Short Stories 1927-1956 (78 page)

I huddled myself up again, pulled up a rug and woke to find the
candle-stub
still alight in the dusk of dawn – battling faintly together to illuminate the little vivid painted face leaning from the wall. And that, on my soul – showing not a symptom of fatigue – in this delicate spring daybreak, indeed appeared more redoubtable than ever!

I sat for a time undecided what to be doing, what even to be thinking. And then, as if impelled by an inspiration, I got up, took down again the trophy from its nail, and with my pen-knife gently prized open the back of its gilded frame. Surely, it had occurred to me, it could not be mere vanity, mere caprice or rancour that could take such posthumous pains as this! Perhaps, ever dimly aware of it as he was in his waking moments, merely the pressing subconscious thought of the portrait had lured Beverley out of his sleep. Perhaps …

I levered up the thin dusty wood; there was nothing beneath. I drew it out from the frame. And then was revealed, lightly pasted on the back, a scrap of yellowed paper, scrawled with five crosses in the form of a
quincunx
. In one corner of this was a large, capital Italianate ‘P’. And beneath a central cross was drawn a small square. Here was the veritable answer
before
my eyes. How very like old age to doubt its memory even on such a crucial matter as this. Or was it only doubt?

For whose guidance had this odd quincunx been intended? Not for Walter Beverley’s – that was certain. Standing even where I was I could see between the curtains the orchard behind the house pale in the dawn with its fast-fading fruit-blossom. There, then, lay concealed the old lady’s secret
‘hoard’. We had but to exercise a little thought, a little dexterity and
precaution
; and Beverley had won.

And then suddenly, impetuously, rose up in my mind an obstinate distaste of meddling in the matter. Surely, if there is any such thing as desecration,
this
would be desecration.

I glanced at the old attentive face looking up at me, the face of one who had, it seemed, so easily betrayed her most intimate secret, and in some
unaccountable
fashion there now appeared to be something quite other than mere malice in its concentration – a hint even of the apprehension and
entreaty
of a heart too proud to let them break through the veil of the small black fearless eyes.

I determined to say nothing to Beverley; watch yet again. And – if I could find a chance – dig by myself, and make sure of the actual contents of Miss Lemieux’s treasury before surrendering it to her greedy, insensitive heir. So once more the portrait was re-hung on its rusty nail.

He was prepared for my scepticism; but he did not believe, I think, that I had kept unceasing watch.

‘I am sure,’ he said repeatedly, ‘absolutely sure that what I told you last night has recurred repeatedly. How can you disprove my positive personal evidence by this one failure – by a million negatives? It is you who are to blame – that tough, bigoted
common-
sense of yours.’

I willingly accepted his verdict and offered to watch once more. He seemed content. And yet by his incessant restlessness and the curious
questioning
dismay that haunted his face I felt that his nocturnal guest was troubling and fretting him more than ever.

It was a charming old house, intensely still, intensely self-centred, as it were. One could imagine how unwelcome the summons of death would be in such a familiar home on earth as this. I wandered, and brooded, and searched in the garden: and found at length without much difficulty my ‘quincunx’. The orchard was full of fruit trees, cherry, plum, apple: but the five towering pear trees, their rusty crusted bloom not yet all shed, might become at once unmistakably conspicuous to anyone in possession of the clue; though not till then. But how hopeless a contest had my friend set
himself
with no guidance, and one spade, against such an aunt, against such an orchard!

Evening began to narrow in the skies. My host and I sat together over a bottle of wine. Much as he seemed to cling to my company, I knew he longed for solitude. Twice he rose, as if urged by some sudden caprice to leave me, and twice he sat down again in even deeper constraint.

But soon after midnight I was left once more to my vigil. This time I
forestalled
his uneasy errand and replaced the portrait myself. I rested awhile; then, when it was still very early morning, I ventured out into the mists of
the garden to find a spade. But I had foolishly forgotten on which side of the mid-most tree Miss Lemieux had set her tell-tale square. So back again I was compelled to go, and this time I took the flimsy, precious scrap of paper with me. Somewhere a waning moon was shedding light, for the mists of the garden were white as milk and the trees stood phantom-like above the drenched grasses.

