Short Stories 1927-1956 (48 page)

The inspector had accepted her card; indeed, had tucked it into the flap of his pocket-book as if for a prize keepsake. And then, having firmly closed the book again, he bestowed on her a last full quiet glance.

‘Well, miss,' he said ‘I'm sorry to have disturbed you. If you haven't, you haven't. And,' he glanced sidelong again at the fatherly guard, ‘p'raps it's just as well. There are them it's best to keep your distance from. And,' he raised his face a little, almost as if, houndlike, he had snuffed up the
imperceptible
, ‘this one has gone as far as most!'

‘I'm sure it's very, very kind of you,' Lavinia had assured him, ‘I wish … And if …' And then she had drawn down her pretty narrow veil again, and was alone.

The highly competent, even if they are also, which is unusual, impulsive in disposition when vexed or put out, though only for trivial reasons, are apt to be unobservant. Charles was competent, but not impulsive, and far from subtle. Yet even the reception of his first greeting to her on the black,
oil-lit
, snow-encrusted platform might have warned him to tread cautiously.
Women are so temperamental. His hurried bearish embrace from out of that long thick country ulster of his had been as little of a comfort as a tonic. The train was late, he was complaining – ridiculously, fatuously, late; his damn fool of a chauffeur had run out of petrol, and they would have to wait for the village fly. ‘My gad, these people!' he kept repeating. And then suddenly, but much too late, ‘What's wrong, Lavinia? You look as white as a sheet, and, by gad, shivering! Come into this miserable little hole for a moment. What's wrong? I actually
told
the feller …'

The train had by now abandoned the tiny country station to darkness and to them, and the porter on the opposite platform was extinguishing the last of its lamps. Indeed, he left them only one, and that out of sight, for their few minutes' talk, in the magic starry moon-dusk of winter snow.

‘Now,' Charles had remarked yet again, ‘tell me all about it.' Why then hadn't she done as he suggested? Why hadn't she reposed her fair head on his manly shoulder and – wept her heart out? Why had she managed to confide in him no more than a colourless fraction of her story? Why had she left out the least mention of that absurd yet valiant search of the train, the carpet bag, the furtive exit? Surely it couldn't merely have been because Charles had said, ‘My damn fool of a chauffeur!' so early? Anyhow, that couldn't be the only reason. And it was nothing but nice of him to assure her again and again that, if he had shared her journey, he would have knocked the inspector's silly head off. ‘It was monstrous: simply monstrous! If only I! … I should have refused to say anything – anything,' he repeated for the ninth time, and Lavinia, chilled to the bone, her heart thumping under her ribs, and her teeth chattering to such a degree that she stuttered and almost hiccupped with every word she said, had asked, ‘To which?'

‘What do you mean?' Charles had inquired angrily. ‘“To which?”'

‘I mean,' she said, ‘to the poor old man or to the nice inspector?'

‘“Poor old man!” You mean you
talked
– to
him
?'

‘Of course I mean I talked to him.'

‘My gad,' Charles had begun, and then the cabman had interrupted them, and they had sat together side by side in the ancient vehicle, noiselessly wheeling and jogging on like marionettes together along the frosted country lane, while the sinking moon obliquely stared in on them from across fields made desolate with snow. But by now they were almost quarrelling.

‘You mean,' she was saying, ‘that if you had been me – I – you would never in any circumstances have had a single word to say to
any
utterly miserable old man if you were alone with him –
any
where? You mean
that
?'

‘But, my dear
child,
I'm
not
you; I didn't
say
“a
single word”; and it wasn't
any
old man. You said so. Some sniffling sneak-thief, or worse. Why, the police were after him! You said so.' He made a gesture with his gloved
right hand – clean across the starry winter night. ‘You don't seem to be able to see the solid facts of the situation.'

‘Don
'
t
I?' she heard herself calling to him, as if out of the year before last. ‘I – I see
you
!'
But no, her feeble little sally had passed unheeded. ‘Besides, isn't it harder and even more valuable to see
through
things – especially solid facts, as you call them? We
aren't.' And at that very instant Charles himself had become almost as transparent as glass – plate glass.

‘For Heaven's sake, Lavinia, let us try to keep to the point. I am
speak ing
of a whining old blackguard who molests a lonely woman on a railway journey – and you say, “We
aren't”.'

