Short Stories 1927-1956 (41 page)

Lettie sighed. And at length she lifted her hand high above her head, and with breath held tight in her bosom, relaxed the four fingers and the thumb. The bird fell a few inches like a stone, and dipped, fluttering a moment, helplessly. But with the next, its wings had gained the mastery they needed over the quiet air in the shelter of the ship. It soared up into the wind, was drifted a few yards in its great sweeping sightless flood like weed on the sea, and then, the gay colours of its plumage still discernible in the sunbeams, it had sped off away towards the shore.

Lettie watched it till it had become a drifting speck – until her eyes were overflowing from the dark dazzle of the sea. She turned away. ‘Safe!’ She had actually uttered the word aloud, and was so elated at her morning’s act of mercy that she very nearly repeated the prayers which she had hurried through only a few minutes before.

How absurd, how silly people were! What ridiculous little webs of mere coincidences they kept on spinning round themselves! Talk about horizons! Good heavens, it was lucky she hadn’t shared her little burst of fireworks with her future mother-in-law.

Not that George’s ‘mumsie’ wouldn’t have sympathized with ‘the darling little bird’. She would have sent one of the stewards for some canary seed, or would have had a special bowl of bread and milk brought up, and would probably have suffocated her little protégé. She might even have asked the captain – ‘so very approachable a man, my dear!’ – to back in and land the tiny creature on the nearest beach.

For you can kill, as well as save, all sorts of things by kindness. For this very reason Lettie had made up her mind long ago that she would
scrutinize
at once all kindnesses to herself when they came her way. So many were showered on her that she was apt to shower them back, without really thinking much about them. And it was absolutely essential not to be merely sympathetic but to be reasonable with George. Not to give way too much to his absurd fits of depression. Not to pamper him. Pampered husbands become perfectly horrible: indolent, cumbrous, oily and otiose, yes and cynical. Creases appear and deepen beneath their several chins, and they always go bald early – lose every scrap of hair!

A sudden revulsion of feeling had settled over Lettie’s mind. How very queer! the sea, the sky, the morning were only a few moments older and couldn’t by any possibility have faded since she had bent her steps this way. And the light sparkling breezes from the twelve corners of the heavens still sang briskly about her ears, as she turned away towards breakfast. And yet, merely because she had caught a glimpse in her mind’s eye of being stout and forty-four and as used to your excellent domesticated job as a cat is to cream, everything seemed to have darkened and tarnished a little. Why, only death itself can free
that
kind of ‘bird’!

It was the same old story: she was always being silly and wrought-up and impulsive like this. And by no means always with success. And invariably the reaction came; then life went flat and spiritless, and the future loomed as ghostly and ghastly before her as a London wrapt in a pea-soup
November
fog. And now there wasn’t any captive aboard at all that could be given its freedom – a sudden headlong gust of sea-sprayed wind had slapped her blue skirts tight against her legs as she pushed on towards its bows. None: except, possibly, herself.

Wasn’t she engaged to be married, good heavens, and wasn’t there a most beautiful sapphire ring welded two joints under the third claw of her left hand? Why, even her hair was as yellow as the bird’s wing. They shared the very same badge. She’d a jolly good mind to throw
herself
overboard and trust to Providence to give his angels charge over her, to fan her up and waft her away towards that cosy little cluster of houses over there, which was so very like England – never, never, perhaps, to be seen again. And then, when the fogs had drifted down once more, perhaps George could come too. She could see them both in sea-sodden old clothes and rubber boots, hunting for their morning cockles along the beach. Why all these forebodings, this confusion and anxiety merely about salary and
prospects
?
Who ever
recognized
the very handsomest of prospects – when it came? Why
not
the simple life, with mamma-in-law in an Early Victorian rocking-chair of colonial manufacture beside the kettled hob!

‘Good
morn
ing,’ she cried suddenly, and this time entirely by mistake, to the sleek heavy young man in the tortoise-shell spectacles, and this time he cocked an inquiring eye indeed. How absurd!
That
belarded hee-haw! And yet just
this
silly little mistake had almost restored her good spirits again. If George wasn’t up by now, she would make the devil of a fuss about it. It was all very well to be ranging round like a roaring young lioness in the wild bright jungle of the morning, but, after all, you did sometimes want a glimpse of your solemn shag-necked lord and master too.

Wonder of wonders, there he was! Balancing himself gingerly along the deck exactly like a reanimated flounder in a fish shop. She had never noticed before what a charmingly genteel and pacifying effect gold-rimmed
spectacles
have on a quiet, round, and even slightly owlish face – compared, that is, with those goggling tortoise-shell things.

