashing across her carpet in the early morning, the first thing that she had said to herself, was, “Now he’ll propose to her today.”

They had come, without spoken word, to a kind of agreement that they would meet in the little dusty park on most fine days somewhere around five in the afternoon; that is to say, if she were free she would go, and if he were free he would go, without any very definite agreement, and it was surprising how often accident led them in the same direction.

Today, on this perfectly lovely afternoon, about half-past five, she was sitting on the bench watching the sparrows and waiting with terrific emotion for his appearance. She was sure that he would need a confidant, someone into whose sympathetic ear he could pour every word of the wonderful occasion. Had she a sympathetic ear? She was not so sure. She felt in some mysterious way guilty. They would not be happy together. There was not the least chance of it. Miss March would lead him such a dance as Miss Maxwell trembled to contemplate. But what did that matter, compared with the house? After all, it was their own affair and not hers. She was not their friend, or, at least, only very slightly. As she sat there she realised that what was happening on this wonderful afternoon was that the house was being given back to her. He must propose, and she must accept him, and they, being engaged, released the house. It was as simple as an easy sum in algebra. The house being released, in some way or another she would hold on to it. She couldn’t see now in what way that would be, but never again, she swore, would she let it be delivered over to the mercies of an unsympathetic tenant. After all, she could live in one of the small rooms at the top of the house on bread and cheese, and open the other rooms one after another as her investments went up. She could feast her eyes on the Chinese horses, the darlings, and go over the house at night, touching the pictures with her hands, listening to every piece of furniture as it whispered to her “Good night,” see the ghostly gleam of the china, hear the faint rustle of the curtains against the half-open window.

There was a step. She looked up. There was Mr. Willings, more flushed in the face than usual, greatly agitated. He sat down beside her, and then to her surprise, instead of bursting into a torrent of explanation, he said nothing.

“Well?” she broke in, at last.

He still said nothing.

“Tell me that she’s accepted you!” she cried. “And then give me all the details.”

“She hasn’t accepted me.”

“She hasn’t?”

“No.”

“Good heavens, what a fool!” Miss Maxwell, in her agitation, turned full upon him. “You don’t mean to tell me she’s refused you? Why, it’s exactly what she wants. She won’t get such another chance in a hundred years. She’s going off. She’s got some money, of course, but not nearly enough, and you’re so kind.”

Her expressions were mixed, but her meaning was clear.

“She hasn’t refused me.”

“She hasn’t refused you?”

“No.”

“Nor accepted you?”

“No.”

“Then she’s going to wait and think it over?”

“No, not that either.”

“Then – Good heavens, Mr. Willings, tell me what you mean. I can’t endure the suspense any longer.”

“What I mean is simple enough.”

His expression was almost sulky as he turned towards her.

“What I mean is that I haven’t proposed.”

Miss Maxwell was so bitterly disappointed that she could say nothing.

“I haven’t proposed,” he went on, doggedly, “and I don’t intend to. I’m never going to propose. I don’t love her. I don’t want her to be my wife.”

Miss Maxwell rose bravely out of her disappointment. Curiosity held her again.

“You’re not going to propose, and you don’t love her? You loved her that day all right when I pressed my nose against the railings. I could see from behind miles of shrubbery your love oozing out all over the lawn. How can you change so quickly?”

“I might have loved her,” he said, his face bright crimson, “if I hadn’t run into you in the road; but you can’t love two people at once, or I can’t.”

She was too utterly amazed to do anything but gasp.

“Why, man, you don’t mean to say—?” she began.

“Yes, I do,” he went on, staring at her. “I fell in love with you after the very first day, and it’s gone on increasing ever since. How can a chit of a thing like that compare with you, with your wisdom and your kindness, and your fun, and – and – your beauty?”

“My beauty?” said Miss Maxwell.

“Yes, your beauty,” he said, stammering in his agitation. “You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. Your quiet grey eyes—”

“Oh, please, Mr. Willings!”

Miss Maxwell wanted to laugh, looked at the piteous, dog-like expression in his large round eyes, and was touched with tenderness.

“Now do think for a moment. Here we are in a dusty little park in St. John’s Wood and we’re both middle-aged and nothing could make us romantic any longer. There is a beautiful young girl with all her life in front of her. I’m a withered old thing, and you know it in yourself. Besides, I’m in love with somebody else.”

His face fell so it was tragic to see.

“In love with somebody else?”

“Yes, with my house. I can’t think of anything or anybody but my house.”

“Why, then, don’t you see,” he cried, triumphantly, “you shall have your house. We’ll turn that girl out of it and you shall live in it for the rest of your days. You’ll have to put up with me, of course, but I’ll do my best not to be in the way.”

•   •   •   •   •

They were both such charming people that a small sparrow who had been hopping about in a businesslike fashion on the path stopped for a moment and looked at them in sheer admiration, with his head on one side.

The dazzling vision blinded her. She didn’t love him; no, not the least little bit. She looked at him, even in that moment of amazement, quite clearly and dispassionately, and saw how fat and bald he would be, even in another five years, and heard him snore in his sleep, and felt his heavy tread as he came towards her when she was tired and inquired solicitously whether she wanted anything, and saw the silly smile of happy satisfaction in his face when he bought her a new hat, and perceived precisely his air of touching proprietorship as he walked across a well-filled restaurant towards the table that he had so carefully chosen. She saw all this, but she saw on the other hand quite clearly a life of ease and affluence, no more struggles, no more watching your shares go down, no more wondering what she could do to get a new dress without paying for it, and, above all, the house, the house, the house – hers for ever and ever. Yes, but his too. He didn’t care for the house; he would pretend to, but he would never be able to hide it from her. Nevertheless, she was deeply touched.

“I can’t tell you,” she said, “what a compliment you’ve paid me. We’ll be friends always, won’t we, whatever happens?”

His face fell directly.

“Oh, I know what it means when you say that,” he said. “I don’t want us to be friends. I want you to marry me.”

“But I don’t love you!”

“You will grow to care for me,” he said. “I’m sure you will. I’ll be ever so patient.”

How many thousands upon thousands of people had said those very words before! How many thousands of people were probably saying those words at that very moment throughout the world!

She looked at him, looked away, said at last: “Give me a week. We won’t meet for a week, nor write, nor anything at all. Be here this same time today week, rain or shine, and I will give you my answer; but remember, whatever my answer is, that I shall never forget how kind you have been. I shall always be grateful.”

She got up then and left him.

•   •   •   •   •

There followed the most critical week of her life. She sat in her little room, looking over at the garden, and fought her severest battle. No one would ever propose to her again. Of that she was quite sure. There was very little prospect that, left alone by herself, life would ever become very easy. Life was not very easy any more to middle-aged women with small incomes and no talents. She would struggle and struggle and struggle, and later on perhaps ill-health would come. She would be alone in the world, and the grim finale was more than she, however brave she might be, could fully contemplate. He would always be kind, much too kind. She would dominate him utterly. He would do everything she told him. When she was cross (and sometimes she was very cross indeed) he would be sorry and go out and buy her something and beg her pardon for some fault that she herself had committed. There would always be somebody to look after her. When she was ill, there would be every attention. They would go abroad and see the world. Most of all, she would not only live in the house, but she would be able to do things to it, make it perfect and beautiful and wonderful, give it all the little attentions that it needed, help it and strengthen it and make it lovely, and at last die in it.

Yes, but he would be there. Every moment of their life together he would be misunderstanding the house. She would never, never be able to make him see it. However strongly she dominated him, she would never prevent his personality from pervading it, and the inevitable moment would surely come when she would implore him to leave it and probably find that the only thing to do was for them both to go and live somewhere else.

•   •   •   •   •

Common-sense readers of this little story will say at once that it is fantastically impossible. No middle-aged spinster with no future would surrender a comfortable, safe, and assured life for such a reason. It was not fantastic to Miss Maxwell. The beauty of that house was the test for her of all the beauty in the world, the only test, and it had to be kept pure and immaculate, and if it were not so, the colour of the world would change. Nothing would ever be quite immaculate again. That was a terrible week. She sat at her window, looking over at the house, struggling, thinking first one thing and then another. Then one evening, just the day before she was to meet him again, a marvellous thing happened. It was a lovely summer evening, with a half moon, crocus-coloured, rising ever so gently into the faint blue sky. She suddenly determined that she would go and see Miss March. She rang the bell and stood waiting, trembling with excitement. The horse-faced servant opened the door. Miss March was out. Might Miss Maxwell go just for a moment to the room at the top of the house and look for a little box that she had left there and forgotten? The servant hesitated and then yielded. Through the rooms Miss Maxwell went. They were soaked with the evening light, the light through which she loved most to see them. The whole house cried out with protest as she went. Ugly things lay everywhere, hideous new novels with bright yellow labels. In the dining-room the remains of a horrible meal not yet cleared away. In the beautiful little blue-walled drawing-room there was a loathsome Pekingese that whimpered at her like a child as she entered. And the bedroom – the mess that it was! Even the horse-faced servant felt something of this and said that it was wonderful how perpetually on the move Miss March had been, and what with dancing all night and entertaining people all day, it was a wonder that she kept her complexion as she did. In the little room at the top of the house, there was desolation. No one had touched it for months. It was dusty and neglected and forlorn. Miss Maxwell looked out of the little attic window, and saw the moon and the pale green sky, and the dark trees coming up to her like old friends from the dusky garden. She leaned out and forgot everything. Her hands pressed on the little wooden sill. Her eyes filled with repentant tears. She heard the servant’s voice.

“I’m thinking Miss March won’t be here much longer,” the servant said. “She is considering giving up the rest of the lease, she tells me. It don’t suit her. Too far out for ’er friends. I’m sure I don’t wonder,” she ended with a sniff.

Miss Maxwell turned round, her heart beating with joy.

“ ’Tis too far out for her,” she cried, triumphantly. “It’s not the house for her at all. She doesn’t understand it.”

The servant looked at Miss Maxwell with a stern pity.

“Maybe, miss,” was all she said.

As they went downstairs, the house seemed to gather around them, and Miss Maxwell felt as though someone put a hand on her shoulder, and a voice whispered in her ear, “We’re so glad you’re coming back. We don’t want anybody here but you.”

•   •   •   •   •

On the following afternoon, Miss Maxwell refused Mr. Willings.

“The Strand Magazine” Dec 1922

The Silver Thorn (1928)

THE ENEMY

At a quarter-past eight in the morning, every working day of the year, summer and winter, little Jack Harding left his little house in Ealing for the Charing Cross Road, where he had a little bookshop. A month every year he took a holiday, but even during that month he might be said to go through the same procedure, because, wherever he might be, he woke up at half-past seven and, lying on his back in bed, went through all the stages of dressing, having breakfast, hurrying to the station, changing at Hammersmith, getting out at Leicester Square, walking up to the little shop, scolding the boy with adenoids, opening his correspondence, and entering happily on the business of the day. It was luxurious indeed to lie on one’s back and take this journey, hearing the waves murmur outside one’s window, or seeing the clouds pass in lazy procession, or hearing the separator hard at work in some distant part of the farmhouse. He enjoyed his holiday, of course, but he enjoyed still more getting back to work again. He loved his shop, although it made him the barest living in these difficult post-war days, and he could not be said to care very generally for books for their own sake. He was a little man, stout and round like a rolling-pin, with very small feet and hands, of which he was immensely proud. He was cheery and optimistic by temperament, loved to hear the sound of his own voice, and, although he was forty-five, was still unmarried. He enjoyed the society of ladies, but liked them in general rather than in particular. An old woman looked after him and his little house, cheated him and robbed him, scolded him and abused him, except when he was ill, when she adored him and took an enormous amount of trouble to make him comfortable. He had only one enemy in the world.

•   •   •   •   •

Now the point about this enemy was that he had seldom spoken to him. Some years ago, when he had first come to live in Ealing, he had noticed on his regular morning journey a large, heavy, red-faced man, who lived apparently in his own street, always plunged out of his door at precisely the moment when he, Harding, passed it, and so plunged apparently in order to have a bright morning conversation. In fact, it very soon became Harding’s conviction that the large, heavy gentleman waited behind the dining-room curtain until he saw him approach and then made his plunge. Now Harding did not want a bright morning conversation. His mind was busy with the details of the day’s work. The catalogue that he was preparing, the cheap lot of books that had come in yesterday and would, most of them, find their way into the sixpenny box outside, and the chances of discovering some unexpected find that would add glory to the aforementioned catalogue: such questions as these made a morning conversation with a stranger extremely irritating, and Harding was English enough to suspect at once of the most abominable crimes anybody who spoke to him without a proper Ealing introduction.

This large man was, in Harding’s view, exactly the person of whom you would expect a crime. On the first morning the large man had insisted on walking with Harding to the station, he talked in a great booming voice about the weather, about the neighbouring music-hall and a dainty little piece who was dancing there, about some shares he had somewhere, about his being a widower, about some geraniums in his back garden, about some horses, about indigestion, and about where he was going for his summer holiday. All these things before they reached the station at all. Then in the train he sat next to Harding, might indeed be said to sit over him, and went on with a long cheerful proclamation about potatoes and beans and cabbages, shouting it all out at the top of his voice in rivalry with the noisy train. If there was one thing in the world that Harding detested it was talking against a train, he himself having a rather small, shrill voice which was not at its best when it was unduly raised, as he very well knew. Then this horrible man stuck closely to him at Hammersmith, marched down the platform with him, pushed past the ticket collector, marched up the other platform, and sat over him once again in the Tube. He went all the way with him to Leicester Square and would, Harding believed, have followed him to his bookshop had he not managed to lose him in the crowd. Work was spoilt for Harding that day. Whenever he tried to think clearly that man’s booming voice seemed to get in the way, his large, bushy black moustache seemed to whisk up and down the bookshelves, and his broad, aggressive chest overshadowed the customers.

Harding had not been encouraging, but nevertheless, next day, there was the man again, darting down the steps with a “Well, good morning, good morning, how are we today?” so that Harding, who detested to be called “we,” was so deeply annoyed that he murmured that he had forgotten something, hurried back to his house again, and was twenty minutes late at the bookshop.

This was how it began, and every day now the poor little man was overshadowed by this horrible stranger. This horrible man’s name was Tonks, and he had something to do with vegetables. He had no children and was thinking of marrying again, but couldn’t quite make up his mind. He gave his reluctant companion most unpleasant and intimate details of his earlier married life. He had an especially disagreeable habit of putting his hand on little Harding’s shoulder. The really strange thing was that Tonks seemed to have no particular liking for any other of the numerous company who went down to the City at that same hour day by day. There were, as Harding complained, any number of men who would have been delighted with Tonks’s confidences, but Tonks appeared to wish to know none of them, and Harding, being a modest little man, could only explain this as a quite definite persecution, deliberately indulged in by Tonks for his own especial annoyance.

Now the passion of Harding’s life was his bookshop. He thought about it all day, slept with it all night, ate it at every meal, and was never so happy as when he was imagining wonderful plans for its future. These plans were not really of a literary kind. His vision and dream was an enormous shop containing thousands and thousands and thousands of volumes. Room succeeded room, rows and rows of bookshelves towered up into the mysterious mists of the ceiling. There were so many books that nobody knew how many there were, nor ever would know, and with this sense of size and multitude went also a keen pleasure in what may vulgarly be called “spotting the winner.” Harding never went to horse-races; as he once explained to a friend, he did his horse-racing in the bookshop.

This was just at the time when there was a passion, both in America and England, for modern first editions, and Harding had a special catalogue of modern firsts of which he was immensely proud. This catalogue might have been better, and he would certainly have made more money had he gone in for quality rather than quantity, but he loved his catalogues to be large and full of important names. He had a list of modern writers, and used to mark them up and down in this list week by week according to the value of the moment. At one time it would be, we will say, Drinkwater and De la Mare, who were going to win the literary stakes, and his modern catalogue that quarter would be full of Drinkwaters and De la Mares, a great many of them of no value at all, but he would put little mystical notes under the items, like “Very scarce” or “Rare in this state,” and then hope for the best. Nothing pleased him so much as when somebody came into his shop, asked for some tawdry novel, and was then lured by him into a consideration of rare firsts. He loved to see them open their eyes in wide amazement as he explained to them the wonderful speculation that investing in these mysterious Drinkwaters would be, of them going up week by week, that somebody in his shop had bought two years ago a little slim Masefield for almost nothing at all, and that now ten pounds wouldn’t buy it. Ladies might be seen going from his shop with a little bundle of mysterious poets, when they had intended to purchase only a very unmysterious story to read in the train. Had this been all, he might truly be said to be encouraging a love of real literature among the masses, but unfortunately those same ladies very often returned at a later date with the same mysterious poets under their arm, expecting him very naïvely to give them an increased price for these same writers and being greatly indignant when they found that these books had gone down rather than up.

•   •   •   •   •

Nothing is perhaps more curious in ordinary life than the way in which somebody who has perhaps a very remote connection with ourselves and our affairs creeps in upon our consciousness and dominates it. I remember once staying with a man in a fine country house, surrounded by a magnificent park, shut off most securely from all the world, and worried almost to death by the personality of a certain butcher in a neighbouring village. He didn’t even get his meat from the man; he was simply conscious of him, of his red face, his stout body, his blood-stained knife, and this man interfered so seriously with his happiness that he sold his house and went elsewhere. That is an extreme case, I daresay, but we must all of us be able to remember times when we have been affected in something of this fashion.

Mr. Tonks crept in upon the consciousness of Mr. Harding very slowly. Mr. Harding could not really be said to be a very imaginative man. He had only an imagination about the possible size of his bookshop. With regard to his own daily affairs he was very practical and sensible. Nevertheless he found himself after a week or two hesitating before he took his walk to the station. Would Tonks be there springing down the steps towards him? Would his cheery laugh ring through South Ealing? Would Harding this time be ahead of him? He noticed soon that he did not move off to the station with his accustomed alacrity, that he paused a little in his bit of garden, and that once or twice he peered down the street to see whether there were anyone there. He began to have a physical feeling about Tonks, as though he were an egg ever so slightly bad, or a bird just a tiny bit too high. He contemplated the possibility of reaching the station by some other route. He thought that perhaps it would be almost as quick to go from Ealing Broadway, but as a matter of honest fact, he knew that it would not. Then he concocted for himself an elaborate conversation with Tonks: how he said to him, very politely, “Good morning,” how they started off to the station together, and how on the way he explained very gravely but with the utmost politeness that it was quite essential for him to have absolute silence on his journey down to Charing Cross Road because there were so many business problems that only that morning hour before the morning rush could solve. He saw himself then bowing to Mr. Tonks, saying that he hoped that he understood, that no kind of offence was intended, and that if there was one person in the world with whom he would like to talk at that moment it was Mr. Tonks, but that, in fact, there must be nobody at all. Harding thought this all out very carefully, and it seemed to him that there was nothing whatever to prevent him from carrying out his desire. There was, in fact, nothing to prevent him except that the words would not come. Something tied him when he saw Mr. Tonks, just as though a seal had been placed on his lips, and this made him more irritated than ever. “I should have thought,” he complained angrily to himself, “that the fellow could see I don’t want him. I surely make it plain enough.” However, the fellow did not see, and Mr. Tonks became more and more amiable, more and more voluble, was ever more and more persistently there.

•   •   •   •   •

The next stage in the proceedings was that Harding dreamt about Tonks. He was not a man who dreamt very often; only occasionally, when he had had a late supper, he fell, screaming, from an enormous height, and he did occasionally dream about somebody coming into his shop with a first Pilgrim’s Progress in perfect condition, and offering it to him for sixpence; but he was, on the whole, most definitely not a dreamer. One night he saw Tonks standing in his room in his night-shirt. The vision was so vivid, the smile on Tonks’s face so real, the night-shirt so exactly what in real life it would be, that it was hard to believe it was a dream. “What have you come here for?” he asked, angrily. “I’m never going to leave you again,” the figure replied. Poor Harding woke with a scream. Then the dream came quite frequently. There were different aspects of it. The worst was when Tonks’s naked feet could be heard padding up the stairs. Then there was a pause outside the bedroom door, and Tonks’s laboured breathing came like a whistle through the woodwork. Then the door slowly opened, and first Tonks’s head was seen peering round, and then the whole big body came into view. Then the door was softly closed, and Tonks stood there watching. Always Harding said the same thing – “What have you come here for?” and Tonks said, “I’m never going to leave you again.”

There suddenly came a week when Tonks did not appear – no sign of him at all. Harding absolutely sighed with relief. Perhaps Tonks had gone away. Perhaps he was on a holiday, and would be drowned in the sea or ridden over by a motor-car. Perhaps he had committed some crime and left the country. At any rate, for a week he disappeared, and Harding was astounded and secretly irritated to find that towards the end of the week he missed him quite seriously, just because to have somebody so thoroughly to dislike seemed to give piquancy to the work of the day, but, lo and behold! there on Monday morning was Tonks again, hurrying down the steps with his “Well, well, how are we, then, today?” and then going on to explain that he had had a horribly bad cold, that his throat had hurt him something terribly, and his inside not been at all the thing. On that day Harding could have killed him, and he did manage to say as they drew near to the station, “Look here, I’ve got to think something out. Let me be quiet, won’t you?” to which Tonks, who had been sneezing hysterically all down the road, replied through his cold-invaded nose, “All right, old feller; forgive my sneezing, won’t you? Terrible things to get rid of, colds.”

The next stage of this affair was that Tonks’s personality invaded the shop. It can only have been hysteria on the part of Harding, and he was most certainly very far from being an hysterical person, but one morning, opening the door of the shop, stepping in, sniffing as he invariably did the aroma of old decaying books, the beautiful scent of piled-up dusty volumes, it seemed to him that Tonks had followed in after him. He whisked sharply around, but of course there was no one there, but for half a moment he could have sworn that out of the tail of his eye he saw the heavy shoulder, the rough red of the cheek, the beginning of that hateful smile.

“That man’s getting on my nerves,” he said to himself. “I really must refuse to think of him any longer.” But he could not help himself. There was something about Tonks as though he had been Frankenstein’s monster of Harding’s own creation. Harding, like all Englishmen, was, underneath his British exterior, a desperately sentimental man. A little of a sycophant, too, something of a crawler; and the odd thing was that if he had met Tonks just a little differently – that is, on a convivial evening at the house of a mutual friend – he might have liked him very much indeed, so close are love and hatred to one another. As it was, he hated him, and every day with increasing fervour. He was perhaps working too hard, bothering himself too strenuously about his new catalogue. Perhaps he was taking too little exercise and eating things that did not agree with him. Whatever the explanation, certain it is that Tonks’s shadow was always now appearing at the shop, hiding behind the counter, squeezing itself in between the covers of books, balancing itself precariously on ladders, always turning up in the most unexpected places. And then one day came the climax. Tonks did make a real appearance in the true flesh. He came in one morning about midday, sauntering in, one hand in his pocket, smiling all over his face. Harding was alone in the shop at the time.

“Well, well, how are we?” he called out. “I’ve caught you in your lair at last. You never would tell me where you worked, and I’ve had to find it out for myself.”

So he’d been spying on him? Harding’s face crimsoned. He had to bend over a book that he was examining, to hide his agitation. Yes, he’d been spying on him, the beast!

Tonks waited a moment for a reply, and getting none, went on most genially, “Well, well, I’m sure you’re busy today. I’ve come in to buy a book from you.”

“What sort of a book?” said Harding, almost in a whisper.

“Well, it’s for a young lady friend of mine, and she’s taking a long journey up to the North of Scotland, and wants something to read. “Why,” I said to her, “I know the very man. He’s a great friend of mine and very clever, and I’ll ask him to advise me.”

Harding suddenly looked up and leaned across the counter, his face pushed forward. The two men were very close to one another.

“I’m not your friend,” he said, “and I’ll have you know it. I hate the very sight of you. I’ve been wanting to tell you this a long time.”

The smile suddenly left Tonks’s face as though it had been snatched away by somebody standing behind him. His eyes were wide with surprise.

“Well, I never!” he said. “Do you really feel like that about me? I wonder why?”

“Never mind why,” said Harding, furiously. “The fact’s true, and that’s enough. You’ve been irritating me for months, walking along to the station with me, only I haven’t had the courage to tell you so. I should have thought a man would have seen it.”

He bent down, his face still crimson, staring into his book. The puzzled expression deepened on Tonks’s countenance. His whole body seemed to grow puzzled too. His waistcoat developed new creases, his hands seemed to wrinkle. Then his great chest heaved a mighty sigh.

“It’s strange,” he said. “I wonder if you know anything against me? Not that there is much against me that I can think of. But it’s curious, because I took a liking to you. A great liking to you. Most unusually quick it was. At the very first sight of you, as one might say. I suppose I’m slow to notice things, but there’s never been a man I’d have liked for a friend so much as I’ve liked you. There’s something about you sort of appeals to me. I suppose you couldn’t explain a little?”

“No, I couldn’t,” said Harding, ferociously. “I just don’t like you, and that’s all there is about it. We’re better apart, if you’ll excuse me for saying so.”

“Oh, I’ll excuse you,” said Tonks, shaking his head slowly, pulling himself together; “but it’s a pity – a terrible pity. I’m a lonely sort of man. Being a widower’s a bit difficult, because, you see, if you’ve liked the first woman it’s most improbable you’re going to be pleased with the second, and if you haven’t liked the first woman, why, you’re off matrimony altogether, so to speak. If you understand what I mean. I’m sort of lonely in that house. I’ve been wanting to ask you in for weeks past. I’ve got an organ in the dining-room you’d love to hear. It’s as good as a church. You’ve never seen my dog, have you?”

“No, I haven’t,” said Harding, “and don’t want to.”

“Well, well,” said Tonks slowly, “that’s the end of that. I’m glad I’ve got the dog, though,” he said, as he went out of the shop.

•   •   •   •   •

There began after this an even worse period for Harding, because although Tonks never actually met him now on the way to the station, never spoke to him, indeed, he was always just round the corner. Harding could never pass his house without feeling sure he was hiding behind the dining-room curtain and longing to rush out and speak to him. At Hammersmith their paths were sometimes crossed, and then Tonks had a mixture of pride and pleading on his large round face that was terrible to see. Harding had now a curious misgiving that in one way or another he was in the wrong. Absurd, of course, but there you are. He only hated the man the more for it. The man became a proverb in his mind. When he was talking with his friends he would quote him as an instance of the depth of his feeling. “There’s a man I know,” he would say, “whom you wouldn’t believe the way I hate, and I really couldn’t tell you why. Just his face or his smile or something. Case of Dr. Fell, I suppose. Really gives me the creeps. You might say there’s nothing against him, and yet in a way there is. His being alive’s against him, if you understand what I mean.” And then all the friends would laugh together and say that they understood perfectly.

There was one morning a most difficult moment when Tonks came down the steps with his dog, the most hideous mongrel you ever saw, kind of fox-terrier with a black spot on its nose, and one ear half bitten off in a dog fight. The awkward thing was that the dog leapt upon Harding as though he were an old, old friend.

“Come ’ere, Spot, come ’ere!” Tonks called out, looking extremely embarrassed, but Spot persisted in claiming Harding for an old friend. He simply wouldn’t leave him alone. The two men stopped and looked at one another, and Harding had the most curious feeling, as though he would like to go up and embrace Tonks and put his hat straight. A most curious and un-British feeling, as everybody will allow, and Tonks and the dog went one way and Harding went another. Bah! how he hated that man! Why couldn’t he go and live somewhere else? Nevertheless, all the way to the shop, he felt ashamed of himself and couldn’t settle down to anything for the rest of the day.

Three days later, about six in the evening, he was returning home. He left the shop a little earlier than usual, because it was so fine and pleasant. He wanted to get into his little garden and do some digging. He got out at South Ealing Station and walked briskly down the road homewards.

Outside Tonks’s house there was an agitation. Several people were hanging about and a policeman was looking into space.

“Excuse me, constable, is there anything the matter?” asked Harding.

“Gentleman been run over by a motor omnibus,” said the policeman. “Just round the corner here. No use taking ’im to the ’ospital. ’E’s done for.”

“Done for!” gasped Harding.

“Dead as mutton,” said the policeman. Harding turned white. It was as though he himself had killed him.

“Beg pardon, sir,” said the policeman. “Are you a friend of the gentleman?”

“Why?” asked Harding.

“Why, because ’e don’t seem to have anybody in the house who does belong. Nobody but an old woman who comes in and does for ’im, and a dawg. The dawg won’t leave his bed. Must ’ave been a lonely sort of life for a man.”

“Yes, I am a friend of his,” said Harding suddenly,“a very great friend.”

He pushed past the policeman and went into the house. There was a doctor there, an old woman crying, the dog sitting on his hindquarters at the foot of the bed and not moving. There was Tonks himself in a nice clean night-shirt with his hair brushed, looking very calm and quiet, a suggestion of a smile hovering about his mouth.

“Caught him in the stomach,” said the doctor. “Instantaneous. Are you a friend of the deceased?” he asked.

“Yes, I am,” said Harding, “a great friend.”

“Well, there doesn’t seem to be anybody else,” said the doctor. “Must have been a lonely sort of life.”

The old woman sobbed. “Oh, ’e was a kind gentleman,” she said.

“I was his best friend,” said Harding. “We used to go into town together every morning. I’ll see to everything.”

He did. For weeks he worked at Tonks’s affairs, which were in a curiously complicated state. There seemed to be no relations. In the end, when everything was sold and all debts paid, there were a few hundred pounds, and these Harding gave to the old woman. No one seemed to question for a moment that Harding was Tonks’s best friend. The action of the dog only confirmed it. He refused to go near anyone save Harding. Harding had to take him home to live with him.

“No, he’s not much of a dog,” he would say, “but, you see, his master was my best friend, so there you are.”

And the funny part of it all was that that was true.

“The Strand Magazine” Feb 1923

The Silver Thorn (1928)

THE TARN

I

As Foster moved unconsciously across the room, bent towards the bookcase, and stood leaning forward a little, choosing now one book, now another with his eye, his host, seeing the muscles of the back of his thin, scraggy neck stand out above his low flannel collar, thought of the ease with which he could squeeze that throat and the pleasure, the triumphant, lustful pleasure, that such an action would give him.

The low white-walled, white-ceilinged room was flooded with the mellow, kindly Lakeland sun. October is a wonderful month in the English Lakes, golden, rich, and perfumed, slow suns moving through apricot-tinted skies to ruby evening glories; the shadows lie then thick about that beautiful country, in dark purple patches, in long web-like patterns of silver gauze, in thick splotches of amber and grey. The clouds pass in galleons across the mountains, now veiling, now revealing, now descending with ghost-like armies to the very breast of the plains, suddenly rising to the softest of blue skies and lying thin in lazy languorous colour.

Fenwick’s cottage looked across to Low Fells; on his right, seen through side windows, sprawled the hills above Ullswater.

Fenwick looked at Foster’s back and felt suddenly sick, so that he sat down, veiling his eyes for a moment with his hand. Foster had come up there, come all the way from London, to explain, to want to put things right. For how many years had he known Foster? Why, for twenty at least, and during all those years Foster had been for ever determined to put things right with everybody. He could not bear to be disliked; he hated that anyone should think ill of him; he wanted everyone to be his friend. That was one reason, perhaps, why Foster had got on so well, had prospered so in his career; one reason, too, why Fenwick had not.

For Fenwick was the opposite of Foster in this. He did not want friends; he certainly did not care that people should like him – that is, people for whom, for one reason or another, he had contempt – and he had contempt for quite a number of people.

Fenwick looked at that long, thin, bending back and felt his knees tremble. Soon Foster would turn round and that high reedy voice would pipe out something about the books. “What jolly books you have, Fenwick!” How many, many times in the long watches of the night when Fenwick could not sleep had he heard that pipe sounding close there – yes, in the very shadows of his bed! And how many times had Fenwick replied to it: “I hate you! You are the cause of my failure in life! You have been in my way always. Always, always, always! Patronising and pretending, and in truth showing others what a poor thing you thought me, how great a failure, how conceited a fool! I know. You can hide nothing from me! I can hear you!”

For twenty years now Foster had been persistently in Fenwick’s way. There had been that affair, so long ago now, when Robins had wanted a sub-editor for his wonderful review, the Parthenon, and Fenwick had gone to see him and they had had a splendid talk. How magnificently Fenwick had talked that day, with what enthusiasm he had shown Robins (who was blinded by his own conceit, anyway) the kind of paper the Parthenon might be, how Robins had caught his own enthusiasm, how he had pushed his fat body about the room, crying, “Yes, yes, Fenwick – that’s fine! That’s fine indeed!” – and then how, after all, Foster had got that job.

The paper had only lived for a year or so, it is true, but the connection with it had brought Foster into prominence just as it might have brought Fenwick!

•   •   •   •   •

Then five years later there was Fenwick’s novel, The Bitter Aloe – the novel upon which he had spent three years of blood-and-tears endeavour – and then, in the very same week of publication, Foster brings out The Circus, the novel that made his name, although, Heaven knows, the thing was poor sentimental trash. You may say that one novel cannot kill another – but can it not? Had not The Circus appeared would not that group of London know-alls – that conceited, limited, ignorant, self-satisfied crowd, who nevertheless can do, by their talk, so much to affect a book’s good or evil fortunes – have talked about The Bitter Aloe, and so forced it into prominence? As it was, the book was still-born, and The Circus went on its prancing, triumphant way.

After that there had been many occasions – some small, some big – and always in one way or another that thin, scraggy body of Foster’s was interfering with Fenwick’s happiness.

The thing had become, of course, an obsession with Fenwick. Hiding up there in the heart of the Lakes, with no friends, almost no company, and very little money, he was given too much to brooding over his failure. He was a failure, and it was not his own fault. How could it be his own fault with his talents and his brilliance? It was the fault of modern life and its lack of culture, the fault of the stupid material mess that made up the intelligence of human beings – and the fault of Foster.

Always Fenwick hoped that Foster would keep away from him. He did not know what he would not do did he see the man. And then one day to his amazement he received a telegram: “Passing through this way. May I stop with you Monday and Tuesday? Giles Foster.”

Fenwick could scarcely believe his eyes, and then – from curiosity, from cynical contempt, from some deeper, more mysterious motive that he dared not analyse – he had telegraphed “Come.”

And here the man was. And he had come – would you believe it? – to “put things right.” He had heard from Hamlin Eddis that “Fenwick was hurt with him, had some kind of a grievance.”

“I didn’t like to feel that, old man, and so I thought I’d just stop by and have it out with you, see what the matter was, and put it right.”

Last night after supper Foster had tried to put it right. Eagerly, his eyes like a good dog’s who is asking for a bone that he knows that he thoroughly deserves, he had held out his hand and asked Fenwick to “say what was up.”

Fenwick simply had said that nothing was up; Hamlin Eddis was a damned fool.

“Oh, I’m glad to hear that!” Foster had cried, springing up out of his chair and putting his hand on Fenwick’s shoulder. “I’m glad of that, old man. I couldn’t bear for us not to be friends. We’ve been friends so long.”

Lord! how Fenwick hated him at that moment!

II

“What a jolly lot of books you have!” Foster turned round and looked at Fenwick with eager, gratified eyes. “Every book here is interesting! I like your arrangement of them too, and those open bookshelves – it always seems to me a shame to shut up books behind glass!”

Foster came forward and sat down quite close to his host. He even reached forward and laid his hand on his host’s knee. “Look here! I’m mentioning it for the last time – positively! But I do want to make quite certain. There is nothing wrong between us, is there, old man? I know you assured me last night, but I just want—”

Fenwick looked at him and, surveying him, felt suddenly an exquisite pleasure of hatred. He liked the touch of the man’s hand on his knee; he himself bent forward a little and, thinking how agreeable it would be to push Foster’s eyes in, deep, deep into his head, crunching them, smashing them to purple, leaving the empty, staring, bloody sockets, said:

“Why, no. Of course not. I told you last night. What could there be?”

The hand gripped the knee a little more tightly.

“I am so glad! That’s splendid! Splendid! I hope you won’t think me ridiculous, but I’ve always had an affection for you ever since I can remember. I’ve always wanted to know you better. I’ve admired your talents so greatly. That novel of yours – the – the – the one about the Aloe—”

“The Bitter Aloe?”

“Ah, yes, that was it. That was a splendid book. Pessimistic, of course, but still fine. It ought to have done better. I remember thinking so at the time.”

“Yes, it ought to have done better.”

“Your time will come, though. What I say is that good work always tells in the end.”

“Yes, my time will come.”

The thin, piping voice went on:

“Now, I’ve had more success than I deserved. Oh, yes, I have. You can’t deny it. I’m not being falsely modest. I mean it. I’ve got some talent, of course, but not so much as people say. And you! Why, you’ve got so much more than they acknowledge. You have, old man. You have indeed. Only – I do hope you’ll forgive my saying this – perhaps you haven’t advanced quite as you might have done. Living up here, shut away here, closed in by all these mountains, in this wet climate – always raining – why, you’re out of things! You don’t see people, don’t talk and discover what’s really going on. Why, look at me!”

Fenwick turned round and looked at him.

“Now, I have half the year in London, where one gets the best of everything, best talk, best music, best plays, and then I’m three months abroad, Italy or Greece or somewhere, and then three months in the country. Now that’s an ideal arrangement. You have everything that way.”

“Italy or Greece or somewhere!”

Something turned in Fenwick’s breast, grinding, grinding, grinding. How he had longed, oh, how passionately, for just one week in Greece, two days in Sicily! Sometimes he had thought that he might run to it, but when it had come to the actual counting of the pennies – and now this fool, this fathead, this self-satisfied, conceited, patronising—

He got up, looking out at the golden sun.

“What do you say to a walk?” he suggested. “The sun will last for a good hour yet.”

III

As soon as the words were out of his lips he felt as though someone else had said them for him. He even turned half-round to see whether anyone else were there. Ever since Foster’s arrival on the evening before he had been conscious of this sensation. A walk? Why should he take Foster for a walk, show him his beloved country, point out those curves and lines and hollows, the long silver shield of Ullswater, the cloudy purple hills hunched like blankets about the knees of some recumbent giant? Why? It was as though he had turned round to someone behind him and had said, “You have some further design in this.”

They started out. The road sank abruptly to the lake, then the path ran between trees at the water’s edge. Across the lake, tones of bright yellow light, crocus-hued, rode upon the blue. The hills were dark.

The very way that Foster walked bespoke the man. He was always a little ahead of you, pushing his long, thin body along with little eager jerks as though did he not hurry he would miss something that would be immensely to his advantage. He talked, throwing words over his shoulder to Fenwick as you throw crumbs of bread to a robin.

“Of course I was pleased. Who would not be? After all it’s a new prize. They’ve only been awarding it for a year or two, but it’s gratifying – really gratifying – to secure it. When I opened the envelope and found the cheque there – well, you could have knocked me down with a feather. You could, indeed. Of course, a hundred pounds isn’t much. But it’s the honour—”

Whither were they going? Their destiny was as certain as though they had no free-will. Free-will? There is no free-will. All is Fate. Fenwick suddenly laughed aloud.

Foster stopped.

“Why, what is it?”

“What’s what?”

“You laughed.”

“Something amused me.”

Foster slipped his arm through Fenwick’s.

“It is jolly to be walking alone together like this, arm-in-arm, friends. I’m a sentimental man, I won’t deny it. What I say is that life is short and one must love one’s fellow-beings or where is one? You live too much alone, old man.” He squeezed Fenwick’s arm. “That’s the truth of it.”

It was torture, exquisite, heavenly torture. It was wonderful to feel that thin, bony arm pressing against his. Almost you could hear the beating of that other heart. Wonderful to feel that arm and the temptation to take it in your two hands and to bend it and twist it and then to hear the bones crack … crack … crack…. Wonderful to feel that temptation rise through one’s body like boiling water and yet not to yield to it. For a moment Fenwick’s hand touched Foster’s. Then he drew himself apart.

“We’re at the village. This is the hotel where they all come in the summer. We turn off at the right here. I’ll show you my tarn.”

IV

“Your tarn?” asked Foster. “Forgive my ignorance, but what is a tarn exactly?”

“A tarn is a miniature lake, a pool of water lying in the lap of the hill. Very quiet, lovely, silent. Some of them are immensely deep.”

“I should like to see that.”

“It is some little distance – up a rough road. Do you mind?”

“Not a bit. I have long legs.”

“Some of them are immensely deep – unfathomable – nobody touched the bottom – but quiet, like glass, with shadows only—”

“Do you know, Fenwick, but I have always been afraid of water – I’ve never learnt to swim. I’m afraid to go out of my depth. Isn’t that ridiculous? But it is all because at my private school, years ago, when I was a small boy, some big fellows took me and held me with my head under the water and nearly drowned me. They did indeed. They went further than they meant to. I can see their faces.”

Fenwick considered this. The picture leapt to his mind. He could see the boys – large, strong fellows, probably – and this little skinny thing like a frog, their thick hands about his throat, his legs like grey sticks kicking out of the water, their laughter, their sudden sense that something was wrong, the skinny body all flaccid and still—

He drew a deep breath.

Foster was walking beside him now, not ahead of him, as though he were a little afraid, and needed reassurance. Indeed the scene had changed. Before and behind them stretched the uphill path, loose with shale and stones. On their right, on a ridge at the foot of the hill, were some quarries, almost deserted, but the more melancholy in the fading afternoon because a little work still continued there, faint sounds came from the gaunt listening chimneys, a stream of water ran and tumbled angrily into a pool below, once and again a black silhouette, like a question mark, appeared against the darkening hill.

It was a little steep here and Foster puffed and blew.

Fenwick hated him the more for that. So thin and spare, and still he could not keep in condition! They stumbled, keeping below the quarry, on the edge of the running water, now green, now a dirty white-grey, pushing their way along the side of the hill.

Their faces were set now towards Helvellyn. It rounded the cup of hills closing in the base and then sprawling to the right.

“There’s the tarn!” Fenwick exclaimed – and then added, “The sun’s not lasting as long as I had expected. It’s growing dark already.”

Foster stumbled and caught Fenwick’s arm.

“This twilight makes the hills look strange – like living men. I can scarcely see my way.”

“We’re alone here,” Fenwick answered. “Don’t you feel the stillness? The men will have left the quarry now and gone home. There is no one in all this place but ourselves. If you watch you will see a strange green light steal down over the hills. It lasts but for a moment, and then it is dark.

“Ah, here is my tarn. Do you know how I love this place, Foster? It seems to belong especially to me, just as much as all your work and your glory and fame and success seem to belong to you. I have this and you have that. Perhaps in the end we are even after all. Yes….

“But I feel as though that piece of water belonged to me and I to it, and as though we should never be separated – yes…. Isn’t it black?

“It is one of the deep ones. No one has ever sounded it. Only Helvellyn knows, and one day I fancy that it will take me, too, into its confidence – will whisper its secrets—”

Foster sneezed.

“Very nice. Very beautiful, Fenwick. I like your tarn. Charming. And now let’s turn back. That is a difficult walk beneath the quarry. It’s chilly, too.”

“Do you see that little jetty there?” Fenwick led Foster by the arm. “Someone built that out into the water. He had a boat there, I suppose. Come and look down. From the end of the little jetty it looks so deep and the mountains seem to close round.”

Fenwick took Foster’s arm and led him to the end of the jetty. Indeed the water looked deep here. Deep and very black. Foster peered down, then he looked up at the hills that did indeed seem to have gathered close around him. He sneezed again.

“I’ve caught a cold, I am afraid. Let’s turn homewards, Fenwick, or we shall never find our way.”

“Home then,” said Fenwick, and his hands closed about the thin, scraggy neck. For the instant the head half turned and two startled, strangely childish eyes stared; then, with a push that was ludicrously simple, the body was impelled forward, there was a sharp cry, a splash, a stir of something white against the swiftly gathering dusk, again and then again, then far-spreading ripples, then silence.

V

The silence extended. Having enwrapped the tarn, it spread as though with finger on lip to the already quiescent hills. Fenwick shared in the silence. He luxuriated in it. He did not move at all. He stood there looking upon the inky water of the tarn, his arms folded, a man lost in intensest thought. But he was not thinking. He was only conscious of a warm luxurious relief, a sensuous feeling that was not thought at all.

Foster was gone – that tiresome, prating, conceited, self-satisfied fool! Gone, never to return. The tarn assured him of that. It stared back into Fenwick’s face approvingly as though it said: “You have done well – a clean and necessary job. We have done it together, you and I. I am proud of you.”

He was proud of himself. At last he had done something definite with his life. Thought, eager, active thought, was beginning now to flood his brain. For all these years, he had hung around in this place doing nothing but cherish grievances, weak, backboneless – now at last there was action. He drew himself up and looked at the hills. He was proud – and he was cold. He was shivering. He turned up the collar of his coat. Yes, there was the faint green light that always lingered in the shadows of the hills for a brief moment before darkness came. It was growing late. He had better return.

Shivering now so that his teeth chattered, he started off down the path, and then was aware that he did not wish to leave the tarn. The tarn was friendly; the only friend he had in all the world. As he stumbled along in the dark, this sense of loneliness grew. He was going home to an empty house. There had been a guest in it last night. Who was it? Why, Foster, of course – Foster with his silly laugh and amiable, mediocre eyes. Well, Foster would not be there now. No, he never would be there again.

And suddenly Fenwick started to run. He did not know why, except that, now that he had left the tarn, he was lonely. He wished that he could have stayed there all night, but because he was cold he could not, and now he was running so that he might be at home with the lights and the familiar furniture – and all the things that he knew to reassure him.

As he ran the shale and stones scattered beneath his feet. They made a tit-tattering noise under him, and someone else seemed to be running too. He stopped, and the other runner also stopped. He breathed in the silence. He was hot now. The perspiration was trickling down his cheeks. He could feel a dribble of it down his back inside his shirt. His knees were pounding. His heart was thumping. And all around him, the hills were so amazingly silent, now like indiarubber clouds that you could push in or pull out as you do those indiarubber faces, grey against the night sky of a crystal purple upon whose surface, like the twinkling eyes of boats at sea, stars were now appearing.

His knees steadied, his heart beat less fiercely, and he began to run again. Suddenly he had turned the corner and was out at the hotel. Its lamps were kindly and reassuring. He walked then quietly along the lake-side path, and had it not been for the certainty that someone was treading behind him he would have been comfortable and at his ease. He stopped once or twice and looked back, and once he stopped and called out “Who’s there?” Only the rustling trees answered.

He had the strangest fancy, but his brain was throbbing so fiercely that he could not think, that it was the tarn that was following him, the tarn slipping, sliding along the road, being with him so that he should not be lonely. He could almost hear the tarn whisper in his ear: “We did that together, and so I do not wish you to bear all the responsibility yourself. I will stay with you, so that you are not lonely.”

He climbed the road towards home, and there were the lights of his house. He heard the gate click behind him as though it were shutting him in. He went into the sitting-room, lighted and ready. There were the books that Foster had admired.

The old woman who looked after him appeared.

“Will you be having some tea, sir?”

“No, thank you, Annie.”

“Will the other gentleman be wanting any?”

“No; the other gentleman is away for the night.”

“Then there will be only one for supper?”

“Yes, only one for supper.”

He sat in the corner of the sofa and fell instantly into a deep slumber.

VI

He woke when the old woman tapped him on the shoulder and told him that supper was served. The room was dark save for the jumping light of two uncertain candles. Those two red candlesticks – how he hated them up there on the mantelpiece! He had always hated them, and now they seemed to him to have something of the quality of Foster’s voice – that thin, reedy, piping tone.

He was expecting at every moment that Foster would enter, and yet he knew that he would not. He continued to turn his head towards the door, but it was so dark there that you could not see. The whole room was dark except just there by the fireplace, where the two candlesticks went whining with their miserable twinkling plaint.

He went into the dining-room and sat down to his meal. But he could not eat anything. It was odd – that place by the table where Foster’s chair should be. Odd, naked, and made a man feel lonely.

He got up once from the table and went to the window, opened it and looked out. He listened for something. A trickle as of running water, a stir, through the silence, as though some deep pool were filling to the brim. A rustle in the trees, perhaps. An owl hooted. Sharply, as though someone had spoken to him unexpectedly behind his shoulder, he closed the window and looked back, peering under his dark eyebrows into the room.

Later on he went up to bed.

VII

Had he been sleeping, or had he been lying lazily as one does, half-dozing, half-luxuriously not-thinking? He was wide awake now, utterly awake, and his heart was beating with apprehension. It was as though someone had called him by name. He slept always with his window a little open and the blind up. Tonight the moonlight shadowed in sickly fashion the objects in his room. It was not a flood of light nor yet a sharp splash, silvering a square, a circle, throwing the rest into ebony blackness. The light was dim, a little green, perhaps, like the shadow that comes over the hills just before dark.

He stared at the window, and it seemed to him that something moved there. Within, or rather against the green-grey light, something silver-tinted glistened. Fenwick stared. It had the look, exactly, of slipping water.

Slipping water! He listened, his head up, and it seemed to him that from beyond the window he caught the stir of water, not running, but rather welling up and up, gurgling with satisfaction as it filled and filled.

He sat up higher in bed, and then saw that down the wallpaper beneath the window water was undoubtedly trickling. He could see it lurch to the projecting wood of the sill, pause, and then slip, slither down the incline. The odd thing was that it fell so silently.

Beyond the window there was that odd gurgle, but in the room itself absolute silence. Whence could it come? He saw the line of silver rise and fall as the stream on the window-ledge ebbed and flowed.

He must get up and close the window. He drew his legs above the sheets and blankets and looked down.

He shrieked. The floor was covered with a shining film of water. It was rising. As he looked it had covered half the short stumpy legs of the bed. It rose without a wink, a bubble, a break! Over the sill it poured now in a steady flow, but soundless. Fenwick sat back in the bed, the clothes gathered to his chin, his eyes blinking, the Adam’s apple throbbing like a throttle in his throat.

But he must do something, he must stop this. The water was now level with the seats of the chairs, but still was soundless. Could he but reach the door!

He put down his naked foot, then cried again. The water was icy cold. Suddenly, leaning, staring at its dark unbroken sheen, something seemed to push him forward. He fell. His head, his face was under the icy liquid; it seemed adhesive and in the heart of its ice hot like melting wax. He struggled to his feet. The water was breast-high. He screamed again and again. He could see the looking-glass, the row of books, the picture of Dürer’s “Horse,” aloof, impervious. He beat at the water and flakes of it seemed to cling to him like scales of fish, clammy to his touch. He struggled, ploughing his way, towards the door.

The water now was at his neck. Then something had caught him by the ankle. Something held him. He struggled, crying, “Let me go! Let me go! I tell you to let me go! I hate you! I hate you! I will not come down to you! I will not—”

The water covered his mouth. He felt that someone pushed in his eyeballs with bare knuckles. A cold hand reached up and caught his naked thigh.

VIII

In the morning the little maid knocked and, receiving no answer, came in, as was her wont, with his shaving water. What she saw made her scream. She ran for the gardener.

They took the body with its staring, protruding eyes, its tongue sticking out between the clenched teeth, and laid it on the bed.

The only sign of disorder was an overturned water-jug. A small pool of water stained the carpet.

It was a lovely morning. A twig of ivy idly, in the little breeze, tapped the pane.

“Success” Oct 1923

The Silver Thorn (1928)

THE ETCHING

I

But can you always tell, do you think? That seems to me by far the most difficult thing. After all, when you are married you hide the truth from the general world, whatever it may be, whether it is too happy to be told – people think you conceited if you are very happy – or whether it is too unhappy to be confessed. A confession of failure? Who doesn’t hide it if they can?

But that is not exactly what you mean. You were referring to that mysterious Balance of Power. That old over-quoted French proverb, about there being always one who extends the cheek and the other who kisses it, expresses it exactly. And for the outsider it is just that that is so difficult to decide. Women especially are so deceptive. How many adoring wives would slit the throats of their husbands tomorrow could they be certain that they would escape detection, and how many submissive and apparently devoted husbands would poison their wives tonight had they the courage and the security?

I am not railing against marriage, oh no. When it is happy it is happier than any other state the human being is capable of, but it does offer splendid mediums for safe hypocrisies. And the deepest and subtlest of all, of course, are the hypocrisies that deceive the hypocrites themselves.

Take, for instance, the Gabriels. Mrs. Gabriel was a large, four-square genial red-faced grey-haired woman with bright blue eyes and a hearty laugh. She was one of the sensible women of the world – “A rock of common sense” one of her many women friends called her. You felt that she had not always been thus, but had trained herself, through many difficult years, to self-control. You might guess that she still had a temper, and a pretty violent one too. But no one ever saw it. She said that losing one’s temper was a criminal waste of time.

She was rather like a man in her business-sense, in her scorn of emotional trifles, in her comradeship with men, in her contempt for nerves. And she spoke to her husband just as one man speaks to another. “Shut up, Billy,” she would say. “All that rot … you don’t know what you’re talking about,” and Billy would say with a shy, deprecating smile, “All right, my dear, I’ll shut up.” And he invariably did.

Some friends of the family thought her a great deal too “bossy” to Billy, but so long as Billy did not mind, was it anyone else’s business? And Billy did not mind. He simply adored her.

They had been married for fifteen years or more. They were the same age – something over forty. Billy Gabriel was the manager of the Westminster branch of the “London and County Bank.” Mrs. Gabriel had a little money of her own and they had, alas, no children, so that they were quite comfortably circumstanced and lived in a nice roomy flat in Harley House, Marylebone.

About only two things had there ever been any words between them – about living in the country and about spending money.

Billy would have adored to live in the country. His ideal happiness was to have a pleasant cottage – not too large and certainly not too small – somewhere not too far from London, but with a view (of hills, woods and a stream), a garden and some dogs (Sealyhams preferred). He was a long thin man with sandy hair, mild brown eyes, and a meditative mouth that often seemed about to break into a smile and then did not.

You would have said that he was a shy and timid man. You would have been nearly right – but not quite.

Their disputes over money occurred because, strangely enough, Mrs. Gabriel was inclined to be mean. I say “strangely” because it was odd that when she was so sensible about everything else she should be a little stupid about this.

It is stupid, when you have plenty of means, no children, and another half who is in no kind of way extravagant, that you should worry and complain about tram fares and seats in the dress-circle. But Mrs. Gabriel had been brought up on very small rations indeed and there is no one so seriously tempted to meanness as he who has had a penurious childhood and then made, or come into, money.

Nevertheless, all the friends of the Gabriels thought them a very happy and devoted couple. Of course he was by far fonder of her than she of him. Anyone could see that with half an eye. She should have married someone with more personality than Billy, and, good little man as he was, there were times, you could see, when she found it very difficult to be patient with him. She was fond of him, yes, but rather as a mother is fond of a disappointing child who will be gauche and awkward in company.

Billy was shy and clumsy in company, but that was partly because Mrs. Billy made him so. She had begun in the early days of their married life to correct him out of sheer love for him and his funny silly little ways. He was so unpractical (outside his work at the Bank, where he was the last word in method and accuracy), so dreamy and, sometimes, so untidy. And he did love to bore people with long endless wandering stories in which really they could not be expected to take an interest, and so she began by checking him when she saw that other people were becoming bored, and soon it was quite a habit with her. “Shut up, Billy…. All that rot…. Who wants to listen…?”

And then he was so mild, she was so certain of his affection, he was so proud of her and submitted to her so readily, that she was encouraged to continue her “bossing.” She ran him completely. She used to like to wonder what on earth he would ever do were she to go away or be ill. But she never went away (without him) and she was never ill (never gave in to illness. She did not believe in such weak pampering). She was like an elder brother – an elder brother who would wonder sometimes how so stupid and imperceptive a creature could have been born into the family. It was his imperceptions that called out her “managing ways” most frequently. The things that he did not see, the way that he idled his time, dreaming! How he would sit in the evening in their Harley Street flat just staring in front of him smoking his pipe, that smile so nearly there and never quite! Oh, it would irritate her sometimes, she must confess, when she was so busy, to see him sitting there, and she would speak to him sharply and the dream would suddenly fade from his eyes and he would smile up at her (but not with the smile that was so nearly there and never quite) and hurry around and do some of the things that she told him. Oh! he adored her! – and she – well it was a pity for her that she had not married someone with a more remarkable personality.

II

Billy Gabriel was only half awake and he knew it. It is very difficult to be fully awake when your work (and very interesting work too) takes up so much of your day (nine o’clock in the morning until six at night) and when, during the rest of the time, you have a wife who directs your every movement.

Dimly Billy remembered a time when he was not so directed. Oh! but very dimly! He would not say, though, that he was happier then than he was now. No, contrariwise. He was never tired of thinking to himself when he sat in the comfortable Harley Street sitting-room smoking his pipe of an evening how fortunate he was. How fortunate that he, an ordinary unimportant kind of fellow with no especial talent for anything, no good looks, no clever talk, should have found a woman so splendid as Frances to care for him! That had been his first original impulse – a surprised, almost confused, choking gratitude. He had fallen quite naturally from that gratitude into subservience.

He was not as a rule a subservient man. He was not subservient at the Bank, where the clerks were rather afraid of him, nor was he subservient at the “Twelve,” a little dining-club that met once a month, dined at Simpson’s and played dominoes afterwards. But he just worshipped Frances, and when she said that he was talking foolishly, why then he was talking foolishly!

But was “worship” quite the word? He would have liked to think that out. One of the minor troubles of his very untroubled life was that he never quite had time to think things out. One could not of course at the Bank think of anything but the Bank’s affairs, and then afterwards, in the evening, one was given scarcely time enough: one was just beginning to think when suddenly that rough good-natured voice would cut across one’s thought: “Now, Billy … sitting there with your mouth open, dreaming again! Here, get up and help me with these books.” And of course she was right. One must not sit there with one’s mouth open, a habit easily tumbled into were there not a wife to correct one!

But there it was. There was never time to consider whether “worship” was the word. Probably it was not. “Worship” implied some kind of tingling breathless excitement, and certainly he felt no tingling breathless excitement when he thought of Frances. Gratitude and admiration, but excitement, no.

But, then, where were the married pair who, after fifteen years of life together, felt excitement about one another? Comradeship, comfort, compatibility – but excitement?

Nevertheless he was aware that had he had time to think about it he would have been certain that he was only half awake.

III

One November afternoon he had, at the Bank, a very bad headache. So bad was it (he suffered from dyspepsia and had eaten unwisely the evening before) that he made a sudden and startling resolution. He would leave the Bank an hour earlier than usual and take a walk. He had not done such a thing for years and he felt quite shy (almost as though he were speaking to Frances) when he said to old Croffett:

“Croffett, I’ve got a head on this afternoon. I’ll chuck it for today.”

“Yes, sir?” said Croffett, putting his spectacles up his nose in a mild comfortable way that he had. No one seemed to think it in any way peculiar and, as he stepped out into the street, he wondered why he had not done it before.

When he had walked a little way his headache was very much better. He felt an almost school-boyish sense of freedom and strode along humming to himself. He walked up Kingsway, turned to the left and, after a little while, was outside Mudie’s Library.

He stopped and looked in at the windows. He liked Mudie’s, the books in those windows always looked cleaner and cheaper than the books in any other window. That was one of his ambitions – to have a library. He would never have one because Frances thought that buying books was an extravagance when you could subscribe to a Lending Library. But he liked to imagine the books that he would have and to stare in at the window and see how much he could buy for five pounds.

He moved up the street and soon was looking at the grey pile of the British Museum. He liked the British Museum. He had a national pride in it. One day, when he had time, he would spend a whole day there and see the Egyptian mummies and the Elgin Marbles. Meanwhile he liked to look at it and admire its strength and security.

Today, turning aside, he saw suddenly a shop that he had never noticed before. It was a little shop with prints and drawings in the window, and there was something in the way that they were arranged that drew his attention. He went up and looked more closely and then discovered that to the right of the door there was a box and over the box was a notice: “No print in this box more than Five Shillings.”

Liking the comfortable shape of the shop, the way that the light from a neighbouring lamp-post fell on a splendid chalk drawing of a gentleman in a ruff, the air of comfort and ease that the brightly flaming interior offered him, he stood idly turning over the prints in the box. Another of his ambitions – in addition to the cottage, the Sealyhams and the library – was one day to have “pictures.” Pictures in the vague, so vague and so impossible that he never breathed this particular ambition to anybody and for himself had scarcely formulated it. He only knew that they were to be real original pictures. Pictures touched, themselves, by the hand of the original artist. None of your copies, no, not even those “Medici” things that looked good enough until you’d had them a day or two, and then were lifeless and dull. No…. Suddenly his hand stopped. His heart thumped in his breast.

He was looking at a little landscape, a simple thing enough, a hill, a clump of trees, a cow and a horseman. But how beautiful! How quiet and simple and true! And the real thing. Not a copy, although it was not a drawing. In the left-hand corner there was scribbled a name “Everdingin.”

He went into the shop. A stout rubicund man came to him. He held up his prize.

“That etching? Five shillings. A nice Everdingin that. Cheap at the money.”

Billy Gabriel paid his five shillings, his purchase was wrapped in paper, he left the shop. His heart was still beating. Why was he so strangely stirred? An Etching, was it? Now what exactly was an Etching? Was it a print? He thought etchings were coloured…. Driven still by a mysterious sense of drama he stopped in a bookshop and bought a little book entitled Prints and Etchings: All about them.

Then he went home.

IV

He said nothing to Frances about all this. The china clock with the red flowers struck nine and suddenly he murmured something and left the room. Frances was busy at the rickety but smart bright red-wood writing-table. She simply nodded without speaking. Then he crept across the passage as though he were afraid of something. He did not know that he was creeping. He opened the door of their bedroom and poked his head inside as though he were sure that he would find someone in there waiting for him. Of course there was nothing but darkness. He switched on the light and suddenly there were the two beds side by side with the pink rose coverlets, there the table with the swinging glass and Frances’ ivory-topped hair-brushes, there the tall wardrobe that always tippled forward a little as though it were listening, and there his case with his shaving things, the shabby shy humble friend.

He was strangely conscious that he was seeing everything for the first time. Nothing before had ever looked as it was looking now. Very odd. He was as deeply excited as though he had come there to meet some woman. He went to the table with the shabby green cloth near the window and picked up the two parcels. He unfolded the paper from the etching with the greatest care. Revealed, he placed it against a hideous purple flower-vase. It stood there, softly, the hill, the trees, the cow, the horseman. Beautiful. So still, so quiet. Breathing the evening air. He could hear the stream running, could feel the colours withdrawing from the sky, leaving it chilly grey and pure. Soon dark would come and the stars sparkle above the trees and perhaps the moon would shyly appear.

He was lost in contemplation and did not hear the door open. Suddenly Frances’ voice broke, scattering the stars, ruffling the stream.

“Why, Billy, what on earth are you doing in here? You ridiculous creature! I want you to come and find out those addresses for me. Why, what have you got there?”

She picked it up. It waved rather helplessly in the air as she looked at it from every corner.

“What an old mess! Wherever did you get it from? What a shabby old thing! Who gave it to you?”

“No one gave it to me. I bought it.”

“You bought it? How much did you give for it?” Her voice was suddenly sharp as she put the etching down on the bed.

“Five shillings.”

“Five shillings? For that! Why, it isn’t worth twopence!”

He was surprised at his own anger. He was angry as he had never been in all his married life.

“Isn’t it? That’s all you know about it.”

“Of course it isn’t. Just like you to go dreaming along. I suppose you picked it out of some tuppenny box. As though we had money to throw away!”

And then suddenly she was indulgent. Her broad red-brown face wrinkled into smiles. “You silly old dear! What a baby you are! Why, I believe you’re cross.”

“No, I’m not.” He looked sheepish.

“Yes, you are. Now confess. I can see it.”

She went up to him and kissed him as a mother kisses a favourite child when the child after some little fault is forgiven. Many a time before had just this occurred and he had always been happy at the little reconciliation, delighted at her generosity of soul. But tonight he was not delighted. He was still angry. She was treating him like a child. Scolding him for spending five shillings! After all, it was his money.

“It’s a pretty good thing,” he murmured, picking up the etching carefully and placing it once more against the purple vase, “if I can’t spend five shillings without being hauled over the coals.”

So astonished was she that she could only stare. Then she said:

“Why, Billy, I believe you really are angry.”

“Yes, I am,” he answered suddenly turning round and looking at her. “That’s a beautiful thing. A beautiful thing. What do you know about prints? Nothing at all. You just show your ignorance, that’s all.”

“And what do you know about prints either, I should like to know?” she cried.

“I know more than you do anyhow,” he answered, “if you say that’s only worth tuppence.”

It became a vulgar wrangle. They were both ashamed and suddenly ceased. They went into the sitting-room and sat silently. When they went to bed they made it up. But she lay awake, wondering what had happened to him, and he lay awake seeing the thing through the darkness – the trees, the hill, the horseman. It was as though he were recomforting it.

V

He knew in the morning that he was different and would never again be the same man as last night. It was as though he had fallen quite suddenly in love with a woman. But he did not analyse it. He only determined that he would keep it all secret from Frances.

Frances was instantly reassured. For so many years had she been able to manage him that it was not likely that there should be any change now. He was the same old Billy. He would be always the same. And she loved him. And despised him too.

Nevertheless, without knowing it, she did, through the next months, tighten the rein. Her dominance of him had been to her, increasingly, during all these years a luxurious pleasure. Everyone fell in with it so completely. All her friends and all his adopted something of the same attitude to him – “Poor dear old Billy.” Once, a number of years ago, a woman whom she knew but slightly had said to her, “You know you bully that husband of yours – and you’ll be sorry one day.” Bully him! When she loved him as she did! She laughed at the woman and was careful not to see her again.

Billy, as though he recognised how unpleasant their little squabble had been, was now very sweet and submissive. He gave in to her about everything. When her friends laughed at him he laughed too. Oh, indeed, yes!

Meanwhile he pursued secretly his new passion. His life was changed. He was happy as he had never been before. He bought six etchings – a Palmer, a Daubigny, a Legros, a Hollar, a Strang, and an Appian. None of them very expensive. The Strang cost the most – five pounds. But then he had never spent anything on himself. Why should he not? There was plenty in the Bank. Nevertheless he hid the six etchings and the Everdingin with them. He hid them in the bottom drawer of the wardrobe under his shirts. A poor place, but he had none better. He would go in, for a quarter of an hour, when Frances was engaged elsewhere, and look at them. He also bought five or six books, and read them with great attention. He subscribed to the Print Collector’s Quarterly and hid also those numbers.

In the back of Frances’ mind the little dispute remained. She would chaff him now, quite often, about “being an artist.” She told other people, the Burns and the Whimbleys, “Billy’s taken up art …” and they all laughed.

In her heart she was not quite comfortable.

The trouble of a passion is that it does not stay where it should. It mounts and mounts, especially when it is starved. Had Billy been a millionaire and able to wander into Colnaghi’s and request them to find for him a perfect Whistler “Venetian set” and all the green-paper Meryons in Europe his passion might have flagged – which is one reason perhaps why millionaires are not, as a rule, happy people. But he held himself in for a long while, had only his seven, and so his passion fed on starvation.

But it was more than that. Here was something for which all his life he had been waiting as the one man waits for the one woman. He had not known it, but it was so. The love of these things, their personality, the intimacy that he had with them, put him in touch with so much other beauty. He paid secret visits to the National Gallery, to the Tate, to the Wallace Collection. All these years had he been in London and how seldom had he been into these places!

He longed for the country – his cottage, his garden view, his rising hill and shining stream – so passionately that once at night when he was lying in bed and the room was dark he stared in front of him and it all suddenly arose there in its quiet and beauty, as though he had it in his hand.

The six or seven books that he had bought had in them many pictures, and soon he felt that some of these lovely things were really his – “The Spinning Woman” of Ostade with the bird-cage and the sleeping pig, the Meryon “Morgue” with its tier upon tier of watching windows, Corot’s lovely “Souvenir d’Italie” with its shimmer of light and colour, Whistler’s “Rotherhithe” so strong and so delicate, best of all perhaps Van Dyck’s “Van Noort,” the living, questing, animal spiritual comrade; these and many, many another.

Then as stage followed upon stage of experience he spent an hour or two every Saturday afternoon in the British Museum Print Room. The luxury, the heavenly luxury of these hours when the stillness settled all about you and you had, actually in your possession, the “Three Trees” and the “Notre Dame L’Abside” and the Whistler “Little Mast.” When he must go he stood up and for a moment had to pull himself together before he moved, shifting from the one world into the other. What drunken happiness! …

Frances for a time noticed nothing. She was so sure of him, of his absolute fidelity of body, soul and spirit, that it must be something very serious that could disturb her. Then she wondered. The Saturday afternoons troubled her. He was always late for tea now, and gave her such absurd explanations, that he had missed a bus, been detained by an old friend and so on. Then one night, lying awake, she heard him talk in his sleep: “Oh, you beauty! You beauty!” he cried.

In the morning she laughed at her fear, but the fear grew.

Then, on a day, she discovered in his drawer underneath the shirts the etchings, now ten in number. She drew them out, one after another, laid them upon the bed, looked at them curiously.

He had a secret then. Whatever else might be true or false, this was certain – he was keeping something from her; he had been keeping something from her for many months. And if he was keeping one secret, why not another?

About the things themselves she had no right to be angry, so unimportant were they, but they gave her the opportunity to exercise her loving tyranny. She loved him so much – and by how much more since these last days when she had begun to suspect him – that to see him bend to her, submit, to feel his complete subjection and her security of him was an unceasing joy. The more unhappy he was the more she loved him, knowing that soon she would forgive him and load him up with her affection. She saw all the course of the affair stretch like a shining path before her.

So when he came home she, icily calm, took him into the bedroom. In her heart she was smiling. She showed him the etchings laid out upon the bed.

A strange scene followed. He was unlike he had ever been. He was indifferent. He did not care that she should be angry. About what was she making all this fuss? It was true that he had bought these things and hidden them from her. He would have liked to hang them on the walls, but what was he to do? She had made such a silly fuss about that first one that he had shown her that it was not likely that he would run the risk of such a scene again.

He did not look at her while he was speaking, but moved his hands restlessly as though he were waiting to protect the etchings against attack.

His indifference aroused her to a passion. She scolded and rated him, seeking always to see rise in him tenderness for her and love and gratitude. The moment that she saw those things her rage would die. She looked in his eyes, expecting. But they did not come. He hid his head and muttered that the money was his own. Was he never to have any freedom? He was not a child. They had money in the Bank, plenty of it.

She flung away in a tempest of passion.

Later – but on this occasion not until a day had passed – they were reconciled. They kissed, tears filled her eyes, and as her hands touched his well-loved body and her cheek rubbed against his she adored him – as mother, as wife, as comrade. Nevertheless, five minutes later, she spoke to him sharply just to reassure herself that he was hers as he had always been. He answered her mildly enough, but she knew that he was not hers as he had always been. A new period in their married life had begun.

Now she was always trying to bring him back “to heel,” and he was for ever escaping her. It was the etchings that were responsible. How she hated them!

She thought of them lying there, in the drawer, under his shirts. She wanted to say to him – she knew that it was the wisest way – “Bring them out, Billy, dear, let’s hang them on the walls. Tell me about them. I will share this new interest with you.”

But she could not do this, partly because he had found this new excitement without her and therefore she was jealous of it, partly because she was afraid that if she encouraged him he would spend much money upon them, partly because she felt herself no interest or pleasure in them. If she liked pictures at all she liked pictures with colour. Something gay. These were drab and dull.

And then she had her pride. She must lead. Billy might rule in his Bank, but outside that he must follow her. So she said nothing and he said nothing, and she knew increasingly with every day that she was being deceived, and he knew that she knew.

More and more in public did she laugh at Billy’s “love of art” – and more and more did the Burns and Whimbleys laugh. Once she forced Billy to show his “silly etchings” to Mr. and Mrs. Whimbley, and how they all laughed! In another place and under another influence they might have admired, knowing nothing about the things anyway, but they always followed Frances Gabriel’s lead. She was such a sensible woman. They followed her lead now. They laughed and laughed again. Billy smiled but said very little. Then he went and put them carefully away in the drawer.

And Frances, when the Whimbleys were gone, was ashamed and miserable and angry. Her hatred of the etchings was now a flame.

VI

Now she did not know herself. It was always nag, nag, nag. She must be at him for ever about every little thing – about his clothes, his punctuality, his unpunctuality, the things that he wanted to do, the way that he ate, the way that he did not eat – everything. And always she hated herself for doing it, wondered subconsciously at herself, saying to herself: “The moment that he looks at me with that old look of love and eagerness and wanting to be forgiven … That moment, I must have that moment….” But he did not want to be forgiven. He submitted, he allowed her to lash him with her tongue, then to excuse him for faults that had never been committed, to make it up with him, to embrace him, then to lash him again…. But he did not ask to be forgiven.

Then suddenly one spring evening in a window in a Bond Street Art shop he saw Whistler’s “Balcony.” A beautiful impression – he had by this time real knowledge – and cheap – One Hundred and Sixty Pounds.

No, but the price did not matter. It was the thing itself. He had seen it before in Exhibitions, in the Leicester Galleries, at the British Museum, but this one was suddenly his – his absolutely as it looked at him out of the window, alive, begging to be taken by him, lovely beyond analysis with its strong arches, its deep water, its dark velvet piled doorway, the gorgeous pageantry of the Balcony.

One Hundred and Sixty Pounds. They could easily afford it. Only last week when discussing the possible purchase of a car he had said, “Well, that means two hundred pounds more,” and Frances said, “Two hundred? What’s that? We’ve got plenty in the Bank.”

They had. He had done very well since the war with his investments and he had bought nothing – nothing really – for himself for years.

He went in and purchased it. He returned home with it under his arm as though Paradise were shining on every side of him.

In his happiness he thought to himself: “I’ll show it to Frances right away and insist that we frame it and put it up. If we do, it will make everything else look awful. Never mind, it’s time we changed the furniture a bit. I’ll have it out with Frances. She’s bound to see how lovely this is. And so we’ll make it up. It has been terrible these last months, all the quarrelling….”

He went home singing. He went straight into the sitting-room, where she was writing letters at the bright red-wood table.

He cried out in his happiest voice: “Here, Frances – see what I’ve got! Something you’ll like!”

She turned, still sitting at the table. She had been missing him dreadfully all day, determining that when he came in she would be loving and kind to him and all the nightmare of the last months should be over. And now, to her own amazement, she said in a hard hostile voice: “Well, what is it?”

She could see his face fall. Reluctantly now he undid the parcel. He held it up, dark and rich in its gleaming stiff mat. “Look,” he cried.

It was an etching. She could have struck him in the face. It was as though he were deliberately taunting her.

“Another of those beastly things?” she said furiously.

His anger rose at once.

“If you can’t see that that’s beautiful it’s just because you have no taste—”

She got up. “How much did you give for it?” she asked, her heart thumping so terribly with love and anger that she could scarcely speak.

“A hundred and sixty pounds,” he answered, challenging.

“A hundred and sixty pounds?”

“Yes. And it’s worth two hundred at least.”

“A hundred and sixty—!”

“All right,” he answered roughly, “if you don’t like it you can lump it.”

He left it lying on the table while he went out, brushing past her, to go into the bedroom to wash his hands.

He touched her as he passed and that touch inflamed her from head to foot. With one movement she was at the table, then had the Whistler in her hands, then had torn it, again and again and again, into a hundred pieces. As soon as it was done and the pieces had fluttered to the floor she felt sick, sick with a ghastly trembling anxiety. What had she done and why had she done it? What did she care about the etching or any of the etchings? What did they matter to her? It was Billy who mattered – Billy, whom she loved with every atom of her body, soul and spirit.

She could not move. She stood there, her knees trembling.

He came in. He walked to the table. In the first instant he did not realise. “What—!” he cried. “What—!” Then he was on his knees, fingering the fragments. Then on his feet he faced her with hatred in his eyes. He was going to strike her, then he stepped right back to the window.

“You’re mad,” he said, “mad. That’s what you are. I’ve known it for months. You’ve killed that. It never did you any harm. It’s murder…. By God, I’ll not be with you in the house another five minutes. You’re a murderess, that’s what you are!”

She broke out then, crying, pleading, supplicating. He did not listen to her. He went out. She heard the bedroom door close. She waited. A kind of paralysis held her. She could neither move nor speak. Ten minutes later she heard the bedroom door open and the hall door close.

Then, crying out, she ran, opened the door, looked at the lift, the grey descending stairs. The place was quiet as a well.

VII

He never came back. He did not want to. He simply wondered how it was that he had stood her so long and why it was that he had never discovered that he did not really love her. He took a charming cottage in the country, made a beautiful collection of etchings, grew fat, bullied his servants in an amiable kind of way and was immensely happy.

She wrote again and again imploring him to return. Then she tried to see him. She never did. He gave her a very generous allowance.

She made the best of her life but missed him always. She longed for him sometimes so that it was like appendicitis or even a cancer. She will love him to the day of her death.

And why did he leave her? She can’t think. She can’t understand it at all. Some silly little quarrel about a drawing or a print.

All about nothing.

“Good Housekeeping” Apr 1924

The Silver Thorn (1928)

OLD ELIZABETH

A PORTRAIT

The Hargreaves lived at No. 4 Montpellier Square, Edinburgh. Mr. Hargreaves was a widower, and he had one son, Philip, aged thirty-two, and a daughter, Margaret, thirty. They were all three of them tall, big-boned, fair and silent. Although they lived in Edinburgh they were not Scotch, but came from the English Lake District near Keswick, and although they were North Country people they had some of that reticence and reserve which an Englishman so often develops in Scotland, as though he had not forgotten that he was within the gates of his ancient enemies.

Mr. Hargreaves, whose business had been something to do with textiles, was now retired, and his two great interests in life were in prints and golf. To look at the big broad-shouldered, sandy-haired man with the rather dour expressionless face and the big clumsy hands, you would never have supposed that he could look so tenderly upon his Lepéres and Hadens when he took them out of their solander boxes, but he would say grimly that prints were his only weakness, and indeed it was hard to detect any other. His son and daughter were as dour as himself. The girl was tender-hearted enough, but her mother having died when she was only a small child, she had been brought up in the grim companionship of her two men folk, and had learnt long ago that enthusiasm and emotion and sentiment were weaknesses that didn’t belong to the Hargreaves. Philip, the boy, was in some business connected with insurance, and you’d have said that that business was his god. He showed no symptoms of interest in anything else whatever. He spoke very little at any time, but when he did speak it was to the effect that the business was doing this, that, or the other, and if it did badly he just shut his mouth and looked like a graven image, and if it did well he went out and played golf with his father, although he cared very little for the game.

The house, like other houses, resembled the people who lived in it. It was thick and grey, standing at a corner of the square, beaten upon by all the winds of Edinburgh, and what winds those can be anyone who has stayed in Edinburgh for even a week will know. Within, the house was scrupulously neat, everything was in its place, no picture hung crooked on its cord, no rug turned up a friendly corner, no newspaper slipped to the floor and rested there in happy déshabille. On the walls hung some of Mr. Hargreaves’ choicest prints, but even such charming intimate personal things as Whistler’s “Little Mast,” or Rembrandt’s “Three Cottages,” or Bone’s “Clare Market” seemed to lose their personality in those rooms. The furniture was splendid and massive and impersonal; you never heard anyone singing in the house or laughing or crying, it was the abode of decorous sensible honest living into which the emotions dared not break.

Margaret Hargreaves, who was pretty in a fair, large, smooth way, and might have been married if men had not been afraid of her, approached more nearly to emotion in her attention to the servant question than in any other of her day-by-day experiences. It was no light matter to run that house as it ought to be run, and everyone knows what modern servants are. Scottish servants are better than most, but they are independent of mind and body; the old ones are apt to be proud and haughty and intolerant of rebuke, and the young ones, as the world over today, want holidays and fun and constant change of occupation. They were accustomed to sober, honest, God-fearing families in Edinburgh, but also to Scottish humour and democratic good-fellowship. They found often enough that the Hargreaves’ atmosphere of almost inhuman detachment was almost more than they could bear, and although the Hargreaves’ wages were good and the work not over severe, they were always departing on one ground or another. Margaret could not understand why they would not stay and the servants frequently themselves could not understand. They had excellent bedrooms, admirable food and plenty of leisure, but they disliked Mr. Hargreaves senior’s eye and the way that Mr. Hargreaves junior would brush past them as though they were chairs or tables.

Mr. Hargreaves sometimes complained to his daughter that he could not understand why it was that Margaret could not keep servants, and he would threaten to bring in a housekeeper, but, of course, he never did. He was proud of Margaret in his heart, but he would have been covered with shame had he allowed her to perceive it.

Old Elizabeth would never have entered the house had not Margaret on a certain occasion been in desperate difficulty. There was to be a little dinner-party to some business friends, and of course the housemaid, irritated by some quick sharp rebuke from Mr. Hargreaves, had left in a temper that very afternoon. Margaret, in despair, had run round to the servants’ agency in George Street with the hope of finding something temporary that would do. What she did find was Elizabeth. On the face of it Elizabeth was absurd. She was well over sixty, a little thin woman of no physique, and confessed at once, with a pathetic eagerness to be honest, that she was a little deaf. She looked a very decent old woman sitting there in the agency, clad in rather faded black, and wearing an old-fashioned black hat that was a good deal too large for her small, wrinkled face. Margaret found to her surprise that she was English; what she was doing in Edinburgh she didn’t explain, her last place had been at York. “I am very strong, mum,” she said in a thin bright voice that had something lively but distant and remote in it, like a note on a spinet. “You mightn’t think it to look at me, but I am every bit as strong as I was thirty years ago; there’s nothing wrong with me except my deafness, and I don’t think you’ll find that much of a trouble, because you’ve a nice clear voice, mum, if you don’t mind my saying so.” She was scrupulously clean, and if anyone in this world ever looked honest to the core she did. Her face, too, had a ruddy-brown colour that spoke of good health and good temper. She was trembling with eagerness to be engaged, and Margaret, who was in real truth soft-hearted and even a little sentimental, engaged her. The little woman’s face was all smiles. “I’m sure you’ll be satisfied, miss,” she said, having suddenly discovered, apparently, that Margaret was not married. “I’m not afraid of any amount of work, and I never fall sick.” “What are you doing up here in Edinburgh?” Margaret asked her. The old wrinkled face saddened. “My husband died six months ago here,” she said, “I left my last place and came to be with him here; it seems to me more homelike now than anywhere else.” She went off to her lodging to fetch her things.

She could not be said to be a great success at the dinner that night. She was nervous, of course, and so eager to please that she confused the young parlour-maid, appeared at the door at the wrong moments, and was heard loudly to exclaim to herself on one occasion, “Dear, dear, I shouldn’t have done that, I shouldn’t have done that.” Mr. Hargreaves raised his eyebrows in ironic question to his daughter once or twice during the meal, and when the guests had gone Philip said to his sister, “My dear Margaret, where did you find that old scarecrow?” Margaret, who had been worried by the evening, replied with more impatience than any Hargreaves was expected to show, “It’s all very well, Philip, for you to talk, but if you had the running of this house you would be at your wits’ end. It’s more your and father’s fault than mine. Yes, Father, it’s all very well to look at me like that, but why did you choose the very day we’re giving a party to be rude to Alice?” Mr. Hargreaves, standing in front of the fire with his hands in his pockets, answered quietly, “Rude to Alice, my dear, what do you mean?” “Well, you know you were. You spoke to her about the hot water or something; she said your manner to her was most insulting. You know they won’t stand it up here; it’s easy to be polite to them.” Philip laughed. “If I were in their place,” he said, “I would not bother about politeness. I would want a decent room to sleep in, good food, time to myself, decent wages and to be allowed to do my work in peace. If they don’t get those things here, Margaret, then it’s your fault.” “They do get them,” she answered irritably, “but they’re flesh and blood just as we are, and they want to be treated like human beings. It isn’t a case of master and servant any more these days; we are all working together under the same roof at our different jobs. There is something inhuman about us,” she burst out, “how many real friends do we ever make here? You’ve been here for years, Philip, and you haven’t an intimate friend in the place.” Father and son looked at her with surprise; she was nearer tears than they had ever seen her before; there was a dangerous threat of emotion in the air, they were all frightened by it and avoided it skilfully.

That little conversation that evening marked something of a crisis in the family. They were not accustomed to thinking very much about one another, but after that evening they began considering one another furtively, and from that consideration Margaret at least passed thoughts about their life in Edinburgh and why it wasn’t more satisfactory, why there wasn’t more warmth and colour and friendship in it. The funny old woman now in the house had some effect on her. She was, of course, to be there but a week or two until somebody else should be found, but this was quite plainly not her own idea. On the morning following the dinner-party Margaret went up to Elizabeth’s room to see that she had everything that she wanted and, in spite of herself, was touched by the things that Elizabeth had arranged there. On the chest of drawers, in a large very ugly plush frame, was a photograph of Elizabeth’s departed husband, the late Mr. Cummings. He was a neat timid pathetic-looking little man in his photograph, staring forward anxiously as though he were begging the photographer not to be unkind to him. There was something very attractive about his face, Margaret thought, he looked a kind little old man, and Elizabeth must miss him very much. There were also a couple of large sea-shells, a green plush box with a coloured photograph of Brighton in the middle of it and a small photograph in a neat black frame of a thin wizened-looking little baby holding a toy horse.

“You see, mum,” Elizabeth commented rather nervously, “I wanted to have a few of my things about me, and I do hope that you don’t mind.” “Mind!” said Margaret gently. “No, of course not. Was that your husband?” “Yes, it was,” said Elizabeth, “or is, I should properly say, because he’s up in heaven now looking just the same and a lot brighter than he was in those last weeks when he was so poorly.” “And was that your baby?” Margaret asked. “Yes, miss.” Elizabeth paused for a moment. “One year old and three days when it died. That’s thirty years ago now and I never had another. It was a sweet little thing and my John was terribly set on it. He did love children and was always running after his nephews and nieces. Well, well,” she smiled brightly. “I’ve a lot to be thankful for, the Lord knows; things are always turning up, miss, in a way you wouldn’t believe. There I was yesterday feeling rather down-hearted, I won’t deny, and you come along and offer me a place that’s just the sort of home I was looking for. Why, miss,” she glanced proudly around her room, “I can settle down here perfectly; it reminds me more than any place I’ve been in since of the room I had when I was quite a girl and was Lady Dunthorpe’s maid. Of course, that was the old Lady Dunthorpe, she’s been dead many a year and the present Lady Dunthorpe’s a bit flighty, they tell me; but there, one mustn’t believe what one hears, and anyway I must be getting on with my work.” And with a little smile of a confiding but entirely unpresuming kind she hurried off.

No, this was not at all what Margaret had intended. She had made it perfectly plain to the old thing when she engaged her that this was only to be a temporary affair until she found someone better suited. How could anyone so old and feeble as Elizabeth expect to do her duties efficiently? That was a house in which everything must be in perfect order, absolute punctuality was insisted on, and, of course, an old thing like that would be always late with everything, the stairs alone would be too much for her. But here came surprise number one. Elizabeth was punctuality in person from the moment when she brought Mr. Hargreaves his morning tea at half-past seven to the carrying in of the whisky and soda-water at ten o’clock in the evening, everything was up to time.

It was indeed like many other Edinburgh houses of the old type, a terrible place for stairs, a thin bony house with many floors. Elizabeth climbed them as though they were nothing at all, and if her knees ached she never said anything to anybody about it.

Surprise number two was that she got on astonishingly well with the other servants. Margaret had never before known such peace downstairs, and the other servants stayed as they had never done.

Surprise number three was a little more confusing in its results than the other two. This was that Elizabeth insisted on considering the Hargreaves family as the most amiable, sentimental and even emotional persons that she had ever yet encountered. When she had been with them several weeks she astonished Margaret by saying to her, “Do you know, Miss Margaret, what’s the matter with your father?” “Matter with my father?” repeated Margaret, astonished. “I didn’t know anything was the matter with him, he’s particularly well just now.” “Oh, I didn’t mean his health, Miss Margaret,” Elizabeth answered almost scornfully. “It’s his good nature I’m meaning. He’s always thinking of others, he can’t see anyone unhappy without its upsetting him.” “He is very good-natured,” agreed Margaret, who, loving her father, had yet never considered him in that light before. “Why, only yesterday,” continued Elizabeth, “I said something to him about Mary” (Mary was the parlour-maid), “and the bad dreams she keeps having and he was terribly concerned. I wasn’t thinking of worrying him about it, but he takes everybody’s troubles as though they were his own.” She said to Philip one day, “Now, Mr. Philip, just you give me that other suit of clothes of yours, there’s a spot or two I noticed. I know you don’t want to give it to me lest you should be making extra trouble. You think of others too much, sir, if I may say so,” and she confided to Margaret, “I do like to hear Mr. Philip’s laugh. Indeed, miss, this is the most cheerful house I ever was in.”

In any case she stayed. Her busy little figure could be seen hurrying up and down the house at all hours of the day. It was true that she made mistakes, that she forgot things, that she didn’t always hear when she was spoken to, and in the very impetuosity of her goodwill went sometimes too far, but these things could be forgiven her; she had become an institution.

When she had been with them about three years she caught a bad cold. She was forced very much against her own wish to go to bed, and there she was for a week. This was terrible to her. She could be seen sitting up in bed, very neat and tidy, her grey hair parted, a shawl over her shoulders, large spectacles on the end of her nose, reading her Bible, but beneath this outward calm there was a desperate sense that the whole of the household was going to ruin without her, that the other servants were all over the place, and she would lie there straining her ears for sounds, hearing imaginary plates crash to the ground and sniffing with terrible distress meals overcooked and all kinds of possible conflagrations. She pulled through and came downstairs again, but it was obvious to everyone that she was not as she had been. She was much deafer than before, she could not see very well in spite of her spectacles, and, do what she would, her knees failed her at the stairs. What a panic there must have been then in her old heart! This was her last place and she knew it. She had not a penny in the whole world besides what she earned, she had not a friend anywhere, her relations had long forgotten her, she was prouder than Lucifer. She could not but know that she was now not up to her work; she must have risen on those cold dark Edinburgh mornings with an agonising fear lest some catastrophe should occur before the night. She was passionately eager that they should not discover her increasing deafness, she pretended to hear when she did not, and gave the most surprising answers to unexpected questions. One day she dropped a valuable piece of china and broke it, and it seemed to her that the end of the world had come. On this occasion a surprising thing occurred. The parlour-maid, Mary, who was an ordinary phlegmatic, not very imaginative girl, went to Margaret and said that she herself had broken it. Elizabeth, of course, instantly told the truth and then went up to her room and, for the first time in the Hargreaves’ household, cried bitterly. Margaret, who had changed considerably during the last three years, did not know what to do. How could they turn the old woman out! And yet things could not go on as they were. It was true that her father and brother had become quite fond of the old thing, but a servant was a servant to them, and Margaret perceived that her father was growing more and more irritated as the days passed and unpunctuality and disorder increased. “Look here, Margaret,” he said to his daughter one evening, “what are you going to do about your precious Elizabeth? She’s past her work, doesn’t hear a word I say; besides that, it’s positive cruelty to force her up and down these stairs; she’s got to go.” Margaret’s heart sank. She was surprised at her own feeling, it was as though some sudden misfortune had happened to herself, it was as though she had to lose unexpectedly someone who was near and dear to her. She had not a great deal of imagination, but in a flash of vision she saw the house without Elizabeth, lacking some vital friendly quality that had come into it with her presence. That did not mean that she had not been irritated by Elizabeth over and over again, that she had not herself said many times lately, “Yes, she must go, she must go, she’s ruining the house.” But when her father spoke it was as though the old woman had come into the room and stood there with her funny little body, her thin hard-worked hands folded in front of her and her old wrinkled face raised up beseechingly to hers. “That’s all very well, Father,” she said, “I realise it as clearly as you, but what are we to do? She has no home, no friends, no money, she’ll never get another place, she’s proud and won’t take charity, we can’t turn her right adrift.” He frowned. “Well,” he said, “things can’t go on as they are.” Then, a week later, the catastrophe occurred.

One morning Mr. Hargreaves came abruptly out of his study and turned towards the staircase. At that very moment, by an unhappy chance, Elizabeth had rested for a moment a scuttle full of coals at the foot of the staircase. She was talking to herself, “Now just a moment, my dear, and I’ll have you up the stairs as right as rain,” but unfortunately Mr. Hargreaves ran straight into the coal-scuttle, gave his leg a sharp and very unpleasant jar and tumbled forward on to the staircase. He rose in a fury; nothing can rouse the temper more quickly than that sharp sudden pain of the shin bone. Elizabeth, not seeing exactly what had occurred, hurried forward with an “Oh dear! Oh dear!” and he turned full upon her. “Do you see what you’ve done?” he shouted at her, pointing to the coals scattered on the carpet. “What do you go and leave a thing like that there for?” He was nursing his leg with one hand as he spoke, the pain was very sharp. “Didn’t know you had left it there, I suppose! The fact is you’re past your work and have been for a long time. I’m afraid you’ll have to leave us; you’ve done well, you are a good worker and it isn’t your fault that this house is too much for you. Miss Margaret will speak to you about it.” And so he went hopping up the stairs.

The blow had fallen. She stood there gazing about her, then fell down on her knees and began in a fumbling sort of way to put some of the bigger pieces of coal back in the scuttle. A tear trickled down one cheek and she brushed it impatiently with the back of her hand, leaving a smudgy mark of coal there. This was the end, the end of her life.

It need not have been the end had it not been for the Hargreaves character, which was such that as a thing was said so it remained. By the time he had reached the next floor the pain in his leg had greatly diminished, and he was already repentant, but the matter was done, no Hargreaves could go back on his word. “I am very sorry, Margaret,” he said five minutes later, “I’ve given your Elizabeth notice; couldn’t stand her incompetence any longer. Deal with her generously, won’t you?” Deal with her generously! Here was one of those occasions when people who live together and love one another very dearly have a sudden impulse of real and almost passionate hatred. Treat her generously! The men of her family were hard, mean, grasping creatures; Margaret hated the lot of them. Again she felt as though some tragic loss had occurred in her own life; she would have gone, had years of training not prevented her, and put her arms round the old woman and kissed her. But Elizabeth needed no sentimental pity. When Margaret spoke to her she looked at her bravely and said in a tone of almost casual matter of fact, “Your father is wrong, Miss Margaret, if he thinks I can’t manage the work of the house, but he knows what he wants and he must have his way. I shouldn’t wonder if he wasn’t thinking of me a little too, fancying that they stairs tires me more than they do.” “And what will you do, where will you go?” Margaret asked. “Oh, I’m all right, Miss Margaret,” Elizabeth answered quite gaily, “I’ve a little apartment I’ve been keeping with the things that I had when I was married. I’ll be very comfortable, indeed, thank you, miss.” And so she went off in her black hat too big for her and her shiny tin box in which, of course, was the photo of Mr. Cummings deceased, the two sea-shells, the plush present from Brighton and the baby with the toy horse.

Margaret was unhappy and uneasy as she had never been before. The thought of Elizabeth would not let her rest. She seemed also to be on strange new terms with her brother and father, she felt that they had both of them been in this affair callous and unkind. They made no inquiries about the old woman, and her father offered no suggestion of helping her out with money. It was true that Elizabeth was proud, but still something might have been arranged. She was disappointed in her family, she knew that they were unsentimental and hated to show their feelings, but in this present case the old woman had seemed, Margaret thought, to pervade the whole house with her presence. She had fancied sometimes during these three years, fantastic as the idea might be, that old Elizabeth had affected her father and brother. Philip had fallen into the habit of laughing with the old woman, chaffing with her and listening to her stories, and Margaret had thought on one or two occasions that she had heard her father laughing in a way most unusual to him. And then that they should let her go, without a word, to absolute penury and friendlessness! No, Margaret was not proud of her men.

Very soon her conscience would not let her rest, and she hunted Elizabeth out. When she arrived at the room at last, down the hill in Leith Walk, she was agreeably surprised. The room was small, it was true, but it was very much better furnished than she had expected. There were cheerful things about, including, of course, the two sea-shells and the plush box, and there was a large bowl filled with fresh flowers. Moreover, Elizabeth herself was in excellent spirits and looking very well. She was no more the servant, but a very independent old lady wearing a lace cap, her spectacles on the end of her nose, and a very handsome and certainly expensive white shawl over her shoulders. Margaret, in fact, felt to her surprise rather as though she had come to call on an elderly and very respectable relation. She sat down, refused tea, then most tactfully explained how glad she was to see Elizabeth so comfortable and asked her if there was anything more that she needed. “Well, no, Miss Margaret,” Elizabeth said, “I can’t say that there is. I am very comfortable indeed, thank you. Of course, I missed the work at first, but there’s a lot of knitting to be done, and I do my own little bits of shopping and such like, and I’ve a friend or two comes in to see me.” Margaret was surprised at that; she had thought that the old lady hadn’t a friend in the place. She was altogether very greatly relieved, she did not feel now nearly so guilty. She stayed a long time; Elizabeth had so many amusing stories of past days, former mistresses, pictures of an old world now dead and gone. “I will come and see you next week,” Margaret said, as she stood up to go, “is there any day that you prefer?” “Well, Thursday afternoon’s a good day,” Elizabeth said. “I’ve a friend comes to see me on Tuesdays, and Saturday’s busy like; come on Thursday, Miss Margaret, do.” She came on the following Thursday, and many Thursdays after that, and soon it became quite the regular thing for her to spend an hour there. She brought her flowers and things to eat and Elizabeth was always delighted, but there was no sense at all of benefits conferred, the relation of mistress and servant was quite gone. Those weekly visits did the girl all the good in the world, she caught from old Elizabeth’s spirit a sense of kindliness and good humour, of courage and optimism that was now become part of her own character. She looked at life differently and soon somebody detected in her this new spirit, and new possibilities of fresh happiness opened in front of her. Old Elizabeth soon guessed this, asked her questions, and in a short time became her principal confidante. All this time Margaret was puzzled by the things that she found in Elizabeth’s room, by the comfort and ease of everything. The old lady must have been false in that at least, she must have saved in the past; there must be a stocking well-filled in some corner.

Then one fine spring afternoon somebody asked a question, and Margaret answered it in the affirmative. Happy as she had never been in her life before and almost dizzy with her happiness she hurried round to Elizabeth to tell her. She opened the door without knocking and then stood transfixed. There, on a chair close to the old lady, was seated her brother reading the newspaper aloud, while Elizabeth sat there knitting, nodding her head once and again to what she heard. “Philip!” Margaret cried. He sprang to his feet, confused, blushing like a boy. “But you,” she exclaimed, moving into the room. “I hadn’t an idea.” “And you!” he answered, laughing, dropping the paper. “Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked. He mumbled something, then stammered, “Well, if you must know, I thought you’d laugh.” Elizabeth, very much at her ease, said, looking up at them as though they were her own children, “Yes, and he’s been coming once a week just as you have, Miss Margaret. He asked me not to say anything and so of course I didn’t. Very kind, he’s been reading me the news, very kind indeed.” She laughed at both of them. Philip was quite sulky, he would scarcely speak a word to her on the way home, and she didn’t tell him her own fine secret. Only he implored her again and again, “You won’t tell father, will you, Margaret, he’d think me such a fool, but she’s a nice old woman; upon my soul, I’m getting quite fond of her, she’s so amusing, got such a lot of funny stories – but you won’t tell father, will you?” “And I suppose it’s you who have been giving her all those fine things,” she asked him. “Oh, nothing very much,” he answered, more confused than ever, “just once and again something I thought she’d like.” And there began between them from that moment an entirely new relationship. They wondered indeed that they could have lived all those years together and known each other so little. There were so many things in Philip’s character that Margaret had never suspected; they had jokes together now and intimacies and secrets. Margaret’s engagement was announced; her father gave his consent with a reluctance, with that same dry terror of emotion that always seemed to keep him apart from the rest of the world. He was most certainly a lonely man and Margaret, now that she was going off into this splendid new life of her own, felt a great tenderness for him, a longing to get close to him, but she was afraid just as she had always been.

One stormy afternoon in the early autumn, when the rain was being driven round the grey corners by a proper Edinburgh wind, Margaret whispered to Philip, “What an awful afternoon! let’s go and see Elizabeth.” “All right,” he whispered back to her, looking with a sort of humorous conspirator’s air across at their father, who was at the other side of the room. “I can’t be free till four, will it be all right then?” “Perfectly,” she said, “that will just suit me.” She fought her way through the rain, met her brother at the top of the Walk. They battled down the hill together, up the stairs and with a cry of “Here we are again, Elizabeth,” burst open the door. The door banged to behind them, and then they had to cling to one another to recover from their amazement. In that same chair that they both knew so well, looking as though he had spent the whole of his life there, reading the newspaper aloud just as they had both done, was their father. He had been caught, you would have supposed, in the very act of some terrible and heinous crime. He did not move, he only stared at them, then jumped to his feet with an angry “Well, I’m damned.” Elizabeth was entirely unmoved. She went on with her knitting, only remarking quietly to the world in general, “Well, it had to happen sometime, didn’t it?” then, turning to the confused man, “I told you you’d be found out, sir, it wasn’t natural to keep it from your own children.” There was nothing to be said; he had been going there, of course, from the very beginning and been giving her things, reading to her, listening to her stories, laughing with her, enjoying himself, it may be, as he enjoyed himself nowhere else. No, there was nothing to be said. Afterwards the three of them walked away together and an odd walk home it was. It was of no use for him to put up the barriers again; he had been found out, and in his turn had discovered them also. They were all in the family guilty together. “Well, you see,” he explained at dinner that night, “it was all my fault giving her notice like that. To tell you the truth, I got quite fond of the old thing while she was here. I suppose you think,” turning round fiercely upon his son and daughter, “that I’ve got no natural feelings. Well, if you do I daresay it’s my own fault. That old woman’s got more sense of fun in her than all the rest of you put together.” They had the merriest evening of their lives upstairs that night. As Margaret was on her way to bed, along the silent passage she seemed to see a little figure flitting and a humorous, almost teasing, little voice seemed to whisper in her ear, “You wanted showing to one another and there was nobody but myself to do it.”

“Good Housekeeping” Nov 1924

The Silver Thorn (1928)

THE DOVE

I

In the memoirs of the Slumber family that I hope, if life is spared to me, one day to publish, there will, I imagine, be very slight mention of Percy Alderness-Slumber. Probably no mention at all. And this simply because there are so many Slumbers and so many events of the first importance connected with their family affairs that a rather subordinate and colourless individual like Percy Slumber cannot naturally expect to play a principal part. Not that Percy Slumber ever did expect to play a principal part in anything save, possibly, on this one particular occasion that I am about to relate, and then, I fancy, his natural modesty forbade, from the plan’s very first inception, too great expectations.

Percy was one of the Alderness-Slumbers, and, as anyone who studies their English social history of the last thirty years is aware, the Alderness-Slumbers have, owing to the sensational failure of Harcourt Alderness-Slumber in 1913, gradually slipped down into positions of genteel poverty. Once in the fifties and sixties of the last century they played no small part in the development of their country’s welfare.

They are now, however, aware that, unless some genius is born unexpectedly to one of them, obscurity – a genteel obscurity – must be their lot for a long time to come.

Percy Alderness-Slumber found himself an orphan in the spring of 1918, his aged mother, who had long been a martyr to various dyspeptic disturbances, passing away in March of that year. Percy had been an only son and a loving and dutiful one. During the weeks that followed his mother’s funeral he felt lonely and abandoned, but then, as the weeks extended into months, he was conscious of a vague freedom that at first he repelled as unfilial and rebuked as treacherous to a beloved memory. By the autumn of 1918, however, he was distinctly aware that he was his own master, only forty years of age, with a competence, small, perhaps, but nevertheless adequate for so moderate a nature as his. Free and his own master. Now what should he do with his freedom?

Percy’s character was of the submissive kind. If human nature is to be divided into that familiar classification of boots and doormats, then Percy would belong unquestionably to the second of those divisions. He had been in fact so long dominated by his mamma, had for so many years obeyed her slightest wish, had during so many trembling hours feared her uncertain temper (dyspepsia is an aggravating complaint), that in all probability he greatly preferred to be dominated, and felt chilly without some warm chastening from a superior power. This is the more odd in that the Alderness-Slumbers have been always noted for their arrogance. Percy was, as I have said, an only child, and Mrs. Alderness-Slumber was before her marriage a Beaminster, although of an inferior branch. This will be, for all discerning readers, explanation sufficient.

Had Percy been of a less diffident nature he would, in all probability, have married very shortly after his mother’s death. He was, however, not only diffident but also insignificant, and you had to look quite hard into every corner of any room in which you might happen to be to see whether Percy were there or no. He was not only plain, diffident and insignificant; he was also as quiet in his movement as any mouse. He had been trained by his mother so to be.

Another of his troubles for which also his mother was responsible was that he always found it very difficult to make up his mind. She had always made his up for him, and now that she was gone he stepped from intention to intention, first forwards and then backwards as though those same intentions were irregular and slippery stones crossing the savage stream of life and he hesitating midway.

From 1918 to 1923 he thus hesitated, living in a very genteel boarding-house in the Cromwell Road and behaving there with so mild an insignificance that even his landlady was scarcely aware as to whether he were truly her boarder or no.

It was in the early summer of 1923 that he read an article in the Morning Leader newspaper, which, although he little knew it at the time, was to determine the whole future course of his existence.

II

Before I go any further it would be well for me perhaps to attempt a slight physical portrait of my hero.

Percy Alderness-Slumber was a little man – that is, he was not more than five feet four inches in height – and all his features were small except, unfortunately, his nose. This large nose would have been, had he been able to have very active feelings about anything concerning himself, a great grief to him, but his mother had, happily, with such determined frequency, insisted that he was completely insignificant, unimportant, foolish and negligible that he had long ago accepted this view as an obvious article of faith.

Nevertheless, he took trouble with his appearance, dressing always neatly, seeing that his clothes were pressed and wearing always the freshest of linen, and had it not been for this large nose, his faintly sandy hair and somewhat protuberant ears, he would have had a very agreeable appearance. As it was, people in the boarding-house occasionally inquired, “Who was that neat-looking little man?” and it was really nobody’s fault that nobody could answer the question.

