Short Stories 1927-1956 (59 page)

He spat again, turned away, and his bow legs were steadily carrying him off. Hilbert had been listening, but only half heeding, he was so intent on the cavernous face. The next instant his mind had reverted to the ‘picture frame', and to the tic-tac, and the iron rumour of the ‘she' he was awaiting. How intensely odd – incredible! Why, one of his favourite chapters in his
Parleyings
had been all about birds – and in a prose he had fondly hoped was not wholly out of keeping with them. He had referred in it to William Davies's unforgettable robin – ‘halfway up his legs in snow' – to Lesbia's sparrow, and Skelton's too, but he had clean forgotten the wagtail – nimble Sallie Dishwasher – and had never himself even noticed her shadow; no, nor the tic-tac either. And if such little things as these were not at least on the way to
poetry
he was a Double Dutchman and deserved to write it in his native tongue. To think that Heaven should have consented to reward him so swiftly! The spring locks of his little bag flicked back with a spirited clap, his hand dived in, he clasped a copy of his
Pegasus,
grass-green as Flora's mantle, and hastened after the porter.

‘Would
you,' he cried, a little breathlessly, calling after him, ‘accept this? A – a keepsake?'

The porter turned, opened his mouth, and looked at the book – as if he were Robinson Crusoe contemplating a powder-puff that had been washed up on to his beach. Then he dusted his large right hand on his green
corduroy
trouser-leg, and held it out.

‘Why, sir,' he said, ‘that's an uncommon kind thought of yours, and very welcome too, I'm sure. My daughter, now; she's none too clever in her
intellects
, poor dear. She'll take a deal of pleasure in it, even though she keeps only to the covers. If there's one thing that keeps her smiling, sir, it's pretty colours. Green in particular. And eyes like hers, watching out quiet in the porch most fine mornings, don't seem to cotton much to many words; though what she don't say, sir, would be a sight better worth hearing than most.'

‘No,' said Hilbert. ‘Yes, I mean.' It was an awkward pause, but the porter did not seem to be indulging either in sentiment or irony. He continued to clasp the dainty little book between grimy finger and thumb as gently as Cupid a daisy; but found no more words to say. Conscious of looking a little hot, damp, and diffident, Hilbert nodded, smiled, and returned to shut his bag. One from four leaves only three, he announced to himself. The sum reminded him of the Young Man with the Cream Tarts, though he rejoiced that the wager he had made with himself did not entail his having to
eat
his little books.

A peculiar faint drumming, as of a prodigious harp-string, had begun furtively to resound. The porter was ding-donging an old bell. ‘She,' then, was probably not more than a mile away now. Yes, here she came, puffing out delirious clots of wool and advancing on the toy railway station as meditatively as a gigantic snail. If Hilbert took a few lessons from the porter at Bovey Fausset he might at last succeed in detecting her at double the
distance
. ‘Man's senses,' suddenly exclaimed a small dry voice from deep down beyond his sub-sub-consciousness, ‘man's senses are his highway to the
infinities.' Hilbert determined to make a note of that. Meanwhile he was hoisting himself into his chosen compartment.

When at last he had settled himself into his corner, and – his eye on the revolving scenery beyond the window – had paused long enough to make the survey a little more polite, he ventured to glance at his only companion. This old gentleman looked about seventy. He was frail but fibrous, and
consisted
of a series of narrow cylinders that were all but oblongs; a high, narrow head, a long, narrow body, and two right-angled legs in black trousers. His waistcoat was faintly speckled, and his little white cambric bow was like that of an old-fashioned waiter. He was reading a dumpy leather-bound book, and appeared to be as far away from the rocking
clatter
of his surroundings as a sleeping infant would be during a performance of
Götterdämmerung.

Did Jesuit priests ever wear speckled waistcoats? Hilbert didn't know – indeed he knew very little about the society, though he had often coveted the privilege of meeting one of its members. They were always aware, he had somehow divined, of exactly what they were talking about. How motionlessly the old gentleman's eyelids hung over his shuttling eyes. The lean-knuckled, blue-veined hand clasping the book never stirred. ‘Pious – no question,' Hilbert was whispering to himself, ‘but a thoroughly good sort, I should guess. Austere, though. He looks,' he added a moment
afterwards
, ‘as dry as an old biscuit.' It might be exceedingly questionable
manners
– but dared he venture?

