Strange Stories (30 page)

I met an old man at the Elephant Theatre, and, though it was not in a pub that we met, we soon found ourselves in one, not in the eponymous establishment, but in a nice, quiet little place down a side turn, which he seemed to know well, but of which, naturally, I knew nothing, since I was only in that district on business, and indeed had been in the great metropolis itself only for a matter of weeks. I may perhaps at the end tell you what the business was. It had some slight bearing upon the old man’s tale. 

“The Customer’s Tale” I call it, because the Geoffrey Chaucer implication may not be far from the truth: a total taradiddle of legend and first-hand experience. As we grow older we frequently become even hazier about the exact chronology of history, and about the boundaries of what is deemed to be historical fact: the king genuinely and sincerely believing that he took part in the Battle of Waterloo; Clement Attlee, after he was made an earl, never doubting that he had the wisdom of Walpole. Was Jowett Ramsey’s Lord Chancellor of Clem’s? Which one of us can rightly remember that? Well: the old man was a very old man, very old indeed; odd-looking and hairy; conflating one whole century with another whole century, and then sticking his own person in the center of it all, possibly before he was even born. 

That first evening, there was, in the nature of things, only a short time before the pubs closed. But we met in the same place again by appointment; and again; and possibly a fourth time, too. That is something I myself cannot exactly recollect; but after that last time, I never saw or heard of him again. I wonder whether anyone did. 

I wrote down the old man’s tale in my beautiful new shorthand, lately acquired at the college. He was only equal to short installments, but I noticed that, old though he was, he seemed to have no difficulty in picking up each time more or less where he left off. I wrote it all down almost exactly as he spoke it, though of course when I typed it out, I had to punctuate it myself, and no doubt I tidied it up a trifle. For what anyone cares to make of it, here it is. 

*** 

Fleet Street! If you’ve only seen it as it is now, you’ve no idea of what it used to be. I refer to the time when Temple Bar was still there. Fleet Street was never the same after Temple Bar went. Temple Bar was something they simply couldn’t replace. Men I knew, and knew well, said that taking it away wrecked not only Fleet Street but the whole City. Perhaps it was the end of England itself. God knows what else was. 

It wasn’t just the press in those days. All that Canadian newsprint, and those seedy reporters. I don’t say you’re seedy yet, but you will be. Just give it time. Even a rich journalist has to be seedy. Then there were butchers’ shops, and poultry and game shops, and wine merchants passing from father to son, and little places on corners where you could get your watch mended or your old pens sharpened, and proper bookshops too, with everything from
The Complete John Milton
to
The Condemned Man’s Last Testimony
. Of course the “Newgate Calendar” was still going at that time, though one wasn’t supposed to care for it. There were a dozen or more pawnbrokers, and all the churches had bread-and-blanket charities. Fancy Fleet Street with only one pawnbroker and all the charity money gone God knows where and better not ask! The only thing left is that little girl dressed as a boy out of Byron’s poem. Little Medora. We used to show her to all the new arrivals. People even
lived
in Fleet Street in those days. Thousands of people. Tens of thousands. Some between soft sheets, some on the hard stones. Fancy that! There was room for all, prince and pauper; and women and to spare for almost the lot of them. 

Normally, I went round the back, but I remember the first time I walked down Fleet Street itself. It was not a thing you would forget, as I am about to tell you. There were great wagons stuck in the mud, at least I take it to have been mud; and lawyers all over the pavement, some clean, some not. Of course, the lawyers stow themselves away more now. Charles Dickens had something to do with that. And then there were the women I’ve spoken of: some of them blowsy and brassy, but some soft and appealing, even when they had nothing to deck themselves with but shawls and rags. I took no stock in women at that time. You know why as well as I do. There are a few things that never change. Never. I prided myself upon living clean. Well, I did until that same day. When that day came, I had no choice. 

