Short Stories 1927-1956 (60 page)

She was a woman dressed up in what Hilbert supposed to be cretonne, and that of a bold and remarkable design, and she wore pink stockings. She had a long face and high knee bones, an eye like a suffering, if not long-suffering, and contemptuous hen, and a mouth that told an inexhaustible tale of inward woe and outward wailing. Beside her stood a tall gaping basket, woven of gaudy bast into a pattern that would intoxicate a
Hottentot
. Its maw gaped as omnivorously as a shark's.

Now Hilbert, above all things, wished to be fair – to himself, to his
apple-green
firstfruits, to humanity in general, and above all to the Muses.
Possibly
because the talk he had just heard had been poured into his ear while he sat between sleeping and waking, he could recall a good deal of it. And if style is the man himself, certainly
its
was a large part of this lady. Like a humble-bee in a garden, he hardly knew where to alight first. On Aggie's blue hat or the devil's checks? Or on the fat open-mouthed young blonde
squatting squarely in front of her – concerning whom the merest fleeting glimpse had disclosed that she must have very few clothes on?

Hilbert was frailly human enough too to be bowled over even by the most casual of references to the Garden of Eden, and he narrowed his inward eye a little at recollection of the ‘pore mite's' – little Amy's – ‘brink'. He felt dis quieted. His chapter on ‘Images' had suddenly in memory fallen a little flat. His old Jesuit had packed a lifetime into a word of two letters, the word ‘up'. Aggie's friend preferred abandon, and so was far nearer the cauliflower in effect than the cabbage. But
was
there any connection between
cauliflowers
and poetry?

What would Mrs Wilcox have said? Far too much, he was afraid. And already on nimble wing he had sped off to Matthew Arnold, to his ‘
criticism
of life', and was reassured.

In his precise pernickety fashion Hilbert had once been inquiring enough to look up this word ‘criticism' in a formidable dictionary, and had then
discovered
that Matthew Arnold had by no means meant just
criticism
–
niggling
, gnawing, fretting, shredding, ravelling out, the activities of moth and rust – but discernment, insight. He had memorized the poet's very words: ‘Criticism,' he was gently repeating to himself, while a simmering silence continued to prevail between the two amazons now watchfully aware that the grey-flannel-suited young man in the corner was awake – ‘Criticism is a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world.' But ‘the best', mused Hilbert, surely, of its
kind
?

He ventured on another peep at Aggie's friend. And their glances met: a glance on the one side like a venomous dart from the blow-pipe of a man of Borneo, out of an eye bead-like, reddish, hot, and fiery, which had
instantly
transfixed as if with a needle his own round orb of a pale and
pensive
blue. It was Hilbert's that faltered; but not before he had decided that of her kind she had lavished on him a draught not only black, but piping hot and strong.

The heat, the violence, the conviction, the expansiveness of her remarks! That hugger-mugger stage, the domestic drama, the ferocity.
Should
he try poems, after all? ‘Go on!' indeed. He would willingly have paid the full price for a middle stall in the front row of Covent Garden if only she would consent to go on in the same strain – until the end of his journey. And surely, wouldn't sweet William, Swan of Avon, have simply revelled in her fumes? ‘Stay put!' She! Never. But heavens alive! – the train was slowing up. The lady had swivelled round her henlike head straight at him, and had clutched at the handles of her basket as if in sheer defiance of the Universe. In another moment she would be gone – for ever. But meanwhile she was at it again.

‘What I say is, trewth's trewth; and I don't care what eavesdroppers
perking
their ears up in corners unbeknown and shamming doggo may have heard me. A woman may work her fingers to the bone for a man and him not so much as a Thank-you. But Aggie –
she
go back – never! Though she's no more of what I should call female
charm
than a tallow candle.'

She had risen; the train had stopped. There was no time now even for a word of congratulation, let alone a convincing decision. Aggie's friend's pink, loose-mouthed young companion had already squeezed lingeringly past his knees and was alighting. The bast bag yawned like Limbo a few inches under his nose. With a triumphant, contrite, glancing gaze up into the woman's constricted visage, and with lightning rapidity, Hilbert opened
his
little bag, extracted yet one more copy of the
Parleyings
– his third – and slipped it in. Could enterprise go further?