I have already mentioned that as the vision of his mother faded into happy distance he felt, in the innermost recesses of his soul, that he ought to be doing something with his life. It was, I fancy, the Slumber blood in his veins that made him feel this, because whatever else you may urge against the members of the Slumber family (and many things have been urged against them), faint love of their country cannot possibly be one of them. It was just this that Percy increasingly felt – that he ought to do something – something, however slight – for his country.

One morning, sitting after breakfast in the pink and green drawing-room of his lodging, the only other occupant of the apartment being that Miss Clarice Elder who was once engaged for a brief fortnight to Major-General Buff-Etherington, a Crimean veteran, when cruel and vicious death (the General was seventy-eight years of age and a desperate martyr to gout) stepped in and separated them, alone then with Miss Elder, Percy was reading his Morning Leader.

I say his Morning Leader, because Percy, like so many of his fellow human beings, was so deeply attached to his morning paper that he felt exactly as though it were offspring of his own loins, chiding it, praising it, supporting it, dressing it in gay colours, indulging it on certain festal occasions with half-a-crown to buy toys with, and very frequently giving it the benefit of his parental opinion.

On this particular morning – the morning of March 13, 1923 – he read the following paragraph from the first leader:

It is indeed apparent to ourselves that but little advantage to anybody is likely to accrue from these official investigations into the truth. Officials are, by the nature of their position, prejudiced persons and Truth has always been shy of such. What we need is more evidence from that much-abused marvellously patient individual, the man in the street. Let the man in the street spend a week or two in Germany, a month in France, talking to the other man in the street, the man in the restaurant, the man in the train, the woman at her cottage door; a few such conversations and we venture to assert that some remedy from this miserable and dangerous impasse will soon suggest itself to active minds. Such an unprejudiced observer may be compared by us to Noah’s Dove, and we confidently believe that during his flight he will discover ground on which his feet may rest.

Like a flash of lightning in a dark room the words thundered in Percy’s soul: “Thou art the Man.”

As always when a message abruptly breaks one’s peace so, he stared bewildered about the room, seeing the pink and green wall-paper, the large “Bringing in the Yule Log,” and the two Japanese fans through a dim confusing mist. Even Miss Elder was not quite clear to him. Nevertheless, he pushed the paper across to her.

“Pray read that,” he said. “The first leader.” Miss Elder was astonished. She had not noticed that Percy was in the room. She read. At the end she looked up:

“Yes?” she said.

Her indifference was nothing to him. His face was flushed as he rose. As always when he was agitated, his nose went a creamy white.

“There!” he said, “There! – something that at last I can do. Some way that I can serve my country.”

He vanished from the room. Miss Elder shook her head. She was sorry for him as she was sorry for everyone who had ever lived, was living at the moment or was likely to live.

It was her métier.

III

It was undoubtedly Percy’s Beaminster rather than his Alderness-Slumber blood that led him so abruptly, so determinately, to take this step.

That had always been the Beaminster way, to feel so secure of their position that ordinary considerations, elements that to other less self-confident persons would be considered deterrent, did not occur to them. Percy could not, in the ordinary things of life, be considered self-confident, but in this matter it was like a divine call – he heard the voice calling him and he went.

He went, knowing no German and no French, having but the slenderest means and a lamentable tendency to neuralgia. He went, trusting in his French and in the exchange. He went, after a difficult time with passports and a truly terrible journey to Munich. He left London at the beginning of June, paying his bill as silently as any ghost and feeling a moment’s shudder, when he saw that there remained no balance at his Bank when he had withdrawn his letter of credit. No more, then, until September. Ah well, with the exchange he had surely enough for three months.

He stayed a month at Munich, on the whole enjoyed himself, but could not be said to fulfil there the purpose for which he came. He scarcely spoke to anyone during his time there, having been desperately frightened during the first three days of his stay by the hours that he spent in the Police Station, attending to the requirements of the Police. They were perfectly polite, but such crowds swarmed about him, so many strange sounds were hurled at his head, so many rough hands pulled him from place to place, so many hundreds of thousands of marks were finally demanded of him that, when it was all concluded, he retired to his hotel the merest whisper of a man.

It was a good hotel. He went there because they spoke English and because, the exchange being what it was (and it varied from day to day, always, of course, to his advantage), he could not really be spending very much. The result of his stay there was that he spent more than he should, spoke only English, and learnt to love Helles Beer. Nevertheless, he was convinced that he had noticed a good deal. The time had very nearly arrived when he could write to the Morning Leader reminding them of their leading article and offering them a few first-fruits of his investigations.

It is true that at present his conclusions varied from day to day, but that was, after all, only as it should be did he have an independent and open mind.

Walking, for instance, one morning along the Briennerstrasse a woman of very genteel bearing stopped and begged of him. That shocked him, and he was minded to return at once to his hotel and pen a violently anti-French epistle, but then, on the next evening, he went out to the Ausstellung and watched the citizens of Munich eating their sausage, drinking their beer and singing their songs, and decided that, after all, the Germans had not had sufficiently impressed upon them the enormities of which in 1914 and the successive years they had been guilty.

He made only one friend during his stay in Munich, and he was, unfortunately, an Englishman. He was a retired Major who was living in Germany because it was cheap. He occupied his time in cursing at the top of his voice the “damned Germans” and Percy was always afeared, in a public place, that some fracas would result. No one, however, paid the least attention. He fascinated Percy and he had also a homely attraction for him because of the close resemblance, allowing of course for differences of age and sex, that the Major bore to his own lamented mother. Percy was always happier with those who dominated him and the Major dominated him completely, cursing him without let or stay from morning to night and, at the last, borrowing five pounds of him with the greatest affection.

It could not be said that the Major very strongly prejudiced Percy’s views; the Major spoke too emphatically to be trusted. He did, however, say one thing that, little as either of them knew it at the time, was to determine Percy’s future life.

“You should see Switzerland,” said the Major, “and stop at Stuttgart on your way through to Zurich. Interesting town Stuttgart.”

Percy made inquiries and found that whether he wished it or no, see Switzerland he must. The Ruhr districts were closed for travellers. Very well. Very good. He would be compelled, however, to live most economically in Paris. Very economically indeed. How he hated to lend the Major five pounds and how he admired the Major for demanding it! He paid his bill – millions of marks by this time – and said farewell to the Major, and a few hours later was in the picturesque town of Stuttgart at the hostelry known as “Marcquardt.”

IV

He at once liked the “Marcquardt,” and on further investigation liked Stuttgart.

He wandered about the streets through the sunny afternoon, liking the gabled roofs, the swinging signs, the cobbled ways. He also bought several things that he did not really need – a pencil-case, two etchings of Stuttgart and four silk ties – because he understood that you were not allowed to take with you more than a very small sum across the frontier. It would be all right. He could cash the remainder of his letter of credit in Zurich.

He went to bed early, because his train was early – nine o’clock precisely. He felt a little uncomfortable in the “Marcquardt.” The officials were perhaps not very friendly. He timidly left orders that he was to be called at half-past seven next morning. He awoke at six, and by the time that the man was banging on his door, was dressed and ready.

He went down and had coffee and an egg. Then he asked for his bill, and on receiving it and reading it, cold water trickled down his spine. It was twice as large as he had expected. They had said that his room would be This. On the contrary it was That, and That was exactly the double of This. He inquired nervously, apprehensively. Very sorry. Waving of hands. Bowing. A polite and cruel smile. As the exchange alters in the night, so do the prices. Yesterday was not today nor, in all probability, would today be tomorrow. No. Quite so.

Well, thank heaven he had enough. But only just enough. And he also had his ticket. How lucky that he had securely purchased it in Munich!

He hurried to the station, through the hall gleaming with imitation marble, up the broad stone steps, then to the gates leading to the platform. Through which gate must he pass? Apparently through none of them. They were all tightly closed. There was No. 9, and No. 12. On No. 9 the train was forty minutes late and on No. 12 fifty. He inquired of an official. No. 9 apparently went to Zurich. He had then forty minutes to wait.

They had told him at the hotel that the porter would bring his luggage and would meet him on the platform by the train. It sounded simple enough, and he went now to the top of the wide stone steps, sat on the broad shining balustrade, having below him the whole wide entrance to the station in his view; no one could go in or come out but he must perceive him. He could not miss the hotel porter.

He sat there then happily enough to wait his forty minutes. Poor Percy! Had he but known it, they were to be the last happy minutes of his life!

As he sat there and as the moments passed, human beings flooded into the station. From his height he could watch everything as an Olympian god. And indeed he felt a real pride in his position. Here he was, neat, tidy and cool, aloft, taking notice of these strange bewildered frantic foreign people just as the Morning Leader had advised him to do. The series of letters that he would begin in Switzerland would be extremely interesting….

Strange, frantic and bewildered these people were! He had never before seen such confused and confusing mobs! It was Sunday morning, and the whole population of Stuttgart was rushing into the country – bands of boys and young men with Tyrolean hats, rosettes in their coats, rucksacks on their backs and staves in their hands, singing to the full extent of their lungs; families, father, mother, three, four, five children, with attendant dogs; pieces of family urgently desiring to be joined to other pieces of family; long restless queues outside the ticket windows; fathers, mothers, wives, husbands, friends and relations screaming and shrieking, shrieking and screaming; children crying; porters pushing here and there with their luggage; tourists bawling at strangers and strangers bawling at tourists; young men almost naked, brown as berries, yodelling as they went; pretty girls smiling vaguely, ugly girls looking anxiously; and through them all, impervious to noise, indifferent to jolting bodies, an old man with a large watering-can scattering the stairs with water.

All this Percy watched, and felt proud and happy at his aloofness. How noisy, how hot, how confused they all were, and how fine was he! He looked up at the clock and alarm smote him. The train must be in! Where the porter? He looked anxiously everywhere, but his bags were invisible. Of course! How stupid! The porter was to meet him on the platform of the train!

His heart thumping, he rushed along, himself now one of that confused, pushing, shouting, perspiring mob that so lately he had despised. He joined the crowd that sweated about Gate No. 12. Right for Zurich? Yes! Right for Zurich. A kind porter in broken English explained. Going in five minutes. His ticket was clipped. He rushed up the platform. Nowhere his porter! Nevertheless he must get his seat. He fought his way over and under bodies blocking the corridor to the only first-class carriage, sat down in it, mopped his brow, looked out of the window. His porter. Oh, where is his porter? His porter! He looks out up and down, down and up. Out through, over and under the bodies he fights his way once more! Where is his porter? Where his bags? He runs up and down, here, there, everywhere. No porter. No porter anywhere. Good heavens! The train is going! A whistle blows! Someone shouts! The train is going! The train is moving! The train is gone!

V

For the first time for many many years Percy was angry – furiously angry. What an abominable thing. The hotel had forced him to miss that train and the hotel should pay.

Soaked now in a bath of perspiration, he hurried down the stone steps and into the fresh air, up the street and once more into the “Marcquardt.” Here he faced the austere and severe officials. Their superb indifference really did raise in him a tempest of rage such as even his mother, had she been present, would have admired. He screamed, he shrieked, he stamped with his feet; he invoked the power and might of Great Britain, at which the officials became even more austere and severe. They were polite, but aloof, even as the snow-clad Jungfrau is aloof from the trembling mountaineer. They explained to him that certainly the porter had been there with the luggage, that he, Mr. Slumber, must, they were regretfully sure, have been on the wrong platform, and that they would send a boy back with Mr. Slumber to the station to inquire.

Back, head up, scornfully striding, with the boy silent at his side, went Percy to the station. They met the porter half-way. Percy began in a rage, but ended in an apologetic and almost sycophantic strain. It was true. He had been on the wrong platform. There had been two trains to Zurich – one fast, one slow; he had got into the slow one. Personen Zug. Yes, naturally the porter had supposed him to be going by the other….

Well, what was to be done? There was another train at three-thirty that afternoon. The porter would meet Percy at the top of the station steps at three o’clock. There could then be no mistake. Percy would be in Zurich at ten that evening. The porter and Percy, with many smiles, parted.

I must pass swiftly over the hours that intervened between their parting and Percy’s return to the station. They were not happy hours for Percy, nor were they short. He had only a few thousand marks remaining to him, and could not therefore buy himself a meal; a soft and misty rain came down, and he moved, a shadow of a shade, among the deserted streets, and then, had he but known it, by a kind of prophetic instinct, up and down a street known as Jakobusstrasse, toiling, toiling, until at length he reached the wooded heights above the town, where every tree was a dripping umbrella.

Punctually at three o’clock, hungry, weary, wet and dirty, but happily aware that in another half-hour he would be leaving this ungrateful town, he was in his place at the top of the broad stairs. He spent there an agonising ten minutes watching for the errant porter, who at length appeared, apologetic and perspiring. Together they hurried to the cloakroom for the bags, slowly these were abstracted, together they hastened – now to Gate 14.

Yes, there it was, “Train for Zurich!” nor were the crowds now so confusing, so impatient, so pugnacious. Quite easily and comfortably Percy reached the ticket collector, and, with a timid smile on his supplicating face, handed up his ticket. The stout and plethoric ticket collector took it, looked at it, looked at it again, then, shaking his head, handed it back to Percy.

“Oh, what’s the matter now?” said Percy in an agony to his attendant porter. “He says,” said the porter in his broken English, “Ticket no good. Been through before. Hole in the ticket.”

“Yes, but tell him,” cried Percy, tears welling in his eyes, “that I only went through for a moment this morning, and then because my luggage wasn’t there I had to come back and—” He heard behind him the gathering swell of those waiting to catch their train.

“Oh, tell him, tell him,” he cried. The porter spoke; the ticket collector shook his head; the porter spoke again; the ticket collector yet more vehemently shook his head. The tears now were blinding Percy’s eyes. On every side of him rose a gale of curses, objurgations and threats.

The porter dragged him from the mêlée; still smiling, he explained that Percy must go and visit a gentleman on the other side of the station and talk to him….

“But meanwhile the train—!” cried Percy. There were yet five minutes.

They went to the other side of the station and explained. This time a long thin man with a long thin voice and a bad cold looked at Percy through long thin glasses and treated him at once as one of the criminal classes. Percy, in an agony, wailed while the porter and the gentleman talked pleasantly together about the weather, how serious it was to have a cold at this time of the year, how abominable were the French, and when were the English going to take steps.

At length Percy’s ticket was returned to him, he paid many thousands of marks and ran breathlessly back to Gate 14.

The train for Zurich had left two minutes before.

VI

He paid the porter the few thousand marks remaining to him, stored his baggage once more in the “Left Luggage” and wandered out into the wet Sunday afternoon, penniless and alone.

His case was not yet so desperate, because, after all, he had the remainder of his letter of credit, which tomorrow he could change, but he was terribly aware how small that remainder was. It was now early in July. His Bank would never, in these suspicious post-war days, advance him money. No – he must live now with the very strictest economy. He realised for the first time how difficult it was to be a true observer of foreign life and manners when you must so persistently economise! How he regretted now that he had chosen the “Bayrischer Hof” in Munich and the “Marcquardt” in Stuttgart! Never mind, tomorrow he would be in Zurich; then he would be no longer puzzled by these confusing marks that leapt about him like wild animals in the jungle.

Meanwhile the rain reminded him that he was alone in Stuttgart without a penny and without a friend. He was now so hungry that he could have eaten eels (his most detested food) had eels been there to eat. Until tomorrow morning he must starve.

He wandered and wandered and then, drawn by a kind of irresistible attraction, started up the Jakobusstrasse once more. Why? Destiny, in whose hands we are the veriest puppets, alone could answer. When, numb with damp and weariness, he had climbed the fiftieth flight of steps, a rather soiled placard in a window of a house on his left attracted him. In German it said that “Apartments were to let,” and in English, “English spoken.”

Had he not had so exhausting a day, had he not been starving and soaked to the skin, were he not, above all else, lonely of soul, the blood of the Beaminsters, the Aldernesses, the Slumbers would have held him back. But to hear English spoken! To be greeted once again in his beloved tongue! The temptation was too strong. He did not even attempt to combat it. He raised his hand and rang the bell.

After a very brief pause the door was opened and Percy Alderness-Slumber’s fate was sealed for ever more.

A large heavy woman, her black hair tousled as though she had been roused from sleep, her long hooked nose inquisitively projecting, her sallow and freckled complexion none the fresher for the flakes of powder that decorated it, asked him in German what he needed.

“I understand that you – someone – speaks English,” stammered Percy.

“Come inside,” said the lady.

VII

Percy explained his case very quickly. He was wet, hungry, homeless. He had at the moment no money, but tomorrow morning he would be supplied and tomorrow afternoon he would be leaving for Zurich. His bags were at the station. Would the lady trust him for one night?

The lady would. A smile, revealing two large rows of discoloured teeth, assured him. His hand was taken and shaken. She had a little room that would, she fancied, exactly suit him – only (and here she dropped her voice) he must pay her tomorrow morning in English money.

Would she give him some coffee and something to eat? She would indeed, and his bags should be sent for. She seemed a friendly woman and her name was Frau Hulda Lowenthal.

Percy submitted. He submitted to everything. He ate his bread and sausage and drank his coffee. Finally, about six in the evening, he went to bed. There was nothing else to do except to sit up with Frau Lowenthal. He did not like Frau Lowenthal. He preferred to go to bed.

He spent a night of horror. Dream after dream swept down upon him and they were all to the same effect, namely, that Frau Lowenthal had her hand upon him and would not let him go. It was but small consolation that the Morning Leader should appear to him in person dressed in a green and pink robe and assure him that he was having now unexampled opportunities as an observer. He wanted to go home.

He awoke in the morning with a head split from side to side, a throat like a nutmeg scraper and a body now hot as chocolate sauce, now cold as the “Bombe” that it envelops. He stayed in bed five days, five agonising days, when Frau Hulda Lowenthal nursed him like a mother, watched over him like a sister and at times revealed tendencies of a kind that had nothing either maternal or sororal about them. Percy lay there hating her more and more, but, as always, with his hatred went admiration for her dominating qualities. Nevertheless, she haunted him in his dreams, her hooked bird-like nose, her black silk dress, her discoloured teeth, her dirty hands….

She haunted him. He feared her. On the fifth day, trembling with weakness, his poor head reeling, he got up, dressed, found the kindly Cook, cashed the remainder of his letter of credit, bought a third-class ticket (he could no longer afford a better) to Zurich for the following day, and mounted slowly, slowly once again and, as he hoped, for the last time, the heights of Jakobusstrasse.

Frau Lowenthal was a widow, and her damp grimy cockroach-ridden house contained apparently only one other lodger save Percy – the short, stout, amiable, uncleanly, only-German-speaking Herr Frederick Klopstock. Percy understood but little German, nevertheless enough to understand that Herr Klopstock was an ally and supporter of the widow Lowenthal. Sometimes, indeed, it seemed to him that Herr Klopstock and Frau Lowenthal were engaged in some kind of plot together. They whispered. They winked. They significantly smiled. But what the plot could be Percy could not imagine. However, little did it matter. Tomorrow, heaven be praised, would see him in Zurich.

That evening he told the widow that tomorrow morning at nine o’clock he would be catching the train. Might he have his bill? He thanked her for all that she had done for him. Certainly he should have his bill. What she had done for him was less than nothing.

The bill, presented to him at half-past seven next morning over his coffee, was certainly not “less than nothing”. It was in English money and the largest he had ever seen. His cheek blanched as he looked at it. It had to be translated into the equivalent of German millions. Good heavens, did he pay it there would be almost nothing remaining of his tiny funds. Nothing remaining! But some of these charges were monstrous. He argued a little, but he was lost before he began. When those discoloured teeth were set and those sharp eyes fixed his own hesitating glance, he quavered and gave in. All he could do was to finger his third-class ticket to Zurich in his pocket. Whatever he did he must get to Zurich! Money or no money, that was all that mattered. The cab was there! He paid his bill, shook hands (he trusted for the last time) with the Lowenthal and departed.

Once more he was in that now so familiar station. The train was on time this morning. Only twenty minutes. He tried to find a porter. He screamed Träger! Träger! He stood there with his bags, anxiously scanning the horizon. No sign of a porter, and today what a mob of people! They were pouring up the steps and then frothing, bubbling, boiling in the long passage before the gates. Träger! Träger! No sign at all of any porter. Ah! there was one! No, he passes with haughty indifference. Another! He shakes his head.

Meanwhile time was passing, so, shouldering perforce his two bags himself, he pushed towards the gate. What a multitude after that involved him! Men, women, children and dogs all shouting, screaming, crying, all with that strange wild air of animals suddenly released from their cage and speeding to devour their food. In one fashion or another he showed his ticket at the gate and was carried along towards the train.

His arms ached with his bags, his hat was pushed on one side, perspiration flowed on to his nose, hung there and then drip, drip, drip…. People shoved, jostled, shoved and collided. There was the train, but how horrible a sight! It was already packed with human bodies, packed to suffocation! They were piled at all the windows and at the doors seemed to stand eight deep one upon the other.

There were, you see (cursed be the French), so few trains now, and this was the holiday time and … But a mania seized Percy. Catch that train he would, catch that train he must. Crying aloud, dragging his bags with him, he moved forward. He was caught into a whirl of human bodies – human chests and thighs, arms and legs, noses and eyes, shirts and trousers. He fought, using his bags as weapons, crying aloud in English, having before his eyes always that dreadful woman in the black silk dress with the creaking bosom and the dirty hands. He pushed, he cried, he fought. Now he was almost at the train.

He had one foot on the lowest step. Dropping a bag, he pulled at the door. Above the door jeering faces looked down upon him. Someone tugged at him from behind. He turned savagely, bent to pick up his bag, fought towards the train once more; the train was moving, the train was moving! With others he ran towards it, crying out, waving his hands. The train moved faster. Oh! it couldn’t be that he was going to miss it, it couldn’t be!

He ran a little way farther, then as the train vanished into the black mouth of the station, turned round, sat down on his bag and burst into tears.

VIII

It was now, as I see it, that he committed his crowning mistake. When he had recovered a little after poking with his pocket-handkerchief at his eyes and nose, he found that he had lost his ticket. He looked everywhere; he had lost it in the crowded confusion. This completed his subjection. He seemed now to be fighting against some strange hostile power mightier than he. The power was perhaps the station – this horrible shining, gleaming, naked station. Consigning his luggage once more to the cloakroom he left the station. Then was his mistake. At all costs he should have bought instantly another ticket for Zurich and departed that evening, penniless though now he would be.

But he felt, I imagine, after that dreadful twenty minutes that he must have breathing-space. He was aching all over, aching mentally, morally, spiritually, physically. He must have a night’s rest. He returned to the house in Jakobusstrasse.

She received him, he was compelled to admit, in a friendly spirit. She seemed delighted to see him, and so was Herr Klopstock. They did not humiliate him by surprise or commiseration. They quite understood his return. It was perfectly natural.

He stayed there weakly for four days in a sort of trance, sleeping, eating his food and dreading more and more the approach of the Lowenthal. Then on one sun-shining, air-blowing morning, he suddenly awoke to his condition. He leapt out of bed, pulled off his pyjamas, plunged his head into cold water. He must leave that day … he must leave that day … he must. Straight through his brain stabbed the thought – First there will be the bill for these four days – the bill which, if it were anything at all like the last bill, would swallow up more than all he had. And then his ticket? He looked at his money, counting it with trembling anxiety. The exchange had altered in the last four days. His money was worth exactly half what it had been worth. Enough for his ticket – third-class. For his bill and his ticket? No.

It was then that he determined on an action disgraceful for a Slumber, yet more disgraceful for an Alderness, abominable for a Beaminster. He determined on flight, and flight without payment.

He made his plans with a miraculous cunning – miraculous, that is, for one who was entirely virgin to such plans. On the following afternoon, Frau Lowenthal walked into the woods with Herr Klopstock, that they might take coffee together. Percy, with his two bags, crept in a cab to the station, paid the cabman, left the bags in their now familiar home, bought his third-class ticket, and returned to the house in Jakobusstrasse, penniless.

On the next morning – a lovely day – at quarter to eight in the morning, he crept downstairs, suffered an agony of apprehension in the stifling and spider-haunted passage, and slipped out and away. Half an hour later he was yet once again greeting those broad and shining steps. No mistake this time! He abstracted his bags, marched through the gate (the crowd today was but small), found a pleasant third-class corner, and then, his ticket clutched in his hot hand, with thumping heart he waited.

The time advanced. Half an hour, twenty minutes, quarter of an hour…. The carriage filled. All pleasant smiling people. They talked to him. He nodded, smiling, back. Five minutes.

The door was darkened.

With the struggling agony of the entrapped rabbit, with the mute and desperate despair of the explorer surrounded by Cannibals, with the dumb and devastating terror of the bird at the tom-cat’s mercy – he saw Frau Lowenthal staring down upon him.

She spoke to him quietly in her so curiously accented voice:

“Herr Slumber, you have wished to escape without payment. I have with me my bill. Pay it, please.”

“I cannot!” he murmured.

“Well then – the police—”

He rose quietly and went with her.

IX

They drove back silently in a cab. In the dingy faded sitting-room, beneath the swollen eyelids of Hindenburg, and the supercilious eyebrows of Ludendorff, they faced one another.

Suddenly Frau Lowenthal flung her arms about her lodger. She sobbed heavily upon his flagging chest.

“Had I known – that I should have ill-treated you so, you whom I adore.”

Percy’s nostrils were filled with the bitterness of faded silk. He murmured something. Over his shoulder he saw the door open. Herr Klopstock stood there. He saw, he smiled, his round face was a pool of welcoming laughter.

“Ach! Ach!” he cried like a happy duck.

A moment and he was congratulating them both.

Later Frau Lowenthal went to the window, and removed the advertisement for lodgers.

“You see, my darling Percy, now – with your regular income – and the exchange – we shall not need to take lodgers any more.”

Dimly, peering above the waters of misery that engulfed him, Percy wondered whether the pronoun included in its decisive plural Herr Klopstock or himself.

“The Story-teller” magazine Dec 1924

The Silver Thorn (1928)

THE ENEMY IN AMBUSH

I

Captain John Ford lodged, in Moscow, with the family Ivanoff. He had been directed by the English Consulate to the family Ivanoff, the lady of the house being used to officers, the flat being in a pleasant part of the town (Kriwarbatsky Pereoulok, D.11. k.s.), and the food “simple but excellent.” He had arrived with a great many boxes at the beginning of September and (of course, he did not realise this) Mme. Ivanoff’s heart had sunk when she saw him. She had had English officers in her house now for fifteen years, but she had never seen anyone so alarming as Captain John Ford. He was handsome but stiff as a deal board. His clothes were surely made of iron, such creases were there in the trousers, so severe were the sleeves of his jacket: he was very tall and very thin, with eyes like cold blue stones, a brown moustache that expressed in its every hair haughty and contemptuous surprise, and black shining boots that showed her, poor woman, that before many days were over Masha would incur his severest displeasure.

She would have liked to have said that her rooms were all occupied, but she had just then no one at all and needed the money. She looked at his healthy, tanned and self-satisfied countenance, and her knees trembled. However, Mme. Ivanoff was a brave woman. She thought of Kostia, of Anna, of little Vladimir…. She said that she was delighted to see him.

II

Captain Ford’s first impression was that “he couldn’t have believed there could have been such a country.” Certainly the weather during the first days towards the end of September was not propitious. It rained very often; the mud rose higher and higher in the streets; on many days a thick heavy pall hung over the place and everyone walked with bent shoulders as though they dreaded a blow. The houses seem to be made of papier-mâché, the towers of gold and blue and green were cheap and tawdry, and the noise of the clanging trams was deafening. The Isvoschiks splashed mud over Captain Ford’s trousers, and officious people were always attempting to take his coat, hat and stick away from him when he wished to retain them. No one walked on the right side of the street, church bells were always ringing when he wanted to slumber. At the Opera he was late and had to stand in the passage during a whole act, he tumbled continually over holes in the pavement, and was kept waiting in his bank two hours before they gave him his money.

“I simply couldn’t have believed such a country possible,” he said to himself again and again….

Then the Ivanoff family was like nothing that he’d ever known. Mme. Ivanoff herself, soft and fluffy and plump, with eyes that were always filling with tears, and the prettiest broken English, had been in the opinion of many English officers “a dear little woman.” They wrote to her long after they had left her and told her that one day they would come back to live in Russia. She treasured their letters in a box that one of them had given her with “A Present from Brighton” in red paint on the lid. But Captain Ford simply found her irritating. She was frightened with him, and when she gave him lessons in the morning lost her head, forgot her English and sometimes even her Russian.

“I’m afraid I don’t quite understand you,” his moustache would say to her.

And she would stammer:

“Oh! How say it in Engleesh? What is that word – yes? You know – ’appy, merry, gay – no, not gay. Ah – Tak!” and he would wait with a terrible patience, staring just over her head at the Ikon in the corner of the room.

Then she was certainly absent-minded and believed that good-nature was of more value than sharpness of intellect. She simply wanted life to be pleasant for everyone and was never happier than when six stout ladies of her acquaintance came early in the afternoon and played lotto with her until dinner-time. Her husband also wished life to be pleasant. He was an inventor who had, many years ago, had considerable success with a Patent Clip that held papers for you with an iron clasp above your writing-table. Since then he had invented many things – boot-polish, a new way of peeling oranges, a game with horses and counters, a book-rest and a collapsible chair that became an umbrella-stand when you had sat upon it long enough. Only the paperclip had been really successful, but he lived in great hope and was one of the most cheerful people in Moscow except at sudden moments of utter despair when he loudly proclaimed his disdain of God and told the cook (very much a friend of the family) that he intended to commit suicide before nightfall. He was a little man with a red moustache and large blue baby eyes – he was sentimental and absolutely credulous; he believed anything that anyone told him.

The children, Kostia, Anna and Vladimir, were just like other children, loved their parents but only occasionally obeyed them, made a tremendous noise, cried and laughed and sang. Kostia, however, was now a boy of fourteen and was beginning to regard life seriously, he read the newspaper, was often grave and silent and patronised his father. But the most remarkable member of the family was Uncle Anton, Mr. Ivanoff’s brother. Some people might have said that he was not quite right in his head, but all eccentricities were forgiven him for his “remarkable ideas.”

“What kind of ideas?” said Captain Ford suspiciously when Mme. Ivanoff first told him this.

“Wonderful things,” said Mme. Ivanoff, “about Russia, and God, and the Soul of Man.”

“Really!” was all Captain Ford said.

Uncle Anton was remarkable to look upon, a giant of a man with a long brown untidy beard, shaggy brown eyebrows and a mop of utterly uncared-for hair. He was dirty and shabby and sometimes not quite decent in his appearance. He ate his food in a horrible manner, blew his soup all over the table and gnawed bones in his hands like a savage. What Captain Ford thought of these things may be imagined – no consolation to him that Uncle Anton loved humanity and would walk a mile rather than tread on a worm – no consolation at all. But the worst of it was that Uncle Anton took, from the first, a great liking to Captain Ford. “Here was a proper man,” he said, “a man to whom I can talk,” and talk to him he did. It was one of Mme. Ivanoff’s hardest tasks to keep Uncle Anton out of Captain Ford’s room. “He has other interests,” she would tell her brother-in-law. “He is different from us.”

“All men are the same,” Uncle Anton replied, smiling down upon her. “We are all brothers. My heart is warm towards him.”

Indeed, at first, the hearts of all the family were warm; they were prepared absolutely to make Captain Ford one of themselves. But Captain Ford did not like vodka, hated Schee, could not touch little cucumbers, and had a real terror of Rabcheek. He watched with paralysed fascination little Vladimir’s manner of mastication. Uncle Anton’s preoccupation with a chicken bone paled the soldier’s bronzed cheek.

Then he had never, at any time, been a great conversationalist. He had always distrusted talkers, and one of his favourite dicta was: “If you’ve got something you want to say, just think first as to whether it’s really worth while, you’re sure to find it isn’t.” The Ivanoffs certainly never thought first. They said exactly what came into their heads, talking all together, screaming and shouting if necessary, happy and friendly and merry. Madame Ivanoff soon discovered that Captain Ford disliked noise at meal-times, and she did her best – but unfortunately her memory was short, she was easily excited, and her apologies afterwards seemed to give him very little pleasure. Other Englishmen had smiled at the noise and confusion. Captain Ford looked as though he were called on by his country to perform an especially hazardous and unpleasant duty. It was evident to anyone that he was not happy. There were many other little things. He wanted a cold bath every morning, and that should have been simple enough, but the taps were eccentric, the water was sometimes brown and thick, the catch would not fasten on the bathroom door (upon one occasion when the Captain was in his bath Uncle Anton entered, and, instead of retiring, proposed that they should have a bath together). Then there was the matter of “the wash.” In England this was a perfectly regular affair. You sent your washing on Monday and received it back again on Friday; but here, whatever you might do or say, the “wash” had its own habits and customs. Frequently the arrival of Prazniky would delay things for a fortnight or so. Masha would be sent to the laundry with orders to die rather than return without the Captain’s collars. Nevertheless, she did return without them; she had had a wonderful conversation with the head of the laundry – he was an agreeable man and hoped by next Tuesday or Wednesday to have discovered most of the Captain’s things.

“You see what it is – on nas,” said Mme. Ivanoff, smiling happily.

“But, Good God!—” cried the Captain.

He shut himself then into an impenetrable reserve, and the family regarded him with frightened eyes. He felt their terror and was irritated by it. He flung himself into the learning of Russian with a ferocity and pertinacity that was devastating. He was not very clever, but of an amazing doggedness. His accent was appalling, but he never made a mistake in grammar. It promised to be a dismal winter for the Ivanoffs….

III

Then, a few weeks before Christmas, Captain Ford discovered that something was the matter with him. The weather improved. The snow had fallen, and there came a succession of shining, crystal days when the colours of the sky were reflected in shadowed lights on the white ground, when the towers of gold and green and blue hung, on misty evenings, like rounded clouds about the stars, when the eccentric shapes and patterns of the Moscow streets were romantic roads leading into mysterious countries, when every ugliness took on beauty and every commonplace corner seemed to watch with a smile, half-hidden, half-pathetic, half-expectant. Captain Ford was uncomfortable. Entirely against his will he began to think of his young days when he had loved a lady in the Gaiety chorus, had thought her a model of virtue and modesty, had even written poetry to her. There had even been a summer night when he had driven her out to Hampstead in a hansom and had appealed to the moon to witness his devotion. Ah! how he had laughed at himself since then, and what fools other young fellows with an equal romantic folly had seemed to him! There had been a moment, after his marriage with Mrs. Ford, when he had been threatened with some return of this same nonsense. It had been Mrs. Ford herself then who had laughed at him: “Why, John!” she had cried (they were at Monte Carlo on their honeymoon), “I had no idea you’d got that kind of rot in you!”

Afterwards, with a shadow of that same idealism, he had hoped for a son, but Mrs. Ford had thought it unwise of them to start a family when their income was still so slender, and they had decided to wait. They were waiting yet.

Now, in spite of himself, Moscow was making him uncomfortable. When, late after some dinner-party, he was driving home in his Isvoschik, he would curse the cold and the bumping roads and the slowness of his horse, and behind that cursing there would be stealing a strange, warm, happy feeling of contentment as the white streets ran in lines of light through the dark, uneven walls; the watchmen’s fires leaping at the street corners, the thin flames burning before the Ikons, the Russian peace of that vast Russian night that covers so spacious and silent a land touching him with its cool hand, whispering to him with its friendly voice. By Christmas he had told himself that, if he did not take care, he would one day be making a fool of himself, he would be actually growing fond of the country. Now this fear of making a fool of himself was a very real terror indeed, and was perhaps all the stronger in him now because he had shut himself up so tightly these last months. Christmas Eve was a hard day for him in this fashion: he bought presents for the Ivanoff children (fine presents, too), but would not come to the Christmas Tree. They, however, emboldened by this happy excitement, came into his room and thanked him, and Vladimir (aged five) wished to kiss him. From this, fortunately, she was prevented. He was very stiff with them and seemed angry at their little speeches.

“Not at all. Not at all,” he said. “Nitchevo. Nitchevo.”

Then at supper the family gave him presents: Mme. Ivanoff a copy of Tutchev’s poetry, Mr. Ivanoff a Russian tobacco box, and Uncle Anton a little brass Ikon. He was terribly embarrassed; he had nothing to say. “Thanks. Really – hum – blagardaryoo vass – hum – thanks.” He wished with all his heart that he had arranged to dine that night with some English friends.

It happened then, in the early part of the year, that he saw performances at the Artistic Theatre, of “The Cherry Orchard” and “The Three Sisters.” He was moved unexpectedly and, as he told himself, quite unreasonably. He had not been at any time a student of the theatre, but he was used in England to a comfortable play that began at nine o’clock punctually, had a story that a baby could understand, with well-known performers in it, some of whom he knew at his club and others who came to have tea with his wife. Moreover, it was one of his theories that a play must not be depressing. “Worries enough,” he would say to his friends, “in ordinary life without your books and plays being worrying too. That’s what I say” – and was apparently quite unaware that all his friends said the same thing. He had then no right to be anything but disgusted by “The Cherry Orchard” and “The Three Sisters.” Here were two plays depressing and inconclusive. Characters came in and out at their own pleasure, uttered remarks quite carelessly and without purpose, seemed to have no idea that they were in a play at all. At the end of the evening no one was settled for life – indeed anyone who, at the beginning of the play, was settled, was seen to be unsettled by the end of it. Moreover, none of the actors looked like actors nor had, apparently, any consciousness that the play would fall to pieces if they were not in it. It was all desperately unlike anything of which Captain Ford could be expected to approve, and yet he discovered in himself an increasing consciousness of disturbed alarm. It was exactly as though he were reconnoitring in some enemy’s country, was aware that a man, in ambush, was waiting for him and that every step might bring him leaping upon him. “One of these days I shall make a fool of myself if I’m not careful” … there was his enemy in ambush, an enemy serious enough in all conscience, because, having made a fool of oneself once, it is only too possible that one may do so again, and then again, and at last be a fool altogether. In the love of Madame Ranevsky, of Gayef, for their house and Orchard, in the burning passion of Musha and Versyenen that glows like a dark fire at the very heart of “The Three Sisters,” he found the footsteps, the very secret marks of his enemy. Had he missed the whole purpose and meaning of life? Had he driven from him everything that life was intended to give to the soul of man? At that thought he shook himself as though he would wake from an evil dream. What had he to do with the Soul of Man? Was he not an English officer and a man of practical common sense? He might as well be that drunken old idiot, Uncle Anton, at once. He was stiffer than ever with the Ivanoff family….

But the worst of it was that Uncle Anton, whom it was impossible to rebuff, whose childlike trust and simplicity saw what they wanted to see and not what they were told to see, insisted on treating him as though he alone in real truth knew Captain Ford as, in the depths of his heart, he was.

“You love this country,” he said standing over him and putting a big dirty hand on his shoulder. “You love this country. It is stealing every day more deeply into your heart. I know that this is so and that after you have left us you will long always to return. You will have a great hunger …” a ridiculous way for one man to talk to another.

It happened, then, that as the weeks of the new year increased Captain John Ford longed every day more passionately to escape. He hurled himself at his Russian and made remarkable progress. The Ivanoffs, with the exception of Uncle Anton, were now really afraid of him, and felt his stiff unfriendliness like a cloud about the house. It could not be said that they awaited his departure with sorrow, nevertheless in their way they were proud of him. “You never saw such an Englishman,” they would tell their friends, “so proud and stiff. He never opens his lips. The children are so quiet you wouldn’t know them – a fine man, a proper Englishman.”

Then Mrs. Ford wrote to say that in the course of her travels she had reached Sebastopol, would travel home through Russia, and would pick him up on her way. “I’m sure you’ll be glad to get home again,” she said, “after all the queer people you’ve been seeing….”

Why was it that, in reading her letter, he had the strangest feeling that his wife wasn’t real? Oh, yes! He had certainly been out of England long enough. He awaited with impatience, and also with a strange anxiety, his wife’s arrival.

IV

Mrs. Ford arrived: she was a brisk little woman, who stood on her toes and pecked at the world like a bright hard little bird. Very smart in her dress, the impression she gave was that she despised above everything else waste of time. She even clipped her sentences:

“Well, John, here I am. Leave tomorrow 10.30. Must. Promised the Andersons be back in time for the Anderson girl’s wedding. Poor dear, how odd you look – want some new clothes.”

Her evening meal with the Ivanoffs was a strange business. She talked brightly and sharply, looking just over Madame Ivanoffs shoulder. Madame Ivanoff hated her at the very first glance, which was odd, because Madame Ivanoff never hated people. The whole family hated Mrs. Ford, and she remained for many years after in the minds of the Ivanoff children as a picture of dreadful, devastating tyranny. Uncle Anton also disliked her so much that he would not speak at all during the meal, and was heard to mutter to himself, later in the evening: “My poor dear friend! My poor dear friend.”

And this was the strangest part of it that, in the light of the newly revealed Mrs. Ford, the Captain, who had been throughout the winter a terror and a depression, was suddenly a victim. The Ivanoff family discovered that it had really loved him all the time, and to allow him to be carried away in the charge of such a woman was a piercing tragedy. He was going away tomorrow! Why, they would miss him! They were not sure that they were not prouder of him than of any Englishman that they had ever had. Upon that evening there was developed a sudden intimacy, and Mme. Ivanoff could not help looking at him with mysterious glances, and Ivanoff himself was grievously tempted to press his hand.

Meanwhile John Ford was in a strange condition. That impression that he had had on reading his wife’s letter of her unreality oddly persisted. When she spoke to him he felt as though he were looking at something through a looking-glass – take the glass away and the reflection went with it. She was like a memory that he didn’t wish to remember or a photograph of a college cricketing team. Moreover, he knew, quite desperately, that he didn’t wish to go tomorrow. That strange dread that had been creeping daily more close to him was now very near indeed.

“I shall make an awful ass of myself if I’m not careful,” he said to himself, looking at his wife.

Before they parted for the night he looked at Uncle Anton and, with a shock of surprise, thought, “I believe he is the only man who’s ever really known me!” He lay sleepless all night beside the unreal body of his wife; his foot touched hers and it was as though someone had asked him to repeat the Latin verses that he used to learn when he was a boy at school. When the early dawn lit her face he felt a sudden impulse to get up and run for miles and miles into the very heart of Russia and there be lost.

He did not run – his training had been too thorough for that – but the parting in the morning was strangely moving. Mrs. Ford said good-bye briskly and with a bright air of relief because she would never see these appalling people again.

“Come, John, we shall miss our train.”

The Captain stood, looking very English.

“I’m coming,” he said.

He seemed to be waiting for her to start down the stairs as though he had got something very special and private to say, but when she had gone, all he said was:

“Well, well, good-bye, Mrs. Ivanoff – very kind – yes. Well, well—”

He tipped the children; Uncle Anton made a rush at him, stopped half-way, rushed back and closed the door of his room. Captain Ford, with eyes that were for the first time in the experience of the Ivanoffs soft and human, made a dash for the stairs as though he were pursued.

“Good-bye … Good-bye … Good-bye,” they cried.

They had hired a motor-car and Mrs. Ford was already sitting in it.

“Well, what people!” she said. “We’ve just nice time for the train.”

The car had started when suddenly the Captain leaned out of the window and stopped it.

“I’ve forgotten something,” he said to his wife.

He jumped out of the car, dashed down the street, and was through the door of the building. He rang the bell of the Ivanoff flat. Masha opened it; he pushed past her, and without knocking on the door, broke into Uncle Anton’s room. Uncle Anton was standing, a huge figure, before his window peering down into the street.

He turned round.

“It’s only,” Ford, who was breathless, stammered, “that I hadn’t – said good-bye.”

He held out both his hands. Uncle Anton took them, then kissed him, gravely, three times. Captain Ford, who had never before in his life been kissed by a man, said, still breathlessly:

“I’m coming back…. I wanted you to know…. I’m coming back.”

“Of course,” Uncle Anton said.

He hurried away and was in the car again.

“But, John,” his wife said, “whatever! … The train….”

He said nothing. He stared out of the window. The first warmth of spring was in the air. The streets were running with streams of water, blue from the reflection of the sky. The Ikon above the gate in the Lubiansky Ploshet shone and glittered; the air seemed to be full of a noise of bells and hammers. The row of booths with their dolls and fruit, their hideous china ornaments and their wooden toys, were reflected with all their colours in the pools of water. John Ford drew a deep sigh; then nodded to himself.

He knew that his enemy had made his spring and he was glad.

“The Cornhill Magazine” Mar 1925

The Silver Thorn (1928)

MR. ODDY

This may seem to many people an old-fashioned story; it is perhaps for that reason that I tell it. I can recover here, it may be, for myself something of the world that is already romantic, already beyond one’s reach, already precious for the things that one might have got out of it and didn’t.

London of but a few years before the war! What a commonplace to point out its difference from the London of today and to emphasise the tiny period of time that made that difference!

We were all young and hopeful then, we could all live on a shilling a year and think ourselves well off, we could all sit in front of the lumbering horse ’buses and chat confidentially with the omniscient driver, we could all see Dan Leno in Pantomime and watch Farren dance at the Empire, we could all rummage among those cobwebby streets at the back of the Strand where Aldwych now flaunts her shining bosom and imagine Pendennis and Warrington, Copperfield and Traddles cheek by jowl with ourselves, we could all wait in the shilling queue for hours to see Ellen Terry in Captain Brassbound and Forbes-Robertson in Hamlet, we could all cross the street without fear of imminent death, and above all we could all sink ourselves into that untidy, higgledy-piggledy, smoky and beery and gas-lampy London gone utterly and for ever.

But I have no wish to be sentimental about it; there is a new London which is just as interesting to its new citizens as the old London was to myself. It is my age that is the matter; before the war one was so very young.

I like, though, to try and recapture that time, and so, as a simple way to do it, I seize upon a young man; Tommy Brown we will call him. I don’t know where Tommy Brown may be now; that Tommy Brown who lived as I did in two very small rooms in Glebe Place, Chelsea, who enjoyed hugely the sparse but economical meals provided so elegantly by two charming ladies at “The Good Intent” down by the river, that charming hostelry whence looking through the bow windows you could see the tubby barges go floating down the river, and the thin outline of Whistler’s Battersea Bridge, and in the small room itself were surrounded by who knows what geniuses in the lump, geniuses of Art and Letters, of the Stage and of the Law.

For Tommy Brown in those days life was Paradisal.

He had come boldly from Cambridge to throw himself upon London’s friendly bosom; despite all warnings to the contrary he was certain that it would be friendly; how could it be otherwise to so charming, so brilliant, so unusually attractive a young man? For Tommy was conceited beyond all that his youth warranted, conceited indeed without any reason at all.

He had, it is true, secured the post of reviewer to one of the London daily papers; this seemed to him when he looked back in later years a kind of miracle, but at the time no miracle at all, simply a just appreciation of his extraordinary talents. There was also reposing in one of the publishers’ offices at that moment the manuscript of a novel, a novel that appeared to him of astonishing brilliance, written in the purest English, sparkling with wit, tense with drama.

These things were fine and reassuring enough, but there was more than that; he felt in himself the power to rise to the greatest heights; he could not see how anything could stop him, it was his destiny.

This pride of his might have suffered some severe shocks were it not that he spent all of his time with other young gentlemen quite as conceited as himself. I have heard talk of the present young generation and its agreeable consciousness of its own merits, but I doubt if it is anything in comparison with that little group of twenty-five years ago. After all, the war has intervened – however young we may be and however greatly we may pretend, this is an unstable world and for the moment heroics have departed from it. But for Tommy Brown and his friends the future was theirs and nobody could prevent it. Something pathetic in that as one looks back.

Tommy was not really so unpleasant a youth as I have described him – to his elders he must have appeared a baby, and his vitality at least they could envy. After all, why check his confidence? Life would do that heavily enough in its own good time.

Tommy, although he had no money and no prospects, was already engaged to a young woman, Miss Alice Smith. Alice Smith was an artist sharing with a girl friend a Chelsea studio, and she was as certain of her future as Tommy was of his.

They had met at a little Chelsea dance, and two days after the meeting they were engaged. She had no parents who mattered, and no money to speak of, so that the engagement was the easiest thing in the world.

Tommy, who had been in love before many times, was certain, as he told his friend Jack Robinson so often as to bore that gentleman severely, that this time at last he knew what love was. Alice ordered him about – with her at any rate his conceit fell away – she had read his novel and pronounced it old-fashioned, the severest criticism she could possibly have made, and she thought his reviews amateur. He suffered then a good deal in her company. When he was away from her he told himself and everybody else that her critical judgement was marvellous, her comprehension of all the Arts quite astounding, but he left her sometimes with a miserable suspicion that perhaps after all he was not going to do anything very wonderful and that he would have to work very hard indeed to rise to her astonishing standards.

It was in such a mood of wholesome depression that he came one beautiful April day from the A.B.C. shop where he had been giving his Alice luncheon, and found his way to an old bookshop on the riverside round the corner from Oakley Street. This shop was kept by a gentleman called Mr. Burdett Coutts, and the grand associations of his name gave him from the very first a sort of splendour.

It was one of those old shops of which there are, thank God, still many examples surviving in London, in which the room was so small and the books so many that to move a step was to imperil your safety. Books ran in thick, tight rows from floor to ceiling everywhere, were piled in stacks upon the ground and hung in perilous heaps over chairs and window ledges.

Mr. Burdett Coutts himself, a very stout and grizzled old man enveloped always in a grey shawl, crouched behind his spectacles in a far corner and took apparently no interest in anything save that he would snap the price at you if you brought him a volume and timorously enquired. He was not one of those old booksellers dear to the heart of Anatole France and other great men who would love to discourse to you of the beauties of The Golden Ass, the possibility of Homer being a lady, or the virtues of the second Hyperion over the first. Not at all; he ate biscuits which stuck in his grizzly beard, and wrote perpetually in a large worm-eaten ledger which was supposed by his customers to contain all the secrets of the universe.

It was just because Mr. Coutts never interfered with you that Tommy Brown loved his shop so dearly. If he had a true genuine passion that went far deeper than all his little superficial vanities and egotisms, it was his passion for books – books of any kind.

He had at this time no fine taste – all was fish that came to his net. The bundles of Thackeray and Dickens, parts tied up carelessly in coarse string, the old broken-backed volumes of Radcliffe and Barham and Gait, the red and gold Colburn’s Novelists, all these were exciting to him, just as exciting as though they had been a first Gray’s Elegy or an original Robinson Crusoe.

He had, too, a touching weakness for the piles of fresh and neglected modern novels that lay in their discarded heaps on the dusty floor; young though he was, he was old enough to realise the pathos of these so short a time ago fresh from the bursting presses, so eagerly cherished through months of anxious watching by their fond authors, so swiftly forgotten, dead almost before they were born.

So he browsed, moving like a panting puppy with inquisitive nose from stack to stack with a gesture of excitement, tumbling a whole racket of books about his head, looking then anxiously to see whether the old man would be angry with him, and realising for the thousandth time that the old man never was.

It was on this day, then, rather sore from the arrogancies of his Alice, that he tried to restore his confidence among these friendly volumes. With a little thrill of excited pleasure he had just discovered a number of the volumes born of those romantic and tragedy-haunted “Nineties.” Here in little thin volumes were the stories of Crackanthorpe, the poems of Dowson, the Keynotes of George Egerton, The Bishop’s Dilemma of Ella d’Arcy, The Happy Hypocrite of Max Beerbohm.

Had he only been wise enough to give there and then for that last whatever the old man had asked him for it he would have been fortunate indeed, but the pennies in his pocket were few – he was not yet a book-collector, but rather that less expensive but more precious thing, a book adorer. He had the tiny volume in his hand, when he was aware that someone had entered the shop and was standing looking over his shoulder.

He turned slowly and saw someone who at first sight seemed vaguely familiar, so familiar that he was plunged into confusion at once by the sense that he ought to say “How do you do?” but could not accurately place him. The gentleman also seemed to know him very well, for he said in a most friendly way, “Ah, yes, the ‘Nineties,’ a very fruitful period.”

Tommy stammered something, put down the Max Beerbohm, moved a little, and pulled about him a sudden shower of volumes. The room was filled with the racket of their tumbling, and a cloud of dust thickened about them, creeping into eyes and mouth and nose.

“I’m terribly sorry,” Tommy stammered, and then, looking up, was sorry the more when he saw how extremely neat and tidy the gentleman was and how terribly the little accident must distress him.

Tommy’s friend must have been between sixty and seventy years of age, nearer seventy perhaps than sixty, but his black hair was thick and strong and stood up en brosse from a magnificent broad forehead. Indeed, so fine was the forehead and the turn of the head that the face itself was a little disappointing, being so round and chubby and amiable as to be almost babyish. It was not a weak face, however, the eyes being large and fine and the chin strong and determined.

The figure of this gentleman was short and thick-set and inclined to stoutness; he had the body of a prize-fighter now resting on his laurels. He was very beautifully clothed in a black coat and waistcoat, pepper-and-salt trousers, and he stood leaning a little on a thick ebony cane, his legs planted apart, his whole attitude that of one who was accustomed to authority. He had the look of a magistrate, or even of a judge, and had his face been less kindly Tommy would have said good day, nodded to Mr. Burdett Coutts, and departed, but that was a smile difficult to resist.

“Dear me,” the gentleman said, “this is a very dusty shop. I have never been here before, but I gather by the way that you knock the books about that it’s an old friend of yours.”

Tommy giggled in a silly fashion, shifted from foot to foot, and then, desiring to seem very wise and learned, proved himself only very young and foolish.

“The ‘Nineties’ are becoming quite romantic,” he said in his most authoritative voice, “now that we’re getting a good distance from them.”

“Ah, you think so!” said the gentleman courteously; “that’s interesting. I’m getting to an age now, I’m afraid, when nothing seems romantic but one’s own youth and, ah, dear me! that was a very long time ago.”

This was exactly the way that kindly old gentlemen were supposed to talk, and Tommy listened with becoming attention.

“In my young day,” his friend continued, “George Eliot seemed to everybody a magnificent writer: a little heavy in hand for these days, I’m afraid. Now who is the God of your generation, if it isn’t impertinent to enquire?”

Tommy shifted again from foot to foot. Who was the God of his generation? If the truth must be told, in Tommy’s set there were no Gods, only young men who might be Gods if they lived long enough.

“Well,” said Tommy awkwardly, “Hardy, of course – er – it’s difficult to say, isn’t it?”

“Very difficult,” said the gentleman.

There was a pause then, which Tommy concluded by hinting that he was afraid that he must move forward to a very important engagement.

“May I walk with you a little way?” asked the gentleman very courteously. “Such a very beautiful afternoon.”

Once outside in the beautiful afternoon air everything was much easier; Tommy regained his self-confidence, and soon was talking with his accustomed ease and freedom. There was nothing very alarming in his friend after all, he seemed so very eager to hear everything that Tommy had to say. He was strangely ignorant too; he seemed to be interested in the Arts, but to know very little about them; certain names that were to Tommy household words were to this gentleman quite unknown. Tommy began to be a little patronising. They parted at the top of Oakley Street.

“I wonder if you’d mind,” the gentleman said, “our meeting again? The fact is, that I have very little opportunity of making friends with your generation. There are so many things that you could tell me. I am afraid it may be tiresome for you to spend an hour or two with so ancient a duffer as myself, but it would be very kind of you.”

Tommy was nothing if not generous; he said that he would enjoy another meeting very much. Of course he was very busy and his spare hours were not many, but a walk another afternoon could surely be managed. They made an appointment, they exchanged names; the gentleman’s name was Mr. Alfred Oddy.

That evening, in the middle of a hilarious Chelsea party, Tommy suddenly discovered to his surprise that it would please him very much to see Mr. Oddy walk in through the door.

Although it was a hilarious party Tommy was not very happy; for one thing, Spencer Russell, the novelist, was there and showed quite clearly that he didn’t think Tommy very interesting. Tommy had been led up and introduced to him, had said one or two things that seemed to himself very striking, but Spencer Russell had turned his back almost at once and entered into eager conversation with somebody else.

This wasn’t very pleasant, and then his own beloved Alice was behaving strangely; she seemed to have no eyes nor ears for anyone in the room save Spencer Russell, and this was the stranger in that only a week or so before she had in public condemned Spencer Russell’s novels, utterly and completely, stating that he was written out, had nothing to say, and was as good as dead. Tonight, however, he was not dead at all, and Tommy had the agony of observing her edge her way into the group surrounding him and then listen to him not only as though he were the fount of all wisdom, but an Adonis as well, which last was absurd seeing that he was fat and unwieldy and bald on the top of his head.

After a while Tommy came up to her and suggested that they should go, and received then the shock of his life when she told him that he could go if he liked, but that he was not to bother her. And she told him this in a voice so loud that everybody heard and many people tittered.

He left in a fury and spent then a night that he imagined to be sleepless, although in truth he slept during most of it.

It was with an eagerness that surprised himself that he met Mr. Oddy on the second occasion. He had not seen Alice for two days. He did not intend to be the one to apologise first; besides, he had nothing to apologise for; and yet during these two days there was scarcely a moment that he had not to restrain himself from running round to her studio and making it up.

When he met Mr. Oddy at the corner of Oakley Street he was a very miserable young man. He was so miserable that in five minutes he was pouring out all his woes.

He told Mr. Oddy everything, of his youth, his wonderful promise, and the extraordinary lack of appreciation shown to him by his relatives, of the historical novels that he had written at the age of anything from ten to sixteen and found only the cook for an audience, of his going to Cambridge, and his development there so that he became Editor of The Lion, that remarkable but very short-lived literary journal, and the President of “The Bats,” the most extraordinary Essay Club that Cambridge had ever known; of how, alas, he took only a third in History owing to the perverseness of examiners; and so on and so on, until he arrived in full flood at the whole history of his love for Alice, of her remarkable talents and beauty, but of her strange temper and arrogance and general feminine queerness.

Mr. Oddy listened to it all in the kindest way. There’s no knowing where they walked that afternoon; they crossed the bridge and adventured into Battersea Park, and finally had tea in a small shop smelling of stale buns and liquorice drops. It was only as they turned homewards that it occurred to Tommy that he had been talking during the whole afternoon. He had the grace to see that an apology was necessary.

“I beg your pardon, sir,” he said, flushing a little, “I’m afraid I have bored you dreadfully. The fact is, that this last quarrel with Alice has upset me very badly. What would you do if you were in my position?”

Mr. Oddy sighed. “The trouble is,” he said,“that I realise only too clearly that I shall never be in your position again. My time for romance is over, or at least I get my romance now in other ways. It wasn’t always so; there was a lady once beneath whose window I stood night after night merely for the pleasure of seeing her candle outlined behind the blind.”

“And did she love you,” Tommy asked, “as much as you loved her?”

“Nobody, my dear boy,” Mr. Oddy replied, “loves you as much as you love them; either they love you more or they love you less. The first of these is often boring, the second always tragic. In the present case I should go and make it up; after all, happiness is always worth having, even at the sacrifice of one’s pride. She seems to me a very charming young lady.”

“Oh, she is,” Tommy answered eagerly. “I’ll take your advice, I’ll go this very evening; in fact, if you don’t mind, I think it would be rather a good time to find her in now.”

Mr. Oddy smiled and agreed; they parted to meet another day.

On the third occasion of their meeting, which was only two days after the second, Tommy cared for his companion enough to wish to find out something about him.

His scene of reconciliation with his beautiful Alice had not been as satisfactory as he had hoped; she had forgiven him indeed, but given him quite clearly to understand that she would stand none of his nonsense either now or hereafter. The satisfactory thing would have been for Tommy there and then to have left her, never to see her again; he would thus have preserved both his pride and his independence; but, alas, he was in love, terribly in love, and her indignation made her appear only the more magnificent.

And so on this third meeting with his friend he was quite humble and longing for affection.

And then his curiosity was stirred. Who was this handsome old gentleman, with his touching desire for Tommy’s companionship? There was an air about him that seemed to suggest that he was someone of importance in his own world; beyond this there was an odd sense that Tommy knew him in some way, had seen him somewhere; so on this third occasion Tommy came out with his questions.

Who was he? Was he married? What was his profession, or was he perhaps retired now? And another question that Tommy would have liked to have asked, and had not the impertinence, was as to why this so late interest in the Arts and combined with this interest this so complete ignorance.

Mr. Oddy seemed to know a great deal about everything else, but in this one direction his questions were childish. He seemed never to have heard of the great Spencer Russell at all (which secretly gave Tommy immense satisfaction), and as for geniuses like Mumpus and Peter Arrogance and Samuel Bird, even when Tommy explained how truly great these men were, Mr. Oddy appeared but little impressed.

“Well, at least,” Tommy burst out indignantly, “I suppose you’ve read something by Henry Galleon? Of course he’s a back number now, at least he is not modern if you know what I mean, but then he’s been writing for centuries. Why, his first book came out when Trollope and George Eliot were still alive. Of course, between ourselves I think The Roads, for instance, a pretty fine book, but you should hear Spencer Russell go for it.”

No, Mr. Oddy had never heard of Henry Galleon.

But there followed a most enchanting description by Mr. Oddy of his life when he was a young man and how he once heard Dickens give a reading of A Christmas Carol, of how he saw an old lady in a sedan chair at Brighton (she was cracked, of course, and even then a hundred years after her time, but still he had seen it), of how London in his young day was as dark and dirty at night as it had been in Pepys’ time, of how crinolines when he was young were so large that it was one of the sights to see a lady getting into a cab, of how in the music-halls there was a chairman who used to sit on the stage with a table in front of him, ring a bell and drink out of a mug of beer, of how he heard Jean de Reszke in Siegfried and Ternina in Tristan, and of how he had been at the first night when Ellen Terry and Irving had delighted the world with The Vicar of Wakefield.

Yes, not only had Mr. Oddy seen and done all these things, but he related the events in so enchanting a way, drew such odd little pictures of such unexpected things and made that old London live so vividly, that at last Tommy burst out in a volley of genuine enthusiasm: “Why, you ought to be a writer yourself! Why don’t you write your reminiscences?”

But Mr. Oddy shook his head gently: there were too many reminiscences, everyone was always reminiscing; who wanted to hear these old men talk?

At last when they parted Mr. Oddy had a request – one thing above all things that he would like would be to attend one of these evening gatherings with his young friend to hear these young men and women talk. He promised to sit very quietly in a corner – he wouldn’t be in anybody’s way.

Of course Tommy consented to take him; there would be one next week, a really good one; but in his heart of hearts he was a little shy. He was shy not only for himself but also for his friend.

During these weeks a strange and most unexpected affection had grown up in his heart for this old man; he really did like him immensely, he was so kind and gentle and considerate.

But he would be rather out of place with Spencer Russell and the others; he would probably say something foolish, and then the others would laugh. They were on the whole a rather ruthless set and were no respecters of persons.

However, the meeting was arranged; the evening came and with it Mr. Oddy, looking just as he always did, quiet and gentle but rather impressive in some way or another. Tommy introduced him to his hostess, Miss Thelma Bennet, that well-known futuristic artist, and then carefully settled him down in a corner with Miss Bennet’s aunt, an old lady who appeared occasionally on her niece’s horizon but gave no trouble because she was stone deaf and cared only for knitting.

It was a lively evening; several of the brighter spirits were there, and there was a great deal of excellent talk about literature. Every writer over thirty was completely condemned save for those few remaining who had passed eighty years of age and ceased to produce.

Spencer Russell especially was at his best; reputations went down before his vigorous fist like ninepins. He was so scornful that his brilliance was, as Alice Smith everywhere proclaimed,“simply withering.” Everyone came in for his lash, and especially Henry Galleon. There had been some article in some ancient monthly written by some ancient idiot suggesting that there was still something to be said for Galleon and that he had rendered some service to English literature. How Russell pulled that article to pieces! He even found a volume of Galleon’s among Miss Bennet’s books, took it down from the shelf and read extracts aloud to the laughing derision of the assembled company.

Then an odd thing occurred. Tommy, who loved to be in the intellectual swim, nevertheless stood up and defended Galleon. He defended him rather feebly, it is true, speaking of him as though he were an old man ready for the alms-house who nevertheless deserved a little consideration and pity. He flushed as he spoke, and the scorn with which they greeted his defence altogether silenced him. It silenced him the more because Alice Smith was the most scornful of them all; she told him that he knew nothing and never would know anything, and she imitated his piping excited treble, and then everyone joined in.

How he hated this to happen before Mr. Oddy! How humiliating after all the things that he had told his friend, the implication that he was generally considered to be one of England’s most interesting young men, the implication above all that although she might be a little rough to him at times Alice really adored him, and was his warmest admirer. She did not apparently adore him tonight, and when he went out at last with Mr. Oddy into the wintry, rain-driven street it was all he could do to keep back tears of rage and indignation.

Mr. Oddy had, however, apparently enjoyed himself. He put his hand for a minute on the boy’s shoulder.

“Good night, my dear boy,” he said. “I thought it very gallant of you to stand up for that older writer as you did: that needed courage. I wonder,” he went on, “whether you would allow me to come and take tea with you one day – just our two selves. It would be a great pleasure for me.”

And then, having received Tommy’s invitation, he vanished into the darkness.

On the day appointed, Mr. Oddy appeared punctually at Tommy’s rooms. That was not a very grand house in Glebe Place where Tommy lived, and a very soiled and battered landlady let Mr. Oddy in. He stumbled up the dark staircase that smelt of all the cabbage and all the beef and all the mutton ever consumed by lodgers between these walls, up again two flights of stairs, until at last there was the weather-beaten door with Tommy’s visiting-card nailed upon it. Inside was Tommy, a plate with little cakes, raspberry jam, and some very black-looking toast.

Mr. Oddy, however, was appreciative of everything; especially he looked at the books. “Why,” he said, “you’ve got quite a number of the novels of that man you defended the other evening. I wonder you’re not ashamed to have them if they’re so out of date.”

“To tell you the truth,” said Tommy, speaking freely now that he was in his own castle, “I like Henry Galleon awfully. I’m afraid I pose a good deal when I’m with those other men; perhaps you’ve noticed it yourself. Of course Galleon is the greatest novelist we’ve got, with Hardy and Meredith, only he’s getting old, and everything that’s old is out of favour with our set.”

“Naturally,” said Mr. Oddy, quite approving, “of course it is.”

“I have got a photograph of Galleon,” said Tommy. “I cut it out of a publisher’s advertisement, but it was taken years ago.”

He went to his table, searched for a little and produced a small photograph of a very fierce-looking gentleman with a black beard.

“Dear me,” said Mr. Oddy, “he does look alarming!”

“Oh, that’s ever so old,” said Tommy. “I expect he’s mild and soft now, but he’s a great man all the same; I’d like to see Spencer Russell write anything as fine as The Roads or The Pattern in the Carpet.”

They sat down to tea very happy and greatly pleased with one another.

“I do wish,” said Tommy, “that you’d tell me something about yourself; we’re such friends now, and I don’t know anything about you at all.”

“I’d rather you didn’t,” said Mr. Oddy. “You’d find it so uninteresting if you did; mystery’s a great thing.”

“Yes,” said Tommy, “I don’t want to seem impertinent, and of course if you don’t want to tell me anything you needn’t, but – I know it sounds silly, but, you see, I like you most awfully. I haven’t liked anybody so much for ever so long, except Alice, of course. I don’t feel as though you were of another generation or anything; it’s just as though we were the same age!”

Mr. Oddy was enchanted. He put his hand on the boy’s for a moment and was going to say something, when they were interrupted by a knock on the door, and the terrible-looking landlady appeared in the room. She apologised, but the afternoon post had come and she thought the young gentleman would like to see his letters. He took them, was about to put them down without opening them, when suddenly he blushed. “Oh, from Alice,” he said. “Will you forgive me a moment?”

“Of course,” said Mr. Oddy.

The boy opened the letter and read it. It fell from his hand on to the table. He got up gropingly as though he could not see his way, and went to the window and stood there with his back to the room. There was a long silence.

“Not bad news, I hope,” said Mr. Oddy at last.

Tommy turned round. His face was grey and he was biting his lips. “Yes,” he answered,“she’s – gone off.”

“Gone off?” said Mr. Oddy, rising from the table.

“Yes,” said Tommy, “with Russell. They were married at a register office this morning.”

He half turned round to the window, put out his hands as though he would shield himself from some blow, then crumpled up into a chair, his head falling between his arms on the table.

Mr. Oddy waited. At last he said: “Oh, I’m sorry: that’s dreadful for you!”

The boy struggled, trying to raise his head and speak, but the words would not come. Mr. Oddy went behind him and put his hands on his shoulders.

“You know,” he said, “you mustn’t mind me. Of course, I’ll go if you like, but if you could think of me for a moment as your oldest friend, old enough to be your father, you know.”

Tommy clutched his sleeve, then, abandoning the struggle altogether, buried his head in Mr. Oddy’s beautiful black waistcoat.

Later he poured his heart out. Alice was all that he had; he knew that he wasn’t any good as a writer, he was a failure altogether; what he’d done he’d done for Alice, and now that she’d gone—

“Well, there’s myself,” said Mr. Oddy. “What I mean is that you’re not without a friend; and as for writing, if you only write to please somebody else, that’s no use; you’ve got to write because you can’t help it. There are too many writers in the world already for you to dare to add to their number unless you’re simply compelled to. But there – I’m preaching. If it’s any comfort to you to know, I went through just this same experience myself once – the lady whose candle I watched behind the blind. If you cared to, would you come and have dinner with me tonight at my home? Only the two of us, you know; but don’t if you’d rather be alone.”

Tommy, clutching Mr. Oddy’s hand, said he would come.

About half-past seven that evening he had beaten up his pride. Even in the depth of his misery he saw that they would never have got on together, he and Alice. He was quickly working himself into a fine state of hatred of the whole female race, and this helped him – he would be a bachelor all his days, a woman-hater; he would preserve a glorious independence. How much better this freedom than a houseful of children and a bagful of debts.

Only, as he walked to the address that Mr. Oddy had given him he held sharply away from him the memory of those hours that he had spent with Alice, those hours of their early friendship when the world had been so wonderful a place that it had seemed to be made entirely of golden sunlight. He felt that he was an old man indeed as he mounted the steps of Mr. Oddy’s house.

It was a big house in Eaton Square. Mr. Oddy must be rich. He rang the bell, and a door was opened by a footman. He asked for Mr. Oddy.

The footman hesitated a little, and then, smiling, said: “Oh yes, sir, will you come in?”

He left his coat in the hall, mounted a broad staircase, and then was shown into the finest library that he had ever seen. Books! Shelf upon shelf of books, and glorious books, editions de luxe and, as he could see with half an eye, rare first editions and those lovely bindings in white parchment and vellum that he so longed one day himself to possess. On the broad writing-table there was a large photograph of Meredith; it was signed in sprawling letters, “George Meredith, 1887.” What could this mean? Mr. Oddy, who knew nothing about literature, had been given a photograph by George Meredith and had this wonderful library! He stared bewildered about him.

A door at the far end of the library opened and an elegant young man appeared. “Mr. Galleon,” he said, “will be with you in a moment. Won’t you sit down?”

“Cosmopolitan” Mar 1926

All Soul’s Night (1933)

MRS. LUNT

I

“Do you believe in ghosts?” I asked Runciman. I had to ask him this very platitudinous question more because he was so difficult a man to spend an hour with than for any other reason. You know his books, perhaps, or more probably you don’t know them – The Running Man, The Elm Tree, and Crystal and Candlelight. He is one of those little men who are constant enough in this age of immense over-production of books, men who publish every autumn their novel, who arouse by that publication in certain critics eager appreciation and praise, who have a small and faithful public, whose circulation is very small indeed, who when you meet them have little to say, are often shy and nervous, pessimistic and remote from daily life. Such men do fine work, are made but little of in their own day, and perhaps fifty years after their death are rediscovered by some digging critic and become a sort of cult with a new generation.

I asked Runciman that question because, for some unknown reason, I had invited him to dinner at my flat, and was now faced with a long evening filled with that most tiresome of all conversations, talk that dies every two minutes and has to be revived with terrific exertions. Being myself a critic, and having on many occasions praised Runciman’s work, he was the more nervous and shy with me; had I abused it, he would perhaps have had plenty to say – he was that kind of man. But my question was a lucky one: it roused him instantly, his long, bony body became full of a new energy, his eyes stared into a rich and exciting reminiscence, he spoke without pause, and I took care not to interrupt him. He certainly told me one of the most astounding stories I have ever heard. Whether it was true or not I cannot, of course, say: these ghost stories are nearly always at second or third hand. I had, at any rate, the good fortune to secure mine from the source. Moreover, Runciman was not a liar: he was too serious for that. He himself admitted that he was not sure, at this distance of time, as to whether the thing had gained as the years passed. However, here it is as he told it.

“It was some fifteen years ago,” he said. “I went down to Cornwall to stay with Robert Lunt. Do you remember his name? No, I suppose you do not. He wrote several novels; some of those half-and-half things that are not quite novels, not quite poems, rather mystical and picturesque, and are the very devil to do well. De la Mare’s Return is a good example of the kind of thing. I had reviewed somewhere his last book, and reviewed it favourably, and received from him a really touching letter showing that the man was thirsting for praise, and also, I fancied, for company. He lived in Cornwall somewhere on the sea-coast, and his wife had died a year ago; he said he was quite alone there, and would I come and spend Christmas with him; he hoped I would not think this impertinent; he expected that I would be engaged already, but he could not resist the chance. Well, I wasn’t engaged; far from it. If Lunt was lonely, so was I; if Lunt was a failure, so was I; I was touched, as I have said, by his letter, and I accepted his invitation. As I went down in the train to Penzance I wondered what kind of a man he would be. I had never seen any photographs of him; he was not the sort of author whose picture the newspapers publish. He must be, I fancied, about my own age – perhaps rather older. I know when we’re lonely how some of us are for ever imagining that a friend will somewhere turn up, that ideal friend who will understand all one’s feelings, who will give one affection without being sentimental, who will take an interest in one’s affairs without being impertinent – yes, the sort of friend one never finds.

“I fancy that I became quite romantic about Lunt before I reached Penzance. We would talk, he and I, about all those literary questions that seemed to me at that time so absorbing; we would perhaps often stay together and even travel abroad on those little journeys that are so swiftly melancholy when one is alone, so delightful when one has a perfect companion. I imagined him as sparse and delicate and refined, with a sort of wistfulness and rather childish play of fancy. We had both, so far, failed in our careers, but perhaps together we would do great things.

“When I arrived at Penzance it was almost dark, and the snow, threatened all day by an overhanging sky, had begun gently and timorously to fall. He had told me in his letter that a fly would be at the station to take me to his house; and there I found it – a funny old weather-beaten carriage with a funny old weather-beaten driver. At this distance of time my imagination may have created many things, but I fancy that from the moment I was shut into that carriage some dim suggestion of fear and apprehension attacked me. I fancy that I had some absurd impulse to get out of the thing and take the night train back to London again – an action that would have been very unlike me, as I had always a sort of obstinate determination to carry through anything that I had begun. In any case, I was uncomfortable in that carriage; it had, I remember, a nasty, musty smell of damp straw and stale eggs, and it seemed to confine me so closely as though it were determined that, once I was in, I should never get out again. Then, it was bitterly cold; I was colder during that drive than I have ever been before or since. It was that penetrating cold that seems to pierce your very brain, so that I could not think with any clearness, but only wish again and again that I hadn’t come. Of course, I could see nothing – only feel the jolt over the uneven road – and once and again we seemed to fight our way through dark paths, because I could feel the overhanging branches of the trees knock against the cab with mysterious taps, as though they were trying to give me some urgent message.

“Well, I mustn’t make more of it than the facts allow, and I mustn’t see into it all the significance of the events that followed. I only know that as the drive proceeded I became more and more miserable: miserable with the cold of my body, the misgivings of my imagination, the general loneliness of my case.

“At last we stopped. The old scarecrow got slowly off his box, with many heavings and sighings, came to the cab door, and, with great difficulty and irritating slowness, opened it. I got out of it, and found that the snow was now falling very heavily indeed, and that the path was lighted with its soft, mysterious glow. Before me was a humped and ungainly shadow: the house that was to receive me. I could make nothing of it in that darkness, but only stood there shivering while the old man pulled at the door-bell with a sort of frantic energy as though he were anxious to be rid of the whole job as quickly as possible and return to his own place. At last, after what seemed an endless time, the door opened, and an old man, who might have been own brother to the driver, poked out his head. The two old men talked together, and at last my bag was shouldered and I was permitted to come in out of the piercing cold.

“Now this, I know, is not imagination. I have never at any period of my life hated at first sight so vigorously any dwelling-place into which I have ever entered as I did that house. There was nothing especially disagreeable about my first vision of the hall. It was a large, dark place, lit by two dim lamps, cold and cheerless; but I got no particular impression of it because at once I was conducted out of it, led along a passage, and then introduced into a room which was, I saw, as warm and comfortable as the hall had been dark and dismal. I was, in fact, so eagerly pleased at the large and leaping fire that I moved towards it at once, not noting, at the first moment, the presence of my host; and when I did see him I could not believe that it was he. I have told you the kind of man that I had expected; but, instead of the sparse, sensitive artist, I found facing me a large burly man, over six foot, I should fancy, as broad-shouldered as he was tall, giving evidence of great muscular strength, the lower part of his face hidden by a black, pointed beard.

“But if I was astonished at the sight of him, I was doubly amazed when he spoke. His voice was thin and piping, like that of some old woman, and the little nervous gestures that he made with his hands were even more feminine than his voice. But I had to allow, perhaps, for excitement, for excited he was; he came up to me, took my hand in both of his, and held it as though he would never let it go. In the evening he apologised for this. ‘I was so glad to see you,’ he said; ‘I couldn’t believe that really you would come; you are the first visitor of my own kind that I have had here for ever so long. I was ashamed, indeed, of asking you, but I had to snatch at the chance – it means so much to me.’

“His eagerness, in fact, had something disturbing about it; something pathetic, too. He simply couldn’t do too much for me: he led me through funny crumbling old passages, the boards creaking under us at every step, up some dark stairs, the walls hung, so far as I could see in the dim light, with faded yellow photographs of places, and showed me into my room with a deprecating agitated gesture as though he expected me at the first sight of it to turn and run. I didn’t like it any more than I liked the rest of the house; but that was not my host’s fault. He had done everything he possibly could for me: there was a large fire flaming in the open fireplace, there was a hot bottle, as he explained to me, in the big four-poster bed, and the old man who had opened the door to me was already taking my clothes out of my bag and putting them away. Lunt’s nervousness was almost sentimental. He put both his hands on my shoulders and said, looking at me pleadingly: ‘If you only knew what it is for me to have you here, the talks we’ll have. Well, well, I must leave you. You’ll come down and join me, won’t you, as soon as you can?’

“It was then, when I was left alone in my room, that I had my second impulse to flee. Four candles in tall old silver candlesticks were burning brightly, and these, with the blazing fire, gave plenty of light; and yet the room was in some way dim, as though a faint smoke pervaded it, and I remember that I went to one of the old lattice windows and threw it open for a moment as though I felt stifled. Two things quickly made me close it. One was the intense cold which, with a fluttering scamper of snow, blew into the room; the other was the quite deafening roar of the sea, which seemed to fling itself at my very face as though it wanted to knock me down. I quickly shut the window, turned round, and saw an old woman standing just inside the door. Now every story of this kind depends for its interest on its verisimilitude. Of course, to make my tale convincing I should be able to prove to you that I saw that old woman; but I can’t. I can only urge upon you my rather dreary reputation of probity. You know that I’m a teetotaller, and always have been, and, most important evidence of all, I was not expecting to see an old woman; and yet I hadn’t the least doubt in the world but that it was an old woman I saw. You may talk about shadows, clothes hanging on the back of the door, and the rest of it. I don’t know. I’ve no theories about this story, I’m not a spiritualist, I don’t know that I believe in anything especially, except the beauty of beautiful things. We’ll put it, if you like, that I fancied that I saw an old woman, and my fancy was so strong that I can give you to this day a pretty detailed account of her appearance. She wore a black silk dress and on her breast was a large, ugly, gold brooch; she had black hair, brushed back from her forehead and parted down the middle; she wore a collar of some white stuff round her throat; her face was one of the wickedest, most malignant and furtive that I have ever seen – very white in colour. She was shrivelled enough now, but might once have been rather beautiful. She stood there quietly, her hands at her side. I thought that she was some kind of housekeeper. ‘I have everything I want, thank you,’ I said. ‘What a splendid fire!’ I turned for a moment towards it, and when I looked back she was gone. I thought nothing of this, of course, but drew up an old chair covered with green faded tapestry, and thought that I would read a little from some book that I had brought down with me before I went to join my host. The fact was that I was not very intent upon joining him before I must. I didn’t like him. I had already made up my mind that I would find some excuse to return to London as soon as possible. I can’t tell you why I didn’t like him, except that I was myself very reserved and had, like many Englishmen, a great distrust of demonstrations, especially from another man. I hadn’t cared for the way in which he had put his hands on my shoulders, and I felt perhaps that I wouldn’t be able to live up to all his eager excitement about me.

“I sat in my chair and took up my book, but I had not been reading for more than two minutes before I was conscious of a most unpleasant smell. Now, there are all sorts of smells – healthy and otherwise – but I think the nastiest is that chilly kind of odour that comes from bad sanitation and stuffy rooms combined; you meet it sometimes at little country inns and decrepit town lodgings. This smell was so definite that I could almost locate it; it came from near the door. I got up, approached the door, and at once it was as though I were drawing near to somebody who, if you’ll forgive the impoliteness, was not accustomed to taking too many baths. I drew back just as I might had an actual person been there. Then quite suddenly the smell was gone, the room was fresh, and I saw, to my surprise, that one of the windows had opened and that snow was again blowing in. I closed it and went downstairs.

“The evening that followed was odd enough. My host was not in himself an unlikeable man; he did his very utmost to please me. He had a fine culture and a wide knowledge of books and things. He became quite cheerful as the evening went on; gave me a good dinner in a funny little dining-room hung with some admirable mezzotints. The serving-man looked after us – a funny old man, with a long white beard like a goat – and, oddly enough, it was from him that I first recaught my earlier apprehension. He had just put the dessert on the table, had arranged my plate in front of me, when I saw him give a start and look towards the door. My attention was attracted to this because his hand, as it touched the plate, suddenly trembled. My eyes followed, but I could see nothing. That he was frightened of something was perfectly clear, and then (it may, of course, very easily have been fancy) I thought that I detected once more that strange unwholesome smell.

“I forgot this again when we were both seated in front of a splendid fire in the library. Lunt had a very fine collection of books, and it was delightful to him, as it is to every book-collector, to have somebody with him who could really appreciate them. We stood looking at one book after another and talking eagerly about some of the minor early English novelists who were my especial hobby – Bage, Godwin, Henry Mackenzie, Mrs. Shelley, Mat Lewis and others – when once again he affected me most unpleasantly by putting his arm round my shoulders. I have all my life disliked intensely to be touched by certain people. I suppose we all feel like this. It is one of those inexplicable things; and I disliked this so much that I abruptly drew away.

“Instantly he was changed into a man of furious and ungovernable rage; I thought that he was going to strike me. He stood there quivering all over, the words pouring out of his mouth incoherently, as though he were mad and did not know what he was saying. He accused me of insulting him, of abusing his hospitality, of throwing his kindness back into his face, and of a thousand other ridiculous things; and I can’t tell you how strange it was to hear all this coming out in that shrill piping voice as though it were from an agitated woman, and yet to see with one’s eyes that big, muscular frame, those immense shoulders and that dark-bearded face.

“I said nothing. I am, physically, a coward. I dislike, above anything else in the world, any sort of quarrel. At last I brought out, ‘I am very sorry. I didn’t mean anything. Please forgive me,’ and then hurriedly turned to leave the room. At once he changed again; now he was almost in tears. He implored me not to go; said it was his wretched temper, but that he was so miserable and unhappy, and had for so long now been alone and desolate that he hardly knew what he was doing. He begged me to give him another chance, and if I would only listen to his story I would perhaps be more patient with him.

“At once, so oddly is man constituted, I changed in my feelings towards him. I was very sorry for him. I saw that he was a man on the edge of his nerves, and that he really did need some help and sympathy, and would be quite distracted if he could not get it. I put my hand on his shoulder to quieten him and to show him that I bore no malice, and I felt that his great body was quivering from head to foot. We sat down again, and in an odd, rambling manner he told me his story. It amounted to very little, and the gist of it was that, rather to have some sort of companionship than from any impulse of passion, he had married some fifteen years before the daughter of a neighbouring clergyman. They had had no very happy life together, and at the last, he told me quite frankly, he had hated her. She had been mean, overbearing, and narrow-minded; it had been, he confessed, nothing but a relief to him when, just a year ago, she had suddenly died from heart failure. He had thought then that things would go better with him, but they had not; nothing had gone right with him since. He hadn’t been able to work, many of his friends had ceased to come to see him, he had found it even difficult to get servants to stay with him, he was desperately lonely, he slept badly – that was why his temper was so terribly on edge. He had no one in the house with him save the old man, who was, fortunately, an excellent cook, and a boy – the old man’s grandson. ‘Oh, I thought,’ I said, ‘that that excellent meal tonight was cooked by your housekeeper.’ ‘My housekeeper?’ he answered. ‘There’s no woman in the house.’ ‘Oh, but one came to my room,’ I replied, ‘this evening – an old lady-like-looking person in a black silk dress.’ ‘You were mistaken,’ he answered in the oddest voice, as though he were exerting all the strength that he possessed to keep himself quiet and controlled. ‘I am sure that I saw her,’ I answered. ‘There couldn’t be any mistake.’ And I described her to him. ‘You were mistaken,’ he repeated again. ‘Don’t you see that you must have been when I tell you there is no woman in the house?’ I reassured him quickly lest there should be another outbreak of rage. Then there followed the strangest kind of appeal. Urgently, as though his very life depended upon it, he begged me to stay with him for a few days. He implied, although he said nothing definitely, that he was in great trouble, that if only I would stay for a few days all would be well, that if ever in all my life I had had a chance of doing a kind action I had one now, that he couldn’t expect me to stop in so dreary a place, but that he would never forget it if I did. He spoke in a voice of such urgent distress that I comforted him as I might a child, promising that I would stay and shaking hands with him on it as though it were a kind of solemn oath between us.

II

“I am sure that you would wish me to give you this incident as it occurred, and if the final catastrophe seems to come, as it were, accidentally, I can only say to you that that was how it happened. It is since the event that I have tried to put two and two together, and that they don’t altogether make four is the fault that mine shares, I suppose, with every true ghost story.

“But the truth is that after that very strange episode between us I had a very good night. I slept the sleep of all justice, cosy and warm, in my four-poster, with the murmur of the sea beyond the windows to rock my slumbers. Next morning too was bright and cheerful, the sun sparkling down on the snow, and the snow sparkling back to the sun as though they were glad to see one another. I had a very pleasant morning looking at Lunt’s books, talking to him, and writing one or two letters. I must say that, after all, I liked the man. His appeal to me on the night before had touched me. So few people, you see, had ever appealed to me about anything. His nervousness was there and the constant sense of apprehension, yet he seemed to be putting the best face on it, doing his utmost to set me at my ease in order to induce me to stay, I suppose, and to give him a little of that company that he so terribly needed. I dare say if I had not been so busy about the books I would not have been so happy. There was a strange eerie silence about that house if one ever stopped to listen; and once, I remember, sitting at the old bureau writing a letter, I raised my head and looked up, and caught Lunt watching as though he wondered whether I had heard or noticed anything. And so I listened too, and it seemed to me as though someone were on the other side of the library door with their hand raised to knock; a quaint notion, with nothing to support it, but I could have sworn that if I had gone to the door and opened it suddenly someone would have been there.

“However, I was cheerful enough, and after lunch quite happy. Lunt asked me if I would like a walk, and I said I would; and we started out in the sunshine over the crunching snow towards the sea. I don’t remember what we talked of; we seemed to be now quite at our ease with one another. We crossed the fields to a certain point, looked down at the sea – smooth now, like silk – and turned back. I remember that I was so cheerful that I seemed suddenly to take a happy view of all my prospects. I began to confide in Lunt, telling him of my little plans, of my hopes for the book that I was then writing, and even began rather timidly to suggest to him that perhaps we should do something together; that what we both needed was a friend of common taste with ourselves. I know that I was talking on, that we had crossed a little village street, and were turning up the path towards the dark avenue of trees that led to his house, when suddenly the change came.

“What I first noticed was that he was not listening to me; his gaze was fixed beyond me, into the very heart of the black clump of trees that fringed the silver landscape. I looked too, and my heart bounded. There was, standing just in front of the trees, as though she were waiting for us, the old woman whom I had seen in my room the night before. I stopped. ‘Why, there she is!’ I said. ‘That’s the old woman of whom I was speaking – the old woman who came to my room.’ He caught my shoulder with his hand. ‘There’s nothing there,’ he said. ‘Don’t you see that that’s shadow? What’s the matter with you? Can’t you see that there’s nothing?’ I stepped forward, and there was nothing, and I wouldn’t, to this day, be able to tell you whether it was hallucination or not. I can only say that, from that moment, the afternoon appeared to become dark. As we entered into the avenue of trees, silently and hurrying as though someone were behind us, the dusk seemed to have fallen so that I could scarcely see my way. We reached the house breathless. He hastened into his study as though I were not with him, but I followed and, closing the door behind me, said, with all the force that I had at command: ‘Now, what is this? What is it that’s troubling you? You must tell me! How can I help you if you don’t?’ And he replied, in so strange a voice that it was as though he had gone out of his mind: ‘I tell you there’s nothing! Can’t you believe me when I tell you there’s nothing at all? I’m quite all right…. Oh, my God! – my God! … don’t leave me! … This is the very day – the very night she said…. But I did nothing, I tell you – I did nothing – it’s only her beastly malice….’ He broke off. He still held my arm with his hand. He made strange movements, wiping his forehead as though it were damp with sweat, almost pleading with me; then suddenly angry again, then beseeching once more, as though I had refused him the one thing he wanted.

“I saw that he was truly not far from madness, and I began myself to have a sudden terror of this damp, dark house, this great, trembling man, and something more that was worse than they. But I pitied him. How could you or any man have helped it? I made him sit down in the armchair beside the fire, which had now dwindled to a few glimmering red coals. I let him hold me close to him with his arm and clutch my hand with his, and I repeated, as quietly as I might: ‘But tell me; don’t be afraid, whatever it is you have done. Tell me what danger it is you fear, and then we can face it together.’ ‘Fear! fear!’ he repeated; and then, with a mighty effort which I could not but admire, he summoned all his control. ‘I’m off my head,’ he said, ‘with loneliness and depression. My wife died a year ago on this very night. We hated one another. I couldn’t be sorry when she died, and she knew it. When that last heart attack came on, between her gasps she told me that she would return, and I’ve always dreaded this night. That’s partly why I asked you to come, to have someone here, anybody, and you’ve been very kind – more kind than I had any right to expect. You must think me insane going on like this, but see me through tonight and we’ll have splendid times together. Don’t desert me now – now, of all times!’ I promised that I would not. I soothed him as best I could. We sat there, for I know not how long, through the gathering dark; we neither of us moved, the fire died out, and the room was lit with a strange dim glow that came from the snowy landscape beyond the uncurtained windows. Ridiculous, perhaps, as I look back at it. We sat there, I in a chair close to his, hand in hand, like a couple of lovers; but, in real truth, two men terrified, fearful of what was coming, and unable to do anything to meet it.

“I think that that was perhaps the queerest part of it; a sort of paralysis that crept over me. What would you or anyone else have done – summoned the old man, gone down to the village inn, fetched the local doctor? I could do nothing, but see the snow-shine move like trembling water about the furniture and hear, through the urgent silence, the faint hoot of an owl from the trees in the wood.

III

“Oddly enough, I can remember nothing, try as I may, between that strange vigil and the moment when I myself, wakened out of a brief sleep, sat up in bed to see Lunt standing inside my room holding a candle. He was wearing a nightshirt, and looked huge in the candlelight, his black beard falling intensely dark on the white stuff of his shirt. He came very quietly towards my bed, the candle throwing flickering shadows about the room. When he spoke it was in a voice low and subdued, almost a whisper. ‘Would you come,’ he asked, ‘only for half an hour – just for half an hour?’ he repeated, staring at me as though he didn’t know me. ‘I’m unhappy without somebody – very unhappy.’ Then he looked over his shoulder, held the candle high above his head, and stared piercingly at every part of the room. I could see that something had happened to him, that he had taken another step into the country of Fear – a step that had withdrawn him from me and from every other human being. He whispered: ‘When you come, tread softly; I don’t want anyone to hear us.’ I did what I could. I got out of bed, put on my dressing-gown and slippers, and tried to persuade him to stay with me. The fire was almost dead, but I told him that we would build it up again, and that we would sit there and wait for the morning; but no, he repeated again and again: ‘It’s better in my own room; we’re safer there.’ ‘Safe from what?’ I asked him, making him look at me. ‘Lunt, wake up! You’re as though you were asleep. There’s nothing to fear. We’ve nobody but ourselves. Stay here and let us talk, and have done with this nonsense.’ But he wouldn’t answer; only drew me forward down the dark passage, and then turned into his room, beckoning me to follow. He got into bed and sat hunched up there, his hands holding his knees, staring at the door, and every once and again shivering with a little tremor. The only light in the room was that from the candle, now burning low, and the only sound was the purring whisper of the sea.

“It seemed to make little difference to him that I was there. He did not look at me, but only at the door, and when I spoke to him he did not answer me nor seem to hear what I had said. I sat down beside the bed and, in order to break the silence, talked on about anything, about nothing, and was dropping off, I think, into a confused doze, when I heard his voice breaking across mine. Very clearly and distinctly he said: ‘If I killed her, she deserved it; she was never a good wife to me, not from the first; she shouldn’t have irritated me as she did – she knew what my temper was. She had a worse one than mine, though. She can’t touch me; I’m as strong as she is.’ And it was then, as clearly as I can now remember, that his voice suddenly sank into a sort of gentle whisper, as though he were almost glad that his fears had been confirmed. He whispered: ‘She’s there!’ I cannot possibly describe to you how that whisper seemed to let Fear loose like water through my body. I could see nothing – the candle was flaming high in the last moments of its life – I could see nothing; but Lunt suddenly screamed, with a shrill cry like a tortured animal in agony: ‘Keep her off me, keep her away from me, keep her off – keep her off!’ He caught me, his hands digging into my shoulders; then, with an awful effect of constricted muscles, as though rigour had caught and held him, his arms slowly fell away, he slipped back on to the bed as though someone were pushing him, his hands fell against the sheet, his whole body jerked with a convulsive effort, and then he rolled over. I saw nothing; only, quite distinctly, in my nostrils was that same foetid odour that I had known on the preceding evening. I rushed to the door, opened it, shouted down the long passage again and again, and soon the old man came running. I sent him for the doctor, and then could not return to the room, but stood there listening, hearing nothing save the whisper of the sea, the loud ticking of the hall clock. I flung open the window at the end of the passage; the sea rushed in with its precipitant roar; some bells chimed the hour. Then at last, beating into myself more courage, I turned back towards the room….”

“Well?” I asked as Runciman paused. “He was dead, of course?”

“Dead, the doctor afterwards said, of heart failure.”

“Well?” I asked again.

“That’s all.” Runciman paused. “I don’t know whether you can even call it a ghost story. My idea of the old woman may have been all hallucination. I don’t even know whether his wife was like that when she was alive. She may have been large and fat. Lunt died of an evil conscience.”

“Yes,” I said.

“The only thing,” Runciman added at last, after a long pause, “is that on Lunt’s body there were marks – on his neck especially, some on his chest – as of fingers pressing in, scratches and dull blue marks. He may, in his terror, have caught at his own throat….”

“Yes,” I said again.

“Anyway” – Runciman shivered – “I don’t like Cornwall – beastly county. Queer things happen there – something in the air….”

“So I’ve heard,” I answered.

The Ghost Book, ed. Cynthia Asquith, (1926)

All Soul’s Night (1933)

A PICTURE

It interested me just now to hear what you said about pictures. To you, obviously, pictures are one of two things, good investments or pegs to hang an argument on. I am not pretending to be superior to you over that, I have never understood myself why it should be considered disgraceful to look on a picture that you are buying as a decent investment; not if you look on it only as that, perhaps, but then you never do, no real picture buyer ever does. If he sees a print or an oil or a water-colour that will go up, he thinks, later in value, he is moved, ipso facto, by the beauty of it. That may sound cynical, but value means beauty more often with most of us than we’d like to confess.

And then as to discussions about art, there are few things in my opinion more amusing and more futile too. As to the futility of it, consider the little collection that I’ve been showing you this evening – John, M’Coll, Orpen, Pryde, Nicholson, Newton, Crundall, and the more advanced ones, the Nashes, Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell, Gertler – jumble all these names up in a hat and spot your winner. Contemporary work, how can you tell? I’ve collected these things simply because I like them and they are a constant unending joy to me, little scraps of beauty scattered up and down my little house. And maybe that’s the best reason, the only reason, for owning a picture, because you like it. After which platitude I come to what I want to say, that some pictures go far far deeper than that, have an active positive life of their own. If they take a liking to you they can save your life, and if they detest you they can ruin it. And that’s no exaggeration; I’ll tell you a little story.

Once upon a time there was a young man – well, if you want to know, it was myself – and I had just proposed to Miss Vanessa Scarlett and been accepted. Grand name, wasn’t it? and it suited her wonderfully, she was like that, all flame and colour and fiery life.

I proposed to her one spring afternoon in a little street off Leicester Square. These little London streets on a spring afternoon can be magical; hawkers with barrows of flowers, daffodils and hyacinths and white lilac and tulips, magenta coloured, the air that pale soft dusty gold, so peculiarly London’s, and a hush in the little street as though it had its finger on its lip. That is peculiarly London’s, too. You don’t get it in Paris or Berlin, where, if you’re not among the main traffic, the streets are dead, nor in New York nor Chicago, where it’s rattle rattle and scream scream from morning to night.

But do what you will in London, pull down all its buildings, fill it with traffic until it doesn’t know where to turn, it keeps its character unflinchingly, and the side streets and squares are pools of active quiet like a lake at evening, when the fish are leaping. Excuse me for being poetical, London always makes me so.

Well, then, it was in such a little street that I was accepted by Vanessa. I just said, “Do you love me?” and she said “Yes,” and I said, “Will you marry me?” and she said “Yes” again, and then jumped into a taxi before I could stop her, and was gone.

I hardly cared for a moment whether she were there or no. I walked, as every accepted lover walks, in a paradise of incredible happiness, and I walked really without knowing it straight into the Durham Galleries. I went in mechanically, I suppose, because I had been there so often before. These galleries had always exactly suited my taste; they were not very large, three little rooms, but their shows were all excellently varied, there was always some good reason for the pictures and sculpture there, but almost every school was represented at one time or another, from the rough ferocity of Epstein to the coloured fantasies of Rutherston and the gem-like pre-Raphaelite perfection of Southall.

I went in and there, standing on a chair looking at me, was a small oil of Walter Sickert’s. It represented two Italian women talking, one seated on a bed and the other leaning over the back of a chair. The one on the bed was worn and wasted with a hard life, but she had lost none of her vitality; in the pose of her head, in the sparkle of her eyes, she was as vigorous as only an Italian working woman can be.

It was a most intimate picture, in dull colours, the only relief a little pink shadow in the dress, but as I looked at it, I seemed to belong to those two women and they to me, yes, although I belonged now body and soul to Vanessa. And it had that wonderful power that everything of Sickert’s has of suggesting so much more than it stated. It was a door, as every fine work of art ought to be, to many things far beyond the picture itself.

I asked its price and found it more than I could afford (Sickert now in his older age was beginning at last to come into his own). I didn’t, of course, really take it in; I could think of nothing but my good fortune, I was in a kind of dizzy delirium.

I won’t bore you with a lover’s ecstasies, there is nothing more tiresome to the onlooker, but the weeks that followed were strangely magnificent. That Vanessa with her red-gold hair, her body straight as a dart and slim as a flower, her vivacity, cleverness, humour, intelligence, that she should love me did seem to me an astonishing thing. I was nothing very remarkable, I need hardly tell you, a journalist, essayist, poet, with a decent income, good prospects, sound health, average looks. Behind my apparent self-confidence was a real diffidence, a sense that the position, nothing very remarkable, that I had achieved was a sort of fairy gold that might vanish at a touch, and that Vanessa should have chosen me out of so many other more brilliant people did seem to me astonishing.

For she was one of the most startling and remarkable people in the artistic and literary London of that time. It was not only her beauty, but her quickness of perception, her ability to enter into anything at a moment’s notice, the impossibility as it seemed of her ever being bored or irritable or prosy; she was like a flame, going from house to house, from person to person, lighting us all up, making us all glad that we were alive.

She seemed to us all the more brilliant perhaps because she used to take around with her a girl who was her exact opposite, a silent, colourless, passive girl called Jane Porter. When you looked at Jane you at once thought how brilliant Vanessa was, and if you didn’t naturally think it, Jane drew your attention to it. She adored Vanessa with an intense quiet but unchanging adoration. Yes, those were wonderful weeks. There was no reason why we should not be married soon, I was making a good income and Vanessa had some money of her own, but for some reason I hesitated. This almost-contact, this worshipping at ever so slight a distance, held an excitement for me that I didn’t want to lose. I had always been a little cynical about marriage. Intimacy, isn’t it a dangerous thing? must one surrender that passionate love to steady-going day by day comradeship? I explained it to Vanessa, but she didn’t feel it at all, she wanted to be married, nothing was going to change.

Sometimes I was a little puzzled by her, as one must always be when one comes into closer contact with somebody. She was marvellously good-tempered, and was always willing to see the other point of view, and yet I fancied sometimes that when she gave in to me I lost her. It was as though I was only really in touch with her when she triumphantly had her own way; her colour, her splendour seemed to dim ever so slightly when she submitted.

Has there ever been a lover who as the weeks pass has not felt some faint tremor of anxiety and even fear? That adjusting of personalities is difficult. And, by Jove, it’s hardly fair: why can’t that delirium of happiness remain intact for a little while, for so short a time as it is? But again and again murmurous whispers of that other terrestrial life come stealing into your joy. It was not that anything about Vanessa was disappointing, only that certain things were strange.

I remember one evening, when we had been engaged for a few months or so, walking by myself under a dim-rayed moon on Chelsea Embankment and trying to define my trouble. It was not that I was afraid of losing her, but rather that my personality was fighting its own subjection. She dominated me, of course, what poet in love with a beautiful woman is not dominated and that willingly? it was rather that some personality that was not mine seemed to be trying to persuade me to some criticism of Vanessa. It was as if, walking slowly in that strange milky glow, land and water alike insubstantial around me, some stranger leaned over my shoulder and whispered in my ear: “Take care, take care, beauty is blinding you.” I was furious, I remember, with even a hint of any criticism, and turned on the stranger rebuking him – but still he lingered at my ear.

All this time in the excitement of my love I had forgotten my picture, and then one afternoon I went into the Durham Galleries with Vanessa to see a new show. It was a show, I remember, of one of the more advanced modernists, squares and cubes of vivid paint slapped down in patterns that were so bright and amusingly arranged that it didn’t matter what the titles of the pictures were, “Place de la Concorde,” or “Still Life” or “Woman Bathing,” it was all the same.

The first thing that I saw when I came in was that my picture was still there standing up on its chair looking at me. I seemed at once to feel a reproach in the eyes of the two women as though they said, “We had thought you were coming again, we were disappointed.”

And what a lovely thing! This time one had no doubt about it. As so often with that artist’s work it grew better and better with intimacy: you did not think of its school, of its period, of its influences, it was simply a true and beautiful picture. It was not like the pictures around it, gay and amusing and odd, nor was it like the water colours in another show that we had that afternoon been seeing, pretty and old-fashioned and so close to nature as to be unnatural. It was lovely as art and lovely as a comment on life, and it needed no justification, no praise, no emphasis. “Isn’t that lovely?” I said to Vanessa, feeling sure that she would admire it. She turned and looked at it: “What a dull picture!” she said at once. “Why, there’s no colour in it.” It was as though she had struck me a blow in the face; we had never discussed matters of art very much; she had a way of quick amusing judgements, summing things up with the lightest touch of adjustment as a butterfly settles on a flower. I had taken it for granted that we thought the same about most things; on looking back now I can see that up to this morning she hadn’t thought as I did, she had kept silent and I had been too deeply in love to notice. But now if it wasn’t as though she had slapped me it was as though she had pulled the hair of those two women. And they were my friends, I could feel them wince.

To my own amazement I was suddenly hot in anger. “That a dull picture!” I cried so loudly that several people turned round to look at me. “Why, it’s beautiful, it’s perfect, if it had any more colour it would be wrong.” She looked at me smiling. “But I don’t think so,” she said lightly, “each to our own opinion, dear Simon.” We moved off, looking at the pictures, I, at least, acutely uncomfortable; it was our first quarrel, if you could dignify it by that name, and yet in a moment I was ashamed of myself. The childishness of my anger because she hadn’t agreed with me! What was to become of our companionship if we were to fight over every difference of opinion? Besides, it wasn’t like me; if I believe in one thing in this world it is tolerance, and above all in things artistic. Are you not insulting the lovely thing by fighting over its body? Cry aloud your praise for all the world to hear and leave the others to their own judgements. Yes, I was thoroughly ashamed, and as we walked out into the showery streets, I put my arm through hers. “Forgive me, darling,” I said, “to lose my temper because you didn’t like that picture, how childish!” “Yes,” she answered, laughing, withdrawing herself ever so slightly, “you were funny; I have never seen you like that before, quite a baby, Simon,” and then most naïvely, although I didn’t mind calling myself childish I didn’t like her doing so. After all, she had shown bad taste in not liking that picture and she didn’t leave it alone. “If I really thought you liked that thing, Simon,” she said, “I’d begin to wonder at your taste.” “But I did like it,” I answered irritably, “I haven’t seen a picture for years I have liked so much.” She said nothing and we walked on a little estranged.

