Short Stories 1927-1956 (90 page)

The scraggy wretch nodded and gesticulated with warty hands.

‘Come in, come in,’ I screamed. ‘You shall eat a meal, poor man. How dire is civilization in rags – Evil fortune! Socialism! Millionaires! I’ll be bound. Come in, come in.’

I was weeping with delight. He squinted at me with suspicion and again waved his hands. By these movements and by his articulate cries, I fancied the man was dumb. (He was vexed with a serious impediment in his speech I now conjecture.) He was manifesting mistrust. He snuffled.

‘No, no,’ said I. ‘Come in, my man and welcome. I am lonely – a
Bohemian
. Ancient books are musty company. Come sit and cheer me with an honest appetite. Take a glass of wine with me.’

I patted the wretch on the back. I gripped his arm. In my tragic acting, moreover, I hummed a little song to prove my indifference. He tottered upon my steps in front of me – his shoes were mended with brown paper and the noise of his footsteps was like the rustle of a lady’s silk dress. I blithely followed him into the house leaving the door wide open so that the clean night air might go through the house, so that the clatter of the
railroad
which lies behind the doctor’s house might prove the reality of the world. I sat the beggar down in an armchair. I plied him with meat and drink. He luxuriated in the good fare, he guzzled my claret, he gnawed bones and crust like a bony beast, considering me the while, apprehensive of being reft of his meal. He snarled and he gobbled, he puffed, he mouthed and he chawed. He was a bird of prey, a cat, a wild beast, and a man. His belly was the only truth. He had chanced on heaven, and awaited the archangel’s trump of banishment. Yet in the midst of his ravenous feeding, terror was netting him, too. Full of my own fear, in watching his hands shivering, and the pallor overspreading his grimy face, I took delight. Still he ate furiously, flouting his fears.

All the while I was thinking desperately of the horrid creature which was in my house. The while I sat grinning at my guest, the while I was inciting him to eat, drink, and be merry, the while I analysed each deplorable action
of the rude fellow and sickened at his beastliness, the vile consciousness of that thing on its secret errand prowling within scent, never left me – that abortion – A-B-O, abortion; I knew then.

On a sudden, just as the tramp, having lifted the lamb bone, had set his teeth to gnawing at the gristly knuckle, there came to my ears the sound of breaking glass and then a rustling (no extraordinary sound), a rustling sound of a hand wandering upon the panel of a door. But the beggar had heard what speech cannot make intelligible. I felt younger on that day than I have since my childhood. I was drunken with terror.

My beggar, dropping his tumbler of wine but still clutching the lamb bone, scrambled to his feet and eyed me with pale grey pupils set in circles of white. His dirty bleached face was stained with his meal. Dirt seamed his skin. I took his hand in mine. I caught up the lamp and held it on high. The beggar and I stood in the doorway gazing into the darkness; the lamplight faintly lit the familiar passage. It gleamed on the door of the room whose window overlooks my garden. The handle of the door was silently turning. The door was opening – almost imperceptibly. The beggar’s pulse throbbed furiously; my elbow was pressed against his arm. And a very thin abnormal thing – a fawn shadow – came out of the room and pattered past the beggar and me.

My jaws fell asunder, nor could I shut them so that I might speak. Tighter I clutched the beggar and we fled out together. Standing upon the topmost of the steps, we peered down the street; afar off with ponderous tread walked a policeman, playing the light of his lantern upon the windows of the houses and the doors. Presently he drew near to a lamp, to where flitted a monstrous shadow. I saw the policeman turn suddenly round about. With fluttering coat-tails he ran furiously down a little lane which leads to many bright shops.

The beggar and I spent the rest of the night upon the doorstep.
Sometimes
he made vain splutterings of speech and vexed gesticulations, but, generally we waited speechless and motionless as two stuffed owls.

