Short Stories 1927-1956 (25 page)

Cecil groped for the hand that hung limp and inert beside the old serge skirt. He lifted it, and looked at its fingers. He counted them. They were long and narrow-boned fingers, and belonging, as they did, not to her right hand, they were a little less marked with work.

‘I don’t want to tell you,’ he muttered as if to himself at last, and still
examining
them in the clarifying focus afforded by his shade, ‘I don’t want to tell you how shockingly miserable you are making me. You think I am a coward. You don’t believe I could ever do anything, ever break free. You say you love me – you
say
you do – but you don’t believe in me, not at all. I might just as well be a child for all that you are saying. But then I know it can’t mean anything. I mean, I know you couldn’t help saying it, and I can’t tell you what I think of you for
having
said it. But you see, what I feel is that if you are going to keep to what you say – even if after all you weren’t utterly meaning it – then I
must
see your face. I couldn’t kiss you until I had, and it may be more than I can bear, more than I can manage, I mean. There isn’t any moon, either,’ he added helplessly. ‘Would you mind taking tight hold of both my hands?’

She flung her arms away from him, took a quick step backwards,
stooping
low, like a dangerous animal about to spring. ‘Do you mean you are going to try
that
horrible thing – now?’ she cried at him. ‘Be quiet, do. You don’t know what you are saying. Be quiet, do. Here I am. All you can see. What
more
has anybody wanted? Oh, you won’t be content till you’ve skinned me to the very bone. Look at
me
!
Oh, you will hurt yourself. You said you might die. And’ – her voice ran down the scale until she was scarcely more than whispering – ‘and how, pray, do you know what I look
like
?
I
do. You should see the looking-glass my landlady gives me.
That
’
s
where I powder my nose!’ A corrosive sardonicism had come into her voice. A look of fierce vindictiveness distorted her narrow face and her blazing, disquieted eyes. ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ she said, ‘do try and be a little kind to me. There won’t be very much time for it, if you only knew.’

But Cecil had followed her up, and she could retreat no farther unless she was to plunge at once into the swirling water a foot or two beneath the bank. He was lifting his chin with convulsive efforts and had thrust both hands on her shrinking shoulders as he did so. And at last, with a strangled sob, he found himself gazing eye to eye with this phantom of his dreams.

Strangely enough, he
had
been without the least expectation of what that face looked like. It hadn’t seemed to matter. And now that he was
scrutinizing
it, only half conscious of the appalling pangs which were darting from skull to spine, it was not as if he had merely recognized her, but as if this were the first face that as a mortal creature he had ever seen at all – a
landscape, a garden, a marvel, before time, lovely, earthly, yet unbelievable, all-pitying, burnt up with pain, never to be forgotten, never to be exhausted, never to be understood.

And before he could make the slightest movement, she had taken him in her arms and had hidden his anguished and distorted and transfigured face on her breast. ‘Oh!’ she cried. ‘How could you do it! How dared you! Oh, dear, my dear! Oh, my dear, my dear, my dear! Have a moment’s peace. Don’t you see it will be mine too?’

Cecil had lost ages ago all but the faintest remembrances of his
childhood
; or rather, he had never let himself think about it. And now he had reached a momentary, yet eternal, oblivion, though it was an oblivion fenced in by misery and pain.

‘Listen,’ he said, drawing back at last, still clutching at her hands, ‘I know now what you meant just then; I know what you meant. You meant you had made up your mind to kill yourself to-night – to drown yourself
there.
Well, then, listen to me. You don’t move an inch until you have sworn to me by the Holy Ghost you won’t do it. Do you understand? I can’t keep you, I know that. I only ask you to go away and to think it over, and to come back again here in the morning. I shall be here. But before you go, even if it’s for ever – and surely you couldn’t, you wouldn’t treat me like that! – you will promise me not to do
that.
Not to be so hopelessly wicked, you understand. You simply couldn’t do it, leaving me the burden.’

The fingers in his grip seemed to consist of little else than thin bones. ‘There!’ she cried into Space, ‘isn’t that the Man all over. You don’t know what you are condemning me to, you cruel boy. You don’t
know.
If I told you,’ she went on rapidly, ‘that to stay here – to stay on this earth as I am – will be only to go from one thing on to another, pillar to post until … Do you suppose yours is the only tender-hearted grandmamma in the world? Or, if you knew how I long, and now of all times, to get away. And I
believe
even God would forgive me, if He has any longing left. Ah, well, you
don’t
know. And what’s the good of talking!’