Next day she was as adorable as ever. What use to recall now all those lovers’ intimacies, those little things that scattered like flecks of sunlight about every step that we took together. She had the magical touch, colour was deeper, music was sweeter, laughter was richer when she was there. And it was not only I, lover as I was, who felt it; everyone knew it. “When Vanessa is there things are twice as good,” was everybody’s saying.

But now I did not forget the picture, those two women would not let me go again. I went in to see it so often that Cadby, the proprietor of the galleries, chaffed me about it. “Why don’t you buy it?” he said, “if you’re so keen about it?” “It is sixty pounds, isn’t it?” I asked. “Yes, sixty,” he said. “Why on earth doesn’t somebody else buy it?” I asked. “That sum would mean nothing to many men.” “Yes,” he answered, “and it’s a good speculation too, but it’s too quiet for a lot of people.”

The consciousness of it began to disturb me; I even dreamt of it one night and thought that I had hung it in my room. I saw the exact spot where it had hung, and I was pleased because it fitted in so pleasantly with my other pictures. I have never been an admirer of the one-picture one-room fashion any more than I have ever wanted to have only one friend in my life, but if you have many pictures a deal of adjustment is necessary, and I remember in my dream that I wondered that my “Venice, 1902,” as the picture was called, blended so admirably with the Johns, the Prydes and Clausens. But why not? Those two women would fit in anywhere, so quiet and true and friendly were they.

When I woke I got up and went into my sitting-room almost expecting to find the picture there, and was quite disappointed to see the John drawing in its place instead. From that moment whenever I looked at the wall above the mantelpiece I was always disappointed. I tried one picture there after another and at last I left it bare.

Another odd thing I noticed was that whenever I had been into the gallery to look at it I was for the first five minutes with Vanessa a little irritated, a trifle not myself. She seemed for an instant too brightly coloured; she loved to wear fine stuffs, crimsons and bronze and amber, and sometimes at first sight of her I would feel as though she were all decoration, as though there was nothing inside the clothes, and then in another moment the brilliance of her personality would overwhelm me, and I would sink into a cloud of sunny bliss.

I used to go into the gallery hoping that the picture would be no longer there, that somebody would have bought it. It seemed an insult that somebody shouldn’t buy it, an insult to everyone’s intelligence, and its presence spoiled all the shows for me, all the other pictures seemed a little garish and untrue. I told Cadby so; he laughed. “You’re daft about that picture,” he said.

And then, in an instant of time, in an instant of heady drunken determination, I bought it myself; I not only bought it, I paid him a cheque for it there and then. I carried it back in a taxi and I was trembling with excitement, with a kind of dismay too; I couldn’t in the least afford it, I was frightened at my audacity. I hurried into my room and hung it in the space above the mantelpiece. I sat and looked at it; I could have sworn that the two women nodded their heads at me. We shook hands, congratulating one another.

While I was looking at it Vanessa came in. “Well, how’s everything?” she began gaily, then seeing that I was embarrassed said, “What’s the matter?” I pointed at the picture and looked, I fancy, both sheepish and embarrassed. She turned round and saw it. “That!” she cried. “What’s it doing here?” “I’ve bought it,” I answered. “You’ve bought it! How much did you give for it?” “Sixty pounds.” “Sixty pounds for that thing! You’re mad!” I didn’t try to defend myself. “Well, there it is,” I answered. “Let’s go out and have some dinner.” She said nothing, we went out silently.

At this point of my story I can see the shrugs of almost any listener. “Anyone so crazy over a picture deserves all they get,” I can hear them saying, and “he can’t have been in love with the girl at all. The young man’s got an obsession and not a very nice obsession either.” But I’ll give you all that you please on Vanessa’s side; there was everything to be said for her and almost nothing to be said for me. The point about it, I think, was just this, that there was something really and truly the matter between us, and that I might have liked all the pictures in the world and she detested them and no harm would have been done; but that is what I began by saying, a picture if it cares for you enough can show you something that you never yourself suspected.

Well, we sat that evening in a little restaurant in Sloane Square and made polite conversation. Vanessa was proud and unhappy too, I daresay; I noticed again on this evening, as I had noticed before, that her brilliance faded out of her, her flame died down. She sat there with drooping feathers. We made no allusion to the picture whatever.

The fight came two days later. We were having tea in my room. She, dressed in dark crimson with a sort of white ruff round her beautiful neck, lay back in my old deep chair, while I at her feet told her how I loved her. “Yes,” she said suddenly and very quietly, “if you love me there is just one thing for you to do; take back that picture and never let me see it again.” The picture had not been mentioned by us since that original hanging of it. “Let’s have this out,” I answered, drawing away from her a little and looking at her. “Listen, Vanessa, I love that picture, I have never cared for any work of art before as I care for this, it means something personal to me. Call me absurd or not as you like, these two women seem alive to me and to care for me as I care for them.” “Yes,” she answered intensely, “you care for them more than you do for me.” “That’s absurd,” I answered hotly, “you’re alive and I love you, and they—” “Are not alive?” she asked. I could not say, the words stuck in my throat; they were alive to me, no love for her, no loyalty, no passion could bring me to that lie. She pushed me aside as she sprang from the chair, she went up to the fireplace. “If I were to slash the canvas finely they’d be alive!” she cried, and for a moment I thought that she meant to do it. I sprang up after her and caught her by the shoulder; she tore herself away from me and for a moment we faced one another in furious hatred. “You think they’re real!” she cried, “more real than me. I am fine for you to make love to, to stroke and to pet and to kiss, and then when you’ve had that you go to that picture for your real life. I hate it, dull ugly piece of paint. Well, you can choose, it’s those two or myself, if you keep that picture you never see me again.” Ridiculous, absurd, two people who pretend to be fond of one another quarrelling about a picture, but who is there, looking back, can’t discover something just as trivial and just as eloquent of some deep divergence? I am inclined to fancy now that for me those minutes of struggle in my room were a crisis perhaps for both of us, one flashing moment in which we both saw things clearly.

But when she was gone how miserable I was! This was our first real break, and as always in a lovers’ quarrel I felt that I could not endure life without the little things that the last weeks had made so precious to me, the notes, the expectation of her coming, the first sight of her as she turned the corner or mounted the stair, the things that we had done together, the concerts and the theatres and above all the absurd ridiculous things, the ridings on omnibuses, the meals in obscure little restaurants, the funny people at whom we had laughed with that wonderful simultaneous laughter that only lovers know, the moments of ecstasy when no words were spoken, the little unexpected gifts, the sudden waking in the night and thinking of her and realising that she was alive and that next day I would see her.

All these things to be surrendered for a picture! Absurd! I would take it back at once to the galleries and change it for something, anything. I moved to the wall to take it down and I couldn’t, I literally couldn’t. It was as though I was unable to face that blank space again, and as though beyond that I was going to commit some act of impossible disloyalty, as though too I were being tempted to support the strong against the weak, to throw in my lot with the big battalions.

Well, I conquered my foolishness, took the picture down, wrapped it up and went off with it to the galleries. I was shamefaced enough when I showed it to Cadby: “Afraid it won’t do in my place,” I said; “too dark for my rooms.” He thought me, I fancy, a poor sort of fool and he wasn’t over pleased; he had had that picture for many weeks and been unable to sell it. However, he was good-natured and there were a number of other things he wasn’t selling very easily either. I looked at them. “I want something very bright,” I said, “full of colour.” He had put my picture on the chair again, but I wouldn’t look at it. He took me downstairs and showed me around; there was a Clausen, a Charles Holmes Lake Country scene, two delightful Segonzac sketches, a Charles Conder rich with primrose and violet hues. I chose the Conder. I went home, hung it up and went round to Vanessa.

In her own rooms, which were as bright as a bird of paradise, she always looked as though she lived in a caravan, as though she were on the move and would at any moment pack up her flimsy stuff and gilt boxes and artificial fruit and appear suddenly, as though she had travelled on a magic carpet, a thousand miles away. I liked her thus; I had a kind of pride, I suppose, because I had been able to attach to myself anything so brilliantly transient.

But on this evening I was filled with alarm and uneasiness. When I told her that I had taken the picture back she adored me; she was like a child who, having got what she wanted, would make up to the giver by every sort of affection for all the earlier quarrels and obstinacies. Yes, she adored me that night, and I forced my passion for her with an extravagance and an urgency that were almost melodramatic.

Her little friend Jane Porter came in, a mouse of a woman, the kind of girl you don’t notice unless you’re very bored and have no one else to talk to. Vanessa had told her of our quarrel (she told her everything, I fancy; she was the kind of girl you would eternally trust) and now Vanessa told her also of her triumph. “Beastly thing,” she said, “absurd to have a quarrel about anything like that.” But Jane Porter looked at me. “I liked that picture,” she said quietly, “I’m sorry you took it back.” Vanessa turned to her tempestuously. “Sorry he took it back! Then you’re sorry that we’re engaged, that we’re going to be married, that we ever met!” “No,” she answered, still looking at me, “you know I’m not sorry, but you were wrong, Vanessa, to make him take it back, and it was weak of him to do so.” I said nothing, I knew she was right, and I had my knowledge deep down in my subconsciousness where not even I could see it.

We all three went out that evening to a music-hall, and I remember that there were Chinese jugglers whom Vanessa admired extravagantly. I had drunk more than was good for me and I was extravagant too. The golden balls that they tossed into the air glittered and spun, they were themselves all spangled gold and they made a whirl of colour in the air, and in the midst of this colour their little dead white faces stared out with a sort of fatalistic sadness. I seemed to spin round with them and something stared out of me too, something betrayed and false.

She couldn’t love me enough that evening. She was close to me, all round me, part of me, and when I left her for my solitary rooms she seemed to go with me, dancing like a streak of flame down the dark street in front of me.

But when I got in I shut her out. The rooms were chill and devastatingly empty.

What kind of madness possessed me that night? I have read and been told of many a man’s obsession, but was there ever an obsession queerer than mine? I am ashamed to confess it, but that night, in a state half dream half waking vision, I came again and again into the dark, cold sitting-room to see whether the picture was there; at least, it was not the picture that I expected to find, but the two women themselves. I remember once being told by some novelist that some character that he had created had become to him so real that she pushed out of existence the people around him, and he seemed to live only in her company. It was something of that kind in the weeks that followed with myself and those two Italian women; it was not that I talked to them or discovered any more about their lives than I had known already, which was exactly nothing, but that they seemed to follow me, two shadows, with some urgent message that they must give me, and the message concerned, I was sure, Vanessa.

Vanessa, if before she had been enchanting and bewildering in her beauty, far more bewitching was she now. It seemed as though my giving up of that picture had determined her to give me everything of sweetness and kindness that she had in return. And yet always my unhappiness increased, now someone seemed for ever whispering in my ear criticism of her, that she was theatrical, unstable, even, God forgive me, false. There was, I remember, at that time a Spanish dancer – Esteban something or other – who was appearing at one of the halls and was for ever turning up at our Bohemian parties. He was, naturally enough, fascinated by Vanessa, her warm, lovely colouring, her vivacity and excitement were something that he did not find too often, I expect, in our stolid, chilly London.

It was when he and Vanessa were together that I felt especially her unreality. It was not that I was jealous of him, I had no need to be, she would leave him, or indeed anybody else, at a moment’s notice to come to me. Had I had any vision or discernment I would have marvelled at the self-sacrifice and unselfishness with which she would leave the most amusing parties, the gayest, merriest company, to spend long, dull hours with me.

Yes, because they were dull. Lying awake at night I would ask myself what had happened to me; I had not before been this grouchy, fault-finding, critical creature, but now everything that Vanessa did was wrong. Was it a kind of pique because I had been cheated of my picture? I flattered myself that it was something much deeper than this, that these two dark strange women had shown me something false and artificial in Vanessa’s character, and that I could not now escape from this knowledge.

And yet all this time how I loved her! I was, God forgive me, making scenes continually because I loved her so dearly, and she took my petulance with the utmost patience and sweetness. I remember one evening when I made a scene with her before the whole of some studio party because of some dance or song or something in her that had seemed to me false and theatrical, and I’ll swear to you that in the very midst of my absurdity I seemed to hear a dry, rather cynical woman’s voice in my ear saying: “Don’t you see how absurd it is? Will you marry her if she’s like that?”

Well, as we all know, when a lover has the privilege of making scenes and is not pulled up sharply they grow with the indulgence of them; and so it was with me. Hating myself, loving her, yet I could not resist constant petulance, the frequent irritation of tiny things, the mad effort to make of her something that she was not.

Yes, and there is an end to all things. One autumn evening as we walked home from some restaurant, where I had scolded her for laughing too loudly or making some too dramatic gesture, she said very quietly, her arm linked in mine, “Simon, do you love me any longer?” “Love you!” I answered. “I love you more every day that we are together.” “Yes,” she said, “you think so, but it isn’t myself that you love, it is the person that you think that I ought to be; you would like me to be like the women in that picture, quiet and grey.” I protested violently. “Well, one more month—” she said. “One more month?” I asked. “Yes, the last chance for both of us,” and then, standing on the stairs inside my door, she kissed me tenderly, pressing her hand for a moment against my cheek, then ran lightly away.

And the month that followed was like the months that had preceded. We were to be married in six weeks’ time, but I could not learn wisdom. There was just that change in her that I wanted to make (ah, how like many another lover) and, that made, I could remain tranquilly with my perfect companion for ever. And so I nagged and sulked and criticised and she bore with me ever more patiently.

There came an evening when we went to some friend’s house to dinner and danced afterwards; Esteban was there. She was very quiet that night and stayed at my side as though she were afraid to let me out of her sight. I was triumphant; this, I thought, was how I would have her be. She, as usual, walked with me to my rooms and then held me close to her as she said good-night. Her parting words I will always remember: “Dear Simon, how good you are and how stupid!” but she laughed as she said it and, leaving me, went with that quick, gay step that was so especially hers, always as though she were hastening off to some lovely festivity.

Next day I was busy with some difficult and urgent work; I didn’t telephone to her as was my custom. I came back late from my paper humming to myself as I quickly mounted the stairs, expecting to find a note from her as I generally did on the evening of a day when we had not met.

I switched on the lights; yes, there was the note, and in front of it, propped up against some books, as quiet and austere and beautiful as ever, was the picture!

I hurried forward and tore open the letter. It was short, and I shall never forget the least word of it.

Dearest Simon,

I have gone to Spain with Esteban; we are to be married as soon as possible. I have bought back this picture for you. Was it myself or you that these women criticised?

Always your friend and well-wisher,

Vanessa.

With a shock about my ears as though a thousand waters had broken in upon me, I stared at the picture, and then, looking at those two enigmatical faces, I knew with a sudden flash of humiliating discovery that it was not Vanessa’s weakness that the two women in the picture had discovered, but my own.

And so I missed the only chance in my life that has been really worth while.

And yet I love that picture; you can see it hanging there opposite you.

“Good Housekeeping” Mar 1927

The Silver Thorn (1928)

THE TIGER

Little Homer Brown had one night, after too luxurious a supper, a nasty dream. He dreamed that he was in a jungle. He was lost in a thick dark mass of bush that seemed to rise like a forest with green spikes on every side of him. He walked with naked feet on pointed grass sharp as razor blades, and then he saw shining at him out of the dark mass two burning eyes. Petrified with something more than terror, as one is in dreams, he stood there waiting for the tiger to spring. As the tiger sprang he woke up.

The only thing about this dream was that in the morning he remembered it. He never remembered his dreams, which was a pity, because they were in general pleasant ones, and he had not much romance in his actual waking life. It seemed that he forgot the pleasant ones and remembered the nightmares, which was perhaps characteristic of him because he was of the sort that worries over little troubles and forgets too quickly the larger delights.

He remembered his tiger for three days at least. He told his sister, who kept house for him, and several of his more intimate friends about it. They wisely cautioned him against eating steak just before going to bed. The trouble with him was, as he thought about it, that he was convinced in his heart that there was more in the tiger than steak. He had all his life been afraid of the future, that something would spring out at him one day and eat him up. He was a man small of stature, sentimental of nature, and likely to catch colds. But, like many another Englishman, he was brave enough before the things which he could see. He had so little imagination in general that the things which he could see were the only things about which he did worry. But again, like many Englishmen, he had one thin stream of imagination running underground deep in his subconscious life. He had been aware of the dark steady flow of it on certain occasions – once when as a child he had been taken to the pantomime and all the houses in Dick Whittington’s London had rocked before the inebriated cook; once in an animal shop in Edgware Road when he had seen a sad monkey stare at him from behind the window; once when he had proposed marriage to a lady friend and had been rejected, and once when a motor-car in which he was riding had killed a black Cocker spaniel.

On such occasions he had seen visions. It was as though the earth had opened up beneath his feet and he had realised that he was walking on a kind of hot pie crust over an underworld of energetic little demons. But for the most part he forgot these revelations and lived quietly enough with his tall, bony sister in a neat little house in Wimbledon, pursuing every morning his successful little insurance job somewhere in the bowels of the city.

And he forgot the tiger.

•   •   •   •   •

It was this insurance business that sent him one day to New York. Quite an adventure for him. Phoebe, his sister, who was as kind as she was tiresome, and, though he didn’t know it, absolutely necessary to his existence, was disturbed at his going alone. She would have liked greatly to accompany him and hinted at this; but he sniffed at his coming freedom and would not have had her with him for anything. Nevertheless, when he found himself quite alone on the gigantic liner his heart failed him. He discovered that he had lived so long with his particular cronies that he had quite forgotten how to make new acquaintances. He was afraid to play cards lest he should lose his money, he couldn’t dance, and for reading he had a kind of shyness as though by giving himself away to a book he was endangering some mysterious part of his morality. So he walked up and down the deck a great deal, very proudly holding his head up and daring any stranger to speak to him, but secretly hoping that some stranger might.

In New York, however, he was not lonely. That warmth and eagerness of hospitality which always astonishes every Englishman and sends him racing through strangely conflicting moods of suspicion, pride and, although he tries not to show it, sentimentality – these caught little Homer Brown by the throat and caused him to think that after all he must be a very fine fellow indeed.

He started with a room at the Brevoort, but this was a little remote for his business, and in a very short while he was staying with a Mr. and Mrs. Moody in West Sixty-ninth Street.

Mr. and Mrs. Moody were very quiet Americans. Mrs. Moody was so quiet that you had to listen very carefully if you wanted to hear what she had to say. Mr. Moody was stout and broad-shouldered, but oddly timorous for a Mid-Westerner. You would think, to look at him, that he would defy the world, but as a matter of simple fact he couldn’t defy a living thing. Englishmen are much more sentimental than Americans, but they are not, of course, so demonstrative. Little Homer conceived slowly a passion for the large, hearty and gentle Mr. Moody, and Mr. Moody, having been brought up in the usual American creed that ten American men were worth only one American woman, was surprised that anybody should pay him much attention. And before Homer Brown returned to England these two had formed a greater friendship than they knew.

Homer Brown was delighted with New York. He loved to feel that every minute of the day was important and it didn’t matter to what you were hurrying so long as you hurried. The noise around him excited him as a small rather lonely child is excited at a large children’s party where everyone shouts and sings for no especial reason.

At home in Wimbledon he always went to bed at ten o’clock. In New York he found that he could be up till three or four in the morning and not feel at all tired the next day. At least, this was so for the three weeks that his business kept him in New York. It is true that he slept on the boat returning to England for three days and nights almost without a break. The sad thing was that, back in London again, he found himself unsettled. He missed the noise, the hurry, the cold sharp air, the sense of rise and fall as though he were sailing on an invigorating sea of waves and buildings, and he missed very much indeed the warmth of pleasure with which people had treated him. No one in London said that they were delighted to meet you, but only, “Hello, old man. Haven’t seen you about lately.” No lady in London told him to his face that he was too amusing for anything or that it had been just lovely being with him. And then, oddly, he missed the large Mr. Moody. He had never missed a man’s company before. He wrote him a rather affectionate letter, but received no answer. American men have time only for business letters.

And so it happened that he was very quick in manoeuvring to send himself back to New York again. He was amazed at his own eagerness when one fine spring day he found himself once more plunging through the Atlantic, straining his eyes towards the Statue of Liberty. His first acute disappointment on arrival this time was to find that the Moodys were in Colorado. Mrs. Moody had not been well, and, as Homer knew, the slightest wish on her part was immediate law to Mr. Moody. He had a sentimental feeling that he would like to be near their street, so he found two rooms in one of the West Sixties, rather high up, and out of his window he could see on the left a huge building crashing to the ground and on the right another structure slowly climbing to the sky. Although the Moodys were away, he was not, of course, alone in New York. He had a whole circle of acquaintances, and almost every evening he went to a party, bathed in the splendid glamour like a tired business man having a holiday at the seaside. The summer came and he did not return to England, and he did not leave New York. The Moodys were still away, and quite suddenly one hot summer’s night he discovered himself to be alone. He sat in front of his open window looking at the pale purple-misted sky, listening to the hooting of the taxis, to the clanging electric hammer, to the wriggling, rasping clatter of the Elevated, and to the flashing of strange adventurous discovery; he had no invitation for that evening and nearly all his friends were away. What should he do? He would just walk out and take the air and let adventure have its own way.

•   •   •   •   •

When he had walked for a while he discovered that it is a very strange thing to be alone in New York. He had never been alone there before. He was standing in Fifth Avenue somewhere about Forty-fourth Street when he realised that he couldn’t make up his mind to cross the street. He looked down the shining length of that wonderful avenue, saw the packs of motor-cars and omnibuses held like animals in leash, knew that he must cross now if ever, and his legs refused to move. The lights changed and the cars swept down, and as they passed him they seemed to him to toss their heads and lick their lips as though they would say, “We should like to find you in our path – toss you in the air and then ride over you. One day we shall lure you forward.” I have already said that in the main he had very little imagination, but once and again something stirred it, and it was the gleaming mass of those fiery eyes that held him now prisoner to the pavement. He pretended to himself that he was lingering there admiring the beautiful evening and watching the stars come out along the river of sky which ran between the high cliffs of the buildings. But it was not so. He was frightened. He didn’t move because he didn’t dare to move. New York was suddenly hostile and dangerous. Guarded by his friends, he had felt until now that the City was benignant and especially gratified that he should be there. The City was benignant no longer. He turned away, his heart beating, and after a while found himself in Broadway. Here was a lovely land – like the fairy play of one’s childhood, scattered with silver and golden fruit. He admired the lighted signs, the cascade of silver that poured out of the purple fountain, the great flowers of amethyst and rose that unfolded in the middle of the sky and then faded tremblingly away, the strange figures of dancing men that hung on ropes of crimson fire, turned somersaults, and vanished into thin air. And he loved with a strange trembling passion the building that soared into peaks of silver light far, far above the town. The only fairy palace ever seen by him in actual truth.

He stood staring at these things and was pushed about by the hurrying crowds. He bore them no malice. They, too, were the sharers of this marvellous fairyland. And then, withdrawing his eyes from the heights, it seemed to him for the first time that the faces on every side of him were pale and unhappy and apprehensive. The laughter appeared to him loud and false. The haste had something of panic in it. Shrill bells rang through the air. Everyone scattered and pressed against everyone else. The fire-engines came clanging down the street, and it was as though he felt the ground rock under his feet.

He thought that he would go into some show, and after a while he pushed through some doors, paid his money at the box-office for he knew not what, and was conducted by a girl, who looked at him with a sad and weary indifference, into his place. He had been to the theatre on many occasions before with his friends and they had always been jolly together, or he had fancied that they had. He had never noticed before that many of the American theatres have no music in the intervals between the acts, nor had he realised how sadly American audiences sit, as though they were waiting for some calamity to occur. He looked on the row of faces that stretched out beyond him to the wall, and they all seemed to him grave, preoccupied, and weary. Again, apprehensive. He had often abused in London the chattering, foolish chocolate-munching sibilants of the theatre crowd, but he would have liked them to be with him tonight. The play was strange and odd, and for his Wimbledon propriety extremely indecent. It was concerned with ladies of easy virtue in China who were imprisoned in small gilt cages, and there was a woman with a white Chinese face who terrified him.

As the play proceeded it became for him more and more a bad dream, as though it were his dream and all the people watching it were all his creation. So strange a hold did this gain upon him that during the third act he was largely occupied with wondering what would happen to the audience when he woke up; what would become of them when he stretched his arms and, yawning, found them all vanishing into smoke as he looked around on the familiar things in his Wimbledon bedroom. The last act of the play presented an exotic situation in which a mother finds that she has unwittingly killed her own daughter. This seemed to little Homer the climax of his bad dream, and, just as one always wakes up from a nightmare when the final crash arrives, so now Homer got up and walked out although the play was not quite finished.

He hoped that his bad dream was over, but it was not. It seemed to continue with him as he walked through the plunging lights and shadows that played over Broadway. The faces now on every side of him were white and strained; everyone was feeling the heat of the night, and a large silver fountain in the middle of the sky that was for ever spilling its water among the stars which it stridently outshone accentuated Homer’s thirst so desperately that he went into a drug store and drank a strange sickly concoction of pineapple, ice-cream, and soda water.

•   •   •   •   •

After that afternoon he never seemed quite to wake from his dream again. He received a letter from his sister urging him to come home. It appeared that for once they were enjoying a beautiful summer in England. It was neither too hot nor too cold. But as he read her letter he had a strange, aching vision of the dark cool lanes, the lap of the sea heard very faintly from across the fields, the sudden dip of the hills and the cottages, of the small villages nestling to the stream, roses and carnations everywhere. Of course he ought to go home. There was nothing to keep him here now. There had been nothing really to keep him this time at all. None of his friends was in New York, the weather would soon be appalling. It was not very comfortable in his lodgings, and he had always a strange little headache that ran like an odd tune, a little distorted, always through his head. Of course he ought to go home. But he could not. And he could not because he was held in this odd dreaming condition. Could he but wake up he would take the next boat back. Perhaps he would wake up tomorrow.

A few nights later the weather was desperately hot. There was no air, and after a brief sleep he woke to feel his heart pounding in his chest like a hammer. His windows were wide open, but there was no coolness. He lay there on his bed, his pyjama jacket open, and the sweat pouring from his body. He threw off his pyjamas, plunged into a cold bath, and then lay a little comforted, quite naked, on the top of his bed. As he lay there he heard, beneath the sharp staccato cry of an occasional car, a kind of purr as though someone were gently sleeping near by. Purr, purr, purr…. It was not, he assured himself, the breathing of an individual, but simply the night sound of the City. He had never heard it quite like that before; and between the breathing there came short restless sounds as though someone were turning over or brushing something aside as he moved. The sound had a little of the rhythm of a train when in a sleeping-car you wake in the middle of the night. Rhythm translating itself into a little tune, but this was not so much a tune as a measure that advanced and then receded and then advanced again. He had the idea that it was almost as though someone were walking in his sleep, padding stealthily along the quiet streets beyond his window, and, so thinking, at last he fell asleep.

Everyone who has lived in New York during hot weather must have noticed that the town seems to change completely its inhabitants. Those who can afford it leave the City. But many of the inhabitants, Southerners, negroes, South Americans who are accustomed to great heat, pervade the streets with a kind of new ownership. They have a sort of pride as though this were their weather and they alone know how to deal with it. They walk about as though they owned the town. Homer, coming one morning out of his door, noticed passing him a large, stout, honey-coloured negro. Rather a handsome fellow with the free disengaged movements of an animal. His big heavy body was clothed in dark, quiet garments, and he passed with lithe, springy gestures. Homer did not know why he noticed him. The negro did not look at him, but passed on with his strange determined ease down the street. That evening Homer met him again. “He must live near here,” Homer thought. Then he had a curious idea. “If he were naked and in a dark forest you would think that he was an animal.”

That night once again Homer dreamed of the Tiger. It was not so hot a night, but damp and humid. Homer was once again walking with naked feet on sharp spiky grass. And once again he was held with sudden terror, and once again saw the gleaming eyes and smelled the thick foetid breath of an animal. He woke in a panic of terror, and was at first delighted to find that he was in his plain simple little room, and then he was horrified to discover that the smell of an animal’s breath seemed still to linger with him in the room. It was so strong that he could not possibly be imagining it. He got up, walked about the room, sniffing. He went to the window and leaned out and saw the town lying under a dazzling sheet of stars. There was a little breeze, and when he turned back into the room again he found the smell was gone. In the morning it was as though he had had actual contact with some animal, and he had hard work to convince himself that some large dark-coloured beast had not padded round his room while he slept. He seriously examined himself. “This won’t do,” he said to himself. “This hot weather is getting on your nerves. You must leave for England at once.”

He went that very morning to some shipping office, booked a passage for himself for the next week, and sent a cable to his sister. He felt now as though at last he had awaked from his dream, and England seemed to come very close to him with its cool breezes and long, gently undulating moors and sudden little woods with scattered anemones. But while he was sitting in his little Italian restaurant eating his luncheon he heard again through the open door a purr as if it were of someone breathing close beside him, and as he heard it his body trembled as though someone said to him, “You are not going home. You will never go home.” That afternoon he sat in Central Park and watched the blue motionless water and felt a desperate longing for Moody’s return. “I am not very well,” he said to himself. “It is as though I am only half awake. Must be this hot weather,” and he did a strange thing, because he went up to some children who were playing at the edge of the water and put his hand on the arm of one of them and spoke to it about something. The child answered him gravely, not at all alarmed, and pointed to some boat that it was sailing on the water. The child was a real thing. But was it not part of his dream? If he woke suddenly in his Wimbledon bedroom where would the child be? So he hurried home in a panic, and then, just outside his door, passed again the large, heavy negro, who did not look at him, but went on padding steadily forward. He hurried into his house.

When the time for the actual sailing came he did not go. He sent a cable to his sister saying, “Important business prevents leaving. Sailing later.” But there was no important business. The weather grew ever more hot, but he was accustomed to it now and, although it depressed him, he liked it. He liked, too, the slightly acrid, rather foetid smell that seemed now to accompany him everywhere. For a while he was puzzled as to where he had known this smell before and then he thought of the monkey rooms and the snake rooms in the London zoo. It had been just that warmth, damp and pungent.

On a very hot afternoon, sitting in his room, he suddenly thought, “There must be animals somewhere. Animals that like this heat.” It was, he imagined, what a jungle smell would be; and the light beyond his windows beating down from the blazing blue sky on to the roofs and pavements had a glossy shimmer as though he were looking at a scene through very thin sheets of opalescent metal. Then, once he had this idea that there were animals about, he began to wonder where they would be. He had the odd fancy to picture to himself this vast city, honey-combed with underground cells and passages, like the dark shadowy cells behind the Roman amphitheatres where they kept their beasts for feast days and holidays. It would be a strange thing were the whole of New York built about these dark stone cellars and the wild beasts for ever prowling there. Sitting at his window in his pyjamas, he fancied how these hordes of animals would slink about, padding their way from passage to passage, and the only things seen in that grey dusk were thousands and thousands of fiery eyes, and then it might happen one day that some of them would escape and appear in the streets. Lions and tigers and leopards and panthers, dazzled at first by the bright staring light and then accustomed to it, plunging into the middle of the multitudes. A great lion with tawny head finding its way through the entrance of one of those vast skyscrapers, padding up the stairs, and then confronting a group of clerks and stenographers. Yes, that would be fine, and how the people would rush from the building to the street! He’d heard it said that if all the human beings ran at the same moment from the skyscrapers into the street, they would be piled one upon the other five deep, and he could see them heaped up in this hot dry weather struggling in masses, and from the windows of the building the lions and tigers peering down at them and waiting with slow licking lips for the splendid meal that was coming to them.

Moving from this still further, he came to his own especial tiger – the animal about which he had dreamed so many years ago, waiting now for him somewhere in the underground beneath the street. At this thought a pleasant warm shiver ran through his body. He put his hand in front of his eyes as though he would shut out from them some picture, and the familiar animal smell seemed to increase in the room.

•   •   •   •   •

It was just then, at the end of August, that the Moodys returned to New York. Homer was very glad to see them, but not as glad as he would have been a month ago, because he had now something else to think about. They didn’t know about all these animals, all these beasts prowling under the streets in the shadowy dark. And they must not know, because they would think him foolish and wouldn’t understand. So, because he had a secret from them, he was very mysterious and preoccupied and not so frank with them as he had been. They noticed, of course, the change and commented on it to each other. Moody had a real affection for this little Englishman, largely because he had been noticed by him and made to suppose that he was somebody; partly because he had a truly kind heart and wanted people to be happy; so he was distressed and asked Mrs. Moody, for whose opinion and judgement he had the profoundest respect, if she knew what the matter could be. “He seems preoccupied with something,” he said to her. “He always thinks of something else. He doesn’t look well at all. Perhaps it’s the heat that’s got on his nerves. Englishmen can’t stand it. When I was in his room last night he asked me whether I noticed a smell. I noticed nothing. But he said that I should in time. He seems to have a terror of the subway. He implored me yesterday not to use it. His eyes were terrified as he spoke to me about it. I don’t like the look of things at all. I think he’d better go home.”

But Homer now saw the Moodys through a dark glass. He wondered how it could be that all the inhabitants of New York were not aware of their great danger. He thought it might be his duty to write to one of the papers about it. But, after all, the animals had been there so long the people must all know. He supposed that they were so confident of their control that it didn’t worry them. But suppose you had, as he had, one particular animal who was watching and waiting for you. He knew now exactly where his tiger must be. Somewhere underground between Fortieth and Forty-fourth Street, where the traffic and the press of people are thickest, and he began to be fascinated by that part of New York. He found that if he went down to the Grand Central Station and stood on that great shining floor he could almost hear the animals moving beneath his feet, and he fancied that if he went lower down through the gates to the trains and stood there in absolute silence when no trains were passing he would be able to hear very clearly soft feet moving and the heavy bodies brushing the one against the other.

So one day he got permission from the station-master to go and meet a train, and he went through and for five minutes was alone there, save for the coloured porters, and through the silence he heard quite clearly the whispering footfalls. There must be many beasts there, thousands perhaps, and you can imagine how one would push ahead of the others and wait, his eyes eagerly fixed for the black gate to open. And one day it might be that the negroes who brought them their food, great red lumps of bleeding meat, would be a little careless, and some of the beasts would slip past and moving noiselessly would be up on the sunlit street before anyone knew that they were there. His own especial tiger would be waiting more eagerly than any of them. He must be a great strong beast with a huge head and gigantic muscles. One scratch of his paw and your cheek would be torn open, and then, at the sight of the blood, the tiger would tremble all over and his eyes would shine until they were like great lamps, and then he would spring.

Then one night Homer told Moody about it. He had not intended to tell him, but it irritated him that that great heavy man should be sitting so calmly in his room and not notice the acrid smell. He told him first about the big honey-coloured negro who was always passing down his street, and Moody thought there was nothing odd in that; so that Homer, thoroughly exasperated, burst out with, “He is one of the keepers. Although he hasn’t told me I know it and he knows that I know it.” “One of the keepers?” asked Moody. “Keeper of what?” “Why, of the beasts, of course. Can’t you smell them everywhere?” He went on then and said that he couldn’t understand why people were not frightened. “It would be so easy someday for one of the animals to steal out while the keeper wasn’t looking. Or suppose they went for the keepers one day and broke out – hundreds of them – into the streets. That would be a nice thing. You would see people run for their lives then all right.”

Moody became greatly alarmed, but, as always when one’s friends are odd or queer, adopted a tone of quiet reassurance as though he were speaking to a sick child. He consulted with Mrs. Moody, and the result of this was that he invited Homer to go with him one day to call upon a friend of his. Homer went with him most readily and had with this kind gentleman two hours of most interesting conversation. The interesting, quiet man who talked to him and asked him questions was surprised at nothing which Homer had to tell him. When Homer spoke about the animals he nodded his head and said, “I know. When did you first notice it?”

Homer, delighted to discover that he had found a sensible person at last, told him everything. “You see,” he said, “I shouldn’t really mind, myself, a bit, but of course I am a little uneasy because of my own tiger. You can quite understand that it isn’t pleasant to feel that he can escape at any time. Then he would come straight for me. He knows just where I am.”

“Why not,” said the quiet little man, “go home for a while? Your tiger won’t follow you to England.”

“Ah,” said Homer, mysteriously, “I am not so sure. Besides, don’t you think it would be cowardly? And then, there’s something exciting in defying him. I am not going to show him I am afraid,” and a little warm tremor ran all over his body.

His kind friend asked him many questions about his childhood. When he was very young, had he been taken to the zoo and had he looked at the tigers there? Homer nodded his head. Of course he had. Had he when he was very young been shown pictures of tigers? Yes, of course he had, but what had that to do with it? His little friend agreed that, of course, it had nothing to do with it, but it was just interesting. It was suggested to him that he should come and see his little friend quite often, and Homer said that he would, but, nevertheless, he had no intention of doing so. This man took it all too quietly. He would wake up one day and find out his mistake.

•   •   •   •   •

Early in September there came those warm days, close days that are perhaps the most trying moments of all the American climate. If you took a walk you were at once bathed in perspiration. The town had indeed, for even less active imaginations than Homer’s, a jungle air. The traffic now was terrific. Down on Fifth Avenue the cars would stand packed in serried ranks. Then, on the changing of the lights, they would slide furiously forward for a brief space, then sit back on their haunches again.

It happened one evening that, hurrying home in the dusk, Homer, looking up the street, saw these hundreds of gleaming eyes and thought with a furious beating of his heart that the moment had arrived at last and that the animals had escaped. He realised at once, of course, that it was the traffic; and yet, was it? Were not these things alive and acting from their own volition? It might be that they were in union with the beasts and were acting under command, and one day at a given order they would suddenly take the thing into their own hands. In great armies of shining metal they would drive the trembling thousands of tiny human beings into panic-stricken mobs and the animals would be released.

This was fanciful perhaps, but when he returned to his room, he knew with a sudden certainty that his Tiger was free. Homer did not know how he was aware of it, but he was certain. What must he do? He wanted to escape. He was trembling with fear, but at the same time he wanted to face the animal. Some horrid fascination held him. He could imagine himself walking down some dark side street, lit only by some scattered lights, shaking slightly with the reverberation of the overhead railway, and then, turning a corner, there the Tiger would be. He sat there all night not sleeping, sitting on his bed, wondering what he must do. At about three in the morning obeying some curious impulse, he barricaded his door, putting two chairs in front of it and pushing his bed toward it. When day came he must buy a gun; but of what use would that be? He didn’t know one end of a gun from another, and, besides, it was hopeless. No gun that he could buy would injure the Tiger. His fate was certain. He could not escape it.

That morning Moody came to see him. He entered very cheerfully. “Now, my friend,” he said, “what’s this, you’re not dressed? Come on, take a bath and come have a meal with Mrs. Moody and myself. You are not well, you know. Mrs. Moody wants you to come and stay with us for a bit. Cheerful company, that’s what you want.”

Homer thanked him, shook his head. It was very kind of him, but he was very busy just then and would come and see them in a day or two. Moody talked to him for a little, and then apparently alarmed at Homer’s expression, went away.

When the evening came Homer dressed and went out. First he walked on Fifth Avenue and as the traffic rushed by him felt an oppressive bewildering excitement. He knew beyond doubt that now the Tiger had come very close to him. He must be very near any one of these side streets. There were so many animals that the keepers had probably not yet discovered the loss of one of them. The Tiger was waiting in some dark alley or court, crouched against the wall in the shadow. At every step that he took he was being drawn irresistibly nearer. He was no longer afraid, but only strung up to some great pitch of emotion as though the supreme moment of his life had at last come. He was oddly hungry (he had eaten scarcely anything for days) and he went into a little Italian restaurant. He sat down in a corner and saw that there was a very good meal for a dollar. You could have antipasto, minestrina, spaghetti, broccoli, and all for a dollar. At a large table near him some twenty people were having a feast, and were laughing and joking very loudly. In the far corner a violin and a piano were playing gay tunes. The minestrina was very good – hot and thick. He talked to the waiter and asked him if he liked New York. The waiter liked it very much. “Now here was a real town. Something was going on all the time and there was money about. Lots of money. You could pick it up in all sorts of ways.” Homer was about to say, “Yes, but suppose the animals get loose one day, where will you be then?” But he didn’t say it, stopped by a kind of sense that it would be bad form to mention it. He sat there staring at the gay supper party. They didn’t seem to care. What would they do if he went over to them and told them that just up the street a great Tiger with huge velvety haunches was waiting? They might not believe it, and then he would look foolish, and in any case this was the one thing that in New York nobody mentioned.

After a while he paid his bill and went out. He was now in one of those streets that seem in the evening to be the very borderland of madness. Overhead the trains rattled, on the right the street was “up” showing black cabins of darkness and then a blaze of burning light. The trains came clattering up, issuing from forests of armed girders and tangled masonry, people hurried by as though they knew that this was a dangerous place and that they must not pause there for a moment.

Homer took a deep breath, stepped forward into the middle of the street, stared past the bright lights of a drug store, and then, with a whirl of concentrated knowledge as though everything in his past life had suddenly leaped to meet him, in one swift instant knew that the time had come. Facing him, as he stood there at the very issue of the dark side street opposite him, crouched the Tiger. Although the street was so dark, Homer could see every detail of his body. He was very like a huge cat streaked with his beautiful colours. His eyes burning just as Homer knew that they would do. His head moving very slightly from side to side. With that vision, terror leaped upon Homer. He turned, screaming there in the middle of the street, and even as he turned, the Tiger jumped. The huge body was upon him. He felt the agonising blow and then sank deep into pits of darkness.

•   •   •   •   •

A crowd collected. His body was dragged out from under the taxicab. The driver began an eloquent explanation. It had not been his fault. The man had seemed bewildered by the lights, had run straight into the cab. There was no time for the driver to do anything. The policeman took notes, an ambulance was summoned.

The Moodys heard of the accident that night. It appeared that it was nobody’s fault. Homer had been crossing the street, and becoming bewildered, turned back, and was struck by the taxi.

About three the next morning, Moody woke up quietly trembling, and at last roused his wife. He talked to her about the poor little Englishman. “I suppose,” he said, “staying here in the heat was too much for him. Odd thing that, his imagining that some animal was after him.” He lay there, greatly discomforted. “New York’s getting a queer place,” he said. “You can imagine anything if you let yourself. All this traffic, for instance. They look like animals at night sometimes.” He turned and took his wife’s hand in his. “A bit close in here,” he said. “You don’t smell anything, do you? Sort of animal smell.” “Why, no, dear, of course not,” said Mrs. Moody. “Imagination, I suppose,” said Moody. “Funny thing if this town went wild one day.”

But Mrs. Moody was a sensible woman, not given to silly fancies. She patted her husband’s shoulder and so fell asleep. But Mr. Moody lay there looking into the darkness.

“Harper’s Magazine” Jun 1927

The Silver Thorn (1928)

THE LITTLE DONKEYS
WITH THE CRIMSON SADDLES

The little donkeys went past the shop-window at eight in the morning and seven-thirty in the evening, punctually, rain or shine.

Miss Pope christened them Percy and Emily. The old man whose donkeys they were she had long ago named Voltaire because he looked wicked, un-Christian and clever – and because she liked literary allusions. One thing she often discussed with Miss Menzies, and that was why, being wicked and clever, he had not advanced further in the world. Miss Menzies suggested drink, and Miss Pope thought it probable.

On the other hand, were it drink he would for sure beat and abuse Percy and Emily, and this he did quite plainly not do, because they were both plump and well cared for. That might be, suggested Miss Menzies, that he kept them in good condition to benefit his business. No one cared to ride skeletons. Miss Pope, who was very thin herself, said that stoutness did no one any good, and Miss Menzies, who was plump like the donkeys, replied that it was greatly a matter of God’s will, although, as Miss Pope knew, she had no very good opinion of the Deity and often enough spoke of Him sarcastically.

Percy, Emily, Voltaire, Miss Pope, Miss Menzies, all lived in Silverton-on-Sea. “When you say lived,” Miss Menzies would sometimes impetuously exclaim, “you are putting it altogether too high – exist is about the word!”

Miss Pope and Miss Menzies had existed together in Silverton for over ten years now. They kept a shop of fancy work and antiquities. The fancy work was very new, the antiquities very old. The shop, when it was lucky, made a profit, and then they went away for a holiday. They had been to the Lake District, Paris, Vevey, the Isle of Man, and Lake Como. On the other years the shop had not made a profit.

Miss Pope was forty-three years of age, tall, bony, a jutting chin, kind, friendly eyes, reserved, sensitive. She loved Miss Menzies.

Miss Menzies was thirty, round, plump, short, dark pretty hair, also kind, friendly eyes, not at all sensitive, and she loved Miss Pope. But she loved Miss Pope less than Miss Pope loved Miss Menzies.

She was – outwardly, at least – more romantic and sentimental than Miss Pope. She thought often of men. Miss Pope never thought of them at all. Miss Menzies had no doubt but that very shortly she would be married. She had thought this now for fourteen years. She had been once engaged. Ten years ago. That had been to a young man in the war, just after she had joined Miss Pope, but the young man had flirted with other girls. “Only his fun,” he had assured her. “Yes, but not mine,” she had replied. She had a hot temper when roused.

Miss Menzies was the lively one. Miss Pope did the business. Miss Menzies was charming in the shop and sold many an article that the purchaser did not wish to buy. When she was gay, she was very gay. Her bad moods never lasted for long. Sometimes she would be deeply depressed. Was this to go on for ever and ever? Of course, she loved Miss Pope, but this stupid old town, this stupid old shop, this stupid unnatural life. After all, a woman was meant to be married. Not every woman, said Miss Pope.

Although, however, Miss Menzies was very gay with men, went to the local dances, smiled and laughed and delighted in compliments, she had a certain deep fastidiousness – just anyone would not do. With everyone there was something the matter.

The life was certainly monotonous. They lived in a little apartment above the shop. This apartment had four rooms, a sitting-room, a bedroom, a bathroom, and a kitchen. The rooms were tiny, but arranged with great taste. Miss Menzies loved possessions and cared deeply for the little Chippendale (half-Chippendale) bureau, the old gilt mirror, some prints from Ackermann’s Microcosm, and the old French clock that had belonged to Miss Pope’s grandfather. Miss Pope cared for these things, too, but chiefly because Miss Menzies cared for them.

The greatest fun that they had was when they went on buying expeditions. They went to London, Canterbury, Winchester, any number of places. They had a little Morris-Oxford which they called after Miss Menzies’ silly uncle, Fortescue.

The position of their shop was very agreeable. It possessed a charming Jane-Austenish bow-window and looked on to the cobbled path that turned down to the sea. From the side windows the sea, in all its glories, its sulks, its rages, and its “comedies” was splendidly visible. In front of the bow-window was the path, a small green common, and the house of a retired lieutenant-colonel. Outside the shop hung a sign with a picture, beautifully painted, of an eighteenth-century street. Over the door was painted in large blue letters: “THE SERENDIPITY SHOP.” No one knew what this meant, but it was out of Horace Walpole’s letters. A very superior London bookseller who dealt only in ancient and priceless editions called his shop by this name.

In the bow-window were arranged a number of enchanting things, brass candlesticks, fire-screens, pewter mugs, brightly coloured samplers, a silver ship, old paste brooches, necklaces, and pins. Miss Menzies loved some of these things so much that it was an agony for her to sell them. For the silver ship indeed she asked so impossible a price that it was still gloriously with her.

Miss Pope and Miss Menzies never quarrelled, because Miss Pope refused to hear of such a thing. At times Miss Menzies would indignantly exclaim that Miss Pope had no feelings, but in her heart she knew that the opposite of this was true. Miss Pope’s feelings were so deep that no trivial dispute was allowed to touch them.

There were occasions when Miss Menzies wished passionately that Miss Pope didn’t love her with such strength and obstinacy. It seemed that nothing could shake Miss Pope’s love for her, which made that love on occasion both unexciting and frightening. Miss Menzies felt that she wasn’t worthy of it.

That she wasn’t worthy of it was no fault of her own. Jane Pope had put all of her force into this one affection, while Alice Menzies allowed hers to spread out over a thousand things – over the silver ship, the Chippendale bureau, the Sealyham puppy next door, the curl of the sea as, on a fine morning, beyond the side window, it slipped back from the shining road, the kindliness of Mrs. Masham the fruiterer, the jolly twin of young Mr. Hexton, with whom she often danced, the touching loneliness and devotion to duty of the two little donkeys – these and many, many other things drew from Alice little impulses of love and tenderness. What she needed was to meet someone who would draw out of her all this love and tenderness to one aim and object, only, unlike Jane Pope, this someone must be a man.

She thought that, after all these years, possibly at last this man had arrived, Mr. Hunting, Mr. Maurice Hunting.

It was twenty minutes past seven of a fine summer morning, and she was standing at the bow-window – waiting for the donkeys to pass. Breakfast and the donkeys synchronised. Half-past seven the year round. They would maybe have had their breakfast at eight in winter-time had it not been for the donkeys, but because the donkeys did not relax they must not.

Although really, when you thought of it, seven-thirty in the morning was ridiculously early for donkeys in the winter-time. No clients would appear before ten. And how few in the winter in any case there must be!

Miss Menzies walked sometimes to the long strip of smooth sand over whose shiny surface Percy and Emily carried their little charges, and on cold, wet days they would look desolate enough – standing bravely there on duty, with their faded crimson saddles, and Old Voltaire, crooked and bent and wicked, staring malevolently out to sea.

No one in the world behaved more finely, more patiently, more decently than Percy and Emily with their soft sad eyes, their faint brown coats, their stubborn ears.

Now, how was Miss Menzies going to behave?

She stood there at the window seeing all the colour, the faint blue sky like a bird’s wing, the clear-sparkling grass of the little green, the poplars over to the right of the colonel’s house swaying musically in the morning breeze, and, through the open window, the hush-hush, the stir-stir of the gentle morning sea.

How was she going to behave? Last Tuesday Mr. Hunting had asked her to marry him. Today she was to give him her answer.

She had said no word as yet to Jane Pope.

Of course she would accept him. There would be no possible doubt. She would have accepted him last Tuesday had not some strange unreasoning caution warned her to wait just for a day or two. He was physically most attractive – the type that she preferred. Not too young (he had told her that he was six-and-thirty), broad and strong, his colour red-brown with health, hair and short toothbrush moustache black, not stout as yet (although he must take care of that), most neat and cleanly in appearance, by profession a doctor with a good practice in Bristol.

He was, he told her, no longer a boy. He wanted a wife who would be a companion, a friend, who would help him in his work – and yet even as he spoke these quite assured words his voice had trembled, he had taken her hand and pressed it quite freely – there was a light in his dark eyes that seemed to speak of something more than a mere desire for companionship. He had fine tastes, too, read the novels of Mr. Galsworthy and the works of Mr. Lytton Strachey, admired the paintings of Sargent, and was a subscriber to the Bristol concerts. He was also a man who played golf – could sail a boat, loved dogs, enjoyed watching Rugby football.

A many-sided man. He had thought too about life, considered that wars were shameful and must be stopped, was a patriot, too, and thought Bolshevism an infernal crime, did not go to church, but yet had religious feelings.

Of course, she would marry him. He was the very man for whom she had for so long been waiting. And yet was she truly in love? Why, at this moment, as she looked out on to the shining grass and heard the rustle of the sea, was she not longing to be caught into his arms; why was it rather of Jane Pope that she was thinking and of all the little things – the little things that had seemed to her for so long to be tiresome, intolerable hindrances binding her to slavery? Why—

Ah! There were the donkeys!

They turned the corner, as they always did, at a little trot. Then, when they came to the stretch of flat with the gleaming green on their right they made a movement in the direction towards it, and then Voltaire, as he always did, switched them back to their proper place.

They paused opposite the bow-window, before resigning themselves to their inevitable duty.

Their crimson saddles – faded long ago with the wind and the rain – gave them their unusual note. Once those saddles must have been grand indeed with their splendid rich colour; even now there was colour enough to place them in a class by themselves. No other donkeys anywhere had saddles like these.

Miss Menzies leaned out of the window and waved to them. Percy and Emily looked neither to the right nor to the left; patiently, with childish dignity they stared down the road.

Then, after a switch of Voltaire’s little stick, on they trotted again.

“Breakfast ready!” cried Miss Pope from the room above. Miss Menzies, sighing, turned away from the window. The moment had arrived. She must deal with it as honestly as she could.

The little sitting-room was very gay in the morning sun, the Ackermann prints smiled behind their glass, the sampler on the wall with its purple flowers and its “Jane Bowl made this” in amber letters, everything welcomed Alice Menzies when indeed she did not want to be welcomed at all, but sat down like a condemned prisoner to her herring.

And Jane Pope at once knew. When you love anyone as deeply as she loved Alice Menzies you know everything.

“What’s the matter, Alice?” she asked in her sharp, kind and rather masculine voice.

“You know Mr. Hunting—” began Alice Menzies.

“Yes,” said Jane Pope, who had met him once.

“He asked me to marry him last Tuesday. Today I’m to give him my answer.”

“Well?”

“Of course I’m going to accept him.”

Jane Pope put down her cup. Alice knew she was trembling; she knew it although she did not look at her. She did not dare to look at her.

But Jane Pope’s voice was quite firm when she said:

“I’m very glad, darling. It’s what I’ve been wanting for you.”

Then, after another pause, she got up, went over to Alice Menzies’ chair, bent over and kissed her. Alice put up her hand and touched Jane Pope’s cheek. They stayed for a moment thus.

Then Jane Pope, moving back to her seat again, said:

“I expect that American woman will be in this morning after those two chairs. She’s got bargains there.”

“She has indeed,” said Alice Menzies. And that was every word that they exchanged on the matter.

•   •   •   •   •

Should not one be happy when one is going to fulfil the desire of one’s heart? The sun is shining, the waters are rolling white-capped on the shore, the skylark is singing above the cornfield, the air is warm with summer scents, it is the day after the heart of all the poets from Syracusan Theocritus to Mr. Wordsworth of Grasmere. In the hollow of the cliff, high over the shore glittering now mother-of-pearl behind the retreating tide, cornfields behind him and wine-purple sea in front of him, Mr. Hunting, passion in his heart and a ring (charming, in excellent taste, three little pearls and a thin gold band) in his pocket, is waiting. Below him are bathing-tents, maidenly in a row like early Victorian ladies; to the left of him along the broad stretch of sand Percy and Emily (their crimson saddles invisible from this distance) are trotting under their infant burdens; above him the cornfields like burnt sugar; everywhere happiness and life and colour. Only Miss Menzies advancing in a dress of pink and white.

He had no doubt of what the answer would be. He was well-satisfied (a state not uncustomary for him). This was all that he needed, a lady, pretty, cultivated, with good taste, to manage his house, charm his friends, assist the growth of his practice, share his bed and bear him two children. Two. A boy and a girl. Percy, after his uncle who, when he died, would leave him money, Emily after his aunt who had left him some money already. He would take that house towards Clifton, the house with the verandah and the garage near the gate. He would—

Alice, as she sat down beside him, wished (Oh, how she wished!) that he had not chosen just this spot in which to make his proposal. Had she thought of it (but when does one think of these things?) there could not possibly be anywhere worse – here where she could see all the familiar things – the little town white and shining in the sun, huddled together so happily as though cosily inviting her congratulation (she so old a friend) at its contentment, the great sweep of purple, green-striped sea, the silver beach, the cornfields and the singing larks. Yes – and then, surely she could see them quite clearly, Percy and Emily trotting bravely, little midgets of patience and determination, to their inevitable destiny.

She had hated all these things. She had regarded them as tyrants holding her to sterility, old-maidhood, failure and negation. But how differently they seemed now that she was about to leave them! And the shadow of Jane, Jane’s nobility and kindliness and love, the touch of her cheek, the unselfish fidelity of her soul, Jane’s shadow hung over all the scene.

Turning to Mr. Hunting, she was forced to confess that he was noble too. Sitting forward, staring at the sea, square and strong, and so very masculine, he seemed indeed a rock – not a rock of Jane’s less romantic kind – a masculine rock with all the masculine allure. His voice, too, was extremely firm and decided.

“Alice,” he said, “I thought you were never coming. I didn’t know how I was going to wait. It has been cruel of you to keep me so long in doubt.”

He took her hand in his. She expected her heart to bound with excitement and joy. It did not. But that was because her eye had been caught by the shining spire of St. John’s Church. St. John’s, where indeed she very seldom went, whose bells, however, seemed to belong to her, to be hers by right of every tiny happening of the last ten years.

“I hope – I mean—” she hesitated. “I’ve been thinking a great deal of what you said. It was kind of you to give me a day or two—”

“That was only fair. You wanted a little time, and so I gave it you. If you had been my patient and you’d wanted a day or two to consider whether you’d have an operation or no, I’d give you time. Of course I would. This is a sort of operation, you know.”

He laughed in a very jolly human way, but she knew at once that her sense of humour was not his. She would never laugh at the things that he would laugh at – or was it that her eye now had travelled to the cluster of red house-roofs that sheltered, as she so thoroughly knew, the market-place? The market-place where on Fridays all the farmers, the dogs, the sheep—

“Well, darling,” his firm voice reminded her, “I want my answer.” Gently (but very firmly) he put his arm round her and drew her close to him. She could smell the stuff of his coat and the scent of a rather strong tobacco. His heart was beating with steady beats. His body, as she realised her contact with it, seemed to be made of iron.

“I want,” she said in a small faltering voice (and her eye now had caught the flag that always flew so bravely in the season from the tower of the little building – the Plaza it was called – where the concerts, the dances, the lectures were held), “to try and explain.”

“To explain?” His hand tightened on hers. “Why, of course; explain away!”

“You see” – and the flag on the Plaza seemed to be waving quite especially in her direction – “I’m not a child any longer. It isn’t as though either of us were children.”

“Quite,” he said, encouraging her.

(The flag above the Plaza seemed to tell her that he had said “Quite” a great many times the other day.)

“And one knows more about life than one did when one was very young, and so one’s more cautious of making a change.”

“Quite.”

“And one’s got fixed into a sort of groove, hard to get out of—”

“Quite,” he said, as she paused.

“What I mean is that I’m not sure even now, after your so kindly giving me these days to think it over, whether I really love you enough—”

“Of course you do,” he answered, laughing the laugh of victory. “Don’t you think I could tell that the first moment we met?”

“Oh, but I don’t think I did love you the first moment we met! Really, you’re a little wrong there. Of course, I liked you, but liking is very different from love, isn’t it?”

“Quite,” he assured her.

Yes, it was different. She knew it as her eyes moved down the line of roofs, all sparkling now like lumps of quartz in the sun, down to the lower, irregular circle of chimneys and windows that covered just the ground where for ten years herself and Jane Pope had been living.

She knew, with a sudden passionate burst of revelation, that she loved that ground; that there, exactly there where gathered together were the chimney-pots, the bow-windows, tables and chairs, pots and pans, dresses hanging on hooks, rows of shoes in cupboard, squares of green grass, thousands and thousands of pebbles, fires and streamers of smoke, eggs on the boil and books behind glass, white-enamelled baths and the Ackermann prints – just there, with their confused collection of oddities, her heart was stirred and moved as – oh, most certainly not! – it was not stirred and moved by Mr. Hunting.

In her distress she turned towards him, and at once Silverton, the beach, the fields, the sea, the sky were excluded and instead there was Mr. Hunting filling all the horizon. Mr. Hunting, so close that she could see the red veins of his cheeks, the short, sharp bristles of his moustache.

As she turned to him, he caught her to him and kissed her.

“There,” he said, “that settles it!”

Had he but kissed her and said nothing about it, it might have been done. She liked the kisses (if truth be told) extremely. But the words offended her liberty.

“Oh, no, no,” she cried; “it hasn’t!”

And her heart cried out to the shining roofs, to the gleaming beach, to the white-capped sea to come and defend her! In a moment she was going to yield. His physical presence was too eliminating. She wanted to be loved by a man, to fling aside her old-maidhood for ever, to be as other women, full of life’s experience, and a living, consciously completed woman. But, oh, she didn’t want to marry Mr. Hunting, to exchange Mr. Hunting for Jane, to suffer his masculine cocksureness, his arrogance, his lack of imagination, to change Bristol and his dull doctor’s house, the monotonous routine of his uninteresting friends, his male self-satisfaction, for Jane’s beauty of heart, her lovely imagination, for the silver ship, the little things of the shop and the flat, the friends, the beloved little town with its crooked streets, its intimate shops, its salty air, its shining reaches of sand and sea. Oh, no! Oh, no!

But she was yielding. Mr. Hunting now had caught her very close to himself. He had kissed her again and yet again, and now he was telling her all about himself – all about his childhood, how he had been considered always the promising one of the family, how his mother had always said that he would go far, and his Uncle Percy, who was also a doctor—

“Percy,” thought Alice Menzies, and her soul for an instant escaped the snarer, her eyes fled outwards, downwards. She saw the sand, now blazing under the sun, and there, brave little heroes, – there they were, trotting for their very lives, Voltaire, a black doll, running at their sides.

“His” Uncle Percy, seeing his ability, had promised to help him. So, indeed, he’d gone from strength to strength; done well at Bart’s (he’d played half-back for the hospital football team), stayed on there as surgeon, then found a small practice in Lambeth. Been there a year or two when his Aunt Emily – (“Emily,” cried Alice Menzies’ soul, and once more she escaped. Now her eyes were fixed on that broad stretch of sand, and she could see how her little friends had come to the end of their journey there; far, far little black toys in the glittering sun) – his Aunt Emily, admiring him as she did, had helped him with money, and he had bought the practice at Bristol. Here had he gone from strength to strength. He might be said, without undue vanity, he hoped, to be now the most promising doctor in Bristol.

People were coming to him from all sides. Why, only last week – here he apologised, lest he should seem to be boasting. He kissed her again. Her soul was caught again. She wanted to be kissed. She wanted to be loved.

And so, he assured her, she would have a wonderful time. He would buy this splendid house with ten bedrooms, garden, garage, and tennis-court. There she should entertain his friends. He knew all the best people in Bristol.

And then – he caught her yet closer to himself – he knew that she would want children. She was that kind of woman. He couldn’t love a woman who didn’t want children. Two, he thought, would be a nice number. Not more than two in these days when living was so costly. A boy and a girl would be splendid, if they only had the luck—

(She was sinking, sinking. Her heart was beating against his. Her hair brushed his cheek.)

A boy and a girl. And he thought, if they were so fortunate, that it would be jolly to call them Emily, after the aunt who had been already good, and Percy, after the uncle who shortly (because he was now seventy-two and had a weak heart) would be.

Percy and Emily! Her heart pounded! She was seized with an hysterical passion of laughter. Percy and Emily! She was out of his arms and, standing there, looking down to the sea, cried:

“Oh, no! Don’t you see? The ridiculous coincidence! Oh, it’s too funny! It’s terribly funny! Percy and Emily! But those are the names of the donkeys. The donkeys – Jane and I have always called them so. And our children – yours and mine. What a silly coincidence! Oh, I’m so sorry! Forgive me!”

For she saw, in the very middle of her laughter, that he was offended, terribly offended.

“Donkeys! Donkeys! Our children!” he repeated, staring at her as though she had gone suddenly mad.

“Yes, I know.” Her breath was coming in little gasps. “It’s the coincidence. There never was anything so absurd. I can never explain, and if I did you’d never see it. It’s only that there are two donkeys – two dear little donkeys—”

“Two dear little donkeys!” he exclaimed. “Forgive me if I don’t see the joke. I was speaking to you more seriously than I’ve ever spoken to anyone in my life, speaking of the most serious things a man and woman can speak of, and—”

“Oh, I know!” She couldn’t now at all control herself. “I know how shocking it is. I’m ashamed. I can’t stop. It’s so silly. Our children – you’re so solemn about them – and then, Percy and Emily running about down there.”

He was growing angry. She saw, in a flash, that he would be angry whenever his vanity was hurt.

“Please explain; I’m sorry if I am slow. I was talking about our children. That seems a joke to you. I don’t understand.”

“Oh, no, it isn’t a joke. Of course they aren’t a joke.” She was struggling to control herself. “It’s because for ever so long Jane and I have watched two donkeys pass our window and their names are Percy and Emily.”

She paused for breath.

“Really, Miss Menzies!” Yes, now he was deeply insulted. “I think you don’t understand me. I’ve always imagined a proposal of marriage was a serious affair, something—”

“Oh, it is, it is! Terribly serious. But that’s the worst of life. Ridiculous things are always breaking in, and if people don’t see the same ridiculous things, think the same ridiculous things, they oughtn’t to marry. I know they oughtn’t.”

“But forgive me – how can I see what’s ridiculous if you won’t tell me?”

“No, but you’d never see. And Jane always sees. She loves the donkeys just as I do.”

“But what donkeys?” Yes, now he was most justly in a rage. “What have these donkeys, wherever they are, to do with our marriage?”

“Nothing. Nothing at all. I apologise. Terribly. It was the coincidence. That our children should have the same names as your uncle and your aunt. Life’s so funny. We’re so absurd, and if you don’t see how absurd we are it wouldn’t do for us to marry. Really it wouldn’t! – I’m sorry,” she went on, with a pang of misgiving. “I’ve behaved abominably. You can’t forgive me, and you’re right.”

She came to him, bent forward, and gently kissed his forehead.

“You’ve been very good to me. You’ve paid me a great compliment. But it would never, never do.”

And, turning, she left him.

At first she scarcely knew the way she went. Then everything stole out and around her, the green slope of the hill over whose breast the late afternoon shadows were now falling, the thick, dark coolness of the oaks, the bright colour of the path that led down to the town, the great sweeps of purple shadow that now lay like islands upon the breast of the violet sea; above all, the sky that glittered with light and into whose great field of faintly rose pearl a piled-up cumulus of ivory cloud was now mounting.

She slipped into the little house. The green shutters had been put up over the bow-window.

She ran straight up to the sitting-room. The lamp with the ivory parchment shade was lit. The table was spread for supper. The French clock struck the quarter.

Jane Pope, who was standing at the window, turned.

Alice, waiting at the door, cried:

“Jane, I’ve refused him!”

“No, no, no!”

“Yes, yes, yes! It never would have done. He had no sense of humour. He suggested – Jane, just think of it! – that our children, when we had them, should be called Percy and Emily.”

“Percy and—”

“Yes. He didn’t know, of course, about our Percy and Emily. How should he? But I laughed, and he was offended, and – there you are! Oh, it never would have done!”

And everything in the room repeated: “It never, never would have done!”

She ran to Jane Pope, clung to her.

“Oh, Jane, I didn’t know. I had never guessed – how good, how sweet all this time you have been.”

So Jane, who had waited for many years, most patiently, had her great moment.

They stood at the open window looking out. The sea lay milky-white, like the smoky glass of a mirror. The sun, very low, lit the green on the other side of the path with a fierce flame. Everything was as still and as gently coloured as a bed of crocus.

Suddenly there was a jingle.

“Oh, the donkeys!” cried Alice. “They are before their time!”

Round the corner they came. Under the window, as usual, they stopped. Then, attracted perhaps by the light of the lamp that was pale against the evening sun, Percy looked up.

For an instant his patient, friendly eyes gazed into theirs. Then, with a twitch of his ear he had turned with Emily hopefully towards the grass.

Once again, as on a thousand earlier days, they were disappointed, and, bending their heads in submission, trotted away round the corner towards home.

“Harper’s Magazine” Jun 1927

The Silver Thorn (1928)

ECSTASY

Yes, yes, it’s interesting that you should ask me that; that sets me talking, because, after all, isn’t it for any man or woman over fifty, that time of life when retrospect begins to take the place of anticipation – isn’t it the interesting question? Whether, I mean, we’ve ever touched in all our experiences that top perfect ecstatic moment that, once proved, justifies the whole of life.

People might suppose that I had known a good many ecstatic moments; men think me a lucky dog, but upon my word, sometimes, lying awake at that awful hour of three in the morning, I wonder why they do. Twenty years of happy married life should be enough, I suppose, but it’s odd now when I look back how the last eighteen years of it, delightful though they were, have blurred the excitement of the first two. You couldn’t have found two more perfectly suited people than Frances and I, suited in every way, tastes, character, sense of humour, everything. And yet I wonder sometimes whether, if we hadn’t quarrelled a bit, struggled, and even perhaps separated and then come together again, there wouldn’t be more now to look back upon. Ungrateful, very, but ecstasy – that’s another matter. And then, as to work, I am considered a success, one of the few poets and critics who make money and are not despised by the high-brows; my book on Coleridge is a standard work, I suppose, and there are poems of mine in all the anthologies; I have been able to start my children well in the world; my collection of water-colour drawings is famous; that Cumberland cottage of twenty years ago has become this house that we’re in now; I have plenty of friends, excellent health. Did you see that pair of tramps this morning, the man with a hunched back, the woman with the sore eyes? You spoke of them as a miserable pair, you were very sorry for them. Is there such a difference between them and ourselves? You were worried badly yesterday by that twinge of lumbago, and last week that article on me in The Fortnightly irritated me for two days at least. Well, fleas for them, lumbago for you, beer at the Knucklebone for them, that Burgundy for you; who is the happier? definite happiness I mean.

It seems to me to level up pretty completely. Oh, I’m not so foolish as to pretend that money and health and friends don’t matter, of course they do, but it’s something beyond that justifies life. If I can explain what I mean, it is as though we were for ever on the edge of a justification, as though we were always saying, “Yes, this is all very well, but if I could only push this a little in that direction and that a little in the other, I’d touch the real thing.” Once would be enough, you know, you can’t expect it to go on for ever; but it’s like this spiritualism business – get one real ghost that nobody can deny and the thing is settled for ever. So with your moment of ecstasy. Granted that even for half a minute you see what life is for, then for the rest of your days life is worth while. Everybody’s had such moments I suppose, only they forget them or mix them up with other moments. It isn’t enough for a moment to be simply perfect of its kind, it’s got to be perfect of all the kinds together.

That was why you interested me when you asked me just now what had been the most perfect moment of my life, and that’s why I’m talking; if I bore you clear out and read a book. Now that you’ve set me on to it I’m going to recover it again.

When you look back it seems at first that there have been a number of times when you’ve tasted life at its very possible best, and then as you look the others fade away and leave you with one or, possibly, if you’re marvellously lucky, with two or three. And often it’s such a tiny thing, in externals I mean. So is this, almost nothing at all, and yet it’s by that half-hour that I estimate life and know that it’s a grand and magnificent affair. There are the other moments, the morning (I was twenty-two) that I got a letter from Henry Galleon, whom I had never met, praising my poem, “The Old Man Euripides,” and then the evening at the theatre in the interval of the Gaiety piece when Frances told me that she loved me, our wedding night at Clovelly, when it rained without ceasing, and I lay awake in the early morning listening to the downpour and marvelling at my happiness, the evening when John was born, the day when I heard that I had won the Murray-Smith prize, our first trip to Egypt, when we arrived on a perfect morning and saw the gods of Abu-Simbel. And so on; there are a number of them, and I am grateful enough for them, but each of his kind, one kind only, although at the time one may have been deceived. I enjoy things, you know, and it doesn’t take much to make me happy. When you look back you are not deceived, those moments are not enough in life, not enough to counteract the disappointments, the pains and angers, failures and mean thoughts. So that I have only known it once, and although there is so little to tell, it may be that you’ve had some experience of your own as trivial as this, and yet as marvellous.

It was years and years ago when I was thirty or so, and had been married for five years. We were as poor as possible, Frances and I, and had rented a little cottage three or four miles from here, over Derwentwater, off the Lake road. It’s gone now; I showed you the place the other day. We had had a wonderful five years, but things were just beginning to get a little criss-cross. You’ve been married yourself, and you know how it is after the first years that you begin to wonder whether something hasn’t gone that you might, if you had been clever, have kept. You don’t realise that it is the universal experience, you put it down to your own personality and a little, to be honest, to hers. You wonder why sometimes you’re peevish, when two or three years ago your character was so admirable; you are irritated by certain little tricks in yourself and by some mannerisms in her that you fancy she could so easily avoid. Then there’s your work. At first it was so wonderful to tell her all about it, she seemed to understand so exactly what it was that you were after, you didn’t mind her criticism, you wanted her to be honest, it was wonderful to have the companionship of a clear intelligent mind; but later you fancy that both in her praise and her blame she is prejudiced. She likes the things she likes because she is fond of you, and being fond of you she surely should understand the things she doesn’t like. If she isn’t sympathetic to your artistic weaknesses, whoever is going to be? and if she’s too sympathetic you feel that she’s indulging you because she doesn’t want to hurt your feelings.

And then there are the children. Wonderful to have them, you love them with all your being, but either they’re with you too much or not enough. You like them to be around you when they’re good, and develop as you want them to develop, but as they grow they show signs of a character that you would never yourself have chosen for them. Their mother sees them in a light that seems to you either too critical or too indulgent; you can’t help wondering whether she is quite as wise about them as you expected her to be.

And then there’s the poverty. It’s all very well to talk about love in a cottage, and you both meant it quite sincerely when, at the beginning, you said that money didn’t matter, but four or five years of just failing to make ends meet takes the edge off things. You have so frequently to talk about money, and the economies that seem wise to you are so often foolish to her. After all, all you want is to be fed and housed in the simplest possible way and then to be left alone, but that same feeding and housing worries her, you can’t but feel, a great deal more than it honestly should. Then, although she never speaks of it, you suspect that she would like you to be a little more popular in your writing. Why not a play or a novel? Something that really makes money. One play that would take you two months to do, and who knows but that financially you’re right for life!

And then there are the relations. Her mother’s a dear and her sister’s charming, but, after all, it is not their business to criticise your life. And they know a side of her that in some odd way is unknown to yourself; they’re always implying that you don’t know her at all, a sort of patronage quite unconscious, of course, but nevertheless irritating.

And then there are the friends. She told you at first she was well aware that many men lost their friends when they married; that should not be your fate, all your friends were hers. But, as it turns out, they’re not; she says very little about them, but she cannot understand what you see in old John or Harry, and they are on their side less frank with you than they were, they suspect that you tell her everything, as, of course, you do, and they are jealous, too, a little, perhaps.

And so the edge is off things, and you wonder sometimes whether it has been worth while. Aren’t you tied down and hemmed in and captured, and how are you going to deal with the next thirty or forty years?

I have never known how conscious was Frances of this gathering change. How can any man tell about any woman, or any one human being tell about any other, for the matter of that, and how especially can anyone tell when he is so conscious of his own change that he has little time left to notice the change in anyone else? In our egotism we take it for granted that the other is changing because we ourselves are. False nine times out of ten, and we know it.

And so there came this morning. I woke, I remember, to one of those pale shadowy days that everyone who knows the English Lakes loves so well. It was the beginning of a warm March, and the birds were singing in fine chorus beyond my window, but singing out of so ghostly and faint a world that they seemed to have no life of their own, but to be the vocal part of that insubstantial air.

I came down to breakfast vaguely dissatisfied, and then, as so often happens, little things pushed themselves forward as though the whole world wanted me to lose my temper. There was a thin discomfort of neuralgia in the room, so impersonal that it was as though the books and pictures had it rather than myself. Frances came in, I remember, full of a kind of cheerful optimism that is the more irritating when you can see no possible reason for it. Then I was worried about a poem, I fancy; like every creator, I have been bothered all my life with a conviction that just round the corner there is the most marvellous work waiting for me to discover it. The irritating thing about this is that you feel as though this work is your own especial property, and that it will wait there until the end of time until you find it. “Drat the thing,” you say to yourself, “if it’s so anxious for me to use it, why doesn’t it take a step towards me?” But it won’t, just hints to you that it’s there, whispers in your ear and then is off again, and you know that if only you could put your hand on it the trick is done, you can say Nunc Dimittis and pass away. Sometimes you fancy you’ve got it, yes, up to the very last moment of complete revelation, and then you see that it is only imitation that you have, and that the game of hide-and-seek is to go on as before.

I had lain awake early that morning, half in dreams, and half out of them, and had had, it had seemed, the whole thing in my grasp. A marvellous poem! But I had not been asleep enough, no “Kubla Khan,” alas, for me, and by breakfast time I had missed it altogether. Frances’ amiable “It’s going to be a lovely day” was exasperating, I saw no chance of it whatever. Then, of course, the post was late. In those antediluvian days we depended upon an aged man on a bicycle who, as he passed through the village a mile below the cottage, greeted all his friends and relations with kindly words and exchanged histories with them. No use to hurry him, he listened to what you had to say, smiled in friendly fashion, and then was later than ever. No use to complain to the Postmaster, who regarded it as a great favour that he should give you any letters at all. But this half-hour, when the post ought to come and did not, shattered the morning into fragments. How can one create immortal things before you know whether in five minutes’ time there will be more bills than you can ever pay, and perhaps one or two of those little letters that coil out of their envelopes like snakes and bite you almost before they’re there?

So the post was late and, when it did come, extremely irritating. Frances had bought two hats in London, and told me nothing about it, and here was the bill, but worse than that, there was a letter from Giles Linder asking me to lend him money. You may remember or you may not, Giles Linder; he is, I think, pretty well forgotten by now, but at that time he had made something of a reputation with his epic “The Colossus.” He resembled “Festus” Bailey in that he had the habit of reissuing his epic every year with additions so that it swelled and swelled, and ultimately, of course, people were thoroughly tired of it. He had some real genius, I think, and the original “Colossus” contained some magnificent lines, but you can’t expect people to go on buying an epic over and over again, although Linder did apparently expect just that. And because people didn’t buy it, he was of course a misunderstood genius, and anything more exasperating than misunderstood genius I have yet to discover. He was not only misunderstood, but also desperately poor, and because he was a genius and because, in his opinion, geniuses were extremely rare, he felt it the duty of all the world to support him. He was older than I, and when I first came on the literary scene it had been wonderful to me to meet him; he was one of the first writers I ever knew. It had seemed at the beginning an honour to lend him money, although I, of course, never had very much of my own. I had thought even at first that he took my loans very much for granted, and he took them with exceeding patronage, regarding himself as so immensely above me, that I was a lucky fellow indeed to be able to assist him. I became very tired of his long lanky body, his pale bulging eyes, and peevish mouth; then as the years passed and “The Colossus” was read no longer, he could talk only about himself. Every time that he saw you, you were given to understand that when “The Colossus” appeared yet once again in a new dress, then you would see! The world would surrender at last, it had been a long time to wait, but genius was like that, and would I lend him twenty pounds?

Nothing could have been more exasperating than to receive just this morning this particular letter. You may say that it was easy for me simply and sweetly to refuse, but Linder had genius, and also no less than eight offspring. I used to be haunted by his silly face, and I did feel that he had something that I had not, but more than that, on this particular morning, as I looked at his sprawling patronising letter, I had an odd conviction that this appeal this time was a sort of test of myself. I had been generous enough in my early days, or if you think generous too large a word, careless will do; if I had any money and someone wanted it, I liked to share it; but I had been conscious of late that I was growing mean. Some justification for it perhaps with a wife and two children and a very small income, but it was a deeper meanness than that. My generous arteries were hardening. It had been in my earlier days one of my pleasantest thoughts about myself that I would share my last crust with anybody, but now, not only with money but with almost everything, I wanted to keep things for myself, and Linder, who belonged to my old days, I felt as I looked at his letter that if I refused him it would be a definite step in a certain direction. If I refused him now, I would never give him anything again, and if I never gave him anything, there would be others who would also be refused; and so it would go on, tightening and narrowing. I saw it, I remember, quite clearly; this morning was a crisis, the events of it, however small they might seem, were in reality momentous; all of us were concerned, my wife, my children, myself, my work. As I looked at his beastly letter, his personality, so peevish, so patronising, so clumsy, seemed to penetrate the room. There was something intensely pathetic about the fellow, something grand too in his obstinate refusal ever to bend himself towards the easier way. Damn it all, why will people be so mixed, and why, when it is all for your good to be persuaded of somebody’s baser qualities, will the others keep breaking in? He wanted twenty pounds; I had had, a week or two before, a piece of unexpected luck; the twenty pounds were there waiting in the bank. If only this letter had come a month earlier I might, with good conscience, have refused him. I could see him standing opposite me watching me with that supercilious smile: “Of course, my dear fellow, if you haven’t got it, why, don’t bother,” and then definitely, with that refusal, he seemed to know that I had slipped one step further into the narrow dark chamber of selfish middle age.

Then Frances came in. She knew quite well that she oughtn’t to interrupt me in the middle of my morning’s work, but on this occasion she was excited because some silly woman had written to her, and in her letter had told her that she had enjoyed immensely some poem of mine. If there is one thing in the literary life more irritating than another it is to be praised by people whose taste you despise. I don’t think that this is altogether arrogance, it is possibly a kind of inverted humility. You feel a great apprehension; you say to yourself, “My God, if she likes my work it must be bad indeed!” Any praise makes one suspicious of oneself, only criticism is truly reassuring. I was irritated that Frances, who had known me so long, could understand me so little and fancy that this would please me.

And then she would go on; she should have seen in the first moment that the mere mention of Mrs. Smith or Mrs. Jones as an excited backer for me was humiliating, but she didn’t. I told her; I said something like this, “For God’s sake shut up. I don’t care what the wretched woman thinks; I’d much rather she disliked my work than liked it”; and then Frances said something like this, “Why, you’re becoming quite conceited”; and I answered back, “That’s exactly what I’m not. If anything in the world is going to make me humble it’s that woman and others like her thinking my work good.” Then Frances wore that obstinate look, the most irritating of all to a husband; you know it, when the wife says nothing, smiles, pretends to be all amiability, hurries on to some other topic and is repeating to herself all the time with self-satisfied pride, “I’m right, and you jolly well know it.”

Then I went on: “Well, whether I’m conceited or not I’d like to know how many more hats you’re going to buy without telling me.” This wasn’t as a rule Frances’ way, she was wonderfully good about bills, and in those days when we were so poor she watched every penny. It wasn’t as though the hats had been very expensive either.

She was terribly distressed; she had meant to tell me but she had forgotten. She had seen them in a window, and she didn’t know what had possessed her, it was as though someone had forced her in, but she didn’t want to excuse herself, it had been very very wrong of her; and while she talked I remembered certain private expeditions of my own, some first editions, a Browning manuscript, a Cotman drawing. I was ashamed of myself and so the more angry with her, and I did the stupidest thing in the world, I said nothing.

And meanwhile temper was rising everywhere, the room was full of it, all the furniture was indignant, whether at herself or at me I couldn’t be sure. There was especially, I remember, an armchair near the fireplace that positively glared at both of us. I was beginning to lose my control, I wanted to do ridiculous childish things, I wanted to scatter all the papers on my table into the air, take the books out of the shelves and throw them on to the floor, to hurl something at the window and see the glass go crashing into a thousand fragments. And all the time something was saying to me, “This is a crisis; lose your temper this morning and all kinds of things will happen, there will be no end to the consequences.” Indeed, it is one of the remarkable things about the life together of any two people that tiny means can produce irreparable results, a squabble about the cooking or a bill and suddenly you are both launched into new and most perilous waters. You don’t know where you are, you don’t recognise one another, you say things you have often thought but have determined never to utter, and then, carried forward, you say things that you have never thought, untrue, dreadful, devastating things; you lust for revenge, you must wound at all costs, wound the more deeply because you love so deeply. Things once said have a dreadful habit or going on and on into endless time.

So this morning we were on the edge of anything. Who knows but that if it had gone the wrong way Frances and I might never have found one another again, so strange, so mysterious, so lonely are human beings, so sadly at the mercy of their meaner selves. But to control myself, without thinking of what I was doing, I wrote at my table, Frances, half tender, half defiant, standing there watching me. What I wrote I didn’t know. I was quite busy for five minutes, then looking around me as though I had come out of a sleep, I said, “Good heavens, I’ve given Linder that money.” And so I had; I had written him a very polite letter saying that I was delighted to help him, that I hoped that he would come and stay sometime, that I was looking forward eagerly for the next version of “The Colossus,” and then I had actually taken my chequebook out of my hip pocket, written a cheque and placed it inside the letter. I was just going to enclose it in an envelope. “Good heavens,” I said again, “I have given him the money.” “What money?” she asked, smiling. Then at her smile I laughed. “It’s the oddest thing,” I said. “Linder, the poet, I had a letter from him this morning asking for twenty pounds. I was determined not to send it to him and now I have. I will tear the cheque up.” “No, don’t,” she said, “then I won’t feel so bad about the hats.” “But I don’t want to send it,” I answered, “we can’t afford it.” “Send it,” she said. I slipped the letter into the envelope and fastened it up.

Already a long way off I could feel the relief coming. We had turned into the right road instead of the wrong one by the merest chance, the silliest accident, but a long way off as though it were seven miles distant in Keswick I could feel happiness approaching me like a sunburst from the clouds that you can see dappling the distant plains, then slowly, elaborately moving in your direction.

Then the next thing happened. John, our boy, burst in (although he knew that he should not). “Oh,” he cried, “there’s such a funny old man in the garden!”

I went out into the misty garden. In those days the cottage stood on a little platform from which there descended a winding path to the road. Leaning on the gate and looking up at us with a roguish smile was a stout old man in a very faded frock-coat. It would be the right thing at this point to make the old man mystical and mysterious; there have been dozens of such old men in English and Irish fiction, old men with flowing white beards and strong voices who talk about the streams and the hills and vanish at a moment’s notice into the clouds. This was not such an old man at all, he was a thorough old rascal, and yet, so strongly does he stand out for me as a symbol of this wonderful moment in my life, that, upon my word, as I look back to him I find it hard to believe that he wasn’t clothed in rainbow colours and had a large white cloud on his head. As a matter of fact there is almost nobody in my life whom I remember more vividly. His was the fat of a tall strong man run terribly to seed, he was clothed in a very shabby frock-coat and ragged trousers, and he wore on his head a dirty floppy black hat. Liquor was no stranger to him, as his nose betrayed. His face was an engaging mixture of slyness and cunning dishonesty, but his impudent smile was rather engaging. “Well, what do you want?” I asked him, and as I spoke to him I was conscious again of this strange distant happiness approaching like a sunlit cloud. He didn’t apparently want very much, in fact a copper or two and something to eat would satisfy him, and also if I had an old pair of trousers he would be very grateful. But he didn’t stop there. Oddly enough I had the impression that I had known him before and he spoke to me as though he knew me intimately. As he talked about his hardships, the extraordinarily hard luck that always pursued him, the injustice of everyone and everything towards him, the way that things were always going wrong just when you would have supposed that they were going right, I had the strangest sense that it was myself that was talking to me. A catalogue of miscellaneous odds and ends seemed to gather around us, old clothes, doss houses of a very melancholy kind, mugs of beer, hayricks, London streets at night, dogs with kettles tied to their tails, slatternly women, and ever-watchful, ever-persecuting policemen. I had known all these, or if I hadn’t known them it was the merest chance that I had missed them; it was as though I were moved all the time to say to him, “Hurry on from these, you’re only telling me what I know.” His confidential manner as he leaned on the gate and leered at me was disgusting, but it was disgusting in just the same way that some of one’s own confidences to oneself, confidences that one hopes no one dreams of one’s having, are revolting. “Well, come along,” I said. We walked up the crooked path to the lawn and a comic figure he was with that slouching shambling gait common to everyone who has been for a long period in conflict with the law. I began to feel extraordinarily jolly and filled with relief, the sort of relief one knows when one wakes up from a bad dream and finds that it hasn’t been true. And as I followed him I felt more strongly than ever that it was myself that I was following, the self that I had suddenly been able to relieve myself of, something like Christian when he flung off his pack.

On the lawn were Frances and the two children, and, most remarkably, they greeted the old man with delight. This was the more astonishing, because Frances had a deep horror of tramps; if there was one thing in her mind against the cottage and our life there, it was that it offered a dreadful temptation to tramps, and whenever I had to go away, she lived in mortal fear until my return. John and Peter, the two boys, behaved to him as though he were a friendly dog just given to them as a companion. He stood and looked about him. “Well, you ’ave got a nice little place ’ere,” he said, and suddenly I realised that that was true; it was as though for years I had not been able to make my mind up about the cottage, and that now it was decided once and for all. I had a lovely little place and I was right to be proud of it.

From our little lawn there was a beautiful view over Derwentwater; there was the lake framed by the trees of the park and beyond them a little collection of fields and cottages and woods, all toy-like and of different colours, and behind these the hills, Blencathra and the shoulder of Skiddaw, not, of course, mountains by your Italian and Swiss standards, but all the more friendly and intimate because they were not unhuman giants, but near enough to you to take a beneficent interest in all that you did. While I looked beyond the lake the sun broke through the mist and the little toy-like fields and cottages came out suddenly into bright burnished colours. The sun swept in and out of the mist and the colours vanished and returned and vanished just as though someone were laying down coloured carpets one after another to see which would be best. The lake in the foreground was silver-grey and quite still. “Well, you ’ave got a nice little place,” the nasty old man said again.

And then the silliest things happened: we all of us, Frances, myself and the children, seemed to be seized with a ridiculous, fantastic, unreasoning gaiety. The children danced about the lawn, or rather Peter, being only two and a half, tumbled and rolled, shaking with excitement. The old man showed no surprise at our behaviour, he seemed to think it quite natural, but he gently hinted that if we had any clothes or food in the place he would be grateful for small mercies. Then Frances excelled herself. Why, of course we had, “Come along to the kitchen,” and the old man came along, and again I felt as though it were myself who was going to be fed. Once in the cottage we certainly lost our heads; we pressed everything we could think of upon him. He sat down at the kitchen table and ate and drank as though there were no end to his appetites, which I am ready to believe was true. “You’re in luck,” he said to me, nodding with his mouth full, “to ’ave all this; you might ’ave been like myself, ’omeless.” And so I might, and what was more, I seemed to feel that this very morning if I hadn’t been careful I might have taken a turn which would have led me at the last into precisely his position. He seemed, as I looked at him eating, to grow more and more like my possible self. I am stouter, of course, now than I was then, but a little lack of soap, a little more beer, one or two yieldings to weaknesses of which I was then conscious and then the pursuit of the law, and it was just this that I would become. I was eager now to do anything for him. I hurried upstairs and searched among my clothes. When anyone had asked me for old clothes I had always thought it difficult to discard things; it is true that I had given up an old suit, but who knows whether I might not want it again, it was quite a good suit still. I realised now as I rummaged how tightly I had been clinging of late to anything that I possessed, and yet I had fancied myself quite as generous as any other man. But now I found all sorts of things, shirts and pants and trousers, and piled them in my arms and came down with them eagerly into the kitchen as though I had just found a fortune.

The old man took everything without surprise and without excess of gratitude. He seemed to feel that he had every bit as much right to them as I had myself, and I am sure that he had. Frances made them into a parcel, and when at last he had eaten and drunk to the human limit, we came out on to the lawn again. A beautiful scene. The sun had conquered, and the whole land was flooded with its glory; everything was so bright that it almost dazzled your eyes. One of the glories of the English Lakes is the sound of running water; down the face of the russet-coloured hill on which was our cottage, streams were always tumbling, but I had grown so used to them, I suppose, that I had lost their melody; now it came as new music whispering, chuckling, all in harmony with an irresistible rhythm of happiness and freedom. The lake was a glass of blue, and in it were reflected the purple shadows of the islands and the dark ebony shadows of the woods.

The old man, clutching his parcel and jingling in his pocket money that I had given him, bid us good-day in very nonchalant fashion. He was in no way grateful to us, he knew quite well that he had given us more than we had given him. So I watched one of my future selves slope down the road, and vanish, thank God, for ever out of sight. I turned to Frances and she to me; we saw one another again as when we first met, a truer vision than all the dimmed and unadjusted patterns that daily life had formed for us so often since.

I put my arm around her and we stood listening to the streams bathed in the wonderful beauty of that morning. “Oh, let’s keep this,” she said, turning to me, “this is true.” “Yes, it’s true,” I answered her, “the only truth.”

And we never lost it afterwards. Things, of course, were difficult and disappointing again and again, but we would sometimes say to one another, “Remember the dirty old man that ecstatic morning!” and often afterwards, when I would see her tired or plain or just commonplace because of so much daily contact, I would hear the old man as though he were whispering in my ear: “Well, you ’ave got a nice little place!”

The days that make us happy make us wise.

All about nothing, you see, or all about everything! I have a very virtuous aunt, and if I had told her this little story she would have said, “But of course! It was all because you gave that poor man a cheque.” But it wasn’t. Linder wrote and said that twenty pounds wasn’t nearly enough, and he wondered how I could be so mean to an old friend, and that he would like fifty.

But he didn’t get it.

“Harper’s Bazaar” Oct 1928

The Silver Thorn (1928)

A SILLY OLD FOOL

I

A number of years ago the Canons of Polchester Cathedral were considerably the worse for wear. Four of them were lame, and hobbled up the nave on Sundays, tapping with their sticks as though “the beggars were coming to town” at last; old Canon Marsh was stone deaf, and Canon Marshall suffered from a perpetual cold, so that his sneeze and his cough were real features of Polchester life.

But the worst of them all was Canon Morphew. It was not that he had anything specific the matter with him; he simply gave the impression of infirmity. He had been a Canon in Polchester for ever and ever; nevertheless he was under sixty, and his reputation for age was based very largely on his obvious failure to look after his appearance and keep himself neat and respectable. The more tender-hearted in Polchester said: “Poor old man, he has no one to look after him.” The more cynical and callous said: “Bah, he’s a silly old fool.” That, for instance, was what Mr. Charles Beaufort said. Charles Beaufort was one of the glories of our town. His physical appearance was splendid – strong, well-made, coloured just the right brown and red, dressed by a tailor in Saville Row, London, known to be a most successful speculator, and owning the handsomest house, garden, motor-car and wife in Polchester. What contrasts life presents! Canon Morphew and Charles Beaufort! One would scarcely have supposed the same planet could have contained the two of them. Beaufort with his jolly smile, his fresh-tanned countenance, hair a little grey above the temples, his walk confident and happy, his chest superb, no sign of a stomach and steady at the knees, and Canon Morphew ill-shaved, his black coat shining and dusty, his nose too large, his eyes always damp as though he were about to shed tears, and a long, rambling body that seemed to be in perpetual struggle to pull itself straight.

Naturally Beaufort said he was “a silly old fool.” He said it in a kindly, friendly fashion, as one might speak of a pathetic monkey behind the bars at the zoo, or an old mongrel chased down the street with a can tied on to its tail. Beaufort, in fact, was a kindly man. Why should he be otherwise, when he was so completely satisfied with himself and all that was his? “It’s a good world,” he would say, stretching out his limbs luxuriously. “A damned good world.” He had rather a contempt in general for the clergy. What he liked was “a man of the world.” Now no one could say that clergy as a whole were “men of the world.” Only once had Polchester possessed as Canon a man of the world, and that, of course, was Canon Berrison of glorious memory who defeated Archdeacon Manning on that famous battlefield where … but that is another story, and belongs to the early ’nineties.

Beaufort always thought it a humorous thing that his lot should have been cast in a cathedral town, but that was, of course, because he had derived most of his splendour and affluence from the clay works near Rafiel, and if you had to spend your days in Glebeshire you might as well spend them in Polchester. He ran up to town frequently, and he would make them roar with laughter at the club as he described the Canons, Canon Marsh and his deafness, Canon Marshall and his cold, Canon Woods and his asthma, and so on. His best character-sketch, however, was undoubtedly Canon Morphew. “You should see the old fool,” he would cry, scarcely able to speak for his merriment, “his legs one way, his arms another, trying to blow his nose and blowing his left ear instead. Of all the silly old fools…!”

It was not altogether true that Canon Morphew had no one to look after him; he had his housekeeper, Mrs. Bartholomew. I don’t know that Mrs. Bartholomew was much of a hand at looking after people, a grizzly, dirty, horn-fisted old woman of nearly seventy; a severe Methodist with very limited ideas of cleanliness and order. She had been in Canon Morphew’s service for twenty years, or, rather, as the wits in Polchester used to say, he had been in hers. That was the reason, perhaps, why Canon Morphew never invited people to his house. Mrs. Marsh had once been to tea with him, and she said that the way that Bartholomew (she was always known as Bartholomew tout court) spoke to him was terrible to hear. Mrs. Marsh was quite frightened and was very sorry for the poor man – however, with a “silly old fool” like that what could you expect?

One morning, at breakfast, just before leaving for his office in the Cury (the smartest office in Polchester), Beaufort told his wife that he had seen the old man the evening before, toiling up the High Street, on his way home, in a gale of wind and rain. “You never saw such a sight, my dear. Struggling with his umbrella and then it blew inside out. You should have seen him stop and look at it, and then shake his fist at it. I don’t mind betting he hasn’t got the money to buy a new one.”

Now Mrs. Charles Beaufort was a tender-hearted woman – that is, so long as her tender heart didn’t lead her into any very difficult and awkward places. She was sentimental, and her eyes would fill with tears when a band played or when she read in the paper about a man ill-treating a dog, or when she heard that a friend was going to be married. She was a large, handsome woman with an iron bosom and gay bright clothes and a happy manner. “I do like Mamie Beaufort,” many people said, “she’s always happy.”

She was happy indeed, but then she also found it difficult to realise very actively the situation of anyone not Mrs. Beaufort. She had a perfect digestion, plenty of money, no children, and a Pekingese. She also collected old china.

She was, however, really distressed by her husband’s description of poor Canon Morphew. She thought about it several times that morning, and in the afternoon she did an amazing thing. She went to see him. She could not think afterwards why she did it. As she said to one of her friends next day, “My dear, you may laugh at me as much as you like. It was just one of my impulses. Sometimes when I’m moved there’s no knowing what I’ll do. I’m like that. Charles has said to me over and over again, ‘Mamie, I believe you’d collect all the lame dogs and help them over all the stiles in Europe if you could.’ One can’t help one’s nature, I suppose. But really I’m afraid sometimes where it will lead me.”

It led her on this occasion to Canon Morphew’s house, and the moment she was inside she wished she was outside again. She did not know what she proposed to do. She could not offer to buy him a new umbrella; besides, umbrellas were expensive. She thought at first she would ask him to come and see her, but then when she saw him standing, trembling, in front of her, “she thought she really couldn’t.” And the house! He lived in one of those old houses at the back of the Close, those old houses all piled together like a maniac’s dream, crooked and tumbling and shabby but so picturesque from the river walk far beneath them that they are always pointed out to our visitors as “the really old part of the town.” Mrs. Beaufort seemed to fall at once into a medley of dirty books and tattered papers. She was shown by the frowning Bartholomew into the study, a little room on the ground floor with grimy windows looking out on to the wall of the next house. Here she stood nervously, like Venus rising out of a sea of newspaper. Old bookcases ran up to the ceiling, and on their shelves were piled the dustiest most ancient books – books without covers, huge tomes in faded calf, soiled and battered remnants of ancient libraries. The newspapers, tied up in great bundles with dirty pieces of string, stood piled up upon the floor, and in the middle of them floated an ancient bureau, its little drawers choked to suffocation with bundles of papers. Dust filled the air so that Mrs. Beaufort coughed and coughed again. Really! What was she about? She determined to retire as soon as possible.

It was, however, worse when the Canon stood in front of her. He was plainly so terrified by her visit that it was an agony to look at him. He stared at her, moving restlessly on his legs, gazing at her with his mouth open, speechless. She said what she could – she thought that she would call. She had only a moment, but she wondered whether he knew about the bazaar they were to have in August for the Sailors’ Orphanage? His face fell. A look of real disappointment hovered about his mouth. She saw that he had supposed she had come for himself, and himself alone; at that she was touched, really touched, so that she forgot the dust and the books and the newspapers, and became for at least five minutes the kind, generous-hearted woman that she might really have been had she not married Charles Beaufort.

She assured him that she had not really come for the subscription; she had come also for himself. She felt that it was really a shame that they should be in the same town all those years and not know one another. She had met the other Canons at the Dean’s, the Archdeacon’s and all the other places, but she had never seen him at any tea-party. He was a great student, she supposed. She looked round at the books. What a lot he must have read and – and – she paused. What could she say next?

Shyly, with terrible embarrassment he begged her to come upstairs. He had not intended his housekeeper to show her into this untidy room. He was afraid that the dust – desperately he bolted out of the room and led the way of the crooked stairs. In the sitting-room things were better. This really might have been a pretty room had there been someone to look after it properly, with its bow-window hanging out over the river and its broad fireplace and good square shape. But, of course, it was in a terrible mess. Two pictures, old prints of Polchester, hung crookedly on the walls, there were some old, rather handsome chairs, and a desk with a glass bookcase on top of it.

Mrs. Beaufort sat on one of the chairs and Canon Morphew on another. He begged her to excuse him; he had been taken by surprise; there should be some tea in a moment … that, however, she prevented. No, please – no tea for her on any account. She must positively go in a moment. She had promised Mrs. Dean – just five minutes to admire his charming view. The owner of the view was engaged in the desperate business of trying to make himself decent for his visitor without her noticing what he was about, making a furtive dash at a mysterious spot here and a blind snatch at a piece of cotton there, and a hurried rub of the knees or the waistcoat. Between these raids at his person he gazed at her open-mouthed and tried to think of something to say. She had never in all her experience found conversation so difficult; she struggled and struggled like a person who finds himself at the very edge of a precipice and catches on to any piece of earth that will save him.

Then she thought of Mrs. Mander. She thought of Mrs. Mander because she was in Mrs. Beaufort’s view just as incongruous a figure as Canon Morphew.

“You know Mrs. Mander, don’t you, Canon Morphew?” she asked.

“Oh – ah – yes – quite so,” he gasped.

Mrs. Mander was one of our Polchester widows, a woman of about fifty, shy, awkward and unhappy, longing to be married again, but, being plain and unattractive, with very little means, she lingered on in her widow’s weeds. She was not “quite a lady,” and Mrs. Beaufort, when she met her, patronised her with an amiable vigour that left the poor woman pale and trembling. Mrs. Beaufort, having mentioned her, was bound to continue, so on she went quite recklessly and simply to fill up the horrible gap.

“I do like her,” said Mrs. Beaufort. “I think you’d like her, Canon Morphew, if you knew her.”

“Perhaps – perhaps,” said the Canon.

“She likes you very much. Only the other day she was saying how clever she thought you were. I assure you she did. She’s more intelligent than she seems. I think she appreciates you more than you know. But she’s shy. We women – you know what we are!”

The Canon didn’t know what they were at all, but he said, “Ah – yes.”

“You should go out a little more,” said Mrs. Beaufort, rising. “I’ll ask you and Mrs. Mander to meet. You’ll come if I invite you, won’t you?”

“Ah – yes,” said the Canon.

Then with many friendly smiles Mrs. Beaufort departed, shaking very literally the dust off her pretty and expensive shoes.

“Mind you come and see me, Canon,” she gaily insisted, wagging her little finger at him.

On the way home she considered:

“Now whatever did I tell that lie for? Mrs. Mander has never mentioned him, poor soul.” Then at the thought of those two curiosities together she gave one of her little twinkling laughs, “like a silver bell,” an admirer had once said. So, well-satisfied, she went in to her tea.

II

Canon Morphew was left in a bewildered state; for the rest of that day he was unequal to his work, and would break off continually from his investigations into the real meaning of the second chapter of the Revelation of St. John the Divine to consider Mrs. Beaufort’s brilliant figure, her gleaming dress, her silver laugh and the soft warm pressure of her hand. But why, why, why had she come to see him? She, leader of fashion and society as she was, was not the kind of woman to pay unnecessary visits to shabby old men – for that he was a shabby old man the Canon had no doubt at all. All the evening he considered this matter, and then just as he took off his brown woollen dressing-gown and was prepared to climb into bed it struck him. Of course, she had come as an emissary from Mrs. Mander.

As that wonderful thought truly presented itself to him he blushed all over his body. He lay on his back looking up at his spider-webbed ceiling and indulging in the happiest dreams he had ever allowed himself. All his life he had had a tendency in this dangerous direction of dreaming, and all his life he had checked himself. Very early in his career he had decided that he was a plain, ugly fellow, and that no woman would ever look at him; he had been always shy and bashful, but the thought of his ugliness was a real agony to him. Very wrong in a servant of Christ to think of his body, but what he would have given for his nose to be a little smaller, his eyes a little brighter, his ears a little less red, or to have in any degree at all that capacity for making oneself smart and handsome that some young fellows so casually possessed. And he liked women! He had always hoped in those early days that he would soon be married. It seemed possible then. He was a clever fellow, gained a scholarship at Emmanuel, Cambridge, won a double first, and then joined Bishop Walters at Polchester. His future seemed as though it might be a brilliant one; he had an especial talent for Greek texts and a very fair dialectical ability. Bishop Walters considered him one of his most promising men. And then it all faded away. How it faded no one exactly knew, but fade it did. Women laughed at him, or he fancied that they laughed. He aged very quickly, bending over crabbed texts and tearing the heart out of musty old folios. Then conversation never came easily to him. He was always a little deaf, and if several people were talking at once he found it difficult to catch the right threads. Above all, there was his natural diffidence, his real deep modesty, his sense of his uncouth ugliness, his true belief that everyone he met was better and wiser and more attractive than he. Also he was poor, having no private means. Nevertheless for many years he thought and thought about marriage, considering how delightful it would be to have children, and how he would teach his boy Latin and Greek and see him swim in the Pol.

Well, the day never came. Bartholomew came instead, and after Bartholomew’s arrival he put his dreams into a deep hole in the garden of his mind, covered them up, and stamped them down and refused to look at them again.