Nothing venture, nothing win. And though the porter had been a purely gratuitous godsend, Hilbert couldn't expect an average of one disposed-of volume every quarter of an hour, even though less than sixty minutes would see him home again.

He leaned forward as winningly as might an uncommonly good-natured barmaid. ‘I am so very sorry, sir, to interrupt you, but could you tell me if this is the
up
train?'

The old gentleman's good angel first gently composed her wings; he himself then lifted his eyelids, lowered his book, and glanced at the young man – out of small, bright, blue-grey eyes, as keen as a kestrel's. He watched him a moment, and a tiny wrinkle showed at the corner of one of them.

‘
Up
?' he repeated. ‘Let me see. That's going north, isn't it? Yes, and the sun is descending on your side. Observe the shadows. I haven't any doubt in the world we are both of us on our way
up
!
And that, I sometimes
endeavour
to remind myself, is the way I once hoped to be going. Alas! I can be perilously absent-minded.' He had smiled outright now, as if in private confabulation with his little jest. Still, there had been that in his ‘up' and in the wintry twinkle that accompanied it, which had set Hilbert speculating. It was a kind of Sesame. He peered into the cavern thus revealed, and
though he could see but a little way, evidently it was neatly kept. There was a vista. But had the old gentleman passed his test?

Now, poetry, he was thinking to himself, depends at least in part on
condensing
, without, possibly, any clear excuse for it, a wide metaphorical view out of some tiny morsel of quite commonplace fact. ‘Bird thou never wert', for example; and ‘Of his bones are coral made'. That being so, the
up,
surely, was just on the mark. This decision, however, left the question whether its author – who was in every line and accent and feature as
unquestionably
a firm believer in the virtues of a sound prose as the ‘Great Bear' himself – could possibly care to accept what poor Hilbert was tempted there and then to label, say, a hybrid medium – his
Parley
ings?
For both their sakes Hilbert wished to be considerate. But his fingers had already strayed towards the catch of his little brown bag.

‘Thank you very much,' he said. ‘Very much indeed. It is always a – a
relief
to know, to be sure one is not in the wrong train – when travelling, I mean. But I am not a traveller in the other sense – not
commercially,
I mean, nor perhaps … It's only that – well, that a friend of mine has suggested …' His eye faltered and fell under the old gentleman's steady scrutiny. ‘I was wondering, sir, if you would do me the kindness of accepting –
this
?'

He snapped open his bag and withdrew the first copy that presented itself. ‘It's – it's only
prose,
even if that, I'm afraid.'

‘You are exceedingly kind, sir,' said the old gentleman, bestowing on Hilbert a formal but courteous nod of the head as he took the book between his lean old fingers. ‘Thank you. I am not a great reader, indeed have little leisure for it, but when the opportunity comes I shall be most happy to peruse the book.'

At which, heedless of the blush which he was aware had mantled his brow, Hilbert managed to retrieve his fib. ‘As a matter of fact,' he blurted, ‘it was
not
exactly a friend. I – I mean – I, that is, am the author. It is' – he had sighed in spite of himself – ‘it is my first – er – effort.'

‘Indeed!' said the old gentleman. ‘That makes the gift doubly welcome. Until this moment we had never met, and now, in what remains of this life' – he tapped the book with his finger – ‘we shall never be parted.'

Goodness, Intelligence, and their younger sister, Courtesy – here, Hilbert decided, were the three Graces all at play in this one aged and quiet face; and, for Dorian porch to the temple within, those strait, keen lines between the eyes.

For some little time, as his new acquaintance had at once resumed his reading, Hilbert sat watching the passing countryside – sheaves heavy with harvest in the stubble fields, green-feathered ‘roots' in others; whirring flights of autumn birds. Another year was emptying itself away. We plough the fields – and scatter.