How did I get into the barbershop? I wish I could tell you. I’ve wondered every time I’ve thought about the story, and that’s been often enough. All I know is that it wasn’t to get my hair cut, or to be shaved, and not to be bled either, which was still going on in those days, the accepted thing when you thought that something was the matter with you or were told so, though you didn’t set about it in a barbershop if you could afford something better. They took far too much at the barber’s. “Bled white” meant something in places of that kind. You can take my word about that. 

It’s perfectly true that I have always liked my hair cut close, and I was completely clean-shaven as well until I suffered a gash from an assegai when fighting for Queen and Country. You may not believe that, but it’s true. I first let this beard grow only to save her Majesty embarrassment, and it’s been growing and growing ever since. 

As a matter of fact, it was my mother that cut my hair in those days. She knew how I liked it and how she liked it. She was as thorough as you can imagine, but all the while kissing and joking too. That went on until the episode I am telling you about. Never again afterward. 

Often she had been shaving me too; using my dead father’s old razors, of which there were dozens and dozens. I never knew my father. I never even saw a likeness of him. I think my mother had destroyed them all, or hidden them away. If ever I asked her about him, she al-ways spoke in the same way. “I prefer you, Paul,” she said. “You are the better man. I have nothing to add.” Always the same words, or nearly the same. Then she would kiss me very solemnly on the lips, so that there was nothing I could do but change the subject. 

How, then, could I possibly have entered that shop? I have an idea that the man was standing outside and simply caught hold of me. That often happened, so that you had to take trouble in looking after yourself. But, as I have told you, I truly do not know. I suspect that things happen from time to time to everyone that they don’t understand, and there’s simply nothing we can do about them. 

I was in the chair immediately, and the man seemed to be clipping at my locks and lathering my face, both at the same time. I daresay he had applied a whiff of chloroform, which, at that period, was something quite new. People always spoke about a whiff of it, as if it had been a Ramón Allones or a Larraniaga. 

There were three chairs in the shop, but the man had firmly directed me to a particular one, the one to my left, because that was the one where the light was, or so I supposed was the reason. The man had an assistant, it seemed, in case the shop might suddenly be packed out. The assistant struck me as being pretty well all black, after the style of a Negro, but that might have been only because the whole shop was so dark and smoky. In any case, he could only have been about four feet two inches high, or even less. I wondered how he managed at the chairs. Probably, when at work, he had a box to stand on. All he did now was lean back against the announcements in the far-right-hand corner, waiting until he was needed. The master was as tall as the assistant was short, lean and agile as a daddy longlegs. Also, he was completely clean-shaven and white. One could not help wondering whether anything grew at all, or ever had. Even his hair could well have been some kind of wig. I am sure that it was. It was black and slightly curly and horribly neat. I didn’t have my eyes on the pair of them for very long, but I can see them both at this very moment, though, in the case of the assistant, without much definition. Sometimes we can see more without definition than with it. On the marble slab in front of me was a small lighted oil lamp and a single burning candle, smoking heavily, and submerging the other smells. This in the very middle of an ordinary weekday morning. Probably, of course, it was only imitation marble. Probably everything in the shop was an imitation of some kind. 

Having your hair cut at that time cost only a few pence, though there was a penny or two more for the tip; and being shaved was often a matter of “Leave it to you, sir.” But I knew nothing of that, because, as I have said, I had never had either thing done to me for money in a shop. I began to count up in my head how much I might have in my pocket. I had already begun to support my mother, and, in the nature of things, it can’t have been a large sum. Frightening ideas ran about my mind as to how much might be demanded of me. It seemed almost as if I were being treated to everything that the shop had to offer. I tried not to think of what might happen were I unable to pay in full. 

At one time, the man was holding a bright silvery razor in either hand, which I suppose had its own logic from a commercial point of view. The razors seemed far shinier than those at home. Reflections from the two of them flashed across the ceiling and walls. The razors also seemed far sharper than ours, as was only to be expected. I felt that if an ear were to be streaked off, I should be aware of it because I should see the blood; but that my whole head could go in a second, without my knowing anything at all about it—ever again, of course. I knew how small my head was, and how long and thin my neck. In the mirror I could see something of what was in hand, but not very much, because the mirror was caked and blackened, quite unlike the flickering razors. I doubted whether blood could have been made out in it, even a quite strong flow. I might well see the blood itself, long before the reflection of it. 

