Short Stories 1927-1956 (43 page)

When she returned with her tray and its contents – a steaming tumbler of milk, a few biscuits and a decanter containing a little whisky – she found him standing beside William’s bedroom fire. He watched her, as with the utmost care she put down her burden on the little wicker table.

‘Millie,’ he said, ‘I’m not sure … But, well – it was, I suppose, because of William’s being ill that you haven’t yet been into – into the other room, our bedroom. And so’ – he had gulped, as if there was some little danger of
producing
his very heart for her inspection – ‘you have not seen
this
?’
He was holding towards her the unfolded note, and with trembling fingers she found herself actually pretending to read its scribbled lines again.

Her face had whitened; she had begun to despair of herself, conscious
beyond
everything else – the tumult in her mind, the ravaging of her heart – that she could hardly endure the mingled miseries, remorse, humiliation in his eyes, in the very tones of his voice, yet listening at the same time to a message of ineffable reassurance. He has not then deceived me again! At last she had contrived to nod, her chin shaking so stupidly for a while that she could scarcely utter a word. ‘Yes. I
have
read it. I put it back … couldn’t face it when I heard you. The children – I had to have time. I’m
sorry,
Edward.’

‘“
Sorry!
”’ he echoed.

‘I mean – it
was
an awful, well, revelation; but I was stupid; I ought to have seen … I did see. But we won’t – I
can’t
go into that now. You are tired, ill; but you are back … for the present.’

Her eyes had managed at last to glance at him, and then to break away, and to keep from weeping. And, as if even in his sleep his usual tact and wisdom had not deserted him, William had suddenly flung back his
scorching
sheet and in a gasping voice was muttering to an unseen listener in some broken, unintelligible lingo that yet ended with a sound resembling the word faces. ‘There, darling,’ she answered him, smoothing back his fair fringe from his forehead,
‘I
know. They are gone; all gone now; and the blind
is
down – to its very last inch.’

She stayed watching him, couldn’t look back just yet.

‘You see, Millie … She’ – her husband was trying to explain – ‘that is,
we
had arranged to meet. It’s hopeless to attempt to say anything more just now … I waited. She sent … She didn’t come.’

‘I see. And so?’

‘Millie, Millie. It wasn’t, it wasn’t
you.
Oh, I can’t bear it any longer. If I had dreamed – the children!’ He had flung himself into a pretty round basket chair and sat shuddering, his face hidden in his lean, bloodless hands.

The few minute sounds in the room, the peevish creakings of the chair, William’s rapid, snoring breathing, the fluttering of the fire, were
interrupted
by the noise of brakes and wheels rasping to a standstill in the street below. A brisk yet cautious knocking had followed, awakening an echo, it seemed, in the very hollow of her breast bone.

‘Look,’ she said, ‘that’s where
that
goes. There’s no
time
now.’ The scrap of paper, more swiftly than a vanishing card in a conjuring trick, had been instantly devoured by the voracious flames, had thinned to an exquisitely delicate fluttering ash, and then, as if with a sudden impulse, wafted itself out of sight like a tiny toy balloon into the sooty vacancy of the chimney.

‘Listen. Must
you
see the doctor, tonight? Unless it’s not – you know – well
bad
’flu? Wouldn’t it be better not? I’ll tell him; I could find out; I could say you had gone to bed. Quick, I must go.’ Every nerve in her body was clamouring for motion, action, something to face, something to do.

He nodded. ‘And you’ll come back?’

‘Yes … I’ll try. Oh, Edward, I’m sorry, sorry. If only there were words to say it. It must have been awful – awful!’ She hesitated, gazing at his bent head, the familiar hands …

And now the doctor, having deftly packed up Sallie again, burning hot but seemingly resigned to whatever fate might bring, and having carefully wiped his thermometer on the clean huckaback towel Emilia had handed him, was stuffing his stethoscope back into his little brown case. An almost passionate admiration filled her breast at his assured, unhurried
movements
, and with it a sort of mute, all-reconciling amusement to see how closely, deep within, behind these gestures, and the careful choice of words, he resembled his small and solemn understudy, William.

