Short Stories 1895-1926 (40 page)

It was a pretty stupid question, for after all, few human beings are so gifted as to be able to recall the names even of the protagonists in genuine
causes célèbres.
To bear in mind every sort of Miss Dutton whose disappearance would be referred to only in news-snippets borrowed by the Metropolitan press from the provincial, would be rather too much of a tax even for those interested in such matters. I sipped my tea and surveyed him as sagaciously as possible; ‘Not that I can actually recall,' I said. ‘Miss – Dutton? It isn't a very uncommon name. You knew her?'

‘Knew her!' he repeated, placing his hands on his knees and sitting stiffly back in his chair, his eyes unflinchingly fixed on mine. ‘She lived with us a matter of two years or more. It was us she left. It was my house she was missing from. It caused quite a stir in the neighbourhood. It was the talk of the countryside. There was an Inquiry; and all that.'

‘How long ago?'

‘Pretty near a year ago. Yes; a year yesterday.'

‘Do you mean the Inquiry, or when Miss Dutton disappeared?'

‘The Inquiry,' he replied in a muffled fashion, as if a little annoyed at my want of perspicacity. ‘The other was – oh, a month or more before that.'

The catechism was becoming a rather laborious way of extracting a story, but somehow its rudiments had begun to interest me. I had nothing to do. To judge from the look of the street, the quicksilver in the thermometer was still edging exquisitely upwards. I detested the thought of emerging into that oven. So apparently did my companion, unless the mere sound of his voice seemed to him better entertainment than, say, the nearest ‘picture palace' – where at least one would be out of sight and it would be dark.

‘I should have thought,' I began again in a voice as unconcerned as I could manage, ‘that living as you do, a stir in the neighbourhood would not much matter, though I agree that the mystery itself must have mattered a good deal more. That of course must have been a great shock to you both.'

‘Ay,' he said, with a gleam in his eye, ‘but that's just what you Londoners don't seem to understand. You have your newspapers and all that. But in most ways you don't get talked about much. It's not so in the country. I guarantee you might be living right in the middle of the Yorkshire Moors and yet, if it came to there being anything to keep their tongues wagging, you'd know that your neighbours were talking of you, and what about, for miles around. It gets across – like those black men's drums one hears about in West Africa. As if the mere shock of the thing wasn't enough! What I feel about it is that nowadays people don't seem to show any sympathy, any ordinary feeling with – with those in such circumstances; at least, not country people. Wouldn't you say yourself,' he added, with feline rapidity, ‘that if
you
were reported as missing it would be rough luck if nobody cared?'

‘I don't quite see what you mean,' I replied. ‘I thought you said that the disappearance of your friend made a stir in the neighbourhood.'

‘Yes; but they were not thinking so much of
her
as of the cause of it.'

We exchanged a long glance, but without much addition to my own small fund of information. ‘But surely,' I ventured, that must depend upon where she was supposed to have disappeared to?'

‘That,' he replied, ‘they never knew. We couldn't find out not one iota about it. You've no idea' – he drew his hands down over his face as if to clear away a shadow from his eyes – ‘you've no idea. Since she has gone I feel almost sometimes as if she can never have been real.
There,
but not real; if you understand me. I see her; and then the real thing goes again. It never occurred to me, that.'

‘The psychologists would tell us something about that.'

‘The what?' he asked sharply.

‘Oh, those who profess to explain the workings of the mind. After all, we can't definitely say whether that teapot there is real – what it is in itself, I mean. And merely to judge from its looks,' I added, ‘one might hope it was a pure illusion.'

He looked hard at the teapot. ‘Miss Dutton was a very well-preserved woman for her age,' he said. ‘And when I say “not real”, it's only in a manner of speaking, I mean. I've got her portrait in the newspaper in my pocket-book. That ought to prove her real enough. I never knew any one who was more “all there”, as they say. She was a good friend to me – I have every reason to remember her. She came along of her own free will – just a chance meeting. In Scarborough, as a matter of fact. And she liked the comforts of a home after all those hotels and boarding-houses.'

