Short Stories 1927-1956 (2 page)

A Recluse

A Recluse
*

Which of the world’s wiseacres, I wonder, was responsible for the aphorism that ‘the best things in life are to be found at its edges’? It is too vague, of course. So much depends on what you mean by the ‘best’ and the ‘edges’. And in any case most of us prefer the central. It has been explored; it is safe; you know where you are; it has been amply, copiously corroborated. But, ‘Amusing? Well, hardly. Quite so!’ as my friend Mr Bloom would have said. But then, Mr Bloom has now ventured over the ‘borderline’. He is, I
imagine
, interested in edges no longer.

I have been reminded of him again – as if there were any need of it! – by an advertisement in
The
Times.
It announces that his house, which he had himself renamed Montrésor, is for sale by auction – ‘This singularly
charming
freehold Residential Property … in all about thirty-eight acres … the Matured Pleasure Grounds of unusual Beauty’. I don’t deny it. But was it quite discreet to describe the house as
imposing
?
A
pair of slippers in my possession prompts this query. But how answer it? It is important in such matters to be clear and precise, and, alas, all that I can say about Mr Bloom can be only vague and inconclusive. As, indeed, in some respects
he
was.

It was an afternoon towards the end of May – a Thursday. I had been to see a friend who, after a long illness, seemed now to be creeping back into the world again. We sat and talked for a while. Smiling, whispering, he lay propped up upon his pillows, gaunt and deathly, his eyes fixed on the green branches beyond his window, and that bleak hungry look on his face one knows so well. But when we fell silent, and his nurse looked covertly round the door and nodded her head at me, I rose with an almost indecent
readiness
, clasped his cold, damp, bony hand in mine, and said good-bye. ‘You
look
miles better,’ I assured him again and again.

It is a relief to leave a sick room – to breathe freely again after that fumy and stagnant atmosphere. The medicine bottles, the stuffiness, the hush, the dulcet optimism, the
gauche
self-consciousness. I even found myself softly
whistling as I climbed back into my cosy two-seater again. A lime-tree bower her garage was: the flickering leafy evening sunshine gilded the dust on her bonnet. I released the brake; she leapt to life.

And what wonder? Flora and her nymphs might at any moment turn the corner of this sequestered country road. I felt adventurous. It would be miserably unenterprising to go back by the way I had come. I would just chance my way home.

Early evening is, with daybreak, May’s most seductive hour; and how entrancing is any scene on earth after even a fleeting glance into the valley of shadows – the sun-striped, looping, wild-flowered lanes, the buttercup hollows, the parsleyed nooks and dusky coppices, the amorous birds and butterflies. But nothing lovely can long endure. The sickly fragrance of the hawthorns hinted at that. Drowsy, lush, tepid, inexhaustible – an English evening.

And as I bowled idly on, I overtook a horseman. So far as I can see he has nothing whatever to do with what came after – no more, at most, than my poor thin-nosed, gasping friend. I put him in only because he put himself in. And in an odd way too. For at first sight (and at a distance) I had
mistaken
the creature for a bird – a large, strange, ungainly bird. It was the cardboard box he was carrying accounted for that.

Many shades lighter than his clothes and his horse, it lay on his back cornerwise, suspended about his neck with a piece of cord. As he trotted along he bumped in the saddle, and his box bumped too. Meanwhile, odd mechanical creature, he beat time to these bumpings on his animal’s shoulder-blade with the little leafy switch poised between his fingers. I glanced up into his face as I passed him – a greyish, hairy, indefinite face, like a miller’s. To mistake a cardboard box for a bird! He amused me. I burst out laughing; never dreaming but that he was gone for ever.

Two or three miles further on, after passing a huddle of tumbledown cottages and a duck-pond, I caught my first glimpse of Mr Bloom’s house – of Montrésor. And I defy anybody with eyes in his head to pass that house unheeded. The mere quiet diffident looks of it brought me instantly to a standstill. ‘Imposing’!

And as I sat on, looking in on it through its high wrought-iron gates, I heard presently the hollow thump of a horse’s hoofs in the muffling dust
behind
me. Even before I glanced over my shoulder, I knew what I should see – my man on horseback. These narrow lanes – he must have taken a short cut.

Up he bumped, down he bumped, and his leafy switch kept time. When he drew level, I twisted my head and yelled up at him a question about the house. He never so much as paused. He merely lowered that
indiscriminately
hairy face of his a few inches nearer me, opened his mouth, and flung up his hand with the switch. Perhaps the poor fellow was dumb; his
rawboned
horse had coughed, as if in sympathy. But, dumb or not, his gesture had clearly intimated – though with unnecessary emphasis – that Montrésor wasn’t worth asking questions about, that I had better ‘move on’. And, naturally, it increased my interest. I watched him out of sight. Why, as I say, I have mentioned him I scarcely know, except that for an instant there he was, at those gates – Mr Bloom’s – gates from which Mr Bloom himself was so soon to depart. When he was completely gone and the dust of him had settled, I turned to enjoy another look at the house – a protracted look too.

To all appearance it was vacant; but if so, it could not have been vacant long. The drive was sadly in need of weeding; though the lawns had been recently mown. High-grown forest trees towered round about it,
overtopping
its roof – chiefly chestnuts, their massive lower branches drooping so close to the turf they almost brushed its surface. They were festooned from crown to root with branching candelabra-like spikes of blossom. Now it was daylight; but imagine them on a still, pitch-black night, their every twig upholding a tiny, phosphoric cluster of tapers!