She was returning earnestly glance for glance, intently observant of every least change of expression in his dark decisive face, of timbre in his voice.
Practically every one of the hungered-for, familiar, foreseen, all-satisfying assurances – like a tiny flock of innocent sheep pattering through a gateway – had been uttered and sagaciously nodded to: ‘It may be just a feverish attack; it might, it
might
be ’flu.’ ‘Don’t forget, Mrs Hadleigh, they are down one moment and up the next!’ ‘I’ll send round a bottle of medicine tonight, almost at once, and some powders.’ ‘I’ll look in again first thing in the morning.’ Then he had paused, little leather case in hand, his eyes fixed on the fire.

Some day, she told herself, she
must
retaliate in kind: ‘You must
understand
, Dr Wilson, that at this hour of the night it would be utterly stupid of you to breathe the word
pneumonia,
which takes weeks and weeks and weeks; may easily be fatal; and one has just to wait for the crisis!’ Or, ‘Don’t be mistaken, Dr Wilson, even if you were at death’s door yourself I shouldn’t hesitate to ring you up if their temperatures go over 103°’ – that kind of thing.

‘You know, Mrs Hadleigh,’ he was beginning again, ‘it just beats me why you mothers – quite rational, sensible, almost cynically practical creatures some of you, simply wear yourselves out with worry and anxiety when there’s scarcely a shred of justification for it. Quite uselessly. Getting thin and haggard, wasting away, losing all that precious youth and beauty. I say I often
think
these things – wish I could express them. You simply refuse to heed
the
lesson in life: that really great Englishman’s, Mr Asquith’s – “Wait and See”.
Condensing,
don’t you see, and not squandering all energy,
impulse
and reserves. “Never trouble trouble until trouble troubles you.” Isn’t
that
good sense? It’s what’s called an old wives’ saying, of course – not a mother’s. But I could have saved dozens of precious lives and bodies and all but souls, if only … well, literally saved them, I mean, a deuce of a lot of wear and tear.’

She was drinking in his words, this delicious lecture, these scoldings; devouring them, as if they were manna dipped in honey, the waters of life. They were a rest and peace beyond expression. A ready help in time of trouble. He shall lead his flock like a shepherd. Yea, though I walk … Why all this Bible? Dr Wilson was not a parson; he was just a doctor. And then another Dr Wilson had piped up in memory again, ‘“You
said
that I was the doctor; and now you are kissing me, Mummie!” … “I could often kiss lots of doctors!”’

‘I know, I know,’ she heard herself meekly assuring him. ‘I’m utterly stupid about these things. And of course if we were all sensible savages or gipsies there wouldn’t be … Even – oh, but you can’t think what a comfort it is to – to be reassured.’

He was eyeing her now more closely, totting up and subtracting yeses and noes, it seemed, on his own account, and on hers. It was with difficulty she
met the straight clear scrutiny. ‘Well, there we are,’ he decided. ‘Just look what lovely babies you have. Everything a woman could wish for! Gipsies be dashed. There are, I assure you, my dear Mrs Hadleigh, spinsters galore in this parish who … How’s your husband?’

Her dark shining eyes had now at last quivered in their sockets, if only for the fraction of a second.

‘It sounds very silly,’ the words were squeezing out like cooing turtle doves through too narrow an exit, ‘but
he’s
not very well either! It’s, it’s almost funny, ridiculous – all three at once. Isn’t it? He came home rather late from – from the office, and he’s gone to bed.’ It seemed a pity that one’s cheeks should flatly refuse not to flame up, when one’s eyes were hard as brass. ‘The fact is, Dr Wilson, he refused to see you. You know what men are. But could it be, do you think,’ a little nod towards William’s bed had helped her out, ‘that too?’

‘I think,’ Dr Wilson had replied drily, a scarcely perceptible forking frown between his eyebrows, ‘it might very well be that too. But listen, Mrs
Hadleigh.
Husbands, of course, are not really of much importance in life – not really. Necessities perhaps; but here today and gone tomorrow.
Children
are what the kernel is to the nut; the innermost part of it. And so must be taken great care of.
Therefore
– and this is not advice; this is
orders:
I forbid you to worry; forbid it. I shall throw up the case! If you
must
stay up – you have a maid, a good solid, stolid one too. Wake up her and chance it; she’ll love you all the better. And you can share the night between you. Otherwise – unless of course you need me again, and you won’t, though I should be
easily
handy – you are not only not to worry (more than you can help) but you are on no account to get up more than twice until the morning to look at your patients – at
our
patients, mind you. It’s bad for them, worse for you. When they’ve had their dose, they’ll soon quieten down – unless I’m
wrong.
And – imagine it! – I sometimes am.’ He was holding out his hand, a look of unadulterated, generous, wholly masculine admiration on his vigilant, assured features.