But the worst thing came suddenly from behind me. Having no knowledge of what went on in these shops, I had never heard about the practice, then taken for granted, of “singeing.” The customers regularly used to have the ends of their hair burnt off with a lighted taper. I don’t suppose you’ve even heard of it happening, but it went on until fairly recently, and it only stopped because the shops couldn’t get the trained assistant. It was said to “seal” the hairs, as if they had been letters. All that may sound like a good joke, but the thing itself was not at all like a joke. 

It was of course the dusky assistant who was doing it—though it suddenly struck me that it might be a disease he had, rather than his natural colouring, perhaps something linked with his being so short. All I know is, and this I can swear to you, that he did not light the taper he held, at either the candle or the lamp. At one moment the bright light behind me was not there, or the assistant there, either. At the next moment the light was so strong and concentrated that, even in the dirty mirror, the reflection was dazzling me. 

I think that really it was hypnotizing me. Hypnotism was something else that was fairly new at the time. It wasn’t even necessary for the two in the shop to set about it deliberately. The idea of being hypnotized was in the air and fashionable, as different things are at different times. People suddenly went off who would have felt nothing at all a few years earlier. 

I felt that my whole body was going round and round like a catherine wheel, feet against head. I felt that my head itself was going round and round in the other dimension, horizontally, so to speak, but faster. At that age, hypnotism had never actually come my way, even though it was being joked about everywhere. As well as all this, there was a sound like a great engine turning over. I think that really I lost myself for a short spell. Fainting was much commoner in those times than it is now, and not only with young girls. What it felt like was a sudden quick fall, with all my blood rushing upward. There were effects on the stage of that kind: clowns with baubles going down through trap-doors and coming up again as demons with pitchforks. They don’t show it on the stage anymore, or not so often. 

When I came round I was somewhere quite different. Don’t ask me exactly how it had come about. Or exactly where I was, for that matter. I can only tell you what happened. 

The first thing I knew was a strong smell of cooking. 

Baking was what it really smelt like. Everyone at that time knew what baking smelt like, and I more than most, because my mother baked everything—bread, puddings, pies, the lot, even the cat food. I supposed I was down in the cellar of the building. Anyway, I was in some cellar. Of course, the kitchen quarters were always in what was called the basement, when the house was good enough to
have
a basement. So the smell was perfectly natural and acceptable. 

The only thing was that the place seemed so terribly hot. I thought at first that it might be me, rather than the room, but that became hard to believe. 

I was sprawled on a thick mattress. It seemed just as well, and kind of someone, because the floor as a whole was made of stone, not even smooth stone, not smooth at all, but rough. There was enough light for me to see that much. My mattress was considerably fatter than the ones given to the felons in Newgate or to the poorer debtors, and it was most welcome, as I say, but the stuff inside was peeping out everywhere through rents, and the color of the thing was no longer very definite, except that there were marks on it which were almost certainly blood. 

I put my hand to my head, but I didn’t seem to be actually bleeding through the hair, though it was hard to be sure, as I was sweating so heavily. Then I gave a gulp, like a schoolboy. I suppose I was still more or less a schoolboy. Anyway, I nearly fainted all over again. 

At the other end of the cellar, if that is what the place was, a huge woman was sitting on a big painted chair, like a throne. The light in the place came from a small lamp on a kind of desk at her side. She had heavy dark hair falling over one shoulder, and a swarthy face, as if she had been a Spanish woman. She wore a dark dress, open all the way down the front to the waist, as if she had just put it on, or could not bear to fasten it owing to the heat, or had been doing some remarkably heavy work. Not that I had ever before seen a woman looking quite like that, not even my mother, when we were alone together. And there was a young girl sitting at her feet, with her head in the woman’s lap, so that I could see only that she had dark hair, too, as if she had been the woman’s daughter, which of course one would have supposed she was, particularly as the woman was all the time stroking and caressing the girl’s hair.