‘George,’ she said, ‘I found a bird just now in the concert room, a bird from the land, a land-bird – Cape Race, over
there,
never seen before – a tiny thing, as light as a postage stamp and almost dead with exhaustion and terror. Oh, such a lovely helpless little thing, and it never stirred a
hair’s-breadth
when it saw I was coming. Fancy
daring
to start off at evening or dawn just because you saw something like a faint lighted palace far out to sea. What
kind
do you suppose it was: dark head, very slim, a crest, golden yellow on its wings, and a sharp narrow bill?’

She led
him in, without the least intention of waiting for an answer, and down the stairs and into the dining-saloon. Dining-saloon! They were the very first passengers to come and eat. How frigid and insecure, how select and horribly discreet it all looked. It would have been far, far better fun to have gone steerage. And they sat down at the table, the little silver vase of iced flowers right in the middle of it, and the crisp rolls and the enormous breakfast menu in front of them – steak and sturgeon and kedgeree, fifteen
kinds of meats and five-and-twenty jams, not to mention ‘Vigorbrits’, ‘Drenergy’ and exploded rice! …

And there was George, just because they had sighted land, looking
glummer
even than twenty flounders, his cheeks no longer sea-green, but
positively
putty-like with anxiety, and even his silly freckled and sunburned hand trembling a little as it lay with its thumb sticking out on the damask tablecloth.

‘You really are,’ whispered Lettie, with a swift glance round in quest of trespassing stewards, ‘you really
are
rather a dear, you poor thing, and I
believe
I love you best when you are most like a fat little boy that couldn’t say
boh
to a cockroach. George dear,
look
at me. Do try and be a little
confident
. You know – and wouldn’t you just rap it out at anybody who denied it! – you know perfectly well that you could take on even that old
President’s
job tomorrow morning without a moment’s hesitation – as soon, that is, as you had recovered from dying of fright overnight. And yet! …’

She slid her slender cold hand under the tablecloth and clasped his right one that lay flaccid and inert upon his knee.

‘Besides, haven’t you
me,
you old silly? Would I have said, Go, or rather Come, all this marvellous long way across the sea, if I hadn’t been
absolutely
certain it was Set Fair? Would I? Would I be unendurably pining to kiss you
now
– if only we weren’t
here
–
would
I?’

George – his fingers still trembling a little, for three solid days of queasy seasickness does take it out of a man even with the stubbornest of
constitutions
– removed his gold glasses, and turned his placid anxious faithful affectionate hazel eyes on Lettie’s, as she sat there, their hands clasped under the tablecloth. But out of the corner of one of them he had at that very moment spotted a steward, nimbly stepping on his way in their direction, and what he huskily
said
was, ‘Any cereal, Lettie?’

Physic

Physic
*

Emilia and William had been keeping one another company in the kitchen. Mary, her trusty substantial cook-general was ‘out’, and would not be knocking at the door until half-past ten. After that there might be another hour to wait. But then Emilia would be alone. Meanwhile, just like man and wife, William and she would soon be having supper together at two corners of the kitchen table, and William would have an egg – with nine bread-
and-butter
fingers.

This, once fortnightly, now weekly, Wednesday-night feast had become a kind of ritual, a little secret institution. They called it their covey night. Not even Daddie ever shared it with them; and it was astonishing what mature grown-up company William became on these occasions. It was as if, entirely unknown to himself, he had swallowed one of Jack’s bean-seeds and had turned inside into a sort of sagacious second-husband. All that Emilia had to do, then, was merely to become again the child she used to be. And that of course needs only a happy heart.

He was a little dark-skinned boy, William – small for his age. A fringe of gilt-edged fair hair thatched a narrow forehead over his small, restless eyes. His sister Sallie – poor gaunt Aunt Sarah, whom she had been called after, having departed this life when less than a month had passed since the gay christening party – little Sallie, after a restless and peevish afternoon and a wailful bath, was asleep now, upstairs, in her crib. You could tell that almost without having to creep out every now and again to listen at the foot of the stairs.

William had been even more lively and hoppity than usual. He and Emilia had been playing Beggar-my-Neighbour, and he had become steadily more excited when with something very like sheer magic, every sly knave in the pack had rapidly abandoned poor Emilia and managed to slide into his hand. And when – after an excited argument as to where the Queen of Hearts had best be hidden – they changed the game, he laughed and laughed till the tears came into his eyes to see her utter confusion at finding herself for the third time an abject Old Maid! And when supper-time came – plates, spoons, forks – he had all but danced from dresser to table, from table to dresser again. They had borrowed Mary’s best blue-check kitchen
tablecloth;
he had said it looked cooler. Don’t you
think
so, Mummie?’ And every now and again he had ejaculated crisp shrill remarks and directions at Emilia, who was looking after the cooking in the outer room, a room she had steadfastly refused to call the ‘scullery’. Merely because she disliked the word! Though one day in a sudden moment of inspiration she had defended his priggishness by exclaiming, ‘Well, spell it with a
k
and then see what you think of it!’

