Short Stories 1927-1956 (36 page)

Anyhow, no one really young and silly and gullible and romantic would have taken food on such an expedition. It was not as though the face at the window would share it. She knew perfectly well that it was for her own sustenance alone – though it had quickly ceased to be. In fact the flavour of raspberry jam even as a memory was slightly indigestible. Miss Curtis was sorry her inside could betray her like that. Sitting among the sand-dunes with the long grey-green nodding grasses, the faint winds stirring their surface under those sunny heavens, and the bright platter of the empty sea– that would only have been pleasanter and pleasanter to remember. But not so the raspberry jam!

And now, in memory, Miss Curtis had come out of the glass and cast-iron shelter to which her feverish excitement had consigned her. It had been for only a very few minutes – to quiet down. With a glance at its one other occupant, an old gentleman, of whose countenance – since he was muffled up to the eyes in shawls – nothing was visible except spectacles, she had set out once more. It had been her new rule to keep her eyes fixed firmly on the barometer under the flagstaff on the front until she was nearly opposite the balcony, and then to cast only one firm straight intent glance up at the
window
, before – and this was the most horrible abyss to remember – before sitting down on a neighbouring seat, a few yards further on. Yes, she could be frank with herself about even that now. She had accustomed herself to sit down there – in wait for him. She had definitely broken herself in to that, and solely with the intention of lying in wait for him. Of lying in wait for him – like other women. Her one scrap of redeeming decency being that once she was seated she never by a fraction of an inch turned her head.
Indeed
sitting there – horribly stiff and hot and self-conscious – she
might
be out of sight of him – unless of course, he changed his position at the
window
to look. And wasn’t that perhaps the least one could expect – when at any rate one had oneself sunk so low? It was on this afternoon however she was to learn that it is actually possible in this world to sink as low as that, and nobody, no human being anyhow, be a penny the richer. While you yourself might remain – well, what? Indescribably poorer? Just because you have been humbled to the dust? Because you’ve been taught your lesson? Had there been need to learn
that
?
And supposing it had not been a lesson – a holiday task?

A slow smile had stolen into Miss Curtis’s face – not sour but
extraordinarily
resolute, even a little grim. But never mind all that. It was the
last
afternoon of her degradation she was now thinking of. Questions were
useless
now.

She had found him there at his window just as usual, just as immobile, and almost excruciatingly alone, as if simply stricken with solitude. Smiling,
oh yes; but – she hadn’t any doubt of it now – unhappy. It was absurd to deny it any longer. He was alone, he was desperate, he needed help. At this it seemed that an emotion of infinite understanding, of selfless
abandonment
, had swamped over her. She didn’t even smile back
that
afternoon. She only looked. But with all her self – mind, heart, and soul and all these thirty years of long waiting – welling over in her eyes. It was no good mincing matters. She had felt like that: just swamped – like some clumsily handled Sunday tripper’s rowing-boat that has landed wrong side on on the beach with a smart sea running. Every drop of blood in her body seemed at that moment to have come to a standstill. Then the gulp, the clutch at her bag, and she had sat down.

She had sat down, her back to the high pleasant house behind her and a few paces to her left, with its late Georgian greenish balconies. And there she had simply waited on and on and on. She had to do so; there was no help for it; tomorrow – or the next day – she must be going back. She couldn’t blue all her savings, not to the very last stiver. Why then he must realize it; his very intelligence would reveal it if only she gave him time. She would wait, and he would declare himself. To ignore her now! With a face like that, a smile so unmotived, so wistful! Perfidy like
that
was not possible even in this perfidious world. The bottom of things didn’t come out quite like that.

So she had sat on and on, only once drifting on, for fifty yards or so, very very slowly, her eyes on the sea, and then returning – without so much as an eyelash lifted towards the window. And as she sat down there the second time – her heart grown a little cold, her mind miserable with wrangling voices, there had presented itself in the skies opposite to her the most astonishing sunset she had ever seen.