Not that Montrésor (or rather what of its façade was in view) was an old or even in itself a very beautiful house. It must have been built about 1750 and at second sight was merely of pleasing proportions. And then one looked again, and it looked back – with a furtive reticence as if it were
withholding
itself from any direct scrutiny behind its widespread blossoming chestnut trees. ‘We could if we would,’ said its windows, as do certain human faces; though no doubt the queer gesture and the queerer looks of my cardboard-boxed gentleman on horseback accounted for something of its effect.

A thin haze of cloud had spread over the sky, paling its blue. The sun had set. And a diffused light hung over walls and roof. It suited the house – as powder may suit a pale face. Even nature appeared to be condoning these artifices – the hollow lawns, the honeyed azaleas.

How absurd are one’s little hesitations. All this while I had been debating whether to approach nearer on foot or to drive boldly in. I chose the second alternative, with the faint notion in my mind perhaps that it would ensure me, if necessary, a speedier retreat. But then, premonitions are apt to display
themselves a little clearer in retrospect! Anyhow, if I had
walked
up to the house, that night would not have been spent with Mr Bloom. But no, the house looked harmless enough, and untenanted. I pushed open the gates and, gliding gently in under the spreading chestnut trees towards the
entrance
, again came to a standstill.

A wide, low,
porte-cochère,
supported by slender stone columns, sheltered the beautiful doorway. The metalwork of its fanlight, like that of the gates, was adorned with the device of a pelican feeding her young. The owner’s crest, no doubt. But in spite of the simplicity of the porch, it was not in keeping, and may have been a later addition to the house. Its hollow
echoings
stilled, I sat on in the car, idly surveying the scene around me, and almost without conscious thought of it. What state of mind can be more serene – or more active?

No notice whatever seemed to have been taken of my intrusion. Silence, silence remained. Indeed, in spite of the abundant cover around me, there was curiously little bird-song – only a far-away thrush calling faintly, ‘Ahoy! ahoy! ahoy! Come to tea! Come to tea!’ And after all it was the merry month of May, and still early. But near at hand, not even a wren shrilled. So presently I got out of the car, and mooned off to the end of the shallow, stone-vased terrace, stepping deliberately from tuft to tuft of grass and moss. Only a dense shrubbery beyond: yew, ilex, holly; a dampish winding walk. But on this – the western aspect of the house – there showed faded blinds to the windows, and curtains too – bleached by numberless sunsets, but still rich and pleasant in colour.

What few live things may have spied out the intruder had instantly
withdrawn
. I sighed, and turned away. The forsaken pierces quicker to the heart than by way of the mind. My green-winged car looked oddly out of place – even a little homesick – under the porch. She was as grey with dust as were my odd horseman’s whiskers. I had come to the conclusion – quite wrongly – that for the time being, at least, the place
was
unoccupied; though possibly at any moment caretaker or housekeeper might appear.

Indeed, my foot was actually on the step of the car, when, as if at a
definite
summons, I turned my head and discovered not only that the door was now open, but that a figure – Mr Bloom’s – was standing a pace or so
beyond
the threshold, his regard steadily fixed on me. Mr Bloom – a
memorable
figure. He must have been well over six feet in height, but he carried his heavy head and heavy shoulders with a pronounced stoop. He was both stout and fat, and yet his clothes now hung loosely upon him, as if made to old measurements – a wide, black morning-coat and waistcoat, and brown cloth trousers. I noticed in particular his elegant boots. They were adorned with what I had supposed was an obsolete device – imitation laces. A
well-cut
pair of boots, nonetheless, by a good maker. His head was bald on the
crown above a fine lofty forehead – but it wore a superfluity of side hair, and his face was bushily bearded. With chin drawn up a little, he was
surveying
me from under very powerful magnifying spectacles, his left hand resting on the inside handle of the door.

He had taken me so much by surprise that for the moment I was
speechless
. We merely looked at one another; he, with a more easily justifiable intentness than I. He seemed, as the saying goes, to be sizing me up; to be fitting me in; and it was
his
voice that at length set the porch echoing again – a voice, as might have been inferred from the look of him, sonorous but muffled, as if his beard interfered with its resonance.

‘I see you are interested in the appearance of my house,’ he was saying.

The greeting was courteous enough; and yet extraordinarily impersonal. I made the lamest apologies, adding some trivial comment on the
picturesqueness
of the scene, and the general ‘evening effects’. But of this I am certain; the one thing uppermost in my mind, even at this stage in our brief acquaintance, was the desire not to continue it. Mr Bloom had somehow exhausted my interest in his house. I wanted to shake him off, to go away. He was an empty-looking man in spite of his domed brow. If his house had suggested vacancy, so did he; and yet – I wonder.

Far from countenancing this inclination, however, he was inviting me not to leave him. He was welcoming the interloper. With a slow comprehensive glance to left and right, he actually stepped out at last under the porch, and – with a peculiar tentative gesture – thrust out a well-kept, fleshy hand in my direction, as if with the intention of putting me entirely at my ease. He then stood solemnly scrutinizing my tiny car, which, with him as solitary passenger, would appear more like a perambulator!

At a loss for any alternative, I withdrew a pace or so, and took another long look at the façade – the blank windows, their red-brick mouldings, the peeping chimney-stacks, the quiet, serene sufficiency of it all. There was, I remember, a sorry little array of half-made, abandoned martins’ nests plastered up under the narrow jutting of the roof. But this craning attitude was fatiguing, and I turned and looked back at Mr Bloom.