‘By gad!’ he said. ‘All three! But then
you
know
I
know what you can manage when hard pressed. So that’s all right.’ He was plunging downstairs into the night, and Emilia was trying in vain to keep up with him.

‘And after the first dose and the powders, Dr Wilson, I shouldn’t, I
suppose
, wake either of them up to give them any
more
medicine – not until the morning?’

‘As a general rule, Mrs Hadleigh,’ replied the doctor, carefully putting on his hat and glancing as he did so into the strip of looking-glass on the wall, ‘it’s wiser never to wake
anybody
up, merely to give them physic – and certainly not mere doctor’s physic.’

The Talisman

The Talisman
*

In the little town of Weissehäuser there are – or at any rate there used to be – three bridges, two cold and beautiful spires, innumerable gables, and at least one old curiosity shop. Of these charming things I confess I liked the shop best. It was my own discovery – made during the first evening walk I took through the windswept starlit streets. I was young, had never before been out of England, knew little German. Nevertheless the queer old dealer in ‘antiques’, Adolph Gessen, whose shop it was, not only tolerated my idling there at every opportunity, but, I verily believe, had taken a fancy to me; and I became his constant visitor.

It was an obscure and poky shop as seen from its stone-silled many-paned window, but it ran far back into the twilight of green trees, and it was packed from end to end with his fantastic merchandise. In a gloomy recess no bigger than a cupboard, Gessen used to sit all day beneath a lamp,
mending
clocks and watches. From here, in a tarnished tilted mirror framed with Cupids, he could scan his customers, of whom the jangling bell above his door had already given him warning. He was an angular, lean old man, his absurd skull on scraggy neck bulging from fleecy fluffs of silvery hair
behind
it. But his profile was aquiline, his expression keen and whimsical, and he had the biggest hands that can ever have been capable of doing such deft and delicate work.

What trade he enjoyed I cannot surmise. Nor can I recall ever having missed any article on which I had cast a covetous glance. It seemed as likely as not indeed that the clock which I usually found him nodding and glaring over he had himself many times put together and taken to pieces again! He knew, perhaps, a little more English than I German. And so we managed to converse very happily together, since neither of us had words enough ever to become wearisome. For though we talked little we told much. His eyes beneath his thick eyebrows could reveal a whole world of human
experience
, and its effects; his hands scarcely less. Perhaps, too, it was the
common
secret bond between us that lightened all difficulties. For the poor old fellow loved, and loved in vain. And so then did I – with my hopeless, sorrowful, youthful passion for Pauline Dussenaine.

In those few sad rapturous days I used to loaf off on long solitary walks. My father had his own concerns and found little pleasure in so raw a
companionship
as mine. Thus I got to know well all that I cared about in the town, in the valleys, beside the rivers. Moonlight I knew, and the
melancholy
beauty of the rain. But rarely a day passed without at least one visit brief or prolonged to my friend Gessen.

There I would sit and talk, or pry, or watch him over his little wheels. Sometimes he would frown and nod and whisper – or sigh of his ancient
affaire.
And I, too, would make my mournful confidences. Occasionally, out of my scanty pocket-money, and prompted, I suppose, by English instincts, I bought some trifling thing – ‘to pay my way’. But it angered him inwardly, for he guessed my motive, and immensely overcharged me, I fancy, for what I would not accept as a gift. ‘Frents,’ he would say, ‘vat then?’

He used to eat his vegetable dinner in a sort of cobwebby cupboard, pushing back his tools and gewgaws to make room for his plate when it was brought in, hot in its napkin, by the little white-haired child from the baker’s with the serious blue-eyed smile. He ate with a spoon, in
extraordinary
haste, with immense gusto, and it was not until after this very audible display, one afternoon, that I first perceived the sound of ticking in his latest acquisition – a dark and battered old rosewood bureau.