‘No, Charles. Perhaps you are right. It's easy not to think if you don't feel – to know, I mean. You
are
right. You always are.' Her teeth had stopped chattering for a moment, and she was colloguing feverishly with the moon while her hand, visible almost to a blind man in that glare, lay idle,
nerveless
, and homeless on her knee. ‘I think it is just possible he was even worse than that. And though I know perfectly well —' and then suddenly she turned. ‘But supposing, just for example, you were being hunted.
Hunted
, do you
hear
?'
and her eyes ranged like a March hare the untrodden wilds beneath the winter stars, ‘Oh, no, you needn't snigger.
Not
the police. Hunted, I said;
haunted
,
threatened, tracked down, and you couldn't even wait to …
BLACKMAIL
. Is there nothing in this miserable world can make us realize –
others
?'

But Charles would not listen this time either. ‘Don't be silly, Lavinia. Control yourself. You need not shout at me. You are utterly unhinged, hysterical.
No,
I say; you are not to utter another word till we are home. Mother will see to all that.' She seemed at this to have shut her mouth and her soul at the same moment – which, with that exclamatory
blackmail
of hers still echoing on in consciousness, now somehow resembled an
eavesdropper
in the midst of phantoms looking in on the contents of a
morgue.
And the small chamber they were sharing, smaller even than a railway
compartment
, though they sat there leagues asunder, jogged silently on into time and space.

And ‘Mother', of course, had done her very best to see to all that; so understanding, so managing, so silkily and exquisitely tactful.

Even after these retrospective nocturnal ruminations had come to an end, Lavinia had continued to stare up from her bed into the ceiling at that ponderous old beam – though what connexion, in the pink and white room so seductively prepared for her, this unassuming object had with the train of her thoughts, she hadn't any actualized notion. And the worst of it was that though, safe but not secure under the roof of the Old Mill, she had at last, however late, dined boldly – and possibly had a little shocked the
hovering, insistent old lady by preferring brandy to ‘this nice light wine,
not
very dry, my dear' – she had nonetheless utterly failed to satisfy Charles as to why she had not at any rate ordered
some
thing on the train.

‘Good Lord, you have only to push the bell. Besides, you get better food then sometimes than – that filthy soup, that odious piecrust – all out of the same tin.'

‘Gourmet!
Fie!' she had smiled at him, with an infantile display of irony, and then had dipped again at her brandy.

‘And you really mean to say you sat on and on with that verminous old … until – where
did
he get out, by the way?'

But with heaven's help the village Waits had then suddenly chimed in with,
The
Lord
at
first
did
Adam
make
Out
of
the
dust
and
clay
… And Charles, being a new arrival in these parts, in spite of fuming at their ‘hideous din', had gone out. And – his best new
grand
seigneur
voice still resounding in the porch – she had managed to shiver to her feet and insist that very moment on going to her room. There, with a last good-night kiss as of faded rose-leaves on her cheek, she had sat down – as if she were
pretending
to be insane – on her bed …

And now she was calm again: though one, alas, may be calm but still horrified. So she continued to watch, her hot-water bottle no longer much of a companion between the sheets, just in case her fellow-passenger or his old friend should decide – well, to come out into the open.
Her
open, that is; for they had enjoyed, of course, their own also. And it was thus the
maypole
parlour-maid, a little shocked, found her in the morning – fast, fast asleep; but with the lamp, held rigidly on tip-toe by the small china Cupid on her bedside table, still burning on, in faint conflict with the reflected splendour of the Christmas snow.

Miss Miller

Miss Miller
*

Because she had very little breath left, and because it must be far from easy to sob and run at the same time, the little girl with the square-bobbed flaxen hair dropped into a walk as she came in under the shade of the
wide-spreading
chestnut tree. And there, at sight of the figure that sat bolt
upright
in the middle of the seat, she at once stopped dead. So complete was her surprise that she had even forgotten to sob any more. She simply opened her tear-washed eyes and stared. And Miss Miller, in her tight soldier-like
jacket and peculiar hat, seemed to be taking no more notice of her than a lighted lamp-post takes of a moth.

But Miss Miller had seen her right enough. Miss Miller had kept a weather-eye open, had watched her come tumbling across the gentle green grass slopes and under the trees and into the sunshine and into the shade again. It was only her funny little way to pretend not to have seen, though she could no more have explained
why
than she could explain why these long balmy summer mornings she always sat bolt upright on a seat that had clearly been constructed with such beautiful scroll-like curves at the back of it on purpose to make those who had time thus to idle the day away
uncomfortable
.