‘But you promise?’ Cecil repeated. ‘For, after all, you are not thinking of me. You haven’t remembered what my life has been like – silly fop that I am.’

‘My dear,’ she sobbed brokenly, ‘your hands are all wet. I can’t really see your face, but you are shuddering all over. I will take you home after all. We can walk well apart … But no – no!’

‘But you promise?’ he repeated.

Her eyes strayed from the hideous pent-house shade to the dark, secret water.

‘No,’ she said, ‘I cannot promise … But there! – God helping me – I won’t.’

Nothing seemed to matter now. She knew all that she was. Every thought in her had seemed to have foundered in an unfathomable pit of darkness. ‘But you don’t know what you are asking,’ she added again, with a sound that might almost have been taken for laughter. ‘You are asking me to go on loving you, and that I don’t see how I shall be able to bear.’

She drew her hands gently away and stood for a moment quietly looking at her solitary companion, as if uncertain whether or not she had ever seen him before. But in a while the illusion cleared away and she realized where she was; the darkened wood, the secret gurgling water, the empty starry sky.

‘Listen,’ she said at last, stooping forward, her shoulders seeming to fold themselves a little together like the curve of a bird’s wings. ‘Are you safe now?’

He nodded.

‘Not in pain?’ He shook his head in his agony.

‘And you won’t quite forget me?’ He made no answer.

‘Well, then,’ she went on earnestly, like a child repeating its catechism, ‘never forget that I came to the
end
of my life when you came to its
beginning
. I didn’t know what it meant to love anybody. And I’d rather have gone. For, you see, when you looked up at me, something came
here
–
I can’t explain, I …’

Nor did she ever come back to explain. The sun was riding high in the heavens next morning, and the scene around Cecil alive with its scintillating summer beauty – skylarks in the empty blue, butterflies wavering from flower to flower, the bosoming waters radiant with light – when, too much worn out with pain and hopelessness to pay any attention to such elusive and illusory promises, he realized at last that she was gone never to return, and he groped his way back to Grummumma and his life.

The Green Room

The Green Room
*

Only Mr Elliott’s choicer customers were in his own due season let into his little secret – namely, that at the far end of his shop – beyond, that is, the little table on which he kept his account books, his penny bottle of ink, and his rusty pen, there was an annexe. He first allowed his victims to ripen; and preferred even to see their names installed in the pages of his fat, dumpy ledger before he decided that they were really worthy of this little privilege.

Alan, at any rate, though a young man of ample leisure and moderate means, had been browsing and pottering about on and off in the shop for weeks before he even so much as suspected there
was
a
hidden door. He must, in his innocence, have spent pounds and pounds on volumes selected from the vulgar shelves before his own initiation.

This was on a morning in March. Mr Elliott was tying up a parcel for him. Having no scissors handy he was burning off the ends of the string with a lighted match. And as if its small flame had snapped at the same moment both the string and the last strands of formality between them, he glanced up almost roguishly at the young man through his large round
spectacles
with the remark: ‘P’r’aps, sir, you would like to take a look at the books in the parlour?’ And a birdlike jerk of his round bald head indicated where the parlour was to be found.

Alan had merely looked at him for a moment or two out of his blue eyes with his usual pensive vacancy. ‘I didn’t know there
was
another room,’ he said at last. ‘But then, I suppose it wouldn’t have occurred to me to think there might be. I fancied these books were all the books you had.’ He glanced over the dingy hugger-mugger of second-hand literature that filled the shelves and littered the floor – a mass that would have twenty-fold
justified
the satiety of a Solomon.

‘Oh, dear me, no, sir!’ said Mr Elliott, with the pleasantest
confidentiality
. ‘All this is chiefly riff-raff. But I don’t mention it except to those gentlemen who are old clients, in a manner of speaking. What’s in there is all in the printed catalogue and I can always get what’s asked for. Apart from that, there’s some who – well, at any rate, I
don’t
,
sir. But if by any chance you should care to take a look round at any time, you would, I’m sure, be very welcome. This is an oldish house, as you may have noticed, sir, and out there is the oldest parts of it. We call it the parlour – Mrs Elliott and me; we got it from the parties that were here before we came. Take a look now, sir, if you please; it’s a nice little place.’

