Short Stories 1927-1956 (26 page)

Well, that was that. This March morning might be speciously bright and sunny, but in spite of its sunshine it was cold. Books, too, may cheer the mind, but even when used as fuel they are apt to fail to warm the body, and rust on an empty grate diminishes any illusion of heat its bars might otherwise convey. Alan sighed, suddenly aware that something which had promised to be at least an arresting little experience had failed him. The phantasmal face so vividly seen, and even watched for a moment, had already become a little blurred in memory. And now there was a good deal more disappointment in his mind than relief. He felt like someone who has been cheated at a game he never intended to play. A particularly
inappropriate
simile, nonetheless, for he hadn’t the smallest notion what the stakes had been, or, for that matter, what the game. He took up his hat and walking-stick, and still almost on tiptoe, and after quietly but firmly
shutting
both doors behind him, went back into the shop.

‘I think I will take
this
,
please,’ he said almost apologetically to the old bookseller, who with his hands under his black coat-tails was now
surveying
the busy world from his own doorstep.

‘Certainly, sir.’ Mr Elliott wheeled about and accepted the volume with that sprightly turn of his podgy wrist with which he always welcomed a book that was about to leave him for ever. ‘Ah, the
Hesperides
,
sir. I’ll put the three into one parcel. A nice tall clean copy, I see. It came, if memory serves me right, from the library of Colonel Anstey, sir, who purchased the Talbot letters – and at a very reasonable price, too. Now if I had a
first
in this condition! …’

Alan dutifully smiled. ‘I found it
in the parlour,’ he said. ‘What a
charming
little room – and garden too; I had no idea the house was so old. Who lived in it before you did? I suppose it wasn’t always a bookshop?’

He tried in vain to speak naturally and not as if he had plums in his mouth.

‘Lived here before me, now?’ the bookseller repeated ruminatively. ‘Well, sir, there was first, of course, my immediate predecessor.
He
came before me; and
we
took over his stock. Something of a disappointment, too, when I came to go through with it.’

‘And before
him
?’
Alan persisted.

‘Before him, sir? I fancy this was what might be called a
private
house. You could see if you looked round a bit how it has been converted. It was a doctor’s, I understand – a Dr Marchmont’s. And what we call the parlour, sir, from which you have just emerged, was always, I take it, a sort of book room. Leastways some of the books there now were there then – with the book-plate and all. You see, the Mr Brown who came before me and who, as I say, converted the house,
he
bought the doctor’s library. Not merely medical and professional works neither. There was some choice stuff
besides
; and a few moderate specimens of what is known in the trade as the curious, sir. Not that I go out of my way for it, myself.’

Alan paused in the doorway, parcel in hand.

‘A bachelor, I suppose?’

‘The doctor, sir, or Mr Brown?’

‘The doctor.’

‘Well, now, that I couldn’t rightly say,’ replied Mr Elliott cheerfully. ‘Let us hope
not.
They tell me, sir, it makes things seem more homely-like to have a female about the house. And’ – he raised his voice a little – ‘I’ll
warrant
that Mrs Elliott, sir, if she were here to say so, would bear me out.’

Mrs Elliott, in fact, a pasty-looking old woman, with a mouth like a cod’s and a large marketing basket on her arm, was at this moment emerging out from behind a curtained doorway. Possibly her husband had caught a glimpse of her reflection in his spectacles. She came on with a beetle-like deliberation.

‘What’s that you were saying about me, Mr Elliott?’ she said.

‘This gentleman was inquiring, my love, if Dr Marchmont-as-was lived in a state of single blessedness or if there was a lady in the case.’

Mrs Elliott fixed a slow, flat look on her husband, and then on Alan.

‘There was a sister or niece or something, so they say. But I never knew anything about them, and don’t want to,’ she declared. And Alan, a little chilled by her demeanour, left the shop.