Not that this little creature had ever seen Miss Miller before, had even so much as suspected she was there. That was certain. Though, since they
frequently
shared the amenities of the park, she very well might have done so. The park-keepers knew Miss Miller all right, and there wasn’t one that wouldn’t nod her a jocular if slightly ironical good morning. So would the elephantine policeman at the gates – and then perhaps solemnly wink at the man who was piling up the dead leaves in his three-wheeled handcart. Hardly a day went by but Miss Miller was to be seen wandering about in these particular parts, observing the observable with a quick bird-like turn of the head, or sitting just as she was now, with her sharp black eyes and her long sharp nose, one cotton-gloved hand resting on the long-beaked stork’s head of her umbrella, her gaze fixed on the sun-sheened waters of the ornamental pond, almost as though she were eternally on the point of being lost in some fantastically quizzical daydream.

Only ‘almost’, though; for Miss Miller had very little ultimate respect for daydreams. She preferred, or rather she restricted herself to, the actual – but with no excessive respect for that either. And however motionless her pose might be, however absent-looking the expression on her long, odd, sallow face, and in her coal-black cavernous eyes, she noticed positively everything that was going on around her – striding gluttonous starlings, clumsy,
strutting
, burnished wood-pigeons, fashionable nursemaids, smartly stepping soldier-boys with their paper-squill puttees and funny little metal-headed swagger canes, ladies and gentlemen politely conversing on the gravel paths, or less politely colloguing under the trees, the swans for ever amorous of their own snowy images on the lustrous pale-blue water, and the
wing-sailed
toy-boats braving the breezes, their small round-behinded owners stooping like Chinese dummies at the edge of the pond as they launched them out upon the deep. She even heard and heeded the changeable talk of the sparrows in the branches overhead, while their cousins of every degree dumpily hopped about her long feet with no more fear of casualties than if she were a dust-bin. And all the while some other Miss Miller sat tristfully
hearkening to the distant murmur of a fall of water feeding the shallow pond.

In the soft sweet air of that hot St Martin’s summer morning her small tear-stained visitor must by now have stood staring at her under the tent of the chestnut tree for at least two whole minutes. And then softly and suddenly Miss Miller turned her sharp, black, coal-box eyes, and the long drooping nose that hung between them, straight at the child.

‘Well, Rosie,’ she said, ‘and what’s for you?’

But the question was neither sharp, tart, tradesman-like nor
grown-up-ish
. It merely asked for valuable information.

‘Nothing at all, thank you,’ said her visitor, ‘I was only looking.’

‘And so was I,’ said Miss Miller. ‘What’s the harm in that?’

The bobbed head under the blue bonnet stooped a little forward. ‘My name,’ she all but whispered, as though she didn’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings, ‘is not Rosie; it’s Nella.’

‘And that’s an odd thing too,’ cried Miss Miller from in under her high hat, ‘for mine is Miller –
Miss
Miller. At least that’s what they call me:

‘Can you make up
much
?’
asked the little girl.

‘It depends on who
for,
on the vocabulary, and the
rhymes
,’
said Miss Miller. ‘Some come, some won’t. But the next and the next and the next thing to inquire is
why
,
Rosie, you have run away? And who from? Or should we say, whom-m-m?

And be sure not to answer if you’ve
no
wish to say.’

The little girl looked stealthily over her shoulder, gazed carefully once more at Miss Miller, turned, and breathed out her secret.

‘It’s my new nurse,’ she said. ‘She’s
not
my real nannie;
my
nannie’s ill. She’s a beast, and I hate her.’

‘Ah, now,’ cried Miss Miller, clutching more firmly than ever her beaked umbrella; ‘“a beast”! With four legs no doubt, but not, oh no, a tell-tale at the end of it! What did I
say
!
Isn’t that
just,
Rosie, what we have to expect? And I’ll be bound she can’t help it. That’s
my
opinion. It’s what’s called
ingrained
. So you ran away. And what more likely? Though
not
,
we must admit, allowed?

Hey now, what about
that
?
Nurses! It’s years and years and years… but then you see after all it’s only Time, Rosie, that divides us. By us meaning just you and me. And what is
Time
?
Nothing I promise you but merely “wear and tear”. Merely.’

Yet another prolonged shuddering sob shook the little girl from head to foot, but it was meaning little more now than that solemn foamless swell upon the Pacific which succeeds a storm.

‘She won’t let me do a single thing I want, and some day I’ll run right away. Then even my daddy won’t be able to find me.’

‘I expect
not
,’
said Miss Miller, ‘and especially even if he shouldn’t
happen
to look. You see, my poppet, even if we have the legs and the brrroth to run with, it’s very very seldom really “right away”. It can’t be done. And
there
’
s
the rub. I have frequently noticed it.’

She was still steadily surveying her visitor, her perched-up hat trembling a little in the process. The fair face looked far too young to have had so many troubles begin to show their markings in it. At which sad notion Miss Miller openly smiled at the little girl, though her smile rather more closely resembled a grimace.

