Short Stories 1927-1956 (72 page)

And then, as if in direct answer to the question, the fallen narrow face on the pillow had suddenly become still again. The eyes beneath the leaden lids
had moved to their extreme angle – away from me. And this, at the sound of a footstep. The door opened; I looked up.

It was the little dormitory maid. She had come to tell me that my sister had arrived, and would I join her in the headmaster’s study. I looked at her – her face vaguely recalled some old picture I had seen. It was a quiet face, not pretty, but fair, with an unspoilt, remote look in her eyes. For an instant I could not reveal my thoughts. I was intensely reluctant to go. I smiled at her as best I could. ‘Then I can commit my nephew safely to
you
for a few moments?’ I said.

She turned to look at him – as I did. And – how describe what I saw? There was no expectation now, no foreboding, or pining in the face on the pillow. No trace of these. But a look fixed on her as near human ecstasy as mortal features are capable of. I detest anything even resembling
sentimentality
; but my heart seemed to clap-to in my body. No expression on any human countenance, not even of hopeless grief or anguish, has ever affected me so acutely. Nor had I realized until that tragic moment – nor have I ever either more than once shared – its inward meaning. But there was not the least doubt of it. The poor child was in love.

The Face

The Face
*

Nora sat on the edge of her iron bedstead, the fingers of one hand firmly grasping the rail, her two strong legs, set wide apart, half-supporting her as she gazed out of the window. The eyes under the dark brows in her square, strong-boned face were vague with reverie; aware – yet heedless – of all that was happening in the neat rectangular back gardens down below.

It was two o’clock, and a Sunday afternoon. The leisurely September sun was now slanting fiercely towards the west. Its beams shone through the yellow and red of the canary-creeper and the nasturtiums along the garden fence, as if their flowers were of frailest coloured glass. And the panes in the gay, green-and-white little greenhouse at the foot of George Trimmin’s garden flashed so like a heliograph that the face up at the window shone in its reflected light – like the moon’s.

Mrs Trimmins, his mother – voluminous body, large grey head – having now gone indoors, no doubt for her Sunday nap, George was sitting in his shirt-sleeves among his pigeons; snow-white creatures that tooralooed and paced and ducketed on the gravel about his feet, while two of their fellows
cooed love secrets into his ear. Across a white wing, he would ever and again cast up furtive glances at the open window. But Nora just now wasn’t thinking of him. She was trying to make up her mind whether to set off at once for ‘the Ponds’ or – not to. She knew that everything would be bound to look different. She realized that, in spite of its vividness, the memory of the night before might seem little more than an illusion in the light of day – and that of a Sunday afternoon! But she must chance it. She had even now and then positively
hoped
,
though her lips tightened a little at this, that it would.

Either way, it would be better to have it over and done with. In some respects the whole experience had been so absurd, so ridiculous, and
fantastic
, so unlike her usual, commonsensical self. What indeed can it have had to
do
with her? And how could it possibly have made such a
difference
? Still, even if it had done so – just for the time being – what did it
matter
? Except – well, would she ever be able to explain it even to herself?

That was the worst of it. There was no positive need, of course, to tell anyone else a word about it. But George? She would have to tell George. Exactly what? How much? He might understand the solitary walk – the wish, almost the craving to be alone. He might think her silly – daft, if you like; so far. But what about the face which she could still see, even with her eyes as wide open as they were open now and fixed on his racing pigeons – that was the absurdest thing of all? How could George possibly ever be made to understand
that
?

The decision would have to wait for a while, until they were alone again. But how was she to sit through the evening that was coming as if nothing had happened? Never before in all her born days had Nora’s mind been so full of thoughts that wouldn’t stay straight, that wouldn’t match, that wouldn’t let her out. What could be wrong, what had come over her, and when was she going to become her usual, matter-of-fact self again? Hands, like her mother’s, square and capable, but now idle in her lap; her bosom slowly heaving as she drew breath, her thoughts at length drooped back into day-dreaming again, and as if into the company of another self. Then suddenly, with a sigh as deep as water from a well, she withdrew her gaze from the window, floated up out of her reverie, and here she was, back in her small, square bedroom again!

