Short Stories 1927-1956 (15 page)

‘You might be suggesting that both shape and scarecrow too were all my eye and Betty Martin. But we’ll see later on about that. And what about George? You don’t mean to infer that he could borrow to order a mere fancy clean out of my head and turn it into a scarecrow in the middle of a field and in broad daylight too? That would be the long bow, and no
mistake
. Ay, and take it in some shape for what we
did
!
No. Yet, as I say, even when I first cast eyes on it, it looked too real to be real. So there’s the two on the one side, and the two on the other, and they don’t make four.

‘Well, sir, I must say that from that moment on I didn’t like the look of things, and never have I shared a meal so mum as when George and me sat to supper that evening. From being a hearty eater his appetite was fallen almost to a cipher. He munched and couldn’t swallow. I doubt if his vittles had a taste of them left. And we both of us knew as though it had been printed on the tablecloth what the other was thinking about.

‘It was while we sat there, George and me alone, him on the right and the window opposite, and me on the cupboard side in what was called the servants’ hall, that we heard some words said. Not what you could
understand
, but still, words. I couldn’t tell from where, except that it wasn’t from the Reverend, and I couldn’t tell what. But they dropped upon us and
between
us as if there was a parrot in the room, clapping its horny bill, so to say, motionless in the air. At this George stopped munching for good, his face little short of green. But except for a cockling up inside of me, I didn’t make any sign I’d heard. After all, it was nothing that made any difference to
me,
though what was going on was, to say the least of it, not all as it should be. And if you knew the old vicarage you’d agree.

‘Lock-up time came at last. And George took his candle and went up to bed. Not quite as willing as usual, I fancied; though he had always been a glutton for his full meed of sleep. You could notice by the sound of his feet on the stairs that he was as you might say pushing of himself on. As for me, it had always been my way to sit up after him reading a bit with the Reverend’s
Times.
But that night, I went off early. I gave a last look in on the old gentleman, and I might as well mention – though dilatory isn’t the word for these doctors, even when they
are
called in in reasonable time – I say a nurse had been sent for, and his sister was now expected any day from Scotland. All well there, and him lying as peaceful on his bed as if the end had come already. Well, sir, that done, coming back along the corridor I blew out my candle and stood waiting. The candle out, the moon came streaming in, and the outside from the window lay spread out beneath me almost bright as day. I looked this ways and I looked that ways, back and front; but nothing to be seen, nor heard neither. Yet it seemed not more than one deep breath after I had closed my eyes in sleep that night that I was stark wide awake again, trying to make sense of some sound I’d heard.

‘Old houses – I’m used to them; the timbers crinkle like a bee-hive. But this wasn’t timbers, oh no! It might maybe have been wind, you’ll say. But what chance of wind with not a hand’s-breadth of cloud moving in the sky, and such a blare of moonlight as would keep even a field mouse from peeping out of its hole? What’s more, not to know whether what you are listening to is in or outside of your head isn’t much help to a good night’s rest. Still I fell off at last, unnoticing.

‘Next morning, as George came back from taking up the breakfast tray,
I had a good look at him in the sunlight, but you couldn’t tell whether the marks round his eyes were natural – from what had gone before with the other, I mean – or from
insommia.
Best not to meddle, I thought; just wait. So I gave him good morning and poured out the coffee and we sat to it as usual, the wasps coming in over the marmalade as if nothing had happened.

‘All quiet that day, only rather more so, as it always is in a sick-room house. Doctor come and gone, but no nurse yet; and the old gentleman I thought looking very ailing. But he spoke to me quite cheerful. Just like his old self, too, to be sympathizing with me for the double-duty I’d been doing in the house. He asked after the garden, too, though there was as fine a bunch of black grapes on his green plate as any out of Canaan. It was the drought was in his mind. And just as I was leaving the room, my hand on the door, he mentioned one or two compliments about my having stayed on with him so long. “You can’t pay for that out of any Bank,” he said to me, smiling at me almost merry-like, his beard over the sheet.

‘“I hope and trust, sir,” I said, “while I am with you, there will be no further fuss.” But I had a surety even as I said the words that he hadn’t far to go, so that fusses, if come they did, didn’t really much matter to him. I don’t see how you would be likely to notice them when things are drawing to a last conclusion; though I am thankful to say that what did occur, was kept from him to the end.