Well, there may well have been a streak of the troubadour in his
hereditary
make-up; it accounted, perhaps, for the fact that his ‘purple patches' were occasionally of a purple a little loud. As the wheels of his carriage began more rapidly to revolve again, he stood up at the window, smiled charmingly at both parties, and – raised his hat.

Decisions are always reviving. Refreshed after his nap, alert and alone, he returned to his corner. And there, amid the rattle of glass and wood and metal – the long-shadowed September sunshine beyond his window, rusty gold on sheaf and stack and thatch and pensive beechwood – he burst out laughing. Never for a moment had he dreamed that the mere circulation of his
Parleyings
could require such critical skill. He was three up, one to play, and (he glanced at his watch) there was still thirty minutes to go. Why, he could probably have disposed of the complete edition on a five-shilling fare in two days' railway travelling. Much would depend on what happened to his ‘fourth'. At which, as if he had positively beckoned it with his finger, the name-board of the station he had but a moment before left behind him, flashed back into his consciousness. His own was three behind it! He had overslept.

By nature impulsive, Hilbert at once seized his bag, tugged at the brim of his hat, and prepared to alight; and then, seeing that the train was
bumping
along at not much less than twenty miles an hour, he sat down again. When he did get out – a few minutes afterwards – the only human being in sight (after he had explained his sad case to the ticket collector) was a curate – a strapping young man, with lips like a cherry, and the assured air of a juvenile archdeacon. How odd; two of a cloth, if not of a kidney, in less than an hour! Still, if the Church went on like this all would be well.

The cherry effect – Hilbert felt assured, as he stalked his latest prey up the wooden steps and over the bridge – was only skin deep. The young man walked with decision, and so held his head as if he were dead certain it was
brimmed with brains of an inestimable value. But yet it was a head that looked a little unpromising – for Hilbert's purposes. A trace of the Byronic, perhaps, but none of the Wordsworthian. Its mere shape and carriage
suggested
that it was seldom closely connected with its companion piece, the heart. Its owner might no doubt be bound for a New Jerusalem, but what little Hilbert detected of it hadn't the least resemblance to Blake's.

Hilbert began to fear it might be as easy to extract plums from plain duff as what he wanted from this athletic young ecclesiastic. Still,
dum
spiro
spero,
though he must waste not a moment.

The curate had seated himself, and from a side-pocket had extracted a copy of a bluish-covered magazine. Hilbert passed him by, paused, wheeled, coughed.

‘I'm so sorry; but I have been taken on,' he said, ‘by mistake. I went to sleep, in fact. This
is
the platform for Dunmow Downs, isn't it?'

The young man in holy orders looked up. ‘Absolutely,' he said. ‘I am expecting – er – a friend by the next one in, and my own station is the one before it. Bad luck.'

‘Not at all,' said Hilbert, continuing to smile because he was listening so hard. ‘It's this drowsy autumn weather.'

‘Yes,' said the young stranger, whose jacket and trousers and nattily tailored ‘vest' were
all
of pepper and salt, and who, from dog-collar to black brogue shoes, was as neat as a new altar vase, ‘it
is
a bit close. Thunder, perhaps. I always wake
myself
by knocking my skull on the window frame once for each station I have to go. It's infallible. But then, when
I
go to sleep I always intend to; and I never dream.'

‘Gracious heavens!' groaned Hilbert inwardly. He surveyed the choice shaven face with ill-concealed consternation. He must try another tack. ‘One misses so much, too,' he went on seductively, ‘even if one does. Dream, I mean. That lovely bit of landscape, you remember, with the peewits and the old mill, between here and Bewley Marshes. And
especially'
–
he stooped forward a little – ‘especially when it is getting towards evening, and the sun is low.' The very cadence of the words was an anodyne and a spell.

At this the young man eyed Hilbert steadily, and eyed him whole. Then he slowly refolded his magazine, replaced it in his pocket, and said: ‘Yes. I suppose nice scenery
is
a pleasant adjunct to railway travelling – but I haven't much time for it myself.'

‘No,' breathed Hilbert, and nodded. ‘Yes,' he added, ‘a great adjunct. And now the swallows will soon be flown.'