I pinned the paper to the mid-most pear tree, measured out with my eye a rough narrow oblong a foot or two from the trunk and drove the rusty spade into the soil.

At that instant I heard a cautious minute sound behind me. I turned and once more confronted the pathetic bedizened figure of the night before. It was fumbling with the handle of the window, holding aloft a candle. The window opened at length and Beverley stood peering out into the garden. I fancied even a shrill voice called. And then without hesitation, with the same odd, shuffling gait Beverley stepped out on to the dew-damped gravel path and came groping towards me. He stood then, quietly watching me, not two paces distant; and so utterly still was the twilight that his
candle-flame
burned slim and unwavering in the mist, shedding its small, pale light on leaf-sprouting flowerless bough and dewdrop, and upon that strange set haunted face.

I could not gaze very long into the grey unseeing eyes. His lips moved. His fingers, oddly bent, twitched. And then he turned from me. The large pale eyes wandered to my spade, to the untrampled grasses, and finally,
suddenly
fixed their gaze on the tiny square of fading paper. He uttered a little cry, shrill and desperate, and stretched out his hand to snatch it. But I was too quick for him. Doubling it up, I thrust it into my pocket and stepped back beneath the trees. Then, intensely anxious not to awaken the
sleepwalker
, I drew back with extreme caution. Nonetheless, I soon perceived that, however gradual my retreat, he was no less patiently driving me into a little shrubbery where there would be no chance of eluding him, and we should stand confronting one another face to face.

I could not risk a struggle in such circumstances. A wave of heat spread over me; I tripped, and then ran as fast as I could back to the house, hastened into the room and threw myself down in my old yellow
sleeping-place
– closing my eyes as if I were lost to the world. Presently followed the same faint footfall near at hand. Then, hearing no sound at all, and
supposing
he had passed, I cautiously opened my eyes – only to gaze once more unfathomably deep into his, stooping in the light of his candle, searching my face insanely, entreatingly – I cannot describe with how profound a
disquietude
.

I did not stir, until, with a deep sigh, like that of a tired-out child, he turned from me and left the room.

I waited awhile, my thoughts like a disturbed nest of ants. What should I do? To whom was my duty obligatory? – to Beverley, feverishly hunting for wealth not his (even if it existed) by else than earthly right; or to this unquiet spirit – that I could not but believe had taken possession of him – struggling, only
I
knew how bravely, piteously and desperately, to keep secret – what? Not mere money or valuables or private papers or personal secrets which might lie hidden beneath the shadow of the pear tree. Surely never had eyes pleaded more patiently and intensely and less covetously for a stranger’s chivalry, nor from a wilder ambush than these that had but just now gazed into mine. What was the secret; what lure was detaining on earth a shade so much in need of rest?

I took the paper from my pocket. Light was swiftly flowing into the awakening garden. A distant thrush broke faintly into song. Undecided – battling between curiosity and pity, between loyalty to my friend and loyalty to even
more
than a friend – to this friendless old woman’s solitary perturbed spirit, I stood with vacant eyes upon the brightening orchard – my back turned on portrait and room.

A hand (no
man’s
asleep, or awake) touched mine. I turned – debated no more. The poor jaded face was grey and drawn. He seemed himself to be inwardly wrestling – possessed against possessor. And still the old bygone eyes within his own, across how deep an abyss, argued, pleaded with mine. They seemed to snare me, to persuade me beyond denial. I held out the flimsy paper between finger and thumb.

Like the limb of an automaton, Beverley’s arm slowly raised his
guttering
candle. The flame flowed soft and blue. I held the paper till its heat scorched my thumb. Something changed; something but just now there was suddenly gone. The old, drawn face melted, as it were, into another. And Beverley’s voice broke out inarticulate and feverish. I sat him down and let him slowly awaken. He stared incredulously to and fro, from the window to me, to the portrait, and at last his eye fell on his extraordinary attire.

