Short Stories 1927-1956 (93 page)

What he could never be astonished at enough was the carriage of that dark young head on its shoulders; the way its owner stood, as if in a little green arched doorway looking steadily and firmly out into a new world. She met his eyes with exactly the same serene assurance as that with which St George met the eyes of the young virgins after he had slaughtered their guardian dragons. They might just as well have been boys together.

‘The one thing
I
should dearly like to see the very instant the sun rises again is not No.444,’ she was saying, and with every ‘four’ her underlip was a marvel to watch, ‘but just you, Mr Pim. Honestly I don’t mind in the least scandalizing my English friends. It’s too easy. They say, “But think, Lucinda! Listen, Lucinda!” And I always think, but never listen, except when there is something in
me
that says, No. As there is now, Mr Pim.
Not
,’
she added almost defiantly, ‘that I wouldn’t stay and watch the moon down else. Only that I do believe there are a sort of lighthouses in one’s mind, and that that’s what makes landfalls such a marvellous experience. But what are reasons – it’s only that I must.’

She put out her hand a little timidly and looked at him.

‘Yes, yes, I see, I see,’ cried Philip desperately; ‘but oh,’ he continued in bewilderment, glancing to and fro and up and down the deserted street as if for help; ‘I can’t, I can’t say good-bye; not this very instant, I mean. There are things in this world one simply
can’t
do, and mine is saying good-bye. It was just the same when I was young; and always with – with someone who seemed to have come straight from – but there, I can’t explain. Would it be dreadfully dreadfully tiring if we walked on just a very little way? Look, there’s a lamp-post; just there and back? You see, the sun will soon be set, and that lovely green light in the sky will fade, and then the dark, and we may never never never meet again. Indeed if I were you, I don’t think we ever should meet again. I simply couldn’t advise it, except for pity’s sake. The fact is,’ Philip went on, and suddenly his mind had become as clear and serene as a ball of crystal, ‘I have something dreadful to tell you. I have a past.’

Lucinda, as she listened to this harangue, had kept her eyes fixed steadily on the lamp-post, its delicate lightless lantern silhouetted against the
afterglow
of the sunset.

‘And I, Mr Pim,’ she said, ‘have had nothing of a past at all, not really; though I never noticed it until, well, yesterday. And oh, whatever the past may have been, I do hope, indeed I do, that you will have the loveliest of futures.’

‘My past, too, is recent,’ Philip blundered ungratefully on, ‘but as pasts go, it is a dreadful past.’

Lucinda set back her slim shoulders a little and looked straight ahead into the fading west, as in a low anxious voice she announced, ‘In
this
country, Mr Pim, you call them wild oats, don’t you?’

Philip searched in vain the remoter acres of his uneventful existence for any crop that could be so defined.

‘Some might,’ he said. ‘Mine was an uncle.’

‘How awful!’ said Lucinda. ‘Like the Babes in the Wood.’

‘My uncle,’ Philip pushed on, ‘ever since I can first remember him, always
detested all things bright and beautiful. And, though that can’t have been the reason, he never liked me.’

‘You never know,’ suggested Lucinda softly, ‘it may be jealousy. Unless,’ she added hastily, ‘I am using the wrong tense. You said detest
ed
. I hope you didn’t mean he isn’t – well, still alive?’

‘My uncle is so much alive,’ Philip assured her, ‘that by tomorrow evening he would have practically finished me off – if it hadn’t been for
this
.’

In the half-light that lay like a deep pool between the houses on either side of them, it was not easy to determine the precise contours of the ‘this’ to which Philip was referring – his umbrella.

‘That!?’ said Lucinda.

‘Yes, this,’ said Philip. ‘My uncle – you will please try and forgive me for mentioning him again – has never had anything that might be called a home. Club-house would be the better word. So, you see, when this morning we decided, when at least I had, that we should never meet again,
except
more or less in public, and
he
was engaged in cutting me off with a shilling, I ordered him one. A sort, you know, of
pied
à
terre.
I did my very best for him. And never has his wretched money been spent so wisely or so well. But would he have agreed? No. He would see me in – in Newgate first. And there I should have been this time tomorrow, if but for, well, as I say,
this
.’

