Short Stories 1927-1956 (52 page)

It was a pocket-wallet, his: a wallet that had mysteriously vanished at least nine years ago. On the other hand it was a pocket-wallet that had vanished not quite so mysteriously as not to result in the dismissal with the usual month’s notice of the reigning Emily-and-Ada dynasty at that time. It is impossible to discriminate in these matters. Under a common cloud they were, under a common cloud they went. And here, except that in this fuscous candle-gleam he couldn’t tell at a glance whether the wallet now contained the treasure it had once contained – here was ample proof that he had been at least, say,
half
justified. Whether half or even wholly,
however
, should he have left the question where left it had been? He had never inquired into the fate of the two females concerned; he had merely left them to their future. To do so now would be a signally belated procedure, even if a practicable one. Well, then, that being so, should he or should he not examine the wallet? To be hesitating again – pestilent habit – at such a moment as this!

Elderly Mr Asprey stood up, a little giddy after that few moments’
concentration
at such an angle; and there, standing immediately opposite to him, rounded, squat, in a large apron, with wisps of faded straw-coloured hair and a tallowish face, was none other than the very Emily in question. By no means a shy or demurring or furtive or embarrassed Emily either; she stood there looking at him, quietly, almost pensively, more than resignedly – as if perhaps she were waiting for morning orders. And what set her apart from all the other old friends he had been negotiating with up above was
the fact – and it sharply interested him – that her apparition obstructed the view of what was immediately behind it. To this degree – and to this
degree
alone, no doubt – she was substantial; whereas what the mere jinnee of fevered memory produces for one’s comfort or otherwise can very seldom be said to be that. And though Mr Asprey had never succumbed to
Materialism
, this was a soothing discovery. He might need Emily later. Besides if she was not wholly ideal, pure fantasy, mere mind-stuff of the past, was there not less likelihood of sentimentality in this encounter? However that might be, here was this dumpy, anxious, tallow-faced Mrs Grosvenor, quite as large as life, though obviously many years dead, looking up and back at him as if she had come to bid him a discreet god-speed, and was meanwhile asking for … what?

Mr Asprey hesitated no longer. He stooped again, picked up the wallet, and there and then, without the least investigatory squeeze between finger and thumb, handed it over to the poor old soul. But why ‘poor’? It is little short of idiotic to call the perfectly competent, whatever their ‘state in life’ may be,
poor.
‘And would you tell Ada?’ Mr Asprey smilingly added.

The one queer thing in this little interchange, was that as the wallet passed from Mr Asprey’s outstretched hand into Mrs Grosvenor’s – and she herself had hardly stretched out hers at all, not so much even as if she were suggesting a small gratuity or remembrance – it had ceased to be real. Unlike the marmalade in the MS, it had ceased even to be realistic. Or rather it had become Mrs Grosvenor’s real. And she had accepted it with so natural and benign a grace that it suggested nothing short of, ‘Well, sir, I must say one good turn deserves another.’ With which, almost as if she were on her way at once to keep the implied promise, her background reappeared. Mrs Grosvenor was gone.

She had vanished so abruptly and irretrievably that a disastrous sense of dejection and loss and discomfort – cold, kitchen solitude, hushed mice, day-secreted cockroaches – had descended again like a veil of the dingiest crape upon Mr Asprey’s mind. Almost any interruption would be better than that.

And at once, and as if to order, an interruption came; and with it an
overpowering
, almost stifling, aroma of coffee. He turned about, but turned too late. Fountaining over in a miracle of iridescent bubbles stood his beautiful burnished coffee-pot, foaming like Etna with her billowing lava, its lid dancing – more fatefully than any receptacle James Watt had ever idly spied upon – above its froth. This, of course, in itself was a minor tragedy that could easily be remedied. The homely aroma was deliciously refreshing. But no expert of any museum of any country in the wide world would be able to decipher for him the sodden script which Mr Asprey now gingerly
attempted to rescue from this overwhelming cascade. It was a disaster. He had taken the utmost pains he could with his corrigenda, at what had seemed so brief a notice. There was no time now to begin again; and even if there were, any revised list, even if it were twice as long as the original, would prove, he knew, to be completely different. Indeed while, sad-eyed and breathless, having turned off the gas tap, Mr Asprey continued to
survey
these sordid relics, he fancied he heard the sound of wheels. Wheels! Now! Surely, surely not!