At the first faint ray of dawn, which leapt above the doctor’s house opposite, the beggar flung away my hand, hopped blindly down the steps and, pausing not to open the gate, vaulted over it and was immediately gone. I scarcely felt surprise. The green-shaded lamp which stood upon the doorstep slowly burned itself out. The sun rose gladly, the sparrows made the morning noisy as they fluttered and fought in their busy foraging. I think my round eyes vaguely watched them.

Soon after eight the postman brought me a letter. And this was the letter – ‘God forgive me, friend, and help me to write sanely. A miserable curiosity has proved too strong for me. I went back to my house, now woefully strange to me. I could not sleep. Now pacing with me in my own bedroom,
now wrapped in its unholy sleep, the thing as always with me. Each picture, indeed each chair, however severely I strove to discipline my thoughts, carried with it a pregnant suggestion. In the middle of the night I took my way downstairs and opened the door of my study. My books seemed to me disconsolate friends offended. The case stood as we had left it – we, you and I, when we locked the door upon the tragedy. In fear and trembling I went a little farther into the room. Two steps had I taken when I discovered that the lid no longer shut the thing from the stars, that the lid was gaping open. Oh! Pelluther, how will you credit so astounding a statement. I saw (I say it solemnly though I have to labour vigorously to drive back a horde of thoughts) I saw the wretched creature, which you and I had raised from the belly of the earth, lying upon the floor; its meagre limbs were coiled in front of the fire. Had the heat roused him from his long sleep? I know not, I dare not think. He – he, Pelluther – lay upon the hearth-rug sunken in slumber soundlessly breathing. Oh, my friend, I stand eyeing insanity, face to face. My mind is mutinous. There lay the wretched abortion: – it seems to me that this thing is like a pestilent secret sin, which lies hid, festering, weaving snares, befouling the wholesome air, but which, some day, creeps out and goes stalking midst healthy men, a leprous child of the sinner. Ay, and like a sin perhaps of yours and of mine. Pelluther! But, being heavy with such a woesome burden it becomes us alone to bear it. I left the thing there in its sleep. Its history the world shall never know. I write this to warn you of the awful terror of the event which has come upon you and me. When you come,
1
we will make our plans to destroy utterly this horrid memory. And if this be not our lot we must exist but to hide our discovery from the eyes of the sane. If any suffer, it is you and I who must suffer. If murder can be just, the killing of this creature – neither man nor beast, this vile symbol – must be accounted to us a virtue. Fate has chosen her tools. Come, my old friend! I have sent away my servants and locked my door; and my prayer is that this thing may sleep until darkness comes down to cloak our horrid task from the eyes of the world. Science is slunk away shamefaced; religion is a withered flower. Oh, my friend, what shall I say! How shall I regain myself?’

From the slender record of this letter I leave you to deduce whatever
conclusions
you may. I may suppose that at some time of the second day (perhaps, while I was rambling through the green places of Kew!) Dugdale had again visited the thing and had found it awake, alert, vigilant in his room. No man spied upon my friend in those hours. (Sometimes in the quietude, I fancy I hear an odd footfall upon my threshold!)

In the brilliant sunshine I drove in a four-wheeled cab to Dugdale’s house,
for my limbs were weak and would hardly bear my body. I limped up the garden path and the familiar steps with the help of two sticks. The door was ajar – I entered. I found Dugdale in his study. He was sitting in the chest with a Bible resting on one of the sides.

He looked at me. ‘“For we are but of yesterday and know nothing
because
our days upon earth are a shadow.” What is life, Pelluther? A vain longing for death. What is beauty? A question of degree. And sin is in the air – child of disease and death and springing-up and hatred of life. Fawn hair has beauty and as for bones; surely less for the worms. Worms! through lead? Pelluther, my dear old Pell. Through lead?’

He gazed at me like a child gazing at a bright light.

‘Come!’ said I, ‘the air is bland and the sun is fierce and warm. Come!’ I could say no more.

