Short Stories 1927-1956 (17 page)

For in general, like Grummumma, Cecil detested beggars, and edged away from anything that could be described as ghastly, horrible, or even
unpleasant
. He detested rags, dirt, and neglect; even the brazen spectacle of ‘potatoes’ in stockings or of leaking welts failed to amuse him. His shoes, his suits, his own gloves and hats and other adornments were made to measure. He enjoyed considering himself a fop; his little, innocent airs and graces were a sort of hobby. The ‘man’ would call at the house, and Mrs le Mercier, anxious to indulge any little harmless whim, would leave them to themselves. In all that concerns clothes and kindred matters, indeed, Cecil was at least as much of an expert as was Thomas Carlyle; and this
morning
he edged slowly along the display in the window, digesting for future use the exclusive shapes and tints and fabrics displayed on the other side of its plate glass.

Then suddenly at whisper of a silken
frou-frou
behind him, a flush of shame mounted into his pale cheek, and he turned about and retraced his footsteps. And Providence was watching over him. For he had trailed on not more than a dozen paces or so when, having arrived at the two private doors separating tobacconist’s from ironmonger’s, his anxious glance alighted on the long expected. And every drop of blood in him stood still.

The owner of this particular pair of shoes must herself have reached the tobacconist’s while he had been engaged at the outfitter’s. And, though the indiscriminate noises of the street had suddenly mounted up into a
prolonged
roar, and then had ceased, and though every fibre of Cecil’s body seemed to be at an affrighting stretch, he knew as well as if an angel had whispered it into his ear, that she – the longed-for stranger – was now actually surveying the peculiar creature he appeared to be.

In a strange, dizzy eternity, every forecast of this meeting, turned over and over in his mind night after night of late before he had fallen asleep, fled on the four shining winds of heaven. It was as if he had come to the very end of a long straight road – and then, nothing.

He had forgotten Grummumma, Canon Bagshot, Miss Bolsover, Mrs Grundy, all the conventions and his manners; he had forgotten himself, his shade, the glove, the universe. There was nothing anywhere but just this mute unknown figure, of whose slim person in its black-braided blue serge skirt less than one-third was visible to him. How odd that even in a world renowned for its oddities just a scarcely perceptible flaw in the sewing of a toe-cap would alone have been enough to distinguish those shoes from every other ‘foot-wear’ in man’s five continents!

Perceptible – no, that was not the real mystery. The shoes, the skirt, were all he could see; and yet it seemed the presence of this unknown girl, the very being of her, flooded his senses, his mind, and – one might almost add – his soul. There was not even the perfume of the glove to help him.
Possibly
that slim malacca cane of his had now become in sober truth one of a pair of human antennae. What he had meant to say, what he had heard himself saying again and again – not a single syllable of it recurred to his mind. His chin had lifted itself by a fraction of an inch. He could scarcely breathe, and his heart, as though it were a hare on a dewy hill-side when distant hounds are hallooing, seemed to be sitting perfectly still in its ribbed cage.

‘Forgive me,’ he heard a voice utterly unfamiliar and yet his own,
pleading
, ‘please forgive me. I have been looking for you for days and days and days. This is your glove.’ He was holding it out, as if, poor young man, it was the very secret of his life.

At this the feet beneath his gaze seemed to have planted themselves a little more firmly in their shoes. There was an enormous pause, while
instinctively
the young woman hesitated to thrust out her gloved right hand or her bare left, till this moment concealed in her skirt. As a matter of fact, it was the bare left hand that came into Cecil’s view. And at first glimpse of it – though Cecil was unconscious of the cause for at least half an hour
afterwards
– a frigid and nauseating misgiving and disappointment had swept over him.

‘And here,’ said the voice, ‘here’s the very hand it belongs to. Thank you
ever
so much.’

