Short Stories 1927-1956 (30 page)

He turned away out of the brightness of the light, and fixed his eyes on the bulky brown-paper package that contained the printed volumes. It was useless to stay here any longer. He would open the package, but merely to take a look at a copy and assure himself that no ingenuity of the printer had restored any little aberration of spelling or punctuation which he himself had corrected three times in the proofs. He knew the poems – or some of them – by heart now.

With extreme reluctance he had tried one or two of them on a literary friend: ‘An anonymous thing, you know, I came across it in an old book.’

The friend had been polite rather than enthusiastic. After, cigarette
between
fingers, idly listening to a few stanzas, he had smiled and asked Alan if he had ever read a volume entitled
Poems
of
Currer,
Ellis
,
and
Acton
Bell.

‘Well, there you are! A disciple of Acton’s, dear boy, if you ask
me.
Stuff as common as blackberries.’

And Alan had welcomed the verdict. He didn’t want to share the poems with anybody. If nobody bought them and nobody cared, what matter? All the better. And he wasn’t being sentimental about them now either. He didn’t care if they had any literary value or not. He had entrusted himself
with them, and that was the end of the matter. What was Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba? What?

And what did it signify that he had less right to the things even than Mrs Elliott – who fortunately was never likely to stake out any claim? The moral ashbins old women can be, he thought bitterly. Simply because this forlorn young creature of the exercise book had been forced at last to make her exit from the world under the tragic but hardly triumphant arch of her own body this old woman had put her hand over her mouth and looked ‘
volumes
’ at that poor old hen-pecked husband of hers even at mention of her name. Suicides, of course, are a nuisance in any house. But all those years gone by! And what did they
know
the poor thing had done to merit their insults?
He
neither knew nor cared, yet for some obscure reason steadily wasted at least five minutes in untying the thick knotted cord of the parcel instead of chopping it up with his pocket-knife in the indignant fashion which he had admired when he visited the printers.

The chastest little pile of copies was disclosed at last in their grey-blue covers and with their enrichingly rough edges. The hand-made paper had been an afterthought. A further cheque was due to the printer, but Alan begrudged not a farthing. He had even incited them to be expensive. He
believed
in turning things out nicely – even himself. He and his pretty volumes were ‘a pair’!

Having opened the parcel, having neatly folded up its prodigal wrappings of brown paper, and thrown away the padding and hanked the string, there was nothing further to do. He sat back in Mr Elliott’s old Windsor chair, leaning his chin on his knuckles. He was waiting, though he didn’t confess it to himself. What he did confess to himself was that he was sick of it all. Age and life’s usage may obscure, cover up, fret away a fellow-creature at least as irrevocably as six feet of common clay.

When, then, he raised his eyes at some remote inward summons he was already a little hardened in hostility. He was looking clean across the gaily lit room at its other occupant standing there in precisely the same attitude – the high-heeled shoe coquettishly arched on the lowest of the three steps, the ridiculous flaunting hat, the eyes aslant beneath the darkened lids
casting
back on him their glitter from over a clumsy blur that was perfectly
distinct
on the cheek-bone in the vivid light of this June morning. And even this one instant’s glimpse clarified and crystallized all his old horror and hatred. He knew that she had seen the tender firstfruits on the table. He knew that he had surprised a gleam of triumph in her snakish features, and he knew that she no more cared for that past self and its literary exercises than she cared for his silly greenhorn tribute to them. What then was she after?

The darkening, glittering, spectral eyes were once more communicating
with him with immense rapidity, and yet were actually conveying about as empty or as mindless a message as eyes can. If half-extinguished fires in a dark room can be said to look coy, these did. But a coyness practised in a face less raddled and ravaged by time than by circumstance is not an engaging quality. ‘Arch!’ My God, ‘arch’ was the word!

Alan was shivering. How about the ravages that life’s privy paw had made in his
own
fastidious consciousness? Had his own heart been a shade more faithful would the horror which he knew was now distorting his rather girlish features and looking out of his pale blue eyes have been quite so poisonously bitter?