‘But the sunlight has no meaning to me now,’ said he. ‘That breeder of corruption, tall here and a monstrous being, walks under my skull strangling all the other beings, puny and sapless. I have one idea,
conception
, vivid faintness, a fierce red horrid idea – and a phenomenon, too. You see, it is when a deep abstract belief rots into loathing, when hope is eaten away by horrors of sleep and a mad longing for sleep – mad! Yet fawn hair is not without beauty; provided, Pelluther, provided – through lead?’…

A vain idle report has been set about by the malicious. Oh, was there not reason and logical sequence in his conversation with me? I give it for demonstration’s sake. I swear that he is not mad – a little eccentric (surely all clever men are eccentric), a little aged. I swear solemnly that my dear friend Dugdale was not mad. He was a just man. He wronged no one. He was a benevolent kindly gentleman and fine in intellect. Say you that he was eccentric – not mad. Tears ran down my cheeks as I looked at him.

The Orgy: An Idyll

The Orgy: An Idyll
*

In less than three minutes, having bolted from Sir Leopold’s warren by the minor exit, Philip found himself seated in a minute and charming tea-shop. Though it was neither its size nor its charm but its propinquity which had invited him in, it was clearly a tea-shop intended for the daintier appetites. There were flowers. There were nymphs in the chicest of caps and aprons, armed with what were almost certainly solid silver salvers. There were lustres and silk shades, and napery almost as delicate as that which Philip had ordered for his housekeeper’s room at No.444. And there was the gentlest of artificial light. It hung in the air like a tenuous amethystine mist against the cobalt gloom of the street outside.

And since Philip was at this moment more in need of a mother than he had been since he was weaned, it could only have been his good angel who had guided his flying steps into this little hostelry. Only his good angel who could have inspired the pretty waitress, after vainly attempting to catch the meaning of the order he choked out, to bring him a cup of chocolate and a meringue. Philip had thereupon sunk into the densest fog of incredulity of which the human mind is capable.

It had been a lark. Oh, yes, it had been a preternatural, unprecedented, top-hole lark. But then, even larks must return at last to
terra
firma.
So had Philip’s. But what occupied his inward eye at the moment was not so much the visionary shape of Ruin, or the Ghoul of Beingfoundout, or even his Uncle Pim, but the secretary he had but just left behind him. He had, it is true, taken this reptile by the horns. On the other hand he had been
compelled
to leave go. It would be very dreadful indeed to bow the knee to that
Baal. O for the wings of a dove, his spirit sighed. But Philip refused to listen. For only the wings of an eagle (as he falsely supposed), could be of the slightest assistance. No, he refused to fly. Ten shillings and a penny is a poor sum with which to face the voyage to South America. He would, as had so many felons in the Press before him, face the music.

He would himself attend next day punctually at four o’clock in Grosvenor Square. It would be inconsiderate to the furniture men to come earlier, but only by a very few minutes would he be just too late to enjoy the vista of vans. And then, the handcuffs, the shackles, the manacles, the dungeon, perdition.

Confronted with this awful moment he raised his head, and gazing through the delicately wreathing steam of his chocolate met the eyes of a young lady, who, seated at a little round table not four yards off, had for the last five minutes been steadily watching him. Not with her whole clear lovely eye, it is true, but out of a tiny fraction of it, and that an infinitesimal distance from its precise focussing point. In all Nature’s marvellous array of living creatures, wild swan to bird of paradise, giraffe to gazelle, there is nothing so secret, responsive and beautiful as the human eye. There is nothing that can so swiftly plead with and soothe a troubled spirit, even though it be the eye of a young stranger whom one has never in one’s whole life seen before.

Philip had noticed this many times, but recognition of it at this precise moment had a most curious effect on him in his present state. It was as if the mother who, quite involuntarily, had left him at the age of seven, had thrust a phantom hand over his shoulder, and gently closed the covers of his disastrous book of fate. It as closely resembled the old-fashioned
Valentines
and Christmas cards as that! Even the phantasm of Sir Leopold dropped instantly clean into the oblivion it deserved.