It was a little way Emilia had. As tenaciously as she could she always put off until tomorrow even what it was merely difficult to put up with today. Never trouble trouble till trouble troubles you, was her motto when driven into a corner. She hated problems, crises, the least shadow of any horror, though they would sometimes peer up at her out of her mind – and from elsewhere – when she wasn’t looking, like animals at evening in the
darkening
hills. But when they actually neared, and had to be faced; well, that was quite another matter.

For some minutes now, busied over her sizzling pan at the gas stove, she
hadn’t noticed that William’s galvanic sprightly conversation piped up from the kitchen had been steadily dwindling, had almost ceased. He had decided to have his supper egg fried, though ‘lightly boiled’ was the institution. And Emilia had laughed when, after long debate, he had declared that he had chosen it fried because then it was more indigestible. She was dishing it up from the smoke and splutter – a setting sun on a field of snow, and with a most delicate edging of scorch.

When she came back into the kitchen William was standing by the table, gazing across it at the window. He couldn’t be looking
out
of the window, for although there was a crevice a few inches wide between the flowered chintz curtains that had been drawn over it and where the blue linen blind had not been pulled down to the very bottom, it was already pitch dark
outside
. Yet even at this distance she saw that he couldn’t also be staring solely at his own reflection.

He stood motionless, his eyes fixed on this dark glassy patch of window, his head well above the table now. He had not even turned at sound of her footsteps. So far as Emilia’s birdlike heart was concerned it was as if a jay had screeched in a spinney. But best not to notice too much. Don’t put things into people’s heads. ‘There!’ she exclaimed, ‘Well now, you
have
cut the bread and butter thick, Mr Stoic!
I’m
going to have that scrap of cold fish. Eat this while it’s hot, my precious!’

But William had continued to wait.

‘I don’t think, Mummie,’ he said, slowly as if he were reciting something he had been learning by heart, ‘I don’t
think
I’ll have my egg after all. I don’t think I feel very hungry just now.’

All his eagerness and excitement seemed to have died down into this solemn and stagnant reverie; and for a child to have the air and appearance of a sorrowful old dwarf is unutterably far away from its deliciously
pretending
to be a sedate grown-up.

‘Not to have it!’ cried Emilia. ‘Why, look, blessing, it’s cooked! Look! Lovely. You wouldn’t know it wasn’t a tiny half of a peach in cream. Let’s pretend.’

‘I couldn’t like even that, Mummie,’ he said, glancing at it, a slight
shudder
ending in a decisive shake of the head as he hastily looked away again. ‘I don’t think, you know, I want
any
supper.’

Emilia’s eyes widened. She stood perfectly still a moment, the hot plate in her hand, staring at him. Then she hurriedly put it down on the table, knelt with incredible quickness beside him, and seized his hand.

‘That’s what it is,’ she said. ‘You don’t feel very well, William. You don’t feel very well? Your hands are hot. Not sick? Not sore throat? Tell Mummie.’

‘I’m
not
ill,’ wailed William obstinately. ‘Just because I don’t want the
egg! You
can’t
like that horrid cold fish, and if I did feel sick, wouldn’t I say so? That’s only what
you
say.’ He paused as if the utmost caution and precision were imperative, then added, nodding his head mournfully and sympathetically in time to the whispered words, ‘I
have
got a teeny tiny headache, but I didn’t notice it until just now.’ His mouth opened in a
prodigious
yawn, leaving tears in his eyes. ‘Isn’t it funny, Mummie – you can’t really see anything out of the window when it’s black like that, yet you needn’t look at your
self
in the glass. It’s just as if …’

His eyes came round from examining the window, and fixed themselves on her face.

‘That’s what it is,’ said Emilia, raising herself abruptly from the floor. ‘That’s what it is.’ She kept squeezing the thin, unresponsive fingers of his hand between her own. ‘You’re feverish. And I knew it.
All
the time. Yes –
how
stupid of me.’ And instantly her voice had changed, all vain
self-recriminations
gone. ‘I’ll tell you what we’ll
do,
William. First, I’ll fill a
hot-water
bottle. Then I’ll run up and get the thermometer. And
you
shall be the doctor. That’s much the best thing.’ And she did not even pause for his consent.

‘I expect you know, Dr Wilson,’ she had begun at once, ‘it’s something that’s disagreed with my little boy. I expect so. Oh, yes, I expect so.’

William, pale and attentive, was faltering. ‘Well, yes, Mrs Hadleigh, p’raps,’ he said at last, as if his mouth were cram-full of plums. ‘You
may
be right. And that depends, you know, on what he has been
eating.’