Nevertheless in two short sentences Mrs. Beaufort had managed to scatter the soil, dig up the dreams and present them to their owner as fresh as when they were buried. He struggled, he fought, he said that his time was past for such things – all of no avail. He was caught, he was caught! Mrs. Beaufort had indeed mentioned the one woman above all others likely to seize the Canon’s imagination. Mrs. Mander was quiet, orderly, decent, of a good age, without pretensions, kindly, he was sure. He had always liked to look at her in the cathedral, sitting so quietly there, saying her prayers as though she meant them and listening to the sermon with real attention. Oh, she was a religious woman, there was no doubt! – a true, religious woman. He had never spoken to her, but he had fancied that on the Sundays when his sermon came round she had been especially attentive, and he had thought of her afterwards and wondered whether she had noticed this or that point that he had made. And then Mrs. Beaufort had said that she admired him. Mrs. Beaufort would not be likely to lie about it. Why should she? Oh, no! There was something in it, there was indeed. And then he was not so old, only fifty-nine. He must brush himself up a bit, shave more carefully, have his hair cut more frequently. He would order a new suit and buy some new boots.

He began at once to clear the study a little, to put away some of the newspapers and arrange the books. Bartholomew, her suspicions already roused by the eccentricity of Mrs. Beaufort’s visit, watched his effort with a dark malignity.

The very next morning he met Mrs. Mander. He met her in the High Street. When he saw her he felt as though he had been talking to her for weeks, so much had he been thinking of her during the last two days. He stopped and smiled, and she stopped too, looking at him with that shy timidity so attractive in her.

“Oh, I beg your pardon,” he stammered “I – I – Mrs. Mander, I think.”

“Yes,” she said.

“You’ll think it very strange,” he continued, “very odd – but – ah – you’re walking this way?”

She said “Yes” and they walked up the steep High Street together.

He was inspired. He had suddenly lost his shyness and hesitation. “I’ve seen you so often in cathedral, Mrs. Mander,” he said. “You’re a very regular attendant. Ours is a wonderful cathedral, is it not?”

Oh, it was a wonderful cathedral she agreed. She couldn’t tell him how wonderful she thought it, and how much it had done for her. She didn’t think she could have pulled through had it not been for the cathedral. It had been such a friend to her. Oh, such a friend!

Quite so. He nodded his head. He understood it exactly. He felt that himself. Sometimes one was – well – a little lonely, perhaps, and – and – well, there was the cathedral.

She agreed. It was just that. One was lonely sometimes, and what a relief to have that cathedral to go to!

They had reached the entrance to the Close. It was a wonderful summer morning, and the green grass flared in the sun. Such a day, wasn’t it? Yes, real summer at last! Quite hot – delightful – good morning – good morning. And so they went their several ways.

III

To Canon Morphew that night the world was a changed place. You may say that it is not likely that an old gentleman of nearly sixty would be so romantic as to allow one conversation with an elderly widow to alter his views of the world, but I say to that, that one is never too old to snatch at a chance and never too hopeless to believe in a sudden gift from heaven. The Canon had indulged in dreams all his life, but of course he had divulged them to nobody.

He lay awake that night and thought of Mrs. Mander. The more he thought of her the more he liked her, and the more he thought her the proper wife for himself. He got up suddenly out of bed, lit a candle and looked at himself in the looking-glass. As he stood there in his night-shirt, the breezes flowing about his bare legs, he really thought that he was not so bad. He had an interesting face, arresting. When he brushed his thin grey hair back from his forehead he was greatly improved. Of course, his nose was large, but it looked much larger when he hadn’t shaved, and he determined now to shave with the most scrupulous care.

He wasn’t really so old. What was fifty-nine in these days? He had been worrying too long over old books in dusty corners. He must take exercise, go for walks, and even perhaps play golf. It looked an easy game. It was called “an old man’s pastime.” He returned to bed not so ill-satisfied with himself. She had said “Yes!” and “No!” so modestly, just looking up at him and then dropping her eyes again. Oh, he could love her very dearly! He had wanted someone to love for so long, and he was the sort of man who knew how to love, were he only given a chance. He had very happy dreams that night.

Next morning he was quite severe with Bartholomew. He told her that he wanted the rooms dusted. Dust the rooms! And who was to dust the rooms? There was the woman who came every day – he supposed that she came in to do work of some kind or another. How did she earn her money? Bartholomew stared at him with an astonished anger. What had happened to the old fool? Here had she been all these years working him into a proper condition of apathy and submission, and here he was suddenly showing signs of life and energy. This would never do!

“Of course, sir,” she said, standing over him, arms akimbo, “if you’re not satisfied, I must go. I won’t say that I ’aven’t worked for you ’ard all these years – it wouldn’t be fair to meself not to say that – worked my fingers to the bone, some might say I ’ad, and never a word of thanks ’ave I ’ad for it – but there, them as expects gratitude in this world will be disappointed and they may as well make up their minds to it.”

“Nonsense, woman,” he interrupted her. “I only want the rooms dusted. It ought to have been done long ago.”

Woman, indeed! She would never forgive the old fool so long as she lived. Woman, indeed! He should pay for that word. She went away intent upon revenge.

It happened that after this he met Mrs. Mander nearly every day; quite by chance too. He wondered that it had not happened long ago. They always had now a little walk. She did not say very much; a silent woman, silent through modesty, he supposed; but he found himself talking to her with a wonderful readiness and spontaneity. The following Sunday saw the beginning of his sermon month. He prepared that sermon as he had never prepared a sermon before. He wrote every line of it with his eye upon Mrs. Mander. The subject was Brotherly Love, and he felt that it was really the most daring thing that he had ever done in his life. He pointed out, in the course of it, that we must never be unprepared to meet affection in most unexpected places, and that when we did meet it, we should respond to it, and see that we did not treat it harshly. There never could be too much love in the world, and it would be a serious matter for us if we rejected it when it came our way. He would like to have spoken to her after the service, but he had no opportunity. He did meet Mrs. Dean in the cloisters, and he was surprised at his volubility and easy manner. Mrs. Dean, though small in stature, had a terrifying manner, and he had been always paralysed in her presence. Today he was so gay and bright that she said to the Dean at luncheon that she was afraid that Canon Morphew was really beginning to break up. Couldn’t the bishop find him a living in the country? He was becoming so strange in his manner that really she was afraid that one day soon there’d be a scandal.

Now the question was, What was the next step to be taken? The matter must not be too long left unsettled or Mrs. Mander might be snatched up by someone else. That was now the Canon’s nightmare. He regarded everyone over forty with the eye of incipient jealousy. No one was too old or too ugly to escape his suspicions. He saw Mrs. Mander in the High Street talking to Canon Smart, and although Canon Smart was married yet you never could tell. But especially was there one figure who roused the Canon’s apprehensions; this was the figure of Mr. Prout, the master of the Choir School. Mr. Prout was about fifty years of age and a bachelor; he lived with his sister. He was a fat, pale-faced man with round legs and arms and a little waxed moustache. Not an attractive man, surely! He had a high treble voice like a girl’s and a silly little laugh. Nevertheless his strength was that he was immensely musical. He could play the piano like Paderewski, the fiddle like Kubelik, and the organ like the man (or was it woman?) in Sir Arthur Sullivan’s famous song. Mrs. Mander liked music and had told the Canon that she sometimes stepped into the cathedral and sat at the back of the nave “just to hear the organ practising.” The Canon trembled when he thought of this lure offered by Mr. Prout. He would have learned some musical instrument himself had there been time or any sign of musical ability. Alas, there was neither of these things. He could not tell one tune from another.

It was obvious then that he must move quickly. The Horticultural Show presented itself suddenly as an unrivalled opportunity.

IV

The Horticultural Show is, or, rather, was, in our town the great event of the summer. The finest Horticultural Show in Glebeshire, and we were rightly proud of it. Granted the weather was fine, nothing could be more delightful. We called our band the Blue Hungarian Band, we put on our most beautiful clothes, and we had a dance in the evening. Canon Morphew had never been to a Horticultural Show in his life; he had the vaguest idea as to what a Horticultural Show might be. Nevertheless he knew that it was a gay affair in which gentlemen walked with ladies up and down, gave them tea and paid them compliments. Why should not he go as well as another, and why should not Mrs. Mander go with him? Did she really consent to come he would regard it almost as an acceptance of him. He trembled when he thought of the adventure. There were so many foolish things that he might do, he would be frightened and awkward and out of place.

But if she were there to smile at him and encourage him he need not fear. He felt that then he would be as brave as any lion.

He ordered his new clothes, had his hair cut at Hill’s, and wrote Mrs. Mander this letter:

Dear Mrs. Mander,

I see that next Tuesday week is to be our Horticultural Show. I wonder whether you would think it very impertinent of me were I to suggest that you should allow me to take you to that gay event? It would give me so much pleasure if we might go together. I believe the roses are really wonderful, worth anyone’s attention. Pray do me the honour of being my companion. I would call for you about four o’clock on that afternoon.

Yours very sincerely,

William Morphew.

With what agony he waited for her reply! He did not sleep that night at all, and as soon as he heard the click of the letters in the letter-box next morning he ran (yes, positively ran) downstairs. Bartholomew had the letters in her hand, and she gazed at his dressing-gown and bare legs in amazement. He snatched the letters from her. Yes, there was one in a pink envelope with a little purple monogram in the corner. He tore it open. He read:

Dear Canon Morphew,

How very good of you! Indeed I shall be delighted to come. Yes, I’m told the roses are beautiful. What weather we’re having! I shall expect you then about four o’clock on Tuesday week.

Yours very sincerely,

Katherine Mander.

The world turned round with him as he read that letter. He could have embraced Bartholomew as she stood grimly watching. He went upstairs, fell on his knees and offered up a long prayer of thanksgiving. Surely she would not have accepted had she not cared for him. This could mean only one thing. Oh, but he would be good to her! He would show her that a man of fifty-nine was as good as any youngster, as good and better. He sang that morning as he worked, sang in a strange, broken, hideous voice; Bartholomew, in the darkness of her kitchen, heard and trembled. Either he was going mad, or some woman had got hold of him. But what woman would ever bother about an old fool like that?

Meanwhile the Canon was changing – quite a number of people noticed it. His new clothes arrived and fitted very well; he had now a Dantesque appearance with his pointed chin and his sad eyes. He often stopped to speak to people in the High Street, and indeed was noticed to linger about – a thing that he had never been known to do before.

He met Mrs. Beaufort one day, and she was quite startled by the change in him. How she made her husband laugh that night! “I believe he’s in love – queer old creature,” she said. “He smiles now in the most ferocious way, and looks so gay as to be almost indecent for a canon.” Then one day he had quite a walk with Mrs. Mander. He met her on the path under the cathedral, above the orchards and the river, one of the prettiest walks in Polchester. She was coming along very demurely, carrying a little parcel. She smiled when she saw him and then dropped her eyes to the ground. How modest and good she looked in her black dress, and quite young he thought! She didn’t say anything very much – she was always a very silent woman – but she agreed with everything he said. He felt that he was on the very top of the mountain of Romance that morning; the sun was shining, the green of the orchards was like a soft cloud beneath the grey cathedral walk, the birds were singing, and a barge, red and yellow, was slowly sliding down the river. A lovely day! He carried her parcel; then he began for the first time since his acquaintance with her to talk about himself, his early life, his hopes and ambitions, how even he had a burning desire to finish his work on the Revelations of St. John, a book he had been preparing now for a great many years. But he was lonely, he would confess to Mrs. Mander that sometimes he was terribly lonely. “Marriage is a very happy state, Mrs. Mander,” he said, his heart beating wildly at his boldness, “or it should be when man and wife are truly suited to one another.” Mrs. Mander agreed with him, but then as she agreed with everything that he said he couldn’t be sure that she meant anything very much. Her silences were very baffling. He had heard someone say on an earlier occasion that “she was the last word in stupidity.” But he didn’t think her stupid. He hated bold, daring women who thrust themselves forward on every possible opportunity. After his daring allusion to marriage he was suddenly very shy. What must she think of him? He snatched a glance at her. Impossible to tell what she was thinking. Her eyes were veiled. Their ways parted. She stopped to shake his hand; hers lay for a moment in his; it was so soft and warm that he trembled all over.

“I’m looking forward to Tuesday,” he said.

“Oh yes,” she said.

“I do hope it will be fine,” he said.

“Oh, so do I!” she answered.

He went home in a desperate state of love. The whole of his romantic, sensitive, lonely soul was staked now upon this venture. He found that he could not say his prayers, he could not think about God very much, but he believed that God would understand, and, in spite of himself, he made bargains with God, promising every sort of self-sacrifice and humiliation if God would give him Mrs. Mander.

He had now very little doubt about the success of his appeal. Had not Mrs. Beaufort said at the very beginning that Mrs. Mander cared for him? And how could he doubt the embarrassment and sweet confusion? He could not expect from her the romantic impetuosity and emotion of a young woman. They were both too old for that kind of thing. He did not expect very much from her of any kind, but the thought of having now someone for whom he might care, someone to whom he might give things, someone for whom he might work and for whom he might die, if need be, that surrounded him now day and night with a soft happy glow, a sense of riotous youth and independence and the beginning of life, gloriously, all over again.

The only serious trouble was Mr. Prout. Mr. Prout was always turning up. He seemed now, to the Canon, to be everywhere, with his ugly moustache and “his flabby cheeks.” That laugh of his, so effeminate and shrill, could be heard a mile away. He seemed to laugh at everything and everybody. Then on the very morning before the show the Canon met Mr. Prout and Mrs. Mander together in Dunkins’ bookshop. He came in to buy a copy of The Church Times, and there were the two of them standing by the counter, talking and laughing together. Yes – laughing! The Canon realised with a horrible pang that he had never seen Mrs. Mander laugh before – smile, yes, and often, but this was a jolly happy laugh as though she were immensely enjoying herself. He stood there, his clerical bosom a very un-Christian field for jealousy, loneliness, anger and indignation. Indignation! Why? He had no right. Mrs. Mander was not his property. Why should she not laugh? He was bitterly ashamed of himself as he hurried home, but he caught perhaps at that moment a glimpse of the peril in which he was placing himself. He saw that he had, during this last fortnight, trusted his all to one issue. If that issue failed … he could not say, he dared not think, he would not think.

Next day was flamboyant with a blaze of sun. Of all the horticultural shows this promised to be the finest – the sky was a sheet of burning blue; warm mists hovered over the river, and the heat could in the early morning be felt pushing its way up through the shadows of hedge and road.

Bartholomew had by now arrived at a rather true summary of the situation. Only the contemplation of matrimony could have wrought this change in her master, and matrimony meant, she knew well, her own exit. She was a mean old woman, with no thought in the world but the increasing of her little hoard of savings. She had no love for anyone or anything; she enjoyed bullying the Canon; she liked to see him tremble before one of her tempers – now it seemed that there was a danger of his escaping her…. Well, if he did not escape she would let him know it.

At a quarter to four the Canon set out for Mrs. Mander’s house. He felt a strange uneasy foreboding. He had none of the earlier confidence with which he had met her a week ago. That man Prout! He was responsible for this self-distrust. The Canon wore his new clothes and his new boots, but nevertheless that last look at the glass had not been altogether reassuring. His nose, how large it was; his eyes how ugly; his mouth how unattractive! Supposing Mrs. Beaufort had been wrong in her suggestion about Mrs. Mander; supposing … no, he would not. Angrily he turned away to face the world. This thing could only be carried off with bravery and pluck. He had been a poor-spirited creature all his life. Let him be a man now. He cast one last look around his dirty untidy house before he went off. If it should really be true that soon he would have someone there with him, someone with taste and pretty ways, someone to fling out the dirt and ugliness and to replace them with cleanliness and beauty? He did then send one urgent prayer to God that He would not now desert him. He had never in all his life asked for anything before; one request in a lifetime was surely not too much. Bartholomew watched him with black looks from her kitchen window.

“Silly old fool,” she said, cursing him.

He found Mrs. Mander in a beautiful costume of black and white. It seemed to him a wonderful omen that she should have discarded her black today. His heart beat high. He paid her one of his elaborate, stumbling compliments. She thanked him, with her charming modesty, and they started off. The Horticultural Show was in Painster Piece, two large fields on the hill above the cathedral. To reach it was a real climb, up the High Street, and then turning aside from “The Rose” up Orange Street, and so to the heights of St. Borowyn and the fields beyond. Here was a fine view, the town lying, grey and red-brown, in the sunlight like an amber setting to the old pearl grey of the cathedral, and below the Pol winding its ways into the woods and meadows bounded by the hills that guarded the sea. Slowly, as they climbed, happiness stole into the heart of the Canon. He spoke very little, being fully occupied with the labour of the walk, but all kinds of old half-remembered instincts crept back into his heart as he felt the presence of his companion. It seemed to him that he was already married, that very little more would be needed to jerk the all-important words from his lips. They came to the little wooden stile just beyond the Close before they plunged into the wooded path that led to Orange Street. Here they paused for a moment; he mopped his brow. “Lovely weather,” he gasped. “Lovely,” she repeated, smiling timidly at him.

He might, on a sudden impulse, have proposed to her there. How altered both their lives had he done so! She might not have accepted him, but of that we cannot be certain. Assuredly in his new suit, brushed and smartened as he was, he looked no undistinguished figure. She had long been lonely, and he was a very wise and learned man – kindly too; no one could be with him even five minutes without seeing the goodness of his heart. But he was out of breath and hot, and she stood there saying nothing; the golden moment passed…. They went on up the hill.

Now, however, he felt sure of his success. There had been something in her silence most truly eloquent; he felt that the air around them throbbed with meaning. So young did he feel, so hopeful, with this brave assurance that there seemed no danger in waiting a little. They reached the top of Orange Street beside the Grammar School, then turned up the narrow little lane with the high hedges, Glebeshire fashion, hanging thick above their heads. Perhaps then she wished for him to speak, wondered why he did not, and was half prompted to say something herself that would lead him on. However, she did not, and again the golden moment passed. They crossed out of the lane into the burning sunlight by the field. Here at the gate was a tent flaunting a flag, and in front of the tent a turnstile. The strains of the Blue Hungarian Band could be heard on the air. The Canon was about to press into the crowd and purchase two tickets when he saw – he saw – Mr. Prout.

At the sight of that stout body and that perky straw hat a horrible sickness struck his stomach; the field, the blue sky, the tent, the crowd seemed to turn and dance dizzily in mid-air, his knees quivered, and a desperate cry rose from his very soul. “Oh God! keep that man away! Turn his eyes from us! Help us to escape him!”

But they were not to escape. Mrs. Mander said: “Why, there’s Mr. Prout!” A moment later the hated figure was bending in front of them, the shrill piping voice was saying:

“Why, Mrs. Mander, what a fortunate meeting! Afternoon, Canon! You don’t often attend these affairs, surely!”

Mrs. Mander said: “Fancy seeing you, Mr. Prout.”

Mr. Prout said: “What luck for me! I’m alone. I’ll attach myself to your party, if you have no objection.”

The supreme moment of the Canon’s life had arrived, and he knew it. Many men would have known how to beat off the attack. Many men, but not the Canon. He paid now for all these years in which he had lived apart from the world – he paid, most bitterly he paid. No words would come to him; he could only stare at that hated face, at that loathsome moustache, at the ridiculous flannels and bright purple tie, and those fat pale cheeks. He saw his judgement descending upon him. A moment more and it would be too late. He made a frantic effort. No words came…. They all passed through the stile together.

V

As they mingled with the gay, fashionable crowd he felt himself most ludicrously out of place. He fancied that people were looking at him, laughing at him for being there, above all wondering that he should attach himself to such a man as Prout. And Prout kept up a stream of chatter. He never ceased. He talked about the silliest things in the silliest way; he made the most terrible jokes. Soon he began to have a kind of secret code with Mrs. Mander. He whispered to her and she giggled. Still the Canon could think of nothing to say. He knew that the day was even now not lost could he but think of something witty or amusing. But all he could think of was to say to Prout: “Go away! Go away! We don’t want you! We are much happier without you! Go away!”

But was Mrs. Mander much happier without him? The Canon had a horrible suspicion that she was enjoying herself more than she had done when they were walking up the lane. She was laughing a great deal and growing more and more confidential….

Soon they were pushing on ahead, and the Canon was being left behind. He tried to keep up; he thought of a sentence that began, “The truth is, Prout …” but no words would come. They were involved in a riot of silk and laces, and scent and roses. They were very near the Blue Hungarian Band; the noise was deafening. Mrs. Mander leaned back over her shoulder and seemed to say something. A moment later, and she and her musical cavalier had vanished.

The Canon was left standing there, jolted, pushed, around him a jesting crowd who treated him with utter contempt, a crowd of strangers and even enemies. Men were laughing, women were laughing. The band played on with a strident scream, the big drum banged monotonously, the sun poured down out of a blazing sky. He could see no one whom he knew; he would not have recognised anyone had he seen. His eyes were dim, his knees shaking so that he could scarcely stand, his tongue dry in his mouth. The colours seemed to grow brighter and brighter, the noise more and more strident.

What had she said? He did not know, but she ought not have left him like that – no, she ought not. It wasn’t kind. This was hell. He realised now what hell was. His new clothes were covered with dust. Someone jolted him in the side, some others pushed against him and nearly knocked him over. Oh, she hadn’t been kind, she hadn’t been kind….

Like a blind man, with despair and a strange terror in his heart, he crept out of the tumultuous field into the quiet of the little dark lane.

VI

Two days later he heard someone in the cloisters say to Canon Smart: “Have you heard? Prout’s engaged to Mrs. Mander. Whatever she could see …”

He was not surprised – quite what he had expected. He had known when she had left him like that that he had been building his castle on illusion. But why had Mrs. Beaufort said what she did? That had not been kind of her, not at all kind. Perhaps she had been joking.

He was like a wounded man. He felt ill somewhere inside, somewhere near the heart. He did not sleep at all. He never left his house except to go to the cathedral.

Everything in the house now failed him. How dirty it was, how horrible! But he did not care. He let Bartholomew do what she would. He looked at his notes on St. John. How silly! Who wanted to read notes on St. John? He opened his favourite edition of George Herbert, with the Izaak Walton life at the end of it. But his eyes fell on the passage about his good marriage, how that they were “indeed so happy, that there was never any opposition betwixt them, unless it were a contest which should most incline to a compliance with the other’s desires.”

He could not read on; he closed the book for ever. Worst of all, it seemed to him that his trust in God was gone. He asked for one thing, only one, and it had been refused him. God, perhaps, knew best. He did not care very much.

He went to bed, and a week later he died. As soon as she was sure that the breath had left his body, Bartholomew hunted the house up and down. All that she found, however, was six and eightpence halfpenny.

Next morning, Mr. Prout said to his fiancée:

“Old Morphew’s kicked the bucket.”

“Poor old man,” said Mrs. Mander, with a little sigh.

Beaufort saw the news at breakfast.

“Old Morphew’s dead,” he said.

“Poor old thing,” said Mrs. Beaufort. “High time. I wonder what he died of.”

The Silver Thorn (1928)

BACHELORS

I

In any cathedral town there must of necessity be certain characters who are bound and tied to the cobble-stones of the place from whose heart they have sprung. One can picture them in no other town or country – they are that place’s property as surely as are the Town Hall, the Baths, the Market Place, and the Cathedral. Their very peculiarities, their little idiosyncrasies, are proudly suggested in that column of the local newspaper headed, “Are You Aware That—?” and, always, their names are to be found after “Amongst those present were—” when any kind of festivity, civic or personal, has occurred.

The cathedral town of Polchester in Glebeshire boasted Henry and Robert Chandler, Esqs., amongst their most distinguished “features.” “Features” they were, and no visitor could spend a week in that pleasant city without having them pointed out to him, just as he had already been directed towards the great west-end window of the cathedral or the magnificent tomb of the Black Bishop.

Harry and Robin Chandler had spent all their days enclosed by the pleasant shelter of Polchester. They had indeed gone first to Rugby, and afterwards to Trinity, Cambridge, but from these places they had always returned to Polchester with such precipitation and eagerness that it was evident that, even whilst their bodies were being harassed and driven in wilder places, their souls were resting in Polchester.

Robin Chandler was, at the time of this crisis in his history, fifty-five years of age, Harry ten years younger, and they lived at the corner of the Close in a house shaped like a teapot, and had a motherly and rotund widow as their housekeeper. Of the two, Robin was most certainly the “character.” He looked a “character.” He was precisely the kind of old gentleman whom you would expect to find in the Close of an English cathedral. You would say, on seeing Robin Chandler, “Ah! there he is!” and you would connect him with the other old gentlemen and the other old maids whom you had, in your time, met in cathedral cities. Robin looked more than his age, because his hair was white and his figure rotund. His face was round and amiable, and a little foolish, and this foolishness was to be attributed to the fact that he was never sure what he would do with his mouth. He would be amused and would laugh heartily, but even in the climax of the laugh his mouth would wander a little, and tremble uncertainly at the corners. He had a dimple in each cheek, and a fine high forehead, from which his hair was brushed straight back into a kind of white waterfall that tumbled down the back of his head. He was short and fat and very neat, being dressed generally in pepper-and-salt trousers, a brown velvet waistcoat with brass buttons, a black coat and a black tie. When out of doors he wore a soft black hat cocked jauntily over one ear, and he always trotted along moving his feet very slightly one in front of the other. He stopped a thousand times during his walk down the High Street, greeting his friends (he had no enemies in the world), and he always had a number of gentle, queer things to say – things that no one else would have thought of saying. His interests were natural history, stamps, bowls, and, of course, his brother – and this last swallowed up the others even as the serpent in the Bible swallowed up all the other serpents.

Henry Chandler was of quite another kind: of middle height, red-faced, short brown moustache, brown hair cut close to his head, his eyes confident and unintelligent, his attitude that of a man who knows his world, takes many baths and has no doubts about anything. He stood at the head of the sporting interests of Polchester, being president of the golf club and the cricket club; his interests were also apparently political, for he was a most important member of the Conservative Club, that had its palatial apartments half-way down the High Street. He might be seen any morning of the week striding along in a tweed jacket and large and balloon-like knickerbockers, his face very red, his eyes very wide and staring, his air that of a man who knows his power and values it. “Ha, Benson,” he would say, or “Ha, Rawlings!” or even “Good day to you, Bumpus!” and sometimes when a local infant threatened his progress, “Out of the way, little one, out of the way!”

People said, with considerable truth, that it was strange that two brothers who were so continually together should be so different, but when one knew Robin Chandler intimately one discovered that he had been endeavouring all his days to acquire some of his brother’s habits and characteristics. He would try at times to be domineering, hearty and monosyllabic, and of course he always failed. He had the pleasantest of voices, but it was the voice of an amiable canary, and he never could express himself without using a great number of words. That Robin worshipped his brother was one of the items of natural history treasured by the city of Polchester.

He had worshipped from that day, so many years ago, when, a lonely little boy of ten, he had been informed that he was henceforth to have a companion in life.

He had been always from the first a submissive character who depended very much on other people’s affection for happiness. It had been, the ladies of Polchester always said, a shamefully one-sided affair.

Harry Chandler’s attitude to his brother was one of indulgent tolerance. “Dear old fellow,” he would call him. “He’s an odd kind of chap, my brother,” he would confide to a listening friend. “You’d never think we were brothers, now, would you? You should just see him try to play golf. Stands there with his legs apart, his body stiff as a rod, biting his lips, don’t you know – serious as anything – and then he clean misses it, you know. He’s a dear old fellow, but, between you and me, a bit of an old woman.”

Robin was quite aware of his brother’s attitude, but, indeed, no other seemed possible. He had watched, with wide-eyed wonder, his brother’s growth. The things Harry could do! Was there anyone who played games with such confidence, anyone who could hold his own in a gathering of men with such assurance and success, anyone so fascinating in a drawing-room, anyone in the world with such captivating savoir-faire? Robin himself was afraid of women, except very old and lonely ones. He had, long ago, been “horribly” in love, and she might, one imagines, have loved him in return had he pursued the matter; but – what would Harry do without him? No, until Harry himself married, Robin must send the other sex to limbo. And through all these years what agitations there had been! For a long time it had seemed as certain that Harry would marry as that night must follow day. That his brother was fascinating to women Robin held as surely as that he himself had no attraction for them whatever! Terrible hours! Terrible apparitions of beautiful young women to whom Harry would give their first golfing lesson! Terrible “alarums and excursions”! “Oh! I hear, Mr. Chandler, that we are to congratulate your brother…!” Is not Polchester a cathedral city?

And yet, always, Robin was delivered. Through all these years Harry had not been even engaged. Robin wondered at the women, but, from his heart, was grateful to them, and with every year the assurance of safety grew. Now always he put the terrible thought from him. Sometimes in the night it would leap out from the dark with mouth agrin and widespread claws. “What’ll you do, my friend, if it does happen? It may, you know. Plenty of time yet…. A nice kind of time you’ll have alone—” Well, that was a bad half-hour, but at the end of it the grinning beast was driven back to its lair.

There was nothing that Harry could do that did not interest Robin, and this, men at the Club said, was bad for Harry.

“Really, Chandler’s getting a bit of a bore. Thinks the least little thing he’s done ought to be sent up to the Times. All that silly old brother of his.”

But they liked “the silly old brother” – liked him, were the truth known, better than Harry. Robin would have been immensely surprised at his popularity had he ever known it.

There came an afternoon. It was half-past four on a day of late October and the cathedral bells were drowsily ringing for Evensong. Robin was standing at the window of the little smoking-room where they always had tea, waiting his brother’s return from golf. It was dusk, and at the farther end of the Close, above an ivy-covered wall, low between two old Georgian houses, the blue evening sky, fading into palest saffron, showed. The cobbles had caught the evening light, and figures – two old ladies, a Canon, an old gentleman in a bath-chair – were moving, like notes in a piece of music, across the grass square to the cathedral doors. It was a sight that Robin had seen year after year from that same window, and it had always for him drama as intense as anything that Napoleon or Wellington can have felt from the top of some smoke-clad hill. “There’s Miss Barton. I thought she was in London. I wonder whether her brother’s left her anything in his will. There’s Prendergast. It’s his month, I suppose. How cross it will make him having to come in from his golf!”

He was conscious, as he heard the bells, of the quiet cozy little room behind him filled with dusty old things that belonged to every period of his experiences – old college photographs, old books, old caps that his brother had worn in different teams, which his presence had honoured. There, too, the kettle was humming, the tea-cake was hot, the clock – the same old gold clock – ticked the minutes away. He ruffled his hair with his hand until he looked more than ever like an amiable well-fed bird. The bells had fallen to a slow monotone – “Hurry up – hurry up – hurry up” … There were steps on the cobbles, a key in the door, a pause in the hall, then his brother had come in.

“Fancy, Harry,” said Robin, moving towards the tea-things, “Miss Brandon’s back. I wonder whether—”

“I say, old man,” Harry’s voice was, for perhaps the first time in his life, nervous and hesitating, “Robin, old boy – hem! You must congratulate me – hem – yes – ha! – I’m engaged to Miss Pinsent. She – hum – accepted me on the – hum – golf course this afternoon.”

II

There followed then for Robin Chandler the most terrible weeks, weeks far more terrible than anything he had ever imagined possible for human courage to support.

It was demanded of him, on every side, that he should be false. He must be false to his brother; he must pretend to him that he was glad and happy that this had occurred; he must be false to all the old women of Polchester who crowded about him eagerly watching for any sign of that wound which, they were assured amongst themselves, his brother’s engagement must have dealt him; above all, he must be false to the girl, Iris Pinsent, who instantly demanded his affection, and (such was always her attitude to the other sex) protection from the roughness of the world.

Iris Pinsent – golden, fragile and appealing – was straight from the schoolroom. Her father had, six months before, arrived at Polchester as governor of its prison, and, during those six months, Iris had put up her hair and “come out.” She had seemed to Robin so entirely of the schoolroom that he had never, for the wildest instant, considered her as a possible wife for anybody. Now every day she appeared, ran over their old teapot house as though it were her own, won the instant and undying hatred of Mrs. Rumbold, the housekeeper, sat upon Harry’s knee, pulled Harry’s hair, untied his tie and tied it up again, laughed and sang and danced about the two elderly men as though they were puppies quite new to a brilliant world.

No one – not Robin himself – had any conception of the depths of Robin’s suffering. “Mr. Robert Chandler must be feeling his brother’s engagement,” said one old lady to another old lady, and another old lady to another old lady. “But really you wouldn’t think so to look at him. He’ll feel it after the marriage, though, when he’s all alone” – and the old ladies either licked their lips or wiped their eyes according to their characters.

To Robin it was exactly as though he were standing on the very edge of a slimy and bottomless pit. Towards this pit his feet were slipping, and soon, very soon, the inevitable moment of descent would come; but meanwhile, gripping with his feet, digging his hands into the slime, he would hold on as long as he could … the world should not know until it must.

He trotted about the town, went to tea-parties, played bowls, was as neat and as careful, as interested in his neighbour’s affairs, as kind and thoughtful as ever he had been. Harry Chandler, who was, of course, not a discerning man, was hurt at this indifference.

“Really, Robin,” he said one evening when they were alone, “I don’t believe you’ll mind it a bit when I am gone.”

Robin paused, then said, “Of course, Harry, I shall miss you – terribly,” and that was all.

Robin, in fact, ran from his despair. There were horrible moments when it caught him up and then there was a grinding cold at his heart; but these moments with all the force of his character he beat down. But what was he to do? What should he, could he, do? He had devoted his life, every moment and thought of it, to his brother’s interests. He could not now, at his age, build up other gods, worship at other shrines. His bowls, his stamps, he laughed aloud when he thought of them. His life had been simply that he should watch his brother’s triumphs, soften his brother’s defeats, listen to his brother’s ideas, anticipate his brother’s wants. This may seem to many a humiliating rôle for a man; Robin Chandler did not feel it so; he was simply grateful that he had so splendid a person as his brother to play shadow to. He fancied that many people in the town thought him a lucky fellow.

No longer, even now, was there any need of him as audience, no longer was his opinion invited, no longer his praise demanded – and yet, even in these early weeks of the engagement, Robin fancied that Miss Pinsent was not proving quite so good a listener as she might. Indeed, he began to wonder whether Miss Pinsent liked being a listener at all. She had so much to say, so many of her own achievements and triumphs to recount. Robin, as he watched the two of them together, wondered at first how anyone could treat his brother with such casual equality; then, as the days passed and this became a common sight, he wondered whether there had not been something a little absurd about his own attitude.

Very reluctantly and only after a very considerable time Robin was compelled to confess to himself that Harry was not quite at his best as a lover. Harry, whilst Miss Pinsent sprang around him, laughed at him, mocked him, imitated him, burlesqued him, was often at a loss. He had found at once that his heavy authoritative manner had no effect upon Miss Pinsent.

“Ha! – hum—” she would imitate him. “How d’y do, Rawlings.”

Robin, listening in amazement, wondered whether there could be any love in Miss Pinsent’s heart, but apparently love there was, of a kittenish, puppyish kind. Another astonishing thing was that Miss Pinsent was, it seemed, more afraid of Robin than of Harry. She was only, on the rarest occasions, “kittenish” with Robin, but would stand in front of him and ask him serious questions about Life and Bowls and Birds’ Eggs, and Robin would ruffle his hair and answer her to the best of his ability. Really, Robin was forced to confess to himself, poor Harry looked quite foolish and even silly on many occasions. “Why does he let her behave like that?” he thought. “I do hope other people don’t notice it.”

He was pleasantly aware – if anything could be pleasant at this terrible time – that he was acquiring now an independent existence in people’s eyes. This had begun, of course, with people being sorry for him, but that the proud little man would not allow for a moment. He had been, for many many years, overshadowed by his brother; but now that his brother was allotted and disposed of, Robin Chandler stood out all by himself. “Poor little Mr. Chandler!” the ladies said. “We must show him a little kindness just now.” And Robin was obliged to confess that he liked it. Nevertheless, it must not be supposed that, during all this time, he was not an utterly miserable man.

Then, as the weeks passed, his discomfort grew. He wished, how fervently, that his brother would deal with the girl in some more dignified and satisfactory fashion. “Why, even I,” Robin thought to himself, “have more influence over her than he has. She never plays about with me like that. Really, Harry—”

But the tragic side of it all was that Harry was not a happy lover. Why was he a lover at all if not a happy one? All Harry’s fine spirit had departed. His honest brow wore a puzzled look that never in all its forty-five years it had worn before. He began sentences, “I wonder whether—” “Do you think, Robin—” and then never finished them. He abandoned the Conservative Club, and, although he played golf with Miss Pinsent on most afternoons of the week, the beloved game seemed to have lost most of its charm.

He no longer on his return would proclaim to his brother that he had done a bogey five in three, or beaten old Major Waggett (his especial foe) by three up and two to play. No, he returned and drank his tea in silence. Robin’s heart ached for him.

Once the two of them had, in Robin’s presence, a most horrible quarrel. They were all having tea together in the little dusty smoking-room, and Miss Pinsent, striking unexpectedly her lover in the chest (one of her loving, playful tricks), upset his tea. He swore then with a frank volubility that spoke of many weeks’ difficult restraint. She cried, rushed from the room and the house, vowing that she would never return….

But, of course, she did return, and that very shortly afterwards. There was a reconciliation – but Robin found, to his exceeding surprise, that he was rather ashamed of both of them. “I wish – I wish,” he thought, “that I didn’t see Harry like this. Love affects people very strangely.”

Then, on an afternoon of pouring rain, Robin Chandler was beating his way up the High Street, hastening home to warmth and tea. He was sheltered by an enormous umbrella, and this gave him precisely the appearance of a walking mushroom. His arm was touched and, turning round, he saw Miss Pinsent, who was looking bedraggled and unhappy, without any umbrella at all.

“I didn’t know it was going to rain. It looked so fine….” Her voice trembled, and she betrayed the imminence of tears – she took his arm and they walked along together. Then, suddenly, he was aware that she was talking about Harry and speaking as though she needed Robin’s advice about him. Robin’s heart began to beat fast. “Did he really think that Harry loved her? … Would Harry really be kind to her? … Of course she was very fond of him, but…. Did he think that differences in ages really made much trouble afterwards? … Of course she was very fond …”

This may be definitely put down as the most critical moment in all Mr. Robin Chandler’s long life. The Tempter, with that bewildering precipitance and complete disregard for the justice of a forewarning prelude that he inevitably betrays, sprang, there and then in the dripping High Street of Polchester, upon the poor little man.

Robin saw, with a horrible distinctness, that the power was given him to sway Miss Pinsent. A little hesitation on his part, an unexpressed but nevertheless definite agreement with her as to the danger of unequal ages in marriage, a hint or two as to possible harshness and brutalities in Harry’s character – he saw with amazing and horrible clearness that these things would be quite enough. By tomorrow afternoon Mr. Harry Chandler would no longer be engaged to Miss Iris Pinsent….

They halted for an instant at the top of the High Street. The wind was rushing round the corner, and the rain lashed the umbrella. Robin could see the wall of the cathedral, very grey and grim, and one corner of the Close with the rain running in little driven lines across the cobbles.

“You’ll have your brother back again…. You won’t be a lonely, lonely old man….”

Then with a shake of his shoulders, the thing was gone and, as they drove their way into the Close, he began eagerly, exhaustively, almost breathlessly, to prove to her that his brother was indeed a god among men.

III

It was arranged that Harry should go and stay with the Pinsents for a week in a house that they had in the country some miles from Polchester, and that during that time the date of the wedding should be settled. Robin saw with confused feelings his brother’s departure; it was the first time for many years that they had been separated – this was melancholy enough – but also he was compelled to admit that it was a relief to him that, for a week at any rate, he would not be forced to watch his brother under such conditions. He found, indeed, that in a resigned, rather dejected kind of fashion, he was quite happy. Mrs. Rumbold, the housekeeper, could not make enough fuss of him. Harry had always been so emphatically the master in the house that she had never considered Mr. Robert. It had always been Harry who had arranged the hours of meals and, did he in the summer come in very late, well then, Mr. Robert waited. But now—! No, Mr. Harry had acted as a selfish and inconsiderate man, leaving poor Mr. Robert all alone “without a thought.” What did an old thing of his age want to do with marriage – choosing so young a girl too – almost indecent! Had Miss Pinsent treated Mrs. Rumbold with care and deference, then there might have been another opinion altogether. As it was, “She’s a regular young Slap-in-the-face, if you ask me,” said Mrs. Rumbold to her chosen friends, “Slap and come again, that’s what she is. You mark my words.”

Therefore Robin received an attention, a deference, that had never been his before. And not only from Mrs. Rumbold! The whole town offered it him. The town had always been fond of him, but so modest and retiring had he been, that the comment always was, “Mr. Robert Chandler? … Oh yes!… Such a nice little man. No one sees very much of him. No one knows him, you might say, but you couldn’t help liking him!”

But, during this week, in what an amazing way did he expand, flourish, blossom! It was at first incredible to him that people should be interested in him for himself, and fifty-five years’ convictions about life are difficult things to shake. But behold! Whereas before it had been, “Oh, Mr. Chandler, your brother has so kindly promised to dine with us on Thursday night, I wonder whether you could come too?” – now it was, “Do come and dine, Mr. Chandler, any night as long as you give us a day or two’s notice.” People found him indeed a great deal more amusing by himself than he had been before in his brother’s company. Always there had been that anxious glance in his brother’s direction to see whether everything were well, always that modest hesitation about giving any opinion at all whilst his brother was present. Now he would sit perched on the edge of a sofa, his hands on his fat little knees, the dimples dancing in his cheeks, his hair on end, his chuckle (a chuckle entirely his own) over some joke that he saw ahead of him, and would very shortly deliver to his audience. By the end of the week he had decided that:

(1)   He liked women after all.

(2)   He would be perfectly wretched alone, but that he would bear up as well as he could.

(3)   He’d really no idea that he’d got so much to say.

(4)   He felt younger than he had ever done before.

“Still,” he said to himself, “dear old Harry’s marriage will be too dreadful. I simply don’t know what I shall do with myself.”

The afternoon of Harry’s return arrived. Robin stood at the window as he had done on that other horrible day when he had first heard of the engagement.

He was inevitably reminded of that day, for now again there, above the low wall, pale blue was fading into saffron, across the grass figures were stealing; already the bell was dropping into its “Hurry up – hurry up – hurry up.”

Robin watched, and then suddenly, like a flame, like a fire, came the truth. He knew, yes he knew, let him deny it as he might, that never in all his five-and-fifty years had he enjoyed a week as he had enjoyed this last one. He had tasted delights, known extravagances and excitements, that had never before been his. He had been free!

He stared round bewildered. What treachery to Harry! What irony that so soon he should have changed from despair to what was not far from triumph! He remembered the bitter dismay that so short a time ago had, in this very room, wrapped him round.

But now he was a man of freedom! No one’s shadow, depending upon no one in the world for his independent happiness! His eyes fell upon a picture above the fireplace, a water-colour painting of a grey fell and a blue lake at evening. It was a picture that he loved, but Harry had declared it “A dreary thing,” and it was only this week that it had been raised to that place of honour. After all, Harry would not care now, now when so soon he was to have a house of his own.

The door was flung open, and Harry was there, there with him in the room.

“I say!” He closed the door behind him and came forward. “Robin, she’s chucked me!”

“Oh!”

“Yes – jolly well chucked me – last night when we were alone she told me. Been mistaken … misjudged her feelin’s – was too young … all the rest of it.”

“Oh! Harry…. Oh, I’m sorry!”

Harry strode twice or thrice up and down the room. “Yes, chucked, by Jove! At first, you know, you could have knocked me down with a feather. But now – damn it – I don’t know, Robin, that I’m not glad. She said it was largely some talk she’d had with you about me – how you’d praised me no end, and then she’d seen that she didn’t feel about me quite like that, and that she couldn’t marry me unless she did. The contrast struck her, don’t you know….”

He paused, then went on: “But I’m glad, dashed if I’m not. It’s awful being engaged…. I felt it all the time really. She never said things about me as you’ve always done – never knew me a bit as you do. It’s a relief to be free – it is really. I missed you like anything. You were always so sympathetic and understanding. It’ll be jolly to have you to tell things to again…. Yes – dash it – hum – ha – won’t the fellows at the club laugh? … Well, I must go and clean. Tell old Ma Rumbold to hurry with the tea.”

He went out.

Robin waited a little, then, with the very shadow of a sigh, walked to the window. He looked out for a moment at the gathering dusk, then got a chair, climbed on to it, and carefully took down the water-colour from the wall.

The Silver Thorn (1928)

NO UNKINDNESS INTENDED

I

The smallest of the Munden children, meaning no unkindness whatever to the piece of paper on which she had written her very bad French exercise, crumpled it into a ball and threw it out of the open window. She certainly hadn’t the least idea that pieces of paper have any feelings, and perhaps they haven’t; on the other hand …

The ball of paper, looking maliciously alive because two of Miss Munden’s full stops came just where the eyes ought to be and a straight line that she had drawn through her French verb did for a mouth, fell on to the grass plot outside the Munden’s hideous villa. Now the ball of paper intended no unkindness whatever, it bore no grudge against Miss Munden for having treated it so, indeed it had more life in it now than it had known before. It lay on the grass and considered its position and while it considered it the little afternoon breeze, which meant no unkindness to anyone in the world, but was merely idle and had nothing very much to do, rolled the ball of paper about a little and gently directed it to the very feet of Mr. Munden, senior, who came through the gate at that very moment and up the gravel path.

Now, as all his friends and especially his family were very thoroughly aware, if there was one thing that Mr. Eric Munden detested above all others it was any kind of untidiness or litter. He prided himself immensely upon everything that belonged to him. He had not prided himself very greatly on Miss Ruby Lessing before he married her, he had indeed married her simply to revenge himself on Miss Monica White, who had married another when she ought to have married him; but once Miss Ruby Lessing became Mrs. Eric Munden she was the pride of his life. He bustled around her tidying up a bit here and putting another bit straight there, snipping off on one side something that he found superfluous and adding something that he found necessary on another, until he finally set up in his villa a monument of all the Munden virtues, a testimony to his pride for ever and ever. If Mrs. Eric Munden lost her soul in the process who was aware of it? Certainly not Mr. Munden. No unkindness was intended on his part, he had in fact done her a world of good. It was the same with his villa and his family; he hadn’t liked the building very much when he had first seen it, but as soon as he had bought it and called it “Ivanhoe” there was no villa in the whole world like it. Also with his children: had they been begotten by any other male he would have considered them plain, dull and lifeless, but as he was responsible for their existence (Mrs. Munden’s share in the matter was of no importance) he considered them marvellous children. But he did like tidiness, and when he saw the ball of paper lying on the path he was extremely annoyed; he kicked it violently with his foot and then, kicking more urgently than he had intended, made a large hole in the gravel.

It was at this precise moment that old Mr. Hannaway came to beg for something.

II

It was very like him indeed to come at exactly the wrong moment; he had been making his entry at the wrong moment all his life. He was the vicar of a very small parish on the outskirts of Seatown’s slums; he had been a vicar there for over thirty years. He had been always an unlucky man: he was unlucky in the first place because he was so insignificant; he was neither tall nor fat nor short nor thin, he was not so untidy that you must feel sure that he had brains nor was he so neat that you would call him smart for a parson. His voice was modest and unassuming and quite without effect; he was not so shy as to seem interesting nor was he eloquent enough to hold an audience. He had never found any woman who had noticed him sufficiently to marry him, although it is said (and I am quite sure falsely) that the women of England will marry anybody. He had never had violent religious views so that his parishioners sent angry letters to his Bishop; he never neglected his duties enough to be dismissed and so cause a sensation in that manner. He had always been desperately poor, but that was the extravagant feature in his life that everyone had taken trouble not to notice. His heart was full of love for others, but he had no gift for expressing his feelings. He was fifty-nine years of age and would be sixty next month.

He had always felt that if he was vicar of Crumplehorn parish at the age of sixty he might be said to have failed in life, and he was determined not to fail. He had had always burning ambitions although nobody knew it, and as one opportunity after another had passed him by he had always said, “Well, next time it shall be better”; only he felt that if he ever reached sixty without its being better there was the end. And now it was within a week of that critical date.

It was the knowledge of this some two or three days earlier that had roused him into a sudden campaign for his poor parishioners. Being a shy man and a modest, if there was one thing in the world from which he shrank it was begging for anything whether for himself or others. It is true that he did it most ineffectively, because he always seemed to imply before he made his request that he knew that you were going to refuse, and then of course you did; no beggar has any hope of success unless he is brazen, as all true beggars know. During these last days he had, alas, failed more than he had succeeded; everyone, he was bound to confess, had been very kind, but it had been in the main that sterile kindness that clergymen so often encounter.

He looked timidly at Mr. Munden, who was just about to enter his front door. “Good afternoon, sir, good afternoon, sir,” he said as brightly as he could. “Good afternoon,” said Mr. Munden, looking at him sternly, still exasperated by a conviction in his mind that his beautiful front lawn was a litter of mess and disorder. “Might I have a word with you?” said Mr. Hannaway. “Certainly,” said Mr. Munden. “I am rather busy, but—” “Oh, I won’t take a minute,” said Mr. Hannaway. They went indoors to Mr. Munden’s library; he called it a library, but it did not contain many books and it was not very large. On the way thither Mr. Munden encountered the dog. Now this dog had been given to the Munden family by a friend in the town who, out of sheer kindness of heart, felt that it needed a better home than he could provide for it. His heart, in fact, was so kind that it did not allow him to stop and consider that he was giving the dog away because he disliked it extremely; he might, of course, have drowned it, but he was a tender-hearted man and couldn’t bear to hurt anything.

Mrs. Munden, also out of kindness of heart, had kept the animal because “the children would love to have a dog.” Her general amiability prevented her from seeing that the children hated it from the first and ill-treated it on every possible occasion. But no one hated the dog quite so much as Mr. Munden. Although it belonged now to the Mundens he could not be proud of it, try as he might. It was not a beautiful animal; a brown Cocker spaniel by birth, it had doubtless many fine points only a real dog-fancier could tell, but it was not very old, a year at the most; its skin was not silky as the skin of a Cocker should be; it stared wildly out of its eyes, and its mouth and nose were too large for its head. It was also long and shambly in the legs.

By nature it was desperately affectionate and demonstrative at all the wrong moments. Had it been a handsome and charming dog that would not have mattered, but people who are really kind, hate to be loved when they cannot give love back again, it seems so ungracious of them and makes them suspicious of their own good-nature.

It most unfortunately followed Mr. Munden and Mr. Hannaway into the library, wagging its untidy tail, and then jumping up against Mr. Munden, rolling its mad eyes in its desperation of affection. “Down, you beastly dog, damn you,” said Mr. Munden, and then was extremely sorry, first because he wished to appear friendly and tender-hearted towards everyone, and secondly because he had said “damn” in front of a clergyman. “Excuse me just a moment,” he asked. He pushed the dog in front of him out of the room, then closed the door behind him. Out in the passage he looked guiltily about him; no one was near. He picked up the dog and very stealthily opened the front door, went down the garden path, opened the gate, looked along the empty road and then edged the dog into it. He shut the gate carefully. At that moment a boy passed him, whistling. “Like to earn a shilling?” he asked almost in a whisper. The boy stared at him amazed, such generosity had seldom come his way. “Take this dog and do what you like with him, anything you like, only don’t hurt him; call him Tiger and he’ll follow you.” He turned back to the house; he had done a really kind action. The boy looked a decent boy, he would probably be very fond of the dog, the dog was obviously unsuited to the Munden household; he had as usual done the best for everyone concerned. He went back to the house, intending to do his best for Mr. Hannaway.

III

Mr. Munden motioned Mr. Hannaway to one armchair and himself sat down into another. “Now, what can I do for you?” he asked. Mr. Hannaway, sitting on the very edge of his chair, rubbed his hands on the knees of his trousers, and began to explain. It was like this: as Mr. Munden probably knew, his parish was a very poor one (at the word “poor” Mr. Munden’s countenance became stern), and of course Mr. Hannaway didn’t like begging, and above all things in the world he hated to bother Mr. Munden, and indeed he didn’t want to bother anybody, but if he didn’t say something for the poor people, who was going to? Here he came to a stammering pause, and as he paused he was acutely conscious that he was doing it all extraordinarily badly, and he ought to have come out at once with his facts and been hard and businesslike. But he was hampered today more severely than ever before, because he felt so intensely the desperate need that Mr. Munden should give him something. If Mr. Munden didn’t, then he must go to Mrs. Morrison-Smith, and, oh, how he hated going to Mrs. Morrison-Smith; his soul trembled at the thought of it. If Mr. Munden gave him something, then he might go home, his conscience appeased, nor would he feel so desperately this approaching crisis of his sixty years. On the other hand, if both Mr. Munden and Mrs. Morrison-Smith refused him, then he would have to go out tomorrow and begin all over again with other terrible people, and then again the day after that and so on. No, no, he must succeed, here and now. And all this time Mr. Munden was wondering with half his mind how he could get rid of the old fool, and with the other half of his mind, whether there was any more litter in the garden and, if so, who had put it there. “Give me a few facts,” he said. Facts, indeed, Mr. Hannaway had plenty of, there was scarcely anyone in his parish who didn’t need money for one reason or another; the Boys’ Club was perishing for lack of money, the Girls’ Club also, the Parish Library was without books, the Sunday School without proper teachers, the Church pews without kneelers, and there were a thousand other things!

Only he could not remember them in any proper order. He was like an old man with a butterfly net. The facts, brightly coloured and of a dazzling brilliance, were for ever eluding him, so he jumbled them all up together and talked about boys’ clubs and vestry meetings and choir treats and old women and families far too large for the rooms that contained them, and all so confusedly that he must have struck Mr. Munden very much as the White Knight struck Alice.

For Mr. Munden, like Alice, could not be anything but kind, only during the first part of Mr. Hannaway’s explanation his brain was discovering what would be the true kind reason for refusing Mr. Hannaway. He need not really refuse him, he had plenty of money, more indeed than he knew what to do with, but Mr. Hannaway was so obviously a person that must be refused, he was such a feckless, wandering, muddled old man. Ah, that was it! There was his kind reason; it would not be good for Mr. Hannaway’s character to be given money until he was more practical in his explanation of his disposing of it. So, while Mr. Hannaway continued his trembling narrative, Mr. Munden chose his words. “Yes,” he said gently at last, “but, if you’ll forgive my saying so, you haven’t as yet planned out your needs in a very orderly fashion. What I mean is, that if you will come to me again someday with a definite practical plan I shall be only too glad to see what I can do. I can promise nothing definitely,” he added in haste, “we business men have great calls on our charity, you quite understand that,” and he beamed upon the old man as though he were his father and was discussing with him his school report. “Yes, I suppose so,” Mr. Hannaway said, sighing heavily. He knew that he ought to go on and press his claim, he knew that when people asked for things they were always refused at first, but for the life of him he could say no more, he could only mumble something about Mr. Munden being very kind, and then, his head down and terror in his heart, because now he must face Mrs. Morrison-Smith, he stumbled out of the room.

Mr. Munden saw him depart with feelings of the greatest affection; he had treated the old man with the greatest kindness and even generosity, so he felt.

He went upstairs to tell Mrs. Munden so.

IV

The dog meanwhile passed gaily forward to a new destiny. He didn’t know it was a new destiny; he thought that this was another member of the Munden family who was taking him out for a walk. In spite of constant shocks and unexpected reverses he had still an absolute confidence in the goodness of human nature. He ambled along finding the world full of enticing smells, and expecting that very soon he would return to the warm comfort of the Munden household and the security of the kitchen fire.

The boy, whose name was Percy Smith, was a nice kind boy. He had been taught by his father, who was a butcher by trade, that if you wanted to get on in the world you should pretend to be generous even when you were not. From his very earliest days Percy had been, on the surface at any rate, exemplary. He had passed through his Sunday School with the greatest credit, receiving any number of those little cards with pictures that are given to boys who are punctual in their attendance, clean in their appearance and intelligent in their answers. He had known the order of the Kings of Israel and Judah better than any other boy of his period. In his Board School, too, he had been admirable. Whenever he cheated in class or bullied a smaller boy or took anything that didn’t belong to him he atoned for these mistakes by his bright polite manners to his elders and betters and his charming ready smile.

He had a great affection for dogs, dogs, that is, of the right kind, but he had not proceeded far on his way before he discovered from the remarks of passers-by that Tiger was not the right kind of dog at all. He had not at first thought that he looked so odd, but now with every step he was made acutely aware of his embarrassing situation. Rude boys called out at him, girls laughed at him and people in motor-cars turned round and pointed. Now, if there was one thing in the world that Percy Smith detested it was to be a figure of fun; to be made a jest of hurt his Smith pride. He was moving now in Mr. Hannaway’s parish, that dreary collection of small streets, houses exactly similar, gutters scattered with dirty children and hawkers with depressing barrows of dates and bananas. It was an extremely cold day and neglected little flakes of snow were falling in melancholy hesitating fashion through the air. Percy Smith wanted to hasten on with his job, which was to deliver certain parcels at certain addresses, and return home to his tea, his bread and jam and his father the butcher. The dog was delaying him; it seemed to have no proper sense of direction, but would wander now this way, now that, for ever excited by some new thing.

He paused to consider this difficult situation, and Tiger, mistaken as usual, burst into demonstrations of love and enthusiasm, barking and jumping up and showing to all the world his pride and delight in the Munden family, to which admirable household he supposed that Percy belonged.

Now Percy was a kind boy, he wouldn’t do anyone any harm for all the world, but he felt that he had fairly earned his shilling. Someone as kind as himself would soon come along, so he took a piece of string out of his pocket, tied the dog to one of the railings and hurriedly turned the corner. As he explained that night: “You see, Father, it was really the kindest thing to do. Someone would be sure to take a fancy to him who would be able to look after him much better than we could; it would have been cruel to give him to a policeman, don’t you think? I wanted to do what was right.”

And his father, delighted that his son should be progressing so finely, gave him an extra piece of bread and jam.

V

Mr. Hannaway found Mrs. Morrison-Smith’s house only too easily. It was a large fine building with big gardens, through which the old man was a long time fumbling his way. It was a dark grey afternoon, and soon there would be snow, he thought, shivering a little; he was not very warmly clad.

If only Mr. Munden had given him a small sum; a pound would have been something, and he knew that Mr. Munden could easily afford it. This knowledge depressed him the more because he felt that it was entirely his own fault that he had been refused, all his own incompetence and muddled brain. But most deeply of all did he wish that Mr. Munden hadn’t spoken to him like a father – after all he was older than Mr. Munden; but he did not know how it was, people always spoke to clergymen as though they were children or idiots.

He rang the bell and was admitted into a grand hall by a very shining and supercilious maid. He asked for Mrs. Morrison-Smith; he was told that if he would wait the maid would see. While she was seeing (and she took a long time about it) he was enclosed in a little room all bright pink wall-paper and ferns in pots. The room was very cold; there was no fire. He was sick in the stomach at the thought of appealing to Mrs. Morrison-Smith; if she refused him he would go home, and what he feared above everything else was sitting alone in front of his fire that evening and considering himself. He knew that a crisis was upon him and that a little more self-consideration would bring him to such a point of contempt that he did not know what might not happen. He must be clear and accurate and definite now if ever, have all his facts nicely marshalled, give her confidence in his ability to use her money well.

And when she came in the very sight of her confused him completely. She was a large woman, full-bosomed, her shining white hair piled high on her splendid head. She also jingled with a little multitude of little charms, lockets and bracelets.

She had been, when the maid spoke to her, entertaining several friends in her bright and beautiful drawing-room. She had intended to invite him to join them, but at the sight of him she faltered. She was a most generous woman, overflowing with the milk of human kindness, as her ample figure indeed suggested, but when she saw him she knew that he had come to ask for something, and she knew too that his presence would embarrass the others, so she decided in the kindest manner possible not to invite him. “Dear Mr. Hannaway, how delightful to see you, you come here far too seldom.” “Yes,” he said, “thank you very much indeed,” and then he paused. “And how are you and how is everybody? I always say that you clergymen put us all to shame the way you work and the good you do for others.” This was a promising beginning; Mr. Hannaway plunged right in. “I have come to ask you to help us,” he said, trying to smile confidently; “the Boys’ Club needs assistance terribly badly, we have a debt of £45 : 3 : 6, and then the Girls’ Club …” His voice wandered away, his smile faded. He was fascinated by Mrs. Morrison-Smith’s bosom and shining hair. She was goodness itself. “Dear me, isn’t that terrible! To think that there’s all that debt! It hurts one dreadfully to know about it. Life should be so free and beautiful for all of us, don’t you think? I always say that if life isn’t beautiful for the very youngest and poorest of us how can we sleep in comfort?” “Yes,” said Mr. Hannaway nervously, “and there’s the old women’s treat coming very shortly, and the subscriptions for it this year have not been so good as they ought to be, and, and, there’s the Girls’ Club …” His voice wandered off again. Mrs. Morrison-Smith beamed upon him and she was thinking, “I do hope he won’t keep me long, I wonder he doesn’t understand it’s just tea-time,” and then beyond this the further thought unknown to herself, “How can I get rid of him without hurting his feelings?” Mr. Hannaway was thinking, “It won’t hurt you to give me a pound, you simply won’t feel it,” and he nearly cried out in a kind of desperation, “If you don’t give me a pound, I’ll smash everything in the room, I simply can’t bear to go back tonight without it.” But of course he didn’t say anything, he only smiled at her feebly. Mrs. Morrison-Smith’s kind feelings simply overwhelmed her and they all led her in one direction, namely, to get him out of the house as quickly as possible without giving him anything. “Oh, but that’s shocking,” she cried, “you should have written to me about it, letters are so much more satisfactory so that one can see just how things stand. Dear Mr. Hannaway, I do feel for you so much, and if only there weren’t so many claims upon me already, I’d simply love to help you. I always say that if there’s one thing we, who are more fortunate, ought to do it is to help the others. Small though my resources are in comparison with many I do try to make that my principle.” She smiled at him as though she would embrace him, then, as he said nothing, continued moving to the door: “Write to me, won’t you, write me a letter about it, giving me all the facts. Yes, a letter’s the thing, isn’t it?” “Oh, don’t you think—” he began, but she opened the door, not having heard him, and went on: “Send me a letter as soon as you can, I am sure that I can help some way; and come and see me again, I do so sympathise with all your difficulties.”

Afterwards in the drawing-room she said to her friends: “It was poor Mr. Hannaway, our vicar. Poor old man, I do hope I was kind; clergymen of the poorer parishes do have such a hard time.” And everyone thought she was very kind indeed.

Mr. Hannaway, stumbling through the garden again, noticed that it was beginning to snow.

VI

The dog, tied by a piece of string to the railing, couldn’t at all understand what had happened to him. The nice member of the Munden family had disappeared; he pulled violently at the string. For the first time in his life he began to suspect human nature, and the first moment of that suspicion is a very serious one in a dog’s life. He ran in different directions trying to break the string, he tugged and barked and tugged again. A wind had risen and the snow was beginning to fall heavily. An old lady carrying parcels came down the street. She was a very nice old lady, Mrs. Williams, renowned in her immediate circle for her independence, common sense and generous instincts; especially did she believe in being kind to animals. But she was in a hurry, what with the wind and the snow, and because Mr. Williams didn’t like to wait for his tea.

She saw the dog and stopped. “Poor little dog. Well, if that isn’t a shame, someone’s tied it up. I wonder whether there’s a policeman anywhere.” She was one of those old ladies who always in any crisis thought first of a policeman. She looked around and, as is frequently the case in the town of Polchester, there was no policeman anywhere to be seen. The dog, seeing her observe him thus closely, was sure at once that here was one of his kind friends come to help him. Barking with joy, he jumped up and down, endeavouring to reach her as closely as the string allowed him. But what is a kind old lady in such a situation to do? The dog might belong to somebody, she might be put into prison for stealing somebody’s dog, and in any case she couldn’t take it home with her, Mr. Williams didn’t like dogs. But she was as good as she could be, and the dog, poor creature, was likely to strangle himself if she left him there. She looked on every side of her and then saw some children running down towards her. “Poor little doggie,” she said, “poor dear little doggie,” and then, as the children approached, addressed them. “Now children, is this your little dog?” There were three of them, two boys and a girl. “No, mum,” they said, gazing with all their eyes as though they saw an extraordinary sight, a hippopotamus or perhaps an alligator. “Do you know whose little dog it is?” “No, mum.” “But it oughtn’t to be tied like that, it’ll do itself a hurt.” “Yes, mum.” “Now, suppose you just wait a minute here until a policeman comes and then give it to the policeman; don’t hurt the poor little doggie.” “No, mum.”

And Mrs. Williams hurried on to Mr. Williams, conscious that yet one more good action crowned her day.

Once the old lady was out of sight, the children undid the string. They were good little children in process of being well brought up; if there was one thing that they had been taught, it was to be kind to animals, but their education was not quite completed. Here was a dog, let’s have some fun with it!

The dog, meanwhile, delighted with its freedom, leapt and bounded all about them; all was well, here were friends again, what a lucky dog he was. But the elder of the two boys (Harold was his name) thought there was no fun in being with a dog unless you did something to it. It was simply in the joy of his young heart that he felt this necessity, he meant no harm; for all he knew, dogs liked having things done to them.

Moreover, this was the sort of dog to whom you simply had to do something, a funny lopsided mongrel animal. So, when they had run a little way, the dog confidently and joyously with them (and now they were approaching a more crowded street), young Harold saw in the gutter a small battered tin can. “Just the thing,” he proclaimed eagerly to his younger brother and sister, and filled with the eager exuberance of youth, he took the can and the piece of string, and in another instant the can was most humorously united to the dog’s stumpy tail.

The children were all delighted with the effect of their cleverness; how funny the little dog looked! But at the same time, they were aware that the snow was falling fast, that it was growing dark, that it was tea-time, and that the policeman might come, so, after laughing and shouting and dancing round the absurd animal, they hurried away.

The dog tried at first to follow them, but there were many people about, the world was odd and strange and uncouth. He ran a little way and stopped, then sudden terror fell upon him. He, who had never known what it was to be frightened, what it was to distrust, above all, what it was to be alone, was in an instant in a world of devils and dismay. Everything had changed, at every movement a strange rattling clatter accompanied him, on every side of him were flashing lights and thunderous noises; he ran a little way, stopped, then ran again, and still, whether he ran or no, this horrible rattling thing accompanied him.

He was lost, and lost with a strangeness that threatened on every side of him some awful disaster. His tongue out, his eyes staring, he began frantically to run, and as he ran all the world laughed; they laughed and laughed and laughed, you might fancy that the houses were bending forward holding their sides with merriment, that the chimneys wagged their heads, that all the lights in shops and lamps shook their flames in chorus. He was frightened with a terror that only children in the dark and lost dogs know.

This awful thing that groaned and chattered with him as he went! Madness seized him. He was watched by a world too busied with its own kind purposes to stop and inquire; moreover, he was running swiftly now, crazily, insanely, the snow blinding him, the wind tugging at him, the tin can careering madly with him, agonised fear in his heart, blindness in his eyes, lost.

VII

When Mr. Hannaway reached the street the snow was falling fast. He was not quite himself; sometimes when he was very tired and when he had not eaten quite enough he was a little light-headed and saw things oddly. He saw things oddly now, the street seemed to run so sharply downhill that unless he took great care he would be tumbling off it into an abyss. At the heart of his light-headedness there was despair, he had reached the end of everything; worst of all was it that there was no one in the world who cared twopence about him. Mrs. Lane, the old woman who managed for him, might in her rough way have some feeling for him, but she was always tried by him and irritated, whatever he did she was irritated; no, he could not say that there was a great deal of affection there. The parish in general put up with him, but they all, as he very well knew, thought him too old for his job. And that was the truth; he could see from this afternoon that the fault was entirely his. Everyone had been kind to him, had wanted to do him a service; it had been his own stupidity that had prevented them; but he did feel that if only someone or something, without being deliberately kind at all, could feel affection for him simply because they couldn’t help it, then, old though he was, he might do wonderful things. But there was no hope any more, this afternoon had shown him that the only thing for him to do was to go away and hide himself and so obscurely die.

This light-headedness increased as he reached the more crowded streets. He was not far now from his home; snow bewildered him, driving into his eyes, and the wind tugged at his thin coat, piercing him with cold. The lights all began to dance before his eyes; people, strange people, hurrying people, hostile people, brushed against him and passed him. He seemed to be of an incredible lightness so that in another moment he might be tossed into the air and blown like a leaf by the icy wind. There was a dreadful noise on every side of him, roaring and shouting and a strange rumbling at his feet. The houses were like cliffs and rocks, black and jagged, and it was as though he were fighting in a turbulent swiftly running stream whose fierce current he could not conquer.

Then, as though some black-faced giant bent down, he felt a tweak at his head and his old shabby black hat was gone. Everyone was battling with the snow and wind; he seemed to see arms raised, legs lifted, skirts distended on all sides of him. He ran a little way after his hat, but he could not see it, only lights rolling like balls on every side from under his feet. He ran forward again and then did not seem to be able to stop from running. He was terrified by the loneliness, the darkness and the sense that everything was swirling around him. Funny old man! Lost his hat! Lost his hat! Lost his hat! He was talking to himself, waving his arms….

Everyone was shouting. Something was coming towards him, it ran right at him, leapt up, almost knocked him over; he clung to it as though it were his only safeguard. A strange silence and stillness fell.

VIII

So the two of them met, driven by the kind feeling of all the world into one another’s arms. Mr. Hannaway, panting as though he had escaped some great disaster, looked around him; the dog, panting frantically, stayed at his feet. They were in actual fact in a small rather dimly lighted street down whose dusky passage a blizzard of snow was now swirling. “Why, it’s a dog!” said Mr. Hannaway, and as though these words were some kind of magical Open-Sesame his brain cleared, his heart beat less madly, he saw and recognised the street as one not far from his own and a curious tired placidity came and rested upon him. The dog never moved, only lay there panting its heart out.

He bent down and untied the tin can, then he picked up the dog and went home.

Mrs. Lane, coming in with the tea, saw him sitting in front of the fire wiping the dog with a towel. Dogs, like children, if the tyranny has not been so long that it has entered into their souls, are swiftly reassured. The dog licked the back of Mr. Hannaway’s thin dry hand.

Now Mrs. Lane objected to dogs, and laying the tray on the table, she began: “Well, I never….” Then a strange look in the man’s eyes stopped her. He was smiling with a pleasure that struck even her dimmed and hardened imagination. “Well, I never,” she said again. “Yes,” he said, looking up at her and speaking timidly, “it’s been a terrible afternoon, Mrs. Lane. Everyone’s been as nice as possible and yet somehow they are not as kind as they mean to be. Why, they had actually tied a tin to this poor dog’s tail. I know you don’t like dogs, Mrs. Lane,” he went on, smiling rather anxiously, “but I can’t help it, this dog’s going to stay.” “Well, I don’t approve of dogs,” she answered, “but I daresay we can find a place for him in the back. Not that it mightn’t be kinder to send him away, but there, if it gives you pleasure…. I wouldn’t hurt a flea myself, as everyone who knows me will tell you, but I don’t like dogs and I can’t say I do. However, no unkindness intended….” Then, as she went out of the room, “No unkindness intended, I’m sure, sir.”

The Silver Thorn (1928)

A CARNATION
FOR AN OLD MAN

Richard Herries, his sister Margaret, and their friend, Miss Felstead, arrived in Seville one February evening soon after midnight.

Their Seville adventure began unfortunately. As Margaret Herries always declared afterwards: “We might have known that it was fated to end disastrously. It had so dismal a beginning.”

It had indeed. At each visit they expected to step out of the train into a glorious tumultuous mixture of castanets, bull-fighters, carnations, Carmen and Andalusian dancers. Instead of this they were received by a gentle drizzle and a Square quite silent and occupied only by some somnolent motor-cars.

They needed encouragement. It had been a long and wearisome journey from Granada. Why, as Margaret said over and over again in the course of it, when Granada and Seville were so close to one another on the map they should be such an infinite distance by train only the Spanish railway authorities could explain, and they, so she was informed, never explained anything. They had been already unfortunate at Granada where it had been cold and where Miss Felstead (who was very romantic) had been unable, in spite of bribes, to persuade the custodian to allow her to see from the Alhambra Tower the sunset light up the Sierras. It would be too bad were Seville to be unfavourable also.

But it really started badly. They had engaged rooms at the Hotel Royal in the Plaza de San Fernando. This had been done only after a most vigorous and almost acrimonious discussion. The point was that the Hotel Royal was a Spanish hotel run for the Spanish and therefore cheaper than those which accommodated especially the English and American. Cheaper, yes, but, Margaret was sure, much nastier. Wasn’t Spanish sanitation notorious? What about the smells they had smelt in Barcelona? And didn’t the Spaniards cook everything in rancid oil? Economically minded though Margaret always was, for once she was against economy. She changed places indeed with her brother, who was the most generous soul alive. But the bill at the English hotel in Granada had seemed to him quite beyond justice, and an English lady (a very clean and particular English lady) had told him that she always patronised the Royal when she went to Seville. An excellent hotel, she told him, clean, the servants polite and remarkably willing. A marvellously cheap Pension and the food good and plentiful. So Richard had for once insisted.

And now behold the miserable commencement! Miss Felstead (who had eyes like gimlets) perceived at once that in the Square there were two hotel omnibuses asleep like everything else, and that on the windows of one of these were inscribed the magical words “Hotel Royal,” so she marshalled the two young dreamy porters and steered them with the luggage in the proper direction.

On the steps of the omnibus was a hotel porter fast asleep. He was awakened, the luggage piled on the roof of the omnibus and the three travellers installed inside. Then occurred the disgraceful event! After waiting for some ten minutes and drinking in the miserable fact that Seville station at midnight in the rain was worse than Sheffield on a Sunday, it occurred to Margaret Herries that nothing at all was happening. The hotel porter, who was again dozing off, explained to Richard – who had a literary rather than practical knowledge of Spanish – that the driver of the omnibus had, some half-hour before, disappeared into the station for conversation with a friend.

“Well,” suggested Richard, “fetch him.”

The porter, who had all the individuality, nobility and gravity of his race, walked with dignified austerity to the edge of the station, looked at it, shook his head, and returned wrapped in melancholy and thinking, apparently, of lottery tickets. After a while he pressed, very gently, the hooter of the omnibus, but with no result. Then, strongly urged, he went once more to the edge of the station but returned empty-handed.

So half an hour was passed. By this time Margaret and her friend were frantic with railway-nerves, bodily hunger (they had had only twenty minutes at Bobadilla to snatch some food three hours earlier), weariness and disappointment. Finally all the luggage was taken off the omnibus, after another half an hour a taxi-cab was found and they set off for the hotel. The last view they had of the porter was curled up inside the omnibus, happily reposing.

As Margaret always afterwards said, this was an Omen. She had herself never believed very much in Omens before. Miss Felstead was the one for Omens – but after the horrible week in Seville with its dreadful ending she never laughed at Omens again.

But for her everything was wrong with Seville from the beginning and, oddly, for Richard everything was right. He was an old man now – seventy-five years of age – and of course wanted his comforts. As a matter of fact the Herries always did want their comforts and saw that they got them. But once and again there would be a “freak” Herries who never seemed to know quite what he did want, and Richard had been rather like that. It was because he had been like that that his many sisters had always looked after him so thoroughly. First Hettie, and then, when she married, Florence, and then, when she married, Rosalind, and then, when she died, the youngest of them, Margaret. On two occasions Richard had almost married, might have been married altogether had he not been looked after so completely.

He had not, be it understood, objected to being looked after; he had rather liked it. He had felt perhaps that only so could he preserve his own secret life. And then they were immensely kind, especially Margaret.

Margaret had always adored her brother. She was not at all a sentimental person. She was a definite type of Englishwoman – a little mannish, thick-set and square, given to white collars, Scotch tweeds and brogues, rosy of complexion with strong black hair flecked now with grey, a snub nose, an obstinate mouth and a clear calm forehead. No other country could possibly produce a woman so calm, so determined, so masculine and yet feminine, so kind and so obtuse and so certain that all the things that she didn’t know were unworthy of any sensible person’s attention, so unsexual and yet so obviously designed for maternity.

She poured all her maternity on to Richard and yet apparently without a shadow of emotion. They never under any conditions showed emotion the one for the other, but they were devoted, self-sacrificing, and very good companions.

For seventy-five years Richard Herries had submitted to his sisters because he was both lazy and dreamy. He was the Herries type that dreams dreams and they have always either submitted and been wrapped away to nothing or rebelled and been cast out.

People described him as a “dear little old man.” He was short and fat with snow-white hair and rosy cheeks, clean-shaven and of an immaculate shining neatness. He had a delightful chuckle, a fashion of jingling his change in his wide trousers pocket. He seemed to enjoy everything. No one would have guessed that for some while now he had been one of the loneliest souls in Christendom.

It had begun a year or two before at a concert of modern music in Berlin. Schnabel was playing and he, Richard, had suddenly realised that he was miserably unhappy, that he had wasted the whole of his life, that he had done none of the things that he ought to have done. Margaret was with him and he bought her a tie-pin. Nevertheless, for some days he still felt miserable. This feeling returned at certain intervals, once when he watched “Punch and Judy” outside the Garrick Theatre, once when he read Madariaga’s Englishmen, Frenchmen, Spaniards, once when he ate too much at a dinner-party, once when he saw his reflection in a looking-glass, once when he was staying in Cumberland and watched the birds fly over Derwentwater on a September evening…. And now again on this visit to Spain!

He connected these distresses at once, like all good Herries, with his stomach. He liked his food and his wine, but when he was unhappy he had only a biscuit for luncheon.

He rearranged his pictures in his London flat, hanging the Utrillo over the piano and the Segonzac over the bookcase, hoping that that would put things right. He had fancied at the time that it had, but here he was now in Spain with no pictures to rehang and his stomach in perfect order.

He was unhappy, rebellious and discontented, and especially he detested Miss Felstead. When a very courteous, aged English gentleman detests an amiable lady, what is he to do about it? Avoid her company? Yes, but you cannot do that if you are travelling with her in a foreign country. Say as little as possible? This he tried, but his unusual silence at once aroused suspicion. Was he ill? Was he uncomfortable? Was he (Margaret hinted) simply sulking? Whenever Margaret thought that anything was wrong she was extremely sensible and cheerful. She was as sensible as a chemist’s shop and as cheerful as a fine day on the Scottish moors. She was breezy and jolly and accommodating. Miss Felstead, on the other hand, was tender and gentle and mysterious. In shape Miss Felstead was as slender as an umbrella handle, and in complexion rather blotchy, so that, quite frankly, when she was tender she was awful.

Richard had never liked her, but she was one of those English maiden ladies with no money and no relations upon whom others are always taking pity. It was rumoured, too, that she was extremely intelligent, that she would have been an authoress of note had she not possessed so critical a mind. When she was young she read Dante in Italian and belonged to a Browning Society, now that she was no longer young she raved about a Czechoslovakian pianist and read papers like “Light” and “Whence? Why? Whither?” But Richard had always suspected her intelligence and his suspicions were confirmed when in the Prado, before “Las Hilanderas,” she had said: “Very fine, of course, but does one like it?”

That evening, in order to annoy her, he had passionately defended the bull-fight and had sent her at once into a rocking wailing recitative of “Ah, but the horses! The poor, poor horses!”

He suspected that in her heart she detested him as truly as he detested her. She was jealous, in the curious tenacious way that such maiden ladies have, of Margaret’s affection for him. The thought that she perhaps detested him gave him some comfort.

In any case, and for whatever the reason, he had from the moment that he set foot in Seville the worst attack of rebellion he had ever known.

He was exceedingly fond of Spain and of the Spanish. It was by his firm wish that they were there now. Margaret did not like Spain; it seemed to her a lazy, purposeless, priest-ridden country. She could not understand what Richard saw in it, but loved him too dearly to refuse his wish.

He timidly suggested that he should come this time without her. He, seventy-five years of age and travel alone?

“But I’m perfectly fit. I’ve been there before. I know the language.”

Margaret smiled then, one of those smiles peculiarly the property of the Herries women, a smile self-confident, indulgent, maternal, kindly and patronising, a smile that had, on more than one earlier occasion, made murder a conceivable practice.

“Dear Richard … at your age … and Spain of all countries to be alone in!”

Yes. “Spain of all countries!” That was Margaret’s honest view of it. She thought that Spain was bad for everybody and especially for the Spaniards.

So, whether it were Margaret’s anti-Spanish feeling or Miss Felstead’s romanticism or simply the air or the disappointment over the omnibus at the station or the fact that they were at a Spanish hotel, whatever the reason, from the very first moment in Seville Richard and Margaret were at loggerheads.

“If I only had known!” Margaret said again and again afterwards. But of course she did not know. No one, thank heaven, ever does.

Richard had never been to Seville before. His first visit, some ten years earlier, had been along the southern coast, Malaga, Algeciras and Cadiz. The second time, five years ago, had taken him into the Basque country and as far south as Madrid and Toledo. At present his favourite town in Spain was Segovia, but he had stayed there only two days because Margaret was homesick for Cumberland. He looked back on it as a lovely city of silver-grey stone, flowers and green trees. He wouldn’t mind settling there, he had told Margaret, for a year or two.

He was thinking of Segovia this first morning in Seville. He had slipped out of his hotel without letting the women know and had almost the air of a guilty schoolboy as, seeing the tower of the Cathedral beckoning to him across the blue above the Spanish Bank, he turned in that direction.

After that first step his story enters into another world. How many other worlds are there? Millions, says one, none at all, says another. “Two are all I need,” says the poet. Richard Herries had all his life known only one and longed always, like ancestors of his, for another. Margaret’s account of it afterwards was: “On that very first morning in Seville he was unwell. Of course for one thing we were staying in a hotel for Spaniards – a most unwise thing to do, but Richard would have it. Then he went out all by himself that first morning, a most unusual thing for him to do. If I had only known that first day how ill he was!”

Luckily she did not.

But he didn’t feel ill at all. He had never felt so well in his life before.

Although the sky was blue there was a sharp nip in the air. It was eleven o’clock and everyone was beginning to wake up. At one all the shops would shut until four, the hour when everyone would really be awake. This was a sort of false dawn and very pleasant it was. In February Seville knows nothing of tourists save for an occasional meteoric flash of a boat-load from Cadiz or Malaga or Gibraltar. Richard might be said to be the guest of all the town.

His head was undoubtedly queer – not unpleasantly so, but as though he had taken a draught of some very potent sparkling wine. His limbs were light, made of gauze, and he seemed to have no age at all.

He was accustomed to the quiet and removed but friendly dignity of the Spaniard. That was one of the things that he liked best about Spain. They never pressed you to buy anything or go anywhere or do anything active, with the important exception, of course, of the boys who wanted to clean your boots for you. If you were a pretty young woman and alone, they might stare at you and even follow you, because pretty young women do not walk about alone in Spain, but that was the only active interest they took. And yet they were friendly, kind and beautifully polite. Richard loved good manners.

So today as Richard passed under the lovely portal that leads into the garden where the orange trees nestle under the Cathedral walls the audacious thought came to him that he would stay in Seville for many weeks, perhaps until June even, see the Holy Week with its processions, enjoy the Feria, bask in the suns of May and, best of all, bury his nose in carnations. Now all his life long his favourite flower had been the carnation, and especially that purple one that is divinely streaked with mauve and crimson.

It had been his thought when he had first come to Spain that he would find a country buried in carnations, but it had been on every occasion too early in the year and he had been bitterly disappointed when offered a miserable bunch of these flowers, already half dead, for the exorbitant sum of four or five pesetas. Why, they were cheaper in Piccadilly!

But now standing in that lovely garden with its uneven and crooked flags beneath his feet, the Giralda at his left stretching to the heavens, and the Patio de los Naranjos, its stone encrusted as though with jewels, the Madonna above the great door regarding him so benignly, the birds flying from buttress to buttress, he trembled with the excitement of his new experience – he would stay here. Margaret and Miss Felstead should return without him. He had in his heart the sweet burning awe of falling once again in love….

He gave some money to the old twisted beggar who, with trembling hand, lifted the black leather flap for him to enter, and passed inside.

Luncheon at the Royal was served from half-past twelve until half-past two, and at half-past two Richard had not yet returned. Margaret was a resolute, contained, sensible woman, but her distress was nevertheless acute and it was not made easier by Elsie Felstead’s little wails: “I know something has happened to him! How could we let him go out alone! He might be ill and neither of us know it for days! What about the police?”

“Oh, be quiet, Elsie!” Margaret seldom snapped at her friend, but when she did her friend knew it. “Of course he’s all right. Richard’s not a child and he knows Spanish far better than we do.” All the same she could have flung her arms around him and kissed him when he came in at last through the hotel door.

Instead of kissing him, being English, she scolded him.

Richard was very quiet. He said he was sorry, but he had been in the Cathedral. He had not noticed the time. It was a very beautiful cathedral.

Every sympathy must be felt for Margaret. Here she was in a strange country and her only brother, who was in her charge, whom she loved very dearly, was ill and refused to admit it.

That evening she attacked him about it.

“Richard, you are not well. Go to bed and I’ll have some dinner sent up to you.”

“I’m perfectly well.” His voice was testy and his eyes absent-minded.

“Now I know you’re not. You can’t deceive me after all these years. You are sickening for something or that’s what you look like. Elsie agrees with me.”

“Damn Elsie,” said Richard.

Margaret was upset and with reason. This was altogether unlike Richard. “Will you let me take your temperature?”

“No.”

Then followed Margaret’s most irritating method of persuasion, her jolly, patronising, friendly method.

“Now, old boy,” putting her hand on his shoulder, “this is childish. What harm is there in my taking your temperature? After all, if you are going to be ill you may just as well know it.”

“But I am not going to be ill,” he answered with much firmness. “As a matter of fact I never felt better.” Then he went on, looking at her in an odd way, rather as though he were seeing her now for the first time in his life. “The fact is, Margaret, I’m going about by myself a bit while we’re here. You and Elsie might go to Malaga or Cadiz perhaps if you are bored by Seville – just for a day or two—”

He looked at her sternly as though he were giving her an order. He had never looked at her like that in all their lives together before. But she simply answered:

“Very well, Richard. Perhaps we will.” And she said nothing more about temperatures.

She was deeply alarmed. She lay for a long while awake thinking. What had happened to her brother? Something had occurred during those hours when he was alone in the town? Love? Absurd at his age … and yet one read in the newspapers the oddest stories about old men. A Spanish siren? They were pretty, some of these Spanish women with their combs and black shawls. But no … not Richard…. He was not like that. She resolved that she would not let him escape her in the morning. Where he went so would she.

And then in the morning an awful thing occurred. Richard lied to them both. He had never, in Margaret’s belief, lied to her before. Dressed and ready, Margaret knocked at his door. He poked his head out.

“All right, my dear. Go down and wait for me. I’ll be with you in a moment.”

They sat, the two of them, in the little hall of the Royal and waited. They waited for a long time, very uncomfortable because the men also seated in the hall, and having apparently all the day in front of them, stared at them so markedly. At last they sent someone up to enquire. He came back. The señor was not there. The femme-de-chambre had seen him, half an hour before, with his hat and cane. Was there another exit to the hotel? Yes, there was another exit … Margaret and Miss Felstead stared at one another in mutual horror.

Richard was not only unwell; he was also insane. But Richard was not insane; he was merely conscious of happiness as he had never been conscious of it before.

On making his escape he went straight to the Cathedral, passed through the Court of the Orange Trees, gave half a peseta to the blind beggar who lifted the black flap for him, and stepped into his true life.

That was how he now expressed it to himself, that was how he saw it. He was seventy-five years of age, had had on the whole a full, interesting and happy existence, and yet – had never been alive until yesterday! Had been asleep, mummified, blind, deaf, dumb and had not known it.

It was not, as he very well knew, that this church was of such marvellous beauty. He had seen cathedrals possibly of greater beauty, Chartres, St. Mark’s in its own kind, even Ely on its slender scale. It was not that he was converted suddenly to any religious belief. Like most men he did not believe in very much but rather snatched at moments of love and beauty for confirmation of his unuttered hopes. It was not that he felt better or kinder or wiser since yesterday; it was simply that he was alive, alive to his finger-tips. It was like falling in love, but there was no one to fall in love with.

If it were not the most beautiful cathedral that he had ever seen, it was nevertheless the most alive. It gave him an impression of vastness as no other cathedral had done. But it was a vastness perfectly lighted. Although far from the darkness of a cathedral like Barcelona, it was quite without the shrill brightness that takes away mystery. The light came from many sources, now in long paths of softening colour, now in splashes of blue and purple that seemed almost to spring like fountains from the ground, now in dim misty gold from behind the shadowy pillars. In all this clarity there was no especial neatness or spruceness. What especially pleased him was that the building seemed always to continue its own natural life, crumbling here, breaking away a little there, stiffening in one place, failing in another. The magnificent colour of the highly placed windows was enrapturing. Never in his life had he seen such true deeps of rose and opal and onyx and crimson. High in air the windows sailed like magical clouds on the points of the vast pillars, and the great gates, thin like black silver or a wall of gold, like the gate before the altar, or a mist of cloud, were everywhere.

On this second day he realised that the church was like a town: here women were kneeling, there children playing, priests passed swiftly on some business, on a seat near to him a woman was suckling a child, before a neighbouring chapel two dogs were playing, two old men were sweeping with brooms, some men in a group near by were discussing their affairs. Life, heightened by the beauty and majesty of the place, was going on everywhere around him, and to himself too something especial was about to happen.

He looked up, a smile on his lips, as though he knew what was coming, and encountered the grave, happy eyes of Santa Emilia.

Santa Emilia has been waiting (for how many years I shouldn’t like to say) very patiently in the right corner of a picture that hangs in a chapel that shall be nameless, nameless because it would be a piece of the worst impertinence if, in the course of this little history, I were to reveal her exact position. I will not even assert definitely that her name is Emilia.

On one of the walls of one of these chapels, then, there is a large painting (by Murillo, perhaps, as so many of the paintings in this city are by that artist), and it is flanked on either side by some six other paintings in the shape of panels. These panels are of a lovely gentle colouring – soft rose and silver, the palest of greens and of dove grey. It was in the largest of these panels that Emilia had for so many years been so sweetly and patiently sitting. In her picture the heavens open and someone, God the Father Himself, perhaps, is delivering judgement, and several Saints seated on the grass listen in a mild surprise.

It is impossible to suppose that Santa Emilia herself was watching for any casual comer. For one thing her chapel was dark, well defended by its high iron gates, and it was but seldom that visitors penetrated that obscurity. Then she had other things to do. Her face, young, eager, ardent, was raised to the sky in an attitude of worship, her hands with their lovely slender fingers folded on her lap, a green scarf falling lightly over the white meshes of her robe. Why, after all these years, should she notice Richard Herries? The answer to that is that obviously it must have been astonishing to her that anyone should notice her at all, choose her from among so many others. She was carrying in one hand a red flower that might have been a carnation (Richard was certain that it was) and it was the agitation of this flower against her fingers that warned her that something exceptional was occurring. So she turned and looked towards the gates and at once in that first glance exchanged they loved one another.

She had been waiting always for just such an experience as this. She had never known anything of earthly love. From her babyhood her life had been dedicated to Christ and she had wanted nothing else. When the Pestilence had struck her convent in Seville she had been only twenty-three years of age, but was even then distinguished among the others for the purity and goodness of her life.

The Pestilence was raging throughout Seville and she had gone into the town and wrought so many services there in caring for the sick and comforting the bereaved that, at her death from that same disease, she had been canonised.

She was only a very minor Saint; she had not lived long enough nor caused enough public attention (for with Sainthood as with everything else, advertisement is a great help) to be remembered very dearly by anyone. And then her position was obscure, seated there in one of the most obscure paintings in one of the darkest of the chapels. She was nevertheless most happy, for to worship God continually when you are certain of His existence is the happiest of all possible lives.

Nevertheless she was, and always had been, a completely human being as well as a Saint, and now, looking down into the rosy, earnest face of that old man who was so very like the child that she might have had, had life been different, she loved him as she would, had it been so ordered, have loved her son.

Richard stayed there a long time. He told her many things that he had never told anyone in his life before. Then he went away….

His life was at once, from that moment, so immensely heightened, intensified and ennobled that anyone, encountering him, must perceive the change. All true love must of course ennoble the possessor of it, but here was a miracle – not because Santa Emilia had turned her head and smiled at him – Saints are continually engaged in these acts of mercy – but because this experience had come to him so very late in his life when everything might have been supposed to be over for him.

Back in his hotel he wanted very badly to give some sort of explanation to the two ladies. But what could he say? He was not so rapt in his own miracle but that he could realise perfectly well that to say to Margaret: “You must excuse me if I seem a little absent-minded. The fact is that I have fallen in love with a Saint in the Cathedral,” would be simply to invite her instantly to summon a doctor.

So he said nothing at all. But he was in fact so charming, so gentle and so happy that Margaret asked him no questions. One thing that pleased her greatly was to see that he had quite altered his attitude to Miss Felstead. He was not irritated any longer by her remarks, did not snap at her romanticism, was patient with her sentiment. He was patient with everyone and everything and his eyes shone with a happy light.

“We were quite wrong,” his sister said to her friend, “to think him ill. Seville seems to be doing him a world of good. We may as well stay on for a while, although I can’t say that I like either the hotel or the town.”

He had now, it was plain, a passion for the Cathedral, and in that, too, they allowed him to have his way. After all it did no one any harm.

In many places of worship it would soon have attracted attention that a little elderly gentleman should stay for so long, day after day in the same position, his face close to the iron gates, staring in front of him. But in this Cathedral nothing human was either odd or vulgar.

He told her everything, he who had never told anyone anything before. Few people realise the tomb-like silence in which most Englishmen spend their lives. Their education trains them to silence, their marriage system encourages it, their belief in physical exercise makes intellectual silence easy.

No one, standing near at hand, would have heard anything: Richard’s lips indeed did not move, but Santa Emilia heard everything. So many things that she could not have believed possible! How far from her cloistered Spanish life of four hundred years before was this strange English one; a family life, made up of gardens shadowed by old trees and guarded by rose-red walls, of sports desperately important, of sisters and sisters and sisters, of many months of rain and mist and fog, of a religion that was no religion, and, finally, what drew her heart just as four hundred years ago it would have been drawn, a sense of babyhood, a perpetual nursery with rocking cradles and the good God coming laden with gifts for good children down through the chimney – as though this little old man with the white hair were the child for whom, although she did not know it, she had always longed.

Yes, he told her everything – even that he had thought that Spain would be filled with carnations, but that, alas, he had found only some faded ones. Was that a carnation that she held in her hand? Yes, she told him that it was. It had not been one until that moment. As she spoke it became one.

She spoke, but no one watching beside Richard would have seen her lips move. He alone saw and heard.

In another place and at another time he would have known that he was very unwell. His heart had been for many years weak and all the symptoms that he so greatly dreaded were now present. But he did not realise them. He was not aware of his body. He was happy as one is happy in a dream when one suddenly, after aeons of disappointment, has perfect satisfaction. Santa Emilia went with him everywhere. Margaret and Miss Felstead of course did not know this. Margaret was worried a little about his appearance. Like many good women she was especially proud of detecting the approach of illness in anyone. She was certain that Richard “was sickening for something.” But he denied any ailment. He had never, he told her, felt so well in his life before, and that indeed was true.

Taking Santa Emilia everywhere, he found Seville most enchanting. Even the Museo, with its too saccharine Murillo, its pathetic air of desertion, its courtyard that echoed so sadly the weary feet of the tourists, seemed to him beautiful because of Santa Emilia’s pride in it. Seville, in spite of its energy and jollity and measure of full, healthy life, is especially the city of children and old men. Nowhere in Spain – and I suspect nowhere else in the world – are there such marvellous old men with such marvellous faces, and nowhere else are the children so gay. No matter where – in the crowded Sierpes, along the banks of the brown Guadalquivir, in the quiet fountain-singing gardens of Murillo – it is the old men and the children who are everywhere.

When at last Santa Emilia knew how deeply she loved her friend, she asked Santa Isabela what she must do. Santa Isabela had always stood, a tall and gracious figure, at her side, looking up towards God coming in Judgement.

“I have been here,” Santa Emilia said, “such a very long time. There are so many parts of Heaven that I have not visited. We should be so very happy together.”

“Perhaps,” said Santa Isabela, “he does not want to leave the world yet. I have noticed how strongly men cling to the world.”

“I will ask him,” said Santa Emilia.

She asked him.

He said that he would go wherever she would take him. She promised that he should see gardens and gardens of carnations. He told her that he wanted only the one that she carried in her hand.

It was afternoon when she told him this and Vespers were just over. Two choir-boys were showing some tourists the carving in the Choir, and one of them swung on the foot of the great bronze lectern to show the tourists what a Spanish choir-boy dared to do. Many women were kneeling in the vast church, and their prayers rose up to the Madonna above the High Altar; she bent upon them glances of the utmost tenderness and protection.

“Yes,” said Santa Isabela. “You are permitted to go. Santa Rosa will take your place here.”

So they went together into Heaven.

•   •   •   •   •

A little crowd gathered. The Englishman had fallen suddenly in a faint. No, alas, he was dead. Of heart failure, said one of the Canons who had been passing and knew something of medicine.

Behind Margaret’s deep distress there were consolations: she had known for days that he was not well although he said otherwise, and on his face there was a look of radiant happiness.

•   •   •   •   •

It was not until many weeks later that the Dean of the Cathedral, who was an authority on the pictures, taking some friends into the little chapel, was puzzled.

“I always had thought,” he explained, “that Santa Emilia held a flower. I was wrong. I must have been deceived by the light.”

“And who was Santa Emilia?” asked a friend.

“A minor Saint. Nothing much is known about her. She died young, very young, in this city, of the Plague.”

“Ladies’ Home Journal” Sep 1929

All Soul’s Night (1933)

THE SNOW

The second Mrs. Ryder was a young woman not easily frightened, but now she stood in the dusk of the passage leaning back against the wall, her hand on her heart, looking at the grey-faced window beyond which the snow was steadily falling against the lamplight.

The passage where she was led from the study to the dining-room, and the window looked out on to the little paved path that ran at the edge of the Cathedral green. As she stared down the passage she couldn’t be sure whether the woman were there or no. How absurd of her! She knew the woman was not there. But if the woman was not, how was it that she could discern so clearly the old-fashioned grey cloak, the untidy grey hair and the sharp outline of the pale cheek and pointed chin? Yes, and more than that, the long sweep of the grey dress, falling in folds to the ground, the flash of a gold ring on the white hand. No. No. NO. This was madness. There was no one and nothing there. Hallucination …

Very faintly a voice seemed to come to her: “I warned you. This is for the last time….”

The nonsense! How far now was her imagination to carry her? Tiny sounds about the house, the running of a tap somewhere, a faint voice from the kitchen, these and something more had translated themselves into an imagined voice. “The last time …”

But her terror was real. She was not normally frightened by anything. She was young and healthy and bold, fond of sport, hunting, shooting, taking any risk. Now she was truly stiffened with terror – she could not move, could not advance down the passage as she wanted to and find light, warmth, safety in the dining-room. All the time the snow fell steadily, stealthily, with its own secret purpose, maliciously, beyond the window in the pale glow of the lamplight.

Then unexpectedly there was noise from the hall, opening of doors, a rush of feet, a pause and then in clear beautiful voices the well-known strains of “Good King Wenceslas.” It was the Cathedral choir-boys on their regular Christmas round. This was Christmas Eve. They always came just at this hour on Christmas Eve.

With an intense, almost incredible relief she turned back into the hall. At the same moment her husband came out of the study. They stood together smiling at the little group of mufflered, becoated boys who were singing, heart and soul in the job, so that the old house simply rang with their melody.

Reassured by the warmth and human company, she lost her terror. It had been her imagination. Of late she had been none too well. That was why she had been so irritable. Old Doctor Bernard was no good: he didn’t understand her case at all. After Christmas she would go to London and have the very best advice …

Had she been well she could not, half an hour ago, have shown such miserable temper over nothing. She knew that it was over nothing and yet that knowledge did not make it any easier for her to restrain herself. After every bout of temper she told herself that there should never be another – and then Herbert said something irritating, one of his silly muddle-headed stupidities, and she was off again!

She could see now as she stood beside him at the bottom of the staircase, that he was still feeling it. She had certainly half an hour ago said some abominably rude personal things – things that she had not at all meant – and he had taken them in his meek, quiet way. Were he not so meek and quiet, did he only pay her back in her own coin, she would never lose her temper. Of that she was sure. But who wouldn’t be irritated by that meekness and by the only reproachful thing that he ever said to her: “Elinor understood me better, my dear”? To throw the first wife up against the second! Wasn’t that the most tactless thing that a man could possibly do? And Elinor, that worn elderly woman, the very opposite of her own gay, bright, amusing self? That was why Herbert had loved her, because she was gay and bright and young. It was true that Elinor had been devoted, that she had been so utterly wrapped up in Herbert that she lived only for him. People were always recalling her devotion, which was sufficiently rude and tactless of them.

Well, she could not give anyone that kind of old-fashioned sugary devotion; it wasn’t in her, and Herbert knew it by this time.

Nevertheless she loved Herbert in her own way, as he must know, know it so well that he ought to pay no attention to the bursts of temper. She wasn’t well. She would see a doctor in London …

The little boys finished their carols, were properly rewarded, and tumbled like feathery birds out into the snow again. They went into the study, the two of them, and stood beside the big open log-fire. She put her hand up and stroked his thin beautiful cheek.

“I’m so sorry to have been cross just now, Bertie. I didn’t mean half I said, you know.”

But he didn’t, as he usually did, kiss her and tell her that it didn’t matter. Looking straight in front of him, he answered:

“Well, Alice, I do wish you wouldn’t. It hurts, horribly. It upsets me more than you think. And it’s growing on you. You make me miserable. I don’t know what to do about it. And it’s all about nothing.”

Irritated at not receiving the usual commendation for her sweetness in making it up again, she withdrew a little and answered:

“Oh, all right. I’ve said I’m sorry. I can’t do any more.”

“But tell me,” he insisted, “I want to know. What makes you so angry, so suddenly? – and about nothing at all.”

She was about to let her anger rise, her anger at his obtuseness, obstinacy, when some fear checked her, a strange unanalysed fear, as though someone had whispered to her, “Look out! This is the last time!”

“It’s not altogether my own fault,” she answered, and left the room.

She stood in the cold hall, wondering where to go. She could feel the snow falling outside the house and shivered. She hated the snow, she hated the winter, this beastly, cold dark English winter that went on and on, only at last to change into a damp, soggy English spring.

It had been snowing all day. In Polchester it was unusual to have so heavy a snowfall. This was the hardest winter that they had known for many years.

When she urged Herbert to winter abroad – which he could quite easily do – he answered her impatiently; he had the strongest affection for this poky dead-and-alive Cathedral town. The Cathedral seemed to be precious to him; he wasn’t happy if he didn’t go and see it every day! She wouldn’t wonder if he didn’t think more of the Cathedral than he did of herself. Elinor had been the same; she had even written a little book about the Cathedral, about the Black Bishop’s Tomb and the stained glass and the rest …

What was the Cathedral after all? Only a building!

She was standing in the drawing-room looking out over the dusky ghostly snow to the great hulk of the Cathedral that Herbert said was like a flying ship, but to herself was more like a crouching beast licking its lips over the miserable sinners that it was for ever devouring.

As she looked and shivered, feeling that in spite of herself her temper and misery were rising so that they threatened to choke her, it seemed to her that her bright and cheerful fire-lit drawing-room was suddenly open to the snow. It was exactly as though cracks had appeared everywhere, in the ceiling, the walls, the windows, and that through these cracks the snow was filtering, dribbling in little tracks of wet down the walls, already perhaps making pools of water on the carpet.

This was of course imagination, but it was a fact that the room was most dreadfully cold although a great fire was burning and it was the cosiest room in the house.

Then, turning, she saw the figure standing by the door. This time there could be no mistake. It was a grey shadow, and yet a shadow with form and outline – the untidy grey hair, the pale face like a moon-lit leaf, the long grey clothes, and something obstinate, vindictive, terribly menacing in its pose.

She moved and the figure was gone; there was nothing there and the room was warm again, quite hot in fact. But young Mrs. Ryder, who had never feared anything in all her life save the vanishing of her youth, was trembling so that she had to sit down, and even then her trembling did not cease. Her hand shook on the arm of her chair.

She had created this thing out of her imagination of Elinor’s hatred of her and her own hatred of Elinor. It was true that they had never met, but who knew but that the spiritualists were right, and Elinor’s spirit, jealous of Herbert’s love for her, had been there driving them apart, forcing her to lose her temper and then hating her for losing it? Such things might be! But she had not much time for speculation. She was preoccupied with her fear. It was a definite, positive fear, the kind of fear that one has just before one goes under an operation. Someone or something was threatening her. She clung to her chair as though to leave it were to plunge into disaster. She looked around her everywhere; all the familiar things, the pictures, the books, the little tables, the piano were different now, isolated, strange, hostile, as though they had been won over by some enemy power.

She longed for Herbert to come and protect her; she felt most kindly to him. She would never lose her temper with him again – and at that same moment some cold voice seemed to whisper in her ear: “You had better not. It will be for the last time.”

At length she found courage to rise, cross the room and go up to dress for dinner. In her bedroom courage came to her once more. It was certainly very cold, and the snow, as she could see when she looked between her curtains, was falling more heavily than ever, but she had a warm bath, sat in front of her fire and was sensible again.

For many months this odd sense that she was watched and accompanied by someone hostile to her had been growing. It was the stronger perhaps because of the things that Herbert told her about Elinor; she was the kind of woman, he said, who, once she loved anyone, would never relinquish her grasp; she was utterly faithful. He implied that her tenacious fidelity had been at times a little difficult.

“She always said,” he added once, “that she would watch over me until I rejoined her in the next world. Poor Elinor!” he sighed. “She had a fine religious faith, stronger than mine, I fear.”