‘That!’ whispered Lucinda.

They had turned, and were once more approaching the guardian griffins, for which at the moment Philip had even less sympathy than for Colonel Crompton Pim. But the radiance which after this stumbling recital had swamped Lucinda’s mind, now lit up the queerest and liveliest of landscapes she had ever seen, and even at her tender age, owing to the restlessness of her Aunt Chloe, she had seen a good many. She laughed out loud, deep
inside
herself. Then she stooped a little, looking at him, her smiling face an exact replica in its own lively and quite as queer fashion of the landscape within. She put out her hand and touched his sleeve, gently as a bird, then withdrew it and laughed quite out loud, clear as a bell between the discreet heedless houses.

‘Well, now, think of it,’ she explained, ‘
that.
It’s a weapon, Mr Pim, which, if it wouldn’t hurt your feelings, I should say was more conspicuous than elegant. But still – well, I don’t know if you have ever heard of
Andromeda
; but if all that’s said about her is true, then I was in exactly her position this morning. And there I should be now, if it hadn’t been for – why, you know who. Not that you’ll find my dear blessed Aunt Chloe who’s landing this very instant at Southampton anything in the nature of a marine monster. Dear me, no. But there may be monsters in one’s head, Mr Pim – where the lighthouses are. That’s what I mean.’

Philip, with face almost as spellbound as the Medusa’s itself, continued to watch her lips moving.

‘More
over
, Mr Pim, when I was in that funny little hat-shop this
afternoon
, I kept on saying to myself in the mirror, ‘Now how on earth, Lucinda, is that heaven-sent young Englishman going to get your Aunt Chloe just all she wants in sixty minutes? It can’t be done.’ But you said it could, so I
knew
it could. Wasn’t it downright stupid of me then not to realize that it had been done already? Why, it’s just come as clear to me now as that new moon up there.
Your
mistake was jumping at the wrong reason for just craving to fit out No.444 like that. You didn’t see you were being told to. And
I
didn’t realize I had been neglecting my poor Aunt Chloe all these days solely to give you the
right
reason. The fact is,’ she
nodded
, and whispered, ‘you and me are what are called accomplices. That’s
our
past. We are “ac- ac- accessories” – I am not sure how you pronounce it – “after the crime”. And so far as I can see the only thing we can do is to wait till tomorrow afternoon and then present
your
uncle to
my
bright and beautiful aunt. She does so dote on enterprise. And if even she – my Aunt Chloe, Mr Pim – who knows almost everything there is to be known, and who has almost everything there is to be had, and yet never despairs – if after just smiling at him and showing him round,
she
cannot convince him what a nephew he is wasting, then I am afraid he must be past all hope. But there, is anybody? Now, where is he? Could we telegraph? Or, better still, telephone?
That
would be the most – unselfish.’

‘You think of everything,’ said Philip from the very bottom of his heart. ‘I simply can’t imagine how. I
could
telephone, but honestly, with my uncle, it’s just like Aetna the other end. Besides, I found I had to send him to Thurso this afternoon. But I promise you, I promise you faithfully, he shall be there. What a reunion it will be!’

At this moment a faint brazen murmuration that might have emanated from a bombaboo in the wilds of central Bengal but was actually the
beating
of a dinner-gong welled out on the evening quiet of the street. It was
followed
by another at a distance, and by a third nearer at hand. The griffins grinned on. Lucinda was holding out her hand again.

‘Then all that is quite, quite settled? And now …’ She paused – a little timorously, too. ‘And you are not sorry for having come to my rescue,
are
you?’

Philip shook his head.

‘We have done our very best for them both, haven’t we?’

Philip nodded.

