Short Stories 1895-1926 (19 page)

‘Well, there he was, a smallish man, with short-growing hair, a little like Thothmes II, to judge from his portrait – a man of extraordinary gifts in his craft, of an exquisite sensibility to quality and design, but seldom, I imagine, at the Board Meetings. Often, it seems, he used to ramble off into the country. He appears to have especially hated a sort of Frenchiness that had crept into the firms' wares. But much worse than mooning about to soak in Englishness again, he would ramble off into the country of his
mind,
and there you need to have a faint notion of where you are before you can safely go any further. It's difficult, of course, to know exactly what his broodings were. But the story goes that he would complete his nocturnal pilgrimages by climbing up before daybreak into one of the fruit-trees on the hill, a magnificent mulberry – to see the sun, I suppose; to “look down” as far as possible on the Works; to be up among the morning birds, like the old man in the limerick.'

‘An odd bat, that,' I interposed.

‘There he would squat,' continued Maunders imperturbably, ‘poor old creature, peering out of the leaves, the rose of dawn on his face, as when it lightened Blake's. And presently, the angels up from the valley would pass by, singing and laughing, to their work. A pretty sight it must have been, with their young faces and pure colours and nimble practised gestures. For, mind you, it was still a happiness to be one of the hands in the firm – as compared, at any rate, with being a grimy paw elsewhere. Only at long last would
they
become aware of the glowing gloom in the heads. Not merely were the brains of the firm tending in one direction and the members remaining more or less static in another, but things outside were beginning to change. The god of machinery was soon to spout smoke and steam from his dismal nostrils, and man to learn the bright little lesson that not only necessities, but even luxuries, can be the cheaper if they are manufactured a gross at a time.'

‘Yes,' said I; ‘there he would squat; and then?'

‘Then,' breathed Maunders, ‘one morning, one shafted scarlet morning, it seems he saw – well, I cannot say what exactly he did see. No hand anyhow, but a light-embodied dream. A being lovelier than any goddess for whom even an L.L. & V. in the service of the Sorceress of Sidon could have been moved from bowels of superstitious horror to design sandals. A shape, a fleetingness, a visitant – poor old Bat-in-the-Belfry – evoked by a moment's aspiration and delight out of his own sublime wool-gatherings. And so this ageing creature, this extra-Lispetted old day-dreamer, fell in love – with a non-entity.'

‘My dear Maunders; pause,' I said. ‘In mere self-respect! How could such an occurrence as that have been recorded in the Firm's annals? No; no.'

‘Weren't there letters?' sighed Maunders, turning suddenly on me, malacca cane in air. ‘Wasn't there a crack-brained diary? Haven't you a vestige of old-fashioned and discredited gumption? Wait till I have finished, and let your sweet-smelling facts have a show. Ask Henrietta. I say,' he repeated stubbornly, ‘that between the dawn and the daytime, down out of his broad foliage, the hill-side in indescribable bloom, this old meandering Query, this half-demented old Jack-o'-Dreams saw a Vision, and his heart went the same way as long since had gone his head. Haven't I told you he was what the dear old evolutionists, blind to the inexhaustible graces of creation, esteem a
sport
?

‘The Family Tree had blossomed out of season, for the last time, jetting its dwindling virtue into this final, queer, anomalous bloom; rich with nectarous bane. It had returned upon itself. 'Tis the last rose of Summer that sighs of the Spring. “Ah, yes, but did the vision see
him
?” – you are sneering to yourself.

‘And to that I reply: I don't know. Do they ever? Or is it that only certain long-suffering eyes can afford them the hospitality of becoming visible? Anyhow, I see her. And in a fashion that is not only the bliss but the very deuce of solitude. Ignore its bidding, K —, and we are damned. Oh yes, I know. The inward eye is all very well. I know it. But to share that experience with these outward groping orbs, I'd – well, I'd gladly go bankrupt. Ask Henrietta.'

‘What happened then?'