‘And now, in what remains of this life, we shall never be parted' – well, if that was not a wholly non-prosaic welcome to a greenhorn little book from the trembling hands of a novice less than a third of one's own age – well … Nevertheless Hilbert felt the least bit uneasy. Not at the difficulty of deciding whether what is non-prosaic is
per
se
poetical; but because he had not confided to the old gentleman
all
the facts of the case. But while he was pondering on how delicate a task that might have proved, his head nodded, chin on chest, and he fell asleep.

He awoke so sluggishly that he was aware of a voice declaiming on and on long before he had decided whether or not to open his eyes.

‘What
I
say is, treat 'em rough and ready and they'll lick your boots. Pamper them, and they won't give you not so much as a Thank-you. But no; Aggie never was the one to take advice. Never. Not her. In at one ear and out at the other; though, if she hasn't had her lesson now – pretty heavy on the stomach and her whole life in ashes, as you might say – I'm not the one to rub the salt in. Straight up from the country, fare and all, that girl had come – somewhere from down Swindon way, so she
said.
And before she'd been in the house a week, in came m'lady from the Pictures at getting on for one in the morning with her No. 2 in young men beside her as large as life, and she, I give you
my
word, dressed up to the knocker and as bold as brass in Aggie's blue hat and her best glassy kids. There – on her
feet,
mind you!'

‘Go on!' murmured a second unseen speaker, apparently hampered with adenoids.

‘I should just about say she did go on! And her husband sitting there with his pipe between his teeth as if butter wouldn't melt in his mouth. Not much. Swinging his legs and yawning his head off. And
him
reely and truly the founting head of all the trouble – brazen trollop. Not that I wouldn't allow it was chiefly Aggie's
fault.
As you make your bed in this world, so you must lay on it. Spoiled, that was what
that
girl was, like the one that had gone before her. Gas stove fresh from the works, Bristle's sweeper,
pink-edged
kitchen crockery and a spring mattress all complete – I never heard the likes of it. What things are coming to I
don't
know. What's more, he
defended
her, put in
his
spoke, he did. “No more than a child; up from the country” – that kind of smooth-me-down. Child! Country! – ask
me
;
a chit with rouge and lipstick all over her face, and that pasty-skinned you could have seen the smirk on her sly cat's features without a candle in the dark!'

‘Go on! And that young feller and all!'

‘Yes, and so they did, all three of 'em, hammer and tongs, though as for him he was nothing but a blind and soon made himself scarce. As for what Aggie thought of that Albert of hers, she kept that for upstairs and the door shut – not for
that
baggage to be listening in to. A bit of her mind Aggie
gave him, too, though I will say she hasn't too much to spare. And when the pair of them come down next morning, lo and behold! nothing but what remained of the slut's meat breakfast on the kitchen table – meat, mind you – and the girl herself gone, lock, stock, and barrel, and Aggie's best set of real silk undies gone with her.'

‘Silk! Real! Lor'! I never! Go
o
n
!'

‘Nor didn't Aggie. Fare paid and faked-up references, until I expect she's got to Buckingham Palace by now – or Holloway. And that angelic-looking in spite of her sauce, you might have been staring straight into the Garden of Eden every time she opened her mouth.'

‘Go
o
n
!'

‘Yes, and ask
me,
that's what kept
him
quiet. Give a man a face to look at, and the devil himself might just as well throw in his checks for all what he thinks is nothing but envy and slander. That ended it. He couldn't stand it any longer, and she went back to her mother, Aggie did, and to that poky upstairs dressmaking business all over again. But it's that pore little Amy
my
heart bleeds for. Pore mite, with her saucer eyes shivering there on the brink! Better her daddy safe in his grave, if I had my choice! It's my belief we're here because we are put; and you might as well be a cabbage as think you have got any say about it. I never did hold with it, and never shall.'

But this time the second unseen refrained from expressing any view at all. She hadn't even invited her friend to ‘go on'.

Hilbert, having rapidly attempted to digest this second-hand
miscellaneous
slice of human experience, opened his eyes and peered out in the direction of the voice at what now occupied the further corner of the carriage, whence alas, his tranquil old Jesuit, while he himself was
dreaming
, had silently departed. Thus motionless, he explored yet another stranger.