‘Oh, then, if only you wouldn’t look at me so mournfully, Mr Pim, I feel I could dance till morning. But go you
must;
and I don’t see why, because
you have broken my poor Aunt Chloe’s bank, you should be trying to – to shatter her penniless niece’s heart.’

‘Penniless! O Lucinda! Could
you
ever live in a horrid squat little tiny house with a monkey-puzzle in the garden and an aspidistra in the window, with hey, ho the wind and the rain, and the rain it …’

But so swiftly in answer to her touch on the bell-push had an austere mutton-chopped butler swept open the smooth apple-green door between the wrought-iron griffins that Lucinda hadn’t time to hear the rest of Feste’s ditty. She had vanished. And it was then, in this surcharged moment, with sevenpence in his pocket and his ‘Miss and Master’ under his arm, that Philip suddenly remembered he had forgotten to order on behalf of the
tenant
of No.444 Grosvenor Square even the nucleus of a Staff! At this, so obscure is the human heart, an overwhelming jubilation swept over him. Avaunt all sadness! He shook his brollie at the evening star, and turned away. Wouldn’t he be seeing his dark young stranger
tomorrow
!
Meanwhile
would,
he wondered, Sir Leopold oblige him with the address of the small boy in the purple tunic who had spoken to him so nicely in the Jewellery Department that morning. He had liked the looks of him so much better than the ‘Scene’.

Late

Late
*

This is the last letter my friend wrote before he shot himself. It is in no sense a vindication, or apology. It was prompted, I think, merely by a like desire to that we all feel – to explain ourselves to those who have any love or regard for us.

‘You will remember that when I came to see you after my wife left me, I seemed almost resigned, even to make light of what had happened. It was but seeming. When the actual thing was over, I only gradually became aware of what it meant to me. As time went on, I began to see things in this new aspect, to realize that all I had valued most in life was become its burden. I was afraid even to think of some things. But memories of the past have a life of their own. They returned like ghosts into my solitude. Even the beauty of a thing was its imperishable sadness.

‘I thought continuously of Lucy – besought, argued, pleaded, reproached,
but thought on. Had I had rest at night from her, it might have been
different
. But I dreamed of her; sometimes, as it were of a great pit of gloom into which we both must descend; sometimes, as of a celestial peace and serenity; only to wake again and again in the darkness and remember. To remember that she was gone, and that I must live on without her. I went on loving her, can words say how hopelessly! – how impiously sometimes! And yet not foolishly, perhaps, as you shall see.

‘But then, as day and night went by and I grew more and more to feel my solitude, as gradually every former interest faded and I knew that it was faded for ever, I strove in vain to be tranquil and patient, to come to life again. But slowly, and, as it seemed, irresistibly all hope withered away, and a kind even of enthusiasm went into one idea – to revenge myself.

‘And yet not “revenge”. That is but a word. I wanted to make an end; to come to terms, as it were, with an impossible life that now had no
meaning
– and this one friend to blame! We
were
friends, almost as intimate in many things as are you and I. I don’t think he bore me any malice. I believe rather that he hated his part in the matter; that he never afterwards found rest or contentment; nor had the least chance of happiness when what was done, was done. But he had Lucy. I cannot describe the pain, hatred and hopelessness that overwhelmed me when in utter folly and futility I dwelt on that.

‘I had made no effort or inquiry to discover where they had gone to. But as this one idea took possession of me, shutting out all other interests, all other memories, then I did inquire. I had made up my mind; that was an unutterable relief. Now, at least, I had an aim to guide me on.

‘But, like a bird that exists in a cage, ever and again I caught glimpses of the open, of the desolation and beauty of what I had lost, and would come no more. I only loved my wife the more; and wanted nothing but her love. Or no love, even, only to have her back.

‘Of course, had she come, my dull stupid humanity would have rebelled against her. Education, tradition, religion, egotism – each, of course, would have had its endless say. And the slow canker of memories of the past. But my own self would have taken her back, inevitably, without a word. All else would have sunk like a stone, even my rancour against him.