‘Yes, yes, I quite understand, doctor. Then would you perhaps wait here just for one moment, while I see if my little boy is ready for you. I think, you know, he might like to wash his hands first and brush his hair. And
pray
keep on your overcoat in case you should feel cold.’ She took a large dry Turkey towel that was airing on a horse near by, and draped it over William’s shoulders. ‘I won’t be a moment,’ she assured him. ‘Not a moment.’

Yet she paused to glance again at his shawled-in pale face and fever-bright eyes, as if by mere looking she could bore clean through his body; and stooping once more, she pressed her cheek against his, and then his hand to her lips.

‘You said,’ half tearfully chanted the little boy, ‘that I was the doctor; and now you are kissing me, Mummie!’

‘Well, I could often and often kiss lots of doctors,’ said his mother, and in a flash she was gone, leaving him alone. She raced up the dark staircase as if she were pursued by twenty demons, not even waiting to switch on the light. And when she came to her bedroom it was as if everything in it were doing its utmost to reassure her. The shining of the street lamp was quietly dappling its walls with shadow. The whole room lay oceans deep in silence;
the duskily mounded bed, the glass over the chimneypiece, the glass on the dressing-table. They may until that very moment have been conferring
together
, but now had, as usual, instantly fallen mute, their profound
confabulations
for the time being over. But she did not pause even so much as to sip of this refreshing stillness. Her finger touched the electric switch, and in an instant the harmless velvety shadows – frail quivering leaf-shadows – the peace, the serenity, had clean evaporated. It was as if the silence had been stricken with leprosy, so instantaneous was the unnatural glare – even in spite of the rose-pink lamp-shades. For now Emilia was staring indeed.

How, she was asking herself, how by any possibility could that striped school tie of her husband’s have escaped from its upper drawer on to the bedspread? How by an utter miracle had she failed to see it when she had carried Sallie into the room only an hour or two ago? Ties don’t wriggle out of top-drawers across carpets and climb up valances like serpents in the tropics. Husbands miles away cannot charm such things into antics like
these
!

Mary had been out all the afternoon. She herself had been out for most of it with the children, and she could have vowed, taken her oath,
knew,
that
that
couldn’t have been there when she had come up to put on her hat. In the instant that followed, before even she could insist on raising her eyes from this queer scrap of ‘evidence’, her mind suddenly discovered that it was dazed and in the utmost confusion. It was as if, like visitors to a gaudy Soho restaurant, a jostling crowd of thoughts and images, recollections, doubts, memories, clues, forebodings, apprehensions and reiterated
stubborn
reassurances had thronged noisy and jostling into consciousness – and then were gone again. And at that, at once, as if by instinct and as
unforeseeably
as a night moth alights on one out of a multitude of flowers, her stricken glance had encountered her husband’s note.

At sight of it her heart had leapt in her body, and then cowered down like a thing smitten with palsy. Novels told you of things like these, but surely not just ordinary life! The note had been scribbled on a half-sheet of her own notepaper, and hastily folded into a cocked hat – perhaps the only
old-fashioned
device she had ever known that husband to be capable of. It seemed that she had learned by heart the message it contained before even she had unfolded the paper and read it. Indeed, it did not matter what it had to say. It hardly even mattered
how
it had said it. So considerately, yet so clumsily, so blastingly. ‘She’ – that alone was enough. When shells
explode
why be concerned with fuse or packing? Edward was gone. That was all that mattered. She had been abandoned – she and the children.

So far, so inevitably. You can in vile moments of suspicion, incredulity and terror foresee things like that. Just that he was gone – and for good. But to have come stealing back in the afternoon into a vacant house, merely
for a few clothes or a little money, and she out, and Mary out, and the
children
out – and everything else out; well, that seemed a funny, an
unnecessary
thing to do!

‘I wouldn’t have so much minded …’ she began to mutter to herself, and then realized that her body was minding far too much. A thin acid water had welled into her mouth. Unlike William, she felt sick and dizzy. She had gone stiff and cold and goose-flesh all over. It was as if some fiendish hand were clutching her back hair and dragging the scalp from her forehead taut as the parchment of a drum over her eyes. It was as if she had swallowed unwittingly a dose of some filthy physic. Her knees trembled. Her hands hung down from her arms as though they were useless. And the only thing she could see at this instant was the other woman’s face. But it wasn’t
looking
at her; on purpose. It was turned all but three-quarters away – a be coming angle for the long, fair cheekbone, the drooping eyelashes, the lips, the rounded chin Clara. And then, suddenly, she saw them both together, stooping a little; at a railway station, it seemed; talking close. Or was it that they had just got out of a cab?