It appeared as if the clouds must have been waiting in the wings all day for this last huge transformation scene. They were journeying, rank on rank, each to its appointed place, not only drenching heaven and earth with an enormous pomp of colour, but widening, shallowing, patterning the whole western horizon and even the zenith arched over her simple head. It was an amazingly joyful spectacle. One could hardly believe that again and again and again throughout the centuries of the earth’s solitary and peopled existence just such vast preparations as these must often have been made before – as if for the entry of some all-powerful and all-merciful potentate. Yet one who never actually appeared. And it didn’t occur to Miss Curtis that, strictly speaking, the immense scene she was contemplating was hers alone; that every instant it was beginning a little further westward to some other spectator; indeed – sobering thought – that sunset was always going on for someone; and daybreak too, for that matter.

For herself that evening the two extremes seemed to have combined into
one. And then, night. During those last brief minutes she had realized as she watched what it is to be in the presence of a life of infinite possibilities, crammed, brimmed with joys and anguish and responsibilities and delights that no foresight could apprehend. She was to realize too at the end of those few minutes what it is – so far as she was concerned – to see it
instantaneously
fade away and die, while still these lovely apparitions of the heavens burned on, in their turn too to fade away. For this life of which she had caught this marvellous glimpse had itself never even been a possibility – merely an illusion. Worse, a delusion.

Miss Curtis was not smiling now as she stood looking out into the street. Her face had never worn an expression so assured and resolute and
indomitable
. What a solace is a career, what a never-wearisome refuge plenty to do! How wise, how sagacious to retire and just look on. At least so it seemed now.

At Newhampton that evening an awful moment had intervened, a moment almost appallingly ridiculous to recall. For you can’t actually
remember
racking pain of mind and spirit any more than you can remember bodily agony. Voices had sounded out behind her as she sat with her little bag clutched in her tailor-made lap, her whole person positively blazing with the preternatural dyes of the west. And one of those voices she was to remember – it had sounded familiar too, though she had never heard it before – to her dying day. It was the voice of the Destroyer.

The esplanade at this moment had been all but deserted – empty. Two men – and as if a tocsin had proclaimed him, she
knew
who one of them was – two men had come straight across from the house behind her, had passed the seat on her left about twenty yards away, had then turned right, and now were but a pace or two distant. She positively saw all this, as if she had eyes between her shoulder-blades. And she had sat on, motionless, half-suffocated with suspense, unable for an instant to stir hand or foot.

Then, with that vast western light for help, she had looked up – straight into the unknown one’s face, straight into his eyes. And though they were fixed in her direction they had made no sign. None – just none. How could they? For though they were wide open they were veiled by a peculiar film, and even if the unknown one’s hand had not been resting on his
companion’s
arm, she would have realized at once that he was blind.

It was curious, perhaps, that being so, he could be capable – as that curiously vague gentle smile seemed to testify – of enjoying this spectacle of light and colour and refulgence, of sea, air, and sky. But Miss Curtis had never thought it curious. She had first heard only the voice, without
catching
the words, and then had gulped down the heart that had come into her mouth, and had so clumsily clutched at the wrong end of her bag, that her
thermos flask had slipped out of it, had rolled with extraordinary animation out of her lap and fallen with an incredible crash on to the asphalt beneath.

‘What’s that, what’s that?’ the voice had cried out, and a panic-stricken expression had transfigured the mute pale face.

‘It’s all right,’ the other replied. ‘It’s only a lady who has dropped
something
.’ And then as if in confidence: ‘As a matter of fact, a bottle of tea, poor thing.’

The last words had been scarcely more than muttered. But in moments of extreme torture the senses may be exceedingly acute and the whole soul observant. They had remained fixed in Miss Curtis’s mind as finally as if they had been recorded in wax for the gramophone. ‘A bottle of tea.’ But since something that seemed very much like her whole being, her very heart itself had at this moment been shattered into bits, it wasn’t till some little time after, when the deeper wounds were numbing, that she felt the full destructiveness of that ‘poor thing’. To see ourselves as others see us and not through the distortion of self-deception, rapture, and romance – ‘Poor thing!’ – in the very words with which she herself had sometimes
compassionated
in silence some blowsy bedraggled tripper – or worse! ‘And so
ad
infinitum.’
That,
anyhow, only amused her now.