Those eyes, into which Philip for this everlasting instant was now gazing, were – and English at times has severe limitations – brown. They were brown as a wren, as hill water over gravel, as wallflowers, as the leather of that unique Elzevir of Catullus in the parlour library of the Popes of Rome. Besides being merely brown they were welling over with consternation and with compassion. Like the waters mirroring Narcissus they seemed to be inviting this young stranger to lose himself and his forlorn woes in their depths.

But only for the whispering eternity of an instant. At the next the faintly fringed curtains of those eyes had descended upon them. And Philip was
able to perceive the face and the slightly-stooping shoulder of the impossible she to whom they belonged. Only dimly though, because of the air that danced between. Lost in thus looking, he forgot all else around him, and found himself wandering in the cinnamon groves of Arabia-Felix, with Mecca at the left-most corner of the firm yet gentle mouth, and Damascus dangling from a tiny ringlet of chestnut hair over the right ear. And the self he had found was one that he had never yet realized he had lost.

Conscience all that morning had been lying gagged and blindfold in the cellar of Philip’s mind. It now found itself suddenly freed; all pins and needles, and with far too much to do. For after but one fleeting glance at this one human face, Philip had discovered that he abhorred not merely his immediate past, but its whole twenty-one years and a bit that had gone
before
. That he abhorred it not because it had been so extravagantly base, but so incredibly wasted. He abhorred it because never before had he really
wanted
anything. Most of the whole long lovely morning that had just gone by had been spent in the
belief
that
he wanted many things. So intense had this apparent rapacity at last become that he had failed to realize that he merely wanted to
bag
them, which is quite another matter. And so the glut had set in. And now the glut was over. The ten-and-a-penny in his pocket, a few old suits and books, three unmerited prizes for good conduct, a
collection
of postage stamps, the hypothetical legacy of a shilling and a reputation on the brink of extinction – these were now all the worldly goods he had – and all just now he needed. He had looked at million-pound notes again and again without once reminding himself that they were anything more than mere paper. He knew where there was enough bullion to buy up a score of Midases and hadn’t coveted a single quid. In brief, there wasn’t a trace of mere vulgar acquisitiveness in his constitution. And yet
now
, all else forgotten, he had been suddenly seized with an overwhelming desperate passion to
acquire,
to possess, to have for keeps, and to all eternity – just what? Why, this gentle stranger. And failing that, but once to make – to see – her merely smile. And as for buying either, he might just as well make a bid for the Milky Way. He sat on, his chocolate grown cold, his meringue untasted, gazing with an appalling forlornness and nostalgia, straight past the bowed head four yards away from him, and out into the deluge beyond.

Though, however, his eyes were fixed on the rain his soul was fixed on the young lady, and the attendant spirits of his inmost dreams were at revel in Arcady. He himself meanwhile was conscious of being at the same time happy beyond telling and ineffably sad. For as she sat there, all alone, in her little hat and her April coat – and to an angel clothes are but hindrances to flight – she was clearly in trouble. Philip had instantly detected the ghost of a fork of anxiety between those slightly lifted eyebrows, arched like the crescent moon. He was in trouble too. In considerable trouble. But now his
mind was only a cold dark sea on which
her
small vessel was tossing. Could he but forget his dismal past, and his despair, and by some sheer feat of telepathy scatter a few drops of oil on these troubled waters, and so bring peace to that afflicted bark! A rosy golden evening, placid waters, a ghostly light-house gleaming on its spit of sandy dune, faint stars aglint in the east. If only, if only!

Philip, for so fair and frail-looking a young man, could be obstinate. Had he not for two and a half months – for almost eleven complete weeks – never wavered in his mortal conflict with that sheer hulk, a stool in a bank, not to mention that nightmare life-in-death, the prospect of its surviving him? He now lowered his brows a little, set his teeth together and, heedless of M. Coué, began with might and main to
will
this young stranger to
forget
her cares. It was no easy feat. To keep, that is, his whole inward being fixed on her very self and his eyes elsewhere, without squinting.