Fortunately his back was turned to the window, and he could in part
conceal
his face with his hand before this visitor had had time to be fully aware what that face was saying. She had stirred. Her head was trembling slightly on her shoulders. Every tinily exquisite plume in the mauve ostrich feathers on her drooping hat trembled as if in sympathy. Her ringed fingers slipped down from the door to her narrow hip; her painted eyelids narrowed, as if she were about to speak to him. But at this moment there came a sudden flurry of wind in the lilac tree at the window, ravelling its dried-up flowers and silky leaves. She stooped, peered; and then, with a sharp, practised,
feline
, seductive nod, as bold as grass-green paint, she was gone. An instant or two, and in the last of that dying gust, the door above at the top of the narrow staircase, as if in a sudden access of bravado, violently slammed: ‘Touch me, tap at me, force me, if you dare!’

The impact shook the walls and rattled the windows of the room
beneath
. It jarred on the listener’s nerves with the force of an imprecation. As abrupt a silence followed. Nauseated and slightly giddy he got up from his chair, resting his fingers automatically on the guileless pile of books, took up his hat, glanced vacantly at the gilded Piccadilly maker’s name on the silk lining, and turned to go. As he did so, a woeful, shuddering fit of
remorse
swept over him, like a parched-up blast of the sirocco over the sands of a desert. He shot a hasty strangulated look up the narrow empty
staircase
as he passed by. Then, ‘O God,’ he groaned to himself, ‘I wish – I
pray
– you poor thing, you could only be a little more at peace – whoever, wherever you are – whatever
I
am.’

And then he was with the old bookseller again, and the worldly-wise old man was eyeing him as ingenuously as ever over his steel-rimmed glasses.

‘He isn’t looking quite himself,’ he was thinking. ‘Bless me, sir,’ he said aloud, ‘sit down and rest a bit. You must have been overdoing it. You look quite het up.’

Alan feebly shook his head. His cheek was almost as colourless as the paper on which the poems had been printed; small beads of sweat lined his upper lip and damped his hair. He opened his mouth to reassure the old
bookseller, but before he could utter a word they were both of them caught up and staring starkly at one another – like conspirators caught in the act. Their eyes met in glassy surmise. A low, sustained, sullen rumble had come sounding out to them from the remoter parts of the shop which Alan had but a moment before left finally behind him. The whole house shuddered as if at the menace of an earthquake.

‘Bless my soul, sir!’ cried the old bookseller. ‘What in merciful heaven was that!’

He hurried out, and the next instant stood in the entry of his parlour peering in through a dense fog of dust that now obscured the light of the morning. It silted softly down, revealing the innocent cause of the
commotion
. No irreparable calamity. It was merely that a patch of the old cracked plaster ceiling had fallen in, and a mass of rubble and plaster was now piled up, inches high, on the gate-leg table and the chair beside it, while the narrow laths of the ceiling above them, a few of which were splintered, lay exposed like the bones of a skeleton. A thick film of dust had settled over everything, intensifying with its grey veil the habitual hush of the charming little room. And almost at one and the same moment the old bookseller began to speculate first, what damages he might have been called upon to pay if his young customer had not in the nick of time vacated that chair, and next, that though perhaps his own little stock of the rare and the curious would be little the worse for the disaster, Alan’s venture might be very much so. Indeed, the few that were visible of the little pile of books – but that morning come virgin and speckless from the hands of the binders – were bruised and scattered. And as Mr Elliott eyed them, his conscience smote him: ‘Softly now, softly,’ he muttered to himself, ‘or we shall have Mrs E. down on this in pretty nearly no time!’

But Mrs E. had not heard. No footfall sounded above; nothing stirred; all remained as it might be expected to remain. And Alan, who meanwhile had stayed motionless in the outer shop, at this moment joined the old bookseller, and looked in on the ruins.

‘Well, there, sir,’ Mr Elliott solemnly assured him, ‘all I can say is, it’s a mercy you had come out of it. And by no more than a hair’s-breadth!’