It was always after one of her tantrums that young Mrs. Ryder had been most conscious of this hallucination, this dreadful discomfort of feeling that someone was near you who hated you – but it was only during the last week that she began to fancy that she actually saw anyone, and with every day her sense of this figure had grown stronger.

It was, of course, only nerves, but it was one of those nervous afflictions that became tiresome indeed if you did not rid yourself of it. Mrs. Ryder, secure now in the warmth and intimacy of her bedroom, determined that henceforth everything should be sweetness and light. No more tempers! Those were the things that did her harm.

Even though Herbert were a little trying, was not that the case with every husband in the world? And was it not Christmas time? Peace and Good Will to men! Peace and Good Will to Herbert!

They sat down opposite to one another in the pretty little dining-room hung with Chinese woodcuts, the table gleaming and the amber curtains richly dark in the firelight.

But Herbert was not himself. He was still brooding, she supposed, over their quarrel of the afternoon. Weren’t men children? Incredible the children that they were!

So when the maid was out of the room she went over to him, bent down and kissed his forehead.

“Darling … you’re still cross, I can see you are. You mustn’t be. Really you mustn’t. It’s Christmas time and, if I forgive you, you must forgive me.”

“You forgive me?” he asked, looking at her in his most aggravating way. “What have you to forgive me for?”

Well, that was really too much. When she had taken all the steps, humbled her pride.

She went back to her seat, but for a while could not answer him because the maid was there. When they were alone again she said, summoning all her patience:

“Bertie dear, do you really think that there’s anything to be gained by sulking like this? It isn’t worthy of you. It isn’t really.”

He answered her quietly.

“Sulking? No, that’s not the right word. But I’ve got to keep quiet. If I don’t I shall say something I’m sorry for.” Then, after a pause, in a low voice, as though to himself: “These constant rows are awful.”

Her temper was rising again; another self that had nothing to do with her real self, a stranger to her and yet a very old familiar friend.

“Don’t be so self-righteous,” she answered, her voice trembling a little. “These quarrels are entirely my own fault, aren’t they?”

“Elinor and I never quarrelled,” he said, so softly that she scarcely heard him.

“No! Because Elinor thought you perfect. She adored you. You’ve often told me. I don’t think you perfect. I’m not perfect either. But we’ve both got faults. I’m not the only one to blame.”

“We’d better separate,” he said, suddenly looking up. “We don’t get on now. We used to. I don’t know what’s changed everything. But, as things are, we’d better separate.”

She looked at him and knew that she loved him more than ever, but because she loved him so much she wanted to hurt him, and because he had said that he thought he could get on without her she was so angry that she forgot all caution. Her love and her anger helped one another. The more angry she became the more she loved him.

“I know why you want to separate,” she said. “It’s because you’re in love with someone else. (‘How funny,’ something inside her said. ‘You don’t mean a word of this.’) You’ve treated me as you have, and then you leave me.”

“I’m not in love with anyone else,” he answered her steadily, “and you know it. But we are so unhappy together that it’s silly to go on … silly…. The whole thing has failed.”

There was so much unhappiness, so much bitterness, in his voice that she realised that at last she had truly gone too far. She had lost him. She had not meant this. She was frightened and her fear made her so angry that she went across to him.

“Very well then … I’ll tell everyone … what you’ve been. How you’ve treated me.”

“Not another scene,” he answered wearily. “I can’t stand any more. Let’s wait. Tomorrow is Christmas Day….”

He was so unhappy that her anger with herself maddened her. She couldn’t bear his sad, hopeless disappointment with herself, their life together, everything.

In a fury of blind temper she struck him; it was as though she were striking herself. He got up and without a word left the room. There was a pause, and then she heard the hall door close. He had left the house.

She stood there, slowly coming to her control again. When she lost her temper it was as though she sank under water. When it was all over she came once more to the surface of life, wondering where she’d been and what she had been doing. Now she stood there, bewildered, and then at once she was aware of two things, one that the room was bitterly cold and the other that someone was in the room with her.

This time she did not need to look around her. She did not turn at all, but only stared straight at the curtained windows, seeing them very carefully, as though she were summing them up for some future analysis, with their thick amber folds, gold rod, white lines – and beyond them the snow was falling.

She did not need to turn, but, with a shiver of terror, she was aware that that grey figure who had, all these last weeks, been approaching ever more closely, was almost at her very elbow. She heard quite clearly: “I warned you. That was the last time.”

At the same moment Onslow the butler came in. Onslow was broad, fat and rubicund – a good faithful butler with a passion for church music. He was a bachelor and, it was said, disappointed of women. He had an old mother in Liverpool to whom he was greatly attached.

In a flash of consciousness she thought of all these things when he came in. She expected him also to see the grey figure at her side. But he was undisturbed, his ceremonial complacency clothed him securely.

“Mr. Fairfax has gone out,” she said firmly. Oh, surely he must see something, feel something.

“Yes, Madam!” Then, smiling rather grandly: “It’s snowing hard. Never seen it harder here. Shall I build up the fire in the drawing-room, Madam?”

“No, thank you. But Mr. Fairfax’s study …”

“Yes, Madam. I only thought that as this room was so warm you might find it chilly in the drawing-room.”

This room warm, when she was shivering from head to foot; but holding herself lest he should see … She longed to keep him there, to implore him to remain; but in a moment he was gone, softly closing the door behind him.

Then a mad longing for flight seized her, and she could not move. She was rooted there to the floor, and even as, wildly trying to cry, to scream, to shriek the house down, she found that only a little whisper would come, she felt the cold touch of a hand on hers.

She did not turn her head: her whole personality, all her past life, her poor little courage, her miserable fortitude were summoned to meet this sense of approaching death which was as unmistakable as a certain smell, or the familiar ringing of a gong. She had dreamt in nightmares of approaching death and it had always been like this, a fearful constriction of the heart, a paralysis of the limbs, a choking sense of disaster like an anaesthetic.

“You were warned,” something said to her again.

She knew that if she turned she would see Elinor’s face, set, white, remorseless. The woman had always hated her, been vilely jealous of her, protecting her wretched Herbert.

A certain vindictiveness seemed to release her. She found that she could move, her limbs were free.

She passed to the door, ran down the passage, into the hall. Where would she be safe? She thought of the Cathedral, where tonight there was a carol service. She opened the hall door and just as she was, meeting the thick, involving, muffling snow, she ran out.

She started across the green towards the Cathedral door. Her thin black slippers sank in the snow. Snow was everywhere – in her hair, her eyes, her nostrils, her mouth, on her bare neck, between her breasts.

“Help! Help! Help!” she wanted to cry, but the snow choked her. Lights whirled about her. The Cathedral rose like a huge black eagle and flew towards her.

She fell forward, and even as she fell a hand, far colder than the snow, caught her neck. She lay struggling in the snow and as she struggled there two hands of an icy fleshless chill closed about her throat.

Her last knowledge was of the hard outline of a ring pressing into her neck. Then she lay still, her face in the snow, and the flakes eagerly, savagely, covered her.

All Soul’s Night (1933)

TARNHELM

OR, THE DEATH OF MY UNCLE ROBERT

I

I was, I suppose, at that time a peculiar child, peculiar a little by nature, but also because I had spent so much of my young life in the company of people very much older than myself.

After the events that I am now going to relate, some quite indelible mark was set on me. I became then, and have always been since, one of those persons, otherwise insignificant, who have decided, without possibility of change, about certain questions.

Some things, doubted by most of the world, are for these people true and beyond argument; this certainty of theirs gives them a kind of stamp, as though they lived so much in their imagination as to have very little assurance as to what is fact and what fiction. This “oddness” of theirs puts them apart. If now, at the age of fifty, I am a man with very few friends, very much alone, it is because, if you like, my Uncle Robert died in a strange manner forty years ago and I was a witness of his death.

I have never until now given any account of the strange proceedings that occurred at Faildyke Hall on the evening of Christmas Eve in the year 1890. The incidents of that evening are still remembered very clearly by one or two people, and a kind of legend of my Uncle Robert’s death has been carried on into the younger generation. But no one still alive was a witness of them as I was, and I feel it is time that I set them down upon paper.

I write them down without comment. I extenuate nothing; I disguise nothing. I am not, I hope, in any way a vindictive man, but my brief meeting with my Uncle Robert and the circumstances of his death gave my life, even at that early age, a twist difficult for me very readily to forgive.

As to the so-called supernatural element in my story, everyone must judge for himself about that. We deride or we accept according to our natures. If we are built of a certain solid practical material the probability is that no evidence, however definite, however first-hand, will convince us. If dreams are our daily portion, one dream more or less will scarcely shake our sense of reality.

However, to my story.

My father and mother were in India from my eighth to my thirteenth years. I did not see them, except on two occasions when they visited England. I was an only child, loved dearly by both my parents, who, however, loved one another yet more. They were an exceedingly sentimental couple of the old-fashioned kind. My father was in the Indian Civil Service, and wrote poetry. He even had his epic, Tantalus: A Poem in Four Cantos, published at his own expense.

This, added to the fact that my mother had been considered an invalid before he married her, made my parents feel that they bore a very close resemblance to the Brownings, and my father even had a pet name for my mother that sounded curiously like the famous and hideous “Ba.”

I was a delicate child, was sent to Mr. Ferguson’s Private Academy at the tender age of eight, and spent my holidays as the rather unwanted guest of various relations.

“Unwanted” because I was, I imagine, a difficult child to understand. I had an old grandmother who lived at Folkestone, two aunts, who shared a little house in Kensington, an aunt, uncle and a brood of cousins inhabiting Cheltenham, and two uncles who lived in Cumberland. All these relations, except the two uncles, had their proper share of me and for none of them had I any great affection.

Children were not studied in those days as they are now. I was thin, pale and bespectacled, aching for affection but not knowing at all how to obtain it; outwardly undemonstrative but inwardly emotional and sensitive, playing games, because of my poor sight, very badly, reading a great deal more than was good for me, and telling myself stories all day and part of every night.

All of my relations tired of me, I fancy, in turn, and at last it was decided that my uncles in Cumberland must do their share. These two were my father’s brothers, the eldest of a long family of which he was the youngest. My Uncle Robert, I understood, was nearly seventy, my Uncle Constance some five years younger. I remember always thinking that Constance was a funny name for a man.

My Uncle Robert was the owner of Faildyke Hall, a country house between the lake of Wastwater and the little town of Seascale on the sea coast. Uncle Constance had lived with Uncle Robert for many years. It was decided, after some family correspondence, that the Christmas of this year, 1890, should be spent by me at Faildyke Hall.

I was at this time just eleven years old, thin and skinny, with a bulging forehead, large spectacles and a nervous, shy manner. I always set out, I remember, on any new adventures with mingled emotions of terror and anticipation. Maybe this time the miracle would occur: I should discover a friend or a fortune, should cover myself with glory in some unexpected way; be at last what I always longed to be, a hero.

I was glad that I was not going to any of my other relations for Christmas, and especially not to my cousins at Cheltenham, who teased and persecuted me and were never free of ear-splitting noises. What I wanted most in life was to be allowed to read in peace. I understood that at Faildyke there was a glorious library.

My aunt saw me into the train. I had been presented by my uncle with one of the most gory of Harrison Ainsworth’s romances, The Lancashire Witches, and I had five bars of chocolate cream, so that that journey was as blissfully happy as any experience could be to me at that time. I was permitted to read in peace, and I had just then little more to ask of life.

Nevertheless, as the train puffed its way north, this new country began to force itself on my attention. I had never before been in the North of England, and I was not prepared for the sudden sense of space and freshness that I received.

The naked, unsystematic hills, the freshness of the wind on which the birds seemed to be carried with especial glee, the stone walls that ran like grey ribbons about the moors, and, above all, the vast expanse of sky upon whose surface clouds swam, raced, eddied and extended as I had never anywhere witnessed….

I sat, lost and absorbed, at my carriage window, and when at last, long after dark had fallen, I heard “Seascale” called by the porter, I was still staring in a sort of romantic dream. When I stepped out on to the little narrow platform and was greeted by the salt tang of the sea wind my first real introduction to the North Country may be said to have been completed. I am writing now in another part of that same Cumberland country, and beyond my window the line of the fell runs strong and bare against the sky, while below it the Lake lies, a fragment of silver glass at the feet of Skiddaw.

It may be that my sense of the deep mystery of this country had its origin in this same strange story that I am now relating. But again perhaps not, for I believe that that first evening arrival at Seascale worked some change in me, so that since then none of the world’s beauties – from the crimson waters of Kashmir to the rough glories of our own Cornish coast – can rival for me the sharp, peaty winds and strong, resilient turf of the Cumberland hills.

That was a magical drive in the pony-trap to Faildyke that evening. It was bitterly cold, but I did not seem to mind it. Everything was magical to me.

From the first I could see the great slow hump of Black Combe jet against the frothy clouds of the winter night, and I could hear the sea breaking and the soft rustle of the bare twigs in the hedgerows.

I made, too, the friend of my life that night, for it was Bob Armstrong who was driving the trap. He has often told me since (for although he is a slow man of few words he likes to repeat the things that seem to him worth while) that I struck him as “pitifully lost” that evening on the Seascale platform. I looked, I don’t doubt, pinched and cold enough. In any case it was a lucky appearance for me, for I won Armstrong’s heart there and then, and he, once he gave it, could never bear to take it back again.

He, on his side, seemed to me gigantic that night. He had, I believe, one of the broadest chests in the world: it was a curse to him, he said, because no ready-made shirts would ever suit him.

I sat in close to him because of the cold; he was very warm, and I could feel his heart beating like a steady clock inside his rough coat. It beat for me that night, and it has beaten for me, I’m glad to say, ever since.

In truth, as things turned out, I needed a friend. I was nearly asleep and stiff all over my little body when I was handed down from the trap and at once led into what seemed to me an immense hall crowded with the staring heads of slaughtered animals and smelling of straw.

I was so sadly weary that my uncles, when I met them in a vast billiard-room in which a great fire roared in a stone fireplace like a demon, seemed to me to be double.

In any case, what an odd pair they were! My Uncle Robert was a little man with grey untidy hair and little sharp eyes hooded by two of the bushiest eyebrows known to humanity. He wore (I remember as though it were yesterday) shabby country clothes of a faded green colour, and he had on one finger a ring with a thick red stone.

Another thing that I noticed at once when he kissed me (I detested to be kissed by anybody) was a faint scent that he had, connected at once in my mind with the caraway-seeds that there are in seed-cake. I noticed, too, that his teeth were discoloured and yellow.

My Uncle Constance I liked at once. He was fat, round, friendly and clean. Rather a dandy was Uncle Constance. He wore a flower in his buttonhole and his linen was snowy white in contrast with his brother’s.

I noticed one thing, though, at that very first meeting, and that was that before he spoke to me and put his fat arm around my shoulder he seemed to look towards his brother as though for permission. You may say that it was unusual for a boy of my age to notice so much, but in fact I noticed everything at that time. Years and laziness, alas! have slackened my observation.

II

I had a horrible dream that night; it woke me screaming, and brought Bob Armstrong in to quiet me.

My room was large, like all the other rooms that I had seen, and empty, with a great expanse of floor and a stone fireplace like the one in the billiard-room. It was, I afterwards found, next to the servants’ quarters. Armstrong’s room was next to mine, and Mrs. Spender’s, the housekeeper’s, beyond his.

Armstrong was then, and is yet, a bachelor. He used to tell me that he loved so many women that he never could bring his mind to choose any one of them. And now he has been too long my personal bodyguard and is too lazily used to my ways to change his condition. He is, moreover, seventy years of age.

Well, what I saw in my dream was this. They had lit a fire for me (and it was necessary; the room was of an icy coldness) and I dreamt that I awoke to see the flames rise to a last vigour before they died away. In the brilliance of that illumination I was conscious that something was moving in the room. I heard the movement for some little while before I saw anything.

I sat up, my heart hammering, and then to my horror discerned, slinking against the farther wall, the evillest-looking yellow mongrel of a dog that you can fancy.

I find it difficult, I have always found it difficult, to describe exactly the horror of that yellow dog. It lay partly in its colour, which was vile, partly in its mean and bony body, but for the most part in its evil head – flat, with sharp little eyes and jagged yellow teeth.

As I looked at it, it bared those teeth at me and then began to creep, with an indescribably loathsome action, in the direction of my bed. I was at first stiffened with terror. Then, as it neared the bed, its little eyes fixed upon me and its teeth bared, I screamed again and again.

The next I knew was that Armstrong was sitting on my bed, his strong arm about my trembling little body. All I could say over and over was, “The Dog! the Dog! the Dog!”

He soothed me as though he had been my mother.

“See, there’s no dog there! There’s no one but me! There’s no one but me!”

I continued to tremble, so he got into bed with me, held me close to him, and it was in his comforting arms that I fell asleep.

III

In the morning I woke to a fresh breeze and a shining sun and the chrysanthemums, orange, crimson and dun, blowing against the grey stone wall beyond the sloping lawns. So I forgot about my dream. I only knew that I loved Bob Armstrong better than anyone else on earth.

Everyone during the next days was very kind to me. I was so deeply excited by this country, so new to me, that at first I could think of nothing else. Bob Armstrong was Cumbrian from the top of his flaxen head to the thick nails under his boots, and, in grunts and monosyllables, as was his way, he gave me the colour of the ground.

There was romance everywhere: smugglers stealing in and out of Drigg and Seascale, the ancient Cross in Gosforth churchyard, Ravenglass, with all its seabirds, once a port of splendour.

Muncaster Castle and Broughton and black Wastwater with the grim Screes, Black Combe, upon whose broad back the shadows were always dancing – even the little station at Seascale, naked to the sea-winds, at whose bookstalls I bought a publication entitled the Weekly Telegraph that contained, week by week, instalments of the most thrilling story in the world.

Everywhere romance – the cows moving along the sandy lanes, the sea thundering along the Drigg beach, Gable and Scafell pulling their cloud-caps about their heads, the slow voices of the Cumbrian farmers calling their animals, the little tinkling bell of the Gosforth church – everywhere romance and beauty.

Soon, though, as I became better accustomed to the country, the people immediately around me began to occupy my attention, stimulate my restless curiosity, and especially my two uncles. They were, in fact, queer enough.

Faildyke Hall itself was not queer, only very ugly. It had been built about 1830, I should imagine, a square white building, like a thick-set, rather conceited woman with a very plain face. The rooms were large, the passages innumerable, and everything covered with a very hideous whitewash. Against this whitewash hung old photographs yellowed with age, and faded, bad water-colours. The furniture was strong and ugly.

One romantic feature, though, there was – and that was the little Grey Tower where my Uncle Robert lived. This Tower was at the end of the garden and looked out over a sloping field to the Scafell group beyond Wastwater. It had been built hundreds of years ago as a defence against the Scots. Robert had had his study and bedroom there for many years and it was his domain; no one was allowed to enter it save his old servant Hucking, a bent, wizened, grubby little man who spoke to no one and, so they said in the kitchen, managed to go through life without sleeping. He looked after my Uncle Robert, cleaned his rooms, and was supposed to clean his clothes.

I, being both an inquisitive and romantic-minded boy, was soon as eagerly excited about this Tower as was Bluebeard’s wife about the forbidden room. Bob told me that whatever I did I was never to set foot inside.

And then I discovered another thing – that Armstrong hated, feared and was proud of my Uncle Robert. He was proud of him because he was head of the family, and because, so he said, he was the cleverest old man in the world.

“Nothing he can’t seemingly do,” said Bob, “but he don’t like you to watch him at it.”

All this only increased my longing to see the inside of the Tower, although I couldn’t be said to be fond of my Uncle Robert either.

It would be hard to say that I disliked him during those first days. He was quite kindly to me when he met me, and at meal-times, when I sat with my two uncles at the long table in the big, bare, whitewashed dining-room, he was always anxious to see that I had plenty to eat. But I never liked him; it was perhaps because he wasn’t clean. Children are sensitive to those things. Perhaps I didn’t like the fusty, seed-caky smell that he carried about with him.

Then there came the day when he invited me into the Grey Tower and told me about Tarnhelm.

Pale slanting shadows of sunlight fell across the chrysanthemums and the grey stone walls, the long fields and the dusky hills. I was playing by myself by the little stream that ran beyond the rose garden, when Uncle Robert came up behind me in the soundless way he had, and, tweaking me by the ear, asked me whether I would like to come with him inside his Tower. I was, of course, eager enough; but I was frightened too, especially when I saw Hucking’s moth-eaten old countenance peering at us from one of the narrow slits that pretended to be windows.

However, in we went, my hand in Uncle Robert’s hot dry one. There wasn’t, in reality, so very much to see when you were inside – all untidy and musty, with cobwebs over the doorways and old pieces of rusty iron and empty boxes in the corners, and the long table in Uncle Robert’s study covered with a thousand things – books with the covers hanging on them, sticky green bottles, a looking-glass, a pair of scales, a globe, a cage with mice in it, a statue of a naked woman, an hour-glass – everything old and stained and dusty.

However, Uncle Robert made me sit down close to him, and told me many interesting stories. Among others the story about Tarnhelm.

Tarnhelm was something that you put over your head, and its magic turned you into any animal that you wished to be. Uncle Robert told me the story of a god called Wotan, and how he teased the dwarf who possessed Tarnhelm by saying that he couldn’t turn himself into a mouse or some such animal; and the dwarf, his pride wounded, turned himself into a mouse, which the god easily captured and so stole Tarnhelm.

On the table, among all the litter, was a grey skull-cap.

“That’s my Tarnhelm,” said Uncle Robert, laughing. “Like to see me put it on?”

But I was suddenly frightened, terribly frightened. The sight of Uncle Robert made me feel quite ill. The room began to run round and round. The white mice in the cage twittered. It was stuffy in that room, enough to turn any boy sick.

IV

That was the moment, I think, when Uncle Robert stretched out his hand towards his grey skull-cap – after that I was never happy again in Faildyke Hall. That action of his, simple and apparently friendly though it was, seemed to open my eyes to a number of things.

We were now within ten days of Christmas. The thought of Christmas had then – and, to tell the truth, still has – a most happy effect on me. There is the beautiful story, the geniality and kindliness, still, in spite of modern pessimists, much happiness and goodwill. Even now I yet enjoy giving presents and receiving them – then it was an ecstasy to me, the look of the parcel, the paper, the string, the exquisite surprise.

Therefore I had been anticipating Christmas eagerly. I had been promised a trip into Whitehaven for present-buying, and there was to be a tree and a dance for the Gosforth villagers. Then after my visit to Uncle Robert’s Tower, all my happiness of anticipation vanished. As the days went on and my observation of one thing and another developed, I would, I think, have run away back to my aunts in Kensington, had it not been for Bob Armstrong.

It was, in fact, Armstrong who started me on that voyage of observation that ended so horribly, for when he had heard that Uncle Robert had taken me inside his Tower his anger was fearful. I had never before seen him angry; now his great body shook, and he caught me and held me until I cried out.

He wanted me to promise that I would never go inside there again. What? Not even with Uncle Robert? No, most especially not with Uncle Robert; and then, dropping his voice and looking around him to be sure that there was no one listening, he began to curse Uncle Robert. This amazed me, because loyalty to his masters was one of Bob’s great laws. I can see us now, standing on the stable cobbles in the falling white dusk while the horses stamped in their stalls, and the little sharp stars appeared one after another glittering between the driving clouds.

“I’ll not stay,” I heard him say to himself. “I’ll be like the rest. I’ll not be staying. To bring a child into it….”

From that moment he seemed to have me very specially in his charge. Even when I could not see him I felt that his kindly eye was upon me, and this sense of the necessity that I should be guarded made me yet more uneasy and distressed.

The next thing that I observed was that the servants were all fresh, had been there not more than a month or two. Then, only a week before Christmas, the housekeeper departed. Uncle Constance seemed greatly upset at these occurrences; Uncle Robert did not seem in the least affected by them.

I come now to my Uncle Constance. At this distance of time it is strange with what clarity I still can see him – his stoutness, his shining cleanliness, his dandyism, the flower in his buttonhole, his little brilliantly shod feet, his thin, rather feminine voice. He would have been kind to me, I think, had he dared, but something kept him back. And what that something was I soon discovered; it was fear of my Uncle Robert.

It did not take me a day to discover that he was utterly subject to his brother. He said nothing without looking to see how Uncle Robert took it; suggested no plan until he first had assurance from his brother; was terrified beyond anything that I had before witnessed in a human being at any sign of irritation in my uncle.

I discovered after this that Uncle Robert enjoyed greatly to play on his brother’s fears. I did not understand enough of their life to realise what were the weapons that Robert used, but that they were sharp and piercing I was neither too young nor too ignorant to perceive.

Such was our situation, then, a week before Christmas. The weather had become very wild, with a great wind. All nature seemed in an uproar. I could fancy when I lay in my bed at night and heard the shouting in my chimney that I could catch the crash of the waves upon the beach, see the black waters of Wastwater cream and curdle under the Screes. I would lie awake and long for Bob Armstrong – the strength of his arm and the warmth of his breast – but I considered myself too grown a boy to make any appeal.

I remember that now almost minute by minute my fears increased. What gave them force and power who can say? I was much alone, I had now a great terror of my uncle, the weather was wild, the rooms of the house large and desolate, the servants mysterious, the walls of the passages lit always with an unnatural glimmer because of their white colour, and although Armstrong had watch over me he was busy in his affairs and could not always be with me.

I grew to fear and dislike my Uncle Robert more and more. Hatred and fear of him seemed to be everywhere and yet he was always soft-voiced and kindly. Then, a few days before Christmas, occurred the event that was to turn my terror into panic.

I had been reading in the library Mrs. Radcliffe’s Romance of the Forest, an old book long forgotten, worthy of revival. The library was a fine room run to seed, bookcases from floor to ceiling, the windows small and dark, holes in the old faded carpet. A lamp burnt at a distant table. One stood on a little shelf at my side.

Something, I know not what, made me look up. What I saw then can even now stamp my heart in its recollection. By the library door, not moving, staring across the room’s length at me, was a yellow dog.

I will not attempt to describe all the pitiful fear and mad freezing terror that caught and held me. My main thought, I fancy, was that that other vision on my first night in the place had not been a dream. I was not asleep now; the book in which I had been reading had fallen to the floor, the lamps shed their glow, I could hear the ivy tapping on the pane. No, this was reality.

The dog lifted a long, horrible leg and scratched itself. Then very slowly and silently across the carpet it came towards me.

I could not scream; I could not move; I waited. The animal was even more evil than it had seemed before, with its flat head, its narrow eyes, its yellow fangs. It came steadily in my direction, stopped once to scratch itself again, then was almost at my chair.

It looked at me, bared its fangs, but now as though it grinned at me, then passed on. After it was gone there was a thick foetid scent in the air – the scent of caraway-seed.

V

I think now on looking back that it was remarkable enough that I, a pale, nervous child who trembled at every sound, should have met the situation as I did. I said nothing about the dog to any living soul, not even to Bob Armstrong. I hid my fears – and fears of a beastly and sickening kind they were, too – within my breast. I had the intelligence to perceive – and how I caught in the air the awareness of this I can’t, at this distance, understand – that I was playing my little part in the climax to something that had been piling up, for many a month, like the clouds over Gable.

Understand that I offer from first to last in this no kind of explanation. There is possibly – and to this day I cannot quite be sure – nothing to explain. My Uncle Robert died simply – but you shall hear.

What was beyond any doubt or question was that it was after my seeing the dog in the library that Uncle Robert changed so strangely in his behaviour to me. That may have been the merest coincidence. I only know that as one grows older one calls things coincidence more and more seldom.

In any case, that same night at dinner Uncle Robert seemed twenty years older. He was bent, shrivelled, would not eat, snarled at anyone who spoke to him and especially avoided even looking at me. It was a painful meal, and it was after it, when Uncle Constance and I were sitting alone in the old yellow-papered drawing-room – a room with two ticking clocks for ever racing one another – that the most extraordinary thing occurred. Uncle Constance and I were playing draughts. The only sounds were the roaring of the wind down the chimney, the hiss and splutter of the fire, the silly ticking of the clocks. Suddenly Uncle Constance put down the piece that he was about to move and began to cry.

To a child it is always a terrible thing to see a grown-up person cry, and even to this day to hear a man cry is very distressing to me. I was moved desperately by poor Uncle Constance, who sat there, his head in his white plump hands, all his stout body shaking. I ran over to him and he clutched me and held me as though he would never let me go. He sobbed incoherent words about protecting me, caring for me … seeing that that monster….

At the word I remember that I too began to tremble. I asked my uncle what monster, but he could only continue to murmur incoherently about hate and not having the pluck, and if only he had the courage….

Then, recovering a little, he began to ask me questions. Where had I been? Had I been into his brother’s Tower? Had I seen anything that frightened me? If I did would I at once tell him? And then he muttered that he would never have allowed me to come had he known that it would go as far as this, that it would be better if I went away that night, and that if he were not afraid…. Then he began to tremble again and to look at the door, and I trembled too. He held me in his arms; then we thought that there was a sound and we listened, our heads up, our two hearts hammering. But it was only the clocks ticking and the wind shrieking as though it would tear the house to pieces.

That night, however, when Bob Armstrong came up to bed he found me sheltering there. I whispered to him that I was frightened; I put my arms around his neck and begged him not to send me away; he promised me that I should not leave him and I slept all night in the protection of his strength.

How, though, can I give any true picture of the fear that pursued me now? For I knew from what both Armstrong and Uncle Constance had said that there was real danger, that it was no hysterical fancy of mine or ill-digested dream. It made it worse that Uncle Robert was now no more seen. He was sick; he kept within his Tower, cared for by his old wizened manservant. And so, being nowhere, he was everywhere. I stayed with Armstrong when I could, but a kind of pride prevented me from clinging like a girl to his coat.

A deathly silence seemed to fall about the place. No one laughed or sang, no dog barked, no bird sang. Two days before Christmas an iron frost came to grip the land. The fields were rigid, the sky itself seemed to be frozen grey, and under the olive cloud Scafell and Gable were black.

Christmas Eve came.

On that morning, I remember, I was trying to draw – some childish picture of one of Mrs. Radcliffe’s scenes – when the double doors unfolded and Uncle Robert stood there. He stood there, bent, shrivelled, his long, grey locks falling over his collar, his bushy eyebrows thrust forward. He wore his old green suit and on his finger gleamed his heavy red ring. I was frightened, of course, but also I was touched with pity. He looked so old, so frail, so small in this large empty house.

I sprang up. “Uncle Robert,” I asked timidly, “are you better?”

He bent still lower until he was almost on his hands and feet; then he looked up at me, and his yellow teeth were bared, almost as an animal snarls. Then the doors closed again.

The slow, stealthy, grey afternoon came at last. I walked with Armstrong to Gosforth village on some business that he had. We said no word of any matter at the Hall. I told him, he has reminded me, of how fond I was of him and that I wanted to be with him always, and he answered that perhaps it might be so, little knowing how true that prophecy was to stand. Like all children I had a great capacity for forgetting the atmosphere that I was not at that moment in, and I walked beside Bob along the frozen roads, with some of my fears surrendered.

But not for long. It was dark when I came into the long, yellow drawing-room. I could hear the bells of Gosforth church pealing as I passed from the ante-room.

A moment later there came a shrill, terrified cry: “Who’s that? Who is it?”

It was Uncle Constance, who was standing in front of the yellow silk window curtains, staring at the dusk. I went over to him and he held me close to him.

“Listen!” he whispered. “What can you hear?”

The double doors through which I had come were half open. At first I could hear nothing but the clocks, the very faint rumble of a cart on the frozen road. There was no wind.

My uncle’s fingers gripped my shoulder. “Listen!” he said again. And now I heard. On the stone passage beyond the drawing-room was the patter of an animal’s feet. Uncle Constance and I looked at one another. In that exchanged glance we confessed that our secret was the same. We knew what we should see.

A moment later it was there, standing in the double doorway, crouching a little and staring at us with a hatred that was mad and sick – the hatred of a sick animal crazy with unhappiness, but loathing us more than its own misery.

Slowly it came towards us, and to my reeling fancy all the room seemed to stink of caraway-seed.

“Keep back! Keep away!” my uncle screamed.

I became oddly in my turn the protector.

“It shan’t touch you! It shan’t touch you, uncle!” I called.

But the animal came on.

It stayed for a moment near a little round table that contained a composition of dead waxen fruit under a glass dome. It stayed here, its nose down, smelling the ground. Then, looking up at us, it came on again.

Oh God! – even now as I write after all these years it is with me again, the flat skull, the cringing body in its evil colour and that loathsome smell. It slobbered a little at its jaw. It bared its fangs.

Then I screamed, hid my face in my uncle’s breast and saw that he held, in his trembling hand, a thick, heavy, old-fashioned revolver.

Then he cried out:

“Go back, Robert…. Go back!”

The animal came on. He fired. The detonation shook the room. The dog turned and, blood dripping from its throat, crawled across the floor.

By the door it halted, turned and looked at us. Then it disappeared into the other room.

My uncle had flung down his revolver; he was crying, sniffling; he kept stroking my forehead, murmuring words.

At last, clinging to one another, we followed the splotches of blood, across the carpet, beside the door, through the doorway.

Huddled against a chair in the outer sitting-room, one leg twisted under him, was my Uncle Robert, shot through the throat.

On the floor, by his side, was a grey skull-cap.

“Liberty” Dec 28 1929

All Soul’s Night (1933)

LILAC

Frederick Anstey moved the Rodin Balzac a little so that the light of the spring evening should catch the strong curve of the nose and the high broad lines of the forehead.

“Marvellous!” he murmured, as though he had never seen it before. “And he put a lot of extra work into this one. In fact there’s not two of them alike. The one Mr. Bernard Shaw has …”

“Yes,” said Mr. Litehouse cautiously. “If only it weren’t so like Lloyd George. I should never be able to get it out of my head. ‘Why, it’s the image of Lloyd George,’ was the very first thing my wife said when she came in to see it yesterday. And you can’t deny…. Two hundred guineas, did you say?” he asked with sudden suspicion, as though Frederick Anstey might have forgotten what he had said.

“Two hundred,” said Frederick, smiling his round rubicund smile that was, he knew, bad for business but he never could check it. Bad for business because when a customer saw it he concluded instantly that Frederick was a creature of no stamina and could be easily beaten down.

“All right, I’ll take it,” said Mr. Litehouse suddenly. (Five minutes before he had declared quite firmly that nothing would induce him to buy it.) “That is if I can take it away now in my car – at once. I want to show it to somebody.” (You could always tell a true collector by his insistence on taking things with him, as though the object would disappear the moment his back was turned.)

“Of course you can,” said Frederick, his whole body smiling now. Then he was grave and sincere. It wouldn’t do (for the hundredth time he told himself) to look as though selling the Balzac had pleased him. His gesture must be that if Mr. Litehouse didn’t buy it, someone else would in half a minute!

Mr. Litehouse wouldn’t allow it to be wrapped up. He ordered it to be carried at once into his car, and there, on the back seat, Balzac sat with Mr. Litehouse’s bony and beautifully dressed person beside him, looking out on to the busy London streets as though he didn’t care a damn.

“Sold the Balzac,” Frederick said carelessly to Pecking, whose attitude always was that no one save himself could sell anything.

“Litehouse?” asked Pecking.

Frederick nodded.

“Too good for him…. Still, he’s got some fine things. It’s only snobbery of course. Doesn’t know one thing from another.”

“Lucky for us,” said Frederick, laughing.

“You look cheerful,” said Pecking resentfully. “Come into a fortune?”

“No,” said Frederick. “Expect it’s the spring weather.”

He knew that it was not, or at least only a little. It had been a wonderful day and now the evening was lovely, but he regarded the selling of the Balzac as an omen. And he needed good omens, for in a quarter of an hour’s time he was going to ask Lily Brocket to marry him. Everything helped. The Balzac helped. The spring evening helped. And if she refused him, nothing would be of any use at all!

He went into the farther room where the Zzierzcky pictures hung. This was the first Zzierzcky show in London and it had been a wonderful success. Nearly every picture had sold. A success of snobbery of course. The people who liked the pictures hadn’t been able to afford to buy them: the people who had bought them had most certainly not liked them. Zzierzcky was very modern indeed. His landscapes were entitled “Pond in Snow,” “The Mountain Pass,” “Winter Sunlight” and so on, but unless you were the kind of person who was ready for anything in pictures, you would never guess what the pictures were about. Nevertheless, they had grown on Frederick during the month of their exhibition. He had, in the last three years, explained so many modern pictures to so many stupid and reluctant people that he had come to have modern tastes himself.

When he had come first to the Gallery he had actually thought Dawson a good painter! Now Dawson made him sick. Or would have done had he not a kindly feeling for Dawson. That was his trouble, that he had a kindly feeling for almost everyone. He was a very modest, kindly-hearted little man, and had he ever considered what he was (which he never did) he would have wished fervently that he was anything else in the world.

But that was his trouble, that no one ever took him seriously. It had not been a real trouble (because formerly he had not taken himself seriously) until he had fallen in love with Lily Brocket. He wanted her to take him seriously. If she did not he might as well go and drown himself. And then at the thought of that he couldn’t help but smile. The picture of his going to drown himself was so very absurd.

While he was washing his hands in the little cupboard off the passage and peering at himself in the glass, he hated, for the hundred-thousandth time, his round rosy face. It was the face of an infant, a good-natured infant who had just enjoyed a good feed from its bottle! Anything less distinguished! And his body too, round and short, thick in the leg, short in the arm. Who could take seriously such a body? The only thing he could do with it was to keep it clean and neat….

He shrugged his shoulders, wiped his hands with a kind of careful ceremony on the towel and then forgot about himself. He never could think about himself for long. Something would keep breaking in; a joke or a meal, a pretty girl, or selling a picture, a game of golf (which he enjoyed and played very badly) or meeting a friend. He was an ordinary dull kind of fellow like thousands of others. That was what he thought of himself. He could not imagine what Lily saw in him.

But perhaps she saw nothing at all. This thought came to him as he put on his overcoat; so awful was it that for a moment his heart stopped beating. When it came to it you could not tell with a girl, could you? You could never tell what a girl was thinking. Were she really fond of him would she not have married him a year ago? There was, of course, her old father, that ridiculous old man of skin and bone, with his greed and rheumatism and voice like a mouse in the wainscot.

She said that she couldn’t leave him, but couldn’t she? Ah, that was the question. Wouldn’t she leave him if she really loved Frederick? How was Frederick to tell?

No, all he knew about it was that he adored her, could not live without her. That was the old hackneyed phrase, but in his case it was real and authentic. In spite of his chubby face and passion for seeing the cheerful side of everything, if Lily married someone else – that ridiculous tobacconist, for instance – he, Frederick, would decline and die – and no one in the whole world would care a halfpenny!

Lord! what melancholy thoughts for so lovely an evening! He was walking up Duke Street, and every shop was a little magic of fire and splendour, and overhead the sky swam in a mist of blue and silver light. People did not look at the sky enough in London. They walked with their noses straight in front of them or hurried like nervous rabbits or talked to their friends.

Perhaps he himself would not now have looked at the sky had it not been for his love of Lily. But spring was in the air and pushing up through the very pavement. You could almost, were your fancy poetic enough, detect violets in the corners of the grey stone and primroses clustered in the doorways.

Five minutes later he was thinking of nothing but Lily. She was waiting for him at the corner of the Green Park, the entrance near the Ritz corner, and they moved away down the Park in the direction of Buckingham Palace, at first not speaking.

“What a lovely evening!” she said softly. She was herself lovely in her little grey hat and silver-grey coat, with her rosy cheeks, black, black eyes and her way of moving as though she loved the world and couldn’t have enough of it.

Someone had given her a bunch of primroses. She had pinned them into her coat. He was instantly jealous.

“Who gave you those primroses?” he asked huskily.

“Never you mind,” she answered him, laughing. And then, lest she should have hurt him, she added hastily: “It was old Mr. Deering. He’s always doing something kind.”

“Oh, is he?” said Frederick scornfully. “Old man of his age. He ought to be thinking of the next world.”

“Now look here,” she said, putting her hand on his arm; his body trembled at her touch. “Don’t let’s waste time talking of old nothings like Mr. Deering. We haven’t got a minute. I oughtn’t to have come, really, but I knew you’d be so disappointed. Aunt Clara’s turned up unexpectedly from Brighton. There’s no one in the house but father, and he’s got one of his toothaches. I’ve simply got to go straight back.”

There was rage in Frederick’s heart, passionate hatred of Aunt Clara, bitter disappointment, a sense that life had once again dealt him a knock-down blow, a physical pain about his heart, an impulse to rage at Lily like a maniac, tear her hat from her head and trample on her bunch of primroses – and a surprising, incredible desire to break down and cry like a child.

She felt at once his bitter, desperate disappointment, pressed her hand into his arm, and, in a voice more loving than any that she had ever used to him before, said:

“Fred, dear … you’re not more disappointed than I am. It’s a rotten shame. I never dreamt of Aunt Clara coming. It’s just like her. It’s our luck. I’m wretched about it.”

And she was! He knew at once that she meant what she said; he knew that she cared for him, and in that knowledge the filmy silver sky, the dazzling friendly lights, the dark, obscure trees danced and turned and danced again and his eyes were dim.

“See here, Lily,” he said, turning her towards him so that she looked into his eyes. “I love you. You know I do. I’ve loved you for two years, and now I love you so that it eats me up. It does truly. You’ve got to marry me. I’ve asked you before. Three times I’ve asked you, but never like tonight. It’s so serious that I can’t live … I can’t live … if you don’t….”

Her face was tender, maternal, gravely anxious, as she looked at him. “Yes, Fred … I know … but there’s father.”

“Damn your father,” he answered (and she saw that tonight there was something new in his face, something really desperate). “Isn’t he seventy-six? Are our lives to be ruined for an old man like that? Isn’t it a wicked thing for an old man to stop two people’s lives…?”

“But you don’t understand—”

“I do understand, perfectly. You’ve told me again and again. And I tell you that if you’re going to let your father interfere any longer, I’ll never see you again after tonight. This is the last time. I can’t stand it…. It isn’t fair.”

“No; it isn’t fair,” she answered him frankly. “I’ve been thinking that for a long time. It isn’t fair to you and it isn’t fair to me, really.”

He felt an impulse of intense irritation and exasperation.

“Well, then, if it isn’t fair, it’s got to be ended…. Are you going to marry me?”

“But there’s father—”

“Father can come and live with us. I’ve told you so over and over again.” He looked at her, tears in his eyes. He saw everything – sky and trees and coloured lights – in a trembling mist. “If you loved me,” he said, his voice shaking, “you wouldn’t have hesitated. I might have known. It’s because you don’t love me that you can talk about your father.”

She shook her head, looking at him with great tenderness. “It isn’t as easy as that, Fred. It isn’t indeed…. But it isn’t fair either…. You’re right there. I tell you what I’ll do.”

He looked at her with new hope. His eyes cleared. The Park seemed suddenly to have a scent of flowers.

“I’ve got to go, but I’ll write a line, telling you what I feel, and I’ll send it along by Alfred to Garland Square. Before ten anyway. That’s the best I can do, really it is, Fred.”

“A note?” he said, bewildered.

“Yes; saying how I feel. I’ll settle it tonight. There are things I can say better in a letter. I’ll send it by Alfred before ten…. Good-bye. I’ve got to run.”

And she was gone, without a pressure of the hand, without another word, swallowed up by the Park as though she had never been.

He stayed there, staring in front of him; then, after a minute or two, started on his way home. He didn’t know what to think. No, but he was hopeful, more hopeful than he had ever been before. And, whatever way it might go, tonight would settle it. Whatever way it might go!

At the thought that it might go the wrong way his body shrank within its clothes as though a giant hand were compressing it. Supposing she should say no! Oh, suppose … He was nearly killed by a car, a voice shouted at him, lights flashed and danced, he was on the farther pavement. A lucky escape; but if she refused him he might as well be dead.

She didn’t mean to, though. She wouldn’t put him to all the agony of suspense, hours of it, if she meant to refuse him. But perhaps she thought that it would be kinder that way. Couldn’t bear to hurt him by telling him … He walked on blindly, seeing nothing, hearing nothing and, before he knew anything about it, he was at his door.

Garland Square is one of those little Squares that have been dropped like pools of quiet and comfort here and there about London. They say that they are doomed, that modern traffic, modern I-don’t-know-what, must drive them away. If that is true, then some of the most beautiful things in the world are doomed.

Garland Square is small and its railed-in garden is like a green napkin laid out between the old dove-grey houses. Round the green square flowers blow according to the seasons, daffodils, purple and white lilac; it is best in the spring; in the summer such flowers as there are are hidden by the dark thick green of the trees and bushes. The trees are haunted by the birds, who use the grass as their promenading ground by right immemorial. There is at one end the statue of an eighteenth-century gentleman in a tie-wig, with a cocked hat and a handsome frill to his waistcoat. There are some green benches.

The inhabitants of the houses in the Square have, of course, a key to the garden – no one else in the world – and the old gardener, who has a beard just like his broom, regrets bitterly that, in these days, the inhabitants of the houses have gone down so dreadfully in “class.” He belongs to the fine old days when “class” mattered, when a gentleman was a gentleman. Now everybody is a gentleman, or nobody if you look at it his way.

Frederick’s house was Number Ten and had been, like several others, divided into flats. They were not flats of the splendid West End order. There was no lift; you walked up the fine eighteenth-century stone staircase and then, if your room was high up, as Frederick’s was, a further smaller staircase, and then a small corkscrew staircase most difficult to manoeuvre if, like Mr. Bendish in the room opposite to Frederick, you came back early in the morning, wine having made your heart so glad that you sang aloud and disturbed everyone. Poor Bendish! He didn’t care for wine, as he often told Frederick. He didn’t care very much for whisky, but what were you to do when you were all alone in the world and one girl after another refused to marry you? He had proposed, he told Frederick, to twenty within the last year. It wasn’t true (what the newspapers were always saying) that an Englishwoman would marry any man who asked her.

Frederick’s room could not, by any sort of courtesy, be called a flat. It was simply a bed-sitting-room, and a woman (Mrs. Marl) came in the morning, gave him his breakfast and cleaned up. He shared her with Bendish and the Russell Greens.

He could have afforded quite easily a real flat, but the house was so grand, the Square so beautiful and so quiet, the neighbourhood so good and old Lady Cannon (who lived on the ground floor and whose house it was) so aristocratic, that he was lucky to be there. He loved his room, his view, his neighbourhood; only marriage with Lily would persuade him to depart.

He was standing now, his window flung up, looking out over the Square. Behind him his room told him that it was glad that he was back. He had two Chinese rugs, some good pieces of old furniture, and three pictures – an oil by Paul of a lady with a white face and a green nose, a sketch by Duncan Grant and a drawing of a music-hall by Sickert. He had had no taste when he had first come to this room, five years ago, but the picture-gallery had educated him, educated him, Lily said, to liking everything that was ugly. She couldn’t understand the lady with the green nose. After all, people didn’t have green noses, whatever light you saw them in. It was their only real difference of opinion.

But he was not thinking of that now. As he leaned out of the window there came to him quite unmistakably the scent of lilac. It could not in reality be. There was no lilac in bloom in the gardens, and yet he smelt the lilac and seemed, as he leaned out, to see through the grey-moth-like evening the sky above the Square broken into soft shreds and patches of blue, and bushes of dim purple lilac staining the air with its colour, a cloud of shadowy radiance.

He knew that he was cheating himself and yet he urged himself to be cheated. The belief acting against knowledge that the lilac was there seemed to be linked with his dramatic anticipation of his fate. His heart was thumping, his throat hot and dry, his body suddenly tired with a rather pleasant fatigue; he was in short like a man waiting for his sentence of execution. And yet surely nothing very terrible could happen to him on so lovely an evening as this. All the world was beautiful, and the Rodin Balzac which he had so successfully sold, the soft Duncan Grant landscape (amber and rose its colouring), the Square with its sense of spring, its scent of lilac, all these beautiful things seemed to come together and assure him that his fate must be a kind one.

He was aware of the door opening and, turning, saw Bendish there.

Bendish was a large, stout, rumpled man with little blue eyes, grey untidy hair, and a small pouting mouth. He seemed to be always asking for your indulgence, wondering whether you would scold him or no. There was something eternally unsatisfactory about him, which was perhaps why girls had so often refused to marry him. Their maternal feelings were roused by his helplessness, their practical self-protection alarmed by his irresponsibility, and so he was still a bachelor.

“I say, have you got a hammer?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Frederick, turning back into the room. “I think so.” As he turned back he was convinced that Lily would accept him, and the room blazed with light and the pictures danced.

“You look as though you’d come into a fortune,” said Bendish rather resentfully. Anstey, after all, was a very ordinary little fellow, and yet he seemed to be always in luck, while himself …

Frederick rummaged in the cupboard, standing on his toes because he was short and the hammer was probably on the top shelf. Bendish, looking at his broad back, the strong sturdy strain of his body as he raised his arms, and something gay and independent about the set of his round, closely cropped bullet-head, suddenly liked him very much and, liking him, felt happier.

He had himself a decision that he must, that evening, come to, a decision that all the week he had been evading. To escape from the thought of it he had come in to borrow a hammer (it was true that there was a hunting picture to hang). Now he was more cheerful, and when Frederick, the hammer in his hand, turned and showed his rosy, flushed face, he said quite amiably: “Thanks. Lovely evening, isn’t it?”

They both turned to the window.

“Bit nippy with the window open,” said Bendish.

“Funny thing,” said Frederick, “I’ve been thinking I could smell lilac. Of course it’s impossible. But an evening like this makes you imagine things.”

Bendish never imagined anything, so he said nothing.

“Made a good sale this afternoon,” the little man went on. “Head of Balzac by Rodin. Sold it to that fellow Litehouse, the big tobacco man. He’s collecting pictures and things. Doesn’t know anything about art, but we look after him – see he doesn’t get anything rotten, you know.”

“Much better,” said Bendish gloomily, “if he gave his money to children’s hospitals or something like that.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Frederick, suddenly irritated, because nothing exasperated him so much as this very popular sentiment; “it would be an awful world if there weren’t any beautiful things in it, and who’d go on making beautiful things if nobody ever bought them?”

“I don’t see that,” said Bendish. “Pictures are only a luxury.”

But he couldn’t quarrel with Frederick; there was something in his easy, quite uncomplacent good-nature that made him difficult to quarrel with. Frederick, on his side, had a very strong impulse to tell Bendish all about Lily. Lily was around him, inside him, everywhere. His heart was still hammering, his cheeks were hot, his throat was dry. It would be a relief to tell Bendish, and ask him what he thought of the chances, to gain encouragement perhaps in opposition to his own fears. But no, it was no use to tell Bendish anything. He was only interested in himself.

Bendish looked at him curiously. “I believe you’ve been making money at racing,” he said. “You do have all the luck. I’ve noticed it before.” He felt, himself, a temptation to tell Anstey about his problem. There was something about Anstey tonight…. But Anstey would only advise him to do what he didn’t want to do.

“No,” said Frederick, “I never have any luck with horses. I always lose.” Never any luck? Would he have luck with Lily? Even now she was making up her mind. It might be that she was, at this very moment, writing her letter.

“Dear Fred, I want to tell you—”

His heart seemed to knock him right over. It wouldn’t have surprised him at all to find himself flat on the floor! To steady himself, he put his hand on Bendish’s arm. At the touch the two men seemed to come into some new relation with one another. Bendish was a lonely fellow. No one ever seemed to need him or put themselves out to see him. Bendish was greatly moved. But all he said was, gruffly: “Well, I must go and hang that picture.” By the door he added: “Thanks for the hammer.”

Frederick said: “That’s all right. Come in any time you like.”

He was alone again: the house was utterly still about him.

Bendish had done something to him; he had made him see how desperate, how abandoned, how hopelessly ruined he would be did Lily refuse him. He would be like Bendish, only worse. Bendish’s loose, stout, uncared-for figure seemed to be a prophecy of his later self refused by Lily. He would go down and down …

Standing now in the middle of his room he saw nothing. The room seemed to be filled with a warm, clinging, smelly fog. Deserted by Lily, all the little devils that were always waiting in attendance (he could see them, hideous naked little demons squatting on their hams) would have their way with him. And their way would be a bad one. He was no saint (he little knew how few his sins were in comparison with many of his companions) and he would yield, he would yield…. He would go over to Paris with Prentiss or Solomon. He would take Miss Geary (what Miss Geary wanted of him had always been perfectly obvious) out to supper. He would …

He pressed his hands to his forehead, sat down, wretched misery overwhelming him. He could not smell any lilac now, but the room was so stuffy that he must go out. He must go out or his head would burst and scatter his brains (such as they were) about the floor. If he went out (the temptation suddenly came to him) he might in another moment be at Lily’s door. A taxi would take him there in no time. But that he must not do. It would be breaking all the rules of restraint that he had ever formulated for himself, and, worse than that, he would be driving Lily to some sort of forced decision which would in all probability be exactly the wrong one. But the temptation was fearful. It was exactly as though a little devil in a shiny top-hat and a frock-coat were leading him (he could feel the touch of the little pudgy hand) straight out of his door.

He got his hat, his coat and his stick and went out. He stood in the little passage and listened. No sound. Not even Bendish knocking nails into his wall. But he knew instinctively that Bendish had not really wanted the hammer. What he had wanted was Frederick’s help about something. He had come in for company. He had his own especial troubles. Yes, after all, we were all alike. All in the soup together and the best thing that we could do was to help one another. He went carefully down the corkscrew staircase – he seemed to be slightly drunk – and, in the lower passage, almost collided with someone. It was dark here almost always, but this evening something of this miraculous spring had pushed through.

A faint pale glow suffused everything, the shabby yellowed print of Victoria receiving the news of her Succession, an umbrella stand, an old chair with a red-plush seat to it. Standing near to the chair, her hand resting upon it as though to support herself, was young Mrs. Russell Green. The Russell Greens were acquaintances of Frederick rather than friends. A very young couple who loved one another apparently but were for ever quarrelling. They had been quarrelling now, it seemed, for at once Mrs. Russell Green, on seeing Frederick, whispered: “Oh, Mr. Anstey, I can’t stand any more of it. I can’t, indeed. I’m going to my mother this very night.”

She was, he saw, in a very agitated state, her hand to her heart, her eyes furious and miserable, staring at him as though she couldn’t see him at all.

“What’s the matter?” he asked. Their conversation had the oddest urgency and whispering conspiracy about it, as though they were, the two of them, plotting to murder someone.

“The matter is,” she whispered frantically, “that he’s just insulted me more than I can stand. Yes, more than I can stand. I’ve stood enough. I didn’t marry him for this sort of thing. I’ve told him often enough that if he did it again I’d leave him. And now he’s done it.”

“What’s he done?” Frederick asked. He could smell the lilac once more. Certainly it was lilac. Coming in from the Square and stealing up the stairs.

“He’s been out with that Marchmont girl again. All last evening, when he said that he was with the Berys. He wasn’t with the Berys at all. He’s confessed it.”

Frederick understood, as though some special agent had whispered it to him, that this was really serious. If she went off now, in her hat and coat as she was, out of the house, she might never return. A burst of temper and jealousy and the Russell Green life was ruined for ever. He must persuade her into the flat again. He must, if it cost him his life. Once more, as with the Balzac and poor old Bendish, there seemed a fateful omen in this – if Mrs. Russell Green left the house Lily would refuse him.

“I shouldn’t take it too seriously,” he whispered. “You know he loves you, whatever he does. I don’t suppose he meant any harm.”

“Harm! What do you call harm? If that Marchmont girl … And lying to me, too! I’ve told him again and again I’ll stand anything, but not lies. No, never!”

He touched her arm with his hand. She was trembling, but his touch seemed to steady her. She leant a little towards him. She liked him. She had always liked him. Nice, kind little man. She realised him now, stolid and kind, wanting to help her. And realising him, she liked men better. She saw her own Walter with a little bit of Frederick Anstey stuck on to him.

“I shouldn’t,” Frederick said, “do anything drastic on such a lovely evening.”

Lovely evening! That was about the silliest thing she had ever heard! Nevertheless, there was something in it. She was a sentimental girl and she loved Walter Russell Green more than all the world and everything in it. She caught Frederick’s hand.

“What does he tell me lies for?” she went on in an agonised whisper. “That’s what I want to know. I could stand anything but that. And such silly lies. He’s always found out and he knows it.”

“Everyone tells lies,” whispered Frederick. “One can’t help it. We all do. And what does it matter when you know he loves you? Anyone can see it.”

Yes, he did. Of that she was quite sure. At the thought of the way that he loved her, of his past goodness, tenderness and incredible childish charm, she softened. She wanted to soften. She had wanted it all the time.

“Go back,” said Frederick. “Don’t leave tonight. See how it is in the morning.”

She looked at the door, sniffed, sighed.

“Very well, then. I’ll give him another chance. But it’s the last.” She nodded, pushed her Yale key into the door and vanished.

He shook his head. Perhaps in a moment she would be out again. He waited, half expecting the door to open and a furious figure to emerge, but nothing happened. Silence and the spring evening. He went down to the main hall, which had still, at the bottom of its stone staircase, an air and a grandeur. The floor was paved in black and white squares; there was a large empty fireplace, and over it hung what Frederick had always supposed to be a young ancestor of Lady Cannon’s – a handsome boy in a blue suit with a fine gold sword at his side.

“I wonder,” thought Frederick, looking at him, “whether you ever proposed to a lady who couldn’t make up her mind if she’d accept you or no … I’m sure you did not…. You are too good-looking. Any woman would have accepted you at sight.”

He still hesitated, glancing at the door as though it held special temptation for him. He must not go out: he would be off at once to Lily. That would anger her. Everything would be ruined….

But the door pulled at him! Its strong dark face seemed to urge him: “Come and open me! Slip outside. It is such a delicious evening.”

Then the door, to his astonishment, opened. The light spread softly towards him, he saw the white stone steps, the shining surface of the pavement, the dark trees beyond. Old Lady Cannon stood there, leaning against the door as though she would fall.

He went quickly towards her and she said with a little gasping sigh: “Oh, Mr. Anstey…. I’m a little faint … please.”

He supported her, standing there by the open door, and it was strange to him, having her in his arms, to feel the absolute frailty of her body, something so sparse and fragile that it was difficult to believe that it could still exist. She always wore the same clothes, a black bonnet, a shiny black dress, a round silver locket on her heart, long black gloves, all very old-fashioned and quaint; she was a figure that everyone stared at in the street.

She was very small in stature, with a little white peaked face in which were set large anxious eyes. Frederick did not know her very well. She could be haughty and superior. She let the rooms of her house through an agent, and Frederick might never have known her at all had it not been that she had asked his advice on two occasions about family pictures that she wished to sell. One of them, a very charming little Romney, had fetched an excellent price.

He had never entered the rooms where she lived. He was to enter them now.

She gave him the oddest, dry little smile. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I beg your pardon. I fear that I shall have to ask you to assist me. I’m not very well. My maid is out.” Then she added, speaking with great difficulty: “They want so much freedom in these days.”

He almost carried her across the hall: she felt in the pocket of her black dress and gave him the key. They went through the little passage into a vast cold drawing-room, and here he placed her in an old deep chair covered with faded brocade near the wide empty fireplace. How cold the room was and, after he had settled her and looked about him, how empty and desolate!

He could see on the faintly yellow walls the marks where pictures had been hanging. There were still some pictures left, faint and beautiful under the electric light.

She said: “Will you please turn the light off again?… And my smelling salts, if you please. On that table!”

He switched the light off and at once the great room was beautiful. From the high wide windows a lake of pale colour spread over the old red carpet, the little tables, the old shabby gilt chairs. A clock struck the hour with a lovely silver tone as though it welcomed the evening.

She lay back, her bonnet on the table beside her, sniffing at the salts, her head turned away from him. He could not see her face. He was sitting stiffly on a gilt chair near to her.

“Can’t I get you some brandy?” he asked gently. “Is there something I can do for you?”

But she did not answer. Her thin arm in its long black glove had fallen to her side. He waited. He did not wish to disturb her. A certain deference that he had been trained from his babyhood to feel for the English aristocracy kept him silent. Our English snobbery, and yet not quite that. He felt, in the presence of an old lady like this, all the romance and colour of the English past. They said that the past didn’t matter any more, that even to think of people belonging to this class or another was vain and empty-headed. Well, he was empty-headed then! This old lady had something that neither he nor Lily would ever have, and it was some beautiful thing with dignity, history, courage in it. Courage! The old lady needed it, he was sure. Looking cautiously about the dim empty room, he felt an air of poverty and hardship. She should not be poor, receiving the rents for all the rooms in her house, and yet she was poor. There was some mystery here. He sat there, not venturing to move. He would stay there a little while, lest she needed somebody. He thought that she was asleep.

The door was a little open and the farther door was open too. He could hear the chatter of the old clock in the hall.

He fell asleep….

When he awoke he was fearfully cold. For a moment he could not remember where he was. Then it all came to him. At once his heart began to hammer again in his breast. Suppose that a letter had come while he slept. He could still see the figure in the chair, quite motionless. She also was sleeping.

Confusedly, things crowded about him – the Balzac, old Bendish, Mrs. Russell Green, the old lady. All omens for Lily; omens of life, too. All these ways life could go – the artist perfecting his beautiful work and then selling it to a man like Litehouse who cared for it only because it cost him money; if Lily refused him, the aimless, decaying life of Bendish; if Lily accepted him, perhaps the quarrelling, jealous life of marriage; and at last, at the end, this old age, nothing left save the past, all gone, all empty, all the fire and stress as though it had never been. Those were the ways that life could take.

But he was no very great philosopher. For an instant only the fantasy of this strange mystery had danced before his eyes. Now it was gone. Lily. Lily … Oh, Lily, my darling, darling!

He got up very carefully from his chair, stole across the floor, moved into the dusky hall. There was the letter-box hanging like a malicious chin from the dark surface. Trembling so that he could scarcely stand, he went, opened it. There, shimmering white, was a letter. He saw that it was addressed to himself and was in Lily’s handwriting.

Now his agony was upon him. He had to summon to his rescue every power that he had ever known. His forehead was damp with sweat. He took out his handkerchief and mopped it. He tore the envelope, letting it fall to the ground. In her big, sprawling handwriting, so precious to him, he read:

Dearest Fred,

I want you to know that I love you and will marry you tomorrow, if you want me to. My mind was made up this afternoon (it has always really been made up), but I wouldn’t tell you in that hurry, and then father…

He read no more. All the world was singing. He flung open the hall door, and a great flood of lilac seemed to salute him and in the dusk he saw the clustered bushes burning purple.

“Good Housekeeping” May 1930

All Soul’s Night (1933)

SPANISH DUSK

“The care with which the rain is wrong, and the green is wrong, and the white is wrong, the care with which there is a chair and plenty of breathing and the care with which there is incredible justice and likeness, all this makes a magnificent asparagus and also a fountain.”

So says Gertrude Stein. She may be right or she may be wrong, but she is right for me at least in this that, at this moment, looking out from my window on to the silver walls of rain that slash the Cumberland fields, that “rain” is wrong and the green and the white are wrong too – for I am plunged back into memory, memory of twenty-five years ago. I love this scene as I love none other in the world, and even now the green shoulder of Cat Bells rises to reproach me, and I know that soon those clouds will break, the pale faint blue push its way, as tender as the leaves of a young lettuce, and the trees in my garden shake their glistening drops and raise their heads gratefully to heaven.

My memory for the moment rejects this world of beauty and claims the sun.

I here indulge myself, giving myself up to a breath, a flash of colour, hesitation on a staircase, a kiss from the first woman I ever loved.

It was my first adventure abroad. I was twenty-four years of age. I was to be a diplomat – that was the plan, and meanwhile because I had been always delicate and was an only child I was to be indulged.

My father was not a man given to the indulging of others. An ironical melancholy, native in him perhaps, but springing to action beside the death-bed of my mother (she died when I was ten years old: he had passionately worshipped her), kept him always from any very close contact with his fellows. Most men and many women feared him, and I, who was perhaps the only human being whom he truly loved, was only at affectionate ease with him in his absence.

As has been my own later case, he had from early days divided his sense of life, of beauty, of passion (if so warm a word may be used of him) between Spain and England. His books on Spanish life and literature, his Cervantes, his Spanish Truth and Spanish Fiction, his Spanish Tragedy and Comedy, are still read, I fancy. The Cervantes at least remains until the present the best work on that great writer. But he was never, as towards the end of his life he constantly told me, able to get on to paper what he really wanted to say.

He returned to Spain again and again, there seemed to be nothing there that he did not see (so far of course as a foreigner is able to see anything), and yet, he died a frustrated man.

He was physically more Spanish than English; short, slight, dark, with that quiet almost stern dignity that is so especially Spanish. He was an exile you might say in both countries, loving this Cumberland scene but sitting in the rain and longing for the dried land that quivers under the sun like a panting dog, and then back again under the snowy peaks of his beloved Nevadas, watching the olives smoking in the clear air, and praising the broken Cumberland sky, the ripple of light over Derwentwater, the thick green woods of Manesty.

It was a great occasion for both of us when I was to make my first Spanish journey. He said little – he was a man of few words – and, as was his way, what he did say was to counteract any kind of romantic notions that I might have formed.

And yet I was romantic. How could it be otherwise? From my babyhood I had understood that Spain was the very heart of romance. In the old Cumberland garden, on the English summer evenings filled with the sound of bees and the scent of roses, a boy to whom anything distant was lovely and anything unseen an adventure, I read Prescott – the old, faded red-crimson volumes, Ferdinand and Isabella and Philip II. and Irving’s Alhambra and Granada – and how could it be but that Ponce de Leon and Alva and Don John clashed their silver armour about my ears, and the Moors cried from the watered gardens of Granada for vengeance on the accursed dog of a Christian?

Age did not sober me. Three years at Oxford did little to sophisticate me. I was an only child, shy, reserved, terrified of exposing my follies to the world, believing in my dreams more deeply than I dared confess to anyone.

The setting out on that journey was such an adventure as I never knew afterwards, as, alas! I shall never know again. Other journeys there have been, neither worthless nor sterile, but dry and barren indeed compared with that anticipation.

During the journey from Paris to Barcelona my father talked to me about women. He had never ventured on this subject before with me, and I can realise now, with my later, older knowledge of him, what a difficult, embarrassing business it must have been for him. He spoke, I remember, with the embarrassment of a man confessing some shameful secret to another. He had, of course, himself no shameful secret to confess. He spoke of his love for my mother, and told me that if I could I must hold myself sacred for just such a wonderful relationship. But if, on the other hand, I could not so keep myself, I was to ask his advice and remember that he was a man of the world. A man of the world! My poor father! I suppose no man was ever less of one! But I too, on my side, had no secrets to confess. I had ideals quite as beautiful, quite, if you please, as foolish, as any that he could have wished for me. I confessed at last that I had never kissed a woman nor been kissed by one, save for my cousins who were to me female as the cow is female but with no more sex than that.

He was relieved, I fancy, but anxious too. He wanted me to be a man and found me, I fear, a good deal of a half-baked prig. In myself I had for some time now realised my own sad absence of experience and was most anxious to remedy it, but did not wish, more than any other boy, that my father should be witness of that part of my education.

He said no more, and the barrier between us was increased rather than weakened by our halting little attempt at intimacy.

Nevertheless his words only added to my already almost trembling excitement. Women! It needed only that word to complete the picture. I burned to have my first adventure, but so absurdly sensitive was I at that time to every minute impression that the smallest thing – a word, a gesture, a scent, a turn of the hand – could frighten my admiration, check my approval, cool my romance.

What I wanted was to be carried off my feet, to be flung, whether I wished or no, into that condition of worshipping adoration that asks no question. Then – so my pride assured myself – the lover that I could be! Poor boy – remote, touching, above all, honest figure with motives clear as crystal and life as simple as a saint’s Credo – how near and how far you are from me now. The rain is ceasing. All the trees glitter and the faint tender blue steals through the grey just as I knew it would, and the wing of a silver cloud flutters over the shadow of the Lake.

We arrived, I remember, in Barcelona at midday, and I can feel now, as I sit here, the fresh agony of my disappointment. Ponce de Leon in his silver armour, Alva stern and cruel on his coal-black horse – and here under a grey, gritty sky with a wind in it, the trams rattling, men as unromantically attired as though they were in Sheffield discussing business prices, the shops filled with vulgar clothes and the shabbiest of sham jewellery. I was sulky and silent. I could have wept. My father made what was for him so rare a thing, an affectionate gesture, pressing my arm with his hand.

“There are so many things in Spain,” he said, “that are not as you expect them to be. Patience. Wait for something to happen. It always does here.”

Even that very afternoon I moved a step forward. Looking back now I seem to see clearly that all these little incidents were steps towards that one great moment that it is my wish here to re-create. In the middle of that afternoon my father left me on business, and I found my way into the Cathedral. Stepping into Barcelona Cathedral is tumbling into a well of blackness. There is no other Cathedral so dark. At first I groped my way about, but feeling already a certain pleasurable stir at the velvet pressure of the obscurity, the distant sound of echoing voices and the shadowed colour of high, richly deep windows. I stumbled at length to the lighter shadows before the High Altar, and there at my back was the choir and in the choir the priests and boys busy over Vespers. It was all exciting and novel to me. Seated on the hard little bench, timidly twisting myself around so that I might see all that went on without appearing too rudely inquisitive, I watched everything as though it were a play. Soon the bells clashed and rattled, a door opened in the wall, the organ burst into what seemed to me a merry jig, and a little procession came out: an old man in a white wig and a rich crimson gown, two little boys bearing gigantic candlesticks with lighted candles, and behind them some four or five priests robed in gold and purple. They all hurried into the choir, and the organ played even more merrily and the prayers were chanted, and I was in an ecstasy. Under what seemed to my Protestant eyes a lectern, the old man with the white wig stood, the little boys on either side of him. I was yet more enchanted when I found the little boys pinching the wax off their candles and throwing it at one another while the old man, who had the rheumatics and moved restlessly from one foot to the other, reproached them gently and the little boys paid him no attention.

Then the organ played another tune, and out the little procession came again, hurrying once more for its very life, up to the altar, then down again with the incense, a minute child with a shock-head of untidy black hair swinging the censer with all his body and soul, down the precipitous steps to the mysterious candle-lit shrine beneath the altar. When they passed me and I was flooded with a cloud of incense, I was swung on that vibrating censer through the opening door into a magic world of light.

That was my first step towards that moment on the high gleaming staircase, the candles glimmering above my head, her hand resting for that immortal second on my forehead …

That same night we went to Madrid, and again, as in Barcelona, there was first disappointment and afterwards rapture. Here was no magic city, as I quickly perceived. Once more the trams clanged, shabby little men in dull clothes went about their business, and, for the women, I didn’t see any. An hour or so and I was standing with my father in the Prado Gallery. It is one of my difficulties now to select out of all my later maturer experience the first naïveté of that original drama. That first shock of Velasquez (Greco was not for me until later), how can one ever recover it? Great painter, he becomes with one’s passing maturity ever greater, but that leaping to one’s eye of the splendour of “Breda,” of “Las Meniñas” – and the others – what can one seize upon now but the vague heat of that excitement, the surging, fresh conviction of the nobility and immortality of the soul of man?

I knew at that time but little technically of painting; it had happened, though, that my father by an odd chance had been a friend of Sickert, Whistler, Spencer Gore and Stevens, through coincidence rather than deliberate purpose, and to our dreary empty house in London these men had occasionally come. Through their atmosphere I had caught some consciousness of French painting, and had, silently (because I was always afraid of betraying my ignorance), thought Manet “marvellous,” Sisley “wonderful,” Monet “miraculous.” I had been perhaps in my secret soul conceited of my little knowledge and select preferences. At last now, in one enraptured instant of experience, my conceit fell from me. As my gaze, bewildered, passed from the glorious vitality of the God of Wine in the “Borrachos” to the fat, sinister malignity of the dwarf in “Las Meniñas,” to the superb courtesy of the heroes of “Breda,” to the chill dignity of “Philip,” tears filled my eyes. I could not speak. I hated that my father should be at my side. It was as though my clothes had been suddenly stripped from me. I vowed myself there and then, in a glory of self-confidence, to the pursuit of Art, rejecting all but the finest, living a century of bare austerities in the ardour of my heroic chase…. Alas! alas! how ironically now Cat Bells tosses its shoulder at me beyond my window, laughing in the sunshine at the burnt stick that has fallen from that blazing star!

No matter. I lived in that great moment with all the heroes of the world! I may be said at that instant to have been baptised of Spain. I was never at least to lose touch with her again.

•   •   •   •   •

Two days later we were in Granada. I had had in my journey there an hour of the Sierra Morena at sunset, and the burning colour of that hour had brought me to the very edge of trembling anticipation….

Those colours – blood-red, purple, amber – lying over the sprawling grey hills like sheets of metal, and yet alive so that you could feel the soil breathe beneath their covering, had in their intensity given me a new sense of Light. I was not, in my present raptures, faithless to my own country. Looking back, it seems to me that that eager and ignorant boy was touchingly aware of the ties in his own soul that held him for ever to the English skies so faintly washed, the soil so gently coloured, but here, in this careless splendour of light, there was something savagely opulent and generous that had never been known before. I sat, in that train, staring from the window as though this were a new birth for me, and my father, his cap tilted over his eyes, soundly slept…

In Granada we drove up the hill through the archway under a sheet of stars. The hotel was filled with passengers from a Mediterranean cruise, but their noise, their absorption in their own affairs, could not rob me of my sense of my own drama – that I was stepping forward at once, without a moment’s delay, into a great adventure.

Next day the Alhambra yet further reassured me. I had expected, from the pictures that I had seen of it, to find it large and gaudy, and was surprised with its gentleness, its colours of pigeon-grey and soft rose, the ceilings that hung in pointed clusters touched with flecks of blue, the fountains, the sounding waters, the views from every window of the town far below in patterns of silver-white against the hill – and above it all the Sierra Nevada with peaks of crystal that cut the blue. But it was all so gentle, so different from the fierce figures of old Muley Abu’l Hassan and the terrible Ez-Zagal.

Nevertheless it completed my preparation. It whispered to me as the Nevadas flamed in sunset that my great moment was assured.

So far, looking back, I have been able to recover with some certainty my little history. From the Barcelona Cathedral to the Prado, from the Prado through the Sierra Morena to the Alhambra everything is clear like a geography book: “The principal rivers of Spain are the Guadalquivir, the etc., etc.” But now, with my father and myself seated next morning in the very rickety carriage that was to take us out to the house of my father’s friend, romantic dimness comes down over the scene. Even the name of the house must be hidden. I have never seen it since that time, although on many occasions I might have done so. I have even refused to visualise it with any positive definition for myself. If I call it anything it is the House of the Warrior, for reasons that will soon be plain.

It must be remembered too that there was, for me then, the added dimness of my complete ignorance of the Spanish language. I had been hitherto with my father in cosmopolitan hotels, but now I was to move in a world of strange voices, of sounds mingling and separating in the air like the waters of fountains, and even the sun itself was to look down upon me with a remote and foreign glow.

As we tumbled over the roads, muddy with February rains, with every kilometre of distance the country seemed to me to become stranger; the hills, speckled like English “spotted dogs” with trees that, close to us, rolled their silver sides under the wind, gathered closer about us. The soil suddenly sprang out of its smoky grey into splashes of red streaked as though with blood, and shadows of angry clouds tore over the vast sky like huge birds obeying some god’s command.

That vast sky flamed into purple, a great sun of arrogant gold stared from between the hills into our eyes, then dropped into dun, the dark world pressed upon us as though it would squeeze us flat, we laboured and groaned against the hill, night was everywhere, and we had arrived.

I felt, I remember, a thrill of mingled shyness and anticipation as I stepped timidly beside my father into the hall. It seemed to my first excited gaze to be filled with figures and with smoke. The smoke may have been simply the sudden illumination after the darkness of the carriage, but the candles were blowing in the breeze and there was a faint acrid haze from the logs that hissed and crackled in the big open fireplace. All at least was dim and to my excited fancy richly coloured. Men and women like figures in a play moved about me greeting my father, while I, awkward, embarrassed, hung behind him.

“This is my son,” he said in English, and a tall, hawk-nosed, black-eyebrowed gentleman, my very personification of a Spaniard, greeted me very kindly. I do not remember what he said. I stared through the blue haze at the white walls, the high carpetless staircase and a magnificent dark picture of a man in armour that hung halfway up the staircase. This was a grand warrior, this hero, with a black beard and armour of a dull gold, his gauntleted hand sternly set on his sword, and behind him the fires of a red sunset playing on the long silhouette of a dark mountain range.

It seemed to me a glorious picture, the romantic key that I needed, when, quite suddenly, as though she had descended upon us from the sky, standing in front of it was a lady in a white dress, a lace shawl of black silk over her shoulders, a bunch of dark purple violets at her breast. She had turned the corner of the stairs and then, seeing that there were new arrivals, hesitated. A moment later, moving, as it seemed to me, with the utmost grace, she had come down to us and my father was being introduced to her. I was for the time forgotten until my father himself turning to me said something about our rooms and we passed to the stairs.

With what startling, lightning vividness is that moment still with me, the dim hall on whose surface the Spanish words rose and fell, the wavering of the candles, the crackling of the logs, and the gentle low voice of that lady as we moved past her towards that golden-armoured Warrior who commanded the stairway.

My room was vast, with a high purple canopy over the bed, dim portraits on the walls, and a beautiful triptych of the Virgin and Saints in faded red and blue over the stone fireplace. I was washing my hands when my father came in and spoke to me with that rough awkwardness that always came to him when he was wishing to show affection. With what sharp accuracy I remember his words!

“I hope you won’t be lonely here. Several of the men speak English. In any case it will be a fine opportunity for you to observe Spanish life at first hand.”

“Oh no!” I answered eagerly. “It is just what I hoped. It is the Velasquez pictures come to life.” Then, more timidly because I feared that he was laughing at my romanticism, “Father, who is that lady?”

“Which lady? There were several.”

“The one who came down the stairs, to whom you were introduced.”

He told me. Her name? What does it matter? Whatever name she had that night it was not destined to be hers for much longer. He told me that she was a guest there, that she was a lady with her husband from Segovia. He knew nothing at all about them.

That evening was spent by me in watching from my corner. No one, I fancy, paid me very much attention. A shy English boy who knew no Spanish would not be very entertaining company for them. Their Spanish courtesy did what was needful and no more. But indeed I asked for nothing more than to be left alone. Before that first evening was half over I was plunged fiercely, madly, wildly, breathlessly into the intoxicating waters of first love.

Everything maybe had been inevitably leading to this. My father’s long intercourse with Spain, so that it had been for me so long the most romantic country in the world, this my first taste of it, the dark shadows of the Barcelona Cathedral, the paintings at Madrid, the violent burning colours of the sunlit Sierra, the tender light and running waters of the Alhambra, all had led me step by step to this moment.

My own life too had prepared me for it, shy and romantic, keeping always to myself my deepest thoughts, longing for love but resolving to know it only at its finest – yes, all the stage was prepared, the light had gone down that the little drama might begin.

But I like also to think that there was something in the beauty and grace of that lady herself. Was she beautiful in reality? How can I say? Reality, or rather realism, calm, cold, selective, had no part at all in this story.

She sat almost opposite to me at dinner, and on her right was a man, thick-set and strong but not dark like the other men, fair-haired with blue eyes and a gentle rather indeterminate mouth. I noticed him although there was no especial reason then why I should. I think it was because he and she said no single word to one another throughout dinner. They did not look at one another. She was for the most part very silent, speaking only occasionally to the man on the other side of her; he, the fair-haired man, never spoke at all. Her face was grave, almost sad, and very white under the pile of her dark black hair. Her long white fingers played with the bread beside her plate. She ate and drank very little.

I noticed everything about her, watching her most secretly lest I should seem to be impertinent.

Oddly enough, that night my father, coming to my room to wish me good night, spoke near to my thoughts. He spoke of Spanish ladies, how different from anything that we could imagine in England, how gay and pleasant their lives before marriage, watched and guarded of course, but designed only that they should be courted and flattered, every young man serving them, worshipping them, adoring them. Then, from the moment of marriage, imprisonment, the husband their gaoler, never free, never alone, their only duty to obey their husband and bear children, the Priest over all.

Following I know not what train of thought, I asked my father of the fair-haired, blue-eyed man who had sat next to her at dinner. He was, it seemed, a Belgian, in Spain on some business. And her husband? Her husband was a gentleman, tall and thin and extremely dark, with a shining white hook of a nose. I had seen him talking after dinner gravely and with, I thought, a good deal of self-complacency with our host.

A prisoner! So she was a prisoner? All night (or so it seemed to me – I dare say that in reality I slept well enough) I lay tossing on my bed, thinking of her thus with that shining hooked nose hanging over her and the eyes behind ceaselessly watching her.

At last I slept, and when I awoke it was to a world of light. Standing at my window with only my English experiences to tell me, I could not believe that light, naked, piercing, sheeted light, could make a flood of glittering fire so cover the world. At the far distance the Sierra Nevada seemed to be built of white flame, and over the great tapestry of the valley the light played like a vast extended note of music. The valley was chequered with colour, the trees that peppered the grey hills, Granada that glittered like a heap of frosted pebble, fields of blood-red and saffron and emerald and the purple hills crusted in enamel. Every colour, but all subdued to this passionate light that was not angry nor cruel as I had heard that it was in the East, but radiating with conscious happiness and power.

It was into this light that my love was translated. Although we were only in early February, during all our stay at this place the light was there. Every morning I rose to it and every evening I bade it farewell.

“How lovely the dusk must be,” I remember thinking, but when that first evening came and I stood by the wall of the garden looking out to the snow hills, I had only an instant of it – one divine moment when the light fell lower, swinging down to purple shadow, and the thin pallor of the almond buds was blue. But it was only an instant caught in my eager hands between light and dark.

How strangely pathetic that first love is! One has learnt as yet no rules. The hot, biting emotions that tear one are so strange and new, so oddly compounded of shame and pride, of diffidence and boldness, hope and despair. One scarcely sees the beloved object; she is dimmed by the glory and worship that one flings over her.

So it was with her now. I scarcely saw her; she was part of the dusky hall, of the portrait of the warrior, of the first blossoming of the almonds, of the silver snow against the blue, the blood-red soil, three peasants moving down the field scattering the thin mist of the grain, of their sudden harsh cries, the lowing of the cattle, the boy singing as he laid the blue and yellow tiles for a new garden path.

Oddest of all, perhaps, that I should worship her so. I knew nothing at all about her. She never spoke to me, only smiled very gently as she passed me. She spoke indeed very little to anyone. Her husband was always with her and he became to me her grisly, fearsome gaoler. I hated him and pictured him in my fancy torturing her.

Her face – how passionately I studied it when I thought that nobody watched me – was often sad, or I fancied so. Oh! If I could but speak her tongue or she mine! But I knew that she understood no English, and the few words that I now had in Spanish—!

At last on my third evening I plucked up heart to say “Good evening” to her in Spanish. She turned, smiled most sweetly and answered me some Spanish words. I tried to say more, but alas! “Good day,” “Good night,” “Thank you,” “Breakfast,” “Dinner” – these were all my pitiful store. As she left me I stood there, my heart beating so that my knees trembled.

Before the end of the week my imagination had created a world for me. I saw her, alone, desolate, in that distant town of Segovia, tyrannised by her hateful husband, longing for release. Who knew but that she had noticed me, had begun to think of me, even to care for me a little? I began – so mad and simple in this early love – to fancy that she realised that there was some especial relationship between us, that she felt my presence when I was in the room with her, that she did not think of me as of the others.

When I lay awake at night I created marvellous fictions in which she made me understand that she loved me, that she hated her bony-nosed husband, that she would escape with me to England …

I rehearsed again and again the scene with my father. “You see, Father, I love her. I have never loved before. I shall never love again. And she loves me. She also has never loved before …”

Alas, alas, the two silver birches who guard now my library door shake their leaves gently in derision of such folly, and there is regret too perhaps because youth can never return.

But dreams are not folly. Reality sometimes pierces them and they reality. So it was with my little story.

We had been guests a week and in another day or two would be gone. I was determined now that somehow I would create my link with her. Schemes chased one another through my brain. I did not eat; I did not sleep; even my father – always unobservant of my moods – was aware at last that something held me.

I need not have schemed; life itself brought me my climax. So the moment came, the moment that still after so many years and so many moments seems to speak of my experience – a flash that lit more landscape than any that flamed for me afterwards. I stood at my window knowing that the instant between daylight and dark that seemed too especially beautiful to me was approaching.

My window was open. The garden shone as the light lowered; the figures of the three sowers passing down the long red field were softening into dark against the glow. I was of course thinking of her, wondering whether she would come perhaps into the garden to catch a picture of that moment of dusk.

Three men passed across the gravel, quietly talking. One I saw as her husband.

My bedroom door was ajar. I heard a step on the passage floor. It hesitated and waited. Driven I know not by what inner certainty, I went to my door. She was standing in the darkening passage, staring into the wall. I saw her dark hair, her pale face, her heaving breasts, and then – that she was crying. She did not try to stop her tears, only stood there as though spellbound.

Her tears tore me with tenderness and love, yes, and triumph too. If she was crying she was in trouble, and if she was in trouble she needed me, and if she needed me—!

I drew her into my room. She came without any resistance. I made her sit down in the tapestried chair by my bed, and then, kneeling beside her, poured my heart out in a torrent of words. What did I say? Would I recover the words if I could?

I told her that I loved her, that I had loved her from the first moment of seeing her, that I could never love another woman, but would adore her, worship her, serve her for ever. That her husband was a tyrant as I knew, but that if she would come with me out of Spain I would make her the most faithful of lovers and husbands, only giving her my life, my service, my soul…. And mingled all this with the light of the sky and the pictures of Velasquez and the blood-red soil of Spain and all the new consciousness of life that had come to me.

She did not of course understand one word of it, but there, allowing me to take her hand, her tears ceased to fall, she stared, I remember, intently in front of her as though listening for some sound. Then she put her hand for a moment on my forehead. At that touch I was all on fire. I sprang to my feet and raised her to hers. Then I held her in my arms and kissed her mouth. She did not move, did not turn away from me. My mouth was on hers, I took her fragrance and her softness into my soul and swam on pinions of ecstasy into the most distant of heavens.

At last, very gently indeed, she disengaged herself. I tried to say more, but something in her eyes forbade me. The last streak of gold in the world lay on my floor in a broad bar of flame. In the passage above the stairs, where all was now dark, she laid her hand for a moment on my forehead, said something that I could not understand, and was gone.

I stayed motionless in my room.

Years afterwards I saw in London a play translated from, I think, the Hungarian, and in the course of it a boy loves a married woman, thinks that she will divorce her husband and marry him – and learns his lesson. Although the lesson that I learnt was very different from his, I sat in the theatre that night overcome with my own memories.

Even as that boy so was I. She loved me. Otherwise she would not have let me kiss her and hold her in my arms. She loved me and she would come with me to England and … What matter that I was only twenty-four and she – I did not think of her age.

She was mine and I was hers for all, for all eternity! I stood there, once and again trembling with my happiness, for I know not how long. Then in the dark I found my way to my bed and, flinging myself down on it, lay there staring with burning eyes into the gloom.

Later – it must have been much later – I heard a great stir about the house. The sounds called me from my trance. Lights flashed beyond my windows, voices called, at last there was a rumble of carriage wheels on the path.

My door opened and my father came in, holding a lamp. I could see that he was gravely concerned.

He came to my bed, touched my arm. “Are you asleep?” he asked.

“No,” I answered. And as I looked up at him I wondered, I remember, how he would take my news when he heard it. At first he would be very angry, cast me off perhaps; but afterwards, I was his only son, he loved me….

“Most unfortunate,” he said. “Very inconvenient for us. We shall have to leave in the morning.”

Leave in the morning! Leave her in the morning? Oh, no I My heart beat fiercely.

“What is it?” I asked.

“The lady from Segovia – you know, you asked about her. Señora S———…. She has run off with Mr. B———, the Belgian, the fellow with the fair hair and blue eyes. Three hours ago. They had a carriage waiting at the bottom of the road. They had been planning it, it seems, a long while. Señor S——— has only now found her letter. He is off in a carriage to Granada. The whole house is in an uproar. Most inconvenient for us. We can’t stay on here, that’s certain. No one dreamt it of her. It’s always these quiet women. They’ll have dinner as usual, I suppose, but it’s most uncomfortable.”

I said that I would not come down to dinner. My headache, bad all day, was now frantic….

•   •   •   •   •

A man at dinner the other night said authoritatively:

“Oh, they have no dusk in Spain. Blazing sun one moment, dark the next.”

But I knew better. There is that second of splendour when earth and heaven meet. I had had my second.

Machado has written:

“Lleva él que deja y vive que ha vivido” (“He carries with him who leaves behind, and lives who has lived”).

And so it is.

“The Yale Review” Sep 1930

All Soul’s Night (1933)

THE SILVER MASK

Miss Sonia Herries, coming home from a dinner-party at the Westons’, heard a voice at her elbow.

“If you please – only a moment—”

She had walked from the Westons’ flat because it was only three streets away, and now she was only a few steps from her door, but it was late, there was no one about and the King’s Road rattle was muffled and dim.

“I am afraid I can’t—” she began. It was cold and the wind nipped her cheeks.

“If you would only—” he went on.

She turned and saw one of the handsomest young men possible. He was the handsome young man of all romantic stories, tall, dark, pale, slim, distinguished – oh! everything! – and he was wearing a shabby blue suit and shivering with the cold just as he should have been.

“I’m afraid I can’t—” she repeated, beginning to move on.

“Oh, I know,” he interrupted quickly. “Everyone says the same and quite naturally. I should if our positions were reversed. But I must go on with it. I can’t go back to my wife and baby with simply nothing. We have no fire, no food, nothing except the ceiling we are under. It is my fault, all of it. I don’t want your pity, but I have to attack your comfort.”

He trembled. He shivered as though he were going to fall. Involuntarily she put out her hand to steady him. She touched his arm and felt it quiver under the thin sleeve.

“It’s all right …” he murmured. “I’m hungry … I can’t help it.”

She had had an excellent dinner. She had drunk perhaps just enough to lead to recklessness – in any case, before she realised it, she was ushering him in, through her dark-blue painted door. A crazy thing to do! Nor was it as though she were too young to know any better, for she was fifty if she was a day and, although sturdy of body and as strong as a horse (except for a little unsteadiness of the heart), intelligent enough to be thin, neurotic and abnormal; but she was none of these.

Although intelligent she suffered dreadfully from impulsive kindness. All her life she had done so. The mistakes that she had made – and there had been quite a few – had all arisen from the triumph of her heart over her brain. She knew it – how well she knew it! – and all her friends were for ever dinning it into her. When she reached her fiftieth birthday she said to herself – “Well, now at last I’m too old to be foolish any more.” And here she was, helping an entirely unknown young man into her house at dead of night, and he in all probability the worst sort of criminal.

Very soon he was sitting on her rose-coloured sofa, eating sandwiches and drinking a whisky and soda. He seemed to be entirely overcome by the beauty of her possessions. “If he’s acting he’s doing it very well,” she thought to herself. But he had taste and he had knowledge. He knew that the Utrillo was an early one, the only period of importance in that master’s work, he knew that the two old men talking under a window belonged to Sickert’s “Middle Italian,” he recognised the Dobson head and the wonderful green bronze Elk of Carl Milles.

“You are an artist,” she said. “You paint?”

“No, I am a pimp, a thief, a what you like – anything bad,” he answered fiercely. “And now I must go,” he added, springing up from the sofa.

He seemed most certainly invigorated. She could scarcely believe that he was the same young man who only half an hour before had had to lean on her arm for support. And he was a gentleman. Of that there could be no sort of question. And he was astoundingly beautiful in the spirit of a hundred years ago, a young Byron, a young Shelley, not a young Ramon Novarro or a young Ronald Colman.

Well, it was better that he should go, and she did hope (for his own sake rather than hers) that he would not demand money and threaten a scene. After all, with her snow-white hair, firm broad chin, firm broad body, she did not look like someone who could be threatened. He had not apparently the slightest intention of threatening her. He moved towards the door.

“Oh!” he murmured with a little gasp of wonder. He had stopped before one of the loveliest things that she had – a mask in silver of a clown’s face, the clown smiling, gay, joyful, not hinting at perpetual sadness as all clowns are traditionally supposed to do. It was one of the most successful efforts of the famous Sorat, greatest living master of Masks.

“Yes. Isn’t that lovely?” she said. “It was one of Sorat’s earliest things, and still, I think, one of his best.”

“Silver is the right material for that clown,” he said.

“Yes, I think so too,” she agreed. She realised that she had asked him nothing about his troubles, about his poor wife and baby, about his past history. It was better perhaps like this.

“You have saved my life,” he said to her in the hall. She had in her hand a pound note.

“Well,” she answered cheerfully, “I was a fool to risk a strange man in my house at this time of night – or so my friends would tell me. But such an old woman like me – where’s the risk?”

“I could have cut your throat,” he said quite seriously.

“So you could,” she admitted. “But with horrid consequences to yourself.”

“Oh no,” he said. “Not in these days. The police are never able to catch anybody.”

“Well, good night. Do take this. It can get you some warmth at least.”

He took the pound. “Thanks,” he said carelessly. Then at the door he remarked: “That mask. The loveliest thing I ever saw.”

When the door had closed and she went back into the sitting-room she sighed:

“What a good-looking young man!” Then she saw that her most beautiful white jade cigarette-case was gone. It had been lying on the little table by the sofa. She had seen it just before she went into the pantry to cut the sandwiches. He had stolen it. She looked everywhere. No, undoubtedly he had stolen it.

“What a good-looking young man!” she thought as she went up to bed.

Sonia Herries was a woman of her time in that outwardly she was cynical and destructive while inwardly she was a creature longing for affection and appreciation. For though she had white hair and was fifty she was outwardly active, young, could do with little sleep and less food, could dance and drink cocktails and play bridge to the end of all time. Inwardly she cared for neither cocktails nor bridge. She was above all things maternal and she had a weak heart, not only a spiritual weak heart but also a physical one. When she suffered, must take her drops, lie down and rest, she allowed no one to see her. Like all the other women of her period and manner of life she had a courage worthy of a better cause.

She was a heroine for no reason at all.

But, beyond everything else, she was maternal. Twice at least she would have married had she loved enough, but the man she had really loved had not loved her (that was twenty-five years ago), so she had pretended to despise matrimony. Had she had a child her nature would have been fulfilled; as she had not had that good fortune she had been maternal (with outward cynical indifference) to numbers of people who had made use of her, sometimes laughed at her, never deeply cared for her. She was named “a jolly good sort,” and was always “just outside” the real life of her friends. Her Herries relations, Rockages and Cards and Newmarks, used her to take odd places at table, to fill up spare rooms at house-parties, to make purchases for them in London, to talk to when things went wrong with them or people abused them. She was a very lonely woman.

She saw her young thief for the second time a fortnight later. She saw him because he came to her house one evening when she was dressing for dinner.

“A young man at the door,” said her maid Rose.

“A young man? Who?” But she knew.

“I don’t know, Miss Sonia. He won’t give his name.”

She came down and found him in the hall, the cigarette-case in his hand. He was wearing a decent suit of clothes, but he still looked hungry, haggard, desperate and incredibly handsome. She took him into the room where they had been before. He gave her the cigarette-case. “I pawned it,” he said, his eyes on the silver mask.

“What a disgraceful thing to do!” she said. “And what are you going to steal next?”

“My wife made some money last week,” he said. “That will see us through for a while.”

“Do you never do any work?” she asked him.

“I paint,” he answered. “But no one will touch my pictures. They are not modern enough.”

“You must show me some of your pictures,” she said, and realised how weak she was. It was not his good looks that gave him his power over her, but something both helpless and defiant, like a wicked child who hates his mother but is always coming to her for help.

“I have some here,” he said, went into the hall, and returned with several canvases. He displayed them. They were very bad – sugary landscapes and sentimental figures.

“They are very bad,” she said.

“I know they are. You must understand that my aesthetic taste is very fine. I appreciate only the best things in art, like your cigarette-case, that mask there, the Utrillo. But I can paint nothing but these. It is very exasperating.” He smiled at her.

“Won’t you buy one?” he asked her.

“Oh, but I don’t want one,” she answered. “I should have to hide it.” She was aware that in ten minutes her guests would be here.

“Oh, do buy one.”

“No, but of course not—”

“Yes, please.” He came nearer and looked up into her broad kindly face like a beseeching child.

“Well … how much are they?”

“This is twenty pounds. This twenty-five—”

“But how absurd! They are not worth anything at all.”

“They may be one day. You never know with modern pictures.”

“I am quite sure about these.”

“Please buy one. That one with the cows is not so bad.”

She sat down and wrote a cheque.

“I’m a perfect fool. Take this, and understand I never want to see you again. Never! You will never be admitted. It is no use speaking to me in the street. If you bother me I shall tell the police.”

He took the cheque with quiet satisfaction, held out his hand and pressed hers a little.

“Hang that in the right light and it will not be so bad—”

“You want new boots,” she said. “Those are terrible.”

“I shall be able to get some now,” he said and went away.

All that evening while she listened to the hard and crackling ironies of her friends she thought of the young man. She did not know his name. The only thing that she knew about him was that by his own confession he was a scoundrel and had at his mercy a poor young wife and a starving child. The picture that she formed of these three haunted her. It had been, in a way, honest of him to return the cigarette-case. Ah, but he knew, of course, that did he not return it he could never have seen her again. He had discovered at once that she was a splendid source of supply, and now that she had bought one of his wretched pictures – Nevertheless he could not be altogether bad. No one who cared so passionately for beautiful things could be quite worthless. The way that he had gone straight to the silver mask as soon as he entered the room and gazed at it as though with his very soul! And, sitting at her dinner-table, uttering the most cynical sentiments, she was all softness as she gazed across to the wall upon whose pale surface the silver mask was hanging. There was, she thought, a certain look of the young man in that jolly shining surface. But where? The clown’s cheek was fat, his mouth broad, his lips thick – and yet, and yet—

For the next few days as she went about London she looked in spite of herself at the passers-by to see whether he might not be there. One thing she soon discovered, that he was very much more handsome than anyone else whom she saw. But it was not for his handsomeness that he haunted her. It was because he wanted her to be kind to him, and because she wanted – oh, so terribly – to be kind to someone!

The silver mask, she had the fancy, was gradually changing, the rotundity thinning, some new light coming into the empty eyes. It was most certainly a beautiful thing.

Then, as unexpectedly as on the other occasions, he appeared again. One night as she, back from a theatre, smoking one last cigarette, was preparing to climb the stairs to bed, there was a knock on the door. Everyone of course rang the bell – no one attempted the old-fashioned knocker shaped like an owl that she had bought, one idle day, in an old curiosity shop. The knock made her sure that it was he. Rose had gone to bed so she went herself to the door. There he was – and with him a young girl and a baby. They all came into the sitting-room and stood awkwardly by the fire. It was at that moment when she saw them in a group by the fire that she felt her first sharp pang of fear. She knew suddenly how weak she was – she seemed to be turned to water at sight of them, she, Sonia Herries, fifty years of age, independent and strong, save for that little flutter of the heart – yes, turned to water! She was afraid as though someone had whispered a warning in her ear.

The girl was striking, with red hair and a white face, a thin graceful little thing. The baby, wrapped in a shawl, was soaked in sleep. She gave them drinks and the remainder of the sandwiches that had been put there for herself. The young man looked at her with his charming smile.

“We haven’t come to cadge anything this time,” he said. “But I wanted you to see my wife and I wanted her to see some of your lovely things.”

“Well,” she said sharply. “You can only stay a minute or two. It’s late. I’m off to bed. Besides, I told you not to come here again.”

“Ada made me,” he said, nodding at the girl. “She was so anxious to see you.”

The girl never said a word but only stared sulkily in front of her.

“All right. But you must go soon. By the way, you’ve never told me your name.”

“Henry Abbott, and that’s Ada, and the baby’s called Henry too.”

“All right. How have you been getting on since I saw you?”

“Oh, fine! Living on the fat of the land.” But he soon fell into silence and the girl never said a word. After an intolerable pause Sonia Herries suggested that they should go. They didn’t move. Half an hour later she insisted. They got up. But, standing by the door, Henry Abbott jerked his head towards the writing-desk.

“Who writes your letters for you?”

“Nobody. I write them myself.”

“You ought to have somebody. Save a lot of trouble. I’ll do them for you.”

“Oh no, thank you. That would never do. Well, good night, good night—”

“Of course I’ll do them for you. And you needn’t pay me anything either. Fill up my time.”

“Nonsense … good night, good night.” She closed the door on them. She could not sleep. She lay there thinking of him. She was moved, partly by a maternal tenderness for them that warmed her body (the girl and the baby had looked so helpless sitting there), partly by a shiver of apprehension that chilled her veins. Well, she hoped that she would never see them again. Or did she? Would she not tomorrow, as she walked down Sloane Street, stare at everyone to see whether by chance that was he?

Three mornings later he arrived. It was a wet morning and she had decided to devote it to the settling of accounts. She was sitting there at her table when Rose showed him in.

“I’ve come to do your letters,” he said.

“I should think not,” she said sharply. “Now, Henry Abbott, out you go. I’ve had enough—”

“Oh no, you haven’t,” he said, and sat down at her desk.

She would be ashamed for ever, but half an hour later she was seated in the corner of the sofa telling him what to write. She hated to confess it to herself, but she liked to see him sitting there. He was company for her, and to whatever depths he might by now have sunk, he was most certainly a gentleman. He behaved very well that morning; he wrote an excellent hand. He seemed to know just what to say.

A week later she said, laughing, to Amy Weston: “My dear, would you believe it? I’ve had to take on a secretary. A very good-looking young man – but you needn’t look down your nose. You know that good-looking young men are nothing to me – and he does save me endless bother.”

For three weeks he behaved very well, arriving punctually, offering her no insults, doing as she suggested about everything. In the fourth week, about a quarter to one on a day, his wife arrived. On this occasion she looked astonishingly young, sixteen perhaps. She wore a simple grey cotton dress. Her red bobbed hair was strikingly vibrant about her pale face.

The young man already knew that Miss Herries was lunching alone. He had seen the table laid for one with its simple appurtenances. It seemed to be very difficult not to ask them to remain. She did, although she did not wish to. The meal was not a success. The two of them together were tiresome, for the man said little when his wife was there, and the woman said nothing at all. Also, the pair of them were in a way sinister.

She sent them away after luncheon. They departed without protest. But as she walked, engaged on her shopping that afternoon, she decided that she must rid herself of them, once and for all. It was true that it had been rather agreeable having him there; his smile, his wicked humorous remarks, the suggestion that he was a kind of malevolent gamin who preyed on the world in general but spared her because he liked her – all this had attracted her – but what really alarmed her was that during all these weeks he had made no request for money, made indeed no request for anything. He must be piling up a fine account, must have some plan in his head with which one morning he would balefully startle her! For a moment there in the bright sunlight, with the purr of the traffic, the rustle of the trees about her, she saw herself in surprising colour. She was behaving with a weakness that was astonishing. Her stout, thick-set, resolute body, her cheery rosy face, her strong white hair – all these disappeared, and in their place, there almost clinging for support to the Park railings, was a timorous little old woman with frightened eyes and trembling knees. What was there to be afraid of? She had done nothing wrong. There were the police at hand. She had never been a coward before. She went home, however, with an odd impulse to leave her comfortable little house in Walpole Street and hide herself somewhere, somewhere that no one could discover.

That evening they appeared again, husband, wife and baby. She had settled herself down for a cosy evening with a book and an “early to bed.” There came the knock on the door.

On this occasion she was most certainly firm with them. When they were gathered in a little group she got up and addressed them.

“Here is five pounds,” she said, “and this is the end. If one of you shows his or her face inside this door again I call the police. Now go.”

The girl gave a little gasp and fell in a dead faint at her feet. It was a perfectly genuine faint. Rose was summoned. Everything possible was done.

“She has simply not had enough to eat,” said Henry Abbott. In the end (so determined and resolved was the faint) Ada Abbott was put to bed in the spare room and a doctor was summoned. After examining her he said that she needed rest and nourishment. This was perhaps the critical moment of the whole affair. Had Sonia Herries been at this crisis properly resolute and bundled the Abbott family, faint and all, into the cold unsympathising street, she might at this moment be a hale and hearty old woman enjoying bridge with her friends. It was, however, just here that her maternal temperament was too strong for her. The poor young thing lay exhausted, her eyes closed, her cheeks almost the colour of her pillow. The baby (surely the quietest baby ever known) lay in a cot beside the bed. Henry Abbott wrote letters to dictation downstairs. Once Sonia Herries, glancing up at the silver mask, was struck by the grin on the clown’s face. It seemed to her now a thin sharp grin – almost derisive.

Three days after Ada Abbott’s collapse there arrived her aunt and her uncle, Mr. and Mrs. Edwards. Mr. Edwards was a large red-faced man with a hearty manner and a bright waistcoat. He looked like a publican. Mrs. Edwards was a thin sharp-nosed woman with a bass voice. She was very, very thin, and wore a large old-fashioned brooch on her flat but emotional chest. They sat side by side on the sofa and explained that they had come to enquire after Ada, their favourite niece. Mrs. Edwards cried, Mr. Edwards was friendly and familiar. Unfortunately Mrs. Weston and a friend came and called just then. They did not stay very long. They were frankly amazed at the Edwards couple and deeply startled by Henry Abbott’s familiarity. Sonia Herries could see that they drew the very worst conclusions.

A week later Ada Abbott was still in bed in the upstairs room. It seemed to be impossible to move her. The Edwardses were constant visitors. On one occasion they brought Mr. and Mrs. Harper and their girl Agnes. They were profusely apologetic, but Miss Herries would understand that “with the interest they took in Ada it was impossible to stay passive.” They all crowded into the spare bedroom and gazed at the pale figure with the closed eyes sympathetically.