Not that that one fish-like glance of Mrs Elliott’s censorious eye had by any means freed his fancy of what had passed. In the days that followed he could never for an instant be sure when or where the face that reverie had
somehow conjured up out of the recesses of his mind on his first visit to the old bookseller’s parlour was not about to reappear. And it chose the oddest of moments. Even when his attention was definitely fixed on other things it would waft itself into his consciousness again – and always with the same serene yet vivid, naïve yet serious question in the eyes – a question surely that only life itself could answer, and that not always with a like candour or generosity. Alan was an obstinate young man in spite of appearances. But to have the rudiments of an imagination is one thing, to be at the beck and call of every passing fancy is quite another. He was not, he reassured
himself
, as silly as all that. He held out for days together; and then when he had been left for twenty-four hours wholly at peace – he suddenly succumbed.

A westering sun was sharply gilding its windows when he once more made his way into Mr Elliott’s parlour, it was empty. And almost at the same instant he realized how anxious he had been that this
should
be so, and how insipid a bait as such the little room now proved to be. He hadn’t expected that. And yet – not exactly insipid; its flavour had definitely soured. He wished he had never come; he tried to make up his mind to go. Ill at ease, angry with himself, and as if in open defiance of some
inward
mentor, he took down at random a fusty old quarto from its shelf and seating himself on a chair by the table, he began, or rather attempted, to read.

Instead, with downcast eyes shelled in by the palm of his hand, and
leaning
gently on his elbow in an attitude not unlike that of the slippered and pensive Keats in the portrait, he found himself listening again. He did more than listen. Every nerve in his body was stretched taut. And time ebbed away. At this tension his mind began to wander off again into a dreamlike vacuum of its own, when, ‘What was that?’ a voice within whispered at him. A curious thrill ebbed through his body. It was as though unseen fingers had tugged at a wire – with no bell at the end of it. For this was no sound he had heard – no stir of the air. And yet in effect it so nearly
resembled
one that it might have been only the sigh of the blast of the east wind at the window. He waited a minute, then, with a slight shiver, glanced up covertly but steadily through his fingers.

He was shocked – by what he saw – yet not astonished. It seemed as if his whole body had become empty and yet remained as inert and heavy as lead. He was no longer alone. The figure that stood before him in the darker corner there, and only a few paces away, was no less sharply visible and even more actual in effect than the objects around her. One hand, from a loose sleeve, resting on the edge of the door to the staircase, she stood
looking
at him, her right foot with its high-heeled shoe poised delicately on the lowest of the three steps. With head twisted back sidelong over her narrow shoulder, her eyes were fixed on this earthly visitor to her haunts – as he
sat, hand to forehead, drawn up stiff and chill at the table. She was
watching
Alan. And the face, though with even fewer claims to be beautiful, and none to be better than knowing and wide-awake, was without any question the face he had shared with Herrick’s
Hesperides.

A peculiar vacancy – like a cold mist up from the sea – seemed to have spread over his mind, and yet he was alert to his very finger-tips. Had she seen he had seen her? He couldn’t tell. It was as cold in the tiny room as if the windows were wide open and the garden beyond them full of snow. The late afternoon light, though bleakly clear, was already thinning away, and, victim of this silly decoy, he was a prisoner who in order to regain his
freedom
must pass
her
way out. He stirred in his chair, his eyes now fixed again on the book beneath them.

And then at last, as if with confidence restored, he withdrew his hand from his face, lifted his head, and affecting a boldness he far from felt,
deliberately
confronted his visitor. At this the expression on her features – her whole attitude – changed too. She had only at this moment seen that he had seen her, then? The arm dropped languidly to her side. Her listless body turned a little, her shoulders slightly lifted themselves, and a faint
provocative
smile came into her face, while the dark jaded eyes resting on his own remained half mocking, half deprecatory – almost as if the two of them, he and she, were old cronies who had met again after a long absence from one another, with ancient secrets awaiting discreet discussion. With a desperate effort Alan managed to refrain from making any answering signal of recognition. He stared back with a face as blank as a turnip. How he knew with such complete assurance that his visitor was not of this world he never attempted to explain to himself. Real! She was at least as real as a clearly lit reflection of anything seen in a looking-glass, and in
effect
on his mind was more positive than the very chair on which he was sitting and the table beneath his elbow to which that chair was drawn up. For this was a reality of the soul, and not of the senses. Indeed, he himself might be the ghost and she the dominating pervasive actuality.