In the course of these ruminating and mournful remarks – and there was unmistakable ‘feeling' in his tones – he was rather privily turning over the contents of an old leather pocket-book with an inelastic black band. He drew out a frayed newspaper cutting and put it down on the table beside the teapot.

‘Looking at that, you wouldn't be in much doubt what Miss Dutton was in herself, now, would you? You'd recognize her,' he raised his eyes, ‘if she were – if you met her, I mean, in these awful streets? I would myself.'

It was impossible to decide whether this last remark was ironical, triumphant, embittered, or matter-of-fact; so I looked at Miss Dutton. She was evidently a blonde and a well-preserved woman, as my friend had intimated; stoutish, with a plump face, a plump nose, infantile blue eyes, frizzy hair, and she wore (what a few years ago were old-fashioned and are now new-fashioned) long ear-rings.

It was curious what a stabilizing effect the ear-rings produced. They resembled the pole Blondin used to carry as he tripped across his rope over the Niagara Falls. Miss Dutton was looking out of her blurred image with a sort of insouciance, gaiety, ‘charm', the charm that photographers aim at but rather seldom convey. Destiny, apparently, casts no retrospective shadow. I defy anybody to have found the faintest hint in that aware, vain, commonplace, good-natured face which would suggest Miss Dutton was ever going to be ‘missed' – missed, I mean, in the sense of becoming indiscoverable. In the other sense her friends would no doubt miss her a good deal. But then boarding-houses and hotels are the resorts rather of acquaintances than of friends.

The owner of the newspaper snippet was scrutinizing the gay, blurred photograph with as much interest as I was; though to him it was upside-down. There was a queer foolish look on his face, a little feline, perhaps, in its sentimentality.

I pushed back the cutting across the marble table and he carefully reinterred it in his pocket-book. ‘I was wondering,' he rambled on as he did so, ‘what you might have thought of it – without prejudice, so to speak, if you had come across it – casually-like; in the newspaper, I mean?'

The question was not quite so simple as it sounded. It appeared as if my new acquaintance were in wait for a comment which he himself was eager to supply. And I had nothing much to say.

‘It's difficult, you know, to judge from prints in newspapers,' I commented at last. They are usually execrable even as caricatures. But she looks, if I may say so, an uncommonly genial woman: feminine – and a practical one, too. Not one, I mean, who would be likely to be missing, except on purpose – of her own choice, that is.' Our eyes met an instant. ‘The whole business must have been very disturbing, a great anxiety to you. And, of course, to Miss … to your sister, I mean.'

‘My name,' he retorted abruptly, shutting his eyes while a bewildering series of expressions netted themselves on his face, ‘my name is Bleet.'

‘Miss Bleet,' I added, glancing at the pocket into which the book had by now disappeared, and speculating, too, why so preposterous an
alias
should have occurred to apparently so ready a tongue.

‘You were saying “genial”,' he added rapidly. ‘And that is what they all agreed. Even her only male relative – an uncle, as he called himself, though I can swear she never mentioned him in that or in any other capacity. She hadn't always been what you might call a happy woman, mind you. But they were bound to agree that those two years under my care – in our house – were the happiest in Miss Dutton's life. We made it a real home to her. She had her own rooms and her few bits of furniture – photographs, whatnots and so on, quite private. It's a pretty large house considering the rent – countrified, you know; and there was a sort of a new wing added to it fifty years or more ago. Old-fashioned, of course – open fireplace, no bath, enormous kitchen range – swallows coal by the bushel – and so on – very inconvenient but cheap. And though my sister was not in a position to supervise the housekeeping, there couldn't be a more harmless and affectionate creature. To those, that is, who were kind to her. She'd run away from those who weren't – just run away and hide. I must explain that my poor sister was not quite – was a little weak in her intellects – from her childhood. It was always a great responsibility. But as time went on,' he drew his hand wearily over his face, ‘Miss Dutton herself very kindly relieved me of a good deal of that. You said she looked a practical woman; so she was.'

His narrative was becoming steadily more personal, and disconcerting. And yet – such is humanity – it was as steadily intensifying in interest. A menacing rumble of thunder at that moment sounded over the street, and a horse clattered down with its van beyond the open door. My country friend did not appear to have noticed it.