‘It was, I suppose, because I loved her so much, and because I am too dull to be able not to love, or to get to love somebody or something else. Other men might. I had only one hopeless idea – herself. And to hide that from me, I did the other.

‘I found out where they were. He had bought a cottage in a rather lonely part of the country some few miles – how odd it seems! – from a straggling village where I used to stay with a great-aunt when I was a child. I
remembered
the woods. I remembered how once I was lost in these woods and fell
asleep tired out in a dell of withered last year’s leaves and moss, with all the world’s rabbits for company, and a summer’s blackberries for a dreadful supper. Well, I was to lose myself there again.

‘I went down to the old village, stayed idly on a few weeks, asking here and there a question. I was mad, and yet at peace. I had sold everything I had, and so had plenty of money. That was an ever-satisfactory thought – that I should not want for money. I had no wish to die. I felt vaguely it could bring me no release, or only a false and transitory release.

‘“Wait awhile!” I used to say to myself, wandering aimlessly in the woods. “Wait awhile, my friend, you’ll have no difficulty soon.” But in my heart my one desire was to see Lucy again. That was
the
impossibility. I could not go without seeing her again. Indeed, I planned coldly to get done with him, but without any hatred, with endless self-contempt. It was of Lucy only I was thinking in my heart.

‘It had always been my delight – the power of seeing things in the imagination. Slim, gentle, beautiful, herself, I saw Lucy on and on in the strange gloom of thought. But now I sometimes in imagination saw them together. So I felt
bound
to him. I could not break away. When he was gone,
then,
perhaps, I should be able to think over calmly all that was past. Once get past this crisis, I should be well. All else – the future, my friends, my duty, death – were nothing to me. And yet, how lucid my mind was, in the long delay! I had never experienced before such intellectual ease.

‘I bought a derelict cottage – scarcely more than a hut – about a mile from the fence that separated them from the past. No other house than theirs stood near it. So long had mine been empty that even its paths and ruts were overgrown, and nearly obliterated. Here I was alone. And now I see that I was happy. Simply because I was near her. And we should be alone again. Time would unfailingly afford the opportunity. I could wait.

‘I rehearsed what I would say to him when at length we met, and again rehearsed what he would answer. And so, from then onward, hardly a day went by but morning, afternoon, or evening, hidden and secure, I saw him pass unconscious, or, as I melodramatically conceived, half-conscious, of my presence, and his danger. He too carried a gun. I used to
hear him
shooting
in the woods.

‘I would generally hide myself a little before night-fall beside a path in the bracken he usually took for home. And though the evenings were now drawing in, he still came the same way. And I determined – though it seemed myself had little interest or say in the matter – I determined to have done with him, to do it at the next moon, while still there was pure, true light enough to shoot without risk of missing.

‘It was the third evening before this one that as I lay on my bed – simply
a straw mattress on the floor – I heard his footstep outside. He actually opened the door a little, and looked in. But I lay in darkness; the place smelt only musty and damp; only the stars shed their small, separate lights – in the window. I knew he would not enter. I stole out, when he was gone but a few yards, and looked after him.

‘I see myself standing there, in that square wooden frame, in the
beautiful
peace, in the still, faint, dewy starlight, hungering only, on and on, beneath that one insane idea, hungering on to see Lucy. I did see her.

‘The third evening after that came at last. I set my little hut in order, ate my last supper, shook out for the birds my crumbs, and locked the door
behind
me. I climbed through the hedge, over the wires and hurdles. “Never the same place twice”, some odd, cunning, triumphant voice used to say to me. There was a strange, beautiful light in the sky, and no wind. I crept
between
the thick bushes, over the brambles. The falling of a leaf made, it seemed, more sound than I.

‘A rabbit scurried down the mossy path, eyes astare, and tiny scut shining. The trees, with their branches still green with leaves; the faint smell; the extraordinary quietude – it seemed a dream, and I, the only reality.