Illuminated texts hung from unnecessarily large nails against the faded, damp-stained, blue-patterned wallpaper: ‘Thou Searchest Out All My Ways’, above the grained washing-stand, and over the mantelpiece, ‘The Price of Wisdom is Above Rubies’: its ‘price’ in pale green, its ‘wisdom’ in clear blue, and its ‘rubies’ a rich red. Nora, from the time when she was a little girl of five or six, had explored every fraction of every inch of these
texts again and again. She knew by heart every single one of the wooden-looking doves in the first; every sea-shell and fragment of sea-weed in the other.

On the mantelpiece itself were arranged her china animals; ‘quaint’ hideous treasured creatures, some with large bows of ribbon round their necks. They were one and all eyeing her with a vacuous grin combined with an incredibly void stare. And in between them stood photographs of bygone ‘boys’. One of them in a hard straw hat, leaning nonchalantly against a property urn; another, with his brother, seated on the steps of a
bathing-machine
in marine surroundings; and the same young man, now topped with what appeared to be a rococo paper nightcap, and evidently the ‘life and soul’ of an animated and well-bottled group in an open charabanc.

On the chest of drawers Nora’s father, Mr Hopper, faced Nora’s mother. He, as usual, was gazing blandly out of the cardboard at his daughter; and her mother sitting there, ample yet solid, was staring no less flatly across in his direction, as if at the moment she had far from approved either of him or of the photographer. However, there she
was
,
and
who cared who saw her! Nora took after them both. She had her mother’s compact square head, frank challenging eye, and full figure; and yet, even at this moment, a glimpse of her father’s half-wistful reserve lurked somewhere in her young vigorous features.

Of George, there was no trace in the little room. Although Nora had been engaged to him for weeks now, his photograph was still shut up in a drawer.

Why, she hardly knew. She didn’t mind Alf and Sidney watching her dressing and undressing out of their skimpy little frames. They had nothing to do with it. Why George, then? He was coming this evening to Sunday supper; to be introduced to Uncle Ben and Aunt Emma. Nora shifted uneasily. She recalled other family reunions. She hadn’t forgotten the evening when her Uncle Joseph, who had finally emigrated to Australia, brought his wife and children to see them. Nor her own Confirmation either! But Mrs Hopper had known George and his family for years; from when he was a little boy, his hair smarmed down with hair oil, and his small square snubby nose in the middle of his face. He and Nora were going to be married.

She looked up sharply, rose to her feet, her mind made up. She would set off to ‘the Ponds’ at once. Her father was safe downstairs in his easy-chair, his handkerchief over his head. It was the one thing he couldn’t abide – flies. And her mother in the next room, for the time being at least, must be far beyond all interest in Nora’s doings – her patchwork quilt half drawn up over her petticoats, the rest of her completely
negligé.

Nora’s sudden hasty activity, however, had not been entirely unheeded. Her fiancé had at last realized that the young lady up above wasn’t
concerned
just now with him and his ‘fancy’. He wasn’t hurt; no fear: she had her moods and her silences. Pretending not to have been even hoping, he clapped his hands, and Nora watched from under the brim of the hat she was putting on before her looking-glass as – with a sudden drumming flutter and scurry – away went the beautiful birds up into the vacant heavens, their wings, cold and white as drifted snow, clapping together under the blue of the sky beneath the furious gaze of the sun. They
gathered
, they circled, they returned – as they always returned; back to their little pagoda-like dove-cote, back to Mr Trimmins’s sleek green-and-white greenhouse with its ripening tomatoes.

Her hatpin between her teeth, Nora decided that he really was a good sensible sort – that young Mr Trimmins, in spite of his being such a
sobersides
and in spite of the interest and time he lavished on his almost uncanny knack with pigeons and tomatoes.

She pushed home the pin, and in a few moments had slipped out into the blinding afternoon. The street was deserted. Its opposite row of yellow brick houses sat roasting in the sun, as if they had been hollowed out of one lump of clay and now were crisp and finished. Someone was playing a hymn on a harmonium. The sound of it intensified the heat fourfold. But Nora didn’t mind the heat. She loved it. Yet still, as she hastened on, with a steady clack-clack-clack of her best shoe-heels on the glinting flagstones,
something
in her mind was doing its utmost to persuade her to turn back. But no; those full red lips closed more firmly; the sensible thing to do was to face things out. And on she went.