‘This happened. The wool-gathering wits flocked back and golden-fleeced him. One might almost say he became equally astute and extravagant. As a matter of fact, of course, only willing and selfless service can bring every human faculty to bear.' Maunders sighed. ‘He sent a cheque for a thousand guineas or so to a Dutch bulb-farm, and planted the hill-walk with tulips, April-blue scyllas and
narcissi poetici. Narcissi poetici!
He tapped an earth-bound spring and set up fauns and dryads, amoretti and what not, spouting subterranean water. He built a shrine of alabaster – with an empty niche.

‘It appeared to be mere scatter-brained fooling. Still, it was in a sense in the L.L. & V. tradition, and his partners appear to have let him have a free hand. Don't forget their even then almost illimitable resources. They'd far far rather – even the strict-whiskered Vaine of the period, who in unhappier circumstances might have sat for the typical alderman – they'd infinitely rather he exhibited his peculiarities within their sphere, so to speak, than bring them to mockery before the world at large.'

‘I see.'

‘They hadn't till then perhaps baldly recognized the world at large, except as a hot-bed of prehistoric or sycophantic customers. And they never – not for an instant – even surmised his depredations would prove active from
within
. None the less, like some secret serpent, spawn of the forgotten fabulous, he was in fact gnawing at the very vitals of the tradition. Let me put it bluntly, in terms which even you, my dear K —, will appreciate. Anthony Lispett had “gone balmy” on his Vision. She – and therefore he – was “beside
himself
'.

‘I do not suggest that he mixed her up with his superannuating old
cor
pus vile;
nothing vulgar to talk of, and tragic to think of, in that sort. He merely lived on from that daybreak dream to dream with but one desire in his poor cracked old cranium – to serve her idea. Aren't we, all of us, myth-makers? Grins not the Lion at the Unicorn? Does not the soapboiler bedizen our streets with Art – and “atmosphere”? Anthony's myth was from elsewhere – neither from his stomach, his pocket, his reputation, his utilitarian morals, nor his brains. That was all. And as he served her, I suppose, he found himself cherubically treading yet more secretly and inwardly her hesperidean meads.'

I glanced at Maunders in some dismay. ‘How?'

‘Well,' said he, ‘it is not easy to divine how exactly Anthony began his malpractices. But clearly, since he was perpetually haunted by this illusion of a divine, unearthly stranger, a sort of Athene haunting his hill, his one desire could not but be to set the Works working for
her
. He could bide his time. He could be quiet and gradual. Anyhow, we know the event, though we can't say precisely how it evolved.

‘One may assume, I suppose, that he would steal to and fro among the nocturnal looms and presses and vats and dyeing rooms, and, ten times more richly gifted by his insane inspiration than he was even by nature, that he just doctored right and left. He would experiment night after night with the firm's materials in the raw. Worse, he rationed himself in his tree-gazing; and climbed to his leafy perch only during certain conjunctions of the planets. Mere circumstances seem to have waited on him, as did the sun on Joshua.

‘But the Lispet and the Vaine of this time were nothing but hidebound old bachelors – intent only on saving the face of convention. The last Double-T died the day after the site of the shrine was decided on. There was no young blood in the firm. And with an almost diabolical ingenuity Anthony seems to have executed only the orders of such clients as wanted the firm's very finest and rarest handiwork. Even those, of course, who coveted or could afford only the commoner materials were already beginning to dwindle in numbers.

‘The other customers he kept waiting, or insulted with questions, or supplied with more delicate and exquisite fabrics than they required.

‘The story goes that a certain Empress renowned for her domestic virtues commanded a trousseau for yet another royal niece or what not. A day or two before the young woman's nuptials, and weeks late, arrived silks and tissues and filigrees spun out of some kind of South American and Borneo spider silk, such as only a nymph could wear. My dear K —, it nearly hatched a European War. That particular Court was little but a menagerie of satyrs.