But Alan made no answer. His mind was a void. He was listening again – and so intently that it might be supposed the faintest stirrings even on the uttermost outskirts of the unseen might reach his ear. It was too late now – and in any case it hadn’t occurred to him – to add to the title-page of his volume that well-worn legend: ‘The heart knoweth his own bitterness; and a stranger doth not intermeddle with his joy.’ But it might at least have served for his own brief
apologia.
He had meant well – it would have
suggested
. You never can tell.

As they stood there, then, a brief silence had fallen on the ravaged room.
And then a husky, querulous, censorious voice had broken out behind the pair of them: ‘Mr E., where are you?’

The Orgy: An Idyll

The Orgy: An Idyll
*

It was a Wednesday morning, and May-day, and London – its West End too, crisp, brisk, scintillating. Even the horses had come out in their Sunday best. With their nosegays and ribbons and rosettes they might have been on their way to a wedding – the nuptials of Labour and Capital, perhaps. As for people, the wide pavements of the great street were packed with them. Not so many busy idlers of the one sex as of the other, of course, at this early hour – a top-hat here, a pearl-grey Homburg there; but of the feminine a host as eager and variegated as the butterflies in an Alpine valley in
midsummer
; some stepping daintily down from their landaulettes like ‘Painted Ladies’ out of the chrysalis, and thousands of others, blues and browns and speckleds and sables and tawnies and high-fliers and maiden’s blushes, from all parts of the world and from most of the suburbs, edging and eddying along, this way, that way, their eyes goggling, their tongues clacking, but most of them, their backs to the highway, gazing, as though mesmerized, in and through the beautiful plate-glass windows at the motley merchandise on the other side. And much of that on the limbs and trunks of beatific images almost as life-like but a good deal less active than themselves.

The very heavens, so far as they could manage to peep under the blinds, seemed to be smiling at this plenty. Nor had they any need for care
concerning
the future, for nursemaids pushing their baby-carriages before them also paraded the pavements, their infant charges laid in dimpled sleep
beneath
silken awning and coverlet, while here and there a tiny tot chattered up into the air like a starling.

A clock, probably a church clock, and only just audible, struck ten. The sun from its heights far up above the roof-tops blazed down upon the polished asphalt and walls with such an explosion of splendour that it looked as if everything had been repainted overnight with a thin coat of crystalline varnish and then sprinkled with frozen sea-water. And every human creature within sight seemed to be as heart-free and gay as this beautiful weather promised to be brief. Every human creature – with one exception only – poor Philip Pim.

And why not? He was young – so young in looks, indeed, that if Adonis had been stepping along at his side they might have been taken for cousins. He was charmingly attired, too, from his little, round, hard felt hat – not unlike Mercury’s usual wear, but without the wings – to his neat brogue shoes; and he was so blond, with his pink cheeks and flaxen hair, that at first you could scarcely distinguish his silken eyebrows and eyelashes, though they made up for it on a second glance. Care seemed never to have sat on those young temples. Philip looked as harmless as he was unharmed.

Alas! this without of his had no resemblance whatever to his within. He eyed vacantly a buzzing hive-like abandonment he could not share; first, because though he had the whole long day to himself he had no notion of what to do with it; and next, because only the previous afternoon the manager of the bank in which until then he had graced a stool specially
reserved
for him every morning, had shaken him by the hand and had wished him well – for ever. He had said how deeply he regretted Philip’s services could not be indulged in by the bank any longer. He would miss him. Oh yes, very much indeed – but missed Philip must be.

The fact was that Philip had never been able to add up pounds, shillings, and pence so that he could be certain the total was correct. His 9’s, too, often looked like 7’s, his 5’s like 3’s. And as ‘simple addition’ was all but his sole duty in the bank, he would not have adorned its premises for a week if his uncle, Colonel Crompton Pim, had not been acquainted with one of its most stylish directors, and was not in the habit of keeping a large part of his ample fortune in its charge. He had asked Mr Bumbleton to give Philip a chance. But chances – some as rapidly as Manx cats – come to an end. And Philip’s had.