‘Odd beggars, aren't they?' remarked the curate. ‘All that irrational journey just to come back! Purely mechanistic, you know; it's merely the light that does it; not even the weather. Only the other day I happened to
pick up a scientific periodical, or rather a quasi-scientific periodical –
The
Aviarian,
you know – and some old Lincolnshire windbag was saying …'

The ensuing soliloquy, which ranged from natural or quasi-natural history to – in Hilbert's modest opinion – completely unnatural socialism, lasted exactly five and a half minutes. And the moment his new
acquaintance
had warmed up, he needed no stoking.

Quite the reverse, for when in desperation Hilbert had managed to
inter-ejaculate
: ‘But I do sometimes feel, you know, that being absolutely broke and
not
on the dole merely because one is not a sweep or a stoker or a
bricklayer
, and being so vilely harassed and harried that one becomes half daft and physically
sick
with —'

‘Speaking for myself,' shouted the curate, ‘there is absolutely
no
silly trouble or ailment of body or mind – or heart,
ha,
ha,
either – that cannot be cured by a cold bath.'

‘Yes; and even life itself,' Hilbert had faintly murmured. To which, with an inhalation that seemed to have exhausted the air for yards around them, his companion had retaliated with:
‘
Life,
you say! Why, as for
life …
' and on he went.

It was soon as much as Hilbert could do to refrain from listening. If the sea – sad prospect – consisted solely of sand, then this electric young cleric – at least on his favourite topics – talked like a spring tide.

But it is not, Hilbert was dolefully reflecting, from sand of this nature that Poesy's buds of Sharon raise their gentle heads. He had had too much luck at the word ‘Go!'; and now wind and weather were failing him. His little bag was three copies lighter, but by yet another not quite light enough; and how much heavier was his heart!

Four minutes before his self-allotted time was up a train rolled into the station. And yet – such are the oddities of human destiny – until its guard's van with screeching brakes jangled into view, Hilbert hadn't the faintest notion that it was bringing with it the strangest and blessedest fraction of his future life on earth. Its last but one grained-box compartment proved to contain the ‘er – a friend' to whom it seemed, centuries ago, the curate had airily referred. And at one glance at its only occupant he was lost.
Everything
in the world, in Time and in Eternity, if not perhaps forgiven, was utterly forgotten.

She was standing at the open window, looking out, but not as if she had ever entirely desisted from looking
in –
an oval face with highish
cheekbones
, and eyes and mouth from which a remote smile was now vanishing as softly and secretly as a bird enters and vanishes into its nest. A moment of dazzling vertigo had swept over Hilbert's being. That mystery of age-long severance and incredible reunion and recognition! Where … when … had they met before? Only Heaven could have told him, and he had no need to
know. In a flash of acute foreboding he had instantly scanned the eight
ungloved
fingers that clasped the window sash. That once almost meaningless ‘er – a
friend'
had suddenly echoed in his heart like a knell. But no; every one of the eight was ringless – every single one. He turned his head away, as if momentarily exhausted yet unspeakably revived.

‘Ah, there you are, Sis!' the curate had now breezily announced, ‘and
only
twelve and a half minutes late! …
What
was that about Karl Marx I was saying just now before I was interrupted …?' His voice, like that of a Bull of Bashan haranguing his subservient heifers, had come booming again over his shoulder towards Hilbert – and Hilbert, as meekly as a dove,
had followed him in.

Seated opposite brother and sister, almost forgetting to breathe, and in a panic of spirit that was past all mundane concerns, he forgot who he was, where he was, what: his bet, Messrs A and B, his Jesuit, Aggie, and even his little bag and the Muses. His one and only wish in this strange world was that the peculiarly disguised young Good Samaritan in the opposite corner should continue his discourse – his dessication and disposal of Syndicalism, the National Recovery Act, Major Douglas, dictatorships, Nazism, Aryan ism, and every other
ism
–
just
ad
infinitum.
When he stopped, the train would have stopped and – well, she would be gone. Meanwhile, to that vibrant, lusty ‘Oxford' voice, an occasional faint ‘Yes', or a much fainter ‘No', was proving no more of an obstruction than a pebble is to a cataract.