A few moments slipped by, echoing with the rumour of the fountains of the heavens without and the murmur of feminine voices under the low
ceiling
within, and then it seemed two phantom messengers had met. For she suddenly raised her head, looked straight across at him, her dark eyes filled with strange, wistful, alarmed, pleading, reproachful questionings, seized the few little parcels that were scattered on the table before her, seized her tiny bead bag and her bill, and turned to depart. Philip had met that
inexplicable
and profound glance with eyes as innocent and as blue as an infant’s. This one morning’s rapid tuition had taught him that he who
hesitates
is lost indeed. He leapt to his feet, gripped his alpaca gingham, and strode after her.

‘You will forgive me, you must try to forgive me,’ he implored. ‘My name is Philip Pim. Here is my hideous umbrella – sopped. Please, I beseech you, spare me the horror of watching you emerge into that appalling torrent of rain. There isn’t a soul as you see in sight. The umbrella is mine. I have
positively
paid for it; I couldn’t help myself; though now I realize there is a divinity … I entreat, if only, of course, the wretched thing will not be a bur den. Any policeman would then return it to the Lost Property Office, where it would remain undisturbed for ever. Oh, if England were not renowned for its climate you might have been free from my unwarrantable
interference
!’

The young woman watched these words proceed from his lips with the utmost astonishment and interest.

‘I
think,’
she said, ‘we had better go back a moment. I – I understand. You are very,
very
kind. But it was not – well, just the rain.’

Philip returned to her table on toes that appeared suddenly to have been converted into cotton-wool. He sat down in a vertigo of agony and joy, and speechlessly watched her replace one by one her dainty little possessions on
the table, while at the same moment, though this he could
not
divine, she strove also to regain her self-possession.

‘To tell you the honest truth,’ she said at last, ‘my real worry isn’t the English climate, but an only aunt – from Brazil.’

Her precise pronunciation of the last word but three erected in Philip’s mind a specimen of
Formix
Rufa
which was nonetheless rufous for being of a dead black, and nonetheless formidable for being in human shape, about five-foot-ten in height, with long straight boots on its feet, a check ulster on its back and a hat with a veil tied round it on its head.

‘The odd thing is,’ said Philip, ‘that you having an aunt,
I
have an uncle. Indeed I have spent the whole morning making what I might call my final peace with him, though it is unlikely to have that appearance. Indeed we, he and I, may never meet again. But his very presence in the world just now is an obvious coincidence, and coincidences come we know not whence. If then by heaven’s help I could be of the least possible service to you, the very least, my only difficulty would be to survive the happiness of it. I do assure you, though what I say may seem to sound like words that have never been taught to do a single thing they are told, that this is so. I assure you it is so. I never felt so anxious or so hopelessly unworthy and useless in my life. But that is just inaction. Please make
any
kind of use of me, as if I were this miserable umbrella itself. Then just hand me too over to a policeman, who will return me also to the Lost Property Office. Lost I say – though no one, let alone my unfortunate uncle, would in any sense consider me as Property.’

‘Well but you know, Mr – Pim, you really are terribly amusing. I am
inclined
to think your ways over here are not exactly our ways over there; but what is life,
I
say, if one is kind of just to keep to the beaten track?’ Philip nodded violently then shook his head. ‘You see, I landed at Southampton last Saturday week, and my aunt is at this moment landing there this
afternoon
. She will be in London, I guess, tomorrow afternoon. My family was Scotch before we were South Americans – they’re homely folk,
aren’t
they? – and at thought of an hotel she just dies, perishes. For all her life long, you see, she has been looking for a really tolerable one – hotel, I mean – and now she knows there isn’t such a thing: that it’s what is called a
contradiction
in terms. It’s an awful thing when an ideal just evaporates like that. But it has; and now what she is hoping for – what, indeed, poor dear she is positively expecting, is somewhere
else
to lay her weary head in this queer cunning irresistible old city of yours. And I –
I
promised to get it ready for her before she came.’