Then two things happened together. Rose gave notice and Mrs. Weston came and had a frank talk with her friend. She began with that most sinister opening: “I think you ought to know, dear, what everyone is saying—” What everyone was saying was that Sonia Herries was living with a young ruffian from the streets, young enough to be her son.

“You must get rid of them all and at once,” said Mrs. Weston, “or you won’t have a friend left in London, darling.”

Left to herself, Sonia Herries did what she had not done for years, she burst into tears. What had happened to her? Not only had her will and determination gone but she felt most unwell. Her heart was bad again; she could not sleep; the house, too, was tumbling to pieces. There was dust over everything. How was she ever to replace Rose? She was living in some horrible nightmare. This dreadful handsome young man seemed to have some authority over her. Yet he did not threaten her. All he did was to smile. Nor was she in the very least in love with him. This must come to an end or she would be lost.

Two days later, at tea-time, her opportunity arrived. Mr. and Mrs. Edwards had called to see how Ada was; Ada was downstairs at last, very weak and pale. Henry Abbott was there, also the baby. Sonia Herries, although she was feeling dreadfully unwell, addressed them all with vigour. She especially addressed the sharp-nosed Mrs. Edwards.

“You must understand,” she said. “I don’t want to be unkind, but I have my own life to consider. I am a very busy woman, and this has all been forced on me. I don’t want to seem brutal. I’m glad to have been of some assistance to you, but I think Mrs. Abbott is well enough to go home now – and I wish you all good night.”

“I am sure,” said Mrs. Edwards, looking up at her from the sofa, “that you’ve been kindness itself, Miss Herries. Ada recognises it, I’m sure. But to move her now would be to kill her, that’s all. Any movement and she’ll drop at your feet.”

“We have nowhere to go,” said Henry Abbott.

“But Mrs. Edwards—” began Miss Herries, her anger rising.

“We have only two rooms,” said Mrs. Edwards quietly. “I’m sorry, but just now, what with my husband coughing all night—”

“Oh, but this is monstrous!” Miss Herries cried. “I have had enough of this. I have been generous to a degree—”

“What about my pay,” said Henry, “for all these weeks?”

“Pay! Why, of course—” Miss Herries began. Then she stopped. She realised several things. She realised that she was alone in the house, the cook having departed that afternoon. She realised that none of them had moved. She realised that her “things” – the Sickert, the Utrillo, the sofa – were alive with apprehension. She was fearfully frightened of their silence, their immobility. She moved towards her desk, and her heart turned, squeezed itself dry, shot through her body the most dreadful agony.

“Please,” she gasped. “In the drawer – the little green bottle – oh, quick! Please, please!”

The last thing of which she was aware was the quiet handsome features of Henry Abbott bending over her.

When, a week later, Mrs. Weston called, the girl, Ada Abbott, opened the door to her.

“I came to enquire for Miss Herries,” she said. “I haven’t seen her about. I have telephoned several times and received no answer.”

“Miss Herries is very ill.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry. Can I not see her?”

Ada Abbott’s quiet gentle tones were reassuring her. “The doctor does not wish her to see anyone at present. May I have your address? I will let you know as soon as she is well enough.”

Mrs. Weston went away. She recounted the event. “Poor Sonia, she’s pretty bad. They seem to be looking after her. As soon as she’s better we’ll go and see her.”

The London life moves swiftly. Sonia Herries had never been of very great importance to anyone. Herries relations enquired. They received a very polite note assuring them that so soon as she was better—

Sonia Herries was in bed, but not in her own room. She was in the little attic bedroom but lately occupied by Rose the maid. She lay at first in a strange apathy. She was ill. She slept and woke and slept again. Ada Abbott, sometimes Mrs. Edwards, sometimes a woman she did not know, attended to her. They were all very kind. Did she need a doctor? No, of course she did not need a doctor, they assured her. They would see that she had everything that she wanted.

Then life began to flow back into her. Why was she in this room? Where were her friends? What was this horrible food that they were bringing her? What were they doing here, these women?

She had a terrible scene with Ada Abbott. She tried to get out of bed. The girl restrained her – and easily, for all the strength seemed to have gone from her bones. She protested, she was as furious as her weakness allowed her, then she cried. She cried most bitterly. Next day she was alone and she crawled out of bed; the door was locked; she beat on it. There was no sound but her beating. Her heart was beginning again that terrible strangled throb. She crept back into bed. She lay there, weakly, feebly crying. When Ada arrived with some bread, some soup, some water, she demanded that the door should be unlocked, that she should get up, have her bath, come downstairs to her own room.

“You are not well enough,” Ada said gently.

“Of course I am well enough. When I get out I will have you put in prison for this—”

“Please don’t get excited. It is so bad for your heart.”

Mrs. Edwards and Ada washed her. She had not enough to eat. She was always hungry.

Summer had come. Mrs. Weston went to Etretat. Everyone was out of town.

“What’s happened to Sonia Herries?” Mabel Newmark wrote to Agatha Benson. “I haven’t seen her for ages….”

But no one had time to enquire. There were so many things to do. Sonia was a good sort, but she had been nobody’s business….

Once Henry Abbott paid her a visit. “I am so sorry that you are not better,” he said smiling. “We are doing everything we can for you. It is lucky we were around when you were so ill. You had better sign these papers. Someone must look after your affairs until you are better. You will be downstairs in a week or two.”

Looking at him with wide-open terrified eyes, Sonia Herries signed the papers.

The first rains of autumn lashed the streets. In the sitting-room the gramophone was turned on. Ada and young Mr. Jackson, Maggie Trent and stout Harry Bennett were dancing. All the furniture was flung against the walls. Mr. Edwards drank his beer; Mrs. Edwards was toasting her toes before the fire.

Henry Abbott came in. He had just sold the Utrillo. His arrival was greeted with cheers.

He took the silver mask from the wall and went upstairs. He climbed to the top of the house, entered, switched on the naked light.

“Oh! Who – What—?” A voice of terror came from the bed.

“It’s all right,” he said soothingly. “Ada will be bringing your tea in a minute.”

He had a hammer and nail and hung the silver mask on the speckled, mottled wall-paper where Miss Herries could see it.

“I know you’re fond of it,” he said. “I thought you’d like it to look at.”

She made no reply. She only stared.

“You’ll want something to look at,” he went on. “You’re too ill, I’m afraid, ever to leave this room again. So it’ll be nice for you. Something to look at.”

He went out, gently closing the door behind him.

“Harper’s Bazaar” Mar 1932

All Soul’s Night (1933)

THE FEAR OF DEATH

I will acknowledge that I was disgusted when I heard that William Rollin was in the hotel. That seemed to me, at the moment, the very worst piece of bad luck. I had come to Sark to escape from everyone, to have a real holiday, and here in this same small hotel, on this same small island, was one of the human beings whom I deeply, with all my soul, disliked. One dislikes, I fancy, very few people with one’s soul. Only once or twice in a lifetime does one encounter a man who affects one so strongly on a very slight acquaintance.

I had met Rollin once or twice, in London, and a good many years ago. He was a man of very considerable reputation, and all of that reputation bad. The human race, I have found, is almost universally fond of gossip and at the same time charitable. When one or two are gathered together they will tear anyone you please to shreds, but in all kindness of heart, simply because they want to pass a pleasant hour and be thought, by their fellows, amusing, interesting and broad-minded. Once and again, however, someone appears whom society agrees to consider dangerous and beyond the pale. This dislike (which is also fear) does not come, especially in these days, from any horror at act or even crime. I have known men and women whose lives were publicly notorious, but there has been about them some quality of kindness or stupidity that has, on the whole, exonerated them. Rollin’s moral reputation was bad, but no moral reputation worries anyone any more, unless it is emphasised by the newspapers. No, it was the man himself, an atmosphere that accompanied him, that people could not endure. He had, of course, his own cronies, and the man was so intelligent that he was often excellent company, but he was an animal whose brilliance was dangerous. He was, for no very clear reason, an enemy to society, always involved in squabbles, disputes … and yet there was also something pathetic about him. He was of the jungle, but always alone there – and he knew it.

There was no reason, except his intelligence, for his position of importance (for he had undoubtedly a kind of importance). He was ugly, a bounder, a sycophant, a snob, a bully. His financial affairs were always on the edge of desperation. He had for many years been in and out of the hands of moneylenders; he had debts everywhere, and it was one of his specially charming characteristics that he never either attempted to repay, nor did he forgive anyone who was fool enough to lend him money.

Nevertheless, his intelligence was remarkable. Had his character and personality not betrayed him, he could have done anything. He was many-sided, cared about games and played them well, was an excellent linguist, read voluminously, had an interest in everything except, oddly, horses. He used to say that he had never been to a race-meeting in his life. I say “oddly” because to look at him you would think that he had spent his life in and around stables.

His supreme passion was for pictures. Had he had money he would have been one of the finest collectors of our time; having less than none he yet managed to pick up, for almost nothing, some lovely things. He possessed a beautiful little Canaletto, a lovely Renoir still-life, a Matisse that he had bought for nothing at all in his younger days in Paris, and an Italian Primitive which in its freshness of colour and sincerity of feeling was one of the most enchanting things I have ever seen. His knowledge of and taste for pictures was extremely catholic, his judgement superb, and when he talked of them a different soul seemed to peep out from his mean little eyes….

His one genius, however, did not cover the unpleasantness of the rest of him, and it may be imagined with what disgust I saw him, when on the day after arrival I went into breakfast, seated at a table near me with a woman who was, I knew, his second wife. There was no avoiding him. I stood at his table for a moment and he introduced me to his wife. He always met one like an animal on the defensive, as though he expected an attack. An uglier man I have seldom encountered. He was short, thick-set, and wore, generally, clothes of a light colour, rather “horsy.” He was almost bald, had small, suspicious eyes and a cruel and greedy mouth, but it was his complexion which was his real trouble. He drank a good deal, I imagine, but he had not exactly the colour of a drunkard. He was like a piece of undercooked beef, white and red and streaky. His hand was flabby to the touch, and he always withdrew it quickly as though he were afraid that you would hold it firmly and lead him off to gaol. I know that I seem here to be describing a real Surrey-side villain. But Rollin was not a villain. He was simply a bad, nasty man, one bad man in a million kindly, weak and well-intentioned ones. Bad men are extremely rare. I have known, in fact, only two others beside Rollin.

The really curious thing was that before two days were passed I felt so strongly the pathos of the man that I almost liked him. I have always been greatly touched by men victims to the two powers of Fear and Jealousy. I have known them so well in my own nature and the misery and loneliness that these possessive demons inflict on their victims; indeed, with regard to the second of them there is no profession so harried and riven by it as that of Letters….

I very soon discovered that these two held Rollin in thrall. His jealousy was of a peculiar kind. Once he was assured that my attitude to him was friendly, words poured from him, all in that sharp, ugly assertive voice of his. Assertive he was, but never with convincing authority except in the matter of pictures. There he allowed no personal fears or jealousies to influence him, and had his worst enemy (and, by Jupiter, he had a few!) painted a good picture, he would have said that it was a good picture.

But with regard to every other occupation possible to mankind, jealousy raged in him. It did not matter in the least – politics, the Arts, the Services, religion, Society, whosoever it might be, anyone of prominence was damned, accused of dreadful offences against Society and the State, dismissed to perdition. “Mind you, Westcott,” he said with that faint touch of Midland accent that he so greatly disliked in himself, “I’m not jealous. Last thing I am is jealous. Nobody could call me that. Only it makes me sick to see men like Webster getting away with it. Why, do you know….”

By the second day I was both sorry for him and tired of him, so I tried to break away.

“Look here, Rollin,” I said. “People aren’t as bad as you say. We all have our little weaknesses, you know. We all live in glass houses. Why throw stones?”

Then I saw fear in his eyes, the fear that after this conversation never again, I think, left him.

“What do you mean, Westcott? I hate this hinting….”

“I don’t mean anything except that we are all in the same boat, and abusing one another seems a futile business. I came up to London about nineteen-hundred. I’m getting on for sixty. I’ve been writing and publishing novels for more than thirty years. During that time I’ve been abused times without number, and very often with reason, but in all that time I’ve experienced only one piece of real dirty meanness.”

“Oh, well….” He looked at me with patronage. He would have liked to say something rude: I could hear him back in London: “Oh yes, we went to Sark for our holiday. Peter Westcott, the novelist, was there, all geniality and speaking well of his fellows. Finds it pays….”

But he was afraid. He broke abruptly into another topic:

“Well, that’s as may be. But, look here! Have you ever thought about death?”

“Death?” I asked lazily. We were lying on Dixcart beach, stretched out full-length watching the blue-green breakers, shining in the sunlight, break into foam on the pebbles. “Of course I have. Everyone has.”

“Doesn’t it seem awful to you that one’s got to die? The inevitability of it—”

“No, I can’t say that it does. If I’m depressed it seems a dreary business like everything else. But in general, no. In the war death became so ordinary, part of the day’s work….”

“Oh yes, I know.” His hand touched my arm. “But if one only knew the way it was going to be. God, to die in one’s bed like Armstrong the other day! What luck! Not to realise that it’s coming! It’s that moment of realisation that’s so awful to me, Westcott. The moment when you say to yourself: ‘My God! I’m going to die! It’s coming! It’s nearly here!’ ”

His hand shook on my arm.

“Life’s merciful,” I answered. “Most sick people pass into some kind of coma long before they die. And, anyway, haven’t you often had nightmares when you have that moment of realisation? You must have died in your dreams a thousand times over. Actual death is no worse than that.”

“I should think I have,” he said, shuddering. “There’s a dream I have—”

Just then his wife joined us.

She was a small, compact, pretty woman with unusually light-blue eyes. I had seen little of her as yet, but she struck me as one of the quietest women I had ever encountered. It was not only that she said very little, but her whole personality struck me as a waiting, listening, determining one. I had heard in London that Rollin behaved to her abominably, that she had once run away from him, but had returned and had told a friend that she had come back because she had to. She couldn’t help herself. But now, as she came towards us, neat, square-shouldered, walking with quiet resolution as though she knew precisely what she intended to do and that nothing would stop her, I couldn’t exactly see her committing any act “because she couldn’t help herself.” She was as controlled, as superior to fears, superstitions, gusts of temper and violence as he was inferior.

He did not want her just then, and showed it. I disliked his manner to her so much that soon I got up and left him. I might be sorry for him, but indeed and indeed he was a nasty specimen!

The little hotel where we were was a very primitive and simple place. You had to fuss for a day if you wanted a hot bath, the sanitation was more than primitive, and there was no electric light. All the same, I liked it. The proprietor, the servants, were kind and obliging. Everyone was friendly. But Rollin, of course, had soon a thousand complaints. The food, he said, was scanty and monotonous, the lack of water a disgrace, the beds hard, and so on. He complained to everyone, and everyone disliked him as much as they liked his wife. This, I should imagine, was a common experience wherever they went, and it did not make him love his wife any the better.

Sark is the ideal island for anyone who wants absolute seclusion: indeed, in these harried and public days I should think there is no island in the world quite so secluded. The South Seas are, I understand, as crowded as Piccadilly! It is not an easy island to escape from. If you wish to pay a visit to Jersey you must go for a night at least, and even the trip to Guernsey must be taken in so small a boat that the mildest of rough seas can be alarming. Moreover, the island itself likes to make you feel that it is difficult. There are few beaches and the paths to them are precipitous and unruly. The island is so small that you are always finding yourself unexpectedly at the end of it. It has no middle, so to speak – only ends!

This difficulty and apartness can be either enchanting or exasperating. The place has undoubtedly a magic; in the spring and summer it is covered with flowers, threaded with leafy lanes, and the rocky coast is superb. The air, on the warm days, seems scented with honey, and on the wild ones, is splendidly vigorous. There is still the mantle of old history hanging over it, and the old Norman dialect is stronger and more vigorous among the people than English. No motor vehicles are allowed there. There are more dogs and cats, happily domesticated, than in any place that I know. All these things give it uniqueness, and when you have been there for a day or two, you will, if you have any imagination, begin to fancy things. I am not here speaking of the supernatural, although I believe that dead pirates are as ordinary as blackberries, and smugglers, a hundred years in their graves, common company along the lanes of an evening. But that is the kind of imagination stirred by a hundred places. Where Sark is unique is that, being shut in, imprisoned if you like, you very quickly begin to have odd fancies about your fellow-captives.

I should, in any event, have been greatly interested in Rollin and his wife. Bad men, as I have already said, are rare birds, and are food for the novelist when he encounters one. Rollin, for instance – I could speculate about him endlessly. Were his cruelties, greedinesses, fears, private nastinesses the result simply of the lack of a gland or the pressure of bone on the brain? Could a little simple operation transform him into an angel? If so, why did he not have one? Was any of it his own fault? Could he help himself or did he, indeed, want to help himself? I decided very soon that he did not. He thought himself, I very soon saw, an excellent fellow: amusing, good company, vastly more brilliant than most men, broad-minded and enterprising. He had, of course, been unjustly treated, he carried a thousand grudges about with him, and his criticism of everyone was continual. But one thing he could not deny – his fear. Many men had the advantage of him there. He could not understand their serenity, and hated them for it.

Very quickly, however, Mrs. Rollin became to me more interesting than her husband. I would not say that she liked me. She appeared to have learnt, through stress of circumstances, to guard herself against any conceivable emotion. Her restraint was almost terrifying – the restraint and watchfulness of someone on a tight-rope to whom one false step meant death. Not that she was afraid of death. She was afraid, I am convinced, of nothing, having been through all the worst experiences that life has to offer. This restraint of hers soon became to me obsessing, but the odd fact was that she was the one thing in the world of which Rollin appeared to have no fear at all. He was proud of her in a kind of contemptuous fashion – proud of her looks, her composure (out of which no taunts of his ever seemed to drive her), her savoir-faire. But while he was proud of her she exasperated him. She had beaten him in their relationship. She despised him from the bottom of her heart.

Why, feeling about him as she did, she had not long ago left him was one thing that puzzled me. One day, when we were alone, we had a queer little conversation.

“You don’t like my husband very much, do you, Mr. Westcott?” she asked me. We were sitting on a spur of Little Sark just above the Coupée, and the sea heaved below us, a moving floor of green and purple silk.

“No,” I said, “I don’t.”

“He’s not really very likeable,” she went on calmly. “I know him very well, and the only decent emotion anyone could ever have for him is a kind of pity. He’s a very lonely man.”

“Yes,” I said, “I suppose he is.”

“And I’ve lost even that emotion about him now. I’ve had some bad times with him, you know.” She looked at me very quietly out of her pale-blue eyes. “It isn’t decent to talk about one’s husband to a stranger – not that you are altogether a stranger. I don’t talk about him, you know….”

“As you’re frank, I’ll be frank too,” I said. “I wonder that you haven’t left him years ago.”

“Do you? I did once. But I came back. I was still in love with him, I think. For a long time he had a physical fascination for me. Now I hate him to touch me – or should if I hated anything…. All the same, I think I’ve had about enough of it at last – at last!” she repeated, looking out to sea.

“I’m years older than you are, Mrs. Rollin,” I said after a long pause. “It isn’t very wise of me to give advice – always a silly thing to do. But leave him. You are young, strong, attractive – if you won’t think me impertinent. You have plenty of time to make a new life and a fine one.”

“Yes, I think you’re right,” she said, getting up and brushing the grass off her dress.

And it was then, at that moment, that I had for a moment a sense of apprehension. Had Rollin been with us I could almost have called: “Look out!”

Mrs. Rollin was very calm and resolute!

•   •   •   •   •

The next thing that occurred was that Rollin developed an almost passionate liking for me. He was a neurotic, and, like all neurotics, saw himself as the centre of a shaking, quivering world and its only nerve-centre himself! This perpetual apprehension meant that he must have perpetual reassurance, whether he found it in whisky, women, or in a character or two safer than himself. It was his sense of my safeness, I think, that made him cling to me.

“Poor old Westcott,” I could hear him saying to himself. “He’s one of those commonplace fellows too ordinary for fate to bother to attack.”

I was like a tree under whose branches he might shelter until the storm was over, but a tree forgotten the moment that the sun was out again. He had also something extremely feminine in his personality. That was one reason why he was not at all to be trusted. Men with feminine souls are often kind, generous, self-sacrificing and even noble – but trustworthy, never!

I cannot say how greatly I disliked this sudden affection of Rollin’s. Like Mrs. Rollin, I hated him to touch me, and he began to develop a habit of laying his hand on my arm and pressing into the flesh. At the first excuse I would move, and at the first move I would see that startled look of suspicion flash into his eye.

It was the Misses Mailley who advanced all unwittingly our relationship a little further. The Misses Mailley were bright, bony and athletic. They swam, they played tennis, wore the minimum of clothing, talked incessantly and laughed a great deal. They were frightened of Rollin, and so, when he was there, they talked and laughed the more.

One morning, after breakfast, we were all of us – the Rollins, the Mailleys and myself – sitting on the veranda looking down the grassy slope towards a magnificent copper beech, under which an old white horse was whisking his ear at the flies and watching out of one eye for a possible lump of sugar.

“The Silver Mines,” said one of the Miss Mailleys. “That’s the place!”

“The place for what?” asked Mrs. Rollin.

“Oh, for an easy murder! Gladys has been reading some silly book in which a man was murdered and buried in a haystack – a ridiculous place! But the Silver Mines – they’re grand! No one would ever discover it.”

Rollin’s hand touched my shoulder.

“The Silver Mines?” he asked.

“Yes. They’re down towards the sea – near Venus’ Bath. You ought to go and see them. They haven’t been worked, of course, for ages, but there they are, quite unprotected, not a fence or anything! All you have to do is to take your beloved for a walk, push him down, and then, next morning, say he’s left by the early boat. No one would know.”

“No. But you’d be haunted,” said the younger Miss Mailley. “It wouldn’t be worth it.”

“It might be,” said Mrs. Rollin. “No ghost is so bad as some living people. One could deal with a ghost.”

That evening Rollin said to me:

“Stroll out to the Point, Westcott? It’s a lovely evening.”

I did not want to go, but I went. We walked across the field, down the little path, climbed the hill and looked down at the sea.

“Awful girls those Mailleys,” he said. “I can’t stand them.”

“They’re all right.”

“Oh, you like everyone! It’s a type I hate, all cheerful and bony. Do them good to be pushed down that mine they were joking about.” He pressed his hand into my arm. “Why have you never married, Westcott?”

“I’m a widower,” I said shortly. I had no desire to discuss my private affairs with Rollin.

“Oh, sorry. I didn’t know.”

“That’s all right. I was very happy.”

“Oh, marriage is all right.” He stood closer to me as though for protection. “I’ve been married twice, you know. Grace” – his present lady – “has learnt my ways by this time. She took a bit of teaching, though. She’s devoted to me, and to tell you the truth, Westcott, it makes a man feel safe to have someone he can trust around. I can depend on her absolutely.”

“Yes,” I said.

He came still closer, pressing his body up against mine.

“I haven’t been well lately. Get all sorts of ideas in my head. Afraid of my own shadow. Upon my soul, I believe my wife’s the one person in the world I’m not afraid of! It’s nerves, of course. I’m highly-strung and not so young as I was. I don’t sleep very well, and I’m a bit of a crank about my health. After all, you catch a cold and before you know where you are it’s pneumonia and in a day or two you’re gone.” He shivered. “It’s getting cold. Let’s turn back.”

Before we reached the hotel he said:

“Thanks for the walk. I think I shall sleep now.”

Next day we went, the three of us, to the pool in the rocks known as Venus’ Bath, and had our tea there. Mrs. Rollin and I bathed off the rocks. She was a magnificent swimmer, the day was a glorious one, and just as we reached the rocks Mrs. Rollin said to me:

“I’m glad you were staying here, Mr. Westcott. It’s made a difference.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I’m glad too.”

“Oh, are you? You can’t be. We’re not an attractive pair.”

On the way back we passed the Silver Mines. There was a ruined tower about whose base flowers – crimson, yellow and blue – clustered. There was the black mouth of a shaft.

“I wonder how deep that is,” Mrs. Rollin said.

“Deep as hell,” Rollin answered.

There comes for me now, as I approach the crisis of my relationship with these two, the difficulty of truth – truth in my story. I mean the truth of facts, as well as the truth of imagination. How soon in this affair did I begin myself to feel an apprehension that, after a time, began to obsess me, so that I was constantly aware of it, constantly shadowed by a sense of my own responsibility? Looking back now, I ask myself what I ought to have done: for it is one of my humiliations to remember that from beginning to end I did exactly nothing. Could I have done anything? Should I have tried to persuade Rollin to leave the island by the next morning’s boat? Should I have frankly asked Mrs. Rollin certain questions? But, indeed, how could I ask her anything unless she gave me her confidence? That, she never gave me. Or did she? And did she invite me to take a step, or to force her to take a step, that would have saved both herself and him? Would it have been better if such a step had been taken? I don’t know. I shall never know. I give you the facts as honestly as I can remember them.

A day or two after our visit to Venus’ Bath the weather broke and rain swept the island. Standing, one afternoon, in my room wondering whether I should read, write, play bridge with the Mailley girls, or sleep till dinner, I heard my door open and, looking up, saw Mrs. Rollin standing there. She was as composed, as quiet, as assured as she ever was. She came in, closing the door behind her.

“I’m not going to stop,” she said. “If I did the scandal would be, I suppose, terrific. But the trouble of this place is that you can’t be alone. I want to ask your advice, Mr. Westcott.”

She sat down in a chair near the bed.

“Tell me—” She looked up at me, smiling. “How far is anyone justified in breaking a natural law?”

“What do you mean by a natural law?” I asked her.

“Well … after thousands of years of living together men have decided that certain laws must be obeyed if society is to keep sane. On the whole the decisions they’ve come to have been wise ones. But once and again it is better that a law should be broken rather than kept.”

“Yes,” I said, feeling stupid under her quiet gaze.

“Perhaps I am myself insane,” she went on. “I don’t think so – but oneself one can never tell. I feel it right to take action in a certain direction – action that you, everyone, would absolutely condemn. I want, in fact, to take the law in my own hands. Is one ever justified in doing that?”

“Yes,” I answered. “If you are ready to face the consequences.”

“For myself you mean?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, the consequences for myself – they’re nothing. I don’t care in the least what happens to me. I died long ago. But my ghost – or the ghost of my ghost – has a fragment of hesitation. An odd remnant of religious superstition, I suppose. I don’t mind breaking men’s laws, you know, but is there another law, something deeper, more permanent?”

I thought then, looking at her, that she was insane. Her composure, the thin shadow that lurked in her pale-blue eyes, something marked her for me as a woman who had ceased to reason, because she had been driven beyond the bounds of reasoning.

She got up as abruptly as she entered.

“I wanted to ask you,” she said. “Do you believe in God?”

“Yes,” I answered. “I believe in a spiritual world.”

“So do I.” She nodded her head as though pursuing her own thoughts. “But not in eternal punishment, you know. That’s altogether too crude. Never mind – I’ll take what comes.” And she went out.

•   •   •   •   •

I have said already that Sark is dangerous for the imaginative. One sees so much more than is really there. Every rock in Sark has a double meaning, and even the flowers know too well what they are about. The weather was bad and we were shut in upon ourselves. Rollin would not leave me alone. He cursed everything, the island, the hotel, the visitors, the natives and, behind my back, I do not doubt, myself.

“Well, why don’t you go?” I asked him. “There are two boats a day.”

“I can’t make up my mind,” he said. He looked ill. He said that he wasn’t sleeping. “I keep seeing things in this beastly place. It’s as though someone was always following one.” He broke down all his reticences. He told me that he hated his wife, but that she was the only person in the world he could trust. “When I’m with her I’m safe,” he said. “She’s like a wall at my back.”

I think it was true that he hated her, and he became quite intolerable in her company. He bullied her, snapped at her, ordered her about like a servant, was insufferably rude to her. Once, when he had been especially intolerable, I left him. He came after me to my room.

“What did you go for?” he asked. “You said you were coming for a walk.”

So, given the opportunity, I told him what I thought of him.

But he scarcely listened. “Oh, you don’t know,” he said. “You’ve no idea how aggravating she can be. This weather gets on my nerves. I’ve got an idea I’m never going to leave this damned island. I shall die here, rot to pieces all amongst the ferns and stones.”

That same night I woke with a sudden start to be aware that someone was in the room. I struck a match, lit a candle (there was no electric light in the hotel), and woke up to find Rollin standing by my bed in his pyjamas, shaking from crown to heel. He sat down on the edge of the bed and caught my arm.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“Let me stay here five minutes. I’ve had a fright.”

How I hated his pressure on my arm, his whole physical self with his pyjama-jacket open, his mottled complexion, the very colour of his red bedroom-slippers! And yet, even as I hated him, I was sorry for him. How could I be otherwise? He was a haunted man. He told me an incoherent story. He couldn’t sleep, then he dropped into deep slumber and dreamt – a horrible dream in which he was lying at the bottom of a deep, black pit in a pool of sluggish water. Scaly fishes swam across his eyeballs. His body was broken and his arms waggled in the water.

“You’ve been eating something,” I said.

“I was dead – I was alive – I suffered. Good God, Westcott, what I suffered! But the worst moment was before I fell. I knew I was going to fall and I cried out to you, Westcott, to save me! I knew I was going to die – then – then – that moment!”

He lay down beside me on the outside of the bed. I said what I could, told him he’d been drinking too much (which he had).

“I know you think I’m a fool,” I said. “But I’ll give you some good advice. Go back to London. Try to take a decent view of things. Don’t curse everybody, and behave better to your wife.”

“Oh, it’s all very well for you to talk, Westcott. You’re one of those damned optimists and well you may be. Everything’s always gone well with you.”

“Well, it hasn’t,” I answered shortly. “When I was a boy in Cornwall, there was an old fisherman had a motto – a sloppy, sentimental motto that men like you would laugh yourselves sick over. ‘It isn’t life that matters, but the courage you bring to it.’ That will be a sort of maiden’s prayer to you,” I added, yawning (for I was extremely sleepy), “but it meets your case all the same. You’re a coward, Rollin, frightened of your own shadow.”

He thought the motto very comic, and that did him good.

“You ought to take Sunday-school class, Westcott. Was your father a clergyman?”

“My father,” I answered, “was the rottenest, most drunken old swine ever a son had. That’s why I found that motto useful.”

He was calmer, and at last, thank God, he left me.

But that night was enough for him. He told me, next morning, that they were leaving for London on the following day.

What a morning that was! Shall I ever forget it? The whole island was veiled in a wet, creeping mist. You couldn’t see a yard in front of you, and a tree jumped out at you as though it were an American gangster bidding you hold your hands up. I’m not a nervous man – or no more than most – but I woke in a state of fear and consternation. Those are the only words that I can use. I must do something – but what? I couldn’t leave Rollin out of my sight. All afternoon I played bridge with him and the Mailley girls.

“What a day for a murder,” one of them said brightly. “Three hearts …”

I looked up and saw Mrs. Rollin standing at the window watching the wet mist as it coiled like a snake against the pane. I was dummy, and I got up and went over to her.

“You’re leaving tomorrow, I hear,” I said.

“Yes,” she said, turning round and smiling at me.

She stood there, motionless, scarcely breathing, but her eyes stared into mine. It was as though she said: “Well – what are you going to do about it?”

Then she did an odd thing. She pushed with her bare palms at the window-pane as though she would break it. I was sure then that she was not sane….

At about half-past six that evening I came on to the veranda and saw the two Rollins in mackintoshes.

“Hallo!” I cried. “Where are you two off to?” It was odd, but it was as though I had known that they would be there.

“We are going for a walk,” said Mrs. Rollin.

“A walk – in this weather?”

“Yes. It’s been so stuffy all day. We want a little exercise, don’t we, Will?”

“I’ll come too,” I said.

“No. Don’t,” she answered. “You’d hate it.”

Rollin said not a word.

“Where are you going?” I asked.

“Oh, I don’t know. Over the Coupée to Little Sark. Down by Venus’ Bath, perhaps.”

“Don’t fall into the Silver Mines,” I said.

She did not answer. We none of us spoke. I shall never forget Rollin. He was like a hypnotised man, like a man in a dream. Her eyes never left his face.

I longed to cry out: “Rollin, don’t go! Don’t go!” But it was as though I were hypnotised too. I only stood and stared at them. They moved off into the mist, he following her like a dog.

They were not in their places at dinner. I watched and watched the door to see them enter. At about nine o’clock I thought I heard Rollin’s voice calling just outside the window: “Westcott! Westcott!” I ran out, but the wet mist was so thick that I could see nothing. I ran a little way down the road calling: “Rollin! Rollin!”

But, of course, there was no answer, only the distant murmur of the sea. I slept brokenly, waking again and again….

And at breakfast Mrs. Rollin was there, eating very quietly her bacon and eggs.

I went over to her.

“Good morning,” I said. “I’m afraid you must have got very wet last night.”

“Yes, we did.”

“Where’s Rollin?” I asked.

“Oh, he went by the seven-thirty boat. He had some business in Guernsey. I’m following by the ten o’clock.” Then she held out her hand, smiling. “Goodbye,” she said.

“Goodbye,” I answered.

“Harper’s Bazaar” Jul 1933

Head In Green Bronze And Other Stories (1938)

MR. HUFFAM

A CHRISTMAS STORY

I

Once upon a time (it doesn’t matter when it was except that it was long after the Great War) young Tubby Winsloe was in the act of crossing Piccadilly just below Hatchard’s bookshop. It was three days before Christmas and there had been a frost, a thaw, and then a frost again. The roads were treacherous, traffic nervous and irresponsible, while against the cliff-like indifference of brick and mortar a thin, faint snow was falling from a primrose-coloured sky. Soon it would be dusk and the lights would come out. Then things would be more cheerful.

It would, however, take more than lights to restore Tubby’s cheerfulness. Rubicund of face and alarmingly stout of body for a youth of twenty-three, he had just then the spirit of a damp face-towel, for only a week ago Diana Lane-Fox had refused to consider for a moment the possibility of marrying him.

“I like you, Tubby,” she had said. “I think you have a kind heart. But marry you! You are useless, ignorant and greedy. You’re disgracefully fat, and your mother worships you.”

He had not known, until Diana refused him, how bitterly alone he would find himself. He had money, friends, a fine roof above his head; he had seemed to himself popular wherever he went.

“Why, there’s old Tubby!” everyone had cried.

It was true that he was fat, it was true that his mother adored him. He had not, until now, known that these were drawbacks. He had seemed to himself until a week ago the friend of all the world. Now he appeared a pariah.

Diana’s refusal of him had been a dreadful shock. He had been quite sure that she would accept him. She had gone with him gladly to dances and the pictures. She had, it seemed, approved highly of his mother, Lady Winsloe, and his father, Sir Roderick Winsloe, Bart. She had partaken, again and again, of the Winsloe hospitality.

All, it seemed to him, that was needed was for him to say the word. He could choose his time. Well, he had chosen his time – at the Herries dance last Wednesday evening. This was the result.

He had expected to recover. His was naturally a buoyant nature. He told himself, again and again, that there were many other fish in the matrimonial sea. But it appeared that there were not. He wanted Diana and only Diana.

He halted at the resting-place half-way across the street, and sighed so deeply that a lady with a little girl and a fierce-looking Chow dog looked at him severely, as though she would say:

“Now this is Christmas time – a gloomy period for all concerned. It is an unwarranted impertinence for anyone to make it yet more gloomy.”

There was someone else clinging to this small fragment of security. A strange-looking man. His appearance was so unusual that Tubby forgot his own troubles in his instant curiosity. The first unusual thing about this man was that he had a beard. Beards were very seldom worn today. Then his clothes, although they were clean and neat, were most certainly old-fashioned. He was wearing a high sharp-pointed collar, a black stock with a jewelled tie-pin, and a most remarkable waistcoat, purple in colour, and covered with little red flowers. He was carrying a large, heavy-looking brown bag. His face was bronzed and he made Tubby think of a retired sea captain.

But the most remarkable thing of all about him was the impression that he gave of restless, driving energy. It was all that he could do to keep quiet. His strong, wiry figure seemed to burn with some secret fire. The traffic rushed madly past, but, at every moment when there appeared a brief interval between the cars and the omnibuses, this bearded gentleman with the bag made a little dance and once he struck the Chow with his bag and once nearly thrust the small child into the road.

The moment came when, most unwisely, he darted forth. He was almost caught by an imperious, disdainful Rolls-Royce. The lady gave a little scream and Tubby caught his arm, held him, drew him back.

“That nearly had you, sir!” Tubby murmured, his hand still on his arm. The stranger smiled – a most charming smile that shone from his eyes, his beard, his very hands.

“I must thank you,” he said, bowing with old-fashioned courtesy. “But damn it, as the little boy said to the grocer, ‘there’s no end to the dog,’ as he saw the sausages coming from the sausage machine.”

At this he laughed very heartily and Tubby had to laugh, too, although the remark did not seem to him very amusing.

“The traffic’s very thick at Christmas-time,” Tubby said. “Everyone doing their shopping, you know.”

The stranger nodded.

“Splendid time, Christmas!” he said. “Best of the year!”

“Oh, do you think so?” said Tubby. “I doubt if you’ll find people to agree with you. It isn’t the thing to admire Christmas these days.”

“Not the thing!” said the stranger, amazed. “Why, what’s the matter?”

This was a poser because so many things were the matter, from Unemployment to Diana. Tubby was saved for the moment from answering.

“Now there’s a break,” he said. “We can cross now.” Cross they did, the stranger swinging his body as though at any instant he might spring right off the ground.

“Which way are you going?” Tubby asked. It astonished him afterwards when he looked back and remembered this question. It was not his way to make friends of strangers, his theory being that everyone was out to “do” everyone, and in these days especially.

“To tell you the truth I don’t quite know,” the stranger said. “I’ve only just arrived.”

“Where have you come from?” asked Tubby.

The stranger laughed.

“I’ve been moving about for a long time. I’m always on the move. I’m considered a very restless man by my friends.”

They were walking along very swiftly, for it was cold and the snow was falling fast now.

“Tell me,” said the stranger, “ – about its being a bad time. What’s the matter?”

What was the matter? What a question!

Tubby murmured:

“Why, everything’s the matter – unemployment – no trade – you know.”

“No, I don’t. I’ve been away. I think everyone looks very jolly.”

“I say, don’t you feel cold without an overcoat?” Tubby asked.

“Oh, that’s nothing,” the stranger answered. “I’ll tell you when I did feel cold though. When I was a small boy I worked in a factory putting labels on to blacking-bottles. It was cold then. Never known such cold. Icicles would hang on the end of your nose!”

“No!” said Tubby.

“They did, I assure you, and the blacking-bottles would be coated with ice!”

By this time they had reached Berkeley Street. The Winsloe mansion was in Hill Street.

“I turn up here,” said Tubby.

“Oh, do you?”

The stranger looked disappointed. He smiled and held out his hand.

Then Tubby did another extraordinary thing. He said:

“Come in and have a cup of tea. Our place is only five yards up the street.”

“Certainly,” the stranger said. “Delighted.” As they walked up Berkeley Street, he went on confidentially:

“I haven’t been in London for a long time. All these vehicles are very confusing. But I like it – I like it immensely. It’s so lively, and then the town’s so quiet compared with what it was when I lived here.”

“Quiet!” said Tubby.

“Certainly. There were cobbles, and the carts and drays screamed and rattled like the damned.”

“But that’s years ago!”

“Yes. I’m older than I look.”

Then, pointing, he added:

“But that’s where Dorchester House was. So they’ve pulled it down. What a pity!”

“Oh, everything’s pulled down now,” said Tubby.

“I acted there once – a grand night we had. Fond of acting?”

“Oh, I’d be no good,” said Tubby modestly, “too self-conscious.”

“Ah, you mustn’t be self-conscious,” said the stranger. “Thinking of yourself only breeds trouble, as the man said to the hangman just before they dropped him.”

“Isn’t that bag a terrible weight?” Tubby asked.

“I’ve carried worse things than this,” said the stranger. “I carried a four-poster once, all the way from one end of the Marshalsea to the other.”

They were outside the house now and Tubby realized for the first time his embarrassment. It was not his way to bring anyone into the house unannounced, and his mother could be very haughty with strangers. However, here they were and it was snowing hard and the poor man was without a coat. So in they went. The Winsloe mansion was magnificent, belonging in all its features to an age that was gone. There was a marble staircase and up this the stranger almost ran, carrying his bag like a feather. Tubby toiled behind him but was, unhappily, not in time to prevent the stranger from entering through the open doors of the drawing-room.

Here, seated in magnificent state, was Lady Winsloe, a roaring fire encased with marble on one side of her, a beautiful tea-table in front of her, and walls hung with magnificent imitations of the great Masters.

Lady Winsloe was a massive woman with snow-white hair, a bosom like a small skating-rink, and a little face that wore a look of perpetual astonishment. Her dress of black-and-white silk fitted her so tightly that one anticipated with pleasure the moment when she would be compelled to rise. She moved as little as possible, she said as little as possible, she thought as little as possible. She had a very kind heart and was sure that the world was going straight to the devil.

The stranger put his bag on the floor and went over to her with his hand outstretched.

“How are you?” he said. “I’m delighted to meet you!”

By good fortune, Tubby arrived in the room at this moment.

“Mother,” he began, “this is a gentleman—”

“Oh, of course,” said the stranger, “you don’t know my name. My name’s Huffam,” and he caught the small white podgy hand and shook it. At this moment, two Pekinese dogs, one brown and one white, advanced from somewhere violently barking. Lady Winsloe found the whole situation so astonishing that she could only whisper:

“Now, Bobo – now, Coco!”

“You see, Mother,” Tubby went on, “Mr. Huffam was nearly killed by a motor-car and I rescued him and it began to snow heavily.”

“Yes, dear,” Lady Winsloe said, in her queer husky little voice that was always a surprise coming from so vast a bosom. Then she pulled herself together. For some reason Tubby had done this amazing thing, and whatever Tubby did was right.

“I do hope you’ll have some tea, Mr – ?”

She hesitated.

“Huffam, ma’am. Yes, thank you. I will have some tea!”

“Milk and sugar?”

“All of it!” Mr. Huffam laughed and slapped his knee. “Yes, milk and sugar. Very kind of you indeed. A perfect stranger as I am. You have a beautiful place here, ma’am. You are to be envied.”

“Oh, do you think so?” said Lady Winsloe, in her husky whisper. “Not in these days – not in these terrible days. Why, the taxes alone! You’ve no idea, Mr – ?”

“Huffam.”

“Yes. How stupid of me! Now, Bobo! Now, Coco!”

Then a little silence followed and Lady Winsloe gazed at her strange visitor. Her manners were beautiful. She never looked directly at her guests. But there was something about Mr. Huffam that forced you to look at him. It was his energy. It was his obvious happiness (for happy people were so very rare). It was his extraordinary waistcoat.

Mr. Huffam did not mind in the least being looked at. He smiled back at Lady Winsloe, as though he had known her all his life.

“I’m so very fortunate,” he said, “to find myself in London at Christmas-time. And snow, too! The very thing. Snowballs, Punch and Judy, mistletoe, holly, the pantomime – nothing so good in life as the pantomime!”

“Oh, do you think so?” said Lady Winsloe faintly. “I can’t, I’m afraid, altogether agree with you. It lasts such a very long time and is often so exceedingly vulgar!”

“Ah, it’s the sausages!” said Mr. Huffam, laughing. “You don’t like the sausages! For my part I dote on ’em. I know it’s silly at my age, but there it is – Joey and the sausages. I wouldn’t miss them for anything.”

At that moment a tall and exceedingly thin gentleman entered. This was Sir Roderick Winsloe. Sir Roderick had been once an Undersecretary, once a Chairman of a Company, once famous for his smart and rather vicious repartees. All these were now glories of the past. He was now nothing but the husband of Lady Winsloe, the father of Tubby, and the victim of an uncertain and often truculent digestion. It was natural that he should be melancholy, although perhaps not so melancholy as he found it necessary to be. Life for him was altogether without savour. He now regarded Mr. Huffam, his bag and his waistcoat, with unconcealed astonishment.

“This is my father,” said Tubby.

Mr. Huffam rose at once and grasped his hand.

“Delighted to meet you, sir,” he said.

Sir Roderick said nothing but “Ah” – then he sat down. Tubby was suffering now from a very serious embarrassment. The odd visitor had drunk his tea and it was time that he should go. Yet it seemed that he had no intention of going. With his legs spread apart, his head thrown back, his friendly eyes taking everyone in as though they were all his dearest friends, he was asking for his second cup.

Tubby waited for his mother. She was a mistress of the art of making a guest disappear. No one knew quite how she did it. There was nothing so vulgarly direct as a glance at the clock or a suggestion as to the imminence of dressing for dinner. A cough, a turn of the wrist, a word about the dogs, and the thing was done. But this guest, Tubby knew, was a little more difficult than the ordinary. There was something old-fashioned about him. He took people naively at their word. Having been asked to tea, he considered that he was asked to tea. None of your five minutes’ gossip and then hastening on to a cocktail-party. However, Tubby reflected, the combination of father, mother and the drawing-room, with its marble fireplace and row of copied Old Masters, was, as a rule, enough to ensure brief visitors. On this occasion also it would have its effect.

And then – an amazing thing occurred! Tubby perceived that his mother liked Mr. Huffam, that she was smiling and even giggling, that her little eyes shone, her tiny mouth was parted in expectation as she listened to her visitor.

Mr. Huffam was telling a story – an anecdote of his youth. About a boy whom he had known in his own childhood, a gay, enterprising, and adventurous boy who had gone as page-boy to a rich family. Mr. Huffam described his adventures in a marvellous manner, his rencontre with the second footman, who was a snob and Evangelical, of how he had handed biscuits through the pantry window to his little sister, of the friendship that he had made with the cook. And, as Mr. Huffam told these things, all these people lived before your eyes, the pompous mistress with her ear-trumpet, the cook’s husband who had a wooden leg, the second footman who was in love with a pastrycook’s daughter. The house of this young page-boy took on life, and all the furniture in it, the tables and chairs, the beds and looking-glasses, everything down to the very red woollen muffler that the footman wore in bed, because he was subject to colds in the neck. Then Lady Winsloe began to laugh and Sir Roderick Winsloe even laughed, and the butler, a big, red-faced man, coming in to remove the tea, could not believe his parboiled eyes, but stood there, looking first of all at his mistress, then at his master, then at Mr. Huffam’s bag, then at Mr. Huffam himself, until he remembered his manners and, with a sudden apologetic cough, set sternly (for himself this disgraceful behaviour of his employers was no laughing matter) about his proper duties.

But best of all perhaps was the pathos at the end of Mr. Huffam’s story. Pathos is a dangerous thing in these days. We so easily call it sentimentality. Mr. Huffam was a master of it. Quite easily and with no exaggeration he described how the sister of the little page-boy lost some money entrusted to her by her only too bibulous father, of her terror, her temptation to steal from her aged aunt’s purse, her final triumphant discovery of the money in a band-box!

How they all held their breaths! How vividly they saw the scene! How real was the sister of the little page-boy! At last the story was ended. Mr. Huffam rose.

“Well, ma’am, I must thank you for a very happy hour,” he said.

Then the most remarkable thing of all occurred, for Lady Winsloe said:

“If you have not made any other arrangements, why not stay here for a night or two – while you are looking about you, you know? I’m sure we should be delighted – would we not, Roderick?”

And Sir Roderick said:

“Ah – ah – certainly.”

II

On looking back, as he so often did afterwards, into the details of this extraordinary adventure, Tubby was never able to arrange the various incidents in their proper order. The whole affair had the inconsequence, the coloured fantasy, of a dream – one of those rare and delightful dreams that are so much more true and reasonable than anything in one’s waking life.

After that astounding invitation of Lady Winsloe’s, in what order did the events follow – the cynical luncheon-party, the affair of Mallow’s young woman (Mallow was the butler), the extraordinary metamorphosis of Miss Allington? All of these were certainly in the first twenty-four hours after Mr. Huffam’s arrival. The grand sequence of the Christmas Tree, the Mad Party, the London Vision, were all parts of the tremendous climax.

At once, Tubby realized, the house itself changed. It had never been a satisfactory house; always one of those places rebelliously determined not to live. Even the rooms most often inhabited – the drawing-room, the long, dusky dining-room, Sir Roderick’s study, Tubby’s own bedroom – sulkily refused to play the game. The house was too large, the furniture too heavy, the ceilings too high. Nevertheless, on the first evening of Mr. Huffam’s visit, the furniture began to move about. After dinner on that evening there was only the family present. (Miss Agatha Allington, an old maid, a relation with money to be left, an unhappy old woman, suffering from constant neuralgia, had not yet arrived.) There they were in the drawing-room and, almost at once, Mr. Huffam had moved some of the chairs away from the wall, had turned the sofa with the gilt, spiky back more cosily towards the fire. He was not impertinent nor officious. Indeed, on this first evening, he was very quiet, asking them some questions about present-day London, making some rather odd social enquiries about prisons and asylums and the protection of children. He was interested, too, in the literature of the moment and wrote down in a little notebook an odd collection of names, for Lady Winsloe told him that Ethel M. Dell, Warwick Deeping, and a lady called Wilhelmina Stitch who wrote poetry, were her favourite writers, while Tubby suggested that he should look into the work of Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley. They had, in fact, a quiet evening which ended with Mr. Huffam having his first lesson in Bridge. (He had been, he told them, when he had last “tried” cards, an enthusiastic whist player.) It was a quiet evening, but, as Tubby went up the long, dark staircase to his room, he felt that, in some undefined way, there was excitement in the air. Before undressing he opened his window and looked out on to the roofs and chimney-pots of London. Snow glittered and sparkled under a sky that quivered with stars. Dimly he heard the recurrent waves of traffic, as though the sea gently beat at the feet of the black, snow-covered houses.

“What an extraordinary man!” was his last thought before he slept. Before he had known that he would have Mr, Huffam as his guest, Tubby had invited a few of his clever young friends to luncheon – Diana, Gordon Wolley, Ferris Band, Mary Polkinghorne. Gathered round the Winsloe luncheon-table, Tubby regarded them with new eyes. Was it because of the presence of Mr. Huffam? He, gaily flaunting his tremendous waistcoat, was in high spirits. He had, all morning, been revisiting some of his old haunts. He was amazed. He could not conceal, he did not attempt to conceal, his amazement. He gave them, as they sat there, languidly picking at their food, a slight notion of what East London had once been – the filth, the degradation, the flocks of wild, haggard-eyed, homeless children – Mary Polkinghorne, who had a figure like an umbrella-handle, an Eton crop and an eye-glass, gazed at him with bemused amazement.

“But they say our slums are awful. I haven’t been down there myself, but Bunny Carlisle runs a Boys’ Club and he says…!”

Mr. Huffam admitted that he had seen some slums that morning, but they were nothing, nothing at all, to the things he had seen in his youth.

“Who is this man?” Ferris Band whispered to Diana.

“I don’t know,” she answered. “Someone Tubby picked up. But I like him.”

And then this Christmas!

“Oh dear,” young Wolley sighed, “here’s Christmas again! Isn’t it awful! I’m going to bed. I shall sleep, and I hope dream, until this dreadful time is over.”

Mr. Huffam looked at him with wonder.

“Hang up your stocking and see what happens,” he said.

Everyone screamed with laughter at the idea of young Wolley hanging up his stocking. Afterwards, in the drawing-room, they discussed literature.

“I’ve just seen,” Ferris Band explained, “the proofs of Hunter’s new novel. It’s called Pigs in Fever. It’s quite marvellous. The idea is, a man has scarlet fever and it’s an account of his ravings. Sheer poetry.”

There was a book on a little table. He picked it up. It was a first edition of Martin Chuzzlewit bound in purple leather.

“Poor old Dickens,” he said. “Hunter has a marvellous idea. He’s going to rewrite one or two of the Dickens books.”

Mr. Huffam was interested.

“Rewrite them?” he asked.

“Yes. Cut them down to about half. There’s some quite good stuff in them hidden away, he says. He’ll cut out all the sentimental bits, bring the humour up to date, and put in some stuff of his own. He says it’s only fair to Dickens to show people that there’s something there.”

Mr. Huffam was delighted.

“I’d like to see it,” he said. “It will make quite a new thing of it.”

“That’s what Hunter says,” Band remarked. “People will be surprised.”

“I should think they will be,” Mr. Huffam remarked.

The guests stayed a long time. Mr. Huffam was something quite new in their experience. Before she went, Diana said to Tubby:

“What a delightful man! Where did you find him?”

Tubby was modest. She was nicer to him than she had ever been before.

“What’s happened to you, Tubby?” she asked. “You’ve woken up suddenly.”

During the afternoon, Miss Agatha Allington arrived with a number of bags and one of her worst colds.

“How are you, Tubby? It’s kind of you to ask me. What horrible weather! What a vile thing Christmas is! You won’t expect me to give you a present, I hope?”

Before the evening, Mr. Huffam made friends with Mallow the butler. No one knew quite how he did it. No one had ever made friends with Mallow before. But Mr. Huffam went down to the lower domestic regions and invaded the world of Mallow, Mrs. Spence, the housekeeper, Thomas the footman, Jane and Rose the housemaids, Maggie the scullery-maid. Mrs. Spence, who was a little round woman like a football, was a Fascist in politics, said that she was descended from Mary Queen of Scots, and permitted no one, except Lady Winsloe, in her sitting-room. But she showed Mr. Huffam the photographs of the late Mr. Spence and her son, Darnley, who was a steward on the Cunard Line. She laughed immeasurably at the story of the organ-grinder and the lame monkey. But Mallow was Mr. Huffam’s great conquest. It seemed (no one had had the least idea of it) that Mallow was hopelessly in love with a young lady who assisted in a flower shop in Dover Street. This young lady, apparently, admired Mallow very much and he had once taken her to the pictures. But Mallow was shy. (No one had conceived it!) He wanted to write her a letter, but simply hadn’t the courage. Mr. Huffam dictated a letter for him. It was a marvellous letter, full of humour, poetry and tenderness.

“But I can’t live up to this, sir,” said Mallow. “She’ll find me out in no time.”

“That’s all right,” said Mr. Huffam. “Take her out to tea tomorrow, be a little tender. She won’t worry about letters after that!”

He went out after tea and returned powdered with snow, in a taxi-cab filled with holly and mistletoe.

“Oh dear,” whispered Lady Winsloe, “we haven’t decorated the house for years. I don’t know what Roderick will say. He thinks holly so messy.”

“I’ll talk to him,” said Mr. Huffam. He did, with the result that Sir Roderick came himself and assisted. Through all this, Mr. Huffam was in no way dictatorial. Tubby observed that he had even a kind of shyness – not in his opinions, for here he was very clear-minded indeed, seeing exactly what he wanted, but he seemed to be aware, by a sort of ghostly guidance, of the idiosyncrasies of his neighbours. How did he know, for instance, that Sir Roderick was afraid of a ladder? When he, Mallow, Tubby and Sir Roderick were festooning the hall with holly, he saw Sir Roderick begin timidly, with trembling shanks, to climb some steps. He went to him, put his hand on his arm, and led him safely to ground again.

“I know you don’t like ladders,” he said.

“Some people can’t stand ’em. I knew an old gentleman once terrified of ladders, and his eldest son, a bright, promising lad, must become a steeple-jack. Only profession he had a liking for.”

“Good heavens!” cried Sir Roderick, paling.

“What a horrible pursuit! Whatever did his father do?”

“Persuaded him to be a diver instead,” said Mr. Huffam. “The lad took to it like a duck to water. Up or down, it was all the same to him, he said.”

In fact, Mr. Huffam looked after Sir Roderick as a father his child, and, before the day was out, the noble Baronet was asking Mr. Huffam’s opinion on everything – the right way to grow carnations, the Gold Standard, how to breed dachshunds, and the wisdom of Lord Beaverbrook. The Gold Standard and Lord Beaverbrook were new to Mr. Huffam, but he had his opinions all the same. Tubby, as he listened, could not help wondering where Mr. Huffam had been all these years. In some very remote South Sea island surely! So many things were new to him. But his kindness and energy carried him forward through everything. There was much of the child about him, much of the wise man of the world also, and behind these a heart of melancholy, of loneliness.

“He has, it seems,” thought Tubby, “no home, no people, nowhere especially to go.” And he had visions of attaching him to the family as a sort of secretarial family friend. Tubby was no sentimentalist about his own sex, but he had to confess that he was growing very fond of Mr. Huffam. It was almost as though he had known him before. There were, in fact, certain phrases, certain tones in the voice that were curiously familiar and reminded Tubby in some dim way of his innocent, departed childhood.

And then, after dinner, there was the conquest of Agatha Allington. Agatha had taken an instant dislike to Mr. Huffam. She prided herself on her plain speech.

“My dear,” she said to Lady Winsloe, “what a ruffian! He’ll steal the spoons.”

“I don’t think so,” said Lady Winsloe with dignity. “We like him very much.”

He seemed to perceive that Agatha disliked him. He sat beside her at dinner – he wore a tail-coat of strange, old-fashioned cut, and carried a large gold fob. He was, as Tubby perceived, quite different with Agatha. He was almost, you might say, an old maid himself – or, rather, a confirmed old bachelor. He discovered that she had a passion for Italy – she visited Rome and Florence every year – and he described to her some of his own Italian journeys, taken many years ago: confessed to her that he didn’t care for frescoes, which he described as “dim virgins with mildewed glories”. But Venice! Ah! Venice! with its prisoners and dungeons and lovely iridescent waters! All the same, he was always homesick when he was out of London, and he described the old London to her, the fogs and the muffin-bells and the “growlers,” and enchanted her with a story about a shy little bachelor, and how he went out one evening to dine with a vulgar cousin and be kind to a horrible godchild. Indeed they all listened, spellbound: even Mallow stood, with a plate in his hand and his mouth open, forgetting his duties. Then, after dinner, he insisted that they should dance. They made a space in the drawing-room, brought up a gramophone, and set about it. Then how Mr. Huffam laughed when Tubby showed him a one-step.

“Call that dancing!” he cried. Then, humming a polka, he caught Agatha by the waist and away they polkaed! Then Lady Winsloe, who had adored the polka once, joined in. Then the Barn Dance. Then, few though they were, Sir Roger.

“I know!” Mr. Huffam cried. “We must have a party!”

“A party!” almost screamed Lady Winsloe.

“What kind of a party?”

“Why, a children’s party, of course. On Christmas night.”

“But we don’t know any children! And children are bored with parties. And they’ll all be engaged anyway.”

“Not the children I’ll ask!” cried Mr. Huffam. “Not the party I’ll have! It shall be the best party London has seen for years!”

III

It is well known that good-humoured, cheerful, and perpetually well-intentioned people are among the most tiresome of their race. They are avoided by all wise and comfort-loving persons. Tubby often wondered afterwards why Mr. Huffam was not tiresome. It was perhaps because of his childlikeness; it was also, most certainly, because of his intelligence. Most of all it was because of the special circumstances of the case. In ordinary daily life, Mr. Huffam might be a bore – most people are at one time or another. But on this occasion no one was a bore, not even Agatha.

It was as though the front wall of the Hill Street house had been taken away and all the detail and incidents of these two days, Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, became part of it. It seemed that Berkeley Square was festooned with crystal trees, that candles – red and green and blue – blazed from every window, that small boys, instead of chanting “Good King Wenceslas” in the usual excruciating fashion, carolled with divine voices, that processions of Father Christmases, with snowy beards and red gowns, marched from Selfridges and Harrods and Fortnum’s, carrying in their hands small Christmas trees, and even attended by reindeer, as though brown-paper parcels tied with silver bands and decorated with robins fell in torrents through the chimney, and gigantic Christmas puddings rolled on their own stout bellies down Piccadilly, attended by showers of almonds and raisins. And upon all this, first a red-faced sun, then a moon, cherry-coloured and as large as an orange, smiled down, upon a world of crusted, glittering snow, while the bells pealed and once again the Kings of the East came to the stable with gifts in their hands….

Of course, it was not like that – but most certainly the Winsloe house was transformed. For one thing, there was not the usual present giving. At breakfast on Christmas Day, everyone gave everyone else presents that must not by order cost more than sixpence apiece. Mr. Huffam had discovered some marvellous things – toy dogs that barked, Father Christmases glistening with snow, a small chime of silver bells, shining pieces of sealing-wax.

Then they all went to church at St. James’s, Piccadilly. At the midday meal Sir Roderick had turkey and Christmas pudding, which he hadn’t touched for many a day.

In the evening came the Party. Tubby had been allowed to invite Diana – for the rest the guests were to be altogether Mr. Huffam’s. No one knew what was in his mind. At 7.15 exactly came the first ring of the door-bell. When Mallow opened the portals, there on the steps were three very small children, two girls and a boy.

“Please, sir, this was the number the gentleman said,” whispered the little girl, who was very frightened. Then up Hill Street the children came, big children, little children, children who could scarcely walk, boys as bold as brass, girls mothering their small relations, some of them shabby, some of them smart, some with shawls, some with mufflers, some with collars, some brave, some frightened, some chattering like monkeys, some silent and anxious – all coming up Hill Street, crowding up the stairs, passing into the great hall.

It was not until they had all been ushered up the stairs by Mallow, were all in their places, that Sir Roderick Winsloe, Bart., Lady Winsloe, his wife, Tubby Winsloe, their son, were permitted to see their own drawing-room. When they did they gasped with wonder. Under the soft and shining light the great floor had been cleared, and at one end of the room all the children were gathered. At the other end was the largest, the strongest, the proudest Christmas Tree ever beheld, and this Tree shone and gleamed with candles, with silver tissue, with blue and gold and crimson balls, and so heavily weighted was it with dolls and horses and trains and parcels that it was a miracle that, Tree as it was, it could support its burden. So there it was, the great room shining with golden light, the children massed together, the gleaming floor like a sea, and only the crackle of the fire, the tick of the marble clock, the wondering whispers of the children for sound.

A pause, and from somewhere or other (but no one knew whence) Father Christmas appeared. He stood there, looking across the floor at his guests.

“Good evening, children,” he said, and the voice was the voice of Mr. Huffam.

“Good evening, Father Christmas,” the children cried in chorus.

“It’s all his own money,” Lady Winsloe whispered to Agatha. “He wouldn’t let me spend a penny.”

He summoned them then to help with the presents. The children (who behaved with the manners of the highest of the aristocracy – even better than that, to be truthful) advanced across the shining floor. They were told to take turn according to size, the smallest first. There was no pushing, no cries of “I want that!” as so often happens at parties, no greed and satiety. At last the biggest girl (who was almost a giantess), and the biggest boy (who might have been a heavyweight boxing champion) received their gifts. The Tree gave a little quiver of relief at its freedom from its burden, and the candles, the silver tissue, the red and blue and golden balls shook with a shimmer of pleasure because the present giving had been so successful.

Games followed. Tubby could never afterwards remember what the games had been. They were no doubt Hunt the Slipper, Kiss in the Ring, Cross-your-Toes, Last Man Out, Blind Man’s Buff, Chase the Cherry, Here Comes the Elephant, Count Your Blessings, and all the other games. But Tubby never knew. The room was alive with movement, with cries of joy and shouts of triumph, with songs and kisses and forfeits. Tubby never knew. He only knew that he saw his mother with a paper cap on her head, his father with a false nose, Agatha beating a child’s drum – and on every side of him children and children and children, children dancing and singing and running and sitting and laughing.

There came a moment when Diana, her hair dishevelled, her eyes shining, caught his arm and whispered:

“Tubby, you are a dear. Perhaps – one day – if you keep this up – who knows?”

And there was a sudden quiet. Mr. Huffam, no longer Father Christmas, arranged all the children round him. He told them a story, a story about a circus and a small child who, with her old grandfather, wandered into the company of those strange people – of the fat lady and the Living Skeleton, the jugglers and the beautiful creatures who jumped through the hoops, and the clown with the broken heart and how his heart was mended.

“And so they all lived happily ever after,” he ended. Everyone said good-night. Everyone went away.

“Oh dear, I am tired!” said Mr. Huffam. “But it has been a jolly evening!”

•   •   •   •   •

Next morning when Rose the housemaid woke Lady Winsloe with her morning cup of tea she had startling news.

“Oh dear, my lady, the gentleman’s gone!”

“What gentleman?”

“Mr. Huffam, my lady. His bed’s not been slept in and his bag’s gone. There isn’t a sign of him anywhere.”

Alas, it was only too true. Not a sign of him anywhere. At least one sign only.

The drawing-room was as it had always been, every chair in its proper place, the copied Old Masters looking down solemnly from the dignified walls.

One thing alone was different. The first edition of Martin Chuzzlewit in its handsome purple binding was propped up against the marble clock.

“How very strange!” said Lady Winsloe. But, opening it, she found that on the fly-leaf these words were freshly written:

For Lady Winsloe
with gratitude
from her Friend
the Author –

And, under this, the signature, above a scrawl of thick black lines, “Charles Dickens”.

“Harper’s Bazaar” Dec 1933

Mr. Huffam And Other Stories (1948)

THE RUBY GLASS

Poor Cousin Jane (as she was for ever afterwards known) arrived on a visit to the Cole family in Polchester in the spring of Jeremy’s eighth year. He remembered the day exactly, because on that afternoon he had bought a bunch of daffodils as a peace-offering for his mother. A peace-offering was badly needed, both on his own part and that of his dog, Hamlet, for they had both of late been repeatedly in disgrace.

On Tuesday of that week Jeremy in a temper had thrown ink at Mary, his sister; on Wednesday he broke the window of the bathroom with a cricket-ball; on Thursday he insulted Miss Jones, their governess, so brutally that she gave notice, and was only with the greatest difficulty persuaded to remain.

It was perhaps the spring – it was certainly the hard truth that it was time that he went to school.

Hamlet also was unfortunate. On Tuesday he brought two filthy bones into the drawing-room at the very moment when the Dean’s wife was paying a call. On Wednesday he frightened Mrs. Cole by running out on her from a dark passage, and on Thursday he was horribly sick on the dining-room carpet.

They were both in disgrace; they were both punished. In fact, matters were in a very ticklish state indeed. So Jeremy bought some daffodils and prayed most fervently that Fate would leave him alone for a while.

He disliked to be in disgrace; he disliked to make his incomprehensible elders unhappy; most of all did he dislike it when people muttered concerning Hamlet, “That dog must go. We really cannot endure him any longer.”

So he was walking on egg-shells when Poor Cousin Jane arrived.

They christened her that immediately. In the first place she was a miserable scrap of a thing. When she stood in the hall, covered with innumerable wraps, she did not appear to be there at all.

Only her very red (for it was April weather) sharply peaked little nose and strange pepper-and-salt eyes, with their sandy eyebrows, were visible.

Unwrapped she was revealed as a thin, little girl, with an untidy bow in her hair and wrinkled black stockings on her spindly legs.

But what struck Jeremy, Mary and Helen immediately on sight of her was her terror. She was shaking with fright; her eyes roamed the room as though she were a wild animal for the first time caged, and when her aunt who had brought her from her home in Drymouth left her she burst into floods of tears.

Now the Coles were not an unkind family. The Rev. Mr. Cole, Jeremy’s father, could certainly be severe on occasion when he felt it his duty to be so, but Mrs. Cole was the soul of maternal comfort – a nicer woman didn’t exist anywhere.

Her three children also were kindly intentioned, only, like all normal children, they were healthy savages in process of being civilised.

Mary in especial was sentimental and emotional, wanted a girl friend, and would willingly have romanticised Cousin Jane had she been given the opportunity.

However, the odd thing about this story is that the only person who from the first did romanticise Jane was Hamlet, and that was queer indeed, because he hated little girls and liked to snap at their legs when nobody in authority was near.

Jeremy disliked Cousin Jane from the start. He could not help it. He was easily touched by females in distress, he was at times both courteous and chivalrous, and he had a good heart – but Jane he could not abide.

There was something about her terror that revolted him. He was not touched by it because it was so complete. He was not old enough to understand how anyone could be such a coward and could be such a fool.

His sister Mary was often both a coward and a fool, but she made brave attempts to conquer her weak points. He understood that. He had weak points himself.

But Jane made no attempt to conquer anything. She was frightened of Mr. Cole, Mrs. Cole, Jeremy, Mary, Helen, Miss Jones, the cook, the housemaid, and terrified of Hamlet.

She started at the slightest sound, blinked with alarm if anyone addressed her, and sat in a corner, straight on a chair, waiting for someone to attack her.

But – strangest of all strange things – Hamlet adored her. When on her arrival she stood among them all, bitterly weeping, he smelt her black stockings, then lay down, his pointed beard flat on his paws, and waited for her to ask him to do something for her. She did, of course, nothing of the kind. No matter. He devoted himself to her service.

Now, from the very moment of her arrival, Jeremy felt that something awful would occur in connection with her. He felt also perhaps ashamed of himself for disliking her, although it is difficult to say what small boys of eight feel and what they do not.

On the first afternoon of her stay it poured with rain and the children sat in the schoolroom trying to play games. Cousin Jane, however, was a blight on all the proceedings.

“I know!” said Jeremy. “We’ll play buffaloes. I’ll be the buffalo. Jane shall be captured by the Indians, and Mary and Hamlet shall rescue her.”

Jane’s eyes nearly split with terror.

“Wouldn’t you like that, Jane dear?” asked Mary in her propitiatory, mother-visiting-the-sick-and-ailing voice.

“Oh no, no, no!” cried Jane.

“There’s halma,” said Jeremy disgustedly.

But Jane could understand nothing. She sat at the schoolroom table staring in front of her.

“Mary shall play with you and show you how to move.”

But it was of no use. She had an awful way of whispering under her breath. She was probably saying that she wanted to go home, but nobody could be sure.

“Mary shall tell us a story,” said Jeremy, trying hard to be a perfect gentleman. They sat round the fire and Mary began (very quickly lest someone should stop her, for she loved telling stories).

“Once upon a time there was a king who had three lovely daughters. One had black hair, one yellow, and one was between the two, and one day when the king—”

But Jane interrupted by slipping off her chair and creeping away to the window-seat, where she sat desolately looking out on to the rain. This was as bad an insult as any author ever received!

This sense of misfortune that Jeremy had in connection with his weeping cousin grew in the following days. He was in no way a morbid child, his imaginings were healthy, he very rarely saw visions, but just now he had the sense of the world that it was waiting round the corner to catch him.

He had had nightmares after stolen cheese or too much toffee, and in these to move a step was to lose your life!

So it was now. Something would happen to plunge him into disgrace, and Cousin Jane would be the agent. He knew it. He felt it in all his bones.

On a certain morning he woke and at once knew that this was an Evil Day. There were Evil Days, there were Ordinary Days and Days of Delight, and the kind of Day it intended to be it began from the very first moment by being!

This day began badly because Hamlet was not there. Always at a quarter to eight Hamlet, released by the cook from his basket in the kitchen, his hair brushed, his beard in shape, rushed upstairs and scratched on Jeremy’s door. He was admitted and games followed.

Today there was no scratching at the door. Jeremy knew at once what had occurred. He was scratching at Cousin Jane’s door. What did he see in the girl? What was it that had softened his ironic heart?

She had, Jeremy would have supposed, no charms for dogs at all. She did not like dogs. She screamed whenever they came near her.

Jeremy, his heart torn by a jealousy that he was far too proud to admit, went down to breakfast. Here for a moment things took a better turn.

“What do you think, my dears?” cried Mrs. Cole (who, loving her children, had never realised how intensely Mary and Jeremy hated to be “my deared”). “Miss Willink has asked us all to tea on Friday.”

Now, Miss Willink was one of life’s joys. She was an elderly lady living five miles out of Polchester in the middle of one of the loveliest gardens in the world. Her house was large and grand, but Jeremy never gave it a thought.

The point was the garden with its lawns, rockeries, ponds, terraces, shrubberies, conservatories and gigantic trees. Moreover, Miss Willink understood what children wanted – namely, food, freedom and fraternity. She was a jolly old lady.

“Oh, hurray!” cried Jeremy, wondering whether he had been wrong about the day’s omens. But he had not.

“Now mind, Jeremy,” said his father, who had neuralgia that morning. “I don’t know what’s been the matter with you this week. One thing after another. Take care or Miss Willink’s is not for you.”

He would take care, and it occurred to him that he would propitiate the fates by being nice to Cousin Jane. They were to go for a walk that morning, it being a lovely spring morning, with clouds like galleons, sunny and shining, stretches of sky like violet-fields, and excited birds in flight.

He would take Cousin Jane to his secret place in Conmer Wood, where the daffodils were so thick that they were like shadowed plates of gold.

Smiling, he suggested it to her. But she shook her head. They were standing together alone in the schoolroom and Hamlet was watching the girl, his eyes soft with sentiment. Every once and again he snapped dramatically at an imaginary fly, but plainly his thoughts were only for his adored one.

Jeremy was so deeply irritated that it was all he could do not to pull her long and lanky hair, but, remembering the fates, he held himself in.

“Don’t you want to go anywhere?” he cried disgustedly. “Don’t you want to do anything?”

Her under-lip trembled.

“I don’t like daffodils,” was her amazing statement.

“Don’t like daffodils? But you don’t like anything! All the time you’ve been here you haven’t liked a thing! We’re all being as nice as nice. Don’t you like being here?”

Upon which Cousin Jane burst into tears, and at the same moment Mrs. Cole came into the room.

“Now, Jeremy, what have you been doing to Jane? What is it, dear? … Never mind. Come with me and I’ll show you some pretty things. Jeremy, I don’t know what has come over you lately. You’re always doing something wrong. Your father is very vexed. Remember what he said about Miss Willink. Now, come along, dear. Dry your eyes. We’ll see what we’ve got downstairs to show you.”

Hamlet attempted to follow his heroine, but that at least Jeremy prevented.

“What has come over you?” he asked him. “You can’t like her. You don’t like girls and this is one of the worst. Besides, she hates you!”

These remarks had no effect whatever on Hamlet, who had the art of sulking when he wanted to sulk beyond any dog ever known. He would half close his eyes, bury his mouth in his beard, turn his head away and yawn lazily, impertinently.

“Now come on,” said Jeremy. “We’ll go out and enjoy ourselves.”

But Hamlet refused. He would not go out. He would not budge. He sat there, his feet firmly planted, his head obstinately screwed away from his master. Jeremy dragged at his collar; his paws seemed to stick to the carpet. Jeremy pulled him, however, as far as the passage, then bumped, breathless and exasperated, into his father.

“Really, Jeremy,” Mr. Cole, whose neuralgia was worse, cried, “you must look where you are going, my boy. And what are you doing to the poor dog?”

“Oh, nothing.” And Jeremy, running downstairs, left dog, father and all to their proper destinies.

“Sulky,” thought Mr. Cole sadly. “Sulky and ill-tempered. The boy will have to go to school.”

At luncheon another misfortune befell.

It happened that it was cold-beef day – cold beef and potatoes in their jackets. Now, Jeremy hated cold fat. So, apparently, did Cousin Jane. Her eyes filled with tears and she looked beseechingly at Mrs. Cole.

“Mother says I needn’t eat fat when I feel sick,” she remarked. “I feel sick now.”

“Very well, dear,” said Mrs. Cole, benevolently smiling.

A short while later Mr. Cole said cheerfully: “Eat it up, Jeremy, my boy. You know what I’ve always told you. One day perhaps you will be glad—”

The injustice was more than he could bear.

“Jane didn’t have to!” he said.

“Jeremy!”

“Well, father, Jane didn’t—”

“Jeremy!”

“Well, but, father—”

He ate it, and most disgusting it was. He swallowed with splutterings a full glass of water. His eye rested on the splendid, tall, ruby glass that stood in the middle of a small table opposite him. This was the family pride.

It was, the children understood, Bohemian. There were little patterns of gold traced delicately over its crimson glories. Jeremy thought that it was laughing at him.

After luncheon he brooded miserably. Hamlet was nowhere to be seen. Even his sisters seemed to hold aloof from him. A hatred of his Cousin Jane stronger than any hatred that he had ever known for anyone possessed him.

He would like to torture her, to stick pins into her legs, to twist her arms, to pull her hair till she screamed.

Meanwhile, as the afternoon drew on, he felt catastrophe drawing nearer.

At tea-time he could have burst into tears, although he was not given to crying. The intensity of those moments in childhood when one is deserted, helpless, under a curse that is eternal, is unknown to maturity.

It would be a miracle if he reached bedtime without disaster. Even the clocks seemed to say to him: “Now – You – Are – Done – For – Little – Man. Now – You – Are – Done – For – Little – Man.” And indeed there is nothing more complacent and patronising than a moon-faced, stubborn clock.

The blow fell.

It was the pleasant Cole custom that one or two nights a week Mrs. Cole should read to the children for half an hour before bedtime. Tonight the reading was to be in the dining-room, because a good fire was burning there. The book was The Chaplet of Pearls, by Charlotte Mary Yonge.

The children – Hamlet, Mary, Helen, Jeremy and Jane – assembled and stood by the fire waiting. Hamlet sat, licking a tangled foot and sniffing between licks. Jane showed a little animation. She began in her thin voice that was like a violin-string struck just out of tune:

“We’ve got nicer things in our house than you have, Mary.”

“Oh no, you haven’t,” said Mary, who was loyal if she was anything.

“Oh yes, we have.”

“Oh no, you haven’t.”

“Oh yes, we have. We’ve got a clock with a Chinaman that nods his head, and a picture as big as this room almost, and a rug with a tiger’s head, and—”

“You haven’t,” said Mary slowly, pushing her spectacles straight, “anything as lovely as the ruby glass.”

“Oh yes, we have,” said Jane. But she was attracted nevertheless. The firelight danced on the deep colours, the thin tracery of gold. She went to the table and picked it up.

“Oh, you mustn’t!” cried Mary.

Jane heard the door opening, and, in alarm, dropped the glass. It lay at her feet, “smashed,” as the story-books have it, “into a thousand fragments.”

Mrs. Cole had entered. Her cry was an agonised one.

“Oh! My glass! My glass!”

Jeremy saw then terror as he was never in all his life again to see it. Nothing, years later, in the Great War equalled it.

To say that Jane was “frozen” with it says little; her face paled to ash, her whole body was seized with a fearful trembling. It was as though she saw the devil.

Something in that agony moved Jeremy to a revulsion of disgust. It was horrible, indecent. Eight years of age though he was, he understood that there was something dreadful here that had nothing to do with his own world – something from beyond boundaries.

Mrs. Cole looked up from her knees.

“Oh, who—?” she began.

“I broke it,” said Jeremy.

“You were told never to touch it.”

He stared defiantly. None of the children spoke a word. Mary and Helen knew, as Jeremy knew, that Jane, dislike her as they did, must be protected. The door opened on the scene, and Mr. Cole entered:

“Well, children—” he began, and then saw what had happened.

“The glass! … Who touched it?”

“I did,” said Jeremy.

For the first time in his life Jeremy was locked in his bedroom. He was to have no supper. Miss Willink’s garden would not, on this occasion, offer him a greeting.

He moved up and down, hot tears in his eyes, feeling sick, feeling utterly alone, deserted by all the world. Why had he done it? He did not know. He hated Cousin Jane. It would have given him joy to have seen her disgraced. Yet if it occurred again he would do as he had done.

He was a pariah (although he did not know what a pariah was). He would never be back any more in a world of sunshine, friendliness, goodwill.

It was too much. He sat down by the dressing-table and burst into a passion of angry, desolated tears. Worst of all – oh, far, far worst of all – was Hamlet’s desertion. That Hamlet should leave him for an ugly, stupid, miserable, little …

He heard a sound. He choked down his sobs, raised his head and listened. There was a scratching at his door. Was he mistaken? He moved across the room. No, there was no mistake. The scratching continued. He went to the door and, pressing against it, whispered:

“Hamlet! Hamlet! Are you there?”

The scratching was eager, demonstrative, and then, quite beyond question, between the scratches, that sniff! That sniff of comradeship, of loyalty, of understanding.

“Hamlet, I can’t get out. They’ve locked me in!”

He heard a soft thud. Hamlet had laid himself down, and nothing, no power, no authority, was going to move him.

Jeremy, smiling, himself again, all the curses and forebodings suddenly removed, turned to the table by the bed, found a pencil and a piece of paper, and, with wrinkled brow and lickings of the stubborn lead, began to draw pictures of Cousin Jane as a witch.

All Soul’s Night (1933)

PORTRAIT IN SHADOW

Mr. K——— told me this story one wet day in Cumberland. He did not tell it me all in one piece: the first part of it I had as we walked in soaking rain from Braithwaite to Buttermere, the second part that same evening over a fire in the Buttermere Inn, and he finished it for me next day on our tramp under a mellow September sun into Ennerdale. We had met three days before in Keswick; we were both looking for the right kind of companion. The week that we then spent together seemed to promise a good and strong friendship but, alas, K——— died in the following year, of pneumonia. I have concealed his name because he would himself have wished it. He had a charming and most original talent, but some kind of delicacy and mistrust of himself, also, I fancy, a constitutional ill-health which all his life pursued him, and thirdly a comfortable income, prevented him from making the mark that he should have done. In all his forty-eight years he published only three little books; one of them, a slight but most brilliant Venetian story, had some success.

However, in these days, with the rush, roar and confusion of letters, a very delicate and fugitive talent such as his has not, I fear, a great chance of survival.

In appearance K——— was tall, slim, and fragile. He had eyes of a very bright blue and eyebrows that were almost white, so faint in colour were they. He had a charming nervous smile and never seemed to be quite sure what to do with his legs and his arms.

But it was his voice that was beautiful. How can I describe it? Anyone who knew it will hear the echo of it so long as life lasts. It had a cadence of reminiscence as though it were best pleased to speak of the past. The timbre was marvellous, very lightly pitched and yet as clear as a bell across water. He was the least affected of men, yet he had a way of lingering over a beautiful word as though he hated to let it go. His shyness, his humour, good-fellowship, almost childish gratitude for being liked, all these things made up his charm, and yet there was more than these – some special goodness of spirit, perhaps, that put him a little apart from other men.

This was his story. I have tried to give it as though he were himself telling it. The point about it is that it should have happened to K——— of all people in the world. There are men I know to whom such an incident would have been nothing at all. It would have been forgotten as soon as it occurred. To K——— it was epochal, transforming. The man with the hair en brosse, the room with the picture, these were part of his life for ever after.

•   •   •   •   •

It happened (said K———) more than twenty years ago. Before the war – the way we date everything now. I had come down from Oxford and was very uncertain as to my next step. I had some means of my own, you see, and I was an orphan. I have been an orphan nearly all my life.

I had been brought up by an uncle who lived in Leeds, but he died while I was at Oxford, and it was then that an aunt of mine became my friend. The odd thing about this aunt was that she was only some five years older than myself. She was my father’s youngest sister, fifteen years younger than he. My father married when he was twenty, and I was his only child. I did not see much of this aunt until my uncle died. She lived with a rather tyrannical, selfish father in London. Then at almost the moment when my uncle died her father died also, and that seemed to bring us together. We were both quite alone in the world.

But she was in a worse position than I, for she had almost no means. She was perfectly charming. I can’t possibly give you any idea of her charm. She was slight, fair, most delicately made, full of zest for life, a zest that she had never been able to fulfil. She had always had the very dullest time.

She was a child in many ways, taking everything with an eager intensity and quite surprisingly ignorant of the world. As a matter of fact, I was that also. I had never been strong, had been driven by a quite invincible shyness into a remote life of my own. I wanted to make friends but did not know how to make them. So, when we discovered one another, it was wonderful for both of us. Almost the first thing I wanted to do was to take her abroad and give her a splendid holiday. She had never been out of England.

The thought of the holiday excited her tremendously. I can see her now, sitting in a dingy room of the London house, leaning on the table after breakfast, her fragile body shaking with enthusiasm, a fog slurring the lines of the street beyond the window, the sordid remains of the meal all about her, as she cried:

“Oh, but how wonderful! … France, Spain, Italy…!”

In the end it was Spain, and, of all mad things, the North of Spain in August. I know that we were crazy, and you may be sure that everyone told us that we were. The North of Spain! August! and you must remember that before the War Spain was by no means the sanitary and clinical paradise that its splendid “Turismo” has lately succeeded in making it.

Yes, everyone said that we were mad, but it was the Sun that we both wanted. We found that we were completely agreed about that. My aunt had never had any Sun at all. She had never been really warm. Northern Spain in August – yes, we would be certain to be warm!

So off we went. What an enchanting journey we had! We found that we were perfect travelling companions. The perfect travelling companion! Isn’t he or she practically an impossibility? As with marriage, you may compromise, and nine out of ten times you do. Is it your fault or the other’s? Surely not your own, for you start out with such splendid confidence as to your own character. And, to the very last, it isn’t your own character that seems to have failed. Aside from one or two little irritabilities you have been perfect, but the other—! You had no idea before you started of the weaknesses, the selfishness, the odd, exasperating tricks, the refusal to agree to the most obvious course, the insistence on unimportant personal rights! No, it has most certainly not been your fault; and yet, in retrospect, are there not suddenly exposed certain flecks, little blemishes in your own personality that you had never suspected?

Forgive me for emphasising the obvious, but this very question of companionship plays its important part in the little story. For my aunt and myself were the most perfect companions. We simply found, as the days passed and all those little accidents, upsets, surprises, turned up their innocent faces, as they always do on such an expedition, that we were only more and more suited to one another. We liked the same things but had our different points of view, we were amused by the same nonsense, exhilarated by the same drama, enriched by the same beauty.

My aunt’s sure perception and lovely sense of humour threw a light about her as a flower is lit by the shaking glitter of a neighbouring fountain. She had that iridescence, that eternal possibility of some beautiful surprise. And yet what a child she was! She had indeed seen nothing of life at all, and every moment of her day was a wonder and an amaze.

Well, we reached San Sebastian, and the heat was terrific. It was then that for the first time I knew a moment of alarm. This was indeed heat as I had never known it, and I lay, that first night in the San Sebastian hotel, naked on my bed while the sweat poured in streams off my body. My aunt, however, I discovered next morning, was in no way inconvenienced by it. She was ready, she declared, for anything!

I was determined to discover some small place by the sea that should be for us characteristically Spanish but quiet and beautiful. Quiet, you know, is not Spain’s most eminent characteristic! I asked the porter of the hotel, and he spoke to me at once of the little resort of Z———, a charming place, he said, over the hills, quiet and beautiful. Strange to think that it was from the round plump features of the porter of that San Sebastian hotel that, in such commonplace words, I first heard of a spot that would never, from that moment, leave me again!

I spoke of it to my aunt and she enthusiastically agreed! How little we both of us knew to what we were going!

At that time a small clumsy railway ran over the mountains to the sea. Into the fearfully hot, exceedingly democratic carriage we climbed! We had chosen an evening train that we might escape the heat of the day. We were embedded in a cheerful clump of eager, friendly people, two priests, an old and a young one, three pretty girls, a stout farmer, a clerk. I can see them all now as though they were still with me, as perhaps they are! I knew some Spanish. There are no people at the same time so friendly and so uninterfering as the Spaniards! Their hospitality is prodigious, their pride and sensitiveness also. They are gay, but never to abandon, and one of their mysteries is that they should at the same time be so kind to children and so cruel to animals.

The heat, I suppose (for that carriage was hot!), sent me into a kind of trance. I saw my companions after a while as trees walking, and the coloured haze that fell in an ever-deepening purple bloom about the hills seemed to tell me that I was entering a new country.

There is little twilight in this country – soon all was dark beyond our windows, and when at last we had arrived we stepped down into mystery. About us, in the little station, I remember, was the sharp scent of some strange unknown flower and the dry sandy whisper of the sea. No breeze, and a sky stiff with the most silver stars I had ever seen.

But it was in the morning that, on waking, we realised the splendour into which we had stepped. It is the charm of Z——— that it lies, surrounded with woods, backed by mountains, in a kind of delicious privacy, as though that especial piece of sea were its own creation and separate possession. The beach is in fact large, but the black rocks that run out on either side to protect it give it a natural aristocracy, as though it were a beach preserved during many, many years by some lordly and beneficent owner for the pleasure of his friends.

Not that it was deserted or sacred with a sort of Crusoe loneliness. Far from it. As we looked out on it that morning (we had slept late) all the brilliantly striped tents – green, purple, red, yellow – were unfolding and from every side, down the hill, the bathers, all wrapped in dressing-gowns as gay as flower-beds, were advancing. I believe that even now, you know, that Spanish custom of coloured dressing-gowns on the beaches is preserved.

Well, but when we saw it all more completely we had both the same sensation. Z——— was like a flower shining at the heart of dark leaves, for all the brilliance of light and colour was enfolded by the dark woods, darker than any woods that we had ever seen.

“It must be terrible in rain and storm,” said my aunt with a little shiver, and then I, looking more closely, fancied that some of the old houses that bordered the woods were of the order of the storm and the wind, old and green, with gardens along whose paths the leaves thickened and in whose hedges no birds sang. This light in this darkness! That was Z———!

Only this was curious – on that very first morning, the two of us walking out towards the beach together, I noticed, from all the others, the very house, the house that still so often seems to invite me within its doors, – a gate, rather shabby, a garden path, some beds thick with dark-red flowers, a front of faded brown, and a bright green door with a silver knocker. It was, I think, the bright green and the silver of the knocker that attracted me. The knocker sparkled in the sun, and even as we looked the door opened and an old lady and gentleman, the old lady in a large black hat and leaning on a stick, walked out. We passed on.

Reaching the beach, it seemed to our young and inexperienced souls that we had attained Paradise. The water came rolling in, trembling in crystal lights, green like a bird’s wing; the tents of crimson and gold were grander and more lordly than anything that we had ever imagined for a beach.

Undressing under a rock on the Cornish coast was the nearest to them that we knew. Don’t imagine, though, that there was anything stiff or ceremonial about the life here. For a week at least we were as happy and care-free as any two in the world. I knew some Spanish, my aunt could smile and nod her head and look the friend of all the world, which, for that moment, she was.

Yes, we had the happiest week of our lives. We had never conceived such a sun, such colour, such laughter, such freedom from interference, such willingness on the part of everyone that we should be at home.

Then, on a lovely morning, some time between seven and eight, bathing alone, I encountered a gentleman in the water. He was, judging by his head, a very jolly gentleman indeed.

He shouted that it was a lovely morning, that the water was perfect. I called back in my funny Spanish that he couldn’t possibly say enough about it or do it any sort of justice.

It was, I think, my funny Spanish that won him, for, coming out of the sea at the same time as myself, he said that he supposed that I was English or American. Now that should have told me something, for the Spaniards, the right Spaniards, are the most courteous people in the world and never press into the privacy of anyone.

But I never gave that a thought. I liked him at once. Standing there in the new morning sun, the water dropping from him in crystal drops, he was as handsome a man as I’ve ever seen – more handsome, I sometimes think, than anyone else in the world. What was he like? I don’t know, except that his hair stood up stiffly en brosse, even then when it was soaked with water. Its colour was raven black, his body bronze. He had a small mole underneath one eye. We talked, and he made me lose my accustomed shyness. He had always a great deal to say and he found everything amusing. He told me at once his name – Ramon Quintero. He was staying with relations. He had been here a fortnight. He liked English people. How well I spoke Spanish! Oh yes, I did. My accent was very attractive.

At breakfast I told my aunt about him. Later that morning while we sat under our crimson tent, eating grapes, he was introduced to her. I know now that she fell in love with him at once, and that from that moment some thin, almost invisible cloud obscured our own relationship.

What a commonplace it is nowadays to remark that we are all as lonely in this life as Crusoe on his island, but it is true enough. On the instant that I introduced Ramon Quintero (robed, I remember, at the moment in a purple dressing-gown, his face of shining bronze, his blue eyes sparkling with an amusement that seemed always to be more directed against himself than anyone else) to my aunt, I lost for ever the only really close intimacy with another human being that I have ever known or, I fancy, ever will know.

Remember that my aunt and I had only reached any sort of true companionship during the last week; there had not been time enough for a real basis of trust, fond though we were growing of one another. Had fate given us another two months—! But it did not. Does it not often seem to break something that is almost completed? – shrugging its shoulders, saying: “Oh, well, this is disappointing. I thought it would turn out better. I’ll smash this and start again.”

In any case she was not, I suppose, sure enough of herself. She fancied, perhaps, that I should think her foolish…. But I don’t know. I don’t know. That’s what, after all this time, makes me so unhappy. Yes, even now. I’m telling you the story perhaps only that I may clear it up a little more to myself in the telling.

Such a child as she was, but not more of a child than I. Quintero must at once have put me right out of account as someone not worth considering. That is why the sequel must have astonished him!

I don’t wonder now on looking back that she fell in love with him at sight. My only wonder is that I should have been such a fool as not to have noticed it, but I knew very little about life or human beings at that time. I was quite incredibly ignorant.

The other figure in the story now appears – Sancho Panza. He was obviously Sancho to anyone coming to Spain for the first time, although Ramon Quintero was most certainly no Don Quixote. He was round and fat like a tub, with a jolly laughing face, and he had all Sancho’s proper equipment of proverbs, love of food and drink, a passion for display, a wife, to whom he was apparently devoted, very much in the background, and a passionate affection for his friend and master, Quintero. He was supposedly Quintero’s secretary, although he never wrote any letters so far as I could see. He did everything for him – a great many things of which I was probably at the moment not in the least aware. He ran messages, endured every kind of insult, was Quintero’s utterly faithful hound.

On the very first day of our acquaintanceship he mentioned my sister.

“My aunt,” I said.

“Your aunt? Impossible!”

I explained.

He spoke only Spanish. Quintero spoke only Spanish. That was one reason why I never dreamed of an intimacy between himself and her. How could there be? Which showed how little, how sadly little, I knew about love and lovers. Quintero was teaching her Spanish on that very first day.

Then Sancho said:

“So lovely and unmarried!”

“Yes,” I said.

“And rich? All the English are rich.”

“Rolling,” I answered. It was a joke, my answer, and, as it turned out, a deadly one.

I should have resented his impertinence, but it was impossible to resent anything that Sancho said or did. He meant so well to everyone.

The next thing that occurred was that we visited the house. I see now – oh, how many things I see! – that that had been arranged by the two of them. I can see her now as, coming over to me on the verandah of the hotel, laying her hand on my shoulder, she said:

“Mr. Quintero has asked us to go to tea tomorrow afternoon!”

“How do you know?” I said, laughing. “You can’t understand a word he says.”

“Oh yes, I can,” she answered.

I should have known by the way she said that that she had already moved worlds away from me. With what a speed, with what force of a sweeping whirlwind, this thing must have caught her! She was not one, as the sequel shows, to love idly or lightly. Had she been, there would have been no story in this. This was the way, I can see now, that she had always dreamt that love would come – in a foreign land, colour and loveliness on every side of her, and the handsomest, kindest, tenderest hero at her feet! Any girl’s dream! How often in that ugly London house, with a cross father inside and the rain outside, she must have cherished just such dreams! Unlike Desdemona, she could not listen to his tales of peril and adventure, but with every word of Spanish that he taught her she crept closer to him, he had her in his possession more securely.

“Of course we’ll go,” I said. “Quintero’s a good fellow. I like him. Where does he live?”

Well, he was staying in that very house with the bright green door and the silver knocker! As we walked up the garden path the world closed in darkly about us. Spain is a noisy country; this house was as still as the grave. But my impressions of that first visit are an odd conflict of silence and sound. The background did not accord with the actors in front of it. In an old room hung with a green wall-paper painted with golden bees we had tea. The two old people, relations of Quintero’s, were there, Sancho Panza, my aunt and myself. Quintero was “the life of the party.” He was brilliant; he was perfect. Merry, kind, full of ridiculous stories, considerate of everyone. How we laughed! We sang songs to an old cracked piano while the two old people sat and nodded their heads with approval like two gentle and very ancient mandarins. To all the noise the house made no response. Beyond the windows were the shadows of the trees, and through the trees the glory of the summer sun came so dimly that it flung a pale glow. Somewhere a bird twittered in a cage.

Then they said that we must see “The Picture.” We climbed a fine old staircase that creaked with our steps, passed ghostly cabinets crowded with ghostly china, and then found ourselves in a room hung with red curtains, containing only a bookcase, a table, an old green silk settee, and some chairs as furniture, and there, the only ornament of the walls, was an amazing picture. I don’t know how good a picture it was. I am no connoisseur. It represented a young man in eighteenth-century dress, standing against a dark background of porticoes, a fountain, shadowy trees. With head erect he stood smiling. His smile was as fascinating and as mysterious as the Gioconda’s. He was young, fiery with energy and the pride of life. He was on tiptoe for any adventure. His beauty (for he was beautiful) resided in his eagerness, his almost impertinent self-confidence. While I looked I thought to myself, “What a splendid friend to have!” and then, moving to another part of the room, the light changed for me, there came some twist in the lip, some evil glint in the eyes, and I said: “He is a rogue, a rascal – I wouldn’t trust him a yard.” Then, moving back again, all my confidence in him returned.

“That’s odd,” I remember saying, but, looking round, found only the stout and smiling Sancho with me.

“Where are the others?”

“They have gone into the garden.”

I thought nothing of that. I was absorbed by the picture. I stayed there twenty minutes looking at the picture. Friend or rogue? Good man or base? To be trusted or to be fled from?

I did not know then. I do not know now.

We went to the house on many more occasions. We had tea and dinner there. Many of Quintero’s friends came. Time passed with enchanting swiftness. The weather was lovely. The waves turned with caressing, loving lightness on the gold sand. The beach was covered with the brilliant shining tents, with hundreds of naked bronze babies; the women walked selling their biscuits, offering lottery tickets, crying the delights of the Tombola; evening after evening sank from crystal blue into grape-dark skies, and the mornings glittered like fire.

But suddenly I wasn’t happy. Why? I didn’t know. I wanted to go away, but my aunt grew pale at the hint. She had never been so happy anywhere in her life as here. I detected in her a strange kind of fierceness. I realised with a flash why I was unhappy. She and I had lost touch with one another. We were never alone any more. We had no longer any confidences. I brooded sometimes, but I was too young, too inexperienced, to find a solution – I knew that we loved one another as deeply as ever. What had occurred?

Then I began to hear things about Quintero. Speaking Spanish, I made friends easily, friends outside the Quintero circle. I found that Quintero was not approved of. He was a waster, an adventurer, something of a rascal. Oh, a jolly fellow of course! Grand company. But not to be trusted. Beware of him. Don’t lend him money. A dangerous man about money. And yet there was nothing very definite. They told me frankly that there was nothing actually against him. Perhaps he was not bad, only – what was his occupation? On what did he live? And there were stories from Madrid….

I wanted to speak to her about him and I had not the courage. She was so happy. She moved like the spirit of good fortune. I noticed – poor fool that I was – a kind of ecstasy of happiness in her eyes, in her laughter. But I guessed nothing. I only knew that we were never alone together, and I wanted to go away….

Then, in a moment, in a blinding second of revelation, the catastrophe crashed. Blinding! That is my only excuse, that I had no chance of preparation, no time for thought.

One lovely morning I went down alone to the beach and came, without warning, upon Quintero and Sancho Panza. I came upon them in the middle of a fearful and appalling row. I caught a glimpse – as you see a face in a flash of lightning – of Quintero in a temper. It was a fine sight, something grand and elemental about it. He looked as though he could have caught the beach, tents and babies and all, into his fist and thrown it, crumpled to nothing, into the sea. He gave me one glance and, without a word, strode off.

Sancho was in a rage too. He was quivering like a jelly in his bathing-dress, a very ludicrous sight. He was too angry to measure his words. With real foreign abandon he flung himself on me. There were no words adequate for Quintero. Had he not slaved for him, endured every insult, served him as no other man? … and now to be cheated … money … fair wages … I caught here and there fragments of his fury.

“And you look out!” He grasped my arm. “You say she’s your aunt. Well, whatever she is, he’s got her. In another day or two he’ll be off with her, money and all…. What will you look like, my friend?”

I gazed at him bewildered. I had, I remember, a sticky sense of being bogged. I felt perhaps as a fly may feel when, dancing aimlessly, its spidery feet catch the fly-paper, its shrill buzz like the twanging of a thin wire…. But I didn’t utter a sound. I simply stared at him. His contempt for me was boundless, aided perhaps by the consciousness of his coming contempt for himself for giving his beloved friend away. He had wondered how long it would be before I would see it. My aunt – or whatever she was – had been crazy about Quintero from the first instant. That was no new thing. Quintero was used to it. In ordinary he let them go. He was not in reality greatly interested in women. But this time it was different. He had liked her, she was pretty, only a child – and then he was low in funds. He had always intended to make a safe marriage. My aunt was “rolling” – I had said so. It was myself, it seemed, who had been the trouble. At first she had said that she must tell me everything. At least that is what they thought that she meant, for one of the great difficulties throughout had been her ignorance of Spanish on one side and his of English on the other. But he had convinced her that it would be wiser to tell me after the deed was done. To warn me would only disturb me, burden me with a sense of responsibility. In any case everything was arranged. In three days’ time they were to be married in San Sebastian….

“But she hasn’t a penny!” was the cry on my lips. I don’t know now what held me back. The beginning, maybe, of that uncertainty that has haunted me all my life after.

Well, I was in an agony of distress. I use that word deliberately. It was an agony, like the fiercest toothache or the first pain of a broken arm. For so many men it would have meant nothing at all. They would have gone to her and said: “Look here, my dear, what’s all this about your running away with a Spaniard? All nonsense…. He’s a rogue and a vagabond. I’m not going to hear of it.” But it is the point of this story that neither she nor I could take anything lightly. This was the first big crisis of both our lives. If only it had come a little later when we knew one another better! But I walked down that beach simply feeling that I had been for ever and ever betrayed! I had lost, in one jeering glance from that Spaniard, the only loving intimacy I had ever known in my life. She might have told me. Oh! she might have told me!

And then, passion rising in me, my only thought was that I would at once prevent it. He was marrying her for her money – the old, old story – and she hadn’t a penny! I had a wild, savage, childish, boyish pleasure in thinking that now I could have my revenge, that now I could make her unhappy. That wickedness – for such selfish angry cruelty is perhaps the wickedest thing our heart can know – rose round the light and happiness of those last weeks as the dark trees closed in on the golden beach and the bright jade water. I would not waste an instant. I would show my power.

I was, of course, on the outside edge of the story, completely justified. Here was my poor little friend, ignorant utterly of life, in the hands of an adventurer, whom I, by a casual careless remark, had led into thinking her wealthy.

It was my plain duty to put things right. That on the outside – the heart of the affair was quite other.

Miserable, angry, blinded as though the sand had risen in a storm about my eyes, I hastened, almost running, to the house.

I remember the stillness and quietness when I had closed the gate and was alone on the garden path. Something in that stillness made me pause as though a voice out of those thick trees whispered to me: “This isn’t what you think. Go back and wait! … Go back!” It was all dim in that garden, the rumble of the sea rocking through the trees, the sunlight shimmering in shadow and little sudden patterns of brilliant light. That garden tried to hold me, but I wouldn’t be held. I knocked on the silver knocker. When the servant came I asked for Quintero. He was an old bent man, that servant, with a bald patch on his head like a nutmeg-grater. He too seemed to say before he let me in: “Won’t you stop a moment, sir, and think it over.”

He took me up the old creaking stairs and led me into the room with the picture. Then went softly out, closing the door behind him. Well, left alone, I looked at the picture, looked at it as though I had never seen it before.

At first, standing in a kind of raging despair, wanting only to get at Quintero as quickly as might be, charge him with treachery, strike him in the face, do anything that would relieve me, I thought that the young man smiled at me. He was wearing cherry-coloured breeches and a coat of white satin. He smiled at me as a friend, and the whole bare room seemed to be warm with his young honesty. “Trust me!” he seemed to say. “This is fair. Give me my opportunity. I never meant anything so truly.”

Then, in my restlessness, moving to another part of the room, his face grew shifty, his eyes narrow, his mouth curled. He seemed to disdain my simplicity, to laugh at my poor attempt at good conduct. Sometimes I think that light can do everything with pictures. Maybe there is no final value in any work of art, it is only our view that gives the estimate.

In any case I moved back to my first position again and suddenly determined to leave the thing alone, at least to wait and judge it more quietly. His honest eyes looked in mine. He seemed to nod approval. “You’ll find that best,” he seemed to say.

And then, with another shift, I was back to the other view again. This was a rascal! You could see it in his shifting eyes, the narrowness of his forehead … Why! Just the fellow to marry a poor girl for her money and then to discard her because she hadn’t any!

The door opened, and Quintero came in.

He advanced to me, his hand out, his face all smiles. And I, seeing the picture in the bad light, behaved with all the melodrama that a boy can use.

“You blackguard!” I cried.

“I know. Of course I am,” he said. “But why?”

It was then that, oddly enough, I had the impulse to leave them alone, let them do as they wished and go. The picture was smiling at me. “What right have you to interfere with other lives? And it may be that I am a finer fellow than you are!”

I think that at that time he may have been, and that she was finer too.

But I turned my back on the picture and told him what I thought of him. I used fine language. He was carrying off a young girl for her money. He didn’t love her.

“How do you know that I don’t love her?”

He seemed now to be years older than before, and his voice was cold with a sick distaste.

“Because it’s only for her money that you are taking her.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I know what you are. Everyone knows.”

Then he threw himself on me. He literally fell on to me, caught my throat with his hands, and we began the silliest, most childish rough-and-tumble. We were both young and strong. We fell about the floor, knocking the chairs over. I tore his shirt open and grabbed at his bare flesh; his long sinewy hand was strangling me. We fell together. He lay on top of me, and our hearts thumped together. We lay there panting in a kind of truce, and at last I gasped out:

“But you don’t know – the best of it – she hasn’t a penny.”

He raised himself and stared down into my face. We looked at one another, calmly, quietly, as though we loved one another. Our hands rested, palm against palm. I think that I had an odd awareness then that this was all a mistake, that if I had let them go on with it, helped them, been their friend, it would have been the most tremendous success – and for all three of us. But it was too late. I had taken the step in the wrong direction. Even if I could draw back he would not. For, resting his hand on my heart, looking down on me, he said:

“So she lied.”