And that had been the end of it. Miss Curtis had stooped – the blood rushing to her head and staining her vision as she did so – and had picked up her broken flask. It looked a little disgusting but she had stuffed it back into her bag with her raspberry-jam sandwiches and her bun. Then she had swept her hands down over her lap almost as if she had finished a most delicious meal and wanted to get rid of the crumbs. And then she had got up and gone off on her picnic to the sand-dunes. And then …

But now Miss Mavor, having finished her last few little jobs – and all
lip-sticked
and freshly powdered for the evening – was ready to go. Miss Curtis herself pulled down the last dark-blue blind, the blind that covered the glass of the door. And she herself turned the handle and opened that door.

‘Good-night, Miss Curtis,’ said Miss Mavor.

‘Good-night,’ said Miss Curtis; then turned back into the vacant and
half-lighted
shop to get her own neat hand-bag and admirable umbrella, and to put on her hat and coat.

An Ideal Craftsman

An Ideal Craftsman
*

Away into secrecy frisked a pampered mouse. A scuffling of bedclothes, the squeak of a dry castor followed, and then suddenly the boy sat up and set to piecing together reality with scraps of terrifying but half-forgotten dreams.

It was his ears had summoned him; they were still ringing with an
obscure
message, a faint
Qui
vive
?
But as he sat blinking and listening in the empty dark he could not satisfy himself what sound it was that had actually wakened him. Was it only a dying howl from out of one of his usual nightmares, or had some actual noise or cry sounded up from the vacancy of the house beneath? It was this uncertainty – as if his brain were a piece of
mechanism
wound up by sleep – that set working a vivid panorama of memories in the little theatre of his mind – cloaked men huddled together in some dark corner of the night, scoundrels plotting in the wind, the pause between rifle-click and the loose fall, finally to culminate in the adventure of glorious memory – raiding Jacobs.

He groped under his pillow for the treasures he had concealed there before blowing out his candle – a box of matches, a crumbling slice of
pie-crust
, and a dingy volume of the Newgate Calendar. The last usually lay
behind
the draughty chimney of his fireplace, because Jacobs had the habits of a ferret and nothing was safe from his nosings. He struck a match
soundlessly
on the edge of his mattress. Its flare lit up his lank-haired head, his sharp face and dazzled eyes. Then the flame drooped, went out. But he had had time to find the broad glossy belt he had cut out of a strip of mottled American cloth and the old sheathed poniard which he had months ago abstracted from his father’s study. He buckled on the belt round his body in the dark over his night-shirt and dangled the rusty blood- (or water-) stained poniard coldly on his hip. He pulled on his stockings, tilted an old yachting cap over his eyes, and was fully equipped.

In this feverish haste he had had little time to ponder strategy. But now he sat down again on the edge of his bed, and though he was pretending to think, his brows wrinkled in a frown, he was actually listening. Even the stairs had ceased to creak. And the star that from a wraith of cloud glittered coldly in the night-sky beyond the rift between his curtains made no sound. He drew open his door, inch by inch, still intent, then stepped out on to the landing.

The first danger to be encountered on the staircase below was his father’s bedroom. Its door gaped half-open, but was it empty? It was here on this
very spot, he remembered with a qualm, that Jacobs had once leapt out on him. He saw in memory that agile shape stepping hastily and oddly in the dusk, furious at sight of the eavesdropper. And in an instant the tiny blue bead of gas on the landing had expanded into a white fan-shaped glare. Not so tonight. With a gasp and an oblique glance at the dusky bed and the
spectral
pendent clothes within, he slid by in safety on his stockinged feet, and so past yet another door – but this one tight shut, with its flower-painted panels – the door of his mother’s gay little sitting-room, his real mother’s, not the powdery eyebrowed stepmother who a few hours before had set out with his father, on pleasure bent.

A few paces beyond he trod even more cautiously, for here was a loose board. At the last loop of the staircase Jacobs’s customary humming should issue up out of the gloom beneath – the faint tune which he rasped on and on and on, faint and shrill between his teeth, superciliously, ironically, in greasy good-humour or sly facetiousness – he would hum it in his coffin
perhaps
. But no, not a sound. The raider hesitated. What next? Where now? He listened in vain.