At the end of the next street she boarded a tram, and edged herself in on to the hole-patterned seat immediately facing a family of Sunday
merrymakers
– the father (with his little dark moustache), the mother (her ringed left hand pressed close against the bag she carried), and their three small children in a row beside them – six, four, and two – with completely motionless bodies, and unceasingly active red-brown eyes.

It was stuffy in the tram. Nora watched the stagnant shut-up shops slide by – the butcher’s, the draper’s, the dairy, the fried-fish shop.
The
Admiral
Napier
– with its chipped padlocked brown doors – suggested a frivolous attempt at disguising itself as a morgue, its upper paint a leprous grey. The confectioners’ were open, though; and so were the tobacconists’. She could see the boys, squatting on stools in their Sunday clothes, eating ices; and Mr Jobson in his shirt-sleeves leaning over the last of his Sunday newspapers, smoking one of his own minute black cigars. ‘Triple murder in Kensal Green. Blood-stained chopper found.’ ‘Well-known Peer charged with Bigamy.’ The placards were always exciting on Sundays. Nora’s gliding dark-blue eyes snatched at their novelties as the tram in its steel grooves lurched on. It was the world she was used to and it intensely interested her.
But when at length she reached ‘the Ponds’ – their shelving banks shaded with lofty, bowering willows, green and silver in the motionless sunlit air – they were all but deserted. At this first glimpse of them again Nora sighed. Just that one deep draught of sweeter air that had filled her lungs, had stilled her mind, set her heart beating. Her dark eyes had become almost as placid and absent as her father’s. The water lay there, unruffled by even the faintest motion of the air, and blue as a plate beneath the sky. On the farther bank, but so far away that their shrill voices sounded not much louder than
starlings
’, a swarm of small boys were disporting themselves; some shying stones into the water, while two or three of them were drying themselves in the sun – small, lean creatures, standing mother-naked under the bowl of the sky on the warm green turf.

And Nora at length softly turned her eyes towards her tree. This, too, was a willow, but it was a good many years older than most of its companions, and in part devoured and hollowed by rot. It leaned far out over the water from its few feet of grass-green sandy bank. And, as she looked at it, the complete experience of the night before flooded back into memory.

It wasn’t as if that had been her first nocturnal visit. This, indeed, was one of Nora’s own few secret resorts. She was ‘friends’ with the place. She had paddled in its shallows with her school-mates, when quite a little girl. She knew its dangers; had been warned of them again and again. How then could she have been so stupid, so idiotic? To have stooped there remotely day-dreaming in that quiet starry darkness, leaning so far out over the water, with the perfectly ridiculous intention of trying to see her face in that dark mirror. The folly of it! As if to bid it good-bye! It would have served her right to have fallen in for good and all. What actually
had
happened – nothing so tragic – had happened in the twinkling of an eye.

Either in sheer absent-mindedness, or because she had been startled
suddenly
by the squawking of a little owl in the branches over her head, her fingers had slipped, and in she had gone. Down, down – like a stone, into the cold, greedy, caressing water. And, in an instant or two, though it had seemed an age, and an age crammed with a wild incoherent disturbing dream, she had come up again, panting, terrified, clutching; trembling, shuddering, but safe.

Better to have drowned almost than to have proved oneself such a silly! But it was then – as if it were hovering in the darkness of the air – that that strange phantom face had appeared. She had found herself gazing straight up into it; though whether, with the water streaming from her hair, her eyes were open or shut, she could not remember. It was through those few
everlasting
moments the face had stayed there, lit faintly as if by some light of its own, smiling, seraphic, unchanging, the eyes faintly luminous, the cheek
narrowing softly to the chin, the hair drawn gently backward from the brows.

At length, and none too easily, Nora had pulled herself out, up on to the bank, had sat there, exhausted a while, to recover her breath, her safety, and her wits. And then, having wrung some of the water out of her clothes, she had hurried off home by as obscure a route as she knew, and so up to her bedroom. Her mother had been ironing in the kitchen when she left home. One of the flat-irons still sat cooling on the scorch-patterned
ironing-sheet
beside its holder. Nora had glanced at it as she came in. And like everything else in the kitchen, it seemed to be in collusion with her – and to be professing it! ‘
We
know; it’s over now; don’t be afraid.
We
shan’t split!’