‘You never know quite where you are with the ladies,' he suddenly ejaculated, and glanced piercingly up – for at that moment our waitress had drawn near.

‘It's a 'Ighteen,' she said, pencil on lip, and looking vacantly from one to the other of us.

‘“Ighteen”,' echoed her customer sharply; ‘what's that? Oh the omnibus. You didn't say what you meant. Thank you.' She hovered on, check-book in hand. ‘And please bring me another cup of coffee.' He looked at me as if with the intention of duplicating his order. I shook my head. ‘One cup, then, miss; no hurry.'

The waitress withdrew.

‘It looks as if rain was coming,' he went on, and as if he were thirsting for it as much as I was. ‘As I was saying, you can never be quite sure where you are with women; and, mind you, Miss Dutton was a woman of the world. She had seen a good deal of life – been abroad – Gay Paree, Monte Carlo, and all that. Germany before the war, too. She could read French as free and easy as you could that mennoo there. Paper-bound books with pictures on them, and that kind of thing.' He was looking at me, I realized, as if there were no other way of intimating the particular kind of literature he had in mind.

‘I used to wonder sometimes what she could find in us, such a lonely place; no company. Though, of course, she was free to ask any friends if she wanted to, and talked of them too when in the mood. Good class, to judge from what she said. What I mean is, she was quite her own mistress. And I must say there could not be more good humour and so on than what she showed my poor sister. At least, until later. She'd talk to her as if conversing; and my sister would sit there by the window, looking back at her and smiling and nodding just as if she were taking it all in. And who knows, perhaps she was. What I mean is, it's possible to have things in your head which you can't quite put into so many words. It's one of the things I look for when I come up to London: the faces that could tell a story though what's behind them can't.'

I nodded.

‘I can assure you that before a few weeks were over she had got to be as much at home with us as if we had known her all our lives. Chatty and domesticated, and all that. And using the whole house just as if it belonged to her. All the other arrangements were easy, too. I can say now, and I said it then, that we never once up to then demeaned ourselves to a single word of disagreement about money matters or anything else. A woman like that, who has been all over the continent, isn't likely to go far wrong in that. I agree the terms were on the generous side; but then, you take me, so were the arrangements.

‘She asked herself to raise them when she had been with us upwards of twelve months. But I said “No”. I said, “A bargain's a bargain, Edna” – we were “Edna” and “William” to one another, by then, and my sister too. She was very kind to my poor sister; got a specialist up all the way from Bath – though for all his prying questions he did nothing, as I knew he wouldn't. You can't take those things so late. Mind you, as I say, the business arrangements were not all on one side. Miss Dutton liked things select and comfortable. She liked things to go smoothly; as we all do, I reckon. She had been accustomed to smart boarding-houses and hotels – that kind of thing. And I did my level best to keep things nice.'

My stranger's face dropped into a rather gloomy expression, as if poor humanity had sometimes to resign itself to things a little less agreeable than the merely smooth and nice. He laid down his spoon, which he had been using with some vigour, and sipped his coffee.

‘What I was going to explain,' he went on, rubbing at his moustache, ‘is that everything was going perfectly easy – just like clockwork, when the servant question came up. My house, you see, is on what you may call the large side. It's old in parts, too. Up to then we had had a very satisfactory woman – roughish but willing. She was the wife, or what you might just as well call the widow, of a sailor. I mean he was one of the kind that has a ditto in every port, you know. She was glad of the place, glad to be where her husband couldn't find her, even though the stipulation was that her wages should be permanent. That system of raising by driblets always leads to discontent. And I must say she was a fair tyrant for work.

‘Besides her, there was a help from the village – precious little good
she
was. Slummocky – and
stupid!
Still, we had got on pretty well up to then, up to Miss Dutton's time, and for some months after. But cooking for three mouths is a different thing to two. Besides, Miss Dutton liked her meals dainty-like: a bit of fish, or soup occasionally, toast-rack, tantalus, serviettes on the table – that kind of thing. But all that came on gradual-like – the thin edge of the wedge; until at last, well, “exacting” wasn't in it.