‘That night there came something sounding about the house that wasn’t natural, and no mistake. I had scarcely slept a wink, and as soon as I heard it, I was on with my tail-coat over my night-shirt in a jiffy, though there was no need for light. I had fetched along my winter overcoat, too, one the
Reverend
himself had passed on to me – this very coat on my back now – and with that over my arm, I pushed open the door and looked in on George. Maybe he had heard my coming, maybe he had heard the other, I couldn’t tell which, but there he was, sitting up in bed – the moonlight flooding in on his long white face and tousled hair – and his trousers and braces thrown down anyhow on the chair beside it.

‘I said to him, “What’s wrong, George? Did you hear anything? A voice or anything?”

‘He sat looking at me with his mouth open as if he couldn’t shut it, and I could see he was shaken to the very roots. Now, mind you, here I was in the same quandary, as they call it, as before. What I’d heard might be real, some animal, fox, badger, or the like, prowling round outside, or it might not. If not, and the house being exercised, as I said, though a long way back, and the Reverend gentleman still in this world himself, I had a kind of trust that what was there, if it
was
anything, couldn’t get in. But naturally I was in something of a fever to make sure.

‘“George,” I said, “You mustn’t risk a chill or anything of that sort” –
and it had grown a bit cold in the small hours – “but it’s up to us – our duty, George – with the Reverend at death’s door and all, to know what’s what. So if you’ll take a look round on the outside I’ll have a search through on the in. What we must be cautious about is that the old gentleman isn’t disturbed.”

‘George went on looking at me, though he had by this time shuffled out of bed and into the overcoat I had handed him. He stood there, with his boots in his hand, shivering, but more maybe because he felt cold after the warmth of his sheets than because he had quite taken in what I had said.

‘“Do you think, Mr Blake,” he asked me, sitting down again on his bed, “– you don’t think he is come back again?”

‘
Come
back,
he said, just like that. And you’d have supposed from the quivering of his mouth I might have stopped it!

‘“Who’s, George, come back?” I asked him.

‘“Why, what we looked through the glasses at in the field,” he said. “It had his look.”

‘“Well, George,” I said, speaking as moderate and gentle as you might to a child, “we know as how dead men tell no tales. Let alone scarecrows, then. All we’ve got to do is just to make sure. You do as you’re bid, then, my lad. You go your ways, and I’ll go mine. There’s never any harm can
befall
a man if his conscience is easy.”

‘But that didn’t seem to satisfy him. He gave a gulp and stood up again, still looking at me. Stupid or not, he was always one for doing his duty, was George. And I must say that what I call courage is facing what you’re afraid of in your very innards, and not mere crashing into danger, eyes shut.

‘“I’d lief as not go down, Mr Blake,” he said. “Leastways, not alone. He never took much of a liking to me. He said he’d be evens. Not
alone,
Mr Blake.”

‘“What have you to fear, George, my lad?” I said. “Man or spectre, the fault was none of yours.”

‘He buttoned the coat up, same as I am wearing it now, and he gave me just one look more. It’s hard to say all that’s in a fellow-creature’s eyes, sir, when they are full of what no tongue in him could tell. But George had shut his mouth at last, and the moon on his face gave him a queer look, far
away-like
, as if all that there was of him, this world or the next, had come to keep him company. I will say that.

‘And when the hush that had come down on the house was broken again, and this time it
was
the wind, though away high up over the roof, he didn’t look at me any more. It was the last between us. He turned his back on me and went off out into the passage and down the stairs, and I listened until I could hear him in the distance scrabbling with the bar at the back. It was
one of those old-fashioned doors, sir, you must understand, just loaded with locks and bolts, like in all old places.

‘As for myself, I didn’t move for a bit. There wasn’t any hurry that I could see. Oh, no. I just sat down on the bed on the place where George had sat, and waited. And you may depend upon it, I stayed pretty quiet there – with all that responsibility, and not knowing what might happen next. And then presently what I heard was as though a voice had said something – very sharp and bitter; then said no more. There came a sort of moan, and then no more again. But by that time I was on my way on my rounds inside the house, as I’d promised; and so, out of hearing: and when I got back to my bedroom again everything was still and quiet. And I took it of course that George had got back safe to his …’

Since the fire had faded and the light of day was gone, the fish-like
phosphorescence
of the gas-mantles had grown brighter, and this elderly man, whose name was Blake, I understood, was looking at me out of his white, almost leper-like face in this faint gloom as steadily almost as George must have been looking at him a few minutes before he had descended the back stairs of the vicarage, never, I gathered, to set foot on them again.

‘Did you manage to get any more sleep that night?’ I said.

Mr Blake seemed to be pleasingly surprised at so easy a question.

‘That was the mistake of it,’ he said. ‘He wasn’t found till morning. Cold for hours, and precious little to show why.’

‘So you did manage to get a little sleep?’

But this time he made no answer.