Tragi-comedy by all means; but was there the least need to be ironical? His will hovered in an agony of hesitation; his eye discovered no help anywhere. There is no peace for the wicked. He hastened out of the kitchen as fast as – being so old and weary – he
could
hasten, without positively
breaking
into an undignified canter in his own house. And – oh, for a respite! Oh that his ears had misled him and there were even but one mere moment left! The instant he reached his front door he flung it open; and there and then, in astonishment, but not in dismay, Mr Asprey all but fell down dead.

Another order of jinnee than his had also been busy in the small hours. The December sun was rising in the east. Out of the east came he. And above that sun, a strange celestiality had usurped the wide horizon: low luminous clouds, in tiers of dappling colour against the crystalline nought of space. Line upon line they lay, in horizontal glory, waiting. Where had Mr Asprey seen before this description of beauty, marvellous and cold? So much for the far. And the near? From the tiniest of the leaves of the bushes at his elbow, from every two-edged blade of grass on the powdery path, to the
remotest
wood between his house and the calm sea, this private world of his was edged, skinned, furred with hoar-frost – hoar-frost of such a splendour that it seemed to be all the colours in earth and heaven, and eye and mind, blazing in a rapture of delight. Alas, Mr Asprey! – how vulgar now and mean seemed all his efforts. He had ceased to breathe. It was as though his mortal being had become a mere organ of vision:
‘Orgy
in
Silver
by Jinnium Naturae’ – a masterpiece! His very soul had begun pondering on the
catalogue
his nimble mind had presented him with. It
must
be merely Nature’s; the blind enchantress’s – it always had been. How else?

But before he could determine the question, though not the faintest motion of the air in this infinite waste of wasteless light was manifest, the door that he had left ajar behind him had, unperceived by Mr Asprey, already begun to stir upon its hinges. There sounded a tiny click in the supreme silence. He turned his head. Too late, again! – the door was shut. And since between heaven and earth there followed not the remotest hint of an approaching
kloop-kloop
of hoof or muffled clatter of wheel, it looked as if he must be intended to walk. So he set out.

A Revenant

A Revenant
*

It was an evening in November; too early in the year, that is, for winter coughs to have set in. And coughs to the lecturer are like reefs to the mariner. They may wreck his frail craft. So extreme indeed was the quietude in the Wigston Memorial Hall in which Professor Monk was speaking that if he had remained mute for but a moment, even the voice of the gentle rain that was steadily descending out of the night beyond upon its corrugated roof would have become audible. Indeed his only interruption, and it had occurred but once every quarter of an hour, had been a sudden, peculiar, brief, strident roar. On his way to the hall he had noticed – incarnadining the louring heavens – what appeared to be the reflected light from the
furnaces
of a foundry. Possibly it was discharging its draff, its slag, its cinders. In any case, a
punctual
interruption of this kind is a little dramatic; a
pregnant
pause, and it is over. Nor did it affect him personally.

The professor had read somewhere that on occasion a certain eminent mathematician will sink in the midst of one of his lectures into a profound reverie, which may continue for ten minutes together. Meanwhile his
students
can pursue at leisure
their
day-dreams. But students are students, not the general public. He himself, while avoiding dramatic pauses, could at once read out loud and inwardly cogitate, and he much preferred a sober and academic delivery. He never allowed his voice to sink to a mutter or rise into a shout; he neither stormed nor cajoled, nor indulged even in the most modest of gestures. A nod, a raised finger, a lifted eyebrow – how effective at their apt moments these may be! He flatly rejected, that is, the theatrical arts of the alien – to let his
body
speak, to be stagy, oratorical.

He even regarded the bottle of water that stood on his reading-desk as a symbol rather than as a beverage. A symbol not, of course, hinting at any connection with sacred Helicon, but of the fact that his lectures were neither intoxicating nor were intended to be intoxicating. How many times, he wondered, had he repeated his present experience? Scores, at least. He had become at last a
confirmed
lecturer.

And yet, to judge by his feelings at this moment, he might almost have been a novice – a chrisom child. This was odd. The particular lecture he was engaged on – its subject the writings of Edgar Allan Poe – was one of his own favourites. He had delivered it at least half a dozen times, and always with a modest satisfaction. No more than just that. It owed, of course, a great deal to its theme; one that possessed an almost repulsive attraction for the queerest of readers.
Any
thing about Edgar Allan Poe was edged with
the romantic, tinged with the macabre – that strange career, its peculiar fruits.