But even if he had been able to speak he had no words with which to express himself. He was shuddering with cold and had suddenly become horribly fatigued and exhausted. He wanted to ‘get out’ of all this and yet knew not only that this phantasm must have been lying in wait for him, but that sooner or later she would compel him to find out what she wanted of him, that she meant to be satisfied. Her face continued to change in
expression
even while he watched her. Its assurance seemed to intensify. The head stooped forward a little; the narrow, pallid, slanting eyelids
momentarily
closed; and then, with a gesture not merely of arm or shoulder but of her whole body, she once more fixed him with a gaze more intense, more challenging, more crammed with meaning than he had supposed possible in
any human eye. It was as if some small wicket gate into the glooms of Purgatory had suddenly become thronged with bright-lit faces.

Until this moment they had been merely eyeing one another while time’s sluggish moments ebbed away. They had been merely ‘looking at’ one another. Now there had entered those glazed dark fixed blue eyes the very self within. It stayed there gazing out at him transfixed – the pleading,
tormented
, dangerous spirit within that intangible husk. And then the crisis was over. With a slow dragging movement of his head Alan had at last
succeeded
in breaking the spell – he had turned away. A miserable disquietude and self-repulsion possessed him. He felt sick, body and soul. He had but one thought – to free himself once and for all from this unwarranted ordeal. Why should
he
have been singled out? What hint of any kind of ‘
encouragement
’ had he been responsible for? Or was this ghostly encounter an experience that had been shared by other visitors to the old bookseller’s sanctum – maybe less squeamish than himself? His chilled, bloodless fingers clenched on the open page of the book beneath them. He strove in vain to master himself, to fight the thing out. It was as if an icy hand had him in its grip, daring him to stir.

The evening wind had died with the fading day. The three poplars, every budded double-curved twig outlined against the glassy grey of the west, stood motionless. Daylight, even dusk, was all very well, but supposing this presence, as the dark drew on, ventured a little nearer? And suddenly his alarms – as much now of the body as of the mind – were over. She had been interrupted.

A footstep had sounded in the corridor. Alan started to his feet. The handle of the door had turned in the old brass lock; he watched it. With a jerk he twisted his head on his shoulders. He was alone. Yet again the interrupter had rattled impatiently with the door handle. Alan at last
managed
to respond to the summons. But even as he grasped the handle on his own side of it, the door was pushed open against him and a long-bearded face peered through.

‘Pardon,’ said this stranger, ‘I didn’t realize you had locked yourself in.’

In the thin evening twilight that was now their only illumination Alan found himself blushing like a schoolgirl.

‘But I hadn’t,’ he stammered. ‘Of course not. The catch must have jammed. I came in here myself only a few minutes ago.’

The long face with its rather watery blue-grey eyes placidly continued to survey him in the dusk. ‘And yet, you know,’ its owner drawled, with a soupçon of incredulity, ‘I should have guessed myself that I have been poking about in our patron’s shop out there for at least the best part of half an hour. But that, of course, is one of the charms of lit-er-a-ture. You haven’t chanced, I suppose, on a copy of the
Vulgar
Errors
– Sir Thomas Browne?’

Alan shook his head. ‘The B’s, I think, are in that corner,’ he replied, ‘– alphabetical. But I didn’t notice the
Errors.
’

Nor did he stay to help his fellow-customer find the volume. He hurried out, and this time he had no spoil to present to the old bookseller in
recognition
of the rent due for his occupation of the parlour.

A whole week went by, its last few days the battleground of a continuous conflict of mind. He hadn’t, he assured himself with the utmost conviction, the faintest desire in the world to set eyes again on – on what he
had
set eyes on. That was certain. It had been the oddest of shocks to what he had thought about things, to what had gone before, and, yes, to his vanity. Besides, the more he occupied himself with and pondered over his peculiar little experience the more probable it seemed that it and she and everything connected with her had been nothing but a cheat of the senses, a triumph of self-deception – a pure illusion, induced by the quiet, the solitude, the stirrings of springtime at the window, the feeling of age in the room, the romantic associations – and last, to the Herrick!