And then, he suddenly remembered that this was ‘silver’ night. And doubtless – cook and housemaid long since snoring in their attic – a white glittering array of forks and spoons, soup ladles, and candlesticks were at this very moment spread out in bedaubed splendour before the aproned tyrant. For Jacobs was not only queer in his habits and nocturnal by nature but a glutton for work. But if it was silver night, why this prodigious hush? No clang of fork ringing against its neighbour; not a single rattle of
whitening
brush on metal reached his ears.

Slim as a ferret himself, he hung over the loop in the staircase as he might have hung over the Valley of Death; but still all was strangely quiet. And so, with a pang of disappointment, and at the same moment with a crow of relief, the boy came to the conclusion that Jacobs was out. And not for the first time either. He must have had a visitor – the woman in the black bonnet, with the silver locket dangling on her front, perhaps. As likely as not, they had gone off gallivanting together, and would re-appear about eleven o’clock, Jacobs either swearing and quarrelsome or amiably garrulous.

But the boy was no fool. In spite of this sinister hush in the house – as if its walls were draped with the very darkness of night – Jacobs
might
perhaps
be busy over his silver. Shammy, however hard you rub with it, makes little sound. And if he were, then too much confidence would mean not only a sudden pursuit, a heart-daunting scuttle up the stairs, and Jacobs with his cane cutting at his legs from behind, but the failure of his raid altogether. Nothing then but a bit of stale pie-crust for his midnight feast. So he trod on velvet down the stairs, his damp palm shunning the banister (
that
squeak
would wake an army!), his lips dry and his tongue rolling in luxury of anticipation. And soon he was in the hall, with all the empty rooms of the house above his head, and minified in his own imagination to a mere atom of whiteness in the dusk, a mouse within smell of the cat. His rusty poniard clutched tight between his fingers, his stomach full of fear and his heart noisy as a cock-crow, he pushed on.

The staircase ran widely and shallowly into the hall; there was more light here, a thin faint glow of gas-light, turned low. He could distinguish the dark shapes of the heavy furniture, as he stalked on through this luminous twilight. But the back passage to the kitchen quarters was hidden from elegant visitors by a muffled door with a spring, which Jacobs, when it suited him, kept propped wide open. This passage, if followed to the end, turned abruptly at right angles; and at the inner angle near the fusty entry to the cellars he paused to breathe and then to listen again. Once round the corner, along the passage in front of him the kitchen door would come into view, ajar or wide open, on the right; and the larder itself a few paces
further
on, and exactly opposite the raider. But before reaching it, the boot cupboard, sour den of long-legged spiders and worse abominations, must be passed, and the window with the panes of coloured glass, looking out on a monstrous red, yellow, or blue garden of trees and stars.

The boy’s lean dark face had in his progress become paler and leaner. His legs were now the skinny playthings of autumnal draughts, and at this moment a sound
had
actually reached his ears – the sound as of a lion
panting
over a meal. A sort of persistent half-choked snuffling. This was odd. This was surprising. Even when, with sleeves turned up and sharp elbows bared, Jacobs was engrossed in any job, he never breathed like that. In
general
, indeed, he scarcely seemed to be breathing at all; when for example, he stooped down close handing a dish of cabbage or blanc-mange at the Sunday dinner table of a taciturn father.
This
breathing was husky and
unequal
, almost like a snore through nostrils and mouth. Jacobs must be drunk, then; and that would mean either a sort of morose good-humour, or a sullen drowsy malice, as dangerous as it was sly. The adventure was losing its edge. Even the hunger for romance in the boy’s Scots-French blood died down within him at recollection of the dull, dull-lidded eyes of Jacobs half drunk.

There came a sudden
crkkk
and the squeak as of a boot. The boy bit hard on his lip. Yet another slow sliding step forward; the kitchen door
was
ajar. A spear of yellow light warned the intruder. But light – spear or no spear – was as vitalizing as a sip of wine. Red-capped, pock-marked faces, all sorts and conditions of criminals, buccaneers and highwaymen, gore and glory, flocked back again into the boy’s fancy. An icy delicious shiver ran down his spine, for now Jacobs, tied with a tape round the middle, in his green
baize apron, must be sitting at not much more than arm’s-length from the door. Or if not, who?