I swore, panting, that she had not, that it had been my own foolish joke.

But he got up. I also scrambled to my feet.

“She has nothing?”

I said nothing.

“My last chance gone.” And, oddly enough, I’ll swear to you that I believed then, and I believe now, that it was not of money at all that he was thinking. Had she, in some innocent ingenuous way that he could not possibly understand, suggested to him that she was rich? Was it that he, like Hamlet with Ophelia, suddenly believed her treacherous, and that, believing in someone for the first time, he was for the first time deceived?

In any case I swear that it was not the money that disappointed him. Something deeper …

He looked at me with hatred and contempt. No one, before or since, has ever so utterly despised me.

He conducted a short cross-examination as a judge might with his prisoner.

“She told you – about us?”

“Not a word.”

“She did. You have been laughing at me – both of you.”

“I tell you that I had no idea. I never saw. I was blind.”

“Yes, you might be. You are too simple for anything. All the same – you are a pair. I have been a fool for the first time – to be taken in by two English …” He broke off and added to himself, as I well remember, “And to believe in an idyll – to think that once – only five minutes ago – I thought life could be like that.”

And then he burst out:

“She has nothing – not a penny?”

“Not a penny.”

He stopped then, looking at me with a sombre brooding as though he were taking a last look at something very beautiful. Then he added: “Too good for me – the whole thing. Sentimental. I always knew it.”

He tossed his head as though he had come to a decision.

“Wait here,” he said, like a master to a servant. He left the room. I remained, trying to tidy myself, but feeling that I had, in some way or another, committed some great treachery. He quickly returned. He gave me a letter.

“That is for her,” he said.

I went out.

Well, then, what do you make of it? I lost the only great thing in my life, a relationship in bud, promising every sort of beauty and friendship. I have been afraid, since then, of making a relationship.

My aunt loved him until she died five years later. When I gave her that letter she died, died to all the new life that was just beginning for her. She became an old maid. After our return to England she shut herself up in the country somewhere. She died in the second year of the war, of pneumonia.

And Quintero? That is the oddest thing. I saw him again only last year, in the rooms at Monte Carlo. He was fat, ugly, peevish. I recognised him by the little mole under his left eye. We talked a little in quite a friendly fashion. Only, at the very last, he said, looking over my shoulder into distance:

“You should have let us go away. It was my only chance. I loved her quite sincerely.”

“Why did you care for what I said? I was only a boy. And if you loved her why did the fact that she had nothing make you let her go?”

“It was not that.” He looked at me oddly. It was as though he were uncovering, for a moment, his lost self. “I had been all along afraid of my fine feelings – so unusual to me, you know. The only ones of my life. I’ve never had them again. You came in and gave me the opportunity to be my natural self. But she might have made me …” He laughed and turned away.

So she was lost and I was lost and he was lost. And if I had let her go? He was a rascal. He would have broken her heart. Or perhaps he would not. No one is altogether a rascal. And in any case she would have had her glorious time, a week, a month, a year …

What right have we ever to take things into our own hands? And how do we know? Rascal or no, doesn’t it depend on where we ourselves stand?

All Soul’s Night (1933)

SEASHORE MACABRE

A MOMENT’S EXPERIENCE

We had gone to our usual summer residence, a farm perched on the steep hill above Gosforth – Gosforth in Cumberland, where the Druid Cross is in the graveyard, so that foreigners come from the far ends of the earth to see it. For the rest the farm was hay and chickens’ eggs, and wall-flowers in hot dusty clusters under the narrow garden-wall, and the ducks walking into the kitchen, and Mrs. A———, the friendly, soft-hearted and deeply pessimistic farmer’s wife, making cakes, hot and spicy, in the cavernous black oven.

But this incident, so clearly and sharply remembered, so symbolic, Mr. Freud perhaps would tell me, of all my older life, has nothing to do with the farm, except that it starts from there. It starts from there because on fine days we bicycled three miles into Seascale.

Seascale was the nearest seaside resort. It looked then as though one day it might become a true resort. It had long, lazy sands, a new golf course, a fine hotel, and there were little roads and lanes in and about that looked as though, with the slightest encouragement, they might become quite busy shop-haunted streets. Nevertheless, little roads and lanes now after thirty years they still are. Seascale has never taken that step upward into commercial prosperity that once perhaps was hoped for it. I myself am glad that it has not. It is the one place of my childhood that is not altered. The flat, passive sands are damp and wind-blown as they always were, the little station – sticky in the warm weather with a sort of sandy grit, damp in the wet weather like a soaked matchbox – stands just as it always did, as though with a rather stupid finger to its lip it were wondering whether it should go or stay.

No, not on the face of it a romantic place, Seascale – and yet to myself one of the romantic places of the world!

We bicycled – my father, my sister and I – while my mother and small brother were driven the three miles in a pony-trap. Then, if the weather permitted us, we spent the day on Seascale sands. We bathed in water that had always a chill on it quite special to itself, we ate ham sandwiches, hard-boiled eggs and gingerbreads under the shelter of the one small rock that the beach possessed (if that rock were not already occupied), and we read – my mother and father The Egoist; I – if priggish – Le Rouge et le Noir, if unpriggish, Saracinesca.

Now it happened that one day in the week was specially glorious to me; this was the day of my weekly pocket-money, threepence the amount, if not already owed for reasons of discipline, sin or back-answering. Now it also occurred that on the same day that I received my pocket-money was published the new number of a paper, yet I believe (and hope) in a flourishing condition – The Weekly Telegraph.

The Weekly Telegraph was my love and my dear. It cost, I think, only a penny. Its dry and rather yellow-tinted sheets (smelling of straw, liquorice and gunpowder, I fancy in reminiscence) held an extraordinary amount of matter, and especially they held the romantic short stories of Robert Murray Gilchrist, the serial narratives of young Mr. Phillips Oppenheim, and even, best of all as I remember it, The Worldlings, by Mr. Leonard Merrick. There were also “Country Notes,” tinged deeply with Cumberland sights and sounds, jests, quips and oddities, ways of cleaning knives and forks, making pillow-slips and curing a child of the croup.

What I suppose I am trying to emphasise is the contrast of these happy simplicities with – well, reader (as Charlotte Brontë always said), be patient and you shall hear!

You can see me, small, spindle-shanked and wind-blown, while my family sat huddled beneath the one Seascale rock, struggling through the spidery sand to the little station, my threepenny piece damply clutched. It was, as I remember it, a day of bright, glittering sun and a high wind. I am at least certain of a general glitter in the heavens and fragments of burning sand about my eyes.

I fought my way up the slope, sand in my shoes, sand in my eyes, sand in my throat. I stood on the higher ground, rubbed the sand from my eyes and looked back to the distant plum-coloured hills where the Screes run down sheer to Wastwater and Gable rolls his shoulder. Then into the little station that burnt in the sun so that its paint sizzled. I asked for The Weekly Telegraph. I cannot remember what he was like who gave it to me, but I do know that I did not take two steps before I had opened the paper to see whether there were a Gilchrist “Peakland” story, all about My Lady Swarthmore and tinkling spinets and a room darkly hung with tapestries, and some fair child working a picture in delicate silks. Yes, there it was! The horn was blowing through Elfland, the long slow sands below me were lit with mother-of-pearl, and there were mermaids near the shore. Mr. Oppenheim was also there – A Prince of Swindlers,
Chap. XVII. “As he walked down the steps of the Hôtel Splendide, wondering whether he should try his luck at the Tables or no, Prince Serge …” I drew a deep breath of satisfaction, took a step out of the station and almost collided with the wickedest human being it has ever been my luck to behold. Now, wicked human beings are rare! I have, I think, never beheld another. The majority of us are fools with or without a little knavery. This old man was, although, as you will see, I never exchanged a word with him, really wicked – capable, I am sure, of real, fine, motiveless villainy like Iago.

He was a little man, bent in the back, wearing a rather floppy black hat and carrying an umbrella. He had, I remember, a sallow complexion, a hooked nose, and a wart on his chin. I say I remember, but indeed he is as vivid to me as though he were standing by my side at this moment – which in fact he may be for all I know to the contrary.

And now, how strange what followed! As I have said, I almost stumbled on him. He stood aside and looked at me, and I looked at him! His look as I recall it was cold, sneering and mean-faced. Then he turned on his heel and, waving his bulging umbrella in the air, walked down the road.

Why, of all things in the world, did I follow him? I cannot imagine. I was on the whole a timid child, a good deal of a coward. Moreover, I had in my hand my adored Weekly Telegraph and was longing to read in it. Nevertheless I followed him. Looking back across all those years it seems to me that a cloud passed over the sun as we walked along, that the walls of the houses shone with a less brilliant reflection, that a chill creeping little wind began to wander. That is doubtless imagination. What is true is that the little man walked without making any sound upon the road. He was wearing, I suppose, shoes soled in felt or something of the kind. What is also true is that I was drawn after him as though I were led by a string.

Now I have said that I knew him to be wicked. How did I know? Was it only the idlest fancy? At that time I had but a child’s knowledge of the world, and wickedness was far from my experience. The nearest to wickedness that I had then reached perhaps was the sight of a schoolfellow who had pulled the wings from a fly, or the lustful anger in the eyes of a schoolmaster beating one of my companions. Well, this little old man with the umbrella had something of that about him. Cruelty and meanness? Are there any other sorts of wickedness? I am sure that this little man could be both cruel and mean.

Did he know that I was following him? He must have heard my step. He gave no sign. With his head forward, his back bent, waving his umbrella, so under the windy sun he pursued his way.

Beyond the little town we reached paths soft in sand and with stiff sea-grasses sprouting there. We approached the sea and I fancy that the wind increased in volume, began to blow a hurricane. My heart was beating with terror, a sort of sickly pleasure, an odd mixture of daring and foreboding.

The little man came to a cottage knee-deep in sand, on the very edge in fact of a dune that ran down to a sea where waves were flinging in a succession of fiery silver wheels. Although the sun shone so brilliantly, the cottage looked dark and chill. There was, as I remember it, no warmth here, and the wind tugged at my trouser-legs. The little man vanished into the cottage. Clutching my Weekly Telegraph, I followed. And then – how did I have the courage? What spell was laid upon me so that I did something utterly against my nature? Or was it that my true nature was for once permitted the light?

In any case I paused, my heart hammering the little cottage as still as a picture. Then – I turned the handle of the door and looked in.

What I saw was a decent-sized kitchen with a yawning black oven, dressers – but on them no plates; windows – but uncurtained. In a rocking-chair beside the fire sat an old man, the very spit of the old gentleman I had followed. The room was dark, for the windows were small; it was lit by candles and the candles were placed, two at one end of a trestle, two at another. And on the trestle lay a corpse.

I had never until that moment seen a dead person. This figure lay wrapped in white clothes; a white bandage was round his chin; his cheeks were waxen and yellow. So he lay. There was a silence, as there should be, of the grave itself. The corpse, as, with horror clutching my throat, I more persistently gazed, was that of an old man, the image again of the old boy with the umbrella, of the old boy in the chair. Nothing stirred. I could hear the solemn tick of a clock.

But, in my agitation, unknowing, I held the door open. A sudden gust of wind rushed past me, and instantly – most horrible of all my life’s recollections! – everything sprang to life. The little man whom I had followed appeared at the head of the kitchen-stairs and, in the most dreadful way, he pointed his umbrella as though condemning me to instant death. The little man in the chair sprang out of his sleep, and I shudder now when I remember his loose eye with its pendulous lid and an awful toneless grin as he stepped towards me. But worst of all was the way in which the thin silver hair of the corpse began to blow and his grave-clothes to flutter.

The room was filled with the wind. Sand came blowing in. Everything was on the move; it seemed to me that the yellow-faced corpse raised his hand …

Screaming, I ran for my life. Stumbling, falling, bruising my knees, tearing my hands against the spiky grass, I frantically escaped.

A moment’s experience – yes, but Mr. Freud might say – a lifetime’s consequence.

All Soul’s Night (1933)

SENTIMENTAL BUT TRUE

I

Mrs. Comber had no idea where it came from. She had been sitting on the green, sloping cliff at Rafiel, a fishing village on the south coast of Cornwall, looking at the sea, and suddenly it came up to her.

“Came” is perhaps an inaccurate word – “rolled” or “tumbled” would describe more nearly its motion, although even then one conveys no sense of its sudden, abrupt halt, a check so sharp that it seemed as though the dog must, by the force of it, be tumbled backwards.

It had come so suddenly from nowhere that Mrs. Comber of course expected that, in a moment, someone (its master or mistress) would turn the corner and summon it down the hill. But the minutes passed and no one came, and the sun continued to blaze out of burning blue into burning blue, and little Rafiel lay on its back down in the valley behind the hill and simmered, and the dog sat there motionless, frozen into amazement at the vision of Mrs. Comber.

Mrs. Comber knew very little about dogs, but she knew enough to be sure that there was no other dog in the world quite like this one.

He might have been, were he smaller, a Yorkshire terrier, or, were he very, very much larger, a sheep-dog. He had, too, a dash of Skye. He was small but remarkably square, so square that he bore a distinct resemblance to the popular conception of a sea-captain. Hair that was turned up at the ends of it into little curls by the wind fell all about him – over his eyes, spreading into an American sharp-pointed beard under his chin, making his legs like the legs of an Eskimo, waving in frantic agitation all round his stump of a tail. His nose, like a wet black button, and his mouth, with an under-lip that went back in rather a melancholy curve, were his most certain features, but his eyes, when his hair allowed you to see them, were a beautiful melting brown.

Perhaps the most amazing thing about him was that the second half of his body was quite different from the first half, being broader and thicker, so that he seemed to have been the complete result of two divided dogs – and these two had been rather badly glued together.

He looked at Mrs. Comber and then he laughed. He gave two short, sharp barks and wagged his stump of a tail.

Mrs. Comber was large and highly coloured. Her face was stout and good-natured; her eyes appealed to you as though they said, “I know that I’m silly and stupid and scatter-brained, but do try to find something to like in me.”

She liked to wear purple or bright green or red; she always looked untidy and a little dusty; she was always in a breathless hurry, hastening to do something that she had forgotten, and so forgetting something that she ought already to have done. She loved to be liked, and therefore seized at any sign of goodwill, but she always made advances too quickly, was flung back, and, with tears, determined that she’d never make advances to anyone again, and then made them again immediately.

Her husband was stupid, conventional, self-opinionated, and an entirely self-satisfied man, who took his wife for granted, and thought she was lucky to be allowed to serve his wants. He was a master at Moffatt’s, a school not far from Rafiel, and there he had been during twenty years of his life, and would be in all probability for twenty years more. He liked food and golf and bridge and arguments and putting people in their places. He despised his wife in her sentimental moments and disliked her in her careless ones, but on the whole he found her useful.

Mrs. Comber had felt lonely and just a little depressed. Certainly this fine weather was very wonderful, and it was a great deal better – oh, yes! a great deal better – than that miserable wet time that they had had during their first days in Rafiel, but it did mean that her husband disappeared every morning with his golf-clubs and was no more seen until the evening, when he was too tired to talk.

No one, up at the pension where they were staying, appealed to her except a girl, Miss Salter, who was at the present moment occupied with a young man who was expected very shortly to propose.

So, in spite of her protestations, Mrs. Comber was lonely. Up at the villa she said, “I can’t tell you how delightful it is just pottering about by myself all about the little place. One gets to know the villagers so well. They are always so glad to see one, so friendly, it’s quite like home. I’ve never enjoyed myself so much.”

But the honest truth was that Mrs. Comber longed for company. As the wife of a schoolmaster she had during the greater part of the year more than enough of her fellow-creatures. One might have supposed that solitude would be pleasant for a little time. So in theory it was. During the heat and battle of term-time, to be alone seemed the most fortunate of destinies. But now in practice – now!

Mrs. Comber looked at the blue sea and the green cliffs and longed for conversation, affection, the positive proof that there was someone in the world – scoundrel or vagabond, it did not matter – who was at that moment desiring her company.

Well, the dog desired it. Of that there could be no possible doubt. His brown eyes, through the tangled hair, gazed at Mrs. Comber with the utmost devotion. Then, his whole body quivering, his lip drew back and he grinned, the most pathetic, urgent, wheedling grin.

Down upon the black rocks far below, the gulls, like flakes of snow, hovered and wheeled, rose and fell. The sea broke into crisp patterns along the shore; its lazy murmur mingled with the hum of bees behind her, among the honeysuckle.

Round the point the Rafiel fishing-boats, with their orange sails, stole as though bent on some secret, nefarious business.

Mrs. Comber, who was emotional and completely at the mercy of fine weather and a coloured world, felt that her heart was full. She drew the dog towards her.

II

Seven o’clock struck suddenly down in the valley, and Mrs. Comber ceased her conversation with the dog and pulled herself together.

Meanwhile, she had told the dog everything. She had explained to him that apparently hopeless paradox that, although one was longing for peace and quiet, yet nevertheless one hated solitude. She explained to him all the disadvantages of having to do with schools most of one’s life, and at the same time gave him to understand that she was not complaining, and that many poor people had much worse times, and that most of her troubles came from the difficulties of her own temperament, from her impetuosity and clumsiness and bad memory for detail.

The dog understood every word of it.

He had a way of sitting with one of his back legs stretched out in a straight line from his body, so that he seemed more certainly than ever to be compounded of two different dogs. His brown eyes gazed sadly out to sea, but every now and again he bent forward and licked her hand. She had now no sense, when she had finished her impetuous disclosures, of shame because she had been too garrulous, too intimate, too confiding. The dog could have listened to a great deal more.

He followed closely at her side as she walked down the hill. She had still, at the back of her brain, a confused sense that his master would suddenly appear round the corner. She would be very sorry when he was taken away from her.

He ran on in front of her, ran back, jumped upon her, showed himself in every way delighted at the afternoon’s events. When he ran, he ran like a rabbit with his stump of a tail in the air, his head down, his ears flapping, and his legs scattering.

The evening scents stole out upon the air. The little square harbour was starred and crossed with reflected lights – blue and brown and grey. The crooked streets flung voices from one corner to another and one evening star came out.

Mrs. Comber climbed the opposite hill up to Sea View Villa, and still the dog was with her.

At one of the little cottages she stopped for a moment to speak to Mr. Tregatta, known in the village by the title of “Captain.” Captain Tregatta, although he was sixty-two, looked not a day more than forty. He was short and square, with the compact, buttoned look that years in the Navy give a man. He had retired now and received a small pension weekly.

He lived for two things – his son and music – and he had talked a good deal to Mrs. Comber about both of these things. His son was in a hosier’s in Bristol, and he had not, during the last five years, found time to come and pay his father a visit, and had quite plainly expressed his wish that his father should not come and visit him. So his father had waited, and now, as Mrs. Comber knew, the son was at last coming home.

“Tomorrer,” said the captain, as he gave Mrs. Comber good evening, “tomorrer the lad’s comin’, bless ’is ’eart. ‘Inconvenient, dad, though it is,’ ’e writes to me, ‘I wouldn’t disappoint ’ee’ – no, nor ’e wouldn’t, bless ’ee.”

“I’m sure I’m very glad,” said Mrs. Comber, a little doubtfully, wondering whether the reality of this reluctant son from a Bristol hosier’s would be quite so glorious as the anticipation. She liked the little captain better than anyone in Rafiel. He had a mild blue eye, a most sentimental heart, and he was lonely.

“That’s a nice little dawg,” eyeing Mrs. Comber’s shaggy admirer, who was sitting now with his leg out and his lip in.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Comber eagerly. “I don’t know whom it belongs to. It just came along and attached itself to me. Dogs are so confiding, aren’t they? And, really, it’s a nice little creature. Yes – well, if you hear of anyone who’s lost one, Captain Tregatta. Good night.”

She climbed the hill and did hope, as she went, that the son would not turn out too dreadfully disappointing – five years in a hosier’s shop could make such a difference.

It was then, as the hideous front of Sea View Villa shone horribly before her, that she first seriously confronted the question of the dog. He, she could perceive, had no question at all as to what she would do with him, and his confidence alone would have made it difficult for her to dismiss him.

But she knew, assuredly, without any question of his attitude to her, that she could not leave him. It might be only for tonight. Probably in the morning someone would come and claim him. But tonight she must keep him.

Then, as she drew nearer Sea View Villa, she knew that she would need all her courage. Had she been of the type that perpetually accuses Fate she would have taken this moment as only another instance of the way that she was for ever driven into the ludicrous. Other human beings passed through life gathering what they desired, achieving their aims, always, to the end, preserving their dignity. But she—

Years ago, when she had first married Freddie Comber, she had told herself that, whatever happened, for his sake as well as her own, she must henceforth never be absurd.

And since then, beyond her agency, without any action on her part, she was driven again and again into ridiculous situations. She was always being driven into them. Things that others could achieve without danger were, for her, beset with difficulties. Always the laughing audience, always that amused anticipation “that Mrs. Comber would put her foot into it.”

Well, for herself, she might perhaps endure it, but Freddie did hate it so. He hated it, and he showed her that he hated it.

Now, once again, when an ordinary person could arrive with perfect security at a pension with a strange dog, Mrs. Comber knew that, for herself, it would be a position of danger and insecurity. Freddie liked dogs – of his own discovering – but he would hate this one. The others, with the exception of Miss Salter, would see in it “another of Mrs. Comber’s funny ways.” Mrs. Pentaglos, the head of Sea View Villa, would be kind and polite, but she would disapprove.

For an instant Mrs. Comber hesitated. Then, remembering that long exchange of intimacies on the cliff, she marched boldly forward.

III

She had hoped that, on this one occasion, Fortune would favour her, would permit her to creep round at the back with the dog and put him in the outhouse, then gradually, at her own time, she might explain to them his presence. But no. How like Fortune’s treatment of her! There, to her horror, she saw them all, taking their last glimpse at a magnificent sunset, sitting in the little green strip of garden.

She could not escape them. Freddie, just returned from golf, was standing, in radiant glow from the sunset, enormous, important, in the fullest of plus fours.

She heard him say, “You can take my opinion for what it is worth, Mrs. Cronnel. I don’t pretend to be one of these brainy fellows.”

She’d heard him say that so often before. Mrs. Cronnel, always fat and yellow, but now under the sunset positively golden, was filling a large easy-chair and was looking up into Freddie Comber’s face with rapt attention. Miss Bride and Miss Salter, two young ladies who were rivals for the hand of Mr. Salmon, the only bachelor resident at Sea View Villa, were saying bitter things to one another in a sprightly and amiable manner.

All these people turned at the sound of Mrs. Comber’s feet upon the gravel and saw her, flushed, untidy, agitated, with a strange dog at her side. Mrs. Cronnel, who for obvious reasons hated Mrs. Comber, cried, with a shrill scream, “Oh! a dog!”

Otherwise there was silence.

Mrs. Comber, laughing nervously, came forward.

“Oh! I didn’t know you’d all be here; that is, I might have guessed that you’d all be looking at the sunset – so natural – but here you all are. Yes, I’ve found a dog, such a dear little thing, and it would come all the way with me, although I did try to send it back. I did really. But you know what dogs are, Mrs. Cronnel.” (Mrs. Cronnel, who detested dogs, obviously, from her expression, declined to have any knowledge of them whatever.) “I hadn’t the heart, I hadn’t really. Isn’t he jolly? A Yorkshire, I think, only he’s rather large. He’s so hairy I think I shall call him Rags.”

Mrs. Comber paused.

Mrs. Cronnel said, with a cruel little smile, “Rather a commonplace name for a dog, Mrs. Comber.”

Mrs. Comber laughed nervously. “Oh, do you think so? Perhaps it is.”

Then there was a long pause. The dog looked at them all and understood at once that he was not likely to be very popular there. But he had, in all probability, been received doubtfully before on other occasions. He was brave; he smiled at them all, wagged his tail, went into the middle of them, pretended to see an enemy, growled; rolled on his back, finally sat up, and, with one ear back, lifted his blackberry nose towards Mr. Comber with the most amiable of interrogations.

Freddie Comber looked at him, then across at his wife. “What a cur!” he snapped, and vanished.

Mrs. Comber slowly coloured, and a little smile, intended for bravery, but too struggling and fugitive for success, came and passed.

They all saw it, and even in Mrs. Cronnel’s dry heart there was sympathy. Miss Salter fell on her knees before the dog.

“You darling! You really are! Oh, Mrs. Comber, how splendid of you to find him! I know Mrs. Pentaglos won’t mind. He can be kept in the stable. And he looks as good as gold. I know he’s adorable.”

To all the women, as they stood there with the dusk coming up about them, there came the thought that men were beasts, that women must band together, that no woman in the world could ever be as cruel as Mr. Comber had been. For the moment they came together – Miss Bride and Miss Salter, Mrs. Comber and Mrs. Cronnel.

“I knew you’d all love him,” said Mrs. Comber, in an ecstasy.

IV

Freddie Comber was one of those men who say a thing by accident and then afterwards cling to what they have said as though it were the key-note of their lives. He liked dogs – he had always liked them.

Had Mrs. Cronnel found the dog, or had even his own Mrs. Comber brought it to him at a propitious moment – when he was flushed with success at golf or billiards or argument – he would in all probability have taken the dog to himself, acclaimed it as his own find, petted and indulged it.

But his wife had arrived at a moment when he was explaining the world to sympathetic listeners, she had looked foolish and frightened – the dog had been condemned.

He had called the dog a cur in public, therefore must the dog always be a cur. His wife had been foolish about the dog in the beginning, therefore must she always be considered foolish. The dog was a nuisance, his wife was a fool – so must things remain.

He regarded Rags, therefore, with exceeding disgust, and the secret affection that he felt for him in his heart only spurred him to further obstinate exhibitions of his disgust.

At any rate, the dog must be a wastrel of the very worst description, because nobody came to claim him. It was obvious to any intelligent person that his former owner had desired anxiously to be rid of him. Probably the dog had some horrible disease or infirmity. Probably he had a vicious temper and bit children and horses. Drowning was much the best thing.

“I know a bit about dogs,” he would say a hundred times a day, “and if ever there was a cur—”

Secretly, in his heart, he admired it. With the other inhabitants of Sea View Villa Rags had instantly won his way.

He was a dog of the most engaging character in the world and of an amazing intuition. He realised, for instance, that what Mrs. Cronnel liked was for people to be deferential to her, to listen and to admire. He therefore lay at her feet and looked up at her golden locks with the burning eyes of a devout adorer. He never practised upon her his humour, of which he had a vast store. She did not understand humour.

He kept his humour for Miss Salter, in whom it lay dormant, waiting for encouragement. Miss Salter had been too anxiously engaged in landing Mr. Salmon to see anything in a very humorous light, but Rags restored to her the funny side of things and was never serious with her for a moment.

To Mrs. Pentaglos he paid the deference that is due to the head of an establishment, to one who may dismiss you in an instant into an outhouse if she so pleases. He was always very staid and respectful to Mrs. Pentaglos.

But it was to Mrs. Comber only that he gave his heart.

The two of them discovered during the weeks that they were together a thousand things that they had in common. They were really very alike in many ways, except that the dog had far more tact, adapted himself much more swiftly to the atmosphere about him. Mrs. Comber herself perceived this. She saw that the dog at Sea View Villa was a very different dog from the dog down in Rafiel. At the villa he was ordinary, amusing on the surface. He did little tricks; he played in an amiable manner on the grass; he allowed himself to be petted by Miss Salter or Mrs. Pentaglos. Down in the narrow little streets of the village he was a dog of importance and also a dog of mysterious perceptions and intuitions.

Mrs. Comber felt that, with the dog at her side, she was more at home among those cobbles, bending roofs, sudden glimpses of blue water, and clustered fishing-boats than she ever was alone. Rags knew every inhabitant; he selected the good from the bad, the worthy from the unworthy; he was treated with a deference by the other dogs of the place that was remarkable indeed, for the dogs of Rafiel were a wild and savage race.

To Mrs. Comber the effect of it all was astonishing – it was as though the dog were, through all these weeks, explaining the place to her. She felt it – the mysterious, subtle life of it – so poignantly that the knowledge that in another week or two she must be uprooted from it all and go back to her commonplace, workaday Moffatt’s – little boys, mutton underdone, Freddie overdone – seemed to her, through these glorious hours, an incredible disaster.

She couldn’t go back – she couldn’t go back. Then, coming to herself, she laughed. Had she not lived that life for all these past years? Could one always expect holiday?

Then also, perhaps, if the dog had so lightened this place for her he would also lighten Moffatt’s in the same way. She must take him back – she must take him back. Would Freddie allow it? He must allow it. This time she would have her way.

Of all the Rafiel natives Rags liked best Captain Tregatta. The little man had an affection for all animals, but perhaps it was because he represented more truly than any other inhabitant the Rafiel spirit that Rags liked him so much. They had always, when they were together, an air of the most complete understanding. Captain Tregatta did not find it necessary to speak to Rags as he would to an ordinary dog. Words were not needed.

Mrs. Comber, indeed, almost resented a feeling that she had when she was with them both that she was “out of it.”

Rags did not like young Tregatta from Bristol. He would go nowhere near him. He would neither bark nor smile, wag nor quiver. He would cut him dead.

Mrs. Comber did not like the young man either. He was thin, with lank black hair, watery eyes and a pallid cheek. His ears stood out from his head like wings. He patronised and sneered at his father. He always “washed his hands” as he came towards Mrs. Comber, and obviously found it very difficult to refrain from saying, “And what can I do for you today, madam?”

They stood, all four, outside Captain Tregatta’s cottage. Young Tregatta said:

“Well, it ’as been a fine day, ma’am.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Comber, who was always at her most voluble when she was in company that she disliked. “It has – really wonderful; so much colour and sun. I—”

“My boy’s had a fine outing today, haven’t yer, John? We went and picnicked up along to Durotter, us and the Simpsons and Mrs. ———”

“All right, father,” the young man interrupted. “Stow it. Stupid day, I call it.”

He caught Rags’s eye. Rags was regarding him with a cold and haughty malevolence. He bent down and snapped his fingers. “Goo’ dog – “goo’ doggie! Come along then.”

Rags did nothing, but continued to stare. Mrs. Comber wished them good night and passed up the hill. How she disliked the young man! The captain had a wistful look; she was sure that the son had been a great disappointment. What a horrid mess towns could make of a man!

V

And now was she horribly driven in upon her climax. Never in all her married life before had she so eagerly desired a request to be granted by Freddie. Never before had she faced the approaching moment of demand with such sinkings of the heart.

They had only another three days before they must return to Moffatt’s, and with every instant of the swiftly vanishing time the spell of Rafiel increased. Could she take Rags back with her to her daily life, then she would seem to be taking with her some of the adorable things that belonged to Rafiel. He would remind her of some of the most precious moments of her life.

But, indeed, of himself now he had contrived to squeeze himself into her heart. Whatever part she might play to herself, God knew that for many years that heart had been empty. But Rags had wanted it and had taken it.

She watched Freddie’s every movement now to give her a clue to his probable answer. Golf had been well with him during these last days; he was in a good temper. Had Mrs. Comber been able to hide her feelings, had she managed to surprise him suddenly with her request, at the last moment, on the eve of departure, she might have won. But she was no diplomatist. She showed him by her fluttering agitation that there was something that she wanted to ask him, and she showed him that she was afraid, already, lest he should refuse.

That determined him at once. He would refuse. These little opportunities of displaying his authority were of great value. Every husband ought to refuse his wife at least once a month. He would certainly refuse.

The moment came. It was the last night but one of their holiday, and Freddie was undoing his collar before the looking-glass. The head of the stud had allowed itself to be bent and the collar refused to move.

Of course, Mrs. Comber chose this unpropitious moment for her petition. It was odd that she should feel seriously about it, but her throat was quite dry and her heart was beating furiously.

“Freddie!”

“Yes? Con – found it!”

“Freddie!”

“Well?”

“I wonder – I’ve been thinking – it’s occurred to me—”

The stud broke, the collar was off, but what was one going to do in the morning? There was no other stud with a large enough head, and on the very day when there would be so much to see to—

“Hang it! Well?”

“I’m so sorry, dear. Perhaps I’ll be able to find another. What I was going to say, to ask you, was whether – if you wouldn’t very much mind – whether – he wouldn’t be in the way, really no trouble at all, and it would make such a difference to me – and I think you’d like him after a time; it would be so nice for the boys, too, and there is that kennel—”

“What are you talking about?”

He had turned and faced her, his cheeks still flushed with the exertion of the stud.

“Well” – Mrs. Comber’s voice trembled a little – “it’s only Rags. I thought, if you didn’t dreadfully mind, if I might – if we might – take him back with us to Moffatt’s; it would make such a difference to me. I’ve got to love this place so, you know, and you’ll think it very silly of me, but if I had Rags with me at Moffatt’s – well, I know you’ll think it just like my usual silliness, but I should feel as though I had taken a bit of this place with me.”

Freddie had said no word, only stood there, staring at her, and fingering, absent-mindedly, his stud. Her allusion to the place had suddenly surprised some curious feeling, right down deep in him, that he too had loved this Rafiel, had had the best of days here, would be immensely sorry to leave it. And this sudden feeling angered him. What was he doing with feelings of that kind?

He was quite ashamed, and resenting his shame, laid the discomfort of it to his wife’s charge, and beyond her to the dog. The dog! The mongrel!

His wife wanted the dog at Moffatt’s. She was terrified lest he should refuse. He was master. He was a man. No more of this miserable sentiment for him. He would show her.

“Once for all,” he said, glowering at her, “you can put that out of your mind. I’ve hated the dog from the first; it’s a beastly mongrel, and the sooner it’s drowned the better.”

“But, Freddie—”

“Not another word will I utter. I’m a man who means what he says.”

“Please, just listen. He—”

“No more. I’ve got to get undressed. You must get rid of the dog.”

She saw that it was final – that, and how much else? For, as he stood there, denying her this simple thing, as he looked at her so angrily, so cruelly, she knew, once and for all, that all her love for him was gone, had been gone indeed for many years past. She would in the future care for him in a protecting, motherly way; she would always be a good wife to him, but no more passion, no more colour, no more poetry.

She turned away and lay by his side that night as though he were suddenly a stranger. In the morning it was almost more than she could bear, the joy that Rags, coming to meet her, flung upon her. He curved round until his tail was nearly in his mouth; he bared his teeth; his stump of a tail, with hair branching out of it on every side until it looked like a Christmas-tree, almost wagged itself from his body. It was very early, before breakfast. Down the hill they went into the little village, all sparkling with morning freshness, the little quay reeking with fish, the cobbles glittering with silver scales.

She turned the corner and came out on to the path that runs above the little harbour. The boats, blue and green, lay in rows and, beyond and above them, the little white cottages stole up the hill into all the misty brightness of a summer morning. A haze was over the sea, so that it came quite suddenly out of nowhere, white and blue on to the rocks.

The abandon and reality of the beauty of it all came up to Mrs. Comber, but she seemed to have no place in it. The future of her life, how dreary, how purposeless! Not even Rags to comfort her! For the first time since her marriage she rebelled – hotly, fiercely rebelled. Why should she not leave Freddie? Why should she be the only one in the world to do without things? Why need she suffer so? It was the hardest, sharpest, cruellest moment of her life.

Little Captain Tregatta turned the corner. Rags ran forward to meet him, jumped upon him, licked his hand. But Captain Tregatta’s face was sad, his shoulders drooped, he looked old.

“Good marnin’, ma’am.”

“Good morning,” said Mrs. Comber.

“Lovely day. Yes, indeed, if you’re in tune for it; but there’s nothing like lovely weather for making you melancholy if you’re out of sorts.”

His distress touched her at once.

“I’m sorry if something’s the matter,” she said.

“Oh! it’s silly. Only my boy. ’E goes back to Bristol today, and ’e’s glad to go. Yes, ’e is – I knaws it. And ’e’ll never come back, I knaw that, too. All this time I’ve been ’appy thinking that ’e cared for me – maybe ’e was a bit busy, but ’e cared all the same – and now I knaws ’e doesn’t – I knaws it; and now all the day will be without somethin’, always. It’s a long time to be waitin, doing nothing, thinking of nothing.”

Rags, with his back legs before his front ones, sat hunched up, looking at the sea.

As she felt the glory of the morning the idea came to her – it flashed upon her.

“Captain Tregatta,” she said hurriedly, “I’m going away tomorrow – I can’t take the dog with me. It wouldn’t do in a school, you know. Would you look after him for me? Keep him here with you so that he’ll be here when I come back next summer. I’ve loved Rafiel so, and I feel that if I knew you were both here together I would feel as though I’d got a link with the place – both of you together here.”

“I will, ma’am,” he said. “Certainly I will. ’E’ll be ’ere for yer when yer come back to us, as I hope yer will.” Then, with a little sigh of satisfaction, “Yes. That’s correct.”

Mrs. Comber thanked him. She waited, tried to say more, but failed.

They all three looked out to sea. Cries and bells came up to them from the village. Suddenly Mrs. Comber, very red in the face, caught Rags’s body in her arms, gave him one hug, and then thrust him into the captain’s hands.

“There – take him – take him. You two together will be splendid to think of. Good-bye – good-bye. I’m feeling too silly for words. Good-bye – good-bye – good-bye.”

She went, almost running, down into the flashing village, past the fish, the smells, the gossip, the cobbles – up the hill to Sea View Villa.

She did not turn or stay, but in her heart there was that picture of the dog and the man – both of them wanting her to come back.

She had staked her claim in Rafiel after all.

All Soul’s Night (1933)

THE STAIRCASE

It doesn’t matter in the least where this old house is. There were once many houses like it. Now there are very few.

It was born in 1540 (you can see the date of its birth over the lintel of the porch, cut into the stone). It is E-shaped with central porch and wings at each end. Its stone is now, in its present age, weathered to a beautiful colour of pearl-grey, purple-shadowed. This stone makes the house seem old, but it is not old; its heart and veins are strong and vigorous, only its clothes now are shabby.

It is a small house as Tudor manor-houses go, but its masonry is very solid, and it was created by a spirit who cared that it should have every grace of proportion and strength. The wings have angle buttresses, and the porch rises to twisted terminals; there are twisted terminals with cupola tops also upon the gables, and the chimneys too are twisted. The mullioned windows have arched heads, and the porch has a Tudor arch. The arch is an entrance to a little quadrangle, and there are rooms above and gables on either side. Here and there is rich carving very fancifully designed.

It is set upon a little hill, and the lawn runs down to a small formal garden with box-hedges mounted by animals fancifully cut, a sun-dial, a little stone temple. Fields spread on either side of it and are bordered completely by a green tangled wood. The trees climb skywards on every side, but they are not too close about the house. They are too friendly to it to hurt it in any way. Over the arched porch a very amiable gargoyle hangs his head. He has one eye closed and a protruding chin from which the rain drips on a wet day, and in the winter icicles hang from it.

All the country about the house is very English, and the villages have names like Croxton, Little Pudding, Big Pudding, Engleheart and Applewain. A stream runs at the end of the lower field, runs through the wood, under the road, by other fields, so far as Bonnet where it becomes a river and broadens under bridges at Peckwit, the country town.

The house is called Candil Place and is very proud of its name. Its history for the last hundred years has been very private and personal. No one save myself and the house knows the real crises of its history, just as no one knows the real crisis of your history save yourself. You have doubtless been often surprised that neighbours think that such and such events have been the dramatic changing moments in your life – as when you lost your wife or your money or had scarlet fever – when in reality it was the blowing of a window curtain, the buying of a ship in silver, or the cry of a child on the stair.

So it has been with this house which has had its heart wrung by the breaking of a bough in the wind, a spark flying from the chimney, or a mouse scratching in the wainscot. From its birth it has had its own pride, its own reserve, its own consequence. Everything that has happened in it, every person who has come to it or gone from it, every song that has been sung in it, every oath sworn in it, every shout, every cry, every prayer, every yawn has found a place in its history.

Its heart has been always kindly, hospitable, generous; it has had as many intentions as we have all had, towards noble ends and fine charities. But life is not so easy as that.

Its first days were full of light and colour. Of course it was always a small house; Sir Mortimer Candil, who helped to create it, loved it, and the house gave him its heart. The house knew that he did for it what he could with his means; the house suffered with him when his first wife died of the plague, rejoiced with him when he married again so beautiful a lady, suffered with him once more when the beautiful lady ran away to Spain with a rascal.

There is a little room, the Priest’s Room, where Sir Mortimer shut himself in and cried, one long summer day, his heart away. When he came out of there he had no heart any more, and the house, the only witness of that scene, put its arms about him, loved him more dearly than it had ever done, and mourned him most bitterly when he died.

The house after that had a very especial tenderness for the Priest’s Room, which was first hung with green tapestry, and then had dark panelling, and then was whitewashed, and then had a Morris wall-paper, and then discovered its dark panelling again, changing its clothes but never forgetting anything.

But the house was never a sentimental weakling. It was rather ironic in spirit because of the human nature that it saw and the vanity of all human wishes.

As to this business of human wishes and desires, the house has never understood them, having a longer vision and a quieter, more tranquil heart. After the experience that it has had of these strange, pathetic, obstinate, impulsive, short-sighted beings it has decided, perhaps, that they are bent on self-ruin and seem to wish for that.

This has given the house an air of rather chuckling tenderness.

Considering such oddities, its chin in its hand and the wood gathering round to listen, whether there should be anything worth listening to (for the house when it likes is a good story-teller), the eye of its mind goes back to a number of puzzling incidents and, most puzzling of all, to the story of Edmund Candil and his lady Dorothy, the events of a close summer evening in 1815, the very day that the house and its inhabitants had the news of Waterloo.

Sir Edmund Candil was a very restless, travelling gentleman, and all the trouble began with that.

The house could never understand what pleasure he found in all these tiresome foreign tours that he prosecuted when there was the lovely English country for him to spend his days in. His wife Dorothy could not understand this either.

There was a kind of fated air about them from the moment of their marriage. The house noticed it on their very wedding-day, and the Priest’s Room murmured to the Parlour: “Here’s an odd pair!” and the Staircase whispered to the little dark Hall with the family pictures: “This doesn’t look too well,” and the Powder-Closet repeated to the Yellow Bedroom: “No, this doesn’t look well at all.”

They had, of course, all known Edmund from his birth. He was a swarthy, broad-shouldered baby, unusually long in the leg, and from the very beginning he was known for his tender heart and his obstinate will. These two qualities made him very silent. His tender heart caused him to be afraid of giving himself away, his obstinate will made him close his mouth and jut out his chin so that nobody could possibly say that his resolve showed signs of weakening.

He had a sister Henrietta, who was the cause of all the later trouble. The house never from the beginning liked Henrietta. It considered that always she had been of a sly, mean, greedy disposition. There is nothing like a house for discovering whether people are mean or greedy. Chests of drawers, open fireplaces, chairs and tables, staircases and powder-closets, these are the wise recipients of impressions whose confidence and knowledge you can shake neither by lies nor arrogances.

The house was willing to grant that Henrietta loved her brother, but in a mean, grasping, greedy manner, and jealousy was her other name.

They were children of a late marriage and their parents died of the smallpox when Edmund was nineteen and Henrietta twenty-one. After that Henrietta ruled the house because Edmund was scarcely ever there, and the house disliked exceedingly her rule. This house was, as I have said, a loyal and faithful friend and servant of the Candil family. Some houses are always hostile to their owners, having a great unreasoning pride of their own and considering the persons who inhabit them altogether unworthy of their good fortune. But partly for the sake of Sir Mortimer, who had created and loved it, and partly because it was by nature kindly, and partly because it always hoped for the best, the house had always chosen only the finest traits in the Candil character and refused to look at any other.

But, if there is one thing that a house resents, it is to be shabbily and meanly treated. When a carpet is worn, a window rattling in the breeze, a pipe in rebellion, a chair on the wobble, the house does everything towards drawing the attention of its master. This house had been always wonderfully considerate of expense and the costliness of all repair. It knew that its masters were not men of great wealth and must go warily with their purposes, but, until Henrietta, the Candils had been generous within their powers. They had had a pride in the house which made them glad to be generous. Henrietta had no such pride. She persisted in what she called an “adequate economy,” declaring that it was her duty to her brother who drove her, but as the house (who was never deceived about anything) very well knew, this so-called “economy” became her god and to save money her sensual passion.

She grew into a long bony woman with a faint moustache on her upper lip and a strange, heavy, flat-footed way of walking. The Staircase, a little conceited perhaps because of its lovely banisters that were as delicate as lace, hated her tread and declared that she was so common that she could not be a Candil. Several times the Staircase tripped her up out of sheer maliciousness. The Store-room hated her more than did any other part of the house. Every morning she was there, skimping and cheese-paring, making this last and doing without that, wondering whether this were not too expensive and that too “outrageous.” Of course her maidservants would not stay with her. She found it cheapest to engage little charity-girls, and when she had them she starved them. It is true that she also starved herself, but that was no virtue; the house would see the little charity-girls crying from sheer hunger in their beds, and its heart would ache for them.

This was of course to some degree different when Edmund came home from his travels, but not very different, because he was always considerably under his sister’s influence. He was soft-hearted and she was hard, and, as the house very well knew, the hard ones always win.

Henrietta loved her brother, but she was also afraid of him. She was very proud of him but yet more proud of her domination over him. When he was thirty and she thirty-two she was convinced that he would never marry. It had been once her terror that he should, and she would lie awake thinking one moment of the household accounts and the next of wicked girls who might entrap her brother. But it seemed that he was never in love; he returned from every travel as virgin as before.

She said to him one morning, smiling her rather grim smile: “Well, brother, you are a bachelor for life, I think.”

It was then that he told her that he was shortly to marry Miss Dorothy Preston of Cathwick Hall.

He spoke very quietly, but, as the armchair in the Adam Room noticed, he was not quite at his ease. They were speaking in the Adam Room at the time, and this armchair had only recently been purchased by Edmund Candil. The room was not known then as the Adam Room (it had that title later) but it was the room of Edmund’s heart. The fireplace was in the Adam style and so were the ceiling, and the furniture, the chairs, the table, the sofa, the commode Edmund had had made for him in London.

Very lovely they were, of satin-wood and mahogany, with their general effect of straight line but modified by lovely curves, delicate and shining. In the centre of the commode was a painted vase of flowers, on the ceiling a heavenly tracing of shell-like circles. Everywhere grace and strength and the harmony of perfect workmanship.

This room was for Edmund the heart of England, and he would stand in it, his dark eyes glowing, fingering his stock, slapping his tight thigh with his riding-whip, a glory at his heart. Many things he had brought with him from foreign countries. There was the Chinese room, and the little dining-room was decorated with Italian pictures. In his own room that he called the Library there was an ink-horn that had been (they said) Mirabeau’s, a letter of Marie Antoinette’s, a yellow lock cut from the hair of a mermaid and some of the feathers from the head-dress of an African chieftain. Many more treasures than these. But it was the Parlour with the fine furniture bought by him in London that was England, and it was of this room that he thought when he was tossing on the Bay of Biscay or studying pictures in Florence or watching the ablutions of natives in the Sacred River.

It was in this room that he told his sister that he intended marriage.

She made no protest. She knew well enough when her brother’s mind was made up. But it was a sunny morning when he told her, and as the sun, having embraced merrily the box-hedge peacocks and griffins, looked in to wish good-morning to the sofa and the round shining satin-wood table that balanced itself so beautifully on its slim delicate legs, it could tell that the table and chairs were delighted about something.

“What is it?” said the sun, rubbing its chin on the window-sill.

“There’s a new mistress coming,” said the table and chairs.

And, when she came, they all fell at once in love with her. Was there ever anyone so charming and delicate in her primrose-coloured gown, her pretty straw bonnet and the grey silk scarf about her shoulders? Was there ever anyone so charming?

Of course Henrietta did not think so. This is an old story, this one of the family relations greeting so suspiciously the new young bride, but it is always actual enough in its tragedy and heartbreak however often it may have happened before.

Is it sentimental to be sorry because the new Lady Candil was sad and lonely and cried softly for hours at night while her husband slept beside her? At that time at least the house did not think so. Possibly by now it has grown more cynical. It cannot, any more than the humans who inhabit it, altogether be unaware of the feeling and colour of its time.

In any case the house loved Dorothy Candil and was deeply grieved at her trouble. That trouble was, one must realise, partly of her own making.

Her husband loved her, nay, he adored her with all the tenderness and tenacity that were part of his character. He adored her and was bored by her: as everyone knows, this is a most aggravating state of feeling. He thought her beautiful, good, amiable and honest, but he had nothing at all to say to her. For many a man she would have been exactly fitting, for it was not so much that she was stupid as that she had no education and no experience. He gave her none of these things as he should have done. Nor did he realise that this life, in the depths of English country, removed from all the enterprise and movement of the town, removed also by the weather from any outside intercourse for weeks at a time, was for someone without any great resources in herself depressing and enervating.

And then she was frightened of him. How well the house understood this! It too was, at times, afraid of him, of his silences, his obstinacy and easy capacity of semi-liveliness, a sensitiveness that his reticence forbade him to express.

How often in the months that followed the marriage did the house long to advise her as to her treatment of him. The sofa in the parlour was especially wise in such cases. Long before it had been covered with its gay cherry-coloured silk it had been famous among friends and neighbours for its delicacy in human tactics.

There came a morning when Lady Candil sat on a corner of it, her lovely little hand (she was delicate, slim, fragile, her body had the consistency of egg-shell china) clenching the shining wood of its strong arm for support, and a word from her would have put everything right. The sofa could feel the throbbing of her heart, and looking across to the thick, stiff, obstinate body of her husband, longed to throw her into his arms. But she could not say the word, and the mischanced moment became history for both of them. Had they not loved so truly it might have been easier for them; as it was, shyness and obstinacy built the barrier.

And of course Henrietta assisted. How grimly was she pleased as she sat in her ugly old russet gown, pretending to read Lord Clarendon’s History (for she made a great pretence of improving her mind), but in reality listening to the unhappy silences between them and watching for the occasion when a word from her to her brother would skilfully widen the breach. For she hated poor Dorothy. She must in any case have done so out of jealousy and disappointment, but Dorothy was also precisely the example in woman whom she most despised. A weak, feckless, helpless thing whose pretty looks were an insult!

Then Dorothy felt her peril and rose to meet it. The house may have whispered in her ear!

Yes, she rose to meet it, but, as life only too emphatically teaches us, it is no good crying for the moon – and it is no good, however urgent we may be, begging for qualities that we have not got. She had a terrible habit of being affectionate at the wrong time. A kind of fate pursued her in this. He would return from his afternoon’s ride, pleasantly weary, eager for his wife and happy in the thought of a little romantic dalliance, and she, fancying that he would not be disturbed, would leave him to snore beside the fire. Or a neighbour squire would visit him and he be off with him for the afternoon and she feel neglected. Or he would be absorbed in a newsletter with a lively account of French affairs and she choose that moment to sit on his knee and tug his hair.

Dorothy was in truth one of those unfortunate persons – and they are among the most unfortunate in the world – who are insensitive to the moods and atmospheres of others. These err not through egotism nor stupidity, but rather through a sort of colour-blindness so that they see their friend red when he is yellow and green when he is blue. Neither Dorothy nor Edmund had any gift of words.

So, a year and a half after his marriage, Edmund, with an ache in his heart, although he would own this to nobody, went once again to foreign parts. The house implored him not to go: he almost heard its protests.

On one of his last evenings there – a windy spring evening – he came in from a dark twilight walk, splashed with the mud of the country paths, the sense of the pale hedgerow primroses yet in his eye, the chatter of birds in his ear, and standing in the hall heard the William and Mary clock with the moon and stars, the banisters of the staircase, the curtains of the long hall window whisper to him:

“Don’t go! Don’t go! Don’t go!”

He stood there and thought: “By Gemini, I’ll not leave this!” Dorothy came down the stairs to greet him and, seeing him lost in thought, stole upstairs again. In any case he had taken his seat in the coach, and his place in the packet-boat was got for him by a friend in London.

“Don’t go!” said the portrait of old Uncle Candil.

He strode upstairs and Dorothy was reading Grandison by the fire, and although her heart was beating with love for him, was too timid to say so.

So to foreign parts he went again and, loving her so dearly, wrote letters to her which he tore up without sending lest she should think him foolish – such being the British temperament.

How the house suffered then, that Dorothy should be left to the harsh economies of sister Henrietta. Henrietta was not a bad woman, but she was mean, selfish, proud and stupid. She was also jealous. Very quickly and with little show of rebellion Dorothy submitted to her ways. If true love is in question absence does indeed make the heart grow fonder, and Dorothy thought of her husband night, morning, and night again.

She was snubbed, starved, and given a thorough sense of her insufficiencies. It is surprising how completely one human being can convince another of incompetence, ignorance and silly vanity if they be often alone together and one of them a woman. Women are more whole-hearted than men in what they do, whether for good or ill, and Henrietta was very whole-hearted indeed in this affair.

She convinced Dorothy before her husband’s return that she was quite unworthy of his love, that he found her dull and unresponsive, that he was deeply disappointed in the issue of his marriage, and that she had deceived him most basely. You may say that she was a poor-spirited little thing, but she was very lonely, half-starved, and her love made her defenceless.

The appetite grows with what it feeds on, and Henrietta found that “educating Dorothy,” as she called it, was a very worthy and soul-satisfying occupation. Dorothy began to be frightened, not only of herself and of Henrietta but of everything around her, the house, the gardens, the surrounding country.

The house did its utmost to reassure her. When she lay awake in her bed at night the house would hush any noise that might disturb her, the furniture of her room, the hangings above her bed, the old chest of Cromwell’s time, the Queen Anne wardrobe, the warming-pan, the fire-irons that had the heads of grinning dogs, the yellow rug from Turkey, the Italian lamp beside her bed, they all crowded about her to tell her that they loved her. After a while she was conscious of their affection. Her bedroom and the parlour were for her the happiest places in the house, the only places indeed where she was not afraid.

She did not know that they were saying anything to her – she had not that kind of perception – but she felt reassured by them, and she would lock herself into her bedroom and sit there for hours thinking of her husband and wondering where he might be.

She became so painfully aware of Henrietta that she saw her when she wasn’t there. She saw her always just around a corner, behind a tree, on the other side of the rose-garden wall, peering over the sun-dial, hiding behind the curtain. She became a slave to her, doing all that she was told, going where she was bid. The house considered it a disgusting business.

One evening she broke into a flash of rebellion.

“Edmund loves me!” she cried, her little breasts panting, her small hands clenched. “And you hate me! Why do you hate me? I have never done you any harm.”

Henrietta looked at her severely.

“Hate! Hate! I have other things to do – and if he loves you, why does he stay so long away?”

Ah! why indeed? The house echoed the question, the very floors trembling with agitation. The stupid fool! Could he not see the treasure that he had? Did he think that such glories were to be picked up anywhere, any day, for the asking? The fire spat a piece of coal on to the hearthrug in contempt of human blindness.

When the time arrived at last for Edmund’s return, Dorothy was in a fitting condition of miserable humility. Edmund did not love her. He was bored with her too dreadfully. But indeed how could he love her? How could anybody love her, poor incompetent stupid thing that she was! And yet in her heart she knew that she was not so stupid. Did Edmund love her only a little she could jump all the barriers and be really rather brilliant – much more brilliant than Henrietta, who was certainly not brilliant at all. It was this terrible shyness that held her back, that and Henrietta’s assurance that Edmund did not love her. And indeed he did not seem to. It was but too likely that Henrietta was right.

As the time approached for Edmund’s return Henrietta was in a fine bustle and the house was in one too. The house smiled contemptuously at Henrietta’s parsimonious attempts to freshen it up. As though the house could not do that a great deal better than Henrietta ever could! Beeswaxing the floors, rubbing the furniture, shining up the silver – what were these little superficialities compared with the inner spiritual shake that the house gave itself when it wanted to? A sort of glow stole over windows, stairs and hall; a silver shine, a richer colour crept into the amber curtains, the cherry-coloured sofa; the faces in the portraits smiled, the fire-irons glittered, the mahogany shone again. Edmund had been away too long; the house would not let him go so easily next time.

The night before his return Dorothy did not sleep, but lay there, her eyes burning, her heart thickly beating, determining on the bold demonstrative person she would be. She would show Henrietta whether he loved her or no. But at the thought of Henrietta she shivered and drew the bed-clothes closely about her. She seemed to be standing beside the bed, illumined in the darkness by her own malignant fires, her yellow skin drawn tightly across the supercilious bones, her hands curving over some fresh mean economy, her ridiculous head-dress wagging like a mocking spirit above her small red-rimmed eyes. Yes, if only Henrietta were not there …

And the old chest murmured softly: “If only Henrietta were not there …”

The post-chaise came up to the door darkly like a ghost, for it had been snowing all day and the house was wrapped in silence. The animals on the box-tree hedge stood out fantastically against the silver-grey of the evening sky, and the snow fell like the scattering feathers of a heavenly geese-flock.

Edmund stepped into the hall and had Dorothy in his arms. At that moment they knew how truly they loved one another. He wondered as he flung his mind back in an instant’s retrospect over a phantasmagoria of Indian Moguls, Chinese rivers and the flaming sunsets of Arabia how it could be that he had not known that his life was here, here with his beloved house above him, his adored wife in his arms. His head up like a conqueror’s, he mounted the stairs, almost running into his wonderful parlour, to see once again the vase of flowers on the commode, the slender beautiful legs of his chair, the charming circles of his delicate ceiling. “How could I have stayed away?” he thought. “I will never leave this again!”

And that night, clasped in one another’s arms, they discovered one another again: shyness fled and heart was open to heart.

Nevertheless there remained Henrietta. Would you believe that one yellow-faced old maid could direct and dominate two normal healthy creatures? You know that she can, and is doing it somewhere or other at this very moment. And all for their good. No one ever did anything mean to anyone else yet save for their good, and so it will be until the end of this frail planet.

She told Edmund that she had been “educating Dorothy.” He would find her greatly improved; she feared that her worst fault was Hardness of Heart. Hardness of Heart! A sad defect!

During those snowy days Henrietta tried to show her brother that no one in the world truly loved him but herself. She had shown him this before and found the task easy; now it was more difficult. Dorothy’s shyness had been melted by this renewed contact; he could not doubt the evidence of his eyes and the many little unconscious things that spoke for her when she had no idea that they were speaking. Now they rode and walked together and he explained to her how he was, how that at a time his thoughts would be far, far away in Cairo or Ispahan and that she must not think that he did not care for her because he was dreaming, and she told him that when he had frightened her she had been stupid, but that now that he frightened her no longer she would soon be brilliant…. So Henrietta’s task was difficult.

And then in the spring, when the daffodils blew among the long grasses and the white violets were shining in the copse, a chance word of hers showed her the way. She hated Dorothy now because she suspected that Dorothy was planning to be rid of her. The fear that she would be turned out of the house never left her, and so, as fear always does, it drove her to baser things than belonged truly to her nature. She hinted that in Edmund’s absence Dorothy had found a neighbouring squire “good company.” And there had been perhaps another or two … men … At that word every frustrated instinct in Henrietta’s body turned in rebellion. She had not spoken before she believed it true. She had this imaginative gift, common to lonely persons. She was herself amazed at the effect of her words on Edmund. If she had ever doubted Edmund’s love for his wife (and she had not really doubted it) she was certain of the truth at last. Dorothy … Dorothy … His stout body trembled; his eyes were wounded; he turned from his sister as though he were ashamed both of her and of himself. After that there was no peace.

It was now that the house wondered most deeply at these strange human beings. The little things that upset them, the odd things that, at a moment, they would believe! Here, for instance, was their Edmund, whom they so truly admired, loving his Dorothy and entirely trusting her. Now, at a moment’s word from a sour-faced virgin, there is a fire of torment in his heart. He looks on every male with an eager restless suspicion. While attempting to appear natural he watches Dorothy at every corner and counters in his mind her lightest word.

“Why,” said the Italian lamp (which from its nationality knew everything about jealousy) to the Cromwellian chest, “I have never known so foolish a suspicion,” to which the Cromwellian chest replied in its best Roundhead manner: “Woman … the devil’s bait … always has been … always will be.”

He attacked his sister again and again. “With whom has she been? Has she ever stayed from the house a night? What friends has she made?”

To which Henrietta would indignantly reply: “Brother, brother. What are you about? This jealousy is most unbecoming. I have suggested no impropriety … only a little foolishness born of idleness.”

But it did not need time for Dorothy to discover that something was once again terribly amiss.

This strange husband of hers, so unable to express himself – she had but just won him back to her and now he was away again! With the courage born of their new relationship she asked him what was the trouble. And he told her: “Nothing…. Nothing! Nothing at all! Why should there be trouble? You are for ever imagining …” And then looked at her so strangely that she blushed and turned away as though she were indeed guilty. Guilty of what? She had not the least idea. But what she did know was that it was dear sister Henrietta who was responsible, and now, as May came with a flourish of birds and blossom and star-lit nights, she began to hate Henrietta with an intensity quite new to her gentle nature.

So, with jealousy and hatred, alive and burning, the house grew very sad. It hated these evil passions and had said long ago that they ruined with their silly bitterness every good house in the world. The little Chinese cabinet with the purple dragons on its doors said that in China everything was much simpler – you did not drag a situation to infinity as these sluggish English do, but simply called Death in to make a settlement – a much simpler way. In any case the house began to watch and to listen with the certainty that the moment was approaching when it must interfere.

Jealousy always heightens love, and so, if Edmund had loved Dorothy at the first, that cool, placid anticipation was nothing to the fevered passion which he now felt. When he was away from her he longed to have her in his arms, covering her with kisses and assuring her that he had never doubted her, and when he was with her he suspected her every look, her every word. And she, miserable now and angry and ill, could not tell what possessed him, her virtue being so secure that she could not conceive that anyone should suspect it. Only she was well aware that Henrietta was to blame.

These were also days of national anxiety and unrest; the days when Napoleon jumping from Elba alighted in France and for a moment promised to stay there. Warm, stuffy, breathless days, when everyone was waiting, the house with the rest.

On the staircase one summer evening Dorothy told Henrietta something of her mind. “If I had my way,” she ended in a shaking rage, “you would not be here plotting against us!”

So that was it! At last Henrietta’s suspicions were confirmed. In a short while Dorothy would have her out of the house; and then where would she go? The thought of her desolation, loneliness, loss of power, gripped her heart like a cat’s claws. The two little charity-girls had a time of it during those weeks and cried themselves to sleep in their attic that smelt of mice and apples, dreaming afterwards of strong lovers who beat their mistress into a pulp.

“Give me proof!” said Edmund, so bitterly tormented. “If it is true, give me proof!”

And Henrietta answered, sulkily: “I have never said anything,” and a window-sash fell on his fingers and bruised them just to teach him not to be so damnable a fool.

Nevertheless Henrietta had her proof. She had been cherishing it for a year at least. This was a letter written by a young Naval Lieutenant, cousin of a neighbouring squire, after he had danced with Dorothy at a Christmas ball. It was only a happy careless boy’s letter, he in love with Dorothy’s freshness, and because he was never more than a moment in any one place, careless of consequences. He said in his letter that she was the most beautiful of God’s creatures, that he would dream of her at sea, and the rest. Dorothy kept it. Henrietta stole it….

The day came when the coach brought the news of the Waterloo victory. On that summer evening rockets were breaking into the pale sky above the dark soft shelter of the wood; on Bendon Hill they were waiting for dark to light the bonfire. You could hear the shouting and singing from the high-road. The happiness at the victory and the sense that England was delivered blew some of the cobwebs from Edmund’s brain; he took Dorothy into the garden and there, behind the sun-dial, put his arms around her and kissed her.

Henrietta, watching the rockets strike the sky from her window, saw them, and fear, malice, loneliness, greed, hurt pride and jealousy all rose in her together. She turned over the letter in her drawer and vowed that her brother should not go to bed that night before he had heard of it.

“Look out! Look out!” cried her room to the rest of the house. “She will make mischief with the letter. We must prevent her …”

“She has done mischief enough,” chattered the clock from the hall. “She must be prevented …” whistled the chimneys. Something must be done and at once. But how? By whom?

She is coming. She stands outside her door, glancing about the dim sunset passage. The picture of Ranelagh above her head wonders – shall it fall on her? The chairs along the passage watch her anxiously as she passes them. But what can they do? Each must obey his own laws.

Stop her! Stop her! Stop her! Edmund and Dorothy are coming in from the garden. The sun is sinking, the shadows lengthening across the lawn. One touch on his arm: “Brother, may I have a word?” and all the harm is done – misery and distress, unhappiness in the house, separation and loneliness. Stop her! Stop her!

All the house is quivering with agitation. The curtains are blowing, the chimneys are twisting, the tables and chairs are creaking: Stop her! Stop her! Stop her!

The order has gone out. She is standing now at the head of the staircase leading to the hall. She waits, her head bent a little, listening. Something seems to warn her. Edmund and Dorothy are coming in from the garden. The fireworks are beginning beyond the wood, and their gold and crimson showers are rivalling the stars.

Henrietta, nodding her head as though in certainty, has taken her step, some roughness in the wood has caught her heel (was it there a moment ago?), she stumbles, she clutches at the balustrade, but it is slippery and refuses to aid her. She is falling; her feet are away in air, her head strikes the board; she screams, once and then again; a rush, a flash of huddled colour, and her head has struck the stone of the hall floor.

How odd a silence followed! Dorothy and Edmund were still a moment lingering by the door looking back to the shower of golden stars, hearing the happy voices singing in the road. Henrietta was dead and so made no sound.

But all through the house there was a strange humming as though everything from top to bottom were whispering.

Everything in the house is moving save the woman at the bottom of the stairs.

All Soul’s Night (1933)

THE WHISTLE

Mrs. Penwin gave one of her nervous little screams when she saw the dog.

“Oh, Charlie!” she cried. “You surely haven’t bought it!” and her little brow, that she tried so fiercely to keep smooth, puckered into its customary little gathering of wrinkles.

The dog, taking an instant dislike to her, sank his head between his shoulders. He was an Alsatian.

“Well …” said Charlie, smiling nervously. He knew that his impulsiveness had led him once more astray. “Only the other evening you were saying that you’d like a dog.”

“Yes, but not an Alsatian! You know what Alsatians are. We read about them in the paper every day. They are simply not to be trusted. I’m sure he looks as vicious as anything. And what about Mopsa?”

“Oh, Mopsa …” Charlie hesitated. “He’ll be all right. You see, Sibyl, it was charity really. The Sillons are going to London as you know. They simply can’t take him. It wouldn’t be fair. They’ve found it difficult enough in Edinburgh as it is.”

“I’m sure they are simply getting rid of him because he’s vicious.”

“No, Maude Sillon assured me. He’s like a lamb—”

“Oh, Maude! She’d say anything!”

“You know that you’ve been wanting a companion for Mopsa—”

“A companion for Mopsa! That’s good!” Sibyl laughed her shrill little laugh that was always just out of tune.

“Well, we’ll try him. We can easily get rid of him. And Blake shall look after him.”

“Blake!” She was scornful. She detested Blake, but he was too good a chauffeur to lose.

“And he’s most awfully handsome. You can’t deny it.”

She looked. Yes, he was most awfully handsome. He had lain down, his head on his paws, staring in front of him, quite motionless. He seemed to be waiting ironically until he should be given his next command. The power in those muscles, moulded under the skin, must be terrific. His long wolf ears lay flat. His colour was lovely, here silver-grey, there faintly amber. Yes, he was a magnificent dog. A little like Blake in his strength, silence, sulkiness.

She turned again to the note that she was writing.

“We’ll try him if you like. Anyway there are no children about. It’s Blake’s responsibility – and the moment he’s tiresome he goes.”

Charlie was relieved. It hadn’t been so bad after all.

“Oh, Blake says he doesn’t mind. In fact he seemed to take to the dog at once. I’ll call him.”

He went to the double windows that opened into the garden and called: “Blake! Blake!”

Blake came. He was still in his chauffeur’s uniform, having just driven his master and the dog in from Keswick. He was a very large man, very fair in colouring, plainly of great strength. His expression was absolutely English in its complete absence of curiosity, its certainty that it knew the best about everything, its suspicion, its determination not to be taken in by anybody, and its latent kindliness. He had very blue eyes and was clean-shaven; his cap was in his hand, and his hair, which was fair almost to whiteness, lay roughly across his forehead. He was not especially neat but of a quite shining cleanliness.

The dog got up and moved towards him. Both the Penwins were short and slight; they looked now rather absurdly small beside the man and the dog.

“Look here, Blake,” said Charlie Penwin, speaking with much authority, “Mrs. Penwin is nervous about the dog. He’s your responsibility, mind, and if there’s the slightest bit of trouble, he goes. You understand that?”

“Yes, sir,” said Blake, looking at the dog. “But there won’t be no trouble.”

“That’s a ridiculous thing to say,” remarked Mrs. Penwin sharply, looking up from her note. “How can you be sure, Blake? You know how uncertain Alsatians are. I don’t know what Mr. Penwin was thinking about.”

Blake said nothing. Once again and for the hundred-thousandth time both the Penwins wished that they could pierce him with needles. It was quite terrible the way that Blake didn’t speak when expected to, but then he was so wonderful a chauffeur, so good a driver, so excellent a mechanic, so honest – and Clara, his wife, was an admirable cook.

“You’d better take the dog with you now, Blake. What’s his name?”

“Adam,” said Charlie.

“Adam! What a foolish name for a dog! Now don’t disturb Clara with him, Blake. Clara hates to have her kitchen messed up.”

Blake, without a word, turned and went, the dog following closely at his heels.

Yes, Clara hated to have her kitchen messed up. She was standing now, her sleeves rolled up, her plump hands and wrists covered with dough. Mopsa, the Sealyham, sat at her side, his eyes, glistening with greed, raised to those doughy arms. But at sight of the Alsatian he turned instantly and flew at his throat. He was a dog who prided himself on fighting instantly every other dog. With human beings he was mild and indifferently amiable. Children could do what they would with him. He was exceedingly conceited, and cared for no one but himself.

He was clever, however, and hid this indifference from many sentimental human beings.

Blake with difficulty separated the two dogs. The Alsatian behaved quite admirably, simply restraining the Sealyham and looking up at Blake, saying, “I won’t let myself go here although I should like to. I know that you would rather I didn’t.” The Sealyham, breathing deeply, bore the Alsatian no grudge. He was simply determined that he should have no foothold here.

Torrents of words poured from Clara. She had always as much to say as her husband had little. She said the same thing many times over as though she had an idiot to deal with. She knew that her husband was not an idiot – very far from it – but she had for many years been trying to make some impression on him. Defeated beyond hope, all she could now do was to resort to old and familiar tactics. What was this great savage dog? Where had he come from? Surely the mistress didn’t approve, and she wouldn’t have the kitchen messed up, not for anybody, and as Harry (Blake) very well knew nothing upset her like a dog-fight, and if they were going to be perpetual, which knowing Mopsa’s character they probably would be, she must just go to Mrs. Penwin and tell her that, sorry though she was after being with her all these years, she just couldn’t stand it and would have to go, for if there was one thing more than another that really upset her it was a dog-fight and as Harry knew having her kitchen messed up was a thing that she couldn’t stand. She paused and began vehemently to roll her dough. She was short and plump with fair hair and blue eyes like her husband’s. When excited, little glistening beads of sweat appeared on her forehead. No one in this world knew whether Blake was fond of her or no. Clara Blake least of all. She wondered perpetually; this uncertainty and her cooking were her two principal interests in life. There were times when Blake seemed very fond of her indeed, others when he appeared not to be aware that she existed.

All he said now was: “The dog won’t be no trouble,” then went out, the dog at his heels. The Sealyham thought for a moment that he would follow him, then, with a little sniff of greed, settled himself down again at Clara Blake’s feet.

The two went out into the thin misty autumn sunshine, down through the garden into the garage. The Alsatian walked very closely beside Blake as though some invisible cord held them together. All his life, now two years in length, it had been his instant principle to attach himself to somebody. For, in this curious world where he was, not his natural world at all, every breath, every movement, rustle of wind, sound of voices, patter of rain, ringing of bells, filled him with nervous alarm. He went always on guard, keeping his secret soul to himself, surrendering nothing, a captive in the country of the enemy. There might exist a human being to whom he would surrender himself. Although he had been attached to several he had not, in his two years, yet found one to whom he could give himself. Now as he trod softly over the amber and rosy leaves he was not sure that this man beside whom he walked might not be the one.

In the garage Blake took off his coat, put on his blue overalls, and began to work. The dog stretched himself out on the stone floor, his head on his paws, and waited. Once and again he started, his pointed ears pricked, at some unexpected sound. A breeze blew the brown leaves up and down in the sun, and the white road beyond the garage pierced like a shining bone the cloudless sky.

Blake’s thoughts ran, as they always did, with slow assurance. This was a fine dog. He’d known the first moment that he set eyes on him that this was the dog for him. At that first glance something in his heart had been satisfied, something that had for years been unfulfilled. For they had had no children, he and Clara, and a motor-car was fine to drive and look after, but after all it couldn’t give you everything, and he wasn’t one to make friends (too damned cautious), and the people he worked for were all right but nothing extra, and he really didn’t know whether he cared for Clara or no. It was so difficult after so many years married to tell. There were lots of times when he couldn’t sort of see her at all.

He began to take out the sparking-plugs to clean them. That was the worst of these Heldsons, fine cars, as good as any going, but you had to be for ever cleaning the sparking-plugs. Yes, that dog was a beauty. He was going to take to that dog.

The dog looked at him, stared at him as though he were saying something. Blake looked at the dog. Then, with a deep sigh, as though some matter, for long uncertain, were at last completely settled, the dog rested again his head on his paws, staring in front of him, and so fell asleep. Blake, softly whistling, continued his work.

A very small factor, in itself quite unimportant, can bring into serious conflict urgent forces. So it was now when this dog Adam came into the life of the Penwins.

Mrs. Penwin, like so many English wives and unlike all American wives, had never known so much domestic power as she desired. Her husband was of course devoted to her, but he was for ever just escaping her, escaping her into that world of men that is so important in England, that is, even in these very modern days, still a world in the main apart from women.

Charlie Penwin had not very many opportunities to escape from his wife and he was glad that he had not, for when they came he took them. His ideal was the ideal of most English married men (and of very few American married men), namely, that he should be a perfect companion to his wife. He fulfilled this ideal; they were excellent companions, the two of them, so excellent that it was all the more interesting and invigorating when he could go away for a time and be a companion to someone else, to Willie Shaftoe for instance, with whom he sometimes stayed in his place near Carlisle, or even for a day’s golf with the Rev. Thomas Bird, rector of a church in Keswick.

Mrs. Penwin, in fact, had never quite, in spite of his profound devotion to her, never entirely captured the whole of her husband – a small fragment eternally escaped her, and this escape was a very real grievance to her. Like a wise woman she did not make scenes – no English husband can endure scenes – but she was always attempting to stop up this one little avenue of escape. But most provoking! So soon as one avenue was closed another would appear.

She realised very quickly (for she was not at all a fool) that this Alsatian was assisting her husband to escape from her because his presence in their household was bringing him into closer contact with Blake. Both the Penwins feared Blake and admired him; to friends and strangers they spoke of him with intense pride – “What we should do without Blake I can’t think!” – “But aren’t we lucky in these days to have a chauffeur whom we can completely trust?”

Nevertheless, behind these sentiments, there was this great difference, that Mrs. Penwin disliked Blake extremely (whenever he looked at her he made her feel a weak, helpless and idiotic woman), while Charlie Penwin, although he was afraid of him, in his heart liked him very much indeed.

If Blake only were human, little Charlie Penwin, who was a sentimentalist, used to think – and now, suddenly, Blake was human. He had gone “dotty” about this dog, and the dog followed him like a shadow. So close were they the one to the other that you could almost imagine that they held conversations together.

Then Blake came in to his master’s room one day to ask whether Adam could sleep in his room. He had a small room next to Mrs. Blake’s, because he was often out late with the car at night and must rise very early in the morning. Clara Blake liked to have her sleep undisturbed.

“You see, sir,” he said, “he won’t sort of settle down in the outhouse. He’s restless: I know he is.”

“How do you know he is?” asked Charlie Penwin.

“I can sort of feel it, sir. He won’t be no sort of trouble in my room, and he’ll be a fine guard to the house at night.”

The two men looked at one another and were in that moment friends. They both smiled.

“Very well, Blake. I don’t think there’s anything against it.”

Of course there were things against it. Mrs. Penwin hated the idea of the dog sleeping in the house. She did not really hate it; what she hated was that Blake and her husband should settle this thing without a word to her. Nor, when she protested, would her husband falter. Blake wanted it. It would be a good protection for the house.

Blake discovered a very odd whistle with which he called the dog. Putting two fingers into his mouth he called forth this strange note that seemed to penetrate into endless distance and that had in it something mysterious, melancholy and dangerous. It was musical and inhuman; friends of the Penwins, comfortably at tea, would hear this thin whistling cry coming, it seemed, from far away beyond the Fells, having in it some part of the Lake and the distant sea tumbling on Drigg sands, and of the lonely places in Eskdale and Ennerdale.

“What’s that?” they would say, looking up.

“Oh, it’s Blake calling his dog.”

“What a strange whistle!”

“Yes, it’s the only one the dog hears.”

The dog did hear it, at any distance, in any place. When Blake went with the car the Alsatian would lie on the upper lawn whence he could see the road, and wait for his return.

He would both see and hear the car’s return, but he would not stir until Blake, released from his official duties, could whistle to him – then with one bound he would be up, down the garden, and with his front paws up against Blake’s chest would show him his joy.

To all the rest of the world he was indifferent. But he was not hostile. He showed indeed an immense patience, and especially with regard to the Sealyham.

The dog Mopsa attempted twice at least every day to kill the Alsatian. He succeeded in biting him severely, but so long as Blake was there Adam showed an infinite control, letting Blake part them although every instinct in him was stirred to battle.

But, after a time, Blake became clever at keeping the two dogs separate; moreover, the Sealyham became afraid of Blake. He was clever enough to realise that when he fought the Alsatian he fought Blake as well – and Blake was too much for him.

Very soon, however, Blake was at war not only with the Sealyham but with his wife and Mrs. Penwin too. You might think that the words “at war” were too strong when nothing was to be seen on the surface. Mrs. Blake said nothing, Mrs. Penwin said nothing, Blake himself said nothing.

Save for the fights with the Sealyham there was no charge whatever to bring against the Alsatian. He was never in anyone’s way, he brought no dirt into the house, whenever Charlie Penwin took him in the car he sat motionless on the back seat, his wolf ears pricked up, his large and beautiful eyes sternly regarding the outside world, but his consciousness fixed only upon Blake’s back, broad and masterly above the wheel.

No charge could be brought against him except that the devotion between the man and the dog was, in this little house of ordered emotions, routine habits, quiet sterility, almost terrible. Mrs. Blake, as her husband left her one night to return to his own room, broke out:

“If you’d loved me as you love that dog I’d have had a different life.”

Blake patted her shoulder, moist beneath her night-dress.

“I love you all right, my girl,” he said.

And Mrs. Penwin found that here she could not move her husband.

Again and again she said:

“Charlie, that dog’s got to go.”

“Why?”

“It’s dangerous.”

“I don’t see it.”

“Somebody will be bitten one day and then you will see it.”

“There’s a terrible lot of nonsense talked about Alsatians….”

And then, when everyone was comfortable, Mrs. Blake reading her Home Chat, Mrs. Penwin her novel, Mrs. Fern, Mrs. Penwin’s best friend, doing a “crossword,” over the misty dank garden, carried, it seemed, by the muffled clouds that floated above the Fell, would sound that strange melancholy whistle, so distant and yet so near, Blake calling his dog.

For Blake himself life was suddenly, and for the first time, complete. He had not known, all this while, what it was that he missed, although he had known that he missed something.

Had Mrs. Blake given him a child he would have realised completion. Mrs. Blake alone had not been enough for his heart. In this dog he found fulfilment because here were all the things that he admired – loyalty, strength, courage, self-reliance, fidelity, comradeship, and above all, sobriety of speech and behaviour. Beyond these there was something more – love. He did not, even to himself, admit the significance of this yet deeper contact. And he analysed nothing.

For the dog, life in this dangerous menacing country of the enemy was at last secure and simple. He had only one thing to do, only one person to consider.

But of course life is not so simple as this for anybody. A battle was being waged and it must have an issue. The Penwins were not in Cumberland during the winter. They went to their little place in Sussex, very close to London and to all their London friends. Mrs. Penwin would not take the Alsatian to Sussex. But why not? asked Charlie. She hated it, Mrs. Blake hated it. That, said Charlie, was not reason enough.

“Do you realise,” said Mrs. Penwin theatrically, “that this dog is dividing us?”

“Nonsense,” said Charlie.

“It is not nonsense. I believe you care more for Blake than you do for me.” She cried. She cried very seldom. Charlie Penwin was uncomfortable, but some deep male obstinacy was roused in him. This had become an affair of the sexes. Men must stand together and protect themselves or they would be swept away in this feminine flood….

Blake knew, Mrs. Blake knew, Mrs. Penwin knew, that the dog would go with them to Sussex unless some definite catastrophe gave Mrs. Penwin the victory. As he lay on his bed at night, seeing the grey wolf-like shadow of the dog stretched on the floor, Blake’s soul for the first time in its history trembled at the thought of the slight movement, incident, spoken word, sound, that might rouse the dog beyond his endurance and precipitate the catastrophe. The dog was behaving magnificently, but he was surrounded by his enemies. Did he know what hung upon his restraint?

Whether he knew or no, the catastrophe arrived, and arrived with the utmost, most violent publicity. On a sun-gleaming russet October afternoon, on the lawn, while Charlie was giving Blake instructions about the car, and Mrs. Penwin put in also her word, Mopsa attacked the Alsatian, Blake ran to separate them, and the Alsatian, sharply bitten, bewildered, humiliated, snapped and caught Blake’s leg between his teeth. A moment later he and Blake knew, both of them, what he had done. Blake would have hidden it, but blood was flowing. In the Alsatian’s heart remorse, terror, love, and a sense of disaster, a confirmation of all that, since his birth, knowing the traps that his enemies would lay for him, he had suspected, leapt to life together.

Disregarding all else he looked up at Blake.

“And that settles it!” cried Mrs. Penwin, triumphantly. “He goes!”

Blake’s leg was badly bitten in three places; they would be scars for life. And it was settled. Before the week was out the dog would be returned to his first owners, who did not want him, who would give him to someone else who also, in turn, through fear or shyness of neighbours, would not want him….

Two days after this catastrophe Mrs. Blake went herself to Mrs. Penwin.

“My husband’s that upset … I wouldn’t care if the dog stays, Mum.”

“Why, Clara, you hate the dog.”

“Oh, well, Mum, Blake’s a good husband to me. I don’t like to see him …”

“Why, what has he said?”

“He hasn’t said anything, Mum.”

But Mrs. Penwin shook her head. “No, Clara, it’s ridiculous. The dog’s dangerous.”

And Blake went to Charlie Penwin. The two men faced one another and were closer together, fonder of one another, man caring for man, than they had ever been before.

“But, Blake, if the dog bites you whom he cares for … I mean, don’t you see, he really is dangerous….”

“He wasn’t after biting me,” said Blake slowly. “And if he had to bite somebody, being aggravated and nervous, he’d not find anyone better to bite than me who understands him and knows he don’t mean nothing by it.”

Charlie Penwin felt in himself a terrible disloyalty to his wife. She could go to … Why should not Blake have his dog? Was he for ever to be dominated by women? For a brief, rocking, threatening moment his whole stable ordered world trembled. He knew that if he said the dog was to remain the dog would remain and that something would have broken between his wife and himself that could never be mended.

He looked at Blake, who with his blue serious eyes stared steadily in front of him. He hesitated. He shook his head.

“No, Blake, it won’t do. Mrs. Penwin will never be easy now while the dog is there.”

Later in the day Blake did an amazing thing. He went to Mrs. Penwin.

During all these years he had never voluntarily, himself, gone to Mrs. Penwin. He had never gone unless he were sent for. She looked at him and felt as she always did, dislike, admiration, and herself a bit of a fool.

“Well, Blake?”

“If the dog stays I’ll make myself responsible. He shan’t bite nobody again.”

“But how can you tell? You said he wouldn’t bite anyone before, and he did?”

“He won’t again.”

“No, Blake, he’s got to go. I shan’t have a moment’s peace while he’s here.”

“He’s a wonderful dog. I’ll have him trained so he won’t hurt a fly. He’s like a child with me.”

“I’m sure he is. Irresponsible like a child. That’s why he bit you.”

“I don’t make nothing of his biting me.”

“You may not, but next time it will be someone else. There’s something in the paper about them every day.”

“He’s like a child with me.”

“I’m very sorry, Blake. I can’t give way about it. You’ll see I’m right in the end. My husband ought never to have accepted the dog at all.”

After Blake had gone she did not know why, but she felt uneasy, as though she had robbed a blind man, or stolen another woman’s lover. Ridiculous! There could be no question but that she was right.

Blake admitted that to himself. She was right. He did not criticise her, but he did not know what to do. He had never felt like this in all his life before, as though part of himself were being torn from him.

On the day before the dog was to go back to his original owners, Blake was sent into Keswick to make some purchases. It was a soft bloomy day, one of those North English autumn days when there is a scent of spices in the sharp air and a rosy light hangs in shadow about the trees. Blake had taken the dog with him, and driving back along the Lake, seeing how it lay a sheet of silver glass upon whose surface the islands were painted in flat colours of auburn and smoky grey, a sudden madness seized him. It was the stillness, the silence, the breathless pause….

Instead of turning to the right over the Grange bridge he drove the car straight on into Borrowdale. It was yet early in the afternoon; all the lovely valley lay in gold leaf at the feet of the russet hills and no cloud moved in the sky. He took the car to Seatoller and climbed with the dog the steep path towards Honister.

And the dog thought that at last what he had longed for was to come to pass. He and Blake were at length free; they would go on and on, leaving all the stupid, nerve-jumping world behind them, never to return to it. With a wild, fierce happiness such as he had never yet shown, he bounded forward, drinking in the cold streams, feeling the strong turf beneath his feet, running back to Blake to assure him of his comradeship. At last he was free, and life was noble as it ought to be.

At the turn of the road Blake sat down and looked back. All round him were hills. Nothing moved; only the stream close to him slipped murmuring between the boulders. The hills ran ranging from horizon to horizon, and between grey clouds a silver strip of sky, lit by an invisible sun, ran like a river into mist. Blake called the dog to him and laid his hand upon his head. He knew that the dog thought that they two had escaped for ever now from the world. Well, why not? They could walk on, on to the foot of the hill on whose skyline the mining-hut stood like a listening ear, down the Pass to Buttermere, past the lake, past Crummock Water to Cockermouth. Then there would be a train. It would not be difficult for him to get work. His knowledge of cars (he had a genius for them) would serve him anywhere. And Clara? She was almost invisible, a white tiny blob on the horizon. She would find someone else. His hand tightened about the dog’s head….

For a long while he sat there, the dog never moving, the silver river spreading in the sky, the hills gathering closer about him.

Suddenly he shook his head. No, he could not. He would be running away, a poor kind of cowardice. He pulled Adam’s sharp ears; he buried his face in Adam’s fur. He stood up, and Adam also stood up, placed his paws on his chest, licked his cheeks. In his eyes there shone great happiness because they two were going away alone together.

But Blake turned back down the path, and the dog, realising that there was to be no freedom, walked close behind him, brushing with his body sometimes the stuff of Blake’s trousers.

Next day Blake took the dog back to the place whence he had come.

Two days later, the dog, knowing that he was not wanted, sat watching a little girl who played some foolish game near him. She had plump bare legs; he watched them angrily. He was unhappy, lonely, nervous, once more in the land of the enemy, and now with no friend.

Through the air, mingling with the silly laughter of the child and other dangerous sounds, came, he thought, a whistle. His heart hammered. His ears were up. With all his strength he bounded towards the sound. But he was chained. Tomorrow he was to be given to a Cumberland farmer.

Mrs. Penwin was entertaining two ladies at tea. This was the last day before the journey south. Across the dark lawns came that irritating, melancholy whistle, disturbing her, reproaching her – and for what?

Why, for her sudden suspicion that everything in life was just ajar – one little push and all would be in its place – but would she be married to Charlie, would Mrs. Planty there be jealous of her pretty daughter, would Miss Tennyson, nibbling now at her pink piece of icing, be nursing her aged and intemperate father….? She looked up crossly—

“Really, Charlie … that must be Blake whistling. I can’t think why now the dog’s gone. To let us know what he thinks about it, I suppose …” She turned to her friends. “Our chauffeur – a splendid man – we are so fortunate. Charlie, do tell him. It’s such a hideous whistle anyway – and now the dog is gone …”

Lindingö, Sweden,

August 14, 1929

All Soul’s Night (1933)

FIELD WITH FIVE TREES

I was asked not long ago, at one of those dinner-parties where people ask such questions, to describe for my fellow-guests the oddest and queerest experience of my life. When one looks back, one discovers so many queer experiences, and then at the same time one realises that most of them refuse not only description but analysis – so I suppose with this one that I am about to relate.

I went to keep an appointment – five trees barred the way, and that was all there was to it. You can believe it or not, as you please.

It happened years and years ago before the war. I am now between sixty and seventy years of age, a widower with two grown-up children, on the whole content, although I have achieved so little – on the whole tranquil, even in this frantically disturbed world. It wasn’t so disturbed then.

I had been married for five years. I had no children. I was a writer of sorts, and lived in a little stone cottage half-way up the hill from the village of Grange on Derwentwater in Cumberland, where I still live.

One of the important elements of this story, if it is to be true at all, is that I shall be frank about Mary Ellen, my wife. Poor Mary! She has been dead for fifteen years, but still keeps me company, as those one has truly loved always do, however long their bodies have been dust.

I think if Mary were to appear here now and give you an account of herself as she saw herself, she would agree very much with my estimate of her, except that she never knew as I did, how grandly unselfish, how sweetly forgiving, how beautifully maternal she was. She was above all things else, long before she had any children of her own, a mother. She mothered me, who badly needed it, with a goodness, a sense of humour, and a tolerance that I’ve never known any other human being to equal. I loved her and she loved me. But there came a time, as there comes in every marriage, when we were dissatisfied, fools that we were. Yet she loved me dearly – especially the companionship that we had. She was a wonderful companion. She had a grand, even a splendid, sense of enjoyment. She loved little things. She was perfectly content on our small income – perfectly happy to be there in the country alone with me from one end of the year to the other. The only thing that she wanted that she hadn’t got was children.

It was just a year after this strange adventure that we had our first child. We had been married, as I’ve said, five years – and suddenly everything went wrong. That is the queerest thing about any relationship between two human beings, that for no reason at all everything suddenly moves out of perspective. Little personal tricks that have meant nothing for years are in a moment exasperating.

Mary had, I remember, a habit of leaving the room without shutting the door. And contrariwise, she would enter a room with a rush, banging the door behind her. Often she would look untidy; her soft, brown hair, which I had once thought the most beautiful thing in the world, would tumble about her forehead. She was not very clever about her clothes. She was strong, robust, rosy-faced, bright-eyed, clean like an apple. Sometimes, when she was happy, she would talk very loudly and with great excitement.

I, on the other hand, in those days took myself rather grimly. I was determined to become a great writer, a thing, God forgive me, that I have never managed to be. I was earning a fair income at that time with my novels and stories, but I thought that I had real genius and that one day all the world would know it. Mary, I can now see on looking back, knew very well that genius I had not and would never have. Perhaps I detected, beneath her laughing praise and encouragement, this sense of disappointment. I was at that time meticulous in my habits. I liked everything to be very neat and careful about me. In fact, I took myself altogether with an absurd seriousness. I was immature for my years and she knew it. I was always a boy to her, to the very end. Perhaps that also, without my knowing it, irritated me.

We had, however, many things in common. We were, on the whole, amazingly happy. One joy that we deeply shared was our love for this especial country. I have no wish to employ pages of description in the manner of Mr. Fitz, the famous novelist, or Mrs. Grundy, the writer about gardens, but it is important to my little story that should make it clear why Mary and I were happier here on this exact spot of ground than anywhere else in the world.

It wasn’t that I didn’t know other places. I’ve experienced the long, purple nights of Arizona – the lovely, benignant glow of the Russian white night – the tawny, boastful pride of the Pyrenees – the lakes and blossoms of Japan – the flowered valleys of Cashmere.

I know that this small square of Cumbrian and Westmorland ground can seem like a mud patch on a wet day, like a garish coloured picture postcard on a sunny afternoon in August, can shrivel up and disappear and disappoint – do all the things that its detractors charge against it. But its beauty, when it chooses to be beautiful, no other place in the world can boast of.

This country was, in effect, the one thing that at this time Mary and I shared best with one another. Everything else began to have an edge – an edge of suspicion, mistrust and danger. But at no time from the first to last did we lose our companionship in this country – and I had almost forgotten to mention the sign and seal of the whole affair, namely, the field with the five trees.

I can see it now as I look from my library window, although it is closest and best visible from the windows of the bedroom Mary and I shared for so many years, and that I still inhabit. It is a field above Lodore on the way to Watendlath, formed like a half-moon. Its grass is, under sunlight, of the intensest green. The five trees that edge the ground are so alike that they resemble the brother Volsungs in Morris’s Sigurd, except that they are not so tall as those splendid heroes were.

I remember saying to Mary when we first came to the cottage, that this field had eyes – or rather it was she, I think, who said that to me. “We will never,” she said, “be able to do anything that we are ashamed of, because that field will always know it. It is, I am sure, looking after us.” In any case, it became one of the great joys of our daily life, to awaken in the morning and see first thing that field and those trees, so beautiful, quiet, permanent and strong. We, both of us, clung to it the more when our troubles began.

These troubles were at first all on my side. Which of us does not know the times when we are irritable without reason – when shame at ourselves makes us yet more irritable – and when we strike at the persons we love most because, I suppose, they will endure our tempers the most patiently? At first I thought I was ill – that it was my liver or indigestion. Then I thought it was because my work was going badly, and here I began to complain bitterly of Mary. Whatever she said about it, my work was wrong.

Then examining myself and at heart bitterly ashamed of my unreason, I decided that I was still a young man – and was I, because I had married a good English woman, to spend the rest of my days as a kind of hermit? And one dreadful evening I broke out with all this, saying so much more than I really meant, reproaching her most unfairly for things that she had never done, accusing her of being what she was not. That evening I desperately hurt her pride. She was so seldom angry, never sulky, and very, very hard to offend. But that evening I offended her. She said very little – only at the end, quietly, “I’m sorry. I see that you should have married someone quite different. But I can’t change, however much you might wish it. I’m myself.” And she went out of the room.

It was after this that Mary made her great mistake. She invited her mother to stay with us. I don’t know – I shall never know – whether she did this in a spirit of feminine revenge or whether it was simply that she thought the old lady would give her some companionship at a time when she must have been desperately lonely. Indeed, as I learned afterward, she was far more lonely and unhappy than I knew. I would say in passing that we never allow sufficiently for the loneliness of those near to us. We are aware often enough of our own loneliness and cry out bitterly against it, but we think that we are exceptional creatures in this.

Mary knew well enough that I detested her mother, Mrs. Millicent. She knew, too, that Mrs. Millicent cordially disliked me.

Physically she was unpleasant to me because she had bobbed her hair, painted her cheeks, wore dresses too young for her, and was altogether, I thought, a silly, tiresome, scandal-mongering old horror. And I did her a great injustice, as one always does when one dislikes people too much. She was courageous, had fine qualities of independence, adored Mary, and made a brave show of what life remained to her.

She thought me idle, lazy, spoiled, and altogether unworthy of her daughter. Her hatred of Cumberland was almost fanatical.

She was a sharp old lady and very soon discovered something was wrong between us.

When mothers discover that their beloved daughters are unhappy and that sons-in-law whom they greatly dislike are responsible, they have only one ambition in life – to punish the sons-in-law! And my mother-in-law wished not only to punish me, but also Cumberland, the English countryside, and everything rustic. She made, at once, my field with the five trees a symbol of her attack.

“I really believe, Walter,” she would say, “that you could gladly sit all day and gaze at that silly field. Why don’t you buy it if you are so fond of it?”

I have no doubt but that she also attacked Mary and tried to drag her secret from her. But there was no secret. We were moving in the dark – away, away, and knew no reason why.

One night I caught her to me and said to her, “Mary, Mary, what is it?”

“I don’t know – I don’t know,” she sobbed. “You don’t love me any more.”

“I do – I do,” I answered her. But as I said it I thought that I did not. I lay there, listening to the rain, and longed to escape, not only from Mary, perhaps, indeed not from Mary at all, but chiefly from myself. I think that this was the first time in my life when, poor defenceless egoist that I was, I began to wonder whether I was worth anyone’s bother. But at least it was a step in the right direction! Love acts always independently of lovers. Sometimes it moves with them. Then, with a shrug of its beautiful shoulders, it moves away. “Catch me if you can,” Love cries, and there is no way to recapture its company save to wait and be patient. But what lover ever was patient?

And then the country deserted us. After all, if you worship a place, it demands, I suppose, on your part, a certain fineness of conduct.

But we did not love the rain at that particular crisis in our lives, and oh! how old Mrs. Millicent hated it! I am sure that she thought it of my providing.

Then, as is always the way when the circumstances are ready for it, a quarrel emphasised the breach and made it appear intolerable.

Breakfast is a dangerous meal, as many writers before me have observed. It was especially dangerous for Mrs. Millicent, for she was an old lady who should never meet her fellows before midday. But there she was, as fresh as her paint and powder could make her, drinking her coffee, and thinking of her enforced, unhappy rusticity. For many a day, Mary and I each read our paper at breakfast and threw to one another little excitements from China or the latest gossip from London. Mrs. Millicent did not read a paper and, therefore, quite naturally hated that others should do so. On this especial morning I glanced at the pictures of my newspaper and then stared across at my beloved field, just now almost fraudulently green, with the five trees guarding it.

“Well,” said Mrs. Millicent, “I’ve always hated that field – but at least I owe it something. It’s made Walter polite at breakfast.”

And then I lost my temper. All the misery of the last weeks came out in that moment. I told the old lady all that I thought of her, all that I had ever thought of her. I blamed her for all the trouble between Mary and me. I said that I could not work while she was in the house. I said – oh, what matters now, after all these years, the things that I said!

Mrs. Millicent rose from her seat and said, “Enough! Mary, I leave this house.” And Mary, rising also, said, “Mother, if you go I go too.”

And the field looked across at me and veiled its green with shadow and once again the rain began to fall. Of course, the trouble was for the moment calmed. Later in the day I apologised.

That night Mary said, “Walter, what has come to you? What is it? Tell me and I will help. I must help or we’re lost – both of us.” Which sounds melodramatic for Mary, but the word “lost” was true. We were, indeed, close to some fatal and irreparable separation.

On the following day, so pat that it seemed as though fate were taking a maliciously personal interest in my small affairs, I met a lady. Here, even after all these years, I write with hesitation. Pearl Richardson is dead. I’ve not seen her for many, many years. I feel now that I never knew her, never had any real contact with her, that she was a shadow from a world filled with shadows, and yet at this moment as I sit here, she is more vivid and actual to me than men who have been my friends for a lifetime – more vivid to me than any woman I’ve ever known, except Mary.

•   •   •   •   •

I was in Keswick, miserable, without plan or purpose. It had been a wet morning, but the sun had come out, and the hills, as they so often are after rain, were sharp and brilliant as though they had received an extra coat of paint. All the little town was gleaming and glittering. In the market square where I was standing, the light was almost blinding. Into this light stepped a young woman.

I’d been wondering what I would do. While I was hesitating the girl passed me. She was wearing, as I so vividly remember, a dress of bright green which ill suited her pale face with the light, fair eyebrows. Just after she passed me she turned and looked at me. It was a look of quiet and considering investigation. She stood there looking at me and then came toward me smiling.

“Could you tell me,” she asked, “where I can find the Keswick Art Shop?”

“Oh, yes,” I answered. “It’s straight along in front of you – over the little bridge and you’ll find it on the left.” And as I spoke, it seemed to me that thereafter I would move like a man in a dream. I put it in that way, because I was still pausing on the border of that dangerous country. A moment’s chance remained to me of turning around and walking away, and I knew with absolute certainty that if I did not walk away I would be a free agent no longer. I’ve never felt that with any other man or woman before or since. But I suppose on that particular day I was acutely unhappy, very lonely, with that kind of hurt pride and selfish resentment that comes from not getting one’s own way.

She was, and it seems very odd to me now looking back, the exact opposite of Mary physically. She was pale, with rather weak grey eyes, with no cheerfulness, no sense of well-being about her at all. But my heart was thumping and I even stammered a little as I said, “If you will allow me, I’m going that way and I’ll show you where it is.”

“Thank you very much,” she said, and she spoke as though it were no new thing for her to be escorted by a stranger.

As we walked along we said very little to each other, but by the time that we had reached the bridge we had come to that sort of mutual agreement which strangers, who both want the same thing and want it badly, generally discover. We stood on the bridge before moving on, looking down at the little stream sparkling in the sunlight. She told me something about herself. She said that she was staying at the Station Hotel with a girl friend – that she’d never been in Cumberland before – that it had rained ever since their arrival, and that this was the first bit of sunshine that she had had – and as she said that, she looked at me.

“You are so bored, I suppose,” I said, “that you’ll be leaving early tomorrow.”

“Oh, no, I’m not,” she answered. “Gracie, my friend, is. She can’t stand the place, but I like it. It’s grand when it rains.”

“Oh, then,” I said, “this is the country for you.”

“Yes, it is,” she said. “I don’t know why I never came here before.” Then she looked at me and said abruptly, “You live here? Are you married?”

I said that I did live here and that I was married.

“That’s a pity,” she said, “your being married, I mean.”

“Why?” I asked her.

“Oh, because we could have seen a bit of each other if you hadn’t been,” she answered.

“We can, anyway,” I replied.

I remember that little conversation as though the words are being spoken now in this room in front of me by two complete strangers whom I am coldly observing. I remember that I thought that I didn’t like her, and that I should like her less the more I saw of her. I remember, too, a funny fancy that I had that her green dress was like the green of my field in the sun. Yes, I remember that I didn’t like her, and that I wanted there and then to take her in my arms and cover her face with kisses. She was so different from anything that I’d known for so long that she seemed to me exactly what I desperately needed. And I suppose, too, in the low, dark cellars of my mind, there was the thought that I would teach Mary a lesson, and above all, show that nasty old woman, her mother, that there were other things in the world. I was certainly not the first man, nor the last, whom Miss Pearl Richardson tried to devour. In any case, whatever her purpose was, we succeeded in those few minutes in establishing a relationship. Before I left her I had promised to give her dinner in Keswick the following evening.

I was no less unhappy when I went back that afternoon, but I was almost wildly excited. Why? I’m afraid I cannot say. I’ve always thought that love, in spite of modern cynicism, is the finest thing in the world. Besides, at this particular moment, although I did not then know it, I loved Mary more deeply than I had ever loved her.

Within a very few hours, Mary discovered that I had changed, and then, as she told me afterward, she began to be very frightened.

“It was that afternoon,” she said many months later, “that I thought for the first time that I might really be going to lose you. Up to then I’d known something was very wrong, but I’d been sure that nothing could truly separate us. But as soon as you came in that day, and with a kind of forced geniality greeted us and talked with an empty friendliness about anything or nothing so that I knew that your mind was elsewhere, I was terrified. I knew that there was someone somewhere that I must fight, but I was fighting in the dark. I hadn’t an idea what to do.”

I was to learn one more curious thing. Next morning, when I awoke and looked across at the field, I had a strange impression that it was nearer to me than it had ever been before. I could see every detail of it. It was almost as though I could count the blades of grass. I’d always had the absurd notion that the five trees were active – that they could move – and sometimes I would look expecting to find only three there, or two.

I lived, I suppose, although my memory of that is very faint, in a kind of armed truce with Mary during these weeks. Everything was unreal to me except Pearl. I remember that I hated her name. I thought it foolish and affected, and her first occasion for rapping me over the knuckles was my saying so. She was deeply offended. I was detached enough about her to realise that her vanity was excessive and that everything that belonged to her – the especial kind of rouge that she used, the flower that she wore on her dress, relations of hers (although she didn’t like them), even places where she had been – were sanctified and important because she had had some connection with them. Even I took on a kind of importance because she thought that I was in love with her.

I’m quite sure that she was never in love with me – that she had from the very first a vindictiveness towards Mary, whom, of course, she had never seen – because if Mary had not been there she could have swallowed me up more quickly. She was irritated, too, and the more determined because I would not make love to her as other men had done. She said I behaved like a hero in one of the old story-books, by which she meant, I suppose, that I did nothing more than kiss her. The odd thing was that she represented to me, and this I find the hardest of all to understand, adventure and romance.

And yet I knew that she was common, with no interest in anything except herself and men, that she never would be different from this. I think for these very reasons she became pathetic to me – someone whom I wished to protect, educate as though she were a poor, strayed child come to me for help. Of all the sentimental nonsense! She was anything but a poor, strayed child.

Women, I venture to think, are of two kinds. Either they must look up to the man they love or they must protect him. Sometimes they must do both. With some women the worse a man is, the more they must protect him. But with many women, as with Mary, if they despise, they cannot love. If I did this she would despise me for ever. And how fantastic it is, upon looking back, that I could seriously contemplate this flight with someone whom I neither admired nor loved, throwing everything away for nothing at all. And yet this is what men so often do.

I was afraid lest people should talk, and Pearl therefore went to stay, of all places in the world, in the lonely hamlet of Watendlath. That, now I think of it, was her principal virtue. She really did love this country. She would meet me in a little valley between Watendlath and Lodore, or I would come up to the farm for tea, or she would be at the bottom of the hill in Rosthwaite.