Nevertheless, and not for the first time, as the professor stood alone up there on the platform, full in the glare of an arc-lamp suspended almost
immediately
over his head, he had become sharply aware not only that he was, with one single exception, the only human being present who was not sitting down, but also that he was the only human being present who was making a noise. The realization, in this intensity at any rate, was new to him; and it made him a little uneasy. Not that he had much patience with members of his own calling who pretend they dislike lecturing. That must be affectation. He enjoyed it. But he would enjoy it even more, he
sometimes
mused, if he could carry off with him a clear and definite notion as to the
effect
of what he had been saying.

Any impression of this kind might, of course, prove sadly disillusioning, but it would at least be positive. As a professional man, that is, Professor Monk lived in a faint mist. It was not that he pined for encouragement.
Certainly
not. His appeal was to the intelligence rather than to the emotions. He aimed at nothing in the nature of what in his subject’s native land is known as the ‘heart-to-hearter’. He had views, and tried to express them; it would therefore be helpful to discover if they were shared or rejected. Such evidence was very scanty. Again and again when, his lecture safely over, the customary rattle of applause had followed its last word, he had sat speculating precisely how much of it was due to good manners and how much to a natural sense of relief. A sigh is so much less audible than the clapping of hands.
Any
physical reaction after one has been sitting cramped and mute for a solid hour is of course as instinctive as sneezing is after snuff. But English audiences are oddly inscrutable.

For this reason he had more than once been tempted to insert in his paper a sentence or two that he himself felt confident was shocking, or even to leave out all the negatives on any particular page, all the
nots
– just to see the effect. But even English audiences are less easy to shock than once they were. Besides … well – not tonight. His only desire at the moment was to get finished, to have done. An unfamiliar longing had swept over him to go away, and never come back. Oh, for the wings of a dove, he was sighing with the Psalmist. And he knew why.

It was not the hall itself that was to blame. Lecture halls are much alike. Sunday-schoolish in atmosphere, they usually resemble railway
waiting-rooms
in their general effect. The fierce light beating into his spectacled eyes and on to his high conical brow was a slight embarrassment – it dazzled if it did not daze. He was accustomed to that too, however. After all, lecturers must be seen, even if they are not heard. He wished again what he had often wished before – that so-called house-decorators, when engaged on places of
public assembly, would choose for their paint other tints than a dingy duck-green edged with a chocolate brown. Why, again, should the chairs selected suggest an orphanage? Were they assumed to be the only certain means of keeping listeners awake?

Still, this was all in the usual way of things. There was no walk in life without its vexations. As for his chairman, all that he could see of
him
at the moment was a puckered ecclesiastical boot. Simply, however, because he was motionless, he was not necessarily either inattentive or asleep. And what if he was? He himself had a genuine sympathy for chairmen. They were usually far too busy men, and tired. He had shared their trials and temptations. Nor had he the faintest hint of a complaint to make against his audience. He would have preferred, naturally, the farthest few rows of chairs to look a little less vacant; but this was a compliment to the
occupants
of the rest. All those who had come had stayed, and – though owing to his glasses he was unable to see them very distinctly – those who had stayed had been markedly attentive. He remembered a facetious friend once gravely asserting that it is impossible to thin a lecture down too much, and that, if it is to be appreciated to the full, at least one attempt at the jocular is essential every quarter of an hour. Make them laugh; it clears the air. That, however, was not his own method. He had neither thinned nor
temporized
, nor tried to amuse. Moreover, everybody was listening; no one had laughed; the theory was absurd. Then what was wrong?

Immediately in front of him and at the end of the room a circular
white-faced
clock hung midway above the two low, rounded arches which led out of the hall. Its hands now pointed to fourteen minutes to nine. The end then was in sight. And so, lowering his head a little, and pausing an instant, he ventured to take a second long, steady look at what he was now perfectly well aware had been the cause of his disquietude – a solitary figure who was standing (almost like a statue in its niche) within the left of these two
doorways
.

This person had been the only late-comer. At one moment the alcove was vacant, at the next
there
its occupant was. He must have sallied in out of the night as furtively as a shadow. The lecturer much preferred late-comers to early-goers. The former merely suggested the impracticable – that he should begin again; the latter that it was high time to stop. There was no doubt, however, that this particular listener had been a little on his nerves. Once having vaguely descried him, he had been unable to forget his
presence
there. Why stand? And why stand alone? He should himself have had the audacity to beckon him in. A warm word of welcome would have been by far the most politic method of – well, he might almost say, of accepting his challenge.