Inch by inch, courage restored, he slid on soundlessly, his stockinged foot first pushing forward into the light, then the white edge of his night-shirt. He pressed skin-close to the further side of the passage, and was actually half past the door ajar, when through a narrow chink he glanced into the kitchen, and so – suddenly found himself squinting full into the eyes of the fat woman in the black bonnet. Crouching a little, stiff and motionless, her eyes bolting out of her face, she stood there full in the light of the gas jet over her head, the faded brown hair that showed beneath her bonnet wreathing it as if with a nimbus. The boy stood frozen.

Not for an instant did he imagine he could be invisible to such a stare as that, to eyes which, though they were small and dark showed as round and shining as the silver locket that rose and fell jerkily upon her chest. His mouth opened – mute as a fish; every sinew in his body stiffened in
readiness
for flight. But the woman never so much as stirred. Every fibre and muscle in
her
body was at stretch to aid her ears. It looked as if she might be able to hear even his thoughts moving. So would a she-wolf stand at gaze under a white moon, with those unstirring eyes; famished and gaunt. And yet, what in the world was there for
her
to be afraid of? If anybody else was there she would have spokcen. She was alone, then? His fingers suddenly relaxed, the scabbard of his poniard rattled against the wall behind him, and there slipped off his tongue the most unlikely question that would ever else have come into his mind. ‘I say; where’s Jacobs?’

The lids over the little black eyes fluttered and the woman’s lips opened in a squawk. Her two rough red hands were suddenly clapped on either side of her mouth. For a moment he thought she was going to scream again, and was thankful when only a shuddering sob followed. ‘Oh, sir, how you did startle me. Mr Jacobs, sir, why just as you was coming – he’s gone, sir; he’s gone.’

The boy pushed open the door and stood on the threshold. He had
supposed
it impossible that so stout a woman could speak in so small a voice. Sheer curiosity had banished all alarm. Besides, if Jacobs was out, there was no immediate danger. He looked about him, conscious that he was being closely watched from between those square red fingers, and that the
forehead
above them was deeply wrinkled almost as if the woman were
helpless
with laughter.

‘Why, lor,’ she was muttering as if to herself, ‘it’s only the little boy. My! I thought he was his pa, I did; God bless him. He’s come down for a drink of water. That’s what he wants. And all in his pretty night-gown too.’

Tears were now gushing down her round cheeks and gurgling in her voice. She walked in angles to a chair and sat there rocking her body to
and fro and smiling at him – an odd contorted smile of blandishment and stupidity sicklied over with fear. He blushed, and stared back at her as hot and angry as when in days gone by bent-up wrinkled old ladies used to stop his nurse in the street to ask questions about him, and had even openly kissed him.

This end to his adventure, which seemed to be leading him into
difficulties
he had never dreamed of, was a bitter disappointment. A drink of water! He resented the presence of this fat woman in the kitchen. He resented even more his own embarrassment. He wriggled under his
night-shirt
, and was profoundly relieved when those flabby florid cheeks suddenly faded to a mottled mauve, the rocking ceased, and two heavy eyelids slowly descended upon the small black terrified eyes. Even if she
were
going to faint, she would at any rate have to stop staring.

But his troubles were only begun; ugly grunts were proceeding from that open mouth, and the woman’s head was twitching oddly. Still, he had had experiences of this kind before. He knew what was to be done, and a
scientific
callousness gave his remedy zest. On the kitchen table beside some empty bottles of beer and a decanter stood a tumbler half full of water. This he liberally sprinkled on the woman’s face and trickled a few drops, not without waste, between her teeth. Grunts expostulated, and the silver locket almost danced. She was coming to. Success stimulated him to fresh efforts; he snatched a scrap of brown paper from among the spoons and climbing up on to a chair lit it at the gas, and thrust it under her nose. It was enough. Such a smother would have stupefied an apiary.