‘Countesses and such-like soliciting “fives” and “fours” in gloves, and “ones” in stockings, might still faintly hope to be accommodated; and even then their coveted wares were a tight fit. For a while the firm seems to have survived on the proceeds from merchandise intended for grown-ups which your cosmopolitan Croesuses snapped up for their children. At secondhand, of course, since few of them could extort a “reference” to the firm for love or even for money.

‘Henrietta has a few bits of embroideries and silk of the time. Perhaps she will show them to you. Even a human craft can reflect a divine disaster. And the linens! – of a quality that would derange the ghost of an Egyptian embalmer.

‘Even worse, Anthony seems to have indulged an extraordinary sense of propriety. He would lavish L.L. & V. urbanities on some sylph of an actress who had no more morals in the usual acceptation of the term than a humming bird, and flatly returned fabulous cheques (with the order) to old protégés of the firm merely convicted of fortune-making, or of organized “philanthropy”, or of “bettering the conditions” of their fellow-creatures. He seems to have hated the virtuous for their own sake alone.

‘In short, he grew madder and madder, and the custom, the good-will, even the reputation of the firm melted like butter in the sun. The last Lispet followed the last Double-T – expired of apoplexy in the counting-house, and was sat on by the coroner. The reigning Vaine turned religious and was buried in a sarcophagus of Portland stone under the foundations of the Unitarian Chapel which he himself had laid in the hope perhaps to lay the L.L. & V. devil at the same time.

‘The hands dwindled, died out, dropped away, or even emigrated to the paws. Only a few with some little competence and an impulsive fund of gratitude and courtesy worked on for a master of whom because they loved him, they asked the paltriest wages. The Fruit Walk mutinied into a thicket; the fountains choked themselves with sighing and greened with moss; the tulips found a quieter Nirvana in mere leaf. And Anthony made at last no pretence even of patronizing the final perishing flower of the firm's old clientele.

‘He trafficked in a kind of ludicrous dolls' merchandize – utterly beautiful little infinitesimals in fabrics worth a hundred times their weight in rubies. So ridiculous a scandal had the “business” at last become that when its few scoffing creditors for old sake's sake sold it up, not a single bid was made for the property. It is in ruins now. Consult Ezekiel. Or Henrietta.

‘I have no wish to sentimentalize; I am not a cynic or a philosopher. Yet I slide my eyes back to that narrow hilled-in strip of sea-coast whence once rose walled Tyre and Sidon, Arvard and Jebail, and – well, I merely remind myself that the Rosetta Stone is but a hornbook of the day before yesterday's children of men. Things
do
as a matter of fact seem to rot of their own virtue – inverted, so to speak. It's not likely to occur again. I mean, not for some time. The Town was almost apologetic. Democracy rarely runs to extremes – unless one may so describe the guillotine. But I am no politician. Enough of that. Even transatlantic visitors are now rare.'

Maunders and I were standing together by this time under the laurels and bay-trees, not of his own planting, beside his garden railings; he with his bulging, pale-blue eyes – and his sham candlestick branching out of his pocket; and I – well, irritated beyond endurance.

‘Good heavens, Maunders; I exclaimed, ‘the stuff you talk! But one would not mind that so much if you could spin a decent yarn. You haven't even told me what became of the Belfry. Was he
nothing
but bats at last?'

‘Old Anthony?' he murmured softly. ‘Why, there is nothing in that. He lived on – for years – in the Works. You could see his burning candle from the valley, even on nights of full moon. And, of course, some gay imbecile set the story about that the whole lovely abandoned, derelict place was haunted. Twangling strings and vanishing faces, and a musing shape at a remoter window, her eyes reflecting a scene which only an imagination absolutely denuded of commonsense could hope or desire to share with her. After all, one does ignore the ghost until it is well out of the body. Ask Henrietta.'

‘But, Maunders,' I called after him.