‘I say,’ he said, ‘what’s this?’

‘Seemingly,’ I said, ‘they are the weeds of the malevolent aunt who has been giving you troubled nights.’

‘Me?’ he said, not yet quite free from sleep.

‘Yes,’ I said.

He yawned. ‘Then – I have been fooled?’ he said. I nodded. I think that even tears came into his eyes. The May-morning choragium of the wild birds had begun, every singer seemingly a soloist in the enraptured medley of voices.

‘Well, look here!’ he said, nodding a stupid sleep-drowsed head at me, ‘look here! What … you think of an aunt who hates a fellow as much as that, eh? What you think?’

‘I don’t know what to think,’ I said.

An Anniversary

An Anniversary
*

At least a minute – and one that resembled not only a sort of hole in Time but a pause in eternity – must have ticked its moments away; but even yet Aubrey could not be positively certain of what he had seen. Of the after effects of just that one transfixed vague glimpse, his present attitude –
long-chinned
face thrust forward; cold, grey, light-lashed eyes peering fixedly through the budding tresses of his contorted weeping-ash – was evidence enough.

His earthenware pitcher still dangled from his numbed fingers. The blood in his throat and temples continued its faint drumming, and was the cause perhaps of the peculiar descending shimmer, as of motes of light, that now affected his vision. His eyes themselves, it seemed, had refused to let him make sure. He had been abjectly shaken – momentarily terrified even. The scalp on his head was still tingling. And yet he had continued to think.

He had made a habit of attending to what happened ‘in his mind’, and was well aware that unpleasing memories, if they are steadily suppressed and driven down into the dark of that mind, may yet somehow grope to the surface again and reappear in unexpected disguises. Especially when one is not ‘watching-out’ for them! What then of this particular memory?

For a whole year it had stationed itself like a skulking menacing shadow on the outskirts of consciousness. With anything so habitual one does not even have to look to see if it is still there; just as in one’s own house – at the end perhaps of a corridor, or on the landing of a staircase, may hang a portrait which appears as if what it represented were always steadily in wait for – well, for a renewed and really close scrutiny of itself.

And even though faces in portraits are only made of paint on canvas, they can yet shed on one a sort of passive influence.

The inward shade that frequented Aubrey’s mind was not, however, a mere portrait. It was the vivid mental image of a ‘friend’ whom he had sufficient reason to distrust, and even detest, although its original must long ago, surely, have given up all earthly (or any other) concern with him. Or with Emily, either! The bourne from which, please God, no traveller
returns
—. It had needed no Shakespeare to discover that! Why then quite unexpectedly – not out of the blue, perhaps – but out of these cold evening shadows had…? That was the question. A fantastic yet rather pressing question. What neglect there had been up to the present, had, it is true, been on one side only. The friend’s. Not on Aubrey’s. And he believed that he knew all that he needed to know of Emily.

When two minds, a man’s and a woman’s, are in close and frequent association with one another – or two bodies for that matter – each, it seems, may be silently aware even of what may be secretly passing in the other’s. They seem to play eavesdropper, not only to one another’s thoughts but even sensations. But then, women are assumed to be more
sentimental
than men. More sentimental at any rate than Aubrey was himself by nature, or than he had any intention of being. Over anniversaries, for example – birthdays, wedding-days, red-letter days, promise-days,
love-days
, mothers’-days, death-days. It was fantastic. It was as if their hearts were their calendars – dismally trustworthy calendars in the clearest of print. To let the dead past bury not only its dead but also its moribund, and bury it deep, had always been – by much – Aubrey’s private
preference
.

And what of that sinister and secretive evil jealousy? Which may rot into a wearisome and corrosive hatred. Hack away as you will at its roots and suckers they will begin sprouting again even in the small hours of a single night. They become entangled with the instincts, and are the hops and brambles and bindweed of the imagination. Trailing, tender, almond-scented bindweed – Aubrey had read somewhere – will penetrate into loamy churchyard sod and soil a sheer nine feet. ‘Full fathom five.’ But that
he
should have fallen a prey to jealousy! And with nothing but envy and a worn-out passion, no affection even, for its justification!