‘Your share, I suppose, was quite a substantial one?’

‘Share?’ he said.

‘In the will …?’

‘Now, didn’t I tell you myself,’ he protested with some warmth, ‘that that, as it turned out, wasn’t so; though why, it would take half a dozen or more of these lawyers to explain. And even at that, I don’t know as what I did get has brought me anything much to boast about. I’m a free man, that’s true. But for how long? Nobody can stay in this world here for ever, can he?’

With a peculiar rocking movement of his small head he peered round and out of the door. ‘And though in this world,’ he went on, ‘you may have not one
iota
of harm to blame yourself for
to
yourself, there may still be misunderstandings, and them that have been deceived by them may be waiting for you in the next. So when it comes to what the captain of the
Hesper
—’

But at this moment our prolonged
tête-à-tête
was interrupted by a
thickset
vigorous young porter carrying a bucket of coals in one hand, and a
stumpy torch of smouldering brown paper in the other. He mounted one of our chairs and with a tug of finger and thumb instantly flooded our dingy quarters with an almost intolerable gassy glare. That done, he raked out the ash-grey fire with a lump of iron that may once have been a poker, and flung all but the complete contents of his bucket of coal on to it. Then he looked round and saw who was sitting there. Me he passed over. I was merely a bird of passage. But he greeted my fellow derelict as if he were an old acquaintance.

‘Good evening, sir,’ he said, and in that slightly indulgent and bantering voice which suggests past favours rather easily earned. ‘Let in a little light on the scene. I didn’t notice you when I came in and was beginning to wonder where you had got to.’

His patron smirked back at him as if any such trifling human attention was a peculiar solace. This time the porter deliberately caught my eye. And his own was full of meaning. It was as if there were some little privy and ironical understanding between us in which this third party was unlikely to share. I ignored it, rose to my feet and clutched my bag. A passenger train had come hooting into the station, its gliding lighted windows patterning the platform planks. Alas, yet again it wasn’t mine. Still – such is humanity, I preferred my own company, just then.

When I reached the door, and a cold and dingy prospect showed
beyond
it, I glanced back at Mr Blake, sitting there in his great-coat beside the apparently extinguished fire. With a singularly mournful look, as of a lost dog, on his features, he was gazing after me. He seemed to be deploring the withdrawal even of my tepid companionship. But in that dreadful gaseous luminosity there was nothing, so far as I could see, that any mortal man could by any possibility be afraid of, alive or dead. So I left him to the porter. And – as yet – we have not met again.

At First Sight

At First Sight
*

At first sight any passer-by chancing to notice the grey-flannelled figure of the young man who was now making his way round the eastern horn of Galloway Crescent, would have assumed that he was blind. But this was not so. It is true the slender cane he carried in his hand was poised
exploringly
in front of him as he stepped quietly on, but then he never tapped with it; and though his eyes were hidden from view beneath a green silk
shade attached to his head under his hat, an occasional slight sidelong movement of that head suggested that he was making at least
some
rudimentary
use of them.

There was a peculiar grace in his movements, too, such as any wild but timid creature shows even when kept in a cage, and an almost absurd fastidiousness was manifest in his clothes. And though – in part, possibly, because this hideous green shade of his had always shielded his face from the furies of a London sun – his features were unusually pale, there was nothing positively effeminate in his looks. Wild things, after all, however timid, are not necessarily of the weaker sex.

Residents in Galloway Crescent were seldom visible at their windows. To many of them, nonetheless, Cecil must long since have become a familiar figure since the pavement between their iron balconies and their
basements
was part of his daily constitutional. Where old Professor Smith lived indeed, at No.24 – an old gentleman so profoundly interested in Persian literature that he had no need of ‘the time’ – the neat parlour-maid
sometimes
actually set her pantry clock by this young man. Busy at her dusting, her dark eye would glance down from the professor’s first-floor drawing-room – to which she was all but the sole visitor – and would descry Cecil gently forging his way along with a motion like that of a yacht on a halcyon sea.

‘Why, there’s that young Mr Jennings!’ she would exclaim to herself, with a thrill in her mind, and would at once run off downstairs to look at the clock to see if its hands – as they usually did – actually pointed to ten minutes past eleven.

On this particular morning, however, Cecil was at least a quarter of an hour before his time; and to judge from his progress, a stiffer breeze than usual was cat’s-pawing his sea. On approaching the crescent’s westerly horn, however, his footsteps began to lag. And now he seemed to be taking the liveliest possible interest in the outskirts of the scene which his shade and his affliction enabled him to command.