Unfortunately, any such word was now too late. Motionless in the dim
light – his dark voluminous cloak around him, and hat in hand – there the stranger stood, leaning indolently the while one foot crossed over the other, against the hollow of the arch. The attitude suggested a pose, but, pose or not, he had not altered it. The glare of the arc-lamp in the professor’s eyes, his very uneasiness indeed, prevented him from clearly distinguishing the distant features. But the turn and inclination of the head, the perfect
composure
, the attitude, vaguely arrogant, of a profound attentiveness –
everything
suggested that this particular individual was either wholly engrossed in his own thoughts,
or
in what he was listening to. The latter should have been a consoling reflection. But, alas! one may be engrossed in destruction – as was Nero when Rome was burning, as is always the Father of Lies, and the angel of Candour. Well what of that? Like the professor himself, he had come, he would go; and that would be the end of the matter.

It was nonetheless a little odd that of all those present none seemed to have become aware of this conspicuous interloper. Yet he was obviously a stranger in these parts. What chance could have summoned him in? Not necessarily the woeful November weather. For as the professor all alone had come walking along on his way to his lecture through the drizzling
lamplit
streets, he had passed by not only a flaming picture palace, radiant with seductive posters, but the vestibule of a dingy dejected little theatre – which appeared a good deal more inviting, nonetheless, than the spear-headed
railings
and dank brick wall of the cobbled alley which led into the Memorial Hall.

There were, then, rival attractions in the town. If so, why had this theatrical-looking personage not taken advantage of them? Or was he
himself
one of a company of touring play-actors idling his time away until the call boy claimed him for the second act? Had he ventured out of his green room for a breath of air, or for a draught even more exhilarating? Why again is it that extremely actual things in appearance may at times so closely resemble the imagery of sleep? But what folly were all such speculations. Nevertheless, Professor Monk had continued to indulge in them, and with an amazing rapidity, while he continued to read his paper. To satisfy them was quite another matter.

His voice – and he enjoyed this scrupulous resonant use of it – his voice rang on and on, sounding even louder than usual in his own ear by reason perhaps of this attack of what might be called psychic indigestion. Nor was he aware of any suddenly revealed reason to be distrustful, let alone ashamed, of his paper. When looking it over he had taken the opportunity of re-reading some of the stories, most of the poems, and an essay or two. He had consulted here and there one of the more recent lives. Its actual composition had taken him a good deal more than a week; and it was at least systematically arranged. In four parts, that is: (
a
)
the Environment;
(
b
)
the Man; (
c
)
the Tales and Poems; (
d
)
the Aftermath. Even if he had been able to extemporize he would have preferred to keep to the written word. It was a safeguard against exaggeration and mere sentiment.

As, tall, dark, steel-spectacled, and a little stiff, he stood up there decanting his views and judgments, it ensured that he said only what he meant to say, and that he meant only what he said. He disliked lectures that meander. He preferred facts to atmosphere, statements to hints,
assumptions
, ‘I venture’s’, and dubious implications. He detested theorizing,
fireworks
, and high spirits. The temperamental critic is a snare. And though poetry may, and perhaps unfortunately,
must
appeal to the emotions and the heart, the expounding of it is the business of the head. Besides, a paper simply and clearly arranged is far easier to report. He hoped that his
audience
would go away with something definite in their minds to remember, though he was not so sanguine as to suppose that they would remember much. ‘Hammer, hammer, hammer,’ he would laugh to himself, ‘on the hard high road!’

Until this hour indeed it was highly probable that many of them had never read, even if they had ever heard of, much more of Poe’s writings than
The
Pit
and
the
Pendulum,
and possibly
The
Bells.
Others may have
accepted
him merely as the melodramatist of
The
Maelstrom,
or
The
Cask
of
Amontillado,
the sentimentalist of
Annabel
Lee,
the cynic of
The
Masque
of
the
Red
Death,
and the fantast of
The
Fall
of
the
House
of
Usher.
A few of the more knowledgeable might have stigmatized him not only as a gross sensationalist, of little character and
no morals – and an American at that  – but something of a poseur and a charlatan. This was a view, he confessed, that had been shared by no less distinguished a compatriot of Poe’s than the great novelist, Henry James, who had dismissed his work as a poet in three contemptuous words – ‘very superficial verse’. Yes, and thrillers are thrillers and shockers shockers, whether they are old or new. He himself could not agree with so sweeping a verdict, but he would not disguise the facts.