It was one of those rare pieces of furniture which are of no conspicuous grace or beauty and on which one either turns a cold indifferent eye or – well, falls in love with at first sight. Having then a tendency that way,
I
fell in love with it. I could not discover where it had come from, although Gessen was spluttering guttural explanations between the aftermaths of his dinner. Nodding and pointing, I asked him if he had explored it yet. He had; and busied his great hands and dangling eyebrows in describing its inward charms. But it was this faint, all but imperceptible ticking that had arrested
my
quickened ear. When he was silent I listened. And at last I managed to make him understand, and he listened too, his old fallen lantern-jawed cheek pressed tight against the wood. He disembowelled the beautiful chest once more; but in vain; the ticking continued.

A ‘death-watch’, I thought to myself; for my old friend Miss Barlow and I had listened together to
that
ticking but just before I had sailed from England. But whether he understood me, agreed with me, or not, Gessen made no sign. Like a doctor engrossed with his first wealthy patient, he again stooped bonily over his prize, and again laid his hairy ear against the smooth dark wood. He then took his smallest hammer and tapped very gently, very needfully all over the precious thing, that was certainly not less black than any coffin ever made. And then I knew it could not be the
deathwatch
beetle, for that abstruse morsel of life desists from telling tales the moment it detects even the vestige of an answer.

The ticking went steadily on, a little louder if anything now that the drawers were removed, and the bureau was reduced to a shell. I had to leave Gessen, tapping, scratching, ruminating, in order to dine with my father. But I sat and sipped without appetite, gazing dreamily out on the gold and
blue and beauty, that far-away yet ever-present pulsation – that summons – in my head, like the sound of the heart of a child, and only a very little more rapid. My father raised his eyebrows at me once or twice; scrutinized his elegant fingers; offered me, very politely, more. But that evening I was in a sour humour, I remember. Had he not that very morning presented roses to Pauline, and caught my jealous eyes fixed on them both? If, indeed, I laugh now to think I could then be jealous of my own father, what must my jealousy have been of Arthur, a second cousin of hers, a dandy neatly moustached, and, I acknowledge, no fool; always laughing, boasting, and at ease, and who is now the father of Pauline’s four charming children, Pauline II, Harry, Antoinette and John!

I hastened out, leaving my father faintly smiling over his walnuts, and there before me, as if rapt but an instant before clean out of Paradise, stood Pauline herself, in her beloved blue dress. I bowed distantly. She smiled.

‘I hope,’ I muttered with a ridiculous attempt at irony, ‘that the flowers are as fresh as ever.’

Her brows gathered into a tiny frown of perplexity. Then she
remembered
. ‘Oh those,’ she said. ‘I was immensely flattered. But if …’

But I much preferred to nurse my gnawing little grievance than to ponder her smiling ‘if’. I cast her a tragic glance of upbraiding and entreaty, coldly and loftily bowed again to her gentle sparkling eyes, and passed on.

There was a solitary candle burning in a rusty old candelabrum when I once more entered the little shop. Gessen was sitting in a chair beside the open window, gazing vacantly out into the green evening solitude of his garden. Silence lay as deep in it as the waters of a well. He did not stir when I entered. He seemed to be lost in thought. But I was accustomed to his moods, knew of whom he was thinking, and my whole attention had at once centred on the curious object which lay on the top of the old black bureau. In shape it was a delicate oval and seemed to be of a very pale gold. Beneath its thick crystal glass, and above a markless face there moved a single slender hand, telling no hours, no minutes, no seconds even; only Time. Despite that faint ticking, I could not detect the least ‘check’ in its stealthy yet rapid movement. One slender hand only – and a motto, in minute German characters, beyond my wits to decipher, engraved around its margin.

Why, I know not – I hesitated to pick it up. It was so quiet in the centuries-old shop. Bells were ringing across Weissehäuser’s waters. And here, among these fantastic relics of Man – Man the curious, the engrossed, the eager, the infatuated, the transitory – ticked on this hourless, beautiful timepiece; sat the gaunt old lovesick dealer, whose treasure-trove it was, lost in reverie. I caught a glimpse of my own face in a grimy mirror as I turned at last from examining it – and saw, as it seemed, another reflection, a
phantom 
face, Pauline’s.
‘She
never told her love’ – but then Viola
could
have done so, and in the loveliest verse, let only the moment come and the loved one, together; whereas I myself, in those greenhorn days, really needed some kind of sorcery to enable me to utter a fraction of what mine meant to me. But Gessen had turned with a sigh in his chair, sneezed, and looked up at me. Then he rose – still sighing – and came and stood beside me.