The day came when I agreed to go with her for a fortnight to Scarborough. I went back to my home that night after it was settled, knowing quite well that I was, as Mary had said, a lost man. As I sat by myself that evening, looking across at my field which now to my excited fancy seemed to be so close that it was almost staring in at my window, I felt the same excitement that I’d known at the very first moment when I met the girl. It was a hot, feverish excitement, and when Mary came into the room and told me supper was ready it was as though she were removed from me by a whole life of experience.

I only wanted to sit beside the girl and look at her. When I was with her I felt a sort of weariness, as though I’d had no sleep for weeks. But when I was away from her, I ached to be with her again. I had no satisfaction, no calm, no peace, whether with her or away from her. We made our arrangements. There was to be a trap waiting at Rosthwaite. I was to walk over, meet her at the farm, take her down to the trap, and then we would drive away. A man from Keswick drove the trap with our bags out to Rosthwaite and left it there, and early on a dark afternoon I started to walk up from the lake road. Dusk came very early at that time of the year, and I knew that we should have a dark walk down to Rosthwaite, but the path was easy to follow and I wanted nobody to see us.

I left my house that morning to drive into Keswick. Mary and I had a few last words.

“You will be back for supper?” she asked me.

“Yes,” I said, “about seven.” And that was really the first lie that I had ever told her. She said nothing, gave me one look, and then I left her.

Now this is the strange part of my little story. I can hardly expect you to believe me … I don’t know that I even want you to … I only know that every word I say is true.

I walked up the path, across the bridge above the tumbling stream, and then stood looking back at what is one of the loveliest views in the world – across Lodore to the lake.

I passed the line of bungalows on my right and came to my beloved field. As I reached its edge darkness began to gather. It was too early for dusk and yet the field was obscure, as though curtained by some thin mist. I was really out of breath and I leaned against a little stone wall, wondering what was the matter with me. As I stayed there some thorn from a bush close by pricked my hand. I looked, but there was no bush near enough, I thought, to have touched me. The feeling of hostility greatly increased and I wondered what was the matter with my nerves.

I came away from the little wall and started to walk. The mist gathered more thickly and I found myself wondering, of all things in the world, whether I would find my way. Find my way – when I knew this field and the path that ran beside it utterly by heart. But I suddenly thought – no, I will cross the wall and go up the other side away from the field. But when I turned to find the wall, I found that I was slipping down a bank into the stream that ran under the wall. I caught at the turf with my hand, it broke away, and before I could stop myself, I was down in the stream. I stumbled about among the stones, the water soaking into my shoes, and clambered up again. Then, as I reached the top, I felt exactly as though someone had struck me in the face. I had a momentary impulse to call out abusively, as though it had been a living person, and then I realised my folly. How strong the wind was, and yet it seemed nothing compared with so many other times I’d known. I couldn’t find the stone wall again, so I turned and began to climb the field which runs on a gentle slope to the fell. The dusky light showed me quite clearly the separate forms of five trees. As I moved up the open ground they were well away from me. Yet, very soon it was as though the wind was beating me toward the left, and although I moved forward, I seemed to make no real progress. It is a very small field and can be crossed in two minutes. But now, as the rain began to fall, striking my face, I felt as though I were blinded. I put my hand before my eyes and then stumbled and fell on to my knees, and now I began to feel quite unreasoning terror. The rain was falling fast and the mist was thick. But through the mist I seemed to see trees marching. I could see against the skyline the faint shape of the fell which seemed an infinite distance away. I began to draw my breath with difficulty. It came in gasps and my heart was hammering unsteadily. One knows that in nightmare dreams, and sometimes in actual fact, one moves round and round a very small space, losing altogether one’s sense of direction. Now when I moved forward, I could no longer see the line of the fell or the stone wall. But quite clearly outlined against the mist were five trees, forming, as it seemed to me (and this was, of course, a hallucination), a complete circle around me. So strong was this impression, however, (and after all what is reality except what one’s fancy makes it?) that I saw what I thought was a gap between two of the trees and made desperately for it. And then the two trees seemed to close together and advance toward me. Panic seized me. I put my hands before my face and ran stumbling forward. Once again, this time more severely, I dashed against what seemed to be now a wall of rough and hostile bark. I even called out, “Let me go! Let me go!”

Then I fell on my knees. The air about me seemed to grow suffocatingly close, just as though the walls of a room were closing in upon me. I could smell the wet bark, the thin timber essence of branches. I put up my hand, touched a branch, which broke, and then I felt tendrils about my legs. I began to beat with my hands, scraping the skin against the bark. The sense of suffocation grew more appalling with each instant, and the bitter scent of wet wood filled my nostrils. I rose to my feet and looked. I could see with absolute distinctness the five trees close ringed about me. They seemed to be of great thickness and intolerable height. It was as though they whispered to me an order. I obeyed it and turned and climbed out with little frightened gasps. Down the hill toward Lodore I ran, as though dreadful destruction pursued me. I remember stumbling and falling – getting up again, going on past the bungalows, over the bridge, down the road to the lake, and then somehow I found my way home.

Mary has told me since how I arrived at the house that night. My hat was gone; my face, covered with scratches, was bleeding; my clothes were torn, my knees soaked with mud. She was sitting reading. When I appeared at the door, she stood up. I cried, “Mary! Mary!” and ran to her. Kneeling down before her and straining upward, I laid my bleeding face against her breast.

That is all. I did not see or hear of Miss Pearl Richardson again until five years later. There was a paragraph in the paper saying that in a lodging-house in Sheffield a woman named Pearl Richardson had killed herself by gas-poisoning.

This is the queerest experience of my life.

A year after this, as I have said, our first child was born, and until Mary’s death there were not, I am sure, two happier married people anywhere in England. And the field with the five trees looks across at me now benevolently as I write. God allows us more protection from our follies than we know.

“The Strand Magazine” Dec 1934

Head In Green Bronze And Other Stories (1938)

THE WHITE CAT

Very strange things happen to very ordinary people. This is an account of one of them. It would have been difficult, perhaps, to find in the whole of America a more ordinary man than Mr. Thornton Busk. He did not himself think that he was anything at all unusual, and yet he had always had a very pretty pride in himself and considered, as most of us do, that it was quite essential for the happy continuance of the history of the world that he should live and be well fed and have a happy and prosperous time.

He came to Hollywood from New York partly because of the climate, partly because he thought he might do a little writing for the films, partly because a very lovely girl whom he knew had gone to try her own fortune there. He’d been in Hollywood five years and it may be said of him that during that time he was happy rather than successful. He had a very cheerful nature. He was good-looking in a quite ordinary way, dark and slim and always correctly dressed. He was useful to women who did not know what to do with their time, and he never had an original idea about anything.

He discovered to his mild surprise that he was not needed by anybody to write for the films, and soon had, as everyone has in Hollywood, a personal story about how near he’d come to achieving this, and by what an unlucky chance he’d just missed that, and how So-and-so, the director of one of the best films of the decade, was his very best friend, and would have given him so much to do if it hadn’t happened that there were so many people already engaged in doing it.

He did not really feel himself ill-used. There are so many parties of so many kinds in Hollywood that you can go out somewhere all the time wherever you are. And there is always a chance that someone quite world-famous will be sitting next to you at the Vendome or dancing quite close to you at the Trocadero. His five years were entertaining and even exciting, and it seemed to him that he had plenty of friends. At the end of the five years what he hadn’t got was plenty of money. He discovered with a shock that his capital was almost gone and that although millions of dollars were rolling about the Hollywood streets, none of them seemed to roll in his direction.

It was then that he began to think seriously of a charming English lady, Mrs. Grace Ferguson. Mrs. Ferguson was a rich widow who had a pretty house on Rodeo Drive, and entertained a great deal in a quiet, ladylike fashion. She was one of the English who, coming to California on a short visit, are entrapped by the sun and never again escape. Her husband, a kind elderly man, who was on the London Stock Exchange, had been dead some ten years. She was quite alone in the world. Except for her large white cat, Penelope, she had apparently no near friends. She had, of course, plenty of acquaintances, and as it is the practice of every American to be charming at the actual moment of contact, all her acquaintances seemed to her to be friends. It is quite possible for an English man or woman to make very real and beautiful friendships in America, lasting ones and sincere, but it is often very difficult for the English to distinguish clearly between friendships and acquaintances. The dividing line is so very clear in their own more cautious country.

There were horrible times when Mrs. Ferguson felt very lonely indeed, and wondered if she had any friends. At such horrible moments she would feel a great wave of homesickness for the long white moors of Northumberland, the rocky bays of Cornwall, and the deep violet-scented lanes of Devonshire. She found that it was then that she wrote long letters to friends in England, saying that she would very shortly be home, recalling the many happy days they’d spent together, and hoping a little wistfully that they had not all entirely forgotten her. Then quickly again would come the delightful excitements of her social world. A concert in the Bowl under the stars (the seats were very damp and it was necessary to wear quite heavy Arctic clothing), an eventful première at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, a lovely trip in somebody’s yacht to Catalina, a most interesting lecture given by a yogi from India. It seemed to her on such occasions that she was surrounded by friends, warm-hearted, enchanted to see her, hating to be parted from her, ready to do anything in the world to make her happy.

Thornton Busk was one of these. A very, very charming man, always smiling, always at your service, full of jokes, a little flirtatious (but not to any dangerous extent), good-hearted and unselfish. She liked him very much indeed. She told him that he would always be welcome at any of her parties. When Thornton began to consider her seriously, he was surprised at himself for not having considered her seriously before. She had, he understood, so much money that she really did not know what to do with it all, and in these days that was most unusual. Moreover, she was not like so many ladies with money, vulgar and unprepossessing. She had the rather aesthetic charm of the delicate English lady. Someone with whom you’d never consider being passionate. Someone with whom you would never be bored.

But when he began to consider her more seriously, he found that passion was not so difficult to conceive. It was unquestioned that she had never been awakened. He knew, he had been told it often enough, how stolid and unimaginative were most elderly English husbands. There had been no scandal about her in Hollywood. She liked men, but kept them at a distance. It would be amusing to awaken her. He flattered himself that it would not really be difficult. Here, indeed, was a splendid way out of all his troubles. He began to pay her very definite court. He noticed that as soon as he began to take a deeper interest in Grace Ferguson, her house and its surroundings also became more personally alive to him.

It was a pretty place in the English style, with cosy rooms and a charming garden at the back with a small pool, a badminton court, some large banana trees and fine mimosa bushes. Her drawing-room and dining-room were in white with some good etchings. Everything was in admirable taste, but a little like herself, quietly aesthetic, rather without personality, gently hospitable. On a certain afternoon he found himself sitting at the end of the dark-blue sofa, very close to her, as she asked him whether he would have tea or a highball. When he said a highball, she asked whether he preferred Scotch or Bourbon. It was all very restful, very friendly, almost intimate.

“Say, do you know what I’ve been thinking?” And he leaned over the end of the sofa and with one hand touched her arm.

“No, what?”

“Wouldn’t it be a grand idea to go down to San Diego for a night or two? There’s the Fair, and we’d get one or two more – Barney, the Thwaites and Lucille. We’d have a grand time.”

“Yes, I think I should like that,” she said in her quiet English way. “The Fair ought to be amusing. I loved them at home when I was a child.” He looked on her face so steadily that she glanced up and looked back at him, questioningly, as though she would say: “Aren’t you a little different today? What’s happened?” And he felt different. He thought for the first time since he had known her that he would like to take her in his arms and kiss her. He wondered why he had never wanted to do this before. He did not know that once a plan begins to work in your brain, it gathers about it aid, assistance. It amuses itself with cheating you a little.

“We’ve been grand friends,” he said, “a long time now. I heard an Englishman say the other day that Americans were superficial, but I don’t think so, do you?” And he touched her hand for a brief instant; almost stroked it, and then sat back on the sofa, turning away from her a little. She looked at him with her mild blue eyes, smiling gently, a little maternally. She was thinking:

“He’s a nice boy. I like him better today than ever before.” She said, “Yes, I think you are superficial, most of you. English people take friendship very seriously. When they have a friend it’s for life.”

“That’s the matter with the English,” he answered. “They’re altogether too serious. They can’t have a good time and then forget about it.” He turned and looked at her very gravely indeed.

“But you’re not like that with me, Grace. You mean a hell of a lot to me, you do, indeed. I like you being quiet, cautious. American girls aren’t quiet any more.”

“I’m glad our friendship means something to you,” she said gently. “I’ve never quite known.”

“Well, you know now,” he answered. “You’re just about the best friend I’ve got.”

He finished his highball reflectively. What would she do if he should kiss her? English women are so strange. They lead you on and then pretend that they know nothing about it.

And the trouble is that they really are surprised. They complain bitterly that you’ve ruined a beautiful friendship, and very often they really do value the friendship more than the passion.

What would Grace be like if she should surrender? And would he be feeling the same about her if she hadn’t a penny? Yes, he believed he would. He felt quite a holy feeling stealing over him, and he asked for another highball. All the same, it was pleasant to think that she was so wonderfully wealthy. And then he noticed the cat. He had never really thought of it before, except that it had occurred to him once and again that women without husbands, lovers or children were apt to waste a great deal of emotion on animals. If he had thought about the cat at all, he’d have been aware of its odd devotion to Grace. Odd, he thought, because cats are always aloof. They lived their own lives and despised human beings.

But this cat, a very large and pure white Persian (or was it a Persian? He’d never seen a Persian so large and so white. He must ask her, some time, its breed) – this cat, Penelope, seemed really to be devoted to Grace. He had noticed that, when Grace left the room, the cat sank into a kind of cold neutrality. He had sometimes attempted to win it over, not because he liked cats, but because he believed in that old adage that animals and children were fond of only good men. Any little proof that he was good, he eagerly accepted. But Penelope would never have anything to do with him at all. It wasn’t that she disliked him, it was rather that he did not exist. And he had felt on one or two occasions, when he was waiting in the drawing-room for Grace, that under the icy grey stare Penelope caused him to sink into nothing.

This afternoon, however, was the first occasion on which he was aware that the cat quite definitely regarded him. As he touched Grace’s hand for that brief instant, the cat, that had been lying in a great white mass near the window, raised itself ever so slightly. The big handsome head turned in his direction.

“That’s the best-looking cat I’ve ever seen,” he said. “How old is it? Have you had it always?”

“Yes, from a tiny kitten. How old is it? Oh, I don’t know – eight or nine years, perhaps.”

“Seems damn fond of you.”

“Yes, it is.”

“That’s strange. One gets to thinking that cats have no feelings for anyone but themselves.”

Grace Ferguson smiled. “Oh, that’s quite untrue. Come here, Penelope.”

The cat raised itself at once, and, with great delicacy for so large an animal, softly crossed the floor. It stood with its back arched a little against Grace’s leg. It purred very gently. Then for a moment the purr ceased. It raised its head and looked at Thornton.

“You know,” he said, laughing, “I don’t think that cat likes me.”

“Perhaps it doesn’t,” she replied. “Penelope can be jealous.”

“Jealous?” This was altogether a new idea to him. “I don’t think,” he said, “that cats care that much. They think only of themselves.”

“It’s very easy,” she answered, “to explain affection by love of personal comfort. I suppose cats are selfish, but Penelope isn’t an ordinary cat.”

•   •   •   •   •

It was after this little conversation that Thornton began to be involved in strange personal experiences. We all know what it is to enter on a certain day into a new atmosphere. We pass into a world where everything seems to go perversely. Letters that we need do not arrive, appointments are broken, a fog, especially on this Californian coast, comes up and obscures the sun, the ground seems to quiver right beneath our feet. It was so now with Thornton. In the first place he had a strange sense of urgency – as though someone whispered to him, “Lose no time over this or it will be too late.”

Hollywood is a nervous, hysterical place. Nothing is sure from day to day for anyone. Even the principal stars, who are supposed to live in such settled glory, do not know from picture to picture how their reputation may be affected. And this uncertainty spreads outside the actual studios into the surrounding world. While Thornton had money in the bank he could defy the sudden unexpected demands on his purse. There is a kind of careless extravagance in the air and with it forgetfulness, so that one is constantly exposed to expenses that one cannot pay. And because everyone else is suffering from the same economic uncertainty, emotional explosions are quite common. The air seems thinner here and nerves more frequently exasperated.

Thornton’s rooms were the upper part of a strange, rather desolate little wooden building on Sunset Boulevard, the lower half of which was occupied by a lady who evidenced each night in brilliant electric lights that she gave psychic readings. These rooms had seemed smart and elegant when he first occupied them, but everything becomes easily shabby and worn in Hollywood because of the brilliant sunshine, unless it is carefully looked after. He had decorated his rooms in Mexican fashion… Mexican rugs and hangings of very bright colours, and then, contrary to these, a roll-top desk at which he had hoped to write for the films, a modern armchair that swirled round when you sat on it in a surprisingly disconcerting fashion, a settee of brown plush, which clung to you as though in a bad temper when you wanted to leave it. He had photographs of film stars in silver frames and hoped that his friends would consider them intimate gifts. But he did not care for the silver. The sudden sense that his surroundings were shabby and ominous was one thing that made him want to hasten into Mrs. Ferguson’s arms. The sooner that he was in her beautiful house the better.

He developed a kind of obsession, not so much for herself as for her possessions. And yet, he thought himself that he loved her; that he couldn’t have conceived such tenderness for her simply because she was wealthy. This was in all probability true. He looked forward to seeing her, and when he saw her he at once imagined her in his arms, and a sense of comfort and affection stole about him. For the first time he began to pity himself and to wonder why it was that, with such good brains, he had not gone further. Some guys have all the breaks, he told himself. But now perhaps, with her at his side always encouraging him, showing him what it was that he could do best, he would astonish the world with his gifts.

So the afternoon came, a foggy, cold afternoon, with a mist that seemed gloomily alive; to have arms and tentacles and a sort of weeping dreariness like a tiresome friend who must always insist on being comforted. Her drawing-room was cheerful, a log fire was blazing, and he noticed again, as of late he had so often done, how brilliant and fresh her pictures and curtains and furniture were. When he entered the room, the white cat was asleep in front of the fire. The Chinese manservant said that his mistress would be down in a few minutes. He was alone with Penelope.

He sat down, picked up a copy of Time, wondered how those boys could be so brilliant week after week and also so unkind to practically everybody, tried to think of world politics and to believe himself a man of affairs, but was aware that his heart was beating with such an agitation that he was unable to think of anything but himself.

That was because within another half-hour he would propose to Grace Ferguson, and would, in all probability, be as good as married before he left that room. He had no doubt but that she would accept him.

But was it only that?

Looking about him he felt that something in the room was discomforting, and then was conscious, to his own extreme surprise, that he hated to be alone with the cat. The animal had not moved, and then quite suddenly it stretched out a lazy paw and scratched the carpet. The sound made him shiver.

“Don’t do that!” he said aloud, as though he were speaking to a living person. The cat very slowly turned its head. He noticed then for the first time how intense were its large grey eyes. And even as he looked at them, the heavy lids obscured them. It was as though the cat were looking at him with twice the intensity through that blinded vision. Nothing in the room moved, and yet it seemed to him that the cat had come closer and grown larger. The whole room was filled with a sort of warm furry odour, almost as though he would soon be stifled with it.

Grace came in and he gave a little sigh of relief. He had his highball and she had her tea. Then he said, his voice shaking a little: “Grace, I want to tell you… I’ve been wanting to for weeks. I’m in love with you.” She turned and looked at him with so kindly a maternal expression that he felt for a moment like a little boy who had asked to be taken to the circus.

“That’s very sweet of you,” she said softly, “dear Thornton. But you can’t be in love with an old woman like me.”

“Old!” he laughed. “Why, Grace, you’re wonderful! You’re no age – you’re every age. You’re the woman I love and I want you to marry me.” At the same time he put out his hand and caught hers. She said nothing and he began to be uneasy.

“We are neither of us children,” he said. “I’m not much. I haven’t anything to offer, except devotion and loyalty. I’ll be as good to you as I know how.” (He had a ridiculous notion that he was quoting something from a story in a magazine.) She did not take her hand away, she even pressed his a little.

“I’ve been married once, you know,” she said. She laughed. “There are two kinds of widows: those who believe in marriage and those who don’t. It depends, I suppose, on what their experience has been.”

“Well?” he asked, drawing his chair a little nearer to hers.

“Well – I don’t know. I was very happy with Egbert. The only thing I had against him really was his name. I like you very much, Thornton. I think we would get on very well together. I’ll confess to you that I’m often very lonely. I can’t think of anyone I’d be better friends with, but—”

“But?” he said eagerly.

“I’ve got accustomed to my life as it is. It isn’t perfect. Nobody’s life is. But on the whole, it’s safe. And I’m not quite alone. There’s Penelope.”

“Penelope!” he said mockingly.

“Oh, you don’t know. You’d be surprised if you did.”

“Now come.” He put his arm around her gently, but he spoke with a sudden masterful decision. “You can’t pretend you won’t marry me because of a cat. I could do more for you than a cat can. I love you, and that’s what you haven’t got in your life.”

“Yes.” He noticed that she didn’t move away from him, that she came, if possible, a little closer.

“I know.” She looked at him. “I like you so much.”

He thought that the moment had come. He drew her to him and kissed her, as he hoped, passionately. Still she did not withdraw. She returned his kiss, but a little as though he were her boy who had just told her that he had won a prize at school. Well, after all, did he want passion? He thought that on the whole he did not.

“Marry me, marry me!” he said urgently, kissing her eyes. “You’ll be so happy, Grace. I’ll see that you are. I can’t live without you.” He coughed suddenly. He felt as though his mouth were full of fur. He choked. “I’m so sorry. Wait a moment.” He drank a little of his highball. “Something in my throat.”

Then he turned to her, his whole being urgent with the necessity of her submitting. “Listen, say yes. I don’t know what I should do without you now. You can save me – make something of me. I’ll serve you so faithfully.”

He actually fell on his knees beside her, put his arms round her just as he had so often seen people do in the theatre. He felt her response. For a moment it was as though she were going to yield to him completely. Then she drew back.

“Let me think it over, Thornton. Leave me to myself for a day or two.” She looked at him again, curiously, anxiously. “Do you think Anglo-American marriages ever work? Isn’t there something both so friendly and antagonistic between the two countries that we can never really be comfortable together? And I’m not very interesting. I’m terribly ordinary. One of the millions of middle-aged Englishwomen who have to content themselves with the little things. I’m afraid you might find me very dull.”

“You dull!” he cried. And now he was entirely sincere. “Why, we’ve never had a dull moment together; you know that’s true. It’s because we’ve been such companions. We like so many of the same things, and I want to guard you, protect you. I feel that you’re so defenceless.”

It was then that he saw the cat rise very slowly from its place in front of the fire and walk across the room. It was a strange thing, but both of them turned and stared at it. It walked as though it saw neither of them, and yet Thornton felt that it enclosed him; tightened the air about his nose and throat and mouth. All that Thornton knew was that, for this moment at least, the scene was ended. He got up.

“All right, I’ll give you your day or two, but don’t refuse me. For God’s sake be kind.” And with a splendid masterful action, he strode from the room.

Three days later she said that she would marry him. “After all,” she admitted, her cheek pressed against his, “it’s only Penelope who’ll object.”

“That damn cat,” he said, drawing away from her ever so little; “you’re always mentioning it.”

“Well, you see, it’s been the important thing in my life for so long. She’s not an ordinary cat. She’s done such strange things. There was Mr. Mangan, for instance—” She hesitated.

“Well?” asked Thornton, feeling, from he knew not where, a strange tremor down his spine.

“Percy Mangan. It wasn’t anything really, only he flirted a little, you know – and next morning he wrote me such a strange letter. He was going back to New York, because of a nightmare, he said. I never saw him again, but I know it was something to do with Penelope.”

“Listen, darling.” He took her face firmly between his hands and was a little annoyed with himself that he should be thinking of her money rather than of her proximity. “You’re not to have exaggerated notions about this cat. That’s one of the things I’m going to stop when we’re married.”

Grace shook her head. “Yes, I know. All the same, Penelope can’t bear that anyone should be fond of me. She scratched Benjie Cooper’s face once so that he couldn’t go about in public for weeks.”

Thornton felt a chill in the room. He looked about him, but the cat was not there. “This is all nonsense,” he said. “Rather than have that cat make our lives miserable, I’ll have it chloroformed.”

She gave him then such a strange, clear look. “I don’t think you could,” she said. “Penelope’s an extraordinary cat. If she didn’t want to be chloroformed, she wouldn’t be, whatever you might do.”

In fact, he went away from the house that evening less happy than he should be. He did not know what was the matter with him. He ought to be radiant. He was not in love with Grace, but he was very fond of her. They were excellent companions. Financially, he was safe for life.

•   •   •   •   •

It was one of those lovely evenings when the sunlit air bathes all the strange little bungalows and untidy lots and oil-pumps and new petrol stations and temporary homes of the ventriloquists or psychic readers, psychology interpreters and soul-healers, and transmutes them all into a lovely film-like iridescence. So much more unreal, so much more exhilarating and depressing at the same time, than true sunlight. He went home. He opened his door, entered his sitting-room. There, staring at him, was the white cat. He looked again. It was not there. “Now this is absurd,” he told himself. “That cat is beginning to get on my nerves. There is no cat there.” But he felt in his nostrils a warm, furry, stifling sensation. He went and had a shower and changed his clothes.

He telephoned Grace. “Just to know whether you’re happy, darling.”

“Of course I’m happy.”

“Thinking about me?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Is Penelope there sitting in front of the fire?”

“Yes. As a matter of fact, she’s on my lap.” He had an absurd instinct to scream through the telephone: “Put her down! Put her down! Don’t touch her!” But he wished Grace a loving good-night, turned from the telephone and saw the cat walking from his sitting-room into his bedroom. He went into his bedroom. There was no cat there. That night he had a dream. Somebody warned him, he couldn’t in the morning remember who, that he’d better not marry Grace Ferguson. Suspended on a little cloud between heaven and earth, he enquired why. “It’s not safe,” said the angel or the devil or whoever it might be. On about the third day from this, driving Grace up to one of the Bowl concerts, he said to her, “Darling, I haven’t been drinking. I don’t know what’s the matter with me.”

“Why?” she asked him, laying her little hand on his.

“I’m always seeing your cat. At least, I don’t know whether I see it or don’t. It seems to be there; and then it isn’t.”

She pressed his hand. “Penelope has been rather strange the last few days,” she said. “I felt a little frightened of her myself, as though I were doing something wrong. You do love me, Thornton, don’t you?”

“Love you,” he breathed.

“Because if you didn’t, if you were marrying me for some other reason, I can imagine Penelope doing something terrible. She isn’t an ordinary cat. You say you fancy you’ve seen her. Well, so did I once. I was at Palm Springs for a week or two and I left her at home with the servants. You’ll think me ridiculous, I know, but she came every evening just as the sun was fading behind the mountains. She would be there, she would rub herself against my leg.”

For the first time since his friendship with her, Thornton was irritable.

“Oh, don’t, Grace! This is ridiculous. We’re both ridiculous.”

They got out, gave the car to a parking attendant and walked slowly up the hill without speaking.

•   •   •   •   •

Two nights later, he awoke suddenly and thought that he was choking to death. He sat up gasping, beating the air with his hands. As he sat there, his heart hammering, his whole body trembling, staring into the darkness, something again whispered to him: “Give this marriage up. You’re in danger.”

Next day he felt so unwell that he consulted a doctor. There was, it seemed, nothing actually the matter with him, but his friends all noticed the change. He was pale and he looked as though he hadn’t slept. His manner was nervous and irritable. For three days he did not see Grace, and during that time quite seriously considered “whether he would not run away. Something was driving him. He would write to her when he got to New York. He would borrow some money from someone there and go to Europe. He would fly to New York. He nearly did.

And then his pride and his real affection for Grace, his thought, too, of the economic comforts waiting for him, these were all too much for him. He stayed. He spent the long afternoon in Grace’s drawing-room, tempting her to comfort him. When she knew that he suffered, she was distraught and distressed; her affection for him grew into love, because the real basis of her nature was maternal. She loved him that afternoon. Penelope sat without moving in a square of sunlight and never looked at either of them.

•   •   •   •   •

On that same evening, he went to bed early. He had no appetite. His whole body was weary, as though he were beginning some kind of attack. Was it influenza? He took several aspirins and a strong highball.

He awoke quite suddenly with a start of apprehension. He switched on the electric light and saw from his clock that it was a quarter to three in the morning. Then he looked around the room and saw the white cat lying up against the wall opposite the bed. He knew then such fear as he had never before experienced. The cat this time did not vanish as he looked at it. It seemed to grow larger, and there was something quite horrible about its watching, emotionless impassivity. While he sat there and stared, he told himself of his own foolishness. All that he had to do was to get out of bed and walk out of the door.

He moved and felt that he was caught, as one sometimes is, by the bedclothes. He pushed against them and got one bare foot to the floor. At the same moment the cat moved, not its head, but rather its back, which seemed to arch and shiver very slightly as though it were shaking itself.

He got the other foot to the floor, and then, his hands gripping the bedclothes, he watched the animal. It slowly rose, stretched first one leg, then the other, then very softly came towards him. When it was half-way across the floor it crouched, watching him with its large grey eyes; the great white body seemed to be instinct with power. It looked as though it might spring with a tiger’s action.

He screamed hysterically, “Get out! Get out!” and then, drawing himself back into bed again, let himself drop on the other side away from the door.

The cat moved towards the bed, and now it was so close to him that he could feel the hot foetid jungle air of its breath, and in its deep grey eyes he saw an intensity of malevolence. But the stupor of a few moments ago had left him. He felt now all activity. Could he but reach the door and escape, all would be well. But as he turned his head, the cat gave a soundless leap and to his horror was crouching there on the top of the bed quite close to him.

He made a movement and the cat, drawing itself on its belly, came to the very edge of the bed, its eyes with a steady burning intensity fixed on him.

He fell on his knees. The air, now close against his eyes, nostrils and mouth, was of so sickening a stench that he could not breathe.

He looked up. His mouth opened for a scream of terror, but no sound came.

The cat leapt. He felt its claws on his cheek. He was stifled with the press of warm fur….

•   •   •   •   •

When next morning Grace Ferguson read that Mr. Thornton Busk was found in his apartment, clad in his pyjamas, on the floor of his bedroom, dead, she burst into a storm of tears. It seemed that he had died of heart failure. Feeling unwell, he had crawled out of bed to get assistance and had died there on the floor. On each cheek there was a tiny scratch for which there was no accounting.

She cried her heart out. She had been so very fond of Thornton. She felt at the same time a strange relief. She had been free for so long, and now she was free again. Poor Thornton! The excitement of these last few days had been too much for him. The Chinese boy brought in the saucer of milk that Penelope enjoyed always at a settled time. Grace Ferguson blew her nose, dried her eyes, and, her voice a little broken with her crying, said:

“Come, Penelope. Here’s your milk, darling.” The cat got up, walked across to the saucer, began happily to lap. It purred its hearty contentment.

Mr. Huffam And Other Stories (1948)

THE PERFECT CLOSE

Old Paul Thomlinson was eighty-nine years of age, and everyone in his circle watched him eagerly to see whether he would capture ninety. Once, and not so long ago, it had been hoped that he would reach one hundred, and his sister, Ada Mailey, had very confidently promised it. She was supposed to have been so completely in control that she could surely manage his age as well as everything else. But maybe, in this particular respect, she was not altogether whole-hearted, for, although the old man was not at all a trouble, it would quite certainly be easier for her when her brother was gone. He would leave her the house, a tidy bit of money, and all the odds and ends. Her son, Morgan, would also benefit.

Paul Thomlinson was a very nice, clean old gentleman; a faint, pale shell, but a shell with fire burning inside it. Behind the delicate, almost intangible, age-washed mask you could see the glow and feel the heat. He was no trouble at all. He slept and passed the day in his library, a big, wide-windowed room on the second floor, with books, seventeenth and eighteenth century for the most part, reaching to the ceiling, a fine portrait of his grandfather in a red tortoiseshell frame, an atlas in old dark oak bound round with brass, a bright-green inkstand, and his dear old dog, Caesar. In his dark-red leather armchair he sat, a rug over his knees, and looked out to the garden, with the Cathedral towers, ancient, beneficent, and the colour of bird’s-nest grey, looking over the old brick wall. He saw the swifts cutting the sky like messengers and, when the weather was warm and the windows open, he could smell the roses and the pinks.

He was very little trouble, but he did hold himself aloof. That was what his sister and her son Morgan felt. For, as Mrs. Mailey herself, a thin but friendly lady of seventy, said:

“It’s as though he thought himself superior.”

But, then, his mother had thought herself superior. Paul and Ada’s father had been twice married, Paul the child of one mother, Ada of another. Paul’s mother had been remote, reserved, austere. Ada’s had been everybody’s friend. Ada herself was everybody’s friend, and when, after Mailey’s sudden death from heart-failure in a London restaurant, she had come with her baby boy to live in Polchester, she had known, in a lick of the thumb, everyone in Polchester worth knowing. Paul had been kind and generous. Ada had run the house and also, as it seemed to the world, her brother. But this last, as Ada had well known, was not the truth. She had never possessed, or even controlled, her brother. It had simply been that he had not wished to take the trouble to resist her about the unimportant things. So long as he had his books, his few friends, the Cathedral music and his summer trip abroad he had made no fuss. And, oh yes, his dog! There had always been a dog. Of his interest in women, Ada knew nothing – perfect discretion, at any rate in Polchester, whatever his annual trip abroad may have included.

He had been a handsome man, brown-haired, straight-backed, with rather gentle and easily amused eyes and a most distinguished mouth. He wore elegant clothes, liking them coloured, a bright-blue tie, a buff-coloured waistcoat. He had the shining cleanliness of Venetian glass. Well, here he was, a very old man indeed, and quite suddenly, on a late autumn afternoon in his library, he knew that he was going to die.

The knowledge came to him as though a bird from heaven had flown in through the closed and heavily curtained windows and whispered in his ear. In the light given by the sharp-flamed fire and the sheltered electric glow, he almost fancied that he saw the bird.

“Within an hour or two you’re going to die. Within an hour or two you’re going to die.”

He smiled to himself and laid on the little table at his side the volume of Dryden’s prose that he had been reading. So it had come at last! He had no pain – simply a quick access of weakness. It was as though he could see, through the glasslike shell of his body, the life force ebbing away. He knew that many old people had these alarms, and that, very often, they were false and meaningless scarings. But, this time, he had no doubt. He was in no way frightened. All his life, like every other human being, he had speculated on death. A child is immortal, for, during childhood, death is an incredibility. Maturity makes it the only certainty. Paul had loved life so intensely that death had seemed to him, for many years, an almost unbearable shame. Very simple things had always pleased him – light and dark, colours and scents, food and drink, friendship. His deeper experiences, hospital work in France during the war, love, once, twice, thrice – these had made death more understandable. They had gone to the roots of experience. But why should he not be permitted to watch the sunlight, keep company with his books, walk with his dog, enjoy the blessed indulgence of sleep, for ever and ever? Of these he would never tire and indulging in them did no one any harm.

For a long time he had resented death. Then, as experience had gathered with the years, he had turned more to wonder as to how he would meet it when it came. He did not fear it. The only thing of which he was really afraid was long-continued physical pain. Once he had suffered acute arthritis in his left arm for a continuous six months and had realized, through that experience, how pain that never relaxes can do something to the spiritual side of man, something disgraceful and humiliating. If he knew that he was to die, would he be a coward? He often pictured to himself that familiar scene in the consulting-room, he seated, listening attentively to the surgeon’s sentence of death. That sudden realization of death! What a fearful thing! To know that, within a definite sum of months, you would be removed, extinct, forgotten!

Could he then summon a brave and philosophic serenity? He did hope so.

Then, as the years had passed and he had grown older and older, he had felt, without too much boastfulness, a sort of triumph. He was getting the better of that old devil, Death! Suppose he reached his century – what a snap of the fingers for that old humbug! He was proud of his birthdays and liked them solemnized. On his seventieth he had a great dinner-party, with all his friends around him. On his ninetieth, he would have another! Now, this afternoon, he knew very certainly that he would never reach that ninetieth.

Of course, as age had advanced, his vitality had ebbed. This room had become his world, and a very agreeable world too. He slept a great deal, he had still a good appetite, his brain was as active as ever, and he was still able to feel his old energetic likes and dislikes of his fellow human beings. He liked his sister, for old times’ sake, although he held the opinion that most men have about most women – that she had little sense of the important things in life. He detested his young nephew, Morgan. He had detested him from the first moment of seeing him, a baby, howling for something, screaming at sight of him. Young Morgan had all the qualities that his uncle most abhorred – he was conceited without reason, cocksure without knowledge, noisy and extravagant. Morgan patronized his old uncle, without intending it of course, but that only made the patronage worse. He delivered his opinions on politics, the arts, love, religion, as though they were the only possible opinions. He had brains, and would make a good lawyer, but he was a horrible young man. Morgan and his uncle played chess together. Paul was an erratic player and Morgan usually defeated him. Paul hated the boy’s supercilious pleasure at his victories, but Paul adored the game and, on every separate occasion, was certain that this time he would trounce the young devil.

And Morgan had a dog, a succession of dogs. Always the same kind of dog – barking, restless, selfish dogs, fox-terriers for the most part. He thought of Morgan’s fox-terrier, Satan, the present one, and he motioned with his thin, blue-veined hand to his old Sealyham, Caesar, who, stretched near the fire, apparently sleeping, had nevertheless his eye closely fixed on his master. Caesar came slowly over to him and rested his head against his master’s leg, sighing portentous satisfaction as he did so. Caesar, old as he was, could still put fear into the heart of young Satan. A grand fighter Caesar had always been!

So here then was Death, and it was neither terrifying nor humiliating. There was a strange agitation about his heart, as though all the forces there were engaged in a last battle together. His brain was extraordinarily lucid and clear. He seemed to possess a double vision, so that the dark plum-coloured curtains were almost transparent, and the black and white marble slabs of the fireplace nearly revealed to him the active world moving behind them. Soon he would know – ah, very soon! – the shapes, sounds, and vigours of that second world.

The door opened. It was young Morgan.

“Like a game of chess, Uncle, before tea?”

“Now,” the old man thought, “I’m within an hour or less of death. I should be at charity with all the world. But I dislike that young man as much as ever. Why does he speak as though he owns the world? And,” he thought, “if ever in all my life I wanted to beat him at chess, I want to beat him now.”

He was not a bad young man, Morgan. He thought himself irresistibly charming. He was thinking:

“Poor old boy – and aren’t I a hero to play a game with him?”

He fetched, from a corner of the room, the chessmen. They were a beautiful set of dark-red agate and clear shining crystal. Very handsome they looked, set up there, with the firelight behind them.

“Red,” said Morgan.

“Red it is,” the old man answered.

Although he wished so eagerly to win, he found it difficult at first to concentrate – and chess demands absolute concentration. Why was it, he thought, that he disliked, almost bitterly, his nephew’s appearance? For he was a handsome young man, hair the colour of ripe corn, blue eyes, a taut, trained, athletic body? The mouth was supercilious, the hands too grasping…. Yes, yes.

That was the thing to do. Knight to Bishop Three and then, perhaps, if Morgan had not foreseen…

His thoughts were captured with the consciousness of the littleness of time that remained to him. Only an hour or two…. What did he wish to do? To win this game of chess. And Minna’s dress… Before he moved his bishop, he said:

“There isn’t a parcel for me downstairs, is there?”

“Didn’t see anything. Your move, Uncle!”

Dear, dear Minna! Everyone thought her so plain, just a dry, ill-dressed, elderly virgin. But she had been always so very kind to him. There had been between them for so many years a most beautiful relationship. She and the dog Caesar were now everything to him. Yes, now that so many dear others were dead. His mind speculated yet further. Did death mean nothing? Would he, in another brief space of time, be aware of Nothing? Nothing! How appalling a word! But it seemed to him that God was more likely and, if God, why, then surely continuing experience.

“Your move, Uncle.”

With a mighty effort that seemed almost the most strenuous exercise he had ever commanded, he looked at the board. He saw with horror that he was in the greatest danger. Morgan’s queen and bishop commanded a line threatening disastrously his king. Every piece of Morgan’s – he had the red, sinister, dark, shadowed agate – seemed to be stirring with menace. His own crystal pieces were, he felt, appealing to him for succour. Oh, he must win this game, he must win this, the last game of his life! He glanced at young Morgan’s cocky, supercilious smile, at the superior, confident fashion of his seat, his back taut, his thighs spread.

“Take your time, Uncle…. Take your time. You’re in a bit of a hole.”

Never before had the old man wanted anything so badly as to win this game. No, not when he had gone on his knees to Maria Bock in the restaurant in Heidelberg and implored her mercy; nor when, at the Wagner Festival in Munich, he had hoped that David Warrinder would be his friend.

His long, long past life came together in the effort that now he summoned. His brain, as fine as ever it was, bit into the board. He could feel his heart leap and die, leap and die. He castled, a thing that he should have done before. Young Morgan’s knight leapt sideways with a little toss of his sunset-coloured head.

“I must attack,” Paul thought. He brought out his queen.

“Check,” said Morgan with exultation and, his arrogance blinding him, had not seen that the checking knight had fallen into the path of his uncle’s bishop. With how quiet a gesture, but with what inner triumph, did Paul remove that knight.

“Damn!” said Morgan, “I never saw it!”

And then Paul discovered his opportunity. By moving that pawn, sending forward a bishop, offering that pawn as a sacrifice, he had a chance of a mate. Morgan’s castled king was tied in – there was a chance… a chance. His brain reeled. If only Morgan were blind enough. He moved his pawn. Morgan threatened his king again. He sent his bishop forward. Morgan, intent on his own triumph, moved his knight. Paul offered his pawn. There was a pause and Morgan, almost sneeringly, took it.

“Checkmate,” said the old man.

Mate in a dozen moves! A really marvellous victory – and he would never play chess again!

“What about another?” said young Morgan, who simply hated to be beaten.

The old man looked at him maliciously.

“No. I’m going to rest on my victory. I was afraid you’d see through that move of mine.”

Morgan said: “You won’t work that on me a second time, Uncle Paul.”

“No. I don’t believe I shall.”

“Come on, have another.”

“No. Allow me the satisfaction of telling everyone I’ve beaten you.”

“Well, you don’t often. If it gives you any pleasure—”

What a baby the boy was! The old man felt a sudden affection for him.

“It’s very nice of you to come and play with an old man like me.”

Morgan smiled.

“I am fearfully busy. But I can always find time for a game.”

“What are you busy about?”

“Work. You know, Uncle, I’m going to be a damned fine lawyer. I feel it in my bones.”

“I expect you are. I hope you’ll be a damned fine man too. There are so many lawyers.”

It seemed to him fantastically that the shadow of a man was outlined against the wall. A long-faced, thin shadow, Death no doubt. A friendly fellow.

“All right, Death. Make yourself comfortable. Give me another half-hour.”

He looked at his nephew and thought of his assured self-confidence. Not so had it been with him! Of all the things that he now regretted, the time wasted in placating his fellow human beings was the heaviest. Not that he wished that he had been bad-mannered. He rated courtesy very high. But, when younger, he had credited his companions with more wisdom, more knowledge of the world, than himself. He saw now that they had all been as stupid as he. He had been sensitive to their criticism, but now he realized that, when they criticized him, they were defending themselves. The distinguishing mark between people was kindness of heart, generosity of spirit, not wisdom. And so he thought again of Minna Prinsep.

“Be a good boy, Morgan, and run down and see whether there isn’t a parcel for me.”

“All right – if you really won’t play another game.”

The boy went out and the old man grinned at Death against the wall.

“I beat him at chess. That’s grand.”

He felt quite wonderfully cheerful. The room, and the house behind it, seemed filled with all the fun they’d had – and especially the Christmas parties. Ada had been good about those parties and, even into his very last year, the music and the dancing, the supper, the mistletoe, the holly, had all been rich with goodwill and friendliness. On this very last Christmas, Minna had thought only for him.

“I think you ought to know,” she had said, “that I never can thank you enough for all your goodness to me.” She had spoken in her dry, rather sarcastic voice that frightened some people. She was terribly poor and terribly brave. He thought that sometimes she did not have enough to eat. And then, a month ago, he had found her looking at a catalogue. There was a dress that she coveted.

“I’m no beauty, you know, but in that I might look quite attractive.”

She had sighed and put the dress catalogue away. And the other day he had written to London for it. If only it would arrive this afternoon!

“Do you think…?” he asked Death tentatively. But he knew that it was of no use to ask Death for anything. Death had his orders.

So he settled himself comfortably in his chair and considered, without any fear or discomfort, this ebbing of his vitality. He had always considered the two possibilities – death under anaesthetic or dope of some sort – and death with himself fully conscious. The second of these would be surely most dreadful – the struggle not to die, not to surrender.

On the contrary, the approach, as he was now experiencing it, was one of the most pleasant he had ever known. It was not only easy and practicable, but it seemed like a real going forward to some agreeable experience. Friends, in earlier days, had fetched him to take him away for the week-end.

“Wait a minute,” he had called, “I will be with you in a minute.” So now.

“Wait a minute, Death. I’m nearly ready.”

He noticed that Caesar had come very close to him and, once and again, shivered. Was he aware, as dogs are supposed to be aware, that Death was in the room? Never mind. The old dog would soon himself be gone. What a pleasant fancy that they might share together the Elysian fields!

The door opened.

“There is a parcel!” Morgan cried. “Here it is!”

“Let’s see it.” The old man raised his thin hand, almost like talc against the fire-light. “Give me those scissors. The large ones over by the window…. Here, you cut it. Open it for me.”

“Why, it’s a dress!”

Morgan examined it.

“Nice stuff – but pretty severe. Mother likes bright colours.”

“I know she does. No, this is for someone else.”

“You dark horse! Giving dresses to the ladies!”

The boy was at his most irritating, for behind his sentences was plainly the conviction that he was the most enchanting of young men, tender with the aged, humorous about sex, wise about women….

“Don’t talk to me about ladies!” the old man snapped at him. “Why, at your age, I knew already more than you’ll ever know.” He winked at Death across the room, as much as to say:

“I know that in this last hour of mine I should be gentle, at peace with all men, unconscious of malice…. I’m afraid to the very last I shall be myself.”

It annoyed him to see Morgan fingering the dress.

“All right…. Leave it. There! on the table—”

Then, as though to himself:

“I wonder if Minna Prinsep will look in!”

Morgan shouted with joy.

“Minna! Why, of course, how stupid! Old Minna! That’s who the dress is for! Why didn’t I think of it?”

“That’s enough! That’s enough! Leave me to myself now – that’s a good boy – I’ll have a nap before tea.”

He felt a tenderness to the boy again. After all, this child was at the beginning of life’s experience, and he was at the end. How little, how very little he had to tell him! Be tolerant, realize yourself as a comic figure, expect no great things either of yourself or others, physical love does not last but spiritual love may, accept the inevitable egotism of all humans save the saints, take joy in little things, do not grieve overmuch for sins of the body, but fight like the devil against meannesses of the spirit – oh, what use would any of this be to Morgan? An old man’s platitudes, they would seem. No one ever learnt anything from the experience of others. He lay back, happy that he would never have to lay down the law about anything again.

He remembered his indignation once, when, at a party, someone had said:

“Constable! Milk-and-water English! Cows and mills and stormy skies! He might have been something of a painter if he hadn’t been English!”

How Paul had exploded! How angry he had been, how his heart had hammered in his chest! Now, in retrospect, that scene was a little curl of grey smoke, a breath of air, a rolling beat of a vanishing drum! All angers, all tempestuous judgements, all dismays, betrayals, burning tears – all gone, all as though they had never been!

The door opened and Minna Prinsep stood there. He gazed at her. She seemed for a moment another shadow against the wall, like Death. And then, he was so rapturously delighted. Yes, although vitality was ebbing from him fast, he could still feel rapture of the spirit.

“Minna!”

Her ugly, rather twisted face, illuminated by the beautiful generous eyes, smiled.

“I looked in just to see how you were.”

“Oh, I’m all right.” He was growing weak. He motioned her rather feebly to his side. “Come over here.”

She came across, moving in stiff awkward jerks her thin, angular body.

“Are you all right? You look rather tired.”

“Of course I am. I beat Morgan at chess this afternoon.”

“You didn’t?”

“I did. And in a dozen moves too. Look here – I’ve got something for you.”

His hands, from which all strength seemed now to be departing, fingered about the tissue paper.

“You take it from the box.”

She lifted it out and held it up.

“Oh!… Oh!”

“It’s for you. I sent for it from London. If it doesn’t quite fit, you can have it altered here.”

“Oh, but it’s lovely.” She held the stuff against her thin neck.

“Perfect. You – you darling.”

She let the dress drop, knelt down and kissed his forehead. He put his arm stiffly about her. They had forgotten the dress.

“Why do you do these things for me?”

Her voice broke. He thought she was going to cry.

“No one else in all my life has been good to me as you have. I’ve never loved anyone so much—”

“Nor have I. There is a love you know, Minna, deeper and deeper – not physical.”

“Yes – ours will last for ever. It has made me believe in immortality.”

His happiness was complete. As he lay there, his hand against her side, the house was suddenly filled with sound. The Christmas party. He was moving down the stairs. In his nostrils was the scent of burning candle-wax, sugar icing, the cold woody chill of mistletoe berries, the hot crackle of holly. Beyond the window were carol singers, and someone was taking the parcels from the tree….

He was hand in hand with Death, and Death’s grasp was warm and comforting.

“Now this is perfect!” he cried, and all the candles blazed and the coloured balls swung gallantly on the tree.

Minna looked up into his face and gave a cry.

“The Strand Magazine” Dec 1938

Mr. Huffam And Other Stories (1948)

THE CONJURER

Everyone who looks back to childhood must be aware of the strange confusion of fact and fairy-story that those early memories arouse. Here there is detail so sharp and clear that its truth cannot be questioned – the screen with the pictures from the Christmas numbers, the green china saucer in which the mustard and cress was sown, the oak guarding the lawn hung with festoons of crystal snow, the murmur of the pigeons above the rose-coloured garden wall, and, with these, the oddest figures – fairies, leprechauns, wizards – and scenes of fantasy when the cuckoo flew out of the clock, the Chinese mandarin from the drawing-room mantelpiece wiped his long moustaches with a cambric handkerchief, and the spotted rocking-horse without a tail bumped down the flight of stairs from the schoolroom to the hall-door. What is reality? Where do dreams begin? What is Truth? asked jesting Pilate.

With wonder such as this, I look back to an adventure of my childhood never narrated by me before because, perhaps, I have been afraid of my neighbour’s incredulity. It may be that at last I perceive that the whole of life is nothing but a succession of wonders and one adventure in it no more unreal than another. Or it may be that I am old enough now not to fear my neighbour’s mocking laughter. He has laughed at me too often, and, like the bluebottle in the fairy-tale, “I have grown accustomed to my cousin bluebottle’s impertinent buzzing.” In any case, however that may be, for the first time I relate this remarkable story, giving you the details exactly as I remember them.

I must have been at the time aged thirteen or so. I was a shy, nervous and self-conscious boy – the more so that my elder brother and sister had not a doubt about anything and laughed at me, when they thought of me, for my paltry spirit.

It was, I am afraid, true. I had a paltry spirit. It seemed to me that so very easily, with a word or a look, with the closing of a door or the opening of a window, things might go so very wrong. The day – every day – was packed with danger, whether at school or at home. I loved my father and mother, but, at that time, also feared them. I hated to see that look in my mother’s eyes as though, in spite of her love for me, the thought would come to her: “Is this child never going to have any sense? What are we to do with him?”

Sarah, my elder sister, a boisterous, happy and extremely popular child, would look at me and say, laughing: “Well, you are a little fool!” – which I was, I have no doubt. But it would have been better had she not laughed. She was (as I have since told her) in those years so carelessly contemptuous of me.

However, I am not here attempting to blame anybody. That I deserved all I got I don’t for a moment doubt. I was a shy, awkward, unattractive child – which only makes this adventure the more remarkable. For several years of my childhood my father, who was a doctor, had a practice in the village of Gosforth in Cumberland. Gosforth was three miles from the sea, and some six miles from Wastwater lake. The village consisted of a long, straggling street. It was famous principally for its church, and the church was famous because of the remarkable cross in the graveyard. This cross was one of the most ancient – if not the most ancient – in the whole of Great Britain, and was the more remarkable because it was carved with certain pagan figures. Antiquarians in large numbers used to visit the cross, and still do, I don’t doubt.

Altogether, with the sea so near, with the lake (the darkest, most mysterious of all the lakes) only a bicycle-ride away, the strange cross, the beautiful outline of Black Combe on the horizon, Gosforth was the very place to nurture the illogical fancies of a romantic child.

We lived in an old rambling house, half a mile from the village. This house had a wild, unkempt garden, a thick tangled wood ran at the back of it, and for birds, for singing, chattering, gossipy, happy birds, I have never known a place to equal it! Neither my father nor mother nor Sarah and Fred – my brother and sister – lived very much in the world of the imagination. During the holidays – I went at this time to Sedbergh School – every minute was filled with practical doings. My father’s belief was that it was bad for children to be idle, and so from morning to night we were busily employed. We were encouraged to play games, and it was one of my troubles that at any and every game I was a duffer. Not so Sarah and Fred, who simply rejoiced in them and gathered other children to share in them from near and far. Children were not in those days hard to find. It was before the times of constant universal motoring, and, therefore, also before the times of a passionate and perpetually disappointed restlessness. We took our pleasures eagerly, but had that best of all the fairy’s gifts – a conscious and excited enjoyment of little things. Almost nothing was too slight for our amusement.

It happened that, although in my childish, lonely soul I was thirsting for affection, none of the children who came to our house found me attractive. There were the Bellishaws of Uffdale, the Croxtons from Moor Park, the Adderleys from Gosforth village. The Adderleys are important in my story and so I must say a word about them – without prejudice, I hope, although even at this great distance of time I can’t pretend that I love them!

The Rector of Gosforth was a bachelor, and lived in rooms at the Wastwater end of the village. The Rectory was a big rambling old house, and expensive to run, so he let it to Sir John and Lady Adderley, and lived with perfect content in a frowsty study and a small stuffy bedroom. (I can see him now, following the stream beyond the village, his black clerical hat on one side of his head, a huge pipe in his mouth, and the gleam of delighted anticipation in his eye!)

So the Adderleys took the Rectory for a year and made a considerable splash in the neighbourhood. They were, as a family, designed for a splash; noisy, happy, confident, most exceedingly self-assured. Lady Adderley, I remember, was a large, broad woman with a big, red, freckled face, and I see her always in a vast floppy hat and gardening gloves, and carrying an enormous pair of scissors. But the three children were the important thing – Ambrose, Grace and Samuel. They were, I suppose, very “bossy” children. At any rate, as I look back upon them they always ran everything, and that instantly. I can hear Ambrose’s commanding voice now as he arrived at our door – “I say! Look here, we’re going to play croquet, and bags I the red ball!”

Of course, they despised me thoroughly. They teased me, mocked me, derided me, all most good-naturedly, of course. They were bursting with rude health, and had to give freedom to some of their energy. And there I was, hopeless at games and easily stirred into a temper that was an amusing game for all of them. “Let’s make Humphrey waxy,” was their jolly cry – and waxy I was very easily made!

It happened, therefore, that when the Adderley children appeared I, whenever possible, slipped away. I hid in the wood or I slunk up the road, and then, safe for the time being from persecution, allowed my imagination its freedom, telling myself stories, or, more often, inventing wonderful crises when I played the hero – fires when I saved my sister and the Adderley girl, expeditions when we would be lost in the hills and I only discover the way out, or accidents at sea when I would swim through monstrous waves to secure assistance.

It was on one of these lonely walks that I first saw Mr. Claribel.

•   •   •   •   •

I have already said that, as I look back, I cannot be sure of what was real and what unreal. I know for certain that it was a cold winter’s day, with a little, whining, lonely wind that blew a few last shrunken leaves twistedly in the air before they fell. Above the far turn of the road the hump of Black Combe – black against the grey-white chilly sky – looked frowning upon me. And down the road came Mr. Claribel. It has always been my constant belief that he was dancing down the road. That, too, may be fancy, but in my memory’s eye I see him, oh, so clearly! with his round black hat, his umbrella ill folded, dancing along while the cold thin air trembled through the branches.

When we met he stopped. I had never seen him before (although he had been living in the village for some considerable time) and I must have stared in a very rude way. He was odd at first sight, with his little, meagre body, his brown face, his bright blue eyes, and his long, black coat-tails flapping behind him.

Our conversation (the first of many) was something like this:

“Well, little boy, what are you doing here?”

“Walking, sir.”

“What – all alone? Haven’t you anyone to walk with?”

“I like to be alone, sir.” (I was at times a priggish little boy.)

“Like to be alone? Tut! Tut! That’s wrong at your age! How old are you?”

“Thirteen and three months.”

“Thirteen and three months – and all by yourself. Where’s your father and mother?”

“At Grange Hall, sir. My father’s the doctor.”

“Your father’s the doctor? And have you no brother and sister?”

“Yes, sir. One brother and one sister.”

“And what are they doing?”

“Playing.”

“And so ought you to be.” It must have been about now that he came very close to me, peering into my face. “You haven’t seen a little dog anywhere?”

“No, sir.”

“It’s a small brown dog, and answers to the name of Napoleon. He’s disappeared. He’s always disappearing. But then so’s everything else.”

I remember quite clearly that he asked me then: “Do you know what’s the secret of a happy life?”

“No, sir.”

“Never to be astonished at anything. Take it all as it comes. It’s no use your being astonished, because IT doesn’t care if you are. IT doesn’t care what you feel.”

He said IT with terrific emphasis.

“Dear, dear,” he said. “It’s very cold talking here. Have you had your tea?”

“No, sir.”

“Well, come and have it with me.”

We started along together, he walking at a great pace, sometimes muttering to himself, sometimes dropping his umbrella, which I picked up for him, and, once and again, calling out in a high, shrill treble: “Napoleon! Napoleon!”

Then, when we were very near to the village, a little brown dog appeared from nowhere. Really from nowhere at all. It was most uncanny. There it was, in the middle of the road, a very nice little dog, with curly brown hair, wagging its tail and looking most friendly.

“Where have you been?” Mr. Claribel said severely. But the little dog didn’t mind, only chased a leaf that the wind was playing with, and ran in front of us as though it hadn’t a care in the world.

I remember that I wondered whether it was right to go to tea with a complete stranger. I had always been warned that I must never speak to strangers or take anything from them, but I didn’t see what harm this gentleman could do me, and I fancy that I was pleased at the thought of disobeying my family for once. Little they cared, I thought, what I did!

We arrived at the little house, with a bare little garden in front of it. This garden was remarkable to me for a large, round silver ball (like a witch-ball) that was posed on a stone pedestal in the very middle of the garden bed. There was also what should have been a small fountain (although no water was playing) and a child’s railway train lying dejectedly on its side in the gravel path. I remember all the details of this house as though I were walking in at the front door this very minute.

Mr. Claribel and Napoleon led the way. He helped me off with my coat and muffler, patting me on the shoulder as he did so. Then I followed him into the very queerest room I had ever seen. It was a small room, with a bright, prattling little fire, a pot of Christmas roses in the window, and a small table laid for tea. The queer thing about it was that it was crammed with the most incongruous things. There were, I remember, two sets of chessmen, a sailing ship modelled in silver with a glass bowl covering it, a large, speckled fish stretched out against the wall, a doll’s house with very bright-looking miniature furniture, one of those large glass balls containing a house painted blue which you turn upside-down and it snows (I know because I tried), a crimson drum with the gilt arms of some regiment on the crimson, an ivory elephant, a musical box painted with little country scenes (I know it was a musical box because afterwards I played it), and many, many things more, although these are the only ones that I definitely remember. I never saw a room so crowded, and yet, in some quite happy way, we fitted in exactly, I sitting on one side of the fire, and he on the other, with Napoleon stretched out at his feet.

Soon an old lady arrived with the tea, and we turned to the table.

“I always sit up to the table at tea,” he remarked (and I observed that he took his napkin and tucked it in under his sharp, little brown chin). “One eats so much more. Don’t you think so?”

We certainly ate a great deal that evening! We had thick, rich blackberry jam; thick, rich gingerbread cake, black as thunder, sweet as heaven, damp in the middle; scones and buns and sandwiches and hot buttered toast; tea out of a magnificent old teapot with patterns of leaves and roses in silver as thick as your thumb. I remember that, while I gorged, I asked myself the question: Does he have tea all by himself to this extent every day? Could he have been expecting someone? But how could he have known that he would meet me?

And then, as he so often did, he read my thoughts.

“I knew you were coming to tea,” he said. “There were tea-leaves in my cup at breakfast this morning.” But he didn’t mean that. He had had some way of knowing. I was sure of it. But how could he … when I wasn’t sure of it myself!

Before I left him that afternoon he asked me every sort of question, and some of them very unusual. I may, in fact, be inventing here. Isn’t it incredible, for instance, that he should have asked me whether I collected acorns? I said, of course, that I did not. He shook his head and said that was a pity. He asked me whether the big toe of my left foot ever ached, and I said that, as a matter of fact, it sometimes did. He smiled, and said that that was an excellent sign, and that he was glad to hear it. He asked me whether I liked to read, and I said I did. What books did I like best? I said Stevenson, Rider Haggard and Stanley Weyman.

He said that he had a book to give me, and out of a drawer near the fireplace he produced a thin, flat book with faded red covers. Inside there were coloured pictures, pictures of remarkable animals, animals with two heads and long swords coming out of their foreheads. There were also maps of the planetary system, and there were ladies with crowns on their heads, and one picture of a large green tree crowded with birds. There were many pages covered entirely with numbers and letters of the alphabet.

“Now, if you could learn what all that means, Humphrey,” he said, “you could turn yourself into anything you liked any time you liked.”

“Could I really?” I asked, quite fascinated.

“Indeed you could.”

“And can you turn yourself into anything you like?” I enquired.

“Ah,” he answered, smiling. “That’s asking. But Napoleon can.”

•   •   •   •   •

After that I went home, swollen with food and clutching the red book under my arm. I was greatly excited. I had made a friend. I knew someone that my family didn’t know. After this, in the next few weeks, I saw him frequently. I had tea with him on several occasions. Very soon I loved him dearly, for I was a sentimental little boy, longing for affection. No one had ever been so kind to me. He made me, too, begin to have some belief in myself. I brushed my hair and put on a clean collar, and really began to have some opinions of my own and assert them.

Then, of course, my new friendship was discovered. I was seen walking down the street with Mr. Claribel. It was not directly disapproved of, but I was terribly teased about it. I found that Mr. Claribel was considered in the village as someone altogether off his head. No one could charge him with any crime; on the contrary, he was a kind, crazy, old man who gave sweets to the children, visited old Mrs. Mumble when she was in bed with a bad leg, and helped Mr. Somerthwaite when his cow died. But he was queer, and that is enough in this world to divide a man from his fellows. As though we are not, all of us, queer as queer! If we are not queer in one way, we are certainly queer in another!

The Adderley children were especially amused at my friendship.

“Let’s do Mr. Claribel asking Humphrey to tea!” Ambrose would cry, and he would present an absurd imitation of Mr. Claribel with his coat-tails and badly-folded umbrella. More than that, this new interest of mine seemed to separate me from the others more than ever. Mr. Claribel was mad, and I liked him, so I must be mad too. And then I had something that they hadn’t got. Children are cruel not because they want to be, but because they are not yet civilised. I was like a sick or injured member of the herd, and the healthy ones must make a protest.

A strange thing was that Mr. Claribel knew exactly what they were doing. I didn’t have to tell him a thing. “If they don’t look out,” he said one day, “I’ll give those children the fright of their lives,” and for a moment, as he said it, he appeared quite dangerous! But no one could have been kinder to me than he was. The stories he told me, the presents he made me (I have the round ball with the snow inside it to this day!), the affection he showed me!

So we moved on towards Christmas. A week before Christmas the snow came. It snowed steadily for three days – real hard snow that covered the ground and stayed there. This is unusual for Cumberland, for snow rarely lies on the lower ground. After the snowfall we had one brilliant blue sky after another. We woke to glittering, sparkling mornings and looked out of the window to a lawn so thick with diamonds that it hurt the eye to gaze on it, and its virgin whiteness was unbroken save for the tiny imprints of the birds. Over everything there was a marvellous hush. You could hear voices calling or dogs barking from great distances, and the shadows cast on the snow by the fir-trees were a deep and tender purple. The oak-tree on the lawn was so heavy with snow that it seemed that, strong though it was, it must bend with its burden.

Inside the house, what excitement! In those days Christmas was an event of mystery, of almost passionate anticipation, of blissful realisation! We had no outside aids. There were one or two parties, a Christmas tree for the village children, but all the realities we must spin, like silkworms, out of ourselves!

It was a fine year, I remember, for holly – the berries were thick – and soon the house was decorated from kitchen to attic. But the principal enterprise was the inventing of presents. These were secrets evolved behind locked doors, wrapped away in paper and hidden in drawers. We children had little money, and the only place for purchases was the village shop. I had, in all, about six shillings of my own, and four people must have major presents, and by major I meant something of real importance, something original, something startling. Never mind now what my presents were. I have, in fact, altogether forgotten.

But what I do remember is that, as Christmas Day approached, I began to be overwhelmed with a sense of coming failure. I wanted this time to assert myself, to show them all that I did matter! My presents were to be so unusual that they would be compelled to consider me. But, of course, they were not. And, as the others grew ever more busy and important and excited, I, as I always did when the whole family was excited, became less and less of anything. When they needed a messenger or a scapegoat or an “odd boy” they made use of me – and with good-humoured contempt. So at least I thought. I have no doubt that I imagined all this, and that they were too busy, too jolly, too happy to think of me at all, or, if they did, fancied that I was jolly and happy too. But because, perhaps, my new friendship with Mr. Claribel had given me new hopes I felt all the more deeply that I was a wretched failure, and of no use to anyone.

And the worst thing of all was the Adderleys’ party. This was to be on Christmas Eve – a grand affair at the Rectory; children from all the neighbourhood, supper and games and a Christmas tree. I never suffered anywhere as I did at the Adderley parties, for it was there that I was most completely disregarded. Nobody’s fault but my own. I was tongue-tied in a large company, or, if I did speak, made a remark at which everyone laughed. I wanted to be gay, but happiness on these occasions seemed to be always just out of my reach.

As the hours passed the thought of the Adderley festivity clouded my eyes. I saw myself, in my sensitive, excited imagination, mocked and derided, the more bitterly a failure in that I could picture to myself so easily how wonderful it would be were I a success. I could see myself applauded, could hear the comments – “What a remarkable boy! A most unusual child!” Not that I thought myself remarkable or unusual, but for once how splendid it would be if I appeared so!

My unhappiness reached a climax on the morning of Christmas Eve. I was carrying something for my mother and dropped it; I could not find something for my brother; my father said “Come, come, Humphrey – where are your wits?” In the middle of the morning – a lovely crystal-clear day it was – I slipped away and took Mr. Claribel my present. After much thought and balancing of possibilities, I had decided that I would give him a penknife. An absurd present, perhaps, but among all his possessions I had never seen a penknife, and, as it was a thing that I needed at the time very badly myself, it was obvious that other people must need one, too.

The one that I bought at the village shop (with, I am afraid, quite half my available riches) was made of tortoiseshell. (Imitation? I fear so. I didn’t know it then.) It had only one blade, but it looked bright, and it could cut, because I tested it. Indeed, I remember that I liked it so much that I had a moment’s awful temptation to keep it for myself. I didn’t know then what I know now – that when one keeps for oneself a present that one has bought for someone else it turns, inevitably, to dust and ashes. No, I loved Mr. Claribel, and by the time that I had reached his house I was delighted at the thought of his pleasure. And he was pleased! He kissed me very ceremoniously on the forehead. I detested to be kissed, but on this occasion it warmed my heart, made me think suddenly of the Adderley party, created in some way a sharp picture of my clumsiness and isolation there – and I burst into tears!

The little man made all sorts of sounds of distress, brought out the black gingerbread cake, sat with his arm on my shoulder while I ate it, then gave me his present, which was none other than the beautiful musical box with the pictures. I was so terribly pleased about this that I threw my arms round his neck and kissed him in my turn.

He asked me then why I was unhappy, and I told him. It was the Adderley party. I didn’t like the Adderleys, and their parties were awful. I knew that I should make a fool of myself, that I should disgrace my father and mother, that I should come home from it so miserable that Christmas would be altogether spoilt. He nodded his head a number of times. Then he said:

“Now, don’t you worry. I promise that you shall enjoy the party.”

I shook my head dismally.

“Just you wait. I’ve never promised anything yet that I haven’t brought off. Just you wait.”

In some mysterious way relieved, I ran home, clutching my musical box.

•   •   •   •   •

At the appointed hour, muffled up to our noses, our hands in thick woollen gloves, my father carrying a lantern, we set out for the Rectory.

Here it may be that, because of after events, my imagination once more leads me astray, but, looking back, I seem now to recover a kind of magic in the air that night. The sky crackled with stars, our breath drove in front of the lantern in cloudy bursts, illuminated by that fitful gleam. The star-shimmering light was brilliant enough to haze the air with a kind of silver twilight, and within this the trees and hedges seemed to sail in shapes of white marble across the fields. The frost was heavy, and the snow crunched and protested under our boots. There would be a little shiver in the air, and a dust of snow would scatter over our shoulders. There was every witness to Christmas Eve. At old Miss Mark’s house down the road a little group were singing carols, and their lantern seemed to greet ours in a roguish fashion, as much as to say: “What are you doing leading those ridiculous mortals along the road? Why not drop them into a pond?”

All in a quite friendly way, of course!

Across the fields came the tumbling, tangled melody of the church bells. They were practising for tomorrow, and I could see Joe Churcher, who was rather a friend of mine and a very fat man, straining at the rope, and little Harry Bone, who was so short and thin, standing on tip-toe. In any case, there they were, those rich, rollicking, impetuous chimes rolling over the white, frosted fields as though they were so wildly excited by good news that they were tumbling over themselves to tell it.

As we approached the Rectory, I was moved, I remember, by two very opposite impulses. One was to run away and hide. I tramped along in the rear of our family procession with all the certainty of being forgotten and neglected that I had all day long been expecting. The family had, up to this evening, the most curious fashion of behaving as though I didn’t exist; after this evening they were never unconscious of me again! I felt miserable, and socially a pariah, but at the same time I was excited with expectation. I was quite certain that Mr. Claribel would keep his promise.

How he would do it I did not of course know, but something would happen, something that would astonish everybody!

Inside the house we were borne along on the general stream. Our wraps were taken from us, we patted our hair, straightened our waistcoats, tried to look as grown-up as possible. I remember, that, in a rather miserable, doomed kind of way, watching my sister Sarah, I decided that she looked too silly for anything. She was not a beauty (none of us, I fear, was that), her figure was lumpy, and her stockings would go crooked and her nose shiny! (Dear Sarah! how I learnt to love you afterwards! What I would give to have you sitting beside me now!) I was a caustic little critic in those days, but a critic (like so many critics) who could be changed, by a kind personal word, into an appreciator.

There were, however, for me no kind words during the first part of that evening. Everything went as wrong as it could possibly go! We all tumbled into the drawing-room and stood about, looking, most of us, angry and shy.

Lady Adderley, red in the face and fastened into a too-tight costume of light-blue silk, sailed into the midst of us, shouting out cheerful remarks to break the ice. The room was very gay, with its blaze of lights and holly over all the pictures, a thick clump of mistletoe, burdened with berries, hanging from the centre illumination that shivered with a thousand silver pennies as we moved about under it.

The ice must be broken, so we started with musical chairs, and then, at the very beginning of the evening, I disgraced myself. For a long, thin lady with a tiresome train was skirting the chairs just in front of me. She was one of those middle-aged ladies who, at a children’s party, are “younger than the youngest,” for she passed along, clutching at the back of every chair, and uttering shrill cries of pleasure and excitement. I was just behind her and trod on her train. There was a rent and a cry. The lady turned, and, for a moment, I thought that she would slap me, she looked so vexed. But she pulled herself together, smiled a bitter smile, said that it didn’t matter in the least, and retired to have something done to it.

Of course, everyone had seen that I was responsible. “Just like Humphrey,” I heard someone say. I was now in that parlous state, known to all of us in nightmares, when every step is perilous. Move where I would, I should assist some catastrophe. Oddly enough, I believe that everyone else felt something of the same discomfort. It promised to be one of those parties upon which unhappy hostesses look back, with dismay, for the rest of their lives. At the end of that very first game there was trouble because a fat little boy, clinging to the seat of the last chair, protested that he had won and not the thin boy with the rabbit teeth who was sitting on the chair-edge as though he were Casablanca. Other people took sides. A little girl said it was a “shame.” We then played Blind Man’s Buff, a dangerous game, because it degenerates so readily into horse-play. It did so now, and a big boy pushed a little girl over, and she started loudly to cry.

Yes, things were very wrong, and I saw Lady Adderley consulting with her husband. She was asking him, I expect, whether it would not be wise to hurry things forward. I was myself so completely neglected that I might have been a little lonely ghost, invisible to all the world. I spoke to no one. No one spoke to me. There are no miseries in after life to compare with these miseries of childhood.

•   •   •   •   •

Then the door opened. A maid stood there and I heard her say quite clearly:

“My lady – the conjurer …”

It happened that I was standing near to Lady Adderley, and I could mark very easily her expression. Startled it was! Plainly she had invited no conjurer, nor, had she had one up her sleeve, would it have been such a man as now stood waiting in the doorway. He was tall and thin, with a long pale face, a very pronounced hooked nose, and black hair that stood up stiffly on end. He was dressed entirely in black, and over his shoulders there hung a short black cape. In one hand he carried a black soft hat with a high crown, and in the other a square red leather box which he held by a bright brass handle. He stood there, very quietly, his long legs close together, not moving at all, as thin and straight and still as a mast waiting for its flag.

Lady Adderley had invited no conjurer – that was plain. She was astonished as though she had seen a witch with a broomstick. She intended, I’ve no doubt, to protest, to ask who it was had come thus uninvited. She took a step forward, then she stopped. Was it something in the conjurer’s eyes, politely bent upon hers, his still, assured attitude, his black cloak, even his red leather box?

Or was it simply that she felt that her party was threatened with failure, that something must be done to save it? Or was it just that she could not help herself?

In any case, she suddenly turned to her husband and I heard her say: “This is the surprise I had for you, dear.” Then she went up to the conjurer and invited him to come forward.

I cannot be sure, but I fancy that from the moment of the conjurer’s entrance the spirit of the party changed. It may have been that we were all delighted to have a surprise – a conjurer was the very last thing that we had expected! It may have been that we ourselves were beginning to be frightened at the spirit of discontent and bad temper that was springing up among us.

In any case, everybody, laughing, chattering, in the very best of tempers, settled down, forming a big circle, the older people on chairs and most of the children cross-legged on the floor.

The conjurer, who seemed to be a solemn man, for he did not smile, walked forward and took his place on a long, thick, purple rug in front of the windows. Lady Adderley placed a table in front of him, and on this he laid his red leather box. Then – so suddenly as to make everyone jump – from somewhere within his cloak, it seemed, he produced a long wand, coloured crimson with a silver tip at the end of it. Then he spoke to us, and his voice was soft, and every word as clear as a bell.

He told us not to be astonished at anything that we saw, that there were a great many things more wonderful in this world than we would ever suppose, that we must never say that anything wasn’t possible. For, he said, smiling for the first time (I, staring at him, felt as though I had seen that smile before), things became impossible to us as we grew older only because we closed our minds up as tight as his red leather box. Of course, if we would shut ourselves up inside a red leather box, that was our own fault – but he hoped that we’d be wiser than that. We all laughed at that, and thought within ourselves that of course we would be!

Then he waved his wand and began his tricks. At first they were quite ordinary. He brought rolls of coloured paper from his black hat, a flower in a pot from under a table, an egg out of his left ear; and a pack of cards disappeared into thin air. I heard Ambrose, who was sitting near to me, murmur: “He’s only an ordinary conjurer, after all.” Then he paused, came forward nearer to us, and looked at us all with his piercing black eyes.

“You’ve seen those things before, haven’t you?” he said. “Well, now you’re going to see something new.”

A little shiver of excitement ran through all of us.

“But first,” he said, “I must have a boy to help me.”

Several boys sprang up – the kind of boys who, all their lives afterwards, would be springing forward on just such occasions.

But he shook his head.

“No,” he said. “I want the right kind of boy.” He looked round, searching through the company. “That’s the boy I want!” he said, and he nodded his head in my direction.

Even then I didn’t think that it was myself he wanted! I was packed away behind a fat boy and between two fat girls. The fat boy thought that it was he! With puffs of pleasure he rose to his feet.

“No,” said the conjurer. “That’s the boy I’m going to have” – and with his red wand he pointed directly at me.

How astonished everybody was! That was the first triumph of my young life. Humphrey Porter, whom no one considered anything at all; Humphrey Porter, who was quite certain to make a mess of it! Poor conjurer! He would soon see how grave his mistake! But here was a curious thing. I, who was terrified of doing anything before others, on this occasion knew no fear. I can see myself now, climbing through the other children, and then, before their mocking derisive eyes, taking my place quietly beside the little table, waiting for my orders.

“Thank you!” said the conjurer gravely. “That will do very nicely.”

Then for the first time he opened the red box and took from it a number of things. There were some small china saucers, a number of little coloured boxes, a tiny pistol, some children’s bricks, three small coloured flags, red, white and blue, a mouse-trap, a silver bell, a toy trumpet. Over all these things he spread a very large white handkerchief. The ground of this handkerchief was white, but I saw that it was covered with pictures of little blue ships all in full sail.

“Now,” he said, “I want you all to understand that this is a very exceptional boy. An ordinary boy wouldn’t do in the least. I’m very lucky to have found such a boy.”

(At this point I should have hung my head. But I didn’t. I stared in front of me and smiled at my mother, who smiled back at me.)

“What is your name, boy?” he asked me.

“Humphrey,” I answered, and for some reason or other was quite sure that he knew without my telling him.

“Now show all your friends what you can do!” he said.

And what didn’t I do in the next half-hour? I was handed the toy trumpet and, quite confidently, played beautiful tunes upon it – I who had never played a tune in my life! At his command I whistled like a bird, nay, like a whole forest of birds. “That’s a thrush,” he said, nodding his head contentedly. “Now a blackbird. And now – what about the nightingale?” I pursed my lips together and the room was filled with the song of the nightingale.

“Now take these little boxes, Humphrey,” he said, “and throw them into the air.”

I threw them into the air, and behold, there they stayed, suspended, shining in all their colours under the glittering silver lights. (“I know how you did that,” Ambrose said confidently afterwards. “There were invisible wires coming out of the red box.” Well, if he knew, it was more than I did.)

I took up, under his instructions, the little silver bell and it rang a perfect carillon of chimes. I took the mouse-trap and, walking backwards and forwards, holding it in front of the audience, drew out of it one small white mouse after another. They ran up my sleeve, over my shoulders, then disappeared into the mouse-trap again. I waved the coloured flags and they grew larger and larger until they seemed to reach to the ceiling.

“Now, Humphrey,” he said, putting his hand on my shoulder (why was that touch so very familiar?), “tell that lady over there what she has in her little white bag.”

“That lady,” I said, without hesitation, “has in her bag a small white handkerchief, a little looking-glass with a blue border, a pink needle-case, and a small bottle of smelling-salts with a crystal stopper.”

How everyone gasped, as well they might! The lady was asked to open her bag, and there were the articles I had named. (I need scarcely say that I was as greatly astonished as anyone!)

“And that boy,” he said, pointing to Ambrose, who was standing up with his mouth wide open. “What has he got in his trouser-pocket? You may as well tell us in French,” he added casually.

So, in perfect French, I told Ambrose that he was carrying in his pocket a lump of toffee, a knife with a broken blade, three coppers and a half-crown, and a catapult. (Strange things to carry in your Eton suit, but then Ambrose was very acquisitive, and I didn’t know until later that Ambrose had stolen the knife from his brother and had been forbidden by his father to have a catapult. My revelations disturbed Ambrose considerably.)

So it went on, and with every moment my glory was growing greater and greater! I could feel it mounting about me! It was as though I could see into the heart of everyone and tell how proud my father and mother were, how pleased Sarah was, and how on every side they were thinking: “Well, I never! I’d no idea the little Porter boy had so much in him!”

At last came the final splendour. The conjurer raised the handkerchief with the little blue ships and told me to lift my arm. I did so. What happened then? How do I know, at this distance of time? Is any mystery ever fully revealed?

But it seemed to me that the conjurer grew to a tremendous height, that the room was filled with delicious sounds, that I was aware that Christmas was better than any other time, and that no Christmas was as good as this Christmas, that high above our heads hung a splendid star, and that the conjurer, whispering from his great height into my ear, promised me that all my wishes should be fulfilled, that if only I were patient and quiet and unselfish enough, I should be happy for ever after. Nonsense, of course. No conjurer can bring off such tricks. But I know, from the later accounts that everyone gave, that we all, in our different ways, felt for a moment the enchantment, were confident of our happiness, knew ourselves to be transformed.

“And that, ladies and gentlemen,” he said, bowing, “is the end of my little entertainment.”

How everyone clapped, how they laughed, how they chattered! And while they were talking he was gone. When we turned round to find him there was no sign of him – gone with his hat and his red leather box and his red wand.

I remained, of course, to enjoy my triumph. I’ll say no more about that. I smiled and I laughed, and I said that it was nothing to do with me, and I ate the largest supper of my life.

“And to think,” said Mother on the way home, “that you’ve taken us all in, Humphrey.”

“It’s always the quiet ones,” said my father, “who come out strong on an occasion.”

•   •   •   •   •

A few days later I went and had tea with Mr. Claribel. I talked nineteen to the dozen, telling him every detail of that wonderful evening – and once again, as so often before, felt that he knew it all before I told him.

Then came one of the most amazing things! He sneezed, and out of his pocket took his handkerchief. It was a white handkerchief covered with little blue ships in full sail.

“But that—!” I cried.

He tweaked my ear.

“When you go home tonight, Humphrey,” he said, “look at that red book I once gave you. If you study page seventy-three, learn it by heart and practise a little, you will become a very good conjurer. It’s quite easy.”

•   •   •   •   •

But I don’t know. Many a day did I study page seventy-three. All to no purpose. I cannot even make a rabbit jump out of a hat.

It needs, I expect, more than a book.

Head In Green Bronze And Other Stories (1938)

THE FAITHFUL SERVANT

No writer of stories should ever point a moral. I know that very well. Nor is it exactly a moral that I am pointing this time. In telling you about Mrs. Rayson and the Negro, I am calling your attention to something that in all probability you have not noticed – namely, that if you, in your own private life, pursue a virtue, a crime, a habit, a taste far enough, it brings you into contact with the strangest persons – and not, in general, living ones. And when I say “living” I mean individuals obeying, for a brief period, the physical laws of this momentary existence.

All this is a pompous and wordy introduction to Mrs. Rayson, who was never pompous, although she was often wordy. Whatever she was, she was the last person in the world you would expect to find in warm friendship with a Negro wearing a primrose-coloured cap and bright-blue collar. Yet so it was. And the word that united them was Fidelity.

Mrs. Rayson had been, for a great many years, housekeeper to Frederick Rowlandson, Esquire, of Salt House, Polchester. Rowlandson, whom I knew well, deserves a whole book to himself. He was the only human being in our town who truly merited the name of Connoisseur, and, in fact, he was famous for his collection of pictures far beyond our town. At the big Winter Exhibitions at Burlington House, you would often read in the catalogue that a Reynolds or a Matisse or a Rembrandt drawing had been lent by “Frederick Rowlandson, Salt House, Polchester, Glebeshire.” He was a large, fat man, untidy, with mild blue eyes and a drooping moustache. He inherited his fortune from his father, who had invented some kind of tooth-paste. Salt House was a hideous building, erected by Rowlandson Senior at the very worst period of Victorian taste: it stood in a sheltered valley only a mile or so outside Polchester. The inside of this ugly building was simply plastered with oils and drawings. No one knew where young Rowlandson had got his taste from. The old man had none, but, a widower for the last twenty years of his life, he adored his boy, his only child, and let him do as he pleased. Young Rowlandson began to buy pictures somewhere about 1880, when Manet, Cézanne and the rest were still derided in their own country, and almost unknown in England. His first important purchase was an Ingres drawing, a male nude, and it hung over his study mantelpiece until the day of his death. Many people in Polchester thought it improper, no fig-leaves being anywhere indicated. He had been to Harrow and King’s College, Cambridge, and it was at King’s that he made a friendship with Michael Testy, one of the best art critics England has ever had. From then on, Testy advised him about his purchases.

In twenty years Rowlandson learnt a lot. His personal preference was for Italian Primitives and Old Master drawings, but his collection was most catholic. Not only catholic, but confused. You could never tell what you would see next! All along the wall of the main staircase were Constable drawings, dozens of them, lovely and sparkling with misted English fire, but directly after them, on the top landing, were Dufys and Légers and Braques. His big Italian pictures were, however, together and separate in the big drawing-room. He had a grand Tintoretto Dethronement and a superb Titian female head. Over the mantelpiece of the small drawing-room hung the Quentin Matsys that is, with Mrs. Rayson, the subject of this story.

Mrs. Rayson came to Rowlandson as his housekeeper when he was quite a young man. She must have been rather pretty then, although no one, I am sure, suggested anything improper between them. Rowlandson, apparently, had no “affairs.” He lived only for his pictures – and Mrs. Rayson possessed a husband, a loafer, who appeared and disappeared and was at last killed in the war.

She did not, I suspect, keep her looks very long. She grew stout and was always untidy. Her face was pleasant, but stupid. She was, in fact, a stupid woman and was not, I am sure, a very good housekeeper. The house never looked very clean or disciplined. The maids seemed happy, but independent, and Frank Gunther, Rowlandson’s chauffeur, was as cheerful, round-faced a man as you’d ever see, but his uniform was not smart, nor his grand cars very clean.

Everything and everyone concerned with Salt House was careless and disorderly, including Rowlandson, but Rowlandson seemed to prefer it thus.

Mrs. Rayson adored him. When I knew him she was middle-aged and shapeless. She had agreeable light-brown hair, always a trifle disorderly; she had the pleasant, rather meaningless, smile of a peasant who is happy but does not bother to think why, and her voice was soft and friendly. She was a terrific talker and no respecter of persons. She adored Rowlandson, but thought him a crazy child who should be indulged by her, because she loved him. She resented that he should spend so much money on pictures. Every time that he went to London or Paris, she knew that more pictures would arrive at the house, and she hated the men she vaguely called “these dealers” so intensely that it was lucky for them that they never paid Rowlandson a visit. She would, I am sure, have put poison in their soup. Michael Testy sometimes came to stay and she would have hated him if she could, but no one could hate him – he was so very amiable, generous and unmalicious.

She ruled Salt House like an untidy queen: she reminded me, in fact, very strongly of the White Queen in Alice. She tried to make an ally of me in the picture-buying question.

“You know, sir, he’s got far more already than the house can hold, and, as I tell him again and again, he doesn’t know what he has got in the top rooms, all piled against the wall they are. Why doesn’t he sell some of them? I ask him that and he says he can’t bear to part with them, which seems to me pure foolish as he never looks at them. And there’s lots wants doing to the house and I don’t think it’s right with all these Unemployed and the Germans as unfriendly as they are.” Then a really lovely smile transfigured her round, comfortable face:

“But there. It makes him happy and that’s the main thing.”

There was, however, one picture that she liked. This was the Quintin Matsys of which I have already spoken. This picture had a romantic history. It represented a wealthy merchant or Town Councillor or Court official, dressed in a rich fur gown. He was staring in front of him, and against the lower part of his gown was a crown of thorns. To the right of him were some trees and, on the left, a Negro in a primrose-coloured cap and wearing a bright-blue collar. This Negro was looking anxiously at the Councillor.

Now this picture, a most brilliant example of Matsys at his best, was part of a large altar-piece that, until the end of the eighteenth century, had been the glory of some Flemish church. No one living had any knowledge of the picture, but it was supposed that it represented the Crucifixion and that these two figures were part of the watching crowd. The church had been destroyed by fire, and a monk, escaping, had saved this part of the picture. This monk had afterwards lived with a family in England and, in return for their kindness to him, had given them the painting. This same family had sold it to Rowlandson.

It made, however, a very complete thing in itself. The colour was gloriously rich; the fur of the coat, the dark green of the trees, the brown of the Negro’s face, and the richness of his blue collar – these were so brilliant that the whole painting was alive, deep in its profundity and reality. Rowlandson called it The Faithful Servant, and once you had heard that, you could not believe that it could be anything else. The most lovely feature of it was the gaze of the Negro at his master. His thick lips were a little apart; his countenance expressed ardently his fidelity, and his anxiety – his anxiety as to what his master would do, or rather as to the effect that the scene would have on him. You felt that the servant knew his master so well that he realized how moving a moment this was for him. It might alter his life! Would he not even now perhaps expose himself by some public protest? The wonderful thing in the picture was the complete absorption of the servant in his master. He had no thought, no eyes, for the general scene. He was waiting to follow his master wherever he might go. It was absurd, of course, to suppose that Mrs. Rayson saw all this in the picture. She did not see it as a picture at all, but the Negro represented a principle to her that she completely understood. Just so would she too behave were her master in any danger.

“You know,” Rowlandson would say, with that fat chuckle especially his, “that is the only picture in the house Mrs. Rayson approves of. It tells her some kind of story that she can understand.”

And Mrs. Rayson said to me herself:

“I don’t know anything about pictures, sir – only I like what I do like, if you understand what I mean. But there, sir, that picture I do understand. There are some in the world, I believe, won’t hold with black folk, but that black servant, even though he has got thick lips, was a good man once, whoever he was. And he’s as alive to me as if I’d known him. That will sound silly to you, sir, but it’s true all the same.”

I said it didn’t sound silly to me at all.

•   •   •   •   •

And now I come to the harrowing part of my story. For Rowlandson, quite suddenly, and without any warning to anybody, married. He was married in a register office in London and, after a fortnight’s holiday abroad, brought his wife home.

Polchester has all the faults, prejudices, provincialism of other Cathedral towns, but, if you have lived there for a long time, you do, most certainly, develop a pride and a warm affection for it. The Cathedral is so solemn, the old houses with their enclosed gardens so really English, the sea is so near, the moors beyond the town’s walls are so open and free. I would not say that we citizens are altogether a loving brotherhood: we have our gossip, our spite, our malice like the rest of the world. And we have also a corporate sense and care for one another, and have a certain pride in one another. Now, of Rowlandson we were always especially proud. He was our only international figure, unless our Bishop might be considered one. Never, since the days of Harmer John the Dane, had we possessed anyone who lived ardently for beauty and, as we thought, was selfless in his pursuit of it. We had never contemplated his marrying anyone. He seemed to care very little for women and there had never been, concerning him, a breath of scandal. We felt that, because of his passion for art, he was free of that maddening, disappointing, enchanting, baffling poison, sexual passion. When we heard that he had married, we could not believe it, and then, when we knew that it was true, we did hope that he had married wisely.

The very moment that we saw Julia Rowlandson, we all knew that he had married most unwisely. I shall never understand why he did it – there are dark places in all our hearts – but I suppose that she, for a brief moment, beguiled his senses and caught him before he could fly into safety.

Julia Rowlandson was not even pretty. She was small and soft and fluffy. She had cold blue eyes, a turned-up nose and a false smile. I am not prejudiced. She was as selfish and cold-hearted a creature as I shall ever know. She was, I think, about thirty years of age, and Rowlandson was a wonderful catch for her.

At first he was, for some unknown reason, very proud of her. He said to me, one evening, talking rather like a bashful schoolboy:

“What luck! I’m no chicken and I’m no beauty. To think that Julia should care for me! And it’s just what I need. Someone to pull this house together, tidy everything up. She’s a marvellous manager.”

That Julia was! She immediately set about putting things to rights. She had her qualities. The house changed under her hand. She gave charming little dinner-parties. Rowlandson was tidied up as well as the house, and efficiency was everywhere. But how the servants hated her! In these democratic days, it is wonderful to me that there is anyone left who can look on servants as servants. Just as we are, most of us, paid to do a job for someone or other, so are they paid to do a job for us. We are all in the same boat and we should all be friends together, working for the same good cause. But Julia had the old-fashioned ideas. Her servants were her slaves and that was the beginning and end of the arrangement.

It was from plump, good-natured Frank Gunther that I first heard. I could not believe that he could be so venomous.

“I would leave tomorrow, but chauffeurs’ jobs are hard to get and I’ve been with Mr. Rowlandson for years and years, and there’s no one I think higher of. But she’s a holy terror, she is. She’ll keep me waiting for hours and hours when one word could save it. She’ll send me into the town for nothing at all, when a word on the telephone would get her what she wants. She speaks to me like a dog and it’s the same with all the servants.”

There were tears in his eyes. I thought he was going to blubber like a child from sheer rage. Julia’s selfishness was a marvellous thing to witness. A spoilt, selfish woman is something that no man can rival. And about Julia there was a self-satisfaction for which there were no grounds whatever. She was not beautiful, not clever, not kindly, not gracious. She needed a criminal assault to bring her to her senses.

And so here these two women were, Mrs. Rayson and Julia Rowlandson.

One afternoon, when it was all over, I had a full and sufficient account of the whole business from Mrs. Rayson’s own lips, one wintry afternoon, when the snow was falling like lazy afterthoughts across the misted window. I would like to give the story in Mrs. Rayson’s own words, but I could never, I fear, catch her fat, reminiscent chuckle. And there was more, of course, in her story than she herself saw.

There is an exciting novel, I fancy, in the relations between those two women while they were together in that house – but it is the business of the short story to catch a moment, a shadow at a window, a horse tumbling in the street, an uplifted glass, a cherry-tree in bloom, the smell of a soiled shirt, the padded walk of a hunting cat – any of these is all that a short story needs. This story exists, I fancy, at the exact moment when the sunlight fades from the room and the Negro’s face is blotted out.

But first there were these two women in the house.

I am sure that Mrs. Rayson dedicated herself, from the moment that Julia entered the house, to perfect service. She did not in the very least resent her master’s marriage. All that she wanted was that he should be happy, and – who knows? – she may for a long time past have felt that she was not herself as efficient as she ought to be. She was determined to give Mrs. Rowlandson, whoever she might be, the loyalty and devotion that she gave to her master.

But, of course, she could not. One glance at Julia and you would know that everything Mrs. Rayson was and stood for would infuriate her spirit – but most of all that Mrs. Rayson had something she had not, a loving, faithful heart. Not that Julia knew that: she thought that she had everything. But we can sense our loss and be maddened by it, simply because someone else says, “Good-bye then.”

Mrs. Rayson surrendered the keys of the house and she soon saw that she had surrendered everything else. The house had always been human – untidy, but human. Now Mrs. Rayson lost her humanity.

“It was an awful thing, sir. In three days it was as though I hadn’t a stomach, if you’ll pardon me, sir.”

It was Julia’s especial gift to turn veins and arteries into wires and strings. At the end of the first week, Julia told Mrs. Rayson what she thought of her….

“She was right, sir, in some of the things she said. I’ve never been very orderly. I have a good laugh and then promptly forget something I ought to have remembered. Mr. Rowlandson was rather like that himself, sir.”

Julia told her:

“How you’ve been housekeeper here so long, I can’t imagine. You’re thoroughly inefficient. No wonder the house was in the mess it was.”

And then, Julia hated the pictures! I think she resented the money Rowlandson had spent on them, but not for Mrs. Rayson’s reason. Mrs. Rayson thought that he would have enjoyed life more had he not spent his money so foolishly. Julia wanted the money for herself. She was as greedy as a hungry cat. She knew what the Titian and Tintoretto were worth. And to think that she might be spending that wasted money herself!

Especially she hated the Matsys. The Councillor’s wise reflective gaze infuriated her, and the Negro was a Negro. She did everything she could to have it removed. She failed.

•   •   •   •   •

Within two months, Mrs. Rayson was her bitter enemy.

“I hated her as I’ve never hated any mortal. In fact, she was the first person, I think, I ever did hate!”

But she hated her because she was making Rowlandson unhappy. Or was she? Rowlandson was terribly proud of his Julia, and, although he was uncomfortable now, disliked to be tidy, hated the interruptions and the dinner-parties, yet – how he was proud of her!

After a time, Julia herself was unhappy. It was not her idea to live in this small provincial place, miles from London. She found us all the dreariest lot. Not quite all of us. She began to flirt. Most of our young men at that time were not very exciting, but there were one or two: Henry Tattersall, Maurice Fleming, Charles Farley. Soon it became obvious to everyone in the town, save Rowlandson, that Maurice Fleming was the one. This selection on her part proved how exceedingly common and stupid Julia was. Maurice was stout and smart. Julia liked men to be stout. Within my hearing, she said:

“Thin men are awful. You can feel their bones.” I myself am thin as a rake.

You certainly could not feel Fleming’s bones. I doubt if he had any. He was well-dressed and had a clever crimson sports car – the regular thing. He was as vain and selfish as Julia, but he was flattered by her liking for him. He was rather old news to the younger ladies of Polchester. They were now continually together and Mrs. Rayson was horrified. She believed in fidelity quite fanatically.

Then, one morning, Julia told Mrs. Rayson to take the Matsys down from the wall and hide it somewhere in the attic.

“‘Has the master ordered it?’ I asked her. Oh no, of course not, he didn’t know anything about it and wouldn’t miss it anyway. ‘Wouldn’t miss it?’ said I. ‘That’s all you know. Why, it’s the pride and pleasure of his life,’ I said. Then she gets as red as a turkey-cock and stands up straight on her high heels (she wears high heels because she’s so short and can’t bear not to be as tall as other people), and says, ‘Now don’t you be impertinent. I’ve had enough of you. Take that picture down.’ And I reply, ‘Not without master’s orders,’ and didn’t we just glare at one another! Almost insane it was.”

Mrs. Rayson was not the kind of person given to hallucinations, but it did seem to her, just then, that the Negro in the picture moved.

“I’d got as fond of him as anything by that time, sir, and that woman abusing him only made me care for him more. And suddenly I was so angry I wasn’t seeing quite straight – if you understand me, sir – I seemed to see the whole of him, not just his head and neck, stepping right out of the picture, with his primrose coat, the same as his cap, and tights on, blue just like his collar. He was a strong fellow if ever I see one, with arms would kill a ox. All imagination, sir, but you’d have sworn he looked at his master to ask him a question. All imagination, and there I was, a moment later, seeing Madam walk out majestic-like on her high heels and nearly slip on the floor with them. It was almost as though the Negro gave her a push when she wasn’t looking.” And the next thing was that Mrs. Rayson found a note from young Fleming under a pincushion on Julia Rowlandson’s dressing-table. She should not, I suppose, have read it, but instinctively she felt that it was against her master’s safety, something that endangered his happiness. I myself have never seen that note, but I understand that it began with “darling” and had something about “holding you in my arms again.”

It was quite enough for Mrs. Rayson. She was not shocked through moral sensitiveness, she always wanted people to be happy in any way that pleased them. But she was shocked to the very centre of her being by the infidelity. Julia Rowlandson had not been married more than three months and now here she was – “darling… in my arms again.” She felt quite sick. She was unwell. She had to sit down. She saw very quickly that, with this note, she could deal her mistress a nasty blow. She had only to show the note to her master…. But what effect would it have on him? He would be unhappy, ashamed, and, in the end, would do nothing at all. Her knowledge of him was perfect. Rowlandson was no good at a crisis. If he knew of his wife’s infidelity, his life would be poisoned at the source. He would hate her, despise her, resent her, and continue to live with her.

On the other hand, it would be a triumph for Mrs. Rayson. She would have Julia Rowlandson henceforth where she wanted her. And – best of all – she would be first with her master again.

She fought, I believe, that dim January afternoon, the battle of her life. She was not greatly accustomed to battles. Her life had been run on a very simple plane. But now – on the one hand, a selfish, triumphant revenge, but with it her master’s misery. On the other hand, subjection to a woman whom now she not only hated but despised with every warm impulse beating from her heart. To be married to her master and, within three months, to betray him. What do you think of that, ladies and gentlemen?

She went, she has told me, on that late afternoon, into the room where the Matsys was. She did not switch on the light, but watched it as the fire-light leapt up and down its surface.

It was there that she fought her battle, fought it walking about the room, her hands clenched together, looking at the picture, seeing the dark face of the Negro, the thick lips open, the serious devoted eyes turned to the Councillor – this face, now so familiar to her, leaping in and out of darkness as the flames leapt.

How she longed to hear him speak! If only he would say a word! She knew well enough that he would understand her longing for revenge. He could revenge himself well enough on anyone who hurt his master! She could just fancy his animal rage, his cry of fury, the force with which that terrific body (for she knew that it was terrific) would leap upon the enemy. But to hurt his master for the sake of revenge! No, that, she realized as the fire died, he would never do. He would never, never do.

And so at last she left the room, her decision made. She would say nothing about the note. After this she felt a physical disgust for Julia Rowlandson that was like an illness….

“As when you have a fever, sir, your head burning and your feet icy and everything feeling twice its size when you touch it.”

She hated even to look at her and, unimaginative as she was, she fancied that the dry, sarcastic mouth of the Councillor in the Matsys curled a little in additional contempt.

It was not perhaps altogether imagination, for Julia’s hatred of the Matsys grew to a frenzy. She made a terrible scene one night about it. Rowlandson told me months later….

“A strange thing. It was the Negro she couldn’t bear.”

Mrs. Rayson’s temptation meanwhile continued.

“It never left me for a moment, digging at me. Just to say a word to the master, showing him the note which, rightly or wrongly, I’d kept. She was a careless slut and that I’ll call her, even after what’s happened. Just to show him the note! But it wouldn’t have been right – sort of betraying my trust; at least, that’s how I looked at it.”

Then came the catastrophe. One morning Rowlandson asked her into his sanctum. This is a small room that has always seemed to me one of the most beautiful I know anywhere. Here he has hung his Italian primitives, Venetian, Sienese, little pictures gleaming with gold, flashing with the wings of angels, deep with that old faded rose of cloth and hanging so especially satisfying – yes, angels and oxen, and tiny, white winding roads and plum-coloured hills, with the Virgin and Child eternally worshipped.

Here, most awkwardly and with a desperate embarrassment, Rowlandson told Mrs. Rayson that she would have to go. He could scarcely, I am sure, form his sentences:

“Dreadfully sorry… most unfortunate… after all these years… but my wife and yourself… don’t seem to get along… don’t know whose fault….” Something like that. The tears, quite frankly, flowed down Mrs. Rayson’s plump cheeks. She had never been one to hide her feelings. It was the end of everything for her. Rowlandson was her child, her love, her care, her possession, her very self. The end of everything.

And now the temptation to show him the note must have been almost overpowering. A terrible longing desire, weakness of the will. She did not yield.

She hurried to her room that had, for all those years, been her home, that Rowlandson, ages ago, had hung with half a dozen pre-Raphaelite drawings – because she liked “pictures with a story.” She cried and dried her eyes. She knew that for her life was over, truly and honestly, as though she had died.

So, to the moment of this story. I have it, of course, only second-hand. A moment in the afternoon of that same day, a sunny day, with that early spring warmth that comes to Glebeshire often in January like an unexpected kiss on the cheek. The sun was just dropping behind the hill. In five minutes the room would be in dusk. Mrs. Rayson was saying good-bye to the Matsys, her bonnet on her head, her cape with the bugles, her shiny black gloves. She would not sleep another night in the house where she was not wanted.

Rowlandson had come to her earlier in the afternoon, taken her hand in his, looked at her like a witless man, and said desperately: “Go home…. I’ll come to see you…. I’ll find a solution.” It was almost like the parting of lovers – these two very plain, elderly people saying goodbye.

But there was no solution. Mrs. Rayson knew that well enough. So there she stood crying in front of the Matsys. She cried very easily – at the sound of a band, at a reported gracious act of Queen Mary’s (she put Queen Mary next to Rowlandson in her heart), at a stray dog with something tied to its tail, at any wedding or funeral.

She stared at the Negro with his primrose cap and bright-blue collar. He had never seemed more adoring – faithful man. Whatever he’d done he must be a good man, and the Councillor was lucky. She said good-bye to her friend the Negro. Through the half-open door, she heard Julia Rowlandson coming down from the upper floor, click, click, click with her high heels. She held her breath, lest she should be found there. She wanted to leave the house without saying a word to anyone – only the Negro.

“Good-bye, good-bye.”

The sun sank behind the hill. The room was in a sun-grey dusk. What was the Negro doing? Had he at last, for the first time in these many hundred years, removed his gaze from the Councillor? Did someone, dark, thick, heavy, brush her shoulders? Had someone crossed the floor?

Was there, in the lit door-space, for an instant, a flash of primrose and blue?

This at least is true.

There was a horrible sound of a slip, a scramble, a piercing cry, a crash….

Mrs. Rayson found Julia Rowlandson in the hall at the bottom of the stairs, her neck broken. She had slipped on those high-heeled shoes; the stairs were steep.

“Very easily done,” the coroner said – “dangerous, these steep stairs.”

The house soon dropped back to its comfortable untidiness again. Mrs. Rayson was no more efficient than she had been before. Rowlandson was happier, I sometimes thought, as though he now realized what he had almost lost. I overheard Mrs. Rayson once say to someone:

“I had a nasty time once – the worst I ever had. I don’t know what I’d have done if a friend hadn’t helped me.”

Julia was as though she had never been alive. She never had been alive. We exist by the strength of the spirit that is within us.

“The Strand Magazine” Jul 1939

Mr. Huffam And Other Stories (1948)