Apart from any reasons, however – and hatred no more than love positively needs any – he had at first sight taken a sudden hatred to John Fiske. In the whole wide world he was certain there was nothing they could have ever agreed about. ‘Oil and vinegar’, yes; but here there had been no salad. One can sneer at, despise, and label an enemy stupid and stolid, too, and yet realize that it would be nearer the mark if in the latter epithet one omitted the ‘t’. In spite of his cursed ‘honesty’, his stubborn directness and
unshakable
devotion (to what did not belong to him), John Fiske had been as hard to see through as he had been to explore. More impenetrable indeed even than the gloom now steadily deepening beneath the branches of this weeping-ash.

Besides, Aubrey had been envious of Fiske long before he had become jealous of him. Not because he thought him as quick and clever – and
certainly
not as attractive – as himself. It was his dull, suety, habitually good qualities that he abominated most. They can be the very devil when one wants the owner of them out of the way. As for his own good qualities – brains, morals, heart? He’d have given himself a
plus
for the first. And the rest? Well, according to taste! Also he knew what he wanted. As, of course, in his slow, honest-to-god, nauseating fashion had Fiske. Precisely how
much of his own particular
want
had he got? By no means all; Aubrey
himself
had seen to that. And yet … to hell with him!

There, indeed, so far as undertaker, sexton, and the passing of time can manage, was precisely where he might perhaps be now; and for good! Though, somehow, the clever seem to be its likelier inhabitants. Why on earth then was he himself dithering about like this, outside this arboreal cage, and extremely reluctant to venture into it? Solely because it had for that split second seemed to be
occupied
; and by a vigilant and tongueless intruder loafing in wait by a damp-greened old water-butt – his clock a
dripping
tap!

Aubrey’s first symptoms of shock having now subsided, one simple question presented itself. Since what he had seen, or had appeared to see, could by no possibility be actual – not at any rate as actual as the
water-butt
– could it have been ‘real’? If real, it would prove a deadly nuisance, and might entail the vilest complications. If not real, it had been merely an illusion.

‘Ghosts’ – pah! No, from that bourne
no
traveller returns; and that may be damned bad luck for those beyond it! ‘Dead men rise up never’; no
matter
into what Dead Sea even the weariest river may eventually wind its way. Apart from their bones and their worldly chattels the only thing the dead leave behind them is their memory. But that – such is the imbecility of the human mind – however anxiously it is hidden, may, as Emily would agree, become an obsession. And obsessions may breed illusions. With
them,
bell, book and candle are of far less service than
pot.
brom.
A sneer webbed over Aubrey’s cold stiff features. For, with Emily, even
pot.
brom.,
let alone her Evening Services, tame-cattiness and deadly taciturnity, had failed.

Real or not, it was just like Fiske to have chosen this particular place and time for – well, this reunion. During the lingering days of autumn how often at his work in the City used Aubrey’s fascinated fancy to turn to this last half-hour of twilight in his long straggling garden; these motionless, misty, earthy, early October evenings, the last of the sunset withering in the west. He loved the reek of his leaf bonfires and its haunting nutty odour of decay. He loved being alone; or, rather perhaps, being in strict privacy. And here, even at noonday, his garden was screened from the direct scrutiny of his neighbours. He was a person who refused not only to allow himself to be neglected, but also to be overlooked. But there are eyes that, once met,
cannot
even in memory be disregarded.

Apart from direct access by way of the house, the only route into and out of Aubrey’s garden lay through a wicket-gate that led into the open – into wide, flat and now mist-bound fields of damp and malodorous cabbages and cauliflowers, sour acres and acres of deserted market gardens. Yet back from his day in London, he delighted in pottering and, hardly less, in
pretending to potter. A perpetual and pleasing activity of mind usually accompanied this busy dolittle. He was abnormally secretive. For weeks he had held his tongue while that little romance of ‘yesteryear’ had steadily intensified and his own particular little intentions and designs had no less steadily matured. And even this no doubt was in part because of his peculiar pleasure in his own society; even at its worst. He especially enjoyed a
festering
stagnant mood. Not that many human beings are not pleasanter when they are alone. It is an eventuality that may be of equal advantage to their friends.