‘Now when
I
was about your size and for a good long time after,’ she said, ‘I didn’t myself usually run away. I was run away
from
.’

‘Didn’t you have a nurse?’

‘Three,’ said Miss Miller. ‘Black, yellow and brown. Turn and turn about. So it wasn’t much good.’

‘I don’t think I quite understand that,’ said her visitor.

‘No? In such cases I am told it is better to explain. You will understand then, Pollie, that when I was young – which is exactly a hundred and
forty-eight
years ago now, not counting Sundays – I lived in a big, a
great
big house – a whacking great e
nor
mous house.’

‘Why?’

‘Because,’ said Miss Miller, ‘it was there it had pleased God to call me. A house, Pollie, not parked as they say in a huge prairie like this one,’ and she swept her umbrella across the ample view, ‘
not
with a bit of a pond in it like that one,’ and she jabbed its point at the lake, ‘but a river, my love, a wide r-r-rolling r-r-river, with cr-r-reeks in its cr-r-rumplings, and simply carpeted with water-lilies. Carpeted. A hop and a skip and a jump and there you were on the other side. And fish –
plop-plip-plopp,
and ducks –
quack-quack
–
quarkk
!
And besides the woolly sheep, my love,
deer
!
Herds of
them, dappled and waggle-tailed and some of them horned, and ears like windmills. But believe me, Pollie,
one
flick of a finger and every single one of them clean out of sight! On the other hand, it was not the deer we were referring to, but the house. It had hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of windows. Specially up above, of course, where the corridors were – one after another and all the way round.’ And Miss Miller spread out the
black-gloved
fingers of one lank left hand as if that would show exactly how. ‘And to every window – or
two
–
or
three, as the case might be, a room or chamber: chiefly, as I say, bed. Not that I’d attempt to tell you exactly how many. Mistakes cannot always be put right. But imagine me there, if you please, looking
out
of the windows; and the
OTHERS
, you know, feasting in the
HALL
.’

‘I have
my
dinner,’ said her visitor, ‘in the nursery; except on Sundays. Then it’s with my daddy.’

‘Halls and dining-rooms – much the same,’ said Miss Miller. ‘All depends on the
entourage.
Well,’ she planted her foot a little more firmly on the little patch of gravel that surrounded the seat, ‘it was at one of those windows that I first saw it running away.’

‘Saw what running away?’

‘That, my love, is what I could never positively descry,’ said Miss Miller, stooping her long nose and the brim of her hat in the direction of the little girl as if she were a cockatoo on a perch. ‘There’s some that run, and there’s some who are run from, and it’s distance lends enchantment to the view. What I can
say
is that it seemed to be something or somebody I didn’t
exactly
want, you know, to go.
And
such a swimming moon! Every bit as the poem says,’ and Miss Miller once more broke into rhyme:

I say
staring
,
Pollie, though we agree it’s not polite. But
politesse
apart, as the barber said, it wasn’t to be seen from
that
window. And why? Simply, my dear, because it had gone out of sight. So that’s where we are.’

‘Where?’ said the little girl.

‘Why, there,’ said Miss Miller.

‘What did you do?’ asked the little girl.

‘That’s just it,’ said Miss Miller. ‘What would you have done? And the answer to that is, I did just the same as that. I ran as fast as my trotters would carry me to the next – and then to the next, and then to
all
the nexteses.
Little
windows, every one of them, with round tops and small –
er – panes. But no.
No
–
and I repeat it on purpose – not a glimpse. I won’t
say,
mind you,’ she continued with due solemnity and with a longer face than ever, ‘that all the little bedrooms had beds in them, or
wash-handstands
or even chests of drawerseses. You’ll pardon me, but I didn’t really
look.
But I
will
say I went in and out, and out and in, and so of course out again of every single one there was, until after twice round the house and back, counting the corridors once and once only, I found myself in the very place I had started from. And by and large, my dear Miss Sheepshanks, that’s what we all do. In time.’

Miss Miller thereupon burst out laughing, and even Miss Sheepshanks opened her mouth – not to laugh, but only because she was so intent on her new acquaintance that she couldn’t help imitating her.

‘What did you do then?’ she said.

‘Well, then,’ said Miss Miller, drawing her cotton-gloved forefinger slowly down her nose as if in deep reflection, and the faded greying tip of it made a right-angle with the rest, ‘then – I gave it up; and
it
gave
me
up. It was what’s called mutual, my poppet. Then too about that time we were compelled to move – the Family, you know. Ups and downs, then downs again. So we dismissed the, the – well – the
entourage.
That
is
the best thing, don’t you think?’