Mr Elliott drew aside. Books – and particularly old books – tend to be dusty company. This may account for the fact that few antiquarian
booksellers
are of Falstaffian proportions. They are more usually lean,
ruminative
, dryish spectators of life. The gnawing of the worm in the tome is among the more melancholy of nature’s lullabies; and the fluctuations in price of ‘firsts’ and of ‘mint states’ must incline any temperament, if not towards cynicism, at least towards the philosophical. Herodotus tells of a race of pygmies whose only diet was the odour of roses; and though morocco leather is sweeter than roses, it is even less fattening.

Mr Elliott, however, flourished on it. He was a rotund little man with a silver watch-chain from which a gold locket dangled, and he had
uncommonly
small feet
.
He might have been a ballet-master. ‘You make your
way up those four stairs, sir,’ he went on, as he ushered his customer
beneath
the curtain, ‘turn left down the passage, and the door’s on the right. It’s quiet in there, but that’s no harm done. No hurry, sir.’

So Alan proceeded on his way. The drugget on the passage floor showed little trace of wear. The low panelled walls had been whitewashed. He came at last to the flowered china handle of the door beyond the turn of the passage, then stood for a moment lost in surprise. But it was the trim
cobbled
garden beyond the square window on his right that took his glance rather than the room itself. Yellow crocuses, laden with saffron pollen, stood wide agape in the black mould, and the greening buds of a bush of lilac were tapping softly against the glass. And above was a sky of the gentlest silken blue; wonderfully still.

He turned and looked about him. The paint on wainscot and cornice must once have been of a bright apple green. It had faded now. A gate-leg table was in the far corner beyond the small-paned window; and on his left, with three shallow steps up to it, was another door. And the shelves were lined from floor to ceiling with the literary treasures which Mr Elliott kept solely for his elect. So quiet was the room that even the flitting of a
clothes-moth
might be audible, though the brightness of noonday now filled it to the brim. For the three poplars beyond the lilac bush were still almost as bare as the frosts of winter had made them.

In spite of the flooding March light, in spite of this demure sprightliness after the gloom and disorder of the shop he had left behind him, Alan – as in his languid fashion he turned his head from side to side – became
conscious
first and foremost of the
age
of Mr Elliott’s pretty parlour. The paint was only a sort of ‘Let’s pretend’. The space between its walls seemed,
indeed
, to be as much a reservoir of time as of light. The panelled ceiling, for example, was cracked and slightly discoloured; so were the green
shutter-cases
to the windows; while the small and beautiful chimneypiece – its carved marble lintel depicting a Cupid with pan pipes dancing before a smiling goddess under a weeping willow – enshrined a grate that at this moment contained nothing, not even the ashes of a burnt-out fire. Its bars were rusty, and there were signs of damp in the moulded plaster above it.

A gentle breeze was now brisking the tops of the poplar trees, but no murmur of it reached Alan where he stood. With his parcel tucked under his arm, he edged round softly from shelf to shelf, and even after so cursory an examination as this – and it was one of Mr Elliott’s principles to mark all his books in plain figures – he realized that his means were much too moderate for his appetite. He came to a standstill, a little at a loss. What was he to do next? He stifled a yawn. Then, abstracting a charming copy of
Hesperides
,
by that ‘Human and divine’ poet, Robert Herrick, he seated
himself idly on the edge of the table and began to turn over its leaves. They soon became vocal:

His eye strayed on, and he read slowly – muttering the words to himself as he did so – ‘The departure of the good
Daemon
’:

Alan’s indolence was even more extreme; he was at this moment merely over-reading what he had
read
– and what he had read again and again and again. For the eye may be obedient while the master of the mind sits
distrait
and aloof. His wits had gone wool-gathering. He paused, then made yet another attempt to fix his attention on the sense of this simple quatrain. But in vain. For in a moment or two his light, clear eyes had once more withdrawn themselves from the printed page and were once more, but now more intently, exploring the small green room in which he sat.

And as he did so – though nothing of the bright external scene around him showed any change – out of some day-dream, it seemed, of which until then he had been unaware, there had appeared to him from the world of fantasy the image of a face.