Too late: his shapeless slouching slate-grey body with its indescribable hat and malacca cane had vanished among the “evergreens”, and the only answer I received was the dwindling rumour of my own expostulatory voice among their leaves – ‘Maunders …'

Strange to say, it was in this moment of helplessness that I discovered that my little bast basket was gone. When? How? For an instant I hesitated – in pure cowardice. It was a quarter past one, and Mrs Maunders, a charming and active hostess, if a little of a martinet, disapproved of unpunctual guests. But only for an instant. The thought of Bettie's fair, glad little face decided me; and I set out to retrace my footsteps in search of the lost plaything. Alas, in vain.

The Tree

The Tree
1

Encased in his dingy first-class railway carriage, the prosperous Fruit Merchant sat alone. From the collar of his thick frieze greatcoat stuck out a triangular nose. On either side of it a small, bleak, black eye gazed absently at one of the buttons on the empty blue-upholstered seat opposite to him. His breath spread a fading vapour in the air. He sat bolt upright, congealed in body, heated in mind, his unseeing eye fixed on that cloth button, that stud.

There was nothing else to look at, for his six narrow glass windows were whitely sheeted with hoar-frost. Only his thoughts were his company, while the coach, the superannuated coach, bumped dully on over the metals. And his thoughts were neither a satisfaction nor a pleasure. His square hard head under his square hard hat was nothing but a pot seething with vexation, scorn, and discontent.

What had invited him out so far, in weather so dismal, on a line so feebly patronized? Anger all but sparkled in his mind as he considered the intention of his journey, and what was likely to be the end and outcome of it. Twelve solid yet fleeting years divided him from his last encounter with his half-brother – twelve
cent per cent
years – shipload on shipload of exotic oranges and lemons, pineapples, figs, and blushing pomegranates. At this very moment three more or less seaworthy ocean tramps were steaming across the watery channels of the world laden with cargoes of which he was the principal consignee. He stretched out his legs, crossed his feet. He was a substantial man. There was nothing fantastic about
him
.

To put on airs when you couldn't afford them; to meet a friendly offer with rank ingratitude; to quarrel with the only relative on earth who had kept you out of the workhouse – he had sworn never to set foot in the place again. Yet – here he was: and nothing but a fool for his pains. Having washed his hands of the whole silly business, he should have kept them washed. Instead of which he thrust them deeper into his capacious pockets and wondered to heaven when his journey was to come to an end.

No, it was with no charitable, no friendly, no sentimental motive that he was being glided joltingly on. A half-brother – and particularly if he owes you a hundred pounds and more – need not be even fractionally a being one smiles to think of for the sake of auld lang syne. There was nothing in common between the two of them except a father now twenty-five years in his grave and a loan that would never be repaid.

That was one galling feature of the situation. There was another. In plain print and in his own respectable morning newspaper the Fruit Merchant had chanced but a week or two ago on the preposterous fact that a mere woodcut of a mere ‘Bird and Flower,' initialled P.P., had fetched at Christie's ninety-seven guineas. Ninety-seven guineas; sixty-eight crates of excellent Denia oranges at thirty shillings a crate. What the devil! His small eyes seemed to congest and yet at the same time to protrude from their sockets.

‘P. P.'! – perfect pest; paltry poser; plaguey parasite. And yet – hardly a parasite. You couldn't with a term like that dish a half-brother who hadn't sent you a single word of greeting for twelve solid fleeting prosperous years. Even if he did owe you a hundred pounds. Even if he hadn't the faintest wish to remind you of the fact. Not that the Fruit Merchant
wanted
his hundred pounds. He wasn't a debt collector. He wasn't even vindictive. It was the principle of the thing.

For if half-an-hour's silly scratching over a little lump of wood could fetch you £101 17s., about twenty-nine and a half minutes would bring in a round hundred. And there were more birds and more flowers in that infernal tree than Noah could have found room for in his Ark. The tree! – the very thought of it swept a pulsating cloud of rage over the Fruit Merchant's eyes. Cool, quiet insolence – he could have forgiven that, and could almost have forgotten it. But the faintest recollection of the tree, and of the talk under it, never failed to infuriate him. It infuriated him now almost beyond endurance, simply because he knew, in the secrecy of his thoughts, that
this
was the decoy which was dragging him on these fifty-three interminable miles on a freezing hideous country afternoon.