Perhaps because their fellow-servants, his eyes, were unable to be of as much service as they might have been, Cecil’s ears were acuter than most. Before that voice’s sound had come to an end, he had half-consciously
examined
and dissected its every minutest cadence and nuance, just as a
connoisseur
may sit down to the critical enjoyment, say, of a fugue by Bach, or a melody of Handel’s. It rang within him – it very quietly rang within him – and he never doubted in the least that he could read not only much of its owner, but even of its owner’s past in its inflexions. How strange; for never in the world was there such a benighted ignoramus, such a poor, abandoned creature on a remote atoll, as he.

‘Yes,’ said the voice, ‘that’s
it
right enough. I should know it, if by nothing else, by the hole in the first finger. I hate mending, and I haven’t much time. But how you came to know it was mine, and why you should have taken so much trouble about it simply beats me. It simply beats me, I confess.’

Every vestige of self-confidence had by this time evaporated in Cecil’s mind. Yet – and how he managed it he could not conceive – the next
remark
he heard himself making appalled him by its boldness: ‘I want, if you don’t mind,’ he said, ‘to keep it. Or will you please let me give it you another time?’

He could not see the longish nose and the dark eyes beneath the delicate curved dark eyebrows of the face now confronting him beneath its cheap straw hat. Its whole attention was steadily, the least bit suspiciously, and yet with immeasurable candour, fixed on his mouth. ‘It isn’t of much
value
,’ said the voice, but without the faintest trace of mockery in it.

‘No, but you see,’ blurted Cecil anxiously, ‘I have kept it so many days now, and should miss it … I haven’t very much to do, you see. And, of course, not many friends.’

This was well on the right side of exaggeration, since in sober fact and in any real meaning of the word, he hadn’t any friends at all. For though his rather remote cousin Eirene seemed to be almost more often in the house than not, and was occasionally accompanied by familiars of her own of both sexes, Cecil could never be perfectly at his ease with her, let alone with them. Nor could he ever be quite sure why she was so persistently
sympathetic
. He hated that even more than he deplored her silly French shoes and the colours and patterns she chose for her clothes. As for her friends, they never took any notice of him, no more at least than if he were a rather
unusual
chair, a dumb animal, or a pet canary that spent its existence pecking at a blunt-headed yellow spray of groundsel and enjoying an unlimited supply of lump sugar.

‘Well,’ responded the clear, crisp voice, ‘even if you haven’t, you don’t seem to mind very much.’

‘I mind
enormously
,’
cried the young man, so loudly that he positively alarmed a little old gentleman with a purplish face and pale blue eyes who happened to be passing at the moment, and who whipped round on him like a startled bird.

‘Then why don’t you make some?’ inquired the voice.

‘I meant not friends – the glove,’ blurted Cecil desperately. ‘I mean, I want to
keep
it. May I give it you next time? Tomorrow?’

‘I am not so sure as I can get out,’ replied the stranger.

‘Well, if you please could and
would
,’
he said, ‘I shall be waiting here at this time. I shall be waiting here until —’

‘Until?’ echoed the other.

‘Why, until,’ he trailed on, ‘there is no hope at all of your ever coming again.’

Once more there came a pause. The eyes regarding him had fallen, and were now overwhelmed, though evidently not for the first time, by a cloud of doubt and perplexity.

‘Well, I really don’t know that I ought to be seeing you again, I really don’t —’ the stranger’s voice was repeating, as if she were speaking to
herself
. ‘We don’t know one another, and it isn’t as if
you
… Not that I should – necessarily – mind that.’

For the breath of an instant Cecil’s hand had fluttered towards his pocket as if to produce a card. It dropped again. ‘My name is only Jennings,’ he said. ‘And I have a perfectly silly Christian name though it exactly describes me, I suppose – what I look like, I mean. So perhaps you wouldn’t mind about that. And though, if you don’t mind, I won’t ask you yours – not here and now, I mean; surely we do know one another now – a little? And you will
come?
’

He awaited her answer, lips ajar, shoulders stooping, as if in expectation of manna from heaven.

‘And meanwhile, I suppose, I am to keep
this
hand somehow covered up!’ There may have been the faintest ring of defiance in her tone, and yet, it seemed, not defiance of
him.
‘Very well, then. I’ll come. And then you promise to give me my glove? Not because it’s of much value – even to me; but because I was already thinking of buying another pair of gloves and – and losing
them
and so – well, that’s settled, then.’