‘I took my place, well screened, commanding the path by which he would ascend, facing the last beams of the sun. The birds soon grew accustomed to me.

‘A greenfinch was singing in the leaves above me. I sat motionless, quite cold, almost numb. But my mind was clear; my heart beat untroubledly; a kind of hideous resignation filled my thoughts. But presently I forgot him. I was at last full of hope. I was thinking of her.

‘“At last!” I kept repeating, “Now we shall see. At last!” I said it aloud in a low calm voice, and then I heard the distant snapping of a twig. I counted slowly, nineteen, and he appeared twenty paces in front of me. He had been running and was still a little out of breath. I can but say I had no thought of turning back. I seemed only to be doing again what had been done already. I even analysed his face, its strength, its charm, its obstinacy and weakness. He looked ill and discontented, yet not, as it were, unhappy. I felt vaguely glad he did not look unhappy.

‘And then I covered his heart, called softly, as he came to where he could see me, his name. He stood quite still, his face perfectly calm in the sunlight, his eyes fixed motionless on mine. I heard the roar, smelt the smoke, and was kneeling on one knee beside him looking into the same face, the lids half-closed over the eyes.

‘I did not touch him, stared at him awhile, wondering guilelessly, as it were, what our quarrel had been; what was the matter now. I turned away with my gun, listened; turned back, listened at his mouth. But I did not touch him; I looked at his face with a kind of anguish; the odds between us
now were so extreme. He would never now have the opportunity of
defending
himself, whatever one might say.

‘“O, yes! He’s dead,” I seemed to hear a voice saying. “He’s dead right enough. Don’t be alarmed. It is the end.” Yet I don’t think anything ever seemed quite so absurd to me as ever to have thought that this would be the end. But I felt no sorrow, no remorse; only disappointment, impotence. And then we met.

‘Her face – how can I describe it? Her hands stretched out to me in a last greeting – pity, horror, fear, hopelessness, but love – love. I only, I think, saw the love, then. I regretted nothing, not even the needlessness of what I had done – nothing. I only knew she still loved me and that we had indeed met.

‘She looked down behind me, and questioned me with her eyes. I
nodded
. I threw my gun into the bushes, and stood quite still, watching her face in the clear, heavenly twilight; in the green, unutterable loneliness. My lips shook, I could not speak. I held out my hands. She put hers, cold and thin as a ghost’s, in mine – “O, me too!” she said, nodding in an odd
authoritative
way, towards my body. I smiled and shook my head, as if refusing some trivial favour of long ago.

‘She looked at me, knew at once, understood at once. She sat down and hid her face in her hands and I sat down beside her, holding her hand and speaking to her. That was all. In the confusion and tumult as of the sea in the inner darkness of my mind shone steadily her love for me, my love for her. We did not speak of it. I knew that to speak definitely of it was to shatter for ever the peace and understanding we had. I no longer tried to wonder why she had left me, only knew deep in my heart that she had wished for me again, and that now we were at peace. Such are human things, seeming without reason, actions like leaves on a brook.

‘She came back with me to my hut. We did not speak of him; only momentary horror answered me from her eyes, when she was not aware. She fell asleep on my shoulder and cried, like a child, in her sleep. And then I persuaded her to go away. I told her lies; of how no one would inquire; of how in God’s sight I was but an instrument; told her that she was not to blame very much, that we go, and do, as Fate resolves. She listened to me, her beautiful eyes fixed on the distant, wooded hills. And we both knew talking was in vain. She will forgive me that I made a promise that I
cannot
keep. She will forgive me that I could not bring myself to have courage enough to live on.

‘I walked with her in the early dawn, through the marvellously shining fields, in a sunshine that poured as if from Paradise on wood and hill. We took hands, and kissed one another, at the last stile. I watched her go, watched her turn, disappear; saw her no more.’