‘It is strange – it is very strange, this,’ he said, touching my sleeve. ‘Take it, my goot boy, and tell me dreams. It is a wonder. It goes here!’ He laid his enormous hand upon his heart. ‘And this’ – he pointed with his long black fingernail to the motto on the dial – ‘this too is a – a …’ He opened wide his pale-blue innocent eyes, shut them, frowned, opened them again, and shook his head; and I understood that
this
was a mystery.

He gave me a little washleather bag to keep the watch in, and a steel chain to secure it. And I slipped it into a pocket inside my waistcoat, not far from some dead gentians, and buttoned it over twice. Gessen stood watching me from over his spectacles. It seemed he had something further to say. He opened his mouth more than once, but at length, shaking his head, said nothing, sighed loudly, blew out the candle, letting the moonlight steal in across the dry and dusty floor, and, muting its dangling bell for me, opened the door.

I pined to buy the watch, even to borrow money from my father, to pay for it; but I knew, had realized instantly at one look into the old man’s face that it was not for sale – never would be for sale. It was a thing Fate sends, and Fate alone; and Fate was the one other revered mistress of my forlorn old friend.

I went out into the town. I knew not why then, but never had night shone with such exalted beauty as this. The moon hung low in the sky above the hueless snows of the mountains. The stars: it seemed that the faint
multitudes
which confuse the eye and imagination were scarcely visible – with so much splendour burned the constellations. There was an air across the darkened town cold as hill-water and clear as valleys seen in dream. And as I mounted the narrow cobbled street which led over a bridge to our inn, I saw with a kind of wild and sweet assurance Pauline standing there
looking
down into the water.

Forgotten every grievance then – every poisonous fang of that cur named Jealousy! I called to her. She started and turned; and we looked into each other’s faces in the dim heavenly light.

‘Why, Harry,’ she said, ‘what’s the matter? You’ve fallen in love!’

‘No,’ I said, ‘not fallen – mounted!’

‘Dear me!’ she said, opening her eyes a little. ‘But really, now, tell me! Tell me! What is it?
Who
is it? When?’

‘Ah,’ I said. ‘I will. But now come a little down. It is so much – it would
take eternity; and all life is only an instant, Pauline. Listen! The waters mean only that. They roar, they come from the hills, and go down to the sea, as we, poor wandering ghosts, go too. We
are
ghosts, you know, you and I. How could you else be so beautiful and – and mock me so?’

I listened, amazed, to this harangue – I who hitherto never had a syllable to say, who even at a simple ‘Good morning’ flushed and stammered. And yet I could not be silent. All my fishlike dumbness had vanished. My thoughts were sparkling in my mind like bubbles in wine.

‘Come, at once,’ I said, touching her hand. ‘The moon will soon be down. It is late.’

She drew back, smiling. ‘You mad boy,’ she said. ‘I am waiting for someone.
I
am early. He will be here at any moment.’

‘Let him, then, wait for Thee!’ I mocked.

‘But who said “him”?’ she cried, laughing.

‘Ssh! now,’ I said, ‘we will soon be back, and
he
could not grow much colder; creep down behind me; we’ll see the moon make rainbows.’

Half silly with delight, scarcely able to breathe, I led the way down the steep, slippery old stone steps; and with a kind of incredulous amusement and astonishment Pauline was following me. I drew her back, her heart beating, into the shadow of the arch. Above the unpausing clamour of the water we had caught faintly a footstep, and her own name called softly. I pressed her hand in mine – it seemed, indeed, that such slender fingers must be unreal, unreal the pale smiling face so close to mine in the shadow of the cold arch echoing with the Lorelei.

‘But, Harry, you know, how dare you do this? Where are you taking me, you mad, ridiculous boy?’

‘Ah, you call me a boy,’ I said, ‘but still you had to come – you had to come, Pauline. Even now, if fifty Arthurs called you, you still would stay here. This way; the shadows lengthen as the moon sinks lower, and a little further down where that moth is fluttering, is the path that leads to the
rainbows
. And then –
then,
Pauline, I’ll tell you how much I love you.’