At this poor Cecil was more confused and dismayed than he could have imagined possible. He had suddenly become aware of but one small
fraction
of himself, the dove-grey, suède-clad hand that held his cane. ‘I don’t see how you can
ever
forgive me,’ he blurted with crimson cheeks beneath the green. ‘I had no idea —’

‘Why, how should you? And there’s nothing to forgive as I know of. And now I
must
be off.’

She was gone. Cecil was alone again. As much alone as if he stood high up on a desert island, safe after shipwreck. But gradually the bustle and babel, the sights and sounds and smells of the street returned to his
perception
. He came to himself, and suddenly realizing the enormity of these proceedings, was utterly at a loss how to look, to move, to free himself, to find his bearings. But the hateful shops at last were left behind him; and, gently forging his course along familiar pavements and yet all but into a world that until that moment he had never even dreamed to exist, he was soon safely home.

Until that now remote day when Cecil had picked up the stranger’s glove,
his secrets had been chiefly of an inward kind. His outer life, his funny little groping ways and traits and fads and interests and everything he possessed, including his tailor’s and hatter’s bills – all these Grummumma had shared to the full. Not that she ever openly intruded. Not that she exacted
confidence
. There are other methods of opening a lock than by forcing it. But apart from that, it is difficult to associate ladies of unusually ample
proportions
with the activities of the spy. Cecil knew perfectly well, and had been again and again assured that anything Grummumma might do would always be kindly meant. She invariably had his happiness at heart and watched over it, too. It was her nature, not only in regard to Cecil but to the world at large. Indeed, those fine black eyes of hers appeared to have so extensive a range that any attempt at concealment or subterfuge would be a mere waste of ingenuity.

What passed within was another matter. By steadily following the path of least resistance, though he was candour and openness itself by impulse, Cecil had tended as he grew up to become more and more secretive
concerning
anything that happened in his mind. That mind had thus become the queerest of little refuges all his own. To watch him
there
was almost like watching the innocent inmate of a private lunatic asylum or a novice in a nunnery. Nonetheless this ‘closeness’ was due, not to the inability to say anything, but to the want of anybody to say all that he wanted
to.
The garden itself was choked to overflowing; at times he felt he
must
jump over its wall and bolt.

So it must have been merely because Grummumma was not interested in his mental states that she now failed to notice anything unusual. She
remarked
, it is true, at luncheon that morning, glancing at him over a
forkful
of green peas, that he seemed a little out of sorts.

‘If I may venture, Cecil, upon a piece of advice,’ she said when the peas had been safely steered to their destination, ‘and it is none the worse
because
, as you know, I have long since acted upon it myself, I should eat a little less
meat.
’

He made no reply; and it was perhaps unfortunate that, as usual, she was unable to see his eyes – eyes now bent on the tiny slice of lamb on his plate and with an expression so innocent of any particular interest in it that she might for once in her life have been tempted to speculate on what he was thinking about. As a matter of fact, Cecil’s whole being was tossing at this moment on a positive sea of the unusual. He
was
incredibly, immeasurably ‘out of sorts’. A complete convoy of ideas, fancies, interests, circumstances that had hitherto accompanied him in his voyage from one eternity into another, had simultaneously foundered before his very eyes. Had foundered in an ocean immense, unimaginable, its crested billows of a dazzling
whiteness
, its arching skies of an unplumbable blue.

It was odd indeed, though he hadn’t realized the oddity, that in his
im
agination
no effort had been needed to survey whatever dizzy heights and depths might there suddenly reveal themselves. ‘Meat!’ He had never felt less hungry in his life. How rare an experience to be welcoming
Grummumma’s
advice! He pushed aside untasted his remnant of lamb, and even the three new, innocent, little potatoes that accompanied it on his plate. He regaled himself with the green peas; and it seemed as though every single hour of his life – or at least of all its solitude – had been merely waiting for this morning.