The tree: never in all his life had he met with such an exhibition of sheer, stark, midsummer madness. And yet with every inch of his journey the recollection grew on him. He couldn't get it out of his head. Curiosity, resentment, vindictiveness, a cold creeping cunning – a score of conflicting emotions zigzagged to and fro in his mind. He glared through them at the walls of his cage. But worst outrage of all was the creeping realization – and his body stiffened at the thought – that he was even now, and perhaps even a little more than ever, afraid of the tree. When you finally deal with a relative and a bloodsucker who has been a pest to you all your life, the one thing you do not look for is an interference of that kind.

He could not deny it, the tree had impressed him. Ever since that first swimming stare at it, the moment he thought of his brother, of the country, even of his boyhood – there it was. It had impressed him so much that the upholstered button had now completely disappeared, and he seemed to be actually in the presence of it again. He saw it as vividly as if its image hung there before his very eyes in the slightly self-warmed air of his solitary compartment. The experience filled him with so sudden a flood of aversion and resentment that the voice of the guard chaunting the name of his destination reached him only just in time to set him frantically pulling down his frozen window and ejecting himself out of the train.

One hasty glance around him showed that he was the sole traveller to alight on the frosted timbers of the obscure little station. A faint rosiness in the west foretold the decline of the still wintry day. The firs that flanked the dreary passenger-shed of the platform stood burdened already with the blackness of coming night.

He was elderly, he was obese, his heart was none too sound, at least as compared with his head. Yet if he intended to catch the last train home, he had scarcely a couple of hours in which to reach his half-brother's wretched little house, to congratulate him on his guineas, to refuse to accept repayment of his loan, to sneer at his tree, and to return to the station.

A bark at a weedy young porter in mittens, with mouth ajar over his long teeth, sent him ambling off for a conveyance. The Fruit Merchant stood under the shed in his frieze coat and square hard hat and watched the train glide out of the station. The screech of its engine, horning up into the windless air, had exactly expressed his own peculiar sentiments.

There was not a living being in sight whereon to breathe a curse. Only himself, a self he had been vaguely cursing throughout his tedious journey. The frozen landscape lay white in the dying day. The sun hung like the yolk of an egg above the still horizon. Some menace in the very look of this sullen object hinted that P.P. might long since have crossed the bourne from which no belated draft on any earthly bank had ever been known to transpire.

The thought diverted into ruggeder channels the current of the talk which he had intended to engage in with his half-brother. In other words, he would give the silly fool a bit of his mind. The fact was, their last quarrel – if anything so one-sided could be called a quarrel – had tinctured the Fruit Merchant's outlook on the world a good deal more densely than he would until now have confessed. A frown settled above the sullen eyes.

No living creature, no sound stirred the air. The fair country lay cold as if in a swoon. Like a shallow inverted saucer a becalmed sky curved itself over the unbroken quiet of the fields. His broad cleft chin thrust into his muffler, his hands into his capacious pockets, the stranger to these parts stood waiting, just stood there, with his small black eyes staring desolately out of his clothes. Why, you might just as well be marooned in a foreign land, or on a stage – sinister, cold, vacant, and not a single soul in the audience. At the sound of wheels and hoofs he coughed as if in uncontrollable indignation; and turned smartly on his heels …

With a gesture of disdain the Fruit Merchant sourly thrust a shilling into the weedy porter's immense knuckled hand and mounted into the cab. At his onset the whole square fusty interior leaned towards him like an extinguisher over the stub of a candle. The vehicle disgraced the universe. Even the man on the box resembled some little cautious and obscure animal that had been dug up out of the earth. When given his direction his face had fallen into an indescribable expression beneath its whiskers: an expression, it appeared, which was its nearest approach to a smile.