No known or remembered face – a phantom face, as alien and inscrutable as are the apparitions that occasionally visit the mind in sleep. This in itself was not a very unusual experience. Alan was a young man of an
imaginative
temperament, and possessed that inward eye which is often, though not unfailingly, the bliss of solitude. And yet there was a difference. This homeless image was at once so real in effect, so clear, and yet so unexpected. Even the faint shadowy colours of the features were discernible – the eyes dark and profound, the hair drawn back over the rather narrow temples of the oval head; a longish, quiet, intent face, veiled with reverie and a sort of vigilant sorrowfulness, and yet possessing little of what at first sight might be called beauty – or what at least is usually accepted as beauty.

So many and fleeting, of course, are the pictures that float into
consciousness at the decoy of a certain kind of poetry that one hardly heeds them as they pass and fade. But this, surely, was no after-image of one of Herrick’s earthly yet ethereal Electras or Antheas or Dianemes, vanishing like the rainbows in a fountain’s falling waters. There are degrees of
realization
. And, whatever ‘good Spirit’ this shadowy visitant may have
represented
, and whatever its origin, it had struck
some
‘observer’ in Alan’s mind mute indeed, and had left him curiously disquieted. It was as if in full sight of a small fishing smack peacefully becalmed beneath the noonday blue, the spars and hulk of some such phantom as the
Flying
Dutchman
had suddenly appeared upon the smooth sea green; though this perhaps was hardly a flattering account of it. Anyhow, it had come, and now it was gone – except out of memory – as similar images do come and go.

Mere figment of a day-dream, then, though this vision must have been, Alan found himself vacantly searching the room as if for positive
corroboration
of it, or at least for some kind of evidence that would explain it away. Faces are but faces, of course, whether real or imaginary, and whether they appear in the daytime or the dark, but there is at times a dweller behind the eye that looks out, though only now and again, from that small window. And
this
looker-out – unlike most – seemed to be innocent of any attempt at concealment. ‘Here am I …And you?’
That
had seemed to be the mute question it was asking; though with no appearance of needing an answer; and, well, Alan distrusted feminine influences. He had once or twice in his brief career loved not wisely but too idealistically, and for the time being he much preferred first editions. Besides, he disliked mixing things up – and how annoying to be first slightly elated and then chilled by a mere fancy!

The sun in his diurnal round was now casting a direct beam of light from between the poplars through one of the little panes of glass in Mr Elliott’s parlour. It limned a clear-cut shadow-pattern on the fading paint of the frame and on the floor beneath. Alan watched it and was at the same time listening – as if positively in hope of detecting that shadow’s indetectable motion!

In the spell of this reverie, time seemed to have become of an almost material density. The past hung like cobwebs in the air. He turned his head abruptly; he was beginning to feel a little uneasy. And his eyes now fixed themselves on the narrow panelled door above the three stairs on the other side of the room. When consciousness is thus unusually alert it is more easily deceived by fancies. And yet so profound was the quiet around him it seemed improbable that the faint sound he had heard as of silk very lightly brushing against some material obstacle was imaginary. Was there a listener behind that door? Or was there not? If so, it must be one as intent as himself, but far more secret.

For a full minute, and as steadily as a cat crouching over a mouse’s hole
– though there wasn’t the least trace of the predatory on his mild fair
features
, he scrutinized the key in the lock. He breathed again; and then with finger in book to keep his place tiptoed across the room and gently – by a mere finger’s breadth – opened the door. Another moment and he had pushed it wider. Nothing there. Exactly as he had expected, of course, and yet – why at the same moment was he both disappointed and relieved?

He had exposed a narrow staircase – unstained, uncarpeted. Less than a dozen steep steps up was another door – a shut door, with yet another pretty flowered china handle and china finger-plates to it. A rather unusual
staircase
, too, he realized, since, unless one or other of its two doors were open, it must continually be in darkness. But you never know what oddity is going to present itself next in an old rambling house. How many human beings, he speculated, as he scanned this steep and narrow vacancy, must in the two or three centuries gone by have ascended and descended that narrow ladder – as abrupt as that of Jacob’s dream? They had come, disguised in the changing fashions of their time; they had gone, leaving apparently not a wrack behind.