His slightly protruding dark-blue eyes were fixed on the pavement as if in eager search of something. They were. What indeed for days past his mind had been positively bent on was the hope of discovering – not its fellow – but the
owner
of the grey suède glove that now lay safely tucked away in the side pocket of his jacket. That hope was rapidly waning – to leave him not only restless but forlorn. This morning he was little more than pursuing its shadow, as one may pursue the vanishing memories of a happy dream.

In a monotonous life even the smallest excitement seems to have dropped clean out of the blue. And since Cecil’s day-by-day had for years been as regular and punctual as Professor Smith’s parlour-maid’s pantry clock, to
want anything badly was a novel and exciting experience. He was still in his early twenties, and in part because of his affliction, in part because of a natural shyness, he was still under the unrelaxing care of a kind of step-grandmother, Mrs le Mercier – a lady of ample means if not always of entirely transparent ends.

Cecil also had money of his own. Comfort lapped him in; every wish – within reason – could be gratified. There was only this one comparatively slight ocular disability. He might have been a cripple, or an imbecile, or a man of genius, or gravel-blind; and even then not always unhappy. But nothing so tragic as that. He was merely incapable of looking
up.
From his earliest infancy this curious and baffling derangement of his eyes had kept whatever attention he had to give fixed almost exclusively on the ground. By thrusting back his head a little he could, it is true, increase his optical range. But any effort of this kind was severe, and was apt to cause him
excruciating
pain. And Mrs le Mercier – ‘Grummumma’, as he called her – steadily set her face against these experiments. She counselled patience and moderation – to any extreme.

‘I cannot bear the distress of it,’ she would cry, when Cecil falteringly groped upwards with his head. And though, naturally, she had spent a good deal of money to get expert advice, she had never given up hope that time which heals all things might alleviate this, and had never been in favour of drastic measures. She hated the notion of plaguing the poor dear boy, and even of reminding him more often than was necessary to his well-being that he was different from other young men.

‘After all,’ she would sometimes confide in her friends, ‘so long as dear Cecil is all right in
himself,
that is all that really matters. There is nothing, thank God,
abnormal
in any way, and fine frenzies, I am thankful to say, are not Cecil’s forte. That is my conviction. So long as he is all right in
him
self
,
we must just make the best we can of his little handicap.’ Still, even Grummumma occasionally had her doubts, and could be peevish when incommoded.

Standing in his shade in the middle of the luxurious, almost lush, French carpet laid all over Mrs le Mercier’s drawing-room, and soundlessly
rotating
on his heels, Cecil could see nothing beyond a circle of a
circumference
of about nine or ten feet. By mounting up on to a chair he could of course extend his survey. Still, all human venture is only
human
venture. And at no time in his life had Cecil ever been tempted to become an
explorer
or a pioneer. He was as normal in that respect as most people. And his grandmother, in the kindness of the heart that lay somewhere within her ample bosom, had, if anything, tended to restrict his range. Whims of a
contrary
kind she would greet with indulgent if not copious amusement. And as time went on – though it seemed powerless to add anything more
suggestive 
of age than ‘presence’ to her general effect – that amusement grew ever more pronounced.

Inspired one April morning in his seventeenth year by a bright idea, Cecil had been discovered kneeling, hairbrush in hand, busily knocking into his bedroom wall – a foot or so above the wainscot – a tintack or two.
Unframed
photographs of the ‘old masters’ lay scattered on the floor around him.

‘You know how I enjoy looking at them, as much as I
can
look at them,’ he had explained to Grummumma, archly surveying him from the doorway. ‘I wanted just to see if – well, you see, at
this
height —’

‘And Grummumma doesn’t blame her dear boy,’ she had replied in that deep, rich voice of hers. ‘It’s the happiest of thoughts! Nonetheless, I am perfectly certain, Cecil, you didn’t want anyone – one of the maids, say – who happened to be passing your door to die of laughing. You can’t
imagine
how absurd the effect is – even to
me.
No, Cecil, we don’t want that.’ And Cecil had at once concurred.

It may or may not be true that
children
in general enjoy a far more
comprehensive
view of life than their elders are apt to surmise. It was true
anyhow
of Cecil: and this in spite of his poor eyes. His mother, indeed, in his quite early days, had realized this, and had always made a point of
engaging
tall, strapping nursemaids, to the end that the little man, while at least
she
had any say in the matter, should see as much of the world as possible.

Fortunately, too, in this respect she had not died until fully six months after he had been breeched, when to be carried about at all, even by the Queen of Brobdingnag herself, would have been a little humiliating. He had
once
enjoyed ‘the larger view’; that was the point.