‘And don't spare your – horse,' had barked his fare, slamming the rickety door behind him.

A railway carriage even of the most antique description, when its glass is opaque with rime, is a little less like a prison cell than a four-wheeled cab. For which reason, perhaps, as the vehicle ground on beneath the misty leafless elms, the frigid air was allowed to beat softly in from the open window upon its occupant's slightly impurpled face.

And still on and on, now here, now there, memory retrieved for the sombre shape within it every incident of his last experience on this self-same road. It had been summertime – June. He had been twelve years younger, a good gross of years less prosperous, and not perhaps quite so easily fanned into a peculiar helpless state of rage.

Indeed, his actual meeting with his half-brother at the little white garden gate had been almost friendly. So friendly that it would hardly have been supposed they were in any way unpleasingly related to one another, or that the least responsibility of each to each could have caused any kind of festering recrimination. Not that P.P. was even then the kind of person one hastens to introduce to one's friends. You not only never knew how he would look or what he would say. You weren't even certain what he might do. A rolling stone that merely fails to gather moss is a harmless object by comparison with one that appears to gather momentum. And even the most trifling suggestion, not so much of eccentricity as of an alien and crooked gleam in the eye, is apt to make the most respectable company a little uneasy.

Not that the two half-brothers had ever discussed together their aims and intentions and ideas about life; their desires or motives or hopes, or aversions or apprehensions or prejudices. The Fruit Merchant had his fair share of most of these human incentives, but he also had principles, and one of them was to keep his mouth shut.

They had met, had shaken hands, had exchanged remarks on the weather. Then P.P., in his frayed jacket and slippers, with his meagre expressionless face, had aimlessly led off his visitor into the garden, had aimlessly dropped a few distant remarks about their common past; and then, surrounded as they were by the scenery, scents, and noises of summer, had pushed his knotted hands into his trousers pockets, and fallen silent; his grey, vacant eyes fixed on the tree. The Fruit Merchant had tried in vain to break the silence, to shrug his way out of it. He also could only stand and stare up and up – at the tree.

Solitary, unchallenged, exotic in its station all but at the foot of the broken-hedged, straggling garden, it rose to heaven, a prodigious spreading ascendant cone, with its long, dark, green, pointed leaves. It stood, from first springing branch to apex, a motionless and somnolent fountain of flowers.

If his half-brother had taken the Fruit Merchant into a dingy little greenhouse and had shown him an ailing plant that with care, water, and guano had been raised from some far-fetched seed – well, that might have been something to boast about. He himself was in the trade. He knew a Jaffa orange from a mandarin. The stuff has to
grow,
of course; and he was broad-minded enough to approve of rural enterprise. Giant Mangolds and Prize Pumpkins – they did no harm. They encouraged the human vegetable. But the …

At last he had come to his senses and had peered fretfully about him. The garden was a waste, the hedges untrimmed, a rank lusty growth of weeds flaunted their flowers at the sun. And this tree – it must have been flourishing here for centuries past, a positive eyesore to any practical gardener. P.P. couldn't even put a name to it. Yet by the fixed idiotic dreamy look on his face you might have supposed it was a gift from heaven; that, having waved his hands about like those coloured humbugs with the mango, the thing had sprung up by sheer magic out of the ground.

Not that the Fruit Merchant had denied that it was unique. He had never seen, nor would he ever want to see, its double. The sun had beaten down upon his head; a low, enormous drone filled the air; the reflected light dazed his eyes. A momentary faintness had stolen over him as he had turned once more and glanced again into his half-brother's long bony face – the absent eyes, the prominent cheek, the greying hair dappled with sunlight.

‘How do you
know
it's unique?' he had asked. ‘It may be as common as blackberries in other parts of the country – or abroad. One of the officers on the
Catamaran
was telling me …'