Indeed, who would deny that it is chiefly the presence of one’s
fellow-creatures
that evokes one’s worst – though these may possibly be one’s rarest – characteristics! Alone, even by no means virtuous people may mean wholly well. Not so Aubrey. He despised what he called cant; and first and foremost he
meant
business. It was, too, in the solitude of his garden, particularly as dusk thickened, that he could best explore his little plans. Then, as if with a dark lantern, he could follow up the wavering intersecting paths leading into the future. Digging, trenching, and even weeding, helped him to concentrate. He was something of a sapper, too; sly and sedulous when things or people stood in his way.

But why so thirsty a creature? He delighted in cold water especially and drank large quantities of it.
For one thing, it
was all but free. For another one’s wet may be a trifle too dry. It was, then, a special pleasure – his gardening done for the day – to sally off down to the water-butt under his weeping-ash, and there fill his earthenware pitcher. For himself, and for the flowers and pot-plants indoors. It was due, perhaps, to the Old Adam in him, after the fall of Eve. Also he had a nice taste in flowers. One might almost describe him as an intellectual aesthete who, on his arrival into this unrighteous world, had been deprived of a suitable start.

As this very moment, he stood listening, he could hear from under the tree the furtive falling sing-song of the waterdrops out of the pump’s iron spout – a tuneless tune, either entirely heedless of its surroundings, or,
contrariwise
, endeavouring to warn him of something amiss. But what? Just lately, as the days drew in, it had been more than dusk, it had been all but dark, when he had abandoned his flower-beds. The first stars would be pricking into the sky. He would stand, looking up; amused to remind himself that these sparkling darlings of the poets and sentimentalists are nothing but remote and unimaginably immense vats of gas or ‘energy’ – anything you please, except the pretty-pretty. That, beyond inconceivably icy Saharas of pitch-black space, they are not only at some appalling velocity hastening towards (or was it away from?) man’s silly little solar system, but are also running
down
!
It was an anarchistic little notion that made him laugh.
All
of us, every one of us, doomed! What concern had they
indeed with human affairs? – these celestial glow-worms, devoid even of harbouring a consciousness! His
own
‘star’ was quite another matter. That was
his
concern; or, at any rate, he meant to make it so.

And now, large as life, as reserved, as unfathomable, and – damn his eyes – as coldly contemptuous of Aubrey himself as ever, here was this devil, Fiske – or his double, or his revenant, his astral body or mere presentiment, masquerading in the shelter of Aubrey’s very own private weeping-ash!

‘Come back’, had he! What for?
Whom
for? Ah, yes! In that maze we call the mind (and heart too), even an illusion may have a purpose and a motive, though either may remain securely hidden in the unconscious. If this was solely his own illusion and he himself was its only goal, well and good. But suppose Emily…? No, he badly needed that there should be no meddling with her. Not yet, anyhow. And to confess to an illusion!
To
her!

He realized that he was being compelled to pay attention to a mere trick of the senses, to a silly hallucination – which might nonetheless tend to become a habitual hallucination. With the advent of this abused notion, Aubrey suddenly changed his mind. A brilliant idea! Why
not
presently make mocking mention to Emily of this silly illusion – and watch
her
reactions
. It would all sound so plausible, and so natural, and so harmless… ‘Yes, darling, just now. As a matter of fact – having finished up – I was just going indoors to fill the water-pot when…’

There had been too much futile reserve and concealment during these last months – the first vindictive indictments and persecutions over and before stagnancy had set in. Far better perhaps bring the whole stupid business into the open again. Yes, and keep it there. If his fancies intended to prey on him, they might in that case not have to prey for very long. Every female heart has its snapping-point. The elastic perishes.