On the other hand, all children, however freely they may twist their big heads on their small bodies, are accustomed to being close to the ground, which may in part account for the fact that as they grow older they are apt to have a rather narrow outlook. Cecil, having as an infant spent most of his waking hours in high chairs and in the arms of these nursery grenadiers, became suddenly
shorter,
so to speak, as soon as his mother died; and Grummumma was not one to gainsay the obvious.

But then again, mere custom, while it may blunt and dull the mind, can also bless it with almost incredible funds of patience and endurance. And of an uncomplaining household – consisting of himself, Mrs le Mercier, an occasional grandniece, three servants, a gardener, his boy, and a kind of crippled old pensioner who did the boots and other odd and dirty jobs – Cecil was the most uncomplaining member. It was to outward appearance a singularly placid household. The servants kept their audibility to their own quarters; Eirene, Grummumma’s grandniece, was unusually discreet for a young woman of her age; Cecil was no conversationalist; and Mrs le
Mercier, though she had a temper, very rarely showed or lost it. Concealed and kept, it was, if anything, more intimidating. Even at its extreme, it dressed itself up in the mantle of a mute, peculiar, ferocious scorn.

Any kind of incompetence in any home cannot but be a burden, however philosophically that burden may be borne. The moment it threatened to
become
unbearable in hers, Grummumma became a dowager Mrs Christian, while remaining Mrs Worldly-Wisewoman in her methods of correcting it. She could be liberal, even magnanimous to anyone really dependent on her, and she never humiliated the humble. Her husband, after a long tedious
illness
, had, as it were, suddenly dropped out of her life. This was years ago. She thought of him nonetheless kindly and even sentimentally, whenever she did think of him, because it had been a release to them both.

She had never had any children, and every scrap of maternal instinct she possessed was squandered on Cecil. He was hers ‘for keeps’. ‘He is “my young man”,’ she had more than once fondly sighed of him over her
tea-table.
‘If anything happened to him …’ A momentary frumpishness of utter dejection would settle over her copious figure; one plump ringed hand
resting
on the Indian tea-tray beside her while she followed up the sentence in the silence of her mind.

All this was nonetheless a little curious, for Mrs le Mercier couldn’t
endure
in any human being the slightest deviation from the normal. At sight of a humpback her eyes rolled in her head. She could be charitable – but only from a distance. As a girl she had been made to read the life of St Francis. It had disgusted her. This experience – and similar compulsions – had tainted for her the very sight of a serious book. Even the marks in a strange face of poverty or sickness filled her with dismay – ‘froze her up’.

‘I know it, my dear,’ she had once confided in a friend. ‘I am at the mercy of horrors.’ And there came with the words such a look of helplessness into her bold and formidable face that even cruelty itself would have hesitated to set to work on such a victim.

It may have been in order to spare her own feelings, then, that though she had never desisted in her efforts to better poor Cecil’s eyes, she had steadily opposed anything in the nature of an operation. Physicians and specialists from every country in Europe had been consulted, turn and turn about, and had expressed their views at large when out of hearing of their subject. For Cecil, this ordeal had almost become a habit. He knew how to avoid being hurt, became an expert in specialists’ little ways, and usually feigned to be much more of a muff even than he looked. And when the specialist was gone, he would settle his silk shade over his eyes and just simply become himself again, whatever that might mean.

‘We cannot be downcast,’ Grummumma would sometimes declare in astonishing contradiction of her habits, ‘we
cannot
be downcast, my dear
boy, provided we know the worst. Face that, and all is well. Not, of course, that all these
clever
men intend to be optimistic. It’s just false hopes that are the bane of most people. The poor hope to be rich, the afflicted hope to be whole, little realizing how much happier they would be if they remained contented with things as they are, and expected them so to stay. After all, Cecil, the ways of Providence are inscrutable.’

So Cecil had continued not to look up. On the other hand, there is a metaphorical use of the phrase, and Cecil had been reminded of it at rather frequent intervals. Here Grummumma and he indeed completely parted company. Particularly when Canon Bagshot came not merely to lunch but to ‘help’. When Cecil was a little boy, the canon used to take him – used
indeed
to wedge him – between angular knees and talk to him. Being spare, dark, and tall, Canon Bagshot looked a more ascetic man even than he actually was. He had done excellent, if rather active, work in the parish and was one of the few human beings whose company Mrs le Mercier could enjoy without any symptom on his part of a polite subservience; and no local scheme of betterment was complete without him. Among these schemes, Canon Bagshot had somehow got imbedded in his mind the notion that Cecil might be cured of his physical difficulty if in
spirit
,
so to speak, he could he persuaded or induced or compelled to ‘look up’.