Now, if Colonel Pim had sent his nephew when he was a small boy to a nice public school, he might have been able by this time to do simple sums very well indeed. Philip might have become an accurate adder-up. It is well to look on the bright side of things. Unfortunately when Philip was an
infant,
his health had not been very satisfactory – at least to his widowed mother – and he had been sent instead to a private academy. There a Mr Browne was the mathematical master – a Mr Browne so much attached to algebra and to reading
The
Times
in school hours that he hadn’t much patience with the rudiments of arithmetic. ‘Just add it up,’ he would say, ‘and look up the answer. And if it isn’t right, do it again.’

It was imprudent of him, but in these early years poor Philip had never so much as dreamed that some day he was going to spend all day on a stool. If he had, he might not perhaps have been so eager to look up the answers. But then, his uncle was both fabulously rich and apparently unmarriageable, and Philip was his only nephew. Why, then, should he ever have paid any attention to banks, apart from the variety on which the wild thyme grows?

Term succeeded term, and still, though ‘a promising boy’, he remained backward – particularly in the last of the three R’s. And his holidays, so called, would be peppered with such problems as (
a
)
If a herring and a half cost three halfpence, how many would you eat for a shilling? (
b
)
If a brick weighs just a pound and half a brick, what does it weigh? (
c
) If Moses was the son of Pharaoh’s daughter, etc; and (
d
)
Uncles and brothers have I none, and so on. And since, after successive mornings with a sheet of foolscap and a stub of pencil, Philip’s answers would almost invariably reappear as (
a
) 18; (
b
)
1½ lb; (
c
)
his sister, and (
d
)
himself, Colonel Pim became more and more choleric and impolite, and Nature had long ago given him a good start.

He had a way, too, when carpeting at Philip, of flicking his
shepherd-plaid
trouser-leg with his handkerchief which was highly alarming to
everyone
concerned. At last, instead of transferring his nephew from Mr Browne to Christ Church, Oxford, or to Trinity College, Cambridge, or to some less delectable resort at an outlying university, he first (before setting out in pursuit of big game all around the world), consigned him to a tutor, who thanked his lucky stars the expedition would take the Colonel a long time; and, on his return, he gave them both a prolonged vacation.

And
then
had fallen the bolt from the blue. On the morning of his
twenty-first
birthday, which had promised to be so cool, so calm, so bright, Philip received a letter from his uncle. He opened it with joy; he read it with
consternation
. It was in terms as curt as they looked illegible, and it was merely to tell him that what the Colonel called a post (but which was, in fact, a high stool) had been secured for his nephew, and that unless Philip managed to keep his seat on it for twelve consecutive months he would be cut off with a shilling.

Of these drear months about two and a half had somehow managed to melt away, and now not only was the stool rapidly following them into the limbo of the past, but at this very moment the Colonel was doubtless
engaged
, and with his usual zest, in keeping his promise. What wonder, then, Philip was not exactly a happy young man as he wandered this sunny
populous
May morning aimlessly on his way. There was nothing – apart from everything around him – to make him so, except only one minute stroke of luck that had befallen him before breakfast.

When he had risen from his tumbled bed in his London lodgings, the sight of his striped bank trousers and his black bank coat and waistcoat had filled him with disgust. Opening the grained cupboard which did duty for a wardrobe – and in the indulgence of his tailor it was pretty full – he took down from a peg the festive suit he was now wearing, but which otherwise he had left unheeded since Easter. He found himself faintly whistling as he buttoned it on; but his delight can be imagined when, putting his finger and
thumb into an upper waistcoat pocket, he discovered – a sovereign. And an excellent specimen of one, with St George in his mantle and the dragon on the one side of it, and King Edward VII’s head – cut off at the neck as if he had sat to its designer in his bath – on the other. This, with four others very much like it, had been bestowed on Philip many months ago by his Uncle Charles – a maternal uncle, who had since perished in Paris. As the rest of Philip’s pockets contained only 7½d. in all, this coin – how forgotten, he simply could not conjecture – was treasure trove indeed.

Now, poor Philip had never really cared for money. Perhaps he had always associated it with herrings and half-bricks. Perhaps he had never needed it quite enough. Since, moreover, immediately opposite his perch at the Bank there hung a framed antique picture of this commodity in process of being shovelled out of receptacles closely resembling coal-scuttles into great vulgar heaps upon a polished counter, and there weighed in brass scales like so much lard or glucose, he had come to like it less and less. On the other hand, he dearly enjoyed spending it. As with Adam and the happy birds in the Garden of Eden – linnet and kestrel and wren – he enjoyed
seeing
it fly. In this he was the precise antithesis of his uncle.

Colonel Crompton Pim loved money. He exulted in it (not vocally, of course)
en
masse
,
as the Pharaohs exulted in pyramids. And he abhorred spending it. For this (and for many another) reason he had little affection for mere objects – apart, that is, from
such
objects as golf clubs, shooting boots, or hippopotamus-hoof inkstands, and he had not the smallest pleasure in buying anything for mere buying’s sake.

His immense dormitory near Cheltenham, it is true, was full of furniture, but it was furniture, acquired in the ’sixties or thereabouts, for use and not for joy. Prodigious chairs with pigskin seats; tables of a solidity that defied time and of a wood that laughed at the worm; bedsteads of the Gog order; wardrobes resembling Assyrian sarcophagi; and ottomans which would seat with comfort and dignity a complete royal family. As for its ‘
ornaments
’, they came chiefly from Benares.

And simply because poor Philip delighted in spending money and hated such horrible impedimenta with the contempt a humming-bird must feel for a black-pudding, he had never been able to take to his uncle – not even for the sake of what he owned. And it was impossible – as he fondly supposed – for any human being to take to him for any other reason. No, there was nothing in common between them, except a few branches of the family tree. And these the Colonel might already have converted into firewood.

Now, as poor Philip meandered listlessly along the street, fingering his Uncle Charles’s golden sovereign in his pocket, he came on one of those gigantic edifices wherein you can purchase anything in the world – from a white elephant to a performing flea, from a cargo of coconuts to a tin-tack.
This was the ‘store’ at which his uncle ‘dealt’. And by sheer force of habit, Philip mounted the welcoming flight of steps, crossed a large flat rubber mat, and went inside.

Having thus got safely in, he at once began to ponder how he was to get safely out – with any fraction, that is, of his golden sovereign still in his pocket. And he had realized in the recent small hours that with so little on earth now left to spend, except an indefinite amount of leisure, he must strive to spend that little with extreme deliberation.

So first, having breakfasted on a mere glance at the charred remnant of a kipper which his landlady had served up with his chicory, he entered a large gilded lift, or elevator, as the directors preferred to call it,
en
route
to the restaurant. There he seated himself at a vacant table and asked the
waitress
to be so kind as to bring him a glass of milk and a bun. He nibbled, he sipped, and he watched the people – if people they really were, and not, as seemed more probable, automata intended to advertise the Ecclesiastical, the Sports, the Provincial, the Curio, the Export, and the Cast-Iron
Departments
.

With his first sip of milk he all but made up his mind to buy a little
parting
present for his uncle. It would be at least a gentle gesture. With his second he decided that the Colonel would be even less pleased to receive a letter
and
,
say, a velvet smoking-cap, or a pair of mother-of-pearl cuff-links, than just a letter. By the time he had finished his bun he had decided to buy a little something for himself. But try as he might he could think of nothing (for less than a guinea) that would be worthy of the shade of his beloved Uncle Charles. So having pushed seven-fifteenths of all he else possessed under his plate for his freckled waitress, with the remaining fourpence he settled his bill and went steadily downstairs. Nineteen minutes past ten – he would have a good look about him before he came to a decision.